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Max falls into a daze from the blood loss, his thoughts cloudy and muddled, and only stirs from it when Furiosa blinks awake. He’s gradually slumped down over the past few hours, as the sun set; his forehead is resting against hers, his hands still cradling the back of her skull. He feels the Gigahorse judder to a stop. When he opens his eyes, it’s to see her opening her own; there is confusion written all over her features, and she stares at him for a long moment before whispering, “Max.”
His heart skips a beat. “Hm,” he says, and sits up, wincing as the movement pulls at aching, cramped muscles. He slides an arm around her waist, bracing her as she struggles upright. From the front seat, there is a flurry of motion; Capable and Toast crowd into the back, leaving Dag and Cheedo asleep in a pile up front. “Furiosa,” Capable says, touching her knee, her hand, as she leans back against the wall with a grimace of pain. “How are you feeling?”
Furiosa lets out a pained huff of what sounds like laughter. Max looks up, concerned, but she seems to be fine; no fresh injuries, no old wounds opened up, just the pain from being knifed and probably an itch in her elbow where the needle still is, pumping blood into her veins. “I feel like I’ve been stabbed,” she says, weakly, in a grim attempt at gallows humor.
Toast is examining the wad of blood-soaked gauze holding Furiosa’s stab wound together. She shakes her head, gingerly peels some of the cloth away. Furiosa’s expression twitches, and Max sees her fist clench for a second before she closes her eyes and tips her head away, not looking at the wound. Capable tears off a piece of linen from her dress to fashion a makeshift bandage and presses it to the bloody cut. “Max,” she says, and when Max doesn’t respond, trying to catalogue Furiosa’s reaction and gauge her pain and getting lost, somewhat, in a misty, light-headed haze, she repeats, “Max.”
He blinks. Everything seems a little bit slow around him; the concerned gazes of the former Wives are vaguely blurry, like he’s watching through a curtain of water. “Huh,” he says.
“Max,” Furiosa says, sharply, and that somehow jerks him back to reality, like her voice is a lifeline. He clings to it. Watches her, a little bit distant and surreal, as she reaches down to his elbow and pulls out the needle. Blood trickles down his arm. “You’ve lost too much blood. Fool, listen to me. You’ve given enough.”
“Hm,” he says, closes his eyes and leans back against the wall next to Furiosa and everything’s a little bit dark and fuzzy around the corners, after that.
--
He comes back around sometime before dawn, just as the sun’s rays are lighting up the distant horizon, bathing the blue darkness around them gold. Light is slanting in through the windows, throwing haphazard shadows on the Wives: making Dag’s skin glow luminescent, setting Capable’s hair on fire. One of the Vulvalini is perched on the back platform, as far away from Immortan Joe’s corpse as she can manage; the other one is outside, head pillowed on one arm and her other resting across her rifle.
Furiosa is still sitting up. He’s lying down, head pillowed in her lap; her fingers are carding slowly through his hair, slightly absentmindedly, like she’s forgotten she’s doing it entirely. Her eyes are closed. There is light creeping up her leg, across her torso. Max watches it lazily, his cheek pressed against the rough material of her trousers, as light slips into the crevices of the folds of her shirt and the curve of her collarbone; it highlights her skin, the blood still spattered across it, plays out over her face and lights the tips of her eyelashes gold. There is something peaceful in her face that Max has only seen in glimpses—when she was telling him about the Green Place, when she recognized the Vulvalini tower. He’s almost forgotten himself, lying there, staring unabashedly at her face, when she opens her good eye and looks down at him.
“You’re awake,” she says. The hand running through his hair pauses, then resumes, almost deliberately. “How are you feeling?”
He grunts, pushing himself off of her. There’s a thin bandage around his arm from where the cannula had gone in; the tube is wrapped up again, tucked back in his shoulder pack. He settles beside her, against the wall. “Well enough,” he says, at last.
Furiosa nods. They sit against the wall in silence for a moment, and Max takes the time to tip his head sideways, looks up at her. Her posture is better than his, even after an entire night of sitting up. “You?” he offers.
“As well as can be expected,” she says, wry. Her hand flits, briefly, to the bandage at her side. “Eye’s swollen shut.”
“Noticed,” Max says, the drawl swallowing the “I’d” that would usually go at the beginning of the sentence. “Does it hurt much?”
“I’ve had worse,” Furiosa says. It’s not quite an answer, but Max drops it, goes back to watching light crawl over their boots. And then: “Thank you,” she says, eventually.
“Hm?” Max cranes his neck to look at her.
“For—” She gestures at her arm. There’s a similar bandage on her elbow. “You gave me back my life.”
“You did the same,” he tells her, and she studies him, his expression and the matching wound on his arm where they’d been connected, and then she leans in, tentative and slow; they curl toward each other like the sunflowers of Before, searching for the sun. There is precious little tenderness in this Wasteland, and both of them know it. She tucks her head in the curve of his shoulder, where it meets his neck, and he rests his head against hers, breathes in, takes comfort in the fact that he can feel her exhaling against his neck, and that means she’s alive, that she’s here and warm, pressed against his side.
“Thank you,” he whispers, against her hair, and he knows she hears it because her hand smooths over the bandage on his arm and then tightens around it, and she doesn’t say anything, doesn't utter the words you’re welcome, but he can read it in the way she turns her head and presses a soft kiss against the side of his neck. Thank you, thank you, thank you, he wants to tell her. Thank you.
--
When he slips away, he turns back, one last time. He can’t help himself; he's not even sure of what he wants. Perhaps—redemption. Forgiveness. And she’s looking back at him—she meets his gaze, and he nods to her, and she nods back because she understands.
Thank you, he wants to tell her again, wants to tell her it over and over again, but from the way she looks at him, he knows she understands that too.
She's still watching him as he turns to go. There are still ghosts that he hasn't answered to, voices that urge him out into the desert; as he slips out from the crush of people back into the arid wastes, there is the phantom shove of hands at the small of his back, a whispering starting back up in his ears, and above it all, he hears you gave me back my life, feels the ghostly press of lips, soft and gentle, at the column of his throat.
Gentleness is precious out in the wastes. He clings to it like a lifeline.