Work Text:
1.
He is not so different from these warboys what drink his blood like guzz, bare-fanged and bare. He is one spark away from what these warboys is. It’s what he recognises when one goes a bit too crazy-Valhalla, breathing with the half-life lungs of a dead boy: warboy chromes himself good, tongue hungry for raw aerosol, and reaches up with ecstatic martyr’s eyes to do the same to his bloodbag. Shiny and chrome. Other ‘boys drag him back and finish what the half-life’s doing with wheels and tire irons, horrified, horrified at what their mate’s honoured in his delirium – but he’s seen, now, what this religion can do, and his own mask-on reflection in a warboy’s eye. These days, he burns near the same shade of atomic.
His jaws ache for days with the chrome. More poison than the bloody water beyond these walls. Immortan Joe’s water is pure, though, and keeps his head. For a while he considers believing but that’s a sure death, without the comfort and certainty of history to ease its going-down. Water is water is not immortal. Ain’t that the eternal-true, bloodbag.
2.
He finds his name again on the road where he left it in the sand. Ain’t it, Max.
3.
Not so different from Nux, his blood in his veins. Like a tree gone sapped out. He feels a crippling sickness in his bones as Furiosa drives them through dawn and he shakes through a layer of murk and visions. Not being sick marks them but this generation you assume, natural, that the big sick is coming in the one-day. The doc said so years back – mark my words and wait. We’ll die slow and inglorious, despite our scraping back. For all our scraping back, there’s no escaping.
Not so different from Nux biological-like, but different, he notices, in her eyes. Furiosa watches Nux like a skit-shy beast she’s trying to size up to pin or slide easy by – too wilddog to respect with a straight-on stare, but careful, detached, hands at the ready for each shudder and sharp turn. He can see her calculate, looking at Nux, how to break the big vein in his neck or pitch her hip against his to send him from wheel to wheels. Even now, curled puppy-loose in the back of the cab with the wives, he’s something to be watched through half-closed burnt-dark eyes in the rear-view. She don’t watch Max but looks instead. It makes each look as good as her asking – for the gun, for the clip, for his hand, for his eyes just as steady and as long. Through the dustclawed windshield, mouth afire with guzzoline, he finds himself looking back at no witness at all, and the next time he drinks water it tastes sacred.
4.
His blood in her veins. Her name rings on the furyroad like a hymn his mother taught him. His blood in her veins. Water ain’t immortal but they won’t remember her for water, he knows for sure - and knows it for sure, eternal-true.
Her name and his blood in her veins. They are one and the same.