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The fever sweeps through the Citadel just as the winds shift westward. Sandstorm season, the older folks call it, those who still remember the meaning of the word season.
The Mothers know this fever, from when it used to come every year. It’s unpleasant, but most adults can sweat in out in a week, maybe two if you’re a half-life. But it can be deadly to the very young, the old and the already weak.
Quarantines are put in place, isolating the most vulnerable. Despite everyone cleaning their hands more than usual, by the second week a third of the Citadel is laid up in bed, shivering and coughing and exhausted.
Furiosa thanks her line of hardy Wasteland mothers for her iron immune system and prays no one figures out to attack them now.
Despite confining themselves to the gardens with baby Angharad, Dag and Cheedo both get the fever at the same time, at the end of the second week. Capable, who takes care of the baby as much as her birth mother does, is running to and from sickbeds all day, tending to the worst-off.
“Please,” Capable says at dinner on the day Dag and Cheedo both start coughing. She is rocking the baby slightly as she feeds her, her face exhausted. “I don’t want her to get sick.”
No way in hell, Furiosa thinks but doesn’t say.
“The milk-makers can take plenty good care of her.”
“But…they have so many.” It was true; every pup under three thousand days was currently sequestered in the former breeders’ den with them.
“I have work to do. The War Tower is no place for a baby.”
“I do all my work with her strapped on. So does Dag. She’s used to it.”
“No.” The hard, flat tone makes Capable recoil, just the smallest bit, and she hopes that’s enough to ensure she won’t have to explain.
“But…she likes you.” It was true. The little thing was always reaching for her metal arm or her flesh fingers or some unpredictable part of her face when Capable or Dag sat next to her at meals.
“Just…just try it for tonight. If you hate it we can figure something else out tomorrow. Please?”
Janey and Eves were already taking extra watches in the sniper towers. Toast was needed to run the garage until Ace recovered. The milk-makers and the former breeders were overburdened already. War Boys—no.
She sighs. “One night. Tomorrow she’s going somewhere else.”
Capable beams, and quick as an automatic reload she deposits the baby into Furiosa’s arms.
Her hands are suddenly numb and clumsy. The little thing is heavier than she looks, in all kinds of weird places, and she squirms and flops and gurgles, and Furiosa nearly fucking drops her before—
“Ahh, here.” Max is at her elbow—where had he come from?—scooping the baby out of her awkward grip, and she can’t help noticing that his arms settle into place just right around her, an ingrained reflex, like he’s done it a thousand times.
Like he’s done this before.
But Angharad screams and wails in his arms. He makes soothing noises and bounces her ever so slightly, but she howls unabated.
“Oh—she’s—she’s not used to men, I think.” Capable looks as shocked by Max’s unknown skillset as Furiosa is, but Angharad is still screaming.
“He knows what he’s doing, though.” Before she can protest, Capable unwraps the sling from her body, drapes it over Furiosa’s shoulder and slides the baby inside.
She freezes up at the feeling of the tiny hot body wiggling against hers. But as soon as she’s in the sling, Angharad stops crying. She makes a small “ehh” sound and nuzzles her head between Furiosa’s breasts.
Capable looks from Furiosa, frozen stock still, to Max, who’s blinking a lot more than usual and seems to be shaking slightly. “Just follow his instructions,” she tells Furiosa. And then, as if to reassure herself as much as anything, “You’ll be fine.”
She hands Furiosa the bag she carries everywhere when she has the baby, which has nappy cloths and…baby maintenance supplies…Furiosa supposes…inside. Then she pulls her scarf back over her face and heads back toward the War Boy bunks.
Furiosa’s limbs feel numb. She looks down at the alien thing now strapped onto her with an unfamiliar swath of fabric.
Angharad is asleep, one miniature fist balled up against her face.
Gods damn it.
“Max?” She reaches out toward where he stood a second ago. But he’s gone.
She manages to stumble through her evening routine of surveying the defenses and checking in with the watch captains. Every gurgle and twitch of the strange weight against her chest sets her on edge.
Angharad, for her part, seems perfectly content to get a tour of the defenses strapped to Furiosa’s torso, although she keeps trying to suck on her nipples through the cloth of her shirt. (She does wash it, she thinks as she pries Angharad’s lips off her shirt and they latch onto her finger instead, but something you’ve worn for thousands of days can only be so clean.)
Most people she interacts with are smart enough to say nothing.
She doesn’t quite realize how much tension she’s been holding until she hears snickers behind her and whips around, teeth bared and metal hand curled into a fist. The War Boys who had been following her scatter in complete terror.
She leans against a wall and exhales a deep breath, suddenly feeling the strain in her shoulders and the way the unfamiliar weight makes muscles clench up in unexpected places.
You can do this, she tells herself. It’s just a baby.
Babies remind her of things she’d tried hard to forget.
There had been babies in the Vault. One, born silent and blue, two moons too early. Another, born screaming but with head too big and limbs too small, dead three days later. One bled out on the floor of the Vault before it was even anything.
None of them had been hers.
It had seemed to personally offend him, that she’d never even had a miscarriage. As if her womb’s stubborn refusal to accept any of his seed was a deliberate affront, another piece of her will that needed breaking. Perhaps that was why he had kept her so long after the Organic Mechanic had told him to discard her—had offered to take her off his hands, in fact, and she’s still not sure which fate would have been worse.
There had only been one scare, a month when she hadn’t bled. But it had been terrifying. Her sleep had been riven with nightmares in which his spawn grew inside her until she split open like a corpse left too long in the sun, in which they ripped a bloody, pulsing thing out of her that latched slimy onto her breast and sucked the life out of her.
When she had bled on time the next month she had sobbed with relief, and let the other Wives think it was disappointment.
Max is not in her room when she retires for the night.
It’s not unusual for them not to see each other for much of the day, but they tend to drift back to her room around the same time.
It’s only now that she thinks back to the tremor in his hands when he held the baby, and how he kept twitching and blinking in the way he does when he’s trying to shake a flashback, and the fact that she hadn’t seen him anywhere in the Citadel on her evening rounds.
He wouldn’t—not without telling her—
The baby wakes and starts crying.
She needs to feed her with the milk Capable left in her room, and when she lifts her out of the sling she can feel—and smell, holy V8—that her nappy needs changing too, which seems like a more urgent problem.
The floor seems too hard and cold and the bed seems like a bad idea as a changing surface, so she settles for the workbench, making sure to sweep carefully for any stray washers or screws.
As soon as she puts Angharad down to undo the cloth she screams and flails, and continues to scream as Furiosa unveils the shockingly large mess in her cloth. How can a tiny thing expel that much? she has time to think right before a stream of baby pee just misses her flesh hand. She jerks away and then has to catch the wriggling thing before she rolls off the table.
She’s trying to figure out how exactly to unfold the clean cloth while keeping Angharad from falling off the table when there’s an uneven scrape of boots at the door.
He’s standing in the doorway, staring at the still-screaming baby, throat working.
“Help,” she begs flatly. A confused mess of emotions fights for control of his face.
Finally he steps forward, and even though his hands are shaking, he seems to know exactly what to do, picking up her little legs and wiping her bum with the edge of the cloth while Furiosa unfolds a fresh one, knows exactly how to fold it around her so it stays in place, guides Furiosa’s arms into the right position so she can hold her to take the bottle without the metal arm scratching, shows her with gestures how to lift her up to burp, and wipes her neck when she spits up on it.
Throughout the whole thing he is silent, jaw clenched, as if speaking would break him open. And she thinks she is starting to understand why, but knows better than to ask him about it.
She sleeps worse than usual that night, jolting awake with nightmares what seems like every hour. When the baby starts screaming in her basket beside the bed at some unconscionable hour, she wants to punch something.
“Make it stop,” she groans and buries her head under the pillow. After a second she feels Max’s weight shift on the other side of the bed.
When she looks up he’s sitting against the wall with the baby in his arms, his face turned away from her in the dim moonlight, rocking her as she howls fit to summon the dead.
“Here.” She holds out her arms for the baby.
It takes some trying to figure out how to hold her securely with one hand and a nub, and Max ends up sitting half-behind her in the bed. She tries offering her the last of the day’s milk, but she’s not interested in the leather teat of the bottle, gumming at Furiosa’s breast instead.
“Ugghh. There’s no milk in there.”
“You could let her suck.” Max’s voice is quiet and raw. “Just wants—” His throat clicks. “Comfort.”
Out of desperation, she scoops a breast out of her sleep top. Angharad latches on and sucks, quieting almost at once, seemingly unconcerned that there’s no milk to be had.
Max’s hands are on her shoulders, easing her weight back to lean against his chest.
“You’re shaking,” she whispers.
“You too.”
A brittle laugh escapes her. “Who in the everloving hell thought this was a good idea?”
“Mm.”
He shifts to settle in a little closer, a cautious curl of his arms around her, both of them unclenching slowly by degrees.
The baby gives a tiny wiggle against her, seemingly content. It’s not entirely unpleasant, she thinks, being nestled in between the warmth of the two of them. It’s maybe even…nice. She rests her head against the side of Max’s neck.
She feels it rather than hears: the stuttering hitch in his breathing, the hot drops that land on her shoulder before he can swipe them silently away. He can be so quiet, even when he cries.
He doesn’t offer details, and she doesn’t need them. Angharad is settled drowsily into the nook of her half-arm and she can run her flesh hand up to stroke through his hair and press against his cheek, feel him lean into her touch, feel the spasm of his fingers against her stomach and the shuddering choked-off sigh that comes out of him, just once.
This is okay, she thinks. She can comfort both of them, and it somehow comforts her too. And if the milk is not real and she is not like the one he lost, she hopes the pantomime will suffice.
The baby falls asleep. But they stay like that for a long time after.