Good thing about the desert: the stars are so clear it takes your breath away.
Bad thing: by the time it's gotten dark enough to see them, the temperature's dropped so far you're freezing.
Reilly thinks it's totally worth it, though, just to see the wonder on Elsa's face. Meteor showers aren't his thing, really -- he only digs the stars when they're framed by the viewport of the Enterprise's bridge. Kids aren't his thing either -- they kinda freak him out.
But Elsa's practically his niece, and he hasn't seen either of her dads in a while, so... it's not that bad.
Roland takes off his jacket and drapes it around Elsa's skinny little-kid shoulders -- you can already see the resemblance between them, Reilly thinks, despite the height difference and the dark. It's something about the way she carries herself. She definitely gets it from Roland.
Reilly shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looks away from them, at the shadows of the mountains against the stars. It's a clear night -- no moon. And they've driven way out in the boonies, so there's no light pollution.
It's beautiful out here, but... it's lonely.
Jeb comes up to Reilly and nods at him in the dark, starlight catching faintly on his glasses. "So what brings you out here?" He's joking, obviously -- he's the one who asked Reilly if he wanted to come out tonight.
"I was in town," he says, and shrugs.
"You're still doin' OK in school?" Jeb's doing that don't-mention-the-problem thing -- Reilly just changed his meds a month ago, and this is Jeb's way of asking if he's still sane.
"Yeah." Reilly runs a hand through his hair, then jams it back in his pocket. Jesus. It's colder than he remembers. "Keepin' my head down."
"They talk about us at school?" And he means, by "us", the School -- as well as Jeb, Roland, and their experiment. Excluding Reilly, who will always be their shadow.
"A little." Reilly scuffs his boot in the dirt, thinking of all the lecture notes he's taken over Doctor Jacob Batchelder, all the people he's listened to singing his praises. "Had a lecture on Roland the other day."
It's kind of nice being back with Jeb, even if it's only for tonight. "Oh?" he says, recrossing his arms.
"Yeah. The prof was wondering who the subject was, and why she hadn't come forward yet. What happened to her. Y'know?"
Jeb laughs a little. "You'd think someone would've seen something in the way he just up and disappeared for a year -- then showed back up with a kid."
"Scientists," Reilly tells him, "don't gossip nearly as much as you think they do." And they're not that savvy. "All the speculation anyone's doing over him is why he's working here."
Men hailed as geniuses generally did not go to work for tiny companies in the middle of nowhere. Especially not if they were Roland ter Borcht and they'd just left Itexicon. He could have gone to any lab in the world if he wanted to.
Instead he'd come here.
"So you're doing all right in your classes, then?" Jeb says, mainly to fill the silence.
"Yeah," Reilly says. No one there knows he worked at the School. He likes it that way. "My anatomy prof really likes me."
"Guess I did a good job." At which Reilly smiles, because he's learned most of what he knows about humanoid anatomy from Jeb -- Jeb with his hands in a retired experiment's guts, patiently pointing out organs and their functions to a young tech with a tape recorder.
"You did." Reilly doesn't know what else he can say.
Overhead, the meteor shower goes on. Reilly can hear ter Borcht and Elsa talking, and Jeb glances over their way, smiling. "Good to see you back here," he says.
Reilly nods. "Nice to be back home."
"See you around."
Jeb turns after a moment of silence, and walks off towards his husband and daughter.
Reilly looks up at the stars, for lack of anywhere else to go. He can hear the crunching of Jeb's footsteps in the quiet, and though he wants to follow, at some level -- he can't.
So he stays here, with his boots solid in the dirt. Meteors arc and flicker overhead, and for a moment he lets himself get lost in the sight.
But he has to be back to school tomorrow, and this isn't his home or his family. Not anymore.
Reilly walks back to his car by the starlight, ignoring the soft conversation he can hear from the family he's leaving behind. He may be Elsa's Uncle Reilly -- he may have been Jeb's friend -- but he's also a busy med student.
With a sigh and a brief glance upward, Reilly gets in the car and shuts the door. He'll have to drive all night to get back in time, but that's OK -- he'll only stop once or twice, for a coffee break at some cheap diner. And for a few hours yet there'll be shooting stars to light his way, visible through his windshield, but he won't stop to watch. No time.
Reilly starts the car.
In case you wonder about this sort of thing, they're watching the Perseid meteor shower, which makes it sometime around August 11, 2013.