#angelichd

Listen, Los Santos is a shit hole. Aleks knows this. It’s why he’s settling down there. Landing in Los Santos is the cheapest flight across the world he can get, and he’ll bet it’s where he’ll find the cheapest living space. The whole city is a mess of run-down buildings and sky high crime rates and graffiti tags on every surface and it’s awful and gritty and scummy but that’s the point.

Despite its shortcomings, Los Santos is a land of anonymity. Opportunity. Where the rich can sit back and get richer and the less-than-affluent individuals can duck their heads down and muscle through, slip around the backstreets and down alleys unnoticed. Aleks knows how to play his cards right so he’ll never get picked out of a Los Santos crowd, takes a shitty office job during the day that will pay his bills and provide blanket coverage and a backstory and he spends his hours between “work” and sleep scrubbing every trace of himself, of Aleksandr Vitalyevich off the face of the planet.

Los Santos might house demons, but Aleks has his own fair share of them too.

Finding a place to live should’ve been the easy part - he isn’t looking for some house with a white picket fence and a perfect yard, he just needs a place with a bed and a shower and an internet connection - but all the apartments he finds are either barely held together or are charging triple rent because they’re “on the nice side of town.” Either way, he can’t afford them, even the ones held together with fucking duct tape and faulty wiring, showers that only have a cold water tap and the possibility still of roommates. Aleks isn’t above sharing a living space, but he left Russia to get out of the cold, so he’d like an apartment with heat at least.

He’s running out of options, though, so when he finds a one-bedroom apartment that has running water and working electric and is cheap enough it doesn’t break his budget, he jumps on it before he can look into it too much. He doesn’t care about the location, doesn’t bat an eye at the shady landlord that tells him to pay in cash, an envelope with his apartment number on it in the mailbox behind the front desk once a month, and he doesn’t ask questions when the guy never introduces himself or gives Aleks his name.

He doesn’t ask for Aleks’, either, just identifies him by his apartment number, “5C,” and leaves it at that.

So, yeah. Aleks knows there’s probably something illegal going on here, but he shrugs and just figures that comes with the area. The apartment comes fully furnished with a decent living space and he isn’t willing to question it. No one says anything about his dog, or the cat he brings home a week later, and no one really says anything to him in general, so Aleks is just happy to let this play out for as long as he needs it to and cross the bridge of finding a new place when he can afford one. Or when he gets kicked out of this one. Whichever comes first.

If his neighbors are a little weird and sullen, and come and go at weird times, it’s none of his business, right?

After a week, there are some people he starts to recognize - a few familiar faces - but for the most part, Aleks feels like he sees new people everyday. Like the building is more of a motel of sorts than an apartment. Either way, everyone in the building operates the same way - head down, not sparing a second glance for who they pass in the hallway. Aleks quickly learns to follow suit.

He chalks it up to the general absurdity of Los Santos and he doesn’t look at it too hard. No one bothers him, so he keeps to himself and doesn’t look too long at any of his neighbors, doesn’t make a fuss. He goes to work at his shitty office job, organizing files for a corporation that does who knows what, and he comes home. He walks his dog, and sometimes he goes out and picks up take out, and he doesn’t do much else. Spends his time inside his apartment with his computers, combing through data files and plucking out the ones he doesn’t want anyone else to see. Certainly doesn’t go out after dark when he can help it.

He’s running late for work on a Tuesday morning coming up on his second week living in the city. Mishka is dancing around his ankles, but Aleks doesn’t have time to take her out and he feels awful when he has to push her back inside and close the door on her. He locks it quick and tries to round the corner as fast as he can, damn near pressed against the sheetrock, and when he runs straight into a hard wall of something and falls back flat on his ass, Aleks really does think he over rotated and hit the wall.

He thinks this up until he hears the tell tale cursing of another person, the shuffling of someone else picking themselves up and stomping away.

“Watch where you’re fucking going!”

They don’t offer to help him up and Aleks doesn’t really get a look at them, too busy trying to get his own bearings and stand up on his own to catch anything more than they’re back as they walk away, still cursing him out, dark hair tied up in a bun, a streak of blonde curled around it, and a leather jacket hung loose over their shoulders. He doesn’t have the time or sanity to worry about it - either he leaves now and gets killed for this later or he stays here and gets killed now - so he scoops himself up and takes the rickety stairs down two at a time and he tries not to obviously check behind himself to make sure the guy didn’t end up following him out to his car.

Aleks makes it to the office late, and he tries to focus on that instead of the guy in his apartment building who is probably planning on killing him.

-

James is going to fucking kill somebody.

“You’re gonna have to tell Fake AH, they’re not using this as a god damn halfway house anymore. I’m sick of the fuckin’ rats they drag in,” he kicks the chair in front of him, expelling energy in a way throwing his hands around while he talks doesn’t quite satisfy. The door to the back office is still swaying on its hinges from when he barged in, but Matt has remained mostly undisturbed. The only move he made was to turn his chair, angled so it now faces James. He’s still looking at his laptop screen.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Do I wanna - Yes, I want to fucking talk about it. I want to talk about how I got bowled over in my hallway today by this bleach blonde bimbo dressed in fuckin’ slacks. What were they even doing here, is Geoff in the business of hiring secretaries for drug runs now?”

The office is small, cramped, but James still paces and throws his arms out like he has all the room in the world. Matt ducks on instinct as James’ voice gets louder, knows his arm movements will only get more wild. He frowns at the description, though, and pushes away from the table, trying to remember everyone who’s been coming through their door.

James curses when he rolls over his foot, but Matt ignores him to ask, “Was it a blonde guy? Accent?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” James is scowling still, sitting down now in the arm chair in the corner that’s seen better days. He’s crossed his legs, right over left, so he can cradle his foot close to him. Matt waves a hand, annoyed.

“I’m trying to figure out who, exactly, you saw. Did they have an accent?”

“I don’t know, he didn’t say anything. Why does it matter?”

“Because if it’s who I think it is, that’s not one of Geoff’s guys. That’s ours,” Matt’s face falls into an expression bordering on a frown. “Or, that’s what I thought.” His forehead is a map of wrinkles, his eyes turned down, confused, and he reaches out to pull himself back to the table quickly, hands settling back over the keyboard while he bangs away at it.

“What does that mean? Did Brett bring someone in behind my back? No one new should’ve been here.”

“This guy came in a couple weeks ago asking about rentals. He was shifty enough and cagey enough to fit in, I thought you both just forgot to tell me you were sending someone. I set him up on the fifth floor and he’s been there ever since, paid his rent up front for two months time, figured he owed a debt and was trying to make up for it.”

James is quiet behind him, and Matt knows that means nothing good. The tension in the room is thick, palpable, and Matt wants to spin around, feels like he should put his hands up, but James stands up and leers over his shoulder before he can.

“You’re telling me, someone has just been living under our roof, unchecked, for weeks.”

“Well - “

“Don’t even finish that fucking sentence. For the sake of us both, shut the fuck up.”

Matt snaps his mouth shut at the same time James straightens up, turns on his heel, and stalks back out of the room.

-

James is going to kill Matt.

“He had one job! I gave him one job!”

“To be fair, he did his job,” Brett doesn’t bother looking up from his phone. James doesn’t bother looking at him, knowing Brett is probably playing some stupid gem game, and seeing the bright-colored screen might actually make him lose it.

“He did not. He fucking, did the exact opposite of his job, is what he did.”

“Fire him.”

James scowls and throws his hands up in the air. “Why do I fucking talk to you?”

Brett finishes the level and as his score racks up, he diverts his attention back to James. He’s still pacing back and forth across the apartment, bulky sneakers most definitely wearing a track in the carpet, and he’s got his hands pushed into his hair now, pulling a few strands loose from his bun. He looks more stressed than Brett thought he was, and he frowns, locks his phone so he can sit up straighter and really look at James.

His eyes have always looked tired, ever since the day Brett fuckin’ met him, but the bags underneath are more pronounced than usual. It makes James’ whole face look pinched, gaunt, and Brett racks his head to figure out the last time he remembers seeing James sleep.

All things considered, it’s probably been a while. They got in from a job out East the day before last, and James drove them all the way through, barely even stopped off for bathroom breaks. When they got home, back into Los Santos, Brett went straight for a bed and crashed, but James went out instead, waved off Brett’s mumbled concerns. He was still missing when Brett woke up the next afternoon, hazy and still sleep numb, and when he dragged himself out of bed and into the warehouse, Lindsey told him James had been in since the sunrise. “Got here before I did, even,” she said as she pressed an already made cup of coffee into his hands, and Brett said nothing but he kept an eye on James that day, sure he would pass out on the job.

He didn’t, worked all the way through the day instead, and if Brett knew none better, he’d say James was well rested.

James likes to work under stress, though, and that’s just a quirk that Brett has picked up through years of making this rag tag team work. James like the pressure of deadlines, of someone to report back to, of an enemy, and when the job doesn’t make him stressed, make him feel pressured, he does it to himself. Keeps himself too busy to take care of his body properly. Pushes himself to those limits so he can - Brett doesn’t fucking know, so he can almost break? So he can prove to himself he can withstand it?

The point is, James hasn’t been sleeping, and Brett should really have noticed sooner.

“Knock it off, will you?” There’s a bark behind it, but Brett and James both know it comes with no bite. It still has James stopping in his tracks, pulling up short and redirecting so he can press his palms against the wooden counter of the butcher block and lean forward, head bent down. His hair is all but down, now, tie clinging to the last of the loose bundle, fallen to sit low on the back of James’ neck instead of the top of his head.

Brett hesitates over how vulnerable James looks like this. James isn’t a vulnerable person, he doesn’t let people see into him easily. He has decades of walls built up around him and there’s a strict security protocol he goes through to let any of them fall. Even behind closed doors, James goes out of his way to keep up a professional air, to keep himself presentable and put together.

This? This is the exact opposite.

“If he hasn’t done anything yet, maybe he really is just some rando. Maybe he’s harmless.”

James snorts at that, lets out a puff of laughter and folds further into himself, like a puppet with his strings cut. Brett counts the slump of his shoulders as the victory it is. He’s still leaned over the counter but the line of his back isn’t so stressed anymore, his hands aren’t gripping the edges like life lines. His voice is still wary, though, tired, when he says, “No one is harmless in Los Santos.”

Brett just hums instead of answering, idly flipping his phone in his hands. He spreads his legs out in front of him as he slumps on the couch. He watches James move so he can run his hands through his hair, find his abandoned scrunchie and re-tie it up.

“Matt said he scrubbed through the security videos from the fifth floor and the entrance, says this guy has a pretty standard routine that he’s been sticking with. Nothing shady. Comes and goes at office hours, and then every night to walk his dog.”

“So? That doesn’t mean shit. He’s a loose end, he’s not supposed to be here. Let’s just off him now,” James comes back around the butcher block so he can stand in the living area, crosses his arms and looks down at Brett.

“You’re not the least bit curious about this guy? I mean, if he’s willing to even pay rent, that’s already better than half the people we bring in anyway. We could keep him around if only for the dispensable income.”

“We could rob any store downtown tomorrow and get more from it than this shmuck would ever pay us in rent money, so what is this really about?”

“How about entertainment value,” Brett shrugs, non-committable. “He could be interesting to watch, is all.”

“Didn’t realize things were that boring around here,” James says, dry, but when he tips his head back Brett can see him smiling.

James’ smile is a wicked thing. Even when it’s genuine it still seems wrong, a shark smile, all teeth and pointed edges. Brett can tell he still wants blood more than anything, wants the kill, but if Brett needles him enough, he can get James to play with his food first.

And oh, are they going to play.

“Not anymore. Things are just starting to get interesting.”

-

Aleks knows he’s being watched.

It’s been a few days since what he remembers not-so-fondly as “the hallway incident” and Aleks has become increasingly aware of the eyes he feels on his back, the guys he catches watching him. They’re subtle enough that he can pin who it is - tries to snatch their attention in ways that will out them, but whoever they are, they know what their doing.

He hates the waiting. The in-between. More than anything, Aleks hates not knowing.

He shoves down the twisting feeling in his gut and tries to ignore it as best he can, stays on his guard every second he’s out of his apartment, and he starts carrying a knife on him 24/7. It’s not much - a shitty little fold out one that fits nicely in his pocket - but the idea of having a way to fight back comforts him.

Mishka helps, too, even though Aleks knows she’d really be useless in a fight. She’s not vicious, is more nervous than anything, but she makes for good companionship and he’s glad to have her to walk the streets with.

It’s late when he takes her out, he had fallen asleep on the couch after work and slept longer than he meant to and she graciously woke him up with her barking, insistent on going for a walk. He pulled his shoes on and suited her up without really thinking about it, still working with a sleep fogged brain and with Mishka underfoot. They head out and to the right, down the block in the same direction they usually go.

Aleks didn’t account for how much later is was compared to when he usually goes out. How much darker it would be out.

Here’s the first thing that Aleks learned about the city - Los Santos changes in the dark. When the whole city becomes a smudge under the shadows, you never know what’s - who’s - going to meet you around the corner, on the other side of the street.

It’s been easy to avoid the gamble, so far, but Aleks was still half asleep when he walked out of his door and he forgot where he was. Forgot the time. Forgot that he had to be careful.

Aleks holds Mishka’s leash a little tighter, walks a little faster, and takes every shortcut he dares to try and get back to the apartment.

Mishka hears the commotion before he does, tugging at the leash and barking, ears flattening against her skull. Aleks wraps the leash around his hand, pulls her closer to try and calm her down, but then he hears it, too.

A wet smack. The sickening crunch of - something breaking under the blow. That same squelch over, and over, and over -

The streetlights on the main roads are shoddy, even at the best of times. They’re dim, dirty, and half the time they flicker non-stop. Aleks can’t see much from them, has been relying mostly on his phone flashlight and the occasional outside light above stores, but -

There’s a 24 hour bar across the way. It’s plastered with those light up signs, all neons and fluorescent lighting, truly a crime from anyone to look at sober, but a good enough source of light in the dark. Certainly an attention grabber.

The sound is coming from the alley, next to the bar. In the glow of the signs, Aleks can see someone bent over, hands above their head, swinging down. Over, and over, and over -

Blood stains the alley, the sidewalk, everything, and Aleks’ stomach churns. He knows this is Los Santos, knows this is just the world, but he never gets used to seeing it.

Mishka is tugging on the leash, still, wants to keep going, so Aleks stumbles forwards on the wrong side of the street. Wants to tear his eyes away, like they’re going to know, they’ll look up, and then it’s him next and he only has this stupid fucking pocket knife -

The bar gives off enough light outside that when the guy straightens up and the sound stops, Aleks can see his face.

The first thing he notices is the blood. He can’t help it. Sees the specks on his face, over the bridge of his nose, seeped into his clothes. The guy reaches up to wipe his face and Aleks notices -

Dark hair, tied up in a bun. A blonde streak, off center, down the side and tangling into the bun.

There’s blood dripping off barbed wire wrapped around the barrel of the bat and Aleks thinks he’s going to throw up.

Mishka tugs at the leash, and if he remembers how to listen to anything other than his own heartbeat Aleks could hear her whining. He stumbles when she pulls, catches himself on the pavement, scrapes his palms and his knuckles and his knees but the pain forces him to refocus and he follows Mishka lead and he runs.

-