Ghosts – (1987)
Ramse doesn't go to the past to kill his brother. That's not the plan. There is no plan. If he had a moment to think, a moment to pause the nausea and the tumbling confusion, the purple light and the roaring rage and the grief – he would laugh. Who's all leap, no look, now?
Ramse doesn't go to the past to kill his brother, but he does. The blood slicks his hands as the knife comes out with a soft, sucking noise – or, not a noise: the feel of the blade leaving his brother's warm, still-living flesh; because how can he hear anything over the silence of the men that surround them, over the rush in his own ears?
He doesn't run. Why would he? He's done. Cole can't stop the plague now, can't erase Sam and the future, bleeding out on a Tokyo dance floor in 1987. Ramse's done what he came here to do, even if it isn't what he came here to do.
He's done, and there's no place to go.
Still, he leaves.
He doesn't turn, a last time, to look at Cole kneeling in that puddle of blood.
He has time to think about that, later: unexpected years of it, going over all he remembers of the fight. Wondering: did he deny himself that last look because he didn't deserve to take with him even that bitter image? Or, like a coward, avoided it because the doing took all he had, left nothing for the looking?
Ramse has done things, two decades' worth. More. He's made a point of not looking back on them. The past is past. The price of not looking back, the deal he's made with himself, is that he has to look at what he does, as he does it. Has to know what he does, as he does it.
Looking is how he knows.
In twilight, behind bars, in a country stranger than he could imagine and years before his own birth, he can't remember what he saw on his brother's face as the knife went in.
What he remembers is – before: Cole's wild wariness, the way he readied himself for a kill.
That, Ramse's seen many times. Seen turned against him, too. (He's known, since, that he'll die by his brother's hand. Knows it still, even now Cole is dead.)
What he remembers is – after: the blood, warm, and so much.
Maybe that's it. He was looking down, at his hands, the knife, and when he looked up again all he could see on Cole's face was his dying.
Ramse remembers the blood, but the blood was just blood, same as anyone's. It didn't show him what he needed to know.
There's no face Ramse knows better than Cole's. No face he's known as well – not Elena's, (not Sam's. Not Sam's.) Not his mother's when he still lived with her. At times his whole world has shrunk down to that face: pale and earnest and small in that first winter, lifted to him like he was some kind of savior, some kind of adult.
Later, leaner and feral – from boy to man, through years of starvation and all the cruelties done, to them, by them, he's seen every expression Cole's face could show, he'd thought. The grinding exhaustion of the world. The grin that brings back the boy, for an instant. Pain, all kinds. Rage, and murder, and what comes after.
He made himself look at what came after, always. Pain, then blankness. It's his fault, and knowing is all he can do about that, and looking is how he knows.
In his bunk, against drifting murmurs of a language he won't understand for years, Ramse tries to imagine what he would have seen if he hadn't looked down, if he'd looked up sooner. If he'd met his brother's eyes, the moment Cole understood that Ramse had killed him.
In twenty-nine years of his brother's face, Ramse can't find a face in which to read his own betrayal.
So he closes his eyes, and Cole is there, faceless, more alive than the living.
He'll always be there, because Ramse didn't look.
Ramse sleeps, surrounded by ghosts. Wakes, surrounded by ghosts. He walks, eats, stares at walls, through wire mesh – surrounded by ghosts. Alive, all, already dead. Seven billion. Seven billion and one.
One, he deserves.