Work Text:
The Evening Star
Tonight, for the first time in many years,
there appeared to me again a vision of the earth's splendor:
in the evening sky the first star seemed to
increase in brilliance as the earth darkened
until at last it could grow no darker. And
the light, which was the light of death,
seemed to restore to earth
its power to console. There were no other
stars. Only the one whose name I knew
as in my other life I did her injury.
Louise Glück
—
sunrise
The day sunrises warm, crowned by a glorious, shimmering sun that snitch on an imminent mid-morning heat wave. Summer at its peak: long days, clotted by the smell of the sun and the buzz of wildlife and cool nights, framed by gentle wind in the leaf litter.
Negan sets him off with the sunrise, has a deer to hunt, and, at least twenty things to do, before the afternoon sun breaks in all its glory, to suffocating him. He doesn’t want to be stuck in the middle of the clear down in the hill, with sticky skin, muggy head, and body buzzing with fatigue from being outside down the sun too long, again.
Although he has learned a thing or two through the years of his frugal life in the middle of nowhere: he's no longer as strong and energetic as he was twenty years ago, and time is always against him. On the far western edge of Virginia, far, far away from the suburbs and comforts that saw him grow old and mature, isn't any rest if he wants to eat and survive.
It is an hour and a half's journey along deserted trails and deserted highways to any kind of comfort. He doesn’t want to waste gas every day, nor does he intend to. After all, he locked himself up on that mountain for a reason, by choice, and he's not going to get the hell out of there for nothing. There’s nothing that the forest and his little red-brick cottage cabin can't offer him to subsist...heal, or atone for: herbs, berries, mushrooms, roots and plenty of time to deal with himself.
Adapting to the cold winters and the stifling summers wasn’t the hardest part, even for a man like him, used to the comforts and vices of the city. Learning to live with himself, fed up of himself with thoughts and reproaches that sank into his bones with the subtlety of a shiver and the force of an earthquake, that, was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
But he has, he found his way after Lucille's death in a way that was almost poetic...if not ridiculously chicle, and he doesn't even close to give it up. So, he doesn't think about it, about everything he's left behind there in the grave with Lucille and his resignation’s letter.
He has never been a good man, nor does he pretend to be. But at least there, in the wilds of Virginia, he does no harm anyone. No one more than the virgin forests and animals, of course...but that's the natural order of things: man over nature.
The clear path down the hill, among the winding tree trails is short, but tire. Although Negan knows the forest down of the green hill like the back of his hand, he doesn’t take that wisdom as universal truth. He always takes the same route, trough the same tree trail and he never goes beyond the limit marked, where the trees grow dark and taller, and the forest became impenetrable. When he bought the cabin, five years ago, its former owner, a strange woman named Jadis, warned him about it.
"Any story I should know about? Any crazy lunatic neighbour I should be aware of at nights?" Negan asked, with more taunt than curiosity.
The woman snorted.
"There are not houses for miles around, but I guess, that's what you're looking for. However," she pointed to the clearing below the hill. "there’s one thing you should know about down there. Take it as prevention, warning, I dunno, but don't go into the forest because... " her voice faltered, "it's weird. Difficult to enter and be in, almost uninhabitable, that's why people have never bought land there. The ground is unstable and the trees are more sinuous, nothing that worth the risk"
"So, no ghost stories, any? No witches or wolves or serial killers to be aware of ... wait, is this even wolf land? "
Jadis ignored him, half-heartedly. -If you ask anyone, they'll most likely tell you a story for each of those things and also that the forest is alive, but I'm not talking to you about witches, elves, spirits, skinwalkers or any of that shit...just simple warning. If you want to live don't go beyond the limit. Everything is less civilized the further you go in, unsafe even for the most experienced hunter... " her voice took on a mocking tone- "if you get lost, swallowed up by all those trees we'll probably never find you. People around here won't go after you, and you'd be a lunatic, not them, who actually believe in forest lords and talking trees"
"Oh, riiight" Negan snorts, shaking his head, skeptical, but cautious "forest is danger, not go beyond the limit, I gotcha. But is that limit visible?"
"Yes. You'll see it when you find it... It's very visible." That was all what Jadis said, before offering him the keys. A week later Negan moved his things, and then found the limit.
Down in the clear, just half a kilometer from an creek, was the end of the named limit, marked by a hut. Negan wasn't afraid of ghost stories, and that day, looking at that hut, moss-covered, grassy hut, which was more like a mural full of missing people's reports, he reaffirmed that thought. He was not afraid of supernatural things, that shit didn’t exist in his books: he was afraid of men, men crazier than him, because it only took one look through that cemetery of faded photography to know that there was a pattern, and that bad things happened to boys and men beyond the limit. Things for which they never returned.
Time made him forget those faces, but he never let his guard down. Elves and wolves were the least of his worries. Getting lost in the damn forest was. Was true, that he wanted to be away from the world, to do his damn penance yadda yadda, but he didn't want to end up eaten by some beast, or dead of starvation in the middle of nowhere, not sir.
He always took his precautions, because, indeed, the forest was strange. Sometimes it seemed that it was alive, in a biblical sense and not only scientific; as if it was aware. The people of Alexandria extended that idea, more than once, when Negan’s presence was sufficiently accepted in the little town and the old folks saw him as a fool, than as a grieving widower. «That forest doesn't like strangers, the trees are always watching», «You must be careful hunting, or something else may hunt you?» But Negan ignored them, laughed at it sometimes, even when he did get the uncomfortable impression that he was being watched all the times he crossed the clearing by the creek returning of a hunt, or when some deer behaved too smartly for his species. But at the end of the day, Negan used to associate it with his strange tendency to mental hyperactivity resulting from his loneliness. It's just your head, he used to tell himself, because the impression wouldn’t return that quickly, and weeks (even months) would go by without any other strange feeling.
That morning in particular, Negan makes his own way as usual, following the course of the creek through the grass, with a rifle and a bag of supplies over his right shoulder, and only one thing on his mind: hunting that damn deer.
The deer he saw three days ago. The animal was leaning over the stream, drinking. It was... beautiful, more beautiful than any other animal he had ever seen in his life. With a smooth looking skin, almost as golden as wheat, and completely immaculate, and bright eyes, fill with somenthing that made Negan want to tear him apart. Negan wanted that head in his living room. But when he tried to hunt it, completely idiotized by the idea of possessing such a specimen: the deer run away.
And Negan, with the sun at its highest point of the day buzzing over his head, saw red.
Then, the next morning, when Negan found it again, now with rifle poised and ready to fire, as if the thing sense the imminence of death at Negan's presence he ran away, again...almost leaping mockingly among the flowers and herb. It was like the beast knew that Negan was following him; by suggestion, signal, luck.
And Negan was freaking out. He felt curiosity, desire, a slight pulse of violence every time he remembered the animal. He wanted to corroborate the law that legitimized man's dominion over nature and animals, by pure whim, the logic that any fragile and delicate object like this animal can be broken into thousands of pieces by introducing a single sharp element (a bullet). He wanted to see it fall, to die, to feel faster than that beast, more intelligent.
All along his way, Negan hears nothing except the murmur of water and an occasional sound of rabbit or squirrel beyond his periphery. Animals that aren’t his main target. As he wades through the grass, the humidity suspended in the air sticks to his skin like a soft layer of sweat, which then begins to drip down his neck and the back of his nape. Small droplets, caught on the ends of his hair, sideburns and greying beard, fall to the ground, where the thick smell of petrichor greets them.
After a few hours of walking in silence, ruminating on a seed, Negan realizes that the breeze is almost static, fermented, and that the sun is getting more and more scorching, where it breaks into pieces upon the earth, the water and his skin. Also, he’s more tired and sluggish than usual, more immobile... as he usually is at afternoons.
He’s standing in the middle of the clearing, the same field he has walked thousands of times, perhaps already several kilometers below his normal line of travel, seeing that his watch has been dead for hours, that the drowsiness the sunlight is causing him is an impending migraine from not having drunk water, when he feels it.
The feeling of being watched. And then from the periphery, out of the corner of his eye, his eyes catch a bright spot in motion: a shadow that seems to glow under the sunlight like boiling gold metal...
For a moment he doesn't know what to do, not with all the vibrant heat of the sun squeezing his brain behind his eyes, but then, he takes a few steps towards the creek and crouches down, as quietly as he can among the overgrown grass.
The deer doesn’t move. And spite of everything, it is still far enough away. It's advancing with parsimony across the boundary line to the other side of the water. It shines, because of the effect of the sun on its fur, like a little-gold-statuette; a temptation. As Negan prepares the gunsight, the animal lies down on the grass, surrounded by innocuous little white flowers protruding from the earth and greenish hedges glistening scattered around it.
Although the whole forest is abundant, tremendously greenish and beautiful; the other side of the creek looks like the garden of Eden, the promised land, crowned with abundance and beauty that act as a premonitory warning, so that ethereal and mundane creations never fall under its spell.
Negan of course doesn't notice it; indeed, he doesn't even care about it. He simply waits, with the sun burning over his cheeks and small beads of sweat gathering between his thick eyebrows, for his breathing to calm down before shoot.
But the sight of the beast, finally calm and unconscious, makes Negan's forehead ache and all the veins under the skin, the hand and shoulder with which he holds the rifle. A burning inside him that seems impossible to bear, that urges him to shoot before it's too late. A stupid move to be honest, because there is no way to beat the feeling of being devoured by the sun when there are still miles to go back to the shade, and at least more strength... even so, the burning is strong.
So, Negan shoots.
Instantly, the recoil of the gun and the dusty smell of coal in the bullet make him dizzy. At his cocktail pain is join the blinding light, the dreadful heat, as well as a small jerk that dissects the nerves from the forehead to the nape of the neck, cutting off his vision.
He falls, face against the ground, unconscious.
noon
Negan doesn't know how long he's gone, but when he returns, the soggy feeling of the shirt clinging to his back like gum is overwhelming; and the itch under his scalp, which tells him he's being watched disapprovingly, is obfuscating.
Takes him a while to wake up. Sweat piles up all over his forehead, running over his eyelids, like a warm, thick, damp veil. It seems to him that the sky is black, even though the sun is shining, all over the back of his neck and forehead like a tambourine.
He’s blinded, brutalized. A pain penetrates from behind his eyes, as time continues to pass, and he's still lying there in pain and dizzy.
He's gnawed by the need for water, but above all for shadow.
Never in his life the imbalance of a life in nature come with so many side effects to him.
As he sits down, leaning on the elongated and woody belly of his gun, he realizes.
Where there should be the inert, or dying, body of a deer —the most majestic and beautiful deer Negan’s eyes have ever seen — there’s a body.
A body that his bullet from his rifle has passed through.
Negan watches the door to the abyss of his destruction opens.
***
Negan stands frozen, staring at the body across the creek without even blinking.
It's a boy, tiny, with a soft and delicate body, like an abandoned doll. A boy who trembles, Negan realizes, when the mist of tragedy begins to detach from his eyes.
Somehow, he manages to crawl across the creek. Throat dry, mouth and jaw clenched in pain. All while he’s staring at the child, staring at the fixed space upon the grass which he lies as victim, where Negan has placed him as hunter.
The child cries looking at Negan without even blinking, without a single real rictus of pain writing all over his face, only tears; transparent tears that fall from his baby-blue-shine eyes, and furrow his temples like thousands of small shiny insects. Tears that more than pain seem of defiance, of war. A sham representation of pain, because under the faded rain that tarnishes the freckled peach skin of the boy, Negan can clearly see a smile. A sharp one, with too many teeth.
Negan registers that, as unimportant; without the delicacy of objective discernment, due to the surprise, the eerie heat of the overwhelm that envelops him under the sun. He’s scared by the too-many-fucking blood all over the ground, that vermilion puddle over which the naked boy is stretched. That blood oozing from a wound caused by his bullet.
The boy curls himself upward when Negan lays his hands on he. He’s is tiny, fragile, delicate and pale on the green grass; like a rag doll, a perfect, broken doll. Despite his anatomy, he doesn't look like a real boy, but neither does he look like a woman; he looks like a bird, a little bird, the kind that falls out of the nest before all his feathers will be fully grown because of a stone. A bird without wings, with a sharp profile, that writhes with fury, with no real semblance of fear, surprise or pain, at the intrusion of Negan’s fingers that seek to save its life. Is like, if Negan's hands disgusted and angered him. Negan has stained boy's skin; his canvas of freckled flesh is no longer immaculate.
Although he says nothing, his eyes, like a wild-cat-one, rain like daggers on Negan face, on his maelstrom of apologies and his actions. Boy seems like he doesn't care about them, like he doesn't even understand them. He’s angry: as much angry as someone can be, lying above the ground, naked and drilled by a bullet.
His dark curly-brown locks, that shimmer when are caught by the sun, rains down around his face like a shadow that frames the weight of his gaze: capable of cracking flesh... or kill a mortal.
Negan is only aware of the mild repulsion and worldly anger that engulfs him whole, until he’s buried down to his knuckles into the blood and fragile flesh of the delicate boy. The fact unnerves him, and then, outburst him on.
It’s not normal to human being of such a fragile and delicate countenance as this boy, get all the drill journey of Negan’s fingers and his bullet, with nothing, but a dark smile, a frown and tears of hatred. Not while the sky is blue, the meadow green and life...rational.
"What’ hell you are?" Negan asks at last, drilled by fog of shock and heatstroke tinged with blood and gunpowder. When the boy doesn't answer as he wants, and just simply looks at him, mouth and eyebrows furrowed, Negan pissed out. Negan presses, sinks his fingers, now viciously into the puncture wound of boy’s side belly, with a force that could make the strongest of the strong falloff, but which barely, barely makes the boy flinch; as if he could care less about being at the mercy of Negan, even replete with blood and sweat fluids “Who the hell you are?" he asks again, angrily. Every word out of his mouth is thick, an octave below his normal voice: reverberating. "Because I’m hot-damn one hundred percent sure I shot a pretty good deer, not a boy...girl...whatever pretty hell you are!"
The boy should be frightened. Should is the key word here. Even when the boy is a boy and he's hurt; and Negan a man that surely, he looks like a monster, sweaty and angry: boy doesn't answer, he just looks at Negan with his delicate pink lips curving upward.
"You have no idea...", is all what he the says. His voice matted with a cheerful tone that drills Negan’s head and chokes his heart, where he’s kneeling on blood. When Negan looks into boy’s eyes, the boy's pupils are drowned by a venta-black as the cosmos, all his baby blue eyes engulfed. It's like looking into the face of a god in the eye of the storm, with the spark of electrification buzzing on the blood and the smell of ozone down way by throat. Immediately Negan looks at his hands, and then the rhythm of his heart slows, slows like the click of a clock before die.
Before he can say anything, he falls down face against the ground, again unconscious.
afternoon
When Negan comes back it’s raining outside. Over the glazed-mottled rays of the afternoon, peeks of flashing and shimmering bolts electrify the sky. But it’s not the sound of the thunder, o the light of the amber sky what awakes Negan back, but the heat.
A heat that creeps up his femur, burning his bone with a bittersweet touch, scratch his periosteum as a claw scratches metal. Negan’s head is so muggy and fuzzy, and his mouth so sour from a taste of ozone and dried blood, that takes him a few minutes to fully recover his vision.
Yet he feels, he feels everything. Mainly a tightness, which seizes him from his chest to his fingers. A warm, suffocating pressure, which holds him immobile on the bed even after blinks into consciousness. A feeling of suffocation only comparable to the heaviness of a waking nightmare, to the sensation of body submerged in water.
Negan has had nightmares, horrible nightmares capable of extinct away his sleep and leaving him stupid in the next morning. Horrible anthropomorphic things that climb into his unconscious mind when he sleeps as a tangle memories fully of familiar or dead faces.... He has never, ever dreamed with this feeling that engulfs him and presses him down on the bed. All his nightmares always vanish when he opens his eyes or pinching his skin; but not this one... this thing that holds him, that seeks warmth in his bones, under his chest, numbing and daze his joints for not reason. It doesn't look like a dream, and It doesn’t seem to be stopping…
Negan's thinking about the possibility that he never woken up, when he hears a crunch. The crunch of a sharp footsteps approaches to him; a white, thin, and so real thing that it distresses him, and send hundreds of intermittent twinges of pain down his spine. Then...he sees him.
The boy.
The boy he shot. The little doll-faced thing, of nymph-like beauty, stands in his room, with his face curdled with anger; looking all too comfortable within his walls.
The boy, who, despite of looking like any other normal boy, Negan knows he’s not. The boy who, when he leans over Negan’s bed with a devilish grin, and his face is caught by the glare of the rays outside (thunder and sunlight), reveal his true nature, and throwing light upon.
Immediately Negan’s assaulted by memories: warm blood under his fingernails, the smell of gunpowder and the sensation of the rays bursting his eyes and nape... The repulsion, the anger, the unbridled... The smell of ozone that invaded him and invades him again now...
Negan shivers, from head to toe, as if a bolt of lightning were passing through him.
"You..." bites angry. "I shot you". His blood boiling inside his veins.
"Me. Yes," confirms the boy, teen?, in a sweet low voice beyond the realm of reality. A smile, sharp and pearly, with too many teeth pulls at his cupid mouth, settling there with more delight than is allowed.
Is he what old men of Alexandria were referring at all the time, «You must be careful hunting, or something else may hunt you?»
"What the fuck are you?" Negan asks abruptly, because of course, even on the brink of a threat he can't shut his mouth. He realizes he hasn't asked "what are you going to do to me", or "why are you going to do this to me" because that sits very explicitly in his gut. He at least wants to know what this boy is, this thing with the face of a teen, hovering over him as the ruler above the world.
He wants to know what’s going to eat him whole.
However, the boy doesn't answer Negan (not directly at least) just gives him a stink eye, a look that doesn't match with the perfect-dangerous doll smile on his pretty face.
"I have a plenty of names", is all what thing says, "Names that your tongue couldn’t pronounce. But this face, this face has a name, or used to have one time ago"
Negan flexes his fingers, the only parts of his body he can still move, and watches the boy for a while, observes the flutter of his eyelashes on his pale skin, the baby-blue of his eyes, completely sceptical and little bit anger... but then, a brand-new knowledge hits him, with a nervous feeling as someone as is poking in his brain.
"Right there," boy says, smiling as Negan reaches words as they crowd into his mind.
Carl.
But that’s not all that reaches him. Then Negan is surprised by a spiral of memories that are not of his own, a spiral that arrives pushed into his brain with the force of a train.
Carl, like a delicate bundle sit in silent and mystery, among the grass, with elegant sprinkling freckles down the bridge of his indescribably pretty-button-nose, his sight almost closed against the glare of the sun, chin on a palm and trembling fingers all over his mouth, spying on Negan. Negan remembers that day, too, but different. Three weeks earlier, sick of the heat in a middle of a run, he walked over to the creek to splash water on his face, forehead and the nape. He remembers having a distant feeling of someone watching him, but the feeling vanished as quickly as the coolness of the water...
The sensation was him all the time.
Carl.
Carl naked on the grass, curling himself, with sweaty palms and flushed cheeks crossed with tears as Negan leaned over him. Carl’s chin and heart racing up because he’s in front of the man he craves, desires.
Negan has seen himself in the mirror at least a thousand times, just like anyone else. However, he’s no prepared for the next spiral, the sensation of seeing himself through someone else's eyes. Is a heartbreaking thing, like a staggeringly paralyzing hallucination.
Under the afternoon sun, where Carl's cheeks, dusted with delicate freckles, become tanned with a soft layer of rosy amber, Negan is like a shadow, something too monstrous, too tanned with scars and too different to Carl’s beyond untouched beauty...yet his shadow, that fragments any light that falls on his body, embraces him like a crimson halo. A breath-taking shadow that blurs the very vision of the world, and steals the creation’s color. Negan glows trough Carl's eyes like something else, almost human; even with his sweaty heat and wild-black eyes.
Carl laughs, pleased with the aphasia he induces into Negan, just by sharing his secrets with him. His laughter illuminates all things around Negan with pleasure. Is an almost beautiful sound, eexcept for the fact that it’s too high-pitched, like a tinkling sound, which stretched out could easily cut off hearing. He sits on the edge of the Negan’s bed and runs a sticky-sharp fingernail down elder’s cheek, transferring a shiver: a flare of crackling heat that sinks over his sternum.
"I've seen many men in all my life on this earth, Negan. Many. Men like you, of your look and build; men, who ’ve done criminal, horrible things just for fun... " Negan grits his teeth as the thing plants a hand on his thigh, and immediately, a tremor, like a thousand localized micro shocks, takes hold of him. "It's been a long time since I've seen an aura like yours, and I like it. So, I have curiosity, a unique curiosity even considering what you did... And as my father would say, you shouldn't let a good feast pass you by" Concludes the creature and smiles again. A strange glow, so hot that Negan can almost feel it shining all over his face.
Negan swallows, stunned beyond rationality. His whole world is spinning, approaching to collapse. But he doesn't look away, can't take his eyes away from the creature that is clearly stronger, and unhinged than him.
He knows madness, more deeply than wildness, though both of them born inside him by the same sensation: desire. Negan knows he's a wild almost monstrous bastard, a fucking liar, as he's been called all over the years; yet he can't remember the last time he felt this inexplicable pinch in his viscera, this fierce, desperate desire welling up trough him to the surface.
Thing sinks his fangs in Negan’s chest to rots his heart. Because his brain is already rotten, saturated by so many years of continuous descents into madness and wild. Negan’s still convinced that everything is a feverish hallucination, because Jesus Christ, he has never come across anyone with someone more fucked up head than him.
"Excuse the shit of my goddamn mouth, but are you- are you saying that: even when you're totally aware of my horrible-fucked-up personality, cuz I know you’re spying inside my mind, and that I actually, shot you this morning, you still want to fuck me?" Negan asks, rough and agitated. He doesn't mean to sound so unhinged, but he assumes it's normal, knowing the shitty situation he's in. He blinks, quizzical, still confused about what the fuck is going on, when the creature responds.
Carl. He should start to call him that, God.
"Yes. " Carl says, before placing a hand on his chest. It's just a touch, a slightly movement that sends a wave of heat through Negan's body. A heat that settles down in his belly and makes his cock hard.
"Jesus Christ," he breathes, still dizzy and sceptical, because what the fuck " This isn't some sort of a praying mantis situation because I shot you, is it?... Are you going to cut off my head afterwards? " He asks, but the creature doesn't answer, just moves a little more against him, catching Negan’s world on fire, as he stands up, tenses his knees and fits his thighs around Negan’s hips, sitting on him, as if he belongs there. The weight, so ridiculously light and yet hefty, make Negan loses the ability to speak and forgets how to breathe.
"No. Not yet" Carl says, finally answering his question, as he tilts his hips down, hard and sure enough for Negan to notice, that the boy is wearing nothing else underneath the faded Black Sabbath shirt he's somehow stolen from him. Negan can feel his cock thickening, pressed firmly between the delicate fat of Carl's butt. He can feel how a sigh breaks through the boy's pink lips, and a quiet gasp goes out from his own throat when Carl slides one hand under Negan’s neck shirt, scratching at the hirsute hair on his chest.
His hands instinctively clench into fists by his thighs, sick with himself for not being able to do anything but stand there boneless, like an idiot.
The whole Negan’s world, precariously balanced, loses his equilibrium.
"Damn," he bites, his face suddenly as red as the soft, flushed shine on Carl's ears. "As pretty as you are," Negan comments hesitantly, "I shot you not too long ago, are you sure that you’re all ‘right...?"
Carl's delicate shoulders stiffen, but only a little bit. "Do you think I'm going to faint all over you or somethin’?" asks warily. A hand reaches up to grab Negan's throat, and something inside him twists without even meaning to. "Or my idea of pain is bothering you? Because I thought pain made you hard-as-fuck"
Negan fights the way his body squirms as Carl punctuates last statement with a shake of his hips. "As I thought" says, and Negan growl in a daze- He wants to raise his hands: to encircle, to press, to mark his fingers against Carl's delicate hip bones, but he cannot.
As if Carl could read him, wraps one of his hands toward Negan’s ones, and kissing his knuckles purrs: "even when I like the idea of what you can do with them, I'll leave them like that for a while," a strawberry-coloured smile on his lips "Don't misunderstand me, you could have shot me and still breathed, but - I want you to understand this very clearly - you don't have chance Negan, don't you?" Negan grimaces.
"Yes," Negan says without even needing to be prompted, "I fully understand. Holy-hell" he manages to say when the boy moves a little against him, "I'm not against this generosity"
There's no way to articulate what Negan feels, what runs through him.
This creature is opening the door to a desire, —a longing, deeply dark hidden in the depths of his soul, a longing thing that sink on him like a vicious virus in his veins,— with nothing but a smirk and bare hands, and Negan’s not going to fight, not this time. He doesn’t even want.
Sun spots are not what heat the room; a shared contagion, dangerously raw, like a electric rain, is.
Perhaps Negan is indeed earnt himself a grave deep in the earth, and he’s more than doom; because never in the world he’s going to find another person, vividly brilliant, delicate and twisted like this boy.
Negan’s pretty sure of that.
Carl’s still leaning over him, now with both hands and fingers spread across his chest hair, clutching at his throat.
"I’m not complainin' any of that... "Negan says, breathless, leaning back on the pillow with his eyes unfocused. His mind dizzy by the hard pressure pushing down on his cock "that’s even more that an old man like me can desire. But seriously, you, such a pretty thing…in bed with me?"
"Then what, do you really need more words to boost your ego?" Carl asks. His thumb tentatively brushing a Negan’s nipple, and nice layer of sweet glistening sweat collects on his collarbone immediately. "This-is-not-for-you, not at all. Is for me. That's all you need to know".
Negan sighs, trying to calm hearing to the roar of lightning from the storm that begins to cease outside. But the hard line of pressure pushing against his belly, bring back his full attention: the boy arches over him, brushing against the bristly hair of his abdomen, to dive under his briefs, and wrap tightly around Negan’s cock.
Carl hums, "But, I must admit, I've never had someone as big as you before."
Then Negan’s lost, his throat raw, dried, hard stretched upward dismembered by a plea on the mattress. Carl smiles, even more.
He's not lying.
Pulling Negan’s pants aside as best he can, Carl feels a kind of sick satisfaction roots him when with each taut movement of his fingers, Negan’s thick length gets even thicker and tighter against him. It's a good cock, Carl thinks, thick and heavy against his palm, with prominent veins running alongside with an uncut head. Nymph’s mouth keeps watering with every slide of his hand over warm-flesh: a peek of a mushroom head, bulbous and spongy, salutes him.
Negan sees him, swallowing and fighting by a sick sort of fascination scratching inside him. More saliva keeps pooling in Carl’s mouth when Negan speaks.
"Bigger" his voice is shatter, but a wolfish grin is tugging at his mouth "the better to fuck you with, pretty"
Carl look at him, half-hooded gaze, keeping a locked grip around his base, until the burning in the pit of his stomach, and the tingling on his tongue is too hard to ignore. Carl's salivating for this man's hard cock, he’s not going to wait if he wants. So, he doesn't hesitate, he bends over and drops his jaw, pushing the mushroom head past his soaked lips. Carl saw this before, but he's not prepared for how wide his jaw has to stretch this time.
"You-holy-shit, pretty" Negan sighs, agitatedly somewhere above Carl’s head. Immediately Carl cut off his grip, and the result is a pair of hands blocking the back of his neck, burying in the longest strands of his hair. "Shit, holy shit. Open up, sweetheart. Nice ‘n wide, fuck, I know you can-"
Carl groan, tasting the sweat-salt of Negan's skin, the hard, heavy weight of his cock down his tongue once he accepts the intrusion. He savours it with relish: eager. Instinctively, wags his head moving his tongue all alongside, and a sharp gurgle coupled with the graze of Negan's blunt nails on his scalp is all his reward. Carl hollows his cheeks as he goes down, and darted his eye up at Negan through his lashes and blinking slowly, waiting: he knows what catching the man's eyes, with a mouthful of his cock, can do for him.
Almost immediately Negan pushes him hard-and-beyond for the rest of his cock, hard enough and without pause to make his eyes watering. Carl feels his throat trembling full of cock and involuntarily gurgling noises. His heart pounds and his cock throb from the amount of power the sensation injects into him the taste of Negan, engrossed in bliss. He savours the sensation with a hum, other gurgling noises- A tingle of lascivious all along him.
He's plunging Negan’s cock further and further down his throat when it comes, the tingle lascivious necessity, so, as he cups his cheeks sucking and sipping the spongy bulb upward, he slides a delicate drag of his fang trough the circumference.
Negan's hands dig into him roughly back, pushing in his throat anxiously, savagely. Carl opens his eyes, his eyelashes so pretty against the pallor of his skin, blinking rapidly like the wings of a little bee, at Negan’s swears and involuntary gurgles peeling from his throat. Negan pulls out his cock quickly, after a while, as he remembers who’s the person he’s fucking around. He just leaves a tip resting on Carl's tongue.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Negan swears, "I didn't mean—. But you did that shit and— holy shit"
Carl bends over himself, rests his sweaty forehead on Negan's knee, coughing and gasping for air...Negan pats his face, seeking to hold his chin to massage his mouth to beg for forgiveness, all at the same time, anxiety settled in the pit of his stomach with the slope of a slippery incline. When Negan’s finally holds Carl by a side of his jaw, he’s all a mess of emotions: cracking and beggin’. But all of it screw up at the sight of Carl lifting his head with nothing but a grin.
Carl’s eyes are brimming with deep amusement, his cherry lips, caught in an inaudible gasp, curved in elegant delight.
Negan collapses, dying. His heart sometimes can only take so much.
For a second… he forget who’s the real beast in the room.
Carl crawls over him, with predatory care, like a feral thing about to gobble up a little mouse. When he sits on Negan side, and looks up at him with half-opened lips and dark eyes: the sun, clinging desperately to the waning remnants of the night sky, is nothing.
But what is the world against a beauty like Carl? He’s a nymph out of the bowels of earth: more beautiful than any sunset and heartbeat of his damn life.
Negan runs a hand over his face, his hand shaking like a leaf, his vision blurred because what is his life right now?
"Did you stop mewling already? Can I fuck you now?" the boy asks, his voice like delicate twittering of birds at sunset. He moves his body toward Negan’s ribcage, and Negan's hands flow to his face, to rub a thumb around his hot cheek, where the freckles are distributed like a trail of stars over the hazy redness of desire.
The boy wraps one hand against Negan’s wet-‘n-heavy-cock, languidly.
"Like a red-blooded man ready to pop," Negan’s wants to joke, but instead of that, he mutters, with a hissing, agonized voice "When I was younger, I was taught to fear gods. I'd forgotten what that was… until now".
Carl strokes against Negan’s hand still on his cheek, looking up at him with sparkling eyes. Then he leans in to kiss his mouth for the first time.
Once Negan tastes Carl he’s hungry. Carl tastes like sunshine and honey, but also ozone and something else older that Negan can't identify. The savage beast on Negan’s wandering heart hums in approval: delight.
Doesn't matter if Carl's fangs draw blood of one corner of Negan’s swollen mouth, because, what's a little bite against a red Carl’s smile that lights up the room; what matter when his body rests so devotedly on Negan’s hands so congruently.
Nothing.
So, Negan drops his head as Carl slides over him, back onto his lap again. His hands, now free, roam to his waist, marveling at how well they fit, nestled between her slender bird bones, until they almost touch.
Noting matter. Only now.
Now. He with his bare cock beneath Carl’s grace.
Negan’s doesn’t even want to question the feel of wet pussy beneath Carl's hard-cock pressure all over him, because there are so many, many things that don't need and can't be explained that night, and all what matters, is Carl.
Carl letting out a high-pitched mewl with his fingers buried in Negan’s collarbones. The feel of Carl, sliding over him like a glove, full of sighs that grow louder and more delicious with every second pass through. Carl, with tears streaming down his cheeks, reddening to his collarbones, from the fever of desire choking him.
Carl aches, thrilled, as his hole fills to the brim. As he can feel it in his belly, in the very centre of him, opening him up.
There is nothing else that could satisfy him better this, the feeling of being paralyzed, electrified.
"Yes," Carl whined. His whole body jerked into the contact, pressing himself into Negan’s cock as much he can, finally "I'm going to enjoy you quite a bit," Carl says playfully, swaying his hips slowly at first. Negan rolls his eyes, and a blasphemous curse erupts from his mouth. Carl couldn't care less about the name of a dead god, but he certainly shows his disapproval with a pinch. He will struggle against the perseverance to inscribed his name and presence in Negan's memory deeper and more rottenly than any other fucking-christ-whatever
Negan is left drifting, his grip on Carl's hips sharp as a sting, pressing his hips into Carl with grunt, his world melted into a garbled moan. Carl likes it. Things like him are not made to feel pain, all day wrapped in colour and natural grace love of nature, so he likes this feeling; the feeling of being touch with savage. He pushes himself back eagerly, enjoying every part of Negan’s cock buried inside him.
"Touch me," Carl panted. He pushed Negan’s shirt over, front of him and tucked the band elastic behind his teeth. His dick swung free, bobbing in the air and slapping his belly with how hard he was. Popped, full and aching. "Neeg, come on, touch me."
"Fuck, kid, you're goin—" Negan didn't finish the thought. He let go of Carl's hip with one hand and wrapped a sweet, tight circle with a thumb and finger around Carl's cock. Carl yelped, his hips rabbited even harder, caught between fuck into Negan's hand and Negan’s cock.
Fill, Carl pursued his pleasure, aware of what exactly he wants between Negan’s squeezing hand and what angle will send him further into a spiral of excitement in Negan’s wet-hard cock.
Even when Negan gets a little frantic from the tension of his messy and uncoordinated movements, Carl doesn't mind. This isn't about the goodness of his heart for Negan, it's about him, for him and only him, and Negan’s going to understand that somewhere in his dizzy head sooner or later.
Carl crashes into him again and again, with a lewd clamour. His moans coming louder, as his pussy shudders with ecstasy. He rides Negan, fervently and ardently, dug his fingers into Negan’s shoulders even after Negan cums inside Carl with a shaking-sultry-pleasure screaming of something that sounds like a fucked-up conjugation of fucking-fuckery-fucker
Carl is determined to take it all. He doesn't mind about the slight burn of abuse he feels after a while, because he craves for more. Negan is breathless, over-stimulated, when Carl keeps moving his hips. He’s visibly shuddering, completely sensitive, but Carl holds him, and sways, not quite satiated, searching for the exact spot that will make his cock and pussy come at the same time.
He allows himself only a moment's rest, when the persistent rush of pleasure sakes him to pulp, blinding him like a nova. Came hard, screaming with his face, head slightly clouded by pleasure. Only then Carl feel fulfilled, and he deflates: his legs shaking and Negan's seed dripping profusely between his thighs.
Negan dead for world and Carl pleased.
night (midnight)
Carl rides Negan again a few hours later, taking him off guard while Negan melts one with his pillow.
He climbs on old man without preamble and fucks himself until he’s groaning with embarrassment. Negan only wakes up just before Carl come: shuddering and frantic, but he fills Carl anyway with hot, syrupy semen.
Carl kisses him all collapsed back down the mattress while he’s too-bright sting, breathless and stupid. He kisses all of him, his mouth, face, shoulders, nape, belly, until the sharp pain of overstimulation between Negan's legs.
twilight
A song of "babyboy" "honey" "darlin" “fucking-pretty-thing” spreads all through the next morning's twilight with all the shimmering glory of a good next sunrise. Words resound in the bedroom like muffled reverberations, fill in pleasure and devotion. A devotion carved with tooth and nails, into a bleeding and lonely heart of an outsider, by a painfully viripotent and famished deity. Words spill with the savagery of a beast's sharp teeth, and the softness of a butterfly's kiss, down the Carl's fine throat after being unstitched from Negan's lips.
The first rays of sunlight rising over the horizon, amid passing clouds, and peeking through the gap in the curtains, like mottled wisps of soft amber ichor, catch them two as tangle of flesh, limbs stretched on bed sheets. Carl's ankles, lifted over Negan's shoulders, as the older man dragged his tongue up into Carl’s hole and cunt. Especially the cunt he had let pass the night before, drunken by thousand other things hanging over his head, but which that morning opened to him like the bud of a rose, a divine revelation, a commandment from the heavens.
Negan ignored it all, only focused on coring his boy open with his tongue. Totally buried down in Carl with his mouth overflowing of fleshy mounds and slick tasted thick, spicy honey; but also beaten down, filled of passion and an uncontrollable wantonness that seemed almost devout to him. Carl clefted his fingers into Negan entrails, transforming it into an unrecognizable being, new and desperate, something like a vessel healed by gold and blood ready to fill and keep safe and sound everything; a wild beast tamed by a caress.
And Negan, released the spectre that threaded his heart, the thing he kept hidden for years, only for Carl’s amusement and nothing more. Finally free but tamed.
What a perfect mix they are.
sunrise once, sunrise again.
Carl leaves one morning wrapped in sunlight and zephyrs of leaves, taking with him Negan's blood and seed.
Negan stop waiting for his arrival, and his gaze in other beast’s eyes in December, eight months after his gone.
Only when his name turns into a fragile and revered memory, awakening him like a longing that cleaves his claws in the coldest nights, Carl come back.
He arrives at noon, two summers later, wading through the grass and clotted air with his cheeks as red as two peaches and his brown hair longer than before.
Negan's wariness overlaps his surprise. The noise of his arrival marked by the howling of the wind in the trees, faded behind the click of the safety of a gun, because, although Negan has waited for his arrival for even more longer time than he’s willing to count, he stopped waiting long time ago.
The amusement in Carl's eyes through the rifle aim makes Negan reevaluate the surprise. The curious glint in boy’s eyes, and the healthier curve of his silhouette, too.
Yet nothing prepares Negan for what Carl brings with him, and pushes into his arms once they’re close.
His heart plummets, and sinks into the pit of his stomach heavier than any stone or April heat, as he receives a delicate gift, wrapped in soft topaz blankets and sweet smells of grass, ozone and milk.
A creature, a little thing with powdered cheeks and brown-sun-kiss locks, with a mesmerizing hazel-hazel that Negan has only seen in the mirror, and an unfading immaculate, pale, freckled beauty that’s Carl's own.
"This is my daughter," Carl says, with a candied delight as sweeping as the syruped-peaches in summer, sharp in his voice. And then, as he can see the pain writing all over Negan’s face, he corrects: "Our. Daughter of spring."
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