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The sea tossed the two ships nestled side by side in the storm, and water came over the sides and sloshed over the decks. Sailors fell to their knees, but no one was swept overboard – yet. Accustomed to the sea’s rhythm, Negan confidently swaggered across the plank that bridged the two ships together.The damaged one was a pitiful vessel for pirating or even sailing for that matter, but Negan would take it anyway. It looked like it was originally a fishing vessel, meant to hug the shores than explore the deep sea. The wood was beautiful, hand-carved, obviously a very loved ship. That would be their mistake.In comparison, Negan’s ship had blackened wood as if it was once set on fire, pitch soaked into the deck. The sails were blood red, deliberately eye-catching, a warning to all that this was the dreaded Lucille with twenty-four cannons on either side. Even then, you were lucky if you got the cannons because Lucille usually preferred the stealthy approach. She’d cut through the waves like a sword, practically singing, and then the crew would reach out the whaling hooks and catch the lesser ship. Which is what she had done to this ship. If Negan didn’t save it, it would sink from the damage the whaling hooks had done to the sides, ripping holes into it until it bled water inward and swelled. Negan was still making up his mind about if it was worth saving.“Pissing our pants yet?” Negan stalked across the deck, smiling like the sharks below deck. Sharks learned that they ate well following his ship, and both Negan and the sharks could smell the blood in the water now. “I have a feeling we are getting close.”Pulling his jagged cutlass from his belt, Negan stopped in front of the row of kneeling captives. The rain soaked his clothes, chilled his bones, but he didn’t mind, not even bothering to lace his shirt fully closed. If he was miserable, then the shivering line of prisoners in front of him were even more so. For that, Negan would grit his teeth and bare it, watching his breath cloud in front of his nose as he finally spoke again. “Which one of you sorry motherfuckers is the captain of this piss poor crew?”Unsurprisingly, no one volunteered. Instead Simon, Negan’s first mate, had to point him out. “This one.” It was not the one Negan would’ve guessed. The red-haired fucker would’ve been Negan’s guess, but instead their captain was one of the smaller men who trembled almost violently.“Captain Grimes, I presume?” Negan took the tip of his sword and held it under the man’s chin, forcing him to look up at Negan. When he did, Negan was nearly swept off the deck by the pair of familiar eyes, wide with fear and swimming with tears that rivaled the rain. Removing his sword, Negan twirled it in hand to hide his nerves.“Your reputation proceeds you, Grimes. Once a colonial captain of the navy, now a goddamn pirate. Sank the Governor’s armada twice over, sank a few other fucking vessels, too. Completely burned down the Woodbury colony. Sailing in my fucking waters now, aren’t you? Sinking my fucking ships? Raiding my ports? Fuck you, you’re going to pay for that dearly.”While he spoke, his men shifted, anxious and hungry. From the corner of his eye, he could see them bare their teeth in savage grins. But Negan had eyes only for Captain Richard Grimes. The man was infamous, well admired among the colonists and despised by the Navy much like Negan was. Whereas Grimes was a hero of the people who shared in the wealth of his conquests, Negan was a villain of legend, on par with the devil, though he had done just as much for those ungrateful colonists even before Grimes turned coat. But all of Negan’s previous frustrations for Grimes’ transgressions was forgotten now as he stared at the man now.It was the eyes that did it for Negan. Ocean blue, matched right now with the dark, almost grey waves as the storm tossed and rolled the ships together beneath their feet and knees. Negan knew those eyes; he’s seen them before – on someone he once loved and now believed was dead.“You’re going to pay for what you fucking did. But not with your lives.” Negan paused, and watched as the rest of his motley crew sagged with relief. “Just one life.” Again, they went rigid and Negan laughed. His plan had been to toss them all into the sea with their throats slit and see how far they make it with the sharks below. But plans change.Stalking forward, he grabbed their pitiful captain by the back of his neck and muscled him to the Captain’s Quarters. “Let’s see who your captain picks.” Grimes crawled forward on his knees, and when waves tossed water on the deck his face was low enough that he nearly drowned in it. Negan ignored it and shoved Grimes into his Captain’s Quarters with a solid kick on his ass.The door swung shut behind them, and Negan locked it on a whim. He doubted anyone would dare interrupt, but he wasn’t a man to take chances. Inside and out of the rain, it was only slightly muffled by the walls. It was still cold, too, not even a lantern lit for light or warmth. Compared to Negan’s own quarters, Rick’s was small with a desk shoved in one corner and a bed in the other. Negan didn’t examine too closely because inevitably his eyes were drawn back to Grimes, still on his knees, dripping water everywhere.“Let’s talk – one captain to another.” Negan jerked him up by the arm and shoved him on the bed while he sat in the desk chair, propping his feet up on the mattress. “While you’re still a fucking captain, at least,” he added darkly.Negan watched him toss his hair out of his eyes and finally meet him with a level look, though he was still shivering. “P-please, none of them have to die.”Cocking an eyebrow, Negan rhetorically asked, “Oh, so you want to die? A captain going down with his ship?” Purposefully, he put his hand on the hilt of his cutlass. “I have to say, I’m not against it.”Those ocean eyes followed Negan’s hand, and Negan was reminded of why he changed his mind. He drew his sword and held it just under Grimes’ nose. On a closer inspection, he had a scar right across the bridge, as if his nose had been broken before or if someone had lovingly drawn the edge of their sword just over his pretty face. Grimes’ eyes flickered up to Negan’s, and they were deadly calm, waiting, expectant. He was a fool to think death would come so easy.“Tell me,” Negan inched the tip of his sword a little closer, “tell me about your crew.”“They are the finest a captain could ask for,” Grimes said with the practice of every navy man.“Cut the bullshit. The more you talk, the more you might just change my mind – but if you play the uptight guy at a dick-sucking contest, I’ll go out there and kill someone until you talk again.” Negan finished off the threat with a playful tap of the flat side of his sword against the tip of Grimes’ nose.He could see the consideration before the man gave in. “My first mate served with me in the Navy before we both left –”“Mutinied,” Negan helpfully supplied.Grimes didn’t correct him, and only continued, “– and we were on our way to the Hilltop colony to seek out their doctor.”“Syphilis?”“One of my crew is…sick,” Grimes’ face pinched as though he wanted to say something else and only just managed to catch himself. “You attacked us without prompting when we were only trying to help one of my crew.”“I thought I told you,” Negan stood up and towered over Grimes for a second, “to cut the bullshit.” Lacing his fingers through Grimes’ wet curls, Negan tilted his head back as if he were going to kiss him like a lover before he held his sword to his Adam’s apple. “Now, honey, why don’t you tell me your name and why you were sailing.”“You know who I am,” Grimes spat.Tightening his grip, Negan added a little more pressure, but not enough to cut the skin, just enough to make it hard to breathe. He imagined Rick was intimate with the feeling. “Tell me your name.”“Richard Grimes,” he gritted between his teeth, and then hissed out, “but my family – my crew – calls me Rick.”“Rick,” Negan stroked his hand through his hair, “what brought you out sailing in the moonlight?”“One of my crew is sick and we needed the Hilltop colony’s doctor,” he repeated tensely.“Not the Alexandrian colony doctor?”“We don’t have one.” At Negan’s look, Rick added, “Anymore.”“What is the illness?”He could tell that Rick didn’t understand the nature of the questions, but he had little other choice but to answer. “She…is with child.”Negan let out a low whistle, and finally pulled his sword away, though he kept his hand in Rick’s hair as he gazed down at him thoughtfully. “Bad luck bringing a woman on a ship – and one in the family way. You were asking for trouble, Rick.”“Well, trouble found us,” Rick supplied, literally pulling the next words from Negan’s mouth before he could draw breath to utter them.Smiling – unsure of whether it was a frightening one – Negan leaned down closer. “Now, Rick, judging by your crew, I can see you’re not the superstitious type. No, you’re the foolhardy type. I counted no less than four women – and a cabin boy, though that might be a cabin girl.”“He’s just a boy,” Rick replied too quickly, and Negan knew a weakness when he saw one.“Just a boy,” Negan repeated, “a boy who dreamed of adventure and a life at sea, I’m sure, and who are you to deny a young lad’s dreams? Why not let him join His Majesty’s navy, hm?”Rick pulled his eyes away and sullenly stared at the floor, his jaw tense.Tucking his sword away, Negan slapped Rick with his free hand and asked again, more firmly, “What is the cabin boy to you?”“My son!”“Very good, Rick,” Negan commented dryly, and he saw how hard it was for Rick to admit that. “We’re making progress. But I just needed to hear you say it. He has your eyes, you know. Well, one of them at least. He’s a regular pirate already. I’m impressed.”To his credit, Rick tried to pull out of Negan’s grip, but with little success. Negan brought his other hand up again to Rick’s face and grabbed his jaw, palm over Rick’s mouth, where he could feel the man’s warm breath panting against his palm. He could just bring his fingers up and pinch his nose and suffocate the man right there, or just slip his hand down to his throat and crush it while he sucked the air from his lungs.It also hadn’t escaped Negan’s notice that he had Rick on his bed – but Negan was not a man for such a monstrosity as that. He had well paid whores at his Sanctuary to satisfy his needs, and a pair of ocean eyes swimming with tears did not bode well for him.Again, his gaze was magnetically pulled back to Rick’s and he could see that the man had an underlying wild fear, though his eyes mostly simmered with barely contained anger. Negan wondered if it would be easy to just ask – Rick had not held back much with proper prompting – and so he did just that.“You may not be a superstitious sailor, Rick, but you are a sailor. Do you believe in the tales they tell?”When he released Rick’s mouth, the man answered quickly, “Dead men tell no tales.”Looking away, Negan tried not to smile, but he failed that. He looked back again at Rick and gently corrected him, “That’s why I leave survivors. But I’m not asking about myself.” Absentmindedly, he stroked Rick’s curls again and his fingers caught on the ribbon he used to hold his hair back. He pulled it free and tucked it away in his shirt before he laced his fingers through Rick’s hair again. “Have you heard fish tales – fish tales about fish tails?”Rick hesitated, and Negan knew why.“Mermaids?” Rick tried to sound doubtful, “Even my son doesn’t believe those old fish wives’ tales anymore.”This time when Negan smiled, he knew it was a dangerous one. “Funny you should mention fish wives, Rick.” He pressed his face closer until he could feel Rick’s hot breath against his neck, and his breath smelled like rum and apples. Stopping with the tip of his nose against Rick’s, eye to eye, Negan asked, “Where is she?”This time, Rick didn’t even bother trying to feign his innocence or confusion on his face. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”Shoving Rick down with his back flat on the mattress, Negan pinned him there and roared, “Don’t fucking lie to me! Don’t give me that horse shit! Where – Is – She?” He gave Rick a hard slap – just a warm up really – but then Rick kicked out wildly and landed a solid hit right between Negan’s legs.As Negan crumpled on top of Rick, Rick tried to turn over on his stomach and crawl away. He only managed his side and reached up towards the headboard to heave himself out from under Negan’s body. Still hissing in pain, Negan held on to Rick while he tried to buck him off. The sea had steadily tossed below deck beneath their feet, but it started to grow wilder with Rick’s movements as the storm outside worsened. Rick managed to throw him off, and Negan stumbled against the desks before he pushed off and grabbed Rick by his boots.“WHERE IS SHE?”With all his strength, Negan yanked Rick back down to the edge of the bed and then pulled him off completely until he was flopped on the floor like a gutted fish.“WHERE IS SHE?”He drove the toe of his boot into Rick’s ribs and the man coughed and sputtered, curling up on himself to protect his vital organs.“WHERE IS SHE?”Negan stomped on the side of Rick’s knee and ground his heel until he heard it snap. Rick screamed out in pain jut as thunder crashed outside.“WHERE IS – oof!”When Negan lifted his leg again, Rick had lashed out and swept Negan’s single leg out from underneath him. On the floor next to Rick, Negan grunted watched the other man scoot himself away, favoring his knee. Through gritted teeth, Rick growled, “I don’t know who she is!” His eyes blazed cold like lightning crackling, and Negan heard more rumbles of thunder, this time further away.Pushing himself to his knees, Negan caught his breath and stared at Rick. A spark of familiarity lanced through his brain of seeing the exact same expression in those eyes before in what felt like a lifetime ago but could’ve only been a few years. Negan panted, his throat sore from screaming, “I don’t care if you don’t know who she is – I just want to know where the fuck she is.”This time when Negan lunged at him, Rick spat blood in his face and threw himself to the side out of Negan’s reach. The spray of blood was warm, and Negan’s open mouth tasted iron and was fueled by it. He turned around to spring on Rick again, but hesitated when he heard him spit, “I don’t know that either! I don’t know anything about her! She found me, she did something, and then left!”“What did she do to you?” Negan scrambled to his feet again. “Did she make you a monster like she did to me?”“Yes,” Rick readily replied, not an ounce of hesitation. Unlike Negan, though, he didn’t sound proud of himself to be chosen – like Negan felt – or disgusted, like others had. Instead, he just sounded like he couldn’t be bothered with it at all. He adapted to it and moved on. Negan would’ve almost been envious, but he had embraced what she had given him. He would show Rick.“Let’s see how far her love goes.” Rick’s eyes minutely widened, and then Negan seized him again by the hair and dragged him out of the Captain Quarter’s on deck again. The rain hadn’t lightened up, but it hadn’t gotten worse either. With a quick glance over his men, Negan could tell they were at the end of their rope with their patience. Rick’s crew, however, was shivering, less scared than before and more broken, already accepting their fate and the loss of their captain. Well, let’s shake them up a bit.Tossing Rick on the deck, he watched the man bite back screams of pain as he landed on his bad knee. Negan must’ve broken his leg, maybe cracked a few ribs. He hadn’t meant to go that far, but too late. He could feel that frenzy inside of him that violence aroused. With the taste of blood and iron still in his mouth, Negan barked, “You sorry piece of shit crew should be damn grateful! You get to live, but your captain…” He drew his sword and collapsed to his knees on the hard deck beside Rick.With one hand, he ripped open Rick’s sodden wet doublet and exposed his fish-belly pale stomach that heaved under his touch. Water sloshed over them both, and Rick gasped for air – he didn’t even see what was coming as he stared out with a dazed look over his crew. “Your captain dies.”Negan’s sword dragged over Rick’s stomach from side to side just over his hipbones. First the blood welled up, and then the entrails spilled out and Rick gaped like a gutted fish, too surprised to feel the pain. The cut was anything but clean, though, since Negan’s sword was specially designed with teeth. When Rick’s hands came up to dumbly clutch his stomach and shove the organs back inside, another wave spilled over the deck and sloshed his blood everywhere – especially over his crew. They screamed – the boy screaming the loudest – and Negan made a gesture to his men to toss Rick over the side. Two of them did, and Negan was already crossing the gangplank back to his own ship.“Give them a dingy and cast them out to sea. Let Fate decide who the fuck lives and dies,” Negan ordered his first-mate.“And their ship, Captain?” Simon prompted.Thoughtful, Negan crossed back over and placed his hand on the railing. This was a loved ship. Was. “A captain always goes down with his ship.”From the Lucille as they sailed back to the Sanctuary, Negan watched as the storm tossed about what was left of Rick’s crew, and how the shark fins cut through the water searching for more victims like Captain Richard Grimes. Rick’s ship sunk into the waves, and it wasn’t for several more knots before the smoke clouds finally went away.
Of course, Negan expected that to be the last of Rick. Even if he had briefly curried Fate’s favor, Negan personally knew her to be a cruel mistress. He courted her when he was at sea, but when he came to port, he was Lucille’s. Really, he should’ve known better than to try and cheat Fate, even if she wasn’t his wife. Fate took his Lucille, and then Fate left him. She had promised him eternal life, though, so long as he sank ships and tossed bodies into the ocean. Negan kept that up even if he wasn’t sure if her promise kept after she was gone.He wanted Fate back because she took Lucille from him. After his encounter with Rick, though, another pirate with a rising reputation, Negan suspected she had moved on to another. The day his ship made port in the Alexandria colony to pillage and plunder, he knew he was right. All of Rick’s people were there to defend it – and so was Rick.“She must really love you.” Negan drew his sword and he quirked a smile when he saw Rick’s son bristle and step forward beside his father. “How many times have you died?”Rather than drawing a sword, Rick drew a hatchet. “Just that once.”"You’re lying. You must’ve have fucking died when she changed you.”"It doesn’t matter,” Rick drawled, and Negan hated that Rick sounded so casual about it. “I’m not dying again. You take your ship and leave with your lives.”“I take it this colony is under your command?” Gesturing with the tip of his sword, Negan flicked it toward the colonists cowering behind Rick’s crew manning the cannons that prevented Negan’s own men from charging forward. Rick’s ship had also survived and had circled out of a hidden cove to target Lucille with its cannons. Negan was impressed because this was hardly a naval tactic. Rick was really a pirate now.“My protection. This colony and the Hilltop.”Negan paced in front of the line of his men, eyeing the colony’s rudimentary measures of protection. His eyes dropped down to Rick’s again, and every time he saw the mark Fate had left. “Did she come to you as a siren? A mermaid singing promises of glory?”Rick’s crew looked uncomfortable. He must not have told them everything. The boy especially looked confused and turned to look at his father with his one eye – and though it was his father’s eyes, they were not eyes touched by Fate. “No.”“What did she promise you? Her heart?” Negan laughed crudely and twirled his sword. “You couldn’t believe that she’d stay true to you.”"She offered me the chance to protect the ones I love.”“And it costs you your life?”“It costs me everything, and it is a debt I still owe.”Wrinkling his nose, Negan called, “Sounds like shit.”"Leave.”“Oh, I’m leaving. But mark me, Rick. I’ll find you again on the sea. This is far from over – and I think you and I are meant to do this, forever.”
Little did Negan know at the time that that was exactly what Fate had wanted from them. For years, he and Rick met on the sea and battled. Sometimes Negan managed to kill Rick only to find him again. For the most part, though, they killed the others with them. Rick had taken Simon, Dwight, Arat, Laura, Gavin, Regina, and even his whores when he had invaded the Sanctuary. Negan took Glenn, Abraham, Sasha, Eugene, Rosita, Tara, and Rick’s lover. Their feud burned down colonies and countless other ships, though their own always survived. Once Rick had slit his throat, but Negan lived, though he suspected that magic had nothing to do with it. Just dumb luck.They went through crew like nothing, and soon everything else fell by the wayside as they forgot all other pleasures and duties of life in favor of revenge. Soon, neither man had anyone left they truly cared about – they only knew each other, having lived longer than others. Even Rick’s own son had grown and sailed away to live his own life, tired of chasing Negan. Negan was glad at least that the boy got to live, and from his own warped perspective, he had watched him grow into a man. It made him strangely proud in a way.It took a long time for Negan to realize that all he had left was Rick. It took some time, but he organized a parley on Ezekiel’s island near the ivory coast. He wasn’t surprised when Rick showed up.“Rick,” Negan greeted him at the lonely shack Ezekiel had offered for their meeting. The rules were that they both had to come alone, though not exactly defenseless. Both captains were too suspicious for that."Negan,” Rick returned with a proud lift of his chin. It had been years – years upon years – and though they clashed weapons most of that time they had grown to learn each other in a way. Where once Rick had been a young man with chestnut curls that made him a pretty thing, now he was weathered and rugged with a crisp white beard. Handsome. He still had the ocean blue eyes, and now they both knew what that meant – power over the tide of the sea and winds. Negan would almost be jealous if he wasn’t the one always getting the upper hand.While Rick was an old man with a hook now, and a peg leg, Negan was also an old man, his beard more white than black as it had been. He was a little less scarred than Rick, though. He waited for Rick to sit in the chair opposite from him before he broke the silence. “I want a truce.”Sighing, Rick ran a hand through his beard. “After all these years, all the deaths and fighting and bloodshed – everything we’ve lost – and you want it all to stop?”“Don’t you?” Negan leaned forward, his tone intensifying with urgency, though anything but a plea. “Rick, we’re cursed to live when all around us die. Fate has played us, and never shown her face again to lift what gifts she gave us. Don’t you think she had a plan for this?”Outside, the wind picked up. Rick was getting agitated, but Negan wouldn’t let that bother him. “You think she gave us each other.”“Yes.” Negan tapped his fingers on the table impatiently. “We have something between us. I feel it. It’s like how the waves crest, this rhythmic push and pull. It waxes and wanes with the moon, but we always find each other.”“You killed people that I loved,” Rick hissed in outrage, and the wind outside howled with him.“And you did the same to me,” Negan argued and then switched abruptly to a different tactic before Rick brought the shack down on top of them. “Your son is gone, Rick. He left you for the mainland. But you and I, we were meant to hug the shore and never leave the sea. We – I –”“– You love me,” Rick stated plainly as if it was the most obvious thing. Because it really was. It happened somewhere around their tenth year together. It was after Rick’s lover was gone for nearly six years. There was tension when they fought, a new kind of passion that had been building and neither one had realized until it culminated in a bloody kiss with more teeth than tongue. It had been more than just one kiss – once it was even a brutal fuck where at the end of it, Rick had slit Negan’s throat while his guard was down before he turned tail and fled.“I’ve told you as much,” Negan replied, more calmly than he felt. The winds outside had lowered to a whistle, but Rick’s been known to be deceptive with his gifts.“Always poetically – never plainly,” Rick said dryly. He tapped his hook on the table and looked away, obviously thinking. Nervous, Negan ran his fingers through the end of his beard."You think…” Rick started slowly, “You think that if we stop fighting and killing, that we’ll die. That we’ll be able to die.”“It crossed my mind, but that’s not my sole motive.”“Of course not.” Rick’s mouth twisted wryly into anything but a smile. “Would you give up Lucille? Would you give up piracy? Sailing?”"I won’t go further than the sand under my boots,” Negan cryptically responded, not allowing himself to hope.“I wouldn’t either, and I wouldn’t ask that of you.” Rick’s eyes unfocused and Negan could breathe. “I’d want to go to America. It’s where my son is. But we’d stay in a fishing port.”"Two old men shacking up next to the sea?” Negan surmised, “Making a living wage by bringing in our catches of fish?”“Somewhere far enough away from others so that we can drink and clash our swords and watch moonlight ripple on the water and wonder if we’re seeing the tail fins of sharks or mermaids or Fate herself.”“And you say I’m fucking poetic.”“Do you agree to it?” Rick fixed him with his gaze. “Do you swear it?”"If we do this, we disappear. That means –”“I know what it means. I’ll slit my crew’s throats tonight.”Negan gritted his teeth and felt himself harden under the table. “I’ll handle mine as well.”They sealed their deal with a kiss, and once both men turned the sea red with the blood of fifty men, they sailed their ships side by side using Rick’s tides until they arrived at the new world. For fifty years, they stayed in their own cove, and drank until the livers of normal men would’ve rotted and caught impossible fish from the deep without ever leaving the shore. Rick’s descendants occasionally visited, and they took the Lucille, and Rick’s ship Lori. They never saw Fate again – and without ever visiting, Fate let them die, but they died together – in their sleep before a hurricane washed their shack away.Superstitious sailors blame the unruly tides on mysterious blue-eyed stranger, and the ones who nearly drown blame it on a man with a smile like a shark’s, claiming to taste copper when they cough up their lung fulls of seawater. But Rick’s descendants, and the islanders near their shacks claim that they hear a jaunty whistle in the wind and raspy laughs when the waves crash over the sand dunes during high-tide. And none of them ever talk of an entity such as Fate.