#petalsverse

I would love to hear more about your Court and Driver AU because today I started to make a fanfic for them after Driver started to remind me of Court :)) and I was wondering your thoughts on them!!

I would also love to send in more asks about Driver too :)) hes so blorbo material , so skrunkly

hello!! i am so sorry it took me approximately one million years to get to this, but please rest assured i have So Many Thoughts about this au. thoughts that will hopefully be steadily translated into a series of fics on my ao3, but for now just rattle around in my head. i will attempt to toss them onto the grass for you here :nod: and pls accept all of my thanks for inviting me to ramble -- you are so welcome to send me asks about them or anything whenever!! i love driver so so bad, absolute skrunkly guy, and i loooove this au hehe

the two of them just Immediately struck me as so similar the moment i first finally watched the gray man -- the coldness, the disconnection, the emotionless devotion to serving their purpose, all right down to their matching toothpicks. we're told driver had a rough childhood, particularly an abusive father who used him for crime from a young age, and of court we're told about the same, particularly that his father wanted to Toughen Up court and his little brother through his abuse. he wanted to make them useful. it just fits together so perfectly. they are so brothers!!!

so, in my au, courtland and river (that's my name for driver!) are the two sons of [father] gentry and [mother] daley, names...undecided. i still haven't exactly locked down the timeline either, but court is maybe 8-10 years older than river. he took on a lot of responsibility raising the kid, between their mother's instability and their father's abuse, but there was only so much he could do as a child himself. the household was violent and erratic and constantly tense, the abuse worsened, and at age 15/16 court realised that their father would very likely kill river if allowed to keep abusing him.

so court shoots him. he's an abused teenage boy and doesn't really think about the consequences in that moment, just that their father needs to die -- deserves to die -- and court's the only one who will make it happen. but then he's arrested and realising with mounting terror that he'll probably never see river again. he tells himself it's for the best. it hardly matters if court rots in jail like the state wants him to, and river will be fine.

river is not fine. he's badly neglected by his mother -- worse than before, that is -- in the wake of his father's murder and court's arrest, and suffers there for a few years, trying to look after her and himself, before he's finally removed from her care and put into foster care, where things aren't much better. he's shifted around households and states, intermittently abused and neglected, until he flees the system at 15/16 (paralleling court killing their father at that age!). legally, he's missing. he promptly tries to get into contact with court in prison, and finds out court was killed a couple years ago.

court, of course, was not. he was just recruited by the sierra program, and once again assured himself that leaving river behind was for the best. he tells himself the kid's safe, maybe got adopted by a good family and built himself a real life, he's probably forgotten all about court. he doesn't allow himself to look to check on river, see if he's even still alive, until he escapes the whole mess with claire, and even then it's only at claire's insistence. court mentions one day, with as little affectation as possible, that he used to have a brother, and claire is elated. she's desperate for court to reunite with him.

so court finally, finally looks for him. and finds the old missing posters, the traces of a halfhearted search, but river's legally been missing ever since, branded a runaway, half presumed dead. nobody seems to have cared. court, however, not only cares, but is really, really good at what he does. driver's become very good at hiding and disappearing and not existing -- almost as good as his big brother at existing in the grey -- but court's real good at finding people, even people like him. it helps that, even after twenty years, court still knows his little brother. and, really, driver isn't used to having anybody care enough to look for him.

court finds him fast. claire insists he go and meet his brother again -- they have no real ties to any location anymore, after all, and she wants court to have this tiny remaining piece of his family. she wants it too. if court's her older brother, does that mean this is her brother too?

so they go.