Archive of Our Own

The motel was the kind of unremarkable place that got forgotten the very second it disappeared behind a bend in the road - cheap and functional, painted that particular shade of beige that all rundown motels defaulted to because the only people staying were desperate ones looking for a last-minute room or people who couldn't care less about the decor. With the remoteness of their current filming location, Colt was just glad they didn't need to drive far after work to find a place to sleep.

Colt had been in hotels exactly like it one for most of his adult life, and he'd stopped noticing the flaws in them years ago. They were just the gap between days of living out his dream, a place to leave his boots.

It was late. He'd been on his feet since five-thirty that morning, half of it spent flat on a mat getting kicked by a guy twice his size, the other half practicing for the fire stunt they'd be filming tomorrow. He had the particular kind of tired that reminded him, dimly, of the summers in his childhood where he and Ryland would spend every available hour in the pool, from dusk till dawn, until their mother had to physically drag them out by their ears.

Jody was at a dinner with some directing colleagues that Colt hadn't cared to tag along for. He'd eaten something forgettable from the vending machine down the hall and was now sitting on the edge of the bed in his socks, scrolling through his work email, because if he didn't check it now Jody would get on him about it in the morning. The joys of becoming important in the business.

There was a rescheduling note from production. A follow-up on a sponsorship inquiry. Forwarded fan mail from his agency that could wait until next week or next month or just the next stretch where he had more than just a few hours between call times.

And then, sandwiched in-between two emails about insurance forms, there was an email titled: going public in 24 hours.

Colt almost scrolled past it completely, not recognizing the sender. His thumb was already moving, and he had to scroll up to reread the title.

Colt read the email twice. Then a third time, slower, the way you read something that isn't making sense - not because the words are complicated, but because the simple words are doing something the brain can't quite catch up with.

I am truly sorry. He didn't deserve what they did to him. He was a good man.

The ice machine down the hall cycled through, its clatter muffled by the sudden loudness of Colt's own heartbeat. A car alarm outside went on and then quickly shut off. 

There was a heavy sense of dread in the stale air.

He looked at the two files attached to the email - both .mp4s, both with vague names - and his thumb hovered over the screen for a moment before he opened the first one.

The first clip was clearly security footage, which Colt figured out immediately from the quality - the faint distortion at the edges, the multiple angles from different cameras, the timestamp burning in white in the upper right. It wasn't a direct screen recording or file of the security footage itself, but rather someone had pointed their phone at a monitor and filmed the screen, the footage blurry and shaky - but still legible.

The angle was wide and impersonal. 

It showed the rear exterior of a building, open grassy ground between structures. A fence in the far left of the frame, chain-link.

And then there was movement.

A blur of bright yellow moving fast across the open ground between buildings. Even at this distance, even compressed by the wide angle and the secondhand recording, it was unmistakable. It was his brother's raincoat. Colt had seen it in a hundred photographs, a hundred news articles, in the image that had been recycled every time someone wanted to write about the Hail Mary and needed a face to put on the mission. It was a rise to global stardom that his brother had never - would never - had the chance to learn about.

His brother looked so... small.

Ryland was running. Not hurrying, not crossing the area briskly - no, he was running, running with everything he had. And he wasn't alone. Behind him, chasing and closing fast, was a loose formation: two soldiers, a man in a white coat, and a fourth figure whose features Colt couldn't quite make out.

There was no audio. The clip was silent except for the ambient hum of wherever it had been filmed - a faint mechanical drone, the creaking of an office chair as someone shifted, the phone picking up its own surroundings. 

Ryland ran across the open ground and Colt watched him, small, silent, a bright shape against the green grass.

And Colt knew, with complete certainty, that he was not watching the footage of a man who had willingly volunteered to join a suicide mission.

He watched the rest of it. The clip ended as another soldier came into frame from the side - and then the person recording pulled their phone away sharply, the footage becoming a blur of desk and floor before the screen went black.

Colt saw his own reflection in the dark screen of his phone, and, try as hard as he could, he couldn't see anything of Ryland in it.

Colt closed the clip. He clicked on the second file.

The second video was different. 

It was phone footage like before, but this time it wasn't recording a monitor. It was recording from around the edge of a doorway or the corner of a building, the angle was closer than the security footage. 

The video had the quality of breath being held. A barely-perceptible tremor running through the frame - not dramatic shaking, but the specific adrenaline-fueled micro-tremors of someone who had locked their body into position because they were scared of what would happen if they moved. 

And this video had audio.

Mostly wind, at first. The ambient sound of the phone picking up its own surroundings. Footsteps, distant, on gravel. Feet pounding against the ground. Running. And then - a voice, from behind the camera: one syllable, involuntary, the shape of a word more than the word itself. "...no..."  

They reached the point that the security footage had cut off at, and then they passed it, and then Colt watched as his brother was tackled to the ground. 

The soldier came from the side, the angle catching it with brutal clarity - his brother going down hard, a blur of yellow, both of them hitting the grass in a tangle of momentum. And then more soldiers, dropping to their knees, pressing Colt's little brother down into the earth as he frantically tried to kick and claw his way free.

Colt's blood felt like ice in his veins.

And then Colt heard his brother's voice.

He turned the volume up. He had known that voice for his entire life. Before he'd had language for it. In the specific way of twins - in the particular way of a childhood spent in the same rooms, in cars, laid out on the flat part of a roof at midnight while Ryland pointed up and explained things and Colt half-listened and half-watched his brother's face instead, the way he always did when he knew Ryland wasn't paying attention.. 

Colt knew that voice in ways he couldn't name. 

"-can't, I can't do it-" and then wind, and then "-don't do it-"

Colt turned the volume up further, as high as he could, as though more volume would somehow tell him what exactly he was watching, and the clip gave him nothing else - just words that broke before they finished, eaten by interference and wind. 

Colt couldn't hear it all. But he heard enough. He heard the register of it, what his little brother's voice was doing inside those fragments he heard - and he had never heard that before. Not in any version of it. Not in their youth. Not in the hospital room after Colt's accident, when Ryland had sat in the chair beside Colt's bed and barely held himself together. 

Not ever.

Colt replayed the video. He watched the tackle. He watched the man with the white coat - a doctor's coat, he could see clearly now - crouch behind his brother, pressing something into his skin. A needle, Colt could guess. The motion was fast and practiced, the movement of someone doing exactly what they had prepared to do.

And then he watched the few seconds after, which was where he kept ending up.

Ryland's panicked voice broke off into something that wasn't a word - a long, ragged wheeze - and then stopped. But his hands didn't. Shaking fingers pressing into the wet grass, clawing slightly, still trying. Still doing the only thing his body had left to do.

And then those stopped too.

Colt rewound to ten seconds before. He watched it again. He rewound again.

There was no one on Ryland's side in the footage - not one person between him and what was happening. The doctor's movements were practiced because this had clearly been planned. The needle had been ready. This had been arranged, prepared for, scheduled - his brother's last moments of consciousness on Earth had been an item on a logistics list, a contingency executed on time.

Ryland had... said no.

And they'd taken him anyway.

Eventually, with shaking hands, Colt set the phone face-down on the bedspread beside him.

He looked at the wall for a while. 

After a while, he picked the phone back up. He didn't go back to the clip. Instead, he went to his texts, to the thread that had been pinned at the top since - since, and the word kept failing him, since doing too much work for too many years now - since Ryland had left. He'd never unpinned it. He never had the strength.

He scrolled past the messages marked Undelivered. Past the years of one-sided birthday wishes and life updates, photos of Colt and Jody and various milestones. Past call me and where are you and everything he'd sent that night, so long ago, in a backwater bar while the Hail Mary had disappeared on the TV screen and his feet were still planted in the broken glass on the floor as his world fell apart. Colt scrolled past all of it, until he reached the last message Ryland had ever actually sent.

I'll try to get out your way sometime after the launch. Even if just for a weekend before I head back home. Your birthday is coming up, maybe we can do something?

Colt had replayed the message in his head more times than he could count. In the bar. On set. Before every birthday. Standing under the hanging solar system in his brother's classroom with a cheap fox lanyard in his hand. 

Colt had been misunderstanding that message for years.

He understood that now, and the understanding had a specific and very clean quality, like the final piece of a puzzle finally settling into the position it had always been meant to occupy. He'd always read the maybe as the tell. The truth Ryland hadn't been brave enough to tell him. Colt had come to think of the maybe as the word of a man who already knew - who had written a soft and careful almost-promise that wasn't a full-promise because the alternative was saying I'm leaving before then and I'm not coming back, which would have meant a phone call, a horrible conversation, Colt's devastated reaction, something Ryland hadn't been able to bring himself to do. 

Colt had spent years with something small and painful living underneath the grief, something he'd never fully let himself name, but something that lived somewhere right beside the burning question of why didn't he care enough to call me?

Now he knew.

The maybe wasn't a tell. It had just been a...a word. The beginning of a plan without the details ironed out yet. An open weekend in a future Ryland had thought he was always guaranteed to have.

Ryland had always been planning to come back.

He had written your birthday is coming up because he had fully intended to be there for it - for their birthday. He had not been planning to leave when he sent that message. He had been making a plan. A real one, a specific one - not the vague we should get together sometime that had always just meant eventually to them, an invitation in the broad sense, meaning the door was unlocked but neither of them would make the first move to open. This had been different. Your birthday was a date. A note on a calendar. A commitment Ryland had thought he had the future to keep.

He had thought there was going to be an after.

He had thought he would be going home.

Colt sat with that for a long time, long enough that the quality of it changed - moved from the thing that had just been understood to the thing that simply was.

Ryland hadn't chosen to leave Colt - he had been forced. And nobody had known. For years, the world has been led to believe that Dr. Ryland Grace had made the brave decision to give up his life to save those he and the rest of the Hail Mary crew left behind on Earth.

But he hadn't.

Colt looked at the timestamp on the email. 9:52 PM.

And in approximately twenty-three hours, everyone would know.

Colt got up.

He put on his boots without untying them first, the way he'd been told his entire life not to do, and he stepped outside.

The parking lot was empty except for a handful of dusty cars and the particular flat silence of being nowhere, miles from anything real, the kind of quiet that had a heaviness to it. The fluorescent lights over the door of his room buzzed faintly. A moth was working its way around the fixture, circling the light in that specific compulsive way, the trajectory that looked like choice and was anything but.

Colt looked up.

Beyond the lot lights, beyond the orange haze they threw against the low cloud cover, there were stars. Not many - pollution ate most of them, the rest too dim to break through the haze - but Colt could see some. A small handful. Enough.

He thought about a roof. The specific flat part over the garage of their childhood house that you got to by going out the bedroom window headfirst and swinging your legs around, which Colt had been brave enough to start doing from age nine, and Ryland had followed every time without complaint, even the first time, even when the height of the drop off the roof had been a lot higher than they expected, a miscalculation that neither of them ever admitted to their mother. They had spent countless nights up there. Colt had sketched out plans for stunts in the margins of his school notebooks and Ryland had named the every minute detail that built up their sky.

He'd talked about light, once. About the speed of it. About dead stars.

The light is already in transit, he would have said, in the voice he used for the things that genuinely interested him, the one Colt had spent decades pretending not to pay attention to. It just hasn't reached us yet. Some of those stars are already gone. What we're seeing is what they were.

Colt looked up at the handful of stars still visible through the orange wash.

His brother had been out there for years. Was out there now, or wasn't - that was the thing nobody could answer, that the news reports and the mission updates and all of it couldn't answer, because the Hail Mary was so far out that they wouldn't be receiving the news on whether or not the mission was a success for years to come. Whatever was happening out there would already be over by the time anyone on Earth heard about it. You are always looking at what had been, not what was. 

Ryland was alive, Ryland was dead, there was no version of this moment where Colt could know which one for sure.

His little brother had been pinned down like a prey animal in the grass on a military base thousands of miles from his home, sedated, and loaded onto a ship, and put into a coma, and sent to the edge of the solar system on a one-way trip - and he had not been given the chance to say goodbye. Not to anyone. Not to Colt. He had not been given a last phone call. He had not gotten to plan his last words.

Ryland Grace had been given: nothing.

The specific horror of it was not in the violence, but rather in the planning. The preparation. The needle ready and waiting. The doctor who had crouched with practiced efficiency, who had done this before or trained to do this, who had been assigned to this contingency and executed it on schedule. His brother's last conscious moment on Earth had been anticipated by someone else. His fear and desperation had been prepared for. His brother had been a logistics problem, and the logistics had been solved, almost so neatly that the problem had gone unknown for years.

And there was nothing - Colt understood with clean and absolute clarity - there was nothing he could have done. No way he could have known. Ryland had sent him a text about their birthday and Colt had been planning a response after forgetting over and over to respond. 

Colt had not known that the text was the last thing his brother would ever actually send him, because there had been no reason to know.

There was nothing he could change now, either. The footage going public in the morning would change nothing. It would be everywhere, and it would mean something to a lot of people, and none of that would give Ryland back the goodbye he hadn't gotten. It would give the world an answer it hadn't known it needed, and his brother would still be somewhere beyond the reach of atmosphere, alive or not, unknowable.

The moth got too close.

The zap was quiet, almost nothing, barely audible over the buzzing of the light. A small and final sound. The little body dropped to the sidewalk and did not move again.

The light buzzed on.

Colt looked away, back up to the stars, and wondered what information they were carrying back to him.