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Geoff says I love you. A lot. To the point of exhaustion. But he had started getting creative with it, buying them small (or not so small) things, “because I was thinking about you”. Started asking if they’d eaten, drank water, were okay, needed someone to talk to, did they just want to sit outside and stare at nothing? Anything, Geoff was there. He cared. Everyone knew it too, to the point that it was almost hellish, to think that Geoff cared so very deeply, to think that he could be so wounded.
Geoff had lived a long life, had seen a lot of things happen, and he didn’t like to talk about it. Jack knew, because she’d been there. Ryan knew, because he’d told him. Michael assumed, Gavin grasped, and Ray had figured, in his time with the crew, that if Geoff had wanted him to know, Geoff would have told him. And when Jeremy joined as their sixth, Geoff attached the new lad just as easily as he had the rest of them, but the lad never quite understood the depth of sadness tucked into the corners of sleepy blue eyes.
They didn’t talk about a lot of heavy stuff, unless it was something that was bothering them greatly – Michael’s missing memories from a time when he thought he had died for good, Gavin’s birth parents, the way Ryan’s hands never seemed to shake anymore.
“I’m losing myself, Geoff,” Ryan had said one night, quiet to the stars, to Geoff’s ears. “I’m scared.”
Jack soothed Geoff, and he soothed her, they worked in tandem, moved together, breathed together and, if they were capable of finite death, they would die together. It was how they were, how they had been since they had met. No one in the crew tried to take that from them, tried to steal the little section of happiness they had carved in a harsh world together.
So few people were genuinely kind like Jack and Geoff.
It started loud, as usual. Middle of a heist, and someone’s voice chokes off mid-shout. Geoff thinks nothing of it, just barks for Jeremy to roll around, pick up Gavin’s body, and get him to the safe house. They keep moving forward, Jack shouting for her arrival, the crew piles into a helicopter for evac, laughing and rambunctious as always. They head back to the safe house, keeping word with Jeremy, who was filled in on their immortality after an ‘accident’ involving Gavin, Michael, and 5 o’clock traffic.
He had known, in the way you suspect something without knowing all the facts. The FAHC was all over the news, after all, and they seemed to take pretty hard hits without ever really going down. So Jeremy had known, Jeremy had accepted it pretty well. Once they were all back at the safe house, they do what they did best. They waited for Gavin to return, chipper and bright as always. Michael and Jeremy cleaned him off, laid him up on the couch as the Gents counted and divided money, resorted to drinking (Jack and Geoff did) while Ryan found a quiet room to clean his equipment, calm his mind, relax.
They waited for a week. The crew grew anxious and Geoff did everything he could to keep them calm. Eventually Michael and Ryan went off to do whatever it was that they did. Jeremy and Jack, however, stayed with Geoff to watch over Gavin’s dead body.
“Has it ever taken this long?” Jeremy asked quietly one night over dinner plates, eyes watching Geoff’s face carefully.
“Once, with Michael,” Jack answered. “But Gavin’s never taken this long to wake up.”
“I mean, he did take a pretty big piece of shrapnel straight to the chest,” Jeremy whispered, despite the fact that Jack was not. Geoff wasn’t talking, just staring at his food like he was eating leather.
When Michael and Ryan returned later that week, Gavin still wasn’t awake. Jeremy watched Michael pace, Geoff clench and unclench his hands as they shook weakly at his sides; Jack and Ryan stood off to the side, talking quietly, leaned into each other. Honestly, it was amazing how well the Gents moved together. Jeremy knew they’d all known each other for years and years and years, and it was just how things happened after a certain amount of time – you tune into that person, their movements and thoughts and feelings. Some things just don’t change.
They leave the safe house at Jack’s urging shortly after that, heading back to the penthouse. The ride home is uncomfortable; Ryan’s deep voice just barely audible under the music Jack insists on blaring, Geoff’s shaking hands wiping against his thigh and Michael staring out the window, watching lights flicker and people walk past. He knows, long before the rest of them accept it, Michael was the first to figure it out, when a week had passed and Gavin had not woken up. He wouldn’t say it, couldn’t admit it out loud.
To say anything out loud solidifies it, after all.
It’s quiet when he slips away. Almost two months after Gavin, Michael can’t take the way everyone dances around the issue any more, and he disappears for long periods of time, sometimes with Ryan, mostly without him. He comes home bruised and bloody and so very close to death, but he always comes back.
Until he doesn’t, for a week. They start to worry when he busts through the door, laughing and carrying money.
Until he doesn’t for a month; they know he’ll be back, he always comes back. And he does, eventually, somber and quiet as he slips in the door, heading to his room. The strong smell of alcohol follows him, and Geoff resolves to talk about Gavin. Then Michael isn’t back for two months, three months. Jack talks to him when they see his face again, and Michael doesn’t leave for a while after that. He tells them when he does leave the penthouse; he’s just going to see Lindsay, see Ray, go back to Jersey for a while, he’ll be back in a week.
Until Geoff gets a phone call to come identify a body; he was the only number in town listed as an emergency contact, you see, and they can’t confirm the name on the I.D. Michael’s pale, freckled face is smudged by ash and dirt, hair wild, hands charred. It’s not the worst state he’s been in at the time of death, but Geoff’s heart sinks – how many times had Michael not been just on that precipice, but all the way down, tumbling and screaming, to the rocks below? How many times had he woken up alone, bloody and dirty in an alley? How far had he pushed himself?
How had they not noticed?
How had he not noticed?
Jack says they need to bring in new crew members after that, and Jeremy offers his contacts – friends of both him and Lindsay, claims they can help. And they do, the crew makes money, pulls off elaborate scams and amazing heists, and spirits are high. But back at the penthouse, it’s quiet. Jeremy leaves often to visit his own friends, and without a single lad in the house, it’s quiet.
Ryan reads while Geoff drinks, Jack between them with the television on low, staring directly forward. They don’t talk about it.
Geoff says I love you, a lot. To the point of exhaustion, to the point that you no longer want to hear those words leave his mouth. He once said it as easily as he said “hey”, but a year after Gavin’s death, he chokes on the words, says it in a rush, desperate, like God, if these are the last words you hear so be it, I just want you to know –
“I love you,” Geoff says, hands curled in Ryan’s jacket as the bigger man’s breathing slows. He pulls his face back to look up at Ryan – bright blue eyes unfocused, swimming – until Ryan finally finds Geoff, forces a smile and shakes his head.
“They aren’t taking me too.”
Geoff wonders, two weeks later, if anyone really plans for their last words. He wants his own to be amazing, to be deep and meaningful. Or, at least, to be cryptic and strange enough that people are haunted by the possible meaning of what the fuck he had said.
Jeremy stays at the penthouse less and less often. Geoff goes through the motions of running heists. Jack almost crashes a plane into the side of the mountain on a test run and sits this heist out. Lindsay comes over one day with cookies and sad eyes, leaves both with Jack and Geoff and vanishes again. Geoff can’t think of how she loved Michael, of how they had made plans of running away together.
“She’s mortal, Geoff,” Michael had said, somewhere between happiness and fear. “I – how am I supposed to deal when -- ?”
“You’ll handle it, we all have.”
How ironic; Lindsay sitting out in her car, tears in her eyes while Michael’s scattered ashes had sunken deep into the soil on the side of a mountain.
Geoff wants to run a small job, him, Jack and Jeremy. He’s leaving the crew to Jack, taking a portion of money and leaving the city. He can’t stay. Every light is a reminder; the silence is a weight in his chest that he’ll never shake. So he has to leave. Jack will pass on crew knowledge and contacts to Kdin, and then she’ll leave as well. It’s for the best. This life has no place for them anymore. Every dynasty reaches an end, and Geoff knows that had one hell of a good run.
The job is easy, goes off without a hitch, and they’re escaping the cops, pulling over to the side of the road, between trees, laughing and smiling and Geoff couldn’t be happier, hadn’t felt this way in a year and a half, weightless and free of sadness and he kisses Jack full on the mouth, holding her to him.
“I love you,” he says in a breath, body shaking with energy and life.
“I love you too,” she laughs back, swatting him away. He leans back, breaths for the first time in forever, and they pull back onto the road, careful to avoid major roads until they can’t anymore.
Lights flash behind them and they pull over, Geoff sliding down to the window to see what officer they’re dealing with. He rolls down his window, sticking his head out to yell at the officer, and everything goes dark. Somewhere he hears Jack’s scream, feels hands touch him, hears more gunshots. Then nothing.
Nothing at all.
Jack wakes up in a hospital. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s done it, and she was hoping that it wouldn’t happen at all. She sits up slow, body screaming from multiple gunshots, from the way she twisted against her seat and seatbelt, desperately trying to get to Geoff.
Kdin is standing just outside her door, talking quietly to someone Jack can’t see. Herhead jerks to the side when she sees her sitting up, and she comes rushing into the room. Herhands find her face, rubbing over her cheeks before hereyes turn sad and Jack doesn’t want to hear it. She won’t hear it. She can’t do this, she can’t do this. Kdin says it – “Geoff and Jeremy didn’t make it” – but Jack only half-hears her. Geoff had no right to leave her like this, to take Jeremy with him. Had no right at all.
Kdin is still talking, words like “lucky to be alive” and “miracle” swirling in Jack’s head. Lucky. Right.
Jack never leaves the world. She hears of the fallout of the remnants of the Fake AH Crew years later, how the city eventually ate them alive, and they abandoned Los Santos altogether. The legacy her, Geoff and Ryan built lasts, and the fear that they may come back lingers. But Jack knows they won’t.
She receives obituaries for the remaining crew – the B team – as they pass away. Married. Kids. 80.
Jack makes new friends, eventually. When all traces of what her life was finally fade away. She settles up to them, runs with them as a seasoned criminal, the oldest of the crew.
She tells them she loves them. To the point of exhaustion.