Work Text:
For once in her dusty, sandy, grease-streaked life in the Citadel, Furiosa is bored.
Sandstorms aren’t unusual enough for special attention, but this one has gone on long enough that Furiosa has just about reached the end of her seemingly never-ending list of tasks, and the threat of inactivity is beginning to itch around the edges of her brain. She’s cleaned every weapon on the Rig and a dozen more besides. She’s sorted through scrap parts and found objects. She’s fixed the sticky switch on the dash. She’s polished her boots and repaired every rip in her paltry collection of clothing. She’s lost count of how many busted capacitors she's made them shiny and chrome once more, and has checked over and rechecked the rig with the praetorian half a dozen times.
Praetorian Jack.
Her mouth twists at the thought of him. From the alcove off the engine room where she’s set up with the capacitors and her tools, she can hear his voice. Commanding, firm, rumbly. Lately that voice makes things happen low in her gut, especially when he’s close to her. Like the other day, practicing maneuvers on one of the bikes, his hands at her waist and his voice at her ear.
Furiosa tenses against the memory and bats it away. She seizes her screwdriver and moves to grab—
Her pile of capacitors is shuffled off to one side, all of them fixed. To get more parts to tinker on, she’ll have to go out into the engine room. She might even have to ask Jack.
Furiosa huffs and bends at the waist, hoping some new job will present itself in the sand between her boots. One of the uppers on her right boot is starting to peel up from the sole. Maybe that should be her next task.
Again, her problem presents itself: to get a needle and thread to fix her boot, she’d have to leave this little corner and probably pass by the Praetorian Jack. He seems to be faring well enough in the sandstorm: calm and assured, as usual. Always ready with a job for the crew or something to teach Furiosa.
Furiosa likes learning. She likes learning from Jack. What she doesn’t like is the sense of imbalance. She’s on his crew, of course; she’s useful to him. But she can’t shake the feeling that there’s a one-sidedness to their partnership. That plus the boredom makes her feel like someone’s rubbing sand into her eyes. She’d scowl if there were anyone to scowl at.
She’s still bent double, unwilling to sit up when sitting up would mean just as much relentless inactivity as leaning forward. The tip of the screwdriver plays through the sand, making little furrows in the gritty dirt that blew in with the storm.
Her hand moves in random patterns. Swirls and circles and stars that match the ones on her arm. She’s about to sit up, to swallow her reluctance and find something productive to do, when her eyes catch on one of the figures she’s drawn. It snakes through the sand like the river back home.
S.
It’s an S.
Memory flashes like the lights on the Rig’s dash.
Furiosa thinks.
Her hand moves, adding half-remembered characters.
s-a-n-d
There’s a buzzing in her head. She’s not sure if it’s a function of her position—the blood rushing to her head—or the sudden flow of memory blowing against her as persistently as the wind battering the door of the engine room.
Her hand moves again. The letters are reluctant, but come they do, sliding from her head to her arm to the sand below her.
s-t-o-r-m
At home, the children were given their lessons in a hut by the riverbank. Furiosa always had a a slate in her left hand and a sliver of limestone in her right. The schoolroom smelled of wild mint that Teacher kept on hand to treat bellyaches and the hunks of chalk that occupied a pocket of her apron. The chalk tickled her nose. Valkyrie, ever-studious, followed along with Teacher’s lesson, eyes rapt. Furiosa leaned to her left and nudged her friend with her elbow, eager for the day's lesson to end and free them to go explore the forest. Valkyrie elbowed her back, a smile curving her lips despite herself.
“What are you doing?”
Furiosa scuffs her boot over the word on instinct, the urge to hide filling her with a hot flood of adrenaline. She sits up too fast and has to blink away the darkness that encroaches as the blood that had gone to her head suddenly spills back where it ought to be.
But she ought to have known who it is. Nobody else in the Citadel speaks to her with that tone. She wonders, as Jack glances around the rocky pillar that makes the wall of the alcove, how he knew to look for her here.
Jack's eyes go from Furiosa’s face to her hand to the mussed dirt at her feet. He crouches and traces one finger along the tail of the M she hadn’t quite erased, his touch gentle, as though he’s keen not to disrupt the flow of the letter.
It’s only Jack, Furiosa reminds herself. Everything-you-need-to-know, no-questions-asked Praetorian Jack. Who, in almost three hundred days of knowing her, hasn’t taken a single thing from her. Who, she’s beginning to suspect, has no intention of ever taking anything from her, not even this little scrap of herself that’s somehow spilled onto the engine room floor.
He looks up at her, eyes big.
“You can write?”
The words are barely voiced, little more than breath, but the way Jack is looking at her is enough to make Furiosa’s face heat. No point in lying. She nods once.
Jack checks behind him again, then shifts to sit fully in the dirt. Furiosa has the urge to laugh; he reminds her of herself as a child, curled at Teacher’s feet.
“Can you show me?”
She has kept so much of herself tucked away for so long, leaning forward again feels like exercising a rusty hinge. She brushes out the creases in the sand where she’d kicked at it, then thinks for a moment before moving her hand.
Jack squints at the letters like he does when he’s spotted a shift on the horizon. Furiosa huffs through her nose. He’s looking at them upside down. “Come over here.”
She bites her lip the second the words are out of her mouth—they sound too much like a command, and she and Jack may be friendly but she’s still his apprentice. Jack only gives a self-deprecating smirk, though, and shuffles around so he’s seated next to her chair. She slides to sit next to him in the dirt, taking care to leave a gap between their knees.
From this angle Furiosa can see the precise angle of his scar, how the end closest to his eye is fainter and paler than the rest of it. Jack studies the letters, then glances back at her. Furiosa pretends she’d been looking at the dirt, too.
“What does that say?” Jack asks.
He knows her name; it’s flown over his lips more than a few times, though mostly he doesn’t call her anything at all. There’s no reason for her to hesitate to show him what it looks like. Still, sounding out the syllables feels like peeling back a bandage once the blood has dried, revealing tender flesh underneath.
She’s never shied away from a twinge of pain, though. She recalls something Teacher would do when showing the children how to sound out long words. She drags the head of the screwdriver in the dirt just underneath the letters as she goes. “Fur-i-o-sa. Furiosa.”
Jack follows the path of her screwdriver with his finger. “Fur-i-o-sa.” The sounds come too quickly, though, and he’s done saying her name before he reaches the end of the letters in the sand.
Furiosa shakes her head and positions the screwdriver under the F. “Say it with me. Fyur…”
“Fyur.”
She points to the I. “Ee.”
“Ee,” Jack says.
The screwdriver taps the O. “Oh.”
“Oh.” Jack is smiling despite the rounded shape to his lips.
“Sa.”
“Sa.”
“Furiosa,” she says, feeling a little ridiculous.
Jack waits a beat longer, studying the word. “Furiosa.”
Furiosa nods. She moves to scrape her screwdriver over the letters to erase them.
“Don’t do that,” Jack says.
Furiosa gives him a questioning glance. He’s still looking down, tracing her name with his eyes, his lips moving as he sounds out the letters. “Let me try one more time.”
Jack’s a quick study, it turns out, or sounding out the word one chunk at a time is even more effective than she’d remembered from her time with Teacher. When he reads her name for the third time, it’s effortless, his finger following the letters precisely.
“Got it,” she says unnecessarily.
The engine room is quiet—or, as quiet as it ever gets, anyway—the sounds of work muffled and softened by the blowing sand outside. It occurs to Furiosa that they’ve got a pocket of time here. They won’t be missed for awhile yet. She scoots backward in the dirt to make a little more space and takes the screwdriver to the ground again.
This word is short enough that she won’t need to go syllable-by-syllable. She points. “J.”
He knows what to do. “J.”
“Aa.”
“Aa.”
For some reason she hesitates just before the final consonant, her face heating. Ridiculous. It’s only a pair of letters, only a sound, only a mark in the dust. It doesn’t matter, not really. They’re just passing the time.
“K.”
“K.”
Judging by the upward tilt of his mouth, he knows what this word is. Still: “Jack,” she says as she underlines his name.
“Jack,” he repeats, and stars, when he looks at her his expression is almost a little fond.
They begin with the alphabet because that’s the best place she can think to start. Every few days between runs, when things are quietest in the engine room and tools are least likely to be missed, Furiosa and Jack pilfer a couple of screwdrivers from the workshop. They hike up to the place Furiosa has begun to think of as theirs, the spot with the pool and cool air that sometimes smells of damp stone. The terrain is rockier there than at lower points in the Citadel, and there's less sand to work with than she would like, but there’s a little patch where they can etch out a handful of letters at a time.
Furiosa is glad to no longer have to grasp at snatches of time to show Jack a few letters. At the pool, she doesn’t have to look over her shoulder, waiting for someone to round the corner and find them out.
It’s not like it’s forbidden to read or write at the Citadel. Not explicitly, anyway. But Furiosa’s certain it would raise questions at the very least, and from people who live high up in the Citadel whose attention she’d prefer to stay out of. The less anybody knows about her, the better.
Jack’s a quick study. This is not surprising. It does surprise Furiosa how eager he is to learn, how easily he takes correction. After months of him showing her new skills, she finds she likes being the teacher. He’s taught her so many things over three hundred days, the least she can do is show him something to keep him occupied during his little downtime. When she’s gone, maybe he’ll remember how to read and write; maybe he’ll show his next apprentice.
Once he knows the letters and their sounds well enough, she invents the first-sound game. One of them will say a letter or its sound and the other has to name as many words as they can that start with that letter. The first time they play it strikes her that it’s not quite fair, since she learned to read so long ago and he’s just beginning, but Jack’s a good sport and quickly begins to hold his own. And since runs have become routine for them, it’s nice to have a way to pass the time on quiet stretches of road.
“B,” Furiosa says once they’re out of the shadow of the Citadel and the crew are all at their posts.
Jack draws the letter in the air: the lowercase, then more hesitantly, the uppercase.
“Boy,” he starts. He glances at her. “Blue. Bike. Baton. Barrel.”
He pauses, thinking.
“Give up?”
“Bollocks,” Jack says defiantly. “Be. Broken. Big. Bright. By.”
Furiosa’s a little surprised at his vocabulary. But—
“Buzzards,” Furiosa says.
Jack shoots her a withering look. “I wasn’t finished.”
“No,” she says, pointing at the spiky cars pouring out from behind a craggy shelter on her side of the Rig. “Buzzards!”
The reading lessons are an oasis in otherwise dry days.
She’d spell out his title, but praetorian is a mouthful that she isn’t sure she can quite sound out. And anyway, day by day, he seems less Praetorian Jack and more—Jack.
She’d insisted on showing him how to write Jack, first and foremost. With a flare of memory she’d made him write his name at the start of every lesson. Teacher hated to see a slate without a name at the top.
“Why’re there four letters?” he asks her one day.
She shoots him a glance. Huh?
“In ‘Jack.’ Three sounds, but four letters? I thought you only needed one letter for each sound?”
Furiosa nods slowly. There’s a reason for it, some rule she’d learned once, but she can’t remember what it was. “There are,” she clears her throat. It seems the more words appear in the dust between she and Jack, the more want to come out of her mouth, too. “There are words that break the rules. Sometimes you need two letters to make a sound.” This isn’t quite right, but it seems the easiest explanation.
“Like, here—” She grabs for her Apache and thinks before she scratches the letters into the dirt with a light touch so as not to dull the point.
b-o-o-m-s-t-i-c-k
Furiosa points to the end of the word. “You need the -ck, I think, for some reason.” She’s not totally sure, and she hasn’t read anything in years, but it looks right.
Jack’s lips work silently as he sounds out the word. He’d been a quick study on the consonants, though the vowels trip him up. She erases the first syllable and replaces it with a new word. “‘Thunder,’ ” she says. “See? Th says ‘th.’ Two letters can make one sound.”
“Two letters, one sound,” Jack says. Her heart jumps when he grins at her, suddenly. “Two praetorians, one rig.”
When he takes the Apache to copy out her word, his fingertips brush against hers for a breath longer than they need to, and Furiosa feels like she’s been lit up by a thunderstick herself.
They move to sentences, etching out three or four words at a time in the sand. The first sentence Jack writes himself is ‘I can go.’
Go where? Furiosa wants to ask. She remembers his words that day on the Fury Road: “There is nowhere else.”
But then she looks over at him and he’s grinning at her, looking boyish and proud of himself. He adds three more words. ‘On a run.’
I can go on a run.
“Good,” Furiosa says. “Great.”
Jack erases the sentence and starts over. You can come to.
Furiosa uncurls her arm from where she’s been holding her knees to her chest and adds a second O. “T-o-o.”
“How do you know that?” Jack asks. A little line appears between his eyebrows. He’s looking at the word like it’s an impudent War Pup who’ll follow a stern command.
“You spell it with two O's when you mean more than one thing.”
Jack learns more little words. Furiosa remembers some of these words as ‘cheaters’—not scumming words, not words that cheat other words. Rather, these are words that don’t follow most of the rules. Words, she thinks with no small measure of fondness, like her.
She likes the -gh words best, and once she starts remembering them, she can't seem to stop. So many of them sound alike, so many of them go in pairs. They trace a map she can follow that tells her own story.
Brought—to the Citadel.
Bought—by the Immortan.
Flight—from the Vault.
Fight—against Jack. With Jack. For Jack.
She runs through them as she sits in the cab in Gastown, one hand on the gearshift, anxiety (fright) pulling the muscles of her shoulders taut (tight). She rolls her neck, tries to relax, tries not to look in the direction of the observation deck. Jack’s up there somewhere (high), hobnobbing with Dementus over some private warlord matter. Their crew is getting restless. Tension roils through the Boys like a wave, one to the other. They listen to Furiosa. They’d follow her orders if they needed to.
No one can calm them like Jack, though.
No one can calm her like Jack.
Furiosa waits in the cab, one hand on the gearshift. The bone is warm under her palm. She inches her thumb into the socket absentmindedly, her eyes out the window and on the side mirror. When Dementus summoned Jack to the observation deck she’d positioned the Rig so she could see the door at the base and watch for his return.
A ripple of relief runs through the Boys (light) when he appears. Her shoulders unclench. Jack’s moving at his usual brisk pace, but there’s something tense in his posture. Still, he’s on the ground on his own two feet, not splattered across the dust like that unfortunate watchman they’d seen once (slaughter). Months ago, Jack had told (taught) her a fancy name for the way they both scan their surroundings, left to right and back again, checking for threats. Situational awareness, he’d called it, a phrase that seems ludicrously flowery for what seems to Furiosa to just be common sense.
Jack’s eyes trip over the crew, the Gastown inhabitants, the Rig, then meet hers in the side mirror. He gives a tiny nod and she loses track of him as he rounds the back of the Rig until the door clicks and squeals and he settles in next to her (right). He has one hand on his Glock, not his knee like usual, but he nods again and they get going. There’s something amiss, but she won’t ask about it, not yet.
A few clicks down the road, he pulls something out of his jacket and holds it out to her. Furiosa nearly swerves when she sees what it is.
It’s a book. It's barely longer than Jack’s hand, covered in black leather, a stretchy cord holding it shut. Lighter than her Apache revolver, but it seems somehow heavier. Furiosa turns it carefully, eyes going between its spine and and the road ahead. She can barely believe her eyes.
Jack pulls one of the clean cloths he carries from his jacket and wipes his fingers before taking the book back. He undoes the cord and flicks his fingers through a few pages hesitantly, like he’s only just remembering how to turn them.
“We had a few,” Jack says, then clears his throat. “We had some books at home before we left. They had pictures along with the words; none were empty like this. There was one about some animal, like a rat but bigger, that I really liked. He could climb trees. There was another one about a boy named Jack who climbed a big plant. Jack and the…” he trails off, thinking. “Can’t remember now. Beam-something.”
“Jack and the Beanstalk,” Furiosa fills in. There was a giant at the top of the plant who’d killed Jack’s father. Jack climbed and climbed to get a hen that laid the most perfect eggs.
Their scout swings into the cab’s back window to give report. Jack tucks the book under a thigh. Furiosa imagines it warming between Jack’s leg and the hot leather seat. She imagines it combusting.
“You know that story too, then,” Jack says when the scout has gone back to his perch. He hides the book inside his jacket.
“Jack was brave,” Furiosa says, thinking of her Jack in Dementus’s quarters, spotting this book, sliding it into a pocket. Coming down the spiral staircase that leads from the Gastown’s observation chambers on the double, listening for the angry roar of the giant.
“Jack was foolish,” he says wryly.
“But he lived happily ever after,” Furiosa adds, something like a joke.
Long minutes pass in the heat of the cab. The rig breathes. Jack has an elbow propped on the window ledge, the backs of his fingers to his chin.
“D,” Furiosa says, giving him a letter. She wants to bring them back to their version of normalcy.
Jack traces a semicircle in the air in front of his finger, then a line twice the circle’s height on the right-hand side, making the shape of the letter. “Dashboard. Door. Datsun. Dinki-di. Do, doing, done.”
Jack trails off and drums his fingers against the Glock. The silence lasts so long Furiosa squints at the blurry horizon, wondering what Jack sees.
“Darcy.”
Jack keeps his gaze pointed firmly out the windscreen.
“My mum.”
It’s a flicker of white, only, that betrays the way his eyes go to her. Furiosa nods, tries to make her face soft. A listening face.
Jack clears his throat. “Dad, too. That’s another one. You got any?”
Dogman. Daughter. Dementus.
“M,” Furiosa says instead. “Many. Mother. Ma.” A pause. “Mary.”
Jack’s hand leaves the Glock and hovers over her knee for a breath. He lets it drop, squeezes, and rubs his thumb along the ridge where bone becomes joint.
Bringing the book to the Immortan would be the right thing to do, the praetorian thing to do.
What use do they have for an empty book, after all?
Stripping the paper and using it for kindling would be just as good. Better, even. Less liable to raise questions.
There's no reason for Furiosa and Jack to keep the book.
They keep it anyway.
Furiosa scrounges up a stub of charcoal for herself and one for Jack. It’ll smear a little, but that’s all right. She writes her name on the inside cover, though marking it as belonging to she and Jack is about as risky as taking it in the first place. She can't resist the ridiculous, illogical urge to put something down with permanence. She wants some piece of herself to remain here with Jack long after she’s left this place for home.
Jack writes his name below hers, his script larger and more labored.
They stow their book in a rocky crevice at the pool, tucked away alongside their med kit. They begin to write notes back and forth to one another. Lacking anything else to write and being on the whole very practical people, they end up writing mundane things. Banal things. Mostly practicing their spelling and handwriting.
Final checks at first light.
Where’s the new capasitter?
Maggot mash no good today.
Furiosa signs hers with an F, one of Teacher’s rules that had little to do with reading or writing: always sign your work. Be accountable for your actions. She hopes she’s living up to the lesson.
Jack has followed suit and adds a symbol after every note that puzzles Furiosa. It’s not a J; it’s not any letter Furiosa has ever seen. It’s pointed at the bottom like a V, but the upper ends are connected with two little bumps like dunes. Furiosa can’t make it out, but figures he’d tell her the meaning if he wanted her to know. Maybe this symbol was Jack’s clan name, the last remaining bit of whatever family he might have once had other than his red blanket. She remembers the Vuvalini language and aches for all the learning she never got to do.
Your hair’s getting too long. This Furiosa writes to Jack one evening. She passes him the book and settles back on her elbows. The water’s cooling quick in the evening air and her feet are starting to freeze, but she can’t bring herself to shake off the drops and put her boots back on.
What she wrote is true: Jack’s hair is beginning to brush against the collar of his jacket, not quite obeying his attempts to tame it with grease. When little locks start to come free on the road, Furiosa has to tear her eyes away to keep herself from pushing them back.
She's begun to look forward to their runs to Gastown, because when she drives, sometimes her attention can snag for a minute on the lush streak of gray at Jack's right temple.
Jack still moves his lips a little when he reads. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen once he’s done, and he chuckles at her before picking up his own charcoal.
So is yours.
Furiosa rolls her eyes, but Jack’s adding a few words in a hasty scribble, followed by that symbol.
Don’t change it.
They’ve run through G (Gastown, guzzoline, gears, grease, go, green) and are making their way along the H's (House of Holy Motors, hand, haul, half-shaft, hardtop, hydroponics) when Jack asks: “Thought about being a History Man?”
She remembers a skeleton in a cage bound by symbols, by the scant space on his body to give over to them, by someone to force him to make meaning from them.
Jack might as well have said, “Thought about going to the Vault?”
She shakes her head.
“I like this,” she murmurs, low enough she doesn’t think he’ll hear. These words are parched things, not nearly big enough to encompass what she’s really thinking, low enough she doesn’t think he’ll hear.
She means being on the road, moving. Unlimited by her body and what someone else can do with it.
She means she likes being with Jack.
Jack nods.
“Me, too.”
“C,” Jack whispers as she crawls under the Rig next to him.
“Climb, car, carburetor, chrome, cast iron, carapace, culprit,” Furiosa says. Jack raises his eyebrows.
“Chrome’s got to be a K,” Jack says. Damn him, he looks pleased to be able to correct her. Still—
“Could be a C,” she shoots back. “C can say ‘k.’”
When all she gets in response is a skeptical silence, she goes on. “Like at the end of Jack.”
Jack dips his head back and forth like he’s humoring her. She passes him the wrench she’d gone to get.
“C-r-o-m-e?” He spells out loud. “Doesn’t make sense.”
Furiosa has to admit he has a point. When she pictures the word it doesn’t look quite right, though she couldn’t explain why even with the Apache to her temple. “Fine. Call that one a draw.”
They’re flat on their backs underneath the Rig, trying to suss out whether the engine’s using oil because of an issue with the turbocharger. If Furiosa lets her vision blur so all she can see is the Rig’s dark underbelly, if she forgets the smell of exhaust and dirt, she can pretend they’re out in the Wasteland looking up at the stars.
“One of the Boys caught me practicing,” Jack says a few minutes later, low in her ear. Furiosa flicks her eyes to him. He looks rueful and a little amused.
“The one with the pair of tumors right there.” Jack points at a spot on the left side of his neck, just above his clavicle.
Furiosa knows the kid Jack’s talking about. He’s one of the more earnest Boys, one of the quickest. He’ll be a fine Driver if he can ever slow down enough to listen to directions.
Furiosa holds Jack’s gaze, hoping she won’t need to shank the Boy in the night. Jack shakes his head. “Don’t do that. He won’t tell. He only wanted to know how to spell his name.”
Furiosa tilts her head skeptically. Jack blows out a breath that nudges her chin. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle.
“I know. He just said ‘be real shine of you, Prae Jack, if you could show me how to do my name, and once I’m a Driver I’ll put it somewhere in my car in your honor.’”
Furiosa lifts her eyebrows.
“Course I showed him,” Jack says.
She inches a little closer to feel the warmth of him radiating. Her own personal sun.
Nice day today.
Not too hot.
Water feels good.
Water taists good.
Furiosa draws a line through the misspelled word.
Tastes.
Jack grunts.
How would I know that?
She shrugs.
It doesn’t follow the rules.
Meedeeoker.
It’s a word whose spelling they’ve argued over, neither of them knowing who’s closer to the correct version. When Furiosa looks up at Jack, his wink makes her stomach flip and her cheeks burn.
When it happens, Furiosa’s first thought is not for her own safety.
She doesn’t have a flash of dread for her life, or anger that now she won’t make it home.
She had been covering for their scout up top and therefore had a bird’s-eye view of the bikers approaching the passenger side while Jack was distracted by a vehicle on his side.
When she plunges into the cabin and directly in the path of the raider approaching Jack and gets the butt of a pistol cracked across her skull, Furiosa’s first thought is fear that after this she won’t remember the words, that a single blow to the brain will do what fifteen years of inactivity couldn’t, and erase reading and writing from her brain.
Her second thought is, Did I get him?
Her third thought is, Did he get Jack?
In the half-second—or minute, or two?—of blankness that follow the blow to the head, somebody must have dispatched the raider, because when she looks up there’s only Jack.
A shrill screech like her warning whistle from back home fills her ears.
Jack is yelling. She can see Jack yelling, shouting a word that’s shaped like her name, but she can’t hear him over the whistle. She wishes someone would stop that shrill racket, and then the sound fades with her vision as she slumps against the door.
Furiosa stumbles to the bunk, supported by Jack; there's something wet on her face, dripping, irritating; there are swirling crew members who she tries to bat away; there is Jack through it all. Jack and hurt. After awhile they are the only two words she can remember, eddying through her skull like river rapids. Jack. Hurt. Jack. Hurt. Jack.
Hurt, she thinks. Then: sleep.
Furiosa dreams of Jack climbing an enormous tree. She is on the ground below, yelling at him to wait for her, that she’ll help him get to the top, but whenever she tries to climb her hands and feet slip off their holds and she’s back on the ground again.
She dreams they’re small creatures out in the Wasteland. Furiosa is invisible to everyone except Jack, and together they try to make her visible again, even though she doesn’t mind that he’s the only one who can see her.
Furiosa dreams of a little boy in the backseat of a car, younger even than she was when she was taken, and in her dream the boy sees the rising mounds of the Citadel and feels a swell of hope that drains away until it's gone completely and the boy grows into a man and meets a woman on the hood of a Rig.
Time, always malleable, loses meaning entirely in this state, and so when she wakes up Furiosa can’t say with confidence how long it’s been since she was struck.
There’s a half-full canteen at her side. Beside it is Jack’s symbol, etched in the sand. Furiosa traces its edges before picking up the canteen. She doesn’t realize how thirsty she is until she starts drinking and can’t seem to make herself stop.
“Hey.”
She sputters on her last, gulping sip, but it’s only Jack entering the bunk. He comes to sit beside her, his eyes filled with such Jack-like concern her breath catches.
“How are you?”
How is she? Her head aches and her mouth is gritty and her eyes sting in the light from the campfires that illuminate the chamber. She’s hungry and sore and tired. But Jack is here. She’s fucking great.
Excellent, she thinks, testing herself. Fantastic. Perfect.
That’s enough for now.
She can see his roving gaze, almost clinical, assessing her for more permanent damage. What can she do to assure Jack she’s fine?
“W,” she says, the sound hoarse.
Jack gives her that half-smirk of his, the one that she wouldn’t like on anyone else, the one she’s only seen him direct at her. But then he opens his mouth. “Weak.”
Furiosa narrows her eyes at him. “What?”
Jack shakes his head. His smile is like the sigh the rig makes at the end of a difficult run: strained, relieved. “Worried.”
There are matching patches of tanned skin on the backs of each hand. His hands-pale and soft underneath his driving gloves-brush the hair back from her face so he can examine the knot on her scalp. He skirts around its base with apologetic fingers, but Furiosa leans into the touch. Jack combs through her hair all the way to the ends. He starts plucking at the little mats that have formed over the last day or two, glued together with dust and sweat.
“Warrior,” Jack mutters. “Water. Wake up.”
Jack’s lips are chapped. Furiosa wonders how many of his own Aqua-Cola rations he used up to sprinkle on her face to get her to come to.
“Wild. Wonderful. Wi—”
He cuts off whatever he might have said, lower lip just brushing against his teeth. “Why,” he corrects.
He adds an upward lift to the end of the word and says it again. “Why?”
Why? Why, indeed, Furiosa thinks. She leans over the side of her bedroll and taps the edge of the shape in the sand. Whatever it means to Jack, it’s important.
He’s important.
When she looks over her shoulder at Jack again, he swallows hard and nods once. “Right.”
Furiosa is laid out for the next two days. Her brain seems to crave dark and quiet and cool, and only the first is accessible consistently. Jack has loaned her his red blanket and she pulls it up over her face and twists to the side facing the bunk wall. Her head aches, a constant throb that radiates from the knot on her skull where she’d been hit.
Every time she wakes there’s a new symbol in the sand. Small ones, usually, tiny enough that anyone else looking at them wouldn’t take them for anything other than random marks in the dirt. He usually brushes dirt over the old ones before drawing a new one, except those he places between the bedroll and the wall. Furiosa ends up with a convoy of Jack-symbols marching from the head of her bedroll to the foot.
She thinks of him leaning over her body to write in the sand. She shivers; somehow the thought of Jack over her fills her with a buzzing, nameless pleasure. There are a half-dozen of Jack’s shapes by the time she’s able to stand. She can’t quite bring herself to scuff them away.
Furiosa’s head heals.
It takes a few more days before her eyes want to focus on anything closer than a meter or two away, from her face. By the time they make it up to their oasis again and are sitting side-by-side at the pool, half a page of their notebook is filled with Jack’s tidy script. It’s a feast for Furiosa’s word-starved eyes.
Had your favrit in the mess today.
Need to get that ute back up and running. Any ideas?
Came up here once to fetch the book but didn’t want to leave you alone too long.
This makes Furiosa swallow hard and flash a hesitant smile to Jack. He’s not paying attention, distracted with tucking his socks into his boots so he can dabble his feet in the pool, so she gets back to reading.
There are more lines like this: workaday notes interspersed with sweet, thoughtful ones. Jack seems to have craved practice.
The last line pulls an honest-to-goodness grin from Furiosa:
Glad you’re feeling better. Missed you.
Underneath he's made that symbol again, filled in this time so the shape is extra bold. Furiosa decides it's time for her to be bold, too. She flips the book so it’s facing him and jabs one finger at it. The charcoal smudges a little, imprinting with part of Furiosa’s fingerprint.
“What is that?”
Three things happen at once:
Jack’s face turns red.
Jack’s mouth goes slack.
And Furiosa realizes that, for perhaps the first time in well over a thousand days since their lessons started, she’s surprised him.
“You don’t—” Jack stops.
So many words they’ve tossed between them, and he has to grope for these. If they were playing the first-sound game Furiosa would be triumphant. As it is, she feels like she’s teetering on the edge of their oasis with a strong wind at her back.
“It’s a heart,” Jack says.
She keeps staring, so he goes on. “You know…” and he presses his palm to his chest.
Furiosa’s about to ask what this means, but something in his face stops her. Jack is holding her gaze, lips still parted.
Her blood rushes hot and then cold the way it did when she spotted the raider scuttling along the edge of the Rig toward Jack. She raises her hand and snakes it under his, palm to his jacket. He’s left it partly unzipped so her fingertips rest against that rough-knit undershirt of his. It’s warm from his skin.
“A heart.”
Jack licks dry lips. “Yeah.” He skates his thumb along her fingers.
Her own heart drops when Jack releases her hand, but he only twists to the side and opens their book to a fresh page. Furiosa nearly protests at the waste—the previous page was only half full, there’s no need to start a new one—until she sees what he’s writing.
Jack draws the symbol: the little hills over the deep valley, the sharp point at the bottom. Underneath, he writes four letters.
love
Before Furiosa can process this, Jack puts charcoal back to paper. He presses firmly. Furiosa holds her breath.
you
Jack holds her gaze the way he holds the wheel on the road. Ever steady, never wavering. Even if this weren’t written in plain, blocky letters for her to see, Furiosa could see it in his face. He’s been telling her for months, and she’s returned the gesture without really knowing what it meant.
Her heart pounds like war drums. She gestures for the charcoal and adds three letters.
too
Jack smiles his sweet half-curve smile and huffs a slow breath out of his nose. This would be enough for him, Furiosa knows; to see the words, to hear the words, to have them forever enshrined in this story they’ve been writing.
But Furiosa’s not done. These words are ones she doesn’t want to take the time to write down, but she does anyway, even as her hand shakes. Jack has written his; she wants to reciprocate.
kiss me
Furiosa has shared thousands of words with Jack. Spoken, whispered, barked in the heat of battle, murmured under cover of darkness, scratched into sand and smeared on paper.
She has thought thousands more about Jack. Beautiful. Brave. Loyal. Clever. Constant. Magnificent. Mine.
She has no words for this.
When their lips meet, they hold still for a long moment, neither wanting to break the spell. Jack is the first to move. He pulls back and then presses against her more firmly this time, sliding Furiosa’s bottom lip between his.
This is like the Rig roaring to life; this is like the flush of adrenaline after a run. This is like scaling a tree back home, like diving into the cold spring and swimming underwater all the way to the other side. It is all of these things, and more, because this is something Furiosa is doing with Jack. Something she’s wanted and wanted and never thought she could reach for.
Their lips are dry until Furiosa touches her tongue to Jack’s mouth. The noise that comes from his throat is quiet and tender and heartbreaking. She winds one arm around his neck, finally giving in to the urge to run her fingers through his hair, somehow soft underneath the grease. She leaves the other pressed firmly to his chest where she can feel his heartbeat thrum. Jack’s hands had been resting tentatively on her hips, but now they move, one fitting to her jaw and the other curving around her waist to pull her closer.
The kiss ends with a soft smack. When Furiosa opens her eyes, Jack is already looking at her. She moves the hand on his chest to his face, tracing his jaw, his cheekbone, the lines at the corners of his eye.
She’s taught Jack the names of letters. She’s watched his hand shape letters, then write words of his own. She’s watched his mouth as he sounded out her words and wondered what his lips might feel like, how he might taste. Jack's lips move now like he's working through a challenging word.
“I thought,” he says quietly, “I thought maybe I wasn’t reading you right.” Furiosa quirks the corner of her mouth at his phrasing. Jack’s words catch up with his brain a half-second too late and he smirks a little at himself. “I thought maybe you didn’t want this.”
Didn’t want this? She furrows her eyebrows in a frown. How could she not want this? But—
“I thought the same about you,” she whispers back.
Jack chuckles and leans their foreheads together in a gesture that makes her breath catch. “We should have used our words a long time ago, I guess.”
Furiosa leans forward and kisses him again, their lips sliding together. A breeze trickles through their oasis. The pages of their notebook rustle. One-handed, she leans over and shuts the book, nudging it off to the side.
They’ll keep writing; she has no doubt about it. And wherever their story takes them, she and Jack will write it together.