Hold Me While You Wait - Andrew “Pope” Cody x Reader
Fic summary: takes place beginning in between season 1 and 2 of Animal Kingdom; you're new in the Codys' neighborhood, trying to find a way to get your life back on track after your father dies and after you receive a new mental health diagnosis. Making quick friends with Deran, you find yourself swept up in the Codys' hectic interpersonal dynamics; even amidst your own struggles, you can't seem to keep your mind off of Deran's oldest brother and his big, sad eyes.
Chapter 52 summary: the immediate aftermath of your unexpected reunion with the Codys
Chapter warnings: 18+ mdni, death, grief, mentions of firearm use, big angst, panic attacks
Reader notes: reader is plus-sized afab, uses she/they pronouns, has tattoos, has OCD and schizophrenia, and is situationally non-speaking
a/n: ahhhh it’s so good to be back!! I’m actually super proud of this chapter ^-^
Chapter inspos - Whipping Post by the Allman Brothers * Barton Hollow by the Civil Wars
Chapter 52 - Find Your Feet
It had been a drizzly, pensive kind of day the day you killed your uncle. One of those that Wyoming pumps out like an assembly line some years, where it’ll just be three and a half weeks straight that the sun is merely a suggestion and it’s not cold enough to be bracing but enough to make the shade feel like a punishment.
You couldn’t have guessed how long the infinitesimal space between when you pulled the trigger and when he dropped to the ground would feel. How there would be a clear line in your life, a before, an after, and the bit in between would forever feel like the ghost of a memory that someone else had once. You also couldn’t have guessed how the sound of him hitting the ground would feel like a disgustingly long-held breath finally releasing.
Something in you - well, not “something.” It’s that moral purity obsession that stems out of your OCD, you’ve managed to figure out in the intervening time. But, yeah, that - that made you worry for over a year, that you’d become some sort of serial killer. Surely ending someone’s life, stopping it well before god or the universe or whatever had its say, removing in just one second the dizzyingly limitless possibilities that spiral out from one person’s existence - surely that should feel worse? Or if not worse, at least not…correct?
This is not like that. This is the unceremonious crunch of a woman you know and loathe and respect and fear and occasionally probably come close to loving despite yourself hitting the earth. This is the hollow ringing that shapes itself too closely around the absence of noise from her sons that accompanies the end of an era.
But there’s no complexity to be found within your brain as the gun clatters to the dirt and all that you can think is no what have I done no had to had to no hadtohadtohadtohadtohadto
It was her or Andy, her or J, probably possibly her or you if you had let it get that far. She asked. She needed. She would have done it herself. None of them are facts big enough to obscure the red stain that spreads around her like a mocking halo as the hot air crowds down your throat and seeks to suffocate you in the aftermath of a sin you know you can never undo.
There’s a scuff behind you, and the hand on your elbow tears a raw, desperate “NO!” from your throat so fast it’s like it was sitting there waiting to be propelled from you. You spin away from it and trip, falling heavily onto your palms behind you, an uncontrollable sob of rage and terror ripping out of your chest.
Deran is left there with his hand in the air, his cheeks wet, and you loose a low, helpless groan. “I’m sor - god,” you choke, sobbing again, “I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. God, fuck.” You’re hyperventilating as you turn over and push yourself to your feet. You can’t bring yourself to look at any of them.
What have I done? The answer is too big, so big it’s going to crush you, so you run. It’s a blind fleeing, the only possible response to the coalescence of the scraping doubt and fear and loneliness of the last months against the dawning horror that you have just independently made it permanent.
All you can hear is the crispy pound of your shoes against the dirt and the heaving of your distraught breaths, until all at once you hear another set of both. You don’t even have to turn to know it’s Andy - somewhere in the barest millimeter of the back of your brain you know he’s the only one fast enough to have caught you with the head start you had right now, anyway - and that’s the last person you can stop and face right now. Because what. have. you. done?!
You thought you’d done the unforgivable before, and you and he managed to claw your ways back to each other past it. But this - this is so far past unforgivable you might as well have unmade yourself. Something in you is convinced he’s chasing you to kill you - a bigger part of yourself screams that you’re crazy, he would never do that, he would never hurt you.
But you’re not you anymore, are you? You’re the monster who killed the monster that made him. He has such an iron code and you shattered it in an instant, you know it. Who on earth would you have to be to transcend that, to escape the consequences of wrenching the heart out of the Codys? Someone far more astronomical than you are, surely.
There’s a low, near-constant but stuttering keening sound happening, and you realize distantly that it’s coming from you. Your heart feels like it’s going to beat straight out of your ribcage. And he catches you - arms around your torso, one ripped away by the continued momentum of your own arms pumping but quickly replaced tightly, both of you crashing to the ground with the barely-interrupted inertia of your crazed escape.
Underneath the hollow roar that kicks up in your ears, you can hear yourself wheezing and muttering “nonononono I’m sorry no fuck I’m sorry no, no,” around your own gasping.
The loud, gravelly sound of your own name right in your ear jolts you at least into becoming mute, even if it doesn’t quiet your frantic breathing laced with gulping tears. You grip his arms where they’re locked around you, seemingly not able to choose between clawing at them and clinging to them for dear life, so you end up just sinking your nails into his skin and leaving them there.
He wraps a leg around you, too, immovable in crushing you with deep, sustained pressure as he shushes you rhythmically.
“You - I - you can’t, forgive me,” you pant haltingly, dragging huge breaths in between the words. He starts to rock you gently in the sparse dry grass.
“You’re here, nothin’ to forgive, shhhh shh-sh,” he mumbles in your ear, and your heart shatters.
He hears the heavy footsteps of his family as you start wailing in his arms, a truly horrific, breaking sound that he’s never heard come out of you. The depth of it floods his eyes with tears instantly, a river that starts coursing harder when he realizes that the space in his ribs where he should feel broken and nothing and everything all at once for the fact that his mother is dead is only filled with something mildly adjacent to relief.
Far, far bigger than that is the consuming feeling that you are here, you are alive, you are breathing and he is touching you and it’s real. “Feeling” is perhaps the wrong word for it - he is made of the fact of your return. It’s such an acute undoing of all the duct tape he’s put in himself to hold his entire being up like a hollow cardboard cutout of a man that used to be Andrew Cody, that it hurts.
He actually has a physical ache pulsing from head to toe, a shrieking burn as the all-encompassing horrid grief of the last what feels like an innumerable stretch of weeks cracks out of him and pours onto the ground. It’s made worse and yet also muffled, shouldered aside by the absolute shattering cries you’re still letting out as he tries to rock you back to reality, ripping sobs that sound like you have lost everything that has ever made anyone a person.
Deran is on his knees next to you both, his hand on your hair as best he can manage with the fact that you’re buried in Pope’s embrace and also rolling back and forth. He’s babbling, nonsense mixed in with occasional clear sentences of disbelief and questioning and awe and horror - clearly just a fountain of every little thing he has contained between the second he had to rip himself from you in the ambulance and now.
So, so slowly, bit by excruciating bit, you start to quiet, J and Craig standing unpretentious, damp-faced guard over the pile of hurt that is slowly rebuilding itself into three people. The broken but carefully joining shell of you; wrapped tightly in a man who hasn’t existed without you; comforted by another who has been blindly slogging back towards a semblance of himself and has suddenly been thrust directly next to it onto another precipice of loss.
Pope can pinpoint the exact moment you go from hysterical and lost to the world to merely very distraught. You stop vibrating uncontrollably, and your cries turn to ones that sound kind of human again, and your hands on his forearms go from unyielding, truly painful clawed vice grips to tight but flat rings of your fingers around them.
He can practically taste the guilt coming off of you in waves. He knows suddenly, with a certainty that he rarely feels for anything at all, that trying to free you of it is going to be one of the hardest and most important things he’s ever done in his entire, fucked-up sideways life. So he starts by letting go of you in increments, making sure you feel how he is only physically releasing you and not letting go on the inside. Scooting to sit up, he draws you up too by your upper arms, wincing at the series of deep but thin scrapes down one of them from the fall.
You hang your head between your shoulders, hunched, but you don’t shake Deran off when he slides his arms around you tightly, turning your face into the crook of his neck while the two of you find your own little maintenance rhythm of rocking together. Pope keeps his hands flat together on your thigh, unwilling to break contact, sure somehow if he lets go entirely you might float away on the wind, some vision his brain conjured to get him through this nightmare.
Eventually, Deran stands, sniffing harshly, and jerks his head to Craig, taking Craig’s post watching for Pope’s cousins on the off chance they came this way. Although Pope feels a sure dread in his gut that they won’t come yet, they’ll wait until they can strike back properly. It’s a blessing and a curse, he supposes. But in either case, Craig takes his turn with you, bear hugging you so thoroughly that your crying is barely audible anymore past the mass of him.
When he stands and nods to J, Pope watches his nephew’s face go through a half-dozen emotions, more than he’s seen on it in months, if he’s being honest. He finally comes and just stands in front of you, staring down. Pope wants a little bit to snap at him, tell him to fuckin’ get down here and hug you like everybody else, but before he can, you tilt your head up to look at him.
“I was going to do it,” J says quietly, his face an unreadable mask of not-quite-neutrality.
“I know,” you say after you catch your breath. “That’s why I did.” J’s brows furrow a bit and his mouth gets tight.
“Why?” he finally says harshly.
“Because you would never have come back.” Pope knows it’s true. He knows it’s true for himself, too. More tears slip down his cheeks as he considers how it’s quite likely you might be the most unbreakable of all of them.
“Who says I’m not already gone?” J replies in a voice that finally almost sounds his age, almost the cadence of a very young man who has not had much time to get used to any of this, life at all let alone life with this family.
“If you were, you wouldn’t ask,” you say gently, and you push yourself to your feet unsteadily, Pope’s hands slipping off you as he scrambles to stand as well. You stand in front of J limply, waiting to let him decide.
All at once, he does, wrapping his arms around your waist with a childlike desperation that makes Pope’s chest twinge. You cradle him around the shoulders, and it’s striking how very different from the way J hugs anyone else it seems to be, even from the outside. It’s not calculated and seductive like he hugs his girlfriends and his marks alike, nor is it stiff and jaded and resisting the too muchness of a hug from Smurf.
Pope knows somewhere in the back of his mind that once upon a time, this is how this kid hugged Julia. And he feels confident that you hold him back just as she would’ve. Maybe better, because yours doesn’t come with the looming inevitability that you’ll pull the world out from under his feet again eventually. Feeling the impulse crawl up from his very soul, Pope does something he knows he would never be pegged as the person to do - he wraps his arms around you both.
J as an entity is shrouded in doubt and worry and second-guessing for Pope, yes. He might always be, so thoroughly tainted whatever their relationship may have been is by both the ghost of Julia and the pulled strings of Smurf. But this is his family, just as thoroughly as Deran and Craig, just as thoroughly as Smurf…only almost as thoroughly as you, Pope realizes all at once in a huge rush.
If someone had asked him at any earlier point in his life if he’d ever meet someone that didn’t share at least some of his blood or at least some of his childhood with him that he would care about as fiercely as - more fiercely than - those that did, other than Lena, he’d have told them to get their head checked. Or more accurately, he probably would’ve decked them. But here you are.
So yeah, Pope holds you, and he holds the boy - the man - that scares even him sometimes, but who somehow, in the same way that Pope himself does not, never seems to scare you in the least. He buries his face in your hair and breathes, wondering on the idea that maybe you’re some otherworldly creature put on the earth simply to love all the worst ones just the way they are.
The shuffle back towards where Smurf’s body lays is uneventful and entirely without fanfare, at least triple the time it took for the panicked flight out. You are rotated between varying degrees of contact with all four men, most often tightly gripping Andy’s hand and staring at the ground, wondering if the strength of his fingers around yours is at all a lie, either of his own or of the world or of your own frenetic brain.
It’s an effort to look at her, one you make nonetheless because you must - you simply won’t do her the dishonor of shying away from the cold actuality of her departure. She looks young, somehow, despite the offensive, rapidly becoming decrepit ring of a bullet hole not quite in the center of her forehead. You feel all at once how this is how she must have always looked behind the guile and the temper and the dark necessities her life thrust upon her and the ones she loved.
Wordless, you let your hand slip out of Andy’s and you march over to the pickup truck you’ve never seen before today, throwing the seats forward to find something to lay her in. You eventually uncover an oversized, dusty and hay-covered rough blanket. Snapping it several times to get as much detritus off as you can, you flip it out into the pickup bed.
It’s Craig and Andy who make to lift her, but as they both bend at the waist you hold a hand out silently. They both straighten to standing, and you can feel the expectant weight of four pairs of eyes bearing down on you. Your head spins a bit, rapidly cycling through a million questions about the near future and the far future and who you are supposed to be now and who they all possibly can be now.
Delicately, you kneel next to her. You pull her eyes shut, the obscenity of their glazed vacancy making you want to throw up. “I haven’t done much talking lately,” you say quietly, not speaking for her but to her. “I wonder if you would’ve done any better than me. Gotten here faster. Probably. Probably would’ve left a smoking pile behind, too.”
A bare, mirthless laugh cracks out of you. “Maybe I’ll go back and do it, just for you. Maybe not. Anyway. You’ll get more than this, don’t worry about that. But I just wanted you to know - the world was something different because of you, Janine. I won’t pretend it was all good. Hell, probably most of it wasn’t. But you were here. You left marks. You took everything around you and shook it in your teeth and it’ll stay bleeding.”
A morbid farewell, maybe. If the others decide they want a funeral or something for her, you’ll do a better job, write something acceptable down and say it like it means something. But here in a cloud of sweltering dust with blood on you and blood on her, you want her to have the truth. You push to your feet with a decent amount of effort and nod at Andy, not quite able to look right at him.
You’re squished painfully between Andy and Deran in the pickup, no discussion had but no other real outcome that would’ve happened, you suppose. Even underneath all the screaming, fraught guilt that’s coating every moment for you right now, you think you might just poof out of existence if you even think for a second that you’ve lost either of them again.
Thirty minutes of silence, back on asphalt and watching both men flick their eyes towards the rearview mirror anxiously five times a minute, you finally let yourself voice a thought that’s even halfway normal.
“What happened?” Andy’s hand on your leg tightens reflexively, and Deran sighs.
“How much context do you want?” D asks, sounding exhausted.
“Much as you can give, I guess.”
“It was a job. Smurf told us it was this guy she used to work with, had a bunch of gold. And he did - ‘s in the SUV up there. A lot. I don’t…I don’t actually know exactly what happened. We heard a lot of gunfire, came to the rendezvous point and Smurf was bleeding, yelling at Pope that he’d fucked it all up…I don’t. I don’t know.” Andy takes over the explanation.
“The guy was my uncle. She shot him right in the head in front of his sons. M-my cousins. Odin, can’t remember the others. It was a hell of a firefight, I got her out. She didn’t want me to, I guess. Didn’t know til just now that we actually got what she’d said we were there for. They’ll come for it.”
It’s surreal, hearing how something so simple spiraled into now, knowing it really was just blind chance that you stumbled upon them at all.
“You don’t know they’ll come for it,” D says weakly, but it’s clear he doesn’t even believe himself.
“We would,” is all Andy says in response.
“I wonder why she killed him,” you say quietly, more to yourself than anyone else.
“Why did she ever do anything?” D says bitterly. Before anyone can say anything, his shitty little burner phone rings loudly. “It’s J.” He frowns ahead at the back of the SUV where J and Craig are as he answers. “Yeah? Oh, hell,” he sighs, and you feel Andy tense in tandem with you, but admittedly Deran doesn’t sound really too concerned. “Yeah. We’ll call her.”
“Call who?” Andy asks immediately.
“Carolina. She got your voicemail, I guess?” D directs at you.
“Oh shit. I forgot I even left that. I had called you guys, too.”
“Our regular phones are at home,” D says.
“So how’d Carolina get ahold of J?” you ask with a frown.
“I guess he gave her his burner number, I don’t know.” You turn your head sharply to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “Man, don’t look at me like that, I don’t know. He’s been actually really kind of nice to her since…” He trails off and stares out the window, pressing his lips together. “Y’know, since you’ve been dead.”
The force with which you slap your hands over your mouth at the snort that spills out of you actually hurts. But you can’t help it. You lean forward as your shoulders shake and you desperately try to contain the giggles threatening to break free. You know it’s not funny - it’s not funny, the grief they must’ve all gone through. But this is just manic amusement coursing through you at the absurdity of it: their clear and total belief that you were dead, while you sit here very much alive between them.
You think Deran just coughs a couple times until you manage to look through your watering eyes over at him. He’s got his fist pressed against his mouth so hard the skin around it is turning white. As soon as you meet each other’s eyes, you’re both done for. It’s not a shared laugh - it’s a cacophony of hooting and gasping and gulping, and he laces his fingers through yours painfully tight while you lean against him.
Anxious, you manage to glance over at Andy - but he doesn’t seem perturbed. He’s definitely not as amused as either of you, but there’s a lightness to his eyes that makes your breath catch, a desperate clinging to a shadow of an idea that things might be okay.
“Alright, alright,” you finally manage, collecting yourself as Deran quiets. “I gotta call her.” He hands you his phone.
“I want you to go in the house and just. Take care of yourself,” Andy says firmly. “You don’t need to do anything more for her right now.”
“It’s not for her, it’s for you guys,” you say stubbornly, arms crossed tightly in front of you as you stare him down in the garage.
“Then you definitely don’t need to do anything more for us. You did everything. Let me take care of it now.” His voice softens immeasurably on the last sentence as he steps closer to you. He hovers his fingers away from your skin as he moves his hand down along the side of your face, studying you intently like he still isn’t convinced you’re real.
You grip his wrist and force him to make contact, because you definitely still aren’t convinced he’s real. His eyes flutter shut and he tips his forehead against yours, dragging in a shaky breath.
“Please,” he whispers, his breath drifting across your skin. “Please just let me…just. I need you to be alright.” Tears fill your eyes.
“I - I don’t know if I can do that for you,” you say brokenly, your arms going limp at your sides.
“You can let us do this, and go inside and try to feel okay for a minute.” He tucks his hand against the nape of your neck securely, opening his eyes to meet yours with a depth and intensity that makes your knees shake. “Right?” You finally nod mutely, your nose brushing his with the motion. He squeezes your neck briefly before he steps away and gestures with his head for you to go inside.
You shuffle inside, and it feels wrong and right all at once. The absence of screamingly white walls under fluorescent lights that buzz is a physical relief - a relief so broad and consuming that it makes you almost feel naked. Clenching your jaw and squaring your shoulders, you take another few steps through into the hall next to the kitchen.
There’s no low chatter of other residents, and the adrenaline you’ve been operating on since you got out has finally stuttered to enough of a stop that you can hear the overwhelming silence. You can also finally feel every bit of too much that you’ve put your body through - it’s like every second of the hours-long trek catches up to you at once, and you nearly fall to your knees from the aches and twinges and stings that make themselves known.
And god, you’re starving. You were too nervous to eat before the escape, so you haven’t had even a crumb to eat for well over twenty-four hours now. Not to mention the rough scrape in your throat from the lack of water.
“Okay, bath first, then food and water?” you mutter aloud. You start to walk down towards the bathroom, but you stop dead in your tracks after a moment. “No, no. Nope. Baby needs food and water way more than I need bath.”
“Baby?” you hear behind you, and you jump with a tiny scream as you spin to face the kitchen.
“Fuckin’ shit, Craig, I’m on like, max paranoia game right now and I didn’t even hear you come in.” He steps toward you eagerly, his big frame filling the hallway so he’s poorly backlit, but you can still see the excitement and tears shining in his big blue eyes.
“Are you pregnant?” he asks, managing to keep his voice low.
“Uh, y-yeah. I am. That’s why I got out. I mean - it’s not the only reason I wanted to get out, obviously, but it’s the thing that made me get my shit together enough to do it.”
“Get out of where?” he says in confusion, and you realize - none of them know. It smacks you anew that everyone really did think you were actually dead.
“I probably should tell everybody at once,” you say quietly, looking down at your hands and picking at one of your nail beds.
“Right,” he sighs. “Well - shit, you know, Renn had ours, right?” The huge grin that spreads across your face is completely genuine.
“I wondered - thought about it when I was pretty sure her due date came by. How did it go? How are they?” Craig looks absolutely beatific, and it makes your heart swell.
“His name is Nick. He’s real healthy, fuckin’ big. We didn’t bother with a paternity test or any of that shit, that’s my kid either way, but he popped out huge enough I don’t think we even needed one.” You laugh, laying your hand against your chest in delight.
“You seem so happy about it, dude.”
“I really am. It’s like everything just, I don’t know. Fell into place. Renn’s good - she, uh. She’s still in the game. Which I’m not very happy about. But she’s not using anymore - breastfeeding and everything. So that’s good. And yeah, he’s - he’s so cool.”
“Of course you’d have a cool baby,” you tease, and he grins at you.
“Don’t lie,” you snort, “Andy and I are not cool people.”
“Well, it’ll be a great baby, anyway,” he says firmly. “And you guys are gonna be great parents. I mean it - I think Pope might end up being the best dad any of us have ever seen.” An unexpected sob flies up into your throat.
“Y-yeah. Assuming he, y’know. Wants to be,” you choke out, giving a few short, sharp panting breaths and pressing the back of your wrist against your temple.
“What do you mean? Of course he’ll want to be.”
“I killed Smurf, Craig. I don’t…he’s not going to. When it hits him, I don’t think he’ll want me here anymore.” Wordlessly, he crushes you in a huge hug. You cry into his chest for a little bit before you pull back, sniffling.
“You’re wrong,” he says simply, and you snap your head back to look at him questioningly. “You don’t…you weren’t here. You don’t understand what him thinking you were gone did to him. I don’t even know if J or Deran fully get it, either. But I was watching the whole time. I’ve seen him at his worst in life, seen as bad as he gets, and this was so much further than that. He was gone, man. Every time I looked at him, it was like I was lookin’ out at space or some shit. Nothing.”
A few more tears trickle down your cheeks. “But I…” You end just in a shrug, no more words to convey it.
“It’s gonna take a lot for him to get over Smurf dying - for all of us, yeah? But dude, look…she’d have found another way anyway. And I don’t think it’s going to take any time at all for any of us to ‘forgive’ you, least of all Pope. I think it’s already done.”
“Oh,” you say simply, unable to hold the idea of it.
“Yeah. Look, I gotta get back out there - you’re right that you should eat and drink first though, okay? And I won’t say anything to anybody.”
“Thank you, Craig. I love you, you know that? I don’t think I ever got around to saying that.”
His face folds into something between a grimace and a smile as he sniffs hard and nods, looking away from you. “Same,” is all he says before he heads out, but a warmth curls in your chest nonetheless.
“Okay,” you breathe out in a wobbly voice after he’s no longer visible, and you tilt your head down towards yourself. “We are hangin’ on tight, huh? What do you want to eat?”
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