She can barely look at the wastelander’s wings. They’re poor ratty things, the feathers cracking and brittle, dissolving into dust and leaving visible gaps even when he has them tightly furled. Everyone knows that if your wingmate dies you’ll never fly again, but Furiosa has never seen the damage up close like this.

Furiosa is the local mechanic, too much a black sheep in town to be having the easiest time of it. Max is working the local coffee shop, for something to do and a soft place to land while he recovers from raging PTSD incurred during his police work, and Citadel, Australia, is about as small and sleepy a place as it’s possible to get, right? The Wives are the residents of a rather discretely run home for abused women that Furiosa supers for when she isn’t in her shop. The lesbian separatist feminist motorcycle gang is literally just that.

This is a love story, hinged around a missing person, a suspected homicide, a broken carburetor, and a mutual disdain for pretentious coffee.

Max knows he’s dreaming.

She slides her eyes over at him, studies him. His hair sticks up in odd places. She wonders how long he’s been cutting his hair by himself, never trusting anyone to approach him with a blade, no matter how dull. She can’t remember the last time she looked at a man and expected anything other than a fight.

“What kind of redemption has a body count?” Angharad asks, the pacifist even in death.

Furiosa wakes and tells the quiet air, “The only kind I knew how to find.”

Furiosa’s first and last days at New Citadel.

It’s one thing to stand and scream “We are not things!” It is something different to sit down in the quiet that follows and find what that means.

“Have you ever had a mate?” It’s not the subtlest approach, but Max hasn’t flirted with anyone in over a decade.

Post-movie A/O AU where Max stays.

Immortan Joe liked all those eyes on him, so he got done faster. That was all you could ask for, him finishing faster and leaving. And what did it matter if they were seen naked on all fours for Joe? Being watched was nothing, compared to having to do it.

And so these women, who had been watched in the act of sex countless times, did not see such witnessing as a violation. They only knew that, once begun, no one was to interrupt.

“Allmother?” Max asks.

“Hmm?” Furiosa asks, automatically.

“They call you ‘Allmother’,” Max says. “Met some Rocketboys last month that spat whenever they said it. Didn’t know they meant you.”

The look on his face suggested he was severely disappointed, as if he intensely regretted whatever he had done to the Rocketboys. If Furiosa knew him, which she suspected she did, Max regretted killing them so quickly.

She doesn’t realize the War Boys have stopped calling him “Blood Bag” and started calling him “First Husband,” not until she overhears one of them ask Capable where First Husband is.

Furiosa knows a green life.

Max comes back in a busted old van with an even more busted leg.

Back then, Miss Giddy’s students would fidget in their seats. None of these five fidget, in spite of their many discomforts.

Max doesn’t know what they wrote on him.

Toast the Knowing has seen the most of the world outside the Vault, and it is she who first says the words.