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She asks him to stay, for once. Can't remember why he has to leave. Hues of green float dark and gentle in his peripheral; the early morning sea spray hangs in the air. Jessie's hair is soft and brown, a curly halo, and his forehead is mashed against hers when she tells him to get out--
He drags himself to consciousness in the driver’s seat of the rig, a soft, insistent voice at the window. ‘Fool’, it calls him. His head clears to see the youngest of the sisters, scowling at him from under a hood of worn animal hide, backlit by a pale morning. She turns away at Furiosa’s reprimand: a reminder the fool isn’t coming with them. Cheedo turns her frown on him once more, then drops from her perch on the door of the rig.
He tracks the girl’s movement until he catches the imperator in the side mirror, moving supplies and securing them to the bikes. It doesn’t take long to see she moves with a massive weight about her shoulders, even if her head is held high… Her words circle back on him, her plan. To ride as long as they can to cross the Plains. They all must know the implications. Reassures himself: they know what they’re doing.
He eases himself down from the cab and shuffles to the hold of the rig, collecting sacked greens, dry ration blocks, cans of guzz, and blankets, to load onto the bikes as well. Aside from an acknowledging nod, or receiving directions on what to tie onto whose bike, he works in silence with the women and the warboy. He helps one of the elders assemble a sled from scrap and parts of the plough of the truck, and hitches it to the bike with the second sand tire. The girls are quiet, too. All of them wear their gifts from the weathered women: pieces of the wasteland and of past places they once lay their heads, sewn together with hide and hair.
They give him a bike and supplies they should not have spared. He should wonder what Furiosa said to her people, that they would give him so much, for no barter and no violence. He doesn't. They know what they're doing.
There is a gravity in the group he recognizes, packing what's left of everyone and everything and running, in reckless hope of an impossible new home. He recognizes it’s not his place to follow. That he can't follow; that he wouldn't. It should scare him that he doesn’t want it, whatever is to be their new home, or wherever it is that they find their ends.
By the time the war rig is empty, the sun hangs high in a grey sky, mirrored by the sea of salt ahead, and the horizon swims lazily in the heat. He stays back, hovering near the bike fully loaded for him, watching. The women and the warboy all look in turns towards the emptiness with grim mouths and grim determination. He sees the degrees by which the Plains of Silence beckon them, pulling on something inside of them. He knows that same pull, of the endless calm of the surface, and of the riptide just beneath that had dragged him under when he once answered.
Furiosa emerges from the hold of the rig after a final sweep. She approaches him directly, a swath of black fabric in hand. He shifts his weight in uncertainty, in the inevitable. Meets her gaze until she’s within touching distance, warm hand outstretched, offering the scarf.
He has to refuse another gift; he’s been given too much already, and one of the girls would be better off with it. He hesitates, studies her face, a mirror of last night’s offer to go with them, carefully shuttered. Cautious. He saw her hardened disappointment when he refused to stay, remembers it more distantly on Jessie when he chose the road over her then, too. It’s hard to let-- Furiosa-- down again, even in this small way, so he reaches for the scarf. It slips over his head instead. As she settles the fabric around his neck, her chin inclines with finality.
He drops his hovering hands, even now still guarded, to his sides. ‘Hmms,’ his thanks. He knows 'goodbye' in many forms, many not so good. There’s a tide that recedes in him when she turns away, exposing an empty two-lane stretching before him in a world long dead, two broken bodies at its end. There’s steel in her spine when she walks to the foremost bike, and doesn’t look back. None of them look back.
They know what they’re doing.
They know where they’re going.
There’s the high roar of the small engines coming to life, and the tang of guzz burned fast in the ignitions. They’re a flurry of efficient movement, shifting as a single unit. He watches their descent, the dust their wheels kick up, the tracks the bikes make. It will be a good while before they vanish on the horizon from his vantage, but he stands, weight off of his bad leg, rooted. Regret eats away at his insides.
Glory knows this. He knows she knows what he’s doing. He turns at her voice, at the others' voices. Flinches when he faces the horizon again, hand coming up reflexively to protect himself, something shot at his head. Could swear it lodged in his hand-- The bikes are barely visible, specks far ahead by now. But so is Glory, a small revenant among the silent expanse of salt. She calls him ‘Pa’ relentlessly, knows just how much that eats at him, too. Guilt fractures the ground he’s made for himself, and cracks the walls he’s spent lifetimes building. Can’t reassure himself anymore, and… he knows Furiosa and the old women and the sisters and that warboy don't know what they’re doing. They don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know that their plan amounts to suicide, and don't know that the kind of hope they have for their impossible home is a mistake. He knows they don't want to acknowledge what they have to fix because neither does he.
But he also knows: the thing about mistakes is it’s easier to try to fix others’ instead of your own.
So he revs the bike left for him and redlines it, hoping to reach them all before his tank reaches empty.