Chapter Text
Perhaps it would have been wise to stay sheltered, to never leave their home, oasis, after one last ride down the Fury Road to hunt down Dementus. If they’d never left the Green Place again, surrounded by all the Vuvalini and peach trees, maybe Jack and Furiosa could have avoided ever knowing pain again. But, for both of them, the open sky and road call, the smell of gasoline and the shake of an engine under them. Runs to nearby settlements, scavenging out in the Wasteland, looking to the horizon to be certain that the bounds of Immortan Joe’s lands haven’t changed.
Jack and Furiosa ride through the ruins past the Bullet Farm, looking through the wreckage for a part to repair a solar panel’s plating with its fine screws and a tire for one of the bikes, taken long ago from the Citadel.
And in the dark of the night and the shadows of the fields, they don’t notice three Buzzards surrounding them. If they can survive Immortan Joe and his unfaltering domination and Dementus’s senseless wreckage, what are raiders out in the Wasteland? While Furiosa drives, they come from both sides. She focuses on maneuvering enough away, so that none of them board the vehicle, and avoiding bullets. Though her side is clear, one has his arm hooked into Jack’s door and swiftly, Jack’s knife is in his arm before she reaches across him and fires into the rider’s chest. In the moment she’s turned away, Furiosa feels one pulling her by her hair. To get away, she tries twisting out of his grip, Jack has slid over, one hand on the wheel, one hand on her belt, foot on the pedal, as she thrashes next to him. With half her body out of the window now and the rider’s arm around her neck, she manages to claw at his eyes and free her throat, twisting her left arm up to his face. In the chaos, neither of them see the machete. It wouldn’t have mattered if they saw it coming anyway, not a free hand between them to fire a round or get any leverage. Just in time, she twists out of his grip enough for her hips to fall back into the cab and her neck to be out of his grip. When the blade falls, it’s on her arm. She’ll never know what happened first, the bike and the car slamming together on her wrist or the machete swinging down.
Furiosa hears a whistle ringing in her ears, feels an engine humming under her, smells fire and gasoline. In her dreaming, Jack is a shadowy figure and when she turns to him he’s never there, her mother drives the Thunderbike away, Valkyrie calls her name, the Black Thumb drags her under the Rig, Rictus throws her from the Citadel. Furiosa sees shadows all around her, the Green Place engulfed in a blue fire, Dementus sitting in it laughing. His dog has its teeth in Jack’s neck, the stars fall out of the sky. It goes on and on until she wakes, disoriented and cold. The cold is deep in Furiosa’s bones, so foreign after years under the sun.
Once, on the road between Gastown and the Bullet Farm, one of the young War Boys, a lancer, had fallen from the rig, and though Jack had swerved, he’d still been crushed under a back wheel. Jack had thrown the brakes and screamed to a stop, hurling her into the door and jumped down. The Boy, still alive, lay on the ground, legs crushed and lungs shuddering. She’d watched as Jack knelt next to him, brushing a hand over his eyes.
“You are awaited,” he’d whispered as he fired his gun once, into the back of his head.
Here, making his way towards her in a low light, he’s got the same look in his eye. Like she’s some wounded War Boy, crushed by their Rig, a dying animal, trapped out on the road. He sits on the edge of the mat she’s lying on, just off the floor, and the thundering in her head is unbearable. She feels the tear of every tendon in her arm, her pulse in her wrist, a cold slice through her, the shattering of a bone all before understanding there is nothing there. The dark, jagged walls around them smell of sulfur and fire, and it’s a taste she had nearly forgotten. He’s got his hands on her face, but she can’t look at him, turning her face into his stomach, her remaining fist in her mouth, to scream.
He’s whispering something to her, but she can’t hear a word. Feels something warm drip on the back of her neck and whether it’s his tears or her blood, the screaming in her head won’t stop.
Like none of it had happened at all — not a fevered drive guided only by a tattoo now lost to the desert, not finally putting a bullet in Dementus, not love and a year under the trees, not planting her mother’s seed, granting her that final wish — Jack holds Furiosa deep in the heart of the Citadel.