AN: Thanks so much for the reviews last chapter! I really appreciate every one of them. This chapter has only been partially beta read by my pal, MartyrFan, so sorry for any mistakes. If you come across one, let me know in a review and I'll fix it. Thanks!
Song: "Looking for the Magic" by Mind the Gap
Recently Re-edited: 4/30/19
Disclaimer: I don't own the Walking Dead.
Looking for the magic, or, "All magic is science and Negan isn't as ignorant as his speech would suggest - this Samantha believed wholeheartedly."
~O~
~Then~
Samantha's parents died when she was twelve, and time didn't stop when it happened.
Someone once told her, she couldn't remember who, that time stopped after losing a loved one, but time moved just as it always did and Sam had felt present and acutely aware through the entire ordeal. She had felt numb, which she supposed was an appropriate response, but nothing about the world around her felt different, just that her parents were no longer in it. They were here one moment and then gone the next.
She loved them, of course, and she did grieve for them, eventually, in her own way. It was just that for the first month she wasn't able to feel much of anything. She didn't know why. Her face didn't budge an inch from its blank expression during the funeral, not even as she watched her parents' caskets be lowered into the ground.
Her father had been loving. He had been supportive, nurturing and very proud of his bright daughter. Being of humble beginnings and having a gentle nature, he wasn't a man of material possessions or soaring ambitions. He didn't come from anything worthwhile and didn't plan to go anywhere worthwhile, either. He saw his only child as his greatest accomplishment and had been content.
Her mother had been difficult. She hadn't been a very happy person by nature. Not unhappy, necessarily - just not happy. There was a difference - supposedly. She had been melancholic and a bit overdramatic. She hadn't been ready to settle down and get married when she got pregnant with Sam, and sometimes that spilled over into how she treated her daughter and the foundation that their relationship was built on (loss of youth, lingering resentment, inability to relate). But only sometimes. She hadn't been content, but that hardly mattered.
The wake was beautiful.
A wake for the Wakes. White roses and lilies. Overcast but not raining. Grey.
She remembered sitting in the church pew, wearing a black dress and cardigan, only half listening to the vicar recite passages from the Holy Book. Her attention drifted whenever he spoke.
Instead she focused on a cloth moth (Tineola Bisselliella, she mouthed to herself), fluttering in the rafters. None of her relatives corrected her behavior because they weren't invested in the ceremony much themselves. Throughout the entire day, Sam recalled seeing only a few tear-streaked faces, from her parents' friends and coworkers, but she saw none from her father's family. They were just as vacant as she had been, but for different reasons.
Her father's family was an isolated incident. The natives on the reservation were friendly, down to earth people, but her father came from a strict, old-fashioned upbringing. Her grandfather frowned upon living dependent on things like technology and modern medicine and he had been deeply distrustful of people not in the tribe. He especially didn't like crossbreeding. Nobody had ever said anything outright, but the family didn't like that Samantha was mixed. Their dislike for her Irish mother was apparent and the feeling was very much mutual, but their feelings towards Sam were more subtle.
Subtle, but still there.
She picked up on their discontent in different ways, instead reading it in what they didn't say and what they didn't do, rather than gossiping and giving backhanded compliments like they did with her mother. The family refused to call her Sam or Samantha, instead referring to her only by her middle name. Every time one of them spoke to her, she could tell they didn't want to. She would look at their shoes and see them turned away from her, itching to bolt. It didn't help that most found Sam to be an unsettling child.
After the ceremony everybody went back to her father's childhood home for the reception. Sam sat out on the back porch with her cousins; the children of the brother who owned the casino - not the nice brother who would eventually become her legal guardian - not the one who took her to tell the bees about her parents. It was the brother who paid for the funeral but complained whenever Sam left the room.
The son, Payat, who called her a mutt and flicked coins at her legs when she wore shorts, was her age, younger than her by only three weeks. He had rolls of what his mother called baby fat, but everybody knew it was just regular fat. He had a round face that reminded Sam of Porky Pig.
The daughter, Tama, who was jealous of Sam's "Pocahontas" hair, was the eldest by two years. She had developed early and called Sam flat-chested while flashing the straps of her bra proudly like she was winning some contest. It didn't bother Sam. Her breasts would come in eventually, but she would always be able to beat Tama in every board game out there, so her cousin could have this, if only to let her keep her fragile ego for just a while longer.
All throughout her parent's funeral Tama typed away on her new flip phone, messaging the friends she would rather be with. After the burial, she asked her mother if she could leave, but her mother refused and now she was pouting on the back deck of the house with her little brother and cousin. Sam took the rare opportunity of Tama's undivided attention and asked if she could see what games Tama's phone came with, but she told her to fuck off before taking out her phone again and turning her back to the table.
Payat let out a snort as he twisted in one of the patio chair, his pudgy legs spinning him around until he got dizzy while Sam stared at Tama's back. In the background, she could hear the voices of the adults and the clattering of utensils inside the house. She didn't feel angry at the crass rejection, but she didn't let it go like she usually would have. Something nasty boiled in the pit of her stomach as she listened to the buttons of her cousin's phone click as she typed ferociously.
She had heard Tama get up several times the previous night to use the bathroom only to have nothing come out, and she had seen the prescription bottle inside the bathroom cabinet.
Even through her apathy, Sam was able to find the will to be ruthless.
"You had sex with Ahmik, that's why you got that UTI."
Tama stopped typing, Payat stopped spinning and there was a pregnant silence.
Her cousin's head snapped around, copper cheeks turning beet red and her brown eyes scathing. She looked like she wanted to throw her phone at Sam's head and Sam prepared for it, not unaccustomed to physical abuse from her cousins, but Tama stood up from the table instead with her phone held tight in a crushing grip.
"I hate you, Nakoma!" she screamed.
Sam didn't flinch as Tama kicked over her chair and stomped into the house, slamming the sliding glass door behind her so hard that it was amazing that it didn't crack. It clicked as she engaged the lock in childish revenge, even though Sam could just walk around the house and use the front door.
Letting out a patronizing laugh, Payat started spinning again.
"She's going to kill you for that later," he said.
"Her period is late. She's going to have bigger problems," Sam replied as she stood up from the table. "Let's go walk the paths."
Side by side they walked off the porch and across the yard. Payat usually wasn't this complacent, but she figured he must have been even more bored than his sister (what an inconvenience her parents' death turned out to be for the family. Six feet underground, she was sure her mother was smiling).
It didn't make them friends. The only thing she liked about her cousin was that they had similar taste in video games, and that her uncle would buy the new ones for him. Her parents couldn't afford to buy Sam her own console, so when she stayed with her cousins, she would sneak downstairs to play them after everybody went to bed because Payat never gave her a turn when he was awake.
They didn't stop walking until they were well out of sight of the house. They branched off from each other and explored the area with lukewarm interest. While Sam stared down at a beetle crawling up the trunk of a rotting tree, her cousin called out to her, pointing at something on the ground in front of him.
"Hey mutt, come look at this. It's a dead pigeon."
"That's a crow," she said as she came up behind him.
"Crows are black, stupid," he sneered, eager to condescend.
"Not always."
It was a hooded crow (Corvis Cornix, it took her a moment to recall). They had a streaked coloring with the main body being ash grey and the head, throat, wings and tail being black. To Sam it looked like what happens when seagulls get caught in an oil spill, or maybe, more poetically, a premise for a mythological tale where the grey bird did something wrong and was going through a process of corruption, cursed to become a crooked creature that feasted only on the dead.
Even if it had similar coloring to a pigeon (though not really, in Sam's opinion), the beak was wrong. Pigeons had smaller, rounder beaks for picking up grain and seeds. Crows had the typical sharper beak of most carrion bird species, prominent and easier to cut through dead flesh with. What was curious, though, was that the hooded crow wasn't indigenous to North America. They were an Eurasian species. That begged the question why her and her cousin were looking down at one all the way in Alaska.
It must have been someone's pet. Probably illegally imported overseas. She suspected Mr. Bishop, an elderly man who lived by himself just outside the reservation. He was a passionate birdwatcher and she wouldn't put it past him to have a few birds of questionable origin around his house. She would have to check up on him. He had a stroke last summer that left him in poor health and it wouldn't be like him to lose track of one of his birds, especially one not native to the US. The forest rangers would not be happy if they found out a foreign species was almost introduced into the ecosystem.
"Here's the nest," her cousin said, "and another dead pigeon."
He stood at the base of a tree, toeing at an overturned bundle of sticks with his shoe. She walked over and saw the second bird that was quite obviously a regular crow laying near the nest. The crow was female, laying on its back with its stomach burst open, full of maggots. They wiggled around inside the chest cavity as they ate away at the insides, little yellow bodies squirming against red and brown, a display of nature at its most macabre. Red ants swarmed around its head, burrowing into its eyes. Her cousin picked up a stick and poked at it with a look of disgusted glee on his pig face.
She knew that Payat was the one who knocked the nest over, partly out of curiosity but mostly to be a jerk. Why he was pretending this was the first time he was seeing this, she didn't care enough to guess. He must have caught the birds off guard and they fell several feet with their nest.
Above them, two other crows perched on one of the lower branches of the tree. They were spots of ink black against the overcast sky peeking in through the tree tops. They looked down at the children and the broken nest with tilted heads, cawing at them almost as if in inquiry. Payat looked up at the birds, his face rolling up. He reached down and grabbed a large rock. He threw it at them, hitting the trunk of the tree next to them with a loud thunk that made them scatter with indignant squawks.
"They'll remember your face," she told him.
"No they won't. Birds are stupid with tiny brains," he said, wiping off the dirt on his hand on his black dress pants.
They would remember his face. It was a well known fact. The kind you would find on desk calendars given as cheap, last minute Christmas presents or on the caps of Snapple bottles.
"I don't like it when they look at me," he complained.
As soon as Payat turned away, the crows collected back on the branch. Sam looked up at them, regarding them just as curiously as they did her.
She had read in the University of Washington Scientific that crows mourned their dead, or at least showed signs that they might be capable of it. They gathered around their dead much like humans would around a person, but whether this was out of grief or just curiosity was still up for debate. If the former, their mourning rituals weren't as heartwarming as elephants' were, known to bury their dead and revisit grave sites, but the fact that they even gathered in the first place was fascinating.
Samantha looked back at the dead crow. She picked up a stick to turn it over. Payat watched her with that constipated look on his face where she knew he was thinking real hard about something that he couldn't figure out but when the frustration became too much he would take it out on her and say something mean.
"It's dead, just like your parents."
When she didn't take the bait, he scoffed and turned away, going back over to the first bird.
"Hey, look," he pointed down at the male hooded crow that was starting to twitch, "this one is still alive. You know what that means, right?"
She shook her head. He bent over and picked up another rock and held it out to her.
"We need to put it out of its misery. Papa said that's the humid thing to do with stupid animals that are going to die anyways."
"Humane," she corrected.
"Whatever. Just take the rock, Mutt."
She took the rock from him, looking down at the crow with a frown. The creature withered pitifully in the dirt as it opened its beak and let out a broken call. Something in her chest tightened at the sight. Even though she doubted he was doing it to be humane, her cousin had a point. The crow was going to die and the longer they left it, the more pain it suffered.
"Smash its brains in," Payat commanded. "I want to see you do it."
Her fingers tightened around the rock and she cocked her arm back, but instead of dropping it on the bird, she threw it at her cousin. It hit him in the cheek, knocking him back. Stunned, he grabbed at his bleeding cheek with wide eyes. Sam watched as tears gathered and his face screwed up in an ugly expression. He let out a noise that sounded like a pig squealing and scrambled to his feet.
"I'm telling my mom!" he cried, taking off back the way they came.
After Sam watched him disappear behind the trees, she sat down on the grass and shrugged off her cardigan, the early autumn air feeling cool against her skin. She used the cardigan to pick up the hooded crow, swaddling it gently as she rested it in her lap. It made another call, but she shushed it. Her thumb stroked its breast, soothing it the best she could.
She held the crow in her lap until it passed. The crows in the tree behind her cawed as soon as the male stopped moving.
For several minutes, she sat on the ground holding the hooded crow in her hands. Her chest felt tight again and her throat contracted until it was too painful to swallow, but her eyes remained dry. She buried the male afterwards and took the already dead female back to the house where she later dissected it to find out what it looked like on the inside (an allusion to her parents, perhaps? She didn't think too deep into it).
When she was done with the female, she went back outside and buried it next to the male, building them a tiny memorial with white pebbles and wild flowers she gathered from the forest. It was peaceful, more peaceful than her own parents' funeral. There were no false mourners there. No bitter relatives looking to maintain their sparkling images. No clergymen to sing praise over an entity who they claimed was the ultimate good but who had no qualms about making a twelve-year-old girl an orphan.
She left and forgot about them for a couple weeks until the day her uncle who owned the casino refused to take her to the cemetery to trade out the flowers on her parent's tombstones. She visited the grave she built for the crows instead.
~O~
~Now~
For three days, Samantha sat locked inside a room.
It was no bigger than a mop closet and it was dark. There was absolutely nothing in the room but four bare walls and a floor. The only light that permeated the claustrophobic darkness was the sliver of space between the bottom of the door and the ground. That was what she woke up to.
Coming back into consciousness had been a slow climb. When her brain came back online, she allowed her other senses to reorient before opening her eyes and seeing where Negan had ended up putting her, since he had clearly decided not to stick her corpse on his front lawn.
The ground felt cold and unforgiving beneath her prone body. The faint smell of bleach teased the inside of her nose and she couldn't hear anything beyond the sound of her own breathing. When she finally opened her eyes, she saw the sliver of light from underneath the door. The glare from the hallway light hurt her eyes, casting pinwheels in her peripherals. She closed them, her sensitive vision causing the pain in her head to spike. Phosphenes rippled with discoloration at the pressure until the ringing in her head calmed down enough for her to blink.
Once her eyes adjusted to a darkness not unlike the one behind her eyelids, she realized that she had been imprisoned. She was still wearing her black dress, but her boots and coat had been stripped from her body and her satchel was gone.
The piece of dish cloth that had been wrapped around her hand as a makeshift bandage was replaced with a real one. She held her hand up close to her face and studied the gauze wrapped over her cut, white and pristine against her dirty hand. Her fingernails were shorter than she remembered them being, cut almost to the bed with the white no thicker than a staple. The scrapes on her arms and shins had scabbed up, but she could feel the residue of an antiseptic ointment on her skin.
Her injuries had been treated while she was unconscious. The thought was more disturbing than comforting. If Negan went through the trouble of fixing her up, that meant he intended to keep her alive and relatively whole.
Her muscles felt stiff from being left on the ground and they screamed in protest when Sam pulled herself up to sit. Her joints popped audibly, her muscles burning like they were on fire, but she pushed through it, pulling herself up just enough before collapsing against the wall. Breathing uneven, she looked at the door, studying it through the hair that hung in her face, but made no move to see if it was locked. Even if her desire to escape the room was immediate, she wasn't ready yet. She knew nothing about her new situation and had no resources. Assuming there wasn't a guard posted right outside the door, she wouldn't last five minutes.
She had no choice but to sit and wait for someone to come for her.
It wasn't long after she woke up that the music started playing.
'All my life I've been looking for the magic.'
It startled her when it first came on. The opening drumming of its upbeat rhythm blared inside her little room. It played so loud that the door rattled in its frame. She could hear it playing in the hallway outside as well, echoing off the walls as the callback to the 70's had her jumping out of an uneasy doze. The sudden transition of going from total silence to pounding music shocked her system hard.
Sam did her best to tune the music out as she curled her legs towards her body and wrapped her arms around them. She rested her forehead on her knees and closed her eyes. Her chest pushed in and out at a steady pace as she counted her breaths.
'Fantasize on a silly little tragic.'
Hours crawled by before she decided that no one was coming for her.
There was the possibility that the purpose of the room was for sensory deprivation. Like a prison, the room wasn't just a place to keep her incarcerated and sequestered from others. The small space, the darkness, the music - this could be Negan trying to break her, keep her under his thumb.
If that were the case, then it wouldn't work. It would take more than throwing a person in a dark room to make the human mind fold in on itself. Sam could still hear what was going on outside her door, could still smell whenever a savior walked past with a candy bar or sandwich in hand, could still see through the tiny sliver underneath her door. If Negan wanted her so cut off from the world where she would lose her mind, then he would have had better luck locking her in the basement like she had done to him.
Sleep deprivation, however, could be more easily achieved with the music. She wondered if the workers managed to get the power back on, but she dismissed the idea when she stared out into the hall through the space and saw the lights flickering with inconsistent energy flow. It was a backup generator. She took satisfaction in knowing that, with the size of the Sanctuary, playing music nonstop was a huge waste and was sucking up a considerable amount of very limited power. She truly hoped Negan was getting his jollies from this because he wouldn't be getting anything else out of it.
'I've been looking for the magic in my eyes.'
She felt like a drunkard, left to dry out in a jail cell. They kept her inside the room longer than she thought they would. When she had woken up, she expected the door to open and reveal Negan, his tall frame a looming silhouette in the light of the hallway. Her heart would pound every time she heard footsteps in the hallway, but when minutes bled into hours and hours bled into a day, she stopped reacting. By the end of that first day Sam was willing to admit, inside the privacy of her own mind, that maybe she had underestimated Negan's patience.
She hated it in here. It was always cold and the smell of bleach burned her sinuses, made them feel dry and irritated; it was going to give her nosebleeds, and her dress could only blanket her legs so well before the cold seeped through that as well.
The first time the door opened, she was greeted by a familiar face, but it wasn't Negan.
With hair almost as stringy as hers, Dwight stared down at her with a mean look. She lifted her head from her arms and stared back at him through squinted eyes as he stood in the doorway, the light from the hallway pouring in behind him. He held a kitchen tray in his hands with a plastic plate and cup. He didn't say anything as he bent down and put the tray on the floor. She gave the tray a look, her nose curling up. The small serving of food on the plate looked like regurgitated MRE's and smelled vaguely of tuna and celery.
She looked back up at Dwight, but before she could speak, the savior closed the door with a firm slam, his scarred face disappearing from sight. Darkness engulfed her tiny space again as the lock engaged and the music started back up a minute later.
'Looking for the magic in my eyes.'
Somewhere along the way, she had gotten used to the room, the darkness and the music. She was becoming desensitized. In the back of her mind she knew that wasn't good. She was becoming resigned to the possibility that she might die here, that Negan might keep her here until she wasted away to nothing. After resignation would come acceptance, and acceptance never bred a desire for freedom in anybody.
Realizing this gave Samantha back some of her power. Her will to keep going reignited just enough for her to remember what she was capable of.
By the second day she started establishing a routine for her guards.
The door would open once a day so she could be given a meal, but she was only ever let out of the room for bathroom breaks, which was surprisingly humane. She didn't waste them by keeping her eyes fixated on the floor. Using her hair as a curtain to cover her face, she scanned her surroundings whenever she was escorted to the bathroom. It was the same route every time, down the same unremarkable hallways and passing by the same blank-faced people, but she studied them nonetheless.
It wasn't just about her surroundings, either. It gave her a chance to study her captors as well.
She made note of everything, from both her bathroom breaks and the crack beneath her door. Her guards alternated between three saviors. She learned their names. She studied the sounds of their strides, learned to differentiate between the confident footsteps of Carter, the youngest, and the missteps of middle aged Sims with the dodgy left leg, and Joseph's (aka Fat Joey) heavy footfalls as he lumbered down the hall. From the shadows on the ground outside her door, she learned what time of day they changed shifts. From soft creaks of wood every time one of them moved, she knew that they had a chair outside her door where they took post.
Carter whistled and picked his nails with his pocket knife. Sims never uttered a sound and rarely moved. Joey liked to read comics and drink grape soda. Sims would nod off towards the end of his shift while Carter was always at least ten minutes late and Joey liked to leave his post halfway through to get a snack. None of them spoke to Sam. They barely even looked at her when they brought her daily meal.
It wasn't out of contempt or superiority. She could hear them whispering at the end of the hall during those moments when the CD went through its run and needed to be reset. They talked about her in hushed voices.
They spoke about rumors that they had heard around the Sanctuary and the night she was discovered - what she did and what she might do if she ever got out. They made her feel like an exotic animal in a zoo, a mysterious novelty to gawk at. People made her out to be something more interesting and dangerous than she really was, so much so they even had her guards acting skittish around her. Joey flinched every time she so much as lifted her head when he opened her door, and they always had him and Carter escort her to the bathroom, the two most physically capable, as if they thought Sam was trained in combat and could take them out with a flick of her wrist.
Ridiculous.
The only thing they had to worry about was the way Joey kept his keys clipped to his belt.
'She's been looking for the treasure.'
The waiting was the hardest.
After studying the guards ran its course, she was left with nothing but herself. Sam didn't do well when she was understimulated. Without anything to occupy her attention, her thoughts wandered aimlessly to appease the suffocating boredom biting at the corners of her mind, and more often than not they wandered to places she'd rather they didn't.
That was partly why engineering felt like a natural choice for her. There was always something that needed to be fixed and tinkering was usually enough to keep her attention. She needed to catalog and compartmentalize things. Anything and everything. It kept her head quiet. She grew antsy and it was hard to keep a calm composure when her mind wasn't on an even keel. Every hour that went by, she felt her brain digest another part of itself, like the stomach when it was on the verge of starvation.
'Because a photograph is like an hourglass out of time.'
The only thing to focus on was the song.
She thought on the song's beat, the song's meaning. The lyrics made her mind break off into tangents of nonsense about magic and Miser's Dream and the Salem Witch Trials, to how the human eye weighed about 0.25 ounces and horrific tragedies like the Crusades and the Khmer Rouge Regime (because her situation wasn't grim enough already, apparently). Of treasure and Jim Hawkins. Of Morpheus' hourglass at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.
It was a mass spew of things she already knew, but her mind clung with a death grip anyways, as if thinking about them again would somehow produce a new fact that she didn't know and could process for a split second of relief.
The waiting tested her more than the lack of food and the poor attempt at isolation ever could. Maybe Negan understood this, with his acute perception. Or maybe he didn't. But if he wanted to punish her, he was on the right track, because Sam responded more to threats of the mind than threats of the body. He didn't have to know that this was getting to her, though. She could hide it.
Her mind was so starved, she was actually relieved when someone came to get her, when Negan finally came calling.
Towards the end of the third day, the music shut off and she heard heavy footsteps. She heard the jingling of keys.
Joey opened her door, and he was alone.
She was sitting in the corner of the room with her legs folded and her hands resting in her lap. She looked up at the portly savior through the black hair hanging in her face. She could tell the look unsettled him.
"Negan wants to see you in his office," he said. He was trying to sound tough, but the uncertainty in his tone gave him away. "I'm here to take you there. We're going to go to his floor and there isn't going to be any trouble from you, okay? I don't want to have to hurt you, so just do what I say."
He commanded her to get up, but it came out sounding more like a request. Sam pulled herself to her feet, using the wall to support her. Her legs tingled with pins and needles and the joints in her hips were stiff to the point of pain. When she stepped out of the room, Joey told her to hold out her wrists and he bound them with a ziptie, pulling it tight.
The floor felt cold under her bare feet and her steps sounded muted compared to Joey's. They echoed through the hall with the jingling of his keys on his belt; she was the only one who took any note. He always had them on his belt so he was used to the sound. Joey led her through the halls where they passed janitorial workers mopping the floors. She could feel their eyes on her as they went by, but she didn't turn her head to look at them. Her hair covered her face as Joey led her to the stairs that would take them to the next floor.
Just before they made it, Sam purposely stuck one foot in front of the other, making herself misstep. She stumbled forward and fell partially on to Joey, gripping his shirt as her knees hit the ground. Joey turned and grabbed her arm, attempting to steady her. In the commotion, her hands snaked up and unclipped the savior's keys from his belt. She held them tight in her hand, smothering the noise.
"Whoa," Joey said, keeping his hold on her. Sam breathed heavy and leaned most of her weight on him. "Are you okay? Do I need to get Doctor Carson?"
"No," she panted, faking fatigue. She made sure to keep the hand holding the keys hidden behind the skirt of her dress. "I'm alright...just a little weak..from not eating."
"Oh, yeah, sorry about that," he apologized, sounding sincere. "Negan said we're only allowed to feed you once a day. Maybe if your meeting with him goes well, he'll let you have more."
His suggestion didn't seem likely in the slightest, but his honest optimism didn't go unappreciated. Sam only nodded as she pretended to take a few moments to compose herself. Joey waited until she righted her feet to release her arm, but he kept a hand on her shoulder just in case.
"Think you can make it up the stairs?" he asked.
She nodded, straightening back up. "Yes."
As soon as Joey turned around to mount the stairs, Sam stuffed the keys into her bra. While she had been pretending to collect her bearings, she had carefully worked one of the keys off the ring behind her back, through feel alone. It was one at random that she hid in the other cup of her bra for safekeeping. She didn't know what it was for, but Joey had them labeled, she could look later.
There wasn't a plan for the keys, not yet. They were taken as a safety net. Even if Negan's attempts to break her had failed, Samantha wasn't immune to the desire for some kind of comfort.
She followed Joey up the stairs, keeping a good distance behind him as he struggled with the climb. Negan's office was on the top floor so this was quite the workout for the savior. Each time he had to stop and catch his breath it was stalling the inevitable, and she was okay with that.
Negan's floor looked different in the light, but she recognized the layout. They passed by a pair of doors that she knew to be the wives' parlor. There weren't any voices coming from it now so she could only assume the women were in their rooms. All was silent except for Joey's footfalls and Sam's bare feet padding against the floor as they came to another set of doors further down the hall that she hadn't notice last time. He raised his arm and knocked, waiting for a few seconds before opening them when there wasn't an answer.
It was an office that she assumed it was Negan's, but the man was absent.
With a hand on her shoulder, Joey guided her inside towards a chair facing the desk. She sat down while he stood behind her. They waited in silence with only the sound of a clock ticking. She looked over at it, wondering if it was accurate. Time was such a relative construct, even before the apocalypse. There was something freeing about shedding that constraint, but maybe that was only because Sam had been a student before the world had ended and the stress levels for fighting the undead were only smidgen higher than finals.
She looked around the rest of the room, taking in the lofty décor. The desk was made of mahogany that shined with a brilliant sheen of varnish. It had a matching set of bookshelves filled with books. There was a collection of garish decorations and wallhangings that held no collective theme and reflected nothing of Negan's personality other than being hulking distractions you couldn't help but stare at, with tacky faux animal skins and clunky lamps with eyesore shades added in.
The air smelled of fine leather from the furniture, but there was also the faint whiff of men's cologne, just under the smell of dust and carpet. The room was a stark contrast to the rest of the Sanctuary, like a room stuck out of time, a wormhole between two doors.
As the minutes ticked by, Sam could feel Joey shifting from foot to foot behind her. She could feel his uneasy with the wait and sympathized, but she didn't move from her own position. She sat with her shoulders back and her bound hands resting in her lap. Her bare feet were pressed together in a conscious effort to keep from thumping one against the ground.
After almost twenty minutes, the door to the office swung open and Negan walked in.
She didn't turn around to witness his grand entrance. From a decorative plate hanging on the wall behind the desk, she could see him in the reflection.
His dark hair was slicked back and his salt and pepper beard was groomed to perfection. He wore his leather jacket and brown trousers with the ends tucked into his boots. The zippers and the buttons on the labels shined like the light coming off a horse's eye, gleams of silver glossing the surface of obsidian black. The scarf around his neck looked pale green to her, but she knew it was a brilliant red. The scratches she had given him in the Sanctuary basement were still there, but they had scabbed over. She had forgotten all about them and seeing them again had her fingers curling into her palms, realizing why her nails had been trimmed down.
She could see him looking at her back and his smirk as he reached up to unwrap his scarf. He tossed it carelessly on to a lounge chair. She caught a glimpse of the baseball bat through the plate, but she averted her eyes and looked forward again when she saw Negan's eyes dart up towards the plate. In her peripheral, she could see his smirk grow, like he knew that she had been watching him.
There was the quiet sound of wood clanking against something as Negan put down his signature weapon (Sam refused to refer to it as "Lucille", deciding that the whole practice of naming inanimate objects as if they were people was ridiculous), propping it against the wall next to the door.
"Je-sus Christ," he groaned, pulling down the zipper of his leather jacket, the zip cutting through the silence like a knife unsheathing. "Long fucking day, boys and girls. Daddy's fucking ready for his pipe and slippers."
Sam risked looking in the plate again, but Negan had moved. She heard him shuffling somewhere else, dressing down as if he was about to settle in for some recreational time. His disposition and attitude when he entered had been lax, leading her to believe that punishment wasn't imminent. Negan was the type of man who, if you needed to be afraid of him would make it blatant. He didn't lack rhyme or reason. If he wasn't making the effort to terrorize her, then she didn't need to worry about anything other than facing the man who nearly suffocated her with his bare hands.
"She give you any trouble on the way up here, Joe?" he asked.
She felt Joey shift behind her again. "No, sir."
"Good. You can get fucking lost now."
Joey made for the door, faster than she had ever seen him move. The door closed behind him with a condemning click as he left her alone with Negan.
She heard shuffling again before he came back into her view. He had stripped down to a grey t-shirt. She peered through her hair and watched him walk towards his desk. He sat down with a satisfied groan and sunk back into the leather of his chair. When he didn't speak, Sam finally raised her eyes and looked at him. He was watching her with his mouth set in a line and his eyes hooded, tired. They looked at each other, blue staring into brown as they sat in silence until Negan finally broke it.
"Sorry about that," he nodded towards the ziptie wrapped around her wrists, "bit of overkill, but considering what happened, I've decided not to take any more fucking chances with you. I'm sure you understand where I'm coming from."
She didn't respond. A lazy smirk bloomed across his face as his eyes twinkled with delight.
"You know, people have done some crazy ass shit to get out of working for points around here, but living in the goddamn vents? That's some straight up Andy Dufresne shit right there. I don't know whether to be boiling pissed or impressed, because that was some original fucking thinking. Fucking props for that."
He knew about the vents, not unexpected. He had three days to figure out how Sam was able to move around the Sanctuary without being noticed. With how tight of a ship he ran, there were only so many possibilities they could consider. She wondered which one of them thought of the vents first. Maybe Dwight. He had a sort of iceberg intelligence about him; unassuming on the surface, but depth below.
He had been the first to suspect Samantha didn't belong among them, after all, even if it had been fleeting.
"Oh yeah, I know about those," Negan said, nodding his head, reading her mind, "and your little hidey-hole."
Sam kept her face blank, but she felt the micro-expression flash across her face. It was one of surprise and panic. She hadn't expected him to find her hideout, partly because she hadn't expected to still be here in the Sanctuary and breathing at the same time. She had left quite a lot of things behind. Personal things.
Negan caught the expression, however brief (1/25th of a second), she knew he had. He caught it in the way she blinked. His smirk turned predatory.
With arrogance, Negan stood from his chair and reached under his desk. Sam watched as he picked up a filing box and set it on top. He flipped off the lid with an exaggerated flick of his hand, letting it fall to the floor. Though she remained stoic on the outside, her heart seized when he pulled out a stack of notebooks and papers, recognizing them to be hers. Her eyes moved around the room, looking for the rest of her stuff, suddenly feeling territorial. Her clothes, her blueprints, her unfinished projects - what did he do with all of it?
If Negan noticed the shift, he didn't let on. He picked up one of her notebooks and sat back down in his chair. He opened it up and licked the tip of his finger, using it to turn page after page until he settled on one. He ostentatiously cleared his throat before reading aloud.
"I shouldn't give such acclaim to a man with an ego, but give credit where credit is due. With how Negan runs his compound and the way he conducts himself as a leader, it's a wonder his followers don't erect a statue of him in the courtyard. If it could be carved from self-entitlement as it would from stone, his vanity would allot a structure at least twice the size of the main building."
He looked up, his eyebrows rising as he gave her a pointed look that begged 'really?'.
Something nasty twisted inside her stomach. She didn't like hearing her words being spoken in Negan's voice, especially when he took on a bright, cheery tone to mock her. It made her own thoughts sound like a stranger's.
"They can't see what's happening. Negan has them believing that no matter how horrible it is being apart of his community, it's still better than being outside with the goblins - cute name, by the way. He's dangerously manipulative. I'm expecting propaganda posters reminiscent of Mjolnir's work on the Sanctuary walls with his face slapped across them any day now."
It was one of her earlier entries, when she was still observing how the Sanctuary worked. Sam wasn't in the habit of keeping journals, neither before nor after the world fell, but when she found the fresh composition book in the marketplace, she felt the need to document what she had learned. They started out as disjointed notes to herself, like what time certain parts of the Sanctuary closed down for the night and where savior hot spots were, but after awhile they became full journal entries.
It wasn't the worst one she had written about Negan, but it wasn't flattering, either. Having him read it out loud felt grossly intrusive.
He scratched at his beard as he flipped ahead through the entries.
"The one you wrote about Dwight was funny; 'rat-faced and constantly underfoot'. More fucking tame than what I've called the scrawny prick myself, but that sums him up just as well, I suppose. You went easier on him than you did me, which is kind of bullshit since you had no fucking idea who I was. Judgmental much?"
She still didn't respond, she only blinked at him. He chuckled and flipped through a couple more pages. His brown eyes danced along the college ruled pages as he abashedly read through Sam's private thoughts right in front of her. A hand came up to rubbed at his chin again and she could hear the scrape of coarse hair against skin from where she sat. She watched him, his mouth moving slightly as he read to himself.
He looked back up at her, amusement still plastered across his face.
"You're a cutie pie, Mouse, but you're also a fucking freak, and not in the sexy way." He raised the book and waved it. "From what you've got in these notebooks, I can't tell if you some kind of baby-faced, Einstein/MacGyver love child genius, or a fucking nutcase. Don't get me wrong, though, I had a fucking blast reading them. A lot more interesting than the shit I've got up on these fucking shelves, that's for sure."
He opened the book again and flipped to a page that was dog-eared. He must have done it because Sam didn't fold page corners, not even in her own notebooks; a nasty habit she had never developed because most of the books she had read in the past were loans and rentals. Couldn't damage those.
Negan pointed out another entry, smiling and shaking his head in amused disbelief. "Here you talk about how metronomes remind you of your first period, which was as entertaining as it was fucking weird, but then after that you go on about social politics and some Michel Foucault guy for six pages, front and back, and I tapped out. Felt like I was reading a fucking encyclopedia."
Snapping the notebook shut, he tossed it unceremoniously on to his desk before leaning back in his chair and tipping his head to the side, regarding her thoughtfully.
"You know, you are something else. I'm not bullshitting you, you really are. I can barely wrap my head around it."
Sam narrowed her eyes and studied his expression. He was smiling and he seemed genuine, but he always smiling. He was a man of smiles. On record, there were nineteen different types of smiles, all varying up and down the emotional spectrum, but from what she had observed so far, Negan seemed to have twice that amount. He had a smile for every emotion, for every day of the week. She couldn't decipher them all.
He noticed her scrutiny and changed his smile, going from amusement to triumph, like he was proud of himself for finally drawing some sort of reaction from her, even if it had yet to be a verbal one. Because she knew that was what he had been fishing for - a reaction.
"The vents were innovated, but disguising yourself as one of my wives? That was fucking genius!" he laughed. "Not only could you get whatever the fuck you wanted from the market, but you could go wherever you wanted and nobody would have fucking questioned it. I talked to some of my people who remembered you, and they told me that you said you were getting something for me, just like when I caught you in the workshop. And you were fucking convincing, too. If I was anybody else, I would have fallen for that shit hook, line and fucking sinker."
She doubted that. She might be able to keep a straight face, but Sam was never a good actress. If any of those workers had been just an ounce less terrified of Negan, then they would have seen through her guise. However, if he wanted to put her on a pedestal like his followers did, then she wasn't going to correct him. Overestimation could be just as dangerous as underestimation.
It was the same mistake, really, and if Negan wasn't going to learn from what happened, that would be her advantage.
"I mean hey, don't get me wrong, I can't fucking blame you for goin' that route. My wives have some awesome perks."
He was leaning back in his chair, the leather creaking under his weight.
"But," he continued, "the only reason they get those is because I get the perks of having them as wives, and cheating me out of what I'm owed is a big fucking no-no around here. I had one of my guys make an estimate of how much stuff you took from me, and Mouse, you owe me a Holy hell amount of points right now. Regardless of how this little meeting of ours ends where I decide your fucking fate in this shitty world, we're going to need to settle this.
The crap you took from the commissary I'm willing to look the other way since you didn't take anything that can't easily be replaced, and because I'd like to think I can be a nice fucking guy when I want to be, but if you wanted to be a wife so bad, all you had to do was ask. Don't you think that would have been a lot fucking easier than sneaking around, hoping to avoid talking to the wrong asshole?"
Rhetorical, or at least, she thought it was. He seemed to enjoy the sound of his voice and she wondered why he even bothered trying to have a conversation with her when he could go find a mirror.
"If you wanted to have some playtime as a wife, you can have some fucking playtime. You just have to play with me, and my favorite fucking game is House," he smirked before tacking on a second thought. "I like playing Doctor, too, but I tend to get further than an invasive physical with House."
He winked at her, making her nose curled up.
He laughed before standing from his chair. Sam watched as he stepped around his desk. It took everything she had to keep from moving as the distance between them closed. He stopped right next to her chair until her head was leveled with his lower stomach. He was so close, she could smell his cologne, the same spicy scent that invaded her senses down in the basement. Now associating it with danger, she felt her hackles raise. She turned her head and craned it back to look up at him.
"What do you say, Mouse?" he said, smiling down at her with a lecherous smile, his dark eyes twinkling with mirth.
In move that did not match his expression, he reached out and brushed away the bangs that hung in her eyes with a surprisingly gentle touch, his fingertips ghosting over the skin of her forehead.
"Wanna introduce your Minnie to my Mickey?"
She didn't know which she was more disgusted by; his proposition for sex, or the fact that he had just referred to their genitals as Disney characters. She realized what he was trying to do. It wasn't an exaggeration when Sam thought of him as a posturing peacock or a cat on the prowl. He was invading her space, using his bigger size to tower over her and spoke without social grace. She knew what he wanted from her. What he really wanted.
He wanted dominance.
She couldn't tell if he actually wanted to have sex with her (he kept his eyes locked on to hers, not anywhere else), but this was another attempt to claim dominance over her. He was purposely being vulgar to make her uncomfortable so she would shy away. He used his crass language and outlandish behavior to shock and intimidate people, to throw them off by acting like a cartoon. She learned very quickly that Negan thrived on shock value. He loved attention, both positive and negative. It gave him his power and control.
Samantha had invaded his territory without his knowledge. She had taken things from him without being noticed. She had stolen directly from his private floor. She had masqueraded as one of the people closest to him and used her position to take even more. And then, when she was finally discovered, she got away. Maybe not completely, but she got away from him.
He was a fully grown man who had failed to subdue a woman not even close to his weight class and had gotten himself locked in the basement of his own home while she went on to vandalize his property and assault his men. She must have served a great blow to his image as the infallible leader of the saviors. The ordeal left him little room to save face, and now this was his attempt to get some of it back.
But Sam had already seen through him for what he really was. He was a nobody. He was a nobody in the pre-apocalyptic world who became a somebody only because he knew how people worked. Types like him always found power in times of crisis. He was charismatic and knew how to use that to manipulate others. The best response, she decided, would be no response. To give him absolutely nothing. She wasn't here to indulge his cravings for validation.
If he wanted to play this game, then fine. She had an amazing poker face.
With her eyes locked on his, she stared back at Negan, matching his stare with her own. She had a mean stare. Her black hair highlighted the planes of her sharp features and her blue eyes were piercing with their crystalline color. She held her ground against him, squaring her proverbial shoulders and letting him know through her body language, explicitly, what she thought of the offer. She trusted that he was like her in that regard, an observer of people.
His eyes danced back and forth between hers, searching her face for an intense moment, before letting out a chuckle. He got the message.
"Yeah, didn't think you'd go for that."
He stepped back out of her space and she was suddenly able to breath again. The tension left with him. He moved around his desk to sit back in his chair. Just as he settled, there was a knock on the door.
He called for them to enter and the door opened to reveal Joey. He looked nervous.
Negan glared, annoyed to see the fat bastard again. "What the fuck do you want? Weren't you just in here?"
Joey glanced between Negan and Sam, stuttering, "I'm sorry to interrupt, sir, but I ah, I just-"
"Fucking out with it."
"It's my keys, sir, my keys are missing. I had them on me when I took her out of the cells, but on my way back I realized they weren't on my belt. I think she must've..." he trailed off as he gestured weakly in Sam's direction.
Her expression betrayed nothing as Negan's attention shifted back on to her. He scrutinized her with an amused look in his eyes, his eyebrows raised almost to his hairline.
"Did you take Fat Joey's keys, Samantha?" he asked her, as if talking to a child.
She sat in her chair, looking at Negan with that same blank stare. They looked at one another while Joey stood awkwardly by the door, watching them with bated breath. When she refused to answer, Negan's expression dropped into a dark frown and his brown eyes hardened to black. It was amazing how his face could go from open and handsome to absolutely hideous with a single shift in attitude. His deep voice came out almost in a growl, the threat ringing clear as a bell.
"Don't make me come over there and search you."
Seeing that he was serious, Sam exhaled through her nose as she reached into her dress and pulled out the set of keys from her bra. In a petty act of defiance, she tossed them on to the floor with a loud clatter instead of handing them to Joey, forcing the savior to bend down and pick them up.
She kept her eyes on Negan, but when she saw Joey stall in the corner of her eye, she turned her head to see him bent into a crouch and his hand hovering just over his keys, staring at her. There was a look of pure awe in his eyes as if she had just performed a magic trick, like she had made the set of keys appear out of thin air and not from her cleavage. Sam shifted a little in her seat at the attention. She looked at him with her brow furrowed, but he still didn't move from his dumbstruck stance.
Negan caught the look as well, moving his eyes between the two. A scowl twisted his features, worsening each time he looked at Joey's fat face staring at Sam before barking, "what the fucking fuck are you staring at? You got your keys back, get the fuck out!"
Joey snapped out of his stupor and stood up, mumbling a nervous apology with his head down while stuffing his keys into his pants pocket. Sam turned her head to look over her shoulder and watched him flee from the office.
"And I'd savor the warmth coming off those keys if I were you, because I'm guessing that's the closest you've been to touching a pair of tits in a long fucking time!" Negan called after him.
The door shut with a resonating slam this time and the older man chuckled, pleased with himself. When Sam looked back at him, all traces of anger were gone and gleefulness replaced it. He bit his bottom lip as he looked at her.
"You see that?" He gestured towards the door, smiling like a maniac. "That's what I really fucking like about you."
He leaned forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the desk.
"Usually, in these types of situations, I have people threatening me, giving me the stink eye, telling me how badass they think they are and how they've faced scarier men than me, blah, blah and all that horseshit. Real self-righteous kind of crap that makes my balls itch, you know? I have no problem fixing their fucking wagons. I just drive a spike up their asses in some rough anal play so they can be put on my wall - much better use to me like that anyways.
But you, Mouse, you let your actions do the talking, don't you? You don't need to say a Goddamn word to tell me what you're capable of. You just need the smallest opportunity to prove it. I fucking love that. You're not a talker, you're a doer. When the shit hits the fan, all those fucking big talkers are too busy picking their ass cracks to move, but not only are you out of the way of the shit spray, you're standing behind the fucking fan. It's fan-fucking-tastic."
'Clever,' she thought sarcastically.
"You want a fucking drink?" he asked suddenly.
Before she could respond, he pulled himself to his feet with a spring. She watched him walk towards a large wooden case and opened it to reveal a fully stocked mini bar. He let out an excited noise as he crouched down and picked through it contents. She couldn't see what he was getting out. All she could hear was the sound of glass clinking as he moved the bottles. It wasn't until he stood up and turned around that she saw the bottle of whiskey in his hands. He gave her a smile and wiggled his eyebrows before placing the bottle on top of the bar and grabbing two tumblers.
The amber liquid swashed in the bottle as he yanked out the cork, filling each tumbler with about two fingers of whiskey. He put the bottle back on the bar and picked up the glasses, making his way back. He sat in his chair and put one tumbler in front of him before reaching over and placing the other in front of Sam.
It was another challenge, she realized. She knew that a person's ability to hold their liquor was a common way of measuring the strength of their character. The only thing it really proved was the strength of someone's liver, but if Negan was issuing a challenge, regardless of how ridiculous, she would rise to it just to deny him the opportunity for control.
The little mouse could hold her ground against his vulgar offers, but could she keep footing directly on his level? She knew that she could, but a drinking contest wasn't the best way to prove it. Sam had never so much as had a sip of wine before in her entire life. Alcohol never held much appeal to her because it never occurred to her to drink something that didn't taste good, and she didn't like the idea of not being clear-headed at all times. She spent her twenty-first birthday watching a classic movie double-feature at a discount theater by herself before going home to study for a test she had the next day.
Still, her hand curled around the smooth glass. She stared down at the liquid that was surprisingly vibrant in color to her deficient eyesight. The strong scent of alcohol wafted up to tease her nose with a rich smell that wasn't entirely unpleasant. Negan watched as she brought the tumbler up to her lips. He raised his own glass to her before downing his drink in one swallow. Sam followed suite, hesitating for only a second. She took it like cough syrup; the kind your parents gave you as a child that had the consistency of half-dried paste and tasted nothing like cherries.
It went all in one go while she tried not to let it touch her tongue, but she stalled at the last second and her throat closed, making it all pool into her mouth instead. The whiskey burned like fire. Her eyes widened at the taste and she let out a distressed sound muffled by her closed lips.
She brought the tumbler back up to her mouth so she could spit out the foul liquid. Once it was gone, she slammed the tumbler back on the desk, nearly knocking it over. Her hand came up to her face as she coughed against the flavor, her eyes watering to the point of tears. It tasted like she had taken a swig of nail polish remover.
Negan laughed at her reaction, reaching out to pick up her glass and knocking back the contents without effort. Sam watched him, her nose curling up even more as he drank the whiskey she had spat out.
'That was in my mouth,' she thought, her mouth still burning.
He set the tumbler back on the desk, smacking his lips.
"God I love this stuff. Really puts the fucking hair on your balls - if you have balls, of course."
'He drank backwash.'
Negan squared his shoulders and rolled his neck to get the kinks out, ready to get down to business. He adjusted himself in his chair, sitting up straighter.
"Now, fucking pleasantries aside, we need to talk about how you're going to pay me back. You caused a lot of fucking damage the other night. I've got a broken mirror in one of the ladies' room, my men had to throw out six scorched cafeteria tables, janitorial is still cleaning up the cafeteria, you sent one of my men to the infirmary with a dislocated shoulder and a concussion, plus a whole fuck load of workers scared out of their fucking minds. None of that shit is even remotely okay."
'That's how you get Mono,' she thought, still thinking about the whiskey he drank.
Negan slammed his hand down on the desktop when he realized Sam wasn't listening. "Are you fucking pay attention?"
"Why am I here?" she spoke. The horrible aftertaste was too much, she had to say something. Her voice came out in a rasp from going so many days without saying a word. It took on an even huskier tone than usual.
"Fucking finally, she speaks!" he exclaimed, smiling big. "You're here because shit needs to be discussed, and because I'm not going to get much use out of you if you're locked in a fucking cell all the time."
"Use?" she echoed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
"I told you, you owe me a shit ton and you thought I was just going to kill you? No, that isn't how things are fucking done around here. Normally, any motherfucker who steals a free meal ticket in my Sanctuary and then digs their fucking nails into my face would have their brains turned into mashed taters by my Lucille, but like I said, what happened, what you did, that was the most fucking impressive thing I've seen in a long time. Way too impressive to just fucking kill you. That would be the biggest fucking waste. You've got something to offer the Sanctuary, you can contribute, but if you die, I don't get shit."
That didn't sound promising. It was a relief to know he had no plans to kill her, but it didn't seem like he had any to let her go, either. If she wasn't going to die, she'd rather move on from the Sanctuary, even if meant living on the road again.
"You know, when I was in high school I was voted for one of those 'most likely, least likely' yearbook award things. Do you know what it was for?" he asked.
"Most likely to emulate Stalin?" she replied.
"No," he said, so amused by this whole interaction that he let the comment go. "I was voted most likely to do good."
Sam always thought those yearbook traditions were just popularity contests, and she supposed this was proof. She didn't know if she should feel satisfied by this discovery, since she was voted 'worst person to talk to' in her own senior class, but then again she didn't need a fake award to tell her how unpopular she was (to this day she couldn't figure out how the yearbook committee got permission to put that in as a category, but it was probably for the same reason she was banned from participating in the science fair).
"I was also voted best smile," he said, grinning in emphasis, "but that's not related."
"I'm sure Stalin thought he was doing good."
And maybe Stalin had a good smile, too, but pictures rarely showed him doing so except for a subtle upturn of his full mustache. Never any teeth.
"Well, he was considered a revolutionary, wasn't he?"
"A revolutionary who caused the worst man-made famine in history for his own people."
"Can we fucking get off Stalin? I'm trying to make a goddamn point here."
Sam straightened in her chair, resigning to make another comment.
Negan rolled his eyes.
"Figures the one time you decide to speak is to fucking annoy me. Where the fuck was I going with this?"
He leaned back in his chair, scratching at his chin again as he tried to remember his point.
How remarkable, Sam thought, how he could stand speaking like that. All the time. She had never had a very high tolerance for curse words herself, having been brought up in a household that generally didn't use them, but since meeting Negan, she was beginning to despise them.
She supposed she was a bit old fashioned in that sense, believing that swearing was a sign of lower intelligence, regardless of how many new studies there were that tried to prove otherwise. Sam thought cursing was a blight on language skills no matter how smart a person was. It was rude and repulsive, end of story. It was no different than passing gas or picking your nose in public. It was a lack of common courtesy. It was lazy. It made proper articulation a recherché skill, like being able to write a grammatically correct paper without using spellcheck (she lamented this one on a personal level because she had participated in spelling bees in her childhood and had been quite proud of her, now obsolete, skill).
She acknowledged that one or two curse words here and there wasn't unreasonable, because as stated, she didn't have a high tolerance, but she did have some tolerance. However, to do what Negan did - that was too much. It was like playing a song off an old vinyl or a scratched CD, and each time he cursed it was like listening to it skip. There would be a rhythmic flow of words and a steady beat, then an ugly lapse of white noise that threw it all off.
In Samantha's head, it was the Devil's Trill Sonata being played by the actual devil, only he had Tourette Syndrome and had to stop after every verse to compulsively yell expletives.
Needless to say, she didn't care much for this conversation.
"I'm still not sure exactly how long you've been hiding in my walls, but I assume long enough to get the gist of how I do business, right?" he asked.
"You..." Sam's mind lapsed on an appreciate word to describe just what Negan did to others, "employ other communities to work for you, make them pay for protection, and in return you get to take whatever you want from them. With the people in your compound, they work for points to buy the things they need from the commissary. Everybody works for you. Everybody answers to you."
"Mmhm," Negan hummed, "and now I want you to work for me, too."
"No."
"Why not? You got other prospects I don't know about? You got some secret underground lair somewhere to hide from the shit storm, or a network of tunnels you can fucking crawl around in like those nasty, ass-naked moles that look like dicks with bucked teeth you see on the nature channel?"
"Because I don't want to."
Negan thought for a minute, pursing his lips and keeping his gaze on her before asking: "Where'd you go to school?"
"Nowhere special. Community college first because it was cheaper before moving on to an unremarkable university. I lived mostly on scholarships and whatever I could get from side jobs."
"Your parents didn't have the money to help?"
"No."
"What was your area of study?"
"Mechanical engineering."
"Uh-huh," he said slow and contemplatively. He gave her another thoughtful look before smiling in a way that was probably intended to be friendly, but Sam found disturbing instead. "Tell you what, Mouse, I've got a proposition for you that I think you're going to like. What if I told you that you could have whatever you want here - good meals, nice clothes, a comfy room all to yourself, a job catered to your expertise - and all you have to do is what you've been doing, but for me instead of against me. What would you think of that?"
"No."
"Don't be a fucking martyr. It's a good fucking deal and you know it. I respect crazy-ass badasses, but not martyrs, and given your precarious fucking situation right now, it won't do you any goddamn favors to shatter my image of you."
"I'm not being a martyr. You gave me your offer and I'm not interested."
"If this is a fucking morals thing, I'm going to be pissed."
"It's not. I just don't want to work for you."
He narrowed his eyes at her, the onset of frustration pulling at the corners of his mouth.
"Even if I did let you go, I would keep all your crap. Everything. You would be fucking lucky if I sent you out those gates wearing a pair of crotchless panties, let alone any supplies that'll help you live past sundown. How long do you think you would last with nothing going for you?"
"Longer than you'd think."
Negan smirked. "Oh, I don't doubt that. But I guess we won't ever get to find out, will we? Because you're staying right fucking here. So why don't you take a fucking minute to think about my offer again, yeah? Because it's the only fucking one you're going to get."
Sam recognized that it was a good deal, probably the best this new world could offer, but his charming smiles and laidback demeanor weren't enough to make his words feel any less like a bear trap, spring-loaded and waiting to snap her ankle in half, leaving her grievously wounded and vulnerable.
Everything was going just as she had expected it to. Negan was a walking contradiction, predictable and unpredictable at the same time. He was looking for her compliance so he was going to charm her first by offering her something she needed, and when that didn't work he would try to intimidate her by talking down to her, and when that didn't work, he would force her.
Personally, she thought the attempt to charm was the coiled snake of the three, because Negan's rewards were just as dangerous as his punishments. The only difference between the two was that one of them risked damage to her character, because choosing to work for him would have her accepted into his fear-mongering militia that exploited others for personal gain.
But then again, it was all relative, wasn't it? Because that was how Negan was as a leader; black and white, his leadership based on a system of rewards and punishments. Working for him would get you screwed sooner or later. It didn't matter if she accepted his offer or not - willingly or unwillingly, she was trapped. That was how he did business.
When she was younger, her cousin Payat would dunk her head in the pond behind her house. He would sneak up behind her as she watched the tadpoles take their first swim and push her on to her stomach. He would drag her over to the edge and dig a knee into her back to keep her still while he dunked her. It was cruel and hateful. He wouldn't stop until she said whatever it was he wanted her to say, or did whatever he wanted her to do, forcing her to say embarrassing things or do his chores and homework. She remembered how the desperation for air had her relenting every time.
However, she knew that no matter what she said or promised to do for him, he would always dunk her head under one last time before letting go, and it was always longer than the others.
Looking at Negan, she felt the ghost of her cousin's fat fingers on the back of her neck.
"You want to know what I'm thinking?" he asked her. "I'm thinking you might need a few more days in the cells, you know, so you can have some nice quiet time to consider my offer more, and I'm going to give you some homework to do while you're in there. Nothing hard. No papers, no pencils - because like fuck I trust you with a fucking pencil. Just some food for thought. I want you to think about three things," he held up three fingers to emphasize, "what happened to you, what could've happened to you and what can still happen to you. Once you do that, I'm fucking positive you'll come to the right decision."
He jerked his head in the direction of the door without waiting for a response, saying gruffly:
"Now get the fuck out of my office."
She hesitated for a moment in her seat, surprised that he had ended the meeting so abruptly and without grandiose, but when he opened one of her notebooks and started reading again, she knew she had been dismissed. She stood from her chair, ignoring the stiffness in her legs, and walked towards the office door.
"Oh, and one more thing," he said.
She released the breath that she had been holding, knowing it had been too good to be true.
With her bound hands on the doorknob, she turned to see him getting up from his desk. She watched as he walked towards her and tensed when he didn't stop until he was well into her personal space again. She released the doorknob and moved to the side to create some space, but he followed her, crowding her against the wall. He was close enough to see her muscles seize under her skin and the goosebumps that erupted from his breath wafting over her. He was close enough to feel her body heat, close enough to see the faint splash of freckles that peppered the swell of her chest. He stared intently at them.
Sam felt disgust at his attention before realizing that he wasn't staring at her cleavage in any sordid way, but more critical.
His eyes came up to meet hers as he brought up his ungloved hand. He smirked as he extended his pointer finger, wiggling it in the air before tapping it against her exposed collarbone. Feeling ensnared between the wall and Negan's towering body, she turned her head up and away from what he was doing, fear and embarrassment rooting her where she stood.
Heat flooded her cheeks as he trailed his finger along the skin of her collarbone and down her chest, tracing the v-cut of her dress and the soft flesh that pooled out the top until it reached the valley between her breast. She breath lodged in her throat with a quiet gasp as his fingers dipped inside.
It lasted only a second when she felt him pull something from out of her bra and his touch left her body. She opened her eyes and looked back at him to see the extra key she had stolen, pinched between his thumb and pointer finger. He held it up between their noses, a cold expression on his face.
"Whatever you decide - whatever I decide to do with you - I can promise you, Mouse, right here and now, I am never going to underestimate you again. So you best behave, because you're not going anywhere."
Even with her back almost against the wall, Sam's foot moved back out of reflex, but she flinched when something sharp pricked the heel of her bare foot. Negan saw it and looked down, smirking.
"Careful there," he said, putting the key in his pants pocket before reaching down.
He picked up his baseball bat that had been left propped up against the wall behind her. He held it with both hands, looking down at it with a sick fondness while Sam stared at the crooked barbed wire wrapped around its head. His eyes met hers again as he gripped the handle in one hand and pointed the business end in her face.
"Once my Lucille gets the taste of someone's blood, she ain't satisfied until she fucking covered in it."
~O~
The hinges of the door creaked as Joey opened Sam's cell for her. Using his pocket knife, he cut the zip tie around her wrists. There was another tray of pseudo food placed in the corner next to the door, but she ignored it, stepping towards the back wall and lowering herself to the ground. The whiskey served as a sort of anti-apéritif, killing any desire to eat. She laid down and curled up into the fetal position facing the wall.
Joey lingered in the door way, his massive shadow taking up most of the back wall.
"That was really cool what you did," he said. "Cool as in amazing, I mean, not cool as in okay. I could've gotten in a lot of trouble for that, but you were like a ninja, I didn't even feel you take them."
He trailed off, expecting her to say something back, but she didn't, and after a couple seconds of silence, she heard him shift and he slowly shut her door. The sound of the lock's mechanism and the jingle of keys was the last thing she heard before she was left in solitude once again.
As she closed her eyes and tried to sleep, she didn't think of anything. Not even about Negan's offer. She had given him her answer and nothing would be different in the morning.
AN: The flashback in the beginning was done to give more insight on Sam's character before her one-on-one sit down with Negan, but if you guys enjoyed seeing scenes of Sam's past, then I might consider including a few more throughout the story. Let me know in a review if you would be interested in that.
Don't forget to let me know what you think of the new chapter! I love hearing your guys' opinions.
~Scorpiofreak~