Chapter Text
The sound is so soft that Toast almost dismisses it as nothing. But then she hears it again. She finds Capable sitting on the floor in the lavatory, weeping.
There had been no need to hide their sorrow from each other before the escape. Before, they’d all known the same pain and had comforted each other the best they could. But then they’d escaped and, in getting free, they’d lost Angharad. They’d all loved and respected Angharad, but Capable had been the closest to her, had been her best friend. And Capable had lost Nux, too, the War Boy she’d found to love for so briefly.
Toast slides down to sit beside Capable and puts her arm around her. Before the Citadel, she’d had brothers but no sisters. Their shared captivity within the vault had made her and Joe’s other ‘wives’ into a sisterhood, and it hurt her to see her sister hurting now.
“What is it?” she asked, deciding not to simply assume it was grief over Angharad and Nux, just in case something had happened recently to make Capable cry like this.
Capable parts her legs instead of answering in words, and Toast sees her lower garments dark with blood. Oh. It’s their woman’s moon time. She will be getting hers later today or tomorrow; she’d forgotten because she hasn’t felt tired or bloated like usual. But she understands now why Capable is distraught.
“You were hoping to have his baby.”
Capable nods. “We only did it the once, but I’d been hoping. I could even see what the baby would look like, how it’d have his eyes.”
Nux had had beautiful eyes. They’d been large, expressive, and the most striking blue in color. Toast had noticed it once he’d no longer been trying to kill Furiosa and recapture them, when instead he’d been cuddled with Capable like he’d found something he’d never realized he was looking for.
Toast doesn’t have any words to comfort Capable. Telling her she’ll meet another man and fall in love again one day won’t make her feel any better right now. And it might not even be true. The world used to be different, according to Miss Giddy and the books. There used to be an abundance of everything, including chances at love. But the world is dead and this is the wasteland, and it’s hard for love to sprout when nothing else grows.
Toast doesn’t bleed that day or the next day. The moon waxes and wanes and turns dark again and she still hasn’t bled. She doesn’t want to believe it. But the moon cycles twice more and she can’t keep denying it.
There is only one man’s it could be, since she and her sisters had all finished bleeding just a day before their escape. Toast laughs. She laughs and laughs and she can hear the hysterical edge to it, but she can’t stop.
Cheedo and the Dag come running, looking worried when they can see no cause for her amusement. The Dag’s belly is round now, though she’s still thinner than Toast sometimes worries a pregnant woman should be.
“He’d be rolling in his grave,” she tells them. “If the Wretched hadn’t eaten him and he had a grave.”
“Joe?” Cheedo queries uncertainly.
“Just imagine the look on his ugly face if he knew some half life War Boy did in a couple of nights what it took him hundreds of tries to do once.”
The Dag gets it instantly. “Well, at least it won’t be ugly like mine will be. Unless you did it with an ugly one?” She looks disappointed in Toast at this possibility.
Toast pictures how Slit would look if he’d never been a War Boy. “No,” she says. “It wouldn’t be ugly. But it won’t be at all. It’s only a matter of time until it dies and bleeds out of me.”
“It might not,” the Dag says.
“It will,” Toast assures her. The War Boys are all sick and dying, everyone in the Citadel knows that.
Capable congratulates her warmly that evening over dinner, although Toast know that inside she must be raging at the unfairness of it. Toast brushes aside the well wishes and just says she’d rather miscarry sooner rather than later.
This pregnancy is not like her previous one. Last time she’d felt a continuous sense of violation, all too aware of Joe’s hellspawn inside her even if she couldn’t feel it physically. She’d been so happy to miscarry, despite Joe’s rage and her subsequent punishment. This time she feels almost sorry that this baby is doomed to die before it ever lives.
There are other differences. She’s in a near constant state of arousal. No matter how many times she brings herself off, it’s not enough. She can’t help but notice the War Boys and Repair Boys walking around the Citadel bare-chested. Was that the real reason Joe had never given them shirts, because the sight of their bare muscular torsos was so very appealing?
She’s avoided Slit since that morning he’d ruined what budding hope she’d had. Though given that she’s assumed helping Furiosa oversee the defense of the Citadel - or rather, she’s learning to defend it - it’s probable she’s only succeeded in avoiding him because he is avoiding her too.
Until the morning she goes to check on the training of the oldest group of War Pups, the ones almost Cheedo’s age, at the cusp of manhood. A War Boy is yelling at them. “Mediocre!” he shouts. “You’re all mediocre!” He turns and strides away from them angrily.
It’s Slit and the sight of him walking in her direction stops her where she stands. His body and the way he moves is… She wants him inside her now.
He is painted white with engine grease darkening the upper part of his face and he has that knife sheath on his arm he’d had the night he… Even that memory only arouses her further now. The last time she’d seen him like this was when he’d been part of a War Boy raiding party that destroyed her family and captured her to be a breeder for Joe. The sight of him should make her angry and perhaps feel a ghost of fear, but she feels only desire. It’s an effect of the pregnancy hormones, she knows that.
Slit’s stride falters when he spots her, and Toast moves towards him without making any conscious decision to do so. She’s proud of how cool and collected she sounds when she asks, “Why were you yelling at the boys?”
She and her sisters have been trying to stop the young boys from calling themselves pups - it’s a dehumanization tactic Joe used to make them battle fodder instead of people - but they seem proud of being War Pups and Furiosa had told her and Capable to learn which battles to pick.
“None of them can throw a lance straight.”
“Then teach them.”
“I was trying,” he grits out, and she realizes he’s controlling his urge to snap at her. She wonders if his restraint is because she outranks him or another reason.
“Try harder. Be patient with them.”
He doesn’t reply.
Toast can barely control her desire to touch him. “Come to my room tonight,” she offers quietly.
His surprise is obvious.
Toast doesn’t give him a chance to say or do anything that will make her regret it. She leaves him watching her and maybe there is a bit more sway in her hips than usual as she walks away, but she blames that on the hormones too.
Cheedo and the Dag are in the room they still share, but Capable is sitting among the stacks of books, looking for ones that will be easy for the little War Pups to understand. Toast thinks she should speak with her before Slit arrives. Not that she needs Capable’s permission, no more than Capable had needed anyone’s permission to be with Nux. But she doesn’t want to be the cause of Capable suffering any more hurt.
“You, ah, haven’t asked me who the father is,” Toast says.
Capable looks up in surprise. “I didn’t want to pry.”
Toast appreciates that Capable understands her need for space and privacy after the enforced closeness of being locked up in the vault for so long. “It’s your Nux’s lancer, Slit.”
“Oh,” Capable exclaims. “I tried to talk to him about Nux, but he… wasn’t very nice.”
It doesn’t surprise Toast to hear that Slit is not nice. “I could make him apologize,” she says. She doesn’t know why she thinks she could do that, why he would do it if she told him, but it feels true.
“Don’t bother. I should have expected it. The War Boys still think Nux was a traitor.” Capable smiles a forced smile. “The little ones think he’s a hero now though.” She’s forcing herself to focus on the good instead of the bad, on the promise of a brighter future instead of the grim past and her hard present. Capable had idolized Angharad, but Toast realizes that Capable is every bit as strong and visionary as Angharad was.
“He was brave. It couldn’t have been easy flipping the rig when he knew Joe was dead and there was no Valhalla to go to.”
“He’s gone somewhere far better than Valhalla, I’m sure of it.” Capable gets to her feet and gathers an armful of books. She has her own need for private space now. “Good night, Toast.”
“Have sweet dreams.”
It occurs to Toast as she waits that Slit might not show up. And even if he does, maybe she shouldn’t let it be so obvious that she’d been waiting for him. She gets up with the intention of grabbing a book to pretend to read - and she sees him.
One of the first things they’d done upon returning to the Citadel was have the vault door removed and taken away. None of them had wanted to step inside the Dome until that hated door was gone. Slit is standing in the doorway, seemingly hesitant to actually step inside.
Toast has to remind herself of how significant this must be for a War Boy. The Dome had been Joe’s private quarters where he kept his treasures locked up - no War Boy had ever set foot inside it. Until she’d insisted Slit be moved to her bedroom. And he probably hadn’t stopped to take in the sights after she’d ordered him out.
“Come in.”
He doesn’t move with that confident stride she’d admired earlier in the day, but the sight of his perfectly muscled body coming towards her is enough to rekindle her desire. The knife sheath is no longer on his arm and there seems to be fewer things hanging from his trousers - the War Boy equivalent of preparing for a tryst, perhaps. It makes her smile, though she wishes he’d also wiped off the white paint and the engine grease.
He opens his mouth to say something, and Toast puts a finger across his lips. “Not a word. Don’t speak.”
She takes his hand and leads him into her bedroom. “Just fuck me,” she says. “No talking.”
It seems to make him angry, and if she’s being fair, Toast would acknowledge that he has a right to be angry. He seizes a handful of her hair and jerks her head back, tilting her face up to him and then he’s kissing her forcefully. Toast doesn’t mind.
Or at least she doesn’t until she thinks about how much her hair has grown back since… She’d cut it to spite Joe, and while she’d expected him to punish her for it, she hadn’t expected him to do what he’d done.
She blinks and finds herself lying on her back with Slit above her. She doesn’t remember how they got on the bed or how much time has passed. Slit isn’t touching her. He’s just looking at her, and he looks worried, frightened almost.
She tries to pull his head down to her breasts. “Keep going.”
“I don’t want to.” He sounds puzzled, as if he himself doesn’t understand why he’s refusing. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, like he’s about to get up.
Toast grabs his arm. “Please stay.”
She sits back against the headboard and draws her knees up, hugging them to her chest. Slit stretches out beside her.
No shoes on the bed, her Gran would say. Even when the ‘bed’ was a blanket on the floor.
“You sleep with your boots on?” she says to Slit, but there’s no edge to her voice.
He accepts it as the invitation it is, pulling off his boots. He slides off his trousers too, and Toast can see he meant it about not wanting to. She wonders what she said or did to affect him like that.
“Do you remember your mother?”
She honestly doesn’t know what she would have done if he’d spouted some nonsense about War Boys not having mothers. Fortunately for them both, he answers simply, “No.”
“I try not to think about mine. When…” When you brought me here, she could say. She says, “When I first got here, I used to dream about my mother. I’d dream she was hooked up to a machine, being milked like an animal, like the milkers Joe showed me. Or I’d dream she was being raped by somebody who looked like Joe, screaming for help with no one to help her. Then I decided she was dead, she had to be dead. I’d rather she be dead than alive like that.”
Slit doesn’t say anything. Toast isn’t expecting him to. She isn’t sure how much of what she’s saying he even understands.
She lies down beside him and puts her head on his chest, and this time he puts his arm around her without her having to move it there herself.
“Last time you said being one of the Immortan’s wives made you want to die. Why didn’t you do it?”
“I don’t know. I thought about it. I just never tried to do it.” She’d hated herself for that for a while, for being too much of a coward to escape Joe the only way it’d seemed she could.
Toast touches the metal in his cheek. “Tell me you didn’t do this to yourself on purpose.”
“Nah. Some feral tried to take my head off. Organic stitched me up and thought I’d like these ‘staple’ things. Chrome, aren’t they?”
He’s obviously proud and thinks he looks good mutilated like this, so Toast just says, “That’s one word for it.”
She lets her fingers trail all across him aimlessly. There’s scarcely an inch of him that isn’t covered in scars, either intentional scarification or battle scars. She’d be scarred worse than him if the things she’d suffered showed on her skin. But Joe had been good at finding ways to hurt and humiliate that wouldn’t leave unsightly marks on his beautiful treasures.
“What did you want for your life?”
“Die historic and ride eternal in Valhalla,” comes the predictable response.
“That’s what Joe wanted you to want,” she retorts. “But we both know you wanted things you weren’t supposed to have.”
He can’t deny that, but it seems to embarrass him. He squirms in her arms and won’t look at her. Finally he mutters, “Don’t understand why you want me now if you were so upset about that.”
Her reply is flippant. “Because you looked so shiny and chrome chained naked to my bed.”
She’s not ready to think about it, except perhaps to acknowledge to herself that she feels connected to him precisely because he and his role in her life had been so dark. It reminds her of what’s real, grounding her when she sometimes gets swept up in her sisters’ and even Furiosa’s dream of utopia.
Toast pokes one of his stomach staples. “You didn’t answer what I asked.”
“Be the best lancer. Get a pursuit vehicle and become a better driver than Nux. Fuck shiny females.” His hand slides down to cup her ass, as if to remind himself he’s lived one of his life goals.
Toast can’t bring herself to be offended by it. “Know what I wanted?” she asks, and she feels him tense, as if bracing himself.
“A place with plenty of water and food, a place my family and I could be safe. A cute boy to love. A strong man to raise a family with. Healthy children, and a long life. To be happy.”
Slit doesn’t respond. Toast knows how alien and incomprehensible what she just told him must seem. But then he rolls onto his side and wraps his other arm around her as well. It’s a good feeling to fall asleep to.