a drabble helen did not ask for xoxo
It’s the rolling HIGH after a fight that keeps them wired well past the time the rest of the Shatterdome will have quieted down for the early morning hours. The place is always functioning on some level though ; there’s no telling what hour a kaiju will claw its way out of the Breach, and they need to be ready. Maybe it’s that livewire edge they all live on that gives them the strength to carry on when others might falter. They could all use eighteen hours of sleep and a meal that had actual BREAD AND BUTTER. ( She can’t remember the last time the scrambled eggs weren’t powdered, when the greens didn’t come out of a CAN. ) But after fighting a kaiju? They can rest easy for the night, knowing it’ll be at least a couple of months before the next attack. A couple of months to rest, to lick wounds sustained in battle. The Shatterdome is quiet outside the repair bay, and even in there the pace has shifted from rabid breakneck to steady, sustainable. THEY HAVE TIME. THEY CAN REST. THEY CAN SLEEP.
But Max and Furiosa don’t sleep. She can still feel him at the frayed edges of her mind, notices that any time his left fingers twitch she gets a ghost itch from her missing limb, that their heads swivel in time to the sudden clap of metal against metal, something aching in her bones that trembles between them. Sleeping is out of the question ; when they’re this connected the mess of their nightmares in combination make sleeping hellish. So they wander, talk sometimes, in muffled voices, rough and soft. Usually they end up leaning against the railings in front of the repair bay and watch sparks cascade down the front of her their War Rig.
They’ve since moved to sitting, backs pressed against metal grating, shoulders bumping. It helps, the physical act of having a piece of her pressed against him after a fight, when the battle still swells in their veins. It’s grounding, in a way that being surrounded by hundreds of tons of grinding metal isn’t. Fingers that no longer exist reach and stretch, and she sees his left hand moving on his other side.
“Can you scratch the back of your left hand?” She doesn’t look at him when she asks, green eyes half hooded fixed on a tear in the War Rig’s hull that she can still feel against their her ribs. He grunts, complies, and there it is, the strange sense of relief she only ever gets from shoving a sharp object between the pylons of her prosthesis or sitting down with a mirror. “Thanks.”
“Mhm.” He runs the pad of his thumb down the length of his forearm, pressing against scars, against veins that stand on end. He splays his fingers, curls them. Sometimes it feels like they’re not there anymore, but that’s only her mind, only the ghost drift. “You know Russian?”
The corner of her mouth lifts in a dry smile. “Yeah, a little. Why?”
She twists her head to look at him, is surprised to see a faint smile tugging at his lips too. A soft snort escapes her, eyes shutting to slits, head tipping back to rest against the grating behind them. Her mind might be moving a hundred kilometers an hour but her body aches from the battle they’d won. When he leans his head against her shoulder, she doesn’t budge. And when she presses her cheek against the top of his head, neither does he. Between her lashes, everything is a blur of blues and purples and flashes of orange and red, and the sound of metal moving reminds her of the low roll of thunder in the desert. “My step-sister says she’s gonna send us some oranges,” she murmurs, can feel the echo of her words inside of his skull, mixing with a host of dim voices that grow dimmer when she talks, dimmer the closer they get. We’re haunting each other, she thinks dispassionately, but we were already being haunted.
He grunts in response and she knows him well enough already to know he’s looking forward to it, to fresh fruit after months upon months of dry rations. Her eyes shut fully, and despite the discomfort of metal against her spine, she feels herself drift a bit into a haze of darkness. Whether it’s minutes or hours that pass she’s not sure, but when she opens her eyes again, his head is in her lap, his body half curled, his left hand resting above her kneecap.
They can sleep in turns, she decides, fingers stained with grease gently smoothing back his hair. I can watch out for his other ghosts. I can wake him when the haunting gets too bad.
