A/N: I feel terrible for making you all wait this long for the last installment of this!

I spent a month in Costa Rica refreshing my Spanish and didn't have much time to work on this. But now I'm back, slightly tanner and no less obsessed with HIMYM.

But anyway, here's the last chapter of The Best Armor. I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. It's been a long journey! As always, if you read, please review. And if you enjoyed this, you might want to check out my other How I Met Your Mother fanfiction.

Chapter X

[Refresher—in the last chapter, Barney + Robin went laser tagging, talked a bit, shared a rather passionate kiss which resulted in Robin running away with a sprained ankle and only getting as far as the elevator, where Barney finds her - go!]

"Shit. Did you fall?" Barney says, coming over to where Robin is sitting on the floor of the elevator. "Are you okay?"

She shakes her head, though she isn't sure which question she's responding to. She averts her eyes, trying to hide tears and smudged mascara even though he's probably already noticed.

"Come back upstairs," Barney says. "You can't even walk."

Robin says nothing but doesn't fight when he pulls her up and drapes her arm over his shoulders. She allows herself to be lifted like a child and removed from the elevator. And she can't help but think of her mother, weak, falling apart, being carted back to bed. The thought doesn't help everything she's trying to keep silent.

"You can have my bed. I'll take the couch. And I'll take you back in the morning. Is that okay?"

Robin nods but is otherwise silent, unable to trust her voice.

"Did you hit your head or something?" he asks, angling her towards him, as if checking for some sign of damage.

She shakes her head and brings a hand up to wipe her eyes. But when she lets it falls back to her side, fresh tears have already formed and start to slip down her cheeks. And why? She doesn't know, not anymore. She closes her eyes. Barney probably thinks she's insane. And as he half-pulls her down the hallway, her unable to make a sound other than the strangled sobs she can't stop from escaping her throat, she's inclined to agree.

With one arm around Robin's waist, the other fumbling with the key, Barney opens the door to his apartment. The scotch is still on the table, the Ziploc bag of water lying on the couch, the memory of the two of them only ten minutes before still fresh in her mind. He sets her down on the couch more gently that she thought him capable of, and then grabs the leaking bag. Somewhere behind her, the ice machine powers up and the apartment is filled with the sound of it. Barney returns a minute later with a fresh bag of ice.

"Here," he says, putting it in her hand. "I'm going to call Ted. Can't worry the Mother Hen," he says with an attempt at a laugh that doesn't quite make it out of his mouth. With that, he disappears into his room and closes the door. She can hear his voice, muffled, "Ted, you awake?"

Robin leans forward and pours herself a half-glass of scotch. She knocks it back and then pours another one.

Barney's voice passes through the walls and reaches her. "Some asshole kid tripped her at laser tag. Her ankle's all swollen. And I think she fell in the elevator when she was leaving my place. She seems of out of it now," she hears, and then more muffled conversation she can't make out.

After a few minutes, the door creaks open and Barney sticks his head out. "Did you hit your head at laser tag?" he asks.

Robin shakes her head.

"How about in the elevator?"

"No," Robin says. "I'm fine."

"Shit, Scherbatsky, why'd you go all Helen Keller on me then?" he says. "She says she's fine. I'll just get her back in the morning. Yeah, you too. Bye, dude."

He comes back over to her and sits down on the opposite side of the couch.

"Do you want to lie down? Sheets are clean, I swear."

Instead of answering, she asks a question of her own. "Can I smoke in here?" she says, though she is already pulling the pack and lighter out of her purse.

After a pause, he answers, "Only if you share."

So Robin draws out two cigarettes; one, she sticks between her lips, the other, she extends to Barney. She lights hers, takes a puff, and passes over the lighter. She is lost in the familiar taste, the comforting feeling these motions bring her. After he lights his own, Barney gets up from the couch and opens a window. From the sill, he brings back a tin can half-full with ashes and cigarette butts, which he sets on the table between them.

Neither of them speaks again until their cigarette butts have joined the others in Barney's tin.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

She thinks a moment, but decides against getting into right now in the middle of the night. She answers, "Yeah, I'm fine." As soon as her words echo back in her ears, she realizes how foolish they should: how shaky; if he knows her at all, Barney can see through them. She takes another drag.

"I don't believe you," he says.

When she doesn't respond, he pours himself a glass of scotch and takes a big gulp of it. The cup clinks against the table as he sets it down, empty. It is the only sound in the apartment, save for their breathing and the sound of the wind.

"Why'd you leave?"

"What?" she says, even though her own words from earlier echo back to her: I can't do this;even though she can still picture herself scrambling to get up and then running away. Robin drops the cigarette butt into the tin and lights another.

"Why did you leave?"

"I gave up sleeping around with ex's for Lent."

He doesn't laugh like she expects him to. Instead, when he answers, his voice is cold. "It's November. And you're not even Catholic."

She laughs, maybe a little forced. "I know," she says and breathes out a wisp of gray smoke. It dissipates in the general direction of the open window, pulled out by a breeze she doesn't feel. "Fuck, Barney." Though she's looking straight ahead, she can see him looking at her out of the corner of her eye. "I can't just sleep with you. It wouldn't ever be… just sleeping with you. What were you thinking? Just because I was here or something?"

"Robin, it wasn't—"

"So you weren't trying to take advantage of me. You probably thought you were helping somehow, right?" she says.

"It's not like that." He runs a hand through his hair. "I just… I wasn't trying to just sleep with you."

She thinks back to the kiss, the slow rhythmic movement of his lips and tongue against hers, the breaths that felt more like sighs against her skin, the way his fingers cupped the side of her face, the way it was different than it used to be. But she doesn't let herself believe him. And even if she did, she can't forget how bad it all ended up, how hard it all was, how much it hurt. She can't handle any more of that right now.

"You're my bro, but you're also not just my bro," Barney says, sort of fumbling for the words. Robin can tell he hasn't had enough to drink for this conversation. But he's saying it anyway. "I know you've been having a hard time and everything with your family sucks, so maybe I'm just being a dick for throwing this at you now, but..." He takes a long drag on his cigarette, like he's working up courage for something. "I want to be with you. Have you ever thought about trying again? With me?"

Robin exhales smoke and leans back against the couch. "For a long time," she says. Her throat constricts, just enough for her to need to stop for a deep breath.

She can't look at him straight on – it would make what comes next too hard – but she knows his expression. That rare one he gets sometimes when he lets her in. The truth is she's never really stopped thinking about it. She's been waiting. It's like this past year she's been holding her breath in expectation of those words, waiting for him to mean them and for some sign that this time, they wouldn't tear each other apart.

But they're still the same two people they were a year ago; stubborn and independent and fiercely afraid of getting in too deep, of needing someone else too much.

So she says, "For a long time, I thought like we didn't get a fair run. It ended so fast. But I've been thinking about it. We were only together on the surface. It wasn't anything else. And if you were really honest with yourself, you'd know that's all it was."

Barney clears his throat. "If you were really honest with yourself, you'd know that's not true," he counters. He leans forward and speaks in a low voice. "I know you, Robin and I know you're hiding. We've been friends for, what? 6 years? And you still act like if you let anyone in, they'll take off running. Every little thing, it's like we have to pry it out of you."

"Like you're any better!"

"I've been trying."

"I have too."

"Sure. You haven't said anything about how you're taking all this stuff with your mom." He makes a gesture. "Not to me or Ted or Marshall. Not even to Lily. You just get quiet and drink. Or go smoke a pack of cigarettes by yourself on the roof. Or run off and almost sleep with some guy and come back a mess. Or you call me on the phone drunk in the middle of the night and pretend it doesn't mean anything the next day."

"I'm not—"

"We know this is hard on you. Ted kept telling Lily not to push you. But you need it. Have you seen yourself lately? You hardly eat. You look like you haven't slept more than a few hours. You've been smoking more than I've ever seen you and drinking all the time. And you pretend everything is absolutely fucking normal. You were never a good liar, Scherbatsky."

"So was this your big plan to find out what's wrong with me, then? Did you guys all sit down and plan this together?" She flicks her cigarette butt into the tin can on the coffee table and starts to stand up, unconsciously almost, like she's going to leave. But something in the way Barney's looking at her makes her sink back down onto the couch.

"No, I already told—"

"You want to know? You want to fucking know?" She says, somewhere in between a cry and a shout. "It runs in my fucking family."

"Robin—" he starts.

"No. Listen to me," she says, her voice falling now to a whisper. "My grandmother died before I was born. And my aunt Carol has had it twice now. The second time, she barely made it, so she had a mastectomy when I was fourteen. She didn't have plastic surgery or anything afterwards. There's just this hollow space… Like it's a trophy or something."

For the second time that night, Robin's eyes fill with tears and the voice the escapes her throat sounds like it belongs to someone else. "And now my mom."

Barney reaches over and puts a hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he says.

"And they want me and Katie to take all these tests, all these tests that will basically tell us what we already know: we're fucked. We watch the two of them go through it knowing in maybe 20 years it'll be us."

Robin's not looking at his face, but at the makeshift ashtray in front of her, the still burning cigarette he must have set there a few minutes ago. The tip burns slowly, the nearly whole cigarette balanced against the rim.

But she doesn't see it.

Instead, she pictures her aunt back in the kitchen in Toronto, her shirt rolled up without dignity, without shame; her body some horrible tortured thing that will never again be seen without a hint of disgust or with the ruthless indifference of medical workers or of her own remembered pain and fear. Robin thinks of herself in the kitchen in Toronto shielding her eyes, thinks of Barney sometime in the future doing the same thing.

She has to make him understand. Still crying, Robin takes his hands slowly into hers and then places his palms against her shirt, holds them to her breasts.

He lets her. He's watching her, his brows creased, entire face framing one question.

She tries to explain before the courage she's gained from the scotch fails her. "I know it's not like you want to be with me because… but, if I had to have a… a mastectomy, I wouldn't want… Or the chemo, I wouldn't want you to… I wouldn't want any of you to see me the way I see them. It would change everything. This isn't who I am. I don't want to be…this… I can't."

"Robin," he says, and she half expects him to make some joke. But he doesn't. It ends there. His hands are still on her breasts, hers are still holding them there. They are warm through the shirt she's wearing. A moment later she drops her hands and his follow.

"Robin," he tries again. His voice breaks. "Look at me," he says.

So she does.

She sees him through a blur of tears. And it is so different from the way she is used to seeing him that it takes a while for this new image to catch up with her retinas.

His tie is loosened, the buttons at the top of his shirt undone, the shirt itself un-tucked and wrinkled. With his eyes red and the little creases gathered along the sides of them, he looks unbelievably exhausted and raw. And his eyes have that look they sometimes get during his brief flitters of honesty, but the expression is etched into them so deeply, Robin has a hard time convincing herself it wasn't there like this, steady, all the years she's known him. And she knows she was wrong, so wrong. They really have changed. She could never have imagined a reality where they would sit here and she would tell him the one thing she was most afraid of, only to have him not make some snide joke to brush it to the side.

Barney swallows. Then he reaches forward and pulls her to his chest. "It wouldn't be like that," he manages.

He runs his fingers through her hair and she thinks, maybe, that he might be crying now, too, because the side of her head feels warm and wet and his breathing noises sound wholly unfamiliar to her. For some reason, it doesn't bother her like she thought it would. Instead, she stretches her arms around him and rubs her palms against his back. Then she rests her head at the crook of his neck.

Robin knows what it is: knows that this last piece of armor between them has somehow, noiselessly fallen away, that they're sitting here now, open and honest, for maybe the first time.

Barney's lips brush against the skin of her neck as he mumbles low somewhere in the vicinity of her ear, "It wouldn't change anything."

And with the intensity of a downpour from dark, bursting clouds, Robin believes him.

After a few long minutes, Barney slings his arm around her shoulders and Robin imagines the two of them speaking in low voices, saying all the right things, slipping out of this reality into another where the shadow of the hangman doesn't follow so close.

When Robin's tears finally stop, neither makes a move for the scotch or the cigarettes. Instead, they take deep breaths. Instead, they sit there, holding onto each other as the last red ember of the night burns out slow.

The End