Wormie

I cannot stress enough how much this is going to be about Court struggling with an opioid addiction. Mark Greaney is a fucking coward and I am here to rectify his stupid mistakes.

Both Court and Driver have explicitly abusive childhoods, I will not be shying away from this fact. There will be references and potentially flashbacks to unsavory moments in their childhoods.

On top of that, Claire is grieving her uncle after the events of the movie. Grief will be a major theme. Claire is not the only one grieving Don; she’s not the only one who will be reminded of dead loved ones.

Hang Your Hopes will depict dissociation, panic attacks, anxiety, ptsd, and c-ptsd from pov characters and around pov characters. (Due, in part, to the fact that I’m not sticking with a single pov character)

There will be a brief mention of someone’s past suicide, but I will not depict suicide in any way.

Six is tired.

They've been on the road for hours and all the driving is starting to stress him out. Not ideal, by any means, but they needed to get gone and fast.

He still has a few safe houses around the country and beyond, but the equipment he needs is in Phoenix. Its unlikely the CIA will stop looking for him, and his usual instinct would be to leave the western hemisphere entirely, but there's Claire to think about now.

Six has been driving for nearly 16 hours. Before his 3 hour cat nap just outside of Fort Worth, he'd driven for about 20. They've changed cars four times, this being the fifth vehicle he's been at the wheel of in 2 days.

He hates it.

Driving has always been one of those things that Six avoids as much as humanly possible. His father was teaching him to drive their old stick shift truck when he went to prison, but the muscle memory was harder to build in his twenties after he got out. Six knows how to drive, he does, he just can't stand it for more than thirty minutes at a time.

The trip has been hell, honestly, but it means getting Claire out. He's all she has left.

Talk about a shit hand in life.

"A plan is just a list of things that are going to go wrong."

"Oh that's pleasant," Claire chimes in from her hospital bed, "who told you that?"

"Old friend of mine."

"Didn't know you had those."

He cracks a small smile at her, but it falls. "I don't."

The ache in his heart mirrors the throbbing of his stitches. He wishes he'd snatched some pain killers when he escaped CIA custody, but it just would have hindered him. The muscles in his back twitch.

"What happened?" Claire's voice has lost its snarky edge.

"His plan didn't turn out so well for him."

They return to the quiet of the room. Claire's heart rate monitor keeps time in steady beeps.

Six hates hospitals. He's hated hospitals since his first visit, when he'd fallen down the non-existent stairs in their house. The smell of chemicals burned worse than the hits he took. Now that he's older, he feels that there's too much restriction on patient movement and not enough restriction on everyone else's movement.

Fuck, he could really do with some pain management about now. It's been two days since he's been off whatever IV pain meds the CIA decided to put him on and damn if he isn't feeling it. He's been feeling it since he woke up in Texas, actually.

The stitches on his thigh are irritating, but not anywhere near as painful as the gunshot wound itself. It took everything he had to not limp inside. He's dealt with cuts and bruises before, it should be nothing.

It's not nothing; it's near overwhelming.

Tears prick at his eyes. He blinks them away, unsure if they're from the pain or something else entirely. He has to find some painkillers.

He can't leave Claire, though, so he stays. Court stays seated in the uncomfortable chair next to her bed, gritting his teeth through the worsening pain, and the nausea, and spasms in his back that only make the pain worse, and-

This might actually be worse than the car ride.

The safe house and the supply drop are two different locations. The supply drop is a simple storage locker under some unknown name that he picks a lock to get into.

The safe house, though, is an actual house. He doesn't own it, not technically—he doesn't own much of anything, really—but the corporation with the deed is a shell company in a Matryoshka doll of holding companies that leads all the way to the late Sir Donald Fitzroy. The best part? It was never Don's name attached to the company, and there's no one left to testify to the connection. It's about as safe as they can get right now.

The supplies sit in the trunk of the car, their (read: Claire's) meager belongings lie in the backseat. He rolls to a stop at a red light and something shifts—pain ebbs out from between his bones. The two Vicodin he took at the supply drop have finally started to work.

His breathing feels easier, his pain lighter, his mind slower. Court is still capable of protecting them like this, his training made sure of that, but he's not at his best. The unease creeps into the place where the pain used to sit and sinks its claws into him. He's not at his best when he's in pain, either.

Its manageable.

It'll be manageable.

The light changes, he continues driving.

Six shuts the door behind him; locking the nob, then the deadbolt, than securing the chain. It was basically nothing but the illusion of safety, but he'd get everything else set up soon. Claire walks down the hallway, peeking her head into the rooms as she goes.

"How long are we gonna be here?"

"Long enough that you should pick a room."

Claire pauses in the doorway to the farthest room, "That's not a real answer. And you're not gonna let me pick my room anyways."

Court can't help but to smile. Fitzroy might have wanted to give her a normal life, but he didn't leave her defenseless to the shadows. "I don't know how long we'll be here. A week, at least. We should get out of the country, but if you need to go back to the hospital, the doctors in Phoenix are the best we're gonna get right now."

"So we're waiting on doctor's orders?" She sounds defeated.

"Essentially." There's nothing Court can do about that.

She sighs, "Which room is mine, then? I want a nap."

Court walks towards her, glancing in the rooms he passes and mentally cataloguing the house and its exits. Both of the bedrooms have windows, but the one at the end of the hall—the one Claire is stopped at—has more. She won't want for natural light in the first bedroom, so Six doesn't feel bad when he says, "The other one."

Clair turns and walks immediately to her newly claimed bedroom. Six follows her. She's already reclining on the pillows when he reaches the door way. There's a single, east-facing window that he'll have to secure, but, other than that, the room is relatively safe. He looks around again.

Courtland's eyes catch on the painting just as Claire asks, "Can we get rid of the painting?"

He doesn't look at her, he can't. Not with that painting looming over him and reminding him of how badly he fucked up.

"I'll move it to my room."

She looks at him, a little offended, "You like it?"

He has a choice here. Court could tell her the truth—that he's spent weeks hunting the painting down and transporting it to a safe house on the other side of the world; that Don moved it to a different safe house when it looked like things would get messy—or he could lie. Claire's going to be with him for the foreseeable future. He can give her this.

"It was my brother's. He painted it."

She looks back to the painting appraisingly, "You have a brother?"

Courtland hums. Correcting her would carve out too much of his heart.

Quietly, she asks, "Can I meet him?"

Her words pierce him anyways. Its such an obvious wish for more family to cling onto that Six is sure he would have heard it even without his trained perception, "No."

He wants to leave it there, to close this conversation forever instead of dwelling on it, but the look on her face urges Courtland to amend his statement, "I could take you to see his grave if you really wanted, but a trip like that's a long ways off."

Everything is screaming at him to disengage, but he won't. He feels like he might be able to talk about this for the first time since he heard the news.

"How'd he die?"

Or maybe not. Maybe Claire has dug down to the root of the issue and smacked him with the shovel in the process. Court can only look at the painting when he admits, "Killed himself. Couple years ago."

He doesn't wait for Claire to say anything else, he just turns and starts out of the room. He's being blatantly obvious about the fact that he doesn't want to talk about it, but there's no room inside his mind for him to give a shit.

"If you need me, I'll be setting up the security."

As per usual, there is no posting schedule. HYH will be significantly less frequent than Flicker because its something of a "break fic." If you'd like me to start a tag list, just let me know :3