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She spends three months trying to figure out what he wants. A gift is never a gift in the Wasteland, and if someone offers up something for free it’s because they mean to swindle you. Not that it matters—Furiosa can take care of herself. She’ll keep learning what she can off him, and when he decides to claim whatever it is he thinks he’s owed, she’ll be ready with her knife.
Furiosa grips the handle of her blade even now. She can’t let go of the instinct of it, especially now that the truth of her has been exposed. To most, she’s still Dogman the mute, but there are a couple who don’t like that Praetorian Jack has picked her out to train and they let her know loudly, physically. In the Citadel, there’s no such thing as coy, as holding cards close to the vest.
“You tell me if any of them give you trouble, will you?” Jack had said in their first few weeks together, but Furiosa handles her own problems. Besides, not one among the war boys denies she’s one of the best mechanics in the whole lot. They worship cars, and she knows cars. The intricacies of an engine have become as familiar to her as the star map inked into her forearm. For that, she's earned their respect.
“Oy, Dogman,” says Huck, one of the older war pups, fourteen or fifteen. She loosens her grip on the knife sheathed on her utility belt, but doesn’t slow down as he chases her. “Oy, I been looking for you. Praetorian Jack said you got it for me. Did you? Did you?”
Furiosa hands him the capacitor she’s built but doesn’t slow her pace. Huck remains steady at her side. He holds up the small device as if to the light, though there’s very little of it here, looks at it worshipfully, then kisses it. “He says you rigged this up just for me, when you couldn’t find none.”
She’s still walking.
“It’s a beaut.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how well it will work,” she says.
He speeds up then halts right in front of her, forcing her to stop, too. “I heard some of the others say you talk now, but I didn’t believe it.” Now that the dam’s broken, she’s been slipping in words and phrases here and there for the last few months, but it’s few enough that many haven’t heard it for themselves. “Means I can’t tell you my secrets no more,” says Huck.
He isn’t the only one who’s expressed this exact sentiment. It’s the sudden existence of her voice that they all notice the most—not the hair and what it might imply about who she is or where she’s come from.
Huck’s stance is wide, braced, like he wants to challenge her. She shoves past him. “You won’t tell no one, will you?” he calls after her. “What I said to you before. About me and—”
Without turning back to face him, she answers. “I won’t.”
///
It’s not like she didn’t know before Jack that her chances making it through the Wasteland to the Green Place were small. Looking back, that whole escape attempt had the flavour of a suicide mission. She’d done all she could to survive it like she always did everything, but riding as close as possible to the edge is its own kind of death wish.
Furiosa is formidable, but she’s curious now how she can be made sharper, harder.
“Notice that there, on the horizon,” Jack says.
“That blur of white?” she says.
“The very one.”
It’s not something she would’ve noticed at all six months ago when they’d begun. “A fire?”
Jack nods. “A smoke signal,” says Jack. Furiosa looks at him curiously, then back at the faint smoke in the far distance.
“What’s it mean?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
Furiosa tenses, ready to get back to the Citadel. The two of them alone are easy pickings for a group of scavs.
“They’re not here for us, don’t worry. I reckon there’s an underground basin there. I haven’t explored much, but anyone who gets too close doesn’t live to tell the tale.” It hadn’t occurred to Furiosa that there might be aquifers in the Outback beyond the one at the Citadel, that there are people out there who are making a life beyond warring and barbarity. Maybe nothing like the Green Place, but still, pockets of kindness. Something worth protecting. “I used to think about trying to go there, waving a white flag so they knew I came in peace, but I know they’d shoot me dead on the spot. There’s no reason to trust anyone in the Wasteland. Not worth the risk.” He pauses thoughtfully, then turns to her. “The place you were headed to,” he asks. “Is it somewhere like that?”
Furiosa’s jaw sets hard, teeth squeezed together. “Do you see those signals a lot?” she asks.
If Jack’s bothered by her ignoring his question, he doesn’t show it. “Time to time. When you do see them, best stay clear, yeah?” he says.
She doesn’t need to be told that. Thinks about Ma and the Green Place, and all they would do to keep outsiders from finding the little home they’d made.
///
Sometimes she thinks maybe the Wasteland is beautiful. The gold and red of the dunes and the blue of the sky and the way you can look left and right and back and forth and never see the end of it. She could steal a bike and drive forever, and the earth would swallow her up, and the seed tucked in the knots and tangles of her hair would sprout and make roots in her decaying body and she’d see Ma again.
The Praetorian—Jack—she can tell now he doesn't want anything after all. For some reason, it’s harder that way. She doesn’t know how to interact with a person who would take nothing from her.
He’s direct and without guile. Solid, without being immovable. When she asks a question, he answers it concisely and without condescension.
It’s easier to think it’s a trick, because if it’s not, she can’t make sense of his soft, easy goodness. She doesn’t have a lick of that, not anymore.
///
He’s playing cards with three of the war boys, and there’s a week’s worth of rations in the betting pot. Thirty minutes ago they’d all been rowdy, raucous, making jokes. Now, the tension hangs heavy as death, and none of them are sure how it got here, why it escalated, how the stakes went from a tiny tube of half-finished toothpaste to seven days of food and water.
“Call,” Jack says.
She doesn’t understand why any of them play these stupid games. Adrenaline is Furiosa’s constant companion. She doesn’t need to play poker to feel it. Doesn’t need to bet on water or gruel when it’s never guaranteed from one day to the next in the first place. Every breath she takes already feels like a gamble.
She hopes Jack wins, because he’s the only one of them who won’t call in the debt.
She tries not to care about any of them because they’re all going to die anyway, sooner or later, but sometimes she can’t help it. She wants them all to have enough food, enough water. She wants this little life to be more than what it is.
///
“You want some?” Jack asks, gesturing to his bowl of crispy fried scorpions. She can smell their musty, earthy tang. Of course she wants some.
Furiosa looks away, wonders where he found those, where she could get some herself.
“Here,” he says, and pushes the bowl toward her.
“Shouldn’t we be getting to work?” she asks and pushes the bowl back.
It’s early yet. Sun barely up so still some coolness in the air. Perfect time.
“Yeah, all right, then,” he says. Today he has her drive a wide loop at 225kph. Furiosa’s strong. Knows how to climb, fight. How to use a knife. Still, the strength it takes to keep the steering wheel steady at a turn at that speed tests her. Her heart races and it feels like at any moment she’ll lose control of the car and kill them both.
“Fuck me dead, you’re getting good, Dogman,” he says when she’s all done. He’s often generous with his praise, but she knows he really means a compliment when he precedes it with a fuck me dead .
He’s looking out the windshield into the desert, head rested back against the seat. Beads of sweat gather on his neck and at his temples.
“That’s not my name,” she says. Jack’s eyes flick toward her then back out the Wasteland.
“No?”
“No,” she says. And that’s it.
Like her, he tends towards quiet. When he’d first offered to show her the ways of the road warriors, she thought there might be a lot of talking. People who think they know something always have a lot to say. She’s had her fair share of people wanting to teach her this and that, but she’s learned it really means they want to tell her what to do.
But Jack likes to listen more than he likes to speak. Not just with his ears but his eyes and his hands. He’ll taste the wind, smell a dust storm coming miles away. He can track the faintest indentation of a lizard’s footprints.
“On the road, you have to see everything,” he’d said a few months ago. “But you also can’t waste time looking.” She’d been at the wheel and obsessively checking the mirrors for sight of trouble. He didn’t often correct her, and it smarted.
“Easy mistake,” he said, and she hated him for saying it because it meant he’d quickly read the fleeting grimace she’d made before schooling her face back to neutrality. She liked to think of herself as blank-faced. Stoic, even. She’s been accused before of being without feeling. Somehow, though, he catches every microexpression.
“You look too much, you die. You don’t look enough, you die, too,” he’d gone on.
Everything he says, she senses the truth of immediately. It makes her ache and want her mother. Makes her remember that there’s a little place with other people who think like her, feel like her.
They sit in the car on a ridge overlooking a deep crater. “When I dream sometimes, this hole is a lake,” he says.
“Me, too,” says Furiosa, and frowns, because she hadn’t meant to say that.
She expects him to ask a follow-up question, to prod, and she’s relieved when he doesn’t.
///
Furiosa has always been on her mettle. She doesn’t know how not to be. Still, he seems to raise the bar of what’s possible. In a year, she can do things she never dreamed of.
A lot of what she gains is technical—handbrake turns, cornering, heel-toe shifting, trail braking, left foot braking, drifting, and so on—but the most important lessons are less tangible. Awareness, road vision. Honing her instinct.
Sometimes she’ll do something he’s shown her and almost smile. She’ll look at him—not for approval, but as if to say, did you fucking see that? His eyes glint bright, face half-covered in grease, and she’ll hold his gaze, and he’ll hold hers and suddenly three minutes or maybe five hundred have passed.
It’s been just over a year since that she tried to escape but it feels like twenty. Before, years in the pit of the Citadel passed by so monotonously it was hard to log the changing of days. But with Jack, she’d grown and learned more in a year than she had in the previous five.
///
She catches two rats one day, gives him one.
“Yeah?” he says.
She nods. “Go on.”
She can tell he wants to check again but stops himself.
They skin them before heading out, build a fire, and roast the meat on a skewer. When the sky darkens, they smother the flames with sand.
“I should get you back,” he says.
“I’d just like to look at the stars, just for a few minutes.” They lay with their backs and heads against the windshield, bums and legs out on the car bonnet for an hour or more, eyes to the sky. In the Citadel, things like wind and sun and stars are often far off notions.
“That’s the Southern Cross there, isn’t it,” he says, pointing. Furiosa nods. “And Scorpius?”
“Yes.”
“The saucepan?” he asks.
She nods, “Orion’s belt, yes. And there, that’s Canis Major.”
“Where?”
“Follow that line of the saucepan southeast to that bright star, there. See it? That’s Sirius. That’s the first star in Canis Major.” She points out the rest of the constellation, then shows him the rest of Orion, then the Emu in the sky. “The Southern Cross is on the far right, then if you go left, that star there is Scorpius. And the head, you see that dark patch there? In the Milk Way?” He nods. “That’s the Coalsack Nebula. That’s the Emu’s head.” Next, she shows him Pleiades.
“Where’d you learn all this stuff?” he asks. All this stuff. She’s hardly begun. There are so many stars, so many planets, nebulae, and there are more still that won’t be visible for several hours, til it’s near dawn.
From the order of the sky she can discern the time of year as well as the time of night. She can tell, roughly, where they are in the big wide world.
“I didn’t know so many of them had names. Do all of them?” asks Jack, when she doesn’t answer the first question he’d asked about where she’d learned it all.
“No. Only a very small fraction. Of the billions of stars in the Milky Way, only 10,000 or so are visible to the naked eye. Of those, only a few hundred have names.”
“And how many of those thingies are there?” he asks, and she always smiles at thingies.
“I was taught 88 constellations, but I think depending on where you come from, that number might be different.”
It’s getting cold, and she wraps her arms around herself.
“Should we get moving?” asks Jack.
“There’s a blanket. In the boot, no?” she asks.
He goes and gets it without further prompting, spreads it out over them back on the bonnet. Underneath the cover of darkness and the scratchy, heavy wool of the blanket, there’s a strange feeling of safety even as they both lie exposed in the open desert.
Furiosa reaches her hand to Jack’s and grabs hold, interlaces their fingers. They lie like that, silent, for minutes, and in none of that time does Furiosa’s heartbeat slow down. Nor does it when Jack’s hand, still in hers, moves towards his lips. He kisses each knuckle with soft, dry lips. When he’s done, he doesn’t return her hand to its previous spot between them, but instead rests it against his chest.
Furiosa scoots closer, then lets her head drop onto his shoulder.
She ventures a glance up toward his face, but his eyes are closed. There’s a tremor in each of his breaths, not a single exhalation steady.
Then his lips press into the top of her head and linger there. His cheeks rub into her hair.
Furiosa folds her body into his, and he wraps his free arms around her. She wants to say something, something true and meaningful, but as usual, the words don’t come.
It’s still cold, even beneath the blanket. She thinks, though, his skin must feel so hot beneath his leathers, if she could only reach under and touch there, how good and perfect that would be, and he could feel her, too, and skin to skin they’d warm each other up, fuel each other’s heat, be a flameless fire in the Wasteland.
“Let’s go,” she says, and wriggles out of his grip and takes her hand from his.
///
One night she wakes up whimpering and soaked with sweat. He’s there next to her, and pushes his bedroll so its closer to hers.
Usually, after waking from a nightmare like the one she’s just had, she can’t count on ever getting back to sleep, but he places a hand on her back and starts to rub. She tenses then relaxes into the touch, feels herself drifting off.
///
Most nights, she hears fucking. Grunting and moans and panting.
She has places she can squirrel herself away to when she needs it, but most nights the quiet of her secret places is too much. She’s grown used to snores and sleeptalking, startled screams when someone wakes from a nightmare.
There are places in the Citadel she can go and never be found, and maybe that’s what she’s actually fighting against, that temptation to disappear, to break her promise to Ma and just be done.
“I know a place,” he says. “If you want. If it gets too much here tonight.”
They’re in the canteen scarfing down maggot gruel with greens and cricket meal. Everyone’s gassed up and jittery from today’s run. Ten injured war boys but none lost. Three wheels on the rig toast.
It’s going to be a late night. War boys brawling. Stashes of booze revealing themselves from dark corners and just as quickly disappearing down throats.
“I already have a place,” says Furiosa, and Jack digs into his gruel. “Where’s yours?” she asks. She doesn’t know why she’d thought she was the only person to claim a bit of the Citadel as her own.
Jack stirs his spoon around his bowl absentmindedly. “I could show you. You’ll like the quiet, and it’s got some creature comforts. It’s a bit of a walk from here, though, so I reckon you might just want to stay here and rest.”
He’s not wrong. Every part of her is sore, just like it was yesterday and the day before that, like it always is. Loud or not, here has the advantage of being closer than anywhere else. “Is it where you disappear off to some nights? To sleep?” she asks.
Jack looks caught out, but he nods. “Come on, let me show you.”
///
It’s both far and a climb, an inlet in a cave with water, a bedroll, a toothbrush, a towel.
She’s astonished, but doesn’t show it, or at least tries not to. “I reckon the boys will be up til near dawn. You should sleep here. Take the bedroll. You need the rest,” he says.
“And you?”
“I don’t mind a little ruckus,” he says. It’s true. She’s seen him sleep through an unspeakable amount. “You take this tonight, and any night you need, yeah?”
Furiosa swallows. “No.”
“No?”
“I’ll stay,” she says. “And you’ll stay, too.”
Declaring it so leaves her with a satisfied warmth in her belly. She makes the rules. She’s in control.
Furiosa turns so she’s facing away from Jack then undresses down to her underclothes, gets down onto his bedroll and under the meagre sheet. Soundlessly, he undresses, too, til he’s shirtless and down to his jocks. She tries not to look at him as he does it, but his eyes have grabbed hold of hers and won’t let go.
“This okay?” he asks before stepping in to join her.
“Yes.”
The bed is too narrow for them to lie side by side on their backs, so they face each other, and while she gets the distinct impression he’s pulling himself as close to the edge of the roll as possible to give her space, she reaches out to his hips and urges him closer to her.
“Dogman,” he says quietly, voice breaking, and so she scooches closer, so she might hold him, comfort him.
But Jack pulls away.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I,” he starts, but doesn’t finish. He’s not one usually to lose his words, not like she is.
Under the light of the lantern, she sees him gesture his head down. She follows his gaze and immediately understands. Beneath his jocks, Jack is fully hard.
“Sorry,” he whispers. “Just give it a minute and—”
“I don’t mind,” she says, swallowing, and she doesn’t, she doesn’t at all, even though her face is hot and her heart is racing and she has learned over time to fear this very thing. Eyes on him, she whispers tentatively, “I’d like to show you something.” She grabs Jack’s hand and brings it to the meeting point of her thighs.
Jack’s eyes squeeze shut and he groans.
Her wetness has pooled into the crotch of her long johns, dampening the fabric. “You see?” she says. “Me, too.
Jack finally brings his body closer to Furiosa’s, throws his arm around her so they are chest to chest, stomach to stomach.
They lie like that til each finds an easy, dreamless sleep.
///
Quietly, Furiosa dresses herself in the morning. She casts a last glance at him in the dark before letting herself out.
Next she sees him is in the canteen for tea. He goes to sit right across from her, and she’s not expecting that. Her rations today are cabbage and potato mash, salty and hearty. It’s one of her favourite meals, and they only get it about once a week.
Jack has got the same, but a much bigger portion and a sliver of meat to go with it and a single thick roasted carrot, the greens still on the top.
He stabs the carrot and sticks it onto her plate. He doesn’t like them, knows she does.
“Tomorrow we’re going to test out the new engine. Early, before light.”
She mashes the roasted carrot into the mush of potato and cabbage, devours it all in a few bites. “Five?” she asks.
“Quarter to. Want to be back in plenty of time for breakfast. Big day.”
Furiosa nods, spoons the last bite of her food into her mouth, then goes to the workshop where she’ll spend the rest of her evening.
///
The thing is, it aches, this much wanting.
She wants Ma. She wants Ma to know Jack. She wants it to not be true that there’s no world where she both kept Ma and met Jack.
Furiosa doesn’t want to want anything beyond what she’s always wanted, to go back to the Green Place.
To want something else is to have another thing the Wasteland can take away. She can’t afford another soft spot.
///
They’re out early enough that she could show Jack constellations she’s never pointed out to him before, but she doesn’t, instead drives into the sunrise silently before circling back to the Citadel.
“I’m sorry,” she says, eyes straight ahead, one hand clutching the wheel hard, the other limp in her lap.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey, no need.” He grabs her hand, squeezes, then lets it go.
///
One night, he’s not there. She reaches for him in the middle of a fitful sleep and her body recoils against the emptiness of his bedroll. “Jack?” she whispers, upon waking. Panicked, she rises and goes to see if he’s in the privy. Not finding him, she makes the journey into the caverns to his place, barefoot and delirious, half asleep.
“Jack?” she calls quietly.
“What are you doing here?” he says, his voice gentle. He sweeps her into his little oasis, clutches her to him.
“You weren’t there. I thought—”
What had she thought? That he was dead? That he’d left her?
“Shhh. I couldn’t sleep. That’s all.”
He should’ve woken her. Taken her with him. At least left a note.
“Come, lie down with me.”
But she wants to leave. Go to one of her own secret places, none of which he knows. Stay there alone, gathering supplies.
It’s been almost two years. She’s learned enough, hasn’t she? To make it out there alone? To get to the Green Place and leave him and the Citadel behind.
“Come,” he says again. Reluctantly, she joins him on top of the bedroll.
They lie in silence, and she’s breathing in the scent of him, annoyed at herself for softening instinctively at the familiar fragrance.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.
“You didn’t.”
He nods. “I’m here now, and you’re here. We’re together.”
Were they? Together? She doesn’t even know what that means. For more than ten years it’s been Furiosa and Furiosa alone.
“I need to tell you something,” she says.
“Anything.”
The thought, suddenly, of her leaving—or dying—and him only being able to remember her as fucking Dogman kills her. “My name is Furiosa.”
He pulls her close, and she buries her face into his bare chest, thick with hair. “May I call you that?” he says.
She nods. “Not in front of the others. Yet.”
“Okay, Furiosa.”
God, it makes her tremble to hear him say her name. It’s too much, and she feels herself crumpling. The adrenaline, the sleep-stupor, all of it rushes her, and for the first time since she reached for the fruit on that tree all those years ago that day with Valkyrie, Furiosa lets herself be guided by want.
She places her palm behind Jack’s head and pulls his face to hers, darts her tongue out to taste his lips. The sound he makes when she does that is so gorgeous it reminds her of a lullaby, something perfect and intimate and all hers, nobody else's.
She knows, theoretically, how the act goes. The hard part of him goes into the wet part of her—and if that feels half as good as it does to taste his lips then she understands the fuss people make.
Jack’s mouth opens, and her tongue is against his tongue. Everything in her body loosens and tightens at the same time, opening itself to the pleasure of the heat of his mouth, yet bracing against the intensity of that very same pleasure.
Furiosa lifts her leg and slings it over Jack’s waist, so she can more easily position herself against him. Jack puts a hand on her arse, pulling her in yet further.
His kisses are maddening, and so is his touch, which she can suddenly feel everywhere. Hands on her back, on her shoulders, on her cheeks, in her hair, on her sides, on her thighs, on her backside. It doesn’t take her long to begin grinding against his erection, and she swallows each choked moan he makes with her mouth as she does.
She should probably feel embarrassed, the way this mysterious thing inside of her has taken over, selfishly chasing friction and pressure and heat and him, him, him. Short of him asking her to, she could not break from him in this moment if she tried. Her clit rubs against his cock over and over again.
“Jack,” she says.
His hand slips between the two of them, slides under her waistband. Furiosa tenses and stills. His hands is so close.
He uses his other hand to adjust her leg, the one over his waist, to spread her. He waits—maybe for her to pull away, to say no, to stop him—but she only whimpers his name again.
Jack presses his hand further down until it is right over her wet cunt. He groans, and she makes some kind of sound in the back of her throat that she doesn’t think has a name.
His hand doesn’t stay still. He drags his fingers up and down along her slit, all the way down from her bottom then up again to her clit. Then he presses two fingers inside and Furiosa bucks and cries out at the shock and intensity of it.
“More,” she says, pressing her hips forward into his fingers.
He jerks his two fingers inside of her, in and out, then pushes his thumb into her clit. She’s so close. Her body’s a live wire. She reaches for him, grabbing his cock out of the fly of his jocks. The hardness of it is breathtaking.
Jack’s muttering her name over and over in her ear between bites of the flesh there.
“Your shirt,” he says, pulling at the hem.
She takes his meaning and pauses only a moment before revealing herself to him.
The feel of their naked bodies this close seems to please him, because his breath quickens. That, more than anything, is what sends Furiosa to her release, bucking into him over and over.
She’s conscious of her volume, the way she calls out louder than she ever has. She feels spurts of Jack’s semen on the her hand where it had clasped him—even though she had not dared rub.
“Furiosa, Furiosa, Furiosa,” he says, voice quiet and small and tender.
She grabs his hand and clutches, needing, still, to touch him.
That is how they fall asleep, wordless, legs entangled, fingers clasped.
///
He is so beautiful it hurts. The way he looks at her, even in the canteen or while they’re under a car, or hunched over an engine, sometimes make her think she could stay here in this wretched place forever.
“I want to keep you,” she whispers one night after he’s fallen asleep. She rests her forehead against his.
That night she dreams of them in the Green Place. She is in a tree, and he’s down at the bottom, and she’s pelting him with fruit. They are both laughing.
In the dream, it’s perfectly clear, though she hasn’t heard Jack’s laughter before.
At night, he climbs into the tree with her, and she tells him the name every constellation she knows. She tells him the plants and how to tend to them.
And in the dream, they survive everything they take on together, and there’s nothing stopping them from getting wherever they wanna go. No questions asked.