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Mulder hung up the phone. "They say two hours."
Scully did not say and I said we should get gas in the last town we went through, because she was a mature adult. She was pretty sure Mulder caught her meaning anyway. Instead, she opened her car door and stepped out into the cooling evening air. "Come on, Mulder," she said, and listened to him follow her.
They sat on the trunk of their rental car, not caring about the dust on their suits (they had spent the week stomping through worse on fertilizer inspection duty). Mulder pulled a pack of seeds from his pocket, and they argued about Bachelors Grove Cemetery and ghost photography, passing the bag and spitting out shells as the pink light of sunset turned to the blue of dusk. As the stars began to appear around and above them, Scully found a Diet Coke in her purse and they shared that too, arguing about which of the agents in the bullpen they thought was most likely responsible for the surprising disappearance of Scully's favorite yogurt from the office fridge. ("An FBI agent with kleptomania, Scully. Think of the possibilities.")
The night grew quiet and still around them, and they lay back against the glass of the windshield. Above them, the stars spread across the sky in the way that they only can do when you're miles from civilization, the faint stripe of the Milky Way banding across the velvet blue, clusters of brighter and dimmer stars giving a sense of depth to the abyss.
"You ever into astronomy as a kid, Scully?" Mulder asked, curling one long arm above his head.
Scully traced the lines of the Summer Triangle through the sky, found Lyra, Cygnus, Aquila, paused to smile at Vulpecula in the middle. "Yes, actually," she said. "For a while. That was actually why I was so interested in physics initially; I was considering astrophysics as a career."
"Really?" Mulder seemed surprised. "I would have thought you were the type to have it all planned out from age six on."
Scully snorted, and threw him a look. It wasn't as if she were under any illusions about how confusing the path was that led her to the trunk of a mid sized sedan in the middle of Kentucky with a badge in her pocket and a Mulder watching her with soft slow eyes. "My first work study job was working in the Leuschner Observatory. Nothing special, just undergrad errand girl things, but." She sighed. "So, yes, I was into astronomy there for a while."
"What made you change your mind?"
And how well Mulder knew her, to know that she'd changed, not that something else had intervened. She stared up at the stars above them. "Have you ever really thought about space, Mulder? About how we perceive it? We see light that's million of years old, so far away from us that we know nothing about those stars now. What we see as tiny pinpricks of light are boiling balls of gas so huge they dwarf our sun, and we can only see them as they were eons ago. And in every patch of empty space are more stars, entire galaxies so far away, so long ago, that we cannot even comprehend it, even with the most advanced technology. If you look far enough out there, deep enough into the abyss, you can see the beginning of time." You can see God, she doesn't say, because she doesn't want to take that detour with him tonight. "And the light that leaves our sun, right now, this instant, by the time it gets to those stars, our planet will be dead, human civilization fallen, and we will all just be carbon returned to the universe." She shook her head. "It was just--I wanted something smaller. Something I could see. Something I could change." Scully turned her head to meet Mulder's gaze. "So. That's why."
Mulder watched her carefully for a long moment, and then turned back to the sky. "Hey, Scully?"
"Yes, Mulder?"
"Tell me something."
"Okay."
"How much weed did you smoke in college?"
Enough, she thought. "Shut up, Mulder."
They watched the stars together until the lights of the AAA truck shone on them, obliterating their faint light from sight.