Grocery Store Revelations
Grant quickly read through the grocery list, planning the fastest route through the store in his head, then gave the list a brisk nod and turned towards Skye.
"It shouldn't take too long," he said. "Are you sure you don't want to split up? It'd be more–"
"If you say something like 'time effective,' I swear I'm going to hit you," she warned him, and there was something in her voice that told him she wasn't entirely joking. "And I've told already, I won't leave you alone to buy all…" she made vague gestures with her hands, "agent-y stuff. So you got yourself a partner on this mission, Robot," she concluded, then simply grabbed the cart from him, and started pushing it towards the shelves. Grant just stood there for half a second, then shook his head, and, with a hint of a smile, followed her (okay, so maybe he was kind of glad she wasn't willing to split up).
Although his happiness didn't last exactly long.
He had a very specific idea of how grocery shopping should go: find the item from the list, take it from the shelf, then go on to the next item, and repeat, easy and simple. Skye, however, had very different ideas about shopping, as it turned out.
"What are you doing?" she hissed at him as he was just about to put the first thing into their cart–a bottle of mayo from a well-marketed brand. "You never take the first one," she chastised him as she took the bottle from his hand and placed it back on the shelf. "And we don't need this fancy stuff anyway." She leaned forward, inspecting the bottles on the lower shelves, then picked up one from a no-name brand (and from the back of the shelf) and put it into the cart. "That'll do."
He didn't comment on it, just gave her a little shrug, and checked the next thing on the list; it really wasn't worth arguing over, and of it made her happy, then he was glad to go with it.
But when the trend continued he started to feel a little uneasy–Skye'd always refuse to buy well-known (and more expensive) brands, choosing cheaper versions instead, promising that they were "just as good," or saying that she knew unbranded products that were even better than the branded ones, and then sometimes she'd stand in front of the shelf for a long time, trying to calculate which product had the best price-quantity ratio. For the first two or three times, he barely even noticed this little ritual. Then it started to annoy him a little. Then it made him think. And then when they got to the dairy section he finally got it.
"You… I mean back when you were living in your van…" he stuttered, trying to find the right words. It was all coming back to him–Simmons' comments right after Skye'd joined the team about how she's malnourished and needs this and that vitamin, Miles Lyndon snapping, blurting out that how she'd been barely scraping by… "You have some experience of it," he concluded, not really voicing what he wanted to, but it seemed like she still understood what he meant, because she gave him a bittersweet smile.
"Yeah, when money is tight, you learn what 'effective shopping' really means," she said, putting some milk into their cart. "And for me, money has been tight most of the time…" She turned away from him to grab more milk, but there was something in the way she seemed to avoid looking into his eyes that told him she wasn't entirely comfortable with the topic.
"Hey," he said softly, placing a hand on her shoulder, making her look at him. "That's not the case anymore, you know that, right?"
One corner of her mouth turned upwards into a tentative half-smile as she shrugged. "Old habits die hard, I guess."
"Then let's break them." The words slipped out before he could have given explicit order to his mouth to move (he just hated thinking about how it must have been for her before they'd found her). Skye blinked up at him.
"What?"
"Let's break this habit and put you at ease," he said, deciding to go with it.
"And how exactly do you plan to do that?" she chuckled.
Grant stuffed the list into his jeans pocket and grabbed the handle of the cart. "By going on a shopping spree and buying something outrageous. For starters."
She actually laughed at that, then slipped her arm through his.
"Alright, Robot, if you say so. Lead the way! Let's treat ourselves."
(Even if the others were a little confused when they got back to the Bus with a bunch of stuff that wasn't on the shopping list, nobody said a word.)
