wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2018-05-28 06:35 pm
wintersday) wrote2018-05-28 06:35 pm
Entry tags:
- character: mad max: angharad,
- character: mad max: capable,
- character: mad max: cheedo,
- character: mad max: furiosa,
- character: mad max: max,
- character: mad max: the dag,
- character: mad max: toast,
- character: mad max: valkyrie,
- fandom: mad max fury road,
- fanfic,
- fanfic: length: 1-5k,
- fanfic: rating: mature,
- fanfic: type: f/f,
- fanfic: type: gen,
- format: drabbles,
- kink: body worship,
- kink: bondage,
- pairing: mad max: cheedo/the dag,
- pairing: mad max: furiosa/the wives,
- pairing: mad max: toast/furiosa,
- pairing: mad max: toast/the dag,
- trope: au - alternate setting,
- trope: bathing/washing,
- trope: character study,
- trope: fictional religion,
- trope: hurt/comfort,
- trope: mutual loyalty,
- trope: recovery,
- trope: smut as character study
Fic: 100 Words of Wasteland
Title: 100 Words of Wasteland
Fandom: Mad Max: Fury Road
Major Characters/Pairings: Furiosa/Toast, The Dag/Toast, Cheedo/The Dag, Capable/Toast/The Dag, Max, Angharad, Nux, The Valkyrie
Wordcount: 33 drabbles and ficlets, ~3,900 words total
Rating: Ranges from PG to as explicit as you can get in a Drabble
POV: Third person
Summary: A collection of Mad Max ficlets for various 100 words prompts on Fail-fandomanon. Primarily canonverse Toast/Furiosa, with a few other ships, gen, and AUs thrown in for fun. Almost all are true drabbles (100 words exactly)
Content notes: Canon-typical implications of/references to rape/noncon.
Furiosa understands the bargains desperate people make, and she knows what it's like to kill a man she thought she could trust. Killed a few who thought they could trust her too, but she'd promised herself, out in the heart of the storm, that those betrayals would be her last.
So when Toast asks to learn the tools of survival, Furiosa teaches freely, without expectation. She notices – what Toast looks like changed by freedom, bare arms slick with grease, shirt plastered sweat-soaked to her skin – but doesn't let herself watch, or wonder.
She won't let herself become what she destroyed.
.
Furiosa is everything Toast wants to be. Her lessons are demanding, her praise sparing and well-earned. She's untouchable.
Toast learns what it's like to feel her stomach flip over when Furiosa guides her hands in repairs or corrects her stance – always brisk, never ungentle – or nods in satisfaction at work well done. She strives to impress. And if sometimes she lets herself imagine those hands lingering a moment longer than they ever do, she'll never ask. She won't abase herself like that for anyone, and especially not her. She couldn't stand the pity she's sure she'd see if she tried.
Toast goes alone into the desert, seeking stories of the world before, and when she returns her face is hollow with sun and secrets, her skin scrawled with ink. She seems a stranger, until Furiosa remembers that she’s only wiser, and a little closer to the dead.
She tells those stories, by day, to the Citadel’s children; at night, held close, she whispers them until words abate, leaving warmth, silence, touch. Furiosa runs a thumb along her hip, tracing text that flows like water – guzzoline, fire, the atom sundered – and wonders how she stands the weight of all that knowing.
In the cavern’s dimness, Toast moves through water and rises with dripping hair, rivulets running down her shoulders. Furiosa lingers in the doorway, watching with parched throat and grit beneath her nails.
“Come in,” Toast calls, sighting her, and Furiosa’s breath catches. If this were battle, she‘d have missed her shot, and that sharp ache would be her death, but – there’s no battle here. That, more than any thirst, decides her. Shedding her arm and desert-stained armor, she steps into cool water.
Toast pulls her deeper, fearless, unshaken by luxury. Furiosa kisses the droplets from her skin, tasting something pure.
The Citadel wants to make a leader of her, but Furiosa knows better. She’s tasted power, blood and guzzoline, her enemies’ fear drowning out her own; she knows what it’s like to stand on a high cliff, looking down. What it’s like to serve, too, and if any of the four wanted that, she’d ride until the storm took her.
Instead she works, defends what needs defending. It isn’t servitude.
And Toast’s hand curled around the back of her head as she kneels is not a chain. Only a touch in darkness, light, constant, reminding her of why she stays.
The gun is shaking in Toast's grip. She tries to remember lessons – the phantom of Furiosa's rough hands on hers, the target in her sights – but memory recedes, leaving only the desert below and the dark shapes of people gathered there: Furiosa, kneeling in chains, and her captors.
No time for fear, but fear floods her anyway. Fighting through it, she aims, breathes, fires. One man drops in a spray of red; another falls in the aftermath, Furiosa's chain around his neck, but there's no time for triumph, either.
Toast fires again, no hands to guide her but her own.
There's nothing in the box but a few sheets of paper, dusty and fragile with time, tied with a faded ribbon. They might be good for tinder. Furiosa can't think what other use they might have.
"What's that you found?" Toast asks, ever curious.
"History," she says, wondering all the while why she didn't say junk.
She hands the box over, and doesn't ask for it back. Toast cares more than she does about old ink on old paper – but when Furiosa finds her reading later, tears in her eyes, she's glad someone saw something there worth more than burning.
Furiosa stands in a half-circle of spectators, bare to the waist, streaked with sweat and white clay. She’s weaving on her feet after so many victories, but still sharp-eyed, still fast.
Her opponent is fast too, muscled and scarred, but incautious. A cry goes up as he charges, rising to a roar as Furiosa pins him, and Toast hears her own hoarse voice join the din.
Furiosa rises, swaying, and takes a long swig of moonshine.
“Any challengers?”
Toast isn’t incautious, but she stands, sun on her face, heart pounding. She’s not expecting victory, but she might enjoy this defeat.
In the time before, Toast had heard, books were easy to come by, free for anyone to take with only a promise to return them. Not so in this world. Some were treasures carefully kept, behind locked doors with other precious things. Some were valued for what they told of survival. Most were kindling.
So when Furiosa brings a crate of them back from the road, Toast‘s breath catches. She turns pages of fading schematics, then looks up to catch Furiosa’s almost-hidden smile.
”For you,” Furiosa says. “If you want them.”
Toast shakes her head, reluctant but sure.
“For everybody.”
Toast is driving fast, hands mostly-steady on the wheel, when Furiosa drops into the passenger seat beside her, wiping blood from her face. Safe, then. Alive. Toast feels the last shaky fear dissipate, leaving only the keyed-up edge of exhaustion.
“You did good back there,” Furiosa tells her – less a compliment than curt acknowledgment of fact, but it still hits her low in the stomach, a breathless jolt of spreading heat. It’s the adrenaline, she tells herself, that’s all, but she knows it’s a lie.
She wants to hear those words again. She wants Furiosa to make her earn them.
When Furiosa makes it back from the supply run, exhausted and aching, Toast is waiting.
"I was watching for you," she says. That's all, but she takes Furiosa's arm, and a little of her weight, leading her back to the room she's claimed as her own. And when they're alone, she strips away Furiosa's outer clothing piece by piece and unwinds the bandages beneath, revealing bruises, vulnerable places. She runs a cool cloth over abraded skin, following the path of Furiosa's ribs and breasts, over old scars and new – washing away blood and dirt, leaving Furiosa bare and clean again.
“Tighter,” Furiosa hisses through gritted teeth, half-command and half plea.
She can’t be comfortable, kneeling there with legs spread and head bowed low, bound by rope rough enough to burn, tight enough already to press white lines into her skin. Toast almost understands it, what she gets from this surrender, and she knows it isn’t comfort.
Not pain, either, she suspects. Something that frightens Furiosa far more.
She runs a hand up Furiosa’s broad, scarred back, feeling her tense and shiver, then lifts her chin with gentle fingers.
“Look at me,” she says, implacable. “You don’t give the orders here.”
With the engine’s growl gone, the Wasteland is silent, empty of everything but the two of them. Dangerous, Toast knows, dropping your guard out here – but even now, she suspects Furiosa hasn’t dropped her guard at all. Which means that Toast can let her body do what it wants, just looking up through half-closed eyes at Furiosa braced over her on that metal arm, pressing back into worn-smooth leather as Furiosa’s other hand moves rough between her legs. Her breath hitches, uneven; her hips jerk, heat floods her, and unsheltered though she is, she finally forgets how to be afraid.
The first time, Furiosa goes very still beneath Toast's touch. Dangerously still, like she is before battle, but the way her eyes fall closed, the subtle tremor when Toast first lays hands against her bare skin – that's not violence, and Toast knows she doesn't want this to stop.
Watching her, Toast realizes she likes the power in this: the gasps she can draw with the slightest touch, the slow way Furiosa relaxes enough to arch up against her, breathing muffled against her throat, good hand pressed to the small of her back.
More than the power, she likes the trust.
Toast marks a note down on the map and follows the faded route north with her finger, thinking of Max's words when he saw them off: there might still be people there, on the coast or what remains of it. Allies. Hell, there might even be a coast, and an ocean not poisoned beyond recovery. Furiosa would tell her that she's being every bit as much of a fool as the fool they left behind at the Citadel – but, well, Toast isn't alone in this truck, now is she? She's not the only one carrying seeds as well as bullets.
It's difficult to relax. There's no pain here, no danger, but Furiosa's body doesn't believe it.
Furiousa is not her body. And it's been too long since she's been touched, so she leans back, baring her throat for Toast's kisses and her breasts to the Dag's inquisitive, not-quite-gentle fingers, too exposed but unresisting when Capable bends low and guides her legs apart.
She jumps at Capable's breath ghosting across overheated skin, but no one gets thrown across the room. That's a victory.
Capable's mouth on her cunt, that soft, sure tongue, that's better than victory. Furiosa cries out, letting herself surrender.
Toast isn't a believer.
She doesn't trust the way her blood surges to the sound of the Dag's voice thrumming inside her chest, the murmur of the crowd, the drum beating counterpoint to her own heart. She doesn't trust how these tales transform what happened. But she trusts the Dag: the hand that finds her own in the dark at story's end, the scrape of nails down her back as the drum's rhythm quickens, the pain. She gives herself up to it, willing.
That's what faith is built from, the Dag whispers: blood, your own, spilled so seeds will grow.
The Dag puts her faith in insubstantial things: voices in the desert at night, the future.
Toast envies her that, but she’s seen where faith gets you – sprayed in silver, speared on a Buzzard’s spike. Better to test a thing until you know it’s true – to hold it, disassemble it, build it back. She’s seen the Dag tested like that, knows her breaking points, her tensile strength.
Still, she needs to touch, sometimes, to believe – to run her hands over the tattooed tracery of the Dag’s skin, slow, methodical, until she’s certain again: You’re here. Real. You’re not going away.
When Toast returns, the air is dark and sharp with storm-smell, and lightning dances as she hurries into sheltering darkness.
It’s not like hiding in the belly of the War Rig with sand rattling the hatches, tossed like one of Miss Giddy’s ships on ancient seas. Nor so different, huddled between Capable and the Dag, listening to something powerful pass by. There’s body heat, quiet breath – but no fear now, of weather or anything else.
She runs her thumb over the Dag’s tattooed knuckles, turns to meet Capable’s shy kiss, and lets them entangle her, feeling safe inside the storm.
"I hear it doesn't have to be bad," Cheedo says.
"Maybe not," the Dag replies, with a distant sort of equanimity. She isn't looking at Cheedo. Her hands are buried in turned earth, her eyes on the Wasteland outside. But she doesn't draw away, either, when Cheedo touches her arm shyly and says, "We could find out."
Instead, she brushes Cheedo's hair back, leaving a smear of dirt high along one cheek, and bends to catch her lower lip between teeth more used to biting. She's careful, as much as she can be. There's nothing here she wants to hurt.
Their new guard is a woman.
Surrounded by soft things and stone walls, Cheedo had never imagined a woman could look like that: shorn hair, hard eyes, built from metal and muscle and grease. She hadn't imagined a woman could move with such force.
Angharad thinks there might be some help there, but Cheedo isn't sure. She sees how Furiosa looks at the Vault and everything in it – with furtive anger, gaze lingering on soft things and luxuries she has no right to touch. Cheedo understands wanting. Every time the door clangs shut after Furiosa leaves, she understands it more.
Toast sees it from the corner of her eye, a flash of scales against dull sand.
Food, she thinks, and grabs it, quick, instinctive, like she never could have before. The little thing struggles, fierce with terror: a spark of life in the midst of emptiness. Then she opens her hand and the lizard jumps to safety, vanishing into a crack between two rocks.
Furiosa is watching her, expression blank. “What’d you do that for?”
It’s hard to say. She’s hungry, and now she’ll stay hungry until they make it back home, but...
“I think the desert might need them.”
It’s easy to get lost out here.
The land seems unchanging – cracked earth, cloudless sky, the engine’s constant song – but Furiosa knows how deceptive seeming can be. She’s seen how the place you meant to find might slip by unnoticed, and what people can become with only their shadows for company.
She keeps what she needs beside her: seeds, water, bullets, a map marked in blood. She doesn’t need to see the path scrawled there, only to have it close enough to touch and remember: hope.
As long as she doesn’t lose that, she can find the way back home.
Sometimes she thinks if she spends too much time at home, she’ll forget what it’s like to taste nothing but dust and gasoline fumes, and to go on anyway. That would be dangerous. One day it might kill her. So when she’s too used to clean water and kindness, she drives out with no goal except to see the parched ground stretching from horizon to horizon, and remember how it was before and still is outside the Citadel they’ve built – and to find, if she can, another place where what she knows of the world might not be true.
The rifle is a part of you, her mother said once, but never thought to warn her: use a thing often enough, well enough, and you become it.
So it is for her guns, and so it is for her Rig. She’s metal and engine grease now; she returns from the road with dust caught in her teeth, sometimes blood even in these peaceful days, and she washes it off, but the road stays with her.
So it’s not that it scares her, setting her weapons down. It’s just that there are parts of herself she’ll never leave behind.
The first harvest is not plentiful, especially shared among those who before had been left to survive or die by their own strength. Toast sees Furiosa holding order in the crowd, breaking up fights, but she also sees people smiling and sitting together, men and women sharing their portions with children who might or might not be their own.
Not long ago, these folk had been ragged and filthy, clawing for scraps of their old god's body thrown from the heights. They had been starving. No need to guess what happened next.
Toast can't think of a more fitting end.
Max is driving towards a long, low range of mountains when he realizes he’s picked up another ghost. This one doesn’t rage or condemn him, just takes a place in the passenger seat like she’s always been there.
“Sorry you didn’t make it back,” he says. Talking to nobody, but he doesn’t care. From the look of it, neither does she.
“Me too,” she says. “But it’s not my world.”
“And this is?”
“For a while, maybe. Unless you want me gone.”
“No,” he says. “Not you.”
The silence of the Wastes settles in again, not uncomfortable. They ride on.
The first thing she becomes aware of is the heat. It suffuses the air and ground, a presence in itself. Then, the shift of winds, and the sand that the winds lift in a stinging dance, red rock beneath and blue sky above. She senses air currents and magnetic fields, pressures beneath the earth, and feels the ancient weight of bedrock and the water below, buried too deep for human hands to reach.
Some time later still, she becomes aware of her body – that she has a body, a small thing discarded, fragile against the land and sky and searing heat. Its heart is still, its blood long since run out to feed the sands. No electrical impulses spark across its brain. But it doesn't belong to the Buzzards rolling in on spiked wheels to scavenge somebody else's kill, or the skittering lizards and insects that come to feed. They can't have it. It's hers, or her, like this desert is hers or her, and she will not let it go.
The wind rushes in through that open mouth, fills up the lungs and the hollow places, the networks of tiny vessels. She might make the heart pump if she chose, if she had need of blood to carry oxygen and heat. She has no need; she is heat, and oxygen, and it's a different fuel she needs.
The body lifts itself to its feet, staggers once, rights itself. Black tangled hair hangs about its shoulders, matted with blood and gritty with sand. There is pain. Her body is damaged, and left too long in open desert.
It can be made whole.
She braces a hand against the side of a smoldering wreck and doesn't burn, only drinks in heat, drawing it up and out through layers of metal. The people of the wastes have poured enough life into their cars, enough love and reverence and blood, for this one to be what she needs. The fire dies, and the machine dies with it; no mechanic, no matter how skilled, will make that engine run again.
She stands a little straighter, a little stronger. The beginnings of rot burn away, replaced by new flesh, and Valkyrie sets off across the desert in search of home.
“What are their capacities?” Furiosa asks, in a clipped, carefully professional voice.
“Anything you want,” says the man known on the streets as the Organic Mechanic. “Sex. Violence. These models...”
He taps the glass, and one of the constructs behind it lifts her head, graceful, demurely curious. “Programmed for entertainment. Not crude pleasure, mind, but art, music, philosophy.”
Furiosa wonders if she imagines the awareness in the eyes watching her through the glass, the fathomless defiance hidden beneath lowered lashes.
No, she decides, she imagines nothing. She knows better than to pretend otherwise.
“I’ll take her. Actually – ” She turns back to him, smiling coldly. “I think I’ll take them all.”
Sex, she thinks with a flash of rage, and violence. She’s always been better at the one than the other.
Her arm unfolds into gleaming metal as she moves, and the air is filled with the sound of glass shattering.
There’s no coming back from the Dark Side.
That’s what they taught, in the green temples of Furiosa’s childhood, and what her Master taught, when he was her Master, still, before she tore the skin from his skull with bloody hands. Rage is strength. Hate keeps you breathing when compassion can’t endure. It’s a road that can’t be unwalked.
“I don’t believe that,” the Jedi says, stepping further into the shadows of the cave.
A Jedi in name, at least, like so many Furiosa has slain. But this one’s anger is close to the surface, burning behind those dark eyes. It makes her powerful, dangerous and tempting. Curious, then, that she came here not to kill, but to negotiate. Furiosa wonders if the Council knows she’s here. But beneath the sharp edge of cunning and defiance, she reminds Furiosa of – something. Green leaves, cool water. Silence without threat.
Furiosa’s lightsaber flares to life as she lunges, red in darkness. The Jedi deflects, moving back without yielding or looking away, and some long-buried part of Furiosa watches, wanting –
– to destroy her. To touch her, tracing warm skin with fingers metal and flesh. To toss her charred, broken body to the scavengers. To leave her vulnerable and unharmed.
It would be too easy. There’s more than one kind of weakness.
“You don’t believe most lies the Council tells, do you?” she says, circling slow, letting her opponent follow the sound of her voice. “If you let me, I can show you the true face of the Force.”
The Jedi considers this. Her face is unreadable, but Furiosa senses no conflict in her, only calculation and a hint of triumph, and knows she’s chosen well.
“Do one thing for me in return, and I will.”
“What?” Furiosa asks, and the Jedi smiles.
“Try.”
Angharad wants out.
Toast does too, but she’s no fool, and there‘s no leaving this business, whether you got in of your own will or not. The only way out is to climb.
The old Don doesn’t realize she’s anything but a pretty ornament, draped in diamonds and hanging off his arm. His enforcer doesn’t either – not at first.
Now, though, Toast leans close, smiling, and whispers, “You’ve been thinking about a change in leadership.”
Furiosa’s eyes widen. Her hand twitches toward her gun.
Instead of flinching, Toast takes a deep drag on her cigarette and says, “So am I.”
Furiosa knew this was mockery, but rejecting the Immortan's gifts wasn't smart, and she'd spent too long pretending loyalty to try.
The way the girl stared at her still felt like an accusation. The Dag, they called this one – his least favorite, with her tangled hair and Wasteland eyes, but still too pretty, too useless, too soft.
"You'll be staying with me," Furiosa said. "You have no choice, so don't argue."
The Dag spat at her feet, then looked up, waiting for pain.
Not so soft after all, then. Against her will, Furiosa felt cold anger shift closer to respect.
Sydney shatterdome might still be standing, but this is madness – climbing into the semi-functional remains of a derelict jaeger, attempting to drift with a nameless feral more stranger than ally. A bad connection with no safety protocols might burn her brain out, and his too. But she'd felt it, there in the marshes, her rifle balanced steady on his shoulder. She knows.
"Initiate neural handshake," she commands; somewhere in the control room below, the Dag listens.
Images assault her consciousness: fear, fire, a child falling beneath a monster's claws.
In the distance, Immortan roars, thundering closer.
His name is Max.
"You see them, don't you?" she says to him, that night on the edge of the Salt, washed by moonlight and lantern-light. He doesn't need to ask to understand what she's talking about. He doesn't need to answer for her to know.
"They ever talk to you?" she asks.
He grunts an affirmation. After a long silence, almost comfortable, he says, "You too?"
"I don't have the ears to listen," she says, and he's unsure whether he hears or imagines the regret in her voice. "My mother did. Me?"
She loads a rifle round, her eyes distant. That's answer enough.
Fandom: Mad Max: Fury Road
Major Characters/Pairings: Furiosa/Toast, The Dag/Toast, Cheedo/The Dag, Capable/Toast/The Dag, Max, Angharad, Nux, The Valkyrie
Wordcount: 33 drabbles and ficlets, ~3,900 words total
Rating: Ranges from PG to as explicit as you can get in a Drabble
POV: Third person
Summary: A collection of Mad Max ficlets for various 100 words prompts on Fail-fandomanon. Primarily canonverse Toast/Furiosa, with a few other ships, gen, and AUs thrown in for fun. Almost all are true drabbles (100 words exactly)
Content notes: Canon-typical implications of/references to rape/noncon.
Toast/Furiosa, Pining, Double-drabble (Teen)
Furiosa understands the bargains desperate people make, and she knows what it's like to kill a man she thought she could trust. Killed a few who thought they could trust her too, but she'd promised herself, out in the heart of the storm, that those betrayals would be her last.
So when Toast asks to learn the tools of survival, Furiosa teaches freely, without expectation. She notices – what Toast looks like changed by freedom, bare arms slick with grease, shirt plastered sweat-soaked to her skin – but doesn't let herself watch, or wonder.
She won't let herself become what she destroyed.
.
Furiosa is everything Toast wants to be. Her lessons are demanding, her praise sparing and well-earned. She's untouchable.
Toast learns what it's like to feel her stomach flip over when Furiosa guides her hands in repairs or corrects her stance – always brisk, never ungentle – or nods in satisfaction at work well done. She strives to impress. And if sometimes she lets herself imagine those hands lingering a moment longer than they ever do, she'll never ask. She won't abase herself like that for anyone, and especially not her. She couldn't stand the pity she's sure she'd see if she tried.
Toast/Furiosa, History (Teen)
Toast goes alone into the desert, seeking stories of the world before, and when she returns her face is hollow with sun and secrets, her skin scrawled with ink. She seems a stranger, until Furiosa remembers that she’s only wiser, and a little closer to the dead.
She tells those stories, by day, to the Citadel’s children; at night, held close, she whispers them until words abate, leaving warmth, silence, touch. Furiosa runs a thumb along her hip, tracing text that flows like water – guzzoline, fire, the atom sundered – and wonders how she stands the weight of all that knowing.
Toast/Furiosa, Something rare and remarkable (Teen)
In the cavern’s dimness, Toast moves through water and rises with dripping hair, rivulets running down her shoulders. Furiosa lingers in the doorway, watching with parched throat and grit beneath her nails.
“Come in,” Toast calls, sighting her, and Furiosa’s breath catches. If this were battle, she‘d have missed her shot, and that sharp ache would be her death, but – there’s no battle here. That, more than any thirst, decides her. Shedding her arm and desert-stained armor, she steps into cool water.
Toast pulls her deeper, fearless, unshaken by luxury. Furiosa kisses the droplets from her skin, tasting something pure.
Toast/Furiosa, Fidelity (Teen)
The Citadel wants to make a leader of her, but Furiosa knows better. She’s tasted power, blood and guzzoline, her enemies’ fear drowning out her own; she knows what it’s like to stand on a high cliff, looking down. What it’s like to serve, too, and if any of the four wanted that, she’d ride until the storm took her.
Instead she works, defends what needs defending. It isn’t servitude.
And Toast’s hand curled around the back of her head as she kneels is not a chain. Only a touch in darkness, light, constant, reminding her of why she stays.
Toast/Furiosa, Daring rescues (Teen)
The gun is shaking in Toast's grip. She tries to remember lessons – the phantom of Furiosa's rough hands on hers, the target in her sights – but memory recedes, leaving only the desert below and the dark shapes of people gathered there: Furiosa, kneeling in chains, and her captors.
No time for fear, but fear floods her anyway. Fighting through it, she aims, breathes, fires. One man drops in a spray of red; another falls in the aftermath, Furiosa's chain around his neck, but there's no time for triumph, either.
Toast fires again, no hands to guide her but her own.
Toast/Furiosa, Love letters (PG)
There's nothing in the box but a few sheets of paper, dusty and fragile with time, tied with a faded ribbon. They might be good for tinder. Furiosa can't think what other use they might have.
"What's that you found?" Toast asks, ever curious.
"History," she says, wondering all the while why she didn't say junk.
She hands the box over, and doesn't ask for it back. Toast cares more than she does about old ink on old paper – but when Furiosa finds her reading later, tears in her eyes, she's glad someone saw something there worth more than burning.
Toast/Furiosa, Drinking games (Teen)
Furiosa stands in a half-circle of spectators, bare to the waist, streaked with sweat and white clay. She’s weaving on her feet after so many victories, but still sharp-eyed, still fast.
Her opponent is fast too, muscled and scarred, but incautious. A cry goes up as he charges, rising to a roar as Furiosa pins him, and Toast hears her own hoarse voice join the din.
Furiosa rises, swaying, and takes a long swig of moonshine.
“Any challengers?”
Toast isn’t incautious, but she stands, sun on her face, heart pounding. She’s not expecting victory, but she might enjoy this defeat.
Toast/Furiosa, Books (PG)
In the time before, Toast had heard, books were easy to come by, free for anyone to take with only a promise to return them. Not so in this world. Some were treasures carefully kept, behind locked doors with other precious things. Some were valued for what they told of survival. Most were kindling.
So when Furiosa brings a crate of them back from the road, Toast‘s breath catches. She turns pages of fading schematics, then looks up to catch Furiosa’s almost-hidden smile.
”For you,” Furiosa says. “If you want them.”
Toast shakes her head, reluctant but sure.
“For everybody.”
Toast/Furiosa, Praise kink (Teen)
Toast is driving fast, hands mostly-steady on the wheel, when Furiosa drops into the passenger seat beside her, wiping blood from her face. Safe, then. Alive. Toast feels the last shaky fear dissipate, leaving only the keyed-up edge of exhaustion.
“You did good back there,” Furiosa tells her – less a compliment than curt acknowledgment of fact, but it still hits her low in the stomach, a breathless jolt of spreading heat. It’s the adrenaline, she tells herself, that’s all, but she knows it’s a lie.
She wants to hear those words again. She wants Furiosa to make her earn them.
Toast/Furiosa, Undressing (Teen)
When Furiosa makes it back from the supply run, exhausted and aching, Toast is waiting.
"I was watching for you," she says. That's all, but she takes Furiosa's arm, and a little of her weight, leading her back to the room she's claimed as her own. And when they're alone, she strips away Furiosa's outer clothing piece by piece and unwinds the bandages beneath, revealing bruises, vulnerable places. She runs a cool cloth over abraded skin, following the path of Furiosa's ribs and breasts, over old scars and new – washing away blood and dirt, leaving Furiosa bare and clean again.
Toast/Furiosa, Restraint (Mature)
“Tighter,” Furiosa hisses through gritted teeth, half-command and half plea.
She can’t be comfortable, kneeling there with legs spread and head bowed low, bound by rope rough enough to burn, tight enough already to press white lines into her skin. Toast almost understands it, what she gets from this surrender, and she knows it isn’t comfort.
Not pain, either, she suspects. Something that frightens Furiosa far more.
She runs a hand up Furiosa’s broad, scarred back, feeling her tense and shiver, then lifts her chin with gentle fingers.
“Look at me,” she says, implacable. “You don’t give the orders here.”
Toast/Furiosa, Backseat quickies (Mature/light Explicit)
With the engine’s growl gone, the Wasteland is silent, empty of everything but the two of them. Dangerous, Toast knows, dropping your guard out here – but even now, she suspects Furiosa hasn’t dropped her guard at all. Which means that Toast can let her body do what it wants, just looking up through half-closed eyes at Furiosa braced over her on that metal arm, pressing back into worn-smooth leather as Furiosa’s other hand moves rough between her legs. Her breath hitches, uneven; her hips jerk, heat floods her, and unsheltered though she is, she finally forgets how to be afraid.
Toast/Furiosa, Touch starvation (Mature)
The first time, Furiosa goes very still beneath Toast's touch. Dangerously still, like she is before battle, but the way her eyes fall closed, the subtle tremor when Toast first lays hands against her bare skin – that's not violence, and Toast knows she doesn't want this to stop.
Watching her, Toast realizes she likes the power in this: the gasps she can draw with the slightest touch, the slow way Furiosa relaxes enough to arch up against her, breathing muffled against her throat, good hand pressed to the small of her back.
More than the power, she likes the trust.
Toast/Furiosa, Roadtrips (PG)
Toast marks a note down on the map and follows the faded route north with her finger, thinking of Max's words when he saw them off: there might still be people there, on the coast or what remains of it. Allies. Hell, there might even be a coast, and an ocean not poisoned beyond recovery. Furiosa would tell her that she's being every bit as much of a fool as the fool they left behind at the Citadel – but, well, Toast isn't alone in this truck, now is she? She's not the only one carrying seeds as well as bullets.
Furiosa/The Wives, Oral sex (Explicit)
It's difficult to relax. There's no pain here, no danger, but Furiosa's body doesn't believe it.
Furiousa is not her body. And it's been too long since she's been touched, so she leans back, baring her throat for Toast's kisses and her breasts to the Dag's inquisitive, not-quite-gentle fingers, too exposed but unresisting when Capable bends low and guides her legs apart.
She jumps at Capable's breath ghosting across overheated skin, but no one gets thrown across the room. That's a victory.
Capable's mouth on her cunt, that soft, sure tongue, that's better than victory. Furiosa cries out, letting herself surrender.
Toast/The Dag, Rituals (Mature)
Toast isn't a believer.
She doesn't trust the way her blood surges to the sound of the Dag's voice thrumming inside her chest, the murmur of the crowd, the drum beating counterpoint to her own heart. She doesn't trust how these tales transform what happened. But she trusts the Dag: the hand that finds her own in the dark at story's end, the scrape of nails down her back as the drum's rhythm quickens, the pain. She gives herself up to it, willing.
That's what faith is built from, the Dag whispers: blood, your own, spilled so seeds will grow.
Toast/The Dag, Doubt (Teen)
The Dag puts her faith in insubstantial things: voices in the desert at night, the future.
Toast envies her that, but she’s seen where faith gets you – sprayed in silver, speared on a Buzzard’s spike. Better to test a thing until you know it’s true – to hold it, disassemble it, build it back. She’s seen the Dag tested like that, knows her breaking points, her tensile strength.
Still, she needs to touch, sometimes, to believe – to run her hands over the tattooed tracery of the Dag’s skin, slow, methodical, until she’s certain again: You’re here. Real. You’re not going away.
Toast/Capable/The Dag, Bad weather (Teen)
When Toast returns, the air is dark and sharp with storm-smell, and lightning dances as she hurries into sheltering darkness.
It’s not like hiding in the belly of the War Rig with sand rattling the hatches, tossed like one of Miss Giddy’s ships on ancient seas. Nor so different, huddled between Capable and the Dag, listening to something powerful pass by. There’s body heat, quiet breath – but no fear now, of weather or anything else.
She runs her thumb over the Dag’s tattooed knuckles, turns to meet Capable’s shy kiss, and lets them entangle her, feeling safe inside the storm.
Cheedo/The Dag, First Kisses (Teen)
"I hear it doesn't have to be bad," Cheedo says.
"Maybe not," the Dag replies, with a distant sort of equanimity. She isn't looking at Cheedo. Her hands are buried in turned earth, her eyes on the Wasteland outside. But she doesn't draw away, either, when Cheedo touches her arm shyly and says, "We could find out."
Instead, she brushes Cheedo's hair back, leaving a smear of dirt high along one cheek, and bends to catch her lower lip between teeth more used to biting. She's careful, as much as she can be. There's nothing here she wants to hurt.
Cheedo & Furiosa, Jealousy (gen, PG)
Their new guard is a woman.
Surrounded by soft things and stone walls, Cheedo had never imagined a woman could look like that: shorn hair, hard eyes, built from metal and muscle and grease. She hadn't imagined a woman could move with such force.
Angharad thinks there might be some help there, but Cheedo isn't sure. She sees how Furiosa looks at the Vault and everything in it – with furtive anger, gaze lingering on soft things and luxuries she has no right to touch. Cheedo understands wanting. Every time the door clangs shut after Furiosa leaves, she understands it more.
Toast & Furiosa, Lizards (gen, PG)
Toast sees it from the corner of her eye, a flash of scales against dull sand.
Food, she thinks, and grabs it, quick, instinctive, like she never could have before. The little thing struggles, fierce with terror: a spark of life in the midst of emptiness. Then she opens her hand and the lizard jumps to safety, vanishing into a crack between two rocks.
Furiosa is watching her, expression blank. “What’d you do that for?”
It’s hard to say. She’s hungry, and now she’ll stay hungry until they make it back home, but...
“I think the desert might need them.”
Furiosa, Lost and found (gen, PG)
It’s easy to get lost out here.
The land seems unchanging – cracked earth, cloudless sky, the engine’s constant song – but Furiosa knows how deceptive seeming can be. She’s seen how the place you meant to find might slip by unnoticed, and what people can become with only their shadows for company.
She keeps what she needs beside her: seeds, water, bullets, a map marked in blood. She doesn’t need to see the path scrawled there, only to have it close enough to touch and remember: hope.
As long as she doesn’t lose that, she can find the way back home.
Furiosa, Thirst (gen, PG)
Sometimes she thinks if she spends too much time at home, she’ll forget what it’s like to taste nothing but dust and gasoline fumes, and to go on anyway. That would be dangerous. One day it might kill her. So when she’s too used to clean water and kindness, she drives out with no goal except to see the parched ground stretching from horizon to horizon, and remember how it was before and still is outside the Citadel they’ve built – and to find, if she can, another place where what she knows of the world might not be true.
Furiosa, Human weapons (gen, PG)
The rifle is a part of you, her mother said once, but never thought to warn her: use a thing often enough, well enough, and you become it.
So it is for her guns, and so it is for her Rig. She’s metal and engine grease now; she returns from the road with dust caught in her teeth, sometimes blood even in these peaceful days, and she washes it off, but the road stays with her.
So it’s not that it scares her, setting her weapons down. It’s just that there are parts of herself she’ll never leave behind.
Toast, Feasting on those who would subdue you (gen, Teen)
The first harvest is not plentiful, especially shared among those who before had been left to survive or die by their own strength. Toast sees Furiosa holding order in the crowd, breaking up fights, but she also sees people smiling and sitting together, men and women sharing their portions with children who might or might not be their own.
Not long ago, these folk had been ragged and filthy, clawing for scraps of their old god's body thrown from the heights. They had been starving. No need to guess what happened next.
Toast can't think of a more fitting end.
Max & Angharad, Someone's past coming back to haunt them (gen, PG)
Max is driving towards a long, low range of mountains when he realizes he’s picked up another ghost. This one doesn’t rage or condemn him, just takes a place in the passenger seat like she’s always been there.
“Sorry you didn’t make it back,” he says. Talking to nobody, but he doesn’t care. From the look of it, neither does she.
“Me too,” she says. “But it’s not my world.”
“And this is?”
“For a while, maybe. Unless you want me gone.”
“No,” he says. “Not you.”
The silence of the Wastes settles in again, not uncomfortable. They ride on.
Valkyrie, Characters becoming gods (375 words, gen, Teen, AU)
The first thing she becomes aware of is the heat. It suffuses the air and ground, a presence in itself. Then, the shift of winds, and the sand that the winds lift in a stinging dance, red rock beneath and blue sky above. She senses air currents and magnetic fields, pressures beneath the earth, and feels the ancient weight of bedrock and the water below, buried too deep for human hands to reach.
Some time later still, she becomes aware of her body – that she has a body, a small thing discarded, fragile against the land and sky and searing heat. Its heart is still, its blood long since run out to feed the sands. No electrical impulses spark across its brain. But it doesn't belong to the Buzzards rolling in on spiked wheels to scavenge somebody else's kill, or the skittering lizards and insects that come to feed. They can't have it. It's hers, or her, like this desert is hers or her, and she will not let it go.
The wind rushes in through that open mouth, fills up the lungs and the hollow places, the networks of tiny vessels. She might make the heart pump if she chose, if she had need of blood to carry oxygen and heat. She has no need; she is heat, and oxygen, and it's a different fuel she needs.
The body lifts itself to its feet, staggers once, rights itself. Black tangled hair hangs about its shoulders, matted with blood and gritty with sand. There is pain. Her body is damaged, and left too long in open desert.
It can be made whole.
She braces a hand against the side of a smoldering wreck and doesn't burn, only drinks in heat, drawing it up and out through layers of metal. The people of the wastes have poured enough life into their cars, enough love and reverence and blood, for this one to be what she needs. The fire dies, and the machine dies with it; no mechanic, no matter how skilled, will make that engine run again.
She stands a little straighter, a little stronger. The beginnings of rot burn away, replaced by new flesh, and Valkyrie sets off across the desert in search of home.
Furiosa & The Wives, Sad robots | cyborgs (150 words, gen, Teen, AU)
“What are their capacities?” Furiosa asks, in a clipped, carefully professional voice.
“Anything you want,” says the man known on the streets as the Organic Mechanic. “Sex. Violence. These models...”
He taps the glass, and one of the constructs behind it lifts her head, graceful, demurely curious. “Programmed for entertainment. Not crude pleasure, mind, but art, music, philosophy.”
Furiosa wonders if she imagines the awareness in the eyes watching her through the glass, the fathomless defiance hidden beneath lowered lashes.
No, she decides, she imagines nothing. She knows better than to pretend otherwise.
“I’ll take her. Actually – ” She turns back to him, smiling coldly. “I think I’ll take them all.”
Sex, she thinks with a flash of rage, and violence. She’s always been better at the one than the other.
Her arm unfolds into gleaming metal as she moves, and the air is filled with the sound of glass shattering.
Toast/Furiosa, Star Wars fusion (300 words, Teen)
There’s no coming back from the Dark Side.
That’s what they taught, in the green temples of Furiosa’s childhood, and what her Master taught, when he was her Master, still, before she tore the skin from his skull with bloody hands. Rage is strength. Hate keeps you breathing when compassion can’t endure. It’s a road that can’t be unwalked.
“I don’t believe that,” the Jedi says, stepping further into the shadows of the cave.
A Jedi in name, at least, like so many Furiosa has slain. But this one’s anger is close to the surface, burning behind those dark eyes. It makes her powerful, dangerous and tempting. Curious, then, that she came here not to kill, but to negotiate. Furiosa wonders if the Council knows she’s here. But beneath the sharp edge of cunning and defiance, she reminds Furiosa of – something. Green leaves, cool water. Silence without threat.
Furiosa’s lightsaber flares to life as she lunges, red in darkness. The Jedi deflects, moving back without yielding or looking away, and some long-buried part of Furiosa watches, wanting –
– to destroy her. To touch her, tracing warm skin with fingers metal and flesh. To toss her charred, broken body to the scavengers. To leave her vulnerable and unharmed.
It would be too easy. There’s more than one kind of weakness.
“You don’t believe most lies the Council tells, do you?” she says, circling slow, letting her opponent follow the sound of her voice. “If you let me, I can show you the true face of the Force.”
The Jedi considers this. Her face is unreadable, but Furiosa senses no conflict in her, only calculation and a hint of triumph, and knows she’s chosen well.
“Do one thing for me in return, and I will.”
“What?” Furiosa asks, and the Jedi smiles.
“Try.”
Toast/Furiosa, Organized crime AU (Teen)
Angharad wants out.
Toast does too, but she’s no fool, and there‘s no leaving this business, whether you got in of your own will or not. The only way out is to climb.
The old Don doesn’t realize she’s anything but a pretty ornament, draped in diamonds and hanging off his arm. His enforcer doesn’t either – not at first.
Now, though, Toast leans close, smiling, and whispers, “You’ve been thinking about a change in leadership.”
Furiosa’s eyes widen. Her hand twitches toward her gun.
Instead of flinching, Toast takes a deep drag on her cigarette and says, “So am I.”
Furiosa/The Dag, Arranged marriage (Teen, AU)
Furiosa knew this was mockery, but rejecting the Immortan's gifts wasn't smart, and she'd spent too long pretending loyalty to try.
The way the girl stared at her still felt like an accusation. The Dag, they called this one – his least favorite, with her tangled hair and Wasteland eyes, but still too pretty, too useless, too soft.
"You'll be staying with me," Furiosa said. "You have no choice, so don't argue."
The Dag spat at her feet, then looked up, waiting for pain.
Not so soft after all, then. Against her will, Furiosa felt cold anger shift closer to respect.
Furiosa & Max, Pacific Rim fusion (PG, gen)
Sydney shatterdome might still be standing, but this is madness – climbing into the semi-functional remains of a derelict jaeger, attempting to drift with a nameless feral more stranger than ally. A bad connection with no safety protocols might burn her brain out, and his too. But she'd felt it, there in the marshes, her rifle balanced steady on his shoulder. She knows.
"Initiate neural handshake," she commands; somewhere in the control room below, the Dag listens.
Images assault her consciousness: fear, fire, a child falling beneath a monster's claws.
In the distance, Immortan roars, thundering closer.
His name is Max.
Furiosa & Max, Ghost hunting AU (PG, gen) Based on a Tumblr scenario where one character can speak to ghosts, one can kill them, and the state mandates they hunt ghosts together. This being post-apocalyptic, there's no state to mandate anything
"You see them, don't you?" she says to him, that night on the edge of the Salt, washed by moonlight and lantern-light. He doesn't need to ask to understand what she's talking about. He doesn't need to answer for her to know.
"They ever talk to you?" she asks.
He grunts an affirmation. After a long silence, almost comfortable, he says, "You too?"
"I don't have the ears to listen," she says, and he's unsure whether he hears or imagines the regret in her voice. "My mother did. Me?"
She loads a rifle round, her eyes distant. That's answer enough.