author's note?: so, i saw mad max: fury road. in a word - badass. as usual, tom hardy was a dreamboat, and i couldn't help but think about what sort of antics he'd get up to as soon as he got back on the road. so...this sprang up. voila! enjoy.

disclaimer - mad max and all his comrades belong to george miller. i'm just taking them out for a spin.

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He'd been driving for what seemed like hours – the emptiness out here stretched them, made them feel thin and quick like minutes - when he knew he had to stop.

In one smooth, rattlesnake motion he stomped hard on the brake and threw the gear into park. The transmission settled as he stared out at the mound of baking flesh lying a few feet out from the rusted out bumper - half coated in sand and more than likely dead. Why should he stop, why should he care? Before everything, he had forgotten how to care, but it brought old things back to him. The tyrant and his stolen wives, the woman who fled across the salt and back again to reclaim all that was good and green in the world for her own. She stirred up cooling embers. He forgot how much he hated the feeling of a fresh open wound.

Sighing, he killed the engine, and silence seeped in through the cracks in the window. It rattled listlessly in a wind so dry and hot it made his mouth water.

Voices rummaged through the absence of sound. Familiar, but not welcome. He closed his eyes against them, murmuring something like a prayer through thick, tightly pursed lips.

Max?

Won't you help them?

Max, you have to.

Help them...help them for us.

You couldn't help us -

Moans of pain – his own. Pain that writhed under the skin, where he couldn't quite reach with dirty fingernails to scratch the ache away.

Max, you have to. You have to!

The image of a little girl with eyes as rare and just as blue as water. She stretched out her pale bloodless hand to the body, pointing. Those eyes find him again...God, how they burrow in his soul.

He opened his own, the voices dying down as the wind picked back up. Grunting, he kicked the door open, palm jamming the rusty handle down so hard it nearly breaks off. The air was scorching, conspiring with the sun, and he remembered the book he found once next to a can of expired peaches. Holy bible. It spoke of hellfire, of lost souls, doomed to burn forever in the lake of fire. Out here, where the heat of the sand blistered his feet through the leather soles of his boots, he cannot help but think...yes. This must be the hell they spoke of in those ancient words. But where had they taken his soul?

The body lay a few feet ahead – ten steps, approximately, and his stride was long and quick like spider's legs. His heels punctured the sand, faster as the whispers weave in and out of his lumbering shadow. He grunted, swatting at their ghosts like flies, and knelt down beside the broken corpse.

At once they're quiet. Peace.

He grabbed the wrist, feeling around the shapes of green veins and fragile little bones – like a bird's, they're so small and so fragile – until he finds a pulse under the heel of the palm turned shiny with scars. It surprised him, those faint staccato drums throbbing against his fingertips. He did not expect to find a person, just the bag of skin left behind when death has dragged out everything that made it human.

Humming, he rocked back onto his heels, crouching there in the open with a living, breathing thing. He can see it now, just there, nothing more than a shift of tired lungs. It is breathing. He took hold of his lip, testing the ragged edge of thumbnail between his teeth only to find there wasn't enough left to bite on.

Take her with you Max

Take her.

Her. Was it even female? The mass of dull clotted hair spread out like ink over the pale sand. It seemed small in stature, of course, but it could just as easily be a young boy or a man of slight build. He couldn't be sure it even had a face hiding in all that mess. Carefully, he reached out, parting the curtains of dreadlocks mottled with blood and sand, and there – a nose. A white mouth slack in repose. The eyes were closed, lashes heavy and blanched with sand. Young, emaciated, but undoubtedly female.

He hummed again, this time in disapproval. Recent events had confirmed that females were nothing but trouble. Beautiful or not, strong or not, capable of handling weaponry twice their size or not – it did not matter to him. Well meaning, yes, perhaps, but trouble nonetheless. His own "wives", so called, had been the cause of the tyrant's ugly bitter end. He did not want to meet the same fate at the small, destructive hands of a woman. They were like cyclones caught up in tiny human cages.

Max…

"No." He snapped his head toward the ghostly voice at this shoulder. "I've done enough."

You can't just leave her Max.

Can you Max?

Can you really just leave her there to die? Die like a dog? Alone?

Like you left us alone?

He shook his head, violently, rattling putrid brains. Dust stirred from his scalp.

"No."

You can't just leave her.

She stared at him. Dead heavy eyes that sag with their weight. He stared back. Wishing. Wishing with something like a sob sticking in his throat that he would never ever see her again.

You have to, Max. You have to help her.

The body hadn't moved since he stopped, except to breathe. He can feel it now, the graze of every breath pushing weakly against the tide of sand and dust. They waft over the toe of his boots. Such a shame, he thinks.

We all must find a way...or we do not. We become dust.

And yet, he felt it just the same. A strange sensation, its potency like a poison in his blood. Could this be pity? The same that drove Furiosa to risk her own life for the sake of five blameless others?

She had given him seeds. They could soon become saplings if he tended them, let them bloom, stretch out their winding roots to find room. He had been shut off for so long. A desert of a man. Just sand and sky and nothing in between. He couldn't even remember what skin felt like in his hands. Her's had been soft, plush and yielding and oh so deliciously warm. And the sound of her voice. Echoing with the cries of those he carried with him, their rotting corpses tucked behind the raw edges of his eyes. She hadn't seem them. Their bloated white faces reflecting in his own. He kept them like the secrets that they were. Quiet. Away.

He made his own way - his own - and that's why he left. That's why he was here, alone, like he'd practiced and like he'd learned. This was how it had to be. They knew that. He knew that. Why this walking corpse? She'd die anyway, someday...somehow. It was only a matter of time. Of when.

But...her skin. Her voice. The company. His head rattled – no, no no– beating down old urges that gnashed their hungry teeth in the pit of his stomach. Need. He learned to live with it - the solitude that became loneliness, the silence when the others slept. But it only made him miss their voices; they filled the void. They made him forget how truly empty this shallow grave of a planet had become.

He gathered the dead weight into his arms, throwing it like a sack over his shoulder. It didn't even shiver in response.

For a moment he stared out into the wasteland in front of him – the safe road, they once called it, when the three tyrant kings ruled with their weapons of water and bullets and gasoline. Safety in numbers. Now, who knew what was out there, far beyond the horizon? He meant to go as far as 160 days of gasoline could take him, like they'd said, like they'd planned. Make it on his own with what he could scavenge - like he always did.

But this dead weight. So heavy. Pulling him down into the sand…into the darkness that waited for him at the end of the road.

The whispers intensified until they filled him up.

You can't Max

You can't let her

Just die

Like a dog

Like you let us die

He trudged on, dragging his feet and the body with him.

The voices were all but quiet as he sped off toward the sun.