jowls | open post.

"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.

"That's a nice idea, but it's not like I can go driving around. Expired license," she points out. Also it's in her purse, which is safely back in 1997. Still it's a nice gesture, and she doesn't disagree... if she sticks around. Which she might, she supposes, considering how little they've figured out so far.

The silence isn't as comfortable as it ought to be, the weight of missing decades heavy between them. She doesn't mind the lack of small talk, but it's frustrating not to have some lead on a solution for this. So she spends the ride half-listening to the radio, looking out the window.

"I have no idea what a good price is for anything," she warns him cheerily as they park.

"Assume they all are," he answers, grateful to have something to say as they find a spot. If the parking lot's anything to go by, they'll have the place mostly to themselves. "You aren't going to break the bank."

Even if she wanted to, it'd be a real stretch to try. Mulder's life has grown small, and as a result, frugal. There's more than enough to share with her here.

Having seen the prices on menus and the cost of a couple of nights in a hotel room, she can't help a little grimace. But it's hardly worth arguing about; she's not looking for anything fancy anyway. It would be a waste, when with any luck she'll be back when she belongs sooner rather than later.

Driving through the countryside, it could have been any year at all; here, surrounded by modern cars and people with their phones and somehow more garish advertising than ever, she feels decidedly out of place. (Score one more point for Mulder's house, which felt relatively timeless in spite of his computer-television.)

"I don't think I need too much," she frets aimlessly as they head toward the department store. Everything is a big unknown, but she can't plan to stay indefinitely-- not when her health depends on getting back to her own timeline. "I guess there's not much we can do until you hear back from your sources, though?"

That's the frustrating thing about being the subject of this case: where do you even start to investigate it?

"I'm not sure," he admits. The mall's a pretty desolate thing, as they're walking through it, and it occurs to him that he doesn't remember the last time he set foot in one of these. Several storefronts on the way to JC Penney are empty; while there are a few old women getting their steps in, the actual shoppers are spread thin. "I've been racking my brain, but I don't see how much we can pick up without access to witnesses or tangible evidence. You showed up, Scully disappeared, and as far as either of us know, it's a totally unique case. I don't have any other examples of alleged time travel that work like this. We're at a standstill."

Except.

Mulder doesn't like suggesting it, but it's the only idea left in his arsenal. "Unless we look up your house and see if you left a key under the mat, of course."

It's not exactly the bustling center of capitalism she was expecting. But it's early, maybe that's it. The mall walkers haven't changed, at least.

"I'd considered that," she admits. "How's your lock picking these days? Breaking a window would attract too much attention."

She is not prepared for the intensity of modern alarm systems.

"I could figure it out." He's not prepared for modern alarm systems, either, frankly. For someone who's mildly fanatical about his own privacy, he hasn't actually installed anything complicated on his own house. Once somebody's gotten that close, automatically calling ADT doesn't seem likely to help. "It's probably easier than convincing a neighbor to help us out."

Scully's simply too young to pass for her own self. Pity it's not the dead of winter - she could probably manage if she was wearing a balaclava.

She mulls it over for a bit, attention split with window-shopping. Everything seems garish and not at all her style. Her style is twenty years out of date. So it goes.

It's hard to feel enthusiastic about breaking into her own home-- not that she thinks she'd mind-- that her other self would-- God. Anyway; the idea feels vaguely uncomfortable, but it's probably a worthwhile exercise. Maybe it will help her figure out why things between them are so cold.

Honestly there's one other possibility, though she's hesitant to suggest it.

"How close is she with Skinner? Do you think he'd have a spare key-- or know who might?"

Mulder doesn't answer right away; he's looking at a shirt that looks like something his Scully might wear, and he's pretending that's preventing him from answering. But after a moment or two, he admits, "I don't know."

Not very, is his instinctive answer. Neither of them had much contact with the FBI after their last case. But in the last year, Scully could of have gotten a dog and never told him, and reached out to Skinner to feed it. She could have started a book club with him. Who knows? "We could ask, but I wouldn't expect much."

It's a distance that probably seems inconceivable in 1997. Skinner is one of the greatest friends they'll ever have in the upper echelons of the Bureau. Without him, they'd have found their work even harder to complete. But things change.

"It seems worth a shot before we turn to crime," she says, shrugging, trying to sound casual about it. What the rift is between Mulder and Skinner, she can't guess; somehow, it seems less intense than whatever's happened with his Scully.

"Tomorrow," she hedges. "We'll try him tomorrow, if we don't find anything else."

J.C. Penney's looms ahead, the most sensible of department stores; even here everything seems terribly young.

"Jeans first," she decides, because it feels like the simplest goal. "Then some shirts, I guess, and a pair of pyjamas." She'll let him pick out blouses while she grabs underwear, because anything else seems awkward. How much does she need? Surely he has some way of doing laundry, even if he... doesn't. A couple days' worth of outfits to cycle can't be a bad idea.

"We'll get you a burner phone on our way out. You can call him from there." Even if they weren't planning on getting Skinner's help, life without cell reception isn't easy in this day and age. Mulder has a smartphone, and he hates people knowing where he is. Some things are necessary, and Scully's going to be able to navigate the world on her own, if she decides she wants to.

(He hopes she won't want to.)

"Oh -" he says, before she can head off to parts unknown. (His portion of this trip, he thinks, will be mostly relegated to making purchases. As enthusiastic as he'd be to watch her try on clothes - anything to spend more time with her - and give his input, he doubts she'll want his help. Especially once it comes to buying anything more intimate than a pair of sunglasses.) He holds out an emerald green blouse to her, plain but silky, with a scoop neck that'll leave room for her cross necklace to lie flat on her skin. "Unless the color's terrible, you'd wear this. Get a blazer and some dark pants, and maybe we can work the neighbor angle."

"Probably a good idea."

Not because she wants to strike out alone, but it would be less unnerving if she had a way to get in touch with him without having to have him in sight at all times. Case in point: if they get separated and he has to page her to the desk like a lost child, she'll shrivel up and die on the spot.

"Sure, I'd wear it," she affirms; it's a reasonable cut and appealing color, not too flashy. "If you want to pick some things out that look-- reasonable, I can handle the basics?"

"Putting a lot of trust in me, Scully," he teases. Not just in his ability to select colors that'll flatter her, but to know what's likely to fit - when to err towards medium, when to err toward small. For a moment, he wonders - does she know? He's going to have to be more careful. "I'll stay around here."

He's no more excited to have to page her than she is, after all.

And anyway, there's an interesting challenge to recreating Scully's wardrobe. Nothing garish, but there's room for a few tasteful rhinestones, the occasional pattern. He finds five or six possibilities for her and hopes he's stretched out the search long enough that he won't be at loose ends while she gets everything else.

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