CONQUEST • Negan

Face of the Future

I rolled back my shoulders hoping to shrug Negan off as we sauntered up the street at a leisurely pace, Negan waving every now and then to the Alexandrians that passed by with a smirk that said he knew he was the new mayor around here. Most of them scurried off whenever they caught a glimpse of the big, bad wolf, taking Ricks instructions and warnings without fault, unlike myself evidently.

"The neighbours are just so cheery!" Negan beamed, squeezing me into his side. "This place is almost a damn Utopia, especially now that I'm here, aint that right, Honey?"

I ignored his last comment choosing to point out the obvious. "They're scared of you." I deadpanned, rolling my eyes.

"Good!" He cheered, "as they should be. As you should be. Might wanna take a page out their book, Dicey, catch up a little with what's at stake here."

I felt his attention on me then, his own eyes watching my face, challenging me. I tilted my head up to look at him, not realising how close our heads were, but kept my expression blank and lifted my brows.

"What can I do to get you to crack?" He was saying it more to himself than asking me but I answered anyway.

"Don't bother tryin', Negan, I think you're a peice of shit and scum of the earth, but you ain't gonna scare me. I hate your guts, through and through, fear can't override that shit."

He raised his eyebrows, "Damn sweetheart, say it how it is. Let me down easy, why don't ya? Let a man have some pride!"

"And don't call me Sweetheart, or honey, or darlin', or Dice. You don't get to call me that. We ain't friends and we sure as shit ain't lovers so quit it with the pet names." I tried to tug away from his hold over my shoulders but once again to no avail. He seemed to only grip me tighter into the side of him. So tight that I could feel the hard planes of his chest and the heat radiating from him, seeping into my own skin. I felt the muscles of his arm constrain hard around me and if he were anyone else, I might've been impressed that a man his age managed to keep a physic like that.

"Alrighty then, beautiful." It was a taunt, he was poking the bear and trying to get a reaction and if I was better behaved then I might not have gave him what he wanted, but two days without food and three nights riddled with nightmares and a gal's temper is going to grow short. And considering said gal's temper was already practically nonexistent prior to those circumstances, my self control was teetering on a very fine line.

"This is it," I grumbled, taking a right turn, and directing Negan up the porch of Daryl and I's home. It was smaller than the other houses but it was all the space we needed, a bedroom each being more than enough.

But before we made it to the front steps, one of Negan's men stopped us, camcorder in hand. I recognised it as the one that Deanna used during our interview process to gain passage into Alexandria and become an official citizen. I still didn't under why she insisted on recording the whole exchange but now it was coming back to bite us in the ass apparently.

"Well, well, what do we have here?" Negan finally released me, moving to take the recorder and flip it open. On the little square screen was my face, dirty and more haunted that it was now, and somehow, impossibly more tired. On my cheeks and neck remained speckles of blood, whose I didn't know. "Wow, you look rough. I'd say I didn't recognise you, Dice, but Id know those pretty jade greens anywhere."

From the device, my voice played out, grainy and distorted, and I cringed at the sound of it. "What you have here? It isn't real. Its just a ticking time bomb until this place falls too, to the dead or the living, it doesn't matter. Civilisation isn't real anymore and you're all a bunch of damn fools for believin' you could replicate it." In the video, I stand up from the chair, sliding Bertha from where she is strapped to my back and dropping her on the table with a thud that makes me flinch. Negan's eyes light up in delight. "You know how many people I've killed with this thing?" Deanna remained silent on the other end of the screen. I remember her look of wariness as she watched me like I was some crazed dog that had broke its way into her living room. "I do. Ive kept count. Made a habit out of it and its sort of become a game at this point. I'm at 36 so far, and not all of them deserved to face the chop, not everyone had it coming, but do I rerget killing a single one of them? Not at all." On the tape, I started picking at books on the shelf, and if I didn't know how the video played out, I would be nervous, tense to find out what the psycho on the screen done next. "I'm a killer and I have no remorse for what I've done. So... you still wanna welcome me into your little paradise here, knowing what sleeps within the same walls as your people, your family." A cruel smirk sliced across my face as I pressed forward, leaning over the back of the chair.