Just another short Mad Max fic - another quick fix. Enjoy.
In the past, his friends and family knew him as Max. After he got revenge for the death of his loved ones, he left behind his remaining friends and his life as a cop, choosing to wander the Wastelands. In a world gone mad, he's been called many things by the people he's encountered – Road kill, Stranger, Blessed Wanderer, Death Walker, Raggedy Man, Road Warrior, Saint, Blood Bag, Chosen One, or any verity of titles anyone could think of. He's always been whatever someone else wanted or needed.
His name or who he was has never been important but he has always been content with this, only because he wished to avoid reminders of his past. In this new world order he is simply a nameless entity. So he found it rather strange when the women known as Furiousa had asked him his name. She's the only person who has ever asked. Why does she care to know? What difference would it make? To him names were meaningless. So were titles. The life expectancy in the Wasteland is too short for them to be worth remembering.
When he didn't tell her, he was surprised that she had chosen to call him "Fool". Not out of offence because he stopped caring what people called him long ago but because he expected she say something like Blood Bag or Feral as he was recently named, or something worse. Fool was a name that actually personified him. It suggested that she didn't view him as just some object to be used and discarded or some type of superficial Wasteland figure who came to save the day as has been foretold be someone's made up stories. He's never cared for such tales as they're just the imaginations of the mad or the desperate, refusing to accept reality.
Her calling him Fool was the most accurate and down to earth description he's ever heard. It makes her appear to be one of the few still sane people alive that he has meet. In the few days they fought together, he's come to understand that even though she needs his help on her quest much like everyone else has needed or used him before, the Furiousa woman is genuinely concerned not just for the people she's leading but for also his own well-being and despite himself, he in turn feels the same for her. When she was laying between life or death with his blood pumping into her veins, He sensed the question she was thinking and he felt the need to answer. She deserved to know.
"Max. My name is Max."
Thankfully she survived to get her Green Place. Although she only called him Fool once, it is the one name other than his own that he would always remember no matter whatever old or new name he gets next.