Chapter Text
It's been four weeks since he'd been carried in, taken back from their enemies, and placed on Furiosa's bed for the healers. It's been three weeks since she'd come back from a meeting to find the bed empty, blood stained and rumpled sheets left cold.
Max knows, Furiosa knows, even the littlest War Pup seems to know, Max won't last long out there. So he stays.
Just a few stair steps has him wheezing like Immortan Joe without his breathing mask, or Rictus without his tubes of oxygen, and his bad knee is now his worst knee and neither would barely hold him. There was usually blood in his urine when he relieved himself. He'd cough and his lips would glisten, painted with red. The tattooed words on his back were now scattered by new scar tissue, some of the black lines of text twisted, smudged, cut and blurred.
She'd come across him once, slumped on the floor, propped against a wall near the quarters no one else wanted, as if he'd been unable to make it to his rooms, eyes half-lidded, most of his body limp, as his chest heaved and he fought for breath while a healer hovered over him, pressing a mask to his face, hooked to one of Rictus' oxygen tanks. His eyes slid away from her, refusing to acknowledge her presence or even what was happening to him.
Furiosa knew this wasn't the first time this had happened, but she hadn't witnessed it before. She'd turned abruptly and headed the opposite direction, eyes focused on the image burned into her eyes of him laying there, trying not to remember the way his fingertips were curled and pressed white, digging into the stone floor, or the way he sounded as he dragged air into his lungs. She passed Cheedo a few steps later and grabbed her hand, spun her away. Max wouldn't like it, Cheedo wouldn't like it.
Max's best defense from himself was running, always running, and with that gone... Max drifts like a pale shadow, keeping to himself and on the farthest fringes of any human activity, as far as one could get in a packed citadel. He snarls like a cornered and wounded animal when anyone attempts to help him. A few healers still try, especially the one he'd sent here, but he rejects them at every turn, preferring to lick his wounds out of anyone's view.
He'd taken over the rooms where Immortan Joe kept his wives, the Vault. None of them want it, no one else either. Furiosa had made a few half-hearted attempts to move herself in, she hated seeing the much needed room go to waste, and the rooms were perfect for working and holding meetings. But when Max came back (carried in, dripping blood, his blood), as soon as he could disappear from her bed, he did. And since this room wasn't being used, it was one of the few places he could go with the least amount of human contact.
The room, once filled with books and old world relics and knick-knacks, is now bone bare, with only the small sound of the trickle of water filling the pool filling the room.
Furiosa wonders if the rooms are a reflection of what Max thinks he is, empty and unwanted, and maybe that is why he is more comfortable here than anywhere else. Anywhere else except out there.
He'd rucked up a pile of blankets and pillows in one corner on the floor in the main room, a small sad lump. A bed was left untouched each night in a side bedroom. Furiosa does not know if it is because the bed, any bed, is too soft, or because Max does not want to give anyone the idea that he is settling in and staying.
Perhaps, Max doesn't want to give in to the idea that he is staying. He wants, no, needs, to be in the open and running, but he also still has a burning drive to survive, and he knows, like everyone else, he'd be dead within a few days of leaving their Green. So here he stays, drifting about and hiding in a room no one can bear to enter.
Furiosa doesn't like to go in the Vault, and not because of any memories of when old Joe had the run of them. Most times Max isn't there when she visits, or the door is closed, locked, and unanswered. There was little of Max in those rooms. Nothing, in fact. The lump of pillows and blankets could belong to anyone.
“That's mine,” he'd snarled at the War Boys driving his interceptor.
“That's my jacket,” he'd snarled at Nux as he took it back from him.
What does Max have now? Furiosa had more than Max does, even under Old Joe she'd had more to call hers, even when he'd been free she'd had more. What he'd had, though, was his freedom.
Furiosa aches for him and his loss of freedom. She and the girls had been running for theirs, and found it, when they and Max had been thrown together by fate. She aches for the fact that any sign of weakness in their world was a death sentence. She aches to be in a world where people could have weaknesses and not be taken advantage of or killed for what little rusty and rotten items they had. Her arm, people zeroed in on that immediately, thought it was her weakness. She taught them quick.
Mostly though, those who had something like her and Max, they didn't fare very well in this world. And Max, he is proving the point, that no, this world isn't for those with weaknesses. And that worries and hurts her the most. To have what she'd seen on that road, what'd she'd seen in the way all those people had been sent to their Green, to see him like this now...
Though, Max, he's doing what he always does and goes his own way, of sorts. It wasn't that his weakness was a target for others, not in their Green, but that he wouldn't tolerate that weakness in himself. That, he couldn't seem to get over or adapt.
Just yesterday Max had snarled at Furiosa when she came back from a successful run, eyes and forehead greased in her war paint, covered in dust and smelling of gun fire and fuel. She'd seen him in one of the great halls, stopped and smiled at him and handed him a new type of crossbow the Bullet Farm had rigged up. He'd snarled at her, dropped the bow, and left, leaving a little trail of silence behind him as he passed others.
A War Boy standing near Furiosa had turned and looked at her.
“Imperator,is Max a half-life now?”
Furiosa didn't, couldn't respond, and the War Boy went on his way.
Maybe the war boy was right, maybe Max was a half-life now.
“Adapt or die,” the Seed Mechanic would murmur as she worked, one of the oldest women in their Green, another one who Max had sent. She'd murmur that over the newest seedlings as she planted them into their soil (using the heirloom seeds), after she'd watched them and carefully hand groomed them from tiny seed in the green house.
Max wasn't growing where he'd been planted.