#rtfic

‘The Know’ runs Los Santos. Everyone knows that. Or at least anyone who matters knows that. The LSPD certainly knows that, even if they’re not quite sure who or what ‘The Know’ is. All they know is that every suspect they’ve ever desperately interviewed, even under threat of torture, has told them that ‘The Know’ gave them the information to rob that convenience store, or kill that gang member or whatever. They’ve checked every database available to the US government, paid off every gang member they can get their hands on and all they know is that is run by ‘two chicks.. Kinda pretty sounding’, which honestly isn’t all that useful.

What they don’t know, is that ‘The Know’ is run by the two woman who will occasionally pop into the LSPD Main Station to ask after a lost purse, or a jacket left on the subway and who will bring delicious cookies for any retrieved goods. For all they know Meg Turney and Ashley Jenkins are the slightly eccentric lesbian couple who seem endlessly clumsy and forgetful and distinctly not the most powerful women in Los Santos. So they keep looking in the darkened alleys and the grimy drug dens and the blood stained remains of gang fights.

If you are any criminal worth his salt however, you will know of the mysterious two women who run ‘The Know’ and their dark skulled body guard who is frankly the ghost of Christmas past, present and future for Los Santos. He’s the mark that appears on your door the day before you die if you betray ‘The Know’. He’s the start and end credits to their broadcasts, the tilted death smirk against a bloody background and those blue, blue eyes. He’s most men’s worst nightmares. Not that it’s just him, mind you, he’s ‘The Know’s guard dog, ruthless, dedicated, sadistic and utterly loyal.  Los Santos fears those faceless women as much as they fear the Black Skull.

Unless, of course, you are Gavin Free and have what most people would describe as ‘less sense than is possible’. Unless you’re the man who has spent his life bluffing through sticky situations and dark corners and ended up in the scummiest, darkest, bloodiest corner of America and are loving any second of it. Unless of course you are the man who ran into a tiny red-headed woman in a prestige lady’s underwear shop with her much, much taller boyfriend who is both very excited and very bored by the prospect by the prospect of underwear shopping.  

‘Honestly, dear, you’d look stunning in anything in here’

Then the tall man leans in slightly closer, arms curving under the small woman’s waist and tickling at her hips as he mutter’s into her ear.

‘You both would. My beautiful, beautiful ladies…’

The red head lets out a tinkling laugh and leans back into him and Gavin suddenly feels guilty for overhearing their conversations and starts studying a set of stockings with an interest that even a man with his tastes might find a little absurd.

He can feel the gaze of the couple on him as he tries to focus on that soft, silky material between his fingers. He convinces himself he can feel their smirks and he feels a hot, scarlet blush rise to his cheeks and makes a hasty dash for the exit, the image of that tall, handsome man and the small red haired woman and their mysterious other lover burned into his brain like a brand.

It’s been 5 months since Gavin moved to Los Santos, 5 months of petty theft and some slightly less petty theft. It’s been enough time for him to develop a personality among the criminal empires of the seedy underworld of a city that is very close to collapsing into the depravity of its darkness.

He’s the boy with lies on his tongue and money in his wallet. He’s the man who took down half of Red’s crew single handedly and he’s the kid who fucked the LSPD up on their last raid on the AH Crew. God knows who he is but the Brit is someone to be reckoned with. He’s also someone who is desperately in need of ‘The Know’s help. It’s not his fault, at least in his beautifully spun words it’s not his fault. In reality he’s in way too deep with too many gangs. There’s a phrase about counting eggs that Gavin can’t really remember here and senses may be a little pointedly close to his over-confidence for him to try hard to remember. Instead he focuses on trying to contact his potential saviors. The Know hold the power of the gangs, the LSPD, the courts, the power of the city, in their hands, and if he can harness just a moment of that then maybe he can make a break for it. Maybe Gavin Free can die in a tragic accident and some other pretty blond British boy can be born from his ashes… He’s always liked the name ‘Mark’ after all.

So Gavin goes through all the twitchy, trigger-happy nerves of the body to get to the mainframe of ‘The Know’. He smiles and teases and asks endless questions to the bored and perpetually annoyed secretary of Gus and pays and flirts and begs his way through Matt and Jeremy, the names that flash fluorescent on a computer screen for three weeks until he is sent a coded video recording.

It’s a short clip, one minute at most. A flash of a masked figure and two women’s voices echoing through the silence of his dark apartment.

‘Mr Free, what an interesting request. A death? We don’t get many of those… Well we’ve checked your records with other crews. You’re in a lot of debt Mr Free….’

A tinkling laugh cuts through it and Gavin feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as a new voice cuts through.

‘Well, what an interesting situation. We would normally state a price here, a price and a threat if such a price isn’t paid. But you are not a stupid man, are you Gavin….’

The first voice, the one that doesn’t throw him back to that pair of silk stockings and a bright pink blush, starts up again.

‘We would like to meet with you Mr Free, you have…quite a reputation… but I would warn you that men to lie to us don’t very often live to tell to tell the tale.’

The video cuts off after that. There is a split second of an address flashed on the screen and Gavin spends a while tracking down the screenshot to write it and the date attached down. After that he drinks a very strong vodka mixer and tries desperately to sleep through the knowledge that he might have seen one of the leading members of ‘The Know’ buying lingerie with her boyfriend.

He tries not to dwell on her sparkling laugh, or his bright eyes and broad shoulders and their secretive lover. He fails miserably.

It’s exactly 17 days later that he finds himself sitting in a bar in downtown Los Santos. He’s in character, hair spiked up and freshly bleached, a far too expensive shirt half buttoned up and ugly gold plated sunglasses resting firmly on his face, disguising lasts night’s troubled sleep. He absentmindedly sips a double whiskey on the rocks which in his humble opinion tastes like gasoline mixed with a trucker’s spit. Nevertheless he keeps drinking and watches the door with a steady eye.

It takes an hour for anything to happen, but when it does he feel his stomach drop and has to force the whiskey down his throat to stop himself from vomiting.

Long red hair flows down her back in relaxed curls and she wears a simple black dress and boots with a chunky heel, discreet and charming. She orders a drink, doesn’t pay and walks over to his booth, settling without a word.

Tension hangs in the air, palpable in the hot air of the summer’s evening.

She doesn’t seem intent on talking and Gavin, despite his normal bravery, is happy to sit in silence, drinking and watching her. She’s very beautiful, small and delicate and the scariest woman he’s ever seen before. He feels a stirring in his stomach that has nothing to do with fear or the copious amount of alcohol he is trying to consume to ease his nerves.

Twenty minutes of awkward silence later a tall man wanders into the bar. He lounges his way over towards them, a drink in hand that Gavin is about 70% sure is just a coke, but is too scared to make any further judgment. He sits down next to the red head and kisses her gently on the cheek, muttering an apology in an all too familiar accent and fixing his blue, blue eyes on Gavin for a little too long.

‘Those were nice stockings…worth an investment from a man as rich as you I’d think…Mr Free’

The man beaks the silence and the woman’s face cracks into a genuine smile, eyes glinting as she stared provocatively.

Gavin swallows hard and speaks, praying his voice doesn’t crack

‘Not really my style, I’ve always preferred lace…’

They merely smirk across the table.

A year later the people of Los Santos have almost forgotten a time when the Brit didn’t work for ‘The Know’.

They can barely recollect a time when he wasn’t to be expected at any criminal’s door, a strongly worded letter, and a black skulled man following very soon behind.

He becomes as much of their vocabulary as the black skull, as the softer and stronger voiced ladies of ‘The Know’.

He becomes a threat whispered between criminals.

And he becomes a name whispered between the parted lips of his lovers at midnight.

It takes Gavin 3 months from his first meeting with Meg and Ryan, as he discovers their names are, before he meet Ashley.

He knows why when he finally encounters her, curled up in a beanbag after the shooting of a video that will result in the deaths of 10 people. She is one hundred times softer and one hundred times harder than Ryan and Meg could ever be. He has watched Ryan murder in cold blood, but nothing compares to Ashley’s final laugh on a bounty hunter video. Yet he felt her lips against the pulse at his neck, so gentle and so needing in a way Meg carefully avoided.

The night, as it so often does, passes quickly in their arms.

He feels himself pressed down under the weight of Ryan’s half naked body, Gavin’s own hands desperately fumbling at the other man’s belt. The lacy stockings they had bought him, held up by a beautifully matching belt, rub against the top of Ryan’s thighs and he groans loudly. Next to him laughter rings out and a hand cupping his face, turning it from the Vagabond’s furious kiss to the teasing, feather light whispers of Meg’s kisses as Ashley instructs them from the leather armchair of their shared bedroom.

‘Slow down… Ryan slow down, I want him to be begging for it’

She has long ago discarded her top and bra and is gently playing with her nipples and grinning darkly at the threesome on the bed.

‘Show me the best you’ve got my darling’s’

She moans into the room and slips her fingers down her skirt.