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It was hot outside in the waning sun of the late summers day. The sun's rays covering everything in thin film of gold.
The cicada were loud, their song carried into the house on the gentle breeze through the half opened window together with smell of dry grass and the sound of two boys laughing from somewhere outside.
They were twins.
Blond hair like the rye fields and blue eyes like a clear summer's sky.
They were maybe four or five.
They were running, playing, in the tall grassy fields that stretched seemingly forever behind the house, the grass scorched yellow by the unforgiving sun.
One of the boys was running away from the other, something precious gently wrapped inside the cocoon of his clasped hands, emerald green glinting from the inside every time he opened his hands to peek inside. The other boy calmly ran after him, watching and laughing, clearly not wanting to take whatever the other one had.
The boy watched as the others foot snagged around something on the ground. Green wings of a stag beetle the other carried flashing softly in the light and buzzing away as he fell, hands and knees scrapping the dry ground.
The boy stopped in his tracks, eyes wide as his brother's sobs joined to chorus of cicadas around them.
Rivulets of tears made the boy hurry towards his twin. Small hands carefully nudging the fallen boy to sit up as the boy knelt down in the dirty in front of his twin, silently catalogueing where beads of red started to slowly well up underneath all the dust and dirt.
Everything will be okay.
He didn't say the words out loud, he never needed to.
"Ryland! Ryland, are you okay?!"
There was a scruffle somewhere in the house. Something falling down somewhere. A chair. Maybe a book? And then came the sounds of the dress shoes rushing against the polished wood.
A tall man with brown messed up hair and same eyes as twins came running towards them from the open back doors of the house. His dress shoes dusting over with the first step.
The boy looked back from the brown haired man towards his still crying brother.
"Ry says that it hurts uncle March." The boy slowly wrapped his arms around his brother as he spoke. His brother huged him back, hiding his face against the boy's shoulders, bloody and dirty palms leave dusty red streaks over the boy's sleeves.
"Okay. Okay, let me..." The man crouched in front of them, "Colt, can you move to the side so I can see?"
A moment of hesitation.
...
Colt looked at his brother, then back to his uncle and then slowly shifted to the side, one hand never leaving his brother's soft yellow shirt.
"Let's see." March leaned in loser, carefully taking scrapped palms into his hands before looking over at equality bloody knees.
"Well bud, you will get to see another day."
Ryland looked at March through tears.
"The bad news is, these need to be cleaned."
Crystal tears somehow came up faster.
"Now come on," a small smile tugged at the corner of their uncles mouth, "up you go."
The man carefully scooted closer, picking up the still crying boy while Colt let go of the yellow shirt, quietly following behind them, the soft evening glow of the Sun and the sound of cicadas wrapping them in a warm bubble.
The bathroom always smelled faintly of soap.
Rough hands carefully washed away all the blood and dirt and small rocks embedded in torn hands and scrapped knees with every soft movement, as one tear after the other ran down Ryland's cheek's.
Colt stood at the entrance of the bathroom and watched.
"Uncle March?" Small hands bunched up the edge of his red faded t-shirt.
"Hmm?" Their uncles gaze never strayed away from the scrapped knee he was cleaning.
"Ry wants to say thank you."
Warm laugh escapes him.
"Ry can tell me that himself once he stops being such a cry baby, yeah?" His wet hand gently wipping away the salty tracks.
The sound of water coming for the faucet and being softly splashed on the skin and then Ryland sniffled once, twice and slowly nodded, finally looking away from his scrapped knees.
"Th-thank you," was barely a whisper, words almost getting lost beneath the sound of the running water.
March smiled.
"There he is! And no problem buddy. Just try not to fall and leave your skin out in the yard next time." March said.
Soft giggles escaped Ryland before he could stop them and March smiled wider.
Colt stood still where he was and watched. As small debri was slowly pulled out of his brother's hands and knees. As dirt and red blood slowly stopped trickling down the drain. As Ryland slowly but surely stopped crying.
He watched, because that is what Colt did.
He watched.
Their eyes met in the middle of the small bathroom.
Thank you for being here. Ryland smiled, cerulean blues still shinning with undead tears, catching the last golden glow of the dimming light coming through the small window above.
Colt smiled back.
Always.
The cracking laughter of busted TV speakers came back into focuse. The golden glow from the afternoon sun dipping towards the horizon pushed in through the cheep curtains alongside the steady cicada song into the motel room Colt was staying in. His eyes slowly tracked the figures on the screen, dancing and twirling in the rain under the street lamplight.
He didn't know what triggered it. Maybe it was the golden glow coming from the window projecting rays with the specs dancing in them like an old film, maybe it were the cicadas playing their song in the same rhythm, maybe it was the happy feeling oozing from the movie he was watching a moment prior, maybe it was the old dusty smell of a dirty motel room he was staying in that reminded him of that house, maybe it was all of it put fucking together in a perfect puzzle to make Colt remember happier days and go fucking mad with envy. He didn't know. He didn't care. He swore he didn't.
He ran both hands down his face and looked up at the ceiling, trying to steady his breathing.
What am I doing? What am I actually goddamn doing?
The heavy feeling of loosing his job and then pushing everyone away and then getting the job back and then being stranded in a bumfuck nowhere in Australia after his last boss tried to frame him for a murder and then faking his own death to try and fix that problem layed heavy on his shoulders. And to top it all of, Jody thought he was dead.
Ryland probably though that he was dead too, which meant that his genius brother out there somewhere had absolutely nuclear mental breakdown if he saw the news how Colt had gone and died on a burning boat like some kind of an overachieving moron after going silent for all those years.
The laugh that came out of him sounding hollow to his own ears.
His life was a cosmic joke of insane magnitude. The worst thing was that Ry would have laugh at it too. Not at him, but with him. And then he would have start explaining, in an over exaggerated teachers voice, why it was actually hilarious in a ten minute rant, complete with graphs, equations, actual scientific model and an accompanying PowerPoint presentation full with over exaggerated and cringe GIFs and memes he somehow absorbed through osmosis from his students because subtlety was a crime, to top it all of.
He could hear it.
"See the probability of this actually happening is really low."
"It happened three times."
"Exactly! It's statically fascinating." And then Ryland would start laughing and Colt would join him a second later.
God, he missed Ryland. He missed his stupid scinece jokes and his awful pun t-shirts and how his leg would tap tap tap in some unknown rhythm when he was deep in thought but his body wanted to move and how he talked with his hands whenever he got to invested into some topic or the other.
He missed their arguments on whether 10th or 11th Doctor was the better one.
He hoped he was having fun saving the world, teaching his kids how to be healthy functioning members of society. Unlike himself.
He looked back to the window where cheap white plastic window frame perfectly captured the golden hour glow and the magnificent view on the motels sorry parking lot bathed in yellow and the wired fence with high grass little ways behind it that was overdue for mowing and he suddenly had this insane urge to jump out of it and run.
And then he blinked, and the thought of jumping out of the window from the ground floor through the real glass to go where (?) exactly, just evaporated. Like it wasn't there to begin with.
He was getting restless and jittery after staying in the same motel room for a couple of days and shouldn't be having his blinds open to begin with, but he wanted some real Sun on his skin after going from one dark room to another for the last month, god damnit. Nobody knew how long it would up there anyway.
Depressing thoughts were really out to get me today, huh?
He sat up from the couch he was on and went to the window, aggressively yanking down the blinds and plunging the room into darkness. The only light source left behind being the old TV screen still playing the movie.
The guy on it now was left alone in the rain, looking like a drowned rat.
Colt went to to fridge, pulled out a cheep can of beer, opened it and tilted it towards the screen. "To you and me pal."
The cold beer going down gave him a little bit of a kick and he hummed softly. Maybe he should go back to working on an actually plan about how he will get out of the situation he was in. He wanted to see Jody and kiss her. He wanted to talk to Ryland...
His feet gave out from under him, beer spilling everywhere and Colt barely caught himself on a nearby table.
He couldn't care less. His hands were shaking so much he couldn't feel where they were.
His perception of world around him slowly narrow to the blurring sounds of the TV, cicadas outside and the fast rhythmic pounding of his heart inside his ears that he could have mistaken for feet thumping the ground any other time.
He couldn't concentrate on anything but the pure animal terror that was making his heart hurt from hard it slammed against his ribcage and held his lungs in a death grip so he couldn't get any air in.
He couldn't breathe. Couldn't get the air inside his lungs no matter how hard he tried. Dark spots started to swim around him and the whole room started to spin as his body screamed at him to move, to get out, to run away, run, get out, run, I need to run, run, run faster, they will catch me, they will drag me away, they will kill me, she wants to kill me, I'm goina to die I don't want to die, run, what about the kids...
Everything stopped.
Who will grade their seventh period science lessons?
Not his. Those were not his.
He could barely register that realisation before panic drowned everything again.
I DONT WANT TO I DON'T WANT TO DIE RUN RUN ESCAPE ESCAPE PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME HELP ME PLEASE I DONT WANT TO DIE COLT COLT
Colt's knees cracked as they hit the floor, but he didn't notice. That one corner of his mind that he kept muffled and blocked with doors and locks and walls and chains for so many years had not been open as much as was violently blasted though by pure animal terror pouring through it. It wasn't even panic so much as the instinctual desire to survive.
And Ryland, Ryland was being so scared and so so terrified Colt thought he could have blacked out from the sheer feeling trickling through their connection.
He tried to focus. Tried to open his mouth to form something, anything. Tried to force out any sound that wasn't heaving or panting while trying to get the air in or the pathetic wine that was building up in back of his throat. Tried to think. But there was nothing. Nothing but fear. His thoughts were drowned in primal panic and fear of dying and they were going to kill hiME THEY ARE MURDERING ME IM GOING GO DIE OH GOD PLEASE DONT I DONT WANT TO DIE I DON'T WNAT TO DIE NO NO NO NO NO CARL PLEASE DONT NO NO I DONT WANT TO DIE I DONT WANT TODIEIDONTWANTTODIECOLTPLEASENO-
Ry-
And then it was gone.
Ryland?
Just...gone.
RYLAND?
Like the person that was screaming in front of Colt's face just vanished before his very eyes.
One second the connection was filled with pure terror and the next it was gone and Colt was left panting and shaking on the dirty beer soaked motel floor in Australia, presumed dead, not knowing where his baby brother has been or what was going on, but desperately waiting for another though or feeling or something, anything, to come through.
The absence was worse then the pure terror brought to him moments prior has been.
Colt stared at the stained motel carpet waiting, knowing that the last spoken words Colt threw at at his baby brothed have been to go to hell and to leave him alone. That the last thing he did related to Ryland, the very last, was making sure his brother, for all intents and purposes, felt like Colt was dead to him.
Years of distance and doors and bricks. Years that Colt spent convincing himself that it was easier that way. Years of making himself dead to Ryland long before he climbed onto that damn boat.
The last thing Ryland knew for certain of his brother was that Colt didn't want him around and everything after that just led him more to believe that he was truly gone.
After all of that, after years of distance and locks and brick walls and pretending to be dead to the whole world and tens of millions of choices on Colt's part, he got what he wished for all those years ago.
Silence.
Utter silence.
After being so desperately called for.
And now, out there somewhere, his baby brother might actually be dead.
It felt hollow. It felt like standing in front of their childhood house at uncle March's with front doors being wide open, the old TV still playing in the living room and lights still on, the phone line ringing somewhere deep inside the house and yet no footsteps could be heard walking around, nobody to answer.
Nobody was home when you knew in every fiber of your being that somebody should be there to answer the call.
The call... The phone...
THE PHONE.
Colt scrambled across the stained carpet towards his travel bag, that sat half unpacked beside the cauch, before he even registered the thought inside his head. His clothes scattered around him as he dug through the bag with shaking hands, searching for his cheap burner phone somewhere in its depths.
He knew it was a stretch. He knew it was the stupid hope. If he couldn't feel Ryland through the connection that was there before they even knew how to speak words to one another what chance did the ordinary phone have.
But he hoped. God he hoped.
His fingers trembled as he unlocked the phone. It felt unnatural, to type in the number he only ever knew for writing down on all the different documents and papers and insurance forms that insisted on a phone number beside the name Ryland Grace even though they never actually needed one for each other.
What were phone calls and messages even for between two people who could just think?
Apparently this. Apparently this desperate hope.
"Please," Colt whispered as he pressed the last number. "Please Ry, please..."
The line begane to ring. The phone slowly beeped, and beeped, and beeped...
Maybe he was asleep.
Beep.
Or was in the shower.
Beep.
Or...
"The person you have dialed currently can't pick up their phone. Please try again later."
The call disconnected.
He started blankly at the screen until it went dead.
Maybe he typed the number wrong. Maybe...
"The person you have dialed currently can't pick up their phone. Please try again later."
And then he tried again. And again. And again. And every time the monotone voice answered tiny pieces of that fragile hope chipped away.
By the seventh try he wasn't even listening anymore.
A laugh that tried escape his throat broke halfway and then it turned into a sob. And another and another and then it just turned into full on bawling.
The phone slipped away from his numb fingers as he slowly folded into himself. His forehead pressed into a beer soaked yellow carpet, fingers turning white with how hard he was pressing them into the floor and he couldn't get a breathe in.
Minutes before he was fighting for air because of the terror than wasn't his and now he was fighting for air because the grief was.
And he cried.
And cried until the movie ended and the credits rolled across the screen and the program went to some late night reruns and cicadas kept singing and the last strip of golden glow of the sun finally slipped beyond the horizon making the only light in the room the glow of an old TV.
And the world kept moving and the sun still set and the cicadas still sang.
And somewhere outside people were laughing, and they had dinners, and they told their loved ones goodnight, not knowing that one man's entire world was falling apart in the small dirty motel room in the middle of nowhere.
And as final tears were shead and Colt curled in on himself, cheek pressed into the carpet and hand still reaching towards the fallen phone, the final though before everything went mercifully black was painfully simple.
I'm sorry for not being there.