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English
Series:
Part 1 of A World Where Furiosa and Jack Make It to the Green Place
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Published:
2024-05-27
Completed:
2024-06-16
Words:
2,245
Chapters:
2/2
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62
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443
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A Green Place

Summary:

The sun has slipped low in the sky, the first blood of sunset darkening the horizon, when Jack at last reaches across to her. He rests his hand on her forearm, a steadying anchor.

“You can stop,” he says. His voice is deeper than usual, rough with aftershocks yet steady as ever. “We can stop. We’re four clicks off the road now, and there’s been no sign of pursuit.”

Furiosa shakes her head. Her foot stays heavy on the pedal, her hands clawed tight around the wheel. There is nothing to do but drive, drive, and keep driving. To do anything else would be folly. A death wish. If she stops, it might all catch up to her.

Or:
What if Dementus never caught up to them?

Notes:

I needed to write the happy ending these two deserve. Naturally, with some angst along the way...

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Furiosa watches Dementus’ wheels churn across the sand in the rearview window, the monstrosity of his vehicle steadily gaining on them even as she stomps the gas pedal down flat. She’d managed to lose him once in the dust cloud from her wheels, but she knows that trick won’t work a second time. Jack keeps leaning out the window to fire off shots towards Dementus’ tires, but the hungry things just keep barreling towards them, ravenous as Dementus’ pack of hounds.

Furiosa wonders if his dogs still remember her scent. If they’d even hesitate before tearing her apart. Or does Dementus have something still more twisted in store for them? Finding ever more creative ways to tear the life from his enemies is the only thing he ever really excelled at, after all.

She senses Jack’s gaze on her, then. Realizes he’s stopped shooting. She knows exactly what’s going through his head – the same thing that’s going through hers. They’ve completed countless runs together, escaped death with only a growing collection of burns and scrapes between the two of them. They both know this feels different.

He doesn’t speak; he doesn’t need to. She senses the apology, the regret within him. It’s why they work together so well. Fit together so well. It’s exactly why she knew - as she stood outside the gate that had trapped him within, as her indecision hardened into resolve – she couldn’t live with herself if she abandoned him there. No place of abundance would ever hold enough for her, if she cut out her heart and left it behind on the Fury Road.

She’s about to tear her gaze from the windshield, just to look at him one last time, when a great, terrible tremor begins from deep beneath the sands. The tires skid for a moment, until she quickly shifts gears and steers hard, straightening out the car. Jack braces himself in the passenger seat as the sands heave beneath them.

They race on, speeding across the desert even as cracks open in the sands beneath them. Furiosa watches the lattice of fault lines spider webbing out before them, tracks their patterns and steers their small, agile vehicle between them. They streak across cracks that widen in their wake, yawning open into deep, hungry fissures.

Furiosa doesn’t look away from the road, but she hears it all the same. The shriek of monstrous tires when Dementus tries to avoid a canyon, splitting wider by the moment. The groan of steel, as his hulking vehicle tips sideways in a last-ditch effort to escape. The contented, gluttonous sigh of the Wasteland, as it consumes a bounty of gears and guzzoline.

Then it is only the desert that pursues them, the cracks of its greedy fingers reaching out to trip their wheels.

But Furiosa learned from the best.

She makes split-second calculations in her head, factoring the weight of the car against the speed of the earthquake’s tremors. She drives parallel to the widest of the yawning canyons, flooring the gas and avoiding a straight path. She keeps the weight of the car moving erratically, unpredictably.

They slip past the edge of the earthquake’s radius before the desert can gulp them down.

It’s only miles later that Furiosa realizes she’s shaking, her breathing erratic and frenzied. Adrenaline burnout from the shootout in Gastown, from hurling that chain to Jack mere seconds before he plummeted into flames; watching Dementus bearing down on her in the rearview, before escaping the clutches of hell itself.

Her foot stays heavy on the pedal, her hands clawed tight around the wheel. To do anything else would be folly. A death wish. There is nothing to do but drive, drive, and keep driving. If she stops, it might all catch up to her.

The sun has slipped low in the sky, the first blood of sunset darkening the horizon, when Jack at last reaches across to her. He rests his hand on her forearm, a steadying anchor.

“You can stop,” he says. His voice is deeper than usual, rough with aftershocks yet steady as ever. “We can stop. We’re four clicks off the road now, and there’s been no sign of pursuit.”

At first, Furiosa gives a small shake of her head. She doesn’t want to stop. She’s afraid to.

Jack says nothing. They drive a bit further. As night begins to encroach, he reaches out to her again. This time, his hand settles at the back of her neck. Furiosa takes a deep, shuddering breath, her upper body gradually unraveling a bit of its frenzied tension. He keeps his hand there until, at last, she finds the composure to lift her foot from the gas.

She brings the car to a stop beneath a rocky overhang, providing a bit of cover. The car’s practically steaming beneath them, its engines overheated, burnt fuel fumes permeating the air. The moment the car roll to a stop, Furiosa throws the door open and falls to her hands and knees in the sand, heaving up bile and shock and emotions she couldn’t begin to name.

As she catches her breath, she becomes aware of Jack kneeling beside her. He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t speak. But when she at last lifts her head, her heaving and coughing subsided, he holds out a flask of water. She takes it and drinks, her eyes slipping closed as the cool water soothes a bit of the helpless frenzy within her. Distantly, she feels his fingers smooth a few strands of hair from her brow, tucking them behind her ear.

With her thirst abated, her words gradually return to her. Soft, helpless things at first.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

It’s so quiet out here, miles away from the Citadel. Leagues away from any other people. Now it’s just the two of them, stars above and sand below.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

This time, tears slip out along with the words.

Jack doesn’t move, but she sees his hands twitch into fists. “I know,” is all he says, his voice the softest thing she’s ever heard. Resigned. Miserable.

She covers her face with shaking hands, reality washing over her anew. Again, she sees Dementus’ truck slipping beneath the sand. She didn’t even see his face. She didn’t even hear his dying scream. She didn’t watch the sand filling his mouth, his eyes, burying him alive.

Furiosa moves before she even realizes what she’s doing. She lurches at Jack, grabbing fistfuls of his jacket and heaving him to his feet. She hits him across the jaw, utterly beyond her own control.

Her tongue salty with tears, with blood from where she bit her lip open, she sobs out, “He killed my mother. I was supposed to kill him for her. For her.”

Jack stands still. Unmoving. Immovable. He doesn’t make a single noise as she hits him again. The second blow is a punch to the face, but after that she’s too distraught to do much damage, her blows glancing off his chest.

He takes it all. Until she’s weak with exhaustion, until her anger runs dry and leaves her trembling, lost in a new, terrible way she’s never known before.

Only then does Jack step into her, moving close enough to offer his own body for her lode stone.

He gathers her close as she slumps against him. His arms aren’t exactly gentle around her. They’re purposeful, strong and functional. He holds her the only way he can. Offers her the only kind of comfort that can exist between two people who’ve learned that nothing in this life comes gently or easily.

He closes his eyes and speaks against her hair. “Instead, you killed him for me.”

She hates herself for the way she cries. The water she wastes. But here, in the clutch of Jack’s arms, there is no weakness.

He slides a hand up to the back of her head, cupping her close. He feels the way she shakes against him, the humidity of her breath, her tears against his neck. He curls himself tighter around her, imagining he might hide her from this entire horrid world.

“You came back for me,” he says, the words murmured against her ear. His own awe fully catches up to him, then, and he has to say it aloud to comprehend that it really happened.

He doesn’t know what this means for her. For her plans. Wherever it is that she planned to go, wherever her star map leads, he always had the impression that it was a place she could only search for alone. Has he stolen this from her, too?

She draws back slightly, and those mesmerizing eyes look up to find his. Those striking eyes, containing whole worlds in their depths, were the first thing about her that bewitched him. The grease across her forehead is mostly wiped away now. Against him, he realizes.

“You did the same. On our very first run.”

That was different, he wants to object. He had few alternatives that day, and the choice seemed clear: replace his dead crew with this ferocious girl who’d proven her mettle and her skill with the rig.

He wants to tell her: he’s never done anything in his whole life anywhere near as extraordinary as she did today. She’d been on the cusp of freedom – wheels, supplies, and bullets all humming in the vehicle, right there for her taking. No one would have followed her; no one would have tracked her. All she had to do was sacrifice him.

Instead, she’d snatched him from the jaws of certain death. She’d driven them to safety like an unstoppable hurricane. She’d given up her long-sought dream of vengeance.

By now, her tears have mostly dried; tracks of cream skin revealed from beneath grease and grime. Desert flowers.

She reaches up, her fingers sinking into his filthy hair. She draws him closer, until their foreheads rest together and they inhabit the same space, breathing the same breath.

Jack closes his eyes, lets his hands settle at her hips. He’s aware of the shape of her body like a throttle, the most powerful he’s ever touched.

He feels the stars realign in the sky above them.

Furiosa slides her hand to the back of his head, her fingers tangling more tightly in his hair. She holds him tight, and where moments ago she’d clung to him for survival, for reason, now she holds onto him as strength fills her once more, flowing into her from all the places their bodies touch.

One wind subsides, and she feels another rising at her back. Another road coming into focus before her eyes. Perhaps, this one will lead her all the way home.

One of Jack’s hands slides to her lower back, his fingers spreading out to press her closer.

“The wheels are yours,” he breathes.

Furiosa hears everything he doesn’t say. I’ll ride with you. I’ll cover your back. I’ll keep your engine humming. As long and as far as you want me.

Another deep breath, one last squeeze to his hair, and Furiosa lets go. She looks back at the car, scanning the two bikes still tethered to the top, the trunk full of food, supplies, ammunition.

Everything he procured for her. This one chance to escape, that never would have been possible without him.

He’d done all of this for her, and never even expected to escape with her. She was supposed to drive off alone. No parting words. That had been the plan.

For the first time, Furiosa finds herself wondering: Could she ever have really done it?

“Get in,” she tells him, her hand brushing his before she steps towards the driver’s side door.

Now, she remembers her exuberant clarity, in those moments just after their escape from Gastown. When she’d looked over at him, miraculously sitting there in the passenger’s seat, after she’d clawed him back to her from the jaws of destruction.

We’re good?

He’d responded with only the barest nod, but the disbelief, the wonder in his eyes said it all. He’d ride with her anywhere. And maybe, just maybe, it had always been that way.

She’d had a plan. Drive east. Switch to the bikes when the dunes began rising into mountains.

She nearly laughs at herself. Two bikes – she’d told him that from the beginning, along with her list of other supplies. He’d never questioned her, never bat an eye. They’d both gone on pretending that their paths could split, just like that.

Furiosa coaxes the engine to life again, gently overcoming its protests. She tracks the stars, turning their path east. They ride in silence. He asks nothing about her plan, her route. Only when she wants him to take over the wheel so she can sleep.

When she at last gives in to fatigue, she doesn’t clamber into the back seat. She curls up in the passenger seat, where the leather’s still warm from his skin. She stretches out just enough so her head rests beside him.

His hands work the gears fluidly, effortlessly. As she drifts to sleep, one of his hands settles in her hair. His fingers are careful, impossibly timid against her scalp. She breathes in his familiar scent, motor oil and musk, and she sleeps.

On this night, she doesn’t have to dream of Green. She’s already on her way.

 

 

Notes:

They deserved better...!!

There may be a second part to this? I do have some very specific ideas about how they're both deeply touch-starved, and how profoundly earth-shattering it would be for these two when they become physically intimate/vulnerable with each other for the first time. So..... watch this space?!

Thanks for reading! And if you're reading this and considering writing your own fic about these two... oh my god, please do it! WE NEED MORE!!

Update: I've started Part II of this story here!

And I wrote another separate fic for these two here!

Chapter 2

Summary:

Adding a chapter here purely to let subscribers know Part II has been added as a series! See here for more Furyjack and thank you!! :)

Chapter Text

Mark my words, Furyjack will ride eternal!

Notes:

They deserved better...!!

There may be a second part to this? I do have some very specific ideas about how they're both deeply touch-starved, and how profoundly earth-shattering it would be for these two when they become physically intimate/vulnerable with each other for the first time. So..... watch this space?!

Thanks for reading! And if you're reading this and considering writing your own fic about these two... oh my god, please do it! WE NEED MORE!!

Update: I've started Part II of this story here!

And I wrote another separate fic for these two here!