Author's Note: So I attempted to rewrite this for about six months before finally saying, "aww, fuck it" and deciding that consistency and canon be damned. Basically, I DO WHAT I WANT, and NO ONE CAN STOP ME.
When the boy burned his hands, no one wanted to treat him.
Rishi, a man from the Hilltop who had been a first-year med student at Johns Hopkins before the Dead started to rise, tried to tell himself he wasn't shaking as he wrapped the child's small, pudgy hand in gauze. Tried to tell himself that he saw only a crying child, not the man with the bat and leather jacket and sadistic smirk; that twisted smile made of blood and barbed wire.
Ridiculous, he told himself. How could you possibly hold a grudge against a baby for the atrocities committed by his father?
This child had never met Negan. The sperm-donor of a father was just another rotting corpse, knifed in the head to avoid re-animation and left to turn to bones in some nameless field. Alone, unmourned. Celebrated, because the monster who had destroyed so many lives was dead.
The war saw the end of Negan. Still, when his child came to their doorstep crying in pain long after the final shot was fired, the people who could help ease it for the small boy hesitated.
Because they remembered.
She thought about bringing Leo, but ultimately chose not to.
Not willingly; since he'd been born, Maggie had rarely been away from her son for more than a few minutes. Leaving him overnight would be a test of her ability to not completely freak out. As much practice that she'd had in that skillset over the past few years, it would be a totally different story this time.
But Tara and Rosita wanted to spend more time with the baby, and since they still lived in Alexandria while Maggie was at the Hilltop, they hadn't been around him as much as everyone else. Aaron offered to take him, but she felt bad about leaving him alone with two babies overnight. And now that Gracie was walking, she would get into literally everything whenever your back was turned. Aaron had his hands full as it was, chasing her around.
So she handed him over to Tara and Rosita with a duffle bag of diapers, a blanket, Leo's stuffed tiger (a gift from Ezekiel, of course) and a can of formula. She'd fed him before saying goodbye so she figured he'd be okay for the night, but it was the first time he wouldn't have her there as a food source whenever he was hungry.
Suddenly, Maggie had to stop moving, stop breathing, stop thinking about everything except the turning in her stomach, and the small meal she'd eaten before leaving the Hilltop threatened to make its return.
"Everything okay?"
She blinked. Jesus stood at her side, eyebrows knitted together.
"We can turn back, you know," he told her. "Nobody said you had to do this."
Maggie straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath. Telling herself to get a grip, she stood upright and shook her head.
"We need to do this," she said firmly, then repeated, "we need to."
Jesus met her gaze, nodding twice, then turned back to the road in front of them and kept walking.
Maggie followed, her mind focused solely on the plan ahead. No time to deal with those kinds of thoughts. Nothing good would come from getting lost in her own paranoia.
Hitching her backpack further up her shoulders, she walked with Jesus down the uneven path through the undergrowth.
Simply killing Negan hadn't brought a stop to the war. Because everyone was spread far apart with no way of communicating quickly over distance, it took a while before news of his death actually made it through the ranks. And even when it did, that didn't just mean the end of the fighting. Several splintered-off factions of the Saviors kept going, even after learning of their leader's death. Some for supplies, some for influence, and others because they didn't want to find out what happened to the losing side.
It took several weeks to bring everything to an end, and when it did, re-organizing their ranks and sorting out the dead from the living left everyone scrambling. Trying to find a coherent narrative as to what, actually, had been the trajectory of the war was even more difficult.
What Maggie learned, weeks after she dealt Negan the killing blow, was this:
Morgan was dead. Carol was dead. Ezekiel had survived, but just by the skin of his teeth. His beloved tiger had been torn apart by Walkers while she was saving her master's life.
Francine was dead. Eduardo was dead. Crystal and Oscar and Kal were dead. Eric was dead, and the fact of it transformed Aaron's features overnight. Maggie recognized the hollow look in his eyes that he tried to hide from her. She remembered it from looking at her own in in dusty mirrors, in the weeks and months after Glenn was killed.
Dwight was dead, killed by Negan when it was revealed he was secretly working for the other side. She knew this because Daryl told her. He was there, and he'd received a gunshot to the side at the end of that fight. He'd still been recovering when Leo was born.
Eugene was dead, which left most people feeling a sense of justice. But even after everything he'd done, none of them would admit to the sting of grief they felt for him, no matter how slight.
Rick hadn't killed him. Negan didn't, either. He was already dead by the time the fighting stopped. No one knew how the end came. He'd been alone, with nothing left to bring back.
Tara cried when she found out. So did Rosita. They were the only ones. Rosita's tears were angrier than Tara's, because she had been with him for so long, and his betrayal had hurt her in ways she hadn't thought anything could anymore.
Carl was dead. This was somehow the most impossible fact Maggie encountered since the dead had begun to rise.
Rick had a broken arm and collarbone. Jesus had a stab wound to his bicep and probably a broken rib or two. Daryl had what was most likely a concussion in addition to his gunshot wound. Michonne and Rosita both had some truly impressive bruises that put Van Gogh's "Starry Night" to shame. And Aaron had several long, deep gashes on his back and side, the aftermath of a narrow escape from a herd of walkers underneath a barbed wire fence. He'd developed an infection, and for a few days it looked like they would lose him, but he'd pulled through in the end.
They were still nursing their various wounds when Leo was born, an unseasonably cold night after a stretch of humid days that reeked of death and rot. He was born while a soft rain beat against the rooftop, just as the pearly fingers of dawn were starting to creep across the creaky wooden floorboards.
The pain had been unbelievable. As a kid, she'd been with her dad when their farm animals gave birth, and she'd been the one to cut Judith from Lori's body. She'd seen the body of her sister, cradled so tenderly in Daryl's arms. She'd witnessed the murder of her father at the hands of the Governor.
She'd watched Glenn murdered right in front of her, their child inside her body, growing under her own shattered heart.
And still, the act of bringing their son into the world felt like being torn in half.
Aaron had gripped her hand. Jesus talked her through every contraction. Enid had dabbed her forehead with a wet cloth, like they did in the movies.
But Rick had been the one able to ease the pain. Holding the hand that wasn't clasped in Aaron's, he looked her in the eyes and kept her steady through the worst of the contractions.
When her son finally made his appearance, Rick kissed her forehead. Aaron nestled his face into her neck. Enid sobbed, and Jesus grinned like a lunatic. Even Dr. Carson was crying, his breathing coming in waves of ragged hiccups as he cleaned the baby's nose and mouth and gave her son an examination that declared him to be "one hell of a scene-stealer".
Maggie, for her part, couldn't do more than hold him at the end of it all. She knew she wasn't exactly looking her best, covered in the gooey afterbirth of pushing Glenn's child into this world and smelling like shit. But as the baby was passed around from person to person, sleeping while the ones cradling him either sobbed or laughed uncontrollably, Maggie couldn't remember feeling more peaceful in her life.
Glenn should have been there. Glenn needed to be there. Glenn needed to see their son.
But at that moment, she didn't need Glenn.
To this day, she wonders if that makes her a bad person. A bad wife; a bad widow.
The swingset had been a birthday present.
Most of the manual labor came from Jesus, Daryl, and Aaron,made from scraps of several Kingdom structures damaged beyond repair in the fighting. In the interest of not pissing Daryl off, Jesus refrained from making too many "Jesus was a carpenter" jokes, mostly.
Leo had adored it. Or at least, most of it. The first time Maggie tried to lower him into the bucket swing, he screeched his protests into her ear, struggling against the hold of her arms. His favorite thing was the slide, but he seemed to love going up it rather than down.
The other kids loved it, too. On any given day, you could find children from the Hilltop, Alexandria, and the Kingdom swinging on the swings and giggling as they slid down the uneven plastic slide.
But until a certain summer day, one child never used it.
They had seen the little boy several times. As a baby, he was worn against his mother's chest in a makeshift cloth sling, his small face hidden from prying eyes. As a toddler, when he walked beside his mother through the marketplace, people looked the other way.
So when they saw that child giggling with his mother, sitting in the seat that had been fashioned for the son of a completely different woman, it made some of them sick to their stomachs.
There was something actively wrong about this child being here. The playground was built for the child of a man they'd loved. It didn't belong to the child of the man who killed him.
Gabriel had baptized both children on the same day, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Leo squawked in protest when Gabriel poured the water over his furious, scrunched-up brow, announcing loudly what he thought of that nonsense. Everyone had laughed, even Daryl.
Gabriel was trying to hold back his own laughter as he cradled Leo, dabbing his little face dry with the sleeve of his black robes.
"And we welcome you, Leo Rhee," the pastor said, "into His loving embrace."
Maggie smiled as her son continued to cry. She took him from Gabriel's arms and shushed him against her shoulder, laughing silently into his backside.
She grew up going to church, and even the end of the world couldn't shake the idea that there was something after life, something waiting for her on the other side of this world. All the hurt, all the pain, all the loss and blood and heartbreak; what was it all worth, if there was nothing waiting for them at the end?
(And even if it seemed silly, Maggie liked to believe that she'd seen them all again. Glenn, Beth, her father, Sasha. Even her mother, gone long before the world came to an end. She lived each day remembering them, grieving them, believing that they'd found peace in a place she could join them someday.)
(She'd never told anyone this secret desire, though. Not even Glenn.)
Everyone filed out of the church and headed to Rick and Michonne's, who had offered to host a post-baptism lunch. Daryl somehow managed to nab a fully-grown deer on his last hunting trip, so everyone was looking forward to freshly cooked venison, and the Hilltop had graciously provided enough home-grown vegetables to feed an army.
They had shown up around dusk. Four women dressed in long pants and loose, frumpy sweaters. One woman had a small sling fastened across her front, tied around her neck and shoulders.
The church was empty by then, with only Gabriel still there. He had stayed behind from the party to tend to the flowers, like he did every night. He grew the flowers in memory of those who were lost; peonies and irises and climbing roses, daisies and rhododendrons and morning glories.
Not long after Glenn and Abraham, Jesus told him about the meaning of certain flowers. Now, Gabriel had a whole garden behind his little church blossoming with remembrance. Not exactly functional, but judging by the amount of people who showed up here, not unwanted.
He was tending the rosemary he'd planted for Spencer – because the boy might have been a tremendous shit, but he'd tried to make peace in his own misguided way; and besides all that, he was Deanna's son, and Deanna had always been good to him – when he noticed the four women approaching him.
He recognized two of them. One was a tall redhead often present in conversations between Rick, Maggie, and the rest of the higher-ups. Since the end of the war, she'd become more or less the leader of the remaining Wives.
The second, an olive-skinned woman with a thick black braid tied over one shoulder, Gabriel knew because everyone knew her. Just like everyone knew the identity of the child she was holding against her chest.
Or rather, where he came from.
Gabriel swallowed, trying to keep his face neutral.
"How can I help you?"
If his voice sounded a little higher than usual, no one commented on it.
The redhead and her companions all looked at the woman holding the baby, so Gabriel directed his gaze to her.
He tried not to see them as much of a threat. It wasn't as if they'd fought for the Saviors. If anything, they were more victims than anything else.
He'd heard the stories.
The dark-haired woman cleared her throat, meeting Gabriel's eyes. He tried not to break out into a sweat.
"Do you think you could baptize him?"
Of all the things he thought he'd hear from them, that was pretty far down on the list.
"My mother –" her voice broke a moment. She looked away. "My mother was Catholic."
He heard himself saying, "that won't be a problem". And just as he had done barely an hour ago with Glenn and Maggie's child, he poured the water and chanted the words, holding Negan's son in his arms.
"Bowie Macarios," Gabriel intoned. "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we welcome you into His loving embrace."
The child cried when the water hit his brow. The women were silent. The child's mother was the only one who made a motion, and that was only to give the child to Gabriel and then open her arms to take him back.
"Ready?"
Maggie stared at the door.
"Hey. Maggie?"
She glanced at Jesus. He was unarmed, save for the knife he kept tucked into his belt. Maggie had one tucked inside her coat, but otherwise came empty-handed. They both decided it was best to look as non-threatening as possible, despite Rick's protest that they should at least have one gun on them.
She nodded to Jesus.
Jesus raised his hand, rapping three times on the door. Almost immediately, it swung open to the pale, tired face of a redheaded woman, her hair tied back in one long braid trailing down her shoulder. Maggie recognized her, but couldn't remember her name.
"Hello," she said, keeping her tone even and friendly. "May we come in?"
The redhead – Frankie, Maggie suddenly remembered – stared them down before inching aside the slightest bit. She could still feel the girl staring daggers into their backsides as they walked down the front hallway.
The front room was cast in shadows, with heavy curtains pulled over the room's two floor-to-ceiling windows. There were a few candles lit on the dusty entertainment center, and a pale overhead light from what Maggie figured was the kitchen off to her left. All three women huddled around the tattered armchair in the corner of the room stared at Jesus and Maggie with expressions ranging from outright hostility to fear mingled with distrust and curiosity.
The woman in the chair shifted the pile of blankets in her arms. Shushing it with words Maggie wasn't meant to hear, she looked up at them, her expression clean of emotion.
"Hello," she said, because she had rehearsed a script in her head about what she would say when they came to this moment, but now she was face-to-face with these women. The ones who had been Negan's women.
She couldn't use the term "wife". Because Maggie Rhee knew what it meant to be a wife, and it had nothing to do with the way Negan used the term.
"My name is Maggie," she said. "I'm here on behalf of the Hilltop community."
"And this," she added, "is my friend Jesus."
A few of the women snickered.
"Seriously?" one of them replied. A brunette, her hair tucked into a greasy bun at the nape of her neck.
The woman in the chair stared at her. Maggie felt the skin on her arms prickle, and she found herself holding back a shudder. This was the closest she'd ever been to her. This woman.
This mother.
She was smaller than Maggie imagined. Long black hair was braided back to reveal surprisingly soft features, but her deep brown eyes were switchblade-sharp.
In her arms, Negan's child squirmed. Tufts of dark hair were plastered from sweat across his forehead. He had quite a lot of it, Maggie noticed. Almost as much as Leo.
Maggie wondered if any of the Wives had been there when this child was born. If anyone had been there to hold her hand, or tell her jokes through the worst labor pains, or cry with her when they first saw her son placed on her chest, covered in red-purple muck and wailing indignantly. The same way Jesus, Aaron, Enid, and Rick had all been there for her when Leo was pulled from her body and placed on her chest.
"How's he sleeping?" she found herself asking.
The woman's mouth tightened, her expression suddenly suspicious. Her eyes narrowed at Maggie, and there was a shift in the blankets as she tugged her son closer to her chest.
"I think my son's allergic to sleep," Maggie confessed, for some reason fighting a smile. Leo's refusal to accept toys, a pacifier, or her uncomfortably full breasts when all she wanted him to do was sleep was anything but humorous. But for some reason, she couldn't stop her mouth from pulling upwards into a grin tinged with exhaustion.
"He thinks he's a college student," Maggie continued. "As soon as the sun goes down, he's awake and ready to party. And he can go all night without taking a break."
There's a small smile fighting its way onto the face of the woman, one that's laced with the same exhaustion Maggie has felt every day since Glenn's child had been placed in her waiting arms.
After a long stretch of quiet that was broken only by the baby rustling in his mother's arms, the dark-haired woman said, "He's not bad."
Maggie looked up at her.
It was a moment before the other woman continued. "He's pretty low-key. Only gets upset when he's hungry."
"That's good," Maggie heard herself say. "My little man loves to make a fuss for no reason. Kind of frustrating when all you want to do is sleep."
They both smiled. Maggie was struck by the normalcy of it all.
The woman must have realized it the same time Maggie did, because she cleared her throat and shifted in her seat, signaling the end of whatever camaraderie had briefly brought them together.
Maggie stood back upright, her hands brushing against the leg of her jeans as if to brush something off.
"I come here," she said, adopting her most official tone – Enid called it her "President Maggie" voice – "on behalf of not just the Hilltop, but the Kingdom and the Alexandria Safe-Zone, as well. I came to look each and every one of you in the eyes and offer you a place in our communities. You have my word, as well as the word of King Ezekiel and Rick Grimes, that no harm will come to you. You will be given housing, food, clothing, medicine…whatever it is you need. All we ask is that you respect the peace agreement between us and the Saviors."
No one spoke.
"I know that may not mean much to you," she continued, "but Rick is a man of his word. And his word is one of the few things left in this world that is worthwhile."
She looked at each woman in turn, before letting her eyes land on the woman in the chair.
"You're just trying to rebuild your lives, same as us. It doesn't matter what side we fought on; we're all doing the same thing. So why not do it together?"
A dark-eyed woman slumped against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest was shaking her head so hard her black ponytail smacked against her cheeks.
"Why do you care what happens to us?" she demanded. "A few weeks ago, we were enemies."
The tallest of the wives, a woman with light brown hair and eyes too old for her youthful face, scowled at the other woman.
"Tanya," she said, a note of warning
"And," the woman – Tanya, apparently – barreled on, completely ignoring the brunette wife's attempts to silence her, "didn't Negan kill your husband right in front of you?"
There was a sharp intake of breath.
Standing against the wall opposite Maggie, she saw Jesus stiffen. She gave him an imperceptible shake of her head.
Maggie looked at her. She thought about what Carl had told her when he'd come back from the Sanctuary. What he'd told her about the women Negan called his "Wives". How there was one girl in particular, a petite and sad-eyed blonde, who had looked so much like Beth.
She put her hands on her hips and looked at Tanya.
"Yes," she said. "It's true. Negan murdered my husband. And my friend. And I watched it happen."
Tanya kept her gaze for a long moment before she finally dropped her eyes to the floor. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other while everyone else stood in tense silence, gazes shifting in the heavy silence.
She stared down at the child in the woman's arms. The son of her husband's murderer.
As far as babies went, he was rather nondescript. He was older than Leo by a few months, with fine hair on top of his head and chubby arms and legs. Really, the only thing that made him look any different from her own son was that this child had wide brown eyes that stared at her with startling focus, whereas Leo's own eyes hadn't yet changed from their watery newborn blue.
"What's his name?"
The woman in the armchair looked up. She looked like she didn't understand the question.
"His name," Maggie repeated. "Did you choose one yet?"
She looked at Maggie, then back at her son.
"My son's name is Leo," Maggie offered. "It took me some days to come up with it. I kept wondering if I ought to name him after my husband, or my dad. But I wanted him to have a new name."
Something clean, she remembered thinking. Something that wasn't a memory of blood and death and screaming and emptiness.
"Bo," the woman said.
She met Maggie's gaze. Then she added, "short for Bowie."
Maggie blinked. "Like, David Bowie?"
An unexpected smile came across the woman's face.
"My dad was a big fan." She winced. "My brother was named David. Dad wanted to name me Stardust, but my mom won the fight."
Maggie smiled, then realized something.
"I don't know your name," she said. She looked at the other women. "Most of you. Could you tell me?"
The Wives exchanged glances.
Maggie remembered the days after, when they were still trying to determine who was dead and who had survived. She remembered that the Saviors, the POWs and the ones who surrendered, wouldn't tell them their names.
At first, Rick and the others thought it was rebellion. Swearing allegiance to a dead man. Refusing to accept that at the end of it all, they were on the losing side.
But it was more than that, they soon realized. If Daryl's brief stint as Negan's prisoner had taught him anything, it was all the ways that a man could and would be broken. How every part of them would be destroyed.
"I'm Negan."
"I'm Negan."
"I'm Negan."
"We're all Negan," one dark-haired man had replied, spitting the name into their faces before Rick cold-cocked him.
"It's Karmen," she said. "Karmen Macarios."
Maggie nodded. The Wives, they had noticed, were quicker to remember themselves. They had been broken as well, but allowed to keep this small part of who they were. Because Negan had allowed it.
"My name is Maggie," she told her. "Maggie Rhee."
For the most part, the Wives stick to themselves and no one else. They live among the rest of the survivors. They are survivors themselves, but don't consider themselves as such.
They were never soldiers. They just made a choice.
At the start, they're mistrusted. Guarded. Not allowed to carry weapons. They're given a decision – live like this until Rick and the rest of the leaders still standing feel like they're not a danger to everyone else, or be exiled to whatever lies beyond Alexandria's gates.
Another choice that isn't really a choice.
When they meet the Widow Maggie Rhee, it has never occurred to them that they, too, are widows. They never thought of themselves as wives; widow would imply a loss, and the death of Negan made them feel as if they'd gained something. Besides, it would seem absurd to measure themselves with the same vocabulary as The Widow, with her sorrow and her son.
They're not tortured. They're not interrogated. Prying eyes of the other survivors watch with looks ranging from curiosity to outright hostility, but don't engage them.
In the aftermath of war, the Wives are left alone.
By the time the first spring weeds begin to poke their way out of the winter-hardened earth, Daryl is teaching several of them how to craft homemade spears. Dr. Carson takes a few as his assistants in the garage that now functions as his personal medical facility. Rick assigns several of them to supply runs. Rosita and Aaron teach them how to shoot, and the field-stripping of a weapon becomes unexpectedly soothing.
It feels like confidence, like competence. Like never being a victim ever again.
Crops are grown. Runs are made. Walkers are killed. People, too. They burn bodies because frankly they're going to run out of room before they manage to bring humanity back. The seasons pass in a mix of rot, gunpowder, freshly-cut tomatoes, and the steaming persistence of southern humidity.
In the middle of it, two little boys grow up. One with black hair, one with brown. Neither has a father, and neither wants for one. They are surrounded by people who love them, and they can't miss something they never knew they had.