Chapter Text
The door was unlocked when he got there. Ryland couldn’t decide if that made the situation better or worse.
He was immediately hit with the horrifying scent of alcohol.
To say his heart dropped would be an understatement. The floor disappeared from under him as pure terror coursed his veins.
Ryland was intimately aware of drug interactions and alcohol and how bad of an idea it was to play chemist with painkillers. There were nights nobody would know about, nights he refused to relive, nights that he was being forced to relive—
He took a step into the threshold.
A lamp was on. Warm, orange light spread across the walls and ceiling in an embrace. The shadows were stark against it.
Ryland shoved the panic in his body down and immediately prepared to have to call 9-1-1.
God, if Colt wasn’t injured, Ryland would be making everything infinitely worse by assuming that he was. If Colt found Ryland here, thinking that he’d have been hurt again, it might drive Colt to the brink of madness.
He took another step inside, the keypad lit up on his phone screen as a beacon in the dim light. The alcoholic scent hung in the air like a weight on his shoulders, clinging to him and trying to drag him to the floor.
“Colt?” He called. A lump took up residence in his throat as he crept deeper into the quiet home. It was eerie. He was so used to associating Colt’s living spaces with loud conversations and teasing and safety.
This had none of that. The faucet was dripping slightly, creating a steady pulse for Ryland’s thoughts. “Colt? Hello?”
There was no response. He crept deeper into the living room, trying to shake the thoughts from his brain before they could fully form.
It took his brain a moment to fully process the scene in front of him.
The couch was slightly crooked, angled differently than usual. The coffee table mirrored it, pushed in the opposite direction. Shards of glass of varying sizes were littered across the table and floor, a puddle of liquid surrounding them. And—
Colt.
Ryland tripped over himself trying to get to him. Colt was on the floor, wedged haphazardly between the couch and table. Tiny droplets of blood dotted his face and hands, and for a moment, he thought that Colt might have slit something before looking closer and breathing a sigh of short-lived relief—for all the dread he was experiencing right now, seeing that both of Colt’s wrists were seemingly intact cooled something in him briefly.
The fire inside him was relit as he tried to piece together what could have possibly happened.
“Colt,” he begged, shaking one of his brother’s shoulders. His legs pressed into the floor, and he knew there was at least one or two pieces of glass currently embedded in his bare knees, cargo shorts not long enough to shield them.
It came out more of a whisper than he meant it to. “...Were you drinking?”
Ryland knew the answer. Of course he did. He could smell it, see it, feel that Colt had done something he had said he wouldn’t.
He couldn’t find it in himself to be mad at Colt right now, not when Colt wasn’t responding and Ryland wasn’t even sure that he was breathing. Oh, God, was Colt breathing?
Ryland leaned in and listened closely. The sound of his own heartbeat grew louder in his ears, and he tried to ignore it, searching desperately for a sign of life.
Colt took one shallow, long breath. His eyes searched for more of the familiar rise and fall of Colt’s chest, but there was nothing.
Fear ripped from Ryland’s throat in the form of a sob. Far too many seconds later, another long, shallow breath escaped Colt. The air passing from his throat sounded more like a pained wheeze than a sign of life.
Ryland shook him again, gently at first and then harder, as the phone rang.
“Hello, 9-1-1, what is your emergency?”
“We need an ambulance at 18 Thorn Street—my brother overdosed on hydrocodone and he was drinking and—” The words fell from Ryland’s mouth in a steady stream. Tears rolled down his cheeks, landing on his tongue. Technically, Ryland wasn’t even sure that he overdosed on his meds, but whether or not he had taken them didn’t change the fact that he was unconscious on the floor.
“Okay, we’ve dispatched people to your location,” the operator said as if they were trying to calm a frightened animal. “Is he breathing?”
“Barely—he—he’s struggling. He’s only taking really shallow breaths every one in a while—”
“Okay, can you turn him on his side for me?”
Right. Recovery position. In case he vomited. So he wouldn’t choke on it. Ryland had done first aid courses. Even if he hadn’t, he knew these things, he should have be able to—
He rolled Colt over, trying not to press his face into more fragments of glass. “He’s on his side now.”
“That’s good. They’ll be there soon. Do you have access to Narcan?”
“No,” Ryland whispered. His throat was raw.
Ryland should have checked the house better a few weeks ago. He should have insisted that Colt have Narcan on hand at all times. He should have pressed him for more details when he received that call less than two hours ago—
Ryland could hear the sirens ever so slightly in the distance, and suddenly he was not the twenty-seven-year-old kneeling on Colt’s living room floor, but twelve years old. He was a kid again, hearing his fifteen-year-old brother be taken away from him in a police car because his body was too battered to do anything from the back of the ambulance.
He shook Colt’s shoulder again before moving his fingers to the pulse point on his neck. Breath hitching, he realized just how weak his pulse was.
“Don’t leave me—you can’t leave me all alone, Colt—” His voice broke as something ancient and miserable escaped him.
Alone. The concept had never fully registered to Ryland until now. Growing up, there was Court and Colt and Ryland. Then there was Colt and Ryland, and he assumed that that’s how it would always be. They’d be alive together until inevitably, the stars would want them back, and then they’d die together, too.
Something twisted in his gut, painful and sharp and feeling all too much like Ryland was going to spend the rest of his life waiting for a person that would never show up, because the only people who would ever understand Ryland were his brothers. But his brothers seemed keen on leaving Ryland too soon, and for all the world it felt like being alone on a sinking ship; watching them drown and knowing he was next.
One of Ryland’s hands was clutching Colt’s. The other was running gently through his hair, as if trying to coax him back to consciousness. His phone was crushed between his ear and his shoulder, but he couldn’t feel the cramps forming in his neck because he was too focused on watching for a sign of life to run across Colt’s features.
They didn’t. He was just still. Shaky breaths, growing shallower and more far apart, lips and fingernails losing their color.
“You can’t leave me, don’t leave me like this—”
His murmurings were as incessant as his tears he clutched Colt’s hand. Shards of glass embedded into Colt’s skin pressed into Ryland’s, and for a brief and horrible moment, Ryland savored the feeling. Every sentence came with new voice cracks, and at some point the words stopped being words until Ryland was just sobbing with his other half on the floor next to him.
He was catatonic when a hand landed gently on his shoulder. For a brief, inexplicable moment, Ryland was sure that he had died, which meant Colt had died or was going to die, which meant—
A flurry of movement surrounded him. In a trancelike state, Ryland was an outside observer as his hands were gently removed from Colt just long enough to put him on the stretcher, and then Ryland was clutching Colt’s arm because grabbing his hands was a bad idea, actually.
The ride to the hospital was much the same. Ryland thought he heard the paramedics talking about them—something about their identicality, maybe, followed by sympathetic murmurings—but he also thought he might not have been alive anymore, so he wasn’t all that sure. He answered questions the best he could, but he didn’t really remember doing it. He just knew that the information must have made it past his lips, because the paramedics seemed to know what to do next.
Colt was given Narcan and an oxygen mask. He was pale, his skin cold, and if it weren’t for the heart monitor proving to Ryland that Colt was alive, Ryland probably would have passed out and joined him—wherever he was.
It wasn’t until approximately thirty-two minutes later that Colt’s eyelids began to flutter with the first vestiges of consciousness.
The first thing he noticed was that he very much was not in his home. He could tell before he even opened his eyes exactly where he was; a fucking hospital. The sterile smell and distant sound of nurses shuffling sent him right back to ten months ago.
The second thing he noticed was a sudden, overwhelming wave of disappointment, followed by an even more overwhelming wave of guilt.
The shame crawled up his throat and threatened to strangle him. Unfortunately (fortunately), for him, he had a mask on his face, providing oxygen. Before opening his eyes, he searched desperately to recall what, exactly, had landed him here.
Colt remembered getting the bottle he had hidden. He remembered calling Ryland after only a small sip. So why…?
Oh.
He had called Ryland. But he hadn’t talked to Ryland about anything going on inside his head.
Mentally huffing a sigh, Colt steeled himself before blinking his eyes open.
Immediately, he noticed the bandages on his hands. They weren’t wrapped thickly, but it was clear that somebody had taken great care to be thorough. The thought almost made him sick, but it also filled him with some other kind of mildly elated feeling, stemming from something that he refused to examine any further than he had to.
His stomach fuckin’ hurt, too.
That fact was immediately ignored, however, in favor of acknowledging the figure staring at his hand, clenching and unclenching his own rather than reaching for it.
“Ry?” Colt rasped, voice muffled slightly by the oxygen mask.
His head snapped up and he met Colt’s eyes. They widened in shock before immediately filling with tears. Ryland couldn’t seem to form any words, instead opening and closing his mouth like a fish for a few moments as tears rolled down his cheeks.
“Colt,” he said, voice so low and utterly broken that it sent a whole new wave of guilt over Colt.
He looked away, unable to meet Ryland’s eyes.
Ryland reached out, ever so slowly, and placed his hand on the back of Colt’s. He was careful not to press into Colt’s palm with his fingers, instead just limply layering their hands. Colt watched.
“Colt,” he pleaded, “look at me.”
He raised his eyes and met Ryland’s. He would do this for him, at least.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
Colt had heard Ryland say things through many emotions. He had heard Ryland scream in pain, laugh through tears, sob with despair; he had heard Ryland’s voice in such a range of scenarios that Colt had been sure, up until that moment, that he wouldn’t be able to discover anything new about Ryland’s speaking habits. His inflections, the way he corrected Colt when he mispronounced words, the way the words “I love you” fit in Ryland’s mouth.
But he had never, ever, in all twenty-seven years of their life together, heard Ryland so completely and utterly heartbroken. He sounded more than just sad, more than just scared. He sounded like his entire life had been set on fire in front of him.
…Except he had heard Ryland like that before, twice before, in situations so similar yet so different from the one they were in now.
It dawned on Colt slowly, horror slowly becoming more apparent on his features as he fought the lump in his throat.
When Court left, Ryland had said something that Colt now couldn’t recall—not now, not in that mental state. But he could remember the tears streaking down his young face, his throat hoarse from screaming from the agony of having his head smashed in, of having his brother taken away. The sound wasn’t loud enough to penetrate the back of the ambulance, but it was plenty loud enough to etch its way into Colt’s brain forever.
But that hoarseness had eventually gone away, and left the two of them with a brother-shaped hole in their hearts. It healed slowly, with letters that would be subjected to security checks and promises that he’d be back someday. That they could be a family again.
That hole had been reopened and ceased healing forever when the prison contacted them. There was so much that they would never know, the twins, and it manifested in the brutal sobs that ripped their throats for the rest of their lives.
At least then, they’d been able to cry together.
Ryland had been crying alone. And if it weren’t for Ryland’s ability to essentially read Colt’s mind and sense the impending peril, he would have spent the rest of his life crying alone over two brothers lost.
Colt nodded, so small it was nearly imperceptible with the oxygen mask on. “Okay.” The sound was still muffled with the oxygen mask. There was a metaphor hidden somewhere in there, about Colt’s responses always being muffled by the consequences of actions too late to take back.
His twin brother looked at him with an expression of someone who had been experiencing survivor’s guilt for a death that had not yet come to pass. The expression didn’t leave even after Colt’s response. Instead, Ryland blinked slowly, breathing in a pattern that Colt recognized was supposed to be self soothing.
It seemed to calm him only slightly. Ryland contemplated something for a moment, allowing a beat of silence to pass. When he spoke again, his throat was less torn but still not anywhere near normal.
“You don’t have to talk about it with me,” his voice cracked, “but you are getting help. You can’t…” Ryland’s voice trailed off as if he was at a loss for words.
It struck Colt; the implication that Ryland—despite being Colt’s other half, his twin, the thing pumping blood through his body—would not be enough for Colt to talk to. To tell the truth to.
And fuck, Colt was crying now, too. Warm droplets of water rolled down his face, dissolving into the line where the mask met his face and pooling.
He nodded again, reaching up to try and remove the oxygen mask so he could talk properly. Ryland grabbed his wrist to stop him.
“Don’t. Your respiratory system needs the oxygen after…” Ryland’s voice faltered again, and Colt understood in one horrifying moment just how bad it had gotten. He couldn’t remember, though, and that in itself spoke to the severity of the situation. He knew that he called Ryland, then went back to drinking, then—
Oh.
Colt knew that the alcohol fucked with his meds to a dangerous degree, and maybe he didn’t really know enough about it to be making decisions like whether or not to drink, but then again, something like this was bound to happen eventually.
And what a sickening thought that was. That no matter what, Colt would end up back in a hospital bed, helpless, because of his own hubris.
…He had taken his meds in the morning, and been drinking nineteen hours later, so why—
Oh.
Colt had taken more pills, after. Hands scrambled to open the bottle as the child-proof cap gave him precious seconds to rethink, to choose something different, to not leave Ryland as the last brother standing. And in his alcohol-addled mind, he hadn’t done anything but become annoyed at it for being so difficult to open, for being another thing that Colt wasn’t supposed to be bad at but was.
The only thing Colt could register right now was how fucking awful he felt. Not physically—though he definitely was far from tip-top shape—but mentally. The guilt was eating at him.
Ryland had gone quiet next to him, possibly interpreting his silence as proof that Colt didn’t want to tell him anything.
“Ryland,” Colt said softly at first, then louder so he could hear it through the mask, “Ryland.”
Ryland’s eyes searched his.
“I’ll talk to you. Not right now. But I will.”
The anguish didn’t leave Ryland’s face, and Colt said the only thing he thought could help in the moment. “I won’t do that again. I promise.”
To his own surprise, Colt believed it. He wouldn’t try anything like that again. Not if it meant destroying Ryland like that, leaving him alone to fend for himself. Not that he couldn’t fend for himself, but… Ryland didn’t fare well when forced into solitude. Not after being terrorized by isolation his entire childhood.
Something akin to disbelief flickered onto Ryland’s face, but the tears stop falling as he nods ever so slowly.
“Okay,” he said, voice raw and quiet, “okay.”
They kept him in the hospital for another thirteen hours, because they had to routinely administer enough naloxone to make sure he wouldn't experience a second collapse, and because he hadn’t yet been psychiatrically cleared. Colt spent most of the time sleeping. Ryland spent most of it hunched over his bed, clutching his wrist so as to not hurt his glass-scraped hands.
Finally, the nurses came to check on Colt’s status, and they told him he could go home soon—they had determined he was no longer a threat to himself. He wanted to tell them “I wasn’t ever really a threat to myself,” but he knew that wasn’t true. He had very nearly…
He didn’t follow that train of thought, instead choosing to just be grateful they’re letting him out so soon. Colt was sure it had something to do with the amount of time Ryland spent at his bedside.
Even with all the time Ryland spent at his bedside, Colt didn’t notice it until he finally got propped up more.
Ryland’s knees were bandaged. Not badly enough to warrant a lot of concern, but bandaged enough that they had more gauze than Colt’s hands did.
Colt stopped talking midsentence, instead staring at Ryland’s knees with his mouth slightly parted and his brows furrowed.
“What happened with, uh…” He gestured vaguely at Ryland’s knees.
Ryland looked away. “The glass.”
Colt immediately felt like an asshole for asking. God, not only had he hurt himself with his stupidity, but he’d hurt Ryland as well.
“Oh.” He choked out.
“Colt, I’m okay. It’s only a few scrapes.”
There it was again, that thing that Ryland insisted upon doing for some god-forsaken reason; acting like his pain was simply not worth fussing over. Like his happiness was something not worth fussing over.
Of course, a lifetime of having that drilled into you by a monster of a father could only be undone so quickly, but still, Colt wished Ryland could see himself the way Colt saw him.
It dawned on him then that the way Colt felt about Ryland in that moment was exactly how Ryland felt about him, and it contextualized… a lot. What an odd thing to not have put into words until then. It had always just been known between the two of them that anything and everything one of them did was for the other.
“I don’t blame you,” Ryland said suddenly. His voice was more sure than it had been earlier. “For any of this. I want you to know that.”
“...You should.”
“No.” His voice was sharp enough to cause Colt to jump slightly. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to tell me what I can blame you for. You told me I had to stop blaming myself after Cory—”
“That’s not fair,” Colt protested. “That’s different, it wasn’t your fault! I did this to myself—”
“And I didn’t stop you!” Ryland roared, love turning into grief turning into rage.
Colt was silent as the words settled around them. “...That’s what this is about? Ry,” he shook his head in disbelief, voice melancholy, “I called you at one in the morning, gave you zero information, and then hung up. And you know what you did with that?”
Ryland didn’t answer.
“You made an hour-long drive take thirty minutes just in case. And you were right. And… I’m sorry that you were right.” His voice came out strangled and tremulous.
Great, now they were both crying again.
Ryland, on instinct, wanted to say that it was okay. But it wasn’t okay.
It would be eventually, though.
He nodded silently and pulled Colt into a tight hug.
The first night that Colt spent home, Ryland insisted that he wait outside for a moment.
Colt didn’t fully understand why until Ryland came back out, helped Colt out of the car (his back was thoroughly even more fucked from laying on the ground), and told him that he had cleaned up the glass, blood, and spilled pills.
He really wanted to ask Ryland what he did with the pills, but that would have made him look bad.
Ryland, of course, could still read Colt’s mind. “I hid them. I’ll give you your meds every morning, and if I find out you went looking for them, there will be hell to pay.”
Colt grinned at him. “Yeah? And what will you do to stop me?”
He poked Ryland in the side. Ryland jumped before letting out a small laugh, responding to Colt’s jab with a poke of his own. Everything wasn’t normal, but it was getting there. Slowly but surely.
“Ignoring the idea that I would have to stop you,” he gave Colt a pointed look, “I have my ways.”
“....Riiiight.” Colt collapsed onto the couch with a wince as Ryland searched his cabinets.
Ryland huffed, a sound that carried no real vitriol. “What do you want for dinner?”
“Oh God, please don’t tell me you’re going to cook. That really would kill me.”
Ryland winced. “Too soon.”
“Sorry. Can we get tacos?”
He flopped down on the couch horizontally, making a show of stretching dramatically until his feet were poking Colt’s side. “Only if you’re paying.”
“That’s not fair! Being a valet driver, like, barely pays.”
“Okay, first of all, you’re there by choice,” Ryland counted the points off on his fingers, “second of all, I deserve it after the emotional strain you put me through.”
He scoffed. “It’s not by choice!”
His twin raised an eyebrow at him, poking him in the chin with a socked foot. “It totally is.”
Colt swatted it away. “It’s not.”
“You got cleared to go back to working on set a month ago, as long as you only do very small stunts,” Ryland pointed out, “I literally went with you to the appointment.”
“Yeah, but it’s just…” He trailed off. Just what? Just that being on set reminded him of how little he deserved to be there?
“Colt.” Ryland warned, feet falling into Colt’s lap instead of continuing to harass him. “Do you… Do you really think what happened with the rig failing was your fault?”
Colt very, very deliberately did not flinch. He also paused, trying to formulate a response that wasn’t technically a lie but that wouldn’t also absolve him. “I think,” he swallowed, “I think that… I made a careless mistake, and it’s only fair that I paid—am paying for it.”
“Colt. You didn’t make a mistake, the rig malfunctioned.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but—”
He was cut off.
“Do you know what entropy is?”
Colt blinked at him in confusion. Ryland huffed.
“It’s a lot of things, frankly, but mostly, it’s probability,” he stated simply. “It’s the measure of possible arrangements that atoms in a system can have.”
“And you’re telling me this because…why?”
“Hush, I’m not done. The more entropy something has, the more uncertain the states of the atoms are, because there are more possible arrangements. Stunt work,” Ryland emphasized, “has a lot of entropy. There are a lot of moving parts. There are a lot of people. There are a lot of arrangements of those parts and people.”
He stared at Ryland with a growing warmth in his chest. Of course he was turning this into a science lesson. The concept was so impossibly Ryland that a tiny grin split across Colt’s face.
“But there are only so many arrangements of those parts and people where everything goes the way you want it to. You just so happened to be the wrong atom, in the wrong arrangement, at the wrong time.”
“That’s… kind of a terrifying way of putting it.” Colt interjected.
“It is. But that’s the thing with entropy. You can’t control it. Humans spend so much of their lives trying to shove themselves into routines. But no matter how many routines you have, you’ll never have complete control over your life.” His voice softened. “It’s… kind of freeing, I guess. To know that there was nothing you could have done differently.”
Colt looked up at the ceiling, wishing he had glow-in-the-dark stars like they used to have in their childhood bedroom. “Yeah. I guess it is kind of freeing.”
A beat of silence passed. “Hey, Ry?”
He saw Ryland look up from where he, too, had been staring at the ceiling.
“I’m glad that our atoms are in this arrangement.” Colt murmured.
“Yeah. I am too.”