Chapter Text
“She did not want to be born,” they say to the gathered, a fireside tale told in the waning heat of the Citadel’s valley. “She fought her birth with a sandstorm’s violent strength, little limbs like lightening, striking out in protest as we reached to welcome her.”
Furiosa knows the story, the familiar voices of the Vuvalini also that of her mother, but she can’t leave once it starts, not when it’s Cheedo that asks to hear it, not with Dag listening while her hand absently strokes the slight swell of her belly they all know will grow. And yet more people creep closer as the story is told until the words are being repeated behind her, passed along to even more.
“Our Furiosa,” the Vuvalini announce, and her name is an echo that seems to carry beyond the Citadel and down Fury Road itself. “She was born with all the indignant rage of the world’s end flowing in her blood, as though maybe she knew what had happened.”
“Maybe she knew what was coming,” Dag offers airily but she sounds wise.
She knew what was coming, the whispers say in response. And Furiosa sees the way others steal glances at her then, the War Pups too young and trusting of gods, their wide eyes filling with shining belief. She shifts uncomfortably at the attention – even though it’s different now, she remembers how stares felt rough and possessive against her skin when she was being watched, when she was owned.
“But with all that fire in her, she never once cried out as infants do, never screamed to declare her arrival.” The Vuvalini pause, and there is a deep silence of anticipation from the hundreds surrounding them. “She was born of soundless fury.”
Heads nod in worship as they turn to her, inspired and desperate for meaning as though she is prophecy fulfilled. Their hands reach out to touch her, sick War Boys and Wretched alike wanting to feel something of her. She is their deliverance, and they don’t understand the kind of fury or hope attributed to her, but there are too many that all want too much to know a taste of it.
“She’s real,” someone says with wonder, and Capable is suddenly at her side gently turning the outreach away.
“We’re all real,” she tells them kindly. “We all have a story.”
And Furiosa’s story is long, thousands and thousands of silent days that she carried with her to finally leave in the blistering wind that danced over endless miles of dead sand.
Her throat is still raw with sacrifice, but her veins hum with new blood now.
==
There’s an explosion they see but don’t hear, oily black smoke thick and crawling its way into the skies above the canyons.
“Bad news,” Toast says, and taps the gun strapped to her thigh. She marches out into the dust to find homes for the bullets she carries, the only one to still wear white, who stands in front of the Citadel like a beacon. Nine days after fleeing and now Toast wants all of them to see her coming.
The first smudge of chrome shimmers at the horizon while they watch. It multiples, grows closer, and soon it’s a caravan of cars, driven by War Boys left bloodthirsty and leaderless.
It’s Cheedo that tightens the belts around Furiosa’s waist to hold the bandages in place, and then nods in approval when Furiosa staggers silently to her feet. They are all far from healed, but these are mere flesh wounds; pain is carried deeper. Cheedo puts a gun in her hand.
The Citadel itself is the best defense they can offer, only the sick and the injured left to fill the ranks. Their small collection of guns are with the few that know what to do with them – the Vuvalini, Toast, and Furiosa –the rest of the weapons just rocks, or twisted and pointed shards of steel, but they outnumber the boys that return.
“It’s ours,” Furiosa reminds them, not hope, survival first.
The roar of the cars reaches them, the clouds of rolling dust next – the ground alive and shaking with the thrum of engines. It sounds like an army, not the remains of one; she’s had worse odds.
Furiosa raises her gun – one body, one bullet – but unexpectedly there’s a break in the noise, engines dropping off until quiet falls and the air clears, and there’s a line of cars sitting right at the edge of Fury Road as though stopped by it. War Boys scramble out to stand in the dirt with arms raised in prostration, pale faces even whiter in the sun.
Toast turns and gives her a little shrug. “It’ll be easier to shoot them now.”
“For you!” The cry comes from one among the mess of boys on the other side of the road. “Imperator Furiosa, all for you!”
“Trap,” a voice mutters from behind her, and Furiosa is inclined to agree.
She tenses when a boy reaches into his car, but he holds up his wheel reverently to her, chrome flashing as he sets it gently down in front of him. “Every one, he said. Every one for you if we come back.”
“Who said?” Capable asks, and looks at Furiosa for the answer.
Dag smiles. “You know.”
Other War Boys desperate for validation and eager to prove their worth add to the bounty, wheels pulled from vehicles and placed on the road, a menu of choice.
“Max,” Toast says.
And Furiosa can see it now, his mark on the returning War Boys seeking purpose – Valhalla nothing but a fiery wreck on desert sand. She knows not to look for him there among the wasted bodies of white, but it’s a gift from him all the same.
The War Boys stand bravely, still dying, but wanting. They wait to cross over, to come home, and one boy points, arm outstretched and taking in the world. “Your Fury Road, he said.”
==
The War Wives, the people call them now – the Vuvalini named in it too for the women they’d lost, Furiosa and the rest for what they had been. They are venerated in a way she can’t stop, honored not for what was taken, but for what they returned. The Citadel is theirs; they own the war.
Furiosa sends War Boys out for patrols, their instincts too feral for domestication. She knows they need to die free, and the Wasteland offers Witness. But there is no valor in Immortan Joe’s form of death, and together with Capable she tries to teach them honor.
“You have a responsibility to life,” Furiosa says, green climbing the walls around them, the Citadel a shrine for the living.
Capable reinforces the message with a hand on a shoulder, another on a head as she passes, gentle and caring, and Furiosa knows she thinks of Nux. “Living matters.”
“Dandelion,” Dag points out – says it only once, for words of such importance should not need repeating to be remembered – walks a few paces and touches a scraggly looking shrub. “Juniper.”
The boys still defend them against those that would take, eyes wild and war cries ringing above engine snarls, but fewer die for glory. They return, and return again, Furiosa’s warriors of Fury Road. And sometimes she goes with them, not to find Max, but to feel – speed and steel pumping fury into the desolate Wasteland, at those that killed the world – the closest she can get to touch his kind of survival and madness.
So she is surprised when the boys take new names – Nettle, Flax, Horseweed, or Buckhorn – and brand their skin with scars of thorns and vines.
“War Boys!” they chant, scrounging for metal in the endless sand, pulling the remains of her War Rig back to be built into something just as dangerous. War Boys they call themselves, but it’s starting to mean something different.
The mechanics are easier, Repair Boys always looking to create, so the Vuvalini show them pipes that carry water, tell them of aqueducts and irrigation – the many mothers now only a few, but still carrying the memories. Furiosa directs their efforts and in usable dirt they coax from the dead earth, between war machines large and bristling, they pave the roads with green.
At night, she occasionally finds her way under the skeleton of her rig, the bones of it wide and formidable, and she lies on her back in the dirt, smells grease and guzzoline, and listens to the soft drops of water that fall. She is here and not here, remembering her lives before. Over seven thousand days counted with the run mapped out in her mind, and somehow it’s Max with blood dotting home on worn fabric, Max that gives her roots at the Citadel she’d escaped and continues running for her.
“Fool,” she says softly.
==
It takes two trips to fight off the scavengers and reclaim Gas Town, no one in the Wasteland giving up anything without dying for it. But it’s a start; truly her Fury Road now, even if she never wanted such a thing all the times she drove it. One hundred and seventeen days of freedom, and she’s making better progress than she expected.
But she knows this is it, the last stand for any kind of life. There is no way to discourage the hope that everyone holds now, and it scares her to know she’s responsible for it. She sleeps with her ear to the ground and can almost hear the thumping of the hundreds, the thousands that will come to claim it from them. Toast knows it too, her eyes always searching the horizon. Taking back the Bullet Farm is next, and Toast is ready.
Furiosa is one foot out of the car returning back with the scouts when she sees him. He’s halfway across the Citadel grounds staring right back at her, intense as ever as he blinks away his ghosts to take her in. She’s coated in sand, her blood screaming wild and chrome-colored through her, and she can’t catch her breath when her chest tightens at the sight of him.
She’s getting used to being seen again, small doses she can lose in the Wasteland or in the deep bowels of the Citadel where ragged rocks can feel almost damp. But Max’s gaze is piercing. She isn’t just seen, she’s known.
His arm comes up then, not exactly a wave, but a form of greeting from a man who’s forgotten how. Dust falls off of him with the movement, and it’s achingly familiar the way the Wasteland is etched over him like rust on metal.
Furiosa tilts her head toward the Citadel proper in invitation and half expects Max will be gone by the time she gets there, just another memory, a ghost of her own, but he’s waiting for her at the base of the crude ramp that had been constructed some days back. She wonders at the relief she feels at the sight of this three-day man that had so quickly made a difference.
Up close, she can see the twitch in his hands, the way the sun has battered away at the life in him, but dust-logged and water-dry, he’s still operating on the primal instinct to survive, the explosive power she knows he wields still radiating at the edges.
“Thought you’d be gone longer,” she says.
He manages to put forth a raspy sounding acknowledgement as he attempts a shrug and tries to form words. “Needed to see,” he says finally, voice dusty and falling apart at the edges from lack of use.
“See what?”
He looks at her like she should know. “The Green Place.”
==