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Chapter Text

On the second day, the horizon rises up before them in a thrashing, ravenous wave. Crimson lightning flashes from within the sandstorm, sunlight strangled from the sky as they draw closer to the edge of the whirlwind.

Furiosa hits the brakes, cuts the wheel sideways to hang a stop. To anyone else, the storm would mean the end of the road. But not to two seasoned road warriors like them.

She looks over at Jack. Just to confirm he’s still along for the ride, no matter if the ride’s changed. No matter if the road leads them through hell itself.

Jack isn’t looking at her. He’s lowering the window, leaning out into the agitated air and holding a scope up to his eye. She watches the wind tousle his hair, notices how his broad shoulders fill the window.

He drops back down into the passenger’s seat and points into the far distance. “The storm’s breaking up there to the northeast – best way through. We’ll lose the sun while we’re inside so I’ll keep our bearing by compass.”

By the time he finally meets her eyes, he’s already tying a bandana over his nose and mouth. His compass is already in hand. The one with a crack down its face, that he always keeps tucked in the inner left pocket of his jacket. The one she knows he never drives without.

It feels like any other run – like they’re a seamless, united front against the world.

It feels nothing like any run before. Like nothing she’s ever experienced before. Right now, they drive for no one but themselves.

It isn’t bullets or fuel, orders or payment waiting for them on the other side of this maelstrom. It’s the terrifying, boundless open road, laid out for the two of them alone.

And Jack is already sealing the windows, already digging out two sets of goggles from the supplies in the backseat. Ready to speed into the future beside her.

He settles back into his seat. Their eyes lock, the inside of the V-8 alight with electricity of their own making.

He holds out her goggles for her. She bites the inside of her lip, stopping some strange, distracting emotion from escaping.

They strap on their goggles in unison. She settles her hand on the gear shift.

“Let’s find out what’s on the other side of hell.”

 She guns the engine and tears off into the raging sands.

*

Two days out from the storm, the sloping hills of the desert begin growing into mountains. Rocky outcroppings thrust up from the sands, making their route more and more treacherous.

“A couple more clicks,” she says in answer to a question Jack doesn’t have to voice. “These tires still have mileage to burn.”

The sand beneath their wheels begins to thin over rock and stone, the horizon lifting before them as the mountainside surges towards the heavens.

Furiosa grips the wheel with both hands as they climb higher, weaving the car between mounds of stone. Jack takes the gear shift in hand, watching the terrain and anticipating each turn before she makes it. He shifts as she maneuvers, their wheels churning over gravel as they advance steadily towards the sky.

The mountaintop reveals a rocky overhang, overlooking an endless vista. To anyone else, nothing but wasteland as far as the eye can see. Furiosa cuts the engine, anticipation suddenly clawing its way up her throat. She lurches out of the car, drawn forward by instinct, by years of longing, by the torment of misery and dreams.

She is herself a compass needle forever drawn to the east, every atom of her splintered body thrumming for reunion with those secret, innocent parts of herself long left behind.

“There,” she gasps, breathless with disbelieving relief. In these last few years, a new fear had begun to spread within her – fear that her roots would no longer take to the soil from which they’d been torn; that she would no longer even recognize her own native landscape.

Jack turns from where he’d been scanning the opposite horizon, checking for any sign of pursuit. Not a single dust cloud in sight. He comes to her side, his eyes following in the direction she points. He slips his scope from his jacket, hands it to her to look through first.

“We take the bikes and ride hard, we could reach it in less than a day,” he estimates, squinting as he assesses the distance.

It takes a long moment for Furiosa to focus the scope, to stop the shaking in her hands. At last, she hones in on the boundary line – those twisted, poisoned trees that mark the doorway home.

She hands Jack the scope, pointing again to direct his sight. “You can see the boundary line from here. Those dead trees on the edge of the forest. They were given a localized poison, one that wouldn’t spread through the roots to other trees. It was an extra cautionary measure to keep this place hidden – to keep anyone from thinking there might be water or life to find within.”

Jack lowers the scope, stands in silence beside her as the wind rustles against them, as if trying to nudge them onward. Without looking, he can sense the slight tremor in Furiosa’s frame. The awareness of her body comes naturally after so many runs together. Borne of the countless times they swapped the wheel of the war rig back and forth without ever losing speed; all the times they fired shots on instinct to defend each other, as if a part of themselves had taken up residence somewhere inside the other’s chest.

Furiosa never trembles. And so Jack asks the question that for so long went unspoken: “What is this place to you?”

She forces her gaze away from the horizon. Her eyes land on the space between their boots, the even smaller space between their hands, resting at their sides.

Fear is no stranger to her, but this is fear of a new kind. It threatens to freeze her through, to turn her to stone right here and now – with an end to her endless yearning at last in sight. She fears that if she takes a step towards it, it will all evaporate like a mirage, like the dream this must surely be. But if she takes a step away, she’s sure this threshold of possibility will be lost to her forever.

So she nudges the back of her hand against the back of Jack’s. To make sure this is real. To know this isn’t some trap – that it’s not some deeper mire of despair that awaits her, if she allows herself this most illicit of all treasures: hope.

It isn’t until she feels Jack’s calloused fingertips slide between hers that she lets the vault deep down in the heart of her unlock.

She looks up into his face when she says it: “Home.”

*

Jack moves their supplies from the car to the bikes, while Furiosa wires a new kill switch into the engine. One sure to be wickedly uncrackable to anyone other than the two of them.  The car won’t be leaving the mountaintop without them – even if anyone else manages to scale the route up to this perch.

They kick off on the bikes at dawn, with the goal of making it past the boundary line with the sun still high in the sky. Furiosa doesn’t know exactly what awaits them after so many years gone, so they’ll want daylight on their side.

As they ride, she has to keep her head down, her gaze trained on the terrain passing beneath her wheels. She stops herself from glancing up, from measuring the shrinking distance to the boundary line. It’s the longest ride of her life.

She keeps waiting to feel it – that long-dormant, locked away part of her bursting free, rearing its head in recognition of its birthplace. To feel it catch like an ignition line inside her. For all these years, she convinced herself that her return to the Green Place could reverse the parade of horrors her life had become, could erase the bruises and singe marks the outside world imprinted into her body and psyche - rewire the ways it contorted her soul.

She always told herself: one day she would return to the place of abundance that birthed her, and the belonging would transform her. Returned to the embrace and acceptance of the Many Mothers, Praetorian Furiosa would peel away from her like a chameleon skin – soon becoming as unrecognizable to her now as that woman would have been to the unblemished girl of her youth.

They ride on; still nothing moves within her but nerves. Only the cloying grip of anticipation, its weight expanding in her chest. She held her dream so close, so tight to her heart for so long. Now that it breathes air, taking corporeal form at last, she finds something confounding in its texture. A weave, color, and tone her memories had long brushed flat and greyscale. A mother tongue become foreign to her ear.

At last, she hears Jack’s engine gentling beside her. She leans on the brakes, bringing her bike to a gradual stop beside his.

Her heart pounding, her vision is too bright, too sharp as she at last looks up into the dead branches; as she peers through the slumping, decayed trunks in attempt to see what lies beyond. Whether she’ll find the rose-blurred memories of her childhood within, their joyful abundance so distant and inconceivable, it may as well have been another planet, another age entirely.

Jack waits for her to dismount first, following her lead. Boots on the ground, they leave the bikes in the cover of the outermost tree line. It’s already quieter here, the wind blocked out and the whispers of the sand fading behind them.

Moving by habit, they each sling a rifle over their shoulder before they venture any further.

Furiosa hesitates. It’s so unlike her, but she can’t seem to help it. She’s abruptly weighed down by the unfamiliar, paralyzing force of possibility. She’s not even sure what exactly she hopes to find, she realizes. And yet she’s lightheaded with expectation all the same.

She senses Jack at her side, then feels his touch. Feather-light, just his fingers tracing the stars inked along her inner wrist.

“You know this place,” he murmurs, soft in the too-quiet stillness. “Nothing can take that from you.”

“What if…” she stops when her voice falters, feeling so fucking foolish. Why can’t she just put one foot in front of the other – like she always has, ever since the day she was taken from this place?

Jack’s thumb strokes across the pulse in her wrist, a silent bid to calm its breakneck pace. She takes a deep, steadying breath. She knows she has to let the words out, before she can move forward. “What if this place doesn’t know me anymore?”

His hand leaves her wrist. Instead, it lifts towards her face, brushes a lock of her hair behind her ear. The strands are matted, filthy, yet Jack touches them as if she were embossed in gold.

“Your magnificence is unmistakable.”

She reaches up for his hand without thinking. She clasps it in hers, holding his palm briefly against her cheek. She savors its size, its perfect weight. And it’s so steadying, the way she needn’t second-guess or overthink the instinct. Like breathing, like driving. Like being home.

She gives his fingers a brief squeeze as his hand lowers back to his side.

“Let’s go,” she says to him. To all the past versions of herself who dreamt of this day. She hikes her rifle up her shoulder, and leads them all forward.

*

The Green Place is rich in quiet. Not an absence of sound – not a temporary break in the rev of engines, the bravado of male voices, the churn of violence and consumption. This quiet is full. It breathes, it lives – alight with bird trills and tree song, with the whispers of leaves greeting the afternoon sun, murmuring and gossiping among themselves.

The boundary line has grown wider than Furiosa remembers. It takes them full minutes to cross it, the trees around them warped and blackened with some new, unfamiliar sickness. But as she and Jack tread deeper, the bodies of the trees begin to straighten, to reach taller towards the sky. The boughs begin to soar above their heads, and naked branches begin to bear their organic treasures. Beneath their boots, sand gives way to dirt, dirt to soil, and at last, a carpet of verdant green.

And then, a deep-rooted instinct bursts free of Furiosa’s packed down, paved over soul.

“We’re nearing the settlement,” she murmurs to Jack, her voice automatically hushed. “We need to stay on the lookout for traps and watchmen.”

Jack shrugs his rifle off his shoulder, takes it in hand. But he keeps the barrel lowered, his finger loose against the trigger. The reverence in his expression matches that in her voice, his eyes scanning the towering trees with more awe than apprehension.

This place is disarming, beguiling to people like them, who’ve become accustomed to drought and desolation. Their senses are all out of sorts, overwhelmed in a wash of sensory overload. The cold steel of their guns is suddenly rendered strange, ill-suited to this place of color and warmth.

She leads them deeper into the forest, until they reach the sharp incline of a moss-covered rock wall. Furiosa is paralyzed for a split second, sure this is the place where a whip once snaked around her ankle, casting her down into imprisonment.

“Alright?” Jack asks quietly, stopping just beside her.

She startles, the cold clutch of the memory broken. She looks again. The light has shifted through the trees, and she scoffs under her breath for jumping at shadows. It isn’t the same place at all.

“We’ll need to scale the ridge,” she tells him, her voice as even as she can manage.

She takes a step back from the rock wall, tilting her head back and squinting up into the late afternoon sun. She might not recognize this exact spot, but her childhood years of scrambling up and down these natural rock defenses bubble up behind her eyes. These waning daylight hours - the long, low sunlight trickling down over the rocky ledges – the sight leaves her breathless; the familiarity like a knife behind her ribs, teasing long-suppressed memories out into the open.

Peach nectar on her tongue. Grass and cool stone beneath her toes. Her collection of shimmering pebbles in her pocket, smooth to her fingers. Valkyrie’s laugh.

She’s small once again, nimble and fleet footed.

Invincible. Untouchable.

“I’ll climb up,” she says, her eyes fixed on the top of the ridge as she slings her rifle onto her back, adjusting the strap across her chest. “I know this stone. There should be a rope ladder hidden at the top. I’ll throw it down to you.”

Jack lays his rifle aside. He lowers one knee down to the forest floor, links his hands together and holds them out to offer her the first foothold.

He’ll lift her up. She’ll raise him after her.

She toes off her boots. A hand on his sturdy shoulder, she steps into the cradle of his hands, and he launches her skyward.

She thrusts up her hands and catches a ledge. Her feet settle into divots in the stone. She finds her next handhold, two more footholds, and then she’s scaling her way up the wall. She’s weightless, shedding scars and misery the higher she rises.

She glances down and sees Jack watching her with wide, anxious eyes. He holds his arms half-outstretched, ready to throw himself beneath her lest she slip from the wall. She bites back a twitch of her lips as she shifts her focus back to her next foothold.

She crests the top of the wall, heaving herself up onto a grassy ledge. Whether she ever climbed this exact ridge or not, she knows every escarpment throughout this forest serves the same purpose – a natural fortification protecting the Vuvalini stronghold. Their settlement was built at the highest tier of the jungle, where the forest melts into a vast canyon nestled between two unscalable mountains. There, they had every kind of wealth imaginable – sunlight and wind to power their generators, streams of clean water tumbling down the mountainside, arid earth for the harvest.

A place of abundance, indeed, though the reverence and care with which the Vuvalini maintained their home, the lessons in temperance and restraint she’d been taught as a girl (“Never take more from the mountain than the mountain can replenish, Furiosa”) were so deeply at odds with the covetous greed she always heard in men’s voices, whenever they sought this legendary place.

Furiosa darts towards the trees nearest to the ledge. She searches the undergrowth beneath each of them, until she at last finds a worn, tangled rope ladder, wound tight and hidden beneath thick bushes. The secret ladders had been fastened at the top of nearly every ledge – a way to move those of the Vuvalini who were either too young or too old to scale the walls themselves, should there ever be need to flee the settlement.

She unwinds the ladder, double checks the knots that tether it to the tree. Just to be sure, she loops its length around another tree trunk for counterweight. Then, she leans over the ledge and drops the ladder down to Jack.

He climbs fast, feet accustomed to clambering in and out of the towering war rig making quick work of the ladder’s knotted rungs. It isn’t until he clambers over the top ledge that she realizes he’d carried her discarded boots up for her, holding them from their tops in his teeth.

“Revolting,” she comments as he hands them over to her, the hint of a smile touching her lips as she pulls them back onto her feet.

He scoffs. “Nowhere near as revolting as carrying mine.”

She pulls the ladder up, winding it up into a neat ring and stashing it away again.

They advance on from the ledge, neither of them bothering to shift their rifles back to the front of their bodies. They’re in the beating heart of the Green Place now, ensconced in its innermost sanctum. Only a few minutes of walking, and the trees have become heavy with fruit, ripe with bright hues of color and verdant green. Birds call to each other from the heights; small, quick-footed animals dart from branch to branch. The air itself changes, infused with warm, sweet scents – with moisture that cleanses her as she breathes it deep. Each inhale feels soaked in a whole day’s worth of water ration back in the Citadel. Each breath could make her weep for the cracked, hollow place her insides had become.

A bit farther, and they come upon a river. Furiosa knows the water’s source is a spring higher up the mountain, the water pure and fresh as a clear morning sky. It flows between banks the water carved across this level of the jungle centuries and centuries ago, leading to where it all tumbles down the rocky ledge in a waterfall, forming a pool of standing water far below.

The vegetation along the riverbanks is even brighter, even more vivid than the whole world of color and life surrounding them. Something about the river’s song, the rush of water flowing freely – wild, pure, uninhibited – makes her nearly weak with feeling. Feeling she’d hardened herself against so long ago, she’d nearly forgotten its healing, transfiguring touch.

She moves toward the river as if in a dream. A dream so familiar, repeated so many times until it became a torment across the long, desolate years of her struggle. There’s a wild, frantic fear fluttering like a caged bird in her chest, buzzing in her ears with each step closer to the water’s edge. Any moment now she’ll wake up. Some noise in the communal sleeping quarters will tear her from this place, and she’ll find herself trapped in the dim dank of the Citadel again.

Furiosa stands at the edge of the roaring river. She closes her eyes, lets herself savor the mist of water against her face. She feels her lips lilting upward of their own accord, a lightening in her cheeks, in her entire being. The feeling is hesitant, so unfamiliar. For so long, sensation was something to be warded off, curled away from. Sensation were things that cut at her, that wore her away and left only hurt and ache in their wake. But this… the mist of the river’s bounty, sweet and abundant, renews her. It pulls her toward the long-lost sun.

After a brief, bounteous eternity, she opens her eyes again, seeking out Jack. She sees him a short distance down the riverbank, on his knees at the water’s edge. From here, she can just barely make out wetness on his face, the drops more solid and sorrowful than what the river’s mist would leave behind.

She goes to him, murmurs his name as she approaches.

Just once, his shoulders heave. Just for a moment, his chin drops to his chest, his trembling hands reaching to touch the grass beneath him. Then, he lifts his head again, raises it all the way to the open sky.

Here, on this elevated plateau, the sky is nearly close enough to touch.

Jack’s shoulders relax, all of him loosened, relaxed and still. She’s never seen him like this, never could see him like this before. Bared to the world.

“I didn’t know,” he whispers, a soft rasp Furiosa comes closer to hear. “Even after seeing your seed… I didn’t know.” He does nothing to stop the fresh tears trickling down his face. “Believing would have hurt too much.”

Beneath the tears, he nearly smiles.

Furiosa lowers herself down to the grass beside him.

She confesses: “There were days when I started to doubt my own memory, that I had ever really seen this place with my own eyes. There were nights when… these memories joined my nightmares, when I couldn’t tell truth from horror any longer.”

She looks at him, but falls silent. Even as she thinks: And then I’d wake up, and see you next to me. And I’d find the strength to believe in the kind corners of this world again.

It’s Jack who reaches across the space between them, who clasps her hand in his own.

“Thank you.” His words are quiet and fervid. Like a prayer, an oath. “Furiosa. I…” His eyes are still wet, greener than even the water-nourished grass beneath them. His expression is like nothing she’s ever seen before. Full of all his quiet, formidable resolution – only its essence, its purpose is different this time. He watches her like she’s the open road.

Then the flame in his eyes cools. The creases at their edges deepen, and his mouth loses some of its weight. He reaches up – cups her cheek in his roughened fingertips.

“Thank you,” is all he says. And yet, those two words set something ringing within her. Something Furiosa isn’t yet ready to decipher.

She looks down into the flowing water, watches it dance and shimmer. The cool spray beckons her, welcoming her. It whispers to her that even after so long, some things remain unchanged, untouched.

When she reaches her hand down, she knows from the first touch of the cool waters. This place knows her. Recognizes her. Claims her.

The rushing water unlocks something, a memory long hidden away. A rite. One she watched countless times, performed on the banks of this very river.

She reaches down with both hands, cupping them together beneath the water’s surface.

“Lean forward,” she instructs Jack.

She lifts her hands from the river, water dripping from the bowl her hands have made. She meets Jack’s eyes, holds them for a shared heartbeat before she lifts her cupped hands to his mouth.

Jack closes his eyes as he drinks, his face slack with wonder. His fingers reach up to brush her wrist as she tilts her hands upward, pouring the treasure of this place past his lips, gifting it to him, its nourishment to his body.

He drinks until his lips kiss her palm. Her right hand, and then, deliberately, her left. Her fingertips brush the water from his lips.

This time, when she looks into his eyes, she’s distracted by the lingering smudges of greasepaint. How they darken his brow, in this place of light.

Furiosa reaches into the water again, wetting her hands. Then she lifts them to his forehead, beginning to wipe away his warpaint.

He says nothing at first, simply sits there, still and compliant before her. He leans down towards her ever so slightly, tilting his head towards her ministrations.

“We won’t need this anymore,” she murmurs to him.

She takes care as she cleans just above his eyebrows, keeping the grease from dripping into his eyes. Soon, the dark smudges are gone entirely.

Though she’s seen him without the paint before, something about the light, the breeze, the sun in this place accentuates his bare skin. Makes her keenly aware that they’re each on their knees before the other, that he followed her across the wasteland without even knowing what awaited them. That he let her remove this last piece of his armor; this last vestige of his praetorian status.

Here, he is baptized anew.

Jack. And the thought settles within her with rich, syrupy pleasure, a kind she thought long fossilized. My Jack.

His eyes lift to her own black-streaked brow. She watches him look down towards the water, though he makes no move toward it.

“The water is of your blood now,” she tells him. He doesn’t have to await permission. “I am Vuvalini, and I gave you the first drink. That makes you one of us.”

She doesn’t mention that no man born outside the Green Place has ever been permitted the rite. After everything, it hardly seems to matter.

“The water belongs to no one,” she continues. “We are simply one with it. We care for and sustain it as we would our own bodies, our own blood.”

There is renewed reverence in Jack’s face, as he gazes down again into the rushing water.

“Did someone give you the first drink? Years ago, right here in this same place?” he asks.

“Daughters of the Many Mothers are born Vuvalini, but it’s tradition for each of us all the same.”

For a moment, Furiosa’s throat clamps shut. Long-honed instinct tells her not to go on, not to speak of this. To do so would push on that splinter in her soul; it might shatter her irreversibly.

But here, today, in this place with Jack, she goes on. She fears nothing. She welcomes back the parts of her that ache.

“My mother would have given me the first drink when I came of age. If she’d lived. If I had never been stolen.”

Hearing that, Jack’s mouth stiffens. His eyes flash with something fierce.

“May I?” he asks, voice soft yet resolute.

You already have, she almost tells him. Every time he shot at the enemy bearing down on her before the one threatening him. Every time he slid to the passenger’s seat, offering her the wheel. When he stood before Immortan Joe and said, “If you want me to keep driving for you, she comes with me.”

He’d made her Praetorian. And it was the least of all he’d given her. The identity, the purpose, the belonging she’d found thanks to him… None of it would be stripped away with her war paint.

She swallows, whispers, “Yes.”

Jack wets his hands in the river. He begins to clean away the mask she’s worn, ever since that long-ago night when she escaped from Rictus.

She knew Jack’s hands would be gentle. She knew it from the way he’d stitched the wound in her shoulder. The way his touch had begun to work some improbable comfort to her, during their countless supply runs and quiet, stolen moments together.

To her, the way he touches her is as precious as the water itself. If she’s honest with herself, she’s not sure she could imagine a world without it. She’s not sure her Green Place could exist without it.

She closes her eyes as the water drips down her face, as Jack’s thumb wipes the grease and dirt and grime from her skin. Distantly, she recalls that wild pang of affection that struck her as she took in Jack’s bare face. What is he thinking, she wonders, to see her divested of her own armor?

You can see me, now. I am your Fury.

She opens her eyes when she feels his thumb brush her lips. And then, he lifts his cupped hands to her mouth, giving her the first drink of this new life.

She keeps her eyes open as she drinks. She wants to see him, want to know the water pours from his hands, as she swallows its sublime deliverance. She wants to be sure he’s there with her, as she feels the holy water transform her.

She watches his mouth shape her name, his eyes full of that flame again. Not hunger, not lust, no, nothing so crass and mundane as that. Jack’s fire is all his own, and if she had to pinpoint the moment she first saw it spring to life, she would think of the dim light of their oasis in the Citadel – the way he looked up to find her gaze, as he spoke of a noble cause.

One more step in the ritual. In their ritual. She reaches for his hand, brings it to her lips. She kisses his wet palm.

He whispers her name, audibly this time. He tilts towards her, the source of gravity always inexorably pulling him in.

Their foreheads come together, her hand drifting to the side of his neck. She sighs at the sweet rightness of it, as her bare skin brushes his, their usual layers of paint all stripped away. In her lap, his fingers tangle together with hers.

They breathe together. They fit together just as they always have. Furiosa and Jack.

As they at last drift apart, she asks him, “Ready to keep going? We should be nearing the settlement.”

He watches her for a long moment, silent. She watches his eyes trace her face with care – the slope of her cheekbones, the line of her nose. The shape of her lips.

“All the way,” he vows.

*

It is just as Furiosa remembers.

It is nothing as Furiosa remembers.

When she and Jack emerge from the jungle, the late afternoon sun low in the sky, they stand at the foot of a great canyon, nestled between two towering mountains. A great stone bridge runs from one peak to the next. Beneath it lies the stronghold of the Vuvalini, sprawled before them across the whole width of the canyon. High above them, massive windmills spin on and on forevermore, immune to whatever happens in the world below.

Only a few steps into the settlement, and Furiosa realizes the truth all at once. It’s a distant, detached realization, creeping from her very bones. It feels as far from her now as her dream of this place always has been, hidden and veiled in her heart.

She and Jack exchange a long look, as they both take in the quiet all around them.

Wordless, they split up as they approach the dwellings. Furiosa searches the homes to their left, Jack takes the right.

The first home she enters is cloaked in dust. Still clean, still orderly, as if its inhabitants had merely stepped out for an afternoon hunt. She searches the storeroom, finds its contents have all been methodically cleared away and moved elsewhere. This is the only evidence she needs to confirm what she already suspects.

She goes to search the next dwelling all the same, her body rapidly going numb. Her mind seems to keep tumbling in a senseless circle, misfiring like an engine that just can’t catch.

A second empty dwelling. A third. A fourth. No voices, no sound, no activity.

Until – Jack’s voice. Calling her over.

Furiosa emerges from another empty home, spots Jack standing across the way. He beckons her towards him. “Might have found something.”

This structure is larger than the others. She thinks she remembers it – a place for the community to come together. In one dusty corner, she remembers whispering, giggling with Valkyrie and the other girls. Trading flower blossoms and secret baubles. The memories are ghosts dwelling inside her.

The back wall is covered by handwritten notices and signs, tacked up in a haphazard array. But in its center…

She gasps. She rushes closer.

FURIOSA:

Her name is there plain as day, written in ink at the top of a sheet of parchment.

Her eyes hurriedly, desperately scan the words beneath her name. These words that were left behind for her. She scans them once. Twice. Again. Again. Her eyes move faster than her mind can follow.

A hollow pressure starts pressing outward from inside her lungs. A roaring in her ears starts drowning out the desperate scramble of her thoughts. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe.

She whirls away from the message, shoves past Jack, rushes out into the open air. In the quiet of the canyon, she falls to her knees in the dust.

There’s nothing but dust to be found here.

She stays there for a long time, rocking back and forth in the center of the place that birthed and raised her. She stays there, kneeling on the hallowed ground, until the sun hides itself behind one of the mountains.

Only then does Jack at last approach. He goes to one knee beside her, doesn’t try to touch her.

He asks only: “What did it say?”

Furiosa balls up her fists, presses them hard to her eyes, then to her temples. As if she could dig out the long-lost knowledge of her people, of her home.

She fought her way here. She escaped the entire wasteland. Everything she did was to protect the Green Place, and to one day find her way back here. Now, how could it be her own mind that betrays her like this? How did she not mark the betrayal, the slippage, escaping her like single grains of sand each and every day?

“I don’t know,” she whimpers, her voice cracking around the words. She can’t hold herself upright anymore. Her shoulders slump, her hands covering her face, all of her weak and weary and relentlessly homesick.

“I can’t read it. I’ve forgotten the letters.”

Of course her people left a message telling her where they’d gone, should she ever return to this place. And of course they’d written it in their own tongue, known only to the Vuvalini. One that would betray the location of their new home to no outsiders.

Is that what she is now?

She hears Jack’s voice as if from far away. “It may not have made a difference. Some of the words were worn away.”

It makes a difference. What am I, if not Vuvalini? Where will I go, if not the arms of the Many Mothers?

All becomes hazy and distorted around her, time and place all indistinct, past and future all elided. For so long, this hope was all she survived on. Will she simply crumble to nothingness without it? If she joins the dust coating the remains of her home, maybe she can at last be one with this place again.

But then, a tilt of the ground beneath her. She’s returned to her body, to the here and now. She resists at first. She snarls, trying to pull away. She’s an animal, conditioned to know all touch as confinement, all sensation as pain.

It’s Jack’s voice that first reaches her, that begins to bring her back to herself.  

Furiosa. Furiosa.

It could be her mother’s voice, in turns stern and doting. She was born into peace and abundance. Joy and unconditional acceptance. She was held, understood, loved.

No, not ‘was’…. Is.

There are arms around her, a larger body cradling her close. These arms around her begin to stitch her universe back together. The thread is a new color, but no less treasured. No less mighty. Gradually, she becomes aware of her body again, supported and held together by this immense force cradling her – the gentlest, most powerful thing she’s ever felt.

The voice again. The tone of her mother’s voice changes, dropping to a deeper timbre. And yet, she feels that love her mother first bestowed on her still burning bright, still shining deep at the heart of her. This is something she will always recognize, no matter how much time passes.

Furiosa. Fury. My Fury.

She gasps against Jack’s shoulder, full awareness crashing down on her all at once. He is an immovable, unquestionable presence all around her, perpetual as the sun and stars, unchanging as gravity.

Her gravity. Keeping her tethered to herself, to the here and now.

“Jack,” she gasps, her lungs heaving between sobs. All of her shaking with violent tremors, as she fights to go on. To overcome even this.

“I’m here,” he murmurs, his lips against her temple as he cradles her closer. “I’ll always be here.”

She wraps her shaking arms around him. She squeezes him so tight to her, it must hurt. He makes no protest, only continues repeating her name in a soft, soothing litany.

He keeps holding her as the sun sets, as the stars begin to cast their cool light over the canyon. Over this civilization that now belongs only to the two of them.

A long while later, he asks her: “Will we stay? Or keep searching?”

Impossibly, she curls still closer to him. She buries her face against his neck. She feels his fingers stroking her hair. She clings so tightly to the leather that is his second skin, she can feel each individual crack and seam. And yet, he holds together.

And yet, they both hold together.

“Stay.”

She finds the strength to pull away just enough to look up into his face. Washed free of the dirt, grease, and blood spray of the Fury Road. Yet when she looks into his eyes, she sees it all. Lives it all again. Every single second they’ve spent at each other’s side, fighting off the clutches of this ragged world together.

She reaches up to trace the scar, arching from his lip up across his right cheek. They’ve searched enough, each of them.

She looks into his eyes, and it’s all the Green she needs.

“Stay,” she repeats, her fingers stroking the rough, coarse stubble along his jaw. She thinks: what an improbable contradiction he is. A legend among road warriors, with a soul so ill-fitted to the role.

Maybe here, they’ll find the people they were meant to be. The dreams that were once theirs, before this world wrung them free of all but subsistence.

Who might she become? With freedom at her feet and Jack at her side?

“Stay,” he affirms, nodding slightly. He leans down into her, still holding her close. Their foreheads brush in a familiar kiss, drawing a sigh from each of their lips.

“It’s ours now, Jack,” Furiosa murmurs, her nose nuzzling his. “This place is ours.”

Chapter Text

Furiosa lies still, cloaked beneath low-hanging branches, a rifle propped on her shoulder. She’s lost feeling in her arms where they’re braced in the grass beneath her, but she doesn’t move. She hardly even breathes.

She waits for the deer to emerge fully into the clearing, waits for it to step directly into her sight line before she fires.

She pushes up to her feet the moment she sees the animal fall. She slings the rifle over her shoulder and darts forward, already unsheathing her knife.

“Shh,” she hushes the panicked, dying animal as she approaches. She kneels at its side, calms its thrashing with a hand on its flank, and makes the killing cut quickly, painlessly.

Once she’s sure the animal lies still, she closes its eyes, resting her hand there for a quiet moment. She whispers the familiar words that, after her first few hunts, had risen back to the surface of her memory.

“I give thanks to your spirit and swear to honor your sacrifice.”

At the rock wall, she ties up the animal’s carcass in the pulley she and Jack rigged up for just this purpose. All food supplies in the settlement had long been carted away, but they knew the jungle contained all the nourishment they could ever need.

Furiosa seizes the rope ladder and climbs quickly up the rock wall. At the top ledge, she takes the pulley rope in hand and begins lifting her kill up towards her, one heave at a time. Then she loads the carcass onto a flat sled, hitched to the back of a bike. She rolls up and stashes the rope ladder, then kicks off on the bike.

She spots Jack as she pulls into the settlement, working over one of the solar panels. While power had continued to flow uninterrupted from the windmills to the generators, the solar panels had accumulated a film of dirt and pollen, blocking their receptors. A few needed to be entirely rewired and repaired, where their cables had begun to fray in the elements.

He looks up at the approach of her engine, drops his tools and comes to meet her.

“She’s a beauty,” he says, admiring her kill as he reaches to unhitch the sled from the bike.

“That should last us at least a week, don’t you think?”

“At least.”

Jack drags the sled towards the shelter they’ve repurposed for dressing their kills, where they prepare the meat for chilling and storage. She knows he’ll be busy for a while, skinning the animal and separating the various cuts of meat for cooking, drying, and smoking. They use every part of the animal they can.

To them, the fruits of this place are even more treasured for their abundance. In their first days here, Furiosa had passed on to him those most foundational tenets of the Vuvalini: Waste not, cherish all.

They are not rulers of this place, but guardians.

Furiosa stows her bike and goes to wash. She pulls on loose trousers and a flowing tunic that slips off one shoulder. She and Jack had each accumulated a humble wardrobe of their own, gathered from what was left behind by the former inhabitants.

Later, after combing out her hair and weaving it back in a single braid, she enters the open-walled structure of the kitchens, where Jack rotates long spits of meat over the kitchen fire.

He casts her a quick look over his shoulder “Nearly done,” he tells her.

Furiosa retrieves fresh-picked greens from the refrigerating unit, cleans them under a faucet of running water. Even after any lingering sand has been washed away and the water turned off, Furiosa stands there for a moment in a dream-like trance, just smoothing her fingers along the leaves’ bright edges. Just watching the droplets trickle across the smooth surface of the leaves. She lets herself linger in the color, in a texture that had become foreign to her for so many years.

She carefully chops and seasons them, arranges them in dishes and lays them out on the table alongside the potatoes Jack already cooked and prepared. Then she takes a seat, curling a leg under her as she watches Jack finish cooking. He rolls the sleeves of his white henley a bit further up his forearms, then begins removing the spits from the flames. He starts cutting the meat into smaller sections, basting and seasoning it, separating off the lingering bits of fat and gristle.

It is in a similar state of pleasant trance that Furiosa watches him work. Her attention fixes first on his hands, where he handles a sharp knife and a long fork with the same fluid assurance with which he used to handle wrenches and winches. Her gaze drifts to his bare forearms, where she watches muscles tense and shift. With care, her eyes trace the familiar shape of his upper arms and shoulders, clothed in a henley similar to the undershirt he used to wear beneath his leathers. He takes comfort in certain routines and familiarities, she’s noticed.

At last, her attention wanders all the way up to his face. To her, the most comforting of all familiarities.

The focus in his expression, the concentrated tilt of his mouth – it reminds her of late-night hours spent checking over the rig’s engine together. It was one of the earliest habits he’d instilled in her, when he first took her under his wing: the night before a run, always check over every inch of the engines yourself.

Without fail, he would always find something to finesse or improve. She’d never heard him speak a disparaging word about the Black Thumbs’ work; he’d only impart concise instructions on how to prevent backfire, how to optimize fuel intake.

But now, it’s no longer the innards of the war rig he tends to. Instead, it’s the wild innards of a living thing – an animal she hunted; that he prepared and cooked to nourish her. She noticed some time ago that the most choice cuts of meat always find their way onto her plate. 

Partners in the act, as ever. She drives, he shoots; she hunts, he dresses her kills.

Over one of their first meals here, she’d asked him how he acquired this particular expertise. In the Citadel, no one so much as glimpsed protein in any recognizable, non-mashed form.

She’d watched his eyes become distant, fogged by years long past.

I was a wanderer. A long time ago. Half-rotted carcasses of roadkill, bony little excuses for birds, roasted over sad little roadside fires. He’d sighed, like the words weighed him down.  I felt half-life.

They don’t speak, as he puts the finishing touches on their meal. There is still something holy in this for the both of them, each and every evening. Something wondrous. Watching the fruits of this place be rendered into shapes and forms fit for their mouths. Savoring this bounty of organic treasure that gives of itself in abundance, in peace.

At last, Jack carries over a serving plate heaped with tender, steaming cuts of meat. Furiosa pours them both chilled glasses of fresh water, garnished with sprigs of mint. She’d come across the wild herb during last week’s hunt, picked it in rich handfuls.

As they do before every meal, they share a brief moment of quiet gratitude. To the animal whose life force will sustain them. To the earth that gives of itself so selflessly.

Furiosa cuts into the first slab of meat Jack places on her plate. She can’t help a quiet moan at the flavor, at the tender give between her teeth. She knows the wonder of freshly killed, freshly cooked meat will never dull.

Across the table, Jack watches her with a tiny but unmistakable lift of his lips, a satisfied gleam in his eye. She can’t even roll her eyes at him for it. Truth be told, she doesn’t mind it at all - the pleasure he clearly takes in her pleasure.

Not for the first time, she marvels at how he’s taken to their new life so quickly; how he treats this place with every bit of the fastidious care and devoted discipline he used to show his Praetorian duties, only without its austere detachment. As Praetorians, they’d had to face each day accepting that all could be lost, all could be sacrificed – that their rig, their crew, their very bodies were nothing but expendable tools for service to the Immortan and his supply trade.

If they’re honest with themselves, that conviction had already begun unraveling for each of them a long time ago. They never spoke of it, of course, the way their allegiance had slowly but irreversibly shifted. And though it had grown in Furiosa with all the slow temerity of a sapling, one day she’d looked over at Jack in the cab beside her and then, suddenly, felt its roots take hold. The war rig would return to the Citadel with both of them, or it wouldn’t return at all.

“About half of the solar panels won’t come back on-grid,” Jack tells her, once the ravenous pace of her eating slows enough for conversation.

“Is it going to be a problem?”

“Doubt it. Our energy needs are minimal, we could probably get by on the wind power alone.”

“What knocked the panels off grid?”

“As far as I can tell, just natural corrosion from exposure to the elements. The cables should have been cleaned or fully replaced regularly, but it looks like that didn’t happen for some years and the connections rusted out.”

This is only the most recent of many signs that the Vuvalini moved on from this place long years ago. Furiosa greets such evidence with a heartsick kind of resignation. At least she needn’t be tormented by wonderings of how much difference a few months or years might have made – of what might have been, if she could only have found her way back here a bit sooner.

“Did you check the seedlings?” she asks.

Jack nods, an irrepressible smile growing as he speaks. “Corn is coming along beautifully, shooting up like it’s got somewhere to be. The cabbage and tomatoes need a bit more coaxing, but I think they’ll do just fine.”

“Should we weed a bit tomorrow?”

“Good on. The strawberries should be just about ripe for picking, too,” he says, watching her with a small, knowing smile as she looks up from her plate, eager at the thought.

The two of them appreciated their rare veg rations back in the Citadel, sure enough, but nothing compares to tending their own gardens, overseeing their own harvests. Nothing compares to the sweet burst of a fruit’s juices, running free across the tongue.

When they first arrived, Furiosa had feared that the Vuvalini had taken their great seed repository with them and left none behind. But to their great fortune, she had remembered her way down into the deepest, most secret tunnels of the settlement’s central storerooms. There, they’d found a single dust-coated bundle of cloth on the otherwise empty shelves. Anyone else might have ignored it, but Furiosa recognized it for the treasure that would keep them alive.

While Jack lifted a lantern, Furiosa had reverently unfolded the bundle. Inside, jar after jar after jar of carefully sorted, carefully preserved seeds. More varieties than they could count, all neatly labeled and secreted away.

“How could they leave such a thing behind?” Jack had asked.

It had taken time for Furiosa’s voice to return, taken time for her to uncurl from where she’d been holding one of the jars to her heart. With a trembling hand, she’d reached into the knot of her hair and carefully withdrawn the peach pit – the single piece of this place that had sustained her spirit for all this time. She held it close to the jar in her hands, held it close to its brethren.

“They have more, many more,” Furiosa had explained. “This was a gift to the earth itself. That one day it may flower once again, even after the Vuvalini have passed on.”

She and Jack had undertaken every step together, with all the same thoroughness of planning a supply run. They’d done their best to match each seed to its optimal climate and planting season; chosen which garden plot to prepare first; tilled the soil; drawn water for the seedlings and prepared compost.

There’s nothing she loves more than sinking her hands into soil, more than tending its growth. She savors each and every task, no matter how laborious, knowing that each planting, each harvest fills her home with fresh life again. Nothing is more comforting, more reassuring, than knowing she and Jack have everything and anything they could ever need.

Even still, Furiosa finds it nothing short of miraculous. To pull up a potato from the earth, to cut away a handful of bright spinach leaves, to pluck a tomato or a handful of grapes right from the vine. When they harvested their very first crop – carrots, potatoes, and onions –she’d been overwhelmed by tears, by this wonder of the generous earth.

Even still, months later, every single meal is seasoned with a dash of that same wonder.

They clear the table together, lovingly tucking away the rest of the food into the refrigeration unit. They play at bickering over how to best smoke the venison. Furiosa contends that he always over-smokes it; Jack maintains the smoky flavor is just right.

She finds herself watching him as he leans down to douse the coals beneath the stove. Watches the hair falling across his brow, curtaining his eyes. He doesn’t keep his hair grease-slicked back anymore, letting it fall where it may. She notices how much it’s grown, reaching nearly down to his collar. He doesn’t seem to bother tending to it, not like the faint beard he keeps neat along his jaw.

He straightens up again. Without much thought at all, she reaches out to brush the unruly strands away from his eyes.

“Green is really in your blood now. You’re going a little wild.”

At first, Jack just makes a rumbling sound of acknowledgement in his chest. He watches her, his eyes soft and half-lidded.

“Tame me back into shape?”

She lets her fingers linger, watches his eyes slip closed as she smooths his hair back from his brow.

“I’ll get my knife.”

His knife, once. Now made hers. The fact that she no longer keeps the blade constantly on her person is perhaps the biggest sign of how much her own blood already flows Green.

Jack sits in the arched doorway of the large communal room, elbows resting across his knees as he gazes out into the sunset, painted in watercolors across the canyon sky. Furiosa perches behind him on a low stool, her legs bracketing his bulk.

They’ve adopted this space for their makeshift bedroom – its similarity to the communal sleeping quarters in the Citadel needing no spoken acknowledgement. Neither of them had any interest in claiming a separate dwelling for themselves, in sleeping and waking without the other’s body close at hand. It was a bittersweet realization, when they wordlessly dragged bedrolls side by side on that first night, the edges of their blankets meeting at the center of the open, moonlit space.

As it turns out, not all habits from the Citadel were things to be left behind. A few, despite all odds, had even become cherished. And those few, the two of them carried with them, all the way across the sands.

Furiosa takes an unhurried, indulgent moment surveying the job before her. She combs her fingers through Jack’s hair, taking care to part it evenly, to tease her fingertips along the uneven ends. She notices how the sunlight catches on the single streak of gray at his temple, something warm and appreciative in her chest.

She plans her approach methodically, languidly.

“Still haven’t gotten used to it,” Jack murmurs. Furiosa feels the rumble of his voice more than hears it – feels its warmth spread from his body into hers, where she’s folded forward over his shoulders.

“Hm?” she hums, gathering a handful of hair at his temple.

“Being this clean.”

She huffs a laugh, though it’s true. His hair is – by their standards – pristinely clean. Exceptionally soft. Daily washing is a kind of decadence all its own.

“Clean skin still makes me feel a bit naked,” she admits, as she slides her fingers into the rings of the knife, taking its familiar shape in hand.

Jack glimpses the flash of the blade from the corner of his eye. He leans back into her a bit further, his body falling still more slack.

As she begins to trim his hair, his arms come to rest over her thighs, bracketing him on other side. His hands fall to the floor on either side of her feet. She follows his hairline, trimming as she goes. As she works, his fingertips ghost along her ankles, bare as her feet.

She works her way to the back of his head, lifting and trimming sections of his hair as she goes. Something about the sight of his neck, bared and relaxed, makes her ask:

“Do you ever miss your leathers?”

She feels him hum in thought, feels him settle a bit deeper into the space between her legs.

“I still find myself reaching for them most mornings,” he admits. “Years of habit are hard to break.”

Snip. Snip. Somewhere out beyond the doorway, one owl calls to another. He tilts his head when her fingers nudge him to do so. Snip.

“They were more than a uniform,” he muses, his voice a lazy murmur. “Sometimes they felt like the only thing holding me together. The only thing between me and the wasteland madness, when the endless empty days threatened to scrape me dry.”

Furiosa tilts his head forward, begins to trim the hair along his collar.

“You’re the most fully alive person I ever met, out there,” she objects.

He breathes out a noise from deep in his chest, something like amusement. “Yeah, well.” Where his fingers had been drifting back and forth across her right ankle, now they lightly encircle it. “That was after you.”

She cuts the rest of his hair in silence. Once she’s finished, she sets the knife down beside her even as her other hand remains at the nape of his neck. His warmth, the shape of him loose and wholly unbound between her legs, she isn’t ready to move away yet. She draws him that small bit closer against her, guiding his head back to tuck beneath her chin. One hand remains in his freshly trimmed hair, her thumb stroking along his temple, the other sliding down to rest against his chest, holding him to her.

No leathers. No warpaint. No disguises. Just the soft fabric of his henley; just him, softer still beneath it.

He is utterly still, utterly relaxed in the embrace. He breathes slowly, deeply. She feels it, aligning with her own. She feels his thumb tracing shapes along her inner ankle. The only time she feels him move, it’s accompanied by the brush of warm lips to the inside of her elbow.

They remain there beneath the rising moon, as the creatures of the jungle begin to tune their nighttime songs. They remain there, soaking in the soft sounds and sweet scents filling the air – fresh-turned earth, petals of night-blooming flowers, the distant susurration of a waterfall.

Life teeming in the very air. Overflowing with it.

“Let’s go to bed,” Furiosa murmurs to him, when the late-night chill begins to outpace the warmth of each other’s skin.

Jack rumbles a soft, sleepy noise of agreement. His hand slips from her ankle as he stands, only to find her fingers as they move inside.

They change into soft cotton sleep clothes, disrobing and dressing before the wardrobes they’d each moved into the space, the drawers gradually filling with clothes collected from the other dwellings.

Back in the perpetual hustle of the Citadel, amid the impersonal crush of bodies, necessity had often demanded that they change their leathers or strip off blood-spattered clothes in each other’s presence. In what feels another lifetime ago, she’d stripped off her shirt without a second thought once he had the needle sanitized and prepped, ready to stitch up the knife wound to her shoulder.

She’s seen Jack unclothed before, yes, brief glimpses in hurried moments of preparation for a run, or the urgent scramble to staunch bleeding or cauterize a wound. Before, their bodies were tools; weapons to keep well-polished and well-fed, just like their guns. The longer they drove together, and the more aware she became of his physicality, the easier her own shaped itself to his.

On a run, there were moments when she would forget his body was a separate entity from hers. Track enemies, watch the road, fire out the window, defend their backs – it all became seamless. Two bodies that worked as one.

Before, she’d had no more inclination to look at his bare body than to look at her own.

But now…

Here, where their bodies need no longer be machines, but rather living things to nourish and tend to with care, just like this green paradise all around them…

Here, now, she feels the urge to look.

After a single surreptitious glance over her shoulder, after a quick glimpse of Jack’s bare back before a grey shirt slides down over it, they lay down side-by-side. Two bedrolls with so little space between them, they may as well be one.

Furiosa watches the ceiling for a moment, listening to the quiet hum of the nighttime, to the distant calls of the jungle. She pictures Jack’s bare back again, the wide expanse dotted with scars. She imagines tracing lines and shapes from one to the next, mapping her way across shoulder blades and scar tissue. Her fingers twitch between them, longing to forge a new constellation.

She can’t sleep yet. Not until…

She begins to slide her hand towards him, but it immediately bumps against his. Already on his way to her.

He slips his fingers between hers and holds on. Then, and only then, can she at last ease into sleep.

The nightmares still come sometimes, but less and less.

Chapter Text

The next day, they notice something odd about the tomato crop.

Furiosa kneels down beside the vine-wrapped stakes, then cups one of the fruits between her palms. She calls Jack over from two garden plots down, where he’d been digging up onions.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, picking up the tension in her voice. He stands beside her with his back to the sun, pushing a hand through his sweat-slicked hair.

“Look.” She plucks the tomato from the vine and stands, holding it out to him.

Jack’s brow furrows, a frown pulling at his lips as he inspects it. He gingerly touches one of the black spots blooming on the fruit’s skin, frown deepening.

“Are they all like this?”

Furiosa bends down to check a second and third tomato, a fourth. When she reaches for a fifth, she finds its skin soggy and mottled to the touch. Her lungs seem to contract, locking out all air.

“Not all, but some are worse.”

Jack breathes out in a rush, shoulder sagging. “This is the first time we’ve planted in this plot, isn’t it?” Furiosa nods, vaguely numb. “The first tomato crop three plots down grew beautifully. Maybe there were a few bad seeds, or something’s off in the soil here.”

The thought makes the very blood chill in her veins. She lowers a hand down to the soil and sinks her fingers in, her pulse throbbing in alarm at the thought of some ailment buried deep beneath. Her mind rebels against the very thought.

“You’ve been watering the plots every day?”

“Yes, every morning,” Jack answers immediately.

“How do you know how much to water them? What if you’ve been flooding the soil?”

This time, he hesitates before answering. “I always try to watch how much water soaks in, try not to leave standing pools.”

“What about the fertilizer?”

“What about it?” he asks, voice perfectly neutral.

Furiosa abruptly pushes to her feet. She doesn’t look at him directly, her hands balled into tense fists at her sides.

“You mixed the last batch, didn’t you?”

A longer pause now before Jack responds, his words careful and measured. “I did. I prepared it the same way we’ve prepared every other batch.”

“So many variables. So many things we could have done wrong.” She stares at the vines for a long, tremulous moment. She is overwhelmed by their vulnerability, by their priceless worth.

 “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” she bites out. “Especially you.”

“Hey-” Jack starts, then cuts himself off with a brisk snap of his jaw. Furiosa whirls and stomps off from the gardens without another look or word spoken.

Jack stands over the crop for a time, long enough to watch the shadows of the tomato stakes lengthen in the afternoon sun. Finally, he kneels down and begins to harvest the healthy tomatoes from the vines, laying them carefully into a basket. He leaves the few mottled fruits in place. They’ve never faced this problem before – it isn’t his place to decide how to dispose of the spoiled crop.

Furiosa avoids the kitchen that evening. She carries a plate of food outside and sits in the shade of one of the dwellings across the way. After a time, she sees Jack leaning against the doorway of their room, watching her even as he makes no move to approach. She turns to face away. She bites into the next strip of venison with renewed force, chewing hard.

She remains there as the sun sets, gazing over the garden plots, contemplating this humble kingdom she and Jack have built.

She raises her hand to the base of her throat, prodding at the lingering tightness there. She and Jack aren’t building from nothing; they are stewards of all that came before. The beauty and bounty of this place bears a heavy weight, too – the duty to preserve the infinite legacies of her foremothers. To preserve this fertile site of life for future generations.

She isn’t ready to fit the vast shape of it all down into words Jack would understand. She isn’t sure she could. She briefly considers sleeping elsewhere, but the thought of lying down without Jack’s warmth at her side is too disagreeable to contemplate seriously.

She waits until she senses him go inside, hopes he might be asleep already when she at last comes to bed.

Later, she finds him still awake, curled in a chair as he mends a shirt. Her shirt, she realizes. She nearly rolls her eyes at the cheap appeal to sympathy.

“I double checked the fertilizer,” he says, voice quiet, cautious. “We’ve used the same batch across four different plots. None of the others showed any issue. If there is some problem, it seems localized.”

Furiosa shoves a drawer closed with a satisfying thunk. “We don’t know that,” she replies, voice tight. “I hardly remember anything about tending the crops, and I was born here.”

Jack’s jaw tightens, but he falls quiet again. He looks down, focusing on the last few stitches to close a small hole in one of Furiosa’s favorite shirts. He forces himself to keep focus until he pulls the last stitch tight and trims the thread.

When he at last looks up, Furiosa is already wrapped up in her bed roll, an arm thrown over her eyes. He listens to her breathing, feels out its cadence. Senses some of what lies beneath.

He hates his helplessness in the face of the weight, the tremor he hears within her. He senses it from her so exceedingly rarely.

He offers the little he can: “I’m sorry. I thought we were being as careful as we can…”

“Don’t,” she cuts him off. She doesn’t lift her arm away from her eyes, keeping her face obscured. “Just don’t. You don’t know.”

Jack forces his gaze back to the shirt in his lap, swallows back words lined in thorns. Stomach in knots, he spreads the fabric over his knees, smoothing out the creases. He lets his mind fill with the soft brush of the cloth against his hands.

It took weeks, but the grease stains had finally faded from the creases of his palms, the dirt at last washed away from around his nails. For years, he’d come to think of all the grease and grime as a permanent part of him – inescapable.

For years, the only whisper of softness had been the woven wool blanket he’d prized most among his meager possessions. He remembers cleaning it every week, painstakingly brushing out dirt and dust from the threads. Tending to that blanket had been a treasured contrast to the constant onslaught of metal, gears, bullets, and boomsticks. To run his hand across the fabric at the end of the day was to remember, even just briefly, the soft spaces within himself. It reminded him he was more human than machine.

Now, in this place, his everyday overflows with sensory riches. He wakes to a pitcher of crystal clear water and bowls of berries, dazzling in their bright bursts of sweetness. His morning hours are full of silky soil, the smooth kiss of seeds, the brush of grass, leaves, sprouts, and clover. Glorious green bursting forth from living earth.  

His afternoons belong to Furiosa’s kills. The animals’ still-warm flesh is a thing of beauty and reverence. They hunt only what they strictly need – only what they know they can use without waste. Jack finds a use for nearly everything. The gristle and fat get churned into the fertilizer. The bones are saved to boil for flavor; later to hallow out for marrow.

The first time he’d cut into a fresh carcass, he’d done so with apprehension. But he found he didn’t feel himself a butcher. Rather, he’d never been more aware of his own precious humanity. Never had he felt more connected to the all-powerful cycles of nature, to the teeming life all around him. He too is full of quivering, vulnerable innards that would one day return to the earth to nourish others.

Sun that warms, never burns.

Rain. Miraculous, fulsome, life-giving rain.  A wonder that pours from the sky, in an abundance he’s never known before.

Furiosa.

His days and nights belong to her above all. As does he. Him, and all his quivering innards.

He can never make himself into anything other than an outsider. But he hopes, in everything he does, to show himself worthy of her trust and to honor this resplendent place. Every day, he does what he can to repay its boundless generosity.

How funny it now seems, to think he once presumed to teach her. It happened so fast, in hindsight. How quickly the tides shifted, how swiftly she became his guiding force.

Jack folds the shirt. Neat, crisp corners. A former soldier can’t do anything but.

His parents might not have put him in the same category, but it’s the only way he can make sense of all the conscripted violence that came to dominate his life. Soldiers don’t have the luxury of moral scruples or resistance, no matter how much his soul chafed beneath the mantle of Immortan Joe’s rule.

Driving in and out of Joe’s stronghold week after week, Jack had been plenty aware of the wretched and helpless, doomed to half-lives in the shadows of the Citadel. Their beseeching eyes, their sunken faces haunted his dreams. (They still do.)

And so he’d hidden his tormented soul behind the shroud of ‘soldier.’ He told himself that stability protected the wretched from the ravages of the wasteland, that even just one hungry mouth fed by the food he hauled made it all worth it. Once, that was how he lulled himself to nightly - even if troubled - rest.

Until the day his noble cause surged up from below the undercarriage of the war rig; until the moment when the world fell quiet before her splendor.

Jack tucks the shirt away in the topmost of Furiosa’s drawers. He douses the lanterns, cuts the power, and slips into his bedding. Beside him, Furiosa lies on her side, facing away. Their heads rest side by side these days, that precious bit closer than how they use to sleep in the Citadel.

He can tell she’s not asleep yet, but at least her breathing has calmed, shed some of its miserable weight. He finds no fault in her distress, nor in her anger. He shares it, to the extent he can. The sight of the tomatoes’ spotted skin had sent unease roiling through him as well.  

He understands her response, no matter the ache it engenders behind his breastbone. But as he closes his eyes, he finds blessing even in this. To be so close, to be such an innate part of her world, that the peaks and valleys of her emotions reach him with equal force. This, after she’d kept herself closed off to him and the world at large for so long.

Before he closes his eyes, he lays his hand in the space between them, his palm falling open and fingers splayed wide.

*

Morning sun nudges against Jack’s eyelids. As he slowly comes awake, he realizes the sun wasn’t what roused him.

No, that had been the warm weight curved along his back, half draped over him.

At first, he keeps his eyes closed and tries not to move. He pretends he’s still asleep, so he can savor the soft yet solid weight of Furiosa’s body curled to the shape of his own. He catalogues each sensation, each delectable point of contact.

Her knees tucked against the backs of his legs. Her arm draped over his side, her fingers resting in the folds of the blanket covering him. Her upper body in perfect alignment to the curve of his back, like a stream’s water meeting the shore. Her quiet, steady breathing – the warmth of it against the nape of his neck. He feels her head tilt closer into him, feels her lips brush ever-so-lightly across the skin just above the neckline of his shirt.

He shivers. He can’t help it. He holds his breath, fearing she’ll draw away.

But when Furiosa realizes he’s awake, she only curls herself still closer around him. She only holds him more tightly, her fingers sinking into the fabric right over his heart.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. Jack can feel the penitence in her voice, can feel it against his skin.  

Jack shakes his head slightly, not wanting to dislodge her hold on him. He moves a hand to rest over hers, hooking his fingers around her wrist. Keeping her there.

“’s alright,” he murmurs back, voice still fuzzy with sleep. “Don’t apologize.”

Then he feels her press her face closer against his neck – close enough that he can make out the flutter of her eyelashes along his skin. He feels her hold on him tighten a little more, drawing him that slightest bit closer against her.

“I just… I wasn’t thinking straight,” she says, and he can sense the effort it takes to keep her voice steady. “I couldn’t face the thought that something could be wrong with the seeds or the soil. I thought: we had to have done something wrong, but… both of us. It was the truth, when I said I hardly remember tending the crops as a child. We’re on equal footing here.”

Jack’s thumb roams across the back of her hand, moving in soothing circles. He stares out the windows, into the brightening blue of the morning.

“It might be hard to recall the details, but… you have an innate understanding of this place. That was clear to me from the moment we arrived. Whatever your instincts tell you… that’s how this place speaks to you. It tells you what it needs.”

She buries her face against his neck, her voice shrinking a bit smaller. “What if I can’t understand? What if I’ve forgotten this language, too?”

At that, Jack shifts in her arms, turning over to face her. He curves an arm around her, keeping her close. Their heads rest side by side on the same pillow.

He savors her early-morning details. The pillow crease beside her eyes. The wisps of her sleep-mussed hair, wreathing her face like a crown.

“A mother tongue never really leaves you,” he says, quiet yet sure.

Furiosa nearly tastes the words, straight from his lips to hers. The way it sends some ancient, unfathomable shiver of warmth through her – she thinks she understands.

Some things live in this world beyond language. Beyond reason or bare description.

She needs to trust herself. The same way Jack seems to trust her. The same way she trusts him. Implicit – abiding in a place beyond fear.

She finds her lips parting, finds herself suddenly hyper-aware of his proximity, the mere breath separating his mouth from hers. Her fingers flutter where they’re draped over his side, skimming across the folds of fabric between her touch and his skin.

How can it be so simple, to be so entangled with him? After all the penury and peril she’s lived through, physical proximity like this was long unthinkable. And yet, for the very same reason, waking in the cradle of Jack’s body each morning is a richness beyond all name. It is a dream, an impossibility made corporeal. Every morning, it is a rebellion and renunciation of the Wasteland’s merciless solitude. It is the very meaning of deliverance.

Then: what is she to do with it? This immensity straining her chest when she’s this near to him; so deeply and dearly wrapped up in him? Is there some way to release this sweet, heady pressure building inside her, or must she find a way to make more room for it behind her ribcage?

She watches Jack watch her. Watches his gaze drift down to her still-parted lips. Green. His eyes are pure Green. Like he was always meant to find his way here with her. To this place. To this bed.

She feels his fingers brush her jaw. Then, ever so softly, the corner of her mouth.

The immensity within her pulses, grows. She’s sure Jack must be able to sense how her heart is suddenly racing. She wonders if he understands why, even when she can’t make sense of it herself.

“I love the way your voice sounds,” he murmurs - a quiet, intimate rumble behind the words that sends some pleasant tingle of warmth down Furiosa’s back. He hasn’t looked away from her mouth. “I’ll get spoiled, hearing it so much.”

Something about that idea suddenly and primally appeals to her. Jack, spoiled by her doing.

Furiosa feels a bit lost, but hides it best she can. She puzzles together, then discards several replies. Before she can craft something adequate, Jack seems to rouse himself from the early morning spell. He seems to remember in a rush that there’s a world outside this space they inhabit together.

His hand drops away, as he cracks a quick, easygoing smile. “I’ll go start the tea.”

Furiosa lazes alone in the blankets for a while, indulging herself. Wondering what to make of this strange, piercing sort of ache in her chest. She reaches an arm out across Jack’s bedroll, as if she could gather the remnants of his body heat like little gems to hoard and admire in the light.

*

Later, they inspect the tomatoes again, together. They count seven in total mottled on the stalks. They carefully look through the crop Jack harvested the day before, ensuring no spoilage went unnoticed. To their relief, the rest of the crop appears faultless, the red tomato skins bright and smooth.

“We’ll stop using this plot,” Furiosa decides. “Like you said, whatever this is seems localized, and no fault of the seeds.”  She gathers up the spotted fruits, holding them gingerly. “I’ll bring these hunting tomorrow. I’m sure some creature could still make a meal of them.”

Jack nods, meeting her gaze. They move on with their day. For now, that will be that.

*

“You’re not even trying! You’re letting me win,” Furiosa accuses, her eyes sparkling.

Jack scoffs, all feigned offense as he picks up the dice again. “Must you beat me and mock my losing strategy?”

Furiosa rolls her eyes, biting back a grin as she shuffles the cards. “You don’t even have a strategy.”

“I’m still a novice here. Give me time.”

She deals the cards again, unable to hold back the flash of a smile at the familiar words.

“Don’t you think cards are rather easier to pick up than road war?”

Jack huffs a laugh under his breath, leaning back against the wall of their bedroom as the final sliver of sun sinks behind the mountains. “We can’t all be such fast learners.”

Furiosa deals the last card with a flourish of her wrist and a teasing gleam in her eye. “Maybe I’m just a natural.”

Jack picks up his cards, fans them out in his hands. “There’s no doubt of that,” he says, his smile all fondness.

*

That night, Furiosa dreams a mangled chaos of what was and what might have been. Before her stands the heavy iron gate of the Bullet Farm, Jack locked behind it along with all manner of bloodthirsty gunfire.

The memories race past in a blur of urgent terror and resolute determination. Ducking through the gate, watching the rig through the sniper scope, then Dementus’ rocket hurtling towards her. The suffocating darkness of dust and dirt, burying her alive beneath.

Air and light again, then gunning the motorcycle, rope in hand, as she watched the rig slip closer and closer to total destruction, nearly taking Jack with it.

His hands at her waist, his warm weight behind her as she sped off with him tucked safely behind her.

We’re good.

The all-consuming way he’d looked at her, as she laid out their route.

All the way.

Then, the growl of Dementus’ motored monster, roaring after them. Jack firing out the window. Those massive tires grow nearer and nearer in the rear view, and Furiosa shudders in her sleep.

He wasn’t supposed to get this close, not close enough to threaten them. This isn’t how it happened.

Furiosa brakes, wheels the car around, slips into the dust cloud from Dementus’ wheels before fanging it hard in the opposite direction.

Dementus follows. He gains on them.

She shoots, but then her arm catches between the vehicles. A shredded mess, and Jack bloody in the seat beside her.

The car flips. In the darkness, there is only the distant but unmistakable touch of Jack’s hand to her shoulder.

Then rough, foreign hands dragging her, throwing her down. Dementus’ voice, droning in the distance. More hands wrench her to her knees and the entire world is agony.

And she has only one thought. One need, above all else. Only one thing matters anymore.

Jack. My Jack.

Moving, speaking, breathing, it all comes with pain. Until she finds him beside her. Until her fingers shape themselves to the curve of his jaw. Until the warmth of his breath melts into the brief, perfectly imperfect slide of his bloodied lips against hers. There, then torn away in an instant.

My Fury.

Then the rev of engines. The clink of chains.

Furiosa thrashes until she screams.

*

Jack’s voice calls her back. Calls her home.

She lurches up from the tangle of blankets, chest heaving and sweat plastering her hair to her face. For a moment, she can’t breathe. That cloud of dust is everywhere – in her eyes, in her mouth.

“Furiosa,” Jack murmurs, soft beside her. His hand remains at her shoulder, still and steadying. Anchoring her to the here and now.

The dust clears with the fog of dreams, and for a moment Furiosa is back in the Citadel. She wakes in the dark, pulse racing and fear spiking as she struggles against the quicksand of her nightmares. And then she need only look up and see him there beside her. Silently watching over her, an oasis of calm with concern and care in his eyes.

She need only see him. Then she knows she’s safe.

Gradually, the night-time songs of the Green Place filter back into her awareness. The hoot of a distant owl. The soft hum of the wind between the mountains. They’re away from all that now. From the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, all of it. And this latest horror she dreamt… it wasn’t real. She digs her nails into her palm and reminds herself they’re safe. The both of them.

 She recalls the great tremor of the earth beneath the wheels of the V8. That yawning chasm of darkness, swallowing Dementus’ vehicle whole. The warlord and his goons sucked down into the ground, where they can’t ever reach her or Jack again.

“Alright?” Jack asks in a soft rumble. At her shoulder, she feels this thumb tracing a soothing path back and forth.

Furiosa tries to nod, but shaking off the dream doesn’t come as easily as it should. It lingers, its despair clinging like cobwebs. The ghost of a world where she lost everything haunts the room.

She tilts towards Jack until her forehead rests on his shoulder. She curls closer, until she feels his arm loop gently around her back. Against her temple, his lips form soft sounds.

Furiosa shudders, a stubborn chill in her bones.

“It felt so real, Jack,” she manages to whisper. “Real and horrid.”

His other arm comes around her now, along with one of the blankets. “Tell me.”

“I got you out from the Bullet Farm. We were driving off, Dementus bearing down on us. But then… the rest was very different.”

She shivers again, not wanting to put the horror and hopelessness to words. She doesn’t know if there are words enough to capture such darkness. She takes a deep breath, steadying herself with a hand against Jack’s chest.

He’s real. He’s here, whole, alive and with her. This is what’s real.

She wets her lips. Forces out the words. She hopes that to speak them will be to thieve away their power.

“No earthquake came. Dementus caught up to us. We were both injured. Captive, on our knees. I reached out to you. We knew the end was coming.”

She tilts her head closer to him, forehead nestling against his throat. She breathes in the sweet spice of his scent, tightens her hold on him. A spark rekindles in her, snarling as it wards off the shadows.

Just try to take him from me.

“And you called me your Fury.”

Beneath her hand, she feels how his breath hitches, how his chest rises and falls. One of his hands shifts to the nape of her neck, loosely cradling her to him. She feels his cheek press to her forehead, his head tilting closer to hers. His other hand comes to cover hers, holding it tight to his heart.

“You are, aren’t you?” he murmurs. At first, his voice wavers between declaration and hesitancy. Then, it holds nothing but certainty, deep and strong as a tree with ancient roots.

“My Fury. Magnificent, relentless. And I am your Jack.” His fingers move gently along her neck, until his forehead comes to rest against hers. Familiar as a sigh, bright as sunrise. “I’m your Jack. And nothing could ever tear me away from you.”

His conviction is unshakable, unquestionable. Finally, the dream relinquishes its hold on her, slinking away into harmless fabrication. In its place comes the irresistible pull of the moment – the pull into him, the urge to be ever and ever closer.

Her attention shrinks down to nothing but his lips, so close she can nearly taste them already. In an instant, that brimming immensity overflows inside her, resurging from when she felt his touch at the corner of her mouth, felt the liquid heat of his yearning surrounding her, matching her own. Only this time, she doesn’t feel lost at all. She knows exactly what this impulse is; she recognizes exactly what this feeling means.

She’s going to kiss him. And this time, no one will drag him away. This time, no one will part them.

Jack makes a soft noise as their lips meet for the first time. A sound of yearning, wonder, and deliverance all at once. He clasps her hand tighter to his chest, as his other hand drifts up into her hair, gently tilting her head. His mouth moves against hers slowly, gently, even as she feels him trembling beneath her hands with the force of it, with the glory of all that sparks and flourishes between each brush of lips.

Her eyes closed, Furiosa’s being is entirely awash in sensation. In the soft warmth of Jack’s mouth, in the way her bottom lip slips so perfectly between his. She blindly reaches up with her free hand, fingers trembling as they find and cup his face.

For so much of her life, she could never have guessed at this. That something could feel like this – so powerful that it washes all the rest of the world away. Like safety and rapture are all her body has ever known.

For years, physical touch was a horror to escape, a danger to be resisted. Her fingers knot into Jack’s hair in incredulous disbelief, in a flare of anger at the world for depriving her of this wonder for so long. Gentle and almighty.

Jack is the one to draw back for air. Against her own body, she feels how he breathes deep, how his hands resettle against her with lively, restless energy. Like they’ve just raced through a firefight together and emerged unscathed, their attackers left crumpled and scattered in their wake.

Truthfully, this doesn’t feel so different. Furiosa blazes with triumph and wonder. They’re untouchable, the two of them, and she could live in this moment forever, could happily lose herself in this flooding rush of tenderness beyond all price or description.

“We should have done that a long time ago,” she breathes, her mouth tilted upward, still tingling with his kisses. It should feel strange and alien, this lightness of being. Instead, it settles within her like a native creature at last returning home.

Jack breathes out a noise that’s half laughter, half incredulity. He strokes a hand through her hair, from the crown of her head all the way down her back. “Fury,” he murmurs, breathless with feeling. His gaze on her is somehow both dazed and intent, hungry and satiated all at once.

She can see in his eyes that he has imagined and longed for this for a long time, but something held him back. All this time, something stopped him from being the one to close this last gulf between them. She doesn’t understand. She would ask, but she doesn’t want to waste a single second more.

She nuzzles her nose against his, lets their foreheads brush. She savors the way he sighs, complete contentment and unspeakable yearning all bound up in one breath, all coursing through him. She can feel it brimming from his body, from between his lips. He’s so alive beneath her, his arms around her as grounding as the earth, his sigh of her name as light as a breeze beneath her hair.

When she tilts her head that little bit further to kiss him again, Jack’s arms encircle her completely, drawing her over into his lap. He cradles her there as he tilts his head up into the soft brush of her mouth, as she hums happily against his lips, both hands now cupping his face. She gives his bottom lip a gentle, hesitant tug with her teeth. When he makes a rumbling sound of enjoyment, she has to wait for her grin to subside before she can do it again.

Slowly, she shifts her attention to his upper lip, letting the tip of her tongue briefly dip into the divot of the scar there. He gives a delicious shudder beneath her, before his lips tangle with hers with renewed, inexhaustible eagerness. Sliding together, then apart, then reuniting in ways and angles endlessly new.

 She strokes the stubble along his jaw with her fingertips, delighting in each new sensory experience, in his strong, firm edges as much as his soft mouth, his softer sounds, the tender strokes of his hands along her back, cradling either side of her waist.

She could happily drown in all of it.

In a brief flash, she remembers her dream. It can’t touch her here, in the circle of Jack’s arms, in the gentling, cleansing power of their kisses. It only makes her grip him that little bit tighter to herself, lends her kisses even more amorous delight.

This is what’s real, she reminds herself, as their lips come together in a long, unhurried embrace. He’s here and he’s mine. This time, our first kiss is not our last. It is the first of countless.

Eventually, they lay down side by side, limbs all tangled together on Jack’s bedroll. Their kisses turn sleepy and languorous, lapsing into the brush of noses and the quiet sharing of breath. The last thing Furiosa remembers before slipping back into sleep is the ache in her cheeks, unused to so much smiling.

*

Furiosa wakes to the dapple of sunlight across her face, to the curve of Jack’s body all along her back, his arm curled over her waist to hold her tucked back against him. She can tell he’s awake by the cadence of his breathing. When she shifts in his arms, she feels him nuzzle ever so gently into her neck.

Flying, fluttering things awaken in her chest, and she rolls onto her back so she can look up into his face.

“Good morning,” he rumbles, his voice light with his smile.

“It is, isn’t it?” she replies, biting her bottom lip.

Jack leans down, his head tipping towards hers. She watches his gaze trail from her eyes down to her lips. Even now, he seems to be awaiting some signal, even though it’s already been far too long between kisses.

Furiosa lets her eyes slip shut, as she tilts her chin up towards him. She parts her lips, silently welcoming his to fit against them.

She feels his fingers at her cheek, stroking her skin as he leans down to close the remaining distance.

Her hand settles along his neck as one kiss slips into the next, and she marvels that such abundance lived here all along. Simply waiting to be found, between and within themselves.

*

They kiss over the morning tea. Kiss the sweet stains of strawberry juice from each other’s lips. Furiosa leaves a long, lingering kiss on his mouth before she goes off to hunt. When she returns, Jack lifts her off her bike and kisses her before her feet can touch the ground.

*

That evening, Furiosa nestles back against Jack’s chest as they sit to watch the sunset. He slips his fingers between hers, resting their entwined hands on his knee.

Something about her dream still nags at her. The memory is vague, but she recalls the older Vuvalini talking about something like this. Dreams that weren’t dreams, but rather glimpses into other worlds.

“Jack?”

“Hm?” He sounds abruptly distracted, lifting his head from where he’d been gently nosing the side of her head.

“Do you ever get strange dreams? Like the one I had last night?”

He spends a minute in thought. “Nothing so terrible as that, no. But I dream about the Citadel, now and then. Some things that happened exactly as I remember them, and sometimes a bit different.”

Furiosa draws their entwined hands forward, studying the interlocking pattern their fingers make.

“I remember some of the Vuvalini would say their dreams were really visions. Of things that were, things that are, things that may be. They said it was something in the pure water of this place. Something that let them see across time and different turns of fate.”

She draws his hand against her heart, holds it there firmly.

“I think we’re exceedingly lucky, Jack. To live in this particular version of the world.”

Before they arrived here, before they escaped their lives at the Citadel, she could never have conceived such a thought. Life in the Wasteland offered nothing for which to be grateful. But now, she finds she means it. With every fiber of her being.

She knows that the promise she made to her mother all those years ago is finally fulfilled. At last, she’s found her way home.

“I’ve thought the same thing,” Jack murmurs from behind her, his voice soft and sincere. “Since the day I met you.”

At first, Furiosa wants to turn to look at him in disbelief. But then she feels how his arms tighten around her, and she stays in place. She feels his lips moving against her hair. He speaks in a hush.

“The moment I saw you surge up from under the rig… The world stopped around me. I used to wonder how this used up, barren world made a living wonder like you. When I saw this place, I began to understand. Still, you remain unparalleled. Fierce and radiant like a diamond, you are, forged under pressure and hardship. But so much more beautiful.”

“Jack…” Her eyes misty, Furiosa tilts her head back to find his shoulder. She feels him press a kiss just above her ear. She grips his forearms, draws them even tighter around herself like a blanket against the nighttime chill. “I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here with me. If I’d returned here alone…”

“Shhh,” he gently hushes her. “Don’t think on that, love. We are exceedingly lucky, just like you said. And we’re going to live every day appreciating just how much.”

She kisses his fingers. The hands that taught her road war, that stitched her wounds and showed her kindness in a world where she’d forgotten what the word meant. And then those fingers lift to her cheek, tracing the shape of her face with reverence. She turns in his arms, just enough to face him.

“My Jack,” she whispers, eyes closed, her whole body relaxed and given over to trust and affection.

She feels his lips brush her forehead, then form the shape of kisses over her eyelids. One, then the other.

“My Fury,” he whispers, voice hoarse with awe and feeling.

She parts her lips, and his fit to hers just as they were meant to. In any world, in any universe. Of that, Furiosa is sure.