More drabbley goodness!
Y'all, I swear, this thread is the most addictive thing. IN. THE. WORLD. I've now written like... seven or eight drabbles in total? But anyway, I think these are the best, so I'm posting them here.
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One night late in September 2009, almost ten months after Ted's nasty breakup with Stella, Marshall and Barney were conspiring at the bar.
"Dude, you've got to tell him," Marshall was telling Barney, accepting four glasses of beer and a bottle of water from Carl. "I'm seriously going to explode if we go any longer without saying something about this."
"Um, no way!" Barney responded, grabbing three of the beers to help Marshall bring them over to the booth. "There's no way I can tell Ted my news unless you tell him yours."
"What's the matter?" Marshall teased. "Ashamed or something?"
Barney scoffed. "Please. In my body, where the shame gland should be, I have a second awesome gland. True story."
"I don't think that's the gland Ted's going to be mad about," Marshall shot back.
Barney squirmed. "It's just... Robin and I talked about it, and we decided we're not ready to go public just yet, okay?"
"If you tell Ted your news, I'll tell him mine right after to distract him," Marshall offered.
Barney thought about it for exactly 8.3 seconds. "Deal."
---
"...and then I went down to the vending machine to get a snack, but once I got there I realized I wasn't hungry anymore!" Ted finished his boring work story, oblivious to the telepathic conversations his four companions were having with each other.
Please, Robin? Barney was mentally begging his girl.
Robin mentally sighed. Fine, Barney. But you'd better make this up to me later. She winked suggestively at him, and Barney smirked back.
"Hey Ted," Robin said to her ex-boyfriend, "Barney and I have something to tell you."
"We're together," Barney supplied before Ted could say anything.
"Have been," Lily added.
"For six months!" Marshall burst, relieved to be rid of the burden of the secret he had been holding in.
From the look on Ted's face, they might as well have said that Star Wars was the worst movie ever made. "What- how- why-" he stammered, unable to make a sentence. Finally, he found his voice. "Why didn't you tell me anything?" he asked, hurt and angry.
Barney looked nervously at Marshall. "Aren't you, uh, going to tell him some news of your own?"
"Ohh, right," Marshall said, winking at his friend. "Ted," he said proudly, looking lovingly at Lily before he continued. "Lily and I... bought an awesome futon for our new apartment."
Barney's mouth hung agape. "You're not going to tell him about the BABY?!?!?"
Ted chugged the rest of his beer.
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Well, kids, it all started when Missy started to chew on one of Robin’s washcloths.
“Oh my GOD!” Lily shrieked upon opening the bathroom door in the middle of Ted’s 31st birthday party. “Missy completely trashed your bathroom!”
“She ate all our towels!” Ted moaned, looking at the remains of his beloved Towel-of-Many-Colors.
Robin groaned as she saw her $35 bottle of conditioner had been ripped to shreds by the goat’s teeth, coating the bathroom tiles in a thin, slippery layer of smelly goo. “Great. Now my hair’s going to go dull.”
“What’s going on, guys?” Marshall asked as he stepped into the bathroom doorway with the rest of them, only to recoil in horror from the sight and the smell, covering his mouth with his monstrous hand. “What happened here?!” he yelled.
“It’s all your wife’s fault!” Ted said, pointing at Lily accusingly. “She’s the one who brought the goat here!”
“Way to go, Lily!” Robin said sarcastically.
“Yeah!” Barney chimed in, joining the rest of them. “What are we talking about?”
“My goat destroyed Ted and Robin’s bathroom,” Lily said sadly. “I’m so sorry, guys…”
But then, Barney let out a shriek of pain, pointing in horror to a spot on the floor. “What happened to my suit?” he cried, gingerly picking up the remains of his destroyed jacket.
“How did one of your suits end up in our bathroom?” Ted wanted to know.
“Well, I must have left it here the other night when we-“ Barney began only to cut himself off.
“When you… what?” Ted looked back and forth between Barney and Robin’s guilty faces. “Guys?”
And that’s how I found out Uncle Barney and Aunt Robin had gotten together.
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3rd: "What Barney Does for a Living"
(Prompt: "Barney is Dr. Horrible.")
Robin sat motionless in the chair across the desk from Barney, who was wearing a white lab coat watching her expectantly. “Well?” he finally asked.
“Are you trying to tell me,” she said slowly, “that all this time, you’ve been working as a low-rent supervillain?”
“Um, I believe the politically correct term is ‘evil genius on a budget’,” he corrected, forming air quotes with his gloved hands. “And yeah, Scherbatsky, you’d better believe it.”
Robin shook her head in disbelief. “Sorry, Barney. Even I know that you’ve just put on your old Halloween costume to try and make me think that your job is cooler than it actually is.”
Barney scoffed. “Please. What exactly do you think ‘Altrucel’ stands for?”
“I didn’t think it stood for anything…”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong. ALTRUCEL is just an acronym for ‘A League, That’s Right, of Ultra-Cool Evil Lads.’ Or, for you civilians, the Evil League of Evil.”
“Okay, now that’s just ridiculous.”
“Oh, really? Okay, then: why else would I be on my blog all the time, if not to talk about my plans for world domination?”
“Come on, Barney,” she said. “Even I know that your blog is just full of ways to pick up women. Not that I read it, or anything!” she added hastily.
“Ah-HA! You’ve fallen for my decoy blog, I see!” He let out a stilted laugh that seemed to try and mimic the sounds villains in old melodramas made.
Robin stared at him incredulously. “Was- was that it? Your ‘evil laugh?’” She started to giggle in spite of herself.
“Hey, it’s coming along!" he said defensively. "I’ve been working with a vocal coach… strengthening the…” He pounded his chest. “Haaaaaah.”
“Well, it’s certainly memorable,” she teased him.
Just then, Marshall burst through the door, wearing a too-tight black T-shirt with a hammer logo on it, his ever-growing hair slicked back and gelled into a Superman-like hairdo. He pointed a finger dramatically at Barney.
“It’s curtains for you, Doctor Horrible,” he boomed, striking a heroic pose. “Lacy, gently wafting curtains!” His heroic facade crumbled as he giggled to himself.
Barney rolled his eyes, his head flopping back in exasperation. “Marshall, for the last time, this is NOT my Halloween costume!”
Marshall caught Robin’s eye. “Denial,” he said in a whisper that carried through Barney’s office, which Robin noticed had been converted into an evil lab of sorts, complete with test tubes and the obligatory giant whiteboard. The only trace that they were still in Barney’s office was the many motivational posters Barney kept on his walls. Among the posters, a framed diploma caught her eye.
"Does that say that you have a Ph.D. in Horribleness?" she asked Barney.
"And another one in Awesomeness," he added, pointing to another diploma in the center of the wall.
"So you're horrible at being awesome?" she couldn't help but ask, smirking. Barney ignored her, though he closed his eyes in disgust.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Barney went on, pulling the goggles on his head down over his eyes, “I need to get back to work on my Freeze Ray, so if you two could just leave, that’d be great.”
Robin and Marshall shrugged and walked out. Before the door closed, Robin could swear she heard Barney mutter, “Ohh, you’ll get what’s coming to you, Captain Hammer, aka Clark Butterfield. That’ll show you for dislocating my shoulder last week!”
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Last one. (Angst ahoy!)
(set during the pilot)
"How does Carl land a Lebanese girl?" Barney asked, watching the bartender in disgust. Behind him, Ted was grousing about marriage once again; Barney wasn't paying much attention to what his friend was saying. "The guy doesn't even own a suit!"
Just then, he felt as if someone was watching him. And why wouldn't they? He looked pretty damn good in his newly-pressed suit. Turning around, he scanned the bar to see if someone really was watching him...
And that's when he saw her.
She was deep in conversation with a blonde woman, but every few seconds her eyes flickered in his direction. She was very pretty in an unconventional way, not at all the usual bimbo he usually picked up at McLaren's. Barney wasn't sure what exactly it was that was making him stare at her: her boobs were hidden by that startlingly green turtleneck she was wearing, she lacked any remote air of desperation, and from her body language he could tell she had enough self-esteem to keep her away from someone like him.
And yet he couldn't keep his eyes off her.
As he attempted eye contact, she gave him a small smile that simultaneously thrilled and terrified him. He quickly looked away, gulping some of his scotch. His eyes fell instead on a young blonde girl sitting alone at the end of the bar, with "daddy issues" written all over her and a top cut down to there. Now there was a much easier target...
"Hey, Barney," Ted said abruptly, having been quiet for several seconds. "See that girl?"
Barney followed Ted's gaze to find himself face-to-face with - who else? - green turtleneck girl. And by now, judging from the Look she and Ted were sharing, it was clear that it had been Ted she had favored with her smile. He tried to pretend it didn't matter.
So Barney said the first inappropriate thing that came to mind as he prepared to forever put Shannon-like thoughts of green turtleneck girl out of his mind:
"Oh yeeeeeah, you just know she likes it dirty."
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So, that's that. Because of this, I haven't gotten a whole lot of work done. I've got less than 2 weeks left to write a 20-page paper on Birth of a Nation, and I still don't have everything read. Oh, and did I mention the blank document that is my short story, due a mere week from today? And my drugs presentation due in a mere... 16 hours? Life's good. NOT.
Halloween is in 2 days, and I can't bring myself to care. It's been a while since I was really into Halloween anyway, but now I feel like I'm such a downer since everyone's got these elaborate plans for Halloween, and the most exciting thing I'll probably be doing is staring at the aforementioned blank document, trying to get over my writer's block. (OK, it's not so much writer's block as not wanting it to suck. But then, I read one in my class today that hurt my eyes, so there's a good chance that it'll be better than that one.) My absentee ballot still hasn't come in the mail. I'm starting to think I sent the application in too late. If I don't vote, that'll just be one more reason to hate myself, since everyone from my mom to Neil Patrick Harris is all "Vote, dammit!!" and the election is 6 days from now and I STILL can't bring myself to care about who's running my own country since I've been burned out on election talk since like November 2006. (Though the "Don't Vote" video I found actually did make me want to vote for... someone. It was surprisingly moving... especially NPH's line. "I vote because I fell in love and I want it to matter." That dude's just made of awesome, and he made me cry once more, this time by being himself. Why do they have to say my vote counts, though? That's just too much pressure, because what if it all comes down to your vote, and you didn't know what you were talking about so you voted for the wrong person? Then you've become responsible for the decline of the free world, since the person you ignorantly voted for was secretly a militant dictator!)
Overthinking? Yes. Vote Nader!
In other news, I'm approaching levels of morbid obesity, and I still won't get off my fat ass to go to the gym.
Oh, almost forgot: today I used the phrase "true story" and made my friend laugh. But I don't think she watches HIMYM. It just made me happy, and I needed some happy news to end this post on.
Sweeney tomorrow!!!!! =D (Okay, more happy news.)