Chapter Text
May 2017
Negan stops in the narrow corridor for the holding cells, noting the cell he’s aiming for is wide open. He holds a hand up and the men with him halt instantly, long trained that failure to respond to a command at best will result in injury and at worst in death. Both of them have served as quasi-bodyguards for damn near five years now. That’s a record for anyone surviving at his side.
There are no voices coming from the cell, just a gagging sound along with something odd, like boots scuffed on the floor. Hand at his gun, he steps closer, getting a better view of the cell.
The lighting is dim, just what little the cell gains from the harshly lit hallway, but there’s no mistaking that one of his guards is getting his ass strangled to death by the prisoner one of his teams brought in while he was out on his own patrol to the north.
David’s frantic, trying to figure out what’s around his neck, but failing to grasp whatever’s being used to slowly end his checkered, useless life. The man’s bulk obscures the prisoner, giving him just flashes of long hair. The man’s belt is unbuckled and his pants unfastened, worn boxers showing through the opening. His intent for the prisoner is pretty damned obvious.
He ignores his dying flunkie’s obvious terror and pleading hand outreached for him to help. If the asshole’s stupid enough to let a confined prisoner choke his sorry ass to death, he deserves the slow and excruciating death he’s currently experiencing. Blood drips from a busted nose, even as any sign of the man’s vestigial level of intelligence fades.
The prisoner doesn’t give up on the strangulation even as the movement stops, and Negan tilts his head, counting the seconds. When he reaches sixty, the tension holding Dave’s body upright is released, and he finds himself facing a battered woman who holds her body with all the tenseness of a snake ready to strike.
He still can’t see what her weapon actually is. It’s too thin to be a belt, and if he were in some fucking stupid Hollywood spy movie, he would guess it to be a garrote.
“Seems you’ve rid me of a particularly stupid minion, gorgeous. I think that might deserve a reward.”
She takes a deep breath, making no move to cover the skin exposed by the tattered remains of a colorful button-up blouse. Her bra hangs open, and he’s not sure if it’s as damaged as her shirt or not. From the blooming color of the bruises on her face and ribs, today’s not the first time she’s taken a hell of a beating, but then again, that’s one of the reasons she’s here and not dead by a roadside.
The bruises are semi-obscured by a tapestry of inkwork that turns what he can see of her torso into a veritable Garden of Eden laid out on human skin.
“Don’t want to talk just yet? That’s understandable. Most people rarely want to converse with their jailers.” He steps closer, watching as her eyes narrow. She’s studying him as much as he’s studying her, gaze taking in the gun and knife at his belt. Lucille gets a few seconds longer attention than the first two weapons.
Most intriguing, she doesn’t move backwards in the cell as he comes closer to her personal space.
“I hear that you killed two of my men before they managed to subdue you. Guess this stupid sack of shit makes three. Saved me some trouble, since rape is very much against the rules here.”
“Your men rely on brute strength and have the intelligence level of a slightly advanced toddler.”
Her voice is raspy, but then again, she’s been in this hole for over forty hours without food or water. He’d probably sound like shit too.
“They also appear to have lost the ability to properly tie a rope,” he says, seeing the length that should be securing her wrists pooled near the back wall. It would have been his first guess for her weapon, but instead, he really is in a fucking spy movie.
Held in her hands is a fucking wire garrote. Now, he knows David’s too goddamned stupid to ever bother with a weapon of finesse, so he wonders which incompetent asshole he needs to introduce to Lucille for being too much of a moron to properly search a prisoner.
“Maybe you should recruit more boy scouts, fewer baboons.”
“Ain’t no such thing as a boy scout left living in this world, sweetheart.” Negan raises Lucille and uses the tip of the bat to nudge aside her shirt on the left side. It’s a mass of colorful bruises. He figures one of his men kicked her once she was down the day she was captured. “Ribs broken?”
“Cracked, maybe.”
He’s a little surprised at what he thinks is an honest answer. She controls the flinch superbly when he presses Lucille against the worst of the bruising, her eyes narrowing again.
“My men don’t bring new recruits back often these days.”
Although to be entirely honest, the only women brought back recently have been attempts at bribing him to add to his harem. He’s gotten bored with a wife in the past and returned her to the general population, after all. The idiots haven’t figured it out yet that he’s fucking bored out of his mind with all of the biddable little bitches. At least the rejects give more warm bodies to the labor pool, even if it doesn’t keep his attention from straying to their wives and girlfriends.
Keeps them on their toes to think their ladies might have to save their asses from his wrath.
“If this is how you manage recruiting, I can understand the scarcity.”
He’s still holding Lucille against her bare skin, and she still hasn’t loosened her grip on the garrote. He actually wonders if she could manage to take a blow from the bat and still get the weapon around his neck. The idea of it is the first real arousal he’s felt in months.
But her words make him laugh and he drops the bat back to rest against his boot. “You might have a point there.”
Her only response is an arched brow and an expression that clearly conveys ‘no shit, Sherlock’ more clearly than if she said the words.
“Your people are dead.”
“I know.” It’s the first emotion she’s displayed, a flicker of grief that warns him that capturing her is probably going to rest among Derek’s nightmares one day, if Negan lets her live.
“I’m going to correctly assess that there’s not a damn thing we can do for you to tell me where your community is.” Most people have a breaking point. He’s not yet ready to give up this interesting puzzle to find out where hers is. He suspects he might have to kill her before she’ll break.
Call it a sense of kinship, of sensing a similar potential for the untapped, darkened abyss standing before him in feminine form.
“That would show more common sense than this bastard had.”
David begins to stir at their feet, unlife making him groan about as intelligently as life did. She looks away for the first time, staring dispassionately at the man reviving into a cannibal at her feet.
Negan wonders what she would do if he simply stepped backward and shut the door to the cell.
Somehow, he thinks he would open that door again to find David’s brains painting the floor and walls and a woman even more willing to feed him his own balls than she is right now.
He grins, sliding the big buck knife from its sheath and flipping it to offer her the handle. “Care to finish what you started?”
It’s a gamble that she won’t use the knife on him, but she’s fucking smart. She’s got to know there’s no way she makes it out of a goddamned prison after killing him.
His devil be damned luck holds, once again, because she buries the knife in one of the dead man’s bulging eyes and leaves it there, stepping back to the same position she was in before. The garotte dangles now, held only in the hand that didn’t handle the knife.
“Maybe we need to up our recruiting game. Show you not everyone at the Sanctuary is too stupid to live.” He reaches out to run two fingers along her jawline, where swelling indicates she took a hell of a punch the day she was captured. He’s still surprised that Derek admits that it didn’t put her down and she killed the man who hit her.
“Why would I care?”
“Well, sweetheart,” he drawls, gripping her chin lightly. “Right now, you’re all on your lonesome, and even if you escaped here, you’d just lead us back to whatever little pissant community you’re protecting. Doesn’t matter to me much if I take it voluntarily or if I have to apply just the right amount of pressure to get a new dirt-scrabbling village to accept the protection that Sanctuary offers.”
Moving down into the warmer climate offered by the Southern states is one of the better ideas Negan's had. Besides, the communities north of Virginia proved too weak to support his people.
“What does voluntarily mean for my people?”
At least she admits the little group of twelve they found on the road isn’t all her people in the world. The group was too clean and too well fed to be nomads. The vehicles were all converted to the same sort of biodiesel Sanctuary runs. You can’t miss the stench of vegetable oil based fuel.
That kind of fuel means crops, or at least contact with a community that grows crops, and that is certainly a resource Sanctuary needs more of.
“A partnership, gorgeous. We provide protection from unsavory bandit groups and clear the dead from the area on our regular patrols. In return, the little rabbits that hide in their dens share half their supplies with us.” He strokes his thumb along her bruised cheek.
“Like serfs.”
“Serfs. I like that term. Strikes me as very feudal overlord. Most of those new to my way of thinking say slaves, but I won’t own your people. They’ll be quite free to continue on their pathetic little lives all they wish to.”
“So long as they turn over the proper tithes for your protection.”
“Precisely.” He drops his hand away from her face, watching as she considers his words.
There’s a split second where he thinks she’s considering taking her chances. But then she sweeps her gaze over him, head to toe. The two men in the hallway get the same treatment.
“Prove it.”
“Prove what, sweetheart?”
“Prove you’ve got the qualifications to protect my people. Then maybe we can talk.”
Negan laughs, a full on belly laugh like he hasn’t managed in ages. “I do like your spirit. Proof? That I can provide. Why don’t you sort out your blouse, if you can. No sense teasing the men with what they aren’t allowed to touch.”
He knows exactly what those words will mean to the two men in the hall. By nightfall, there won’t be a man, woman, or child who will risk even breathing funny in her direction. Not as long as she holds his interest.
The mystery of how his men missed the garrote is solved when she flips the wire around her torso and embeds it back into the base of her bra like a goddamned underwire, using the loops to fasten the undergarment back together.
“Holy shit, if that ain’t the most ingenious bit of womanly weaponry I ever fucking seen.” He’s glad he didn’t take it now.
Her blouse is a complete loss, most of the buttons missing, so she just ties the shirttails together. It results in a Daisy Duke style cover up of her bra that is almost as intriguing as bare skin. She surprises him by reaching down to tug his knife out of David’s useless brain, methodically wiping the blade on his shirt.
She flips the knife to offer him the handle, a ghost of a smile on her features. There’s nothing really welcoming in it, yet that lingering sense of danger he’s feeling in her presence sizzles down his spine like lightning.
Fuck him running, but he wants this woman so bad he can feel it in his damned bones.