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The afterlife is supposed to be pretty. It’s supposed to be sunshine and rainbows and happiness everlasting; it’s not supposed to be the thrill of adrenaline, or the pulse of smug satisfaction after a heist well done.
It’s not supposed to be five when there were meant to be six. It is one thing to say there are no grudges, that all is water under a bridge; and may that bridge lead to better, greener pastures; and quite another to make yourself believe it.
It’s the quiet pain, the kind that festers like an infected wound. The kind of death that happens in an alley, a bullet hitting a spot that won’t kill you quickly. The one where you are alone, and even though you have bled out a thousand times before, this may be the one that sticks. The fear they all feel, even if they pretend otherwise. They are oh-so-good at pretending these days.
In some ways, they are the same as they were; scrappy, still pulling of elaborate heists for the sake of petty cash, explosions and races as reckless as they ever were, too reckless for the denizens of the city who pass the myth of the Fakes to their children, a modern legend.
They say the Fakes cannot die. That no matter what they do, they cannot be beat. That you could put a bullet through their skull and less than an hour later they will be putting one through yours.
Whispers. That’s all they are. All they can be, because the Fakes are already bloody, enacting brutal and swift revenge against a slight against their crew. It costs to care in this city, and the whispers say that the Fakes care for their own as if it was themselves, even though the only person who you should ever trust in this city is yourself (That was Jeremy’s first, and best mistake).
He doesn’t believe the whispers, of course he doesn’t. People die. That is what people do . They’re born, they eat, they shit, they fuck and then they die, and sometimes it’s Jeremy that does it, and well, what’s one more on his conciousness, he can answer for that when he’s dead. He’s very good at what he does, and hey, if you’re good at something, never do it for free! Especially now he has Matt, and Ayra, and Scooter and Booker and god, the little one that came over the fence last week that he has taken to calling Zipper.
Whispers. Geoff knows they whisper, the whole crew knows it, and it seems the whole city knows that their unspoken rage and grief and irrational betrayal bleeds out of their chaos and stains the whole city red. Sometimes, they tell themselves that it’s enough that Ray is alive, when the retirement rate in their profession is probably in the minus numbers.
Grief is a strange thing when you’re immortal. Lamentation for the dead, mourning, sackcloth and ash, all is naught when what you’re mourning isn’t so much a person as it was a moment, a match-fire spark, a flashbang grenade of beauty, tinted red in rose coloured glasses.
Maybe that’s why they hire him. Well, them, because Jeremy and Matt came as a package deal even though Geoff swears he only meant to hire a bruiser for the crew because Micheal’s dealing with explosives more and more and one day he’s going to blow up the whole city just for a laugh and the fact that he keeps taking his anger out on the tops of skyscrapers makes for great fireworks but Geoff needs sleep, goddamnit, not explosions.
Anyway. Mortality. There’s a moment, a month or so after pulling Jeremy into the fringes of the crew, holding him at arm's length because caring hurts in this city, or so the ghosts say. There’s a moment where some fuck at a bar; some six foot bullshit motherfucker who boasts about his sniping skills while failing to hit a dartboard from two feet away; anyway, he says something , and Micheal snarls, hissing and furious, the print on his jacket and in his face is mirrored in anger, and Gavin’s eyes go sharp and cold, the uncaring sheen of gold, and his fingers dance over the dagger in his jacket. This is where things would get really ugly; knife fights always are, and Gavin was raised in England, where the best weapons at hand were fruit knives, built for carving and slicing deep, and Gav is better than anyone gives him credit for.
Maybe they would have killed the asshole, but not without a few stabs in return, but Jeremy, reckless, loyal, five foot brave Jeremy, steps in front of them and says “You wanna say that again, pal?”
They haven’t told him, but they should, because the next moment he is bent over with a broken bottle between his ribs, and oh fuck. The Fakes haven’t been confronted with death for a long time, and they hover, after the ensuing fight that leaves Gavin’s third favorite bar up in smoke and Jeremy stitched and bandaged in Caleb’s long suffering spare bedroom. The way they tell him is, hm. Questionable (By which, Gavin says, “Hey, lil J, watch this,” And prompt flies the plane he’s in into a tall building), but it works.
It all spirals from there after that; there’s a lot of shouting, arguments, and grudgingly upheld requests:
“After I took a bottle in the chest for your immortal ass, you need to buy me a new paint job, the Rim Timinator is ruined,”
“Jeremy, but it’s so awful , Jeremy,”
Sometimes, they forget that he’s mortal. He takes their deaths in their stride; Throwing Gavin over a wall during a getaway, and then sighing and resetting the timer when he hears the body crunch unhelpfully; Pulling Jack out of his crashed car and pretending to be innocent bystanders when the ambulance arrives; even ‘avenging’ Geoff when a rival crew fucks up a deal until the bastard wakes up from his nap and he doesn’t even have to fight, the asshole.
It’s a game. A stupid game. Gav and Jeremy and Micheal are up in the woods, a lads day out, and god, it was so easy for them, falling into friendship like other people fall in love. How could they not be swayed by Jeremey’s easy smile and revered admiration that was often quashed by fond annoyance instead?
After the bar fight, Geoff dropped by, obstinately to check on the other lads with a delivery of Mcdonalds in hand, but really there to check on his crew's cohesion, and a ghost of a smile brushed over his face;
“Though he be but little, he be fierce,” he says.
“Oh, shut up, you quote-y bastard,” Micheal says, his mouth full of Big Mac, and he and Gavin begin the debate on whether quote-y is actually a word or not, and all is as it is supposed to be. They see the moment the mask slips, when Jeremy is talking about the latest Lads hijinks (and isn’t it funny, how that mantle passes and finds exactly where it is meant to be), and Geoff can't help but grin, at how well his family has grown.
It’s a game, because they have those now; hunts and little missions that are just the lads, and who knew they would work so well together? (There was a betting pool. Jack won)
It’s a game, three trucks with oversized wheels and a cliff's edge and a natural incline, and honestly, they’re customised, how could they resist? They’re pushing at each other, jostling, laughing as they play oversized dodgems in cars that were made to be pushed and rolled and beat up, and it’s the stupidest game of all, chicken to the edge of the cliff, what are they, idiots?
But it’s adrenaline and thrill and trust and care (the two most dangerous things in the city, though the Fake AH Crew come close), as they nudge each other closer to the edge, immortal vs mortal. Who let the stakes be so uneven?
It’s not Gavin’s fault, not really, Jeremy slams a foot onto the gas pedal and it’s too much too close, and suddenly all they can see is twisted metal and broken glass and, as they fly towards him at breakneck speed, Jeremy really regrets the chains he hung on it to make it look cooler. Then he doesn’t regret anything at all.
It’s a cruel joke, is what it is, when Jeremy jerks back to life to see the other two staring at him, trail tracks of tears down bloodsoaked cheeks, looking like he stepped out of the set of Carrie . He’s never seen Gavin cry before, and he doesn’t realise what happened at first until Gavin looks at him like he’s standing on the remains of the rules he used to know and says, in a voice that is as rough as ash, “I had to collect you,” and, well, that is that.
Jeremy wins the Goriest Death award that month (“There were bits everywhere," Gavin says, "Are you sure we aren’t going to have to scour the countryside for your dick, lil J?”). They have to add another name to the chart, and Jeremy insists on orange and purple stickers and at least it goes well with the abundance of glitter Gavin dumped on it.
There’s an unending series of questions though. Why them, why Jeremy, how the fuck does this work (Gavin’s wifi theory is brought up, mocked soundly, and never brought up again), is it even more finite than before? Does the city just love her children, and gifted them with the tools with which to repaint it with their devotion to chaos and anarchy and love?
“Hey, maybe even Hell decided we weren’t worth the trouble,” Someone suggests, and it’s a testament to their situation that it causes some serious deliberation in the penthouse.
But the biggest question is still; Who will be next?
They’ve brought on more people, and they’re still careful, because they’ve killed so many and watched so many die and none of them came back, Jeremy might be a coincidence, a million billion trillion to one coincidence. Either way, life (and death, haha, fucking hilarious joke Jack, shut the fuck up), continue. New people enter their lives; Matt, because Jeremy won’t leave him and his army of cats behind. Trevor, because both Jack and Geoff are bored of paperwork (seriously, who knew crime had so much administration?), Alfredo, because they’re all pretty decent shots but Alfredo is the best on this side of the country. Lindsey isn’t so much hired as much as they decide that they are going to stay, pulls out a fucking rocket launcher when Geoff asks them what they are going to do when they leave the city and goes to pester Micheal.
They try to be careful, but they pay their dues to the city with blood and bullet wounds, knees scraped with dirt and ash and knives in their backs. They pay it in death, in the recklessness of the six who know that the end is not the end, pulling pieces of or the burned parts of the bodies in with them as they make their escape, waiting for those first gasps when they’re well clear of the cops.
They try to be careful, but it’s a dangerous line of work, and they’re careful, but the Fake AH crew at its heart is reckless and cares not for the whims of humanity, the law, or physics.
Matt goes down in a plane crash, missiles locked onto the wrong target and he actually dies twice before they manage to find him.
(“Why didn’t you tell us about the first time, you moron?”
“No one asked!”)
Trevor accompanies Geoff to a late night meeting that goes south hard and fast and soon Geoff is standing over a body leaking blood into his expensive suit. The crew that attacked them is dead before Trevor sits up, poking a finger through the holes in his jacket, and lamenting the loss.
Later, Trevor tries to teach Alfredo how to actually street race because he’s so fucking terrible it should be illegal, and Jack is chasing them, “Goddamn dusk boys, stop stealing all my good cars!”, and Alfredo can’t stop laughing, until the moment the car wraps itself around a lampost. When Alfredo wakes up, there is an expletive filled lecture waiting for him, mostly along the lines of; “you need to wear a seatbelt, you dumb fucking idiot, what the fuck were you thinking?”
They should have known Lindsey and Micheal would kill each other one day; Lindsey gasps back to life with lungs that had been scorched to the bone, Micheal with a face blackened with ash apart from the stray trails down his cheeks, and his face splits into a huge grin as he hugs them in front of the building they blew just a little too soon to be safe. He’s got some nasty burns on his arms from where he dragged them out of the fire, but those are for dealing with later. For now it’s just them and the chaos they create.
Cos here is the thing about being immortal; you don’t get a manual. You don’t know if you need to find a green mushroom to give you an extra life, or break a crate. You live and you die and you hope and you pray to every god you don’t believe in you come back again. Here’s the thing about being immortal; it’s fucking terrifying.
So maybe that’s why they don’t hire anyone else for a while. Oh, talented people come and go, infiltrators and hackers and snipers and heavy hitters and Geoff snaps them up, puts them to work in the B-Team, because they’re a large enough crew for that to be needed now. But at their heart, it’s still them, still the Fake AH crew and the whole city trembles in the wake of it’s expanded cast of horrors. (They all have more names to add to the lists on their bodies, and even if one of them isn’t here with them, he will always be on their skin, on their heart, watching their back)
And then they meet Fiona and it’s a match flare moment, mentos in coke, bomb in a volcano; absolute devastation, but god, is it fun to watch. Fiona works by letting people underestimate her, lets them see the part of her that is all flailing limbs and outspoken confusion; that way they don’t see the glint of silver and gold in her eyes, the careful control of her flailing limbs that let her clever fingers reach close to them and take everything of worth, how her dancer’s grace let her slip past security cameras and sensor lasers like they were nothing. It helps that she’s also an excellent shot, fucking hilarous, and,by the end of the week she has most of the crew wrapped around her little finger.
Jack immediately pulls her under his wing, Micheal acts like she is the little sister he never had. Geoff seeks her out when he wants to talk about something other than work; there's a torn jacket in the rubbish outside of the apartment and for a few days the city is alight with rumour and panic until Fiona sees the darkened looks on her crew's faces and they burn the jacket in an explosion that lights up the city and gives the world something else to talk about. Her, Alfredo and Trevor spend many evenings running missions for Geoff that require a certain touch, and wherever they are sent, their enemies scatter like rats. With Lindsey at her side, they are a terrifying force that borders somewhere between sisters in arms and fleeting flirtations. She fights with Jeremy, a mess of limbs and teeth and punches too fast to see, and at the end of it they help each other up, grinning from ear to ear.
But it is with Gavin, a pairing they honestly never saw coming, that her true chaotic nature comes rushing to the surface. They bully each other like siblings, squabble and fight like siblings, laughing until they can’t breathe. When she finds out that Gavin and the others are immortal, she is gleeful in the way she exploits this, no longer holding back her punches, and he lets her, excited to test his immortality in ways that haven’t been done yet.
So here they are hopped up on the rush of silliness and excitement that normally comes from 3am at sleepovers, except it’s the middle of the day and Fiona is piloting one of the most expensive planes Gavin owns and they’re going to jump out of it and parachute to the strip club, because the two of them are enablers and only make each other worse in the best way possible.
Gavin goes first, grinning in reassurance, the same reassured confidence that helped her get her car repainted, that helped her do all the things that the Fakes did with ease, without an ounce of condesenction because fuck if he could creep and climb and take things without even the dust knowing he was there.
Fiona had been a dancer, and her poise was steel, he saw, as she braced herself against the open door of the plane (His golden bombushka and, well, a willing sacrifice on the altar of the Fakes, these local gods of chaos and destruction and life eternal). She fell like a dancer too; graceful and fluid, shrieking in delight and ecstasy, and may his life always be like this, falling through the sky with his best friend.
He tells her to pull her parachute; he expects fumbling, as she fumbles cars and planes and exactly how she doesn’t even put an atom of herself out of place when she is so entirely focused on a task. He thinks that he loves her because he is the same way himself, the mixture of bumbling and expertise that makes them both entirely wonderful and entirely human.
He tells her to pull her parachute, and he does, and he watches as she falls straight past him, and her sheiks turn to screams as something small and black sails off behind her.
“Gavin, Gavin, it came off, the parachute came off, what the fuck, Gavin, I don’t have a parachute, Gavin, GAVIN!”
It’s like lead, a bullet without an entry point, except through his comms, where he can hear the rushing wind and the panicked screams and he can’t do anything, he’s stuck floating in the sky as his best friend hurtles towards the ground. It settles in his stomach and he wishes it would drag him to the ground, and he flails knowing it’s hopeless as he grasps for any hope.
“Your back up, Fiona, you should have a -”
“No, I don’t, it’s not working, it’s not working, no, I don’t, Gavin, NO-!”
There’s a sickening crunch of viscera, a sound that only he can hear, because Gavin has died so many times and he knows what death sounds like just as much as he knows the sound of popcorn in the microwave and which of Micheal’s huffs mean he is truly angry of if he’s just annoyed.
It’s like the first, worst time all over again, and this time there is no one but him there, there is no Jack to pull him into a hug, and oh god, the thought of having to explain what happened to Jack makes him sick to his stomach. He has no other recourse but to descend as quickly as he can (not fast enough), no point calling an ambulance because there is no way she made it, and he doesn’t want to go, doesn’t want to see the consequences of his actions, but she’s crew, she’s family, and there’s no way he is leaving her.
When he finds her, he doesn’t speak. The corpse is already cold, a yellow jumpsuit stained with red, grey matter mixing with the cement of the canal. Her legs, those which carried her through with grace and poise and dedication, the legs of a dancer and the greatest thief the city had ever seen; cracked and broken and lying at an angle that shouldn’t be possible on a human. Her eyes are open, glassy, well, eye, because her skull is so crushed that if it wasn’t for her clothes he wouldn’t have recognised her. He doesn’t even care for his clothes, he just holds her. It takes a moment for him to recognise that he’s talking, murmuring so quiet into the body. The other’s cried. He doesn’t, just hopes and hopes and hopes.
It wouldn’t be fair. It couldn’t be, if out of all of them, she was the only one. It was the faintest hope, a desperate hope, but it’s all he had, so he sits in the dirtry canal water, and holds Fiona; “Come on, come on, you would love immortality, it’s so fucking fun, we’ve got so much more shit to do, come on, you have to come back, I got fucking rainbow stickers for you and I know you don’t wanna lose to me in “shittiest death”, come on, Fiona, come on,”
Gavin doesn’t keep count, but it’s exactly 23 minutes and fourty-five seconds after he arrives that something shifts in his arms and Fiona groans, “Fuckssake, Gavin, where the fuck is this stripclub, the sewer?”
There’s a sound that’s somewhere between a sob and a laugh and she’s being crushed in a hug, already trying to pull away because fuck, she’s soaked to the skin with crimson, and blood is sticky.
“Gavin, what the fuck, get the fuck off me, Gavin,”
“You died, Fiona,” Gavin says, pulling away and holding her arms so tight the colour is bleeding out of them, “You died.”
Her eyes widen, and slowly she takes in the blood, the brain parts on the cement, and the dull ache in her legs; and a moment later, her face splits into a huge grin.
“Oh fuck yes.”
It takes a moment before her grin is matched, and Gavin’s grip turns into a hand helping her to her feet.
“God, I can’t wait for my lap dance after dying.”
And the sound of ecstatic and hysterical laughter echoes through the streets again.
May their lives always be like this.