A/N: This piece was done as part of the Mad Max Secret Santa on Tumblr. I had the idea for it kicking around in my brain for a while, so the stars totally seemed to be in alignment when I saw that my gift recipient had asked for (among other things) a Furiosa/Toast fic (and maybe one that could involve the War Rig as well). I've also always been a little intrigued by the term "anti-seed" (as Cheedo says, "plant one and watch something die"), not just as a description of bullets, but as a way to think about how ideas come to fruition. Furiosa's plan to free the Wives - like all ideas - got planted somehow, and it was that idea that led them down a path that ended with the toppling of Immortan Joe's regime.
"I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds…"
The Bullet Farm truly is the asshole of the world. It stinks of shit and piss, carried on the kick of a southern wind, and it's all Furiosa can do not to flinch as the acridity stings the inside of her nostrils.
Her eyes begin to tear up and she roughly pulls her goggles down to shield them. It's not much help; the lenses are mottled with dirt and grime, clouded by the rough scour of sand.
She knows she'll get used to it soon enough – an hour or two within the gates of the Bullet Farm and she'll have lost her sense of smell altogether – but until then she can only continue to stand sentry, her body vibrating with each growl and jolt of the rig, her eyes straining through the filmy glass to keep a steady scan on the horizon.
Up top with her, in the aft cab, the other warboys are getting restless, full of shaky energy, ready to be doing something other than watching and waiting for any hint of hostiles bent on attacking the convoy. Only once they reach their destination, the threat of danger gone, their bodies – like the metal-bladed engines they pay homage to – will desire nothing more than to cool down and rest.
It is her second supply run. Now, at least, she has some sense of what to expect.
To the rest of the crew, though, she's still untried, untested. In some ways, she knows, they still see her as an interloper, a hastily-promoted revhead who has yet to prove she deserves to be on the rig at all. Each day she binds her chest as tightly as she can with strips of bleached linen - an ineffectual attempt to negate her own body, to erase everything that had been done to it - but even so she never quite feels like one of them. It always seems just out of reach, that soldier's camaraderie, shared easily among the others but never truly extended to her.
Of course, the other warboys don't seem to know how or why she first came to the Citadel – what she was before she arrived broken and hungry in the doorway of the mechanicals' workshop – and she prays by chrome they never do.
The sun beats down, the hot air squeezing their throats and stealing their breath, gripping them like a vise, an unrelenting pressure that never seems to ease. Sweat pools down her back and her mouth is thick with thirst, but there hasn't been water since Gas Town. It's not hard to forget that they're riding on top of thousands of gallons of it, but she'd just as like lose her other arm if she got caught skimming from the cargo.
The engines drone on, minutes passing into the empty expanse of the road, and finally their destination emerges fully from the dusty landscape.
"EYES RIGHT!"
She looks to see the signalman at the gate snapping his colored semaphore – only a blur of black and yellow at this distance – and in return she grabs onto the rig's right flag and swivels it fully forward and then all the way back. This is their only guarantee of not being shot at as they approach.
"STEADY ON!"
Following the advance vehicle, the rig lurches right, ochre-red dust catching under the tires. The unpaved dirt path to the Bullet Farm comes into view, a barely visible indentation in the earth.
The road slowly transforms into a man-made ramp of rock and dirt that guides them to the gates, and Furiosa can feel a crunch and shift in the rig's gears as it begins to strain against the gradual elevation in terrain. She lets out a tiny sigh of frustration at the driver, for his thoughtlessness in revving the engines and giving them too much gas, even after the long drive they've just come through. But their commander, an Imperator named Sear, drives everything hard – the rig, the crew – as if expecting nothing else in return from the world. Sometimes, of course, this perspective makes sense to her; there are days when she realizes she's staying alive mostly out of spite, a bitter rebuke to the ones who couldn't protect her, who shackled her and made use of her body, who discarded her without a single passing thought. Sometimes the only thing you have left is living, the choice to survive the only one you can lay claim to.
As they approach the gates, she looks down, gazing on the workers' dirt-trodden hovels. Like the Wretched of the Citadel, their dwellings are overshadowed by the walls, their meager possessions camouflaged into the earth by weather and dirt, by the recycled use of generations.
There is a painful shriek of rust and metal as gates are opened slowly from within.
The rig rolls forward, passing underneath an earthwork arch, and then lumbers its way along a narrow strip of road for several minutes, until they find themselves facing a host of weaponized vehicles, parked in rows and shaded from the sun by long sheets of corrugated metal. This, she knows, is the armada of the Bullet Farm.
At their approach, the bulletboys have begun to silently emerge and populate the space around them, eyes wary, distrust and readiness written into their stances. Even as half-lives, they have status in this place, their bodies decorated with the Bullet Farm's most valuable commodity. They wear them in their belts, their masks, cuffed against their arms, slung crisscross across their chests on bandoliers. Tiny harbingers of death, encased in smooth, identical metal jackets.
As they drive past, one of the bulletboys stares up at her, hungrily appraising her mechanical arm.
The engines grunt in protest as the rig comes to a final lurching halt. No one makes a sound, but in the quiet, as she stands at the ready, she can hear the familiar metallic melody of the gears settling into place.
The Imperator opens the cab door and jumps down into the dirt. She can only see the back of his head as he surveys the scene, looking for whoever's in charge.
The stink of the place has somehow gotten both better and worse now they're inside. Furiosa turns her gaze over towards the source of it, a gaping pit in the ground at least a click wide and half as deep, with narrow terraced paths leading down into the central depths. If one were stupid enough to kick over an anthill, she thinks, this is what it would resemble: workers in dun-colored rags swarming and scurrying as part of a single-minded colony, harvesting, collecting, shoulders straining with the weight of their yield. All of this – the plunder and extraction of the earth, its distillation into the necessary components of explosives – has always been the sole purpose of the Bullet Farm. The exact process of manufacture is kept as a closely-guarded secret, although from the stench alone she can tell it involves the use of human waste. Say what you want about the Citadel, she thinks, but at least its deep-dredged water bears no color, no odor, no lingering mark or telltale stain.
A flurry of movement down below by the wheels snaps her attention back into place. A half-dozen bulletboys and the crew from the advance and rearguard vehicles have begun draining the tanker, attaching a variety of different hoses and siphons to its valves. After an hour or two, the war rig's primary cargo of water, guzzoline, and mother's milk should be transferred into the Bullet Farm's above-ground tanks. The rig also carries produce, in the cargo bay on the bottom of the tanker, all of which needs to be hauled away before they can begin loading the crates of bullets on board.
"Sky's gettin' dark," a rough voice mutters behind her. Furiosa quickly swivels her head to catch a glimpse of one of the older warboys, a weathered half-life named Ace, squinting into the western horizon. "Could be a storm." He's not really talking to her, she realizes, but to all of the crew still keeping watch up on top of the rig.
Inwardly, she curses; if it's a dust storm, it'll be nightfall before it passes and they'll be stuck here until the following morning. Because no one – not even their commander – would risk driving the supply convoy in the dark unless it was absolutely necessary.
She leans her hip against the front fender of the aft cab and settles against it, knowing there's little to do but wait and keep watch atop the rig.
Time passes far too slowly for her liking as the liquid contents of the tanker are drained away. Her gaze remains fixed on the west, as an opaque and billowing wall of darkness begins to emerge, the top of it curling against the expanse of blue sky and threatening to block out the late afternoon sun. The wind is snapping menacingly against her face, both a promise and a threat.
The boys below have also noticed and consequently speed up their work; with controlled efficiency, they uncouple the hoses and with a few turns of the handwheels, the valves are sealed tight. No one's loaded the bullets onto the rig yet, and Furiosa wonders when they're going to get to it, with the storm coming upon them so quickly.
Clearly, the war rig crew will have to find some place to wait out the storm. If they were out on the road, with no shelter, they'd have to cramp and huddle together in the front cab and the cargo bay and hope the seals on the windows and doors were tight enough that the dust couldn't worm its way in. There's a chance, though, that the bulletboys are feeling generous, now that they've gotten their goods from the trade, and might offer them some temporary space in their barracks.
As the boys hustle through their final tasks, a sharp whistle pierces through the muted sounds of their labor. She looks down near the front wheels and her gaze catches on her commander, who is staring fixatedly in her direction.
"CREW!" he bellows upwards.
It's unclear, at first, that he's talking to her – she can't really imagine what he might possibly need her for – but there's no one else nearby that he could be addressing. And then he jabs his finger right at her.
"Yes, YOU! Down here!" With a jerk of his head, he motions for her to come down off the rig.
With as much haste as she can manage, Furiosa clambers around the weather-beaten cab and then down the runged steps attached to the back of the tanker. As she jogs over to the commander, she can see that he's not alone. One of the Bullet Farm Imperators stands a few paces away, a mass of copper-jacketed cartridges arrayed across his neck and shoulders like blinding plates of armor. And right next to the commander – oddly enough – is a child, so small that the top of its head barely reaches the mid-point of his chest.
"Name?" the commander asks brusquely.
For a moment, she can't say anything. She's been with the war rig crew for nearly fifty days; how can he not even remember what she's called?
"Furiosa," she replies, trying to keep her gaze level and not make direct eye contact. Out of the corner of her sight, she inspects the child – a girl, by her quick reckoning – wrapped in the dusty rags of the Bullet Farm workers, a thin headscarf shadowing most of her face.
"We're carrying a different kind of cargo back with us," he says. "The most valuable kind. Breeding stock for the Immortan." He grabs the girl around her thin upper arm, his whole hand easily circling it, and gives her a rough squeeze. "You're to guard her, keep her safe, until we get back to the Citadel."
The girl briefly tries to shake her arm loose, but only succeeds in throwing the headscarf back half-way. Furiosa quickly takes in a rounded face, a wide expanse of light brown skin, and thick and matted hair crudely braided into plaits. Fear has hardened in the girl's dark eyes, their movements tiny and furtive. A different kind of cargo, Furiosa thinks, her commander's words bubbling back into her consciousness. They had bargained for a person – a girl, a tiny vessel – instead of bullets, in exchange for water, for guzzoline.
"You need to keep her away from the others, at least until morning," he says. He looks around, seemingly in search of a place where they can go and take separate shelter from the storm. "Up in the front cab," he says, nodding towards the rig. "Back seat."
Furiosa nods; he is her commander, after all, and she's been trained to follow orders and not ask questions. She reaches up to open the cab's back door, thinking that she'll have to figure out some way to hoist the girl up inside and considering what kind of resistance she might meet, but to her surprise, the girl grabs hold of the protruding bar below the door and quickly scrambles her way up and disappears into the cab.
Hoping the commander at least had the presence of mind to lock the doors on the other side, Furiosa braces her flesh and mechanical hands on either side of the open doorframe and, setting her foot onto the bar, in one fluid motion hoists herself inside.
The girl has folded herself into the far corner of the bench seat, knees curled up into her chest, arms tightly banded around them. She had looked so tiny, so childlike before, but now Furiosa can see that the girl is older than she had first imagined, more than five thousand days at least, much older than Furiosa had been when she was brought in captivity to the Citadel, older than she had been when she was first brought to the Immortan. Now that she can observe more carefully, Furiosa is able to glimpse the faint outline of a woman's curves half hidden under the rags she wears. But there's also something in the eyes – as if this girl knows of lives and secrets beyond her natural ken – and in the quiet defiance written into the blades of her brows.
At first, Furiosa does nothing. She's just a guard, after all, meant to watch over a captive, the same way one of the crew will have to watch over the remaining reserve of guzzoline in their fuel pod. Her only task now is to wait – wait until morning, when they can leave this stinking pile of a city, wait during the quarter-day's journey back to the Citadel, at which point her temporary ward will be escorted to the Vault and eventually made ready to fulfill the duty for which she was bought.
It's growing dark outside, so she takes a moment to ignite a hand-held lantern, and after setting it carefully on the floor, she relaxes back into her seat. Her body feels depleted, drained of energy, the heat of the day having settled heavily into her bones. But Furiosa knows she needs to stay alert – by chrome, there'll be hell to pay if the girl escapes and they have to start searching for her in the middle of a dust storm – so she sits up straighter, glancing around towards the front and then the back of the cab, her eyes once more catching on the girl.
The fear's still there, in her eyes, but something else, too – barely-concealed curiosity – as she stares quite openly at the sidearm Furiosa has strapped to her hip. It's unusual, this kind of interest, and Furiosa wonders if it's born out of familiarity or inexperience. But if the girl's been plucked from the Bullet Farm, it's more likely to be the former.
"You know something about guns, huh?" she asks, raising her eyebrows a sliver of an inch.
The girl offers a tiny nod, her eyes trained closely on Furiosa. "I know a little," she half-whispers.
Half-wondering what she's doing even as she does it, Furiosa unclips her Beretta from the holster and removes the magazine. Slipping the heavy receptacle into her pocket, she passes the gun over, holding it on the barrel as the girl takes it by the grip. The girl seems surprised by this turn of events, but says nothing.
Instead, she looks down at the gun in her hands, and begins to test the weight of it, pushing the grip into her palm and turning it over so the barrel faces towards the floor of the cab.
In a movement faster than Furiosa would have expected, she pulls the slide back with a rough click and looks closely to see if there's a bullet in the chamber. There's nothing there, of course – it's been more than a dozen days since the gun has been fired and, as a point of habit, she checks and cleans her weapon every night – but it's the look on the girl's face, that knowing, searching look, that brings Furiosa's thinking into focus.
She had been no more than a child – barely past three thousand days – when she was shown how to handle and care for weapons. Her training had primarily been with the bolt action rifle, as there were few handguns among the Mothers, but she had excelled, even at such an early age, quickly honing her skills as a sharpshooter. Her talents had not been enough, though, to frighten off the raiding party that had come across the tiny makeshift camp Furiosa and her mother had made in the scrubby desert folds. Her keen eye and steady grip could never be enough, not after they bound her hands before her with tight cord that bit into her wrists. Not after she passed the point of being able to fight against the heady weight of terror and exhaustion. Not after her eyes began brimming with unsteady tears each time she had thought back to her mother's body, savagely slashed across the throat by an impulsive blade and left to be picked at by carrion along the empty desert wastes.
"That's enough," Furiosa says, and snatches the gun back.
The girl won't really look at her after that, and turns her head towards the window, not that there's much to see in the encroaching darkness. It's just as well; Furiosa can't afford to lose focus. She can't afford to dredge up things that need to stay forgotten.
In the quiet of the cab, she can hear the wind begin wailing, the fluid waves of sand softly breaking against the windows. Time passes slowly, hazily, within the shelter of their tiny illuminated cocoon.
Furiosa looks over again at the girl, at the reflection of her face in the glass. The side of her head is resting against the cushioned seatback and her eyes are closed, her lips barely parted as she takes even, shallow breaths. Framed this way, she looks like a child once again, one who has yet to fully taste the bitterness of life. But Furiosa knows this is a foolish notion; even the youngest of children are quickly made to understand the harsh truths of this world, imparted alongside their mother's milk.
Does the girl dream? Furiosa wonders. What does she see when she closes her eyes, when she retreats into the dark cavern of her mind?
Furiosa never dreams. Or if she does, nothing lingers long enough to make any kind of imprint on her memory. The others dreamed, though. It was clear from how they tossed and turned, making the rusted springs of the bed frames groan in collective protest. Sometimes she still hears them in the darkness, the sounds a half-dozen women make as they dream and snore, as they whimper in their nightmares, as they quietly cry themselves to sleep.
Whose bed – whose place – will this girl take?
There were five when she left, not counting Miss Giddy. She remembers them in broken fragments: Mad Sheila and Nike and Tegg the Stout. Clytemnestra, who would sing to them, when she could be cajoled, songs full of foreign words, in languages Furiosa never understood. Joonette, the youngest, and clearly touched in the head. She has no idea if any of them are still alive. How could she? They had been locked away, kept apart, far from prying eyes and grasping hands, existing for him and him alone.
The high life, he had called it, as if they were more than just stock in a breeding pen. As if such captivity could even be thought of as life.
She can feel the old anger begin to rattle within her veins, pulling at her ribs with tendrils of fire. Most of the time she can keep it suppressed, binding it down each day much as she straps the linen bands tight against her chest, but it's always there. Blinding fury, powerless rage. It's as much a part of her as the air she breathes. She's hated him for so long, hated him for what he did to her, what he took from her, how he claimed her body and destroyed the girl she had been. He is the cancer that infects everything it touches, the evil that was born out of the ruin of the world that was.
But what cuts the deepest is the realization that she can't hate him without hating a part of herself.
Because what kind of servile filth would stay within the grasp of such a monster? What kind of slave would work with bleeding fingers to repair his fleet? Serve on a crew to protect his property? Swear oaths of allegiance and fight for him against his enemies?
Each breath she takes with his brand upon her neck is a betrayal of her Mothers. Even as she bides her time and waits – for what? to die? to feel the empty hollow of her heart stop beating? – every passing day offers only a bitter reminder of her own failure to escape him and exact her revenge.
She had imagined killing him so many times – the subtle entry of the blade and the frenzy that would follow, his lifeblood staining the skin of her flesh hand, the fight in his eyes slowly subsiding and then extinguishing altogether – but there had never been a chance. He was nothing if not cunning, and his guards were too careful.
It would be nearly impossible to kill him, especially now, when she was just some nameless crew on the war rig. There had to be something else, though, something that he would feel just as painfully as the loss of his life, something that would cut him right to the bone.
Her eyes shift back to the girl, sleeping quietly, her arms curled protectively into her chest. A girl worth a thousand bullets. A breeder. His treasure.
Furiosa couldn't take her now – not without knowledge of the rig's kill switches, not with hundreds of bulletboys between her and the gates – and regardless, he'd still have the ones he held captive in the upper reaches of the Citadel. But there had to be a way, some way to convince them to leave and steal them away from his stronghold. And then, when he came for his prizes, he'd find nothing but ashes.
Out the back window, she can see that the storm has passed, the vastness of the night sky opening into the horizon. Against the darkness, tiny stars seem to twist and turn, forming intricate and indecipherable patterns.
She feels a warmth kindling inside her chest, partially fueled by the hatred and rage that's always been with her. But there's something else there, too, something she hardly recognizes. For so long, she was alive, but just barely. Now, she realizes, with a ghost of a smile playing on her lips, now she has something to live for.