Poker Face

Chapter 78 - Back and Forth

Fuck, he's trying to run my life again and here I am worrying about him. He let me plan his attack like I was going to be part of it, after leaving me out of the plans to infect the Hilltop because he knew I'd have a problem with it. He wants my ideas but he works them out of me for his own benefit and then leaves me behind. He says I'm his equal but this all just goes to show that I'm not. Maybe I'm the closest thing he could possibly consider to an equal, but so long as we're in disagreement, he's in charge.

I don't doubt he loves me, but I'm not okay with all of this. I'm not okay with the secrecy, the scheming within scheming, the belief that what he's doing is okay as long as he keeps it from me. I'm definitely not okay with the fact that his people fear him and grovel at his feet while the Hilltop workers coexist as happily as they can under the cirucmstances. And that's another thing I'm not happy about: their circumstances.

Maybe the Saviors really do need half of each community's supplies, but that's Negan's fault for forming a community whose people can't function without outside help. I hate to say it, because in a lot of ways he's a great leader and a great man, but he's also a really poor leader in some ways. His complete lack of foresight in building such a dependent settlement proves that. He was too hasty to take power and expand and paid hardly any attention to diplomacy and quality of life.

He said relics from history have no use to us anymore? Guess what, Negan, for as long as humans have existed we've been learning how to coexist and thrive. And I actually know a small fraction of some things from the past that might have helped make the Sanctuary a better, more sustainable place to be. But apparently my interests are meaningless.

Negan

Aven doesn't actually care who I hurt tomorrow. That has to be it: she's just worried about how my actions will hurt me, as usual. She's putting on whatever fucking face she thinks will help us keep things together, but she's not seeing things clearly and she's freaking the fuck out like she does when she gets worked up. It's not like I didn't know her mental stability was shaky.

Fuck, that's not fucking fair at fucking all. Fuck me for thinking that. Fuck. There's nothing fucking wrong with her...Well, there definitely fucking is, but nothing she won't get past. Nothing that affected what she said to me back there. No, she was in her right mind just now. She said everything she said for a fuckin' reason. She doesn't say shit she doesn't mean.

I told her myself that my rules aren't perfect. She knew that from the beginning when I figured out I had to ditch the wives for her. It was an easy decision at the end of the day, but they were part of the system I carefully built here and I uprooted it for her...I guess that proves her fucking point. My rules can be pretty arbitrary, but I fucking admit when they are.

Aven

I'm not mad that he wants to kill them all. Hell, last week I thought that was the right call. But in my defense, I was sick and in pain and unsteady on my feet, and I wanted them all to pay for what Rosita did.

What I'm mad about is the games he plays. But fuck, do I really enjoy those games sometimes. The way he works people shows just how intelligent, how acutely observant and quick-thinking he really is. He walks around like a brute, cursing and swinging a club, the choice weapon of any barbarian, but underneath it all he's a brilliant strategist. You don't have control over people like he has unless you know what you're doing. It's just a shame he knows how smart he is. It makes him stupid. He really needs to be humbled.

The games are what will get him killed. The games are what got us into this war. What he did that night to the Alexandrians was nothing short of psychological torture, though, again, it was brilliant. They had already killed upwards of thirty of our people and the response they expected was a battle. That battle could have happened and they'd have lost. That night alone, we outnumbered them by several dozen. Negan really was generous in only killing two of them but any level of generosity in the act went out the window after the experience as a whole.