Full Summary: Negan has spent over two decades coping with his struggles through songwriting, and it's made his band, Negan & The Saviors, an established stadium rock act. After the tragic deaths of his wife and unborn daughter, Negan dives head-first into exorcising the demons in his head, but he can't deal with the ghost of his wife Lucille haunting the home they once shared. Desperate to put his lost love's spirit to rest, Negan seeks the help of paranormal investigator Rick Grimes, and an unexpected intimacy develops between them. As a single father to two children, Rick has suffered loss too, and in time Negan finds himself building a life with Rick and becoming the father he never had.
Unwilling to lose anyone else that he loves without a fight, Negan joins Rick in the perilous job of hunting monsters, and together they face demons, ghosts, and other unexplained creatures terrorizing the lives of their clients. But Negan soon discovers that even in a world crawling with supernatural beasts, the darkest horrors lurk inside human beings.
Tags/themes: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Developing Relationship, Drama, Grief/Mourning, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Fluff, Domesticity, Rape, Rape Recovery, Death, Horror, Dark Themes
May 2013
They lost the baby twenty-two weeks into Lucille's pregnancy, but Negan should have seen the signs early on. From the start, Lucille was warned about miscarriage due to blood clots from her heavy bleeding. Every spot of blood terrified her on good days and depressed her on the bad ones. One particularly harrowing evening, Negan found Lucille sitting on the edge of the tub and crying into a fluffy white towel.
"She's not going to make it," Lucille sobbed, her eyes and nose tinged with red from the bout of weeping.
Red beads and splashes flecked a short trail on the marble floor, stopping at the toilet bowl.
"You don't know that," Negan said. Back then, he believed optimism would soldier them through anything; the power of positive thinking was a gift Lucille had given him from the start of their relationship, and he was determined to pay it forward.
Lucille wiped her eyes with the towel, but more tears came just as quickly. "There's too much blood. Even if it's not every day, even if it's just once a week… That's too much."
But the bleeding cleared up after a while, and everything seemed fine until her next sonogram, where she was told her placenta had a likely chance of invading her bladder.
Lucille squeezed Negan's hand impossibly tight, and he could only imagine what that grip would be like when she went into labor.
"My baby…" Lucille said, trying to keep her chest from hitching. "Will she—"
Lucille's doctor, a middle-aged woman with a blonde ponytail and Angelina Jolie lips, said delicately, "If that happens, your baby should be fine. In most cases, the risk is to the mother."
Lucille nodded, seeming to take a great deal of strength in that.
So Negan and Lucille remained cautiously optimistic. As the frontman and lead guitarist of Negan & The Saviors, it wasn't like he was doing anything; the band had been on hiatus since their tour for last year's Hearts Still Beating album. Negan had all the time in the world to tend to Lucille's every need, which he did without complaint.
Lucille began painting one of the spare bedrooms they had designated for the nursery. She covered the walls in a soft pastel blue, then later painted in some colorful cartoon animals. Negan did his best to help, but visual art was never his forte, so he stuck to handing her brushes and sponges. And, most importantly, providing conversation.
"This is a damn beautiful nursery, honey," Negan told her one afternoon.
Lucille gave a tiny huff of a laugh and a smile that told the world in general that she was humoring him. "That's sweet, but you're my husband. Bias comes with the territory." She was detailing a colorful parrot, and her hand was speckled with red and green paint up to the wrist.
"If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'. I'm also an artist myself. I know good shit when I see it."
"If you say so." She rolled her eyes, but the smile on her pink lips betrayed her.
A few days later, Lucille took up another painting project. She decided if the baby was going to stare at the ceiling most of the time, it ought to look appealing. Negan brought her a ladder from the garage, and Lucille became Michelangelo, brushing and stippling painted clouds across the ceiling.
For this fragile two-week period, it seemed as if they were growing closer, like they were newlyweds all over again. Neither of them knew how short the time was.
"Something's wrong," Lucille said in the middle of the night, shaking Negan awake just as he began to slip into sleep.
Negan sat up in the bed, rubbing his eyes. "You sure?" A stupid question, but he was still sluggish after being yanked from the cusp of dreamland.
Lucille opened her mouth to answer him, then she was sprinting for the bathroom. She barely managed to reach the toilet before vomiting. Negan saw the red splatters in the bowl and knew they were in for some serious shit.
The rest of it is hazy. His mind, to protect its sanity, has tried to blot out the awful memories of that night in the emergency room, but like erasing pencil marks from paper, an imprint still remains. He can recall a few bleached-white snippets of the hospital, a handful of flinch-worthy phrases: internal bleeding. Ruptured uterus. Hysterectomy.
Negan knew he stood to lose either the little ball of life in Lucille's belly or Lucille herself, and in his frantic moments of deliberation he could not choose one over the other. It was an impossible choice, but it was one already made for him.
None of it made any sense to Negan until he saw Lucille in the ICU that afternoon, saw the vacant, lost expression on her pallid face. The room began to spin. His lungs contracted. A doctor with thick-framed glasses took Negan aside and explained that Lucille's uterus had blown like a tire, drowning her insides in blood, and an emergency surgery had been necessary to save her life. The baby had not survived, and due to the life-saving hysterectomy Lucille would be unable to get pregnant again.
Memories pierce through Negan in rapid succession like angry stabs: the struggle to conceive, and the fun they'd had trying. Lucille's joyful tears and laughter over the blue line on her home pregnancy test. Their deliberation over baby names. Dean for a boy. Emily for a girl.
It would have been a girl.
"Your wife is very lucky to be alive," the doctor said, which struck Negan as such a bizarre thing to say under the circumstances he actually wanted to punch the guy.
"Don't tell her she's lucky," Negan said savagely before heading back into the room.
After burying Emily, a numbness spreads through Negan like Novocain. He feels nothing, perhaps staving off his grief in order to help Lucille deal with her own. And Lucille has plenty of grief for both of them. Negan does the best he can for her, but she barely looks at him. When she manages to meet his eyes, something in them makes her cry harder.
Negan knows fuck-all about cheering people up. On Lucille's previous bad days, when she'd come through the door with a storm cloud over her head, Negan could usually lift her spirits with a joke or physical affection. But none of those tactics work here: she pushes away intimacy, and his humor falls flat. So what the fuck is he supposed to do?
"Maybe you should talk to somebody," Negan suggests one afternoon. It's been two weeks since they put their dead baby in the ground. "I'm doin' a pretty shit job as a shrink."
Outside it's a bright, clear day, sunshine flowing in through the windows and half-open curtains. Negan hoped letting in some light would brighten the place up and, thus, brighten up their moods, but the illumination seems all wrong now.
Lucille's sitting beside him at their kitchen table. Her complexion is paler than usual, her dark hair stringy and oily. Underneath her eyes are dark purple circles that look like bruises. She stares at the table, her expression placid, which scares Negan more than tears or angry outbursts ever could.
Lucille doesn't answer. Gently, Negan plucks Lucille's hands out of her lap and covers them with his own. She doesn't retract them, which he thinks is a sign of progress. "You gotta talk your shit out with someone. I'll go with you, if that'll help."
Lucille nods, but there's nothing behind it.
The following week they visit a psychiatrist, Denise Cloyd, who barely looks older than Lucille had been when Negan married her five years ago. Before her turbulent pregnancy, Lucille barely looked a day over twenty, and she's thirty-one. There are numerous degrees hung on the wall of Dr. Cloyd's small office, so maybe she, like Lucille, has a youthful face.
"Do you want to talk about how you're feeling, Lucille?" Dr. Cloyd asks in a soft voice.
"There's no point in talking," Lucille says after gazing at the ceiling for a bit. "My baby is dead, and I'll never have another baby. Talking about it won't change anything."
"You're right. It won't. But it can help you and your husband deal with what happened. It's okay to cry and be upset. You need to grieve, to have an outlet for your emotions. Whatever you're feeling is okay to feel. But you don't need to talk right now if you don't want to. We can deal with things on your schedule." Dr. Cloyd turns her attention to Negan. "Do you have anything you'd like to talk about, Negan?"
"Nope."
"You sure? You lost a daughter, too."
"Yeah, I did, and I deal with my shit in my own way." Negan was raised to handle his problems on his own; his father was a class-A douchebag who bailed on the family when Negan was twelve, but not before instilling all kinds of harmful ideals into Negan's brain, like self-reliance to the point of self-destruction. He can't ask for help. Not when it really matters.
"And how's that?" asks Dr. Cloyd.
"Just keep grinding. No matter how hard it gets."
"Do you think that's a healthy way to deal with things?"
Negan shrugs. "It's got me this far."
"That's not really an answer."
"Why are you even asking me questions? Ask her." Negan tilts his head in Lucille's direction.
"You've been acting like everything's fine," Lucille blurts out. "But it's not. It's a fucking mess. And you're just ignoring it, because if you actually face it, it's real and you have to deal with it."
The flicker of fire in Lucille's words takes Negan off-guard. "I know it's real," he says. "I know our little girl is dead, and so are our chances of having another one, and while that is a sad fucking state of affairs, it's not the end."
Lucille scoffs a heated noise that strikes Negan like a punch in the chest. "You're delusional."
"What makes you say that, Lucille?" Dr. Cloyd asks her.
"All I wanted was to have a baby," Lucille says. Her hands are clenched around the hem of the Rolling Stones sweatshirt she borrowed from Negan's closet. "Losing Emily was bad enough, but I can't even try again. My body failed our baby. How am I supposed to forgive myself for that?" She covers her face with her too-long sleeves, and she sobs the way a child does, lost and endless.
Dr. Cloyd writes Lucille a prescription to help her post-partum depression. Lucille exhibits no enthusiasm over this, though Negan doubted she would. Maybe after a few days of taking the medication she'll feel a bit better. He has no idea what it's like in her head, and he's terrified to find out.
"We can get through this," Negan tells her later that afternoon. He made her a bowl of soup so she wouldn't take the pill on an empty stomach. He's overjoyed to see her eating now. "Hell, you pulled me up from rock bottom. Before you know it things'll get better."
Lucille snaps her head up to look at him, as if he has slapped her. "How can you say that?"
Some part of his pep talk offended her, and it's on Negan to figure out which one. He's trapped under the weight of her furious glare, and he wants to escape, to dive out the dining room window into the flower beds.
"It's not going to get better," Lucille says, her voice cracked. "Don't you get that?"
Apparently, he does not. Negan feels like he's in a Groundhog Day loop of this argument. No resolution. No compromise. Is it that way for her, too?
"Honey, can I be frank?" Negan says, before throwing his argument into four-wheel drive. "So what if you can't have a baby again? That doesn't change who you are or how I feel about you. If you still want kids, we can adopt. That's right up your alley, isn't it?" After she married Negan, Lucille quit her job to volunteer at women's and animal shelters. Though she put on a tough face, helping the less fortunate was important to her.
"It's not the same," Lucille protests. "How would you feel if this was on you? If you had a narrow urethra, or if your sperm count was too low, or if you couldn't make sperm at all?"
Before Negan can unpack that one, Lucille says something that throws him for a loop: "How would you feel if your baby died because you were scared? Like all that negativity and fear created a toxic soup inside you?"
Negan straightens up in his chair. He feels punched, breathless. "Honey, you didn't kill Emily. You did everything right. All those vitamins and that healthy food shit, rushing to the doctor practically every time you sneezed… Sometimes it's not your fault. Didn't you tell me that?"
"That was different. The Bitch was the problem." The Bitch is Negan's ex-wife—his first wife before Lucille came along. They have an unspoken agreement not to say her name, as though she is Voldemort from the Harry Potter books.
"And here the problem is that sometimes shit's just fucking horrible."
That, Negan realizes far too late, was the wrong thing to say.
Negan still has the note he found on the other side of the bed when he woke up that miserable June morning. The one written in Lucille's familiar handwriting. The one that talks about losing the joy and light in her life, about the hole in her heart, about how much she loved him. The one that begs him to forgive her.
The one he read before discovering Lucille in their acrylic bathtub, an orange prescription bottle discarded on the marble tile.
One month after losing Emily, Negan buries his wife next to their lost child.
At the cemetery, Negan is joined by Lucille's family—her mother, father, and older brother—and his bandmates from Negan & The Saviors. His own family is not present, because the only person who would have attended—Negan's mother—died three years ago. Lucille's mother is wailing sobs into her husband's chest, and these sounds cleave Negan's heart anew. She has lost something too, maybe something even larger than Negan has.
The Saviors don't sob or break down, but their eyes leak tears. They all knew Lucille and loved her for being good to Negan after his first wife had been anything but. Simon, the band's drummer and the closest thing Negan has to a brother, helped organize the funeral arrangements. Standing to Negan's left, Simon places a hand on his shoulder as the coffin is lowered into the ground. Negan lifts his own hand, as if reaching to his right to take hold of Lucille's dainty fingers, the way he had during his own mother's funeral.
It's not Lucille standing to his right, but the Saviors' rhythm guitarist, Jesus.
As Lucille's coffin is covered with dirt, Negan's world goes wobbly at the edges. Then he's on his knees, his fingers gripping the cold, smooth marble of his daughter's tombstone, and every pore of his body weeps.
March 2012
On a crisp spring morning, Lori Grimes told her husband Rick that she was heading to Panola Mountain State Park with her friend Jacqui for an afternoon hike. She kissed him on the cheek and took Carl and Judith to school and daycare, respectively. The next time Rick saw her, she was dead.
Around the middle of the afternoon, Rick received a panicked call from Jacqui.
"Lori's missing," Jacqui said, sounding breathless.
Rick sat up in his chair. "She didn't show up?"
"No, she did, but she just vanished. We were walking the trail. She was behind me, and—I don't know what happened, Rick." Jacqui started to sob, but composed herself long enough to tell Rick that she had contacted the park rangers, who conducted a fruitless search of the area in which Lori vanished. Calling Rick made sense, because he was the sheriff of King County, and Search and Rescue hadn't turned up any leads.
According to the coroner after Lori's remains were located, her cause of death had been exsanguination. Multiple bite wounds and tears were found on her body, made from inhuman teeth. The creature had eaten her for hours until she bled out. Her body—or what was left of it—was cremated.
So it's almost poetic justice that Rick cremated the wendigo that killed her. He, along with three of his deputies, discovered the wendigo's lair deep in the park. As they ventured deeper, a pair of glowing eyes lit up the darkness, like the burning tips of cigarettes. Then a fifteen-foot tall pale creature with elongated limbs emerged from the shadows.
Sheriff's Deputy Leon Basset didn't stand a chance. The wendigo tore through Leon like he was made of papier-mâché and popsicle sticks. Rick and his remaining deputies Shane Walsh and Lambert Kendal immediately opened fire on the creature. But bullets did nothing to deter the wendigo's approach. The monster sank claws as long as knives into Lambert's shoulder and tossed him out of the way. The stench of blood filled Rick's nose. And those screams…
Rick whipped out a lighter and struck up a flame. "Shane!"
Shane Walsh, having been like a brother to Rick for the past two decades, knew Rick's intentions and took out his can of pepper spray. The pepper spray ignited a jet of flame that torched the wendigo. The creature howled an unholy scream as the fire consumed it before shriveling up like a lit tissue.
They found Lori's body in the deepest part of the cave, along with the skeletal remains of other lost hikers.
It took Rick about a week for the world to feel real again. He fumbled through the memorial service in a daze, shaken to the core by all that had happened. Judith was two and a half, and wouldn't stop asking "where's Mommy?" And it broke Rick's heart every time he had to tell her Mommy went to heaven. Children that young don't understand the concept of death. It is incomprehensible to them that a person could be here one day and then gone the next, never to be seen again. It's a little incomprehensible to Rick, too.
Twelve-year-old Carl took his mother's death hard. He shut himself in his room, only leaving for meals. His grades at school plummeted despite the slack given to him by his teachers due to his loss. "You should have been with her!" Carl yelled at Rick one evening, his emotions erupting. "You were s'posed to protect her, and you didn't!"
It was the cruelest thing Carl had ever said to him, stabbing deeper than the I hate yous thrown out in pre-teen frustration. Because Carl was right. Rick's unspoken vow on that beautiful Georgia summer day he married Lori was to protect her. And he failed. He had no idea of the dangers lurking out there, and that ignorance got his wife killed.
So Rick let Carl storm up the stairs and slam the door to his bedroom. Rick lingered in the den, trembling after the Chernobyl of father-son arguments.
Since his son was already disillusioned, Rick decided to tell him the truth. He might have gotten Lori killed by proxy of his ignorance, but there was no way in hell he'd let the same thing happen to his kids. "No more kid stuff," Rick said the next day, crouching to get on Carl's level. "I wish you could have the childhood I had, but that's not going to happen. You are not safe. The thing that killed your mom… There are more of them out there, and you'll never know where."
It was in this moment Carl asked the question that set Rick's life on a new course: "How do we stop them?"
Rick didn't know. He needed to find out.
Rick spent the next few months keeping a journal to document his research on various supernatural creatures and lore. He scoured websites and books for information, clipped out reports of mysterious deaths from newspapers. He watched "reality" shows about ghost chasers and Bigfoot hunters. Most of these shows were bullshit, dramatized fakery, but he discovered one more tolerable than the rest.
Redneck Bigfoot Hunters didn't have the most eloquent title Rick had ever heard, but it was succinct and to-the-point. Hosted by brothers Daryl and Merle Dixon, the show chronicled their search for Bigfoot in the Georgia backwoods as they were followed by a camera crew. Of course they never caught a Bigfoot on camera, but something about their methods pointed to the Dixon brothers having experience with other supernatural creatures.
"They never catch anything on these shows," Carl complained one night when he came downstairs for a drink of water and found Rick on the couch watching TV. "They're so stupid."
Rick knew enough to know a couple bozos in the wilderness with cameras wouldn't ever record anything substantial. These creatures have existed among humans for thousands of years because they're smart. They know how to hide and live undetected. Bubba McMoonshine and his mulleted crew won't get documented footage of anything other than their own hijinks.
But he still watched, eager to learn, hoping for a glimpse of something once thought unreal.
Rick retired from the sheriff's department four months later when Shane was wounded in a shootout. Shane wasn't mortally injured ("I've had worse," Shane told him when Rick visited the hospital), but again Rick was stricken by the sudden, shocking nature of violence. This could be you, Rick thought when he saw Shane lying in that hospital bed with blood staining the crisp white gauze wrapped around his shoulder. Rick realized he could not afford to die. Judith and Carl would be sent off to live with their grandparents—whether his parents or Lori's would be specified in Rick's will, if he were wise enough to draw one up before his premature death. Carl would remember him, perhaps fondly, but Rick would only be a hazy recollection for Judith. She might remember how he'd pushed her on the swings at the park, or taken her for walks around the neighborhood, but it would be unclear and impermanent, like wisps of smoke.
Before Rick turned in his resignation, he looked up houses for sale on his laptop. There were plenty in Georgia, but he wasn't interested in those. He wanted a fresh start, somewhere people wouldn't look at him with pity. A place that didn't remind him of Lori. By chance, he found a house for sale in an Alexandria, Virginia community: a Nantucket style two-story with grey shingle siding and white trim. The house had a sunflower yellow door, a quaint front porch, and a decent price tag due to foreclosure.
Rick bookmarked the listing and researched the neighborhood. Their current house was newly paid off; he could sell the place for relatively cheap and still have money left over after buying the more-attractive-by-the-minute house in Alexandria. Lori's savings account—the contents of which now belonging to Rick—was pretty impressive from her career as an advertising executive. It wouldn't be much of a financial strain to get out of here.
Something to consider.
"I've been thinking about moving," Rick said to Carl some time in late August. The three of them were sitting at the table, eating the lasagna Rick heated up for dinner.
Carl looked at Rick with a curious expression. More confusion than anger.
"But you have a life here too, and I don't want to take you away from that unless it's your decision," Rick told him. "You get a say in this."
"Where would we go?" Carl asked.
"Somethin' on your mind?"
Carl shrugged halfheartedly. "Japan?"
Rick gave him a look.
"It's where they make anime."
"You don't even know Japanese."
"I could learn," Carl said, like it was absurd Rick would question this. He sighed and changed his answer to something more reasonable. "What about Hollywood?"
"No."
"I thought I was s'posed to get a say!" Carl protested. He turned to his sister, who was paying zero attention to them, just diligently chewing her food. "Back me up on this. Tell Dad you wanna live in Hollywood."
"I wanna live in Hollywood," Judith parroted with glee.
Rick smiled at their banter. It was good to see Carl coming back to himself, exhibiting emotions that weren't anger or depression. "I don't have the money for that kind of lifestyle. But here's what I had in mind."
Rick showed Carl the listing on his laptop. Carl lifted an eyebrow, searching for a reason Rick might have chosen this house other than a random roll of the dice. "It's cool, I guess. Isn't that where Washington D.C. is?"
"It's nearby, yeah," Rick conceded.
"Are you running for president or something?"
"It just seems like a nice place… but if you don't like it, I'll find something else. Or we'll stay here. It's up to you."
Carl made a face, like he didn't appreciate bearing the weight of decision-making. "I guess it doesn't matter," he said with another shrug. Apparently kids seem to be made of shrugs and noncommittal responses. Or maybe it was just Carl.
"Are you saying that because you want me to stop talking?"
Carl huffed a laugh, which surprised Rick, because he hadn't heard his son laugh in quite a while. "No, I just… No matter where we move, I won't know anybody. I'll be the new kid. But at school now I'm the kid whose mom died"—Rick wasn't oblivious to the way Carl's voice shook when he said it—"and that's worse."
Rick knew what Carl felt, the sense of ostracization that came with being a victim of tragedy. People either treated you like a social leper, tiptoeing around you as though every conversation was a minefield, or they tried way too hard to cheer you up.
"Is that why you haven't been spending time with your friends?" For almost the entire summer, Carl stayed at home playing video games, watching TV, or using his computer. Rick would have worried Carl wasn't socializing as much as he should, but the kid was definitely chatting with online friends, with people who didn't know who he was or what he'd been through.
"Some of my friends found out about the monster," Carl told him with a shake of his head. "They keep wanting to talk about it or go find more. I just wish they'd forget about it."
Contrary to Rick's personal experience, which involved a whole lot of denial and willful ignorance. No one at the sheriff's department wanted to talk about the wendigo. And Rick understood.
Rick sold the house, and by January the following year the Grimes family moved to Alexandria. Almost everyone on their street welcomed Rick with open arms and perfectly baked casseroles, fawning over Judith as the movers hauled furniture and boxes into the house. The neighbors to Rick's left were a young couple with a baby: Glenn and Maggie Rhee. On Rick's right lived Pete and Jessie Anderson with their two boys; Carl and the Anderson's eldest son, Ron, seemed to get along okay. At the end of the cul-de-sac was another young couple: Tara and Rosita Espinosa.
No one pestered Rick about why he moved here, or why he had two children and a wedding ring but no cohabitating partner. They gave him and his family space but made sure to let him know to just ask if he needed anything. Tara and Rosita volunteered to babysit Judith; Rick took them up on the offer when he went into town to meet with the owner of an office building on the outskirts of the city. There was a vacant space for rent, and Rick eventually turned it into Grimes & Associates, a licensed private investigation agency. There were, of course, no associates, but he couldn't think of a snappier name.
Rick did a fair amount of business, though most of his clients were the average PI fare, looking for someone to catch their spouse in the act of cheating. Some asked him to track down their long-lost relatives. He advertised his paranormal investigation services in the weirder parts of Reddit and Craigslist. He made somewhat of a name for himself among cryptid and paranormal enthusiasts. And every now and then he got something strange, something that raised the hairs on the back of his neck…
