Ignoring finale, this is set in the non-death, non-divorce world . Random one-shots about Barney and Robin's friendships with the Erikson and Mosby kids. Enjoy!
Bottle Tops
2022
He's noticed by now that Aunt Robin and Uncle Barney are very different when they enter the house. When they come round to visit, Uncle Barney throws each kid in the air (Marvin's ten now and big for his age, so it's getting more difficult for anybody apart from Dad to lift him up. Still, Uncle Barney does his best), ruffles their hair almost violently, and stuffs five-dollar-bills into their fists. Aunt Robin smiles, hugs them politely and immediately starts asking about school and sports and what they've been up to. Marvin's younger sisters and cousins are mad about Uncle Barney, for obvious reasons: magic, high-fives, taking them to Laser Tag, teasing their parents, encouraging them to get into mischief- but recently Marvin's been appreciating Aunt Robin more. Now he understands what her job is and how she has to travel, he likes asking her about different places she's been; what language they speak there, what the capital is, what the currency looks like. His bedroom wall is covered with movie and music posters, and some drawings he's done himself- although Marvin also has a world map pinned up in front of his desk. Every time Aunt Robin comes back from abroad she helps him find where on the map she's been to, and he sticks a pin in green pin in it (blue pins are for countries Uncle Barney and Aunt Robin have been to together; yellow pins are for places any of his own friends have visited; and red pins are for anywhere that Marvin himself has visited). She brings presents back for all of them: foreign candy, toys, dolls, soccer jerseys, the occasional book which Marvin suspects Uncle Ted persuades her to buy. Marvin's favourite thing, though, is the bottle tops.
Every metal bottle top from every Coke bottle in the world has an address on it. Did you know that? Fanta and Sprite and some brands of beer, too. It's the address of where the Coke was bottled, printed between the points of the metal bottle top. When Aunt Robin buys a Coke or a beer in a different state or country, she keeps the bottle top, and gives it to Marvin when she gets home. He likes deciphering the writing, and Googling the zip code to find out exactly where it is. Once, Marvin tried to hang the each bottle top on the pins on his map, but they fell off- so now he keeps them stacked neatly in front of it. Aunt Robin tells him that one day when he's grown up she'll take him abroad with her (to which Uncle Barney always gasps, and narrows his eyes suspiciously at Marvin) on a report.
"You can carry my luggage,"
"Is that why I have to be grown up?" he asks.
"Of course," she smiles.
"I was six foot by my thirteenth birthday," Dad reminds them.
"Awesome! Only three more years!"
"You'll have to be old enough to drink, otherwise you'll miss out on all those bottle tops,"
"Eleven more years, bro," says Uncle Barney.
"That's ages! That's my whole life all over again, and then another year,"
"In Europe drinking age is fifteen or something," Aunt Robin tells him.
"Wow,"
"No," says Mom.
"You forget, his first outing was to a bar," Robin points out.
"It was a restaurant," Mom and Dad say together.
"It was MacLaren's," Uncle Barney tells Marvin.
"You took me to MacLaren's when I was a baby?! What did Uncle Ted say?"
"I don't think he was there. It was when we lived right above the bar, and it just happened, we didn't realise- no, wait, Ted must have been there because it was when Victoria came in a wedding dress. That's why we came down to the bar,"
"I don't remember Ted being there," Barney muses.
"I don't remember you being there," says Mom.
"I was! I was most definitely there!" Uncle Barney retorts indignantly.
"Maybe you were running a Play," sighs Dad, to shut him up. Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect.
"That's right, I must have been! Perhaps it was The Laurence Of Arabia. No, it was The Window-Cleaner. Or maybe-"
"Was this before or after the one when he had to talk like a dolphin?" asks Lily.
"Before," says Aunt Robin.
"After," says Dad.
"How would you know, you weren't there when Barney had to talk like a dolphin,"
"-The Cheap Trick? The Romney?"
Marvin rolls his eyes, leaves the grown-ups to bicker and heads upstairs to his room. He sits on his desk chair and lays out all of his bottle tops, and carefully rereads the addresses on each one. He looks up at the map with its scattered pins, and dreams about when he's twenty-one and he can go travelling to all the places with pins in, and some of the places where there aren't pins in; places where nobody he knows has been yet. He can get hundreds of different bottle tops and coins, and ride on hundreds of new city subways- and eat all kinds of foreign varieties of pizza!
When Aunt Robin and Uncle Barney come upstairs to say goodbye an hour later, Marvin's still leaning his elbows on the desk and gazing up at the map.
Thank you for taking the time to read. I would be super-grateful of review- I've drafted another couple of chapters, so I'll polish them up and post them if enough people like this one. Thanks a lot, have a great day xx