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Furiosa gasps awake.
She barely registers the ache of the scorching desert air in her sand-choked throat before her entire body is consumed by blinding agony. The pain concentrates, sharpening into a white-hot fire in the mass of blood and shattered bone that was once her left arm. She can hardly discern any other sensation besides a light pressure on her shoulder and a distant shouting that's barely audible over the ringing in her ears. A man’s hand roughly grabs her by the chin, and she instinctively snatches at his wrist in a feeble attempt to fend him off.
“This one’s still alive!”
This one...Jack. Her mind burns briefly with the fear that he might be dead in the passenger seat of the Valiant, but then she’s being dragged through the sand and thrown savagely on the ground, another body landing next to hers moments later. She can’t move her head from where it’s pressed into the dirt, but she can see the slight rise and fall of his chest out of the corner of her eye.
He’s alive.
Her world is nothing but pain and humiliation, but he’s alive, and she’s alive, and as she’s pulled to her knees, she almost dares to feel the tiniest pinprick of-
“There is no hope!”
That spark is quickly extinguished when she finally registers that hated, abrasive voice that haunts her nightmares and stifles her dreams. Dementus is raving, driven mad with rage, and Furiosa knows that this is the end. She wants nothing more in this moment than for Mr. Harley to put a bullet in the back of her skull.
But only after Mr. Davidson shoots Jack. If she brought him here to die, she wants to at least spare him the torment of her death.
She knows that their deaths will not be quick, will not be painless, and will certainly not be merciful. As Dementus turns away from them, still screaming his indignities, Mr. Harley releases his hold on her right shoulder and she sways, unbalanced and yet, somehow, barely mobile.
She’s finally able to look over at Jack kneeling beside her. He’s staring at the ground in front of him with a slightly vacant expression, like there's nothing from within him to keep him tethered to this earth. It’s this raw defeat more than the blood running down his face or the hole punched clean through his shoulder that hurts her the most. He was always so grounded and present, so capable and self-assured and simply constant, and it was why Furiosa had loved him.
Is, not was. Loves, not loved. It may not be for much longer, but he’s still alive. She feels herself turning towards him, breathing hard with the effort of even the slightest movement.
“Jack,” she mutters. He barely responds, slightly inclining his head in her direction. So, she musters up all her strength and twists toward him, her right hand landing on his chest and moving up to the side of his neck. He finally turns to face her, and the second he meets her eyes, she breathes, “my Jack,” bringing their foreheads together the way she had when he’d agreed to come with her, not knowing they’d die the next day.
His voice is so low as to be almost inaudible, but she hears him mumble, “Fury,” as his own hand moves up to the side of her face. Furiosa’s heart twists at the nickname. He’d only ever called her that in secret, when they were alone; when they would wash their bruised feet in the pool of their little cliffside oasis, or when they would lie side-by-side under the Rig late into the night, trying to repair the damage done by the Fury Road. Oftentimes, they’d work in their usual companionable silence, but when Furiosa would start growling and muttering curses under her breath, the notion of incompetence chafing at her, Jack would take her hand in his and anchor her.
“You’re good, Fury,” he’d say with the softest of smiles, and she’d turn towards him, allowing herself to find a bit of solace in this one thing, in his calm and even gaze, barely a foot away. But that memory is already morphing, his face turning bloody, bruised, and filthy not even an inch away from her own.
Their breaths mingle, and they don’t embrace in that steady way they had on the cliffside. They’re nearly falling into each other, their noses meeting as she tilts her face and leans toward him, desperate for these last moments of closeness. She’s barely realized that their lips are hardly a hair’s breadth away when Dementus bellows in rage and wrenches them apart, hauling them to their feet.
He forces them together again, side-by-side, but this time the contact is agonizing as it pins her shredded left arm against his jacket. Surely, Jack must be in equal pain as her pauldron digs into the bullet wound on his shoulder. Furiosa keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon as Dementus rants in their faces, determined not to give him the satisfaction of her tears the way she had when he’d butchered Ma. He releases them with a shove, and their injured arms fall apart. Furiosa is dizzy with the blinding pain and can’t focus on anything except staying upright until she feels Mr. Harley’s grip on the back of her jacket, steadying her.
She turns into Jack once more, her forehead pressing into his cheek. He exhales shakily at the contact, like it’s a balm just to have her touching him. Her own rush of relief at this naked show of affection is almost stronger than her agony. It’s something she’s adamantly denied herself ever since Ma died, but there’s no use in holding back any of it now.
She tries to choke out those words she’s held close for so long, but they’re momentarily lost in her faint gasps of pain. As his face angles towards hers again, his lips brushing against her temple, she manages it, audible to no one but them, and them alone.
“I love you.”
She can offer him no other goodbye than that, and his response, if he’s even capable of it, is lost in the revving of dozens of motorcycles. But she doesn’t need one; she briefly meets his eyes just before they’re hauled away from each other, and the depth of the emotion she sees in them, so reminiscent of his expression when she’d asked him to come with her, is all she needs to know that he’s always felt the same.