Chapter Text
Colt knows that something has happened to Ryland.
He’s at the grocery store looking through the olive oil, searching for the bottle with the green label for Jody when his stomach drops, and he feels a hauntingly familiar headrush, like the ground is coming up to swallow him. It’s the same heaviness he felt when they gave him morphine after he fractured his spine, like he’s suddenly just a sack of rocks.
He stumbles back a step and blinks like a flashlight was shone in his eyes. His heart hammers in his chest. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. He’s known that something was wrong for a few months now, Ryland hasn’t answered his phone but Colt knew he was doing something important and that he wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone about it, some top-secret clearance thing, but he hadn’t felt this in conjunction to it. Not the feeling of Ryland being in danger.
That’s what this is. He’s felt it too many times before to mistake it for anything else. He is intimately familiar with his fear of losing Ryland. This headrush of terror and adrenaline was a common sensation in their younger years, when both were always in danger of losing the other to something they were supposed to trust. It’s how he kept Ryland alive. It’s how Ryland kept him alive.
He leaves the shopping cart at the end of the aisle and starts running.
“RYLAND!” Colt yells as the door finally fucking opens and flings aside. “RYLAND!”
Ryland hadn’t answered any of the dozens of calls he’d made on the way to his brother’s apartment. All of them rang a few times, and then dropped into the bucket of Ryland’s voicemail. His brother’s cheery voice, answering with “Hey, this is Ryland! Sorry you couldn’t reach me right now, leave a message and I’ll call you back!” played in a loop in his head, mixing with the rumble of the engine and Colt’s own panicked heart pounding against his ribs. Not Ry, he kept thinking. Not Ry. Not Ry. Please not Ry.
But now that he is here, standing in the front door, he stares at the living room with an ever-sinking pit in his stomach.
A thin layer of dust coats everything. Something sour permeates the air, like the sickly sweet stench of rot. A throw blanket has been draped over the back of the couch instead of folded up and put away in the little basket next to the TV console table.
It hits him then, that Ryland hasn’t been home in a very, very long time.
Colt knows that Ryland’s been working on something that he’s not really allowed to talk about. Something having to do with this astrophage bullshit that makes his stomach tighten thinking about what the next few decades will bring for the planet, the same kind of hovering breathing-down-the-neck anxiety he gets when he thinks about climate change. This is climate change, though. It’s not global warming, it’s global cooling. It’s ice in the vents, it’s blizzards in the Mojave, it’s a layer of snow blanketing the world like ash. It’s the quiet that comes with the dampening of sound during winter but because there’s nothing left living to make noise. It’s the bay frozen over. It’s his brother, dragged off somewhere else to fix it.
Colt remembers the book on Norse Mythology he and Ryland checked out from the library to learn more about their favorite comic book characters. He remembers the descriptions of Ragnarok.
He remembers Fimbulwinter. He doesn’t know why that one stuck with him, the description of a winter so violent, so pressing, so insistent that your joints creak and freeze. A winter that lasts forever until the gods rip each other to pieces and everything ends in fire and blood.
Maybe the old Norse storytellers were onto something.
He thinks of Baldr and Hodr. His throat closes.
He can’t lose his brother.
“RYLAND!” he calls again. His voice breaks as he steps further into the apartment.
No answer.
He’s not in the bedroom. His bed is made. He wasn’t just taken willy-nilly from his apartment in the morning. Ry always makes his bed.
He’s not in the bathroom, or the guest bedroom where Colt stays when he visits. He’s not in the kitchen, either. When Colt opens the fridge door, the sour smell assaults him. Everything is rotten, wet, putrid. A layer of green and white fuzz grows on the bread on his counter. The freezer meals are covered in crystalized ice. The trash reeks like rot.
He’s not here.
Colt doesn’t realize his hands are shaking until he’s dialing Ryland’s number again. It rings. And rings.
“Hey, this is Ryland! Sorry you couldn’t reach me right now, leave a message and I’ll call you back!”
Colt sucks in a broken, stuttering breath as his eyes burn and a taut panic snaps in his stomach. “Ry, I need you to pick up the phone right now,” he says. His voice trembles. “Right fucking now, Ry, I’m serious, I need to know you’re safe.”
What if…
No. No, that’s irrational thinking. That ghost stopped haunting them a long time ago. Courtland saw to that.
Oh. Oh shit. Court. He needs to get in contact with Court. How? Court was somewhere across the world doing things that Colt and Ry could have never conceived of from their kind, gentle big brother. Colt didn’t even know if this really qualified as the kind of emergency to pull Court away from his work, he could very well just be overreacting. Maybe Ryland’s phone was dead. Maybe he was halfway across the world in some big important meeting? Maybe he just wasn’t allowed to answer his phone recently because some important stuff was happening?
His heart trembles, but he forces himself to breathe, dragging air in through his nose and pushing it out past his lips like Ryland taught him. Breathe, he hears his brother saying. You can’t think rationally if you’re panicking. When you try to weigh consequences when you panic, the worst of the worst seems like the most plausible.
Ryland always makes him panic, without exception. Any thought of Ry getting hurt sends him into a tailspin. But it’s okay. He can’t panic when he doesn’t have all of the information he needs.
“Please,” he says into the phone, still pressed to his ear. “Call me back. I love you.”
Ryland hasn’t called him back.
It’s been hours at this point, the dimming sun slipping below the ocean horizon like a plate dropped into dishwater, and Ry still hasn’t called.
“It’s just not like him,” Colt says, the edges of his voice shaking. He paces back and forth in Jody’s living room. The evening news is on in the background, turned down so that only a trickle of sound reaches past the radio crackles of panic singing in his ears. “He always calls me when I tell him to call me back, it’s our rule!”
“He’s probably just really busy and hasn’t seen his phone yet,” Jody says gently from the couch. Her face is creased in concern like it always is when he becomes nervous like this. “Colt, please come sit. You need to rest.”
“What if something happened?” he says. He doesn’t slow his pacing, feet hitting the carpet in a rhythm that he can hear his brother’s name in. Ry-land. Ry-land. Ry-land. “What if he isn’t able to call me back because he’s, like, incapacitated? Like what happened with my back, where I just couldn’t call him? Should I start calling hospitals and asking if they have him there? Should I—”
“Colt,” Jody says, standing and putting a hand on his arm. “Look at me.”
Colt tears his gaze away from the floor and looks up at Jody’s sweet face. The vice that’s been around his ribs all evening tightens. “I can’t lose him,” he whispers.
“I know,” she says, cupping his face. “It’s gonna be okay. We’ll call his school in the morning, okay? Explain that you’re family and haven’t heard from him in a couple months and that you’re getting worried. We will find him.”
He lets out a breath that makes his lungs spasm. “Okay. Okay. Yeah.”
“Good,” Jody says, running her thumb over his cheek. “We would’ve been told if something happened—”
The footage on the TV changes. A rocket. A capsule. Colt’s eyes are dragged to the screen. He’s heard of this, the rocket launch. It’s the crew of the spaceship, the one they assembled in orbit, the one that’s supposed to take three people out to a different star to look for an answer to the astrophage crisis or whatever. The one that’s never coming back. The footage is a few days old at this point.
The banner of the report reads “Hail Mary Leaves Earth Orbit”. There’s a woman with a stone face on screen giving some sort of address, some sort of eulogy for the crew, calling them selfless and noble and brave. The caption below the banner reads “Petrova Taskforce Leader Gives Statement”.
Jody looks at him with a furrowed brow, and then looks at the TV. The footage of the rocket plays next to the woman speaking. The rocket slams fuel out of the back, sprinting up through the blue sky and out into the furthest wispy tendrils of the atmosphere and beyond.
Colt doesn’t know why he needs to watch. He just does.
Photos appear on screen, one at a time.
The first is of an older Chinese man with silver hair, sitting poised and dignified for his official astronaut portrait. China’s red flag with golden stars is on a pole behind him. Text sits below his name in English and Chinese. [YAO LI-JIE — MISSION COMMANDER].
The second photograph comes a few moments later. A Russian woman with her black hair pulled up in a ponytail. She’s in the same kind of portrait as the man, an official astronaut portrait. The Russian flag sits behind her. Her name and mission role are printed in English and Cyrillic. [OLESYA ILYUKHINA — MISSION ENGINEER].
The third photograph—
The floor drops out from under him.
Static pounds in his ears. A lead weight lodges itself in his throat. He chokes, and lets out a cry like a wounded animal whose leg has been snapped in a metal-tooth trap.
Nothing else in the world exists except for him and the image of his brother on the TV screen.
It’s his yearbook staff picture from his middle school. He’s smiling, his glasses just slightly askew, his lanyard around his neck. His nose is a little crooked from when he fell and hit his face on the concrete on the playground when they were seven.
Beneath his picture is text printed in English.
[DR. RYLAND GRACE — MISSION SCIENTIST].
He’s scrambling for the TV before he even registers his movement, reaching like he can pull Ryland out of the screen and into his arms. He’s screaming, his voice scraping against his throat. “NO!” he snarls, like his brother will hear him. “NO, YOU CAN’T! NO!”
Ice pounds through his veins. He’s still screaming but he can’t hear it anymore. He can’t hear the television. He can’t hear Jody. He can’t hear the cars outside.
Ryland’s picture is replaced by the newscaster.
He feels Jody clutch him to her chest at the same time that his knees hit the ground. He is begging. He’s begging Ryland. No. No. No. He is still screaming. He can’t breathe. His throat is too clogged with his own voice, his eyes burning.
A hole has been blown through his chest the size of his brother.
He remembers, in some corner of his still-present mind, when they were in sixth grade. Ry had gone to a science camp for the day, some special reward for the kids who were really good at science and who wanted to learn more about it. The bus had been twenty minutes late getting back to the school, and Colt had sobbed into Courtland’s shirt, panicked and terrified that Ry was never coming home, until the second that the bus pulled up to the curb. Ry had bounded off the steps of the bus and straight into Colt’s arms.
His body shudders. His hands rip at his hair. Anything. Anything to not feel this. Jody’s voice mingles with the static as her hands pull his away, as she holds him.
He is still screaming.