Chapter Text
Do not be afraid.
Nux hears nothing. But he can…
What is that? What is that?
There's someone screaming, far away, but right near his ear. She's screaming like she wants him to listen, but he doesn't know what she's saying. She's too quiet. Why is she whispering so quietly when she's screaming?
Do not be afraid. You are no longer half-life.
Sand is golden and chrome and bloodied, and so is the sky, with clouds like red scabs torn all across it. The wind howls, loud , but the sand moves slow and lazy. He's bleeding, too, from his neck, and the blood sort of drifts away with the sand instead of dripping and sinking. It looks like what he imagined Valhalla would look like, but this cannot be Valhalla. There is only emptiness everywhere. No War Boys. No war. No glory.
The half-life has died. What are you now, full-life?
And then he sees The Immortan.
"Joe!" he cries, relief crashing through his chest like aqua cola as his hands form the sign of the V8. Oh, here is The Immortan to guide him into Valhalla! He understands now. "Immortan Joe! Immortan!"
Joe steps toward him and Nux hears the sound of bone cracking. Another step, and Joe's knee makes a thick popping noise as it slips awkwardly to the side, broken and out of joint, and the whole leg crumples.
Nux stares, wide-eyed, with his hands still in formation. His heart jolts in his chest over and over again, hot and cold and fearful like he has never known fear before in his half-life.
Crumbling piece by piece until he breaks upon the sand, Joe falls, cracking open and rotting. He is all black and gore inside, already in such a state of decay that he should have been long dead. Tumors breathe and hiss angrily where they grow from splintering bones and cling to bloated, discolored organs. Blood and pus and black ooze roll from Joe's open, dislocated jaw until his face folds into nothing and the wretched body deflates and sinks.
Half-life! Half-life! The voice on the wind shrieks victoriously. You live again while he rots! He is half-life! You are not! Half-life! He rots! He has always been rot! A breeding bed of tumors! Ash and blood in your mouth! Spit him out!
The sand flows over the mess until it is nothing but a dark stain and some twisted bones rising up to salute the bloody sky.
The only reason Nux does not scream is because he doesn't believe he can. His lungs are crushed under the wild, painful thrashing of his heart, which feels so large in his chest that he is afraid that it will burst. But he cannot calm it and does not want to. The Immortan is dead! Dead! And a death more horrible than that suffered by any one of The Wretched.
He turns and runs.
He rots, he rots! The false god is half-life!
He does not make it very far. He cannot breathe. There's a wheezing sound coming from him, practically screaming, but it can't be screaming because he can't breathe. It must be Larry and Barry. It must be. They must finally be turning on him, choking him, because this must be what death really is because The Immortan was a half-life and a liar, he lied, he lied!
Nux collapses and believes that he will split open and melt like Joe too, like rot and nothing, like toxic smoke blown away on the wind… but he does not.
Coughing into the sand, Nux hears a strange gait of steps on the shifting ground. A brief pain pulls at his neck, like a string running through his throat, and it pulls pulls pulls until suddenly the pain is gone and he can take a deep, easy breath, unrestricted for the first time since he was too small to reach the pedals in a car. His papery lungs expand and feel strong again. The thrashing of his heart eases, and Nux dares to look up.
Some sort of thing is standing in the sand, with blood on its feet and mouth. What is it? Somehow he knows that it is his own blood that drips freely from this creature. Nux thinks it must be an animal, but it's so much bigger than any lizard or rat or bird. It has fur like a rat and four legs like a rat and a long, pointed face like a rat, but… it simply is not a rat. It stands tall and strong. Its fur gleams like oil under the chrome sky. And its eyes, blue like the deepest and hottest fires of an engine, are watching him.
What will you be?
Its mouth opens, full of sharp teeth as white as sun-bleached bone. Two strange, wormy things, like maggots but as big as his thumbs— no, bigger— fall from its mouth, and land wetly in the sand. They wriggle, alive and terrible, until the not-rat-thing kicks dirt over them with its clawed feet.
He recognizes those strange maggot-things.
Larry and Barry.
He wants to reach for them and their familiarity in this uncanny landscape, but the not-rat-thing steps forward with its long legs and leaves Larry and Barry behind in the bloody sand. It looks at him, tall and proud, and lowers its head so that it is face-to-face with him.
The long, narrow mouth opens much, much closer to his face than it had been before, and breath that smells like fresh aqua cola hitting dirt washes over his face, and fire-blue eyes burn.
"Wake up, War Boy."
Nux isn't sure what's happening. He thinks he's dead, at first, because he can hear the holy rumble of a shine engine, and his skin feels like he's been watered like a green thing, and the cool darkness makes breathing easier. And he can breathe, really breathe, and his neck hurts a bit where Larry and Barry were but their pressure is gone and it's blissful to breathe without them.
Not what he expected from Valhalla.
He drifts back to sleep, then back to consciousness again, and then to sleep, until he settles into a heavy dose somewhere in between. His blood feels pretty damn guzzy, like it hasn’t in a long time, maybe hasn’t ever, but he's tired . He didn't know there would be tired in Valhalla. But this drifting sort of sleep is pleasant, like he might float away, and if Valhalla is less chrome-plated and more of this, just drifting to the sound of an engine and the feeling of water and the ease of his own cleaned-out air pipe, he won't be upset.
… His skin feels a little odd, though.
But the dream-world that was Valhalla-or-not rushes to him like the inhalation of thick smoke and he lurches forward so suddenly that he is in motion, on his feet and practically flying through a small space, as small as his cot.
Bright sunlight and dust sting his eyes, so he doesn't see what his hand lands on, but he instinctively grips it, fingers curling around something soft. He pulls back when he senses danger, just enough instinct left to preserve his own life, and whatever he grabbed comes with him. It’s heavy, he’s set off-balance, and he tumbles onto his rump, cracking the back of his head against something hard.
“Ah— ow—” he hisses, wincing. That’ll leave a lump for sure. Does he hear bullets?
Blinking the sand and the pain out of his eyes only reveals more confusion, for sitting atop him is Immortan Joe’s prized breeder.