The Only One | Negan

1. First Impressions

When I was fifteen, the world ended.

A little later on I learned how to shoot. It was nothing new to me, given that my father was ex-military and taught me all about guns and such even before the apocalypse started. But I never knew the time to use my knowledge would come so soon.

By the age of sixteen, I could shoot a crossbow, a regular bow, a rifle, I learned how to operate a sniper, an automatic Uzi, a Kalashnikov. I could now drive a car, automatic or not. A motorcycle. And that's also when I lost my parents.

When I reached seventeen, I was trained in close combat situations, melee fights, defending myself from the walking dead bodies that surrounded us from all sides, all of the time. Knife, no knife, baton, baseball bat. I could take care of myself and of others. I learned how to hunt. I knew how to make a tourniquet, how to stop a wound from bleeding, and how to sew skin if needed. I learned how to clean gunshot wounds with little to no materials at hand. And I knew I should always aim for the head - no matter what was standing in front of me - a human being or a walking dead one. That's also when I killed a person for the first time.

By eighteen, I'd already seen so much and been through so much, that the child in me retreated back into the far-off corner of my mind and stayed there. My body was collecting scar after scar. On my hands, my legs, my face. My heart.

When I was nineteen years old, I had become so indifferent to the shit show the world now was, that nothing could surprise me. Nothing scared me anymore. Nothing could make me flinch.

For my twentieth birthday, instead of a gift, the leader of our group, who also happened to be somewhat of a father figure to me when my parents died, promoted me to be second in charge after him. This meant that in dire and not-so-dire circumstances and situations when he wasn't around to give out commands and make decisions, I was the one to do it. And I did. A couple of months later I had to make my first big decision and it turned out to be a good one. That made me more organized, more motivated, collected, and extremely protective of my people.

Then three years passed and I now was irreversibly stuck in survival mode. Fight mode. Rarely flight. But my mind was calm like the ocean before a storm. It had to be. Occasional thunder shook me from time to time when we would lose a person of ours or some other type of inconvenience occurred. But you could only do so much in the world we now lived in. You had to be strong, you had to be calm, you had to be numb to the animosity. Sometimes you had to strip yourself of your own emotions. Sometimes you had to be hard and cold. Be rational, not subdue yourself to your feelings. Otherwise, you'd be dead and all those around you would die too.

And those three years were just as unpredictable as the goddamn weather. We had been happy and calm, finally settled in what seemed to be a stable community, after we endured quite a lot. We thought it'd be finally sunny. Hell, it looked sunny. And then - the storm.

—•—

"You are so gonna regret crossing me in a few minutes. Yes, you are."

Heavy, predatory, and slow steps echoed through the silence of the night. The cracking of leaves and branches beneath his boots, the distant chirping of late-night birds. The air was thick with the dreadful sensation of the unknown. The incoming, impending doom. Just like the electricity that gathers when thunder is about to strike. The storm.

"You see, Rick, whatever you do, no matter what, you don't mess with the new world order. And the new world order is this, and it's really very simple. So, even if you're stupid, which you very well may be, you can understand it. You ready?"

And then it all happened way too fast, but way too excruciatingly slow. I shut my eyes, I couldn't watch. If I could cover my ears too, so that I couldn't hear those awful sounds, I would. But I couldn't. I heard that twisted countdown, I heard each thud, each strike, each cry. Everything. And even when it was all over, it still echoed in my mind.