The last thing he wants to do is admit defeat – Whatever the defeat is in this scenario. He’s tried to keep his head above water and keep swimming, but each time something wraps around his ankles and pulls him under. The last few weeks have been one thing after another, piling over him despite how hard he’s trying to remain calm – Lettie’s arrest is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. He’s tried to keep a stiff upper lip, everything in him telling him to buck up and keep moving – But truthfully? He has a feeling the the second he lets his guard down, lets himself breathe in the catastrophe that’s happening around them, and he’ll be a goner. It’s a childish fear, one only propelled forward by his own insecurities and unresolved issues – But he has a feeling if he lets his walls down, lets himself feel everything that’s going on around them, he’ll never be able to come back. He’s terrified of spiraling out of control again, of finding himself downing a bottle of scotch and throwing punches at the first cop he sees; He’s terrified their lives are bound to fall apart like it had after Maddie’s death, that they’ll end up back at square one once again and this time, they won’t make it back. He can already hear her telling him he’s being irrational, reminding him that she’s there. He has no doubt in his mind that Rowan would be by his side through anything, he’s more afraid of himself, of the destruction he’s capable of. God, he wants to feel something, but he knows it’ll only snowball into something much worse.
So he clenches his jaw as he hits the floor, trying to ignore the way his hands shake and the unrelenting pain shooting up his leg. He’s bound to have bruises forming by now – He’d gone down hard, there was no denying that he’d end up in bed all day icing the injury tomorrow. Take your time, handsome. As if like clockwork, he voice helps keep him semi-grounded, pulling him from the thoughts plaguing him in this moment. It only lasts a second, though, before he’s reminded of why she’s telling him to take his time at all. Bullshit, he can’t help but think. This is utter fucking bullshit. He lets his eyes fall shut as her hand moves slowly on his back, a sigh following. A hand stays at his eyes in that moment, in an attempt to keep himself calm. There’s tears threatening to spill over, threatening to pull him under despite his best efforts. A silence comes with it, as Andy tries to control his breathing. It’s Rowan’s next words that push him over, and he finally begins to drown. How can I help? It’s not a particularly loaded sentence, but an honest one, enough to cause him to hunch, his hand moving to push through his hair. “Fuck, Rowan.” He begins with, voice cracking as he says her name, eyes blinking furiously as he tries to regain control of himself. She’s seen him cry plenty of times, seen him in his worst moments and he’s done just the same. It doesn’t make it any easier each time, though. It’s not often that he actually lets the tears fall and let himself give in to the grief that eats away at him – He’s teetered the edge plenty of times, but he’s sure she can count on one hand the amount of times he’s truly cried in front of her.
“I don’t know, I don’t –” he cuts himself off, shaking his head. At some point between him saying her name and now, he’d begun to cry – He can feel the tears beginning to roll of his cheeks and hit his shirt, leaving little droplets in their path. Fuck, this is embarrassing, a voice in the back of his head reminds him, taking him back to the times when he was child crying into his pillow at night after a nasty fight at the dinner table. There’s a shame that always comes with it, telling him he should have done better, been stronger – Only digging the hole deeper and deeper each time. He’s caving in on himself, and it feels as though there’s no going back now. He takes a shaky breath, still refusing to look at her. Even though Rowan’s the only person he trusts to cry around, it doesn’t mean he enjoys her seeing him like this. He avoids eye contact each time, his hand moving to wipe at his cheeks to remove the evidence – Only to end up replaced with new tears soon after. Another pause, before he’s letting out something between a scoff and a bitter laugh. “I can’t even get up, Christ… How fucking pathetic is that.” He states rather than questions, his shaking hand moving slowly over his thigh. “I – What am I supposed to do?” He asks, unsure if it’s to Rowan or just into the void, “I don’t think we can come back from this, baby.” His head finally turns to her as he speaks, not bothering to hide the emotion anymore. The second the tears began to fall, there was no way back. “She’s gonna go to prison ‘cause of me, Ro.” He begins again, shaking his head. “She saved me and now she’s paying for her mistake.”
The frown on her lips pulls down deeper when Andy hunches forward, his voice cracks and she watches his hands press against his face. Andy isn’t okay and that becomes even more apparent as she feels him start to crack and fall apart under her hand, knowing she’ll have to pick the pieces back up and try and piece the jagged edges back together over the rest of the night. Sometimes she thinks he’s more duct tape and super glue and safety pin than Andy, he’s been chipped away at so much over the years. For now, the hand on his back moves up and down the length of his spine slowly while she waits for him as he lets everything out, resisting the urge to interrupt him right away with words of reassurance and comfort. She’s seen Andy get emotional thousands of times over their relationship, but to see him actually cry like this? She can remember each instance vividly, they happen so few and far between. “I don’t know,” she answers honestly when he asks what he is supposed to do, chewing on her bottom lip anxiously for a second. “But you don’t need to figure it out yourself. I’ve got you; let me help you.” Her voice is soft when she reassures him, repeating back words she’s said to him what feels like thousands of times.
“Hey,” her tone takes on a slightly sharper edge to it, the hand in his hair moving to rest against the side of his jaw softly to keep him from looking away from her again. “Saving you was not a mistake.” She’s not sure if he had meant it the way the words came out but she knows Andy’s self-worth has been bent and twisted and splintered every which way and so even the possibility that he did mean it had her heart cracking in her chest. “You know what a wreck your Ma’d be if she hadn’t saved you? Or Ollie? What it’d do to me?” There had been a brief moment during the whole thing, before she got to the club house when a new prospect who sounded half on the verge of a breakdown had told her to get there fast in a shakey voice that she thought she would be walking into something even worse than she was, where she had tried to prepare herself to finding his dead body on the club house floor. “I don’t even wanna think about that.” Her lips purse together for a beat, unsure of what exactly he needs from her right now. She doesn’t have a solution for all of this --- as much as she wishes there was some kind of magic wand or something she could wave to make it all fix itself and go away, she can’t. “C’mere, baby,” she sighs out quietly, hand moving to the back of his neck to gently pull him down so his head can sit on her shoulder, free arm moving to wrap around his middle.
A moment passes and Rowan repeats Andy’s words in her head. There’s an odd feeling that comes over her at them ‘she’s gonna go to prison ‘cause of me’ because yeah, technically she kind of is. Rowan didn’t think Lettie going on was the right call --- her stomach had been in knots about it from the minute she heard that she was going to be the driver, but she knew she couldn’t put a stop to it. While she knew if she asked him to, Andy probably would have rescinded his offer of letting her in on it, she also knew that might not have been the right choice either. The two of them have a whole other side to them that she will never fully understand, no matter how much she would like to. The chaos that comes from stuff like this is something the two of them need, something that somehow keeps them who they are --- and that’s not something that is ever going to change. The whole situation is frustrating because it somehow feels inevitable and preventable all at once; she knows even if Lettie hadn’t gone on that job, she’d be on one eventually. “Lettie asked to come on that job with you,” she reminds him quietly, a hand moving to smooth through his hair gently. “We all know the risks that come with that. She’s a big girl now, even if we don’t always see her that way, and this was her choice too. It isn’t all on you.” The list of things that can go wrong on a job is about a million bullet points long, it’s an unspoken truth Rowan keeps tucked in the back of her mind every time she kisses Andy goodbye and tells him to come home in one piece. “We don’t know how this is gonna go yet,” she reminds him, trying to keep some hope alive that Lettie isn’t going to get a life sentence and rot away behind bars for the role she played in that night.