"Why would you make it easier on me to satisfy
I'm on fire, I'm rotting to the core."


The sun quickly faded into twilight, but they continued to ride on in the dark with only Cersei's headlights as a guide. Unbeknownst to him, he had managed to doze off against her back and he opened his eyes to a sea of inky blackness. He half expected to see grisly faces smiling back at him with peeling flesh and unhinged jaws, but he only saw the sunburnt kid with messy hair riding beside them.

His back ached, muscles sore and restless from being prone in one position for too many hours. He had lost touch with time and reality, blindly following a woman with seemingly sociopathic tendencies. She had never told him what their destination actually was, but he thought that he already knew the answer to that. The destination was wherever the hell she was going, even if that was hell itself.

He found it admirable that she was able to command a group like this on her own. Eventually, they slowed down after arriving at the outskirts of a small town. A lone building stood off on its own to their side, the abandoned remnant of a storage house from the looks of it. Everyone switched off their engines and flashlights were brought out to illuminate the area in multiple flickers.

Cersei held her hand up and they listened to the silence of the night. Then, almost inaudibly, they could hear the soft thump-thump-thump of drumming from inside the warehouse.

"Heath, Drew, and you Three Stooges," she hissed as she slid off the motorcycle like a cat on the prowl. Her eyes glanced at Negan before she grabbed hold of his shirt. "You too, big guy. Let's see what you're actually made of."

He frowned unhappily as he stumbled off the bike from her manhandling. Someone tossed him a handgun and he made sure to check that it was loaded. Without standing on ceremony, Cersei led them towards the back of the warehouse where the soft bumps were coming from. They could see at least three cold bodies behind the grimy glass window. A louder thump resounded as one of the biters slammed against the screen and Cersei let out an annoyed sigh.

"Shouldn't be more than half a dozen," Heath guessed, his flannel shirt now tied around his waist as he only donned a white singlet.

"Then let's go, go, go!" One of the Three Stooges, a blonde female with pigtails, cheered loudly. She couldn't have been older than nineteen though. Next to her was a dark skinned man wearing a skull mask over the lower half of his face, and their last companion was a burly stoic man who looked more like a bull.

Like he thought before; colourful.

Drew was a muscular wiry thing that was literally covered in tattoos and piercings. "What if there's even more inside?" he asked.

"Then we kill them," Cersei replied, cocking her rifle in hand before pausing in thought. "We should probably try doing this quietly first. Don't want to draw any unwanted attention, do we?"

"I like it old fashioned." The blonde crooned with a manic grin. She slid a knife from her belt and licked the blade. Negan thought that was disgusting, knowing she had probably stabbed a few dead things with it beforehand. The girl would be one of those people who died of infection from a cut or something equally moronic.

Cersei slid a machete and a dagger from a belt. "Hey." She threw the dagger to Negan and he managed to catch it easily with his already honed reflexes. Her eyes continued to appraise him, and there was a flicker of regard at the small display of capability. Heath and Drew went to position themselves next to the door. With a nod from Cersei, they pried the entryway open while the rest of the group tensed their muscles in anticipation.

The first biter shambled towards them and Blondie tackled it to the ground, driving her knife deep into its skull. She cheered as she dislodged the blade, pulling it out with great flourish to splash blood and brain bits onto the floor. The other two biters from the window ambled towards her with outstretched arms, but were quickly dispatched by the masked guy with a sabre.

"Trevor!" Blondie whined. "They were mine!"

"You snooze, you lose," he replied, moving forwards to cut down another biter.

"Kitty, I swear to God." Cersei shook her head, pausing next to her to survey the warehouse interior. It was dark but filled with rusting shelves, bars of metal and hanging chains with hooks on the ends.

Kitty looked up at her and grinned widely. "Hey, Boss," she said as if seeing the woman for the first time.

"Just shut up, Kitty," Cersei sighed as she joined Trevor deeper within the building. Sounds of metal slicing through flesh penetrated through the air.

"Sure thing, Boss," the girl said, picking herself up from the ground and following after her.

Negan stepped inside after Heath, gun and dagger held tightly in both hands. He could hear the grunts and hoots of the others as they put the biters to rest once and for all, the smell of rank flesh filling his nostrils the farther in he went. There was one in front of him, an elderly man who still wore a cap and overalls. Half his face had been gnawed off, bone and torn muscle dangling out of holes from his cheek. A slimy, bony hand extended towards him and he dug the dagger in his hand through the reanimated man's soft skull.

The biter fell to the ground as he pulled his dagger out, turning around to be faced with the gaping face of an old woman that snuck up on him. Decaying teeth snapped loudly as the biter lunged forwards, soiled hands clawing at his clothes. Negan let out a yell as he struggled with the living corpse, as if death had granted it strength that living beings were incapable of.

He tripped over the cold body he just killed on the ground and slammed his back against the metal shelves behind him with a rough jolt. The biter on top of him snarled and hissed from deep within its throat, nails scratching into his skin. With a feral yell, he pushed against the undead woman like a battering ram. It shuffled backwards, losing balance from clumsy fractured feet, and Negan grabbed a fistful of thin white hair to impale its head against a protruding metal bar.

He breathed heavily once it stopped moving, grabbing his gun and holding it up in the air. Cersei looked back at him calmly, a streak of blood splattered across her chest. Her eyes shone with indiscernible emotion as another smirk spread across her face. She had removed her leather jacket, exposing the smooth taut muscles of her arms. There was a certain resemblance in her figure to a Celtic warrior returning from a hunt.

"Aren't you positively beastly?" she chuckled. "I think my knickers have gotten a bit damp."

Negan lowered his gun back to his side as Cersei walked away, leaving him ultimately bemused.


AUTHOR'S NOTE:

my mind is telling me noooo but my body... my body is saying yeesssss

i'm really enjoying writing this story mostly because a lot of negan fanfics are set in season 6/7 or about negan's daughter lol. so this fic is gonna be all about smol bean negan before he got his lovely bat. i dig it. please leave a review if you like this story! i wanna know what you think & thank you for reading!