Recap / How I Met Your Mother (And How I Met Your Father) Intimacy Arc Chapter Seventeen: Naegiri Counsel!

Intimacy Arc Chapter Seventeen: Naegiri Counsel!

Original Release: May 18, 2020 (Fanfiction.net), May 19, 2020 (AO3)

Summary

Taking Sakura's advice, Kyoko goes to see her father and ask for his guidance about her feelings. Meanwhile, Makoto takes a walk to clear his head and accidentally runs into Chiaki. Will the two receive the counsel that they desperately need?

Tropes

• Call-Forward: While giving advice to Kyoko, Chisa tells her "If you spend all your time trying to avoid danger, you’ll never move forward", something that Kyoko would tell Makoto during the Killing Game.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Chisa and Chiaki admit that they hesitated in confessing their feelings for Kyosuke and Hajime respectively, and they advise Kyoko and Makoto respectively not to make the same mistake.
• Everyone Can See It: When Kyoko asks Jin how he and Hibiki fell in love, he immediately can tell that this relates to her crush on Makoto and says that he could tell how close they were when he brought her into the infirmary after their investigation on Ibuki's missing guitar.
• Innocently Insensitive: While Jin telling Kyoko about how he and Hibiki fell in love was meant to help her with her feelings for Makoto, this only angers Kyoko since she only has brief memories of her mother and their time as a family.
  Kyoko: (Thinking) He has all these memories of Mom; years of experience with her love. And me? The most I get are brief flashes from before she was taken from me, and I can’t even control them. The only memory I can recall on command is seeing her pale face floating above a white sheet in the morgue. And while I come to him for help with my own feelings, he has the nerve to make a tangent to the years that we were a family that I can’t even remember. Has there ever been a worse father?