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Slit has never had a mirror of his own. Every shard of mirror in the Citadel was reserved for rearviews and sideviews and the signal towers. Maybe the odd mechanic had a mirror, but that was for real tricky engine stuff, where you couldn’t trust a pup’s eyes even though they were small enough to fit in most nooks.
Slit had used a polished tin’s lid to do his mouth up, and to check that Torx didn’t fuck up his back art too much.
But an actual mirror? Of his own? And the time to look at it? Slit’s never had that.
He won’t have that, either, if the Vuvalini figure out he’s stolen one of their signal mirrors. But then, the bloody tower was a trap anyway, so he doesn’t feel too poorly about it.
Nux’ll be pissed at him, though. Slit sniffs at the thought. Lanky little chrome driver. It’s his fault he’s turned traitor.
Slit sits on the back of the war rig, his legs hanging off her and his eyes scanning the horizon for headlights and death and his false prophet. (That’s what the mad wife called him, Immortan. Said it meant he was full of shit. Slit sneered at her and called her a ‘right proper prophet, then’ but her smile went all funny and he had to turn away.)
There is enough light to see himself in the mirror. It’s weird. Chrome, but weird. He’s so used to seeing his face distorted by reflections off metal that it takes him a moment before he recognises himself. Slit drags his finger across the mirror’s face, feeling it’s surface. It’s so smooth. The only distortions he sees are because of his hand, not the silver in it.
Slit turns his face this way and that, examining his cheeks. They look scarred and mangled, like this. Not clean-cut and pure, how he’d imagined them. How he’d glimpsed at them, in the sun-bright glint of a car’s hood. His eye, too, finally gets a proper look. The gunk is growing over it again, and it’s bright red, like he’s bleeding on the inside. The other one is a nice, bright blue, though. It’s the first thing on his face that seems familiar, and it’s only after a minute that he realises why: Nux’s eyes are the same shade, more or less.
Nux. Little shit’s hanging off the red-haired wife like a pup. Probably gonna get her with pup, too, at this rate. He’s not bad-looking, his driver. Not scary, not scarred, but that seems to please the wives better than Slit’s face.
Slit tries out a smile on the mirror and winces. Nothing like his driver. Nothing like the feral, either, who’s gotten soft words from the Imperator. Slit tries again, less, this time, but his smile still wears the ghost of the knife that cut it. He sighs.
“Hey,” he says to himself, to his reflection. “You’re hot high-octane stuff.” A half-hearted wink of his bad eye. “If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t make it to a bed.”
It doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit. It’s like putting tractor wheels on a beetle. Stupid. Embarrassing. Pathetic.
Slit tosses the mirror away and goes back to staring at the horizon. His fingers idly trace his scars. Behind him, the wives and the Vuvalini chatter. Nux’s giggle shows up, here and there. Slit feels a burning, bitter weight coil in his stomach. He was the perfect war boy. Perfect. But the mirror showed him none of that. Only a broken face with faded paint.
He used to be perfect.