Chapter Text
Max saw ghosts out here. Every day, another face dragged up from the rotten depths of his mind, some he hadn’t thought of since the Before (people said before the Great Red, before the Water Wars, always before. Max found it easier to use the one word). Most times he ignored it, kept walking, step after step, mile after mile. He didn’t have much choice in it. Learn to live alongside them, stop talking to them, or slip into the feral mindset of the shifting sands. After being branded as a feral, insanity wasn’t as appealing anymore.
Some he saw less often than others. Goose made a common appearance. So did Sprog. Every burning wreck gave Johnny a screaming voice in his head. He didn’t see her as often. Tried to forget about her, not think about her. If he could, the guilt stopped eating at him and he could catch a few moments sleep without feeling an ache in her side where she should be.
That’s what he thought she was. Another trick of the sands. Another ghost, come to haunt him ’til the ends of his days. But she looked different. Harder angles. Wearing leathers like the kind he used to, torn off at the elbows and arms blackened with grease. Shoulders back, head tilted high to catch the final rays of the sun. She looked stronger, less like she gave a fuck about what the world thought about her.
She looked different than what Max remembered. So he stopped, staring wide-eyed at the new image of his late wife. He didn’t dare move. He didn’t dare breathe in case it shattered the illusion.
If it even was one. If it wasn’t an illusion, Max would cross the entire desert just to see her again. Just to hear his name pass her lips.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, and the dunes were bathed in the red glow of the approaching twilight, Jessie ducked her head and turned, walking quickly over the dune behind her. Her footfalls disturbed the sand, sending rivers of it cascading down the dune and switching the shape of dust barely settled. Storms were a regular, here, but since the new governing system of the Citadel, there had been none. There should have been several, and history said that the next storm would blur together with the one after it, a fortnight of sand thick enough to choke on as it forces its way through every nook, cranny and crevice. From where he stood, Max could hear the roar of an engine, and saw the plume of dust from behind it.
He heard the roar. He was intimately familiar with that roar. Amongst all the chaos, of the driving into the storm on the Fury Road, she’d found the scraps of his car and pulled them all together, giving the interceptor another life (the fourth life, it was the cars fourth life after all the times he’d wrecked it) and racing ‘round the desert with it.
It drank guzzoline like the desert soaked up the rare rain, she needed a regular supply of it to keep using the car, and hopefully she’d disabled the bomb under the boot.
The car was what cemented the idea that she was real, rather than an illusion of the sands. Somehow, Jessie had survived and had made her way almost to the Fury Road, all the way from home.
She’d covered his journey, and probably in a more direct way.
Max had nothing better to look for, so he followed her. He trudged along in the dust, cresting the hill before he could find her trail to follow. If he didn’t sleep, and she was smart with how she drove, he had a chance of getting the car in his sights before sunrise.
For better or for worse, for sickness and in health.
She was his wife, and he had abandoned her once before. He was going to find her again and make sure he didn’t lose her. Even if she didn’t know he was there, even if he could never catch up, he was going to try.
Jessie was his wife. He never had the marriage annulled; there hadn’t been a government worth trying to figure out how. She was still his wife regardless of anything that happened, and he had left. Left her in the hospital while he sought out revenge, and too scared to come back in fear of the worst.
He had left her and regretted that fact every day. He needed to make up for it. And so he walked. And walked. Focussed on putting one foot in front of the other and ignoring the other ghosts that demanded an audience. Focussed on finding the tracks compared to the roads and the dust, and the fading light.
Once night fell, he wouldn’t be able to see more than a foot ahead without a light source, and he used his last match the previous night.
And he walked, unsure if the path was straight any longer, or if he only wished it was.
The roar of a rig behind him was the only thing that prompted him to its presence, diving to the side and ending up with a mouthful of dust. The squealing breaks, and a fond call of “Blood bag!” alerted him to who was driving.
And he walked no more.