-Slit-

I dreamt of the caverns every night, of waking up to the sound of the scavenger singing to herself as she started her day and washed her face. I wondered if I wasn't capable of waking up any way but disappointed.

When I lived with Dune, I used to dream about waking up in the Citadel barracks next to my driver, and then I'd find myself in the caves again and feel like crap all day. Now I didn't wake up at either place. Nux was here with me, but things between us were different, harder, but quieter.

It took a month before I could stand up without my trashed flesh suit protesting it. My left arm still hung in a sling because for some reason that would take more time than anything else to right itself. We found a dentist who pulled shards of tooth out of my gums when Wilson botched up the yanking of my two broken teeth. Nux had gotten back into the habit of shaving his own face but still kept the hair on his head. I'd grown mine back too and hardly bothered with my face. No point in sheering it off if I wasn't headed to the Citadel any time soon. It was just one less way to aggravate my elbow.

I counted days, scratched tallies on the leg of the desk we slept next to with the tip of my wrist blade. It had been thirty eight days, counting the time I spent laying there unconscious. Nux had been doing janitorial work for twenty seven of those days, I'd joined him in it about a week prior. I woke up every morning to Nux slapping me awake with the rolled up wad of discarded cloth he used as a pillow.

"We're gonna get there late an' somebody's gonna steal our job!" He urged.

He always said something similar and he always seemed to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn, ready to work. He woke up earlier than me before, at home, but never to this degree. I tried rolling over but he'd just swat harder and confiscate the thin sheet we used to cover up at night. He was standing over me, just swinging away with his wad of pillow at my shoulders and uglier end until I sat up and slung my own at his face. He tossed it back.

"I'm UP... Can't just let me finish up a dream, tosser,"

"You dream of rusty nails and dust, rot-head,"

"Says you, pervert scum bucket who dreams about tailpipes,"

"Better than you, feral fucker,"

He didn't mean it the way it sounds like he meant it. Feral Fucker was a common War Boy jest, nothing but a good natured insult but, it hits you different if you've spent any real time with anyone who's anything close to feral. I said nothing, but I know my expression twisted.

Nux didn't really know how far things went between Dune and I, but he had been told enough about Dune in the night while we were supposed to be sleeping to know what she was like. He realized what he'd said, what he'd insinuated -perversely but not incorrectly- and after a second or two his playful grin dropped and became a cringe.

"Sorry, um, I forgot," He murmured as he pulled his belt through the loops and tightened it. He still hadn't gained enough weight to use belt holes he hadn't had to poke through himself.

I shrugged, pulling my trouser leg up to wipe off night sweat, check for dry spots and to see how the friction sores were healing, too. It didn't ache any less when Dune was brought up. If anything the pain of knowing where she was and what she was being forced to do only raged louder in my head every day. Nux seemed to sense how impossible it was to talk about it and hardly asked about her anymore. He knew enough. He knew she shoveled my sorry skin out of a wreck, that she taught me how to farm maggots, that we got close, I guess, and that's all I could figure out how to tell him outside the random things about Scav Country. The War Boy in me was afraid to admit to him how soft I got with the scavenger. All he had to know was that I couldn't talk about her, not with him and not right now.

I knew he was afraid too, of telling me what went on when he was with the wives and Furiosa. I knew because he avoided the topic and It was fine for now because I wasn't ready to hear of it.

We dressed quietly but quickly. Nux wasn't lying that someone might steal our job. We got assigned a section of halls or barracks or both to sweep for garbage each morning, but if you're late to the barracks to pick up your equipment, they might hand your stuff off to anyone who shows up.

Wilson wasn't even awake yet when we gathered the last few crumbs of the previous night's rations into our pockets and left the room to hurry to the surface and into the narrow halls of the submarine. We were headed toward the locked entrance of the rooms used for storage.

There was already a line forming as we arrived. We were the fifth and sixth to show up and wait. Most of the cleaners sat in the corridor and ate whatever they'd brought to fuel up for work, Nux and I did the same. Crumbles of compressed ration stuffed into a square of moldy tack like a sandwich. We each took a bite and that's about all we'd probably get to eat until noon. The man ahead of us had nothing to eat, instead he rolled up something in a torn corner of an old magazine page and began to smoke it. It smelled foul, we had to fan off the smoke before it gave Nux a coughing fit.

Most places in the sub were lit with flickering strings of colored lights or a bulb or two but they were always few and far between. Most folks, if they could afford anything to burn, walked around with their own light source. Nux and I didn't need that. We were already well accustomed to dim and narrow tunnels, and the pitch of a black tunnel was no worse than the caverns for me.

The first glow of dawn light could not be seen so deep in the dead ship, but was signaled through the settlement by someone near the square who played old world tunes and announced news over a sprawling sound system. When we heard that noise start up, it would signal that the door would open soon and they'd start calling work numbers.

Everyone who worked official like for this house had a work number. Mine was 117, Nux was 118. If you're a worker with a number, you have your own work equipment that has to be turned back in every evening before sundown. If you don't show up for a few days, they give your number and your equipment to somebody else. If you never turn in your equipment at night, you get "fired" which by the way does not involve being lit on fire. They just blacklist you and you can't work for them anymore. Anyway, our numbers just guarantee that there's always work for us if we show up on time.

The man who came out every morning to start calling workers in was the same enforcer who'd hauled me around the day I met Jawbreaker. This takes time. Dozens were queued up behind us. Slowly workers were called in and shuffled past him. More guards would appear as he came closer to the end of his list. Sometimes the unemployed begged and started trying to push through the door, and if you're at the back and get your number called, you might have your ass handed to you by somebody who wants your work. That's why you get here before dawn. I hated being conscious this early, but I'd rather get harassed awake by Nux at The Crack than be at the back during the calls.

Our numbers were up, so we showed him the little metal tags -flattened bottle caps- with the digits press-stamped into them and we filed in. Our stuff was all in a room down the hall, a bunch of trash bins with wheels bolted on. The bins were corraled together and stacked up. Our numbers were painted in bold white letters against the dented aluminum. We found our cans and checked inside them to make sure the brooms, rags, and dust pans weren't missing, and we wasted no more time.

We rushed to get to our section of hallways. Nux would bump my can with his own to hurry me. I bumped back or stopped short. We'd still get there in plenty of time. These halls were claustrophobic, my leg would catch on any pipework or I'd clip a door knob with a hip trying to hobble too fast. I always tried to be in front of Nux, because otherwise I'd always be rushing to catch up with him.

We split off as we reached our sections. I had two hallways and he had two of his own. It sounds like a simple chore, one you could do in just a few minutes, but it was dark and there were always obstacles. Shit people dropped, never ending piles of trash to pick up and stuff down into the can. That was just how it was done, apparently. People were always just dropping their garbage through these dark passages.

It's easiest to just push the wide broom along and build up a good pile at the nearest light source, in this case a rust-rotten hole through two upper levels to serve as a sky light. Under the faint light I could then shovel the shit up with the dust pan. I had one yellow glove full of holes to half-blindly pick up the mess that kept falling out of the pan before I could dump it into the can.

You never know what nasty shit someone might've left, assuming it'd get picked up eventually by workers. Every day so far was another section of this sub or one of the tunnel roads down below, and I was always amazed at how much rubbish could accumulate so quickly. According to a few of the old timers, it wasn't always so bad, but people started to figure it didn't matter where the trash ended up because a cleaner would eventually get assigned to a hall once it was almost impossible to walk through without stepping in human shit or broken glass.

One of the first things we had to get with our wages was shoes. The cheap wretch sandals made of yet more trash wouldn't do. We had to pay cola out the nose for work boots. You better have closed toed shoes, or you'd regret it after a while. Every drop Nux saved and everything I made the first week I worked went toward that. We were at square one again, getting dried out trying to save sips of aqua-cola.

Nux finished both of his assigned halls before I finished my first. I was slower than him but didn't used to be. It was the leg and it was the meat on me still struggling to fix itself. I swear, I used to heal up from a beating like this in a week or two, tops. Wilson told me once when I complained that it is the joy of aging and to give it time. You're made of fresh rubber until you're twenty-five years old, after that, the rubber starts to dry-rot. Nux was a handful of years younger than me, even as underweight as he was, he still had more guzz than I did. He helped me finish my job, and it stung, but he didn't berate me for it.

Things weren't the same, things were reversed, and it shows that I'm a shit. Nux was worried I was so beat up that I'd never be right again, even asked Wilson if it could be lumps hiding in me somewhere making me slow at healing up and slow at work, and slow at damn near everything else. Give him time, Wilson would say. Organic told me once to spend time wisely because Larry and Barry were going to kill Nux. I didn't help Nux then the way he now helped me, I used to scorn him for his failure to thrive and stand up proper to be a warrior. Time won't heal that.

We finished my work together and the cans were heavy now. At least this was the part where I was useful. We would put both cans ahead of us in the narrow passages and I was heavy enough to lean into them and just walk the trash on wheels out to where we could dump it.

All trash gets dumped outside what they called Fur-No. It was supposedly the room where this water rig's engines used to be. Wilson said engines big as a house, and you bet Nux salivated at the very concept, but all of that was now gone, scaved and melted down long before our time for the steel. Now it was the place they burned trash to heat the place through winter. The piles outside it were at the ceiling, men shoveled it through the doorway, the destitute plucked through the detritus in search of anything valuable.

Nux and I struggled one can at a time, lifting at either side to dump the dreck. The cans always had a sour stench. We left and tried to move as quickly as we could to our secondary assignment. Slave fighter barracks.

Fighter barracks is a different animal to tangle with. There were bodies sometimes, fighters who refused to be taken to The Blues for a patch job and die in the night. Buckets of literal shit because their latrines were just a room full of repulsive privacy curtains stained where people had wiped their asses with them, and grimy toilet seats nailed on over wooden chairs with holes bored through the seats. Latrines at the Citadel weren't any better, but I never had to clean them.

The reason we tried to get our first job done quickly was because fighters trained in the proving grounds on a tight schedule. Fighters owned by the house trained in the early morning a little while after we start working, and come back to their living spaces around mid-morning so that employed but otherwise free fighters could use the proving grounds until noon. We didn't want to be in the barracks when they were still there or when they came back. To say it wasn't safe to be there while it was occupied is an understatement.

I always wondered where literal hundreds of the Scrotus War Boy horde went after their Warlord and master carked it. Some obviously clung to their faith and took over The Canyon from Rock Riders much later somehow. A few dozen were absorbed by Bullet Farm and the Citadel, and those who'd been stationed in the dumps around Gas Town stayed where they'd always been, but that only accounted for a small percentage. I always assumed they'd just dissolved into deserting scum. Nope, shrewd cunts like Scrud had rounded up Scrotus boys by the dozens, straight up disappeared them as they scrambled around confused after the death of Scrabrous Scrotus. Then they were sold here to the four ever warring Shatter Houses. Carnage Fodder.

They generally don't show up at Wilson's office either, because they go for it so damn hard in the arenas that they either come out victorious or dead. The wounded typically refused to get patched as well, and it wasn't hard to guess why. No War Boy enjoys being mediocre enough to constantly need that kind of intervention to survive. So, those who were still breathing by this point were nothing but the absolute strongest of our kind, built out of disfigurements from raging infections that had healed over and a lust for recognition from their new "daddy". His name was Chuck, The top man of this house which employed Nux and I. Wilson called him Caligula, though I don't know what that meant.

Nux shoved his trash bin against mine anxiously. "C'mon, c'mon! We're cuttin' it too close!"

"I know, I KNOW!" I snapped back, anxious too.

I could only move so fast now-days in a narrow passage. I couldn't swing the metal leg forward to run in here without wanging it on the wall over and over and beating the shit out of my stump in the process.

I knew why he was buzzing like mad to get there and get done. He'd already been cornered in there once before and had to be saved. Praise V8 that scrotus Boys weren't the only War Boys who'd ended up here. A handful were our own, Citadel Boys. They coexist with the Scrotus Boys, kind of, and one of them had called out for the barracks guards to come get my former driver out the day he got grabbed and tossed around for fun.

Nux hadn't gotten much more than a few very ugly bruises but if he'd been in there any longer, V8 knows what they might've done to him. The one who saved his ass was named Sprockets. I still owed him for looking out for Nux before I could come along to work with him, but I had no idea what I could do to return the favor.

We passed a tiny window, one machined through the wall and hull, and Nux pressed close to it as we passed to glimpse how high the sun had risen and wager a guess at how much time was left for us to do our job.

"Two hours maybe, I'll do the shit buckets, you start the bunks," he declared, claiming the task neither of us wanted, but with both arms in working order, he'd be quicker about it than I would.

"Just pray there isn't a corpse in there, 'cause the arm isn't gonna have it," I couldn't lift worth a shit, and I couldn't help but scorn myself internally. My heart pounded miserably at a thought, that Dune would be reminding me that I shouldn't expect myself to be made of steel. She used to scold me for trying to do too much when my leg was still healing.

I had to put away the thought, we'd arrived. The way in was guarded, but our bins and brooms granted us access without question. The reinforced door came open and we were allowed in after a quick search of our pockets for shivs or banned things we might leave behind for fighters we may know. The smell hits you first. Sweat, the funk that tells of unwashed bodies being recently present, stale foot odor from discarded socks. Actually, smells a bit like any crew's kip back home, only more potent because no one around here bathed much.

We split off again. Nux would be running the shit buckets to and from where we were to dump it. There was a chute system to pour it down. I'm unsure where all the excrement went, but I was told it had to do with producing power. The locals called it Fart Sparks. I had absolutely no idea what turning shit to power entailed, but I knew nothing went to waste around here. Nothing.

My job began in the living spaces. I started with the cots, dragging them off their narrow shelves in the walls and dumping them all into the center of the rooms. You have to flip them, too, to check for knives or weapons. Any food left behind, you pocket that. They weren't supposed to leave food lying around because of the rat infestation. Rats make fine tucker when farmed but the wild ones are harbingers of pestilence. Debris and dust is swept up, everyone's shit is left in the piles in the middle of the rooms to sort out themselves when they returned.

The point of this was more to remove anything they weren't supposed to have and to make sure that the place stayed just the least bit better than squalid.

My bin hardly had anything in it by the time I was nearly done because they had little to make a mess with. Again, Nux came to help me before I was through with the third room.

"All guzz pedal," I muttered as he made me useless without meaning to, running circles around me as he flipped the last few cots in the room and quickly scattered belongings to check them.

He sighed and glanced at me. His eyes were drawn to my metal leg. It made me cringe.

"You'll get better," He lied to the both of us.

This leg wasn't about to grow back like a lizard tail. The arm might eventually heal up and the scab on my foot might fall off soon, but I was never going to go back to being what I used to be.

Switch around everything and go in reverse until we were back home three years ago, I would've discarded him if he'd dropped a leg. He'd be left to die whenever he lost it. It wasn't just the fact that the practice of leaving behind the maimed was a part of War Boy life, it was the fact that I'd grown so wrapped up in being worthy, better than anyone, that Nux had become not my brother and littermate but a means to an end. A tool. Just my driver. A part which was wearing out fast.

I almost bit the end of my tongue off as I thought about it. I thought about this almost every day, and it now drove me just as close to a fit as the thought of Dune did. I definitely should have waited until we were done here before opening the valve on my bullshit as the pressure built up, but my mouth was already open.

"Nux," I called his attention and waited till he looked up from what he was doing, his eyes still looked through rather than at me because he was most concerned with getting done in here very quickly, "you deserved better."

I couldn't believe what I'd said, well, I sort of believed it. I had already figured out up in my rusted skull that Dune had deserved better. Why not Nux?

His mouth opened and closed, eyes bulging in the present again instead of narrowed and thinking about what was in the looming near-future. He appeared to swallow air for another moment before looking away to glare at the pile of mattresses with his jaw clenched and brows pinched together.

"You're right, I did." He grit out through his teeth.

Truth literally hurts, I felt pain across my skull and the back of my neck at his agreement. So, I turned away and reached for the last plastic woven basket of crap to overturn and sift through with my metal foot. I couldn't look at him. I don't know for sure but I don't think he could look at me either. I heard sniffling, something that had stopped since he had me shave his face for him almost a month ago. Great, I just had to keep jabbing open the wound and making us both rust, didn't I?

We hardly brought up home anymore, and we never talked about how things were between us before the road war. There are too many moments for us that are beyond finding words for, good, bad, euphoric, horrid all jumbled together and buried under it all was Joe. The very worst of it was trying to figure if it was the lies Joe wove into us though the cult or something in my very blueprints that made me monstrous.

We moved on through the rest of the rooms, turning everything upside-down and inside-out in silence. We left the barracks just in time. Had to press into the wall just outside the entrance and behind one of the guards as they moved single file through the doorway. Didn't particularly want to be in their way.

I've never seen them up close like this as we were usually out of their way in plenty of time. First Scrotus Boys, you could always tell who was from what branch of the faction by the scars, then random men from all corners of the wastes in their own little groups, then Citadel Boys. I recognized no one out of the line, too much hair and no paint. As they kept passing, I felt the pressure of a body pressing into the side of me that was mostly scars, then arms winding around, then hairy skull grinding on leathery skull. I'd gone rigid, not really sure what to do. Now that line seemed to go on and on forever while Nux was trying to crush his own bones to dust against me.

Alright, okay, he's panicking or something, I thought. He was hanging on me like he had when we were pups. It took a minute to beat back the War Boy way of being. Be a scavenger instead, it's not that damn hard, just grip him back. So, yeah, he got the crush of arms back. Had to pull my arm out of the sling to do it, and it twinged, but I held him back. Still felt like I was breaking code to do it.

The fighters were long gone and he was still stuck on me as the guards were staring.

"...Hey. Hey, they're gone. We can go now," I tried, shuffling away from the barracks entrance and back to our bins but he was locked up around me while the guards started muttering to each other.

"S'not them- that, whatever-" He mumbled as he only partially detached himself from me.

He was acting like he was thousands of days younger than he really was. For some reason my brain reminded me of those dreams I had months ago where Nux was a pup again. I wondered if- oh, maybe it had to do with... Oh. What I'd said in there.

Alright. I let him cling. It was okay. It felt so awkward that I had to force my acceptance of it and some part of my head urged me to get away from the door guards, and their authority, as quickly as possible. Once we rounded the corner back into dark hallway, my throat felt tight and I found myself just pushing the bins along clumsily with my mass while my good arm reached around behind me to grasp at Nux wherever I could, only finding his side. I felt like a pup too young for a branding iron and paint.

I stopped, so did Nux but only after he walked into me and his forehead collided with my cranium. I meant to pull him around front and hold him in the darkness of the unlit hallway, the way you're supposed to do with a brother, so you don't have to admit it ever happened.

"Ow, Slit! What're you doin?!" he whined.

I tried to turn and reach out but we just fumbled and knocked heads again before I could get ahold if him properly.

My guts twisted, because I wasn't supposed to be this damn soft. My throat tightened up worse than before and I bit my tongue to hold back whatever was boiling over in that pool of tar in the pit of my spirit. Nux had it all wrong, I didn't just die and get reincarnated from the body as a driver/passenger friendly model. Dune disassembled me down to a thousand pieces and put the parts back together. I was overhauled, so that meant the raging car-fire Nux grew up with never died to be absolved of the shit I put him through. I remembered all of it, and all of it was rust. You could have a healthier relationship with fume than you could with me as I was back then. All of this was true, I was sure of it, and nearly crushed the boney bastard where we stood, but we're still War Boys, and I couldn't hold him and try to start making up for all I'd done in the brutal light.

He went stiff as a corpse. I thought I stomped my way over that thick, canyon sized line that got drawn somewhere between when we woke up the day Furiosa went rogue and when Nux joined her. Bloodpump did a fearful leap, then another. I was horrified of this abstract idea that not only was Nux simply not my driver anymore, but some supreme force would punish us for acting this way.

I let go and he didn't stop me. We just stood there in the dark, in what might as well have been an endless void, apart and doing nothing. My head spun, probably because the bloodpump was still hammering away and it seemed like reality had crumbled.

Now I was the one snorting back snot and wiping my face on my sleeve. This is pup shit. We were too damn old for this and too sore at each other for it too, at least I thought so until he shoved at me, but not hard the way you do when you're trying to get a real fight out of someone. It was loose limbs and leaning with all of his gawky self.

"You soft, shit," he said through a restrained sob, shoving again.

It took me no time. I remembered this. Not more than a minute later Nux was laughing insults at me while I had him in a headlock.

"Soft as a nice wet milker! Hah! Hey! Ngh!"

"I'm too soft? You're the one who looks like what gets shaved off licey bloodba- Ow!"

He was maneuvering his leg behind my metal one and pushing back with his elbow against my sternum. He almost had himself out, but he was straining with everything he had and so was I. It wasn't chrome, we were both rusted out so bad we were at a pathetic and un-epic stalemate of mutual fragility.

The sensation which came over me was freakish. It was like nothing and everything had changed at the same time. It excited my skull meat and bloodpump in a dim kind of euphoria. I laughed too, and that just made Nux laugh harder. He laughed so hard that it was hard to tell if he was still laughing or had broken down into sobbing.

It had to end. We were separated when someone, the guards leaving for shift change, needed to use the walkway. We still looked at each other somewhat awkwardly in the light when we emerged on the other side, but it wasn't so bad as it had been. What had happened, pup level soft bullshit really, changed things again.

I don't hate change, I'm just chicken-shit afraid of it. I didn't want things to go back to the way they were and become monstrous again. Can't let it get that way again.

We still had trash cans and work to hurry for before someone else took it on first. There's something more immediate to think about than the vague perception of horrifying change.

Usually we didn't go back to Wilson's right away, we took the bins out with us to the parts of the shanty town where a lot of the free fighters lived so we could knock on shacks and offer to pick up trash and sweep out dust for a little food or a sip of aqua-cola.

It didn't seem like something either of us wanted to do today. Nux was still shaky, I was sore already and tired in a way that was mostly from the neck up. I was hemorrhaging commitment to the idea of extra work.

"...Think we can do without the side stuff?" I huffed, still catching my breath. He'd know what I meant.

"No, but- yeah, I just want to go scrub down and be done," he admitted shamefully.

We finished up, turned in our trash cans and collected our pay for the day. A carefully measured quart of cola each for the cleaned corridors, and the barracks searches and sweeping got us some stale hard tack. I don't think the tack was made within Shatterbone, it was too old, usually just beginning to grow green spots. It was probably traded here from the northern territories where we came from, which made it a luxury here because you need water to bake anything.

No one liked cleaning the barracks, thanks to the risks it involved, so the turnover rate of cleaners assigned to it was rapid. Jaw set us up so that we'd gotten that job most mornings and the extra food for it but to this day I'm unsure if I should be thankful or hazard a swing at him over it.

The best that could be done to clean up was going to the surface for a scrub down in the road dust. You just had to be careful. Dirt with any wet about it meant somebody had just pissed there, and up top you constantly have to watch out for piles of shit. Around here, the wretch folk drop trow pretty much wherever the urge hits them.

We found somewhere in an alley between the shanties and scoured the filth off the best we could in the salty earth. Nux and I had taken on the look of the working class without meaning to. It was just necessity to keep clean somehow, so we'd turned a crusty grey and brown with the stuff of the seabed. People here were color coded. The grey crust for workers, soot black for slaver auctioneers, ash on the noses and shoulders of merchants, blue dye for doctors, red ochre for enforcers of law, and true flesh tones for fighters.

We started on our way back to Wilson, but Nux pulled on my good arm to stop us.

"Hear that?" he said.

I turned my head left and right to try hearing anything but pedestrian jawing all around us and garbled business transactions happening.

Nux broke away and moved toward one of the shack homes, So I followed. Just a few steps closer and I could hear the slap-n-crack of flesh striking flesh, bare knuckles rapping skull again and again like a drum. We didn't dare pull back the scraps of cloth covering the doorway. We had to peek in through a loose seam in the corner of the rubbish built kip.

It was dark, my good eye had to adjust, but there was movement, a circle of wretch folk cheering, shrieking and booing, a big jug of cola passed round and round for them to dribble drops from their personal bottles into it, and in the center of it all, two men beating the nuts and bolts out of each other.

Took a minute to process since the winnings looked different than what I was accustomed to, but what we were looking at was gambling.

I could feel a shitty idea on its way.