Archive of Our Own

The meeting was at two o'clock on a Tuesday, which Gail Meyer thought should have been her first warning. Tom Ryder didn't do two o'clock Tuesdays. Tom Ryder did six AM calls and midnight texts and showing up at locations three hours before crew to walk the space alone, and he did all of these things with the particular energy of a man who was always, in some private internal way, already running. A scheduled Tuesday afternoon meeting meant he had something prepared. Prepared Tom Ryder was a different animal from spontaneous Tom Ryder, and Gail had learned to pay attention to which one walked through the door.

This one sat down across from her with a folder, a coffee he hadn't touched, and the expression of a man who had been thinking about something for a very long time and had finally decided to say it out loud.

"I want to make a film about love," he said.

"Okay," said Gail.

"Specifically, my love. Specifically—" he paused, and something moved across his face that Gail couldn't immediately categorise, something that was neither performance nor affect but just, plainly, feeling — "for someone who is currently unavailable and therefore cannot tell me this is a bad idea."

Gail put her pen down. "Tom."

"His name is Ryland. He's a scientist. He's the most brilliant person I've ever met and he has terrible eating habits and he laughs at his own jokes before he finishes telling them, and I haven't..." He stopped. "I haven't spoken to him in eight months."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. We're fine." He said it with absolute certainty, the way Tom said most things, which was as though the alternative had simply never occurred to him. "He's working on something classified. Very important. He can't really have contact with ... with outside. I understand that." He picked up his coffee, finally. "I just think he should know that I'm here."

Gail looked at him for a long moment.

In twenty-two years of directing, she had worked with people who were difficult, people who were brilliant, people who were both simultaneously and people who were neither and had somehow ended up in front of a camera anyway. Tom Ryder was, in her professional assessment, one of the most genuinely talented performers she had ever collaborated with, and also one of the most structurally unusual human beings she had ever encountered in her personal capacity. He was not like other people. He never had been. And this ... this folder, this coffee, this Tuesday afternoon , was him asking for something, which he almost never did.

"What kind of film?" she said.

He opened the folder. Inside was twelve pages of notes, handwritten, and three pages of something that was almost a script outline. Gail read the first page.

She looked up.

"The scientist character," she said. "Ryland Gradce."

"Yes."

"G-R-A-D-C-E."

"Yes."

"Tom." She held up the page. "That's one letter from being his actual name."

"I added a D," Tom said, serenely.

"I noticed. Why?"

"Plausible deniability." He said it without any apparent awareness of irony. "It's a fictional character. Inspired by real ... by someone real. The name needed to be different."

"One letter different."

"Sufficiently different."

Gail set the page down. She picked up the next one. The notes were ... dense. Specific. The kind of specific that came from memory, not research. There were details about the way the character moved, the way he held a pen, the fact that he apologised by making food rather than saying sorry directly. There was a note that said he always takes the window seat, even if it's worse, because he likes to be able to see out and another that said when he's excited about something he speaks faster and forgets to account for whether the other person is following , this should be endearing, not annoying; it always was.

That last clause , it always was , was underlined twice.

"He broke up with you," Gail said, carefully.

"He said it was over," Tom agreed.

"That's generally what breaking up means."

"He was stressed. He had just been offered a major position on a classified project. He was ... he had a lot happening." Tom was very calm about this. "People say things when they're overwhelmed."

"Tom..."

"Gail." He looked at her, and there it was again , that thing that wasn't performance, that was just him, just Tom, the part of him that had made her say yes to the first project they'd done together because she could see it on screen, that quality of meaning everything absolutely. "I'm not making a film because I can't cope. I'm not ... this isn't grief. I know he loves me. I know it." He set his hand flat on the folder. "I just want him to remember, while he's wherever he is doing whatever he's doing, that I'm here. And that I'm waiting. And that when he comes back, nothing has changed."

Gail looked at him for a long time.

She thought about the twelve pages of notes. She thought about the underlined clause. She thought about the D in Gradce, the one extra letter, the plausible deniability that was not even slightly deniable.

She thought: this is either the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed or something that would concern a mental health professional, and I cannot tell which.

She thought: the story, as a story, is genuinely compelling. The scientist and the actor. The distance. The waiting. It had bones.

She said: "I want script approval."

Tom smiled. It was the smile of a man who had known, going in, that the answer would be yes.

"Done." he said.

Colt found out about the film the same way he found out about most things in his professional life, which was from Dan, in a parking lot, forty-five seconds before it became relevant.

"New Ryder project," Dan said, falling into step beside him as they crossed toward the production office. "You're on it. Stunt double, same as always."

"What's it called?"

"Across Every Distance. Romantic something. Gail Meyer directing."

"Gail's good," Colt said.

"Yeah." Dan paused. "Ryder's producing too. And starring."

"He always stars."

"He's also, according to my source in the art department, personally involved in wardrobe decisions for the scientist character." Dan said this carefully, in the tone of a man laying down information and stepping back from it. "Like, very personally involved. Apparently he brought in reference photos."

Colt stopped walking. "Reference photos of what?"

"Specific flannel shirts."

There was a pause.

"Dan!" said Colt.

"I know."

"Tell me he's not..."

"I don't know what he is." Dan said. "I'm just telling you what my source told me. Specific flannel shirts, Colt. Plural."

Colt stood in the parking lot and breathed through his nose for a moment. Then he took out his phone and called his brother.

It rang six times and went to voicemail.

Hi, you've reached Ryland Grace. I can't come to the phone right now .... if this is about the research contract, please contact...

"Ry." Colt said, after the beep, "call me back. It's about Ryder." He paused. "It's about Ryder and a film he's making. About a scientist. With reference photos." Another pause.

"This is really fucked up... Just. Call me back."

He hung up. He looked at Dan.

"He's on that project," Dan said. "The classified one."

"I know he's on the classified one."

"So he probably can't..."

"I know he can't." Colt put his phone in his pocket. "He'll call when he can. Come on."

He went into the production office. Tom Ryder was already there, standing with Gail and two people from art department, holding a photograph and saying "...more like this, the collar sits differently when it's a medium..."

Tom looked up when Colt walked in. His entire face did the thing it always did when Colt walked in, which was to become briefly, genuinely delighted in a way that Colt found both transparent and infuriating.

"Colt," he said warmly. "Good."

"Ryder," said Colt, with the flatness of a man conserving energy.

"I was hoping they'd put you on this one." He said it like they were friends. Like Colt had not, on the last project, told him to his face that he had the emotional intelligence of a particularly confident golden retriever. Tom Ryder retained nothing that didn't serve him. "It'll be good to have a familiar face."

"Mm." said Colt.

"We start with the lab sequences next week. I've been working with Gail on the physical language for the scientist , there's a specific way he stands when he's thinking, sort of forward-weighted, like he's about to walk somewhere, and I want to make sure that reads in the long shots..."

"Who's the actor?" Colt said.

A brief pause.

"We're still in casting," Gail said, smoothly.

"Right," said Colt. He looked at Tom. Tom was looking at the photograph again with an expression of warm concentration. The photograph, Colt could now see, was of a man in a blue and grey flannel shirt.

The man in the photograph was his brother.

Colt was quiet for a long moment.

He excused himself. He went to the corridor. He called Ryland again.

Six rings. Voicemail.

"Okay." he said, "okay, so I've seen the photograph, Ry. The photograph he brought in for the wardrobe reference. For the Facking scientist character. Call me back immediately. This is not... call me back."

He went back inside.

Tom was explaining something about the way scientists hold pens.

Colt smiled the smile of a man who had decided to gather more information before he did anything he'd have to fill out paperwork for.

The eating scene was scheduled for a Wednesday.

Colt knew it was scheduled for a Wednesday because he had been given the call sheet, and because the call sheet listed the scene as INT. LAB — DAY — Tom/Ryland conversation (eating), and because he had read the words Tom/Ryland and spent a full thirty seconds staring at them in the way of a man processing a fact he had already known but had not yet seen written down.

The character's name was Ryland Gradce.

Colt had found this out on day eight, from Jody.

Jody was his girlfriend and one of the camera operators, and she had told him with the specific expression she used when she was trying to communicate information while simultaneously preparing to handle his response to it, which was the expression of someone setting down a glass of water next to a person who has just been told bad news.

"G-R-A-D-C-E," she'd said.

Colt had said nothing.

"It's one letter from..."

"I can Facking spell my own Fucking surname, Jo."

"He added a D."

"I noticed." He'd looked at the ceiling. "Why a D."

Jody had been quiet for a moment. "His last name is Ryder," she'd said, gently. "D for Ryder."

Colt had looked at her.

"He put his own initial in Ryland's name," Jody said. "Like. Like a..."

"Don't." Colt had said. "Don't say it."

She hadn't said it. But they'd both known what it was like. Like writing your name next to someone else's in the margin of a notebook. Like a fifteen-year-old's idea of forever, scaled up to forty-seven million dollars.

That had been day eight. Today was day nineteen, and Colt was standing off set watching Tom Ryder prepare to film the eating scene, and he had called his brother four times in the past week with no answer.

The scene was simple. Tom's character walks into a lab. The actor playing Ryland Gradce , a good actor, Colt would give him that, and clearly well-briefed, which was its own specific thing to think about , is working at a bench. They have a short exchange.

Tom had rewritten the exchange himself. Gail had approved it. Colt had read it in the script and felt a muscle in his jaw do something involuntary.

He watched them run it.

"You know what your problem is? You forget to eat unless someone puts food directly in front of you."

"I eat."

"You eat when I feed you. That's different."

"That is factually inaccurate."

Tom laughed on the last line. It wasn't performed , it was the laugh of someone remembering something, warm and involuntary, and Colt had heard that exact laugh directed at his brother in a kitchen in Pasadena and he was going to need a moment.

"Cut," said Gail. "That's good. Tom, can we go again?"

"Can we adjust the line?" Tom asked. He was already looking at something on the script.

"The last one ... he'd say it differently. More .... he'd be a little more offended, but not actually offended. He'd say it like he was correcting a mathematical error."

"Okay," said Gail.

"Like this." Tom demonstrated the inflection. "That is factually inaccurate." The emphasis on factually. The expression of a man being very precise about a thing. "He'd want to be clear that it wasn't the sentiment he was objecting to, just the logical framework."

Marcus, The actor playing Ryland Gradce wrote something in the margin of his script.

Colt looked at Dan.

Dan had been watching with his arms folded and the expression of a man who was reassessing several assumptions about his place of employment. "Is he directing now?" Dan said, quietly.

"He's been directing since day one," Colt said. "Gail just hasn't told him that's what it is."

"She seems fine with it."

"She's not fine with it. She's managing it. There's a difference." Colt watched Tom cross to the actor and demonstrate the blocking , where to stand, how to hold the pen, the way the character would turn his head when he was listening to something that interested him. "She told me yesterday he asked to reshoot the opening scene because he felt the light was wrong. When she asked wrong how, he said, quote, 'Ryland has this particular quality in good light, it's hard to describe, it's just , he looks like himself, you know, and this doesn't look like him yet.'"

Dan stared at him.

"She relit it." Colt said. "Because the thing is, he's right, and everyone knows he's right, and that's the worst part."

They watched Tom step back, satisfied, and nod at Gail. Gail called action. They ran the scene again.

The line landed perfectly. The laugh was real.

Colt took out his phone, walked to the far end of the sound stage, and called his brother.

Five rings. Voicemail.

"Ry," he said, very quietly and very precisely, "he just spent forty minutes making sure an actor performs your specific inflection pattern correctly on screen, in a forty-seven million dollar film, that is going to be in theatres. And streaming. And I need you to understand..." he stopped. "I need you to call me back. Please. I'm begging you. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I am begging."

He hung up.

He went back to set.

Tom was discussing the next scene with Gail with the satisfied expression of a man whose morning was going exactly as planned. He caught Colt's eye across the sound stage and smiled.

Colt did not smile back.

Tom seemed to find this delightful.

The wardrobe conversation happened on a Thursday, which Colt thought was appropriate because Thursdays were already the worst day of the week and this was consistent.

He was passing the makeup bay , not going in, passing, when he heard Tom's voice through the open door, talking with the ease of someone who had forgotten sound carried.

"...the flannel is right, it's the specific shade, he has this one that's blue and grey, he's had it for years, it's one of his favourites..."

Colt stopped.

He stood very still in the corridor.

"...and the hair needs to stay natural, he doesn't do anything to it, it just does that, the curl at the temples is just what happens when he doesn't..."

There was a pause. A softer voice , one of the makeup team, said something Colt couldn't hear.

Tom answered it. He answered it in the warm, private tone of someone sharing something that mattered to them, completely unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that the door was open.

"I think about it sometimes," he said. "Getting married. He'd hate the fuss, he'd want something small, something , honestly he'd probably want to do it in a lab and just sign the papers and that would be that." A brief pause. "I think about the name, actually. I've thought about it a lot. Grace-Ryder, or Ryder-Grace." Another pause, and when he spoke again there was something in his voice that was almost shy, which was the most alarming thing about it. "I landed on Gradce. As a — as a middle ground. G-R-A-D-C-E. His name, with my initial in it. That's where the character's name comes from."

Silence.

"I know it's the film," Tom said, quietly, to whoever was listening. "I know Ryland Gradce is a character and this is a film. But it felt like — it felt like a way of saying something true. He's mine and I'm his and one day, when all of this is finished and he comes back, I'm going to say that to him properly." He paused. "He'll probably say something about the grammatical construction of the concept of belonging. I'm looking forward to it."

Colt stood in the corridor.

He was not a man who was easily silenced. He was, by most accounts, a man who had strong opinions about most things and expressed them frequently and at volume, which was a trait he shared with exactly one other member of his family, though his brother's strong opinions were about astrophage and light absorption and Colt's were more broadly distributed.

He stood in the corridor and felt something complicated happen in the region of his chest, which he immediately refused.

He took out his phone.

He called his brother.

Four rings.

"Shit... Ryland Andrew Grace," he said, after the beep, with great and careful calm, "this man is going to put your initial in the character's name because he's thought about your wedding. Your wedding, Ry. He's thought about the name. I need you to understand that I am dealing with this alone and you are not picking up your phone and I cannot..." He stopped. He ran a hand through his hair. "Just call me back. Please. There has to be some kind of emergency signal thing on that project. Figure it out."

He hung up.

He went back to work.

Tom came out of the makeup bay twenty minutes later, cheerful and perfectly prepared and apparently untroubled by anything, which was his consistent state and the most consistently maddening thing about him.

"Good morning," he said to Colt, with genuine warmth.

"It was." said Colt.

Tom smiled, unbothered. Colt wanted to say something. There were many things he could have said, and he had rehearsed several of them in the past three weeks with increasing fervour and decreasing restraint.

What he actually said was: "Your call sheet says you want to run the cliff sequence this afternoon."

"After lunch," Tom confirmed. "You up for it?"

"I'm always up for it," Colt said, which was true. Physical work he could do. Physical work was uncomplicated and made sense and did not involve anyone saying things through open doors about wedding names.

"Good." Tom clapped him on the shoulder with the easy familiarity of someone who had never once considered that Colt might object to being clapped on the shoulder. "He'd have liked the cliff sequence, I think. Ryland. He'd have pretended to be horrified but he'd have been fascinated."

"Don't." said Colt.

"He used to come on set sometimes, when his brother .... when your ... when Colt invited him." Tom corrected himself with the smooth ease of someone who was absolutely aware of the distinction and was choosing to observe it. They had an arrangement, of sorts, that Tom would use Colt's professional name on set and not reference the family connection unless Colt brought it up. Colt had instituted this arrangement because the alternative was Tom saying when Ryland came to watch you every forty minutes and Colt could only metabolise so much at once. "He'd watch the stunt work like he was cataloguing it. Asked me once how the harness physics worked and then spent fifteen minutes working out the math in his head." He said it with the expression he always had when he talked about Ryland, which was the expression of a man describing a sunset. "He was embarrassed when he caught himself doing it. He always thought he was being boring."

Colt looked at him.

Tom looked back, open and certain and completely, structurally convinced that this was fine, that everything was fine, that Ryland Grace was his boyfriend who was temporarily at work and would come home and things would continue as they had been.

"Ryder!" Colt said, and stopped.

"Hm?"

Colt thought about the corridor. About one day, when all of this is finished. About the name that was one letter off and contained an initial.

"Nothing," he said. "Let's go run the cliff sequence."

He told Jody that evening, in the small office space she'd claimed as a base, while she was reviewing the day's footage.

She listened. She did not interrupt. This was one of the things Colt valued most about Jody , she let him finish before she reacted, which was a discipline he respected especially because he lacked it entirely.

When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.

"He really said all of that," she said. "In the makeup bay."

"Through the open door."

"About the name."

"About the name."

Jody turned back to her monitor. She pulled up a clip, reviewed something, made a note. Then she said, without looking up: "Colt. Do you think he's actually in denial? Like, genuinely doesn't accept the breakup? Or do you think he knows, and this is how he's dealing with it?"

Colt thought about this.

He thought about Tom's face when he talked about Ryland. The consistency of it, the ease, the absence of any performance in it. Tom Ryder was one of the best performers in the industry. Colt had watched him, up close, for six years. He knew what performance looked like on that face.

What he saw when Tom talked about Ryland did not look like performance.

"Both." he said finally. "I think both things are true and I think he's decided they're compatible."

Jody nodded slowly.

"Call your brother," she said.

"I've fucking called him seventeen times."

"Call him again."

Colt called him again. Five rings. Voicemail.

He looked at the ceiling. "Ry!" he said, "it's me again. He thinks you're coming back. He genuinely, completely, one hundred percent thinks you're coming back and everything is going to be fine. I need you to know that." He paused. "I also need you to know that if you don't call me back in the next forty-eight hours I'm going to find a fucking way onto whatever classified ship you're living on and shake you until your teeth rattle, and that's a promise, not a threat." Another pause. "Love you. Call me."

Jody patted his hand.

"It'll be fine." she said.

"When?" Colt asked.

She didn't have an answer for that.

It was day twenty-six when Tom suggested it.

They were between setups, in that specific limbo time when the lighting crew is doing something complicated and everyone else stands around drinking coffee and pretending to check their phones. Tom was talking to Gail about the pacing of the second act. Colt was six feet away talking to Dan about absolutely nothing, which was what they did in limbo time because it was better than thinking.

"I've been thinking about the casting," Tom said, to Gail.

"The casting is done," Gail said.

"For the scientist. For Ryland."

"Marcus is doing very well..."

"He's doing well. He's doing everything right." Tom paused. Colt, six feet away, became very still in the manner of a man whose animal hindbrain has identified a threat before his conscious mind has caught up. "But there's something that's not quite..."

"Tom..."

"What about Colt?"

Silence.

Colt turned around.

Tom was looking at him with the expression of a man who had just had an idea so good he was surprised no one else had thought of it first.

"He looks exactly like Ryland," Tom said, with the serenity of someone presenting a reasonable professional suggestion. "He's already on set. He knows the material. And he..."

"Tom." Colt said it very quietly.

"...has a built-in understanding of the character that Marcus can't..."

"Tom."

Tom looked at him with polite attention.

"You want me," Colt said, measuring each word, "to play my own brother. In your film. About your relationship with my brother. Which my brother does not believe is a current relationship."

"Ryland does believe..."

"Which Ryland has ended," Colt said, and his voice did the thing it did when he was controlling it very hard, which was to get quieter rather than louder. "He ended it. He told you it was over. He told you that in a kitchen in Pasadena at two in the morning, Ryder, and I know because he called me after and I'm the one who told him he was making the right call, and now you want me to put on his shirt and stand in front of your camera and..."

"I want it to be right," Tom said. He said it simply, without apology. "I want it to be true. And you're , you know him, Colt. You look like him. You know the way he stands and the way he talks and the..."

"I'm not doing it," Colt said.

"If you just..."

"I am not," Colt said, with great and final clarity, "getting in front of your camera and performing my brother for you to put in a film. That's it. That's the answer. There is no version of this conversation where the answer is different."

Silence.

Tom looked at him for a moment. His expression was not chastened , Tom Ryder's expression was never precisely chastened , but it shifted slightly, into something more thoughtful.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?" Dan said, from behind Colt, where he had been listening with undisguised attention.

"Okay," Tom repeated. He turned back to Gail. "Marcus is doing well. He's doing everything right." He said it as though the previous conversation hadn't happened. "Let's look at the second act pacing."

Gail, who had been silent throughout with the expression of a director making rapid calculations about her own culpability, caught Colt's eye over Tom's shoulder.

She mouthed: I'm sorry.

Colt mouthed back something that was not appropriate for a professional environment.

He walked off set. He walked until he found a quiet exterior wall, and he leaned against it, and he called his brother.

It rang. And rang. And rang.

"Listen to me very carefully," he said, after the beep, and his voice was extremely calm in the specific way that meant he was the furthest from calm he'd been in weeks. "He just asked me to play you in the film. In the film about you. That he is making because he loves you and has decided the breakup wasn't real." He stopped. "He asked me, Ryland. Me. Personally. He looked me in the eye and said you know him, you look like him and I want you to sit with that for a moment. I want you to really sit with it." Another pause. "I said no, obviously. Obviously I said no. But the asking, Ry. The fact that he asked. Call. Me. Back. Shit."

He hung up.

Dan appeared around the corner with two cups of coffee, which was what Dan did when things had gone wrong, because Dan was a practical person who expressed care through available resources.

Colt took the coffee.

"You good?" Dan said.

"Absolutely not."

"He backed down pretty fast."

"Tom doesn't fight battles he's already decided," Colt said. "He just ... moves on. He's always doing twelve things and none of them are about you specifically, they're all about whatever he's decided is true." He drank the coffee. "That's the thing about him. He's not malicious. He's not even ... he's not trying to be difficult. He just. Decides what's real and proceeds accordingly."

"And what he's decided is real is that your brother is still his boyfriend."

"Yes."

Dan was quiet for a moment. "Is there any chance he's right?"

Colt looked at him.

"Not being funny," Dan said. "Just ... you know your brother. Is there any chance Ryland..."

"No." Colt said. "Ryland called me the night he ended it. He was sure."

"Okay."

"He was sad," Colt said, because it was true and it was relevant and Colt had been carrying it for eight months. "He was sad about it. It wasn't ... he wasn't glad it was over. But he was sure it had to be." He looked at the coffee in his hand. "That's the difference between them. Tom decides things and holds on. Ryland decides things and lets them go, even when he doesn't want to."

Dan nodded.

They stood in the exterior for a while, not talking, because sometimes there wasn't much else to say.

The rain was artificial. There was a unit for it , the rain unit, operated by a very patient technician named Phil who had worked in film for thirty years and had never before spent quite so long on a scene this short.

The scene was the last major emotional beat before the ending. Tom's character, alone, outside a building that was dressed to look like a research facility , the same research facility where the fictional Ryland Gradce worked, where they'd had conversations and shared food and looked at each other in the particular way that made Gail's cinematographer go quiet for a moment before calling the next setup.

The character stands in the rain. Looks up. Says his line.

They'd rehearsed it dry. They'd been rehearsing it dry for three days, because Tom kept stopping before the line.

Not forgetting it. Not getting it wrong. Just ... stopping. Standing in the position and looking at the building that was dressed as a research facility and stopping.

Gail had not pushed it. She had watched it happen twice and then told the crew to take ten and stood next to Tom without saying anything, because in twenty-two years she had learned to recognise the difference between an actor who was stuck and an actor who was finding something.

On the third rehearsal, he did the whole thing.

"I don't care how far away you go. I will wait."

Gail called cut.

The set was quiet in the way it got sometimes, the involuntary quiet of a room full of people who have witnessed something real.

"That's it," Gail said. "That's the scene. We shoot it tomorrow."

Tom nodded. He was very still, in the way he got sometimes that wasn't performance and wasn't affected , just him, just how he was when something had cost him something.

"He's a long way away." he said, not to anyone specifically.

"I know," said Gail.

"I keep thinking about..." He stopped. "Doesn't matter."

"Ryder."

"It's fine." He turned, and the stillness resolved back into him, into the ease and certainty that were his default mode. "Tomorrow. We'll get it in two takes."

They got it in one.

The rain came down , Phil's careful rain, measured and consistent , and Tom Ryder stood in it and looked at a dressed facade and said the line with everything he had, which was considerable, which had always been considerable, and when Gail called cut the set was quiet again and stayed quiet.

Colt was watching from the shelter of the lighting rig, arms folded.

He had called his brother nine times.

He watched Tom come off the rain rig, accept a towel from a PA, shake the water from his hair, look briefly at his phone ... the way he always did, the brief check that Colt had seen every day on this project, the quick look that was clearly habit, clearly hope ... and put it back in his pocket.

Dan appeared at Colt's shoulder.

"He checks his phone the same way every time," Dan said quietly. "Like he expects..."

"I know," Colt said.

"Like he's waiting for a...."

"I fucking know, Dan."

Silence.

"He really loves him," Dan said.

Colt unfolded his arms. He picked up his phone. He looked at it for a moment , at the unanswered call log, at the name Ryland that appeared nine times in a row at the top of his recent calls, at the little symbol that meant no response.

"Yeah," he said. "He really does."

He called his brother one more time.

Six rings. Voicemail. The familiar recording . Hi, you've reached Ryland Grace, I can't come to the phone...

"Ry. Shit." he said, quietly. "It's me agaim. Don't worry about the other messages, they were , it's fine. I just..." He stopped. Watched Tom across the set, talking to Gail, gesturing about something with the towel still around his shoulders, looking for all the world like a man who was entirely okay. "Just call me when you can. Alright? When you can."

He hung up.

He went back to work.

The wrap party was in a rented space in Culver City on a Thursday evening, and Colt attended for approximately ninety minutes, which was long enough to be present and not long enough to be asked to make a speech.

The film was done. Forty-seven million dollars. Gail's edit was, from the first assembly, clearly very good , Tom's instincts about the emotional core had been correct, which Colt would acknowledge privately and never publicly. The cinematography was beautiful. The scientist character was warm and specific and real in a way that fictional characters usually weren't, and everyone on set knew why that was, and nobody said it out loud in front of Tom because Tom was already saying it everywhere and that was enough.

The wrap party was loud and celebratory in the way wrap parties were. Tom moved through it with his usual ease, talking to everyone, laughing, receiving congratulations with the warmth of someone who genuinely appreciated each one individually. He was good at that. Colt had never denied he was good at that.

Jody found Colt by the bar and stood beside him and they both watched Tom for a moment.

"He's happy," she said.

"He's always happy," Colt said. "It's a malfunction."

"He thinks Ryland's going to see it."

"He's going to see it eventually. It's streaming."

"Tom thinks it's going to—" Jody paused. "I heard him tell Gail today that he thinks when Ryland sees it, he'll understand."

"Understand what?"

"That Tom's waiting. That it's not over. That the distance is..." she paused "...survivable."

Colt was quiet for a moment.

Across the room, Tom was laughing at something someone had said, head back, entirely unguarded, and in the laugh was everything Colt had been watching for months: the certainty, the warmth, the absolute unshakeable conviction that Ryland Grace was his, that some things didn't end just because someone said they did, that waiting was not the same as giving up.

Colt took out his phone.

He called the number he'd been calling since week one of pre-production, the one that went to voicemail in six rings every single time — Ryland's personal mobile, somewhere at the bottom of a locker on a classified military vessel in the North Atlantic, powered off or blocked or simply unreachable in all the ways that mattered.

Six rings.

Hi, you've reached Ryland Grace...

He hung up.

He found, instead, the other number. The one he'd had to call the communications office of a classified research project to obtain, which had taken three phone calls, two emails, and explaining himself to a woman who spoke with the specific economy of someone who had been screening calls for Eva Stratt for a long time.

He had used it twice before. Both times had resulted in a message relayed through Stratt's office to Grace, which had resulted in nothing, because nothing was what happened when Ryland Grace was doing twelve things at once and a personal phone call was not one of the twelve things.

He called it again now.

It rang twice. A voice answered , not Ryland's, administrative, carefully neutral.

"This is Colt Seavers," he said. "I need to leave a message for Dr. Grace. Again." He paused.

"Yes. I know. It's about the same thing it's always about."

Three days later, he got a call.

He was at home. It was a Sunday morning and he was making coffee and not thinking about Tom Ryder, which was easier now that the project was wrapped and he didn't have to see the man's face every day. Jody was at the kitchen table with a book. The call came from a number he didn't recognise, long prefix, international, the kind of number that belonged to a satellite relay.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Colt." His brother's voice, tired and slightly tinny with the compression of a very long-distance connection. "I've got thirty minutes. Stratt arranged it." A pause. "She said, and I'm quoting, that you had called her communications office five times in the past month and that she was, quote, allocating the window as a matter of operational stability."

Colt sat down very suddenly on the nearest available surface, which was the kitchen counter.

"She said that?" he said.

"She also said..." Ryland paused, and there was something in the pause, "...to tell you she appreciated the persistence, which from Stratt is approximately equivalent to a standing ovation."

"Ry." Colt said. "Do you know how many times I've called you in the last year."

"I'm sure you're about to tell me."

"Over forty times. Over forty, Ryland. Voicemails. Messages through the comms office. I've been..." He stopped. He looked at Jody, who had put her book down and was watching him with an expression of quiet relief. "He made a film," Colt said. "Tell me you know about the film."

A pause.

A pause that was, Colt now recognised, not the pause of someone hearing new information.

"I know about the film," Ryland said.

"How long have you known."

"...Two days."

"Two days." Colt absorbed this. "So you've known for two days."

"There was a movie night," Ryland said. The quality of his voice was the quality it got when he was choosing words carefully for reasons of dignity, which meant the reality was significantly worse than the words he was choosing. "It came up."

"It came up."

"Someone suggested it. The description sounded good. We put it on."

Colt pressed a hand over his eyes. "And then what."

"And then..." Ryland stopped. "The character. And the name. And Yao noticed, and then everyone noticed, and then Dubois paused it..."

"They paused it."

"They paused it." Another pause from Ryland's end, longer this time. "And then I had to answer questions. For quite some time. In front of everyone."

Colt took his hand away from his eyes.

He tried very hard not to.

He failed.

The laugh came out before he could stop it, not unkind, or not entirely, but helpless, the laugh of a man who had spent eleven months calling his brother and leaving increasingly unhinged voicemails while said brother was unknowingly two days away from watching a forty-seven-million-dollar film about himself in a room full of colleagues.

"Don't," said Ryland, flatly.

"I'm not..."

"You are."

"I'm just..." Colt pressed his fist to his mouth. "Yao noticed."

"Yes."

"He noticed the name."

"G-R-A-D-C-E," Ryland said, with the specific intonation of a man who had heard it spelled out several times recently and expected to hear it several more. "Yes. He noticed."

"And you had to explain."

"I had to explain." A breath. "All of it. Who Tom was. How we met. How long we dated. Why it ended. Why..." Ryland stopped. "Ilyukhina has opinions. She has expressed them. She will continue to express them. It's been two days and I've been referred to as Gradce in at least three separate conversations by people who found it very funny."

"That's," Colt said, "genuinely the funniest thing I've..."

"Colt."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry ... how did they find out about the name? The D?"

A pause.

"Dubois worked it out," Ryland said. "He didn't say anything at the time. He told me this morning, quietly, that he'd figured it out the night of movie night and had decided I'd had enough for one evening." A pause. "He was being kind. It didn't help."

"D for Ryder," Colt said. "In your surname. He told a makeup artist, Ry. He sat in the makeup chair and told someone about your hypothetical wedding and then..."

"My what."

Colt stopped.

"My hypothetical what," Ryland said again.

"The..." Colt recalibrated rapidly. "He. On set. He was talking about. The name. Why he chose it." He paused. "He may have mentioned thinking about. Futures. Hypothetically."

There was a very long silence from the satellite relay.

"How hypothetically," Ryland said.

"He said," Colt said carefully, "that you'd want something small. That you'd probably want to sign papers in a lab. That he'd been thinking about names. Ryder-Grace. Grace-Ryder." He paused. "Gradce."

Another silence.

"That was his reasoning," Ryland said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"He named a character in a major motion picture after a theoretical version of my married name."

"That is a reasonable summary, yes."

Silence. The particular silence of Ryland Grace processing something that required several simultaneous mental operations.

"He's not well." Ryland said finally.

"He's completely well," Colt said, which was the thing that made it difficult. "That's what I've been trying to tell you for eleven months. He's not — he's not struggling, Ry. He's not sad about it, he's not in denial in any way that worries people, he's just—" He looked for the word. "Certain. He's decided something is true and he's proceeding accordingly. He does it with everything. You know he does it with everything."

"He's decided we're still together."

"He's decided the breakup was a miscommunication."

Ryland was quiet.

"He checks his phone," Colt said, and he hadn't planned to say this, but it came out anyway because he'd been watching it for eleven months and it had settled into him. "Every day. Same way every time. Quick look, puts it away. Like he's waiting for a message." He paused. "He's not panicking about it. He's just. Waiting."

Something happened on the other end of the line that Colt couldn't quite identify. A breath, maybe, or the absence of one.

"You absolute disaster," Colt said, gently. "The both of you."

"I ended it," Ryland said.

"I know you did."

"I was sure."

"I know."

"I'm still..." Ryland stopped. "I'm still sure. It couldn't have worked. The timing, the project, the..."

"I know," Colt said. "I know, Ry. I'm not arguing with you."

A pause.

"He's really alright?" Ryland said.

Colt thought about the wrap party. Tom with a drink, laughing, checking his phone once and putting it away with the ease of a man who was not afraid of the waiting because he didn't think it would last forever.

"He's really alright," Colt said.

A long pause.

"Your colleagues," Colt said, because he couldn't help it. "Have they been—"

"Yes," Ryland said, with profound feeling.

"How bad."

"Komorov told me, in the corridor, unprompted, that Tom clearly loves me very much. And then quoted the rain scene at me."

Colt covered his mouth.

"Shapiro has watched the film twice. She told me this. She wanted me to know." Ryland's voice had the quality of a man describing a series of minor disasters with the detachment of someone who has moved past active distress into something more like grim cataloguing. "Ilyukhina has said nothing since the night it happened, which is significantly worse than if she said something, because I know she's waiting. She's waiting for the right moment, and every time she looks at me I can see her assessing whether it's the right moment."

"Oh, that's..."

"Dubois is being kind about it, which is almost worse because it means he thinks I need kindness." Another pause. "Someone wrote Gradce on my coffee mug. In marker. I don't know who. I have suspicions."

Colt made a sound that was not entirely a laugh.

"You absolute disaster," he said, again, with more warmth. "Both of you. I've been calling you for eleven months, Ry."

"I know. I'm sorry. The signal..."

"I know about the signal. I know." He settled back against the counter. Jody was watching him with the smile she had when things were, finally, okay. "Listen. Are you... how are you doing with it. Actually."

A pause that was different from the other pauses.

"It was a very good film," Ryland said, quietly.

Colt didn't say anything.

"The rain scene was..." Ryland stopped. "It was very good."

"Yeah." Colt said.

"He's good at what he does."

"He's very good at what he does."

"That was always..." Ryland didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Colt had known his brother for his entire life and he could hear, through the satellite compression and the distance and the eleven months of no signal, what the unfinished sentence contained.

"Ry." Colt said.

"I've got maybe five minutes," Ryland said, with the careful precision of someone changing direction deliberately.

"Right." Colt straightened. "Okay. I just ... next time. When you can. Call sooner."

"I will."

"And Ry." He paused. "The mug. The Gradce mug. Keep it."

Silence.

"Absolutely not," said Ryland.

"Keep it," Colt said, and he could hear, even through the satellite relay, even across the distance, the particular sound of his brother failing to come up with a response to that.

"I have to go," Ryland said.

"I know."

"Tell Jody I said hello."

"She's right here, she heard everything."

"Of course she did." A pause. The sound of someone who was very far away and very tired and, underneath all of it, fundamentally okay. "Colt."

"Yeah."

"Thank you," Ryland said. "For calling. All forty times."

"Forty-three," Colt said. "I want it on the record."

A short sound from Ryland's end that was, unmistakably, a laugh.

The line went quiet.

Colt held the phone for a moment, then set it down on the counter.

Jody handed him his coffee.

"How is he?" she said.

"He kept the mug," Colt said, which wasn't an answer, but Jody had been with him long enough to know that it was.

END