Charge it, please.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

He should have been sitting at home, reviewing file after file and photo after photo, memorizing his deposition and preparing his posed smile. He should have been readying himself for a day of emotions running high and dumbing down his gag reflex (or at least eating his last meal; damn if he was risking breakfast on a day like tomorrow; it was a fucking murder trial, after all). He should have been going to bed early and getting his beauty sleep.

Instead, he was slinking past row after row of glitzy cards with sayings like, "Once beautiful, always beautiful! Happy Fiftieth Birthday!" and "Congratulations on your bundle of joy!" and colored illustrations of flowers and kittens. Fucking kittens. If anyone ever sent him a card with a kitten on it, he was going to give it a ceremonial burning and send it to greeting card Valhalla, the poor bastard. He ducked down as he scooted past the cashier, who had taken a shining to him the last time he had been in the shop. He didn't fancy a chat and a coffee with plump middle-aged women with more pink-swathed bosom than sense.

Bee-lining for the specialty paper section, he waved at the pen counter girl who watched him walk past with uninterested eyes. (When you're twenty-four years old with blonde hair, big blue eyes and the sort of breasts of which the women in plastic surgeon's offices dream, you don't have to give a damn about thin, gangly boys who take photos for a living and purposefully ring up their purchases at the wrong counter, just to say hello to you.) He found the rack of hand-pressed papers with flowers in them and, beneath them, vellum, and at the very bottom, stack after stack of glossy photo paper.

It never took him long to decide to buy the nicest (and most expensive) paper they sold. After all, he deserved a treat after all that hard work and having to deal with so much digital photo equipment. He might not be Irving Penn, but he worked pretty fucking hard to get those photographs looking as nice as they did, and then Basil would dismiss them and tell him to look at them and just bring him the conclusions, that sad fuck. He picked up another twenty sheets to add to the expense account.

[Camille Desmoulins]

Imogene stared at the birthday cards, chewing on her thumb nail and scanning them for something appropriate. Her mother was turning 50 next week and she never knew quite what kind of card to get her. She didn't see her mother very often so she wasn't ever very sure what kind of card to get her, though she was certain it had to be classy. She couldn't just get her something funny or one of those ones that poked fun at her mother's age. The last time she saw her mother she remembered clearly a woman who was trying very hard to look twenty years younger.
She picked up a card and looked at it, opening it, reading the inscription, then putting it back- it was far too campy. She couldn't get anything that mentioned her mother's age. She couldn't get anything that sounded too mother-daughter-y. She sighed and put her hands in the pockets of her jacket, but paused, feeling something rather furry and warm and sitting in her pocket and squirming as she touched it.
"Basil!" she exclaimed, pulling the mouse out of her pocket and looking at him. The mouse looked back at her for a moment then tried to scurry up the sleeve of her jacket. She grabbed him though and glanced back at the woman at the pen counter who wasn't looking over at her. She gave her mouse a murderous look. In response, the mouse bit her. She gasped in pain and dropped the rodent, which proceeded to run off and after recovering from her shock, she ran after it.
She tried to remember that one spell that caused paralysis. She was pretty sure what it was, but it could also be the one that turned the floor to ice. They were really quite similar spells, but she decided not to risk it.
She slid a bit as she followed the mouse's sharp turn into the specialty paper section and slipped, hitting the floor painfully but also slamming her hand down on the escaped mouse. There was a squeak from under her hand and she groaned.
The mouse was fucking immortal, she wasn't terribly worried about it.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

He heard the word "Basil" said some distance away, just loud enough that he could hear it all the way at the back of the store. His insides froze. The last thing he needed was his boss on a night like this. Basil might ask why he wasn't preparing for court, and Caden didn't have a good answer for that. Hell, he didn't even have a good answer for that. He clutched the paper nearer and glanced at a display nearby, judging if he could stand behind it and not be seen by passers by or if he would simply succeed in knocking it over.

Before he could duck behind a rack of stickers, a woman skidded around the corner behind him, falling down flat on the floor in pursuit of— a mouse. Well, if that doesn't go against all the clichés about women and mice, I don't know what does. "I didn't know the shop had a vermin problem," he said conversationally. "Do you need a hand?" The irritation that radiated off her was just on the edge of his range. Not too bad. He could stand it. He shifted the paper into his left hand, balancing it against his hip, and offered her his right. On second thought, she didn't look much like an employee. Well, that was odd. Had she simply been carrying the mouse with her? No, that was ridiculous. Who carried mice in their purses? Well, thought Caden, it isn't as though mascara makes much more sense than mice. At least mice are a conversation starter.

[Camille Desmoulins]

Imogene took a deep breath and looked up at the guy who was talking to her, "Thank you," she said, grabbing his hand and pulling herself to her feet, "However, this-" She looked at the mouse in her other hand, which looked quite dead, "-is my vermin problem." She tapped it's side with her thumb, "Come on Basil," she muttered to the mouse, "Stop being a such a baby." The mouse twitched, sneezed, and got to it's feet in her hand.

She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that none employees had noticed. No one seemed to have, which was good. She really didn't want to be thrown out for chasing down her mouse.
"I have no idea how he got out of his cage, or into my pocket for that matter," she said, looking back at the young man who'd helped her up, the mouse looked around and then just resigned itself to curling up in her hand, "Sorry about that though..."

[Maximilien Robespierre]

"Ah," he said. Don't meet very many women who keep pet mice, do you? "I— uh—" Think I'll just take credit for it so as to not make a complete idiot of myself, okay? "No problem. No problem at all! So you don't always carry small cute animals about with you? Because I hear that's quite popular among the younger set. Have you considered selling your story to Disney?" Caden smiled at her. What sort of person kept mice, regardless of whether they carried them around with them? Mice just made weird pets. All scribbly scrabbly-like. They were household pets for goodness sake. "Has he got a name?" He nodded slightly at the mouse in her hand. Please tell me you call him Basil. Please tell me that's why you shouted that name.

"Don't think we've met before. I'm Caden, by the way." He offered her his hand to her for the second time in a very few minutes. "I don't think I caught yours, I'm afraid. What did you say it was—?" He added a grin to his words, hoping it would patch over the fact that she had not, of course, told him her name.

[Camille Desmoulins]

She picked it up immediately. She hadn't told him her name. Therefore there were two possible ways to classify him:
Crazy and possibly hallucinating- in which case she should make her excuses and go.
Or
Trying to not sound like an idiot and slipping up.
Those were the most likely cases, he could always be a mass murder trying to get her name to see if she was the person he was going to kill. However, she wasn't going to leap to conclusions. There was a reason she didn't want to work for the police, part of it being that she didn't like jumping to the conclusion that it was murder all the time. She already did that enough without having any reason for it- having an actual reason would certainly make it worse.
However, she analyzed further, if he was crazy she was certain there would be more signs. He seemed about as well kept as any normal person would, didn't seem too twitchy, he was pretty relaxed. More likely it was option two.

"I didn't," she pointed out, "However, I'm Imogene. And this little guy is Basil." She held up the mouse, which squeaked in annoyance at being moved so much and shifted around in her hand. She awkwardly shifted the rodent to her other hand, and shook the hand he offered her, "It's nice to meet you Caden."

[Maximilien Robespierre]

"Gosh, really?" Because, lately, I've been having these hallucinations about chatting up girls in stationary stores, a place into which no sane human male should ever venture. You see, that's doubly odd because I don't actually like spending time around girls because you're all dreadfully emotional and you get all frazzled and, really, it makes me feel a bit ill, you know. That's not to say that I don't like girls or that I'm gay or anything. I just think you're like emotional giants and that's not what I look for in a friend and definitely not anything I could put up with in a so-called life partner. And— "Yeah, charmed. I don't often get to meet women who aren't dead." Or really into dead people. There's nothing charming about Dr Bates's near necrophilia. Urgh.

"You know, my boss is named Basil. Dunno he likes mice much, though. He's a cat person." The tone of distain in Caden's voice was evident, and he tried to tone it down. What Basil would say if he heard Caden speaking ill of the feline race was likely composed of mostly four-letter words and punctuated by Benjamin's claws.

[Camille Desmoulins]

"Well, I can assure you I didn't name my mouse after your boss," she said, laughing lightly, "Especially if he's a cat person. I think it would curse the mouse to name it after a cat person. Or a cat."
"Although," she said, jumping topics very suddenly, "I'm a little curious as to why you're spending time with dead women. Are you a homicide detective, mass murderer, or work in a funeral home? Or do you just have a weird fetish for dead people?"
Because if it was the later, she would have to reassess her original presumptions about Caden and put him into category one. If he was a mass murderer she was going to have to question what he was doing in a stationary store. She had the general assumption that wanted murderers hung out in places a little less... bright and floral scented.
She kept her tone light hearted though, trying to make sure he knew she was joking. Because if it were the two less normal options she really didn't want to know. Well, she would want to know about the whole mass murderer thing so that she could run. But the whole necrophilia thing... yeah. She didn't want to know.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

"After the mouse detective then?" He had the decency to look ashamed. "Sorry. Liked that film as a kid, you know, and some things tend to stick with you."

He laughed weakly when she asked him about him spending time with dead women. Oh, boy. Here goes. "Homicide detective. With the local government, you know. Not by trade, though; a photographer, actually. My boss —Basil, like I said— saved me from a happy life as a starving artist to become a slightly miserable detective who takes pictures of things and spends the office budget buying fancy papers." He hefted the ones he was clutching. "Which is what I'm doing now."

"As for weird fetishes for dead people, no, haven't got one of those. I swear everyone I work with has, though. It's just creepy. I mean, the forensic patho— Sorry, the coroner is so into her job that sometimes I wonder if she isn't a little too into her job."

[Camille Desmoulins]

"Oh!" she said, "I loved that movie too. Oh.... uhhh..." she waved her free hand vaguely and hummed a bit of Oh Rattigan, "I haven't seen that in ages."
She looked at the mouse in her hand and finally decided to put it back in her pocket, since she was finding holding him to be increasingly limiting. The mouse shifted around in the pocket of her jacket before settling there.
"See, there is one more reason I am very happy I made the choice not to work with the police," Imogene said to his explanation of his time spent around the dead, "I get to be very happy with my job and not have deal with people who have necrophiliac tendencies."
As he held up the paper though she realized that they were standing in stationary store.
"Would you like to relocate to somewhere less..." she paused, trying to think of a good way to describe the store, "Lavender scented? Possibly someplace that sells hot chocolate?"

[Maximilien Robespierre]

"What sort of work do you do, then?" he asked. "It isn't the police that're so bad, though. They're quite nice most of the time, but the detectives and the coroner are total nut jobs. I think that working that close to dead people for too long just makes you lose it a bit." He smiled at her. "No necrophiliacs? I might have to forsake my cushy civil servant job and beg you to let me staple your papers instead. I do a mean case report, you know."

"Going somewhere that doesn't make me want to sneeze sounds good. I'm sure there's a cafe or something around here. Let me just buy these first. I'm not exactly in the mood to shoplift."

[Camille Desmoulins]

"I'm a private detective," she explained, "Although, to say that I've never have to work with necrophiliacs is something I wish I could say. I did once get hired to find a body which had been apparently misplaced. Got to say, the was one of the weirdest clients I've ever worked with..."
"Though I would discourage you from abandoning your cushy civil service job," she advised, "I'm paid on commission and I'm sure you have a nicer office then I do."

"Anyways," she said, waving a hand as if to push the previous topic of conversation aside, "You go pay for your paper and I'm going to run and pick out a birthday random card for my mum. I'll meet you at the register, alright?"

[Maximilien Robespierre]

"I think I would've backed out of that case. A little out of my league, and I've had my fair share of madmen." Caden gave a barking laugh.

"I'll see you in a bit, then. Good luck with the card search!" he said cheerfully. He strolled over to the register, and for once, he didn't go to the pretty blonde at the back. He put the papers on the counter. "Hello," he said cheerfully, and before she could ask, added, "Just these, thanks." He produced a slim black faux-leather wallet from his back pocket. "Can you subtotal the first twenty sheets? They're for work. Got to charge it to the expense account." Hello-Dearie-Call-Me-Mrs-Jones began to ring up his purchase, pressing a few buttons after the first twenty sheets. "That'll be twenty dollars ninety-eight cents with tax." He handed her a credit card and waited for her to finish ringing up his purchase.

[Camille Desmoulins]

Imogene laughed and walked back over the the rack of birthday cards she'd been looking at before Basil had made himself known in her pocket. She looked over the cards and glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was looking.
"Right," she said, putting out her hand and taking a deep breath. She closed her eyes and her hand glowed a gold color for a moment before a card flew into her hand. She opened her eyes and looked at it. She shook her hand out and examined the card, frowning and looking at it.
YOU KNOW YOU'RE OLD WHEN....
She glared at the front of the card and put it back. "Why can I never get anything regarding my mother right," she sighed. She abandoned the birthday cards and went and grabbed a blank card, a disposable camera, and a package of assorted stickers. She walked to the counter with her card making supplies as the cashier rang up Caden's purchase, "Hullo again," she greeted him brightly, setting her card making supplies on the counter and, as an afterthought, grabbing a package of star burst from the display of candy.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

He shifted over to make room for her at the counter. "Couldn't find a card you liked?" he asked, seeing her stickers and camera, "or is that the gift?" Is her mother not the schmoopy rabbit aging-with-grace kind, then? He picked up the disposable camera as the cashier rang up the remaining items and looked at it in disgust, handling it with only his fingertips as if it had the plague. It was your average, run-of-the-mill disposable camera with just enough plastic to make Caden feel a little sick. Cameras weren't something that you were supposed to be able to pull off a shelf and start using. If there was one thing that kept him in his cushy office, it was the knowledge that snapshots were considered just as high art as the carefully composed studio photograph. He glanced at the photo paper and back at the disposable camera, and he realized what he had to do for the good of cameras everywhere. It was his sacred duty as a bearer of the telephoto lens.

"If you'd rather have a nicer photo for your mom, I could take one," he said. Hoping she wouldn't think he was being forward or, worse yet, propositioning her, he added, "I mean, I don't get an opportunity to take photos of people who aren't dead. It'd make a change." And I wouldn't have to shell out for a model or a photo course.