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david-lynch-ate-my-son · 1 month ago

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Title: Relative Fiction

Part: 1/?

Fandom: Animal Kingdom

Pairing: Andrew "Pope" Cody x Reader

WC: ~6k

Summary: Lena's in a foster home, Smurf is making moves to gain custody, and Pope is out of hope.

Enter: Lena's sweet, dependable, entirely-too-respectable next door neighbor with a very interesting proposition.

The one where Pope enters into a marriage of convenience and gains so much more than he bargained for.

Warnings: Possibly too much eye narrowing and jaw clenching, use of the word "simulacrum" (but I genuinely couldn't think of another way to say what I wanted to say), exposition bomb

The first time Pope called you by your real name, as far as you knew, was on your wedding day.

The entire affair felt like something out of a Hunter S. Thompson novel–the chapel in Vegas with its electric blue, shag carpeting, the plastic wisteria plants draped from the ceiling and trailing down the walls, the Elvis impersonator slurring his way through your vows, and a very confused (very high) Craig who’d been dragged out to Nevada to act as witness.

And yet, the most surreal moment was when Pope actually said your name at the altar–not “kid,” which was what he usually called you–but your legal, god-given name.

It had sounded foreign on his tongue–like a gauzy simulacrum of the name you knew–and you were so thrown that Elvis had to nudge you with his elbow to remind you to say, “I do.”

Pope’s gaze was always a blade, sharpened and direct. Cutting across rooms, through bullshit, to the heart of things. You knew it freaked some people out, having all that attention held so tightly against their throats. But you liked it; liked knowing that he was taking his time to look; that you could almost feel him prodding, nudging, grasping, looking for something (only he knew what) and refusing to be subtle about it.

And in that moment, at the head of the aisle, exchanging vows, the blade sunk deep. Pinning you with a singular focus you’d never felt before, like a moth mounted to styrofoam. All that blue, swallowed in an instant as his pupils dilated, then constricted, holding your gaze.

Before the words, “you may now kiss the bride,” were even halfway out, Pope was dragging you down the aisle and into the chapel’s front office to sign the marriage certificate.

You were certain the clerk was half-swooning at how tightly Pope grasped your hand, knuckles turning white. How impatient he was for the marriage to be legal. You’d smothered a wry grin; it was desperate, sure, but it wasn’t romantic.

You’d never been the type of kid to dream about her wedding day. You’d gone through phases where you imagined yourself married to Nick Carter (objectively the cutest Backstreet Boy) and then later Bam Margera (you developed a thing for bad boys in high school). But in those fantasies, it was always about the man standing at the end of the aisle, not the dress or the flowers or the first dance.

Growing up thumbing through your parent’s wedding album had taught you that great spectacles of love often worked as sleight of hand–a misdirect from something far less shiny and far more hollow.

So you didn’t mind the ill-fitting ring purchased at a nearby pawn shop or the gas station bouquet wilting in your grasp. At the cut of it, none of the details really mattered.

What mattered was the man standing next to you, the wedding certificate, and the little girl whose future depended on getting it signed as quickly as possible.

“Do you have any dirty laundry I can use?”

Skidding around the hallway corner and into the kitchen, you came to a halt in front of Pope. He was exactly as you’d left him 5 minutes ago–sitting with straight-backed alertness at the breakfast counter and staring with familiar intensity through the living room to the front door. While you’d been nervously skittering about the house, fluffing throw pillows and spit-cleaning smudges on door frames, he’d been maintaining the same position with the composed stillness of a sniper.

But your question briefly jolted him, as he turned his head slightly in your direction.

“What?”

“Dirty laundry,” you repeated. “So I can add it into the laundry basket with mine. Right now it’s just my stuff in there and I’m worried it’s going to look suspicious.”

His brow furrowed, a look of confusion, then concern, flitting across his face.

“Do you think they’ll come in the house again?” he asked, now turning on his stool to face you fully.

He was impeccably dressed, as usual, in a freshly-ironed, short-sleeve button-up, bootcut jeans, and clean leather boots. But his fists, clenching and unclenching against his thighs, ruined the veneer of composure.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” you sighed, running a hand through your hair. Pope tracked the movement. You knew he’d picked up on it as a nervous tic. “Normally, I’d say the home visits they did before signing off on the temporary placement would be enough. But, you know…” you trailed off, shaking your head.

Pope’s jaw tightened and his eyes darted away. But you caught the look of guilt that scorched through him before he could hide it.

You wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but you’d been through this song and dance enough times to know it would be a useless endeavor. You could take the whip from his hand, but a martyr would always find another way to self-flagellate.

And the sting of it was, his instinct to self-blame wasn’t entirely wrong. You’d fought tooth and nail for DCFS to allow Lena’s temporary placement into your care, and the shitstorm it had kicked up certainly wasn’t due to your track record.

A high school art teacher with a supplementary degree in school counseling, you were the perfect candidate to entrust with Lena’s care. You didn’t drink or do drugs, you’d never even had a parking ticket, your credit score was an impeccable 850, you’d shown up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for jury duty both times you were selected, and you recycled religiously.

Hell, you even drove a goddamn Subaru. You were DCFS’s wet dream.

Pope, on the other hand…

It wasn’t just the litany of charges marring his record that was the problem, but the way he’d flown off the handle when DCFS intervened to place Lena in foster care. To say her case worker wasn’t a fan of Pope was an understatement. You considered it a minor miracle, what you’d pulled off, and still couldn’t believe that Lena would be back home–intact and within arm’s reach–in just a few short hours.

“Just to be safe–even a pair of jeans I can throw on top of the pile will do.” You knew you were probably being ridiculous, but the idea of having come so far just for one minor detail to derail the whole plan had you feeling paranoid.

Pope eyed you for a moment, thoughtfully, before standing up and unbuttoning his shirt. You made a pathetically half-assed attempt to look away as he revealed his pecs, then his upper abdominals, then his–

“Here–” he tossed the shirt your way, “you can add this to the laundry basket. I’ll get another one.”

He walked past, and you tracked the movement of his back muscles for only a moment before ducking into the bathroom to artfully arrange his shirt atop the pile of your dirty clothes in the hamper.

You could hear hangers clattering in the main bedroom–formerly Baz and Cathy’s room–and pushed down the weirdness that thought brought up.

It had taken quite a bit of coercion for Pope to allow you to move into the main bedroom, and he still approached it with the wariness of a cat circling a cage, but where else were you going to sleep if you truly meant to pull this whole thing off?

You’d already leased your own house next door to a new tenant, and you both agreed that this marriage needed to look as real as possible for Lena’s sake. She had enough going on without you asking her to lie to her teachers or caseworker. So if anyone asked her whether her Aunt and Uncle slept in the same bed at night, or ate breakfast together in the morning, you wanted her to be able to say “yes.”

It was a situation you and Pope were still adjusting to.

You were once again nervously pacing the length of the kitchen by the time Pope returned, wearing a new shirt. He paused, eyes following your movements back and forth, head tilted to the side.

“Sit,” he said. His voice brokered no argument; not because he was being particularly stern, but because his voice always brokered no argument.

And–god help you–you obeyed immediately, taking up his former post at the breakfast counter.

He approached in that slow, deliberate way of his, never breaking eye contact. Stopping on the opposite side of the counter, he leaned down onto his forearms, his eyes level with your own.

“You need to relax.” He didn’t say it quite as a command, but it definitely wasn’t a request.

You scoffed. “You’re one to talk, you–”

“Relax.” He repeated, more forcefully, leaning in just a fraction of a centimeter, but filling the remaining space with the heat of his gaze.

After a moment, you took a deep breath, nodding.

“Only one of us can afford to be unstable right now.” There was a near-imperceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Track record says it’s most likely to be me.”

You pursed your lips, trying not to smile, and Pope’s eyes darted down at the move.

“Okay, yeah.” You relented. “You’re right. I’m calm. Can we just go over everything one more time?”

“That would make you feel better?”

“Yeah. Maybe. A little.”

“Okay.”

To tell the truth, the plan had been fucking insane since its inception. You’d known it was insane, too, which was why you’d spent three restless nights lying awake in bed, turning it over and over in your head like a wishstone, before you’d even approached Pope about it.

But you couldn’t stop thinking about Lena’s little face pressed against the car window, staring after her Uncle Pope, as the DCFS officer drove away.

And, god, the hunted look in Pope’s eyes when she’d finally disappeared from sight and he’d collapsed to the front steps of Cathy’s house, head in his hands.

That man loved his niece; not out of some moralistic, familial obligation. But truly loved her. Like he was cradling a light–watching it grow and feeling warmth for the first time.

And you knew that exact feeling, because you loved Lena too.

You’d been her neighbor, technically, since before she was born. The year you’d started your teaching job at El Camino, you’d moved into the bungalow right next door and instantly hit it off with Cathy.

She was a little serious and had a tendency to withdraw into herself at the oddest moments, but she also had a huge heart and reminded you of the older sister you’d always dreamed of as a kid. Someone responsible and steady, who you could confide in and watch trashy TV with.

Baz was another story.

From the moment you’d met, he’d struck you as arrogant and almost a little detached. It puzzled you, sometimes, how someone as dependable as Cathy could end up with someone as….weasley as Baz. And their affection for one another, while it seemed genuine, often flipped from hot to cold in arbitrary turns (always determined by Baz’s moods and whims, it appeared, and never Cathy’s).

Once Lena was born, your opinion of him only got worse.

Cathy worked a lot, and her hours at the bar weren’t always predictable. At first, it seemed like Baz was making a genuine effort to pick up the slack and take over childcare whenever he could. He changed diapers (occasionally), brought Lena to mommy-and-me classes (when he wasn’t busy with other things), and even took her on long afternoon walks (though you always found it a little suspicious how many bikini-clad women seemed to cluster around the stroller when he’d park it at the beach).

That effort lasted about two months. Then, it just seemed like he got…bored with it all. Like he figured he’d given full-time parenting the good old college try and found out it wasn’t really “for him.”

He started fucking off to god knows where at all hours of the day and night, leaving Cathy with a colicky kid and practically no money for daycare or a babysitter.

Which was where you stepped in. School let out at 3:20pm (2:50 on Wednesdays), which meant that you had afternoons free to look after Lena. And really, she wasn’t too much of a difficulty. Early on, you realized that if you rigged her baby chair to your oscillating fan just so, the back and forth movement soothed her right to sleep.

You couldn’t really go out on weeknights anyway, what with all the grading and lesson planning you needed to take care of. And having Lena by your side, even if she wasn’t much in the way of company at that age, made you feel less alone.

Which was how you became Lena’s auntie. Became the person who cleaned up her scrapes when mom wasn’t around, sang Joni Mitchell songs to put her to sleep, and taught her all the best clapping games to show her friends at school.

And until a little under a year ago, aside from Cathy, you were the only steady adult presence in Lena’s life.

Then her Uncle Pope got out of jail and suddenly there was someone else buying her ice cream and taking her to the park after school.

At first you may have been a little jealous, sure. After all, you weren’t used to Lena ditching you, preferring to spend time with someone else, and it kind of hurt. But then you actually met Uncle Pope and–yeah–you got it.

There was something about all that quiet intensity that was intoxicating. Watching him was like staring down at a glass-bottom boat, only catching the slightest movement toward the surface but knowing there were leagues of life beneath.

And for a kid like Lena, who’d been starved of attention from her sole male role model for so long, you could only imagine what it was like to have someone like Uncle Pope suddenly hanging on her every word.

She perked up when he came back into the picture. It was subtle–kind of like her uncle, everything with Lena was a little subtle–but it was there. And she talked about him a lot when it was your time with her.

Uncle Pope says I’m a good color-er. He asked if I could do him another picture like the one I did with the dolphins but I told him I had to think about it because it took me a whole recess to draw it and I’m supposed to play fairies with Jenna at next recess.

Uncle Pope got me chocolate ice cream today. He never gets ice cream but he says grown ups don’t like sugar like kids, is that true? You like ice cream. Are you a grown up?

Uncle Pope said the friendship bracelet you made me is cool. Can you show me how to make one for him? But maybe blue instead of pink. I don’t think he likes pink.

And if you also spent a little extra time thinking about Uncle Pope, who had to know, right?

All he seemed to wear were those damn short-sleeved button-ups, so who could blame you for lingering a little too long on the bulge of his biceps or the veins of those thick forearms whenever you caught a glimpse of him through your window picking up Lena.

Even before his curls began to grow back out, his face had a kind of gladiatorial-beauty–too rough to be classically-handsome but compelling in its resoluteness. The recent addition of those reddish-brown curls added something so soft to the harsh line of his mouth, the cold blue of his eyes. A clash of concepts you couldn’t look away from.

So damn compelling.

Then Cathy had ‘disappeared’ and Baz had been shot and bled out mere feet away from your front door.

Lena’s entire center of gravity, which had been losing stability and shifting from underneath her for months (maybe years), collapsed.

Watching Pope contort himself into unfamiliar shapes to hold Lena’s world together–rearranging his schedule to give her something constant to trust in, softening his edges to provide comfort, begging (probably for the first time in his life) for the opportunity to prove himself worthy to care for her–it broke something open in you.

It flayed you wide, peeling back layers of flesh and sinew and metallic-tanged viscera. Laying bare the infected heart of you–a splinter planted in your youth and left to putrefy–the injury that screamed–

Why didn’t anyone care about me that much?

Why wasn’t I ever worthy of such devotion?

Where was the devil-hero who would destroy the world to save me?

So yes, the plan had been fucking insane.

I know we’ve only really been acquaintances up until this moment, but do you want to get married and petition the family court for temporary custody of Lena with the goal of eventually working toward your full adoption of her?

But what could you say?

Truly, what could you do?

Your nerves immediately dissipated the moment Lena walked through the door.

As you’d suspected, her caseworker had insisted on a “final” walkthrough before the official handoff. She’d forced Lena to wait in the car, peering through the passenger window with too-tired eyes, while she scoured every corner of the house. Opening the pantry and assessing the array of (healthy, organic) foods available, turning every tap on and off again, letting the shower run long enough to test for hot water, inspecting every corner of Lena’s bedroom and closet.

All things she’d done before–multiple times. All completely unnecessary.

But it was a show of power; a reminder, specifically aimed at Pope, that he was under surveillance. That no place was sacred and nothing his own. Not even his home.

For his part, Pope had stood silently at the living room window, not sparing a glance at the social worker, but instead locking in on the outline of Lena in the car parked across the street.

You’d done what you could to cut the tension, answering all the case worker’s questions and steering her away from Pope any time she wandered too close. But you didn’t take your first deep breath until she was out the door and Lena was dragging her Frozen suitcase across the threshold.

“Hey, bean!” You smiled, dropping to your knees and opening your arms for Lena to walk into. “We missed you so much. We’re so glad you’re home.”

Lena’s hug was weaker than normal, but she tucked her little face into your neck and you felt some of the tightness in her shoulders melt.

As you were giving her a good squeeze, you could practically feel Pope’s energy burning into your back, impatiently waiting his turn.

In all the time you’d known Pope, you’d never seen him be particularly affectionate, physically, with anyone. But with Lena, he was different–holding her hand, hugging her goodbye before school, brushing her hair out of her face when it got too unruly. And you could tell he was done waiting his turn for a hug.

You stepped back and watched him kneel down, grabbing Lena and pulling her into a tight embrace. With his face turned toward you, you watched him close his eyes as dual feelings of relief and guilt contorted his features.

He was so often studiously, carefully blank– tightly controlled and able to bank his reactions under a blanket of inflexible coolness–that seeing the unrestrained emotion steal over him felt strangely intimate.

You wanted to reach out and comfort him–place your hand at his nape or pet your fingers through his hair. But you didn’t want to intrude on the moment.

So instead, you clapped your hands together, injected some pep into your voice, and announced, “I made birria for dinner–are you hungry?”

Pulling back from Pope’s hug, Lena shrugged and made a non-commital noise before heading down the hallway toward her room.

Still on his knees, Pope turned slightly to follow her progress, mouth tightening. Once Lena was out of sight, he shifted his stare toward you.

“Give her a little time,” you tried to assure him quietly. “It’s been a long, tiring day for her.”

From his expression, you could tell he didn’t feel assured, but he nodded anyway, standing to follow you to the kitchen.

“I’ll finish up dinner,” you said, opening the fridge. “You fix the table.”

Dinner was a quiet affair. Aside from asking, “are you and Uncle Pope really married?” Lena didn’t have much to say. She pushed her food around her plate, took a few bites when you encouraged her, but mostly sat quietly with a pensive look on her face.

Her silence agitated Pope, if his furrowed brow and clenched jaw were anything to go by. He kept shooting you pointed looks across the dinner table, as though he was waiting for you to say or do something to magically fix her.

But you knew it was best to give Lena a little space to readjust and find her footing. The last thing she needed was someone making her feel like her natural reaction to all the recent trauma was somehow wrong. Or making her feel guilty for not acting a certain way when she was just trying to figure things out for herself.

When dinner was over, Lena ambled off to brush her teeth and get ready for bed. You grabbed Pope as he brought his dishes to the sink.

“Hey, hold on a sec.”

He stilled instantly, his gaze dropping to your hand on his forearm. Instead of letting go, you gave into instinct and ran your thumb over the tender skin of his inner arm in a soothing gesture until his eyes came back to yours.

“I’ll do the dishes. You put Lena to bed, read her a story. Just sit there with her for a bit and let her soak up some good juju from your presence.”

He stared.

“Good juju?” The question was skeptical.

“Yeah, you know,” you gestured vaguely with both hands, “positive energy.”

His brows twitched downward.

“Positive energy?” he repeated, blinking. He held his arms out at his sides, looking askance.

You snorted a laugh.

“Yeah, I guess positive energy might not be the right descriptor.” You tilted your head back and forth in thought for a moment. “Protective juju, how about that?”

Pope studied you for a moment, eyes flitting across your face, then nodded. He turned to walk toward Lena’s room before stopping suddenly in his tracks and turning back.

“Do you know how to load a dishwasher?”

The question was so abrupt, it took a moment to register.

“Uh, yeah?” You meant it as a statement, but in your confusion, it came out with the lilt of a question. All the meals you’d eaten so far in the house had been small enough that you’d hand washed the dishes, so this was the first time you’d be using this particular dishwasher. But still, it wasn’t like Baz and Cathy’s dishwasher was from the future. “Who doesn’t know how to load a dishwasher?”

“The right way.” He narrowed his gaze. “Do you know how to load it the right way?”

“Like plates on the bottom and cups and bowls on top?”

Pope made a frustrated, growl-like noise and started back toward you.

“No no no!” You threw your hands up, stopping his progress. “Lena! Bedtime story!” You pointed back toward Lena’s bedroom just as the sound of her opening the bathroom door made its way down the hall. “The world will not end if the dishwasher isn’t loaded correctly, I promise.”

He didn’t look entirely convinced, but Lena’s bedroom light flickering on in the hallway drew his attention and he was forced to capitulate.

“If it’s not right when I unload it tomorrow, you’ll be hand washing the dishes from now on,” he grumbled as he walked away.

“No I won’t!” You called after him, smiling to yourself.

You heard him pause, as though seriously contemplating turning back around, before eventually continuing to Lena’s bedroom.

By the time you were done with the dishes, Pope had finished reading Lena her story. He didn’t use funny voices, or project particularly loud, but he read with a sort of rhythmic cadence that carried into the kitchen. So you knew the moment he was finished with that night's chapter of Blue Willow.

On your way to the main bedroom, you stopped just outside Lena’s door and quietly pressed in closer, eavesdropping. You caught the last half of whatever Pope had been saying.

“--would have got you out of there sooner if we could. I never wanted you to be anywhere else but here, you know that, right? Lena, tell me you know that.”

There was a desperate vulnerability in his voice that you’d never heard before, and you suddenly felt guilty for listening in. Before you could hear Lena’s response, you continued down the hallway to get ready for bed.

The entire time you’d been preparing for Lena’s arrival, Pope had slept on the couch, insisting that you needed your space. But now that Lena was in the house, that particular sleeping arrangement was coming to an end.

You tried not to overthink it as you brushed your teeth. While you briefly considered exchanging your normal sleep outfit of a big t-shirt, no bra, and men’s boxers for something a little more full-coverage, you decided against it. If Pope couldn’t handle the possibility of seeing a little nipple poking through your shirt, he’d just have to get over it.

You were walking out of the en suite when he came into the room. He stopped in his tracks so quickly, it jolted you, and you dropped the earring you were removing from your ear.

“Sorry,” he muttered, bending down at the same time you did, hand bumping yours as you both reached for the earring. “Sorry,” he repeated lowly, withdrawing his hand quickly, as if your touch burned.

“It’s okay,” you brushed it off with a chuckle. “You just surprised me. I can be a little jumpy.”

You both straightened, and while you turned to place the earring on the bedside table, you tried to ignore the heat of Pope’s gaze on your legs. It sparked a keen awareness up your spine; buzzed pleasantly at the nape of your neck.

“Lena down for the night?” you asked, turning back around in time to see Pope’s eyes dart away from your ass.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” You climbed under the covers and began nestling down. “Is it alright that I take the right side?”

Pope nodded, shifted uncertainly from one foot to the other, then walked into the en suite, closing the door after him.

Turning out the lamp–the only light in the room–you rolled onto your side away from the bathroom door. You didn’t want to make things any more awkward by staring straight at him when he walked out.

As much as he tried to hide it, you could tell he was skittish about this part of the whole arrangement. Knowing what you did about his personal life and his past, though it wasn’t much, you wondered if he’d ever shared a bed with a woman for more than a night.

The idea that you might be the first person to lay next to him night after night gave you a secret little thrill. Made an inappropriately proprietary feeling take plant its fingers in your chest.

Contemplating that thought, you tried not to react when the bathroom door creaked open and Pope padded quietly over to the bed. He hesitated briefly on his side before slipping under the sheets.

You waited to feel the customary wiggling and moving about indicating that he was getting comfortable, but Pope’s side of the bed remained dead still.

Glancing over your shoulder, moonlight from the window illuminated his figure–flat on his back, sheets pulled up to his chin, arms at his side, staring straight up at the ceiling. Like a corpse or a Pharaoh in a sarcophagus.

Rolling your head back over, you shoved your face in your pillow to stifle a laugh. There was probably something clinically wrong with you that you were charmed by how unsettled he seemed to be with the entire situation.

Once you had your giggles under control, you were about to say “good night” when Pope spoke.

“She isn’t talking.”

He said it quietly, but with weight.

You rolled to your back.

“Yeah.”

“Why isn’t she talking?” He continued staring straight up at the ceiling.

“She’s always been a quiet kid.”

“Not this quiet.”

“I know.” Running a hand down your face, you paused to gather your thoughts. Unlike Pope, you had some experience in this particular area. All of your pre-service teaching had been at Title 1 schools, and you’d acted as a support system for plenty of dispossessed kids navigating the system. Too many, really.

So while Pope was going into this with Lena blind, you weren’t. And you knew it would be up to you to help guide them both.

“It’s going to take some time, Pope. The last few months have been so unstable for her, just one sucker punch after another. When kids go through stuff like this, when they’re not sure what they can trust or where they’ll be the day after tomorrow, they enter into survival mode. They’re not thinking about laughing with their friends and doing schoolwork and playing with their toys. They’re just focused on what they can control–themselves. Which is why it’s going to take a while for Lena to loosen some of that control and relax.”

“When they’re not sure who they can trust?” Pope’s head snapped toward you, his voice still quiet, but with a dangerous undercurrent. “Lena knows she can trust me, okay?”

“No,” you turned your head toward him as well, “that’s not what I said. I said she’s not sure what she can trust.”

“What’s the difference?” His tone was accusatory, defensive.

“Andrew.” You rolled over completely, facing him squarely and holding his heated gaze. “Lena is a smart kid. She knows she can trust you–I believe that–but she also knows that you can’t control every circumstance in the world. She’s lost her mother, her father, and even briefly, her home–all in the span of a year. And none of that had to do with her trust in your ability to take care of her.” You gave him some time to absorb your words.

He made a choked, frustrated noise. Then, he sighed, resigned.

“Well then what am I supposed to do?”

“We.” You corrected. “We are going to give her routine, stability, and time to adjust. Kids are resilient. She’ll find her footing sooner than you think, as long as we keep the ground she’s standing on steady.”

It was quiet again, for a long moment. You almost assumed the conversation was over, preparing to roll back into your sleeping position. Then Pope spoke again.

“What if I’ve already fucked her up?” He whispered, so quietly you almost didn’t catch it.

“You didn’t.” Your answer was immediate.

“How do you know?” Still whispering.

“How do I know?” Shaking your head, you took a deep breath, not sure where to start. “First of all, if Lena were somehow fucked up–IF,” you emphasized, pausing until Pope turned his head back toward you and caught your eyes, “which she isn’t…it wouldn’t be your fault.”

He started to speak, but you cut him off. “I’ve known Lena since the day she was born, and she’s had a lot of less-than-stellar influences in her life, but you are not one of them. You’ve never yelled at her, belittled her, forgotten her at daycare, or left her alone at a party past midnight.” You didn’t have to say Baz’s name for him to know who you were talking about; the stories you’d heard from Cathy could fill a case worker’s files to overflowing.

“Secondly,” you continued, starting to rile yourself up a little, “even if things have been bumpy and you weren’t always able to shield her from the bad stuff, you’ve been trying. Genuinely trying. Kids see that–they know when someone gives a fuck about them, and it counts for a lot more than you think it does.”

Pope swallowed visibly, his lips twisting as he thought.

“And third, Lena’s just a good fucking kid. At her core. She’s smart and funny and she cares about people. That’s not going to change because DCFS took her away for a little while. Trust me.”

You fell back against your pillow with a huff, staring up at the ceiling once again. Pope’s side of the bed rustled as he rolled over to face you, stared for a moment, not speaking, then rolled to his back once again.

“Okay,” he finally said.

Just that.

Okay.

He said it without conviction, less an agreement and more a surrender. Like he didn’t know how to respond and so just gave up.

Worrying your lip a moment, you contemplated your next thought before you said it out loud. It’s not that you were particularly precious with details about your past, or that it was something you safeguarded out of a misplaced fear of vulnerability. But there were times you still felt trigger-shy about overplaying your hand, emotionally, and you worried that what you were about to admit might be a step in that direction.

“Look,” you rolled back over to face Pope, who turned his head toward you. “I spent two years in foster care when I was just a little older than Lena. It was not like her situation with a sweet house in the suburbs, yeah? It was messy and chaotic and scary. And even still, when I was sent back home, I didn’t want to go. That’s how bad it was with my family.”

You tried not to get distracted by the way Pope’s gaze narrowed and darkened, or the look that crossed his face that you couldn’t quite describe.

“I would have given everything to have someone like you looking out for me back then.” Pausing, you swallowed as an unexpected surge of emotion tightened your throat. “Everything. But even without someone to ride in and save me, I ended up just fine. And I’m not half as strong as Lena is. So when I tell you that you haven’t fucked anything up, believe me.”

“Okay.”

This time, when he whispered it across the pillow, you almost believed him.

As you drifted off to sleep, you considered that maybe Pope was going to need as much care and guidance recovering from this whole incident as Lena was.

#andrew pope cody #pope cody #animal kindgom #andrew pope cody fic #pope cody x reader #andrew cody x reader #what the hell is tagging #i'm just clicking all the ones that pop up #how do i do this #i haven't posted fic since 2018

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