It hurt. It hurt, and hurt, and hurt. It never stopped.

She stood there silently and stared outside. The ground was covered in snow, the cold seeping into the room through the open window. The cold didn't bother her, though. She didn't feel it. She couldn't feel much of anything anymore. Her eyes focused on one of the trucks, his truck, parked at the edge of the compound, and her heart seized in her chest.

The bite of the cold was dulled just barely by the leather jacket she wore. It was four sizes too big, but she didn't care. It smelled like him. It belonged to him. It offered a shred of comfort to her in the midst of the fucked up hellfire the world had become since he had died. She hugged her knees to her chest and continued staring out the window, surveying the Sanctuary from above. Tracing all of his old paths by memory. The places he liked to sit. The places he stood while he observed his community. The place he stood when he barked orders after returning from a scavenging run.

He had died in front of her, feet from her, and she could do nothing but watch as he fell to the ground. She remembered the burning in her wrists as she struggled to get away from the man holding her back. She could still remember the aching in her chest as she screamed. Cried. Begged.

The most vivid memory was the worst. The image of him, bullet wound to the chest, spitting up blood, trying to mouth to her that everything would be okay. The image was burned into her mind forever. They left him there on the ground to bleed out. Didn't put him down, didn't do anything to end his suffering. They just forced her to watch as the light left his eyes, and made her watch as he turned.

Then, they made her pull the trigger.

They shot her, too. A shot to the gut, and they left her there next to him, staring up at the sky through the dense leaves and branches of the trees surrounding them.

It seemed odd to the others to find her smiling when they found her, having followed the sound of gunfire. The location of the struggle wasn't far from the Sanctuary, and for that, she was grateful. If nothing else, she was just grateful that she could take him home. Bury him in his territory, where he belonged. Somewhere she could visit him still.

It had been three months. She was still barely recovered. She had spent almost all day every day for the first month at his grave, regardless of Carson's warnings about her staying in bed. She couldn't lay in bed by herself. She couldn't lay there, painfully aware of the absence of his solid warmth, his low rumbling snore, his calloused hands tracing aimless patterns over her skin, his slow breathing as he held her in silence.

The only reason she had stopped spending hours on end by his side was because of the snow. If she could, she would sleep at his grave. She had, more than once, before the cold came. It wasn't comfortable, it wasn't pleasant. It was just too difficult for her to tear herself away from his final resting place.

She felt a sharp tug in her chest whenever she looked at the rock that served as his headstone, but after the sharp pain, there always came a dull ache. A feeling that she, eventually, was able to address as love. Love for their memories and the home they had continued building together after he had taken her in.

Love for him, love that never went away. Not even when she saw his eyes glaze over and listened to him snarling and snapping his teeth at her, looking at her as a meal instead of the woman that had been by his side through thick and thin for nearly two years. The woman that he himself had loved until his very last breath.

She had been so lost in thought that she barely registered the far off sound of gunshots and the warning cries from the watchtowers. She knew it would happen eventually. They would come back. The fact that it had taken them three months was a small shock, but there was never a doubt in her mind that they would come after her community eventually now that he was dead.

She stood slowly and her hand found Lucille's handle, and she felt tears begin to well up in her eyes.

It was a simple plan, really, one that she had convinced herself was for the best in the long run. She had spoken to Simon about it before and he had tried desperately to talk her out of if, to say anything he could to keep her from doing something she would regret, but deep down he knew that she had lost the ability to care about her own well being the moment her partner had been taken from her.

So it was no surprise that she smiled at him when he ran to her side and dragged her out of the line of fire, and he forced a small one back at her. It had all happened so fast, and she was grateful for that. She had swung Lucille once, twice… Searing pain, and then nothing. Her left shoulder ached ever so slightly, and she was faintly aware of the sensation of blood running down her chest and back, and tasted it as it bubbled up her throat. She pushed out a weak laugh laced with a cough, the force spraying blood from her throat onto Simon's shirt. She barely managed to rasp out a sentence as she started to shake.

"He would beat my ass if he could see me now, huh?"

The sentence barely made it out of her mouth before she started coughing.

"He would," Simon chuckled softly, and in that moment she could have sworn she saw tears building in the corners of his eyes. She shivered again and closed her eyes, letting out a labored sigh as her grip on Lucille began to go slack.

"Go on to sleep, kiddo. You can go, it's alright. I'll fuckin' take care of this shithole," Simon whispered to her as he stroked her hair, "you go on ahead now, and be with him."

That's all it took. Her head fell limp against his arm and it took less than a minute for her to draw her final few breaths, and she passed with the faintest ghost of a smile on her lips.

…

Simon stood silently, his hands stuffed into his pockets, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he stared at the stone marking the graves in front of him. He could just barely make out the faint scratches in the rock.

'Negan and his love.'

"Sorry for the sappy shit, boss, but I really hope you two are happier now," Simon whispered, flicking away the ashes of his cigarette as he turned and walked away after resting a bundle on the ground.

There, nestled against their headstone, was Lucille, wrapped in Negan's old scarf.

And somewhere, somehow, in that moment, Simon knew the two of them were smiling down on Sanctuary.