Title: Boxes

Summary: Post 8x08, Maggie collects retribution for their boy and Jesus reflects. Spoilers for 8x08

AN: I just felt like I had to write something in response to 8x08 and this is what came out. My heart hurts.

He learned about sorting people long before he was ever Jesus. He was still Paul when he realized kids could be folded and separated into piles like laundry; clean verses dirty, salvageable verses garbage. The older you got in the system the more you became a sock with a hole or a pair of jeans with grass stains that just wouldn't budge; damaged goods, unadoptable.

The notion never sat right, the black and whiteness of it all. He never understood how you could put people in boxes. Still, as he paces the chicken wire pen full of humans turned cattle he finds himself categorizing them.

Some could be saved. The wrong place, wrong time people. The ones who had ended up in the sanctuary out of desperation, unable to make it on their own, willing to live under Negan's thumb if it meant also living under a roof. These people could be salvaged, utilized, mended.

It's the others that have kept him from sleeping since he made the decision to bring them home. The ones with the jutted chins and puffed out chests who stand at the gate with snarls. They drank the Kool-Aid and relished in every sip; still steadfast in their radical devotion to their dictator behind enemy lines. When all was said and done, when all was said and won, some would have to be taken care of. There was no other way to spin it and he wasn't naïve enough to deny it no matter what the others thought. They would be put down; animals who would never acclimate to domesticated life, scheduled to be euthanized.

Maggie walks the fence, dragging the butt of her gun against the metal so the links clink with her paces. The night is inky black and some of those in the pen are blinking away sleep as the flood lights hum to life and bare down on them. The soldiers in the front watch her with a dare and he thinks maybe some of them are hoping for their card to be pulled, so desperate to die for their leader as if it could ever mean anything to the man.

Maggie isn't sorting. They're all the same to her, especially now.

Her jaw is steel, clenched so tight he could probably count the indent of her teeth through her cheek if he got close enough. He knows better than to get to close.

Tara arrived not long after the first prisoner was laid down. Her eyes were swollen, breath ragged, pressing a letter into Maggie's palm because she couldn't find it to deliver the words herself. The Alexandrians had gone underground, waiting out of the bombing of their home while the saviors scoured the woods. Tara had volunteered to carry the message, the blood on her hands said she hadn't made it without incident.

She'd come with the news. Maggie had braced herself against a wall, asked to be left alone.

And now she's collecting her retribution.

"I'll need two," she croaks, "his life was worth more than any of yours, so just one won't do."

She's terrifying, he won't pretend otherwise. Hair pushed off her forehead, her face and body a collection of sharp angles and hardened muscles protecting the tiny life inside her. Such a hard shell wrapped around something so precious. She is terrifying and overwhelmingly beautiful all in the same moment. He doesn't know where she's been, not really. Knows enough to know she lost her daddy and her sister and her husband and she still stands like a giant among men.

He never believed in the boxes of what women and men were and weren't supposed to do either. He was a boy who liked boys in a group home in small town southern America, he knows all about those kinds of boxes.

"He's not gone yet," he reminds quietly, "we should be preparing a room for him, or prepping a group to go out there and help them escape. Not…"

"You're right," she cuts him off and stops in front of one particular prisoner, tilts her head just slightly as she stares him down, "He's not gone yet. When he is then I'll take two more."

"Good Lord," Gregory drawls from somewhere in the back, curled around himself in a little ball where'd he'd been using his blazer as a pillow, "what is she going on about now?"

Maggie doesn't pay him any mind because he knows it's the big guns in the front row she's set her sights on.

"Rick's son Carl was bit," he finds himself explaining, not only to answer the question but because he needs to remind her, "he was bit Maggie. It's terrible and devastating but it didn't have anything to with Negan."

He knows the words are futile, but they should be said. Someone still has to say these things.

Her back stiffens, fingers of her free hand clench. They're friends, closer than any he's ever had. Now though, now she looks at him like maybe he could be one of the two she takes. She stalks towards him; their boot toes knock.

"It all has to do with him," she hisses, "maybe if we weren't fightin' this war he wouldn't have gone out on that run with Rick. Maybe he wouldn't have met that guy, wouldn't have come across those walkers. Maybe in a world where my husband was still alive he'd have gone with him, or stopped him from going. Maybe if we never crossed his path Carl would have been at home, just doing something like a kid should be doing instead of out trying to save someone."

Maybe, Jesus thinks, if he'd never taken Rick and Daryl's truck that day none of this would have ever happened. Maybe they'd never hear the name Negan uttered from his lips. Maybe he was the curse set upon them and they just hadn't realized it yet.

"Or maybe," Maggie shrugs non-committedly, "some gust of wind kicked up half way across the country and threw a scent that got some walkers going in a different direction and set this all into motion. I don't know. All I know is that right now, it all comes down to him until he's dead. I'm not going to keep burying my family."

He knows that in the class system of their new world, he is not part of the family. They're all a team, the champions of the greater good. He knows that if the moment came he'd die for Maggie and he's certain she'd do the same for him. Still, he's on the outside.

He knows all about being on the outside.

He'll never fit in the confines of whatever bond was formed somewhere out in the world where this group lived and breathed and fought among the unliving together. They don't need to share blood, the lot of them wear their relation like a matching birth mark.

And when it came down to it, when the shoe really dropped, the family came before all else. And this was their boy, their Carl. He could see it from the moment he met them, the kids weren't just Ricks. They were theirs, the whole of them would stand for the children like the elders of a pack at any given moment.

Like that old saying went, it took a village.

"I take two for him," she repeats, this time to him, daring him to challenge her. He doesn't.

"Ok."

There's no point in arguing. Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong. But some of them will have to go anyway, might as well let her start sorting them out now.

"And when he goes," something tightens in her throat, but she pushes past it, turns from him back to the pen, "when he passes, we'll bury him with his family. And then I'll take two more."

Lit up under florescent lighting he assumes most of them can't even see his face as he watches their terrified eyes, set in their gaunt hungry faces. She picks two; one comes willingly like he believes some bounty awaits him on their other side. One drags his feet and Cal holds him down in the dirt.

Maggie doesn't flinch over either shot.

She holsters her gun and turns to him, something softer in her shoulders.

"I'm going to go up, make up a bed for him. In case he makes it before…"

He nods, gestures tiredly towards the two crumpled bodies at their feet with gaping holes in their heads.

"Box them up," she directs simply, "just like the others."

These kind of boxes, he knows those too well also.