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The first ones show up three months after. The man is like everyone else out there. Dead eyes, soul blunted, body scarred and beaten. His child though, hoisted and cradled carefully against his side, peeks curiously out from under the tattered and filthy wrap he'd snugged her in. She's filthy as well, but her eyes burn with something that even the new born don't keep for long. The man, her father, had allowed her to keep that, at cost to himself.
The scouts guarding the road he came in on hand her a scrap of cloth the man had surrendered to them. A map, inked in blood. Different from the one Max himself kept and worked on, but there was little doubt as to the map's cartographer.
Furiosa held up the bit of cloth and looked at the man. There was finally a flicker of something in his own eyes.
“He helped us,” was all he said.
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The next one was a lone woman, two months later. Her eyes burned fierce with anger, hate, rage, but also with defiance, independence, and more. Furiosa took her scrap of cloth. The map was rougher, with thicker and darker blots of blood, not the careful pin pricks she'd witnessed Max making.
The woman hesitated at the gate they'd built, then took a careful step in. She paused, then brought in the rest of her body. One more step, then one more pause and the woman looked back at her.
“I don't know if he lived or died.”
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The one after that almost refused to give up his map, but the other four in his group, a teen boy, an old woman, a masked figure, and one too covered in wild hair to determine anything more, made him give it up.
This map was on animal skin, not cloth. The careful pin pricks were back, but the scrap was burnt, smoky. The smell of weapons and fuel rose from it.
The old woman looked at her. “He frightened me, all of us. Rode out of a cloud of dust and fire that I think he created. I thought he was going to kill us. But he left, after he gave us this. The next day, to the south, we saw another cloud of dust and fire.”
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Some people wanted to kill these new ones before they even got close to their Green. They'll bring enemies right to our door, they said. How can you trust this man knows what he is doing? they said. How do you know it is even him sending them? they said. What if someone else takes the map from them, the bad ones? they said. You know the chances of those on the road out there, they said.
Furiosa said nothing, just looked at them, and they went away.
They didn't know him like she did, like the other wives did, but they'd heard the story, some had seen him at the end, knew who else they had to thank for their new freedom, their new hope, their paradise.
The War Boys and War Pups in particular liked hearing the story told over and over again about Max, and Nux, and the run on the road. Furiosa never told them herself, she never actually knew who did tell the story, but soon everyone knew it, and knew it proper, not quite a big mythical, false and out of proportion story, though it did seem to get a bit bigger every time she heard it. She'd tried to stamp out her role, at least downplay it, along with Max's. She didn't want to simply replace Immortan Joe, and she knew Max wouldn't like the attention and the notoriety. But, she wasn't too disappointed when Max's story seemed to become a favorite, a feral Blood Bag turned hero.
She'd dealt with the last bastions of old Joe's supporters. Weeded out the last dissenters who wanted things to go back to the old way. Fortified their Green, no longer just a Citadel, with gates, scouts and traps and other things to protect them. Fended off those thinking they were easy pickings now that the old regime was gone. But most important, still allowed the water to flow for everyone. They knew Furiosa was the best chance they had. She also knew, Max or no Max, word was spreading about Immortan Joe's fall and the Green place left for the taking. She'd struck a wary and very cautious agreement with the Bullet Farm and Gas Town. They returned the wariness and cautiousness, but also enjoyed a change in leadership the run on Fury Road had helped bring about.
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They kept coming, Not many, but more than a few. Some still grumbled about the new comers. But the grumblings faded.
The first man, his child no longer hidden safe next to him, running instead at his heels and playing with others her age, showed them another way to look for water. And when they found it, he showed them how to build machines that pulled the water from the deep earth.
The woman, the one who'd been so hesitant to step inside their gate into the Green, she healed people. She knew ways their healers didn't. She'd carried with her books, long lost tomes that detailed the body, the systems, and ways to heal them. She worked closely with their healers, adapted their ways to hers while they learned from her.
The old woman became a teacher, something long forgotten by most people. The teen boy excelled at running, at shooting as well. The others in their group faded into the crowds, but those two, yes, she could use those two.
Not all were as helpful as those, but slowly, as slowly as they trickled in, Furiosa came to realize Max wasn't sending them their way just to be safe, to be helped, but also so they could help her, help her people.
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Furiosa realized long before any others did, what it might mean that no more new people had come for months. Oh, they had those wasteland scum, scavengers and raiders that sniffed around their borders for any signs of weaknesses, or the occasional wanderer, but no new ones with scraps of cloth or animal skin clutched tight in dirty fingers.
The last few that had straggled in were warriors, deep and to the bone. Their eyes weren't dead, but calculating, assessing. The last two that came didn't have any map, just verbal instructions.
The months went by. Everyone did their things that would help them all survive. Furiosa walked the walls protecting their Green, spent long hours planning and in discussion with her advisers and war leaders, the engineers, and others that would help keep them safe. No one seemed to feel the sense of urgency, of something not friendly just hovering on the horizon, not like Furiosa did.
The final group came in, 16 months after she'd last seen him disappearing into the crowd.
They had his map.
“He said 'no more.' The next that come, you kill.” The woman was the only one in her group of ten that could talk. The others had their tongues cut out.
Furiousa didn't watch them walk through the thick series of gates into their Green. Didn't watch their faces as they dared themselves to hope that they might have actually reached paradise.
She stared at the map clutched in her hands, the frayed ends waving in the breeze. His.
It was changed, new additions from when she'd last seen it. He'd even stitched on other small scraps of cloth, to make it slightly bigger. She walked back into their Green, into her rooms, never taking her eyes off his map.
The Dag found Furiosa staring at her wall. The wall was covered with his maps, all of them. Furiosa had tried to match them up like a puzzle. Many overlapped each other, others sat with wide gaps between them while others bumped right up against the next one. Some spots had a big X marking across them, others looked smudged out, others were tiny, insignificant looking spots but marked in slightly deeper blood, making them stand out, while other places held big empty spots, with a line dashed around them.
If she looked long and hard enough, she could tell herself she could see the story of Max since he'd left.
She preferred the maps drawn with ink. She could tell herself then that he'd had a good run, exploring and finding things from the old world, safe enough to take his time inking the map, not with his precious blood, but with ink.
She hated the maps that had random smudges of blood and less careful lines. She imagined his shaking, blood covered hand (always his blood, not someone else's) hurriedly detailing the map enough to get one more group to her. The blood used to ink those maps came from a deeper wound, not a small cut he made himself to use as ink. Those, they were not good runs.
“Does it mean anything?” Dag asked Furiosa. Dag's child sat on her hip, a toy clutched in her pudgy, small hands. “Other than directions for people to come to us?”
“I think only he knows if it does. I can tell where our Green is, but the rest... There's more of it left than I thought, but does that mean there are people in those places he's marked? Enemies? Potential Allies? Resources?”
Dag doesn't answer. The one who could answer hasn't been seen since he faded into the crowd in what seemed both so long ago and so short a time. Even those sent by him weren't quite sure who or what they'd seen. Just a man, who could have killed them but didn't and instead, dared to offer them hope in a hopeless world. Furiosa knew the only way they had made it to their Green was through clinging to the hope they themselves said didn't exist.
Furiosa almost didn't let herself acknowledge the hope she held close, that the map did mean something, even if only it meant one day Max would come back.
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His broken and battered body lay on her bed, because she wouldn't let them place him anywhere else. His chest rose and fell, and that's all they knew meant he was still alive for several days.
The last month had been spent defending their Green from a huge horde of wanderers and wasteland scum that had heard about their paradise and wanted to take it from them. War Boys, Full-lifes and everyone fought alongside to keep them out. They'd succeeded, barely. But in the end, the horde had caused their own downfall.
Twenty days into the siege (they could afford to wait, they had water and green, growing things, but it was hard and her people were starting to break under the death, pain, and pressure) the horde had dragged a blood stained and filthy man to the front, lashed him to a car, muzzled and head hanging.
The voice of one of their leaders rose to taunt them.
“We have one of your men, the one you sent out to kill us, defy us, and help those that were ours for the keeping. Look at him and know this is also your fate!”
Furiosa had felt a chill even before she'd seen him through the telescope. She knew that shape, even though she hadn't seen it for a year and a half, and even then she'd only known him for a few days. But she knew it, like she knew the others with her on that long ride would know it.
It was Max.
She couldn't tell if he was dead or just unconscious, and a great rage welled in her. The rage shook her to her bones, buzzed loud in her ears, until she realized the buzz and the shaking wasn't just her, it was her people, realizing the same as her. Their voices and rage rising out to meet the horde, shaking the air and bouncing off the rock walls. It made the screaming horde go silent in shock.
It was that rage that fueled them, sent them pouring out the gates, biting into the horde with a rage and fury that broke its back and sent the remnants of the horde scurrying. Not many of the enemy survived.
Furiosa wasn't the first to reach Max. Others had him down, wretched muzzle off his face. He lay, small in the dust, fresh blood dribbling from his lips. Furiosa knelt next to him, placed her flesh hand on his forehead. Her raging and cheering people fell quiet as his body passed them as they carried him into their, his just as much as theirs, Green place.
And now, several days later, patched up as best could be, tended to closely by the woman he'd sent to them with the healer's art and touch, he lay, yet still to wake. He looked wrong, laying so still and quiet. Furiosa wanted nothing more than to stay with him, but that quiet and stillness drove her away, but never much farther than the next room, where she could keep her eye on him through the doorway.
Right now, the widows of Immortan Joe, now free and living for themselves and their children, and their people, not for one man, gathered around him, chatting and bringing a lightness with them Furiosa could not. Their children, along with others they watched sometimes, played at their feet, or sat in their laps, while they talked about their day and the tasks that still needing doing, like repairing the damage the horde had done to their Green.
They'd spent a half hour in the room around him, each one pausing at some point to stand by his bed, fussily check his forehead for fever, or his bandages for fresh bleeding, or tweak the bed covers just so, to make sure Max caught no chill.
The children had gotten used to the silent addition in their routine and mostly ignored him. But their sweet young voices, no real words, not yet, filled in the spaces of the women's voices with a sort of fresh, safe, music. Children like this, they did not sound like this if they were hungry or scared. It relaxed Furiosa on a level she hesitated to acknowledge. She hoped that it did the same for Max, wherever his mind wandered now.
The women stood and gathered children, taking one last glance at Max, as if they hoped he'd woken up to bid them farewell until the next day. One small toddler broke away unnoticed and made a quick dash for the bed. He stood solemnly for a moment, looking up, then pushed a box closer to the bed and climbed it to tumble gracelessly onto the bed next to Max.
Furiosa took a quick step forward, ready to pluck the boy from the bed if he looked in danger of tumbling on one of Max's wounds, but then Max stirred, the first real sign of life in days. He blinked open crusty eyes to find himself staring into the face of a smiling toddler. And for a moment, Furiosa saw a fleeting and unguarded expression on Max's face. Foreign, but soft. A smile, a real one. She didn't think he even realized he was doing it, and then she realized her own face was mirroring his.
“Max!”
Max flinched, but the boy just giggled and started to climb back down. He missed the box and tumbled down to the floor, but picked himself up with not even a whimper. The boy ran out the door and to the group of waiting women and children.
Cheedo's voice floated back in through the door.
“There you are my Maxie boy, don't go sneaking off on me! It's time for dinner.”
Max, the man, blinked slowly at the ceiling, looking like he was unsure of where he was. Furiosa stepped into the doorway. His eyes slowly moved to focus on her, confused expression clearing. She didn't think he still quite understood where he was or what had happened, but he recognized her enough to relax. She smiled again, then, huge and corners of her mouth stretching into a position almost as unfamiliar on her face as she thought it must be on Max's.
Time would tell if he would heal, body and soul. Time would tell if he would stay or if he would go. But for now, it was enough.