Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

You stood at the centre of a silent road, staring out into the vast American wasteland of what was probably once a lovely place to live. There were lovely suburban homes that stretched as far as the eye could see, each having a somewhat similar structure but with different windows, rooftops, and garage choices, and if you hadn’t known the world had ended, you would think you were standing on a television set. Everything about it seemed perfectly American to you, like someone would just open the door in their slippers at any second and get their mail out of their odd little outside boxes. Yeah, even that was different.

You scrutinised the worn-out map in your hands, the downside of escaping the state you were in meant that the second you crossed out of Louisiana, you had no real maps of use for Virginia and you were not used to feeling lost in such a big country. You wondered, briefly, if back home in England, you would have had an easier time of the end of the world. Snorting at the thought, you rolled the map back up and began checking homes. Four years into what your people back in Louisiana had called The Rising, it was getting harder and harder to find food that hadn’t rotted or gone sour.

The bayou people at least had their own means of food production, you were starving, and your body usually had a heavy intake of protein even if it was just military mush from the old base. The sun was uncomfortably hot, you’d run out of books to read, you were on your last bottle of water (which was disgustingly warm) and you were covered in sweat.

Looking down at yourself, you wiped the sweat off your naked collarbone and scowled, feeling yourself melting under the Virginia sun slightly.

It wasn’t quite like India, which you were used to, because you had weather durable clothes, beautiful ones at that – saaris and salwar kameez, no, instead you had thick selvage denim and even thicker sporting boots which made you fry from the waist down. The denim was so heavy with blood that they weren’t baggy anymore, and instead clung to the muscles which remained taut from walking miles upon miles down the massive too-large roads. You stripped out of your blood and guts-covered shirt once you’d gotten out of a small hoard, feeling the smell start to actually get worse under the heat and just giving up, letting the sun bleach and discolour your pale bra instead.

“Fuck’s sake, empty,” you scowled, kicking the door back open as you left the first house.

Hell, it’s not like you’d seen a living face in weeks and even if you did, you didn’t particularly care. Tying half of your hair up in a messy clumsy attempt at a turban, large dark bangs escaped either side of your head and fell-down to your chest, but it was at least now much harder for walkers to grab you. It didn’t do much for the heat though, but at least the sun wasn’t frying your scalp with it, you mused. So, you were hot, you were on your last bit of water which now tasted as appetising as sweat, you were pretty sure you might be on your last tampon, and you were really fucking hungry.

At the sound of familiar shuffling and raspy, decayed vocal chords, you turned around, detaching the kirpan from your hip – a long, ornate holy dagger, before looking at the size of the walker approaching you. You were short sure, but even if you weren’t, this guy was huge – and ugly, well, uglier than most – towering over you immensely.

“Waheguru give me strength, you are one ugly bastard,” you muttered, mingling Punjabi into your exclamation of surprise at the walker’s size alone. At least he was on his own, you’d gone through at least twelve today and you had your fill.

You slid the knife back and detached the large sledgehammer from your back, charging for its head first, gripping the long handle with both bruised fists, you swung it with enough force that had you been any weaker, you’d have been lost in its momentum. Cringing, you stepped back, realising that the sun was making the walkers worse than usual, they seemed more hungry, if that were possible, and the putrification process was getting more disgusting and making them smell even more bad than they already did. They had gone so soft in their state of decay that you didn’t even need to do much in the way of cutting them with your curved knife anymore, if you swung the sledgehammer with enough force their heads would just detach from their vertebrae and go flying.

And go flying they did, completely destroyed of course, like a grape, and landing on a car.

That’s how you’d met Rick Grimes.

You’d launched a walker head directly onto the jeep he’d been driving to scavenge, making him almost swerve and come to a screeching halt, with several spidery cracks going through his windshield. You froze when you saw a moving car, because in your experience, meeting other survivors wasn’t a good thing. Not considering the place you’d fucking fled from, you’d met maybe one nice person and tried to help them take a pharmacy, they ended up getting killed, so you weren’t really in a good place to be making friends or potentially meeting new enemies.

You glanced down the road and contemplated just running and then hiding in one of the houses, only to hear the jeep door open as you thought about it. Swallowing thickly, you clenched your hands around the long handle of the sledge which was, in fairness, as big as you and therefore a rather impressive feat, and began slowly backing away from the figure that came out of the truck.

“Hey!” he called out gruffly.

“That was an accident,” you blurted out.  “No harm done, I didn’t even break the window properly, I’m just gonna… just… back away now,”

The man bristled in surprise at your accent, but continued advancing. You noticed he had a piece on him, secured in a holster and honestly looked like the cleanest person in the apocalypse that you’d seen in a while. In fact, he was even dressed as a cop – or what you supposed cops in America were supposed to look like.

“I’m sorry, I’m just – going to be on my way now –“

The man held up both his arms in what you supposed was a surrendering motion, looking you over curiously – behind him, you saw a woman coming out, a black woman with an impressively long sword. They both just stared at you, mostly at how you were dressed, and the fact you looked like you’d probably been on the roads longer than you even realised, because it showed.

“Who’re you? Where are your people?” was the first thing he barked out, making you blink slowly and continue backing away, eyes refusing to leave the gun that he had holstered. You’d had a gun – in your gym bag you were carrying, but it was long out of bullets, which left you very much up shitcreek.

You cursed internally, these were probably more junkyard rats, but, you mused, they looked a bit too clean for all that. Still, anything you’d heard about human communities here – having spied in bushes and pilfered here and there, it wasn’t good, so you just kept moving. You decided to put the sledgehammer back on your back, using the makeshift strap you’d made out of old clothes sleeves, you slowly placed your gym bag down – at least that didn’t have anything in it, and slowly detached the kirpan, putting it on top of your bag and putting your hands behind your head without being asked.

They looked at you strangely.

“Don’t hurt me okay? You’re clearly packing more heat than I am – I’m just – I’m just scavenging. Like anyone else whose alive I guess,” your voice was crackly and hoarse from not having interacted with a living human being in months, you were more than a little rusty. “It’s just me, on my own.  I um. People called me Deadshot back when I had people. I don’t anymore,”

The man looked at his people before putting a hand out in a calming gesture, letting you know you could have your knife on you and pick your things up, and that they weren’t going to take anything from you after a moment of silent deliberation.

“We’re not gonna hurt you,” said the man calmly “-Did you walk yourself here?”

You heard your stomach rumble loudly, and frankly, so did they, but they didn’t react. You just glanced down at your boots and nodded, hoping to God they’d believe you. The black woman murmured some things to him, which seemed to put him at ease, you didn’t know what, but it seemed she had a good eye for recognising lone wolves, and you were definitely one. She had been one herself, so she could see it clearly in you.

“Well,” the man cleared his throat “-That’s an awful big walk, how long have you been on the road?”

You cringed, and it was at that moment you realised that you didn’t know, and from the clueless look on your face, they gathered as much too.

“What month is it?”

“April,” he said shortly.

You blinked, it was April when you left – which means – oh God. Fucking Christ. You’d been walking with the dead for…that long?! They watched as you innocently looked at your hands and started counting on your fingers to be sure in what was a very childlike gesture, because in truth, you just weren’t very good at math in your mind. You were very much a sharp sort but you worked messily, and on paper, like a mad genius – as far as your mentor had been concerned.

“Like, a year?” you said quietly, disbelief wheedling in your tone, clearly you hadn’t quite got to grips with it yourself. “Anyway, I think I should be asking you who you are and who your people are. I haven’t run into a single good one since I’ve been out on my own. I ain’t heard nowt good about the people in these parts,”

“That is…fair,” the man acquiesced, supposing you’d heard of the Saviors.

“My name is Rick Grimes – and this is Michonne, do you mind if I ask how old you are?” he said gently, because you couldn’t have been too much older than Enid, he was judging on your height, but your body screamed woman. You were wondering around the apocalypse in a bra and blood covered denim trousers and mountain boots, with a figure that put all of the men he knew to shame in terms of defined muscle. It was a weird sight, to be sure, but he couldn’t judge your age from your chest, or your height, so he just asked.

“Um…?” you gave him a clueless look and replied “-does that even matter anymore? I think I’m…twenty? Maybe nineteen? Look, I don’t know. I think I’ve…lost track of time,” you crackled out.

It was at that point that Rick made a decision.

“Well, you sound hungry, and I have a good group – a good town. Alexandria, not a few miles north of here. We were on a run too – you can help us and come back. I insist on it,” he said.

You frowned, and said you didn’t do groups, only for Michonne to cut in.

“We have running water,” she said “-and food, medicine,” she glanced at your exposed torso “-clean clothes, and not enough people that know how to fight. It’d be nice if you came with us at least for a little while, then you can go on your way, if you want,”

Rick marvelled at how she had the perfect answer, but it was because Michonne had been exactly in the same sort of position, only she had been older, had clothes and more supplies, and had a better lay of the land than you. She looked at you and saw a highly capable woman, but also someone who needed help, and lots of it.

At the sight of your empty water and the sound of your scratchy voice, she silently reached into a brown bag and tossed you an unopened bottle, making you stare at it in disbelief, then at her, before thanking her and clearing the entire thing in seconds.

It was the only thing you’d had in days and it showed.

“Who were your old people?” Rick asked warily, it seemed both had made the decision to take you home like an errant puppy, but you just shrugged – and figured they’d want to make sure you weren’t one of the disreputable folk known in these parts.

“I ain’t a Junkrat if that’s what you wanna know, my people are all the way in Louisiana, and with any luck, they stay there. It’s just me Sir,”

Yeah. Just you. You needed him to believe that if he was to trust you, it just seemed so impossible in how hard it was to survive in a world like this, but it was true. Michonne had done it, so couldn't have others? Rick mused.

You were surprised with how much they just trusted you because you were alone and didn’t seem like a threat, you went as far as to open your bag and show them you didn’t actually have any guns. Inside was dismally empty, you handed him the gun and told him you ran out of rounds a long time ago, and just kept it in case you happened across any.

“The last time I did, I was robbing some old redneck’s shack – but I haven’t got that lucky in a while,” you’d said, making him smile weakly, and take the gun. Rick was surprised personally by how much of a non-problem you were, doing things without even him having to say it, clearly you’d been dealing with not very good people or at least, knew how the survival game worked.

Inside your bag, he didn’t react to the scant feminine supplies, he was just surprised at the sight of portable CD player but no earphones, two clearly well-read books, and some rolled up maps and A-Zs, some from Louisiana and some of Virginia, where you were now and some pens that you’d used to make markings on them with. You really didn’t have a lot – there wasn’t even any food in there, just a twinkie wrapper.

“You like music?” he said, trying to make a slightly less strained conversation, because the air was stupidly tense. You gave him a strange look, and glanced at the woman, who was just watching him go through your things with her arms folded over her tank top.

“I like to listen with one ear – it’s better than being left with my own thoughts but you have to listen out for things too. My earbuds broke,” you said, feeling your throat ache, you winced. It had been a long time since you’d used properly it beyond muttering insults at walkers to yourself.

“Smart,” Rick praised, before making an effort to soften his tone, looking you over and considering the fact you’d been on the road this long and had survivor scrawled all over you, more so than most. “If we find some, we’ll bring them and you can see if they work,”

You mumbled a thank you, frowning at him in confusion, in truth you were waiting for that penny to drop, for the big reveal that they were in fact, not good people. Waiting, and waiting – in truth, a day into being in Alexandria, you were still waiting.

Michonne looked at you warily, like she was also ready for you to reveal you weren’t as good as your forthcoming actions portrayed you as, and to be honest, you were more comfortable around that than Rick’s attempt at being kind. Kindness was never to be trusted. They noticed that you were silent and methodical, wielding your sledgehammer with more strength than some fully grown men, and how you span like a whirlwind of death when you got out a curved knife and one from a kitchen. It wasn’t just fighting, it was clearly a style – you were definitely skilled. Highly skilled. Enough that from having you on their run they could now make sense of how you survived for a year on your own.

“We have people closer to your age at Alexandria,” said Rick when you got in the jeep with him. “-My boy Carl, he’s seventeen,” he said conversationally, apparently unable to bare the awkward silence since he couldn’t really talk with his lover the way he usually would with this strange, other presence in the vehicle. “There’s others,”

You shrugged and stared blankly ahead, feeling your legs ache with relief as you watched the houses become a blur as he sped down the road, your stomach somewhat filled with the water but still no solids – it rumbled loudly.

“And food,” said Rick helpfully “-when was the last time you ate?”

You frowned and closed your eyes for a moment, sighing deeply – you really didn’t trust this, but maybe they were like the guy at the pharmacy, they gave off good vibes, you could tool-up and leave, the sword lady – Michonne? She said as much. That thought comforted you.

“Four days ago I had a twinkie which somehow hadn’t gone bad. Mostly because I don’t think they were ever good. It was probably mostly chemicals anyway. Americans aren’t good at candy,” you said bluntly.

“You’re British, aren’t you?” said Rick, latching onto it the moment you otherised everyone in the jeep, making you almost be sarcastic in response along the lines of ‘figure all that out on your own?’ but considering you were hoping they’d be good people, pissing them off probably wasn’t smart.

“English, yeah. I was in the country with my family during the collapse. Airport. Long story. Still getting used to walking for miles upon miles without so much as seeing a petrol station. Your country is decadently big,” you accused, stretching, and taking the moment to relax your aching body.

“You can explain in your own time, I think you need some food and some rest,” said Rick “-you’ve been very helpful for someone running on empty,”

“I’m always running on empty,” you said with a yawn “-it’d be nice to sleep without waking up every hour to survey the area, y’know I slept in a tree once?” This was the most you’d talked in a while, and your vocal chords ached at the sensation.

“That’s…creative, but walkers can’t climb, so smart as long as you don’t fall out,” Rick said, driving in a manner you found entirely too relaxed for what was a strange situation.

“Walkers? Is that what you call them?” you said curiously, making him glance at you briefly before turning back to the road.

“Yeah, what do you call them?”

You shrugged.

“In the bayou we just called them rotters, ‘cos… well… yeah,” you said lamely, even the terminology you used sounded painfully British to him, but it was a fitting name all the same, making him hum quietly in agreement.

“Come across many on the road?” he said.

“A herd, north of here, small – wanna say like, thirty?”

Rick wondered what qualified as small in your world, but didn’t react.

“Came through them, did the undead shuffle – they’re not really smart, y’know? If it walks like a rotter, moans like a rotter, smells like a rotter, they’ll pretty much just bugger off,”

Rick cringed at the idea of a young woman only slightly older than Carl making their way through this world on their own, covered in blood and guts in a herd of thirty people, and Michonne couldn’t say she was fond of the idea, but didn’t react outwardly.

“We uh, we know, it’s a good trick, disgusting but it works, unless it rains,” said Michonne, finally saying something. “You can also just have them follow you around, if you take out their teeth,”

You nodded – and wanted to say you had one, but didn’t want to get into that whole fucking story with them, there was no real way to spin keeping your dead mother around until she rotted so much she couldn’t walk anymore, so you just kept silent after that.

Upon arriving in Alexandria, you were floored with how undisturbed it looked – they had impressive gate-work, not the best you’d seen, but impressive. They had huge, sprawling homes and a cosy sort of community setup.

You really, really hoped they were good people.

A man in slacks and a flannel opened the gate for you, letting Rick drive straight in and park up in one of the garages, before pulling you out by the hand. A woman who was on the outpost that leered over the gate came down – she seemed a bit more on the curvy side like yourself, but tall, with hair tide back and rather pretty, in your opinion.

“How was the run?” before realising he’d come back with company, and glancing at Rick warily “-Whose this?”

“It was a decent haul, not great for food but we got more clothes, knives and amenities in. This is – what did you say your name was again?”

“Just call me Deadshot. I don’t do names,” you said shortly, before realising how rude you sounded, you cleared your dry throat and elaborated. “I mean, I probably won’t be around for long and I don’t do that whole….attachment thing, learning names and all that. People come in and go out, that’s just how it is, how I am,”

Rick found that to be rather pessimistic, but he understood the reasoning, and glanced at Tara with a small, tired smile.

“She accidentally launched a walker head at our jeep with her sledgehammer. She helped us on a run to apologise for it – she’s capable Tara, so I thought I’d bring her back with us,” Rick elaborated. He wanted to say that it was because you didn’t seem that much older than Enid and Carl and despite being a full-figured, blatantly strong woman, you were running on fumes and didn’t even have a shirt on your back. But he didn’t want to patronise you.

Tara noticed, and didn’t bother masking the appreciative stare because it happened before she realised she was doing it, not that you cared much.

“Yeah you look pretty strong,” said Tara finally. “I’m Tara,” she gestured to the expanse of houses behind her lamely.

“Welcome to Alexandria, I guess.”

You pieced together a few things, first that there was more than one community, there was a place called the Hilltop, The Kingdom, something ominously dubbed “The Compound” – and Alexandria, and from what you gathered, these people had been through some rather trying times of their own. They had just warred with another faction, you didn’t care much for the details, just that they’d lost people.

That was why you didn’t do communities, too much in-fighting. You were already surrounded by predators, you didn’t need to put yourself willingly in the viper’s nest, which is what you likened communities to, in front of Rick.

Oh yeah, the first thing that became apparent was your abject lack of community spirit. You were about as talkative as a rock and everything about you was an extreme curiosity. When you got there, you took to wearing a sports bra as a shirt and changed into some combat trousers that weren’t waterlogged with blood, and honestly presented in a somewhat masculine manner, exerting more physical and outward strength than a lot of the soft people in Alexandria.

Needless to say, you didn’t fit in with the kid’s much, even the survivor girl – Enid, didn’t much speak to you, which was fine by you. There was a gangly boy – Carl, the one that Rick mentioned, who had an eyepatch that you glanced at for a moment, before resuming your business. True to promise, they had food – dried military mac n’ cheese which you had missed. A lot. It even had chilli – or what white people thought passed for chilli anyway, but you weren’t about to complain. You were given a house, your own house – a whole entire house just because they had one spare, making you look at Rick uncertainly.

“Alexandria is a big place, full of promise. We lost a lot of people, but we have space for more,” he said quietly.

“I’m just passing through but, thanks, for – for everything,” you said.

Rick gave you a silent, critical stare, he observed the almost bodybuilder-respectable muscle in your back, and the strength in your arms and your torso, and how you seemed so close to feral from how long you’d been out in the wild. You were just, to him, a young girl – a woman – out on her own, in a very dangerous place. You needed to stay. Alexandria needed people like you, it was something Deanna never quite got to grips with when she was alive, but Rick knew. He knew exactly what it took to survive, and they’d already lost so much.

“I hope that the longer you stay here, the more we can try to change your mind, find me if you have any problems,” he said after a moment, before telling you in the morning there was going to be a small community meeting with the centrefold of his people, the ones who more or less governed Alexandria with their strength, and that they would meet you properly.

You slept – not well, due to your habits, but better than you’d slept in a very long time, and you even had the luxury of a hot shower, which made your aching bones almost sing with relief. The fact that when you opened your pantry, there had been some food left in there by Rick’s people, that was just so normal and so shocking that you stood there, holding a tin of beans, trying not to cry.

It was funny what ended up hitting you hard in the apocalypse.

You ate and joined the gathering of people, and just let their voices wash all over you, silently surveying the crowd and the community members who’d come together. You were mostly impressed with the man you saw practicing fighting with a long stick. It reminded you of Gatka – the classes your mother used to take you to, only, you’d be wielding a wooden sword. You saw a priest, and didn’t know whether to laugh or just stare. How could anyone Godly be left in this shitshow? Then again, Alexandria also had a church, so you weren’t surprised. Finally, you tuned into the conversation, feeling sets of eyes on you.

“-trust her, Rick? That she doesn’t have people?” – you heard one of them say, a woman with a complexion slightly lighter than yours whose name you’d learn was Rosita.

“There were no cars or camps for miles out we’d have seen if she was with anybody, so far, she checks out, and she helped us on our run, and to be honest, has been more than forthcoming with us. She’s skilled too, and we need more of that. Now more than ever,” said Rick.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the woman said, leaving brusquely.

Then, blah, blah, blah – some sort of power talk after losing people in their stupid faction war, honestly, you really didn’t care and you practically exuded that fact with your arms crossed under your chest and a bored expression on your face. For a second, you couldn’t have looked more teenager than you did in that moment.

Tara had sidled up to you, and you found her presence rather nice – something about her gave off an honesty you couldn’t pinpoint, so you stood next to her considering she was the first to welcome you in.

“-What about Negan? Do we kill him yet?”

“We keep him prisoner. We don’t just kill, besides, we have to take care of the remaining Saviors. Keeping him is an example to them,” said Rick.

God, you were bored. You wanted to try sleeping in that nice bed some more, if you were honest. Blah, blah, blah...more talking you didn’t much care for because it didn’t seem relevant to you because you didn’t plan to hang around. The next thing seemed to be giving people new jobs to do, there was a lot of clean-up and holes to fill after they’d gone to war with the Saviors, because people had lost a lot.

You had no desire to get in with the community, nor did you give off any sense of community spirit, not even slightly. You were happy to go on runs, but you didn’t like being forced into a team, even though you could see the logic of it, you still didn’t really like it. You didn’t want to work their kitchens even if you were good at it, or help keep track of supplies, which used to be some woman called Olivia’s job, and they didn’t want to let you near all of the guns until they were absolutely certain you were trusted. Which was a shame, because you were excellent at packing and making bullets from your time in the Louisana bayou community.

“Fine, I can watch your prisoner or whatever, I don’t care. I’m not all about this community spirit stuff, I’m not even gonna be here long so I’d prefer to not really…bond with you guys. I mean, I’m sure you’re nice. You seem nice. But I move around. A lot. That’s how I’ve been surviving,” you said curtly.

“That’s a lonely way to survive,” said Tara, making you shrug. You didn’t want to tell them it wasn’t always that way, everyone had their own stories and you didn’t feel like spilling yours out. It just didn’t matter, not to them. You were a temporary cog in their community and they’d you’d roll out, simple as that.

“Are you sure we can trust her with him?” this was a woman with grey hair who looked like a survivor, but Rick just gave you a long, critical look before replying.

“I don’t know, but he’s in a cell, and if we don’t give her the key, I don’t really see the harm in her doing a shift. We can’t leave it all to Morgan,” said Rick, glancing at his very tired, but non-complaining friend – the one with the stick, you realised.

“He is manipulative,” Carl muttered “-they should rotate shifts, dad.”

“I don’t plan on socialising, in case that went over anyone’s heads,” you butted in crisply, giving them your bitchiest expression.

Rick sighed and asked if this was really what you wanted, you shrugged, not wanting to be a burden on them while you were there, you were happy to do whatever job kept you somewhat isolated but not a moocher. He reached into his pockets as he walked over to you, dismissing the meeting, and silently handed you some earbuds he found on the run.

“Forgot to give you these. Watching Negan isn’t an exciting job, so let’s hope those work,”

You thanked him and stared at him, as though still waiting for that penny to drop, before plugging them into your portable CD player. You only had one CD. But it was a damn good one and it was going to be nice to be able to hear it again.

“Negan, the guy you were fighting with? Saviors? Sorry I kind of faded out for a moment – I haven’t been around this many people in a while so I wasn’t really all there,” you admitted, making him nod understandingly. This was probably horribly disorienting for you, he realised, and now – your choice to just watch a prisoner instead of get involved made more sense, and his stare softened considerably.

“He’s not a good man. He’s killed a lot of our people. Good people. Personally – cruelly, you can ask anyone in Alexandria about him and get the picture. I would advise you just listen to your music, and don’t talk to him,” said Rick firmly.

You shrugged again, smiling for the first time in weeks as music filled your left ear when you put the earbud to it, eyes glittering with the first bit of happiness you’d felt in a while.

“Hey, they work!”

You were starting to wonder how good these people were, one thing you’d read in your books was that you should not judge a person by how they treat their friends, but how they treat their enemies, and those who aren’t, and from the state of the man in the cell, you weren’t sure what to think.

There was a designated bathroom bucket and an empty plate of what you supposed was eaten food, and the room smelled of sweat, leather and bleach – which you supposed was an attempt to clean said bucket. You looked and saw a leather jacket on the floor of the cell, which you supposed had been taken off because it was a disgustingly hot day. The room was smaller than the other rooms in the house, and you noticed the windows had been blacked out with material to stop too much light coming in, or rather, so people didn’t peer in.

You’d seen worse setups to be honest, it could have been a lot more horrible than it was, but it wasn’t good.

You found yourself a beanbag chair from your home and dragged it over the second you saw that the room didn’t have anything comfortable beyond a horrid wooden chair for you, and sank yourself into it, earbuds in your ears and clearly blasting music so loud that it could be heard a little bit in the dead silence of the room. You laid eyes on the slumped figure – it had your back turned to you, and was that of a somewhat toned looking older man. He had some battered trousers on, even worse for wear trainers, and a white tank top which was now heavy with sweat and turning off-colour from passive dirtying.

You glanced at him and reached into your gym bag, shuffling it around in the process, apparently making enough noise to wake him – but didn’t notice, as you were blasting Warren Zevon’s ‘Excitable Boy’ album in your ears, something you’d long missed, it was ’07 CD remaster too, so the sound was much crisper than your mother’s old vinyls had been.

You felt his stare on you, but kept the well-read book over your nose. The album took up about thirty minutes back to back, with you eventually humming along to your favourite track – Werewolves of London – now this was music, you mused. You were glad to find it, you didn’t think many Americans had good taste, so this was a golden needle in an absolutely shit-coated haystack. It was a good book you were reading too.

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn – about a man who applies for a job being a pupil to a teacher who wants to “save the world”. Said teacher is a gorilla which communicates telepathically, a silly concept but executed flawlessly. Now you were older, you understood the big concepts it alluded to. Mythological thinking, the effect of modern civilisation on ethics, and it’s relation to societal collapse and sustainability. It got rid of this idea that humans were somehow the pinnacle of human evolution.

It was quite topical, you thought.

It had powerful themes too, which, again, relating to captivity and all the Socratic dialogue you managed to make sense of was fascinating, forcing you to take a new meaning each time you read it. You glanced over the book, and saw the huddled man staring at you through hooded eyes. He was probably in his 40s, a handsome sort of face buried underneath a salt and pepper beard, but he looked worse for wear, like he hadn’t slept well in a long time. You could relate to that.

About thirty minutes in and your music ended. You spent a few hours in silence with nothing but the page turning before Morgan took over – and that’s just how it was, for a while anyway. The book of choice was an annoyingly accurate one, you thought, which spurned your idea to try to talk to Negan.

A horrible idea, probably. You didn’t plan to socialise much but what would be the harm in doing it with a guy who was in a cell anyway? Besides, you were overdosing on Warren Zevon at the moment and devastatingly close to finishing your book for the fourth time.

You knew the album was going to loop again when you sat on your beanbag chair, and pulled the earbuds out, turning the CD player off and quietly putting it away. You looked up from your book and contemplated shuffling the beanbag chair over to the bars, but remember how dangerous the man allegedly was, you kept the distance as it was, putting a bit of scrap paper in as a bookmark despite having read the book so many times.

“People call me Deadshot,” you said after a moment, seeing him look up at you with burning curiosity now – your accent was the first thing to break the silent atmosphere, and it did so rather sharply. You waited for him to say something – his name back - but he didn’t, he just stared at you openly, like you were some sort of strange creature that appeared from nowhere.

In a way, you sort of were.

“You’re Negan right?”

He scoffed, as if you didn’t know, but you had the sort of look about you that actually made out like you really didn’t know. You were definitely a new face, but he presided over so many communities and people that he wouldn’t have known who you were even if you weren’t a new addition, so he’d just assumed you were a resident he’d never bothered to take note of before.

But the way you spoke, implied strongly that you weren’t.

“Do you want a book or something?” you sighed, looking at the overwhelming emptiness of his cell – it was usually Morgan who brought his food, but this time, it was you, sliding him a sandwich under the bars of the cell as he stayed in his corner, with chains loosely around his ankles.

Jesus. They really didn’t want him getting out any time soon. Not even for the bathroom – hence bucket, you supposed they could just let him out and have him in a stress position, but that would require someone watching him go with a gun to the head. God. There was just no humane way of doing it, so they’d given him a damn bucket.  It was about the only thing in his cell besides the jacket, which you saw him use as a blanket in a manner you found, admittedly, quite sad.

“I want out,” Negan said hoarsely, making you grimace and turn your head away from him. Yeah, this was probably why Rick said not to talk to him. You’d been in his position before, and it fucking sucked. You rose up off of the beanbag chair and sighed, watching as his eyes raked along your figure, you didn’t blame him, you showed a lot of it off, not many women (or men for that matter) looked like you, and you worked damn hard for it.

He watched you root around in your bag for a protein bar that was recovered on a scavenge, a horrid, tasteless thing which was mostly chemicals, but good for you, and something you ate often if you found one. You moved the beanbag chair a few centimetres closer – not too much, but a bit, and sat back down.

“Can’t do that old man,” you said with a half-shrug “-even if I wanted to. No key. I’m new here so they don’t trust me that much yet and I don’t plan to stick around long enough till they do,” you paused, gesturing at the plate.

“You should eat,”

“Why?” said Negan darkly “I’m only going to shit it out and deal with that until someone deigns to clean it up,”

You winced at the man’s bluntness but respected it, having been captured before, you’d taken a similar approach in the past, but with Alexandria seeming as civilised as it was, this was especially cruel.

“I’m getting you a new bucket,” you said after a moment of deliberation.

“Whoop-de-fuckin’-do,” said Negan sarcastically in response. You didn’t blame him, but hesitantly pushed your fingers through the bars after getting up so you could slide the plate insistently to his feet as much as you could, before quickly retracting it.

It was as close as you’d gotten to him, and it felt rather like poking your hand through a tiger cage. When he finally took the damn sandwich, you started eating your hideous protein bar, and couldn’t help but think he had the better deal – his at least had fresh tomatoes in it.

You ate together in silence, with you pulling a face of visible disgust, before screwing up the wrapper with a grimace. Okay. That had been pretty nasty. You glanced at the aforementioned shitbucket and sighed. That needed to be cleaned and bleached more than it was if this is how they had to do things. This wasn’t just wasn’t right though, they should either put him out of his misery or torture him to death or whatever macabre thing they wanted to do as revenge for what he did to their people, not do this halfway shit where they can make like they’re better people than him for doing so.

You said as much to Rick later, who grimaced at how harsh you were, and acquiesced to you eventually (and only when Morgan trusted you enough) – having a key to put some things in his cell. Nothing he could escape or hurt himself with, Rick had said.

Huh, was that his game? Make him hate his life so much he ended it on his own? Your mind were awash in thoughts, contemplating what you thought of Rick and his people. On one hand, Rick was very sweet to you and seemed to want to trust you, and his group reluctantly acquiesced to it – on the other hand…this.

You spoke to the stick guy – Morgan – about it, and he could see where you were coming from, truly, but went out of his way to assure you that Rick was a good man, these were good people, and Negan? Negan just wasn’t.

He told you why, and considering what you learned – the barbed wire baseball bat and all? Shit, that sounded nasty, you were surprised they weren’t flat-out torturing him, instead going for this bizarre half-measure.

“Okay but you can’t pretend like you’re doing a good thing by going for some weird half-measure like this. Even if you think it’s more than he deserves, we should at least clean the fucking bucket out more, get him a new one even, y’know. Make it a little…humane? You should strive to be better than your enemies,” you bit out.

Morgan could agree with that, but it took your devastating sort of English sharpness to drive that home to Rick, who decided to leave the managing of Negan almost entirely to Morgan. It seemed he trusted Morgan a great deal, and apparently, he’d done something like this before.

Yeah, you really didn’t know how to feel about Alexandria, but at least they weren’t unreasonable. You watched with your own two eyes as Morgan unlocked the man’s cell, took the bucket out, put a new one down and left. It wasn’t much, but it was something – but the guy didn’t react, he just stared at the bucket blankly.

You wondered how long he’d been the Alexandrian’s prisoner.

“A few weeks,” Morgan said, when you asked “-we’re still picking up all the pieces,” he said, no hint of bitterness in his tone but certainly in his choice of words.

Huh, no wonder.

For someone they were worried about manipulating you, he didn’t actually engage with you much, it seemed that he was swallowing the idea that he’d lost, well and truly. Absolutely, he’d lost – he had nothing now, and it felt like every day was another day on death row, waiting for his number to be called, waiting to die. He couldn’t help but think this was poetic irony, because he’d done this sort of thing to people before in his isolation chambers, granted, it was a little more human about bathroom breaks, it surrounded people in pitch black darkness and was much, much smaller.

But hey, no fucking chains.

Negan would be lying though if he said he wasn’t bored, if he wasn’t sick of his own fucking thoughts, sick of thinking about the battle, sick of thinking about losing, how much he was scared to die, enough that he almost killed Carl. Negan actually liked the kid too, but all that went out of the window when it came to his mortality.

Without his Saviors, and his power, he had to muse that he really was a sad sack of shit, the difference was, he was a smart, sad-sack-of-shit who was good at surviving. Rick Grimes had that quality too, except, he was good at leading – better than Negan, and didn’t need fear to do it.

Not the way Negan did.

You wondered around Alexandria when your shift was over and found your only real company to be Tara, even though you didn’t want to make friends, the fact that she was the one who willingly exchanged words with you the most while Rick and Michonne went and did things made her your de-facto friend.

“Do you know where you’re going after us?” Tara had asked, she saw you studying maps outside under the bleating sun, you just shrugged.

“I wanted to get to one of the Hawaiian islands but all the boats are going to be defunct or taken, I’d have to find something seaworthy. The idea was to find a finite space that’s easy to secure and island is a good idea, but that’s probably what everyone thought, so they’ll be communities there that might either be good or bad, or they’ll be overrun with rotters that I’ll have to take care of on my own. Assuming I even got there,” you said in irritation.

You thought about this a lot more than most people would assume people living day to day would, that much was clear.

“You could stay,” said Tara with a small encouraging smile. “I know I’d like to get to know you, I think a lot of us would, you seem pretty…different,”

“We’re a finite space,” Tara added “-y’know, with walls, and people that – well – I mean, you’ll see for yourself if you stay, we’re good people,”

Good enough to make a man shit in a bucket, you wanted to say, but held your tongue. She really did seem rather sweet – but you didn’t trust people. Not very easily. You slept with one eye open, figuratively, and still got up every few hours out of paranoia and anxiety. Being on the outside had kind of made you a hard and prickly sort, and being in a place like this might make you soft – but wasn’t that the goal? Making a place like this?

“Besides, aren’t you kinda lost feeling? Wandering around like this?” she pushed, and you nodded reluctantly.

“Yeah, America is… I mean I could walk for miles and miles without seeing anything, for all that I’ve walked, if I’d been in England, I’d have gone through three cities at least,” you sighed.

“So, think about it?” said Tara with a small smile, making you shrug.

“Time’ll tell. If I think you guys are dodgy I’m outta here like a shot, and I don’t mind sayin’ that – because trying to get my slippery arse is damn near impossible and you’d need all the help you can get if you wanted to try,” you said with a smirk.

Yeah, Tara thought she’d like you – you seemed fun, especially with how Rosita had been treating her as of late. It had been a while since she felt like she had a friend, one who wasn’t dead, or angry or mourning. Someone who was just there to talk to – it helped that Tara found you quite pretty, and while she didn’t expect anything, it made her want to find your company a bit more, enthralled with curiosity. So, you spent all of your free time not watching Negan either training - especially now you had access to food and protein, or trying to figure out what your plan B was. Rick came over to speak to you, to ask you about your people and why you left, you told him it was the same reason anybody left, and that it wasn't safe anymore.

You let him assume your community fell to walkers, you were lying by omission, but some things you just wanted to leave in your past, and how dangerous the Louisiana bayou was, was definitely one of them. You still had no idea what plan B was in case this place fell, I mean, they got into wars, right? Battles with factions? You didn't want to get tied in with that shit, that's one of the better reasons to keep on moving. You were fine before Rick Grimes found you, and you'd be fine after.

You just had to fucking plan.

That's why, now you were trusted with longer shifts, your legs were propped up on the beanbag chair and the front of your torso spread out over the cool floor, your bare abdomen resting against it as you used the fact it was a good, flat surface to spread your maps over. It was an odd position to be sure, when you weren't kicking your legs in an admittedly rather teenager-looking posture, you were resting them on the beanbag, earphones in with your only CD on low, drawing out things from your smaller, more irrelavant maps you'd used to get to Virginia onto your new, big map. Things in your other ones had been marked on the border and just before the map faded out, so you needed to put it on the big one now, which showed your current location.

At this point, Negan was just a background feature for you, and you didn't care that you felt his eyes on you.

He watched as you picked up a pencil and chewed on it, drawing things on your map. Eventually, curiosity got the better of him and he silently crawled over as much as his chains would allow, it was their clinking which made you look up, hearing it over the low music to see Negan curiously leering over as much as he could, casting an eye on your maps.

He saw you'd named and circled places - he saw "Compound?" where he recognised his own place, Hilltop, the Kingdom, then places he didn't recognise, like Prescott over the airstrip and then the capital city, Richmond, but it had a massive cross over it - and just a few words etched out in pencil.

BAD PEOPLE - The New Frontier.

It was stupidly childish, but also a painfully innocent way of putting it - he wanted to ask what the city capital Richmond was like now - or "New Richmond" as you had added the word 'New' to it - , but took one look at your face and saw that it was immensely distracted. You were erasing lines which looked like old foraging routes, and getting out a black pen to cross out Richmond and some other places. To the east, he saw you'd made your own little dots for settlements you'd come across from spying at a distance, pilfering from in the night before leaving.

BAD PEOPLE - Highway Hounds - on a certain part of the highway.

BAD PEOPLE - Junkrats - a place which was clearly a junkyard.

Negan could say that, some of these people being as far as they were, he didn't actually know them, aside from hearing about some vaguely, he didn't actually make contact, and some he didn't know at all, the only place with a small tick under it was Prescott, but that had been crossed out, as it was a place you'd already been.

You had Alexandria marked on there, and didn't know if they were bad people or not, instead, all he saw was a question mark, a great big "?" over the area.

"What're you doing?" Negan asked eventually, unable to stop himself.

You flinched at the sudden question, before taking an earbud out and looking at him in surprise, enough that you dropped what you were writing with and it rolled onto the floor under his cell, hitting his foot silently, making him grab it and run his finger along it as he turned it pen-side to himself as though trying to assure he wasn't actually going to stab you with the fucking thing.

Because he could have, if he wanted to be a dick. You reached out through the bars slowly as though waiting for him to pounce, only for him to hand you the pen silently - holding it firmly for a moment when your fingers grasped it - because for one electric moment, through the bars, you were quite close. Closer than you'd been yet, and he was staring at you intensely with his horribly tired stare, which mirrored your own, but seemed heavy with its own burdens, before letting go of the end of the pen and letting you scramble back to your maps.

Yeah, that had been maybe slightly too close than you were probably allowed to be.

"Making a Plan B, in case I don't stay, or something happens," you said with a shrug "-I don't know America very well so... lots of maps,"

It was a big country to be fair and even if you were American born and bred, you'd probably still need about as many.

"You're British," said Negan after a long moment, he'd been curious since you opened your mouth but hadn't been in the mood to talk, when you specified English, you saw a flash of a smile behind his beard, but it left just as quickly as it came.

"Yeah, I was in an airport during the collapse," you said curtly, as if that explained everything, and in a way it sort of did, at least, in the bluntest manner possible - and while he was curious to know more, he didn't need to know more, so for the moment, he didn't push it. He didn't want you to go silent on him like your first day there, and he rather liked the sound of your voice, it was certainly better than his own thoughts, and it had a certain charm to it, he had to admit.

"Shitty luck," Negan commented, pressing his face to the bars - not for the first time, getting a good look at your maps.

"You've managed to get around though," he said, when you didn't say anything for a good long while, apparently it wasn't just Negan's socialising skills which were rusty, yours were positively horrid after how long you'd spent shambling along with the dead.

"What do you think will happen if you stay here?" he asked curiously, maybe you knew something he didn't, he didn't get any news in his fucking cell, after all, he thought scornfully.

You shrugged.

"Maybe these people turn out dodgy - I mean look what they're doing to you, or maybe they keep getting into beef, I don't know, didn't they just get done fighting your people? Maybe things get better for me if I stay here, or they get worse before they do - but I'm not a big chance taker, I operate on logic, I was fine before Mr Grimes found me, and I'll be fine long after,"

Negan was silent for a long while, before he leaned backwards and went back to his slumped position against the back of the cell, watching you work dilligently, occasionally pausing to pencil chew or chew your own lip in a manner that exuded intense thought. You talked smart, very, very smart - you were clearly a sharp mind, enough that he had to be careful what he said to you. If you had even a vague hint of manipulation on his part, he'd probably lose the only jailor that actually spoke to him and didn't try to browbeat the correct morality into him, like Morgan so often tried.

"You won't find better, I can tell you that," said Negan finally, making you look at him in surprise. "Don't get me wrong, this is fucking bullshit right here, what they're doing to me - but you won't find people that operate much better than this. It only gets worse from here on out darlin', if I was you I'd just hedge your bets, use the fact they obviously don't distrust you too much and stay while the easy ride is there,"

Huh. He sounded like he had enough experience of his own, you mused - and you'd been in the bayou four years while the world was collapsing, this guy was probably busy building his empire, and seeing it all happen in front of him, he sounded pretty honest too.

"Your opinion is duly noted," you said with a sigh "-but I still need a Plan B, 'case this place goes tits up. Settlements fuck up, all it takes is one mistake. Always have a Plan B."

"You sound like you've been doing this a while," said Negan, quietly testing the waters.

"We're not discussing this anymore,"

You shut down at that point and stopped talking, putting your earbuds in and turning the music up in a manner he came to associate with him asking you too many things, he cursed inwardly, and returned to his boredom, staring up at the ceiling as he so often did. You didn't mind talking to him a bit, there didn't seem much danger in relieving him from his cruel and unusual punishment by at least stimulating his mind a little with some conversation, but between that question, Tara, the rest of Rick's people, the curious looks you'd get - and how much you just weren't used to all these people, you just didn't want to spill your guts out. Not when every part of you was telling you not to fix what wasn't broken, keep to your method of moving on, and just fucking leave.

People getting close to you, trying to integrate you as a permanent part of their community, people trying to get to know you - that just made everything so much harder, and the kind of place you came from? Fuck, how did anyone even begin to talk about that shit? You'd need a PhD in psychology or something to even handle that Pandora's box of bullcrap, and you weren't ready to sit and engage with it. You were searching for safety ever since you left the bayou, safety and independance, but if you couldn't feed yourself - like when you left and struggled to find anything that wasn't rotten, maybe you needed to be here.

Fucking hell.

Just because you could survive, didn't mean you had to - you thought, as you laid in your bed that night, staring up at your own ceiling, sighing and feeling the sensation of bedsheets around you. When was the last time you felt that with any consistency? It had been a long fucking time, to be sure. It was nice here, you had to admit, you had your own fucking building! You were on the property ladder and all it took was the end of the fucking world, fancy that. You were fed for remarkably little work in your eyes, and so far, nobody had done anything untoward and the women here seemed to be treated well, which was much better than the place you had been brought up in.

Indeed, part of you kept waiting for that penny to drop, but it never did - and Negan's words hung in your head.

It only got worse out from here, there would be no better people than Rick's people. Now you just had to see how much "better" they were - that Rosita woman seemed to have a stick up her ass the size of Texas, there was a guy with a horrid mullet who didn't seem to have any friends, a priest working the church, a grumpy old grandma looking lady, a guy with a crossbow of all things - just - a hodge podge of weirdos, Morgan included and more you didn't even bother to note. Then there was Carl, Enid - and yeah you saw some kids, probably around fifteen years old, but you just felt too old for them, but too young for everyone else.

You were a cog that just didn't fit anywhere.

You picked up your new book - they at least had those - and started reading until you fell asleep, trying not to think about your long shift tomorrow. You didn't know how to feel about all that shit, truly - you'd gathered enough information to deduce that he was a horrible, horrible man - but it was pretty hard to remind yourself of that when he was curled up in a pile of chains and made to shit in a bucket. Now, you were by no means soft, he definitely deserved it and you certainly wouldn't be putting him in the Ritz any time soon, but it just didn't feel humane. If he even deserved humane.

Doesn't everyone deserve humane?

Well, you mused, the bayou folk didn't - so what was it your place to tell Rick what he did to his own personal bayou-nightmare? For him, that was Negan, for you - it was a man called Major Chuck.

You remembered the shattered look in his face when he handed you your pen - the burning intensity - and how it made your stomach lurch. He just looked so shattered and tired, it was like staring into a mirror at least, when it came to the state of your mutual exhaustion, only you'd been rolling with the dead for months, Negan's came from pure captivity and it was awful to look at.

Morality was hard, was your last thought, before passing out that night.