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The sun is hot on Furiosa’s back as she walks, but she can sense the beginnings of a cool breeze ahead. Her panting mouth tastes the traces of a fine mist of water, like the shockwave from a powerful waterfall that’s still too distant to be heard. The desert is starting to bloom here: just cacti and aloe plants that can survive on the thinnest of water supplies, but they grow more frequent as she approaches the haze of green on the horizon.
There’s a heavy iron chain around her ankle, dragging behind her, straining the muscles in one leg as she walks determinedly. But as she ventures on, it starts to feel lighter and slimmer – so much so that Furiosa is able to break into a run when she sees the two bikes and the figure standing beside them, arms folded.
Praetorian Jack turns his head at the sound of her noisy approach, sees her, and starts sprinting as fast as the shifting desert sands will allow. It’s like running in a nightmare: unfairly slow as the unstable ground greedily swallows half of the effort put in. But then he’s there, and he pulls up a little to lessen the impact as she collides with him, folding her into his arms like he’s catching her from a fall. Their legs waver and they drop to their knees in their sand, only remaining upright by leaning against each other.
The grief that Furiosa has walled up for years, brick by brick, comes pouring out all at once as she sobs against the hardened leather of his pauldron, then turns her face to muffle her tears against her cheek. Jack buries a hand in her hair, wraps the other around her back, holds her hard against his body. For a while they can do nothing but cling to each other, fearful of letting go. But Furiosa desperately needs to see his face, so she lifts her hands to hold both sides of it as she pulls back just far enough to look at him. They gaze at each other, eyes darting over every detail so busily that it takes a while for them to make eye contact.
Jack looks exactly the same: the same stubble on his chin, the same scar that cascades down his cheek and falls into his mouth. Only his war paint has faded to a faint shadow on his forehead. His face looks better without it, Furiosa thinks. When she finally looks into his eyes, it makes him smile, which makes her smile. They close their eyes and press their foreheads together in an old, familiar gesture.
“Furiosa,” he murmurs, close enough that she can feel his breath on her lips. He speaks softly, but the word echoes across the desert until it sounds like it’s coming from behind her. Furiosa, Furiosa…
She almost starts crying all over again at the sound of Jack’s voice. It had faded from her ears until she couldn’t conjure it in her mind any more. She could barely even remember his face. He was more like a shape in her mind: a shadowy figure shrouded in leather and silhouetted by a setting sun. He’d been kept alive not through her thoughts but through her actions as she practiced everything he’d taught her: the weapons she stashed around the cabin of the war rig, the killswitch sequence, the way she watched the horizon for danger. Jack had been right there with her, protecting her girls and keeping them alive in their desperate flight across the Wasteland.
(Most of them. A fresher wound in Furiosa’s heart starts to bleed again as she wonders if Angharad passed this way as well, not too long ago.)
“Come on,” Jack says at last, getting to his feet and pulling her up with him. “Let’s go home.”
Home, home, home…
The word echoes back across the desert, calling to Furiosa as she follows him, nagging at her mind. She looks back over her shoulder as she walks, the chain still snaking through the sand behind her foot. They’re almost at the bikes when it pulls taut, and she stops walking.
Jack turns around, puzzled when he sees the tears streaming down her face. “What’s wrong?”
Furiosa shakes her head. “I’m not ready,” she tells him wretchedly. She wants nothing more than to get on that bike and go with Jack to whatever strange biome is beckoning them. But the people of the Citadel don’t know the wives, and won’t follow them. If she leaves now, it was all for nothing.
The confusion in his brow clears, giving way to a melancholy understanding. His gaze drifts away from her to look at something on the ground as he replies, his voice cracking slightly on the hard truth of the words.
“Neither was I.”
She follows his line of sight to an old chain half-buried by the sand. With a lurch in her stomach, she recognizes it as the chain they dragged him by. It ends in a shattered link, a few stray metal fragments strewn around it.
While Furiosa is still trying to articulate an explanation, Jack’s attention wanders over to her chain and he frowns. He walks over and crouches down to pick it up, following its trail to where it’s still connected at her ankle. He turns the cold links over in his fingers and Furiosa shivers. It feels like he’s handling one of her nerve endings.
“Look,” Jack calls up to her.
Furiosa squats down beside him and studies the chain. There’s a tube wound into it now, snaking through the links, red oozing through it. She watches the liquid creep up to her ankle and enter her bloodstream, and feels it feeding pain and exhaustion back into her body. Her left arm falls uselessly to her side, and suddenly it's gone. Her legs lose their strength and she falls, Jack moving quickly to catch her. Blood blooms on her clothes and trickles down her side. Everything hurts.
Someone’s calling to her across the desert. Jack hears it too this time, raising his head to listen as he cradles her.
Furiosa, Furiosa…
He contemplates this. Complex expressions flit minutely across his face. Finally he looks down at her with a wry smile.
“Looks like they’re not ready either.”
Furiosa grips his arm desperately as she feels the chain go taut and start to pull her away. “Come with me,” she begs. “Just hold on!”
He tries, but his hands are slipping, suddenly unable to find purchase on her clothes. Jack shakes his head, then presses his forehead to hers, keeping them connected for as long as possible. “I can’t go that way, my love. But don't fret. I’ll still be here when you get back."
She cries out his name once more, and then he's all alone.
Jack stays kneeling in the sand for a while, his head still bowed where it was touching hers. Now that she’s gone, he permits the storm of emotions to rage through him: the euphoric joy of their reunion, the jarring disappointment of its briefness, the sharp grief of their separation. He weathers it all with a practiced heart.
He can hear familiar voices too, calling to him not from across the Wasteland, but from what lies beyond it. There’s no urgency, though. They’ll be there whenever he arrives – and he’s not arriving without her.
Jack stands slowly, returns to the bikes, and resumes his vigil, eyes already scanning the horizon for her return.