My name is Max. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theroadwarrior) wrote2016-10-07 12:29 pm
theroadwarrior) wrote2016-10-07 12:29 pm
IC Contact for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
etraya
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(Good fuckin' luck.)
IC Contact for
Action | Video | Voice | Text | Etc.
(Good fuckin' luck.)
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[ She's kidding, a little. ]
Anytime.
I'll be there.
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How're you healing?
[Sorry, he has launched immediately into hovering. Preambles are for losers.]
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We must all make sacrifices.... ]
Popped a couple stitches.
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You were supposed to be taking things easy.
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1/2
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[Says the most hypocritically overactive idiot in the universe.
Ask his knee what it thinks of its owner.]
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Where are you
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B e g r u d g i n g l y:]
Tell me the number.
I'll bring the suture set.
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Knock.
[ Don't break down her door... ]
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Be there then.
[He'd never ruin a perfectly good barrier between them and immediate danger, Furiosa. That's just poor strategic planning for when this place inevitably goes into the shitter (which is what he thinks, because he has always been fatalistic, always assumed the worst will happen). For now, though, he focuses on this: Furiosa has stitches popped; those must be taken care of, for better healing time.
So he hobbles his way from the junkyard to the trolley system, mourning the absence of the motorbike he'd been glued to for a large portion of his time in Solmara — and inevitably makes it back into the more active area of the city. It can be a hell of a ghost town in places on the outskirts; he immediately pines for the extreme quiet, maybe foolishly so, considering the quiet is what births so many unpleasant dreams and images of long-dead ghosts.
Knock, knock.]
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She checks the peep hole before letting Max in. He'll hear her click open the extra locks and chains she's reinforced the doors with. She may not be as paranoid as Max, but that doesn't make her trust her neighbors naively either. ]
Come on.
[ She seems well enough, gesturing him in with the jerk of her chin. He'll see the sticky blood, blooming into a stain through her shirt from her popped stitches. She gave up trying to fight it. A little blood doesn't bother her.
She's only been here for a few days, but Furiosa's started piles of eclectic scavenged bits. Here, a pile of scrap and sheet metal. On that surface, stripped wires and a pair of pliers next to a small collection of colorful glass. Her project isn't immediately clear. There's more utilitarian stores too, of course. Food and medical supplies stacked into piles into the kitchen. ]
Hospital supplies there.
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If it doesn't suffocate her, he sees no reason why he should let it suffocate him.
Well, too much, anyway.
He slowly puts down the travel pack over-stuffed with supplies, looking around in quiet interest. He reaches down to pick up some of the colorful glass, holding it up to the light that comes through one of the apartment windows; green and blue colors glide over the bridge of his nose and cheekbone, over the faint scar there.]
What's this for?
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Max, she finds, does not inspire the amount of ire she might expect with someone poking around her stuff. ]
Was thinking about what to put in front of the window. [ She pulls out a string where she's started winding wire around the bits of glass and metal. She jostles it slightly, demonstrating how the pieces chime musically when they clink against each other. ] Makes noise if someone tries to climb in. On a sunny day you can see how the light shifts even if your back is turned.
[ And the aesthetic of casting the apartment in blues and verdant greens evoking the sense of life is purely coincidental... ]
Setting up a home base means you can make the effort to always secure it.
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Smart choice.
[The glass is put back where it rightly belongs. It would be a good set-up for Furiosa. Something to look at while she keeps herself safe. Or as safe as she can be, anyway. He can't help but think of what he'd told Jayce: how easy it would be, for someone to target this building in its entirety. He doesn't want to be anywhere near this place, not long-term, but now that Furiosa is here... A dilemma. The junkyard isn't very close, not if something dangerous were to happen. He couldn't be reliable.
... For things like this, also.
He clicks his tongue as he looks at the bloody patch on her shirt, before turning and moving toward the kitchen. His brace has been oiled once again at least, so there's less comical creaking in his step. As he sifts through the medical supplies Furiosa had alluded to earlier...]
Going to try to ask Aurora for rifles, soon. Something long distance.
You should work on getting something, too.
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[ Little curl of her lip. If he can give her shit about getting stabbed and popping stitches, she's earned this. Yes, of course, she's going to ask for guns. She needs to have one within reach in every corner of her apartment. ]
I'm planning on it, [ She does add, in sincerity. ] But trying to figure out how many errands I need to run for something else. Need a harness or something for any rifles in the meantime.
[ She gestures to her stump. She's scavenging for materials but it's harder to come by what she needs here. Her arm was a great arm!! She misses it.
But Max isn't here for small talk or reminiscing about lost limbs. She reaches her hand behind her head, grasping the neck hole to pull her shirt off in one practiced motion. For the most part. Blood had crept up her torso, staining the edges of the sports bra, but her wound is fully exposed, the last several sutures pulled open. ]
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Shoot better when I've got more blood in me.
[Or so he says. Whether or not that's true is left to be seen. He gestures for her to sit in what was probably a pre-established seat, oh-so-kindly already furbished by Etraya and it's AI system. Max couldn't imagine such a thing -- that the being in charge actually bothered giving out more than any kind of bare minimum on a good day.]
I can make 'em. Make harnesses. Made the one I'm wearing now.
[Solmara wasn't good for much, but there was plenty of old, sun-cracked leather. Rusted metals. Some of the parts of his knee brace where swapped out while he was there; one thing he could say was the place at least worked eerily close to home most weeks.]
Not used to seeing buildings so... cared for.
[The inside of the apartments, he means. He saw a very small roller rink and some entertainment stuff. But even without the extra goods in the apartments, the whole place had a crazy amount of working infrastructure compared to the other city. He studies the bloody spot thoughtfully before he starts to dab away the mess. Methodical, his gaze hyper-focused and vigilant.]
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Eh, too late. If she bleeds on it, it just means its hers. Those are the wasteland rules. ]
It's weird.
[ She admits, humming a soft agreement. The wound stings, but it's minor all things considered. But the way she flinches away from his touch isn't from the pain. She's rusty with this type of casual vulnerability. Can't imagine Max is used to playing nurse either. ]
Quiet. [ Even though there's tons of people (Max's major objection to the apartment building). These people are mostly quiet and polite, at least relative to what she's used to. ] Don't know how I'm supposed to sleep without a pack of warpups stomping past my head every hour.
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His hands are steady, and he tries not to flinch when she flinches. She'd be right in assuming he's so unbelievably skittish; it takes his focus to not feel like he's somewhere about to get a wrench smashed across the top of the head. Won't take too long, at least; he's more gentle as he carefully touches his fingertips to the skin beneath the wound, making sure the wound's edges stay together.]
Lot of healthy people here. No lumps and bumps.
[Max always wondered if he would end up sick. His father had died from cancer when he was terrible young — couldn't say if it was from how sick the planet was getting, or if it was from bombs he'd been too close to, or if maybe it was simply an older man getting sick, as some older men tended to do before the world fell in full.
He doesn't think too long about those things, though. Nothing's killed him yet.]
Never really slept in the company of other people.
[Not like that, anyway. He slept in the War Rig after struggling tooth and nail to pretend he doesn't require it like other people. But it was — soothing enough. For a while. The whir of an engine is a bit of a lullaby.]
cw reference to canon variety human trafficking
She slept best with Jack at her side, boots on and weapons tucked between them.
There is little else to do but wait for him to finish. He's careful. Reliable hands, stitching her as well as they kill.
There is one point she feels to counter this. Her head tips to the side, examining him, wondering if she should broach it. Hers said it too. Did he read it? ]
That thing said you were widowed.
cw: loss of a child and spouse
"He's been standing there like a zombie all day," he hears, crystal clear all these years later. It's a nurse in a perfectly clean uniform, unaware that the last few safe havens of society were about to burn with the rest of the them. DOA for one body. Brain-dead for the other. He stole their shells and buried them himself, just outside their home. What was left of an ocean would be bone-dry the year after. Recede so far away, that all you'd ever see was cracked, flat plains of salt. He left and never looked back. Or maybe he did visit that place again. Visited and never knew it, because nothing was left he would remember.
(Furiosa is lying in a car, dying as he gently cradles her neck, holds her head up for her. Does she know that the baby who had taught him how to speak so kindly and so softly has been dead for years and years now?)
Max doesn't realize he's been quiet for — too long.
Max does realize it's the first time someone has called him what he was.
Softly, firmly, as he steadies his hands again to finish his work:]
Don't.
[Not an angry sound. If anything, it almost sounds like a plea. Because if they don't amputate this conversation before it spreads, he will hear his wife and son crying out for him somewhere he wasn't fast enough to follow.]
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And then the winds calm, and you are still standing. Weathered and worn, but still standing.
Softly:] Okay.
[ Not 'sorry.' Because, while she is sorry for this misstep, an apology feels like it would belabor the point. This is the quicker course correction. And she doesn't make the same mistake twice.
The wasteland is littered with ghosts. Best to let them be. ]
You almost done?
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If anything, he feels a little mortified by how much such a simple thing had tail-spun him into memories that are likely older than even some of the Wives.]
Mm.
[He appreciates the quick bounce back. He can focus on fixing her like he would a car. Perhaps not quite so generous a thing to say — well, anyone who knows him knows that a particular car is more valuable to him than almost anything else in the world. Being compared to a car he's eager to work on, that's a compliment.
Breathing out, he clips the lingering suture thread.]
Not too tight?
[Can't be, or it'll risk infection. Wound dehiscence. He's seen it happen before, with unskilled organic mechanics. Ones that pretend they have some idea of what they're doing, anyway.]
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