Curate, connect, and discover
After years of searching, you finally find her
Cw: teen pregnancy mentioned, postpartum anxiety, child abandonment
The sun beat down through the mouth of the cave, the sweat from your brow running down and burning into your eyes as you focused intently on the carburetor in your greasy hands. There was no fucking way this would be a surface repair. You let out a growl and grab one of your smaller wrenches to begin disassembling the part. You can feel boring holes into your back but you just roll your shoulders in an attempt to shrug off the sensation. The feeling goes and is soon replaced with a presence. You turn, prepared to shout off whichever Warpup had the audacity to bother you, but instead of stark white flesh you’re greeted with a small frame clothed entirely in light leather work gear. It was that boy again. He was still a child, probably no older than twelve, and certainly no Warboy. He never spoke, making you question if his tongue had been cut out.
“What is it?”
He brings his fingers level with his eyes and then turns them towards the carburetor.
“Do you want me to teach you how to do this?”
He nods and leans on the workbench, eyes locked on your hands.
“Okay. I have to rebuild it, probably replace some of the interior parts and clean it. Just try to look busy.”
He nods again, watching as you take the cover off and begin detaching all the inner workings. You send him for small parts of scrap from time to time and make sure he has his goggles on whenever you have to weld or cut the new pieces to fit into the mechanism. Finally you’re finished rebuilding the part and give it to him, telling him to go put it back in the truck it was from. Another nod, and then he’s gone.
You allowed the boy much more grace than any of the other mechanics. He was just a child after all, a foundling most likely, and starkly human compared to the Warboys, a whole life. He’d often come sit with you while you ate, but you never saw his face, he’d just slip his spoon under his dust mask instead of removing it. There were several occasions on colder nights that he would climb into your bunk shivering, and you’d just wrap your arms around him without question, pressing your lips to his forehead and smoothing down his cap.
In moments when your mind was loose, when you were unfocused at work, or too tired to properly hold your eyes open you saw in him glimpses of the child you had left behind. Close in age, and hopefully status of life, you saw her, darting around, almost playful in moments of ease, but reserved nonetheless. You had no real idea what your daughter looked like, you had gone when she was just a baby, leaving her with your sister and running into the wastes, too young then to be a mother or a wanderer, but your fear had driven you further than any car ever could.
You remembered her, blue and screaming when she came into this world, covered in blood and viscera, her tiny hands clenched into tight fists as she was handed to you. You’d barely had enough time to name her before you’d passed out. You were fourteen then, too curious for your own good, drawn in by the charms of a farmer’s son, and you’d ended up ripped in half for your stupidity. The bleeding wouldn’t stop, so the doctor had taken your womb to give you a chance at living, and lived you had.
It was three days before you had woken up, connected to your sister by a tangle of tubing while another woman held out the child for you to hold. You took her and brushed the wisp of hair from her face, smiling when she opened her eyes, looking up at you. You’d stuck around for a couple of months, but by the time you left you felt like you needed to claw your way out of your skin, like even if you never stopped running you’d still have gone nowhere, so you left your daughter with your sister and ran, taking a bike and going as far and as fast as you could.
Years later you had gone back, twenty four then, finally ready to settle back down, your wild urges sated, your body relaxed and your mind solid once again, only to find nothing. The women had told you that your daughter had been taken, and your sister had followed after. You’d lit out in the direction they pointed and rode until you came across the remnants of a camp, a pile of warm ashes and an all too familiar locket buried beneath the cinders. The metal had burned a crescent moon into your palm as you’d gripped it and screamed, but you didn’t care. You just knelt there in the sand sobbing until you had no tears left to cry, pathetically making your way back to your bike and continuing in the direction you’d been heading, despite the absence of tracks, no trace of your sister’s murderers or your little girl. Just riding into oblivion with no real care if you lived or not.
So you cared for the boy, as much as he’d let you, as if he were your own, the guilt deep in your belly driving your actions just as much as your compassion. He grew up under your mechanical guidance, loosening up around the workshop, forgoing his mask, and before long it became glaringly obvious that you had mistaken him. Long hair and bright eyes began to reveal “his” true nature, but it didn’t phase you. There were many reasons for a girl to hide in this world, especially around the company you worked with. She grew brawny as she aged and you gifted her with a knife to keep sheathed in her boot. She’d kept it close, pulling it on more than one occasion to escape the grabbing hands of the Warboys you worked with.
You knew nothing of her but what you’d seen, but you could still say you loved her. All these years, watching over her, protecting her, teaching her. There were times, even now, that she, maybe seventeen now, would crawl shivering into your bed and you’d hold her and kiss her forehead as you always did. She would never object to your affections, just worming her way closer and sighing as her eyes fell shut.
Years later she’d disappeared, and you’d worried for her, fearing the worst, but after a month she returned, staggering, weak, a crudely stitched stump where her left arm once was. You’d tended to her without a word, cleaning her wound and dressing it without question as she sat on your bunk that night. She’d been through hell and you knew she wasn’t one to talk. The girl, no woman, before you was alive and that was all that mattered right now. Before you could think your hand was at the back of her head and your forehead was pressed to hers, with your eyes squeezed shut, fighting the tears of worry that threatened to fall. She’d been strong, wherever she’d been, and it was your turn now, for her sake. She mirrors your actions, pressing her head to yours so hard it almost hurt.
“Stars bless you,” she whispers, her voice shaking with the same tenacity you were exerting.
You pull away from her sharply, shocked not only by her voice but the words it carried. Her eyes are wide and wet, her hand trembles against the back of your head and you know now what your heart had secretly known for years. You look at her in the torch-light of the bunk room and see your own eyes staring back at you, your own hair falls over her shoulders and down her back.
“Furiosa,” you breathe, pressing your forehead back to hers, finally allowing the sob to wrack your body, pulling her tightly into a hug and she reciprocates it. She’d learned to love and trust you, completely unaware of the fact that it was your immaturity that had gotten her here. It was all your fault and she was none the wiser. It was too late now, to be her mother. She was twenty three years old and had mourned for the mother she knew for all those years now. It was not your place to try to claim that place, to fill that void.
“How do you know my name? You’re not from the green place, I’d have known you,” her voice is sharp and demanding despite the low volume.
“I am, I left when you were a baby, and only went back after you’d been taken.”
“Then who are you?”
You silently reach behind your neck and unclasp your necklace bearing two pendants, a sun and a crescent moon, and give them to her.
“She was my sister. I’ve spent years looking for you. I needed to see you again, even if it was just for a moment.”
Your answer was incomplete, but still truthful. It was all she needed to know. Too much would do more harm than good, and she was already fragile. Maybe when you finally got her back home safe you would come clean, but now, just having her here in your arms, knowing she was alive and as safe as someone could be in the wasteland was enough for you.