Anonymous asked: TALK TO ME ABOUT FURIOSA I LOVE HER SO MUCH
So I’ve been planning a fic for a while and I was gonna just write it here but then I realized that HA this is an ask and you seem too nice for me to dump a few (like maybe ten) thousand words in here. So instead here are some headcanons for the fic I am writing where Max is the immortal unaging fey avatar of the desert who fetches up at people’s doorsteps and loses himself in months and lonely years without water or company, and is delighted to find Furiosa, who is growing into the immortal unaging fey avatar of green places and oases.
- Max doesn’t stay places, he leaves places, and Furiosa knows someone who leaves when she sees them. So it shocks the hell out of her when she gets a Fury Boy (the name wasn’t her idea, it was the Dag and, well, they had to call them something other than War Boys) rushing up to her and insisting that there’s a bike coming toward them, and it’s the road warrior who fought on their side. And she meets Max when he pulls up through the Wretched—not Wretched anymore, just people, people who look better than ever with Capable and Cheedo piecing together a cistern for the water—and he offers her the faint shadow-smile she remembers as he brings his (wrecked) bike to a halt. He’s loaded down with a small bag of seeds, an assortment of weapons, and a sheepish expression.
- She takes herself by surprise as much as him, when she strides forward without a pause and presses their foreheads together. His eyes are as blue and burnished as the scorched sky overhead.
- He comes back…not often, but not rarely, never gone for more than a year or so. Furiosa flatters herself that he’s glad to see her, when he returns, and her heart tightens when he begins to initiate the gentle forehead-touch of the Vuvalini. (The third time he comes back, they have found another underground current, and they have enough water for a public bath. She worries that Max might have drowned himself, after the third hour of him sitting in the water, but he’s still breathing. He tells her, in his quiet, stilted way, that it’s the first time he hasn’t been thirsty in he doesn’t know how long, and she wonders about that. She wonders how he’d known that, a hundred and sixty days out, there was nothing but salt.)
- People start to trickle in, drawn by the siren-call of water and food, because with the Wives—the Sisters, now—in charge, there is more than enough. And Furiosa begins to hear stories, about how the Road Warrior saved people or killed tyrants or, more often than not, was dragged into a fight not his, quite against his will, and did the right thing anyway. Here’s the thing, though. Some of the stories are recent, just months or years past. Others…well. She talks to a child, who claims that her grandfather was a child when he knew Max. But Max can’t possibly be much older than she is, and she’s…Furiosa doesn’t really know. She tries to count back in her head, but… The Dag’s daughter Angharad is walking well, talking well, maybe seven years old. When did that happen? Shouldn’t Furiosa be greying, shouldn’t there be lines at her eyes and aches in her joints?
- The next time Max comes to the Citadel, she asks him how old he is. He tells her, in his quiet way, less stilted now than when they met because he’s more at ease with her, that he doesn’t know. But he tells her that he had a child, once, and they played in grass, and he and his wife had all the sweet clear water anyone could want.
- Furiosa goes out on a mission. She runs out of water in a sandstorm, and she waits to die.
- She strides back into the Citadel two weeks later, and her throat is not even dry. She drinks, and it’s good, but not necessary. Max is there, and while everyone else marvels over the fact that she’s alive, little Radi—Angharad who is not so little, who is thirteen now and as mad and gifted as her mother—touching her unlined face in wonder, Max watches her and nods. He doesn’t need to marvel, doesn’t need to question, because he has stood in her place and felt time trickle by like water, like sand in a clenched fist.
- Furiosa remembers being a little girl, screaming for the loss of her mother and her arm and her innocence, and wishing that, if nothing else, she might live to see victory. She has. And it seems she will live to see a good deal more. She leaves the Citadel more and more, and she never grows thirsty, never grows tired. She has an impossible talent for finding water, for finding places where seeds will take root, and Max trails after her like a desert wraith. (She’s not sure how long it’s been since they met, when she kisses him. But his breath is as hot and dry as the wind under the sun, and she is growth and water and life to his desert, and he melts under her touch.)
- She leaves for good, when Radi is old enough to take her place as Fury, the Citadel’s Road Warrior, and she and Max wander. They will not die. The desert has been fed for too long to be taken by the green places, but life is tenacious and neither will Max’s desert swallow Furiosa’s green places whole. It’s an uneasy truce, between his and hers, but it stands.
