Chapter Text
Claire has curled into a tight ball in the corner of the large room where she's been confined for what seems like hours and hours.
She tries to keep herself calm, her breathing even. Donald always tells her that when people panic, they get sloppy. When they get sloppy, they get dead. And that's not even accounting for her fucked up heart.
Claire just wishes he'd given her more advice about what to do if some psycho freak and a small personal militia kidnapped her. She would drill him on that later. There would have to be a later.
She holds that simple demand from the universe in her head and close to her heart. She would be okay. Donald always had something or someone up his sleeve.
Claire lets out a small whimper into the fabric of her pajama pants. She wants Donald. She wants Six. She wants to be home and listening to her records and playing with her camera.
It could be worse. That's a thought that keeps popping into her mind unbidden; the armored men who surround the place with guns that are nearly as long as she is tall only come in to bring her food and otherwise leave her alone.
Claire's head turns ever so slightly at the sound of footsteps getting closer and closer to the door. Maybe two sets. Heavy, booted.
Maybe Claire had counted the chickens before they got a chance to hatch. There was a good chance her luck was running out.
She had checked most of the little room for places to hide or possible weak points that she could try to escape through hours earlier and had found the space thouroughly lacking. It had the same sort of lack of personality and crawls space as a hotel room. A nice one, to be sure, but functional useless for hiding or sneaking out. The little en suite bathroom doesn't even have a lock.
Claire holds very still and tries to make herself very small as the sound of the lock being turned fills the otherwise silent room, holding her breath as the doorknob begins to turn. Maybe if she holds very still and stays very quiet, they won't notice her.
She was half right, she discovers when she finally pries one of her eyes open. There are two guards, but there's a third person being dragged between them like dead weight.
The sight of his dark blonde hair and sturdy shoulders makes Claire's blood run cold with recognition.
She had been praying to see this exact man, but she'd thought for certain that she would see him kicking down the door and covered in blood. She doesn't know what to do at the sight of him ragdoll limp and being dropped onto the floor like garbage, his wrists lashed behind his back by a thick pair of zipties.
The guards leave like that with little fanfare, simply walking out and locking the door behind them.
Claire waits a beat, then two, and then she's scrambling toward him, relief making her eyes water.
Up close, Six looks like hammered shit.
There's a bleeding wound near his temple and swelling. His wrists are raw and bloody under the zipties, like he spent ages trying to get them off to no avail. There are also weird divets on his nose, right beside his eyes, and Claire has no idea what could have caused that sort of thing.
He groans, shifting slightly.
"Six?" She whispers
For a long and terrifying moment, Six says nothing. And then he cracks one of his eyes open. It's probably her imagination but they look... different than she remembers. Brighter. Bluer. Claire holds her breath again, counting on him to say something about this was part of some grand plan, that everything is going to be okay. They'll get out of this, together.
"Six seveeen." Is what he slurs instead.
Claire stares at him for a moment, really stares at him.
The man lying in front of her looks like Six. Almost exactly like him, actually. But there are hairline differences that she's only really seeing now that he's close. He's big, but not particularly muscular. He's wearing a shirt with Snoopy on it. When she checks his mostly bare arms, she finds none of the scars or tattoos she made a careful study of during the few days she knew him.
She also realizes where she knows the divets on his nose from; her uncle has the exact same thing when he takes his reading glasses off and kisses her head goodnight.
He's not Six. She has no idea who this is.
"What the fuck." Claire whispers.
Ryland hasn't been having the best twenty four hours.
It started on his bike ride home from work. A nice little side street through a park where he didn't have to worry about cars or being run over, especially not after 7pm on a Thursday. He barely had to worry about other bikes and pedestrians on cold and foggy nights like that. It was just him, his bike playlist, and the feeling of cool mist from the lingering fog on his face. It was as close as he got to meditating.
He remembers bits and pieces.
Someone ramming him from the side and how he'd fallen off his bike hard. Not hard enough to be a car, but more than hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs and leave him dazed on the ground. Another bike maybe?
He thought it was just an accident at first, just both of them being a little unlucky. It happened, especially around that blind turn. Ryland had been expecting to dust himself off, check if the other person was alright, and then get his bearings before riding the rest of the way home or coughing up the money to catch an uber to urgent care.
He thought that right up until the person who rammed him ripped the helmet off his head and punched him so hard he saw stars explode across his vision like the fireworks off the bay.
By the time he was hauled up and to his feet and dragged to the trunk of a waiting car, his scrambled brain had finally been able to put together that this was in fact a kidnapping and by then it was too late. Someone had flipped him onto his stomach, torn his raincoat and suit jacket off, ziptied his hands behind him, and then slammed the trunk down, shutting him in total darkness.
Grace remembers overhearing a tiktok about breaking zipties that one of his fellow teachers had been watching in the lounge. He tries to execute what the lady in the video described to the best of his ability several times and all he earns is raw and aching wrists for his efforts.
When the trunk finally opens, Ryland has been in his head enough that he just starts talking, rambling really: This is a mistake, you've got the wrong guy, please just let me go, please don't do this- please, please, please. Various, near hysterical pleas that fall on deaf ears. The face above him is wearing a neck gator pulled up and over their nose and mouth and he doesn't say a word as he holds Ryland's head still and injects something into the exposed side of his neck.
After that, Ryland is in and out for most of it. He doesn't even realize he's been put on a plane until they land and someone gives him another dose.
By the time he wakes again, he's lying prone and on a cold floor. It seems as though one of his students has gotten into the room, because there's a little face staring at him in horror and concern.
He figures that maybe everything that happened, from his bike crash to the kidnapping, was some sort of terrible stress dream. Maybe he had an accident in the classroom or something. That wasn't much better, especially not if one of students had to find him like that, but it would be easily more preferable than the alternative. He wants to ask her what happened, ask her to go get Mrs. Dimaano from down the hall, but his tongue is thick and hard to use.
"Six?" The kid whispers.
Ryland has been forged in the fires of pre-teen internet speak. He knows this call and response by heart and has even made a game of it with the periodic table in his classroom. Not once in his entire teaching career has he had so many eleven year olds who could gleefully tell him what number holmium was on the periodic table; he just hopes he can use his desperately dry mouth to make a quick little joke to put his student more at ease.
"Six-seveeen." he replies, letting his aching head rest on the cool floor.
His student is stunned into silence for a moment. Tough crowd. Usually that has the room at least giggling. But hey, they're both probably at least a little afraid. He hears her swear either at him or about him and Ryland laments the email hes going to need to send to her parents.
When he's feeling better, of course. Right now, he just needs to rest his eyes for a moment.
There's just a second where Colt is staring at a man on the floor of his hotel room beside another limp body in black tactical gear and he thinks dimly to himself that this isn't right, Ryland is supposed to be in San Francisco before enough of the differences register.
The Ryland lookalike is older, for one. Heavy shadows mark the undersides of his eyes, like he's not slept properly in ages. He's also more built than Ryland, bulkier. His eyes, too, are a slightly muted, if not an achingly familiar, ghostly sort of silver blue. He looks caught out- like he didn't expect to be seen, like he was counting on not being seen. There's another man just beneath him, and this one isn't moving.
Colt is thrown back to the last time he'd seen his older brother without a wall of glass between them, when he was eight and in the back of an ambulance, him and Ry about to be on their way to the hospital, both of them begging for Courtland and unable to process the sight of him, their indomitable older brother, being led to a police car in cuffs. Courtland had worn something of a similar look, back then, not wanting them to see him like this.
Eight years later, their adoptive parents had paid for the funeral, even if it was just the four of them to see the chestnut colored coffin being lowered into the unforgiving ground. He can still practically hear the sound of Ryland's sobs in the back of his mind, the feeling of his twin's hand wrapped tightly around his, the coffin growing blurry with tears and the thought that he would never, not one more time, get to hear Courtland crack a wry joke to make him and Ry laugh.
He was buried right next to their birth Mom.
So this cannot be Courtland. There has to be dozens of other explanations.
"Colton,"
Or maybe not. His long dead brother half whispers his name as he draws himself up to his full height, slowly like he doesn't want to spook him. Little too late for that. He's already walked into his hotel room to see a ghost.
Colt seems to flash through dozens of emotions at once, one right after the other like old fashioned film in a projection screen, so fast it became a moving, living thing. Disbelief. Shock. Joy. Relief. Confusion. Rage.
Rage, yeah, that's the one he settles on, the one that's most comfortable.
His fist collides directly with Courtland's cheek hard enough to send pain shooting up and down his hand and wrist.
"You FUCKER." Colt screams, raw and wounded.
For a moment, the world has narrowed into a thin tunnel that only encompasses him and the man that he thought had died alone and in a cell from an aneurysm in a freak accident at twenty-three. Other people in the hotel who could hear him are far from a consideration. Colt has eighteen or so odd years of things he wants to say.
Helena and Finley Grace had been good parents. Probably better and more patient than he and Ryland deserved, but there were still so many nights where Colt would lie awake, staring at the glow in the dark stars pressed to the ceiling, and wish that Court would walk through the door. There had been days where the absence of his older brother had been a nearly physical ache deep in his ribs. He and Ryland would sometimes talk about it, what they would do if Court was let out of prison that week.
Court's expression is even, impassive, even as he wordlessly wipes blood from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. All he has to say for himself is, "Yeah, that's fair." as he reaches just behind Colt and tugs the door shut just behind him.
"Fair? Fair!?" Colt finds himself swinging at the nearly identical stranger's chest, "We fucking buried you-!" Colt feels like he's having a long and semi-lucid dream. He'd have been sure of that had it not been for his aching his hand, the way the pain lights up again and again with each hit to the man's chest that barely makes him falter. He inhales, preparing to scream at his brother some more,
"I know," Courtland says, a touch of desperation edging into the very corners of his voice, "I know, Colt, I'm sorry,"
When his brother steps closer to him, there's a terrible second that Colt fears what he's going to do. It's been an entire lifetime since he'd gotten to be this close to his brother- he did not know him anymore, if he ever had at all. But Court tugs him into a hug, the way he used to do on the really bad nights, up close and with a warm palm cradling the back of his skull.
It's only then that Colt pieces together that he's crying. He's probably been crying this whole time, from the second it clicked in his head that Courtland wasn't dead, that that last little assurance he'd made to him and Ry that no matter what, he'd always love them, hadn't been the last thing he'd ever hear from his brother.
It seems that the two of them are frozen in place like that for a long time, Colt sobbing into his brother's shoulder and Courtland keeping him standing, one hand moving up and down his spine as he allowed himself to cry.
"I missed you," Colt hiccups, "I missed you so fucking much-"
"I missed you too," Court whispers into Colt's hair, pressing a kiss to the side of his temple the way he used to when they were little. "And... And I need you to trust me. You aren't safe here."
Colt pulls back, still brushing at the tears in his eyes with the back of his hand, "What are you talking about?"
Court's voice is strained, aching, "There are some bad people who want something from a friend of mine, and- and they knew I would be coming for them as soon as I heard."
A sneaking suspicion was beginning to take shape in Colt's head, one that he prayed more than anything he would be wrong about, even though he already knew exactly what would come out of Courtland's mouth next.
"Colt, they took Ry."