It's Not About the Shopping

It was Kim and Ron's first Christmas together.

Technically, of course, the first decade-plus worth of Christmases had been spent together, or at least in each other's 'totally platonic' company. Of course, they had not been officially together-together at that point, so they decided to simply count the Christmas of their senior year as their first couple-Christmas, and be done with it. It made explaining things to the grandparents a whole lot easier.

Ron, whose sweetness gene had gone into overdrive ever since prom, which was a development that manifested itself in ways both endearing and absurd, decided to go all-out in acquiring Kim's Christmas present. Indeed, he had briefly considered throwing a Christmas bash to end all Christmas bashes, something that would beat even the North Pole Incident and atone for all the years of Bueno Nacho Bucks. Ron was talked out this when Rufus, moved to terror at the thought of no Possible Family Christmas eggnog, scampered up Ron's arm, interrupted his high-intensity planning session, and chattered some sense into him.

So he decided to go the route of the old reliables: jewelry or chocolate. In the end, he went with the former.

The hard part, as far as the actual purchase was concerned, had been convincing his dad to release some of the naco royalties from the trust fund. Said fund had been set up after Ron had gone stark raving mad whilst in possession of the first naco royalties check, and his parents were understandably hesitant in releasing the funds; not that they didn't trust him, but his having carried around ninety-nine big ones in his pants was not regarded by them as a wise move.

Okay, fine, they didn't trust him with the money.

Fortunately Ron was able to tap into a romantic side hidden deep within Mr. Stoppable, and thusly secured the necessary fundage.

He had also had to pledge to perform several chores around the house, such as cleaning the bathroom, mowing the yard, and re-organizing the garage (it had filled up, again). Two out of those three, namely the mowing and the garage organizing, had him scared to death.

But it was alright: to him, making Kim smile was worth any possible encounters with the garden gnome.

With a blank check stuck in one pocket, and Rufus snoozing happily in another, Ron set out on December 22nd for Middleton Mall, and the fairly upscale jewelry store known as Kyle Jewelers. He'd already shopped for the Doctors P and the tweebs (those presents were already under the Possible family tree, courtesy of an arrangement with Mr. Dr. P.), and now all that remained was to get Kim something special.

Also present at the mall that day, by freak coincidence, were Kim and her mother, who were taking care of their own last-minute Christmas shopping.

Kim very nearly saw Ron at the jewelry store, but he managed to jump over the counter in time to hide from her. Kim thought she saw something vaguely shoe-like disappear over the top of the counter, but she just shook her head and walked on. After all, she'd already completed her Christmas shopping (sans Nana), and didn't really need to buy anyone any jewelry.

She really hoped that Ron would like the "Fearless Ferret Complete Series" DVD set she'd gotten him for Christmas; even though she figured he would, she expected him to pull out some sweet and corny lines, like 'Gosh, KP, you didn't have to get me anything. Having you as a girlfriend is the most bon-diggity Christmas present ever!' or somesuch as that. Even so, she was rather pleased with her selection, as what she'd gotten for him had just screamed 'Ron' from the moment she saw it.

Not literally, of course, as that would have been really weird. Though she did think that Ron was mentioned in one of Mr. North's commentary tracks.

At the time she had nearly given poor Ron a heart attack, Kim had been making her way towards the fountain at the center of Middleton Mall, where she was supposed to find her mother. They had spent most of the morning shopping together, in order to get gifts for Mr. Dr. P. and the tweebs, but they had split up at a quarter till eleven, so they could successfully purchase presents for each other and still maintain the surprise factor.

She shifted the bags around a little as she walked, and hoped that her mom would already be there. It was already well past eleven o'clock, she was quite hungry, and they hadn't even shopped for Nana yet. Kim figured, then, that a lunch break was in order.

'Spankin', she's already here,' Kim thought with a happy sigh, as she stepped out from behind a rather large fellow and saw her mother waiting at the fountain. Mrs. Dr. P. had set her own bags on the floor, and didn't appear to have been waiting long enough to grow impatient.

"Hey, Mom," Kim called out as she drew near to the fountain.

"There you are, Kimmie," Mrs. Dr. P. said in reply. "Find anything interesting?"

"You'll have to wait 'till Christmas to find out," Kim scolded. Her mother was secretly pleased by this, as her reading of that answer meant that Kim hadn't encountered Ron. Mrs. Dr. P. had actually run into the boy herself as he was entering the mall, and she knew that he wanted to keep his destination there a secret. At least, that's what she figured he wanted, given how he'd dived behind a trashcan when he'd seen her, and it was left to Rufus to explain things.

They then began to haggle over where to go for lunch.

Neither Kim nor her Mom were ever able to fully explain what happened next.

Kim put out Emerald Wednesday's as an option; Mrs. Dr. P. countered with the food court. They both became adamant, in a manner entirely disproportionate to the severity of the subject. One thing led another, and thus began an event that was feared by all men, an epic struggle that had long haunted the nightmares of Doctor James Timothy Possible.

The Duel of the Puppy Dog Pouts.

"She's gone, man," said a slightly bemused jewelry store salesman. "You can get up now."

He grinned at the nervous-looking young man who was curled up on the floor, his head covered by his hands, as if that would actually help to camouflage him. Business had been somewhat slow, and Ron was actually the only customer he'd had that morning. The salesman didn't mind that too much, as he figured this way he was guaranteed of making a sale.

"You sure?" Ron asked uncertainly.

"Positive, man. She went around the corner a minute ago."

Ron slowly stood to his feet and looked around suspiciously. It wasn't that he didn't trust the salesman, it was just that he i>knew /i> Kim Possible, and knew that if she i>had /i> seen him, then she was just wily enough to make him think that she'd left, just so she could jump out at the last second and find out what he was up to.

He sighed with relief when he confirmed that she had, in fact, walked on. That meant his Grand Plan to Surprise KP with a Bright Shiny Object was still in motion. Now he just had to pick out said Bright Shiny Object, a feat which was proving to be far harder than he had originally anticipated.

"So," the salesman continued, "you actually planning on buying something or not?"

Ron had just spent the past hour simply walking back and forth in front of the display counter, studying each and every item with an intensity and attention to detail that was almost foreign to him. That particular activity had been interrupted when he had made his great leap over the display counter, and now he looked as if he was ready to repeat the process, just from the employee side of the counter.

"Huh? Oh, yeah," Ron said, somewhat abashed. "Sorry, dude, it's just..."

He waved his hands in air, as if he was uncertain of what to say.

"Let me guess," the salesman replied. "You want to get something really nice for the most important person in your life, but despite our great selection of many fine diamonds and other jewels, you just can't seem to find something that really fits."

Ron thought for a moment.

"Yeah, that's about it."

The salesman looked at him for a moment. He'd thought that the strange person who had spent an hour browsing his store was Ron Stoppable; in fact, he'd pointed out Kim Possible just to try and confirm his suspicion. With that confirmed, he knew exactly what he had to do.

Granted, it wasn't something that he was really supposed to do, but if he couldn't bend the rules a little for the male half of Team Possible...

He jerked his head towards a door located at the back.

"Normally I wouldn't do this except for a select few customers," he began, "but eh, it's Christmas, and I'm pretty sure that my boss owes the two of you for something. C'mon, Stoppable, I'll show you where we keep the good stuff."

Under normal conditions the salesman would never have left his post to show just one person, and a teenager at that, the 'good stuff'. However, it was a slow day, it was Ron Stoppable, and the salesman had noticed that most of the passers-bye were headed towards the fountain area, apparently drawn towards to some sort of activity.

One Puppy Dog Pout can be resisted, if the person is of sufficient strength of will or coldness of heart. But two, simultaneously, and from a pair of gorgeous women of varying ages? Even the coldest hearts in that mall found themselves melting, and men of all ages and sizes threw themselves to the ground, and begged the goddesses to make their bidding known, so that they might willingly perform it.

Those who came just to see what was going on quickly rued their curiosity, as they fell into the thralldom of the Puppy Dog Pouts.

The wives and girlfriends, of course, were not thrilled by this turn of events, and many of the men received ill-tempered jabs to their ribs or backsides.

Through it all, by route of quivered lips and bambied eyes, Kim and her mother continued to debate where to go for lunch, rendered by their contest oblivious to the mayhem caused by their pouts.

This went on for a good ten minutes, until Kim and her mom realized that they had reached an impasse, and decided to compromise by going to Cheeburger Cheeburger instead.

As they wandered in the direction of one of the greatest burger joints known to man, they wondered just what exactly all those strange people were doing on the floor.

"So this is the good stuff?" Ron asked quizzically. All he saw, in the generously lit room, were stacks upon stacks of plain boxes.

"No, those are what we use to restock the display cases," the salesman replied from behind him. "The good stuff is over here."

Ron turned to see a much smaller assortment of plain boxes.

"It's... more... cardboard..."

"No, it's boxes. Which contain the good stuff," the salesman explained as he opened up on of the boxes.

"Uh-huh. Sure. What makes this stuff so good?" Ron asked.

"Because each item in these boxes," the salesman said, beckoning for Ron to come over and look, "is one of a kind."

Ron, his curiosity piqued, walked over to the box that the salesman had opened and began to look around inside it. Even with his untrained eyes he recognized the quality of the gem-work, and could only marvel at the brilliance of the diamonds. Then he spied a single item, and knew then that his search was complete.

It was a necklace, wrought of the finest silver. The middle third of the necklace was a silver lattice-work, which radiated out from the middle and tapered down, until each end became a plain strand. Set into each half of the lattice was a series of brilliant diamonds, ranging in size from a half-carat to a tenth of a carat, the size decreasing as the width of the lattice decreased. Each was a perfect diamond: colorless, of flawless clarity, and cut in such a way that the light seemed to dance within them.

Four jewels hung from the lattice-work, each suspended from and bordered by finely crafted silver laces and strands. The first two jewels were emeralds, expertly cut and faceted, and each as green as Kim's eyes. The third jewel was a ruby, polished smooth with a prominent asterism, and as red as Kim's hair. These three jewels formed a triangle, with the ruby at the lower most point.

Set equidistant between the ruby and emeralds was a single, two-carat diamond.

If the smaller diamonds were perfect, then that one was an utter paragon, one of the finest examples of such a jewel ever seen.

'That is the second most beautiful thing I have ever seen,' Ron thought to himself, and then he asked the salesman how much it was.

The salesman, seeing that Ron had apparently chosen that particular necklace, actually felt bad when he quoted the price. That was replaced by a very pleasant surprise when Ron produced a blank check and pen and wrote in the amount.

They left the back room and returned to the front counter, so the salesman could finalize the deal and package the necklace. However, as they left, neither the salesman nor Ron noticed the beady monkey eyes that stared at them from the shadows of the boxes.

It was Christmas Eve, and Ron was feeling a little bit tweaked. A water main, or a gas line, or something similarly repair-and-safety-intensive had burst (or broken) on the route between his house and Kim's. Whatever it was that had gone wrong, it had forced the city to close several streets to through traffic (both vehicular and pedestrian), which meant that Ron had to take the long way around. This wasn't too bad, as he was already way early for the Possible festivities, by Kim's request, but he was still still tweaked, because of the principle of the thing, if nothing else.

Still, his tweaked-ness was tempered somewhat by pity for the poor city workers who had to spend their Christmas Eve fixing what was broke.

The long way around wound up routing him through Middleton park, so he decided to take his time and reminisce a little bit. His quick little stroll down memory lane brought him to the duck pond (which was partially covered in a very thin layer of ice), where he relived the memory of how once, as a wee lad, he saved Kim from a rampaging mallard, known to all of the park regulars as 'Drake'.

'Or was that the other way around?' he thought to himself. 'Eh, I always get those details mixed up. Heh, that was one dangerous-getting duck, though, and his quacking vexed-'

"Greetings, Stoppable. It seems that you have something that I want."

The cultured English accent of Monkey Fist interrupted Ron's questionably-accurate reminiscence. Ron turned and saw that his personal arch-foe was perched atop a snow covered hill, and was escorted by a dozen monkey ninjas.

"Dude, so not in the mood right now," Ron grumbled. "So how's about you just take your monkey self and head on home, and we can settle this after the holidays, alright?"

"Two days ago you purchased a necklace from the Middleton branch of Kyle Jewelers," Monkey Fist stated as he calmly walked towards Ron, and ignored the younger man's protest. "You intend this, I believe, as a gift for your paramour, yes?"

"My para-what?"

"For Possible," Fist sighed.

"Oh yeah, it's KP's Christmas present."

"Indeed. They didn't tell you where that necklace came from, did they?"

"The dude said something about Lucian Benelli having found it on some-"

"He found it in an old monkey temple!" Fist interrupted, with a manic look in his eyes. "That necklace you paid a pretty pound for is the simia avaricia, an ancient monkey artifact!"

Ron just looked at him as if he were nuts.

"Oh, please, you had to have seen it," Fist grumbled. "The fierce green eyes, the red mouth, the invincible diamond, and all in the shape of a monkey head! It is obviously a mystical monkey artifact of great power."

"This?" Ron exclaimed, as he pulled the box from his jacket. "Monkey-dude, this is a Christmas present for my girlfriend, which Mr. Benelli found at a shop in Calcutta. There's nothing monkey about it, so unless you i>want /i> me to go ape on your monkey self, you'll-GAH!"

Monkey Fist had thrown himself at Ron, in an attempt to wrest the necklace from his hands. They struggled for a moment, until both lost their grips on the box and it sailed skywards and arced away.

Towards the middle of the duck pond.

It landed, broke through the thin ice shell, and promptly sank straight to the bottom. Ron and Monkey Fist both stared on in shock, and the monkey ninjas simply looked at each other with a well-known sense of defeat.

"The... the simia avaricia," Fist said mournfully. "It's-"

He was cut off when a snowball smacked into the side of his head. He turned to glare at Ron, who was himself fixing Fist with a glare that could melt, well, that could melt something with a really high melting point.

"DUDE!" Ron cried. "CHRISTMAS PRESENT! FOR GIRLFRIEND! Do you have any idea what I had to do to get that?"

"Oh please, the mall wasn't even crowded."

"Two words, monkey-boy. Garden. Gnome."

"You've gone nuts."

"Oh yeah? You're one to talk, Mr. 'CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR GIRLFRIEND is a sacred monkey arti-thingy'!" Ron replied.

"Enough with the silly banter, let's just bring it," Fist said, determined to vent his frustrations on Ron. "MONKEY NINJAS, ATT-"

He was cut off by yet another snowball.

Kim Possible lay stretched out on the couch in her living room, reading a magazine. Mrs. Dr. P. was in the kitchen prepping dinner, Mr Dr. P. had gone to the airport to pick up Nana Possible, the tweebs were up on the roof, putting the finishing touches on the Christmas lights (and the now-traditional Christmas multiple redundant power supplies), and there was a snow covered monkey ninja running down the sidewalk. Ron would arrive soon enough, and then-

'Wait,' Kim thought, realization having interrupted her contented reverie. 'Did I just see a monkey ninja?'

She leapt off the couch and rushed out the door, only to discover that there were, in fact, actually a dozen monkey ninjas, along with Fist himself, and they were all covered with snow and were running from an angered Ron Stoppable, who, along with Rufus, flung snowballs at the retreating simians.

"Monkey ninjas, retreat!" Fist continued to yell, unnecessarily, even as he ran.

"Get out of here, monkey! Get out of here, monkey!" Ron cried as he threw the snowballs.

The terrorized foes vanished over a hill. Ron flung one last snowball with a mighty throw, and was rewarded by the sight of a monkey ninja popping up into the air and then crashing back to earth. He ceased his pursuit and tried to catch his breath.

"Hey, Ron," Kim asked, her voice amused.

"AH! KIM!" Ron cried, and promptly tried to bury himself in a snow bank. He stopped when Kim walked over to him and placed a hand on his arm.

"Amp down, Ron," she admonished with a smile. "What's the sitch?"

"Uh, just FYI, KP," Ron said, embarrassed. "I did, in fact, get you a Christmas present that was not Bueno Nacho Bucks. I... just don't have it with me."

"Did Fist get it?" Kim asked, having deduced some of what was going on, as she helped Ron to his feet. She kept her arms linked with his.

"Nah, he didn't get it," Ron groused. "Might as well, though, since, well... it's at the bottom of the duck pond, KP. Man, you were gonna love it, too..."

"Oh, Ron..."

"You shoulda seen it, KP," Ron said wistfully, "all sparkly, and shiny, and pretty. Just like you, really, though it wasn't quite as pretty as you-"

The last bit earned him a kiss on the cheek.

"Still, it was something that I was hoping would get me a dating-style 'Club Banana Jacket Reaction'," Ron finished, and then he winked at her. "But the kiss'll do.

"I just wanted to get you something special," he concluded with a sigh. "So much for that..."

"I've already got something special, Ron," Kim replied after a moment's quiet. "I've got you, and you are just too sweet for your own good, you know that? So not the drama on the... whatever it was, we'll get it when it warms up a bit. Besides, you're the only jewel I'll ever need."

"KP..." he said, touched. He felt like waxing philosophical, but words failed him.

"Awww," Rufus cooed from Ron's pocket.

She tugged on his arm.

"Now c'mon inside where it's warm," she said with a grin. "I'm cold, and I want to snuggle a bit before I give you your present."

They walked towards the door, with its promises of hot chocolate, a soft couch, and central heating.

"Gosh, KP, you didn't have to get me anything," Ron said sincerely. "Having you as a girlfriend is the most bon-diggity Christmas present ever!"

THE END