Title: "A Bargain at Twice the Price"
Author: anxietygrrl(at)hotmail(dot)com

Notes: A love story in six shopping trips. Written for a "take your OTP to Target" prompt. Starts off fitting into canon, and then veers wildly AU. And not the bittersweet, make-the-best-of-it AU of my other fics, but the happy AU in which horrible events are kept to a minimum and everybody has all their limbs. Target! The happiest place on earth!

Thanks: To my awesome beta and pal, Jesshelga

2005

"I'm beginning to think this was a bad idea."

She held her phone up with her shoulder as she struggled to maneuver the heavily laden shopping trolley around a corner--she never failed to select one with a wonky wheel--and nearly collided with a small boy who darted into the aisle between handbags and children's shoes. "Sorry," she said, genuinely apologetic. He stuck out his tongue at her and ran off. She returned the gesture.

"What?" asked Abby.

"I said I'm beginning to think this was a very bad idea."

"Well, it's too late to change your mind now. I already changed the locks."

"Funny."

"And are you ever going to pick up the rest of these boxes? Because I can call the Salvation Army and--"

"All right, all right. I'll get them tomorrow. I've just bought shelves." The flatpacked boxes jutted out dangerously from the bottom of the cart.

"And you signed the lease, right?"

"Yeah."

"So there's no turning back."

"I'm afraid so."

"It's not going to be that bad. He's not so bad."

"I know. And we'll hardly see each other. But I've been there a week and I've already met two different girls named Nikki. I didn't think about having a front row seat to the--"

"Neverending skank parade?"

"Exactly. I guess it's not sleazy, really, it's just...oh, whatever."

"Uh huh. You don't have a crush on him or something, do you?"

She stopped in her tracks, and used her right hand to switch her phone to her other ear, not noticing when the cart drifted into an endcap on its own momentum and knocked over half a dozen bottles of Listerine. "What? That's ridiculous. He's ridiculous."

"I was just making sure."

"He's sloppy, and lazy, and irresponsible, and now I've lost him in the Target. He's like a four year old."

"You don't have to babysit him, you know."

"No, I just have to share a bathroom."

"Yeah, good luck with that."

They wrapped up their call on that oh-so-encouraging note, and Neela continued pushing her way through the Saturday afternoon crowd. She finally found him in cosmetics, chatting up a--well, she didn't want to say 'skank,' but those cheap platform wedges were a podiatric nightmare, and the skirt was so short she didn't think she'd seen that much of another woman's inner thighs since her ob/gyn rotation. They were probably comparing favorite brands of eyeliner.

"Ray."

"Oh. There you are. Wow, you got a lot of stuff."

She reached into the trolley, pulled out two packages, and held them up for his perusal. "I'm getting us a new one. Striped or plain?"

His new friend saw the shower curtains and tottered off into the next aisle.

"Nice. Thanks."

"I did you a favor."

"Hey, she could have been a grad student in comparative literature, you don't know."

"Spare me your feminist manifesto."

He came over to examine the contents of her cart, and made a face. That one where he tilted his head, quirked up one side of his mouth, and a little wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. "Do you own anything you're not planning to store in a plastic tub? Or is Sterilite going out of business?"

"I like to be organized."

"If you're that worried about my stuff contaminating yours we can swipe some biohazard containers from work."

"Oh, shut up."

"We could swing by office supplies and get you a label maker, so you can put 'property of Neela' on everything. Or we could just get a big roll of tape and make a line down the middle of the living room..."

She rolled her eyes at him, tossed the plain shower curtain back into the basket and left the striped one under a row of Maybelline, and began the increasingly laborious procedure of turning the wonky-wheeled trolley one hundred-eighty degrees.

"Need some help with that?"

"I can manage." She gave a hard shove, and stumbled forward a little as the cart veered to the right. Her shelves slid off the bottom rack with a depressing thwack.

She sighed, and stepped around to retrieve them, but bumped into him on his way to do the same. He balanced the boxes under one arm, grabbed the lame corner of the trolley with his other hand, and together they made their way to the nearest checkout lane.