It was always coming back, they didn't let him go.

First it had been Lucille, the woman she was, the woman he lost. Lucille the bat, a simple possession by every literal sense of the word but that brought him grounding beyond any reasonable explanation. They didn't let him go, useless wishes, useless longing for something or someone, a time and a place that couldn't return. His wife was dead in the previous world, his bat was lost in this new one. They didn't let him go.

Negan had grown used to be haunted by Lucille. He could understand the prospect of it, reasonably, both while he was himself and as this sorry version they wanted him to turn into - that he had become. He could understand that she wouldn't let him go.

But then they creeped in, sinked in, holding him so tightly he couldn't breathe. Those two he didn't want to, didn't understand why they'd bother, why they'd bother him. Why he'd be bothered by them. Yet here they were, again, and with them they brought that feeling again, of fulfillment, of hoping, of something, anything, that wasn't here anymore. And all he wanted was for them to leave him but they wouldn't.

Carl, Judith.

The names, the faces, he wanted them gone but they didn't let him go. One time, that one time he could have killed them both, buried them in their fucking daddy's front garden, and instead he cuddled the baby's blond silky locks, held her close enough to imprint that baby smell into his mind and those adorable features, those big big brown eyes and those chubby round cheeks. Now, he wished he could hold her again, and not to hurt her, not to clench a fist around her soft neck and see those cute cheeks turn purple; he just wished he could hold her and make sure no one would harm her in a crossfire or a bombing or anything that war brought down to people, just hold her and let himself feel something, anything, that wasn't wanting to scream and cry.

Carl would hold him the hardest, strangling him with his bare hands and shoving his head against the bricks. That fucking little serial killer in the making, growing up by the day and turning into a fine badass young psychopath, had his father been a good one and stopped him from doing stupid things, dying like he did, dying altogether. He held him, wouldn't let him go, kept pushing and shoving and exposing Negan's shameful wishes, all his hopes, all he hoped the boy would be, all he could do, all he should have been to Negan.

He shouldn't have ever wished he'd buried the children in the garden. Instead he should have gone from wishing to pratice by burying the fucking Prick and let the two children be here and alive with him. There wouldn't have been a war, Carl wouldn't have died and written that stupid letter than wouldn't let him go but now there wasn't much to be done, now was there? Now they didn't leave, they were gone from his life and their afterimages didn't leave him alone, so it was a good thing Prick Rick was here today to gloat about his day in his pretty merry life for the first time since... when the fuck had he last been here?... because he had a couple of things he wanted to tell that son of a bitch.

"He'd be alive." Negan didn't even hear the past five or six fucking minutes because all those pretty descriptions of Rick's pretty little world out those bars had brought them back and he wanted them gone. "He'd be alive and you know it."

"Don't talk about him."

"I'm gonna talk about Carl because I fucking cared about Carl and he died being a stupid prick you taught him to be," Negan replied, wanting to pin Rick with his words and with the truth, to force the afterimages to haunt him instead, but Rick didn't want to give him the satisfaction, didn't want to bend, still didn't want to bend. "Because you're a weak shit, you let your son die and you'll let that little girl follow the same fucking-

"Don't talk about Judith."

Negan swallowed the words. Not because Rick's order took effect, or the flash of menace that crossed his features felt threatening, but because he knew it would happen, he knew because Carl was dead. All he could have been, all the conversations they could have had, all gone. And the prospect of that happening again with Judith, of never holding that baby again, scretched open the scar on his throat and suffocated him.

"You know, I..." He felt the words struggling to come out, thought 'why should I even...?', but they managed to come through regardless of his wanting or his struggle. "I couldn't. I can't have kids. That... That's fucking bothering me because you-"

"Don't tell me you're jealous now, Negan," Rick spat, cutting him off the moment and for once he was thankful for that. Humiliation could only go so far before it destroyed him. But he wasn't thankful for the faintest taint of a smirk he could see somewhere beneath Rick's beard. "You've grown so used to terrorize people into serving you and giving everything to you on demand, that you wish you could have had my children as yours."

Negan wanted to spat back at him, to have the satisfaction of grinning it away, but they... for fuck's sake, please, they didn't let him go.

"I don't envy you Rick." His voice was coarse. From lack of use, he wanted to force himself to believe. But he couldn't, not after being so worned out by those afterimages strangling the very air out of him. The answer that followed was surprisingly spontaneous, surprisingly clear to him as to why this was all happening, why he was even bothered by it all: "I just wish I'd had the opportunity to see how I could have been if I had what you did."

Rick snorted quietly.

"Well I can tell you right now it wouldn't have made a difference."

"Sure it would. Kids make you better people, don't they? Isn't that what they say?"

"You are not the type of person that changes, Negan. You don't let the good of others affect you. You taint everything and everyone around you, you're poison breeding into everyone you touch."

"You think you'd be better than me? Huh?" Negan leaned forward in the bed. "Would you have bothered, if you didn't have Carl? Or Judith?"

"I would." Rick didn't give him the satisfaction of even hesitating, of bothering to take the time to imagine for a second to picture the world Negan wanted him to. "If you had stolen my daughter from me, you would have gotten her killed in a crossfire..."

"No," Negan waved his head firmly, but Rick continued.

"...brought by the people you preyed upon turning against you. You brought an all out war that would have happened even if you had bashed my skull into the ground the first time you saw me."

"I didn't kill you because of Carl. I didn't-"

"If you had taken Carl away from me, he would have been beaten to death by a survivor, because that's how you teach your men to act, to-"

"No! He would be alive!" Negan stood up and crossed the cell into the bars whereas Rick barely flinched back, even if that flash of madness on his face wasn't such a flash anymore. "Because Carl deserved to see the world I was trying to build. Hell, he even deserved to have your world, but he's dead!"

Rick had stood up from the chair too. Both men stared into each other's eyes, and the hatred that once was behind those blue fucking eyes, the same blue Cal had, remained unchanged, beyond letters and wishes, beyond anything.

"Carl didn't know shit. He wanted you to find peace, and you used that to try to kill me. You say I'm poison, that the good of others doesn't affect me, but you are just as unaffected by it."

"Yet you are here, alive, in the world my son envisioned," Rick threw back at him. "You are here after you killed and butchered your way until I finally stopped you, and with my son's wishes in mind, I let you live while you would have killed me. I think that shows everything there is to show about how my children would not have changed you."

Negan's face contorted into a mask of hate and for the longest time, he did not recall missing Lucille more than he did now, how it felt to have blood bashing against his face and dripping from the brain matter etched into the barbed wire.

Rick left him alone in his cell again knowing fully well what was on Negan's mind. The confirmation of his words.

Negan fell back his steps to the bed and sunk on it, knees pulled up, closing his eyes shut and holding the sides of his skull with his fists, trying to breathe, to calm down. To tell himself it was never going to happen, and he couldn't imagine how it could have been.

He failed. He tried again, and failed. He leaned his head forward, locked it between his palms and bashed it violently back against the wall. The impact left his ears ringing and numb, forced air out, and air in.

Rick was wrong. They did change him. He wanted to hold Judith. He wanted Carl alive and here, talking with him. He wanted to be able to feel what Rick did and shouldn't. And he couldn't.

Please.

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the end

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Author's Note: A spontaneous idea that overlapped all my other writings because I couldn't stop having a relapse to things that were and it fucked up my day greatly.

Thanks for reading.