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Capable has horrible dreams that night. They’re about Joe finding them, mostly. She dreams of him standing over corpses—one, two, three, Furiosa, the road warrior, Nux—reaching out for them, somehow pulling them to him without touching.
Angharad is there, beautiful and decaying, stomach torn open and guts falling out, and as Joe devours them she and the corpses stare. Silent. Judging.
“The dead are dead,” the road warrior’s voice, and somehow through Joe’s eyes she sees him sit up. “They’re not coming back.”
The bleak acceptance tugs at her. Her heart almost gives into him, and then he smiles and his mouth is dripping with blood and his ghosts rush in and tear her apart.
As though from far away, each tattered piece of her body hears her name, feels hands on her, shaking her apart at the seams—
She wakes up and Nux is not dead, but alive and clinging onto her, rocking her. Calling her name.
“You woke me up,” she whispers. It’s meant as an accusation but all her fire is gone.
“Yeah. You were screamin’ like a—somethin’ awful. Checked you but no fever. Figured it was safe to wake you.”
Furiosa talks like this too. These short, blunt sentences, no secrets behind them. Did she bring that with her from the Green Place? Or was this older?
“Stay,” she murmurs.
“Wasn’t plannin’ on leaving.”
“Oh.”
“Got nowhere else to be.”
“Thanks.”
“You need to be awake or asleep?”
“What?”
“You thinkin’ you could sleep again?”
Capable shakes her head. “No. I—well. I don’t know.”
“Dreams hit you bad?”
“Yeah.”
He’s so fucking sweet it makes her sick. Suddenly she wants him to be evil, just so she can justify pushing him away. She doesn’t want to but she should, because he’s Joe’s still, somehow, there’s something tying him back.
He sees her hesitation and isn’t impressed by it. He just sighs and mutters something about how he’s always getting the angry ones, V8 have mercy.
“Wanna hit me?” he offers after a minute. “I can take it.”
“No! I—maybe.”
She wants to hit something and cold metal doesn’t sound appealing. So Nux it is, and she’s sort of gentle because he’s sick, what if she—
“Fuck’s sake. Fourteen hundred day old pups hit harder.”
Anger shoots through her like a lightning bolt. He’s calling her weak. Just like Joe did.
Well, fuck him.
Capable hits him with all her strength and he still barely flinches, but she can tell it hurts him a little when she looks at his face. He smiles, though. “Better?”
“Little bit.”
“My lancer used to do that. Sorta. He didn’t—I mean half the shit he did to me I don’t think you can do? But you can make a fist. Close enough.”
Capable should be worried and ask if he’s hurting like she is. If his lancer hurt him like Joe hurt her. But the words won’t come in this strange dark space. Instead, she says, “I could try.”
Nux hums. “Maybe.” He looks down at himself, kind of sadly. Capable feels bad and she doesn’t know why, but he changes the subject and she doesn’t have to think about that anymore. “You ever—you ever um. Have one? Kids?”
“I was meant to,” she says slowly. “You know that.”
“Don’t mean you did.”
“No. But I almost had two. The first…I bled. Not even a hundred days in. The second was born dead. Why are you asking?”
Why did I say that?
Even now she can’t bring herself to grieve. She should. Maybe. But she never asked for them. They were forced on her, like everything else in the Vault. Angharad had thought differently. Angharad had said Joe had nothing to do with hers. No, that was all her doing—all he’d done was start it. He wasn’t anything to it.
But she and her baby are dead. And here Capable is, with her ghosts, and this strange creature asking her about them.
“I don’t know.”
There’s weight there, in those words. Fear, probably. Something bound down under layers of steel—they both have so many of them.
“I didn’t want them. It’s not sad for me,” Capable assures him. “Is that it? What’s upsetting you?”
He shakes his head, too quickly. “Nah. I—it’s. I dunno. Never met someone else who knew…”
“Knew what?” But she already knows, really. His hands are shaking.
“I had one. Or I nearly did. I didn’t know ‘til it died.”
“How long—”
“Didn’t ask. Just found a red thumb. He waited it out with me, then cut me so it couldn’t happen again.”
“How?”
“Trapped in a storm. Bored, got up in each other’s business. You?”
For a moment she’s angry at him. How dare he get to have such a simple story as being bored in a storm? How dare he have wanted it, all of it, the whole time?
“How do you think?” she snaps, and he flinches.
“Sorry. Thought maybe the first one was earlier, or something.”
“I was a child when I came to the Vault,” she snaps. “There was no earlier.”
“Oh.”
“Did you want it?”
“I wanted the road. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“But you’re sad.” She can’t understand it. She feels nothing about hers, and she never has. It’s strange for her not to, though: normally she feels so much.
“‘Cause it was Slit’s too. Somethin’ that was just ours. Car belonged to the Citadel, we belonged to Joe, but that—we made it. Just us.”
Maybe that makes sense. That where for her it was something out of her hands, forced on her as simply what she was meant to do, for him it was a tiny bit of rebellion. The reclamation of a body meant for nothing but violence.
“Furiosa has a cut like that,” she says. “She said she did it to herself.”
“Huh. Never heard of someone doing it themselves. You’d have to have real steady hands.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Now?”
“No. When it happened.”
“Worse’n the bleeding.”
“Can I…”
“Yeah.”
He takes her hand in his and presses it to the scar. It’s a strange texture, dense and almost rope-like.
How different would her life be, if she had that same scar? There’s no question that it would be different—she wouldn’t be here. Would she have turned out like him and Furiosa? Would she have known them? Grown up with them?
“It feels strange.”
“I don’t feel it much.”
Capable leans into him. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? My life’s been easier’n yours.”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, it has. You got some nice stuff, sure, but you got hands laid. I know what that’s like. Seen it happen.”
“It’s not like what you saw. It’s different. It was…there was a routine to it. It wasn’t violent, just…well, I mean, it hurt anyway, but it wasn't like what happens in road war. Furiosa told us about that. The blood, the screaming, the death—it wasn’t like that. It was quiet.”
“So what?”
“What do you mean, so what?”
“You think it sucks less ‘cause you couldn’t fight back?”
Capable considers. “I never tried. Toast did, once. And Dag—that’s how she got pregnant, this time. Then it was like a road war. She said he shoved his hand down her throat, threw her against the wall, hit her—all kinds of awful.”
“What about Toast?”
“It was her first time. He went easier on her, I guess. She cut her hair after, though.”
She feels Nux shift, and then his arm is around her. She twines their fingers together and changes the subject, because there’s only so much pain she can take. “How’d you get so…”
“Tall? Dunno. Got lucky.”
Capable laughs. “I’ve never met a woman your size before.”
“You still ain’t, ‘cause I’m not a woman,” he snaps, and she startles.
“I meant…sorry. I know you’re not. I meant—someone with our type of body? Female? I hate that word.”
“Same.” He snorts. “Organic used it for me once and I tried to bite his hand off. Attending said…fuck. What’d he call it? Some old world shit…”
“Assigned female at birth?”
“That was it. Thought it was weird ‘cause ain’t no one assignin’ me shit at birth.”
They both laugh at that.
“I kinda wish I could, still,” he mumbles. “Just…to have the choice, I guess.”
“Hm. Furiosa said it was the best decision she ever made.”
“I didn’t make it. It just happened.”
“Like how me having to have the babies just happened.”
“Yeah. Like that.”
Capable marvels, again, at how three people can have such similar experiences, and be so different at the same time. “I don’t know what I’d choose,” she admits. “If I had the choice.”
“Maybe you don’t need to pick. No one’s gonna make you it here.”
“No,” she agrees softly. “They’re not.”
Furiosa crouches by the side of the rig, breathing heavily. The pain would pass—it always did.
“What’s wrong?”
Valkyrie. Shit. She’d never meant any of them to know what she’d done. The weight of her choices—the blood on her hands.
“Just my stomach,” she says. “It’ll pass.”
“Ah.” Valkyrie hums in understanding. “Your blood?”
“What?”
“Your blood? Do you not bleed?”
She had, once, that’s right. But the cut stopped that. She doesn’t know what to say—does she lie?
“Furiosa? Are you having a baby?”
No. No, she can’t lie, not to Valkyrie. She never could, and after all this time she owes her the truth. “No. I—there’s a cut. I can’t.”
Valkyrie gasps and drops to her knees beside her. “That place. They did this?”
“I did.” Furiosa smiles grimly. “It was my hand. My choice. Never regretted it.”
“Except the pains.”
“Pain is part of life. It’s not that bad. Better than being a breeder.”
“That’s what they call the women?”
“The fertile ones.”
Valkyrie yanks her into a tight hug. Furiosa can feel her, the warm, solid weight of her, and all she can think is she’d rather have Ace's hand on her shoulder. Gruff, impersonal. Safe.
This feels dangerous. This feels like being seen.
“I’m sorry we never found you,” Valkyrie murmurs. “We looked. I swear we looked.”
“I know.”
“Your mother—”
“Gutted. I killed the man who did it.”
“Good. The men with you—the young one, anyway. Man by choice, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“He seems unstable. You called him reliable, but he looks like—”
“They’re both like that. In different ways.”
“Oh.”
Furiosa disengages from the hug. “I’m not what you thought.”
“It’s been thousands of days. You were never going to be the same.”
Furiosa hears those words.
She doesn’t know what to do with them.
“I’ll never be a mother,” she says. The words come out sharper than she intends them, more forceful, but that’s because they’re true and she needs Valkyrie to understand. This is not something to grieve.
“No. But that was your choice to make anyway.” Valkyrie’s hand rests heavy on her shoulder. “You are not your body.”
Unthinkable words in the Citadel. Incomprehensible. “Then what?”
“Your choices. Your heart, Furiosa. Look at how far you’ve come, what you’ve lived through. How could any one part of your body compare?”
Furiosa looks out at the horizon. Over at the road warrior, staring like she is. Alone with his ghosts.
“Yeah,” she says finally. “Maybe.”