wordburger | MAD MAX SANDBOX POST

"The women know the stories. Ask Capable."

She says, but starts to tell him anyways; he's going to be trapped in that bed for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life, even. She can give him something to dream about.

"The ground is grass, long thin stalks of it, light and swaying in the wind, like soft wires, but brittle, bending and breaking under your feet. Thousands, millions of blades of them, carpeting a ground made of a moist, lush earth, damp between your toes. There are trees, too- remember the one you saw? But hundreds of them, standing so thick together you couldn't drive the smallest bike between them. The tree we saw was dead, but when they're alive, trees are covered with leaves."

She doesn't know how much purchase any of this is getting, but she spins the story anyways, like she did for the five wives a hundred times over, letting her tone and his imagination do all the work.

Nux's imagination is paradoxically both limited and endless: he's never seen grass, has no idea what it looks like, and the image that's coming to life in his mind is probably absolutely nothing like the truth. She says wires, so he thinks something like green wires, thin and light enough to rustle in the wind but woven together in a loose mat, springy underfoot. He thinks of the sun glittering off it, and thinks it must look very, very shiny, indeed. She says damp earth and he thinks of mud, but... maybe a better mud. Not a sour, sandy mud. A mud where things can grow, like trees with...

"What's leaves?" he asks, caught by the story, even though something in him tells him it's not true. She'd said as much. It's a story; they're making a new faith. She's dismantling Valhalla and putting up something in its place, and if that had been a fiction -- which he's still not sure he can believe -- then so is this.

...But he had seen a tree out there.

"Wait here."

She instructs him, and then gets to her feet. Furiosa is moving very carefully- a punctured lung is not something you walk off, and she'd had a dozen other serious bumps and scrapes besides. But she makes it to the shelf where some of the room's old trinkets still live, and brings back to him one of Joe's baubles for the girls. A book.

It's fairy tales, not that that makes a difference right now, what she wants him to see is the paper. She limps over to him and settles, with something just shy of a gasp, down on the edge of his cot, and opens it up to the centre, so the sheets fan out. It's stained, yellowed, and old, but still, she offers it for him to touch.

"Gentle, but feel this. These are like leaves, except this is dead, and leaves are alive. Imagine, this, with the feel of skin warmed by the sun. Alive, and with a scent like the freshest, cleanest thing you can imagine. Each one-" Making a circle with her forefinger and thumb "-small, like this, and attached to the tips of the branches. Millions, on every tree."

Nux watches her curiously, though he respects her enough to purposefully take no notice at all of the way she limps or the tiny hitch in her breath as she sits down. She is here to show him something; he masks his own discomfort, too, as he shifts painfully to look. Fortunately, his hands are undamaged, as agile as the day he first picked up a socket wrench. He takes the leaf from her with due caution, holding it by the stem and twisting it carefully back and forth in his fingers as he examines it. When she says scent, he gives it a sniff.

This is dead, and leaves are alive, she says. He tries to imagine it alive, maybe rippling in the wind like the shiny wire-grass. Fresh and clean aren't words that come up often in his part of the Citadel, so he looks around this room -- easily the cleanest place he's ever been -- and breathes in deep, though his ribs and Larry and Barry all complain at him for it. There they are, his old mates: shrunken with whatever they've given him, but never forgotten. Not worth thinking about, right now. He turns his attention back to the leaf.

"Do we have them in the green place here?" he asks, twisting it again. "Leaves? Trees? Grass? Or is it all in..." The other one. The one she wants to grow in the ruins of Valhalla.

"We do. And Capable will take you, once you've had a little more rest."

She says, taking it gently back, closing the book and setting it aside- but in reach, in case he needs.

"Do you think you could try to sleep, until then?"

It would give her a chance to, as well, and they both need it.

He only just woke up, he wants to protest, but either he's in worse shape than he thought or they've given him something, because he finds when she says it that he probably could if he tried. He doesn't really want to. It seems like a waste when they both agree that his time is limited, and besides, he wants to hear more about the new world he helped create.

He's more used to following orders than not, though, so he gives a reluctant nod and gingerly lies back down, curling up on his side this time so that both the book and Furiosa's cot are in his line of sight. "I'll be strong again soon," he murmurs. It won't change the outcome, but she'd offered him a choice, and he still wants to go out fighting.

MAD MAX SANDBOX POST

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