Fic: Shot Through the Heart (2/2)
Fandom: HIMYM - Barely Coping-verse (crossover with Pedro Páramo)
Word Count: This part: 1945
Rating: PG-15 for zombie carnage and language... and general weirdness.
Written for: The lovely loquaciousambie, and anyone who's ever been traumatized by "Barely Coping".
Summary: Crack-like companion/epilogue to "Barely Coping". Barney Stinson is dead and buried. But then the zombie uprising cometh...
Previously: Part 1
Zombies had broken into MacLaren’s, and the gang had snapped out of their grief-induced stupors to defend their favorite bar.
“Hey, I could use some reinforcements!” Ted called from where he was slowly being surrounded by shuffling, moaning zombies.
“Sam, go help Uncle Ted!” Robin instructed, her gun pointed at another wave of the undead invaders.
Sam, dressed in a filthy wifebeater and camo pants, tied a thin strip of cloth around his forehead and reached for his flamethrower.
“I’m on it, Aunt Robin!” he said before sprinting over to where Ted was, shooting flames at the zombies.
“Is that really necessary?” Ted asked, looking with apprehension at the flamethrower.
“Hell yeah!” Sam panted, sweat glistening across his brow. “You’ve got to set those undead bastards on FIRE if you want ‘em gone!”
“Didn’t your dads ever tell you not to play with matches?”
Sam shot a withering glance in his surrogate uncle’s direction. “Uncle Ted, this is a flamethrower.”
All around them, zombies were burning to a crisp.
“He still isn’t here,” Ted mused, looking around at the smoldering re-deaded corpses thoughtfully. “D’you think… maybe he didn’t get undeaded with the rest of them?”
Sam gently blew the smoke from the end of his weapon, his mission accomplished.
“Maybe we should visit the graveyard and see for ourselves.”
---
“I promised my mami,” Juan was groaning now. “I promised her when she was dying that I would come to Comala and find my father, Pedro Páramo…”
Barney was hitting his head against his coffin lid repeatedly, hoping to give himself a concussion, or at least achieve unconsciousness. So far, all he’d managed to do was give himself an even bigger headache than Juan had caused. Did he seriously not remember telling him this story already?
“¿Qué pasa con la escritora? Probablemente tomó el crack antes de escribir el cuento, o tal vez el LSD…”
“¡Estoy enamorado con tacos!” Barney shouted with his unapologetically “white” accent, hoping that his (not really all that awesome) Spanish skills would finally shock Juan into silence.
And for one heart-stopping (wait, could he even say that anymore?) moment, it seemed to have worked. But then Juan sighed heavily. “Ohhh… I miss tacos...”
And that sent him off on another rant on things from his life that he wished he still had.
The top of his coffin seemed to be pressing down on him a little more than usual; was someone standing over him, adding to the weight of the earth above him, or was his coffin just trying to crush him?
He knew better than to think someone was going to rescue him from this purgatory. He was completely alone, trapped down here forever with Juan and his incessant moaning and bitching.
She wasn’t coming for him.
---
All the graves in the cemetery had upturned earth from where the zombies had popped out of their graves like daisies. All the graves, that is, except for Barney’s grave and the one next to it, which was marked with the name “Juan Preciado”.
“Looks like he’s still down there,” Marshall commented, studying the undisturbed grass around Barney’s grave as he stood above it.
Robin handed him, Ted, and Sam some shovels as a hint of a true smile began to spread across her face.
“Start digging.”
---
Barney was now trying his best to somehow get his hands somewhere near his head, so he could cover his ears. Juan was no longer moaning or complaining… no, now he was singing. In Spanish.
Barney really was a bad influence, wasn’t he?
“Que aquí estamos del prestao, que el cielo está nublao, que uno nace y luego muere, y este cuento se ha acabao… Depende…”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand a word you’re singing,” he yelled through the dirt that separated them.
Of course, that fact had never made Juan shut up before.
He groaned and leaned his head back into his pillow. The solitude and the confinement, the constant penetrating blackness, the emo Spanish prattling were all driving Barney insane. He’d already sung every single song that had come out in the past 40 years, and he was sick of all of them. So he’d moved on to (gulp) showtunes. And not even the awesome ones like Rent or Sweeney Todd… he’d gotten sick of those long ago. He took a breath (though, being dead, he’d lost the need to breathe, so it was only out of habit) and began to sing, even louder than Juan was.
“Out there, there’s a world outside of Yonkers, way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby!”
---
The shovels scraped the top of the coffin as Ted, Sam, and Marshall finished digging up Barney’s grave, leaving it lying bare at the bottom of the rectangular hole.
“Hey,” Sam said slowly, “do you guys hear something?”
They all cupped an ear and listened. They could barely hear faint singing coming from somewhere nearby. The voice sounded so familiar -
“Put on your Sunday clothes, there’s lots of world out there...”
“Is that… Hello, Dolly?” Lily asked quizzically.
“No, that song’s definitely from WALL-E,” said Sam.
“…Girls in white in a perfumed night where the lights are bright as the stars! …” sang the voice.
“That can’t be Barney,” Ted scoffed. “He hates Broadway.”
“No he doesn’t,” Robin said, her eyes shining and smiling wider than she had in months. “Get out of my way!” And Ted, Marshall, and Sam clambered out of the grave as she knelt beside it.
“And we won’t come home until we’ve kissed -“
“Barney?!” Robin cried at the coffin lid, lowering herself onto her stomach at the edge of the grave.
“Scherbatsky?!” the muffled voice shouted back. “Is that really you?”
“Hang on, I’m going to get you out of there,” she said, reaching into the open grave, gripping the lid of the coffin and giving it a good tug.
Nothing happened.
“Robin, what’s going on?” Barney asked impatiently.
“It’s stuck!” she cried desperately.
There came a muffled “Oh, HELL no!” from inside the coffin. They heard him pound on the lid from the inside as Robin jumped into the grave, standing on the lower half of the coffin. She braced her feet against the coffin’s lid, grabbing the top half with both hands and tugging it with all her might as he continued to bang the lid from the inside…
Their combined efforts made the lid burst open; Robin lost her balance and fell into the coffin, landing right on Barney’s bare, icy chest.
She was closer to him than she’d been in months… closer to him than she thought she’d ever be again.
“Hi,” she breathed, not quite able to believe what she was seeing. She’d known he’d somehow been reanimated with the rest of the dead people in New York, but she’d been so afraid of finding him in some state of decay, or even worse, as a brains-hungry zombie, that she’d almost been afraid to find him.
Almost.
But he looked exactly the same as she remembered him. The only difference was that four months underground, away from the sun, had given his skin an unpleasant sort of pallor.
“Hey,” he whispered back, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he grinned at her. Even his eyes were the same shade of bright blue that she remembered so clearly… his beautiful eyes lacked that same disgusting, milky film that all the other zombies she’d fought had had.
“Sorry I’m late,” Robin said, smiling as tears started to fill her eyes. “I was… fighting the zombie uprising.”
“What, another one?” Barney asked, smiling incredulously.
“Yeah,” she said, fully intending to laugh with him but somehow ending up letting her tears fall.
He wrapped his stiff, freezing arms around her, a gesture she found macabre and comforting all at once. “Not getting sappy on me now, are you, Scherbatsky?” he murmured in her ear.
“No,” she said, brushing away a tear. “It’s just that I thought I’d… that we’d never… because you were…”
She was too overcome to finish any of her sentences.
“It’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair. “Yeah, I was gone for a while, but I’m back now.”
He pressed his arctic lips to her cheek as she gave a hearty sniffle. She drew back and gave him a mock-offended look.
“A kiss on the cheek? That’s all I get after going four months without seeing you?”
“So needy,” Barney grumbled good-naturedly as she covered his mouth with her own. His lips were unpleasantly cold at first, but they quickly became warmed by hers. His tongue darted between her teeth… how was it possible that, all these months later, he still tasted like scotch and cigars and Eggs Royale, without a trace of decay?
“Aww!” said Ted and Marshall as they watched Robin and her re-alived lover make out.
Sam’s eyes were wide with horror. “Does anyone else think this is kind of… disturbing?” he whispered to the rest of them.
“Shut up, it’s adorable!” sighed Lily happily. But Sam just slowly shook his head, unable to get away from the notion that his aunt was such a necrophiliac.
Barney pulled away, clearing his throat before saying, “Er, Scherbatsky? I think we’ve got an audience.” She glanced up to see their friends still standing at the edge of the grave, their eyes all on Barney and Robin. “Let’s get out of here, huh? My arms and legs are killing me.” He (finally!!!) sat up and stretched his arms as Robin got off him and took Lily’s and Sam’s hands so she could climb out.
“You’re not going to… you know, fall apart on me, are you?” Robin asked him anxiously as he let Ted pull him out of his grave.
"Wasn't planning on it,” Barney shrugged. Decomposing was really too lame to bother with.
Right then, Marshall slapped him heartily across the face. “OW!” Barney yelped.
“That’s five!” Marshall hooted, clapping his massive hands together in glee.
“What the hell!” Ted asked Marshall angrily. “Our best friend comes back from the dead, and that’s how you greet him?”
“Unfinished business,” Marshall said apologetically. “No offense, buddy.”
“Yeah… none taken,” Barney muttered, a hand still clapped to his cheek.
“Uncle Barney!” Sam cried, running up to his uncle and embracing him.
“What up, Awesome Junior!” Barney said, returning Sam’s hug. “Miss me, much?”
“We had such a hard time getting used to not having you around,” Robin said sorrowfully, joining Sam and Barney in their hug.
Lily wrapped her arms around the three of them, admitting, “We were barely coping.” The Omnipotent Author giggled madly at her own cleverness.
“Don’t ever die on us again, okay?” Ted said as he and Marshall added themselves to the group hug.
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” came Barney’s voice, muffled by Sam’s hair and Lily’s arms.
The five of them stood there for a while, their arms wrapped tightly around Barney like he was a tree they’d all grown around, a support that they had slowly been dying without.
All Barney kept thinking that it was a good thing he didn’t need to breathe any more, as his family had their arms wrapped a bit too tightly around his windpipe. But he was so glad to be back with them after all this time they’d spent apart.
Then, after they’d all stood there for a good while, Barney ventured, “Um, guys? I’m still naked…?”
---
And now Juan was left alone under the soil. His rotting face warped itself into a demented sort of grin. That irritating gringo was finally gone, and he could after-live his afterlife in peace now.
“Este será legen- …espera, espera…”
--------------------
Translations!
- (cut text) "¡Póngase el traje, arriba!" = a very, very literal translation of "Suit up!" At least, I think that's how you'd say it. My Spanish is a wee bit rusty. (word-for-word, "Put on the suit, up!")
- “¿Qué pasa con la escritora? Probablemente tomó el crack antes de escribir el cuento, o tal vez el LSD…” = "What's wrong with the author? She probably took crack before writing this story, or maybe LSD..."
- "Estoy enamorado con tacos!" = again, "I'm in love with tacos!"
- "gringo" = white guy
- “Este será legen- …espera, espera…” = "This will be legen- wait, wait..."
Lastly, near the middle, the stuff Juan's singing is actual lyrics taken from the song "Depende" (It Depends) by the Spanish group Jarabe de Palo. 'Cause I'm a dork! The lyrics translate as follows, and I think they ended up being somewhat apropos, what with the zombie!Barney reunion and all:
We are here on borrowed time,
The heavens are overcast,
One is born and later dies
And his story has ended…
Well, it depends.
Word Count: This part: 1945
Rating: PG-15 for zombie carnage and language... and general weirdness.
Written for: The lovely loquaciousambie, and anyone who's ever been traumatized by "Barely Coping".
Summary: Crack-like companion/epilogue to "Barely Coping". Barney Stinson is dead and buried. But then the zombie uprising cometh...
Previously: Part 1
Zombies had broken into MacLaren’s, and the gang had snapped out of their grief-induced stupors to defend their favorite bar.
“Hey, I could use some reinforcements!” Ted called from where he was slowly being surrounded by shuffling, moaning zombies.
“Sam, go help Uncle Ted!” Robin instructed, her gun pointed at another wave of the undead invaders.
Sam, dressed in a filthy wifebeater and camo pants, tied a thin strip of cloth around his forehead and reached for his flamethrower.
“I’m on it, Aunt Robin!” he said before sprinting over to where Ted was, shooting flames at the zombies.
“Is that really necessary?” Ted asked, looking with apprehension at the flamethrower.
“Hell yeah!” Sam panted, sweat glistening across his brow. “You’ve got to set those undead bastards on FIRE if you want ‘em gone!”
“Didn’t your dads ever tell you not to play with matches?”
Sam shot a withering glance in his surrogate uncle’s direction. “Uncle Ted, this is a flamethrower.”
All around them, zombies were burning to a crisp.
“He still isn’t here,” Ted mused, looking around at the smoldering re-deaded corpses thoughtfully. “D’you think… maybe he didn’t get undeaded with the rest of them?”
Sam gently blew the smoke from the end of his weapon, his mission accomplished.
“Maybe we should visit the graveyard and see for ourselves.”
---
“I promised my mami,” Juan was groaning now. “I promised her when she was dying that I would come to Comala and find my father, Pedro Páramo…”
Barney was hitting his head against his coffin lid repeatedly, hoping to give himself a concussion, or at least achieve unconsciousness. So far, all he’d managed to do was give himself an even bigger headache than Juan had caused. Did he seriously not remember telling him this story already?
“¿Qué pasa con la escritora? Probablemente tomó el crack antes de escribir el cuento, o tal vez el LSD…”
“¡Estoy enamorado con tacos!” Barney shouted with his unapologetically “white” accent, hoping that his (not really all that awesome) Spanish skills would finally shock Juan into silence.
And for one heart-stopping (wait, could he even say that anymore?) moment, it seemed to have worked. But then Juan sighed heavily. “Ohhh… I miss tacos...”
And that sent him off on another rant on things from his life that he wished he still had.
The top of his coffin seemed to be pressing down on him a little more than usual; was someone standing over him, adding to the weight of the earth above him, or was his coffin just trying to crush him?
He knew better than to think someone was going to rescue him from this purgatory. He was completely alone, trapped down here forever with Juan and his incessant moaning and bitching.
She wasn’t coming for him.
---
All the graves in the cemetery had upturned earth from where the zombies had popped out of their graves like daisies. All the graves, that is, except for Barney’s grave and the one next to it, which was marked with the name “Juan Preciado”.
“Looks like he’s still down there,” Marshall commented, studying the undisturbed grass around Barney’s grave as he stood above it.
Robin handed him, Ted, and Sam some shovels as a hint of a true smile began to spread across her face.
“Start digging.”
---
Barney was now trying his best to somehow get his hands somewhere near his head, so he could cover his ears. Juan was no longer moaning or complaining… no, now he was singing. In Spanish.
Barney really was a bad influence, wasn’t he?
“Que aquí estamos del prestao, que el cielo está nublao, que uno nace y luego muere, y este cuento se ha acabao… Depende…”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand a word you’re singing,” he yelled through the dirt that separated them.
Of course, that fact had never made Juan shut up before.
He groaned and leaned his head back into his pillow. The solitude and the confinement, the constant penetrating blackness, the emo Spanish prattling were all driving Barney insane. He’d already sung every single song that had come out in the past 40 years, and he was sick of all of them. So he’d moved on to (gulp) showtunes. And not even the awesome ones like Rent or Sweeney Todd… he’d gotten sick of those long ago. He took a breath (though, being dead, he’d lost the need to breathe, so it was only out of habit) and began to sing, even louder than Juan was.
“Out there, there’s a world outside of Yonkers, way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby!”
---
The shovels scraped the top of the coffin as Ted, Sam, and Marshall finished digging up Barney’s grave, leaving it lying bare at the bottom of the rectangular hole.
“Hey,” Sam said slowly, “do you guys hear something?”
They all cupped an ear and listened. They could barely hear faint singing coming from somewhere nearby. The voice sounded so familiar -
“Put on your Sunday clothes, there’s lots of world out there...”
“Is that… Hello, Dolly?” Lily asked quizzically.
“No, that song’s definitely from WALL-E,” said Sam.
“…Girls in white in a perfumed night where the lights are bright as the stars! …” sang the voice.
“That can’t be Barney,” Ted scoffed. “He hates Broadway.”
“No he doesn’t,” Robin said, her eyes shining and smiling wider than she had in months. “Get out of my way!” And Ted, Marshall, and Sam clambered out of the grave as she knelt beside it.
“And we won’t come home until we’ve kissed -“
“Barney?!” Robin cried at the coffin lid, lowering herself onto her stomach at the edge of the grave.
“Scherbatsky?!” the muffled voice shouted back. “Is that really you?”
“Hang on, I’m going to get you out of there,” she said, reaching into the open grave, gripping the lid of the coffin and giving it a good tug.
Nothing happened.
“Robin, what’s going on?” Barney asked impatiently.
“It’s stuck!” she cried desperately.
There came a muffled “Oh, HELL no!” from inside the coffin. They heard him pound on the lid from the inside as Robin jumped into the grave, standing on the lower half of the coffin. She braced her feet against the coffin’s lid, grabbing the top half with both hands and tugging it with all her might as he continued to bang the lid from the inside…
Their combined efforts made the lid burst open; Robin lost her balance and fell into the coffin, landing right on Barney’s bare, icy chest.
She was closer to him than she’d been in months… closer to him than she thought she’d ever be again.
“Hi,” she breathed, not quite able to believe what she was seeing. She’d known he’d somehow been reanimated with the rest of the dead people in New York, but she’d been so afraid of finding him in some state of decay, or even worse, as a brains-hungry zombie, that she’d almost been afraid to find him.
Almost.
But he looked exactly the same as she remembered him. The only difference was that four months underground, away from the sun, had given his skin an unpleasant sort of pallor.
“Hey,” he whispered back, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he grinned at her. Even his eyes were the same shade of bright blue that she remembered so clearly… his beautiful eyes lacked that same disgusting, milky film that all the other zombies she’d fought had had.
“Sorry I’m late,” Robin said, smiling as tears started to fill her eyes. “I was… fighting the zombie uprising.”
“What, another one?” Barney asked, smiling incredulously.
“Yeah,” she said, fully intending to laugh with him but somehow ending up letting her tears fall.
He wrapped his stiff, freezing arms around her, a gesture she found macabre and comforting all at once. “Not getting sappy on me now, are you, Scherbatsky?” he murmured in her ear.
“No,” she said, brushing away a tear. “It’s just that I thought I’d… that we’d never… because you were…”
She was too overcome to finish any of her sentences.
“It’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair. “Yeah, I was gone for a while, but I’m back now.”
He pressed his arctic lips to her cheek as she gave a hearty sniffle. She drew back and gave him a mock-offended look.
“A kiss on the cheek? That’s all I get after going four months without seeing you?”
“So needy,” Barney grumbled good-naturedly as she covered his mouth with her own. His lips were unpleasantly cold at first, but they quickly became warmed by hers. His tongue darted between her teeth… how was it possible that, all these months later, he still tasted like scotch and cigars and Eggs Royale, without a trace of decay?
“Aww!” said Ted and Marshall as they watched Robin and her re-alived lover make out.
Sam’s eyes were wide with horror. “Does anyone else think this is kind of… disturbing?” he whispered to the rest of them.
“Shut up, it’s adorable!” sighed Lily happily. But Sam just slowly shook his head, unable to get away from the notion that his aunt was such a necrophiliac.
Barney pulled away, clearing his throat before saying, “Er, Scherbatsky? I think we’ve got an audience.” She glanced up to see their friends still standing at the edge of the grave, their eyes all on Barney and Robin. “Let’s get out of here, huh? My arms and legs are killing me.” He (finally!!!) sat up and stretched his arms as Robin got off him and took Lily’s and Sam’s hands so she could climb out.
“You’re not going to… you know, fall apart on me, are you?” Robin asked him anxiously as he let Ted pull him out of his grave.
"Wasn't planning on it,” Barney shrugged. Decomposing was really too lame to bother with.
Right then, Marshall slapped him heartily across the face. “OW!” Barney yelped.
“That’s five!” Marshall hooted, clapping his massive hands together in glee.
“What the hell!” Ted asked Marshall angrily. “Our best friend comes back from the dead, and that’s how you greet him?”
“Unfinished business,” Marshall said apologetically. “No offense, buddy.”
“Yeah… none taken,” Barney muttered, a hand still clapped to his cheek.
“Uncle Barney!” Sam cried, running up to his uncle and embracing him.
“What up, Awesome Junior!” Barney said, returning Sam’s hug. “Miss me, much?”
“We had such a hard time getting used to not having you around,” Robin said sorrowfully, joining Sam and Barney in their hug.
Lily wrapped her arms around the three of them, admitting, “We were barely coping.” The Omnipotent Author giggled madly at her own cleverness.
“Don’t ever die on us again, okay?” Ted said as he and Marshall added themselves to the group hug.
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” came Barney’s voice, muffled by Sam’s hair and Lily’s arms.
The five of them stood there for a while, their arms wrapped tightly around Barney like he was a tree they’d all grown around, a support that they had slowly been dying without.
All Barney kept thinking that it was a good thing he didn’t need to breathe any more, as his family had their arms wrapped a bit too tightly around his windpipe. But he was so glad to be back with them after all this time they’d spent apart.
Then, after they’d all stood there for a good while, Barney ventured, “Um, guys? I’m still naked…?”
---
And now Juan was left alone under the soil. His rotting face warped itself into a demented sort of grin. That irritating gringo was finally gone, and he could after-live his afterlife in peace now.
“Este será legen- …espera, espera…”
--------------------
Translations!
- (cut text) "¡Póngase el traje, arriba!" = a very, very literal translation of "Suit up!" At least, I think that's how you'd say it. My Spanish is a wee bit rusty. (word-for-word, "Put on the suit, up!")
- “¿Qué pasa con la escritora? Probablemente tomó el crack antes de escribir el cuento, o tal vez el LSD…” = "What's wrong with the author? She probably took crack before writing this story, or maybe LSD..."
- "Estoy enamorado con tacos!" = again, "I'm in love with tacos!"
- "gringo" = white guy
- “Este será legen- …espera, espera…” = "This will be legen- wait, wait..."
Lastly, near the middle, the stuff Juan's singing is actual lyrics taken from the song "Depende" (It Depends) by the Spanish group Jarabe de Palo. 'Cause I'm a dork! The lyrics translate as follows, and I think they ended up being somewhat apropos, what with the zombie!Barney reunion and all:
We are here on borrowed time,
The heavens are overcast,
One is born and later dies
And his story has ended…
Well, it depends.