Chapter Text
Alright so imagine that the song Something by Azedia (Ramses B remix) is the one thing that describes the FAHC’s past and their brush with immortality.
So here’s how I think it would go;
Ray finds it first, he spends most of his free time on youtube, especially when the other are getting drunk and it’s just him and Ryan that are sparkingly sober - It speaks to him of moving past abuse and pain. Of people that supposedly loved him turning his world to shit and him being too naive to realise it’s not his fault. Of having to fake a million smiles and one suicide attempt - but it reminds him of his world now, of his immortality and his friends - his new life, new better reality. He shows Ryan with unshed tears still stinging his eyes. Ryan can see how much it’s affected him, listens because that’s what someone does when there’s something important that someone cares about.
To Ryan it calls of his psychosis - his little moments where he loses himself to the madness and scares himself when he comes to - when his crew turn their faces away with dull eyes and downturned mouths. He loves them, he really does, and the prospect of hurting them makes him sick to his stomach but as he listens he feels more justified - he may have an underlying disorder that debilitates him from time to time but it is part of him, and if he doesn’t learn to accept it then no one will. It’s a part of his humanity. Things get better when he accepts it, he starts being able to tell when it comes on - a massive headache paired with a throbbing itching heat beneath his skin. He starts telling them how to help him when he’s in one of his fits. The others start helping him, and his fits start getting shorter, his boys become his anchor when he wants to rip his skin off and float away.
From there Ray and Ryan listen to it when the others have a piss up, it’s a constant flow amidst the alcohol ridden air and clash of loud voices. One day Michael - the idiot got into a car accident and broke his arm - who can’t drink because of the pain killers, who looks at the very least furious at this development, humours Ray when he asks him to listen. He’s grudging at first, but as the music flows into his ears his face clears moment by moment, his eyes fall close as he falls into the music.
For him it’s the screeching of blood pounding in his ears from his last fight. THAT fight. The only one he’s ever lost. It’s a sticking point for Michael. He used to be a brawler you see, travelling over the states, moving with the mafia’s underground fight ring. He was the star - the undefeated champion until he got his shit knocked in. Beat to death, but he didn't die. It still leaves a sour taste in his mouth, and a mottled view of life. His pride was in his physicality, the hardness of his hits. He doesn’t trust words, words lie and twist the world to suit them, there is brutal simplicity in throwing punches and seeing blood flow.
But this song… It speaks levels to him, soothes the raging storm inside him, wraps his tired mind up in a caccoon and shushes him to forget his past. That the present is much more worthy of lingering on.
Gavin’s next. His normal twitchy jitteriness is gone and his short attention span is completely focused on the song. It immediately becomes a grounding point for him. When things get too much for him, when his sense are overwhelmed and he wants to scream because doing everything he can isn’t enough he sits down and blasts it through the speakers, lets the song cover him in a warm blanket of stability, slowly lets all of his muscles unclench. And suddenly the entire world is enough, his crew is enough, the skyscraper they live in isenough. It’s enough to last him an eternity.
Geoff and Jack hear it when Gavin plays it, the music thumping the building to it’s foundations. It brings up old memories, painful shared pasts. Their friendship runs deeper than blood, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t mistakes. The song brings up the reek of vomit and alcohol soaked skin, the stink of squallor, the echo of painfully empty stomachs and huddling together for warmth when the streets froze overnight. It rings of messy fights over girls in high school and travelling across the states in search of something better,something more exciting than the slice of white bread suburban life they’d lived in till the ripe age of 18. That's how they found Los Santos, and the snarling deadly wilderness beneath the calm smiles of passers-by on the streets. When they’re pulled back to the present they both just stare at each other, eyes dripping with locked away sorrow, before they hug, both with endless words that they’d both buried deep within their minds tumbling from their lips with a desperation like it was air and they were suffocating.