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“How old do you think this tree is?” Scully asked, leaning comfortably against the thick, knotted trunk of an elm. She was still in her blouse and skirt, though her shoes, coat and pistol lay beside her in the grass. She tucked a shiny autumn leaf behind her ear, but the littlest breeze tossed it away. Stella watched her with cool, stoic eyes. There was no denying Scully's hair stood out in the fall. It stood out any day, Stella supposed, but today she looked particularly stunning.
“Few hundred years,” Stella guessed after a moment's silence.
Scully chuckled and wrinkled her nose. “Be scientifically precise.”
“Centuries older than us, but relatively much younger.”
“Still in the prime of its life.” Scully toed the ground, hands in her pockets. Stella knew what she was thinking—a few nights ago, Scully had looked in the mirror and run her fingers over crow’s feet that used to be freckles and noticed the shadows of her cheeks and confessed that she was afraid of growing old. Not death, she’d specified; death was too inevitable to be worth fearing, and she’d spent so many hours slicing corpses that death had simply become a fact of life. It was the frailty and limitation of old age that terrified her. When she was fighting cancer, she explained, the pain and weakness shattered her, constant reminders of her body’s failure to save itself. She had survived so much and to die so weakly forced her to face the unremarkable truth that every survivor died like this. Every life she saved in the hospital would be lost feebly and quietly to time.
“We’re in the prime of our lives,” Stella said, resting a cold hand on her shoulder, running her fingers through Scully’s rust-colored hair. “I may have been nimbler in university, but it certainly wasn’t the prime of my life. It’s not the time that matters—it’s what you’re doing.” She’d learned young not to worry her life would never be as fulfilling as it was in the past.
Scully cocked her eyebrow playfully. “Did you hear your ankles crack walking down the stairs this morning?”
Stella sniffed. “I spent seven hours on an airplane yesterday,” she retorted, “or would you rather I spend my vacation days drinking wine alone in my flat, instead of paying you a visit?”
Scully rolled her eyes and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a smile. “Seeing you was a pleasant surprise, even if you did make me late for a meeting with Skinner.”
“Had I known you were in a hurry, I wouldn’t have suggested we fuck on your new couch that very instant," she said, and pressed Scully gently into the elm tree. Her throaty voice dropped as a biting gust of wind raised goosebumps along Scully’s collarbone, “Can I kiss you now, or do you have somewhere to be?”
"Nowhere important," Scully said breathily, as Stella slipped an arm around her waist and another between her head and the rough tree trunk. Her eyes drifted to the knot above her, where some careless couple had inscribed their names—Shaun + Victoria 4eva—within the ragged outline of a heart.
“Don't stop," Scully whispered, "but aren’t we too old for this?”
Stella’s once-stern eyes twinkled with shrewd bemusement as she followed Scully’s gaze to the tasteless engraving. “Au contraire,” she said huskily, “Shaun and Victoria haven’t put in our travel hours.” Not to mention they lacked proper respect for the tree.
She captured Scully’s lips in hers, stepping forward until the toes her her boots perched between Scully’s legs. She kissed her smile lines, the small patch of strawberry-blonde freckles and the strong jaw that had sharpened in recent years.
Scully’s hands brushed over her cheekbones and down her neck, tracing the austere angles of her face and sharply dressed curves of he body. The parts of her an acquaintance had once told her made her like “a kick-ass Mr. Darcy.”
Stella brushed her billowing black overcoat off her shoulders. The wind rustled her hair, blowing it into her face just as her lips left Scully’s skin. She shook her head, hearing Scully chuckle lightly in her ear.
“How tight is your skirt?” she asked coyly. Scully fixed her with a skeptical stare, and in response her hands slid decidedly below the doctor’s hips.
Scully let out a surprised, “Oh!” as Stella lifted her into the air. She felt Scully's knees press into her hips as she braced herself against the tree.
Her proud nose pressed into Scully's collarbone, lips against her breast, expertly unbuttoning the pinstriped blouse with her teeth and leaving only the ghost of a mark on her lover’s skin. Above her, a breathy sigh escaped Scully’s lips, red hair splayed against the bark, obscuring the scruffy inscription.
The breeze strengthened once more, but the goosebumps trailed down Scully’s bare sternum and scattered recklessly across Stella’s neck and shoulders where the doctor's deft fingers had been, had nothing to do with a chill. An fiery orange leaf fluttered past Scully’s nose, slid down the ridge of Stella’s cheek, and settled comfortably on their laps, shifting as they moved against each other.
They parted breathlessly, faces flushed a rosy pink. She set Scully down gently on the earth and caught her breath with her nose still resting on Scully’s brow. When she spoke, her voice was a soft, throaty rumble.
“More at home,” she suggested, and Scully nodded slowly, her hair rustling with pieces of loose bark.
“To the boudoir,” Scully murmured with a contented smile. She re-fastened the loose button on her shirt, pulling away from the tree and stepping in beside Stella. “We’re making wonderful use of what little time we have."
Stella picked up her coat and brushed off the dirt. “Better than a boring eternity.” She put her hands in her pockets and strolled toward Scully’s car, parked before a lone, ivy-covered lamppost at the park entrance.
Feeling more serene than usual, Stella looked around at the nearly bare trees and thought, autumn suited them. Brisk October winds seemed to follow Stella’s footsteps as she strolled through the grass, the dry bones of leaves crunching beneath her boots. Stella had found the deep russet-brown of autumn leaves increasingly macabre as time went on. Every year she sank deeper into her job, plodding obstinately from murder scene to murder scene, and somewhere along the line death had tainted her eyes, and the red leaves fluttering about and crackling like old bones became one more reminder of life’s fleeting pleasures.
Meeting Scully hadn’t necessarily changed that—Stella stood firmly against the notion of eternal souls and everlasting love, and she’d come to terms with impermanence a long time ago. But when she saw the leaves above them quiver on their precarious stems, their crinkled edges slowly turning a coppery red, she no longer thought of bloodstains. She thought of Scully’s hair sticking to the tree trunk when they finally peeled apart.