#all bafflement about what the fuck kind of au this is aside

[non-plutonian-druid]

[ID: an illustration of Delores as a mermaid swimming in a pool and looking at Five. It is a distant overhead shot in 3 point perspective. They are in the ruins of what might be a courtyard or a bathhouse. The color palette is made of teals, oranges, pinks, and yellows. Also in the ruins are a handful of trees and plants, a stone bench, and a frieze of a mermaid. End ID.]

i dont really know what this is. why is delores a mermaid? what is this building? why is there a mermaid in it? what does this have to do with the umbrella academy? where did five find a mermaid? all of these questions and more are completely unanswered and you can decide for yourself. i just wanted to draw a mermaid, and tile, and five and delores, and a statue, all at the same time. enjoy!

[vagrantblvrd]

Tabula Rasa (1/1)

Summary: In a shocking twist, Ryan finds it annoying when he stumbles over a body when it’s not one of his. Especially when it’s obvious whoever left it there for just anyone to find didn’t even try to hide it.

Notes: Prompt fill for Anon who asked for FAHC AU Ryan finding amnesiac hitman!Gavin who unbeknownst to Ryan was hired to kill him.:D?

(Read on AO3)

In a shocking twist, Ryan finds it annoying when he stumbles over a body when it’s not one of his. Especially when it’s obvious whoever left it there for just anyone to find didn’t even try to hide it.

It’s sloppy and unprofessional, even in a city like Los Santos where the news outlets don’t cover stories about dead bodies being found unless they’re a celebrity or otherwise well-known figure in the city.

So this, literally tripping over one in the middle of an alley when he’s taking a shortcut back to his apartment after a quick run to the corner grocery story is galling.

“Aw, come on,” he mutters, staring in dismay at the groceries that didn’t survive the cartoon clownish balancing act he did trying to keep them from tumbling out of the paper bag  he was carrying. “Not cool.”

The eggs continue to ooze their way along the dirty asphalt, seeping into cracks like some kind of terrible metaphor for his life.

Or maybe it’s been a long goddamned day and he should just go home and order takeout and drown his sorrows in diet soda.

But then what he assumed was a typical dead body has the temerity to groan, this awful, pained sound followed by a soft scrape. Rustling, clattering nose as it tries to pull itself out of the pile of trash and whatever else it fell onto.

“Dammit,” Ryan says, as he turns to look at it.

There are eyes – well. An eye, the other doesn’t count with the way it’s swollen shut, focused on him.

Battered face with dried blood all over and whoever they are, they must have pissed someone off in a major way because they look like hell.

“You look awful,” Ryan’s mouth says without his brain’s okay because he’s tired and it’s been a hell of a week for him and it’s only Tuesday.

The body makes this horrible rasping, croaking sound, and after a moment Ryan realizes it’s laughing at him.

Mouth pulled up in this little smile as they give up on trying to sit up and slump back down, zombie noises giving way to this breathless laugh.

“Oh good,” they say, hand flopping around as they gesture vaguely at themselves. “I’d hate to feel worse than you think I look.”

There’s a pause.

A frown.

“Wait, that doesn’t sound right.”

========

You’d think Ryan would know better than to bring strange bodies home with him given his line of work, but you’d be wrong about that.

Horrifically, astoundingly wrong.

By all rights he should have left it there and gone about his business, but he’s not as heartless as all the rumors say he is. Had regarded the body for a long, long moment considering his options before that last shred of a conscience he had goaded him into making what’s turning out to be a grievous mistake on his part.

“Oh, what a lovely place you have,” the body says, slumped sideways on Ryan’s couch as he roots through his first-aide kit. “Urban modern?”

There’s no theme to his “décor”, just whatever the place came furnished with or whatever he needs from a furniture store catalog.

Ryan side-eyes the body, suspicion in the back of the mind why someone would want to kill him because he’s proving to be an annoying bastard.

Kept talking all the way here, odd little comments and hasn’t shut up since.

Oh, there was the expected trepidation when Ryan set his bag of groceries aside in the alley to approach him. This pathetic attempt to move away from Ryan that ended in a soft hiss and hand clamping down on his side. (Wary expression and tense as hell like he expected Ryan to finish the job someone fucked up.)

“Do you ever wonder,” he asks, words twisting oddly with that accent Ryan can’t quite place. Bit of a twang to it, but more something you’d find in a bad movie rather than the Texas panhandle or thereabouts. Might be down to the split lip and everything else, or someone with a bad grasp on accents. “Do you ever wonder if hands could have toes?”

Normally it would seem like a bizarre question coming out of the blue like that, but considering one of the body’s hands is a bloody mess, broken fingers and such?

Not so much.

“Well I mean,” Ryan says, and shrugs because somehow that’s not the weirdest thing anyone’s ever asked him. “There’s a surgical procedure for that.”

Not your typical elective surgery, maybe, but it is a thing. Ryan remembers reading about some poor bastard a while back who had it done after an accident where they lost their thumb.

The body looks up from staring at his hand, and does his best to smile.

Painful to look at, and right, okay.

Better get him cleaned up and patched up before he makes things worse.

========

Ryan’s still trying to figure out what the hell he thinks he’s doing bringing strange bodies home with him when Meg calls.

Meg’s one of the smartest people he knows, one of the best and brightest in the assassin-for-hire field, and all around terror when she gets something in her head.

They’ve know each other for years, professionally and personally, and he’s learned to be terrified of when she gets a particular tone to her voice.

The same one she has when she asks “What the fuck did you do?”, the moment he picks up.

Ryan freezes as he runs through recent events, eyes going to the body on his couch that fell asleep as he was stitching him up.

First time that’s ever happened to Ryan, what with the whole stitching someone up without proper anesthetic being an unpleasant sort of thing.

“Uh,” he says, watching the rise and fall of the body’s chest, hears the faint wheeze of his breathing. “What?”

Meg sighs, something she does a fair amount when dealing with Ryan and his everything.

“Did you know,” she asks sweetly, which means whatever she is seriously doubting his intelligence and self-preservation skills. And, like. Everything else to do with him. “Ryan, did you know there’s a price on your head right now?”

Ryan doesn’t roll his eyes because she would know about it (Meg always knows) and also -

“When isn’t there?”

Ryan’s one of those well-known figures in Los Santos the news would have a field day about if he ever turns up as a dead body. (Statistically speaking, it will happen one day. Can’t do what he does and not expect to.)

He’s made his fare share of enemies over the years, stepped on the wrong toes and worse. And even if by some miracle he hadn’t, there’s bound to be someone who wants to prove themselves by going after the big, bad Vagabond like something out of a Vinewood western.

Meg sighs again, and Ryan likes to think it’s a fond sort of sigh, not the eternally exasperated kind.

“You know what I mean, smartass,” she says.

Ryan doesn’t smile because she would know about that too, and he’d rather not have to worry about her being one of the people out to collect the bounty (bounties?) on his head because he pissed her off.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah I do.”

========

The body wakes up when Ryan’s trying to decide what to make for dinner, or if ordering takeout is still on the table.

Makes a pained noise, and then goes quiet and still as he tries to figure out where he is and how the hell he got there. (Why he feels like shit and if there’s a chance of more pain headed his way anytime soon.)

“Hey,” Ryan calls from his kitchen. “Does pizza sound good to you?”

He’s too tired to bother with cooking anything resembling edible, and it doesn’t make sense to kill his house guest after all the work he put into keeping him alive.

When he doesn’t get an answer, Ryan goes to make sure the poor bastard keeled over on him.

“Er,” the body says. “Yes?”

Trying to get his preference for pizza toppings is more of the same bafflement.

All, ”That sounds fine?” and “I suppose?” and ”Does anyone like anchovies on their pizza?” which is the firmest opinion he seems to have on the subject.

“Probably,” Ryan says, wrestling with the app for the pizza place a few blocks over. “Otherwise you think they’d take it off the menu.”

He gets a noncommittal noise from the body – and honestly, it’s getting weird for Ryan to refer to him as that even in his head.

“Not to be rude,” Ryan says, pocketing his phone once the order’s sent off. “But do you happen to have a name? Something I can call you?”

The body stares at Ryan – he does that a lot – and frowns. (Also something he does a lot.)

“Er,” he says (yet another thing he seems fond of doing). “I honestly don’t know?”

========

Ryan’s seen his share of terrible movies, watched more than enough terrible television shows.

Grew up watching old soap operas with his grandmother, so naturally the first thing to pop into his head is amnesia.

The body makes a face when he floats that little idea in front of him as a – perfectly valid – answer why he can’t seem to remember anything about himself.

His name.

Occupation.

Reason for ending up half-dead in one of the many glorious alleys Los Santos has to offer.

The usual things people have a decent grasp on in their day to day lives.

And since there’s not much that can be done about finding answers to most of those questions tonight, they settle for choosing a name for him in the meantime.

“You don’t really look like a Gunther,” Ryan says, picking up another slice of the pizza that arrived while they were taking stock of what they know. “Sorry to disappoint.”

He’ll ask around in the morning, go to his contacts all nice and discreet because it’s dangerous not knowing what, who, he’s dealing with here. More so, considering the condition he was in when Ryan found him.

“What about Edgar?” Ryan asks, and no, he doesn’t have a problem. It’s a perfectly fine name. “Reggie?”

========

The real question in all of this, Ryan muses as he searches through piles of trash and other horrible things looking for clues, is what the hell does he think he’s doing?

He knows how Los Santos works better than anyone. Knows you don’t go around looking for trouble if you want to keep doing that thing where you’re the opposite of dead. Knows you sure as hell don’t go poking into the kind of trouble that’s landed him with a house guest who has amnesia, for God’s sake.

And yet he still made a few calls to the handful of contacts he trusts to be discreet – extra discreet – without prompting.

Mark, as he settled on rather than any of Ryan’s suggestions, looks somewhat more human with all the blood cleaned off. (Sure, he also looks like someone who should probably be in a hospital but that’s beside the point.)

So, yes.

The two of them are back in the alley where they met (if you want to call it that) looking for any kind of information about Mark.

There’s a scrabbling noise behind Ryan as said house guest searches through his own pile of trash and God knows what. A far more difficult task for Mark given the fact he has one functioning hand at the moment along with his other injuries.

They’ve been here for a while, and Ryan’s starting to think it’s all in vain when Mark makes a triumphant noise, catching his attention. When he turns around to see Mark holding up a phone that looks like it’s had better days.

“Found something,” he says, wiping it off on his pants.

Ryan moves closer and watches as Mark turns it on and runs into a fingerprint lock screen.

They share a look before Mark unlocks it – and they’re faced with the a home screen littered with app icons and the most adorable looking wallpaper with fluffy kittens.

“Huh,” Ryan says, as Mark’s face softens and he makes the quietest little noise.

Either Mark has a thing for cluttered home screens on phones or he’s a sucker for adorable kittens. (Ryan’s fairly sure it’s the kittens.)

Overhead the clouds that have been threatening one hell of a thunderstorm all week rumbles threateningly and they share another look.

“My place or yours?” Mark asks, wry smile and a lame attempt at an eyebrow waggle that has Ryan coughing to cover his laugh.

As far as they’re concerned this alley is Mark’s place, and just, no.

========

They don’t quite make it back to Ryan’s place before the storm hits, rain pouring down in one of Los Santos’ thunderstorms, because of course they don’t.

As a courteous host, and since Mark’s teeth are chattering by the time they get inside, Ryan lets him have the first shower. Sets out a pair of old sweats that might offer some bit of extra warmth while his own clothes are being washed.

To kill time, Ryan rattles around his kitchen to make them something to take the chill off. He doesn’t have coffee on hand because Ryan’s not the biggest fan of it, but he does have is several kinds of hot chocolate.

He’s debating whether he wants mini-mini marshmallows in his or regular mini marshmallows when he hears Mark shuffle in.

“I may have used all your hot water,” Mark says, something like a smile in his voice and not sounding apologetic at all. “Sorry about that.”

Ryan glances at him, and ends up staring longer than he should.

He was concerned his clothes would be too big on Mark from the outset, but other than forcing the poor bastard to go around in wet clothes and risk catching a cold or worse there wasn’t much choice.

It was a short-term fix until Mark’s clothes were dry, but now?

Ryan’s unsettled at how much smaller Mark looks in Ryan’s clothes. Bruises and other small hurts standing out in the harsh lighting of Ryan’s kitchen. Dark and ugly against his skin, split lips giving him a lopsided grin as he moves over to the kitchen bar and takes a seat.

“Is one of those for me?” he asks, teasing note to his voice.

Ryan’s a hardened criminal. Gun for hire with a reputation that has people running scared with all those rumors about him out there, and yet -

“What?”

Mark’s lopsided smile is distracting, and the quiet laugh of his as he points at the mugs in Ryan’s hands  is even worse.

“Uh, yes,” Ryan says, when Mark’s eyebrows go up when Ryan doesn’t answer right away and all that staring he’s doing doesn’t stop. “If you’re into that kind of thing?”

- Ryan is a human disaster.

========

Ryan doesn’t flee the latest scene of his complete and utter failure to human being, no.

He just.

He’s wearing wet clothes and the shower’s free and look, alright, look.

No one would take the Vagabond seriously if he came down with a cold and had to deliver a message or other menacing threat with a stuffy nose.

So, yes.

When he he goes out to the living room it’s to see Mark sipping his hot chocolate and scrolling through his phone, furrow between his eyes as he does.

“Find anything useful?” Ryan asks, and stares as Mark jumps.

This startled little thing, quickly followed by the phone falling from his hand as he hisses in pain and Ryan catches a quiet, strained, “Oh, God, that was a mistake.”

Ryan moves closer when Mark lifts his head to give him a wan smile, not sure what to do to help.

“I’m alright,” Mark says, pained note to his voice as he slowly straightens up. “You just startled me is all.”

Obviously.

“Are you - “ Ryan stops himself before he can ask Mark if he’s okay because it’s clear he isn’t. “Do you need help?”

Mark laughs, this painful sounding wheeze, and waves Ryan off with a soft thanks and an apology of all things.

Ryan frowns, but when Mark waves him off again he backs up a step to give him space and notices the phone’s been kicked under couch just out of arm’s reach. Feeling guilty about startling Mark, Ryan skirts around him to retrieve it, taking a curious look at the screen to see what Mark was looking at  - and freezes.

“Wait - “ Mark says, but it’s too late.

Ryan’s staring at the  phone’s screen and the grainy photo Mark was looking at before Ryan surprised him.

Black and white and grainy as hell. Blurry and out of focus. Something off a surveillance camera, if Ryan had to guess.

Odd to be sure, but not the strangest thing Ryan's seen.

No.

The thing that’s caught his interest is the focus of the picture.

Someone in a leather jacket looking at someone or something just off camera. Looks to be in a parking garage of some kind.

A mask that looks like a skull.

“There’s more,” Mark says quietly, getting up to walk over to Ryan.

Ryan lets him take the phone, watches as he pulls up the messages and tilts the phone so Ryan can read the latest ones.

Nothing overtly incriminating to them, but it’s clear there’s a business transaction taking place.

An interested party contacting Mark for a job they have for him.

Carefully worded and if this wasn’t Los Santos, if Ryan wasn’t what he is, he could almost think it’s just someone concerned about potential leaks or unscrupulous business rivals.

But this is Los Santos and Ryan is very much what he is, and he’s had more text conversations like this than he cares to remember.

He darts a look at Mark, sees the expression on his face and realizes that while Mark may not remember who he is or what series of events landed him back in that alley, he’s not stupid.

Can read between the lines just as easily as Ryan can, and that’s a little troubling in itself, but -

Mark scrolls down to the most recent message and opens the attached file.

The still from the surveillance video pops up again.

Too much to hope that Mark just happened to have a still of Ryan on his phone, that it was disconnected from the series of messages Mark showed him.

“I think,” Mark says, with a disbelieving laugh like he knows most people in his position wouldn’t have expected something like this when Ryan doesn’t say anything. “I think I was meant to kill him, whoever he is.”