Chapter Text
When Courtland Gentry is eight years old, his dearest hope in the world is that this new baby will turn out to be a little brother.
He’s always struggled to build friendships with other children his age. They live in a cloud of perpetual carelessness that he never could figure out how to emulate, no matter how hard he tries. He is always on the periphery in their lives – never particularly disliked, just disregarded.
But perhaps, if he had a brother?
Court’s wish is granted twice over, with two beautiful twin boys. They’re small and scrunchy and they make so much noise, but Court loves them completely and without reserve. Except, there’s always a cost, when Courtland gets something he wants.
Seven weeks after the twins are born, his mother is gone from his life forever.
His father hates all three of them for it.
When Courtland Gentry is fourteen years old, what he wants more than anything is his brothers’ safety.
They’re in school themselves, now, a perfectly matched pair. Two halves of a single soul. They love their big brother dearly, and he loves them more than anything he’s ever known, but he’s well aware that he’s the one orbiting around their shared center of gravity. Spinning in their periphery.
Colton, the older of the two by roughly twenty minutes, left all the survival instincts to Ryland in the womb. He has an utter disregard for his own safety, which was challenging enough when he started climbing (and falling out of) trees, but now that the weather has turned cold, his interests have shifted dangerously close to home.
He’s been snooping in their father’s room.
He’s found the gun.
Colton saunters around like he’s in a cowboy movie, trying to spin the weapon on one finger, while Ryland begs to be allowed to take it apart to see how it works.
It’s the same gun that their mother used, not that he would ever tell the twins that.
He does tell them that the gun is dangerous. It’s not a toy, or a science experiment, but a tool used to hurt people, and that doesn’t want any of them to have anything to do with it. He tells them how dearly he loves them both, and that he couldn’t bear it if either one of them got hurt because of it. Ryland cries, because he always cries when Court gets even a little bit stern with them, and Colton pouts but doesn’t argue back.
Less than a week later, Courtland takes that same gun up to the bathroom. His hand shakes on the trigger, and the recoil reverberates all the way up his arm and into his chest. Ry is still coughing up water on the floor, he and Colton now so tangled up in each other that the only way Court can tell them apart is the colours of their shirts.
But they’re safe now. Their father will never be able to hurt them again. That’s all he really wanted.
Except there’s always a cost, when Courtland gets something he wants. Just barely fifteen now, he’s tried as an adult. The judge calls him a threat to his family and a danger to society.
By the time his sentence is up, he will be older than their father ever was.
When Courtland Gentry is twenty three years old, he explains to Fitz that he wants out more than anything, but he won’t snitch for bubblegum.
He hasn’t seen either of his little brothers in nearly six months, and even Ryland’s letters have become sporadic. Where once they used to arrive every two weeks like clockwork, the intervals between have stretched to months, large chunks of the twins’ lives left opaque and unaccounted for.
Court’s lived his eighteenth and his twenty-first birthdays in prison. The technicolor world he remembers has grown and shifted and moved on outside the gray brick walls, and he’s still stuck here, on the periphery, trying to imagine a version of his life where he’s still an active participant.
Fitz’s offer seems like a fair one. Court leaves the bars behind forever in exchange for a life of meaningful service to his country. He’ll have to spend the rest of his days on the periphery of society, but then, he’s never really known anything else.
Two weeks later, Cortland Gentry dies tragically in a prison riot, and Sierra Six is born from his ashes. But there’s always a cost.
Six spends the next eighteen years of his life learning that some prisons don’t need bars to keep you trapped, and that no matter how many times you push that rock up the hill, the CIA never offers parole.