I'm sorry.

No I'm not.

Gotta write the sad stuff sometimes, yeah?

Anyway, drop me a line, tell me what you think. I love feedback ^_^

CHAPTER ONE

[max's POV]

Furiosa didn't scold me. Not verbally, anyway. But her eyes – her emerald eyes were sharp and hard, her face blank and expressionless: the face of the Imperator. Her glare laid into me worse than any words ever could. I shrank away from her. Couldn't move far, though. The car at my back, my Interceptor, stalled me, and I pressed my skull against the rusted fender, teeth bared.

Then she was kneeling, reaching towards me. Her hands – too close! I shied to the side and guarded my damaged abdomen with a palm pressed flat over the dirtied bandage strapped there. Even through the fabric, I felt the heat of the wound, the wetness of fresh blood, and I knew it was bad, but I didn't really want to think about it because if I didn't think about it I could pretend it didn't exist.

She was stronger than me, though. As sweat dripped from my hairline and stung the cuts on my face, and tremors wracked my body, I didn't argue, knew it was useless. She took my jacket. I growled. She silenced me with those eyes again. I let my head thump against my Interceptor again. Rust flaked away from the sheet metal, blended with the sand below.

It was a hot breeze, but I still shivered when she peeled my damp shirt away from my stomach, chest, lifted it over my head, freed one arm from its sleeve and went for the other. I showed my teeth when her hand strayed too close to my injury again, but she worked gently. Threw my shirt to the side. I felt exposed. Didn't like it. She draped my jacket in the window of my car. I went for it, dragged it into my lap, but couldn't find the strength to put it back on.

"You should not have ignored this," she murmured as she pulled the hastily-applied bandage loose. It stuck to my skin, glued with blood, gore, that oily stuff that sets in before a scab does. I grimaced as she pulled it away. Didn't want her to see. I put my hand over it again. The skin was hot, stretched taut over infection. My fingers covered it, came back sticky.

"Let me look." Furiosa's order was gentle, and it worked, because when she tugged my hand out of the way I let her and felt my fist thump down into the hot sand beneath me. Her face darkened. Her brows lowered. She swallowed hard, and though her expression remained blank as a sheet of undamaged sheet metal, her smoldering eyes betrayed her.

She was scared.

That's when I knew it was bad, and that it was only going to get worse.

My fatal mistake had been trying to pull the thin metal arrow out of my gut with my bare hands. I should've left it where it was and let the medic deal with it, but, damn, when you're in the heat of the moment you're not thinking about what you should be doing. You see something sticking out of your gut, you're thinking that doesn't feel too good, and then that thing probably shouldn't be there, and then you're pulling it out of your body as fast as you can because instinct tells you to.

So I grabbed it and yanked as hard as I could.

Still not sure what the hell happened. Maybe it caught on something inside me, maybe it was already broke – but the thin metal shaft snapped off at the base, leaving part of it buried inside me. Couldn't get to it then. I tossed the scrap as far as I could and then dug into the entry wound with my fingers, slicking my hand up with blood, lots of blood, I felt it in there, the busted-off piece of metal burrowed into viscera and resting in that little hollow right above my left hip. Thought about going for my pocketknife and slicing myself open to get it out, but I ended up dropping that idea because I didn't trust the steadiness of my hand at the moment. Didn't want to risk gutting myself.

I wasn't bleeding too bad, so I dug some bandages out of my car and wrapped myself up. That had been three days ago. Hadn't even looked at the wound since.

The arrow – it was one of those small ones from those crossbows the Buzzards liked to carry around. It had ended the fight. They'd gotten away with my spare guzzoline, which pissed me off more than the piece of metal buried in my gut. Luckily, they apparently weren't interested in my car, so they left it alone. Probably figured it didn't have enough fuel to get back to wherever I was headed when they'd crossed my path. It did, though, just barely. The Interceptor was literally running on fumes by the time I coasted into the outskirts of the Citadel. Walked the rest of the way. When I showed up, Furiosa lent me a wrecker so I could collect my car, and I hauled it back in and pretended nothing was wrong.

For three days I walked around the Citadel with the piece of metal inside of me, and for three days I felt fine. Mostly fine. If I ignored the way it clinked against bone every time I put weight on my left leg. I'd get used to it. My body would close up the hole around it, seal it in, and it would become a part of me, and that would be that.

Now, though, I understood that wasn't gonna happen. My body was rejecting the foreign object. It needed to come out. That's what the medic said when she leaned over me with her headlamp sprouting a horn of light between her eyes. Her gray tail of tied-back hair swung at her spine when she turned away to rummage through the bag of medical supplies on the table next to the bed. Cheedo and the Dag were both present, since they'd both expressed interested in nursing, but I could tell that they didn't really want to be here. It was fine when it was someone else bleeding into the mattress.

Not fine, though, when it was me.

They stayed because as much as they didn't want to be here, they didn't want to leave, either.

Furiosa leaned on the doorframe. Arms folded, one leg crossed over the other, held cocked with the weight off it. It was hard to see her face with the light filtering in from the glass ceiling of the domed Vault. She hated this place, and so did the other women – it had been the place the Immortan had kept them as his breeding stock – but like it or not, it made for the perfect hospital with its natural lighting, climate-controlled atmosphere, decontaminated air, and endless supply of running water from the aquifer below.

I hated it, too.

It was a room of deathbeds.

Only those who stood little chance ended up here, but I wasn't one of them. They didn't need to treat me here. I was only here so I would receive the best care they could offer, because Furiosa would never admit that she would be devastated if she lost me, and she didn't want to take any risks.

"I'll have to send for my tools," said the medic, partly to me but mostly to Furiosa. She slapped antiseptic into her hands, then brandished the bottle on me. I flinched when she grabbed my arm and sought the crook of my elbow. Her touch was freezing. She swabbed my skin as I gritted my teeth. "The sedative will take some time to set in. If I inject it now, I can operate as soon as my bag is brought to me."

"No," I found myself saying, trying to sit up despite the rippling pain in my gut. Saw my jacket laid over a chair, the key to my Interceptor dangling from the pocket, taunting me as it glittered in the light. Had to prove to myself that I was strong. I didn't belong here, not in the Vault, not waiting to die. Bare feet struck the cool stone floor. Tried to stand up. The Interceptor called me, drawing me out with the promise of the open road, the scream of pistons and supercharger, nobody chasing me, nowhere to go, nowhere to run from, just me, me and my car—

A hand clamped onto my shoulder. Not forceful, but firm, and my ass met the mattress again.

"Max," said Furiosa, and the sound of my name on her tongue made me stop, because I could tell she was fighting to keep her voice even. "Max, it's not going to get better."

I pressed a hand to my hip. The metal piece inside me grated against bone as though confirming her words.

I lay back down. Furiosa kept her palm to my shoulder, pressing me into the cot, silently offering assurance, and only when the artificial blackness of the sedative dragged away my consciousness did she lift her touch.

Darkness. Couldn't see. Everything cast blue in shadow, outlined in silver moonlight, save the small patch of unnatural light by my bed. An electric lamp. I turned so I could look at it, and startled. There was someone else with me. My hands felt for the pockets of my jacket where I kept my weapon, but my top half was bare, my hands slapped against sweat-soaked skin and nothing else, my jacket was gone, my guns were gone…!

"It's okay." The calm voice cut through the muddled fear, grounding me. Chair legs grated over the stone floor as she stood, took her place at my side. She twisted around and snagged something from the bedside table, something metal knocking around in the confines of a tray. Managed to prop myself up on one arm as I grunted and tried to shake the heaviness of the sedative out of my eyes. She angled the tray so I could see into it, and there it was, the rusty little piece of scrap that had caused me so much pain. Couldn't've been more than the length of my thumb.

My heart raced, my breathing came hard, and my jaw felt tired like I'd been clenching it in my sleep. I stared at Furiosa, who tossed the tray back down onto the table and stared at it for a second before speaking. "It was in there deep," she said.

Wanted to run those Buzzard blokes down, take their fuel, stab them in the gut with a piece of metal and leave it there, see how they liked it! Nothing I hated more than sitting in one place waiting for something to happen to me. Besides, I needed to look after my Interceptor, knew nobody else would. I'd left it parked out there, backed up against one of the spires, out there in the open! Something like panic wrapped cold hands around my spine. "My car—"

"Under watch," Furiosa said, adjusting the leather straps lashed over her shoulders that held her prosthetic in place. "Anyone who touches it loses a hand."

I relaxed a little bit, finding dark humor in her words. She was kidding. I think. She didn't lead like that, not by keeping her people in fear, but part of me suspected she had actually threatened punishment for messing with my car. Ah, well. If she was in charge of the machine, it was safe. I'd see if I couldn't get out tomorrow to take a look at it, just to make sure everything was squared away, ready for our next run. I was gonna go after those Buzzards. They were gonna pay.

Furiosa settled back down into her chair, kicked her feet up on my bed, and tucked in for the night.