wintersday: (Default)
wintersday ([personal profile] wintersday) wrote2020-08-22 07:49 pm

Fic: Vestiges

Title: Vestiges
Fandom: Mad Max: Fury Road
Major Characters/Pairings: Furiosa/The Valkyrie, Angharad, Miss Giddy, character of ambiguous identity
Wordcount: Four 100 word drabbles
Rating: Teen
POV: Third person
Summary: Furiosa is haunted by the past, and by the future.



Angharad finds her in the desert, driving home. There’s no chill, no electric charge or change, just someone in the seat beside her.

Talking to ghosts is pointless. Still:

“You could come back with me.”

Angharad‘s face is scarred, unreadable.

I would have lived, she says, mercilessly gentle. Her voice is formed from Wasteland sounds, desert wind and engine growl, wheels turning below. My son would have lived. I don’t blame you, but don’t forget.

Furiosa nods, and they ride together in silence. When green-crowned bluffs rise in the distance, she touches Furiosa’s shoulder, then blows away on the wind.



They haven’t forgotten you, Miss Giddy says. She’s leaning against the rusting truck that marks the settlement’s edge, grinning. Crows attend her, and her voice is a rustle of feathers.

Of course they haven’t forgotten. Last time Furiosa came here, it was fire she brought. That it’s seeds now won’t raise the dead.

Maybe some Wastelander with a long memory will put a bullet in her skull. All this time, she’s been waiting for it, haunted by History with her scribed skin. But they have shelter, water traps, ground mostly free of radiation. If the seeds take, it won’t matter.



The Valkyrie meets her on the rooftop after dark, no warning but a footfall behind her.

Hard to say what Furiosa feels, with memory transfigured by years, distance, and now a greater distance still. But she’s a comrade, with her rifle and crow-feather cloak, and a friend, and she kisses fierce as any living woman could.

She doesn’t stay long – duties elsewhere, she says – but long enough to spread that cloak beneath the sky and learn a past that never was. Her skin is scarred, her body lean, unguarded beneath Furiosa’s fingers and mouth. She feels solid, until she’s gone.



The gardens have their haunting too, though Furiosa’s never been sure whether it belongs to the Keeper of the Seeds or an older ghost yet. There’s no wavering vision, just the feeling of a weathered hand pressed over her own, guiding her as she pats soil into place around another sprig of green.

Her mother used to say that ghosts like the same things seeds do: water, a little blood, good earth to hold them down. They give back what you give them.

Furiosa gives herself, blood and guzzoline, seeds and water, hoping it’s enough to grow a future here.


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