Poker Face

Chapter 55 - Tough

The next day, Negan reluctantly woke and shifted Aven from his arms to the bed of pillows they'd made on the floor of their fort. He groaned as he crawled out from under the blankets, his back stiff and sore from sleeping the wrong way. Without watching where he was going, he bumped into a corner of the fort, one end of the couch near the window with four different blankets strung from it, causing the corner to collapse. He cursed under his breath and carefully stepped around the pile of blankets and into the bedroom to get dressed for the day.

"Good job, you fucking destroyed it," Aven sneered, as she pulled herself out from under the tented area of the room, which now hung lower to the floor without the corner that had fallen. She got the words out confidently but groaned as she pushed herself back against the wall, peeking over the fort at him before throwing her arm over her eyes to dull her headache. When Negan was fully dressed, he hiked Lucille over his shoulder and turned to leave the bedroom but stopped curiously in his tracks when he spotted Aven's blue spiral notebook on the bedside table. He'd read or at least skimmed most of it but the more he got to know her, the more her obsessive note-taking said about her.

"Catherine the Great and...what's his face?" Negan began.

"What?" Aven grunted, her arm still over her eyes as she leaned her head back against the wall.

"Who was the other guy history fucking shit on? Henry the VIII?"

"Oh god no," she said, her eyes popping open as her arm fell to her lap. "History got Henry VIII very right, there was plenty of public record and knowledge on him. Richard III is very different."

"Richard III," he repeated. "So him and Cathy, no one wrote down their true stories and now they're the shitsacks of history." He slipped her notebook off the table and quickly flipped through it before holding it up to her to see. "Is that why you want a chronicle of everything? So history remembers?" Aven looked up at him, her jaw dropped slightly as the thought dawned on her.

"I hadn't thought of that..." she muttered. "But yeah, I guess that makes sense...Richard was remembered as a tyrant, and maybe he was in some ways, it's hard to say, but it's not necessarily all he was...I don't want that if I can keep it from happening." Negan nodded thoughtfully, gazing over at her.

"You don't want me to be remembered that way," he thought aloud with a small smile.

"From the outside, it's easy to call you a tyrant," she replied. "It's easy to make assumptions about the way you act, or your choice of weapon," she added nodding to Lucille with a tiny smirk. "If society ever truly reemerges, I wouldn't want the people who only saw you or only heard about you to be the determination of who you were...are." Her voice cracked on the last word and she let out another long groan, leaning forwards from her seat on the floor and pressing her hands into her stomach to try to get the sharp pains to subside. Negan quickly swept out of the bedroom and knelt at her side, placing Lucille on the floor and resting a hand gently on Aven's face. "Are you okay, doll?" he asked. "Do you need the doctor?" She grimaced uncomfortably but shook her head.

"No, not right now," she grumbled. She was still in pain and half-asleep but the unusually intense, almost sickening fatigue she'd been feeling was letting up ever so slightly; she could tell she was past the worst of her injury. "I think I'm just gonna go back to sleep."

"I hate to leave you here like this," Negan murmured, observing her brighter but still pale complexion and trying to decide if he could take another day off at such a critical time for the Saviors.

"Go do what you have to do." She grunted as she began to sluggishly crawl back into the fort.

"You want me to help you to bed?" he asked. "Sleeping on the floor like that can't be too fucking good. I'm stiff as shit. And not in the fucking good way."