FIC - "The Not Happened Yet" (Mad Max: Fury Road)
Title: "The Not Happened Yet"
Fandom: "Mad Max: Fury Road"
Author: rightfootred
Rating: R
Warnings: Discussions of peril/death and injury, and pain meds
Pairing/Genre: Gen or very light Furiosa/Max
Word Count: 2064
Spoilers: The entirety of "Fury Road" could potentially be spoiled by reading this, to be fair.
Summary: From a prompt on the Mad Max kink meme. OP wanted an AU in which Max, instead of marching off "all lone wolf" into the desert, succumbs to the injuries he acquires in the movie, and things go in a lovely h/c direction from there. ;)
Creds: Opening quote and fic title from the song "Adventures in Solitude," by The New Pornographers.
Balancing on one wounded wing
Circling the edge of the neverending
The best of the vanished marvels have
Gathered inside your door
We thought we lost you
We thought we lost you
We thought we lost you
Welcome back.
-The New Pornographers, "Adventures in Solitude"
The Not Happened Yet
Her mouth is filled with sand.
There's sand under her nails, plastered to her skin, packed in her ears. Sand has burrowed its way into her brain, grinding all thought into a gritty pulp and muffling the world. The faraway cheers, the dull clank of the platform machinery, the clouds of pain gathering behind her eyes. The sunlight dancing across the water...
Water.
Water... There's something important about water, about what's happening here, and she thinks I should be doing something, but the thought is smothered by the sand and by the all-consuming impulse to just lie down.
Instead of lying down, the Imperator stretches her cracked lips into a smile and scans the crowd.
Doesn't take her long to find him, even with a blackness creeping into the edges of her vision that's she knows isn't engine grease. There he is, the only face in the throng that's pointed up at her and not at the place where the water is hitting the earth. The sand got to him, too, but it looks more or less like it belongs on him, like an extra layer of skin he'll never shed. Always on the road, putting down tracks in the dirt, forever and ever in the sand. That's him... That's Max.
Max: she weighs the name in her mind like it's the wheel of a new rig. It's the first name she's asked someone for in as many years, and now that she knows it she gets to watch its owner walk away. The thought smarts more than she expected, a pulsing hornet sting. Furiosa wills her every aching muscle to stand still and erect and let him see her, see how much everything is about to change here before he leaves it in his rear-view mirror.
The redoubled effort of standing up straight brings dizziness crashing down on her. She tries to focus on Max's forehead, on the sooty crease between his brows, but suddenly Max's forehead isn't there anymore. And not just his forehead - his head is gone from view completely. And his shoulders. And his chest. The space where he was just standing is filled with the tops of strangers' heads and a cloud of dust, like something fell and kicked sand into the air.
It takes Furiosa's battered brain a long, horrible moment to realize that she's just seen Max drop to the ground in a dead faint.
Fool, she thinks, right before the blackness fills in the rest of her vision and she joins him.
...
...
Pa...
Pa, wa$;&...ke up\>||..,
WaAk\+\|*~,.,...
He's woken up in pain so many times that he's surprised when he opens his eyes and the pain's not there.
Drugs, then, he ponders, slowly, woozily. Must be drugs blocking out the pain, because the last thing he remembers is being thoroughly, completely buggered, bodily health-wise, and he doesn't feel completely buggered now.
He also doesn't feel like jumping the first thing that moves, which is new.
Drugs, then, Max ponders, right before realizing with queasy amusement that his thoughts are repeating themselves.
Wherever he is, there's light, but it's weak like the dawn, or the aftermath of a dust storm. The ceiling overhead is low, sloping terracotta, mottled with the same reddish-browns that have made up his entire world since he can remember. Could be the Citadel, could be a random cave... For all he knows it could be that goddamn stinking Valhalla the War Boys won't shut up about, although he seriously doubts he'd be welcome there.
On his right, he hears a hitching wheeze. He rotates his head toward the sound at the pace of a shadow inching around a sundial's plate.
She's there, lying so close he could touch her with an outstretched arm. She's clean, and pale, so pale he thinks he could see through her if he squinted. Her large, light eyes are weary, but trained on him resolutely. She looks angelic, like she's walked through hell and been made new.
And he thinks, If she's here, then I must be dead and we've made it to Valhalla after all.
M@!,,]+@aX y--ou c^
ou''.>[[ld have
s:aaaaAav))ed-\us-
Ah, no, no, he thinks, his heart sinking, it's all wrong... If he were in Valhalla then the voices of the dead wouldn't have followed him there. Couldn't have. Because in Valhalla he would be with the people he'd lost, and not just with their voices.
So.
So Earth, then, and alive. That's okay too - mostly because she's there.
Furiosa raises her arm off the bed - the one that ends at the elbow - in a weak greeting. The corner of her mouth hitches up a little: Look at this. Look at us.
"Where..." Max tries, but he's coughing before he can finish the syllable and oh dammit, there's the pain, hot and immediate and racing down his torso.
Somehow Furiosa understands him anyway.
"Citadel," she says, her voice a tiny, husky imitation of itself. "You thought..." she continues, pausing to inhale shakily between words, "you could leave... without any intact ribs... and half... of your blood missing."
Max thinks about this, and says: "Hm."
He wants to say he's had worse - he knows he probably has had worse - and if they could just quit pumping him full of opiates he'd be on his way. But he thinks about the fact that he still has no wheels, and about the fact that a person he just saw on the brink of death is here and talking to him and real, and he reconsiders leaving.
Or maybe it's just the drugs.
"Where'd they find O-negative?" he croaks.
"They didn't," Furiosa responds. "You're lucky... to be alive."
He feels whatever blood he has left draining out of his face. Shit. That close.
"Lucky," he exhales. It's not a word he's ever used to refer to himself. He tries to muffle an onslaught of coughs with his hand, but the hand is so densely wrapped in bandages he can scarcely lift it. That would be the hand that got smashed by a steering wheel and subsequently impaled on a spike, then.
"You shouldn't," Furiosa says, "be talking."
Max frowns if only to keep himself from laughing, which would assuredly drive the tip of a broken rib into his lung. Neither of them should be living, much less talking.
"Everyone else?" he finally asks, when he's done coughing. Except it doesn't come out as a question, because his voice is too hoarse to inflect one way or the other.
"No serious injuries..." she says. "Getting... their bearings. Being... free, it's..."
She pauses, but not because of her injuries; her eyes are filling with tears.
Max turns his head back so he's looking straight up, trying to focus on something else and give her a moment. He never knows what to do at times like these, when someone is confronting something as ugly as what she's been through. There's real bravery in her display of emotion, and it turns him unexpectedly bashful.
He takes the moment to realize how quiet the voices have been since he woke up and started talking to her.
So quiet, he could... almost sleep...
And so he does.
...
...
She's limping back from bathing for the first time since they woke up when she catches Max trying to leave.
He's braced himself against the side of the infirmary's open doorway. His uninjured hand is behind him, splayed at the end of a forearm that's pressing his entire weight into the wall. The rest of the arm is bent at the elbow, its bicep quivering and its owner looking pallid and grey and sweaty.
Furiosa clears her throat and Max starts - he looks up at her with the blanched, blank face of a thief caught in the act.
She tries to put on her most grim expression, dipping her chin and sharpening her eyes beneath their brows. It must look idiotic.
Max says, "Erm."
Furiosa holds the mock-stern gaze a second more, because there's something about locking eyes with him that makes her feel more alive than her injuries could possibly allow.
And then she limps right past him.
"Coming back?" she asks lightly when she gets to the side of her bed.
After a few long moments of ragged panting, she gets a response:
"I suppose I am."
Max can barely walk back to bed, but something in the way his jaw is set tells Furiosa she should let him do it on his own. He puts his hand on the edge of the mattress to brace himself, and sits down, his face cycling through at least three different shades of green and seven unique grimaces as he does so.
"What were you doing over there?" Furiosa asks, once he's recovered enough to rest his chin in his hands and stare into space, his bandage-free fingers tapping an anxious beat against his jawline.
She thinks she already knows the answer to her question: Putting down wheels instead of roots. Moving on.
But Max shrugs, winces heartily, and says:
"To be honest, I was trying to make sure you hadn't passed out in the shower."
...
...
M**aaA!>::?xXxx..,..
"Max."
He starts, and then swears: he hates how much he's been starting lately.
Max looks up to see the Dag's eyes piercing through his bravado.
"That ready to be rid of us?" she says, grinning her gap-toothed, knowing grin, as broad as her accent is thick. She crosses her arms and leans against the earthen wall of the corridor: she's got nowhere to be but here, and all the time in the world.
"Nothing personaaAhh, ow..." he starts out strong and finishes hissing and clutching his side. There's a rib on the right that hasn't come fully together yet; he's been trying to pass it off as residual stiffness, but the bastard keeps betraying him.
The Dag rolls her eyes.
"Not that it's any of my business," she offers, "but I'm fairly certain the person in charge'll kill you if you die out there."
Max nods, trying to put murder in eyes despite the urge to smile with a warmth he's just now rediscovering.
"Good to know," he says to the Dag, biting the words sarcastically.
Good to know, he thinks in earnest as he marches himself back to bed.
Good to know, because there's something incredible about knowing that Furiosa cares what happens to him.
...
...
"Look," she says. Her long legs are dangling over the edge of the infirmary window. Her right leg is touching Max's left leg, and she almost falls apart when she tries consider how casual it feels.
The Vulvani wouldn't let them hear the end of it if they caught the pair perched on a rock windowsill, both of them inches from death after just having recovered from mortal injury. Furiosa lets herself smile at the thought.
"Look at it," she repeats, letting awe creep into her voice. She's starting to realize that innocence doesn't have to feel like weakness around Max. It can be just that: innocence. Bare-faced awe. The way people used to feel when they saw a sunset like the one they're looking at now, with so many shades of pink and purple and orange. She feels almost childlike, so wrapped up in it all.
Max just says: "Mm."
Furiosa doesn't laugh. She knows not to mistake his frugal word economy for simple-mindedness.
"Things like this remind me," she says, "never to let myself wonder why I keep going."
Max turns his head to look her in the eye.
"That's why you'll outlive us all," he says.
"Best not to spread that idea around," she responds, her smile turning rueful.
'Immortan' is the last title she'd want.
...
...
"Look," Furiosa says, and Max does look, but not at the sunset. He looks at her, at the color coming back into her cheeks, at the unchecked wonder she's letting fill her eyes.
He hasn't heard the voices for over a day now, and he thinks:
Maybe I will stick around here for awhile.
Fandom: "Mad Max: Fury Road"
Author: rightfootred
Rating: R
Warnings: Discussions of peril/death and injury, and pain meds
Pairing/Genre: Gen or very light Furiosa/Max
Word Count: 2064
Spoilers: The entirety of "Fury Road" could potentially be spoiled by reading this, to be fair.
Summary: From a prompt on the Mad Max kink meme. OP wanted an AU in which Max, instead of marching off "all lone wolf" into the desert, succumbs to the injuries he acquires in the movie, and things go in a lovely h/c direction from there. ;)
Creds: Opening quote and fic title from the song "Adventures in Solitude," by The New Pornographers.
Balancing on one wounded wing
Circling the edge of the neverending
The best of the vanished marvels have
Gathered inside your door
We thought we lost you
We thought we lost you
We thought we lost you
Welcome back.
-The New Pornographers, "Adventures in Solitude"
The Not Happened Yet
Her mouth is filled with sand.
There's sand under her nails, plastered to her skin, packed in her ears. Sand has burrowed its way into her brain, grinding all thought into a gritty pulp and muffling the world. The faraway cheers, the dull clank of the platform machinery, the clouds of pain gathering behind her eyes. The sunlight dancing across the water...
Water.
Water... There's something important about water, about what's happening here, and she thinks I should be doing something, but the thought is smothered by the sand and by the all-consuming impulse to just lie down.
Instead of lying down, the Imperator stretches her cracked lips into a smile and scans the crowd.
Doesn't take her long to find him, even with a blackness creeping into the edges of her vision that's she knows isn't engine grease. There he is, the only face in the throng that's pointed up at her and not at the place where the water is hitting the earth. The sand got to him, too, but it looks more or less like it belongs on him, like an extra layer of skin he'll never shed. Always on the road, putting down tracks in the dirt, forever and ever in the sand. That's him... That's Max.
Max: she weighs the name in her mind like it's the wheel of a new rig. It's the first name she's asked someone for in as many years, and now that she knows it she gets to watch its owner walk away. The thought smarts more than she expected, a pulsing hornet sting. Furiosa wills her every aching muscle to stand still and erect and let him see her, see how much everything is about to change here before he leaves it in his rear-view mirror.
The redoubled effort of standing up straight brings dizziness crashing down on her. She tries to focus on Max's forehead, on the sooty crease between his brows, but suddenly Max's forehead isn't there anymore. And not just his forehead - his head is gone from view completely. And his shoulders. And his chest. The space where he was just standing is filled with the tops of strangers' heads and a cloud of dust, like something fell and kicked sand into the air.
It takes Furiosa's battered brain a long, horrible moment to realize that she's just seen Max drop to the ground in a dead faint.
Fool, she thinks, right before the blackness fills in the rest of her vision and she joins him.
...
...
Pa...
Pa, wa$;&...ke up\>||..,
WaAk\+\|*~,.,...
He's woken up in pain so many times that he's surprised when he opens his eyes and the pain's not there.
Drugs, then, he ponders, slowly, woozily. Must be drugs blocking out the pain, because the last thing he remembers is being thoroughly, completely buggered, bodily health-wise, and he doesn't feel completely buggered now.
He also doesn't feel like jumping the first thing that moves, which is new.
Drugs, then, Max ponders, right before realizing with queasy amusement that his thoughts are repeating themselves.
Wherever he is, there's light, but it's weak like the dawn, or the aftermath of a dust storm. The ceiling overhead is low, sloping terracotta, mottled with the same reddish-browns that have made up his entire world since he can remember. Could be the Citadel, could be a random cave... For all he knows it could be that goddamn stinking Valhalla the War Boys won't shut up about, although he seriously doubts he'd be welcome there.
On his right, he hears a hitching wheeze. He rotates his head toward the sound at the pace of a shadow inching around a sundial's plate.
She's there, lying so close he could touch her with an outstretched arm. She's clean, and pale, so pale he thinks he could see through her if he squinted. Her large, light eyes are weary, but trained on him resolutely. She looks angelic, like she's walked through hell and been made new.
And he thinks, If she's here, then I must be dead and we've made it to Valhalla after all.
M@!,,]+@aX y--ou c^
ou''.>[[ld have
s:aaaaAav))ed-\us-
Ah, no, no, he thinks, his heart sinking, it's all wrong... If he were in Valhalla then the voices of the dead wouldn't have followed him there. Couldn't have. Because in Valhalla he would be with the people he'd lost, and not just with their voices.
So.
So Earth, then, and alive. That's okay too - mostly because she's there.
Furiosa raises her arm off the bed - the one that ends at the elbow - in a weak greeting. The corner of her mouth hitches up a little: Look at this. Look at us.
"Where..." Max tries, but he's coughing before he can finish the syllable and oh dammit, there's the pain, hot and immediate and racing down his torso.
Somehow Furiosa understands him anyway.
"Citadel," she says, her voice a tiny, husky imitation of itself. "You thought..." she continues, pausing to inhale shakily between words, "you could leave... without any intact ribs... and half... of your blood missing."
Max thinks about this, and says: "Hm."
He wants to say he's had worse - he knows he probably has had worse - and if they could just quit pumping him full of opiates he'd be on his way. But he thinks about the fact that he still has no wheels, and about the fact that a person he just saw on the brink of death is here and talking to him and real, and he reconsiders leaving.
Or maybe it's just the drugs.
"Where'd they find O-negative?" he croaks.
"They didn't," Furiosa responds. "You're lucky... to be alive."
He feels whatever blood he has left draining out of his face. Shit. That close.
"Lucky," he exhales. It's not a word he's ever used to refer to himself. He tries to muffle an onslaught of coughs with his hand, but the hand is so densely wrapped in bandages he can scarcely lift it. That would be the hand that got smashed by a steering wheel and subsequently impaled on a spike, then.
"You shouldn't," Furiosa says, "be talking."
Max frowns if only to keep himself from laughing, which would assuredly drive the tip of a broken rib into his lung. Neither of them should be living, much less talking.
"Everyone else?" he finally asks, when he's done coughing. Except it doesn't come out as a question, because his voice is too hoarse to inflect one way or the other.
"No serious injuries..." she says. "Getting... their bearings. Being... free, it's..."
She pauses, but not because of her injuries; her eyes are filling with tears.
Max turns his head back so he's looking straight up, trying to focus on something else and give her a moment. He never knows what to do at times like these, when someone is confronting something as ugly as what she's been through. There's real bravery in her display of emotion, and it turns him unexpectedly bashful.
He takes the moment to realize how quiet the voices have been since he woke up and started talking to her.
So quiet, he could... almost sleep...
And so he does.
...
...
She's limping back from bathing for the first time since they woke up when she catches Max trying to leave.
He's braced himself against the side of the infirmary's open doorway. His uninjured hand is behind him, splayed at the end of a forearm that's pressing his entire weight into the wall. The rest of the arm is bent at the elbow, its bicep quivering and its owner looking pallid and grey and sweaty.
Furiosa clears her throat and Max starts - he looks up at her with the blanched, blank face of a thief caught in the act.
She tries to put on her most grim expression, dipping her chin and sharpening her eyes beneath their brows. It must look idiotic.
Max says, "Erm."
Furiosa holds the mock-stern gaze a second more, because there's something about locking eyes with him that makes her feel more alive than her injuries could possibly allow.
And then she limps right past him.
"Coming back?" she asks lightly when she gets to the side of her bed.
After a few long moments of ragged panting, she gets a response:
"I suppose I am."
Max can barely walk back to bed, but something in the way his jaw is set tells Furiosa she should let him do it on his own. He puts his hand on the edge of the mattress to brace himself, and sits down, his face cycling through at least three different shades of green and seven unique grimaces as he does so.
"What were you doing over there?" Furiosa asks, once he's recovered enough to rest his chin in his hands and stare into space, his bandage-free fingers tapping an anxious beat against his jawline.
She thinks she already knows the answer to her question: Putting down wheels instead of roots. Moving on.
But Max shrugs, winces heartily, and says:
"To be honest, I was trying to make sure you hadn't passed out in the shower."
...
...
M**aaA!>::?xXxx..,..
"Max."
He starts, and then swears: he hates how much he's been starting lately.
Max looks up to see the Dag's eyes piercing through his bravado.
"That ready to be rid of us?" she says, grinning her gap-toothed, knowing grin, as broad as her accent is thick. She crosses her arms and leans against the earthen wall of the corridor: she's got nowhere to be but here, and all the time in the world.
"Nothing personaaAhh, ow..." he starts out strong and finishes hissing and clutching his side. There's a rib on the right that hasn't come fully together yet; he's been trying to pass it off as residual stiffness, but the bastard keeps betraying him.
The Dag rolls her eyes.
"Not that it's any of my business," she offers, "but I'm fairly certain the person in charge'll kill you if you die out there."
Max nods, trying to put murder in eyes despite the urge to smile with a warmth he's just now rediscovering.
"Good to know," he says to the Dag, biting the words sarcastically.
Good to know, he thinks in earnest as he marches himself back to bed.
Good to know, because there's something incredible about knowing that Furiosa cares what happens to him.
...
...
"Look," she says. Her long legs are dangling over the edge of the infirmary window. Her right leg is touching Max's left leg, and she almost falls apart when she tries consider how casual it feels.
The Vulvani wouldn't let them hear the end of it if they caught the pair perched on a rock windowsill, both of them inches from death after just having recovered from mortal injury. Furiosa lets herself smile at the thought.
"Look at it," she repeats, letting awe creep into her voice. She's starting to realize that innocence doesn't have to feel like weakness around Max. It can be just that: innocence. Bare-faced awe. The way people used to feel when they saw a sunset like the one they're looking at now, with so many shades of pink and purple and orange. She feels almost childlike, so wrapped up in it all.
Max just says: "Mm."
Furiosa doesn't laugh. She knows not to mistake his frugal word economy for simple-mindedness.
"Things like this remind me," she says, "never to let myself wonder why I keep going."
Max turns his head to look her in the eye.
"That's why you'll outlive us all," he says.
"Best not to spread that idea around," she responds, her smile turning rueful.
'Immortan' is the last title she'd want.
...
...
"Look," Furiosa says, and Max does look, but not at the sunset. He looks at her, at the color coming back into her cheeks, at the unchecked wonder she's letting fill her eyes.
He hasn't heard the voices for over a day now, and he thinks:
Maybe I will stick around here for awhile.