Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

No one comes for them after the Bullet Farm.

Perhaps the gate holds. Perhaps Dementus fell to his death atop the crane they left him dangling from.  Maybe he saw that they weren’t heading for the Citadel and in an uncharacteristic fit of wisdom, decided to let them go and focus his maniacal energies on his planned conquest of the last fortress.

Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, there is no pursuit trailing after them as they round the escarpments, as they fang it over the Wasteland and into the East. And nothing interrupts them that night when they settle down in the sand beside the Plymouth Valiant, toe to tail as they always have, as the horizon behind them turns red as blood while the sky in the east darkens and the stars are revealed. Among them is Furiosa’s constellation, her guide home, hovering above the black shape of the rock mountains in the far distance.

And Furiosa wonders how they could have possibly been so lucky.

She glances over at the small pile of metal and leather to the side, made of the metal Citadel belt buckles that they had taken off and discarded first thing. They might not be able to get rid of the brands on their necks, but at least they can relieve themselves of those ridiculous things. Be free of the weight of them hanging from their waists, that irritating jangle that would follow them with every step they took.

Movement pulls her eyes away from the skull and fire insignias and to where Jack’s lying, trying to get some sleep. Or so she had thought. She can just make him out as he pulls at the gloves on his hands. A light hiss of pain alarms her so that she shuffles over and, without asking, takes his hands in her own.

Under her touch, she can feel the welts and shredded skin. The layer of leather from his gloves was not quite enough protection to spare him from the damage caused by the grappling hook that had saved him. Without a word, she pulls at his gloves, slowly and gently, as he holds his hands out to her until she manages to wiggle them off. Within one of the pouches at her waist, she produces the roll of cloth she always keeps on hand, and starts to wind it around one of his palms. His fingers are also scraped, but she leaves them free. Just in case a gun or a knife needs to be grabbed in the middle of the night.

They may be free of the Citadel, but they’re still far from home.

His hands are freezing too - the Wasteland nights are always cold, the red blanket thrown over the both of them offers just enough warmth to make sleep possible. Furiosa brings his hands together so she can cup them between hers, holds them to her lips so she can puff warm arm over them. It doesn’t feel like enough. After a moment of thought, she unzips her jacket and stuffs them under it and into her armpit. They’re like ice against her skin through the thin fabric of her shirt, making her jolt and grunt involuntarily.

Something brushes against her forehead, and when Furiosa looks up she sees that she’s pulled him right into her space. He’s so close that her whole field of vision is taken up by his eyes, the stark whiteness around his dark pupils in contrast with the dark mark on his brow that’s started to melt away with his sweat. She can feel his breath misting her lip. A few stray blown-about strands of his hair tickling her forehead.

She goes very still. Something about the quiet all around them, their belt buckles cast aside for good in the sand, having pulled him in so close and having his hands on her with only a thin shirt between their skin, makes this different from the many other times they had been close to one another that had been driven by simple necessity. The freedom here, so far away from the warlords they had been sworn to, the fact that they now had no rank within that system.

Jack’s the first to move. Just a little closer, his eyes keeping hers, until his hair is just brushing her forehead again. He goes no further than that.

It’s always been more difficult, Furiosa thinks, for her to…bend like this. To let herself take comfort in another human, to trust and give. Even with him, the one living connection she still has in this world. She’d been so hardened over the years, that trying to bend for anyone, toward anyone, made her feel like she would break herself if she tried too hard.

But she had done it before, hadn’t she? That night, a time that felt more like thousands of days ago than just the one. She tries again here, and instead of resisting that strange magnetic force she’d felt so many times with him, that long-buried instinct bubbling to the surface, she lets it guide her in. Until their heads are pressed together, and then a little further until the tip of his nose taps hers. And the last tension of the day is eased out of her by the feel of his contact, the sound of their breaths mingling in the small space between them.

“Hard day.” The words are hardly more than a sigh from his lips, relief edged with a little humor in his tone.

Furiosa can only huff in agreement. The white puff of her air mingles with his in the cold night air.

“Three days, you said?”

“A little longer, perhaps. Over the flats and dunes.” She replies, closing her eyes. His hands inside her jacket have started to warm, as has the place where his forehead touches hers.

“Then over the rainbow?”

Furiosa feels her brow crinkling against his as she opens her eyes and looks at him, confused. The scarred side of his lip is pulled up some into a little smirk, and there’s an amused flicker in his eye. “Ah, nothing,” is all he says.

She huffs again. The corners of her own mouth threaten to pull into a smile, but she doesn’t manage - perhaps because those muscles are so unused to the strain. Or because she’s so tired. So very tired, and sore and bruised.

Still, she lets Jack rest first after they part, so he can lie back on the ground. It’s not too long before she sees the outline of his head tilting to the side as he relaxes, his chest rising and falling rhythmically.

Before he drifts off, she thinks she hears him say something…or murmur, or perhaps hum. But she doesn’t catch it, nor is she willing to wake him after such a hard day. So she occupies herself by keeping a sharp ear out for anything untoward and watching the constellations turn overhead.

They are not so lucky at the rock pass.

The crackle of gunfire is a familiar tune to Furiosa, and she knows the steps of the dance very well. But each time it’s still nerve wracking and heart pounding, brings forth the thought that this could really be the last time.

They had managed to make it through the pass to the other side. But the guzzoline they had offered for passage wasn’t enough to appease the guardians at the gate, who apparently thought two travelers in a single car would make an easy target.

If it had been anyone else, they might have been right.

Furiosa is fanging it over the flats in the driver's seat, the rush of her heartbeat and whine of the Valiant’s engine mingling with the chorus of motorbikes closing in on them. She swerves to her side when one of them gets too close, trying to run him over, but the biker moves with her as he comes up to her open window and aims his pistol.

An arm stretches into her field of vision - the zipper sleeve of a leather jacket and fingerless riding gloves grasping the handle of a glock 17 that fires on the man, who tumbles into the sand. Furiosa keeps driving.

Among the rev of engines and gunfire, there’s a tiny, metallic sound behind them in the trunk of the pursuit - something small clattering around between the bikes that should not be there, where their precious supplies are tied down - among them, the gallons of Guz meant to carry them all the way. A moment later Furiosa smells smoke.

Movement in the passenger seat draws her eye - Jack’s crawling through the back opening to scrabble at something, his rifle abandoned in the footwell behind him. There’s a sharp creak and a groan as a new opening above her head appears - the wheel of the white bike leaves the notch in the roof where it had been secured, there’s a rattling of chains as an acrid burning smell starts to fill the car, and over Jack’s legs and through the passenger window Furiosa glimpses the shine of sunlight reflecting off the barrel of a gun.

It’s hard to aim through the black fog that’s gathering in front of her eyes, but Furiosa must hit something with her boomstick because nothing fires back at them.

Instead, there’s a snap and a lurch and a crash behind them. Furiosa feels Jack jerk in the seat and she hooks an arm around his leg, fighting against whatever had been trying to pull him out the back window.

And Furiosa closes her eyes as she pulls his thigh against her shoulder and prays to the stars guiding her home until she feels Jack moving against her, pulling himself back into the cabin. He sits down heavily in the seat beside her with a huff.

The sound of motorbikes begins to dim as they apparently fall back. Furiosa looks over at Jack, checking him over for possible injuries with her eyes. But all she sees is his lips pressed into a thin, grim line.

Behind them, there’s a hollow boom. And when Furiosa chances a look back, she sees a thin trail of smoke wafting up from the ground. And when the fog in the cabin starts to clear, a noticeably emptier trunk. Furiosa just floors it, putting as much distance between them and their pursuers as she can while they’re busy picking over whatever burning supplies Jack had dumped from the trunk. At least, it appeared they had gotten away with their lives.

Until about an hour later, the engine starts to huff and whine. It’s a sound they shouldn’t be hearing, especially not when they had just filled the tank before taking on the pass.

When they pull over, Furiosa sees the problem immediately in the sand behind them, a dark wet line running between the tire tracks. And when she jumps out and squirms her way under the body of the car, she sees the expected steady drip coming from the fuel tank.

She keeps herself composed long enough to get a tin box under it to collect what little is left. Only after that does she allow herself to kick the faulty vehicle’s tire and fling the first thing within her reach - the SKS rifle propped up against the side of the car - out across the sands with a holler.

“Well, it’s certainly not good.”

Jack’s languid drawl behind her drags Furiosa down from the heights of her frustration and back to earth. She turns to see him standing by the trunk, beside the remaining black motorcycle in the back, picking through what’s left there. He looks up at her with a puckered brow and a sigh, and Furiosa unballs the fists she had made and walks over.

“How much?” She asks him, looking down at the blackened smear that had been burned into the metal trunk, the collection of smoke stained sacks and jugs that was less than a fourth of what they had left the Citadel with.

“For fuel, we have what’s left in the bike, what’s dripping into that pan, and…” He holds up a single battered red gas canister.

The weight of the situation comes down on her. Furiosa feels her knees weaken and threaten to buckle under her. For a moment, she feels the temptation to drop down into the sand and let the weight of the world crush her. Instead, she brushes herself off and settles for leaning against the side of the car and staring out over the horizon.

Out east. Toward home.

“It’s not good,” Jack says behind her. “But it might not be quite hopeless yet.”

Something taps her on the shoulder pad - Jack’s holding the rifle’s scope out to her, having taken it while they were driving to play lookout. When Furiosa puts it to her eye, she follows his pointing to look out where the blue sky meets the yellow sand. 

To where there’s a column of smoke billowing up from the ground.

Furiosa huffs. Maybe the sight should fill her with hope or relief, but it just makes her tired. “Could be nothing,” She says.

“Could be something,” Jack returns.

And right now, just the promise of anything at all is better than the nothingness they have right then. Because she knows they don’t have a choice. They likely don’t have enough gas to make it back to the Citadel, let alone to travel for another three days.

Furiosa drops the looking glass from her eye and looks over at Jack. The Praetorian Jack, driver of the war rig and warrior of the Fury Road. The man who left everything he had behind to follow her into parts unknown based on nothing more than a seed and a promise.

And right then, it’s not the promise she’d made to her mother, or the desire for her home and her people that hardens Furiosa’s resolve. It’s a man with grease paint still smeared over his forehead, a scarred lip and green eyes who’s with her all the way.

And she didn’t bring him out here to die.

It does in fact turn out to be something. More than something. It’s exactly what they need.

They lay crouched down on the top of a rocky hill, the motorcycle, which had been making a series of strange noises likely caused by one of the bullets it had taken earlier, is parked behind them out of view. In the valley below is what looks to be a small compound. Low walls made of sheets of metal and stacked sandbags behind a trench dug around it. Within, Furiosa can see several buildings, three precarious watch towers made of scrap that are barely holding together, and what looks like piles of junk strewn all around. Among that junk, Furiosa can make out several vehicles and parts of more vehicles.

And movement - a single lone oil sump that bobs rhythmically. The smoke they had spotted was coming from some sort of silo contraption not too far from that, with pipes sticking all out of it. Furiosa believes she had seen similar contraptions in Gas Town, though not quite so...rusted.

The area is completely silent, except for an occasional low whistle of wind. No movement except the bobbing of the pump. Not inside the compound, nor outside, where there are various carcasses strewn all about. Both of the mechanical variety and the organic. Black scorch marks scuff the surrounding area like great bruises on the land. There are two crows circling above in the sky, eventually coming down to land beside one of the bodies.

“Looks fairly recent,” Jack says next to her, with the looking glass now held up to his eye. “Judging by the decay of those bodies. I don’t see anyone inside.”

But they don’t make any move forward through the hours of the day that they watch the place. They wait on the top of the hill for nightfall, when they can better sneak up and in. Nothing is said between them, an agreement to stay silent and still as they can, an attitude they are both used to from so many hours driving in silence on the Fury Road.

When the sun touches the horizon, throwing long dark shadows over the earth, they finally move from their position. There’s no way to completely hide their approach, but by keeping behind the hill until they reach the shadow cast by the compound, they are allowed some cover at the least.

Nothing happens until they reach the sandbag wall. A sharp caw greets them as they start to climb - the two crows they had seen circling in the sky hours ago, perched overhead and watching them. The sound startled Furiosa so badly that she nearly fired her boomstick at the two. Instead, she waits and watches them for a few breaths, until they take off into the darkening sky.

It’s still quiet when they crawl inside, except for the scuffing of their boots in the dirt and the pumping of the well huffing in the middle, like the beat of a great heart. Jack takes point with his glock as they move from a low bunker half dug into the ground, with a roof made out of the cut-off upper half of a school bus. There’s nothing around the strange silo or the pipes leading from it into several large barrels. Old faded letters are painted on some of the barrels: “Mimir Oil Co.”. There doesn’t appear to be anything living amongst the scrap and junk either.

No bodies. No sign of what might have killed all the people outside the gates….until they reach the last watch tower. They can’t quite prevent the clank of their boots against the ladder as they make their way up, though they try to go slowly and as quietly as they can manage. It's more than enough to give them away.

“I hear you coming.”

The crackling voice on the other side of the door Furiosa had reached for sounds tired, raspy, and perhaps not too much longer for this world. Both of them freeze on the other side and their gazes meet. Jack nods, and Furiosa silently cocks her boomstick and aims at the middle of the door. It’s made out of a thin sheet of aluminum, like much of the compound’s surrounding walls, and she bets a direct shot could blast right through it and to the other side.

“Now,” continues the old voice, and she freezes again, “I got…a proposition for you out there…but otherwise…I’d appreciate it if you’d…make it quick.”

Furiosa looks back up at Jack. He lifts his brow - he’s curious. Furiosa, not so much. But she still steps to the side as Jack does as well, and she pulls away the loose door. It falls back and down to the ground below with a loud clatter.

Inside, they find a pile of rags, scraggly gray hair and rotting teeth all pulled together to form the shape of an old man with weathered skin stretched over knobby bones. He has a rifle across his lap and a pistol at his feet, but makes no move to lift either as they cautiously approach. Red covers the front of his shirt, blooming from his shoulder and his side.

“Well, either I’m the luckiest bastard this day in the Wastes or the most unlucky,” the man spits the words out more than speaks them. One of his eyes is covered by a strip of cloth, the other is watery gray in color and fixes on the two of them.

“Anyone else in here?” Jack asks as he kneels down to take a look at the man. Furiosa turns her back and keeps her gun on the man, however helpless he might seem.

“Just me,” groans the old man, “And whatever dead bodies are lying out there. And I’ll tell you now, I got no interest in lying about it. The way I see it… argh !”

Jack pulls at the man’s vest to get a look under it. When he turns to meet Furiosa's eye, he gives a doubtful shake of his head.

“The way I see it,” the old man huffs, his voice strained, “There are two ways out of this for me. You can either finish me quick, and take what you want. Or you can try and take a chance on patching me up, and you’ll have a steady supply of guz the rest of your days.”

“That so?” Jack says absently. Furiosa steps closer to look with him at the wounds. Three bullet wounds that don’t seem to have pierced anything vital. But it’s a lot of blood.

The old man licks his dry lips. “You can pump as much raw oil out of that sump as you want, but unless you know how to refine it it’s useless to you. I can do it. Help an old man out here, and it can be worth your while.”

The typical begging, pleading, and wheeling and dealing of the Wastes. No one expects anyone to use up their supplies, effort, or time for free out here unless you can offer anything in return. One of the first lessons she had learned from Dementus out here.

Furiosa meets Jack’s eye, skeptically. They don’t need this man, or his help. All they need is a new ride and enough fuel to carry them across the land for a little over three days and they’ll never have to worry about guzzoline for the rest of their lives.

But when she sees the look Jack has on his face, the raised brow and sardonic little smile pulling at the scarred corner of his mouth, Furiosa lowers her rifle and kneels down next to him. Jack pulls out the spool of thread and the little sewing needle he always keeps on hand. And Furiosa has to hold the rank, howling old man down as Jack starts cleaning and stitching.

A missing belt, and a need for a new carburetor…among other issues. Furiosa huffs down at the engine in front of her, at its faulty parts and incomplete setup, before pulling her head out from under the hood and wiping her hands on the sides of her pants.

It’s getting too dark for her to work anymore on it, so she slams the hood down a little harder than necessary and climbs down from the old semi-truck. She sucks briefly on a small cut on her finger as she makes her way to the same watchtower they had found the old man resting in before they moved him down to the bunker where neither of them could hear his constant complaining. For someone who had been knocking on death’s door earlier that day, he’s proving remarkably energetic and caviling.

Thankfully they had been too busy scrounging around the man’s collection of junk, trying to pick out a possible new vehicle from the various relics the man had, to bother too much with him. Furiosa didn’t like their chances with only one faulty bike, even if it was only a few more days. Unfortunately, nothing here seemed capable of running, not without a significant amount of repairs and additional parts. It would take time to put it together.

Furiosa feels her frustration and ire starting to build again - so close, after fifteen years she was so very close - but she puts it away, lets it simmer down inside her as she makes her way to the tower where Jack was keeping watch over the surrounding area.

Then, as she starts to climb up the ladder, she hears a curious noise.

Humming. A low, quiet hum carrying some kind of a tune. Furiosa pauses on the ladder and listens - she doesn’t recognize the specific song, but it has a pleasing melody. However much he seems to be butchering it.

She climbs much slower now, trying to keep as quiet as she can, but the silence of the empty world around them means there’s nothing else to cover the thumping of her boots on the rungs. So that when she reaches the top, Jack’s already stopped and is looking back over his shoulder at her from where he sits on a fold-out chair, rifle over his lap, eye reflecting the pale moonlight back at her.

Furiosa pulls herself the rest of the way up, boots hitting the floor hard as she walks over to where he sits. “It’s the most complete vehicle there is here. Still has some parts missing, but I think I’ve already found some that will work as replacements.”

“Good.” He nods from where he sits and turns his attention back to the Wasteland stretched out before him. “And how is our resident faring?”

Furiosa exhales through her nose. “Still breathing. And complaining. But he’s still pretty weak, so he won’t be a threat for a while.”

“Hmmm.”

Quiet descends between them again. Only interrupted by a gust of wind, and a low creek as Jack adjusts in his seat.

“What was that?” Furiosa finally breaks it. Jack just looks up at her quizzically. “What you were humming before.”

Jack regards her for half a second, perhaps unsure, before turning around and reaching down next to him. He brings up a small stack of what look like thin, square boards, flimsy and battered. They look like they are made from some sort of malleable material like leather, something fragile that has started to peal and tear along the sides. He very carefully pries the one on the top open, and pulls out a thin black disk.

He hands it over to Furiosa, and by the way he gingerly holds it along the sides she knows to be careful with it. She turns it about in her hands - it’s like a small, thin wheel, with ridges all along the sides There’s a faded yellow and blue label in the middle, and in the golden glow of the setting sun she can just make out some of the letters on it: "MGM. The Wizard of Oz". It feels light and fragile in her hand. 

“It’s a record,” Jack tells her as she flips the disk over and sees the other side also has the same finny little ridges as the other. “It plays music.”

She must look skeptical when she looks up at him, because the corners of Jack’s eyes crinkle in amusement as he smiles, a free and easy quirk of his lips unlike the wry smirks he wore back at the Citadel. Small crows' feet crease the skin around his eyes.

“You need something to play it on. There’s a table with a spinning wheel,” He twirls his finger around to mock a horizontal spinning motion, “And a needle that runs along the record. Here.” He hands her one of the cases and taps a picture on it. A device made up of a square block, with a large horn hovering over it.

“My parents had one,” He goes on as Furiosa squints down at the picture. “Unbelievably, one of the disks - records - they had was the exact same one as this one. The Wizard of Oz.”

Furiosa scrutinizes the disk and the picture of the…disk spinner? on the cover. She can’t see how it could possibly play music, but…if Jack says it happened, she believes him. She thinks. After slipping the disk back into its cover, she hands it back to him. He takes it gingerly and gently lays the stack down by his side again.

There’s a rug to the side that they had hauled up from the junk below, suitable as a thin bed roll. Furiosa takes it now and unrolls it next to where Jack’s sitting in his chair on first watch, and lies down with her feet next to him and her head behind as she ponders the record and its strange little player. Her mind turns over thoughts about how it could have worked, what parts might have gone into it, how a needle could make any kind of sound other than an irritating scrape.

When she chances to look up at Jack, the dark outline of his shoulders against the red sky, her mind drifts to the tune Jack had been humming. The low, murmuring sound he had been quietly singing. She’d never heard him hum back in the Citadel.

Furiosa sits up and turns over in the middle of the rug, so that when she lies down she’s looking up at Jack who’s looking back down at her. She folds her arms up against her chest.

“What were the words?” She asks.

Jack shifts in his seat. He frowns down at her, uncertainly, a very curious look on his face. “I can’t remember all of them,” He says.

Furiosa keeps her eyes on him, stubbornly. She keeps them on him as he turns away to stare at the horizon very pointedly, his jaw set. Furiosa counts the breaths she takes in the silence, and it takes about thirty before Jack’s the first to break, his eyes briefly flickering back down to her and then up.

Jack inhales deeply and lets it out as he settles back into his chair. And Furiosa knows she is victorious, as she watches him swallow the lump in his throat.

“Somewhere…over the rainbow, way up high…”

His voice is so quiet, more of a murmur. Higher in pitch than it normally is, off-key.

“There’s a land that I… hmm hmmmmm hmmm …once in a lullaby…

“Someday I’ll wish upon a star…and wake up hmmm hmmm hmmmmm hmmm …where troubles melt like.. hmmm hmmm …”

He stops and glances back down at her. Furiosa’s arms had dropped more to her sides as he had gone, and she had felt her expression softening. She hardens it again and folds her arms back over herself.

The side of Jack’s lip twitches, almost forming into a smirk, but he turns away before she can properly see it.

“Somewhere over the rainbow, Bluebirds fly…. hmmm hm hmmm hmmmmm …”

It’s mostly just humming after that, as Furiosa lets her eyes droop closed. She clings to wakefulness a little longer so she can listen as the uneven, tone-deaf melody lulls her into a deep sleep and for the first time in a very long time, pleasant dreams.

Chapter Text

A dust cloud on the horizon, in Furiosa’s many years of experience in the Wasteland, always meant trouble. And despite the old man’s assurances, she feels the hair on the back of her neck stand on end when she sees it. And when she looks through the old man’s telescope to get a better look at the new arrivals, she can feel her pulse kick up a notch when she spies the familiar spikes decorating the old rusted vehicles approaching.

“Buzzards,” she says when she looks back at Jack. He frowns.

“A usual group,” the old man’s voice is casual and unbothered as he pulls the telescope to his one good eye from where he sits, “Comes by about every month. Trades are easy, straight forward, no nonsense with them. Usually fair.”

“They really just come and go?” Jack looks as skeptical as Furiosa feels. “Leave an old man like you with all this guzzoline?”

The old man purses his lips in annoyance at being questioned. “They like getting a steady supply of guz even if it is slow, and they know if I’m not alive they don’t get it. You just do your part and don’t do nothing stupid and we all walk away like I’ve done the last few thousand times I’ve met with them.”

Jack meets Furiosa’s eye. He looks more amused than irritated with the old man, and she finds his humor soothes her own annoyance. As it often had. If it were not for Jack, Furiosa thinks she would have tipped the old goat over the wall of his compound with all the caterwauling he had been doing in the week since they arrived. How long are they planning to stick around and bug him? Why won’t they let him keep a gun on himself? What are they doing with that Holden 48-215, don’t they appreciate the classics? That’s not how you properly roast a rat. These bandages itch. That’s not the right booze, it was the other bottle you nitwit.

Stars above…

The group has approached close enough that she can see that there are five vehicles - what looks like a kind of dump truck surrounded by several sedans and a pick up. All covered in shrapnel, rust and red dust. They pull up and stop about a hundred yards away, and a single man gets out as the dust settles. It’s hard to make out much under the heavy metal armor and rags that cover every part of the man’s body, but she can see he’s big. Maybe even Rictus big she thinks, as the man comes forward. There’s a path marked with rocks that runs through the land-mine field set up around the compound. The Buzzard carefully treads it until he’s by the wall nearly under them.

“You make some new friends?”

It’s strange, to see one of them speaking. Furiosa had so rarely seen them out of the vehicles they had used to attack the Citadel convoy, let alone had a conversation with any of them. She had never really gotten a good look at them, just brief glances before she stabbed or shot or ran over them.

“Employees,” The old man shouts down. Furiosa hears Jack snort from where he’s crouched down with her behind the short crenelation they can use as cover. Small embrasures between the sandbags allow them to point their rifles down at the convoy. “Helping me out. Now, what do you got and what do you want?”

“Two dozen barrels for six barrels of water and ten full of grub.” His voice is accented in an unfamiliar way, but he speaks English clearly.

The old man snorts in disgust. “It’s a barrel for a barrel like always. You got sixteen barrels and you’ll get sixteen back.”

Furiosa exchanges a glance with Jack. They might have a better position, but they are very much outnumbered. The old man’s voice carries a tone that indicates he is unbothered by this, and she hopes he doesn’t push it too much more.

“That might be changing soon,” the Buzzard shouts up at them. “Trouble in west. Pickings going to be getting slim from now on.”

Of course they had gotten a lot of this from the Citadel convoys. Furiosa exchanges a look with Jack. It sounded like Dementus had gotten off that crane after all and was likely stirring up trouble. Again.

Something dark simmers in the deep depths of Furiosa’s tattered heart. She pushes it aside.

“A barrel for a barrel.” The old man is unmoved by this news. Furiosa tenses behind her rifle, until she sees the Buzzard loosely throw up his hands in surrender.

There’s a lift to the side - a tall forklift that had been built into a lower section of the wall. The creaking it makes as they roll the oil barrels onto the platform makes Furiosa nervous. Especially when she works the controls to the side of it, so that with a lurch it starts to descend to the ground below, where the Buzzard had signaled for someone to back up the pickup truck.

Jack’s on the lift too. He gives her a wane smile as he goes down. It’s only twenty feet down to the bottom but it’s twenty feet too far from where Furiosa looks down at him with her rifle gripped tightly, thick cloth wrapped around her face and chest to conceal herself better.

But the trade seems to be going smoothly, as the old man said it would. Two other buzzards dressed the same as the first - rusted metal and ragged clothes, not an inch of exposed flesh in sight - come out of the truck and Jack helps them load and unload. He checks a couple of the barrels real quick and nods up at her. It takes about four trips up and down the lift before the last load is going down.

Just as Jack rolls the first barrel off, Furiosa notices the first Buzzard looking at him very closely.

“I know you?” The man asks him abruptly. Furiosa watches as Jack’s shoulders tense up under his jacket.

The Jacket he always wore as a Praetorian.

“No,” is all Jack says as he turns to the next barrel. Calm, cool as ever. Furiosa feels her own heart jackhammering in her chest.

“No, I think I am knowing you,” the buzzard says slowly. Jack just keeps working. The other two men have stopped though, and are watching their leader.

Suddenly, the big guy grabs Jack by the shoulder pad and turns him around to face him. Jack goes still, hand hovering over the holster where his mauser is. The other two men reach for their own guns. Furiosa clutches her rifle tightly and aims for the big man, wondering if a bullet can get through that armor. The old man uselessly yells down to ask what the fuck is going on down there.

And then the big Buzzard starts laughing. He gives Jack a rough slap on the arm before letting him go, and Jack takes a step back with his hand still hovering over his holster. Furiosa keeps her gun on the man.

“Bozhe moi! That stupid straw on the jacket! Oi, Veck! Eto tot voditel' gruzovika iz Citadel!”

“Ser'yozno?” Says one of the others as he comes over, hands on his sides as he stares at Jack. “Right pain in the zadnitsa cheek you were back there.”

His back is to Furiosa, but she can see Jack’s shoulders drop a touch, his hand lower from his gun. Furiosa doesn’t let up at all, keeping her rifle on the other two. Willing them all to hurry up so Jack can get back to safety up on the wall.

“None of you were ever exactly easy either,” is all Jack says.

The big man huffs. “Guess I be taking that as compliment from likes of you. Survival, is all it was in the end.”

“Oi, Shark, eto ta devushka tam naverkhu?”

Furiosa had, stupidly, taken her eye off the third guy, who’s now standing right under her. The front of his helmet has a hinge, so that he can lift the mask part off. Furiosa trains her rifle on him now, and over the barrel she sees a man with a face as grimy as hers. He has pale skin under it, hair that might have been blond under all that dirt. Eyes as blue as the clear sky overhead.

“Relax,” she hears the big man say, and she glances over to see Jack’s hand hovering over his glock again. “We are not here to jeopardize steady supply of Guz.”

“Not even for, ahhh…” Veck’s looking up at her on the wall now, “Krasivaya devushka, hah!”

“Zamolchi!” The big man hits Veck on the side of the head, hard, sending him forward two steps. “Vernut'sya k rabote! And you can ignore him,” the big man turns back to Jack on the ground, “He is, how you say…eh, ass. But I can make him shut up when it is needed.”

“You can all shut up and get on with it all!” shouts the old man. The Buzzard in charge - Shark? - waves at the older man dismissively.

“You are both having my pity with him,” Furiosa hears Shark go on. The old man to her side scoffs. “But I think you be better set up here than you would be if you two stayed at Citadel, no?”

“We left days ago,” Jack tells him, and Furiosa blinks away her surprise that he’s actually bothering to converse with these people. “Guessing things went to hell back there since?”

Shark makes a disgusted noise. “Understatement. Just hope it all blows over and not up.”

As she listens, Furiosa realizes she has put her rifle aside without really noticing.

The last of the barrels are loaded off the truck and onto the lift. Jack climbs on with them, but before Furiosa can hit the switch, Shark puts a hand on Jack’s shoulder. The movement is much slower than the last time he had grabbed for him. Shark looks from Jack…and then up to her. Eyes hidden behind the faceplate so she can’t really see them, but she can feel them. It’s a shock to be talked to, to be given that kind of respect by a man she doesn’t know. Usually she has to land a few punches on them or someone else nearby before they start doing that.

“You both keep this Mudak,”  Shark jerks his head at the old man,” safe, hear? Might be only source of Guz soon. And you both keep each other too. Some out there who would know you and would not be so diplomatic as us, da?”

“That was…” Furiosa leaves the statement hanging in the air as they stand atop the wall, watching the Buzzards drive off and away from the compound.

“Unusual,” Jack finishes for her with a nod in the convoy’s direction. “But it’s all just survival, as he said.”

“You two going to fuck up my trades on the regular?” grouses the old man as he watches the Buzzards drive off through the telescope. Furiosa and Jack are unloading the barrels, a task she wonders how the man was able to do by himself even before he was shot, with his scrawny limbs and aged joints.

“You going to rolls these barrels all the way down there yourself, old man?” Jack drawls. Furiosa coughs what was almost a chuckle into her arm, and Jack catches her eye with a little uptwist of his lip.

“Your mister has a mouth on him,” Sniffs the old man after Jack has rolled the first barrel down the ramp, its liquid contents sloshing within. “ ‘Old man’…”

“Should we call you something else instead?” Furiosa asks him with a roll of her eyes. He had never given them a name, nor had they given him theirs. He’d just settled on calling them “Mister” and “Misses”.

The one eyed man hums thoughtfully, a shaky hand stroking the gnarled beard hanging from his jaw. “What day does it say it is over there?”

Furiosa turns to where he points. Beside them, on the wall of the lookout tower, hangs a small blackboard. A piece of chalk worn to nearly a numb hangs from a string by it. There are a series of columns drawn on the board, with numbers on them and words written above. Some are x’ed off, and Furiosa assumes the man is referring to the first box not crossed off.

“Three,” she tells him, the number written in the box. And then, written above the column it belongs to: “Wed…ness..day.”

“Wednesday,” he corrects her, and nods, “You can call me that, then.”

He doesn’t ask for their names, so she doesn’t give them.

More trades go the same way. Another group of men wrapped in cloth who speak with their hands, and a twitchy loner who visits at night and doesn’t say anything to them. No attempted attacks like what they had found when they arrived. Like Wednesday had said, the people who come regularly seem to understand where things stand with them and Wednesday. They trade what they can for guz - water and food, car parts and occasionally some oddity. Sometimes they want something from Wednesday’s junk pile too, a part they need for their transports or other machinery. And to Furiosa’s surprise, Wednesday agrees to trade some of his guzz for the capacitors she needs for the truck. He answers her suspicious look with a sniff.

“The quicker you’re set up, the quicker you both can leave me alone.” He scoffs. The logic sounds sure to her.

When they come, Jack ditches his protective vest and wears only the leather jacket part of his attire, and Furiosa wraps up her hair and face to better hide herself. Jack, she notices, has also stopped shaving. What had once been a short gathering of stubble gracing his face had become a denser undergrowth as the days pass them by. “My clever disguise from the scavs,” He had told her when she had looked pointedly at it.

She must have made a face or he had read something in her eyes, because his expression had fallen from good humored smirk to something akin to…worry, perhaps? “What, don’t like it?”

“How would that matter?” She said it with a roll of her eyes, but when his frown deepened and his brow pinched she had shrugged. “Doesn’t it…get in the way?”

“No more than your hair, I would suppose,” He scratched a hand through the long whiskers thoughtfully. “And with the amount of water here, it’s not so hard to keep it clean.”

There was a surprising amount of water. In addition to what was traded, there were a system of “fog collectors” set up - sheets of metal hung vertically over troughs, collecting the water vapor in the air overnight. There were also a number of troughs set up along the sheet metal used for the walls, or anything else that could collect the condensation, with a series of pipes leading off to empty into barrels. A slow process and not a whole lot came from it. Furiosa highly doubted he -let alone they- could have survived on it alone. But it helped keep the water supply up.

All in all there was actually an excess before they came. Wednesday was diligent about making sure he had a significant over supply in case of tough times, obsessive even. But he doesn’t seem to begrudge them the use of it, for however much he howls about them using anything else. So they wet rags into shallow bowls filled with water to allow themselves the pleasure of a first real wash since they had left. They towel away the layers of dust and oil that had built up over the days since they had last been at the rock pool, until Furiosa almost feels clean.

It’s especially nice after a long day of gutting car parts from various sources, and putting it all together in the semi. Though she finds that there are long stretches after she’s done what she can with what she has, where there’s nothing much to do. There’s a lot of time where she just has to sit and wait to see if the scavs bring in the parts they had asked for the last time they came around. Wednesday won’t let them do any of the oil refining, paranoid as he is. 

But all the same, the two of them and one of him seem to have settled into a good enough truce for the sake of mutual survival - they help him while he’s still recovering, and he allows them to take what they need from his junk yard. It’s enough that Furiosa and Jack trust him enough to keep watch while they tinker with the cars or get some rest, even if not enough to give him a gun. Even if he still can’t walk very far with his slow healing injuries.

The first night they do this so they can both get some sleep, they set up a spot out of the watchtower in the bed of a pick up truck, useless for anything else since it’s lacking wheels and an engine. Wednesday’s bunker is there of course, but Jack had said he is pretty sure the man has fleas and the place smells rather rank at any rate. They stretch a tarp over the bed of the truck to keep in their body heat, and are able to doze off under that and the old red blanket they had managed to make the whole journey with them thus far.

Furiosa wakes up one morning just as the sun is rising and finds Jack already gone, the half of his blanket thrown over her for extra warmth. Alarmed as she always had been when this would rarely happen, and annoyed that he had managed to sneak off without her being alerted, she finds him not in the tower on lookout, nor tinkering with the semi truck.

Instead, he’s set up a chair near the middle of one of the walls. Just sitting there, humming that song again.

He stops humming when Furiosa climbs the ladder up to the wall and walks over to him. There’s another chair set up beside him, along with a metal box - a drawer pulled from some cabinet - on the ground between the seats. They’re on the wall facing east, toward the lightening twilit sky and the flats and, just visible in the far distance, the crests of the first dunes they will cross.

Eventually.

Jack doesn’t look up until she’s right next to him. He gestures to the chair between them and she takes the offer, settling into the creaking metal and sagging plastic bands making up the seat.

“Come to see the show?” He gestures to the horizon.

He means the rising sun. It was something they would do on occasion at the start of a day the was going to be slow, sneaking up to their hidden cliff side getaway before the crack of dawn. Furiosa remembers the first time he had brought her there late in the day. Sitting on the edge of the cliff, watching through the crack in the rock as night turned to day. Before she had met Jack, it had been a long time since she had done anything like that. Just…sit and watch the sun rise. The Wasteland had actually looked beautiful, for the first time since she had been dragged into it.

She doesn’t quite feel like she’ll be able to enjoy it now though, as she puffs out a heavy breath through her nostrils. “It’s too dark to get anything done yet.”

“There isn’t really anything to get done right now, Fury.”

Furiosa scowls out into the east as the edge of the fun peaks over the dunes, the direction they should be heading in now. But she realizes he’s right - they don’t have the parts to finish the repairs on the truck.

There’s a tap on her arm - Jack’s bumped her shoulder with his hand, which is clutching a glass jar with some sort of liquid. He has an easy smile - unusually easy - as he nods at her and leans back in his chair. “We’ll get over the rainbow, Fury. Eventually. But for now, why not just stay and watch the sun rise?”

She notices her hands are curled into tight fists where they rest on her lap. She forces them to open and relax, stretching out her fingers and giving them a flex before resting them against her knees. As she does so, her nose catches a whiff of something sweet, and acidic. Her eyes catch on the glass jar in Jack’s hand, which he sets down on the ground beside his feet. She also notices how his eyes have a slightly glazed look over them, a look she had seen on many black thumbs and war boys when they thought they had some down time. But never on Jack.

She leans forward and toward him in her seat, a tight lipped smirk across her own face. She can tell Jack notices because of the forlorn sigh he lets out and the rather chagrined look on his face, even if he doesn’t look over. He taps the jar with his foot.

“Gift from Wednesday,” he sighs, “I woke up and found him sitting here. Scuttled off not too long ago, into whatever crevasse he holes up in. He’s getting more mobile now.”

“Should we keep a closer eye one him?” Furiosa suggests. They had scoured the place for weapons before, but she highly doubted they had found everything in this junk heap.

“Nah,” Jack gives a quick shake of his head, “All that talk about wanting us to leave? Hot air. Honestly, I think he’s rather lonely.”

Furiosa isn’t so sure, but Jack’s always been really good at reading people. Better than her, she often thinks. So she trusts his judgment, and lets it rest.

She leans back into the sloped back of her chair, and when she stretches her foot out she hears the box it hits scrape against the wall, its contents rattling about.

“Ah!” Jack bends down and riffles through it, “He brought this up too. Bunch of knick o’ knacks and little things. See these?”

He holds up a beaten, rotting little box with two sticks in it. “You ever know old Scurvy?”

“The Praetorian?” Furiosa remembers the name - he had died a few years before she had met Jack. “Not well.”

“He was a friend of my parents,” Jack goes on as he tips the box in his hand, the two little paper sticks rolling into his gloved palm, “Grouchy old fart like Wednesday. Used to be obsessed with these. He mainly guarded the food stores in the Silos, would let you sneak in and knick whatever you liked if you could find these and bring them to him. Ciggies, he called them, or smokes. Showed me how to smoke once. Pissed my folks off something awful.”

“He show you how to get drunk too?” Furiosa can’t help smirking again at the way Jack sways a little in his seat when he puts the end of one of the smokes into his mouth, how his tongue is just a bit looser.

He turns a genuinely offended look on her. “I’m not drunk,” he grunts as he puts the end of one of the sticks in his mouth, “Just tipsy. Wednesday’s hooch was stronger than I thought it would be.”

There’s a clicking noise coming from the hand holding some kind of tiny contraption - a lighter, she realizes. It takes a few flicks for a tiny flame to sputter at its end, and when it does he lifts it to the end of the stick in his mouth and lights it. The end catches, then dulls to a red ember that slowly starts to eat away at the stick. Smoke wafts from the tip, as well as a strong, pungent smell.

Jack inhales a deep breath, holds it in, then lets it out in a long, slow exhale. Pale smoke curls around his face as the morning sun lights up the Wasteland. It paints him all golden, highlighting the whiskers on his face that have grown into an actual beard, makes him scrunch up his eyes against the glare of it as he waves away the smoke getting into his face.

Furiosa realizes she’s holding her own breath, and forces herself to let it out.

He looks down at the smoke in his hand, then offers it up to her. Furiosa takes it gingerly, then stares at the unlit end that had been in his mouth. She slowly lifts it up to hers, but doesn’t put it in.

“Careful. Hold the smoke in your mouth a moment,” He tells her, “Let it cool a sec before you breathe it into your lungs.”

Furiosa feels a bit dubious about inhaling smoke willingly, but she looks again at the end of the ciggie…she carefully places it in her mouth. It feels flimsy, old and slightly wet at the tip.  She inhales…

And immediately starts coughing.

She takes the ciggie out of her mouth and starts hacking into the ground between her legs. Acrid smoke scratches at her throat and coats her tongue. She feels Jack’s hand slapping at her back.

“Took me a few tries to get it right,” He says, and he’s grinning when she comes back up. His eyes are slightly glazed over from his drink, as he takes the other ciggie and puts it into his mouth, and she hears him tut as the lighter refuses to light a second time.

Against her better judgment, or perhaps just to spite the offending ciggie and show it who is boss, she sticks it back in her mouth to try again. Just before she does, she feels Jack tap her shoulder. “Hang on,” he says, tossing the now useless lighter back into the box. “Give me a light.”

When she turns to him, he leans over right into her space, putting his face right up in hers, until the ends of their smokes touch.

She freezes. It takes him a moment to freeze too, and he only does so when his eyes flicker up and meets hers.

Strands of smoke curl up in the air between them. Now neither of them seem to be breathing.

“Huh. Blue,” Jack says suddenly, the smoke stick dancing in his mouth as he talks.

She just blinks back at him.

“Your eyes are blue,” His words slur a bit.

Were they? Furiosa can’t remember the last time she had paid attention. 

“I noticed before,” he says, as if he has to. “The color. Pretty. All that.”

Furiosa’s lips twitch. “You’re drunk.”

“Tipsy,” he corrects, not pulling away. Neither of them do.

Until Jack suddenly turns away, pulls the smoke out of his mouth and holds a curled fist up to his lips. He takes a deep, clean breath and holds it.

“Jack?” Furiosa puts a hand on his shoulder. He looks quite suddenly a little paler, and maybe a bit green.

“Yeah…” he shakes his head and takes another breath. “Forgot the damned things can make you-,” he turns away and coughs.

“Not worth it, is it?” Furiosa drops the half used up smoke stick in her hand and crushes the burning end with her boot heal.

“Hmm,” Jack holds his breath a minute, looking rather uncomfortable. “My mum used to warn me that they turn your lungs black after a while too. I think that’s what actually did Scurvy i-”

Furiosa swats the smoke right out of his hand before aggressively stomping on it. 

They both stare at the smoldering, crushed remains on the ground. Furiosa thinks she’s more shocked than Jack is - her reaction hadn't really been a conscious thought, but rather an instinctual impulse.

“I’m not going to drop dead from one,” Jack huffs.

“You look like you might,” Furiosa counters, a little harsher than she had intended. Perhaps to cover for her acute embarrassment. 

Her mouth still tastes like exhaust fumes, and she reaches for the jar of alcohol between them. When she catches a wiff of its vapors though, she thinks better of it and sets it aside again.

“You change this out recently?” She asks him, pulling at the tubing going into the hydropack on his back that’s looped around his shoulder. Jack nods, his mouth tightly shut against his nausea, so Furiosa snaps the mouth piece off the clip that holds it to his chest and takes a swig.

The water inside is warmed by his body. Not terribly refreshing, but it’s good enough to help get the smoke taste out of her mouth. She takes a mouthful and swishes it around before turning to spit it out on the ground, then takes another drink that she swallows. It doesn’t get rid of it entirely but it does help.

She can feel him watching her as she does so, and she realizes that they’re all up in each others space again. Which shouldn’t be that big of a deal. It never had been before, when they were sewing one another up after a hard day, or when they were fighting for their lives and had to grab or pull or lean over the other to save their lives. But somehow it’s different now that they are away from their responsibilities, with nothing to do but watch the sun rise.

Furiosa only looks up after she’s done, and offers the end of the straw to him. He doesn’t take it from her hand, nor does he take his eyes off hers as he leans forward in his seat and presses his scarred lips against the mouthpiece - after the second try, he misses on the first - and takes a long pull.

She feels her pulse pick up. Like it did when those Buzzards had rolled in a few days ago, or whenever there’s any other kind of danger around. But it’s not exactly like that, she thinks, it’s more like…that feeling she would get when they were practicing maneuvers at the Citadel, when she would hit the gas and sending them careening over the land. A kind of thrill that sends a shiver up her spine.

And she thinks Jack knows exactly what he is doing.

She stays stock still, face set into what she hopes is a stony expression that gives nothing away as he pulls away from the mouthpiece. His tongue flicks out to catch a droplet of water on the edge of his upper lip. The skin on the back of her neck prickles as he leans just a little closer, and his lips part again, and he whispers…

“I’m going to be sick.”

He doesn’t manage to throw up, but he does turn quickly to dry heave a few times to the side.

Later that day while Jack’s napping off the hooch and the smoke, Furiosa’s sorting through the junkyard for the fifth time since she had gotten up, looking for the alternator belt she needs and avoiding Wednesday. He keeps trying to approach her when he spots her - he is more mobile, but luckily not enough to catch her. Probably wants to complain about something she can’t help with. In the end Furiosa doesn’t find the belt she needs, but she does stumble across something of high interest.

She finds it in a small teardrop camper that they had been trying to get into - it had somehow been sealed shut from the inside, but she finally managed to get in using a blowtorch and some elbow grease. The unusual bell on the floor, crumpled nearly in half, was what had caught her attention, though it had been smashed to the point where it almost wasn’t recognizable from the picture Jack had shown her. She had to go nick the record cover from the truck bed where Jack dozed so she could compare the picture of it to what she had found before she could be sure it was one of the players Jack had told her about. Or it had been. The only part she had managed to salvage was the metal arm that held onto the pointed needle that was supposed to touch the disc.

Furiosa turned it in her hand skeptically, wondering how sound could come from such a thing. The smashed remains of the rest of the box had contained nothing especially remarkable. Just a needle, some kind of shredded electrical mechanism to spin the wheel, and the horn attached to the needle.

She gathers up some of the other odds and ends she had found - a saw blade large enough to fit one of the black disks on. The handle used to roll down the window of a car door that would make a good hand crank. Some gears she had taken from a busted clock - the teeth of one of the gears fits into the much larger saw blade just well enough to make it turn. Another gear fits into that one that she connected to the handlebar so that she can crank the handle and thus cause the gears and by extension the saw blade to all spin.

It’s simple, and ugly. All hammered and screwed into an old wooden dresser that has a flag pole in place of one of its original four legs. But it all technically works, so that when she drops the record onto the saw blade and sticks a well fitting pipe through the hole in it and the saw blade to hold it all in place, it spins the record as she manually turns the crank.

Furiosa stops turning it and stares at the whole thing. She puts down the folder that had held the record now resting on the contraption - its faded cover showing a group of young men with ridiculous haircuts posing on it - and takes up the other record she had snuck off with that has a better picture of the player on it. In her hand she has the arm with the needle she had found earlier and, with a huff, pins it down and places it so it rests halfway onto the record.

She turns the handle slowly. Feeling a bit silly as she does so. Stupid, really. The idea that sound could come from a bunch of lines on a piece of plastic. And even if these kinds of things worked back before the world ended, she likely couldn’t see what-

“Hhhaaaaaaaaaarrr…”

Furiosa freezes.

The sound is crackly, quiet. Sort of…wobbly. But she could have sworn…

She turns the handle again, a little faster this time.

“…rrrdddd daaaayyssss niiiiigghhhttt….”

It’s defiantly a human voice. And not just that, there are other sounds leaking through under it. Furiosa cautiously ups the speed she’s cranking the handle, and finds that the words become clearer.

“Aaaannnddd I’vve beeen wooorkinggg likee a dog! It’sss been a haaard daayyss ni-”

Holy shit.

Furiosa keeps turning, testing the speed of the player. Too slow, and the sound is drawn out and sluggish - “IIII shoooouullllddd beeee…” - but too fast, and the sound is whiny and high pitched until it’s unintelligible - “Slee-in-lia-log!”. But when she gets it just right - 

“But when I get home to you
“I find the things that you do
“Will make me feel alright!”

She stops, takes the record off and studies it closely. All she sees, again, are the series of grooves etched into the surface. She slips the disk into its little folder, and pulls out the other one whose cover - in addition to the record player she had studied before - depicts a man holding a type of horn to his face. Once it’s on, she places the needle nearer to the edge and starts to crank, this time noticing as she goes how the needle slowly starts to make its way to the center of the record. This time the voice is less melodic at first, simple talk, while music plays in the background.

“…see what a wonderful world it would be, if only we’d give it a chance. Love baby…”

It’s actually eerie, she thinks as she listens to the long dead man talk. To hear these voices from the past, from a time better than what the world was now. She’s seen their old inventions and read some of their words, but this is almost akin to listening to their ghosts. As if they haunted these strange black disks, waiting for their souls to be released by her little contraption and the tiny needle dancing along the surface.

Though the sound crackles and pops and isn’t very strong…the horn on the picture of the player must have been used to amplify the sound somehow. Furiosa thinks on that as she listens to the man from the record talk, her eyes going to the cover of the record and the picture of the man holding the horn. She had seen a similar instrument piled among some of the junk. Perhaps she could -

“I see trees of green, red roses too…”

Furiosa sucks in a deep breath and stops turning, and the music stops. It takes a little courage to keep cranking it after that.

“I see them bloom.
“For me and you.
“And I think to myself…
”What a wonderful world…”

Her hand slows of its own accord, until the music stops. It’s a little too much, and Furiosa sets the hand crank aside.

What a wonderful world it must have been.

A part of it’s still out there, she knows. Where there are trees of green and flowers bloom. Over the rainbow. A world Jack might have heard of through these songs, but she doesn’t think he had ever really seen himself.

Furiosa looks down at her contraption skeptically. It’s technically functional, but she could make it better. Make it look better, at least. More presentable. Perhaps rig something simple up to get it to play by itself - perhaps a simple wind up mechanism.

When she goes to sleep that night, it’s with possible schematics and designs for the final model of her hand made record player buzzing about in her head.

“Ow!”

The tap of her boot against something hard jolts her out of her thoughts just before she hears the exclamation - she realizes only than that she had been swaying her feet to the tune she remembered from the record, and one boot had collided with Jack’s face. His dark silhouette appears in front of her the same time she sits up and the tap lifts with them, and a moment later there’s a creaky squeak as Jack flips on an electric torch and the yellow glow lights up his tired face.

“Nightmare?” He asks her as he rubs the corners of his eyes.

Furiosa shakes her head. “Can’t sleep.” It must be late she realizes just then, and feels a pang of guilt for having unwittingly woken him after he had gotten sick that day.

“Mmm,” He squints at her. “Wanna go for a small walk about? Might help.”

“Are you feeling up to it?” She asks. He didn’t quite look like he had quite rested off that drink. It must have been some pretty awful stuff.

He waves the torch dismissively, “Sure. Some clean air will probably help.”

Back at the Citadel, if they would wake up before the morning (often by kicking Jack in the same way she just had when she had a nightmare) they would occasionally sneak up to their oasis and wait there for the rest of the place to start stirring. There’s no reason to go sneaking around here, but she can’t suppress the instinct to be as quiet as possible as she slides out of the truck bed. It’s colder out in the open, and she reaches back to take her leather jacket and put it on herself. She hands Jack his as well - just the jacket portion, leaving the protective vest part of his attire with its clunky buckles and hydration pack under the tarp.

“Wait,” Jack turns around after they get out of the back of the truck and his front half disappears under the tarp for a moment. He comes back out with the blanket and holds it out to her. She pushes it back at him in refusal, because it’s his and he can use it. Jack tosses it over her head, and after some struggling she rips it off, balls it up and shoves it into his chest.

Furiosa watches his mouth set into a thin line in the lamplight, but she thinks she might have won this - she usually does with these things - as he throws it around his shoulders. Then he holds his arm out with the blanket - a peace offering. Furisoa huffs at how practical the solution is, having half a mind to stand there in just her jacket and freeze for the spite of it.

Perhaps its because of that spite that she doesn’t quite realize the implications of stepping close enough that they can wrap themselves up together, that there’s barely any space between them until she’s there. She stiffens when she does realize this, and keeps enough distance between them that they don’t quite touch. His arm, for a moment too long, stays slung over her shoulders after she’s taken her side of the blanket in hand and pulled it across herself. She hopes - thinks he might leave it there. But then it slides off, and falls to his side.

She can’t tell what Jack’s thinking about this, because just then the lamp goes out. Jack curses and gives it a few hits, but it’s dead. He sighs and the two just stand there - it would be foolish to go walking around this junk heap in the dark, especially folded together as they are. But they don’t go back to sleep either. They just stand there, and Furiosa looks up at the stars, trying to ignore how warm it’s getting under the blanket.

“They have stories,” She says suddenly, feeling like she has to say something into the silence to break it, to distract her so she can resist the urge to huddle up into his warmth.

“Oh?” At the corner of her eye she sees the silhouette of his head turn to look at her. She knows he can navigate by the stars like she can - he had tried to teach her once, before he realized she could. But she imagines that everything he knows about the stars is all practical knowledge about positions and how they move and where the southern cross is. And it seems she’s right. “I never thought their names meant anything.”

“Up there, what you call Orion,” She points to the three bright stars that make it up, “It can be a…” She pauses, realizing he wouldn’t know what a canoe is, “a kind of boat…something that floats on the water that you can ride in. There’s a story about three brothers who caught a forbidden fish…” She stops again. Does he know what a fish is? He doesn’t ask, but perhaps this wasn’t the best story to start with. She can’t remember much more about it either.

She chooses a different constellation. “And that one is the horse, Windfola. There was a hero who rode into battle while riding him. A woman who dressed up as a man, and had to fight some kind of monster. ” She stops again realizing she made the same mistake, mentioning things he might have no reference for.

“Did she make it?” is all he asks her.

Furiosa doesn’t say anything. Because she can’t remember any more of the story. Who the woman was, who she was fighting, if she was triumphant. And it hurts.

She feels a nudge at her arm. “Is Dorothy up there?” Jack asks her. She doesn’t have to ask what he means, or make any kind of noise, he can sense her confusion through that strange tether that ties them together, the same one that must have told him she was upset over the constellations. 

He elaborates, “That song about going over the rainbow. It’s from a story, about a girl named Dorothy. She gets sucked up by a tornado and thrown into a strange land and has to find her way home.”

“She didn’t die from getting sucked up into a tornado?” Furiosa snorts.

“It’s a story Fury, it doesn’t have to make sense.”

She supposes he’s right. None of her star stories really made any logical sense either.

“There were others in the story, helping her. A man made of metal looking for a heart, a…fearcrow? A stuffed man looking for a brain. And some kind of giant gigarat, I think. That talks. It wanted courage.”

Nonsense, like most stories. But Furiosa stifles the noise she was about to make in her throat. Like he said, it’s not really supposed to make sense. Stories are supposed to tell you things about the world, or about yourself, her mother used to say when she would ask too many questions about them. Back at the Green Place, when they would sit under the trees by the river, and her mother would tell her stories about magic fish and heroines of old.

“I’m going home.”

Puffs of icy breath between them that fill the pause.

“The place we’re going,” Furiosa tells him, finally, “It’s where I come from.”

“Are you Dorothy then?”

It’s an amusing thought. Maybe it should be a sad one. “What does that make you? The stuffed man?”

He chuckles, a deep rumbling noise. Furiosa shivers, but not from the cold. “Nah. I think I’m the metal man.”

Furiosa’s still mulling that over in her mind when he clears his throat and continues, “Or the dog.”

“The one looking for courage?”

“No, there was a dog too,” Jack says, “A little yappy thing she carried around with her.”

“I think that’s Wednesday.”

That gets him to actually laugh.

He has a nice laugh. It’s rare thing that warms her all over, more than the thick blanket they are sharing. 

“You know,” He says slowly, “You can be pretty funny, when you try.”

Liar, she almost says. But maybe that would be funny too, and prove him right. Though a second after thinking that, she regrets not saying it. 

Because maybe he might of laughed again, and she would have really liked to hear that.

Maybe, if she stepped a little closer, he might put his arm around her again.

Maybe she might have liked that.

But she doesn’t find out, because she keeps still.

Why, though?

It’s something that’s been brewing between them, she thinks, for a long while. Before they had left. Before they embraced in their secret place. Back in the west, they had been under the heel of the Immortan, too tired and crushed under his boot to feel much of anything with those buckles hanging between them. And even when she had started to feel her heart beat again for the first time in over a decade, and to realize what had caused that…back then, she was going to eventually leave, and there wasn’t any point in planting something if she was just going to have to pull it out after it had sprouted.

But then she’d taken him with her, and they’re both here under the stars. And she’s not home, but they’re not living under a tyrant either, or on the run. They’re sitting around in a junk heap waiting days on end for the right scraps to show up with nothing to do but watch sunrises and drink bad alcohol and tinker with silly contraptions. Why shouldn’t she chase these feelings?

She supposes it’s because of the way it makes her insides squirm, and her neck prickle, and how it feels all around uncomfortable despite also warming her all up inside. It’s all so incredibly contradictory, and she’s having some trouble processing it.

So she doesn’t move closer while they’re standing there. But a little later one, when Jack suggests they try to go back to sleep and they lay back down in the truck, Furiosa waits until she hears his breathing even out before she rolls over and spins herself around. So instead of toe to tail, they sleep face to face for the first time.

Chapter Text

“You’re starting to look like Wednesday.”

Jack looks back at Furiosa from where he’s knelt by the car jack that he’s using to crank up the semi truck, sweat running along his brow and down his neck.

“That’s a little unfair, isn’t it?” he grunts as he pumps the lever, causing the front part of the truck to slowly rise. “I’ve been keeping it trim and cleaner than he does.”

Furiosa just hums from where she’s watching him over the tire she’s holding up, her chin resting on her arms that she has crossed over the top. While she might not exactly approve of his beard, there are other qualities about him that she has started to become more appreciative of over the lazy days in the little junkyard outpost. The little patch of gray at his temple. The way his brow wrinkles up when he squints or looks particularly amused. Crinkles at the corner of his eyes that appear when he smiles.

And when he bends over, the way the seat of his pants tighten around his-

She stands up straight as she hears an ominous creaking coming from the car jack. It had looked much too small to handle the truck’s weight, and although it’s managed so far it doesn’t sound like it’s going to hold long.

They quickly roll the new tire over and lift it onto the hub. Furiosa just manages to tighten the fifth bolt when the car jack gives out with a metallic screech and the front end of the truck bounces back onto the ground. A quick check that nothing has broken, thankfully, and they’re able to secure it the rest of the way on.

“She’s almost all set then, is she?” Jack asks after they take a step back.

Furiosa nods. “It’s not a War Rig, but it can carry us there. Just need that one last part.”

She hopes. They can take their bike as well, slung onto the back with their other supplies on the sheet of metal Furiosa had welded onto the back wheel plate. She still doesn’t like the sound that motorcycle makes, but it does technically run and she doesn’t like the idea of getting stuck out there with just one vehicle. Especially if they are going to have to find a way across the sandy dunes in this clunky heap.

A loud cawing overhead catches Furiosa’s attention, and her eyes snap up to where one of the crows is hovering in the sky. Friends of Wednesday - he feeds them regularly, and in turn they signal when vehicles are approaching. But the one overhead just comes down to perch on the wall of the compound beside its partner and watch them. 

“Not yet, then,” Jack sighs. They were expecting the Buzzards again around now, hopefully with the last part they need. “I’ll head over and finish fixing that steering rack. Might have a chat with Wednesday after as well and just make sure he’s got the guzz ready for when they come.”

Furiosa nods and picks up the welding torch from the ground. She’s just about to walk off with it when Jack calls out, “Hang on, I’m going to need that.”

She stops and frowns. She needs it too, to put the last few touches on her “personal project” before the go. She had finally found a suitable horn that she thinks might make a good speaker, and she was planning to try attaching it while Jack was busy talking to the old man. “I’ll bring it over when I’m finished.”

“I want to try and get that cracked steering rack fixed and ready for when the buzzards show up,” Jack counters. “We’re not getting that part if we don’t have it ready for them, and they could show up any day now.”

“I won’t be long, and I can do that after,” Furiosa says as she starts to walk away. It might make more sense to let him have it and work on the rack first so they can be ready, because her project is of much less practical importance, but it really wouldn’t take her long and she doubts the Buzzards will show up before she’s done. And with them almost ready to go, she feels like she has to hurry and finish her project. They’re leaving with only the bare necessities they need to keep going for the next few days, to avoid adding on too much weight to a rickety truck that’s going to have to drive them over loose sand. So she imagines she will be leaving the player behind as well, and she doesn't think she could stomach leaving it unfinished after all the fussing and work she put into it.

“Really?”

Furiosa stops in her tracks and turns back around. Jack’s standing there with his arms crossed in his “all business” pose, looking at her suspiciously. “There’s something so important that I need to hold off on making sure we get the only part we need to get you home? Does it have something to do with whatever you have been working on in that trailer?”

Furiosa schools her face into an impassive expression. She had been sneaking off to the camper to work on her little project whenever Jack was busy helping Wednesday or doing other Jack things by himself, under the guise of going back to work on the truck. Apparently she hadn’t been subtle enough.

Jack sighs and shifts around on his feet, his expression both amused and perplexed. “Fine. You can have your secrets, as usual. But let me at least get that rack fixed first, right then?”

Now she’s annoyed. It really wouldn’t take her all that long to finish, and she figures he can wait a few minutes. So she takes a step back when he takes a step forward.

And so suddenly everything seems unnaturally quiet, and the air between them feels unusually charged. Jack takes another step forward, this time slowly, maintaining an intense eye contact with Furiosa as she matches his movements and takes a slow step back.

There’s a spark in Jack’s eye now. A slow smile inching across his lips. Furiosa feels herself starting to smirk back.

She’s not sure who moves first, likely they both do at the same time. All she knows is that suddenly the tension snaps like a bow string pulled too tight, and Furiosa whips around and finds herself hurtling down a pathway, Jack’s heavy footsteps running behind her in hot pursuit.

The place is a small maze, with walls made up not only of piles of crap Wednesday had collected but other items that had actual uses. Water collectors, Wednesday’s bunker, machinery used to refine the guz pumped up - all provide obstacles to maneuver through. But it is mostly the junk that gets in the way. The fossils of the old world piled up into tall dunes that create walls Furiosa has to find her way around. Jack’s behind her the whole time as she weaves her way about, too close for her to get out of sight and lose him. And she thinks he might actually be gaining. But there’s some hope - if she can just get to the trailer, she can jump inside and bolt the door so he can’t get to her.

She recognizes certain marks that lead her down the right paths - the handlebars of a bike sticking up means she has to turn north, that sign post reading “Melbourne” points to the left turn that she has to take right after. But she must mess up at some point - distracted by the sound of Jack’s footsteps pounding behind her or from checking over her shoulder to see how close he is, the sight of him having gained on her sending her heart beating that much faster - because when she rounds one particularly tall trash heap, she finds that she’s run into a dead end. 

There’s two steep piles of garbage that block her on either side and the wall of the compound right in front of her. And before she can escape, she finds Jack already there blocking the one entrance.

They both stop there, huffing to catch their breath, sizing the other up. Jack eventually stands up straight, rolls his shoulders and holds his arms out in a mockingly inviting gesture, smirking as he steps forward. “Now, where did you think you were going?”

Hilarious. Furiosa paces back and forth, and Jack follows her movements like an irritating shadow. When she makes a dash to one side, he’s quick to react and cut her off. All the while slowly coming closer and closer.

When she sees that spark in his eyes again, that uneven smile of his, Furiosa has the brief thought that perhaps… she wouldn’t mind being caught.

But then her eye flickers to the left, where the metal husk of a small kei truck is propped up against the side of a mound of scrap. A way out. And before she can think about anything else, she launches toward it full speed, making a leap over a small pile of hubcaps and onto the back. Her boots hit the flatbed of the truck, and she thinks she feels a light brush of fingers against her ankle before she vaults onto the top of the cab. She doesn’t stop to look back as she pushes off, sending herself over the top of the rubbish mound and over to the other side. 

Her jump takes her half way down the junk heap before she slides and skitters down the rest of the way, and then she’s off around the refining tower and past another heap, and only then does she stop to catch her breath and listen. When she doesn’t hear any kind of pursuit, she picks herself up from where she’s bent over gasping for breath and makes her way through the compound with the torch still in hand, feeling particularly smug.

She’s practically on the other side of the compound from where her trailer is, so it will be a little bit of a walk. Instead of going the quickest route as Jack would probably expect, she takes a longer one beside the outer wall. Nothing else crosses her path, and as she passes under one of the watchtowers the whole world is as still and quiet as it usually is.

Yet… It feels too quiet. That sixth sense that tells her she’s being watched, that makes her hair stand on end and her skin prickle, makes her freeze in the shadow of the watchtower and scan her surroundings. There’s nothing in sight, but there are so many places that a strikingly handsome praetorian could be lying in wait for her.

Then there’s a clank behind her that makes Furiosa spin around and back up. A metal pipe rolls innocently along the ground. Her eyes snap up above it to the tower, where she sees Wednesday grinning a wide snaggle-toothed grin down at her through his bushy beard. And as soon as she hears boots scraping against sand, she knows she’s been had and that she’s not going to be able to get away this time.

But she's not quite expecting what comes next.

A set of strong arms loop around her waist and pull her into his chest, then lift her straight off the ground. She huffs in surprise as she watches her feet leave the earth under her and fly out as he swings her around mid air. There’s a light, heady feeling when she feels the zipper of his jacket pressing firmly into her back and his hands on her sides as Jack spins them both about.

They topple clumsily over. He’d come in too fast and with too much momentum so that they both go crashing down to the ground, with him under her as he twists last minute so that she’s on top. She’s light headed and dizzy, but when she feels the tool easily pulled out of her hand, Furiosa snaps back into action.

The sheer arrogance. 

Furiosa rolls over onto her side away from him and gets a death grip on the torch with both hands, and after that it’s a little difficult to tell what exactly is happening as they wrestle about on the ground. At one point she hears him laughing, or maybe it’s Wednesday watching them from above. Then he’s over her with her back pressed into the ground and their legs all tangled, and it’s distracting enough that she loosens her grip and he’s able to get the tool out of her hands again. Not for long though - Furiosa hooks a leg around his and rolls them so she’s on top. She stretches her body against his, reaching for the tool that he’s holding away as far as he can. He’s got more reach than she does, so she has to crawl up him practically, scrabbling at his arm and his hand and pressing against his body with hers until-

Jack’s hand goes lax just enough to allow Furiosa to snatch it from his grasp. She stuffs it under her arm and before he can react properly, she pins his arms by the wrists lest he get any ideas, one by his head and the other nearer his shoulder, and leans over him, grinning triumphantly down.

The formerly Praetorian known as Jack, road warrior and apparent buffoon, looks ridiculous lying there all covered in dust and dirt. It’s tangled up in his new beard and his hair that has grown too long, turning it a red brown color so that he blends into the ground under him. But by far the most ridiculous thing about him is the look of utter reverence in his wide eyes while he’s looking up at her.

Furiosa feels her smile slowly drop away. They stay there for far too long panting, chests heaving as they recover. She should take her prize, let him up, and smugly march away to finish her project. But she finds herself not really wanting to pull away, as she becomes very aware of the brightness of his eyes and the feel of his hips pressed against hers.

But just as she leans down toward him an inch, she sees Jack’s eyes flick away and up. He’s looking up past and behind her at something, squinting against the sun.

“Oh don’t mind me,” Wednesday calls down from above, all casual.

Nosy old git. Furiosa huffs and rolls off Jack, and quickly snatches the welding torch off the ground where she must have dropped it at some point. Jack sits up next to her, brushing the dust off his sleeves and the front of his jacket.

It’s quiet again, except for their heavy breathing as they sit there still catching their breath. Jack’s still puffing after Furiosa has hers back and she light heartedly pulls at a spot at his beard where there’s some gray growing there, just visible through the dirt. Like the streak at his temples that she can see now that he’s no long running grease through his hair every day. 

His response is to give her shoulder a little playful shove. “Take it then,” He waves at her dismissively, “and your secrets. Finish up whatever you need to, but I want it back before the sun’s at the zenith.”

“You don’t hold rank over me anymore,” Furiosa shoves him back.

“Did I ever?” He chuckles, looking her all over. Then says, “Hang on,” and reaches behind her to brush the back of her hair. It must be a filthy tangled mess back there now, and as he runs his fingers through the locks she can hear the sand sifting out of it. He works his fingers through some of the knots that had formed, being careful around the braid at the back that holds her secret. Their secret.

“There,” He says as he finishes and takes his hand away, “Now it’s… better. Less dirty. Straighter. Nicer”

His tone sounds oddly off, and Furiosa gives him a puzzled look.

“Your…” He gestures to the back of his head, “Hair. Cause it’s…nice. Shiny and all.”

He finishes this lamely, his hand slapping back down to his side. Furiosa just stares at him - it’s still probably all a dirty tangle up behind her head, and she’ll have to comb the rest of it out after she gets up. Maybe his head had gotten scrambled during their tussle. “Did you get into Wednesday’s booze again?”

“No,” Jack sighs, “But I think I might have to.”

“Now this is just sad,” the old man tuts overhead.

“Right,” Jack gets up abruptly and brushes himself off. He looks down at Furiosa where she’s still sitting in the dirt, and gestures to the torch in her hand. “You can… have that and do what you need to. I’ll go and… maybe dunk my head in some water or…something. After I finish with this old crow.” He points up at the old man watching them.

“Well get on up here then, idiot.” She hears Wednesday scoff from above. “I’m not dragging myself all the way down there.”

The trade with Shark and his Buzzards goes well the next evening. They get their steering rack and in turn Furiosa gets the disk brake, which she finishes putting on by the next afternoon. Which means that they should be ready to go at any time. The next day, probably. All they have to do is get their supplies together and tied down to the back of the truck. They’ll probably start up as early as they can the next day.

Furiosa also finishes up her project that day, and it looks much nicer than her first prototype. She found a nicer hardwood side table with faded floral patterns that she knocked the two remaining legs off of. She fixed the drawer on it by bolting the inside together so it doesn’t pull out, then knocked the front out and reattaching it with hinges so that it folds open when you pull on the pretty, ornate brass handle she had pulled off another drawer and screwed on to replace the drabber original handle. The gears and other parts that make up the mechanism are all attached inside there, with a small hole punched in the side for the handle she can use to wind the thing up from the outside. It makes it harder to get in and adjust the spring coil, but it looks much nicer this way and she doesn’t think she’ll need to readjust it since she after she gets the timing of it right. She also bolts in some heavy metal odds and ends in there to balance the weight, since otherwise it topples over from the weight of the horn on one side of it.

The tricky part had been figuring out how to get the spring coil to release at the proper speed using a governor as well as figuring out the length to make it spin for the whole length of a record. But after several days of tinkering Furiosa thinks she has finally got it to go at the right speed and length. So she doesn’t have to continuously crank the handle, but rather can just wind it up and let it play on its own.

Furiosa ran off to mess with it some more as soon as they were finished with the semi truck while Wednesday pulled Jack aside to “give him a talking to” - whatever that meant. Now she’s staring at the whole thing with an oil lamp burning off to the side since it’s fallen dark outside, thinking about any other possible improvements she could make to it, when she hears a knock at the door to the trailer.

She should have noticed someone approaching in the silence before they knocked. Furiosa briefly worries she might be going a bit soft after so long lazing about in the fairly comfortable and secure compound. But maybe it’s good practice for when they get home and can be as lazy as they want.

Furiosa opens the door and finds Jack standing out there, as she had expected - if it was Wednesday, he would have started shouting at her to hurry over. She looks down at him from where she stands atop the trailer steps, waiting for Jack to tell her what he wants.

He doesn’t say anything right away, just stands there at the bottom of the steps. Then, finally: “I was just… it’s getting late. Were you going to stay here tonight?”

It is late. And Furiosa realizes that he’s asking if she’s going to sleep here or side-by-side with him like they had for the past several years. Which had never seemed especially intimate, surrounded by dozens of other sweating bodies in a large barracks. But lately, since they had switched to sleeping face to face - something Jack had never commented on, just seemed to accept - it had become something a little more. Particularly in the instances where she woke up and found that they had started to drift together in their sleep.

“It’s fine,” Jack says quickly, “I just wanted to talk to you before hitting the rocks, as it were.”

Furiosa considers him for a moment, before standing aside from the doorway. He accepts the invite and walks in.

“Holding out on me here,” He tells her jokingly after he’s walked in, nudging the bed built into the small camper with his foot. Not that she had used it for anything other than laying out her tools, but she supposes it would be more comfortable than the back bed of a truck. “At any rate, Wednesday says he’ll give us a full barrel of guzz and water to take us across. Should be more than enough, maybe some extra to trade if we come across any-”

“What’s that?” Furiosa interrupts. She had only been paying half attention to his words after her eyes landed on the front of his jacket. There, tucked between the leather and the tube to his hydropack, is what looks like a sad wad of yellowed cloth atop a limp green colored stick made of plastic. It looks like an artificial imitation of a sickly flower. Some kind of old world décor perhaps, that probably looked much better before several oil wars and the end of the world.

However he had gotten it, Jack seems to have forgotten it was there. He hurriedly pulls it out and tosses it to the side, sighing irritatably. “Just that old crow having a laugh at me. Gave me some… words on some things I didn’t ask for.”

“Was it grooming advice?” She asks, unable to keep the amusement out of her voice. He seems to have trimmed his growing hair and beard some since that morning - still long and scruffy looking, but marginally neater now. He looks a bit neater in general, with his clothes brushed off and his face looking like it’s been washed.

Jack shrugs. “Well, it is the last time we’ll be able to - hang on, what is that?”

He’s looking behind her - Furiosa had forgotten to throw the tarp over her project before letting him in. She briefly considers moving more in front of it to block it from view. It is finished, technically, but she’s still nervous about showing him. It’s just not…perfect, yet. But then, it might never be perfect enough. And this might be the only time she’s able to show it to him, with their departure imminent.

So instead, she sighs and steps aside to let him by. He walks up to the table it’s on, and has his back to her as he studies it. Furiosa feels the earlier pride she had in her invention shrivel up into uncertainty as she watches him wrap a finger around the arm holding the needle and lift it. Perhaps she got something wrong. Maybe he thought it was nothing but a stupid toy. “I know it doesn’t look a lot like the picture,” Furiosa says hurriedly, “I wasn’t sure if the kind of horn I found-”

She stops talking when he turns around and looks at her, his expression one of…awe, maybe. “Does it work?” he asks, excitedly. Sounding like a war boy who’s just been told he’s part of the War Rig crew.

Furiosa doesn’t say a word - she just steps over and starts to wind it up as tight as she can get it, drops the needle on the record…and releases the handle.

“Heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
And I seem to find the happiness I seek…”

Furiosa watches the record’s slow spin, feeling some of her pride returning at having managed to get the speed of it just right. And the length of the metal cord was enough so that the last time she had tested the player it had kept spinning until the needle had reached the middle of the record. It’s not the most complex thing she has engineered, and far from the most impressive, but as she listens to this ghost of the past sing their lovely lyrics, Furiosa thinks it might be the most beautiful.

“Is this why you’ve been locking yourself away in here?”

She flicks her gaze up and sees Jack staring at her with that incredulous expression. Furiosa shrugs - it might sound pretty but it really isn’t all that impressive, and she doesn’t know why he’s looking at her like she invented a way to turn sand into water. “I just found a way to wind up a wheel and get it to spin on its own,” she says dismissively.

“Huh,” is all Jack says, and they both go back to staring at the spinning disk. Furiosa tries to get her hair to fall over her face to hide away the red she can feel starting to burn up her neck to her face. She hoped he would be happy with it, but she hadn’t quite expected that reaction from him over a silly toy.

The voice had switched from the gravelly man’s voice to a higher, sweeter woman’s singing similar lyrics.

“Heaven, I'm in heaven,
And the cares that hung around me through the week,
Seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak,
When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek… ”

“Could I try something?”

Furiosa thinks that her face has cooled enough that she can risk looking up at him. And when she sees that very eager, boyish look, she feels her embarrassment fade into amusement. Furiosa nods, and Jack turns to her and gestures for her to turn toward him. When she does, he hesitates and his expression becomes unusually uncertain, and she thinks he might have changed his mind trying to do… whatever this is.

But then he takes a deep breath, like he’s steeling himself against an oncoming battle and he holds his hands up and out. “Like this,” he says. Furiosa can’t quite suppress her smile - small, tight, but easier to manage than it had been for many years - as she obediently holds up her hands to mimic him, palms out.

And then he takes her hands in his, and the contact startles her.  If it were anyone else, she’d immediately pull away, ram her fist in their gut and follow it swiftly with her knee.

But because it’s Jack, she lets him interlace their fingers together and hold their arms out to the side. And she lets him take her other hand and place it on his left shoulder. When it looks like he’s going to put his other hand on her waist for the briefest of moments, Furiosa can feel her pulse pick up at the thought. It is with some disappointment that she watches him suddenly move his hand upward and awkwardly curl it around her arm to grab her shoulder in the same way she’s now holding his.

Jack looks at their hands, as if to check that everything is in place. Then he gently starts to pull her so that they sort of shuffle off to the side, and Furiosa has to glance down at her feet to make sure she doesn’t step on his toes. She can feel how rough his hands are where they aren’t covered by his leather gloves, worn from the long years of road war and hard work just as hers are. But gentle. Always gentle with her, like when he’s stitching her up after a fight and he's trying his best to make it hurt as little as possible. Strong hands that she has seen smash noses and pull the trigger of a gun a thousand times over the years, now holding hers with the lightest grip. He doesn’t look at her, and rather seems determined not to, which she is glad for because otherwise he might see that red flush starting to creep up her face again.

They keep shuffling their feet about in the tight space, maneuvering around the table holding the player and the tools Furiosa had left on the ground, the other dilapidated items scattered around. But eventually they fall into something of a pattern, their motions smoothing out, getting into a rhythm not unlike the kind Furiosa feels when they’re in the middle of a fight. When this happens, Jack clears his throat and nods as if approving of something. Although whether it’s directed at her or himself or the wall he keeps staring at Furiosa can’t really say. It’s still a bit awkward, their bodies held away from each other so they touch as little as possible. 

Furiosa’s never been much for words, but she can’t think of anything else to do to break through the awkwardness as the record pauses and switches to a new song. “What…” She clears her throat, “Where did you learn this?” Sounds better than the first question that had popped into her head: What is this?

“My parents,” Jack says, again to the trailer wall in front of them. “They used to do this now and then at night, when they thought I wasn’t watching.”

It’s only the second time he’s ever mentioned them. But she gets the impression that they had been as important to him as her mother and her people had been to her. And she wants to show him that she understands.

Furiosa has stared down death in the form of scavs, fellow Citadel dwellers looking to pick a fight, warlords and the elements of the Wasteland a thousand times. But she thinks the bravest thing she’s ever done in her life is when she closes the distance between their bodies just a little more, so she can reach her arm a little more around him and pull him in just a bit. She thinks she feels him jump in surprise, but then he takes the hand off her shoulder and wraps it under hers so that it settles more intimately on her upper back

The song fades and ends, and there’s a few seconds of nothing but the crackling of the record and the scrape of their feet on the trailer floor until a new song pops on. It’s the same man singing about some old world thing called a “cabaret”, but the tune is very different. Jumpier, is what Furiosa would call it. But it’s still soft. Nothing like what the Doof Warrior would play, the harsh electric jumble of sounds that would echo in the hollow caverns of the Citadel when he played for the War Boys to work out their anxieties and energies between road battles. This song is upbeat, happy sounding, and their slow and swaying motions no longer feel like they match its rhythm.

So Jack changes their steps. He guides her into quicker movements, dipping their clasped hands up and down to the beat of the song. Furiosa chances a look up at him and sees he’s watching her now, his eyebrows and lips quirked up into a half grin. And suddenly that awkwardness and fumbling gets covered in a warm layer of deflecting self mockery and good humor. The same thing that had taken hold of her when he had chased her through the junkyard takes over again, something light and brilliant that had been locked away for nearly fifteen years bubbling up inside her until she’s willingly bobbing along with him.

“Here,” Jack stops them and takes his hand from where it had moved down to her side, but keeps their other hands clasped together as he steps away. He pulls them up over Furiosa’s head, then makes a twirling motion with his finger. “Spin around.”

It’s an awkward movement since Jack seems to want to keep hold of her hand, but she manages to spin fully around by dipping under his arm. She feels more than a bit silly about it, and she’s not sure what it was supposed to accomplish, but Jack seems pretty excited by all this and his energy is incredibly contagious. 

After that, Jack steps further away until their arms are stretched out to their limit, hands still clasped together in the middle. “Now kind of…” Jack seems to think for a moment, then adjusts his stance so he’s standing horizontal to their arms instead of directly facing her. “Spin again, but inward against our arms. Ready, and…”

He gives a tug, and she takes that as the signal to move. Slowly, careful not to bump into anything, twirling around as he had said so that her arm curls up against herself. And then his arm follows until it’s around her too and he’s pulling her into his chest.

Before Furiosa can think too much about that, the world tips around her - Jack has moved the his hand to her lower back, supporting her as he quickly tips her backward and then brings her back up. Furiosa stares at him wide eyed. Jack stops moving, then takes half a step away, looking a bit uncertain.

“That alright?” He asks.

Furiosa thinks about it for a minute, but can’t come to a decision yet. “Try again,” she suggests.

So he does, a little more slowly this time. It feels a little uncomfortable at first, not having her own feet under her. But his hand on her back holding her up is as remarkably steady as always, so that when she’s fully tipped backward Furiosa finds that she feels comfortable enough letting her weight fall into his hand. She tilts her head back, letting her hair spill back and fall behind her.

He pulls her back up quickly, and the rush back upward has Furiosa feeling a bit dizzy. Maybe a bit giddy all over again. She might have laughed a little if she remembered how to, but as it stands she just huffs and smiles. Jack gives her a roguish grin and a cheeky wink, before turning her around and dipping her a third time. After he pulls her back up, he goes to step away a again to give her space. But Furiosa’s ready for that, and as she comes back up, she loops her arm around his back and holds them together before he can move away.

And unlike the other times before, Furiosa doesn’t shy away or hesitate. She tosses her hair back out of the way and tilts her head up, staring challengingly and expectantly at her partner.

Jack blinks at her, as they both stand there with their hands clasped and arms around each other. It seems like now that he’s actually got her, he’s not entirely sure what to do next. Or maybe he just didn’t really expect that to work.

Looks like it’s up to her, then. Not that she herself has much courage to do much more than quickly lift herself up the few inches it takes to place a quick peck on his lips. A fleeting thing, a blink and you’ll miss it, but it’s enough that she can feel the whiskers of his trimmed beard tickle her face. Enough that, she is pleased to see, it flusters him as much as it does her.

It might be the first time she has ever truly seen him speechless.

“Right,” Jack eventually clears his throat, “Right then. I-”

A sharp, high pitched squealing sound from the record player interrupts them just then.

"Life is a cabaret…life is a cabaret…life is a cabaret…"

Furiosa stopped paying much attention to the words of the song, but she’s pretty sure that’s not how it is supposed to go.

“Ah, damn it,” Jack lets her go a little too quickly and hurries over to the record player, taking the needle off. “They do that now and again, get stuck like that. Want to try another one? Ah!”

He picks up one from the stack that Furiosa had nicked from his collection for test playing - The Wizard of Oz. Furiosa brings the player to a stop by holding the handle so it stops spinning, and after Jack replaces Louis Armstrong with The Wizard of Oz, she winds it back up again.

She drops the needle on the very edge of the disk, and they both wait there as it crackles and makes its way inward. Until…

"Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high…"

It’s the most beautiful voice Furiosa’s ever heard. 

Or, maybe the second most.

Furiosa taps Jack on the shoulder, and when he turns she motions for him to hold his hands out. Because she isn’t quite finished with him yet. And she thinks that she’s gotten the idea and movements down now, although they don’t try any of the fancy one they had been trying out with the last song. Instead they mostly just sway to the new music, gently and intimately.

“We should take it with us,” Jack says suddenly after a few verses, and nods to the record player. “It won’t take up too much room, and it would be a shame to leave it behind. Unless they have record players where we’re going.”

Furiosa thinks for a bit, before she frowns. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

They continue to move to the music without any other words between them for a few lines. After a bit Jack sighs, “I’m sorry it’s taken so long to get you home, Fury. But, all in all, this place wasn’t so terrible. Might not have gotten to hear Dorothy sing if we hadn’t found it, and had to stay for a bit.”

“Might not have heard you sing,” Furiosa smirks at him.

Jack grumbles. “That was a one time thing.”

That actually makes her genuinely sad. She stops dancing and frowns up at him. And she must look particularly wounded, because Jack does look a little bit guilty now. Which is what she had hoped. And eventually, after heaving a defeated sigh, he starts to hum and mumble along with the song.

Furiosa is feeling merciful this evening, so she doesn’t ask him to start singing the actual words. Satisfied with this much, she starts to move them through the dance steps once again and listens to the words coming through the makeshift player. It sounds like a silly kind of song about rainbows and dreams and such, but the melody is incredibly moving. So much so that she thinks she can feels some tears prick the edges of her eyes.

In the Wasteland, tears are considered a waste of water. So Furiosa will have to wait until they get there before she can let them loose. But she does bend herself just a little bit then. It’s difficult, like trying to loosen a bolt that’s rusted to a steel hubcap. But the lull of the music and their movements helps guide her in until she’s resting her head against Jack’s shoulder so they’re pressed closer together. And it’s definitely worth it when it makes him stumble a bit and cough, and she has to bite back another snort.

“Did she make it?” Furiosa asks after a few more sways.

She doesn’t look up, but she can feel Jack turn to look down at the top of her head. “Hmm?”

“Dorothy,” Furiosa asks, “Did she and her tin man friend make it over the rainbow?”

“No, she got swept away TO the rainbow,” Jack corrects, “She was trying to get back home away from that place. I think…”

“So did they get home?

He doesn’t say anything at first. Then, she feels him rest his cheek on top of her head. His beard rustles against the hair on top of her head. “She did. But her friends couldn’t come with her. They had to stay behind.”

“Why?”

Now she feels him shrug against her. “Just the way the world works. They had to stay, but she wanted to get home. And there’s no place like home.”

Furiosa thinks about that as the woman sings on.

“I would have stayed,” she tells him. Furiosa pulls away and looks up at Jack. When he looks back down at her, a query in his eyes, she clarifies. “For you. I would have stayed here. Or back there.”

She’s known this since that moment at the Bullet Farm. Maybe even to some extent back at their oasis. And right now she feels like she had to tell him, in case he didn’t know.

And she’s glad she does, because he looks so genuinely moved. Almost broken.

“Fury.”

This time, it’s Jack who bends and kisses her. And when she feels his beard rustle against her soft skin again - pleasantly soft, not sharp and bristly like she had been thinking it would feel like - Furiosa thinks she might come around to his new look after all.

Chapter Text

Jack leaves first that morning, just as the gray of early dawn starts turning the bright yellow of morning outside the window. He says he wants to check on a few things with Wednesday first thing, and that he’ll meet her by the semi when she’s ready.

Furiosa dozes on and off for another hour in an uncharacteristic fit of laziness. But eventually she gets up, languidly stretches her limbs before getting dressed, and heads out feeling refreshed. If not entirely well rested.

She also feels a strange, rough, burning sensation on parts of her skin. Namely her face. She stops by the husk of a volkswagon and glances at herself in the side mirror to see… ah. Hmmm.

Furiosa does find Jack standing by the semi, hauling gear and supplies onto the back plate and securing everything down with cables and wires. He looks up at her from where he has one foot up on the side of the truck as he pulls a cable tightly over a barrel of guzz and knots it. His smirk looks particularly smug this morning, but Furiosa supposes she’ll allow it. Just this once.

It’s replaced by a frown when she gets closer and he gets a better look at her. “What happened here?” he asks as he stands up and reaches over to brush the back of his hand against her jaw where a light pink coloring had appeared there. As well as on her neck. Some other places.

Furiosa smirks now, and responds by rubbing the back of her own hand against the beard growth on his cheek. Jack drops his hand and rubs the back of his neck, looking adorably guilty and apologetic. “Guess I’ll have to shave it off after all,” he says, chagrined.

“No,” she says after giving the hair on his chin a light, affectionate tug, “Keep it. It suits you.”

“It’s far too early to be flirting,” grumbles an old, raspy voice as it comes around the truck. “You two are enough to drive an old man to his grave.”

They take the truck for a test drive around the compound. It takes over a dozen laps before Furiosa finds herself satisfied - it’s far from a smooth ride, but they don’t really need one. Just a set of wheels, an engine and enough guzz to carry them all the way.

After the last pass, Furiosa turns the truck around so it points east, toward the end of her stars. They both step out to check one final time that everything’s tied up and secure in the back. The music player isn’t there - it and the stack of cardboard encased records are secured in a place of honor in the cab behind and under the seats.

“What are you hoping to find out there anyway?”

Furiosa looks up from where she’s tying down the tarp they had thrown over everything in the back and at the one eyed man standing next to her. He’s healed up pretty well, but walks with a limp she doesn’t think he’d had before he got shot up, and has to support himself with a metal pole bent into the shape of a cane.

“Ain’t nothing but dust and trouble out there,” the old man goes on, staring past her and out to the horizon. “Hasn’t been anything beyond these walls for decades. You keep going that way and you won’t find nothing but sand and salt as far as this clanker will take you.”

“You’re so certain about that?” Jack asks as he walks around the truck, checking knots every few feet.

The old man purses his lips and grunts. “Ain’t nothing good that people won’t find a way to ruin. We had a whole damn planet and scorched every inch of it into ash and dust. Even if there is something out there, won’t last much longer.”

Furiosa turns her back on the man and finishes tying the knot, giving it a yank that’s a little more forceful than needed.

“Well, if we don’t find anything,” Jack tells him, “I guess we know where to come back to.”

“You don’t really need to go at all.”

Furiosa stops fiddling with the straps of the canvas and looks back at the old man skeptically. Wednesday is, very pointedly, not looking at either of them, and seems to be studying the ropes holding everything to the truck. She exchanges a glance with Jack, who raises his eyebrows at her and looks rather amused.

“Bah!” the old man eventually harrumphs and turns away from the two of them. “Be gone with you. You’ve been a drain on me enough as is.”

He limps back to the entrance of his little world, back bent and wispy hair sticking out at odd ends. His crows, sitting atop the walls, caw at him as he approaches the gate.

God damnit. “Wednesday,” Furiosa shouts after him. He doesn’t even turn around, just looks over at him over his shoulder. “Thank you.”

The old man scowls at her one last time before he’s gone for good.

“Well, vacation’s over now,” Jack sighs as they climb into the cab together, Furiosa taking her seat behind the wheel. “It will be nothing but sand and heat for now until we get there.”

Furiosa starts up the truck again, glancing into the cracked side mirror to get one last look at the little compound. The angry rumble of the engine drawing her attention back to the road in front of her. Her foot hesitates on the gas pedal for a fraction too long.

“You with me?”

Furiosa looks over at Jack, who’s resting a hand on her leg to get her attention. She smiles at him - a full, face wide smile for the first time in a long time - and reaches her hand over to bring their foreheads together. 

“Over the rainbow,” She breathes against him. “All the way.”

She doesn’t look back at all once they get going.