wordburger | MAD MAX SANDBOX POST

He was in surprisingly good condition for a War Boy who was supposed to be dead, but that wasn't the same as being in good condition by anyone else's standards. He was indeed badly dehydrated, his face pale and sallow even under the faint remnants of paint and all the scarring. Larry and Barry had taken greedy advantage of the past few days and had swelled dangerously close to his throat. Beyond that, he wasn't all that badly injured -- being thrown from the rig had spared him most of the damage -- but there were plenty of scrapes and cuts and burns there all the same, and there would be pain when he actually started paying attention to it again.

At the moment, he wasn't at all. Overjoyed and overwhelmed, he kept turning his attention from her to the screaming crowd over the edge and back again, his eyes aglow like chrome itself. He managed to focus on her when she grabbed his chin, but he barely seemed able to hear the words that followed. "Okay," he said anyway. He would have said it if she'd told him to dive off the Citadel.

It caught up to him a moment later, at least in part. IV wasn't a word he knew offhand, didn't know why it would be connected to the water, although it was amazing to realize that she was planning to let him have as much of it as he wanted. Transfusion he knew all too well, and it gave him a brief pang of disappointment -- transfusion meant sitting chained to a spit of rock all day with a needle in his arm -- until something else occurred to him and he brightened up considerably again. "Is he here?" he asked excitedly, looking around. Where was his blood bag?

She was no doctor, but like anyone else who grew up in this toxic world, she knew dehydration when she saw it. Guessing he needed another blood transfusion was just added intuition on her part. After all, Larry and Barry looked bigger than she remembered them to be. She didn't want him to survive such a brutal massacre only to expire of his tumors. Something so many War Boys fell victim to in such a toxic environment. They were lucky to even live to their teenage years.

"Max?" Blood bag, his blood bag. Capable gave a sad shake of her head to verify he wasn't in the Citadel. Not to her knowledge. "He left as soon as we were safe. Slipped away...." They might never see that brave and insane man again. Perhaps Nux, who had share blood with him, would mourn Max more than the rest of them.

She touched his arm gently, urging him away from the crowd once he was ready to leave. "My sisters and I, we have a shared common room with a fountain. You can parch your thirst there until medical help can be procured."

"Max?" Nux echoed blankly. Who was-- oh. As large as the man loomed in Nux's mind, he'd grown used to thinking of him as a warrior with no name. No longer Blood Bag, maybe, but... well, there hadn't been anything to supplant that, either. Max, then. Max was gone. He wilted a little, disappointed, although not too much and not for long. Between Capable's touch on him and the wild noise of the crowd still in his ears, it was hard to feel the loss too keenly. Later, he would be surprised to find himself grieving.

For now, he let Capable lead him away from the edge, then reached out and took her hand. "You really drink as much water as you want?" he asked, a little amazed at the idea. He'd been allowed some, but he had never felt as though it was enough. That was why it was called an addiction, he'd thought.

She hated that she flinched when his hand touched hers. It was a reflex to any touch these days. Immortan Joe might be dead and gone, but his memory and the actions he inflicted upon his breeders could never be fully erased. Instead of drawing her hand back, she relaxed and linked her soft fingers with his. She gave him a smile that seemed to say she would be alright. Not to worry. "We don't ration the water as tightly as Immortan Joe." It was necessary to hold some water in reserve for such a harsh dessert climate, but for the most part it ran freely to those who sorely needed it.

She led him inside and through several rooms before pointing out the old fashioned water fountain in the center of the room. It was a drinking fountain, but Nux had probably never seen anything like it. "Push down on the button and lean your mouth towards the spout. Water will come." The wives knew about it, but then again for all the cruelty they had endured at Immortan Joe's hands, they had lived a life of luxury.

Edited 2015-06-10 22:44 (UTC)

There were a great many things in Capable's world that Nux didn't understand, and some that he would never. He saw the flinch in her, though, and stilled uncertainly, hand going loose on hers, easy to pull away. Only when she laced their fingers together did he tighten his grip again, and then a little more slowly, a little more carefully. Whatever it is that they had between them, the rules might have be different here than they were out on the Fury Road, where everything had been terror and adrenaline. She had let him kiss her on the cheek then -- but he had been a War Boy with one day left at most, and she had been fleeing for her life. They had curled up together against the horrors outside.

Would she let him kiss her now? he wondered, and let her lead, and didn't try.

He moved quietly through the rooms after her, looking around curiously. He'd never seen any of this part of the Citadel before. When they got to the fountain, he did indeed look completely blank, but he followed her directions a little awkwardly. He leaned down, pushed the button, and startled in surprise as water leapt out and splashed his scarred face. He jerked back slightly, blinking. "It's a... hose?" He leaned back in and took a tentative drink.

They came from two completely different worlds. Capable, born perfect and without the common mutations that most people suffered these days from the toxic environment, had been bought from her mother before puberty and tucked away with the rest of the wives ever since. She was exposed to every luxury possible and yet it was a life she was glad to be free of. Immortan Joe had brutalized her, treated her as s shiny 'thing' to possess. Nux was completely different. He was sweet and innocent in his own way. His touch and even a kiss to her cheek was welcome. She just preferred to see him coming rather than be surprised.

She smiled when he jumped back in surprise at the sight of water coming from the spout. Granted, the pipes were old and rusted so the color of the water was a bit red, but it was water. Just the mere presence of it was miracle enough. "Something like that." With his back to her, she noticed some scrapes and cuts, but nothing that would seriously worry her. War Boys were trained to take a major beating and keep on going.

"Don't drink too much at once." Or he'd make himself sick.

He didn't, less because of that and more because whether the Immortan was dead or not, his words would linger on for quite some time in Nux's mind and in the minds of the other lost children of the Citadel. He took only a few hasty mouthfuls, not minding the coppery rusty taste of it -- like blood, he thought -- or the tepid warmth, although it did hurt a little when he swallowed. He coughed when he pulled away and bit back a grimace. He had been weak before her on the war rig, but it wouldn't do now. Not to show weakness because of a few measly war wounds. She was right: that had been trained out of him.

Instead, he took a step back and looked around, surveying their surroundings again. "This is yours?" he asked softly.

Capable placed a gentle hand to the center of his back when he coughed, though she knew he wasn't truly choking. When he was finished, she led him over to a bench and urged him to sit down beside her. Rest was another thing he sorely needed and she took more than a little comfort in tucking herself against his side. To anyone who might have walked into the room, they looked fairly 'cozy' together.

"It belongs to Cheeto, Dag, Toast and I at the moment. To be honest, I've never seen half the rooms here." Immortan Joe did keep his wives locked away in an old bank vault. His most precious possessions. That no longer mattered. What mattered right now was that Nux was alive. He might not be in the best shape, even for a War Boy, but he was here with her. "Dag is pregnant, so there will be an addition in seven months." They were all secretly hoping the child would be a healthy girl. That would surely make Immortan Joe roll over in his grave.

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