"Bless me, father, for I have sinned...probably," Negan drawled with a lazy chuckle. "Any second now." Aven rolled her eyes from her hiding spot in the trunk. Only he would take such pleasure in the destruction he was about to cause.
You're taking pleasure in it too, hypocrite, she thought to herself. And it was true. Even now, even with a shitty feeling in the pit of her stomach over what they were about to do, she took pleasure in Negan's power, in the devious growl he spoke with, anticipating an absurdly easy victory. It was good to be on the winning side. After her ordeal before the outbreak, after feeling weak for so long, she was partially numb to human suffering. She saw it and denounced it, but she didn't have the same capacity for remorse that she used to; she didn't feel the guilt the way she knew she should. And she was thankful, because there was no other way things between Negan and her would ever work out otherwise.
Even so, his unholy confession was about to anger her.
"Those men I sent down that road a ways back?" he continued, explaining his plan that Aven had initiated. "They're setting up a roadblock with the dead, not knowing they'll be joining their cold asses any second."
Wait, what? she thought.
"I don't enjoy sacrificing my own people." Bastard, she thought as it became apparent he'd sent his men to die. Just like John F. fucking Kennedy.
She specifically laid out a plan where none of their people would get hurt, telling Negan that every Savior life lost after Alexandria's initial attack was his own fault, that he put them out there to die. She thought he had listened; she thought that she was getting through to him, that he was finally re-adjusting his view of human life to one that would better sustain his position as leader. But apparently not, yet he'd let her think he was following her plan.
"But those guys back there were with Simon at the dump," he continued. "Some of us had to take one for the team, it may as well be them."
"What do you mean?" asked Father Gabriel.
"Ricky was already slipped some intel to make him think he can get the jump on me, but it came from a less than reliable source and he knows that. If I were him I'd be scouting ahead. Taking out that little road block crew is gonna make him think he's got the real story, where I'll really be. They'll come to get me, but see, that's a trap. They'll find a map with the time and place I'll be, and they're gonna believe it because they will have killed all those poor bastards."
Normally, it wouldn't bother Aven that Negan was speaking as though this was a plan he'd devised himself. Afterall, he was the leader and she supported his guise of omnipotence and omniscience. But not only was he using her idea, he lied to her about it, hid the extent of the plans from her after pretending he was hearing her out. To say she felt betrayed was an understatement. Her heart dropped to her stomach, disappointment gnawing at her insides as she replayed Negan's words to her in her mind: The Saviors have two leaders now. It wasn't true. He hadn't learned anything.
"So that's your confession? That you're going to kill every last one of them?" Gabriel scoffed, horrified as though he'd expected better from Negan.
"Only the soldiers," Negan replied. "Only the ones who have taken up arms against me."
"But before you spoke as though you didn't want it to happen."
"It ain't about want, Gabey." That much was true. Part of him still wanted to end every last living soul behind the walls of the Hilltop. But he was doing the responsible thing as a leader, he thought. He was doing what Aven would approve of. For the most part. "But I'll make a little deal with you. You said you didn't want to die a fruitless death and I'm the fuckin' genie that's gonna make your want come true. You'll be the first to die, right in front of Rick's eyes. Your death will serve to remind people of the new world order. You're welcome in advance for that."
They weren't far from the Hilltop when Gabriel tried to escape, tucking and rolling out of the car and running off into the woods to warn his friends of the trap that had been set. But, as Negan so astutely put it, he couldn't see crap, thanks to a virus he'd just barely survived. Negan, Laura, and Eugene easily caught up and dragged Gabriel back. Fifteen minutes later, the Saviors' convoy pulled off the road, some continuing towards the gates of the Hilltop where they'd demolish the community as they had Alexandria, Negan and the others parking on a hill at the edge of the woods.
Aven slipped out of the back of the truck and made herself scarce among the other Saviors. She was hurt by Negans indescretion but she was only there to watch, to make sure he was okay. She didn't want to make herself known until after the attack. Negan needed to stay focused on the task at hand, not on the fact that she'd disobeyed his orders (though they were orders she didn't have an obligation to follow). She watched from the back of the group as Negan rallied with some of his men, taking a megaphone from one of them and gesturing to his radio. This was part of the plan Aven had been informed on, amplifying several of the Saviors' whistles through the radios and over the megaphone to announce themselves in the most eerie fashion possible.
As usual, part of Aven thought it a cruel, over-dramatic psychological game. But, like the night of the lineup in the woods, she also found it exhilating. The whistling was a very sensory assertion of Negan's dominance, and she couldn't quite bring herself to fully denounce his sensory assertions of dominance.
The group of Saviors Aven had hidden herself in was tasked with sneaking through the woods to get eyes on Rick's group and make sure they were in the valley where Negan had lured them. It was a bright, sunny day with only a slight chill in the air, the wind almost non-existant. Save for the loaded army and the promise of death, it was peaceful. Aven stayed with the lookout group, trailing behind them and watching the fallen leaves crunching under her feet. She was deep in contemplation of what was to come next, both immediately after the attack and in the coming weeks and months. Negan was going to get another piece of her mind for his withholding of information from her, but she wasn't sure she'd even be able to keep the smile off her face once the threat of Rick was gone for good. Maybe she'd wait a few days to rehash their recent arguments and assert her own dominance.
She trailed further and further behind the group, though not so far that she couldn't see and hear them, until she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned to see three walkers slowly stumbling in her direction. The rest of the Saviors didn't notice and the walkers were spread out enough that she'd have time to put each one down before another reached her. The Saviors ahead of her stopped at the edge of the woods and radioed Negan to tell him that Rick and his miniscule army were in position. Aven was already making her way towards the walkers when Negan responded and she was just far enough that she could hear his deep, gravely voice but couldn't make out what he was saying. Then she heard his voice loud and clear over the megaphone.
"Well damn, Rick, look at that," Negan drawled, his cocky grin apparent even to those who couldn't see him. "Pegged again, pegged so very hard. I ambushed your ambush with an even bigger ambush." Aven couldn't help but smirk to herself as she unsheathed her knife and took out the first walker. She vaguely heard Rick call something out, probably telling Negan to show himself, to which Negan had his typical response. "I am everywhere. Pick a direction and run, see how you do. Make it fun for all of us." Aven took out the second walker and then the third, using maybe more force than she needed to as the conflicting emotions of the past month came to a head for all parties involved.
Meanwhile, Negan was monologuing his plan and the players involved, how Eugene made this final attack on his ex-friends possible and how Rick was about to watch the people he was responsible for die, starting with Gabriel. But not Dwight, or as Negan referred to him, "a gutless nothing that sucks at life." Rick would see everyone he cared about killed and then be killed himself, but Dwight was be granted yet another opportunity to live, only so he'd have to live with the things he'd done, with his failure to save anyone.
Aven was wiping her bloody knife on her pants when she felt a sharp pain on her scalp and fell backwards, a fourth walker having grabbed a hold of her pony tail and pulled her down. Caught off guard, she dropped her knife and had to scramble in the opposite direction from where it fell to avoid being bitten and having everything end right then and there. She didn't have the handgun she normally carried, having instead grabbed one from the stock the Saviors had brought with them. She'd picked one with a silencer for this exact reason. Any time she'd been out on her own and used a gun to kill one of the dead, it drew more. She wasn't taking any chances today.
The gnarled walker crawled after her, its ankle having snapped when she fell backwards on it. She kicked it in the face, scrambling for her gun as the moving corpse just barely recoiled and then started clawing at her jeans. In the few seconds it took to ready her weapon, the decaying body had dragged itself up so it was pinning her legs to the ground and she didn't have another second to spare.
"Let's get this show on the road," Negan continued. "Gabey is the first to go." Given Aven's current predicament, she wasn't exactly listening to Negan's speech anymore and just barely registered the sound of his gun cocking over the megaphone, signifying that Gabriel was about to die and any fight Rick might put up was about to begin. But Aven didn't have time to worry about that. She readied her weapon at the side of the dead's head, holding it back at the neck with her other hand so its teeth couldn't graze her.
She pulled the trigger and the side of the walker's head exploded, but not because it was hit by a bullet. No, it exploded because the gun against its head did, and seemingly so did Aven's hand. She cried out as a fiery pain shot up her arm and the scalding hot gun landed on her thigh, both the walker's and her own blood spattering against her face. She frantically bucked the gun off her leg and clutched her wounded hand to her chest with her other hand, beginning to shake when she saw her right ring finger just barely hanging on, the bone clearly exposed with scraps of burnt skin and muscle around it.
"It never had to be a fight, Rick" Negan's voice continued to echo over the hills and through the trees. Aven was briefly in shock, her mouth hanging open like a fish as her eyes went back and forth from the misfired gun on the ground to her injured hand. Tears were welling in her eyes and she shook her head back and forth feverishly as though she were rejecting a terrible idea. "You just had to accept how things worked."
Somehow, Aven came back somewhat to her senses and quickly skimmed through the reasons why her gun may have misfired. She wasn't sure exactly what could have possibly happened, but then she was hit by a suspicion she'd pushed down due to lack of evidence. Eugene, she thought. It was odd that he had turned so easily on his people, and he'd insisted today that the Saviors use his bullets and no others. Panic was already surging through her and only got stronger when she heard Negan's next words.
"Here we go," he said, letting her know that he was about to start the attack by shooting Gabriel and giving the other Saviors the okay to make themselves known at the top of the valley to begin firing on Rick's army down below.
"No!" she choked out, pushing herself to her feet with her good hand and running back towards the trucks.
"Three," Negan began the count down as Aven approached the edge of the forest. She tried to call out to him but he was too far away and her voice was raspy from the intense pain in her hand. The other Saviors had dispersed from the trucks and were ready to step up onto the peak of the hill, also too far away to be warned.
"Two." Aven tore out of the woods and past the trucks, spotting Negan fifty meters away standing at the front of the convoy. The remaining hundred or so Saviors stepped in unison onto the peak, guns drawn.
"One."
"NEGAN!" she called out and this time her voice carried, but Negan didn't hear. Her call was drowned out by the sound of his own gun misfiring, and subsequently the misfiring of a hundred others. The line of Saviors went down all at once as though being mowed down by machine gun fire, and Negan dropped his gun, holding his right hand to his chest the way Aven was. She kept running towards him as Gabriel stepped up and knocked him off his feet with a well-placed punch. He was only down for a second before stumbling back up and grabbing Lucille, turning just in time to brace himself as Dwight body slammed him. Negan easily pushed Dwight off and retreated behind the trucks as Rick and Maggie came charging up the hill with their army.
Aven ducked behind a truck with the intent to follow Negan, but that's when she saw Eugene unmoved from where Negan had just been standing. Rage overtook her and she emerged from her hiding spot and sprinted towards Eugene. A few feet away from him, her instincts from years of martial arts training took over and she jumped, pushing off the ground with her back foot and tucking it under her with her other leg extended outwards. Her kick struck dead in the middle of Eugene's chest and she followed him down to the ground, landing with a knee on either side of his torso as she began punching him in the face with her non-dominant hand. She landed several punches, breaking his nose and knocking a tooth out, before she again felt a sharp pain in her scalp from being yanked backwards.
Aven struggled to regain her footing but finally turned, a hand still gripping her thick pony tail, to see it was Rosita dragging her off of Eugene. Aven tried to bring her elbow forward to strike the woman in the face, but she wasn't in the right position and only hit her shoulder. They struggled for a moment, Rosita trying to simultaneously keep her grip on Aven and get a grip on her rifle. The two fell to the ground, neither gaining the upper hand for a moment, until Rosita's hand slipped from Aven's hair, pulling her pony tail loose. Aven managed with her one good hand to loosen Rosita's grip on her gun. Aven wasn't sure if she was seeing red from anger or from Eugene's blood dripping in to her eyes and she tossed Rosita's gun to the side and grabbed a fist-sized rock on the ground next to them.
Eugene came up behind her, lowering himself closer to the kneeling woman and trying to drag her off Rosita with an arm around her throat, but Aven threw her head back, slamming it against his broken nose and causing him to lose his grip and stumble backwards. She raised the rock in her hand above her head, and had the situation not been so dire she might have identified another difference between her and Negan's tactics: Negan would be sitting here taunting Rosita before killing her, but Aven didn't waste a second.
If human blood came in multiple colors, Aven's face would have been something akin to a Jackson Pollock masterpiece, spatters of Rosita's blood adding to that of Eugene and the walkers' as she bashed the woman's face in. She didn't stop until Rosita was just as unrecognizable as her friends who had been victims of Lucille.
Rosita had been dead for a whole minute when Aven's attack finally stopped, only because of a strike across the back of her head. She groaned, falling to the side off the corpse and just barely avoiding reaching out to put weight on her injured hand. She was struck again and again on the side of her head and through her pained daze she could just barely make out a stone-faced black man wielding a wooden rod, someone she had seen during her few days at the Hilltop but couldn't quite remember his name. Something with an M? That's why she liked writing things down; if she'd had her notebook at the Hilltop, she wouldn't have forgotten a single enemy's name.
Her vision was going dark and fuzzy as the man pointed the sharp end of his stick at her and drew back to bring it down through her neck.
"Morgan, stop!" a somewhat familiar voice yelled, effectively freezing the man in his tracks. He didn't change his stance, end of the stick only inches away from killing her as he glared down at her with dead eyes. She was sure this was the end and was surprised when another plea from the disembodied voice caused Morgan to lower his weapon. "This isn't what we do," said the man's voice.
Pain radiated through Aven's head, protesting her attempt to get back to her feet. She had just barely sat up when she was struck several more times on the back of the head. Before her vision went black, her most recent savior came into view: Jesus?
And then darkness.
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Rick knocked Lucille out of Negan's hands and tackled him to the ground, the two rolling around until Negan managed to spring to his feet and kick his opponent, rearing his foot back to swing his boot into Rick's ribs several times. Rick writhed on the ground, holding his bruised side and trying to summon the energy to get back up. Negan, breathing heavily and pushing away the pain from the punches landed on him, picked up Lucille and stood tall above Rick. He could have killed him right then and there, but he still had more he wanted Rick to hear.
"Just so you know," he panted, "eenie meenie miney moe, that was bullshit. I made a choice. I just didn't want to kill a kid's dad in front of him. Turns out that would've been the best thing I could've done. Had I done it, that kid might still be alive." It didn't matter that Carl died from a bite. It was Rick's fault regardless. At one time in his life, Negan would have been overjoyed to have a child, to raise a son just like Carl with Lucille. But this was a different world, one unfit for raising children. Lucille was gone and Aven couldn't have kids anyway. After this moment in time, after killing Rick, Carl would have been his. Negan would have molded his mind for greatness.
His inflamatory words reawoke Rick's mettle and the man swept Negan's legs out from under him, bringing him back to the ground.
"You're beat," Rick said, still holding his side and unable to get to his feet. "Your people are down."
"I'll get out of it. I always do." Negan was back on his feet again while Rick was just barely able to sit up. Negan was too resiliant to stay down, even without his people. He hadn't heard many gunshots; he knew they were still alive. The Saviors were going to endure, not Rick and his band of pricks. Rick thought otherwise; he knew his own people would endure, even as it seemed he himself was about to die by Lucille. "I am bigger, I am badder, and I got a bat."
"There's a future for all of us," Rick said shakily, pushing himself up to his knees. "Just give me ten seconds to tell you how. For Carl." Negan's uninjured hand gripped Lucille tightly, twitching with the impulse to bash the man's brains in. But somehow the mention of the boy's name, a boy Negan had really only spoken with face to face a handful of times, gave him pause. His shoulders relaxed ever so slightly as he looked to the sky, trying to quell the tears rushing to his eyes. The boy was gone and the Saviors were down. If he didn't listen to what Rick had to say, he might not make it back to Aven today or ever.
"Ten," he hissed after a moment of disbelief that he was giving the prick a chance to speak. He began to count down as Rick made his final plea. "Nine."
"Carl said it doesn't have to be a fight anymore."
"He was wrong," Negan spat, his eyes glossed over. "Eight."
"No," Rick retorted quickly, still trying to catch his breath. "He was right." The next number, seven, was on the tip of Negan's tongue but it got caught in his throat as Aven's concerned face flashed through his mind. She read Carl's letter too and as much as she'd tried to disguise it, she was moved by the little shit's words. She wanted a real future with Negan, and as stuck as he was in his ways, as much as he relished the power he held over people, he wanted that future too. It was a future he'd dreamed of when he met Lucille, a future he had a hand in destroying before she died. He never thought he'd have another shot at it.
Lucille hung limp at his side and his lips twitched tensely, both from holding back tears and from the inability to form a coherent thought when he so desperately wanted to speak. For once, he was without words. For years to come, he'd wonder why he didn't take those past few minutes to just shut up and end Rick's life, why he even gave the man the courtesy of a ten-second countdown. Negan had made a lot of mistakes in his life, and that was one of them.
Negan barely registered what had happened when Rick's hand swung out between them, a stinging pain flaring in his neck as he dropped to his knees. He pressed his shaking, uninjured hand to his throat as the warm, red liquid began flowing the way Aven's had only weeks earlier when he almost lost her.
"Look what you did," Negan whispered, managing the smallest of taunting smiles as his tears began to mirror the blood dripping down his front. "Carl didn't know shit." He fell to his side, watching the world in front of him at a skewed angle, the dirt and dead, brown leaves taking up half of his vision. He just barely processed Rick's order to save him and the face of a young Arab man kneeling down in front of him. What caught his attention more were the screams of a woman begging Rick to kill him.
He struggled to remain conscious, but one final sight knocked the wind out of him: Two men dragged the limp body of a small woman with wild, curly red hair and a bloody face into view and let her drop to the ground.
It's Aven, he realized.
She's dead.
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Author's Note: A lot of dialogue from the show, still need to edit more thoroughly. I didn't realize I was actually going to get to this part in this update, so I'm fucking shaking right now holy shit. I figure now is a good time to share my original ending, which would have entirely broken my spirit: I was going to have Aven practicing with sniper rifles throughout the story and snipe Rick from far away. Siddiq would have tried to save him (and failed) and let Negan die because of it, and Aven would later find out that Rick had given the order to save Negan before she shot him. Effectively making Negan's death her fault.