jowls | open post.

"They've always been interested in us," he says, though there's something guarded in his voice. Mulder, you're crazy hits differently these days, and he doesn't want to hear it right now. "Think of it as covering our bases, Scully. We'll look at all the possibilities. If you think of something else, we'll investigate it."

Any theory. Every theory. This is the best opportunity he's had in years to do something that matters.

She's not going to say it; the theory that this might be part of some long-running conspiracy seems less unlikely than her half-formed gut instinct that she's here to help him through-- whatever he's going through. Even trying to articulate it to herself, it feels ridiculous.

"It's as good a theory as anything," she agrees, shrugging a shoulder. "Maybe your contacts will turn something up. I'm not sure I have any leads-- I can't think of anything they would have wanted to interrupt," she muses. If the answers lay in the results of any of her active cases, he'd be the one to know.

"But maybe a new pair of jeans is the best place to start?"

He breathes out, relieved but trying not to show it (and probably giving the whole game away). This is a plan he can work with: Get Scully something to wear, come back home and dig into his latest conspiracy.

There's more he could be doing, he knows. Finding her actual home, not to mention gaining entry, should be trivial - but the trespass it'd represent makes it off-limits. He can't imagine taking that privacy away from her, even in extremis. He's also half-tempted to sign the current Scully up for a spa day and spend the time trying to whip the house into the kind of shape she'd appreciate...but he doubts his own follow-through there. Maybe later, if she's still stuck here after a week or two.

"New jeans," he agrees, getting up from the bed. "The style's different these days. They call them skinny jeans - more like the 80s than the 90s."

The notion makes her grimace, though it's a vague and light-hearted disapproval. No one should have to adjust to twenty years of fashion progression overnight; but honestly all she wants is something clean. (And, maybe, something proper to sleep in. Secretly, guiltily, she doesn't mind borrowing his shirt-- but the unspoken awkwardness of sleeping otherwise naked in his bed is something she could do without.)

"Just give me a few minutes to freshen up, I'll get dressed. Any chance of coffee?" she adds brightly, hoping the answer's yes but mostly hoping asking for something overtly will make them both feel less at sea.

"Sure." He pauses on his way out, grabbing a different shirt from the drawers, and shuts the door after him. Keeping everything else the same probably isn't the best move on his part, but he'd like to get out of Scully's hair sooner rather than later.

Downstairs, there'll be two cups of coffee waiting, along with a rumpled but basically fine Mulder. (He could stand to shower and shave, but the three-day shadow's just going to have to wait; Scully deserves to have the bathroom to herself.) He's reading an article on his phone, drinking from a mug that says I RAN FROM THE FEDS AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY MUG. The one waiting for Scully is a little less garish; it looks hand-thrown and glazed, with decoration on it that makes it clear it's from Shenandoah National Park.

It's a little awkward, being in his bedroom. What ought to be his most private space, and probably is-- except it feels barely lived in, laundry notwithstanding. Knowing Mulder, he's likely genuinely more comfortable in his office than he would be knowing she was there. But she can't help feeling a little bad watching him usher himself out so quickly.

(Is it just, as he'd said when they got here, that what's his is hers? Or is it that he can't shake the sense that this is as much Scully's bedroom as his own? The distinction feels fuzzy but crucial. She keeps trying not to think about.)

She opts just to wash up, figures she might as well save a proper, relaxing shower for when she has clean clothes to change into. In the mirror she looks a little bedraggled-- shirt wrinkled, eyes dark, a little pale-- but not too bad. It doesn't seem like a bad day, at least. Folding his shirt-- noting the blood on the collar with mild dismay-- she leaves it at the foot of the bed and heads downstairs, lured by the scent of coffee.

"Thanks," she murmurs, taking a sip and closing her eyes. She could almost pretend she's in her apartment, Mulder just stopping by to check in on her after the weekend. With her eyes shut it feels remarkably close to normal.

She opens her eyes, studies him quietly while she sips her coffee.

"Did you get any sleep?" she asks, deciding it's better than brooding on the question.

She savors the coffee, and he savors the sight of her. Even with the traces of her cancer - the circles under her eyes, the ease with which he can imagine blood dripping down her philtrum - she looks great. Happy, calm, relaxed. Like she belongs here, if he can only make here somewhere worth being.

"Yeah," he says, and if it's a lie, it's only because he's not volunteering how much. "How about you?"

If there's anywhere in 2014 she belongs, it's here. Certainly not in her older self's house-- wherever that might be. She might, she thinks, have to ask Skinner if their other leads don't pan out; it's possible there's some clue there. But thinking about it doesn't feel like going home. If she can't be at her own apartment, or on Mulder's leather couch in the blue glow of his fishtank, this is probably the next best thing.

She doesn't belong here. It's hard not to be aware of it-- every time she looks over at him and finds him grown into himself, she remembers. But there's a version of her who could belong in a version of this place. It's like a film that's slightly out of focus-- a puzzle with a missing piece; some fight, some sorrow, she can't guess at.

Even if she's wrong about the nature of their relationship-- at this point she'd be more shocked to be wrong-- she's not wrong about that. A year is no time at all when there's a lifetime ahead of you.

"Not too badly. Better than in the hotel," she adds, honestly. It feels safer here. "I guess that's replaced the newspaper?"

She gestures at his phone, not bothered, just vaguely curious if he's really reading that thing.

"Oh - yeah." Put it away, Fox. He turns the phone toward her so she can see the text of an article. It won't mean anything, he figures - it's mainstream news, and she'll have never heard of anyone called Obama. After she's seen the screen, he clicks a button on the side, and it goes dark. "Paper news is a dying art."

After he sets down his phone, he adds, "Are you hungry? I have some bagels in the fridge."

What he actually means is eat, you have to keep your strength up, but he wouldn't have said it so baldly in '97, let alone now. Scully needs to make her own choices here. "Actually - I think the eggs are still good. Let me make you a breakfast sandwich."

The snatches of text she catches don't, in fact, mean anything; she's happy to ignore it, other than the faint marvel at how far technology is going to advance. It makes sense. Desktop computers turn to laptops, laptops get smaller... Eventually it fits in your pocket.

"I could eat," she says. She's pretty sure she could, at least, though she isn't particularly hungry. But that's not particularly unusual and he's right, in what he doesn't say. They've got a long day ahead, and she has to take care of herself as best she can.

"Do you think it'd be worth reaching back out to Skinner?"

It's a good question, one he doesn't really have an answer for. "If we get desperate. I don't think anyone at the FBI misses having Spooky Mulder around."

Skinner still gives a damn, and Mulder knows it; he could see it in the way he'd looked at them both. But it's easier to stew in misery than try to reach out. As he cracks a couple of eggs into a pan - last clean one, clearly not actually for eggs - he adds, "It'd probably sound better coming from you. Might give us a little more to work with."

It's potentially better for Skinner's blood pressure not to have them, but who knows-- the current state of the Bureau is far from her concerns at the moment. But she thinks, if he could, he'd help them. The question really is if there's anything he can do.

"We don't have to deal with it now. Maybe tomorrow-- I think I'd like to check in anyway, let him know I'm holding up."

She's pretty sure he could do the math, too; knew the moment she'd been taken from, and how tenuous her health is.

Meanwhile, she's watching Mulder with thinly-veiled interest, trying to remember if she's ever seen him cook with anything other than a phone and credit card.

"Sure." If it gets that far. By tomorrow, for all they know, she could be gone - though he hopes not. However much he wants the right Scully in the right place, if only so this one can get her chip implanted again, he's too selfish to be happy about the idea. As soon as she's gone, his connection with her vanishes, too.

But for now, she's here, and he's proving reasonably adept at frying eggs. And when he catches her examining him, he can guess why. "Don't worry, I got all the eggshells out."

If she wasn't on borrowed time she might be more curious about the future, more inclined to try and stay a while. As it is... well, she's worried, but she's not exactly eager to go; not without understanding the why, if not the how. Ideally both.

And she still can't shake that irrational feeling that she has to fix this, somehow.

"I trust you," she says with a little laugh. It smells good, actually; maybe she is hungry.

"You'll trust me more after this sandwich," he says, cheerful in the moment, as he gets the rest of the ingredients ready. "I figured out how to make pretty decent eggs in the Bahamas, believe it or not."

Make takeout impossible, and cooking is no longer improbable. He slides the plate over to her: an open-faced bagel sandwich, one egg on each side. Beneath each egg, there's a paper-thin slice of deli ham and a thin swipe of cream cheese. Nothing that'll overwhelm her, but it's a sandwich built to be hearty. (And he's kind of assuming she'll only manage half of it, so he doesn't bother making a second one.)

Oh, there's absolutely a story there. Brushing up on his domestic skills while in the tropics. And he says it in good spirits, and she doesn't want to ask anything but she wants to know everything.

And really, if he had all this on hand to cook, he's clearly much more domestically inclined than she recalls. Probably as a matter of necessity; this is far enough out that he can't have many options for delivery.

She grabs half the sandwich and takes a hearty bite. Lots to do today; she's fairly sure there's no way to emotionally prepare for a mall in 2014, considering how little she likes going to the mall in her own time.

Considering it, she decides to risk the question.

"How long were you in the Bahamas?"

"Long enough to get tired of island music," he says, keeping it light in turn, and takes another sip of his coffee.

Watching her eat is reward enough for just about anything right now; so is seeing curiosity light her eyes. Talking about the time they spent on the lam is playing with fire, but the reward is something greater than small-talk about the state of the present day. Even if she can't know...any of it, actually, none of the real details, he can cultivate a little mystery. Something strange and intriguing, just enough to keep the future looking interesting.

(And who is he kidding? If she asks the right questions, he'll probably tell her everything.)

"A flight layover would do that."

It's an evasive answer, but that's fair. If she really wanted to know, consequences be damned, she'd say so-- and maybe he'd tell her, or maybe his resolve to preserve history would keep him quiet. Somehow the latter seems less likely. Maybe it's unfair of her to keep poking at the edges, tempting him to tell her; Mulder has always liked offering the impossible up on a platter to her.

So she mulls it over quietly. Long enough to take up cooking suggests a stay rather than a visit; not just a weekend or a week at a hotel. Did he live outside the country a while?

(Did they, she thinks, of course; she fits somehow into the future-past, she's sure of that much. If his goal is to make the future intriguing, he's doing well-- though in fairness she's a receptive audience, pathologically looking to fit puzzle pieces together.)

(It's not so hard to picture him on a beach. Or herself, walking beside him on cool sand, given a chance.)

She gets about halfway through her half of the sandwich before nudging the plate with the other half towards him. It's an oddly nice morning, if you ignore everything wrong with the world.

"So where are we heading?"

He picks up the other half of the bagel and takes a bite before he answers, having long since grown comfortable with companionable silence. He could spend all day watching Scully think things through - smartphone, eat your heart out. And for a moment, when she's about to speak, he thinks she'll ask the inevitable questions, all the followup he's hinted at. He can keep the mystery going for a while longer, dance around the central premise until one of them can't help but prod at just what kind of company he's had over the years.

It's the opposite of the way they used to talk, champing at the bit to spill everything he knows about a given mystery. At the same time, it's as familiar as breathing; neither of them have ever been raging successes when it comes to talking about the things that matter most.

"That depends on you," he answers, when her question comes. "We can go classic and hit up a department store, or we can figure out where the kids get their clothes. Forever 21, maybe? Or - Hot Topic, that's where they shop."

Maybe it's that the question of a relationship between them-- other than the obvious working one-- is not as mysterious as the question of why she's here, and how she'll get home. It's a step, but not a leap. It's a likely hypothesis, that they could be together. All the likelier if they're not working at the Bureau.

"I don't think dressing like I'm 21 will help us out," she laughs. She's already younger than she ought to be. "Penny's is fine. I'm not worried about being fashionable." Just clean.

She's going to look like an old lady, with her intact mid- nineties fashion sense.

It gets a laugh out of her, and that's all he cares about, right then. Everything about her is familiar; everything about her is lovable. He didn't realize just how badly he missed her until now, and he wasn't exactly laboring under the delusion that he was fine without her.

"JC Penney?" he asks, around another bite of bagel. "We can go high-end here, Scully. Fur coats, designer suits, Louboutin pumps."

"It doesn't seem like fur coat weather."

If she's gotten into high fashion in the last fifteen years, that will be a big surprise. (Okay, maybe the shoes, but she's more of a window shopper in that regard; their work is tough on footwear.)

There probably isn't a polite way to point out what it would look like, him randomly splurging on a couture wardrobe for a woman twenty years his junior. Mulder, in fairness, probably wouldn't care.

(She wonders if he knows anyone here well enough for it to matter, if he's seen having traded Scully in for a younger model.)

"Let's stick to casuals until we need to infiltrate a black tie gala."

"All right, all right." He puts his hands up, too obviously amused to be disappointed. "I'll wait on the mink stole and the silk evening gown."

It wouldn't be Scully if she actually cared about this stuff anyway. Her goal, so far as he can tell, has always been to dress exactly well enough to be seen as well-dressed, without getting to the point of drawing attention to herself for it. (With some exceptions, of course - she knows how to pick lingerie to keep his eyes fixed on her - but all those exceptions are off-limits as well.) The temptation to try and spoil her for whatever time they have together is a coping mechanism for the knowledge that, at some point, she'll vanish and leave him alone again. Letting it go beyond a joke isn't wise.

Once they're finished eating, he adds the dish to the pile and goes to slip on a pair of running shoes. And, to ensure the subject drifts away from how much money can Mulder spend on the houseguest he's utterly besotted with, he adds, "When we get back, remind me to show you the garden."

The eye roll he gets is, no doubt, expected. It's a part she's pleased to play, too playful and toothless to even call bickering. It shouldn't feel so familiar, but Mulder has stayed Mulder; that much is something of a relief.

If things were different she might be more enthused about a shopping spree; but everything is horrifically expensive in the future, his finances are a total mystery, and-- most notably-- it feels a little too much like a last hurrah. She believes him when he says she'll live, but she hasn't adjusted to the idea.

She gets her shoes on-- impractical out here, maybe she should get running shoes herself-- and smiles at the thought.

"I'd like that."

So he leads the way out, locking the door behind them - "We should get a key made for you, if you're here more than a couple days" - and back to his SUV.

It's quiet in the car, aside from the sound of the radio murmuring away. He's never wanted so badly to talk to someone but had so little to say. Not that there's actually nothing to talk about, but conversation seems like a minefield from this vantage point. They've exhausted the easiest conversations they can have about the future, he already knows what happened in the past, and he can't keep asking her how she's feeling. They might spend the entire drive in silence, at this rate.

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