Chapter Text
When Colt was eight years old, he switched places with his brother.
Not even in the ‘haha, let’s swap places and see if the teacher notices’ way – no, as in they literally swapped places.
Colt had been on a soccer trip, and Ryland – in the other class in their grade (Colt thought it was so unfair that the school had split them up) – had been back at school.
One second, Colt was grabbing his sports kit off the bus, and the next moment he was sitting in Geography class, Miss Holt droning on about tectonic plates.
Suffice to say, they’d both freaked out. Colt had fallen out of the chair, which Miss Holt had barely blinked an eye at, other than a passing comment of ‘be careful, Ryland’.
Ryland, on the other hand, had panicked, almost ended up running into traffic, was then promptly wrangled onto the soccer pitch, proceeded to have a panic attack at the sight of a soccerball traveling full speed towards his face, and passed out.
Not great for Colt’s Cool Reputation.
They’d managed to maintain their composure until they’d both gotten home, shoes thudding up the staircase to their shared bedroom hard enough to shake the walls.
They slammed the door behind them.
And just stared.
Neither of them spoke at first, just standing there, identical gobsmacked expressions mirrored back at each other.
Colt was still clutching Ryland’s geography worksheet in one hand.
Ryland still had grass stains on the knees of his jeans.
“You-” Ryland pointed accusingly. “You were in my class.”
“You were at soccer!”
“I know I was at soccer!”
“Well, I know I was in your stupid tectonic plate class!”
“It’s not stupid, tectonic movement literally shapes the Earth’s crust-”
“Ryland!”
The silence rings. Colt worries for a second that the yelling will bring their mom running up the stairs.
They stare at each other again.
Colt realises Ryland’s trembling a little, “Colt, are we going crazy?”
“We need to switch back!” Colt whisper-yells. They then proceed to try everything from holding hands, to running directly at each other, to smashing their foreheads together hard enough that both of them nearly throw up.
They even tell their mom, who laughs, and obviously doesn’t believe them. She points out that Colt is still Colt – just look at the scar on his knee that he’d gotten two years ago from falling off his skateboard.
That’s how they realise they hadn’t switched bodies, they’d switched places. It makes sense in hindsight – Colt had still been wearing his faded greenday shirt and his jeans with the hole in the left pocket. It makes him wonder why no one in Ryland’s class had noticed an entire change of clothes. At least he had the excuse of spontaneous teleportation.
That’s what they name it – Spontaneous Twin Teleportation. A real-life superpower.
“We’re basically Spiderman,” Colt says.
Ryland stares back at his affronted, “This has…nothing to do with Spiderman’s superpowers. He can’t teleport! Colt, do you even listen to me when I’m telling you about Marvel-”
Colt’s already zoning out, more focused on the fact that they have a super cool superpower.
Except when they try to replicate it, nothing happens.
Being able to switch places at will would be so cool – Ryland could take Colt’s exams if he gets to a question he doesn’t know the answer to!
For weeks, they wear identical clothes, just in case it does happen again – wouldn’t want people around them to be suspicious and cart them off to Area 51 or wherever it is they take people with superpowers.
But it’s a massive fail. They never manage to switch again.
And eventually, time passes, and Colt writes it off as the overimaginative brain of an eight-year-old. Him and Ryland used to play pretend all the time – they’d obviously just made it up.
Until now.
Colt is having an incredibly realistic dream that he’s on the Hail Mary. That, or he might be going crazy. Dream him is standing in nothing but his white boxers that had been dyed pink in the wash, and a ratty old Haelstrom stunt crew’ t-shirt from Jody’s directal debut that he’d gone to sleep in.
He’s sentimental, okay. It was an important year – even if he was temporarily framed for murder and almost murdered.
But now he’s having a dream that he’s on the Hail Mary. The ship his brother was sent off to die in.
His therapist is gonna have a field day over this.
The problem is the details.
Colt’s dreams of Ryland mostly consist of them sitting on a beach together, with Colt crying all over Ryland as his brother tells him that it's ‘okay’, that it wasn’t Colt’s fault. That if only Colt had picked up the fucking phone, maybe Ryland would still be alive here.
Those dreams are often blurred at the edges, details fuzzy as Colt’s brain tries to decide if it want’s Ryland to look as he did that last time Colt saw him (young young young, not even thirty, too young to be dead-) or as the mirror image of Colt as he is now (older, with new age lines in his face that Ryland will never get to have-).
It kills him either way. Sometimes it’s all he thinks about. That they were born together, identical for life, but now Colt will keep aging, and Ryland never will, because he’s dead.
Or dying soon. It’s been thirteen years since he last saw his brother, and all the news can talk about is how the Hail Mary will have reached its final destination by now. That the team will be conducting their research, and then sending the information probes back. And then killing themselves after the mission has been fulfilled.
It’s a difficult concept for Colt to process. That Ryland technically died thirteen years ago, the second he stepped onto that ship, and it launched out of Earth’s atmosphere, and yet he’s technically, as of right now, still breathing, still alive.
But completely out of Colt’s reach.
It’s the permanent awareness of a countdown that Colt cannot change. Over a decade of grieving his little brother, his twin, who is out there in another solar system, the distance constantly growing between them by kilometers every second. No one will ever be able to understand that pain.
It’s been thirteen years, and Colt hadn’t even known. Hadn’t known that Ryland had shot himself off into space until he’d seen it on the news. Until it was too late.
He’d hounded the internet for any kind of information, tried to contact people involved in the Project Hail Mary mission.
Screamed and had a complete breakdown when he’d gotten his answers.
It’s been thirteen years, and Colt’s stunt career is great, Jody is great, breaking his back was (not) great – but everything happens for a reason.
Life is great.
Colt misses his brother every day.
He cries when he looks at his reflection in the mirror, knowing that he’s outliving Ryland, that they will no longer be identical.
At first, the differences had been tiny. A new line near Colt’s eye, his shoulders broadening out as he does more and more stunts, new scars, small gray hairs beginning to show.
Over the years, it becomes unbearable.
Because every change to Colt’s face is proof that Ryland wasn’t here to age alongside him.
Their whole lives, people had mixed them up, now Colt sometimes catches his reflection unexpectedly and realises with a horrible lurch, that no one would confuse them anymore.
Ryland is frozen somewhere at twenty-nine in every photo Colt still owns.
Sometimes Colt presses his fingers against the mirror and imagines Ryland doing the same thing somewhere impossibly far away. Their faces side by side like they used to do as kids, laughing over who copied who better.
Now the mirror only reflects one of them.
And Colt thinks that might be the loneliest thing he has ever experienced.
Maybe that’s why he’s having this weird dream now. The Hail Mary was constantly in the news, relevant in media again in ways he can’t even try to avoid. It’s a topic of conversation constantly coming up on film sets, no one seeming to understand why Colt Seaver’s suddenly has to leave the room when it comes up.
He also hadn’t cried when he’d looked at his face in the mirror this morning. So maybe this is his penance.
The weird rock in the corner is a new one, though. He hums as he catches it in the corner of his eye, before turning around to inspect the rest of the ship his brain had conjured up.
“Grace?”
Colt lets out a shriek at the sudden voicing of his surname. And if it’s a very high-pitched scream – well, no one needs to know.
“Grace is different, question?” The rock moves, uncanny valley style.
Okay. This is a new one, “What the fuck, brain…” he mutters to himself.
“No understand word – where Grace, question?” The rock responds back to him, moving its many limbs in a spider-like manner as it gets closer to Colt. He shudders at the movements.
Colt stares at it, not replying.
The rock gives him a judgmental look at Colt’s lack of response. Which is impressive, considering it has no face.
It pauses for a second, and Colt realises he’s leaned forward to get a closer look at this dream spider creature, when it speaks again.
“Grace sibling – Colt?” It articulates in the same robot voice, and now Colt is getting seriously freaked out. His dreams aren’t normally this unnerving. Just devastating. So he’s not sure what’s happening here.
“How – how do you know my name?” He blurts out, which is stupid because it’s his own brain. Obviously, it’s gonna know his own name.
He needs to focus, needs to wake up and get out of this dream; he doesn’t want to picture what the Hail Mary looked like. He’d deliberately never looked up the layout plans for the ship, because it would torture him to think about Ryland stuck in such a small place. His final resting place.
“Grace tell Rocky about sibling – same but not.”
Well, that's devastating.
“Twin,” Colt croaks out, automatically correcting, “Where’s Ryland? Normally, he would have shown up by now. In my dreams, I mean,” he adds, suddenly wondering why he’s actually bothering to have this conversation with a sentient dream rock.
A sentient dream rock that is suddenly very affronted, “No dream! Grace here one second, then not. Colt here instead. How possible, question?”
“Dude, I just wanna see Ryland-”
“No understand word – you mean Grace, question?”
Colt pauses. Speech confusion is…an oddly specific problem for a dream to have, “Grace is our surname. Ryland is his first name. He’s Ryland Grace, I’m Colt Grace,” well, legally anyway. Colt had chosen Seavers as his stage name at the beginning of his career, and it had stuck. But for legal documents, he’s still Colt Grace. And now it’s one of his only connections to Ryland left, so he’s never going to give it up.
“Mmm – Grace name is Grace.”
Okay, whatever. He’s not gonna argue with the sentient rock he’s likely hallucinating. That’s too much of a low point.
“Right, where is Grace then?” Or dream Ryland, anyway. Colt would rather be spending time with him than sitting through this bizarre conversation.
“Rocky already say! Grace there, then gone! Now Colt instead.” It says back, visibly frustrated.
And what is the use of that? What’s the point of this stupid spaceship dream if his little brother isn’t even in it?
“Well, can you manifest him up for me then?” He says. It comes out slightly sarcastic.
The rock lets out a series of trills and musical tones, “Colt bring Grace back! Colt on Earth, now here, Grace no longer here! No understand, Bring Grace back back back!” It’s basically bristling at him, and Colt freezes because-
Why does that ring a bell?
“Grace was here…but now he’s not. Because I’m here instead,” he says slowly, turning over the words in his mind. Why is this so familiar?
“Yes! Statement!” It trills back impatiently. He’s getting the distinct vibe that it thinks Colt’s a bit thick. Rude.
He starts turning away, “This is the weirdest dream ever…”
The rock lets out a musical shriek, “Not dream – Colt awake!”
He huffs at it, annoyed by the repetitive conversation, “Okay, okay! Jeez, you’re super insistent for a boulder. What was in those brownies Dan made-”
“Check Log!”
He turns back to it, eyebrows furrowed, “Check what?"
Which is how he ends up watching videos of Ryland. The ships ‘logs’, as the little rock, ‘Rocky’ – real imaginative – calls them. And the doubt is starting to set in, because this is too realistic. There are things in these vlogs that Colt couldn’t even begin to understand. Scientific equations, and centrifuge mechanics and the intricacies of Astrophage – Colt’s brain couldn’t make this up.
He feels like he watches hours of footage, just to try and map Ryland’s face. To stare at his little brother as Ryland seems to go through every emotion. He laughs at the lab footage of Ryland trying to get that grey metal cylinder open. His chest goes cold at the older clips, where Ryland seems very confused and distressed. Even the rock creature seems mournful from where he’s watching over Colt’s shoulder.
And Ryland looks so young. So so young. He barely looks different from when Colt last saw him, only a few years older at most. He can barely wrap his head around the time dilation for the ship's journey.
Ryland had been recruited to the Petrova Taskforce in 2021 at 25. He’d only been on his second year of teaching before he’d given it up to research an alien microbe. Which, Colt understands – he literally did his degree in microbiology. But god, does Colt wish he’d just stayed as a teacher. The ship had launched in 2025, when they were 29. Now Ryland is 33, and Colt is 42 and that's-
That’s too much to think about right now.
Let's think about something else.
(Like the fact that everything about this is too realistic-)
He turns back to Rocky, “You said Grace was there one moment. But then it was me. Like we’d…swapped.”
“This is secret skill humans have? Able to swap with each other? Grace no tell anything like this. Eridians not have this.”
His eyebrows furrow as he stares at the frozen image of Ryland on the screen infront of him, “Humans don’t have that either. You can’t just teleport across the universe and switch places with someone, that sounds like something straight out of a comic book, like Spiderman or something-”
He freezes. The doomed sense of deju vu is so strong it’s almost a physical barrier.
He’s had this conversation before.
Before…with Ryland.
And suddenly it comes flooding back. The switch at school, the panic, smashing their heads together in a foolish attempt at breaking the glitch.
Oh my god. That was real?
It had been so long, and they’d been kids – whenever he’d vaguely thought about it, his mind had just assumed it was just some stupid roleplaying that Ryland had convinced him to do. Had dismissed that geography lesson out of his mind, the fact that he’d gone from a bus the next town over to their middle school, in the space of a second.
The fact that him and Ryland had apparently switched places.
But this – it’s too much of a coincidence. That Colt is on the Hail Mary, with such detailed surroundings, a sentient rock, and hours of footage that Colt felt took the appropriate amount of time to watch. Not like in dreams when time is all weird.
No, this all felt real. Like he really is on the Hail Mary.
But that means-
“Oh fuck. This isn’t a dream?”
“Rocky already say this. Colt not listen, just like Grace. Annoying! Listen to Rocky next time.”
He spins round on the chair, “But that means, Grace is on Earth, and I’m- I’m in space.”
“Take Colt long time to realise. Can bring Grace back now, question?”
He can’t bring Ryland back. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t even know how this happened, let alone figure out how to switch them back again.
He can barely wrap his head around the fact that it was apparently real.
That the one person in the universe Colt had always been tied to was still tied to him, across impossible distances and vacuum and stars. That Ryland hadn’t disappeared completely beyond Colt’s reach after all.
That somewhere on Earth right now, Ryland was probably panicking exactly the same way Colt had panicked in that geography classroom all those years ago.
They’d just teleported across light-years. That shouldn’t be possible. Atoms didn’t work like that, right?
And yet here Colt is, on the Hail Mary, 11.9 light-years away from the bedroom he’d gone to sleep in.
He’s making a vlog for Ryland.
Since this is apparently real, he needs to leave some proof. Needs to tell Ryland that he was here. Needs to tell his brother that he misses him more than life itself.
It takes him multiple tries. He keeps crying.
Rocky asks if all humans are this leaky, or if it’s something specific to the both of them. He leans back and tells it that it’s the reason that the jury’s still out on whether this is real.
Aliens? Really? He can deal with apparent superpowers, but aliens is where he draws the line.
Rocky calls him slow.
Hours later, they still haven’t switched back. Colt’s getting a bit nervous – he can’t be responsible for saving the human race, he doesn’t even remember how alegrba works. He’d be dooming them all if he ends up stuck up here.
He goes to bed after. Pulls out Ryland’s sleeping tube. The two other beds remain sealed. Rocky crawls close to him from within the weird see-through enclosure. It’s unnerving.
He drops off slowly. He hopes Ryland is okay.
[PLAY VIDEO RECORDING?]
“Hi, Ry, it’s Colt. Sorry, that’s obvious. I always was the prettier one out of the two of us, you’d know it wasn’t just past you on a drunken bender making this. Anyway. You’re really here, or – you were. Which, wow, that sounds super creepy now that I say it out loud.”
“I dunno if you’re gonna see this immediately or if the switching thing has rules now, or whatever. Honestly, if anyone’s gonna figure that out, it’s you. You always were the smart one. I can’t believe that stupid switch when we were eight was actually real.”
“Jody’s doing good. Really good, actually. You’d like her movies now – they’ve gotten even weirder. Although if you already woke up in my house at some point during this whole freaky twin-space-teleport thing, then you might already know that. Try not to freak out, yeah?”
“Oh, and don’t panic about the temperature outside, yeah? That’s normal now.”
“I met you’re…rock friend. He seems fun. Was very alarmed to see that I’d replaced you. Only you would go into space and immediately make friends with an alien, Ry. Your weird Star Trek obsession finally came in useful.”
“I’m sorry about your crew. Rocky told me how they didn’t make it. You’ve been on your own this entire time, I’m-”
[NO AUDIO – TWO MINUTES, TWELVE SECONDS]
“I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your call, back then. I wish I had.”
“I wish we’d had more time. I wish things were different.”
“I love you, baby brother.”
“I miss you.”
[VLOG END – REPLAY?]