Chapter Text
Colt Seavers has a lot of regrets.
Some of them are small enough to live with. The kind that sit in the back of his mind and only show up late at night when the house is quiet and Jody’s asleep next to him. He regrets every stunt he ever said yes to while injured. Regrets every phone call he ignored after the accident because he couldn’t stand hearing pity in people’s voices. Regrets that Ryder got as far as he did before Colt managed to stop him.
Some regrets are worse.
He regrets that Jody never got to have children. Even if there’s a part of him— ugly and selfish and relieved— that’s grateful there was never another life depending on him to not screw everything up.
But none of that comes close to Ryland.
Ryland, his twin. His other half. Ryland who died for the sun.
And even now, decades after the Astrophage disappeared and the world stopped ending, Colt still feels cold whenever he looks up at the stars at night. Funny, really. He used to love the night sky when they were kids. Back before everything got complicated. Back before grief started following him around like a second shadow.
He had pushed Ryland away after the accident. Told him he didn’t need him hovering over his shoulder all the time. Told him he wasn’t as weak as Ryland, didn’t need a school teacher’s twenty-four-seven supervision just to function.
What a fucking lie that had been.
Between the two of them, Ryland had always been the stronger one. Colt thinks maybe some part of him knew that even back then, but Ryland proved it for good less than three years later when he climbed into that spaceship and launched himself into deep space just to give humanity a chance to survive.
He never even called before he left.
That part still twists in Colt’s chest all these years later, old grief worn smooth at the edges but never gone. Ryland had gone into space knowing he would never come home, and he still hadn’t called Colt.
Maybe Colt deserved that.
A small part of him still rebels against the idea anyway.
Over time the anger faded and guilt crept in after it, slow and patient and impossible to outrun. If he had done something differently, would Ryland still be here?
The thought circles through Colt’s head some nights while sleep refuses to come, his heart beating too hard beneath ribs that feel older than the rest of him. If he had called first. If he had apologized. If he had stopped being so damn stubborn and talked to Ryland instead of waiting for Ryland to reach out first, could he have convinced him to stay?
Could he have convinced him to let them send someone else instead?
Anyone else.
Or maybe he could have at least told Ryland that he loved him. Told him he regretted the last conversation they’d had, all sharp edges and wounded pride and words Colt wishes he could shove back down his own throat.
Too late for that now.
Ryland is dead, and Colt has to live with the fact that he will never see his brother again. Never stand next to him again. Never be buried beside him. Ryland’s body is drifting somewhere so far away from Earth, and even in death there will be light years between them.
At least he still has Jody.
Jody who lies asleep beside him, warm and steady beneath the blankets, her breathing slow and even in the dark. Colt stares at the ceiling for a long time, listening to it, grounding himself in the sound before exhaustion finally drags him under.
Sometime before morning, Colt’s heart finally gives out.
Colton Grace dies on March 13, 2078 the same way he spent most of his life after Ryland left Earth behind: full of regret and worn down by a lifetime of missing his brother, with with only the stars as his witness.
The sand shifts strangely under Grace’s cane that morning, loose and warm and hell on his old joints. Sometimes he really misses sidewalks. But he would never trade this, not with Rocky clicking happily beside him, all bright overlapping chords while he explains Adrian’s newest modifications to the pressure circulation beneath the artificial shoreline. Something about subsurface flow stabilization and microcurrent redistribution—Grace understands maybe seventy percent of it, which wasn‘t surprising, given Eridians could do math at double his speed.
He’s content like this, living on Erid with Rocky and Adrian and the dozens of other Eridians he’s met over the years. Sure, the food could be better, even with the introduction of actual meat, but in the end he’s loved here. He still gets to teach.
Even if the pebbles will outlive him by centuries.
That thought still keeps him awake some nights, staring at the ceiling, wondering what will happen to his family once he’s gone. Wondering how much it will hurt Rocky to lose him after everything they survived together.
His mind drifts more these days too. The older he gets, the harder it becomes to hold onto the present for long stretches of time. He tries anyway, tries to focus on Rocky’s voice and the warmth beneath his feet and the familiar rhythm of their walks, but thoughts slip sideways before he notices.
Somewhere to his right Rocky trills at him, a sharp note of concern cutting through his spiraling silence.
Then something slams into Grace from behind hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs.
The world lurches violently sideways. His cane vanishes from his grip. Sand slams against his knees and palms, rough grains scraping across skin, and suddenly there are hands on him—grabbing his arms, pinning them—and every nerve in his body ignits all at once because he knows this. God, he knows this.
No no no—
His pulse explodes into painful uneven beats. Somebody shouts over him. Another voice barks orders. The weight on his back shifts and for one impossible horrifying second he is back there entirely, trapped beneath crushing hands and blind panic and the absolute animal certainty that if he could just get away for five more minutes—ten, maybe—he could stop all of it. Stop Stratt. Stop the launch.
“Hold him still!”
A knee dugs sharply between his shoulder blades.
Carl leans into view above him for half a second, blurred and watery around the edges. He looks devastated. Which was fair, really. Grace is currently not feeling especially charitable toward him.
“You know who you are,” Carl says softly. “You’re gonna do great.”
Traitor.
Grace twists hard enough to hurt himself—
—and fluorescent lights are buzzing overhead.
The transition happens so abruptly it leaves him nauseous. One second panic is clawing its way up his throat hard enough to choke him and the next there is only the faint creak of a chair beneath him and the papery rustle of something spinning lazily overhead.
A model solar system.
Oh.
His eyes track upward automatically. Mercury dangls crookedly beside a dented papier-mâché Sun that someone had very obviously thrown a ball at years ago. Venus rotates slowly near the ceiling tiles, contected to the sun with a red string.
Grace blinks.
Okay. This is different.
Since arriving on Erid the memory episodes have calmed and behaved less like coherent experiences and more like somebody is dumping loose film strips directly into his brain. Tiny disconnected things. Hallways. Voices. The smell of antiseptic. Once, weirdly, an extremely vivid memory of eating a burrito. But this? This feels focused. Sharp. The worksheet beneath his hands even feels real when he touches it, rough paper dragging faintly against his fingertips.
His gaze caughts on the name written across the top.
Abigail Morson.
Right. Abby.
Recognition floods him instantly, warm and immediate enough to make his chest ache a little. Abby had sat by the windows, since she loved looking out when she was finished with her work. She was smart and clever, finding loopholes and showing off her skills at every chance possible. And god did she love to argue. With her schoolmates or with him, didn’t matter. Grace had adored teaching kids like that. Tiny terrifying gremlins powered entirely by curiosity and spite.
He tries to picture her face.
Nothing.
Well—not nothing. Just a blur. General shapes without much detail, like his brain had put a fog over it.
Grace rubbs tiredly at one eye before picking up the worksheet again, testing the solidity of it. Still there. Huh. Apparently whatever bizarre neurological nonsense is happening inside his skull lately has decided to upgrade production quality.
Maybe that is good.
The thought settles quietly somewhere deep in his chest before he can stop it. It’s hopeful in a dangerous way.
Because despite everything—despite all the years he can remember now, despite how often entire stretches of his past feel like they belong to somebody else entirely—there is still a horribly selfish part of him that wants all his memories back with an intensity bordering on desperation. He wants to remember his mother’s laugh, wants his father’s voice to stop sounding distant and underwater in his head, and wants to know why there always seems to be something missing just beyond the edge of what he can reach.
Grace exhales slowly through his nose and pushes himself upright. Might as well explore this while it lasts, right? Free hallucination field trip. Very exciting.
He starts stacking worksheets automatically, reaching for his bag beside the desk just as a soft knock sounds against the doorframe.
His stomach tightens instantly. Something like foreboding settles in his chest.
“Dr. Grace?” someone says gently.
And oh.
Oh no.
Pain hits him before consciousness fully does, vicious and immediate, ripping up the length of his spine hard enough that Colt wakes with a strangled noise caught somewhere between a gasp and a swear. For one awful second he can’t breathe properly. His whole lower back feels molten, nerves screaming like somebody shoved a live wire straight through him, and Jesus Christ, he hasn’t hurt like this since—
Since his accident.
His fingers clutch uselessly at the sheets while he tries to orient himself through the pounding static in his skull. The mattress underneath him feels too firm. The air smells wrong too, all antiseptic and stale recycled cold instead of laundry detergent and Jody’s stupid lavender sleep spray she kept pretending helped him relax.
Opening his eyes turns out to be a mistake.
Light crashes into him instantly, sharp enough that his stomach rolls unpleasantly. Colt hisses and squeezes his eyes shut again, pulse suddenly thundering way too fast beneath his ribs. White. Everything was white. Walls. Ceiling. Bright overhead lights.
No.
No, that’s wrong.
Their bedroom walls were green.
Jody spent three weekends debating with paint samples taped all over the house before settling on some rich dark shade she claimed looked ‘peaceful’. Colt never got the appeal, but he loves her too much to argue over something that inconsequential. It makes her happy, so it makes him happy, end of story.
So there really shouldn’t be white walls in their bedroom.
Trying to process the wrongness of it all, Colt reaches automatically across the bed toward the empty space beside him, expecting warmth and tangled blankets and Jody grumbling at him for moving too much again.
His hand hits nothing.
Not just empty sheets. Nothing.
The mattress edge arrives way too quickly beneath his palm, narrow enough that panic spikes sharply through him, because that means he’s on the wrong side of the bed. He never sleeps on the right side. Jody does.
Colt forces his eyes open again despite the stabbing ache behind them and immediately regrets it. The room swims nauseatingly for a second before finally settling into focus.
He’s in a hospital bed.
There's a plastic chair in the corner.
A monitor.
And white walls.
What the fuck?
His thoughts trip over each other so fast they stop making coherent sense. Did he collapse? Throw his back out? Stroke? Concussion? Did he crash something? Why can’t he remember getting here?
Where’s Jody?
Adrenaline floods his system hard enough to almost burn the pain away as he shoves himself upright too fast, biting down hard on another groan when his spine protests violently. His gaze jerks frantically around the room searching for something familiar, something grounding, anything—
And stops dead on the jacket hanging over the back of the chair.
Black leather. Faded red stripes running down the sleeves. Old stitching pulling loose near one cuff where he caught it on a rig wire. The logo on the back is half-cracked with age: Miami Vice stunt crew.
That can't be right.
He lost it the night the boat exploded in the harbor, back when half the city thought Colt Seavers had blown himself up skyhigh in a murder suicide. The fireball had lit up the water bright orange against the dark while his pursuers circled the wreck, and Colt had spent the next twelve hours hiding until Dan came to pick him up.
After they had finally made everything right and Ryder and Gale were on their way to prison, Colt walked back into his own life looking worse for wear, but contend and happy in a way he hadn‘t felt for a long time. The jacket never turned back up afterward though. Burned, probably. Sunk. Torn apart by the explosion.
Gone.
Yet there it is anyway, hanging casually over the back of a hospital chair.
A cold unpleasant feeling twists low in his stomach.
Slowly, Colt drags his eyes away from the jacket and spots the phone sitting beside the bed on the rolling tray table. The movement feels strangely underwater, delayed somehow, like his body’s still catching up to whatever the hell is happening around him.
He reaches for it, nearly sending the plastic water cup beside it flying onto the floor. His fingers don’t work right. They feel stiff and shaky and weak in a way he hates immediately, and it takes him multiple tries to unlock the damn thing because his pulse is hammering so hard beneath his skin he can practically feel it in his wrists.
Then the screen lights up.
The date settles into focus.
And Colt’s entire body goes cold.
At first his brain tries to reject it automatically because the numbers don’t even remotely make sense together. Wrong month. Wrong year. Wrong everything. He keeps staring at the screen waiting for it to correct itself somehow while nausea crawls slowly up the back of his throat.
It doesn’t.
The date stays exactly the same.
It's the year of the accident (or more like the not-really-an-accident. Thanks a lot Ryder), but roughly six months afterward.
Colt grips the phone harder without realizing he’s doing it, breathing suddenly shallow and uneven. There are decades of memories inside his skull, layered thick and tangled and impossible to reconcile with the glowing numbers sitting calmly in front of him now.
On autopilot his thump is pressing Jody’s contact.
The phone trembles faintly against his ear while the call rings out.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
Then finally—
“Colt?”
Jody’s voice comes through, roughened by sleep and confusion, low and warm and painfully familiar in a way that hits him straight through the center of his chest. For one disorienting second everything inside him lurches violently between relief and panic because she sounds young. Not young young. But younger than she should.
“Jody?” His own voice sounds terrible. Tight. Breathless around the edges. “Jody, hey, I— okay, this is gonna sound insane, but I need you to listen to me for a second, okay? Don’t hang up.”
There’s rustling fabric on the other end, sheets shifting around while she moves, and he can picture it automatically with awful clarity because some things stay burned into a person forever: Jody pushing herself upright with one hand shoved through sleep-mussed hair while squinting at the clock.
“Considering this is the first time you’ve called me in almost a month, I wasn’t planning to,” she says, voice dry with exhaustion in that particular way that means she’s annoyed but worried enough not to lean into it yet. Then her tone changes slightly, sharper now, more awake. “Colt? What’s wrong?”
The guilt hits immediately.
He knows exactly what kind of month this version of him has probably been having. Painkillers, mixed with physical therapy and self inflicted Isolation. Picking fights with people trying to help him because anger feels easier than helplessness. Colt remembers this period of his life vividly even now. Remembers how badly the broken back messed him, and every relationship he had up to this point, up.
“I think something’s really fucking wrong.” The words tumble out too quickly while he presses the heel of his hand hard against his forehead. “I’m in the hospital again. My back hurts like it did after the accident and my phone says it’s 2024 and I know that sounds insane, I know it does, but—”
“Colt,” Jody interrupts carefully, and just like that the sleep is completely gone from her voice, replaced by something softer and tighter with concern, “Hey, breathe for me a second, okay? You’re talking so fast I can barely understand you.”
Colt drags in air automatically because she told him to, though it catches unpleasantly halfway down his windpipe. The movement shifts the hospital gown against his skin and the unfamiliar stiffness of the fabric sends another wave of disorientation through him.
“My jacket is here,” he blurts out instead because that's what unsettles him the most. “The Miami Vice one. The one I lost after I faked my death. And I know how that sounds, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s here, Jody, and the date is wrong and—”
“Okay.” More fabric rustling through the speaker. He can practically see her fully awake now, sitting on the edge of the bed trying to make sense of this conversation. “Okay, slow down. Start from the beginning.”
“I don’t know what the beginning is.” The frustration comes out sharper than he intends, roughened further by pain and adrenaline and the growing awful certainty that none of this is actually getting less real the longer he looks at it. “I went to sleep at home. In our house. Next to you. And now I’m here, my back hurts and my phone says it’s 2024.”
Silence stretches briefly across the line.
“What year do you think it is?” she asks eventually, voice very careful now.
Colt lets out a shaky breath and drags a hand down over his face slowly, fingers catching briefly against stubble that feels shorter than it should too. Everything about his body feels slightly wrong in ways he doesn’t have enough spare brainpower to process yet.
“It’s 2078,” he says finally.
Another silence follows afterward, longer this time, and Colt’s chest tightens hard enough that for one terrible second he becomes irrationally certain she’s going to hang up. That this is the moment where he finally sounds insane enough that even Jody decides she can’t deal with it.
Instead he hears sudden movement on the other end of the line. A closet door. Footsteps. Keys jingling faintly somewhere in the background.
“I don’t know what’s happening, Jodes,” Colt admits quietly, and there’s something almost helpless in the confession despite how badly he hates that. “And you’re not here and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Okay.” Her voice comes back firmer now, grounded in that steady practical tone she slips into whenever everything around them starts going sideways. “Okay, first of all, you are not dealing with this alone, got it?”
Colt squeezes his eyes shut tightly enough that pressure builds painfully behind them.
“I’m coming to the hospital,” she continues before he can argue, already fully in motion now by the sound of it. “And then we’re gonna figure this out together, okay?”
“Jody—”
“Nope. Don’t even start.” The sound of keys again, sharper this time. “You called me, Colt. So let me help you.”
Something twists painfully beneath his ribs at that, reminding him taht he could have had that the first time around. He could have had her support in this and everything else, if he hadn‘t been such an idiot.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jody says more quietly after a second. “Whatever’s happening, you don’t have to deal with it alone.”
“Okay,” Colt says, voice rough around the edges. “Okay.”
Standing in the lab again loosens something unpleasantly tight in Grace’s chest before he can stop it.
Which is weird.
Objectively speaking, this place should represent several of the worst years of his life. Sleep deprivation. Global apocalypse. Eva Stratt. Yet the second he steps through the security doors and catches the familiar smell of the containment wing, some deeply embarrassing part of him goes oh thank God, I know this.
The drive over had been awful. Not actively hostile—Stratt rarely wastes energy on hostility when cold professionalism accomplishes the same thing more efficiently—but tense in that horrible compressed way that makes him overthink every interaction he ever had. She’d spent almost the entire ride staring at her tablet while Grace had sat beside her trying very hard not to think about the fact that his brain had dragged him back here specifically.
The equipment pulls him out of his own mind once he actually gets inside. Familiarity settles over him piece by piece as he moves through prep procedures, muscle memory sliding into place so naturally it almost makes his skin crawl. His hands remember everything automatically—the sequence for the seals, the pressure checks, the glove adjustments. Even the hazard suit feels familiar in that deeply unpleasant way only certain permanently embedded experiences in your memory can make you feel.
The argon chamber hisses softly around him as pressure equalizes.
Grace looks down at the container resting beneath the overhead lights and feels a strange little jolt of recognition run through him.
There are tiny scratches near the outer latches from transport handling. Slight discoloration around one seal. The exact cloudy texture of the reinforced casing. All details that he should not remember, that he didn’t even remember the day after.
Everything feels off.
The latches are still ridiculously stiff. Grace wrestles the fourteenth one open with enough force that the metal snaps back against the housing with a loud clack. He vaguely remembers how he spent several deeply sleep-deprived hours trying to figure out how the ArcLight probe had sealed them in the first place later.
Inside, the setup looks almost disappointingly mundane.
At the center sits a tiny transparent sphere that appears completely empty unless you already knew what was in it.
“No radiation detected,” Stratt says through the intercom.
Grace glances toward the observation window. She is watching him through the glass wall with the kind of unnerving focus that suggested she was simultaneously monitoring seventeen different things and judging all of them. He forgot how intense she could get.
He looks back at the sphere.
“You can open it. The entire room is full of argon,” she says when he doesn’t move immediately. “That reminds me: Make sure you don’t kink your air line or rip your suit. If you breathe argon—”
“I suffocate without even realizing it. Yes. I remember.”
He freezes under her sharp look.
“…From the briefing,” he adds quickly.
Technically true. Which counts. It's definitely a flexible truth, but it still qualifies as true. Probably.
Stratt keeps staring at him for one long unreadable second before looking at her tablet.
Grace exhales carefully through his nose and focuses very hard on what he is supposed to be doing. Opening the sample.
The sphere twists apart beneath his gloves with a faint plastic squeak. One half goes into a sealed container immediately while he uses a dry cotton swab to gather material from the other, movements automatic and smooth despite the uncomfortable knot tightening steadily beneath his ribs. The sample drags lightly across the microscope slide before he carries it over and adjusts the scope.
The Astrophage appears instantly beneath the lens.
Tiny black dots. Wriggling constantly.
“Sample consists of many round objects,” Grace says automatically, voice slipping into a detached observation mode with an alarming ease. “Almost no variance in size. Each appears to be approximately ten microns in diameter…”
He adjusts the focus.
“Samples are opaque. I can’t see inside them, even at the highest available light setting…”
“Are they alive?” Stratt asks.
Grace looks toward the glass window with immediate irritation. “I can’t determine that instantly. What exactly do you expect to happen here?”
And there it is.
The conversation unfolds almost perfectly from memory after that, every response from her the same as he remembers.
“I want you to find out whether they’re alive. And if they are, figure out how they work.”
“That’s a pretty tall order.”
“Why? Biologists figured out how bacteria work. Do the same thing they did.”
“That took thousands of scientists two centuries.”
“Well,” she says, utterly unfazed, “do it faster than that.”
Grace points vaguely back toward the microscope. “Here’s an idea: I’m going to continue working, and I’ll tell you what I discover when I actually discover it. Until then, everyone can enjoy some quiet study time.”
God, that still feels satisfying.
The strange part is that he technically doesn’t need to do any of this.
The thought lingers in the back of his head while he adjusts the microscope again. He already knows the answers. Knows which experiments matter and which ones waste time and resources. He knows how Astrophage reproduces, what environments it tolerates, what kills it, how it moves.
He knows things no human being on Earth had even imagined yet.
Which is, objectively speaking, an absolutely insane situation to be in.
But if he skips directly to conclusions now, Stratt will assume one of two things:
A) Grace completely lost his mind.
B) Grace is the worst scientist alive.
So he forces himself to slow down.
Pressure tests first. Vacuum exposure after that. Temperature extremes that should destroy anything remotely Earth-like. Astrophage survives all of it with complete indifference, tiny black bodies continuing to twitch beneath the lens.
Honestly, knowing they spent most of their existence swimming around near stars, even living on the sun, makes the whole thing significantly less dramatic the second time around.
After that comes spectroscopy and calculations and enough properly documented procedure to satisfy even the most sceptical critic. Mainly Stratt. Grace doesn’t actually mind the routine as much as he probably should. There is something calming about it. It’s familiar.
Eventually, though, he reaches for the nanosyringes resting beside the microscope tray.
Time to Poke it with a stick, like Stratt so wonderfully supplied the first time around.
The instant the needle pierces the surface, the entire organism turns translucent. One moment it’s a featureless black dot beneath the microscope, the next its internal structure becomes visible in startling detail, layers and organelles suddenly exposed beneath the lens before the whole thing dies almost immediately afterward.
The ruptured cell wall loses cohesion within seconds and unravels completely. What had once been a compact rounded organism dissolves into a slowly spreading puddle with no clear outer membrane left behind.
Grace reaches automatically for a standard needle from the nearby tray and carefully draws up some of the viscous residue before carrying it over to the spectroscope. He deposits the remains onto the analysis platform, seals the chamber, and initiates the scan.
Carbon. Nitrogen. Mostly hydrogen and oxygen. Two-to-one ratio. Water.
Grace leans back slightly and closes his eyes for a second, feeling the exact same flash of irritation he remembered from the first time around. After all his theories and speculation and desperate hope for something truly alien, Astrophage still turns out to be water-based life anyway.
At least he doesn’t have to explain the implications immediately this time. Most of the officials and military observers cleared out hours ago once the initial excitement faded, leaving only Stratt behind in the observation room. She’s still working silently on her tablet, though Grace suspects she’s paying far more attention to him than she pretends to be.
So no need to share his findings yet.
Which means he can finally move on to the important part.
Now he just has to recreate Venus with whatever equipment they actually have available here. Carbon dioxide shouldn’t be difficult. The specific light signature emitted by Venus will be more annoying, but still manageable if the lab has the equipment he remembers it having.