MAD MAX SANDBOX POST

[iamawaited]

Welcome to the Wasteland: a sandbox/open post for Mad Max RP

(Seriously, go nuts.

That's what this canon is for.)

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[witness_this]

"Cats. They're animals. Small, fluffy, whiskered hunters, who can jump ten times their own height, who see in the dark, who are lithe and fanged and clawed. They were reported, rumoured, in religion, to have nine lives each."

Turning her head, glancing over at him.

"And here you are."

Here they all are, but him especially.

[iamawaited]

Four times, he thinks. This is four times the gates have stayed closed. Will there be five more?

There may or may not actually be reproach in her voice, but he hears it all the same and looks down, shame twisting in his gut as he stares at his beloved V-8. It's ruined now, at least temporarily, bisected by a swathe of bloody bandage, and all he can think is--

"Why?" He lies back again and stares at the light mottled on the ceiling. "Why bring me back?" Why waste bandages and medicine and water on a War Boy at the end of his half-life who just doesn't know how to die?

[witness_this]

"That redheaded girl of yours will pinch your ear for asking a question like that. She's gone to sleep, now, but she's been sitting a vigil at your bedside, waiting for you to wake. She wrapped most of those, you know."

Nodding at the kit of bandages. Furiosa is never entirely comforting, but she does, for Capable's sake here, try.

"We took the Citadel. She wants you to see the world she's building here."

[iamawaited]

Nux looks up again at that, and though he still seems embarrassed, it's shading more towards shy and pleased than ashamed and guilty now. His redheaded girl. Awaiting him. Wanting to show him things. What a thing that is, for something like that to be true for someone like him.

"I am glad you made it," he says suddenly, as if he's concerned that his own despair at being alive might translate into anything but relief for the rest of them. "Did everyone else...?"

[witness_this]

"Many of the Vuvalini fell." She admits, voice breaking, but only just for a moment, until she has her composure back and can look him over again. "But Capable, Cheedo, Dag and Toast live. I live, and Max, and each of those things is thanks in part to you."

Reserved, but serious praise. She has a reputation, among Joe's ranks, for meaning what she says, for offering encouragement sparingly, but seriously.

"They count you as one of us. One of the survivors of the mad dash down the Fury Road. You're part of something now."

[iamawaited]

Max? he thinks, but what she says next overshadows that brief confusion, and he figures it out a moment later anyway. He sits the rest of the way up, so he can look at her properly, despite the pain it sends in shocks over his skin. War Boys can handle pain; with or without it, he definitely looks pleased now. Pleased and proud, in a quiet, simple way that's very different from the cocky crowing of the pursuit driver. "I brought you back," he says, very softly. He had done something. He had died for something.

But then... "You brought me back," he murmurs in that same soft voice, a little less pleased, and glances towards the door as if Capable might come through it at that very moment. His smile fades slowly. "I won't live much longer," he says, almost apologetically. Furiosa must understand that, even if Capable doesn't. She's seen enough War Boys die. "Should've let me go there."

[witness_this]

"You'll be the first among us, yes."

She agrees.

"But we're beginning a new faith. A new world. We can find another fight for you, if you want, or you can be the first one to try dying a peaceful death, in the arms of someone who loves you. If you're brave enough."

She connects to the mythology, in a kind of radical and utilitarian way that the girls just don't, and isn't scared to manipulate it to help the world she's building here. She has too much to do to have those kinds of scruples.

"You'll go to the green place."

[iamawaited]

And indeed, he was right to say it to Furiosa and not to any of the Wives first; her response honors him in a way he's not sure they would understand easily. If they brought him back here, they don't want him to die. He's sure Capable doesn't want him to die. Only Furiosa would know to help him find a good death. He softens, truly touched by it, something swelling almost painfully in his chest.

"I thought this was the green place," he says, but with a small, crooked smile. "Green on top." He doesn't know if it's true -- the only parts of the Citadel he's ever seen are anything but green -- but he remembers why this had to be the place.

[witness_this]

"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.

[iamawaited]

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.

[witness_this]

"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."

[iamawaited]

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.

[witness_this]

"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.

[iamawaited]

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.