Chapter Text
Max exhaled. So far, on this drive, so good. Made it through the Hot Zone okay. His latest car was still in one piece. Supplies were intact. And Furiosa was by his side. In the passenger seat right now: in their shared bedroll at night.
They were on their way to a scrap of a green place Max had found. More of a brown place, to be honest. Still, its dusty eucalyptus trees, cranky birds, and haunting dingoes could be the subtle start of a new world for the Citadel's people. Provided that Furiosa approved of it. And that Max could find the place again.
Max said, “Driving gets harder from here. Wilder. May be able to trade for fuel, if… maybe.” In the wild wastes, there were no guarantees, only luck.
“Seven days driving so far,” Furiosa mused. “Longer than it used to take, out here.”
“Less roads than there used to be. In the past.”
“The past…” Furiosa said. Two words that carried so much. Furiosa said them like past was a dream, a dream that hurt.
Max's heart went heavy. For all their intimacy, the way their paths had slowly converged, there was something he ought to tell Furiosa. This was the first time Max felt up to it, driving this car. The only way, staring straight ahead at a road that wasn’t completely hopeless.
Max cleared his throat. “In the past…long time back…I was with someone. Her name was Jessie.”
Tiny, tanned, dark-eyed Jessie. Sweet and tough and talented. Her smile had shot him through the heart once, and he’d been a goner.
“We were in one of those civilized places that held up a while.”
Big cities had gone down in riots and looting and the ultimate destruction. The Outback’s farming stations and First Nations places, the government said they were too far, too hard to deal with. But a shoreside place ringed by farms, a place that didn’t ask for too much, could still call itself Australia. Like where they’d been.
Some of the women there clung to the past, swapping rancid makeup, living by rancid rules. Not Jessie. She’d been a person, first, doing what she wanted. It had been amazing when she’d wanted him.
“We’d been – we were young. I was a fool for her.”
Furiosa gave a light, dry laugh.
Max huffed in acknowledgement. The mocking moment made it easier to say, “Even got married. Folks liked that we were together. We had a house by the sea. She made it home.”
Jessie might have thrived in the later Wasteland. She’d been happy bartering, busking on market days with her saxophone while Max glowered by her side. She’d say yes to weird crap that, when she brought it home, fit just right. Like a ridiculous pair of breast pillows, perfect on the bed where they made love again and again. And the children’s toys. When Max had asked her why she’d accepted them, that was when Jessie said she pretty sure she was pregnant.
“I joined our guard gang – cops, back then – to keep us safe. When she had our baby…I asked if she was worried. About the world. She said she was worried but she’d fight for us.”
What they’d had was worth fighting for. Max had shifted from the local abbers to the Main Force Patrol that mad Fifi McAffee had refused to disband. It had fit him like a glove. He’d even had MFP mates like Goose. Together, they’d stretched out the past, until it snapped. Money lost its meaning, government faded out, and gangs swelled, all at the same time. More than once, looking back, Max wondered if he’d joined the wrong gang...
“Didn’t last. The place, I meant. She got killed. Her and our sprog. Sprog was still a littlie.”
Max swallowed. He hadn’t taken the kid for granted. They’d been waiting until Sprog was a year old to name him – families had started to do that, the way times were. Their kid was a sturdy, big infant, so they’d been planning. Max hardly allowed himself to remember kissing Sprog’s chubby cheeks, let alone burying his face in Jessie’s soft, abundant curls. Lost riches, impossible dreams in the thin Wasteland the country had become.
Furiosa said, “I’m. Sorry.”
She’d weighted those words just right, Max thought. Parsing out the awful singularity of loneliness, the sorry business of existing, afterwards.
“Start of the end for the place. I left. Couldn’t stay anywhere after that.”
Jessie’s death had nuked him. Burned him down, hollowed him out, like the Hot Zone they’d driven through. Nowhere had felt real. Nothing did, except fighting, the savagery that he hadn’t done enough of, himself, to keep Jessie alive.
Max finished. “She was the only one, before. Like you’re the one now.”
He inhaled and waited. Fully prepared for seven days of silence before she replied.
It was the only time Furiosa could have replied, sitting in the front seat of a vehicle. The way she used to sit next to somebody else. The only way she could tell Max, after all this time.
Furiosa said, “I had one before, too. His name was Jack.”
Praetorian Jack. Hearing what they called him, Furiosa’s first thought was, old man’s name. Then she’d seen him, his sturdy, scarred health, his thousand-yard stare. Jack had held himself like he, too, was surrounded by enemies in the Citadel.
“Didn’t last either. He died in the Forty-Day Wasteland War. Tortured to death.”
Max made a pained noise, acknowledgement.
Furiosa could have left it at that. But she found she couldn’t stop. “His family was from one of those places, too. Like where you started. They wound up at the Citadel. So he was Citadel, but … not really.”
There were clusters like that, at the Citadel, five thousand days ago. Folks who remembered the pre-apocalypse; who were slow to rev it up for the Immortan Joe, or dared to roll their eyes about it. People who had other stories they weren’t telling, either. She’d been drawn to them, for all her hiding silence. That was how she’d wound up amongst the black thumbs.
“We met when I tried to steal the Rig he was driving. I was trying to get back to the Green Place. He didn’t dob me in. Instead, he said he’d help me if I joined his crew.”
They’d saved each other’s lives and fought between themselves before their first actual conversation, on the dire dirt between the Citadel and Gastown. Jack had come back for her. Met her eyes and never looked away. Jack hadn’t been appraising. He’d been amused. Appreciative. Hopeful. Reflecting hope back at her, when she’d thought she’d lost it. In her furious disappointment, hating the world, she'd thought Jack an idiot, a fool. Then he'd spoken, and the world changed.
Furiosa went on. “I was young. I’d been at the Citadel three thousand days. He was older than he looked. He was the one who wanted to go slow. And he kept his promise. Taught me what I needed.”
There had been more to it than the teaching. He’d thrown his authority behind her, too. So much so that other Citadel denizens had been unsure whether she was his daughter or his lover. More than once, looking back, Furiosa wondered if he’d yearned to have her as both. If she’d yearned to be both - or to have his power and knowing, be Praetorian and walking legend, like Jack was.
Raw, she admitted, “I needed him, then. I didn’t have anything but him. That hurt. Everything mattered too much. He… didn’t hurt me any more than I was already hurting.”
Being beside him was the only refuge she’d known in thousands of days. It was more than the way others left her alone, once she was Jack's crew, after he’d punched louts out two or three times for form’s sake. Jack never asked her questions. Never touched her first. Gave her what she needed, too, when she did reach out, the rare times it was possible.
“We were about to make a break for it when the war started. He died, last death in the first battle. I didn’t - snapped off my own arm to escape. I still don’t know how I made it back to the Citadel. But I did. I dragged myself out of a maggot farm and traded myself back to the damn place to avenge Jack. For all that it burned me down to do it.”
Max made that pained noise again.
“One time, I asked Jack why. Why he was helping me. I hadn’t offered to bring him along, then. He said, somebody should get to go home.”
“I told him to come with me after that.”
That had been their best time, when she’d been lifted by the hope that she could rescue Jack, too. When they’d hoped together.
“You’re the one, now. And it’s different with you.”
Furisoa said that defiantly, as if it would neutralize what Max and Jack had in common. Their stocky swagger, sad blue eyes, soft mouths. Their quiet. How they had each been prisoners of the Citadel, in their own ways.
“You and I. We went there – and back – on the Fury Road.”
Furiosa knew that nobody would ever do what Jack had done for her again. That was part of the youth she had lost forever. She’d used the temptation of the Green Place to lure away the Immortan’s Wives, while trying to bar herself against seeing them as people. But halfway through the Fury Road, fighting Max, she’d realized at last she could do what Jack had done for her for somebody else.
She scanned the scene ahead of them; wide and untracked, empty, zero threats. She could spare half a minute to turn to Max’s profile. He deserved her full regard. He'd found new things to give her that she hadn't imagined. “You kept us from dying in the Salt. Gave me your blood. Went scouting and found this place we’re going. I don’t know why I deserve all this.”
Max finally had words again. “’Cause of how you fight, too. How and why.”
That was giving her too much credit, Furiosa thought. She kept that inside. Like all the things Jack hadn’t said, too.
Their silence was unbroken until the sun began to set on their left.
“Time?” Furiosa said. “Those dunes?”
“Mph,” Max agreed.
They set up for the night behind the dunes Furiosa had noted. Silently, they chewed through uninspiring rations. Nightfall flowed over them, pure and starry, vast and timeless.
They both knew they should sort the first watch, plan the next day. Instead, star gazing, they edged beside each other. Furiosa draped her ruddy, tattered blanket over Max’s left side. Max slid an arm around Furiosa’s waist. Furiosa sent her own full arm around Max’s shoulder, leaned her forehead towards his.
Soon they were curled up around each other, tight, tight, tight. As foolish, as needy, as they had been once before.