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He becomes a permanent fixture in her gardens, something of a scarecrow with his strange metal object and the sounds he makes with it. The sun seems to please him after so many years hidden in a garage in the dregs of the Citadel but it has yet to cut through the thick layer of paint he still insists - like so many other Warboys - on wearing. Though the layers are undecorated and even more barren without eyes, she doesn’t find herself as put off by it as she does others. Something about it is almost ‘pure’.
The moon has made itself a new nearly a dozen times and yet the one thing they still hold onto, near religiously, is their appearances.
Sometimes, Dag thinks they are worse in this regard than her or her sisters - their desire for bodily decor. But does Coma apply his own paint or is it another Warboy that does it for him? The layers are cracked in places and worn down in others. The fingers she sees picking idly at the strings of his machine, erupting from red-frayed sleeves, are almost the same shade as her own skin - skin that has darkened with her working under the sun. Underneath it all he is a man. Not a monster as she'd first thought upon seeing him.
The Dag watches him only because she knows he can’t catch her staring. As long as she keeps tending to her children, pruning them as needed and plucking little bugs off their limbs the Doof Warrior won’t stop his gentle music to listen for her, making sure she is still with him, she’s certain.
At first she had thought him put here by one of her sisters to...to what she wasn’t certain. It was not as though he had eyes to watch over her.
Perhaps he could protect her to some degree. His hearing was terribly good and she’d seen the strength in his body as he carried that fusion of wire, chrome and guzz of his everywhere he went. It looked much heavier than she herself and not once has she seen him without it.
No, Coma could protect her as readily as any other, but Dag didn’t need protecting.
As the months went by The Dag realized he was there cause he wished to be. He did not speak often and when he did it was a strange assortment of words, laced like something out of her old word burgers. Like music...but in word form and hard to understand. She grew to love it when he spoke though, just as she did the sounds he made with his fingers. In fact, Dag found herself thinking of him often, especially when he was absent and all she could focus on was when he’d join her in the gardens - where was he? was he asleep or awake and thinking of her as she did him?
She thought about the way his hard body felt when she helped him to his spot on days when he couldn't seem to find his feet. She thought about the way he grinned, and how it would have looked menacing if not for how unthreatening he'd been. Or sometimes she wondered if he was trying to court her like some of the other Warboys did her sisters.
The music he played was so different than what she remembered from the road after all. Gentle and soothing, as if played just for her.
Today she could not stop throwing shy glances his way, finding him through a curtain of her hair, as though he could catch her staring if she wasn’t discreet. But as long as she went about her gentle ministrations he never moved his head in her direction. So after a while in the hot sun she took her fingers from her children and rested them in her lap, waiting and watching.
It took a short few seconds for his fingers to pause, and his head to rise, staring in her direction with bare, white sockets. She could see the distant line of a frown on his lips, red and raw from the way he teethed them as he played his music.
Coma’s head tilted, turned a degree as though tuning his ears for her - searching. Then when she shifted on her knees, her skirts rustling, she caught the wide grin stretching his lips before his fingers went back to picking at wires. It felt oddly powerful to have him focus on her so heavily...she felt like music - like his music. As important as his axe, maybe - which she'd taken to time to reach about in her word burgers. A guitar...
She went back to her children with a smile breaking out on her face.
Dag decided she liked Coma, very much, even though he spoke little with his mouth. He spoke to her through music and that, at time, felt more honest than anything else did.
One day, weeks after she struck up the courage to touch his face after her lesson in soil - brushing off some dirt, he comes to her bloody. A fresh rip in his red onesie exposing a portion of his hip, bare of white paint but coated in dark red. She was tending to the apple trees in the center of her nursery, removing the small dead and diseased shoots, of which were very few thankfully, when he strummed his axe, slowly stepping between a grove of newly hatched potatoes. How he knew where to step she did not know, maybe he could see somehow...she was watching him, very impressed until one small blossom was crushed under his shoe.
“No!” she darted to him, unthinking but for the protection of her children. They were all she had left now and the fear as he stumbled back, axe swaying from the strap on his shoulder, shocked and trampling another budding baby - the fear raced up her stomach and into her throat.
“Don’t move!” she screamed, “Please - stop!”
And he did, wobbling and digging his heels in her soil and broken children, palms flat on the strings of his axe. They could be saved, she knew but she had to move him away - take him under the shade by the seedlings, tell him to stay as she salvaged them. And she did just that, feeling him tense under her guiding hands, wrapped around his shoulder and wrist, careful of his axe. If he had eyes she would have sworn he were watching her. A burn, not the sun, but like it stained her face as she took him to the stone bench, helping him settle himself.
Quickly she took him in. His cheek was swollen, lower lip cut but not bleeding and blood stains like a paint brush fading down the open color of his reds. The wound on his hip worried her, but Dag cared more for her broken babies than him in that moment. So she pressed her hand to his shoulder, “Stay here, please. I’ll be back, but first I need to tend to them. It was an accident I know...but stay here. No moving.”
Coma nodded, frowning, brows furrowed and his hands holding tight to the frame of his axe - fingers going white with the strain.
The Dag's eyes wandered over to The Doof Warrior much too often as she tended the trampled ones. It took twice as long to clear the separated leaves, to splint the bent stems with tiny dead twigs and twine and aerate the soil once again. The leaves she had to prune went into the decomposing pile of plant matter and rot for later. Nothing would go to waste, in her sanctuary, in their second lives of green and sustenance.
When she reached him, dirtied in soil and salty sweat from her task, he appeared to have moved little-to-none at all. Aside from how low his head hung in front of him, he was unchanged.
So Dag drifts to him, quiet though she knows he hears her, and settling down besides him. This is one of the few times she’s ever been so close to him and he reeks far worse than any other time - reeks of spoiled sweat, old grease paint and oil...with a hint of what she knows is blood. All the Warboys she's been around, which are few, have that wet metal smell to them, but this is much worse.
Beyond the powerful smell there is something else maybe, but it’s hard to separate from the rest and she nearly smiles at the pair they must make. Dirty and silent, on the bench where she lays naked for the fresh moon each month. Giving her body to the Night Goddess.
“And he comes with hell on his heels…” he stutters, hot under his breath and gnarled like a serrated edge. Dag does not at first know how to reply, or if it even needs one but his fingers pluck a melody of sorrow so dense she dares to touch the bare ball of his shoulder, where his open collar had fallen to reveal. Coma is warm and brimming with energy - as though he vibrates with life.
His melody ceases and she whispers back, “I won’t bite you over a few culled back seedlings.”
She smiles when his head turns up to her, even though he can’t see her. Dag continues as he listens “They’re stronger than anyone can know. They grow from the bones of powerful souls after all...and one day they’ll grow from ours too.”
Even without eyes she can sees when he finally understands, smiling, his lower lip breaking again but the blood only welling, not spilling. Her fingers twitch on Coma’s shoulder and in her lap. To ease the urge to stroke away the blood she lays her palm on her thigh, squeezing herself gently through thin linen.
“She see’s the end, and does not weep.”
There is no helping her when she raises her hand to wipe at the blood on his lip, feeling his breath ooze hotly down her hand. Though something in her whispers for her to lick the blood away she doesn’t, just wipes at the smear gently, cleaning it from her thumb along her skirts.
“Who hurt you?” she asks, leaning back to see the deep scratch on his hip, hoping there is not worse marks down his chest where she can’t see.
“Not but me. A...missed step...and down we go,” Coma sings to her, tilting the head of his axe, bouncing it on a thick thigh and she sees for the first time the dents in the frame, subtle - but the chrome is scratch where the rest is smooth and shiny. He has no one to walk with him? Not a soul that could spare the time to take a survivor of the Fury Road to and fro?
She frowns, dropping her hands from his shoulder. Dag does not see the way he leans forward when she releases him, as though to get her touch back somehow, she is much too busy staring off at her culled seedlings and ignoring the reek of him.
All he needs is a bath. Just once - it’s possible he’s never really been clean. Most of them just applied layers of paint when their true colors showed thru, and even then if they did bother to clean themselves she knows it’s with sand and scrapers.
They could both use one - a true bath. And the vault is empty, save for maybe Cheedo who has taken to sleeping most of the days away in her room now that she’s carrying a child of her own. Dag frowns, touching at her flat belly. She feels a distant sense of loss, but it is short lived. Her baby was not meant for this world so it never entered it - not the way it should have. She likes to think she has thousands of children now and tends to them as such.
“Come with me, Doof Warrior,” she stands and touches his wrist carefully, taking his hand when he presents it to her, “let me wash off that blood. My herbs can help you as well. You’re smell might wilt my babes if we hang around here much longer.”
Coma stands with her, steady and sure, face curious and so expressive despite how he has no windows for her to gaze upon his soul with. Truly, she thinks, he is a mess. But some sort of, wild beautiful mess.
The Dag does not see him grinning behind her as she leads them down the spiral stairs, away from the heat of the sun and the open air of up high. Neither does she notice how he doesn’t truly need her help to take the steps easily while he plucks chords one handed, his other hand in her grasping fingers. It is easy to lead him, but she thinks nothing of it while they descend to the high, brittle sound leaking from his axe.
The Vault is empty, of even Cheedo who could be with the Vuvalini or sleeping with her adopted Warpups. Toast has taken a shine to driving and as such has been gone with a trade party to Gastown that morning. Capable never ventures into the Vault but to visit her sisters, spending all her time with Nux in the garages, working on hot rods and growing into more of a Warboy than some Warboys themselves.
They are alone and it feels comfortable.
Perhaps, she thinks, it’s because he is bloody and bruised, and blind that she isn’t threatened by bringing him here, but she knows that it’s because she likes him. Maybe in the same way he likes her. Though he is a man despite his lack of eyes and men like women in different ways…
When she turns around, seeing him unsteady on his feet, swaying with his axe, she holds to his shoulder and speaks softly, “This is the Vault, my home. Would you like to have a bath? Do you need help?”
He nods to both questions, rolling his shoulder to ease the strap of his axe off. The shift of weight makes him side step to rebalance and she holds onto him tightly, feeling the coiled strength in his body - all lean muscle. It makes her flush from her cheeks to her chest, and again she is happy he can’t see.
“Careful now, wouldn’t do much good if you fall and crack your skull would it?” she teases, but he doesn’t grin, just starts fumbling with the buttons on his chest.
They have no concept of modesty, Dag reminds herself, trying to figure where the paint ends and his real skin begins. The swath of blood on his chest is just a stain. And when the line of his navel is revealed she releases him quickly to which he stumbles and she’s forced to hold him steady again.
He is just a body same as she, and there is no shame in flesh.
“Like reeds in a storm,” he mutters, more words she’s only read but isn’t familiar with. Her silence must show her confusion so he grins, toothy and grunts, “Unstable.”
Dag nods, turning her eyes away, her hands holding him firm as he sheds clothes that sink to the floor, heavy with filth. She thinks to take them to the basin and wash them later, but perhaps he needs help washing. The idea is both rattling and thrilling at once. Her eyes fall to his axe, tilted along a tall, deep stack of word burgers. He doesn't look whole without it - more naked than a man should ever look.
“Are you ready? - here...it’s warm,” she urges, taking him to the bath, cut into the center of the Vault.
“Steps here,” and he lifts a still covered foot, “Wait! You’re feet.”
Coma turns back and while she helps move him away from the bath her eyes can not stop their descent down his body - hard plains of lean muscle, a deep ruddy scratch at his hip, narrow waist, heavy cock...thick legs...all covered in a chaos of paint, dirt, blood...and bare skin. He still smells terrible, but it’s not what The Dag is thinking about when he puts his weight on either foot, and his soft cock sways gently; fragile.
Praise be the moon, she prays wildly, gasping.
The Dag looks up quickly, catching a quick fading grin on his face before it’s straight and expressionless once again.
He’s toying with her, she’s sure of it now.
That grin had not been her imagination and it was not belligerent or nasty either, it was amused. For a moment she sneers, flushing, feeling wronged and then she feels a gentle poke against her belly and they both look down to see him half-hard between them.
The Dag is speechless…
“Into the heat he runs and out of the mist she follows?”
What does he mean? She doesn’t even care. Something wild is taking a hold of her and it feels brittle, fleeting as though if she doesn’t use this, whatever it is now, it will fade away and never return.
So she reaches down hurriedly and unbuckles his shoes, knowing he didn’t need her to stabilize him as he steps out of them, kicking the other off by the heel, easy and smooth. A grey bandage is wrapped loose around his calf and that goes too, exposing old cuts that run deep into the muscle. Coma does not trip over himself, does no sway or falter when as she slips her sleeves off her shoulders, twisting free of the fabric so it can join his on the floor.
This wild energy is still coursing through her veins when she grabs at his wrist, taking the first step into the heated water and pulling him with. They are both bare and the bath feels better than it ever has on her skin. Even the sting of it on her shoulders where the sun had bitten her too hard is exhilarating. His touch is rough, but only for the calluses on his fingers, the pressure itself is ghosting like a whisper, but this energy inside her doesn’t crave gentle and soft.
She reaches him quickly, close enough her breasts are grazing his chest. The water around them runs opaque as the white paint dissolves, coating the surface like oil. Dag cups hot water, sleuths it over his shoulder and head even though he frowns, shaking it off like some animal.
The strange trance is broken when she laughs, pure and high. “Coma, that’s what your true name is, isn’t it?”
He grins, baring odd, big teeth, but her teeth have always been too big, so it’s not a thing she finds too out of place on him - though he is an odd man. His strangeness is attractive...maybe it’s addictive too since she’s sharing a bath with him, hoping he will do even more when she gets the grit off them.
“The Dag, Mother of the Dead,” he calls her, still grinning, lower lip puffy and red.
Never before has she felt like this - she doesn’t want it to end. This feeling as though there are no consequences for doing as she pleases. His dishonesty is forgotten, replaced by a strange respect. He is sly for a man with no eyes and confusing words - so sly she’s found her lips pressed against his ragged grin, tasting blood and the heat of his mouth closing in against hers.
He does not kiss well, but that’s alright. Dag is too full of vigor to draw out kisses and careful touches. If he lets her, perhaps it is something they can work on later, for now she has a furious need that extends past her own being. It's a need that's base and older than herself - it's heedless and pure.
The idea that her soul needs his is easier to accept than just her body needing to be filled, for she wouldn’t find herself here with just anyone. It has been a long while of her curious looks and his lyrical speech that has led to this moment, his cunning just gave her that little extra push and it is good, because he seems to know what she wants by how she touches him - by the way her nails rake through moist paint, leaving lines of reddened skin exposed red raw.
The questions ‘are you certain?’ and ‘may I?’ and ‘will you, please, by the moon, take me?’ as well as a hundred others race across her teeth, but none of them come. Just thoughts of questions that come and pass, making no difference to the way she speaks and he answers with touch and feel, something electric between their skins that’s like a hum, almost music.
He treads water, ripples tickling her skin and her back is pressed against stone, dragged along it and body lifted to the rim. Water softened hands skim her thighs, touching instead of seeing. He open them, strokes low and then his mouth is there at her garden, feasting loudly.
Dag bends, hisses and pulls him by the back of his head deeper along her. Power. She tastes the words, speaks it maybe…
“Power…” and his tongue seemingly spells the word over her flesh as stray sounds of pleasure fall from her lips.
It is quiet but for the sounds of her pleasure and his lips and tongue slipping wet and quick between her thighs, taking her where her fingers have only done before, under the light of the new moon each month. She’s made a habit of giving herself to the lights above...but there is no moon and her fingers are not on her, but on him, stroking behind his ears and thumbing his brows.
But Dag doesn’t want to go out like this, though the feelings are so much sweeter than what she brings herself. She’s never felt a man fill her and enjoy it, but she knows this will be different, so she gently pulls him away from her, momentarily savoring the sight of him licking his lips with a feral smile. It would be a lie to say she did not want to put him back between her thighs, back to his feast, but her insides clench softly and she knows she needs to feel him there; deeper than his tongue can go.
“Breed me, please,” she doesn’t care for what she calls it, but she’s no other word for it.
“And we make a union in flesh,” he intones, pulling at her knees and settling between them. Dag decides that is what it will be called from now on. She’ll spread the word and banish the other.
“Union,” she repeats reaching to lick her taste from his lips and finding it as earthy and fragrant as fresh watered green things. The idea she is one herself claws at her heart, takes hold of her as she pulls him close. “Unite with me, please. Coma...we’ll give ourselves to the moon.” It is the greatest feeling, she thinks, and it will only feel better with someone - with him.
It is that thought that keeps her from panicking when she feels him guide his cockhead to her, releasing it to grasp along her spine for balance when the angle is just right. Slow, she prays and he is slow. Shallow, she prays and he only goes so deep as to make his next thrust blow her pupils with sensation. The third and their hips meet - it is all she needs to howl at the hidden moon and settle a rhythm both frantic and smooth.
In the bowels of her mind she can’t help but think of Joe and how horrible it had been - in a way that terrible inkling makes whatever is happening between her and Coma that much more special. When his hips thrust against hers and there is that deep, gratifying stab of pleasure in her belly, it’s a cleansing of the past. A new life he gives her. Life like she gives those in her soil. She blossoms like a flower with each lengthily stroke inside her.
Coma, without eyes, relies on everything else to know her - to heighten her pleasure. His hips angle without her needing to ask, and when she feels that deep concentrated pressure of her end. He knows and reaches deeper, harder...churning faster. Those rough fingered hands hold onto her, keeping her steady against his upward thrusts. He reaches a spot inside, like a pain but a wonderful pain and Dag lets go - holds him tighter but lets everything else go for the wash of euphoria.
The end. Her end and then soon his own. Her throat goes raw as though she’s been screaming for days and tears flood her eyes.
There is nothing but silence surrounding their noises. The splashing water around his thighs, the wet smack of their hips, her hoarse sounds of given pleasure and a rasping sound coming from his throat.
A wet warmth floods inside her. Coma’s hips snap; deep and hard, and then again and again...losing their strength until he is still. His face falls between her breasts and the heat of his breath stirs along the tender slopes, filling her with gratitude and bliss.
“The Dag,” he breathes, like a prayer she thinks, “my desert rose.”
The tears fall this time, and she cannot stop them, nor the sniffle that comes when she tries to hold them back. When he tenses at the sound she is there tightening her hold, flattening her palms to his back and nestling her face against his shoulder.
“No,” she whispers, “it’s fine. I’m fine...I…” she can’t finish her thought, only holds him and hopes he understands she is merely brimming with too many emotions and the crying is nothing close to upset or regret. Coma does not pull away, so Dag smiles past the tears and shuts her eyes.
“Thank you.”
Her response is rough fingers skimming her back, massaging her spine and soft, wide lips on her chest. She is very, very grateful Coma decided to be a dishonest, sly smeg. Maybe, one day she’ll get him back. But for now? For now she’s going to enjoy his scheme’s result and bask in it’s afterglow.