for the mash au thing: dance and criminal or dance and time travel with freewood?

(send me some tropes to mash together)

9. Dance AU and 97. Time Travel (and a hint of 15. Criminal AU)

Okay, so for this one I’m imagining that they’re both time travelers. Maybe Ryan’s, like, a time travel cop/timeline keeper, and he’s been stationed in 1920′s New England (somewhere that’s a jazz center, basically - probably NYC) for a decade to ensure that no one gets screwy with timelines and history. He’s pretty good at blending in - keeps to himself, is very polite, has a cover as a journalist, which allows him easy access to major events and also explains why he spends so long typing “articles” (read: reports back to HQ about how once again, literally nothing happened.)

Until the day his journalism takes him to a special jazz concert - one he doesn’t know the details of, besides it being some battle of the bands. He’s only there to try and observe, in case any time tourists have gotten a bit too drunk on the dance floor and forgotten the rules of blending in-

There. A rich-looking white boy, dark blond hair mussed everywhere, and he’s dressed appropriately but that’s definitely not modern jazz dancing, he’s pretty sure no one invented the chicken dance until the fifties. Ryan makes his way over to him, prepared to pull him outside because even if he isn’t a time traveler, the way he’s dancing is atrocious and needs to be stopped. But as soon as he gets within ten feet of the guy, he’s spotted by his target - who promptly runs off and disappears into the seething crowd of lindyhoppers.

Ryan reports it to base, heads out again, continues his patrol… and the guy keeps showing up. Always at a dance, always a little too out of place… like he’s trying to get Ryan’s attention, because this has to be deliberate now, this has gone from a drunken case of futuristic dancing to a goddamn cat-and-mouse chase. And when Ryan finally gets close enough in the crowd of dancers to apprehend him, he’s not expecting relief in the guy’s eyes, nor to be swept up in a partnered dance with him.

Gavin, he introduces himself; time tourist who did a few rogue things for the fun and cash and now is wanted by some real bastards. Care to protect him, mister time cop?

Around them, the jazz pulses and the dancers continue their wild movements, and Ryan gets the sinking feeling that he’s just gotten pulled into something much grander than he anticipated.

fahc au where gav comes from this mega rich british family (n hates it there), the fahc is there tryna steal from them n end up teaming up with gav in exchange for getting him out (winds up running off with them, obviously) bonus points if u can get some mavin in there ps i love ur writing

awww thank you!!! it always makes me so happy to hear people like my writing, and yes I can absolutely slip in some Mavin for you

(this brand of headcanon asks is closed, but you can send in two numbers from this post for the current ask game i’m doing! this is just playing catch-up)

-I am SO down for class traitor Gavin. Bonus points for Gavin actually hiring the Fakes on his heart… but like, unintentionally, sort of?

-Meaning, he’s at this bar, getting absolutely sloshed, and this dude comes over to chat him up (perfect, Gavin loves attention) and he’s significantly more sober, gets him talking about his family and the old money and everything Gavin hates about his family but can never say. It’s not until the next morning that Gavin realizes the dude was probably going to rob him until he started talking about his powerful family; it almost makes him sad, because he would have gladly given the curly-haired man everything in his pockets for the simple fact that it would inconvenience his parents and aunts and uncles some.

-But to his surprise, a few weeks later he runs into curly-hair again (Michael, the man has to reintroduce himself) and he’s brought a friend? A very strange man with a ridiculous mustache and loads of tattoos and he’s wearing a suit to this fucking dive bar in the middle of the queer part of town, Gavin’s got no clue what to make of him. He also insinuates pretty strongly - alright, outright says - that Michael and Gavin slept together, which, no, Gavin’s glad to see Michael’s as embarrassed about those words coming from Geoff’s mouth as he is. (Though he’s certainly open to the possibility.) It makes him briefly worried when Geoff suggests the three of them head elsewhere-

-Until Geoff clarifies “about taking down your family?” and suddenly it’s like a dam has been unlocked in Gavin’s head, the alcohol-blurred night from a few weeks ago coming into focus: Gavin complaining to Michael, the two of them flirting a lot, Gavin lamenting his family, Gavin trying to get Michael to sleep with him (oh dear, that’s an embarrassing memory), and most importantly, Michael offering to help with his horrible family. That’s where Geoff comes into play, and some distant part of Gavin’s late-night internet rabbit hole searches pops up to say “hey, that’s the Kingpin, the most powerful criminal in this half of the state” and holy fuck what’s Gavin gotten himself into

-But hey, Gavin’s nothing if not a “leap first, look later” sort of person, so he heads back with Geoff and Michael to a safe house of some kind and they all talk. A lot. Like, it’s five in the morning when they’re done talking and Michael’s fallen asleep on the table level of “a lot of talking” and Gavin can’t help but notice how cute the dude is like that, face all squished up against his arm.

-He ends up just hanging with the guys; he doesn’t want to go back “home,” some fancy place his parents bought for him and he doesn’t care for. He feels much happier around the ragtag group of criminals: Jack’s more like a mother than his own, Geoff seems to have already accepted him as a part of the crew, Jeremy’s a riot with no self-control and Ryan’s so much fun to make do wild stuff. But by far, Gavin’s favorite to hang out with is still Michael, the two of them getting along like a house on fire (almost literally, in several instances) and Gavin decides he really doesn’t care if it’s friends or more that they end up being, so long as it’s something

-The hit on his family ends up being many hits. Gavin has to go back home several times to get info for the Fakes, who he’s offered his official services to (he is a bit of a tech genius, thank you fancy education) and every time he starts to get pissed at the way his one-percent family treats the rest of the world, he imagines how sweet it’ll be to watch their bank accounts drain and their estates fall into ruins.

-The final hit has a twist: Gavin needs to bring someone into his home to plant a few electro-thingies (Ryan couldn’t find the words to describe their function properly) so they aren’t disturbed while they take everything from the Frees. Pretty much everyone votes Michael go along… as Gavin’s boyfriend. Which. They’re not dating. Sure, they spend almost every waking second together, and they flirt constantly, and Gavin will grab Michael’s hand and Michael will hug him and - okay, yes, Gavin can see why they’d be a good disguise, but he still sort of wants to actually date Michael, and there’s only a week before the infiltration and after the meeting he panic-corners Michael and blurts “go on a proper date with me first, won’t you? We don’t have to pretend that way”

-He could punch himself for making it seem like he only wants to go out with Michael as some sort of bloody practice for the heist, but to his amazement Michael understands perfectly. And of course he does, why wouldn’t he? He’s Gavin’s boi, and vice versa, team Nice Dynamite out to redistribute wealth and maybe kiss a few times along the way.

Imagine Ryan's first stint working with the fakes, where he's warming up to them and likes everybody but still stays at his own place. He wakes up one day with fever and aches and chills and of course that day gets a call about a job the fakes need him for, he absolutely refuses to let them down (or tell them he's sick, what will they think? his Reputation™) so he drags on his outfit and heads out to meet them and do his best (which they see through pretty quick and get him back to bed)

given the current state of events, please let me know if there’s anything I need to tag this with. I’m going with a bog-standard bug here, nothing contagious, just one of those 24-hour things you sometimes get.

(this brand of headcanon asks is closed, but you can send in two numbers from this post for the current ask game i’m doing! this is just playing catch-up)

-I like to imagine the Vagabond doesn’t get sick often. It doesn’t get cold enough in Los Santos for the more severe things like bronchitis or pneumonia to really be major problems, and he’s healthy enough (despite his sugar intake) to fend off most flus, colds, etc. (Also, because he’s responsible, goddammit, he gets his flu shots.) So waking up one morning feeling like his skin is going to crawl off his body and like his bones are suddenly made of slag iron and like he wants to be literally buried in blankets is a shock

-And, like, he’s probably known about this job in advance, since it’s his first stint with the crew? He’s supposed to show up at the base in- he checks the time, in twenty minutes, shit. They’re going to go over the heist plan with him and then go start on the setups and preps to get a feel for working with him and he doesn’t want to miss this, they’re the Fakes and he’s the state’s most notorious hitman and he doesn’t get sick

-The panic of “be there in twenty minutes” combined with the brain fog of “wants nothing but to fall asleep again, preferably in a hot tub or fifty blankets” means he doesn’t make the smart decision here. AKA, he slugs back a shitton of coffee, puts on the mask and eye makeup to hide the bags under his eyes, slips into his outfit. He plans on just not talking today so they won’t hear the grating quality in his voice, gets on his bike, and speeds over, fashionably five minutes late

-Of course it’s Jack who catches on really quick. He’s actually spent a decent amount of time with her before - she’d been the one to hire him for this, and they’d hung out at a couple criminal bars in the process of hiring and interrogating each other. She’d also impromptu-helped him on a job once, when he’d been trying to evade surprisingly competent cops and she’d stopped to give him a ride to his safehouse. So as soon as the meeting is over, she holds him back in the heist room, waits until everyone is gone, and firmly says “we’re staying here and you’re resting” in a tone that brooks absolutely zero arguments

-He still complains and tries to say he can do it, because he’s Ryan and the Vagabond and he wants to do this job with them, but Jack is literally putting a cup of soup in the microwave as she shoots him down and heading into a back room to grab tylenol and blankets and within twenty minutes, Ryan finds himself wrapped up on the couch; mask off, tea in his hands, soup on the side table, Jack sitting next to him and scrolling through Netflix for a show to watch

-Geoff and Jeremy get back first from their part of the setup, and Geoff starts to pitch an absolute fit about how they’d slacked off but freezes when he sees Ryan half-asleep against a very protective Jack. He ends up going into the kitchen to make “actual soup, Jackie, you know that microwavable shit doesn’t do anything” and Jeremy makes himself comfortable on Ryan’s other side, his hand somehow finding Ryan’s neck and the pressure points on it and oh my god, Ryan’s never loved a massage so much. When Michael and Gavin finally get back, Ryan’s wholly asleep, and they take impressive initiative and go make up the spare room so Jeremy and Jack can put him in a proper bed. Michael grabs a humidifier; Gavin gets to work figuring out how to make up their part of the setup; several hours later, Ryan wakes up feeling much better, relieved to see no one else is sick, and officially decides these are his new favorite people.