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Grace glanced around nervously. “Are you sure you’re not gonna get in trouble for this? I don’t want you to lose your job.”
Colt shrugged. “Don’t even worry about it, Ry. I cleared it with Gail, you’re only in disguise so nosy buggers like Ryder don’t start complaining.”
The ‘disguise’ in question was the jacket from Colt’s costume, identical to Ryder’s. They weren’t filming any more stunts that day, although Colt had some technical setup later. Colt himself was back in his familiar Miami Vice stunt team jacket. With Grace’s hair messed up and glasses safely tucked away, he could pass for his twin at a glance, and actors never looked at a stuntman for more than a glance. Colt’s plan was perfect.
“I’ll show you round the set, introduce you to some people. You can have a proper VIP behind the scenes tour.” He showed Grace around all the empty sets, and they crept in at the back to watch a scene being filmed - Colt pointed out all the techniques the lighting and cinematography teams were using, and quietly heckled Ryder's performance until Grace laughed. Then they went to bother Jody on her break, and she was delighted to finally meet Colt’s brother.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, shaking his hand. “To hear this one tell it, you’re some kind of academic super genius.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Grace, blushing. “I teach middle school nowadays. It's nice to put some faces to the names from Colt's stories, though.”
Jody was nice, but Colt and Jody quickly got distracted by flirting with each other, and Grace decided to give them a bit of space. After all, wasn’t the point of the disguise that he could explore a bit and go overlooked? He wanted to check out the stunt set, where Colt spent his time.
“Go for it!” said Colt, distracted. “Just make sure you follow all the instructions the stunt team or the safety guys give you.”
Grace wandered out, leaving the pair to their conversation. He stuck his hands in his pockets and sauntered like Colt, looking at the rush and flow of the set around him. Everyone was purposeful, and none of them even spared him a second glance – why would they? He was just another part of the crowd, a stuntman hanging out on set after the work was done for the day.
He explored the area set up for Colt’s stunt the next day. It was a massive drop off the side of a building, and it made Grace dizzy just looking up at it. He'd never been good with heights, even when they were kids. Colt was the one always getting up into trees and onto roofs, and Grace would only follow under sufferance.
“Hey, Grace. Want to go have a look?” said Gail, appearing behind him with her ubiquitous Diet Coke. “They’ll think you’re Colt, no one will care, and the view from the top is great!”
“Sure,” Grace said, “thanks.” He was a bit scared of heights, but the opportunity was just too cool to pass up. When else would he be able to say he'd climbed a stunt set in a Hollywood studio? Besides, Colt would think it was cool, and he did want to get a better look at the technical side of what his brother did.
No one else was up there when he got to the top, and the view really was great. He looked at the safety gear, careful not to touch anything, and leaned over to look at the settings on the computer controlling the gear.
…Hang on. That didn’t look right. He did the math in his head again, hesitating, when someone spoke behind him.
“Hey Colt, stop fussing with the safeties already and get over here!”
He turned around reflexively to see who was speaking – while he was distracted by the rigs, the stunt safety coordinator and a couple of assistants had appeared behind him and were setting something up.
“We’ve been looking for you all afternoon, asshole,” said one of the assistants jokingly. “We’ve just got this last practice run and then we’re all set for filming tomorrow and we can all go home. Except you I guess, you crazy workaholic.”
“Wait, what?” said Grace, as the other technical assistant pulled him over by the arm and started strapping him into a harness.
“You don’t need to still be wearing the costume, by the way,” said the safety coordinator, “This is just a technical rehearsal before the shoot tomorrow.”
“Hang on a sec, wait, wait, stop,” said Grace, now worried, “You’ve made a mistake, there's something wrong,”
“You did the calculations yourself, Colt, you never make a mistake with safety. Let’s just get this drop done and we can all go home.” The coordinator double checked the harness and gave the assistant the thumbs up, and they went over and hit something on the computer.
“Drop? Hey guys, hey, no,” Grace stammered, his mouth drying up as they walked him towards the edge.
“Are you gonna do it, or do you need pushed?” said the other assistant, laughing. “It doesn’t need to look real for the tech run, you know!”
Grace’s mouth was too dry to speak, looking at the edge, looking at the void past the edge. It had all happened so quickly, he was frozen. He desperately tried to come up with something, some way to explain, but the height had robbed him of all rational thought, and all that was left was terror.
“Ready?” said the assistant. “On go – three, two, one-”
***
Colt screamed his way into the back of the ambulance with Grace. Jody was saying something to him, offering to drive him to the hospital – Gail was talking to him, something about liability insurance – even Ryder was there, face white with shock and maybe something else – but he couldn’t hear a word of it over the ringing his ears.
“That’s my fucking brother! Let me come with him!”
He couldn’t see much of his face around the neck brace and oxygen mask, but he held his hand the whole way there.
“It’s okay, Ry,” he said. “It’s gonna be alright. You’re gonna be okay, I promise.”
Grace blinked at him, hazy through the drugs and pain, but didn’t speak. Colt wasn’t a believer, had never had any kind of religion, but all he could think was please, please, whatever power is out there. Don’t let my brother die. Don’t let me have killed my brother. Don’t let him die.
He couldn’t erase it from his memory. Walking out of the trailer with Jody, laughing, they'd totally lost track of time and she was late back from her break. Shading his eyes and looking up at the building where the drop stunt was set up for tomorrow. The annoyed panic of – oh shit we were gonna do the test run – the relief of seeing that they were setting up for it with someone else anyway – and then hearing the voices over the radio, Ry’s terrified stutter, the final, agonizing terror of realizing they thought they had him up there, Colt fucking Seavers the stuntman, and not a totally untrained middle school teacher, his nerdy older brother who couldn’t so much as drop out of a tree as teenagers, let alone forty feet onto concrete. Reassuring himself that he’d done the calculations, he'd set that rig himself with his own hands, Ry was if anything lighter than him, that he would be shaken, probably terrified, but not hurt, already planning the lecture he was gonna give the stunt safety coordinator about making sure everyone was happy to go ahead before a stunt because their stupid attitude was gonna get one of his team hurt someday -
And then realizing, before his brother was even halfway down, that something was wrong, the braking mechanism wasn’t working, he was coming in too fast, it wasn't right -
- and the sound a person made when they hit concrete.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he said, and he kept his voice steady and he didn’t let go of Ry’s hand. “I’ve got you.”
***
The hospital was a blur of scans and tests and beeping machines and shouting at doctors because his brother was in pain and then apologizing to doctors when they came back with morphine. He spent a sleepless night by Grace’s side, and then called Gail first thing the next morning to quit the rest of the movie. He doesn’t remember most of the call, only saying, “Sorry, Gail. Ry is just the only thing that matters to me right now.”
He called Ry’s work, too, the school he liked so much. He got six months full sick pay, and then – well, they’d work that out when it came to it. They’d work the hospital bill out, too – he refused to worry about it. His only priority was Ry’s recovery. The doctors wouldn’t tell either of them what the prognosis was, just that they were waiting for the swelling to go down, that nerve damage was so unpredictable, that they would have to wait and see.
Ry, of course, never flagged for a second. He was reading medical papers on his phone by day three, bothering the nurses to let him look at the images taken of his spine, and reassuring Colt more than he let Colt reassure him.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, again and again until it made Colt sick. “It wasn’t your fault, I should have made it clearer I wasn’t you, I should have told them to stop and refused to go near the edge.”
Of course it was my fault, Colt wanted to scream. My calculations, my fucking harness, my stupid fucking stunt, you were up there in my stupid fucking place, my stupid fucking idea to bring you on set at all and make you look like me.
But he didn’t say anything at all.