Chapter Text
Back in the Green Place, Furiosa and her mother had lived next to an elderly pair of sisters, Miss Hallie and Miss Libby. They were among the few Vuvalini who could still remember what it was like Before, as they were only teenagers when the world died.
They would tell Furiosa of their childhood in hushed moments. The Vuvalini strongly discouraged the elders from discussing the Old World, as they feared it would engender resentment and melancholy amongst those who would never experience its riches. But the sisters would tell Furiosa of their home, a land so far away as to be unreal to a girl like her. They told her of their family’s move to the place that would become the Wasteland mere months before the Great Dying.
Furiosa would listen raptly to stories of this faraway land, how their parents would take them on days-long drives just for fun, visiting massive cities constructed entirely out of glass and metal, hard gray dunes so tall that it was hard to breathe at the top, and a very strange place that they called “Disneyland.” How they soared through the sky over an expanse of water so big that it would take an entire moon cycle to travel the same distance on horseback nonstop. How these “oceans” were full of wonderous creatures, some even bigger than a horse, and that, if you were to travel beyond the Wasteland, there was more water in these oceans than there was earth. Furiosa asked why no one traveled to find this bounty of food and water, but the sisters said that the water had been undrinkable even Before, and that those creatures had died like so many others had on land.
They said that in the months when the sun shone briefest, the air would be even colder than the river and white powder would come down from the sky, that in the warmer times, the storms would not be sand, but instead water that fell from above. Furiosa wondered if their old home had a sky-river, for water existed nowhere but the river here, a gift from the Mother of the Many Mothers, the sacred land that nourished them.
The sisters had assured her that the Old World Wasteland did indeed once have this river-fall too, but that the region of the Green Place rarely saw it even then. Furiosa questioned why anyone would leave the river-fall for a place known as the Wasteland, but Miss Hallie simply said that it wasn’t always called that. She had refused to tell Furiosa what its old name was, but when she went to tend to the garden, Miss Libby had shared the secret if she promised not to tell. And that was how Furiosa learned that this foreboding Wasteland was once simply “the Outback.”
Furiosa would listen to their stories and marvel at the unique way they spoke, how their vowels seemed flatter, and their r sounds strongly enunciated. They told Furiosa that while they too spoke the Wasteland language in their old home, the world used to be so vast and diverse that the language had been spoken a hundred different ways in regions oceans apart. Furiosa studied their strange accent and began to mimic it back to them until she had perfected this voice from afar. When she’d shown off her new skill to the sisters, their shock and amusement had soon turned to watery eyes and a faraway expression that had puzzled young Furiosa. But her mother said that they were just missing home, and that hearing someone else speak like them after so many decades apart had brought up a lot of complicated emotions.
From then on, Furiosa would continue sharing in this relic of the Old World with the sisters. After all, it was the only thing besides their memories that they still had from home.
“Was your home better than this place? Even Before?” Furiosa asked once.
“Oh no, dear,” Miss Hallie said. “It was a lovely place, but so was the Wasteland back then.”
“You don’t talk much about the Wasteland before.”
“We weren’t here very long, and we were both too angry about leaving home to appreciate much,” Miss Libby said with a wry smile. “But home is what you make it, darling. It’s a person as much as it is a place.”
“Even more so, I’d say,” said Miss Hallie with a fond smile, and her sister nodded in agreement.
It wasn’t long after that Miss Libby died.
And with that, Furiosa began to see the truth of Miss Hallie’s words. It was as if all the meaning left the old woman's life. Even though the sisters hadn’t kept anything from their Old World home in the struggle for survival since, Miss Hallie initially refused to let any of her sister’s belongings leave their little house, even though the Vuvalini always repurposed anything left behind by the dead. She eventually relented, although Furiosa noticed that Miss Hallie never wore any of her own clothes again and instead dressed in Miss Libby’s, giving up her own possessions to keep her sister’s. And that was how Furiosa knew that as much as the Green Place was home, her mother was the home she cherished most of all. She would always be home as long as she was with the one she loved.
***
And then both homes are ripped away from her in a maelstrom of blood, smoke, and sand. All she has left to keep her tethered to it is the peach pit in her hair, and since her mother lives on only in her memories, the Green Place becomes her singular obsession, her only way of fulfilling her bone-deep desire for home, because no one in this godforsaken Wasteland could ever occupy that place in her heart again.
***
She loses her old self by degrees. She loses her innocence in Dementus’s brutal perversities against her mother and anyone else who wrongs him. She loses her name in his vainglory as he tries to mold “Little D” in his own image. She loses her freedom in a cage that she can escape only in her dreams. And she loses her voice in her own defiance.
***
She gains a tiny bit of that self back with those five pivotal words in the Immortan Joe’s inner chambers. Those five words that she speaks without knowing exactly where it will lead her, only knowing that it may get her away from Dementus, and that she can endure anything for that chance.
No. He slaughtered my mother.
And although she reclaims a bit of her old voice, she ends up in a cage more sinister than the one she just escaped. She finds herself at the mercy of yet another man who thinks he has the right to own humans, but now even her own body is locked away in a fanged prison. At least the Wives are kind to her, keeping her out of sight and earshot of the Immortan when he visits the next day, although she’s kept awake through the night by the quiet sobbing of the Wife he’d just violated. She doesn’t sleep.
***
She sleeps little else in the following weeks as the abject horror of this existence becomes clear, despite how much the Wives try to shield her from it. She rarely speaks, and when she does, her voice sounds wrong, as if it belongs to another person, a person who died slowly in her captivity with Dementus, and then all at once in her imprisonment with the Immortan.
When she bleeds for the very first time after only a month in the bio-dome, her stomach drops in a panic more startling than ever before in her life. As she reaches with trembling hands for one of the scraps of cloth the Wives keep for this purpose, one of them, the kind-voiced one who had reassured her on the day she was brought in, rounds the corner and freezes.
“Is this your first?”
She nods.
Something breaks behind the Wife’s eyes as she releases a shaky breath. “You’re a smart girl. You know what this means.” She glances around frantically. “You need to keep this hidden as long as you can. None of us can help you if he finds out.” Her heart seizes at those words, and she just blinks at the other woman until the Wife grabs her by the shoulders and hisses, “Do you understand?”
The Wife shows her how to best use the rag to keep both herself and her white robes clean and gives her a long, sturdy cloth to bind back her developing breasts. She looks the Wife in the eye and gifts her some of her rare words.
“Thank you.” It doesn’t feel like an adequate expression of her feelings.
***
It’s not long before she witnesses her first birth. She watches the Wife scream and cry in agony as she brings the Immortan’s child into the world, and her panic over her own future begins to claw its way up her throat. When she feels a hand in her hair, she freezes, the noise of the ongoing birth fading away until all she can hear is the gentle chiming of the bells as Rictus fondles her long hair.
She jerkily turns her head to look at him and sees nothing behind his eyes. She’s heard the other Wives speak about him, about how he has the body and violence of the most terrifying of men, but the reasoning and impulse control of a child. And he’s staring at her with that insidious, vacantly curious gaze that makes her stomach twist.
She turns and runs without looking back, but she hears the distant cries as the Wife gives the final push and the infant enters this awful world. She stands with her back pressed against the wall, and by the time the blood stops roaring in her ears, all she hears is the Organic Mechanic’s callous, “Sorry, boss.”
She steps forward to see over the ledge as the Wife starts pleading for her life, but Rictus catches her movement, and the look in his eyes is all she needs to know that she’s in perhaps the worst danger of her life.
Scrotus’s obnoxious voice snaps Rictus’s attention away from her. But the horrors of this life never end. The Organic Mechanic mocks the ailing Wife before she is carted away, finally escaping this exploitation just to be slowly drained of life at the pumps.
She needs to leave. Tonight.
***
As she shears her hair off, the peach pit clenched tightly in her jaw, she mourns the loss of yet another part of her identity, another characteristic of that girl with a home, a girl who she barely knows anymore. But as the razor severs the last lock of hair, she’s pretty sure that her survival instinct is all that's still worth having.
***
Rictus comes for her in the night, just as she knew he would. When he carries her out of the vault, her heart is pounding so hard that she fears it will burst out of her chest. She knows this is either going to be her one opportunity for escape or something devastatingly unthinkable.
But her plan works, and as she flees his chambers, she feels oddly light for the first time in ages, the wind whipping strangely against the skin of her bald head and her robes flying freely without the perverse belt.
***
And so she becomes the mute dogman, toiling away in the mechanical heart of the Citadel, waiting for that glorious day when she can escape and find her way home just as her mother asked her. She’s unobtrusive, but she’s useful, and that allows her to maintain a place of relative safety. What was it the History Man had once said? Make yourself invaluable, and Dementus will look after you. Well, it’s not just Dementus this applies to- it's all these powerful men, Dementus and Immortan Joe and his foul sons alike, those who only respect people for the usefulness and loyalty they provide. In fact, she thinks this might be true of all the men trying to survive in this brutal world, for it seems that they’re always waiting for the first chance to stab each other in the back just to advance their position in this infernal machine.
(This with the possible exception of the large redheaded brakeman, who sometimes stands protectively in front of her or the littlest War Pup when the others leer at them like easy prey. But she can’t afford to trust in his integrity.)
She misses the Many Mothers.
She hates disguising herself as one of them, but she persists, binding her breasts, stealing spare grease rags to staunch her monthly bleedings, and hiding her long hair under a brown cap. She’s often toyed with the idea of cutting it all off again, but she can’t seem to bring herself to do it. Besides, it’s the best way to keep the peach pit reliably on her person.
She doesn’t say a word to anyone for years, but sometimes she feels the undeniable urge to let her voice out, to speak and communicate in the way that makes one uniquely human. At first, she tries to alleviate this urge by humming to herself in the quiet corners of the garage, but although she’s never been a woman of many words, her soul screams for release. So, she finds a tiny corner in a disused hallway where she mutters to herself, and she feels more human than she has in a long time.
But the voice still feels wrong to her, like it still belongs to that girl she buried years ago, because that girl is not who she needs to be now. That girl only survives in her resourcefulness, intelligence, and fierce devotion. When her mind wanders back to the Green Place, as it often does, she remembers those old sisters and their strange voices. How she learned to mimic them so well. And she realizes that this is the voice of this new her, a voice that sets her apart from everyone else here, because she is different from them in more ways than they could ever imagine.
She nearly forgets what it was like to speak as she used to, without her adopted accent or the new huskiness in her voice from years of disuse. When she finally masters the word “mirror,” with all its crunched-up r’s, it’s one of the only times a faint ghost of a smile twists the corners of her mouth, and she repeats the word to herself- mirror, mirror, mirror.
She has another tether to home, and when she realizes this, a real smile nearly breaks out across her face.
***
Home. Her deepest desire, her only reason for living besides her innate need for self-preservation. It’s what drives her, nourishes her, subsumes her.
But as they begin to build the Immortan his grand War Rig and she sees a real path for escape, a darker ambition begins to form with the repeated mentions of the Rig’s future travels to Gastown. She doesn’t hear as much about Dementus nowadays, but his damnable face has increasingly occupied the obsessive parts of her mind that used to only hold thoughts of the Green Place. She starts to wonder whether it might be a better idea to stow away all the way to Gastown, sneak away to kill Dementus, and then escape east with as much of Gastown’s resources as she can gather. She ultimately decides against such recklessness, but she has to hold tight to her mother’s last wish in order to stave off her delusions of a glorious revenge.
He’s always been a regular part of her nightmares, except now it’s not always her dreams of home that are the sweetest, but instead the ones where her knife slices through Dementus’s throat and she feels the warm gush of his blood between her fingers.
***
The Rig has its twin V8 engines installed and escape finally begins to feel real. If this metal beast can’t help bring her home, nothing can.
They’re brainstorming a rear defense system known as the bommy-knocker when she hears one of the blackthumbs ask about the Praetorian Jack. It’s a name she’s heard whispered around the garage like legend, but she’s never seen its owner before.
He’s surprisingly ordinary.
Unremarkable, even, when compared to his reputation. Sure, he has the black grease paint across his forehead, the leathers, and the heavy Praetorian belt that distinguish him from most of the other men, but he doesn’t carry himself with that air of superiority she sees from the majority of the Praetorians and Imperators. She appraises him as calculatedly as she does with all men, mostly taking note only of the large scar that cuts across his cheek and twists his lip. But then their eyes meet for the briefest of moments and it feels oddly inevitable, a small magnetic force. She soon turns away, but then the mighty engines roar to life, and she whirls around to look at this duo of man and machine who will unknowingly take her to freedom.
***
But then everything goes wrong, as it is wont to do on the Fury Road, and she finds herself sitting tensely beside this maybe-not-so-unremarkable man. Her nerves feel like live wires, and she’s constantly fighting the urge to jump out of the Rig again, because this humanity is a completely unknown quantity in the Wasteland.
It just doesn’t exist, so she’s certain he must have an ulterior motive and that she's stupid to take him at his word. Her fingers clench in the steel knuckles of the bizarre weapon that she has not let go of since she followed him back into the Rig. As she flips out the knife and runs her thumb over it, Praetorian Jack glances sidelong at her.
“What’s your name?”
She stiffens. These are the first words either of them has spoken since their standoff on the road. She stares out of the gaping hole where the passenger door used to be in determined silence, still not sure that this is smart (in fact, there's a part of her that still thinks that killing him is the better idea). She's unwilling to share any piece of herself with this man yet.
She can sense him still waiting next to her, but eventually she hears him blow out a soft breath through his nose and refocus on the road. And with that, he surprises her again. She’d expected him to be pushy in the way most men, especially men with the power he has, tended to be. But he’s not. And she’s forced to mull that over on the long drive to the Citadel.
When its hulking shape begins to take form on the horizon, her chest tightens in alarm. Why on earth had she agreed to come back here? To this place of depravity and injustice and subjugation, all the things she had been so desperately trying to escape? She can feel her soul writhing for freedom inside her, and as her breathing intensifies, the knife flips out again.
She once again feels Praetorian Jack’s gaze flick towards her appraisingly, and this time she deigns to meet his eye. His expression is unreadable, but he still gives her a tiny reassuring nod before turning away. This time it’s her who continues watching, her eyes tracing that scar that’s the only thing that mars his mask of unbreakable calm and quiet intensity. He’s clearly a fighter, but he’s not an aggressor, and there’s just something kindred about that that allows her to entrust him with one tiny piece of herself.
“Furiosa.” He shoots her a bemused look. “My name is Furiosa.”
He nods shortly and reschools his face into that expression of steely composure, but she could’ve sworn she saw the corner of his mouth make the tiniest of quirks upward when he realized that she’d shared her name with him.
And so Furiosa becomes someone new once again, and yet she feels closer to herself than she has in a long time. She exists under her own name again, a name she had tried to forget in all these years, because she couldn’t be anyone except whoever she needed to be to survive. Furiosa realizes with a start that the Praetorian Jack is the first Wastelander to know her true name, and as they drive into the Citadel, she thinks that, for once, she might not be surviving alone.