Furiosa knew what death was when she was five years old. It was the flailing screaming mass of her mother digging desperate nails into dirt and skin and anything as she was dragged off into the unknown by hulking white men. It was the cries of "Fight them, kill them, my love, survive. Survive. Live on."
She didn't have a name then. She was a darling, a child, my little lullaby. Her skin was soft and darkened by growing up as a small flower in a giant field of vegetables and plants. Names weren't given, where she was from, they were earned.
They put her to work on the craggy cliffs that broke off into sudden luscious green. She was one of hundreds of pretty little girls who picked and plucked and planted until they reached an age where they disappeared forever. Each one replaced with a new bawling baby, confused and tired by small hands and an abundance of work. She gathered them at the end of the day and bundled them into a small sleeping pile. She quieted their cries with stories of a land far, far away, large and fertile and endless and filled with mothers, only mothers, who loved them, each and every one. She kissed bruised and battered knees, brushed hair into makeshift braids and pony tales, and held tight, so tight, to stifle tears cried out for a momma under the looming night sky.
But they all went some day. Ones even smaller than she was, with big, scared eyes and sniffling noses and names like Lilly and Lavender and Leif. They were all taken from her.
She earned her name when the day came for her to be yanked from the green clifftops to be shackled below. She dug her teeth into the fleshy arm of a fumbling, fondling war boy. He slammed her tiny body into a wall, hard enough that dirt and plaster rained from the ceiling. But instead of crumpling into a broken heap on the ground, she let out a roar of smoldering rage and lifted her bloody self up. Fifteen years old and she plucked out his eyes with hands that used to reach up in wonder at fireflies and stars. From then on she was the wild child, feral Furiosa, branded with a sigil and tattoos of eternally pulsing life and power. No one dare touch her unless they wanted to be witnessed.
She lived on the tops of tankers, flitted and fluttered underneath the churning bellies war machines. Sand and bullets turn impressible skin to hardened leather. Blood became water, each dead body became another number, another goal. Each time the party turned east, she scanned the horizon with a desperate fervor for something, anything, please just a tiny glimpse of green.
Once, with her mouth sprayed chrome and eyes tired and body savage she threw herself into a war buggy bursting to the brim with gas guzzlers. Her brothers behind her let out a raucous roar in witness and slammed their hands flat against the metal of their trucks in a constant beat. To this beat she turned the buggy into a sloshing mess of mangled bones and blood. The beating of hands against steel slowed and stopped grounding to silence when her foot hit the accelerator and she called out of the window: "Let's go, we have to get this shipment to Gastown by sundown."
Her arm went after a wasteland bug ripped a rusted broken spear through her muscle. They were on the road south, stranded after a massive swirling storm of dust.
"You may have to put this one down" The medic told the Imperator one night as she sweated through her clothes, her arm pulsing with ooze.
"You can't afford to put me down." She spat back at him.
"She's insubordinate to boot" The medic didn't face her.
The Imperator nodded, "That she is, that she is. Damn shame, but between you and me, she's been a pain in my ass since day one" He let out a hacking phlegmy cough. "Do her in."
It took fifteen minutes for her to hoist the Imperator's limp head up in one hand and secure her position on top of the main rig. The entire camp hushed into silence and lifted folded hands above their bowed heads.
"This mouth has given its last order" She called out, "You officially answer to me now," the camp beat their fists into the dirt, raising up a giant cloud of ashy dust.
"As if you did anything else before." There was a collective, synchronized laugh.
"We keep to the same plan, no changes, except we now have one less inconvenience. Rest up, feed up, bleed up, we set out at dawn. Oh and medic, I want this bloody stump" she gestured to the gnarled rotten mass of her left arm with the former Imperator's decapitated head, "Off of me before we head out." she called back out to the rest of her troops, "Understood?"
They all lifted their arms again and in perfect unison replied "Yes, sir"