Creature Comforts (Mad Max: Fury Road fic pt 1/2)

[pinknose]

I've been thinking about sick Nux for days and I finally decided to do something about it. Now you can suffer with me.

Warning for some really morbid themes and references to terminal illness. It's a side effect of trying to write anything having to do with this movie. This is basically gonna be 1/3 sneezing, 2/3 Feelings. So, yeah...

It goes like this.

Some bug makes it's way through the barracks and, let's face it, the Warboys are not the sturdiest stock. It goes like too much sand in the engine. Nothing to do for it but wait for the mass of chalk and charcoal bodies to flush out the virus from their ranks. It's pretty much a guarantee that some of the weaker ones won't make it, those poor boys who are doomed to face the dishonor of a quiet death, but no one goes who wasn't bound to sooner rather than later.

The close quarters are both a blessing and a curse. The latter is more obvious than the former, or it would be if those afflicted had a fuller understanding of how germs worked. Most of them knew their way around a rig far better than they knew their own systems, particularly their limitations. After all, all pain and sickness was fleeting when compared to the glimmering promises of the next life.

There is an upside however. The phrase “misery loves company” finds physical form through the collective coughing and snuffling of the Warboys tossing restlessly in their bunks, cots, hammocks, or bits of floorspace. In the pups especially, illness brings out an animalistic instinct to pile together for warmth and tactile comfort.

Slit jokes that Nux could pass as a pup any day, spindly and wide-eyed as he still is. But Nux knows that he's getting too old for those old comforts. He's had his first rides, his first tattoos, gotten his first lumps and scars, he's more than ready for the time-honored Warboy tradition of suffering his shivers and sniffles in silence until his body gives out on him, and then a little more past then. That point, unfortunately, has already come and gone.

Warboys don't sleep, only succumb to unconsciousness. Sleeping is a waste of precious time, short as their half-lives are. Nux blinks in and out until he can't tell the difference between dreams and fevered delirium. His nose is completely blocked, forcing him to draw unsteady breaths in through shredded lips, his face flushed under the chalky residue from his last layer of warpaint.

In the beds beside him, Warboys wheeze and sniffle without hope for relief. Between the high altitude and the stuffy, guzzoline-scented air, it's a rare blessing when any of them can muster up a sneeze. That, Nux thinks with some bleary satisfaction, is probably the one problem he doesn't have.

For all his other failings when it came to his health, Nux has always had a good healthy sneeze. It's a point of some small pride for him, though it can be troublesome when he's dusting on a fresh layer of paint. He swears the other boys do it on purpose sometimes, knowing that if they get him just right on an inhale they can send him into nose-squirming ticklish fits, sometimes for a full minute . There's not much to do in the barracks between outings, and of all the malicious entertainment derived from a brother's misery, this is probably the most harmless.

“hh-shuuh! Hh-SHUH!” Two quick, cleansing bursts. The sound is lost under the groans of another in an adjacent cot.

No one bats an eye, least of all Nux himself. At this point, it's been happening just as much as not. Shiver, sniff, sneeze, and the process starts all over again. It's as natural as breathing or driving. At least the coughing's let up. At the start it was so bad he was thinking Larry and Barry might've finally got the best of him.

Across the row, three Warboys fight half-heartedly over an open cot. The metal bed frames rattle to the tune of revving engines in the workshop below, so close Nux can practically taste that sweet octane. He takes a sharp sniff but only succeeds in setting off another thrumming itch in his sinuses . He bobs his head up for a gulp of air once, twice, and... nothing. The feeling peters off.

Nux gropes around for his disobedient nose, a busted up crooked thing from too many petty fights and minor collisions. It was like this then too, while he was healing up. At that time too was his head feeling blocked up something awful, and at that time too did the drip drip dripping drive him half-feral while he waited for the raw sting and the terrible sand-in-your-eye-that-you-just-can't-work-out sort of irritation to go quiet.

“hh- hh- ht-TCHUHH” The pair of false starts makes him feel like a stuck pedal. He's busted, broken. But Nux is not made of metal and scrap and all things shiny and good, no matter how he might try, and he knows people aren't like machines. People can't be put back together and make like new with enough spit and polish. Some of the Warboys' sick can be treated with things like blood and pills and foul-tasting slurries, but even if the Organic Mechanic could fix them up from this, there's no use when there are so many dying already . The small sicknesses help root out the weak.

Nux is not shiny, but he is also not weak. He will recover, he thinks as he purges the itch at last with another snarled out “huh-TCHUHH”, and another, and another that forces him up until he's practically sitting up. He must be improving already, to be able to evacuate his sinuses so effectively and even (nearly) sit up all on his own. Yes, this will not be how he goes, hot and cold and leaking like a busted boiler.

Nux is destined for greater things. His true death, he dreams, awaits him all glistening chrome on some dusty road under a bright and lovely sun.

[Salamander]

I was so excited to read this and you didn't disappoint. I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT NUX IN GENERAL AND THIS FIC IN PARTICULAR.

nose-squirming ticklish fits, sometimes for a full minute

He must be improving already, to be able to evacuate his sinuses so effectively and even (nearly) sit up all on his own.

Oh Nux, ever the optimist in his own twisted way.

I adored this. Can't wait for the next part.

[pinknose]

part two! timeskipping to magical post-canon verse where Bad Things don't happen. heads up for spoilers, more morbid talk but not as much as part 1 actually, feels, and gratuitous puppy piles.

It goes differently now.

It figures that after having only just earned the Capable Seal of Approval on the state of his recovery that Nux would stumble and fall face-first into another blasted cold. It was bad enough being bedridden for what must have been weeks when more than ever there is so much to be done and so little time to do it. Now he's back in captivity, confined to the new chambers that Furiosa and the Wives (no, not Wives, not Breeders, just women) keep trying to push on him.

The new living situation is not an unwis. Even with the Warboys slowly turning their favor to their new leader, who promises not glorious death but rather a life worth living, he's not entirely sure he'll be welcome among them, what with the part he played in offing their god and hundreds of their own brothers and all that. He tries not to think about that bit too much.

Capable keeps watch over him, and this is a blessing and a curse of its own, but this time mostly a blessing because it's her. Capable Capable Capable shiny red glory more sweet and soft and chrome than anything he could possibly deserve in this life or the next. Only she's not a Thing at all, as she and the others are keen to remind him. He doesn't think of her as such, not anymore, but at times it's hard not to regard her as the Treasure she had once been. He doesn't yet have the words to explain that it's not who she was to the dead ex-god that makes him feel this way, so he holds his tongue.

Nux has adored Capable in ever-compounding layers of feeling ever since she first found him curled up like a lame pup in the back of the war rig, but by all gods real and false alike, she has an absolutely infuriating fixation with keeping him alive and intact.

Nux knows Capable wants him to live. He knows because he remembers the dampness of her eyes when his old Bloodbag, now called Max, carted his half-mangled hide back to the Citadel, back to her. He knows this, and yet he can't fully understand it. If it's only that she prefers them not to be apart, he supposes he can understand that. But it seems to go deeper than that, into a place whose depths he can't yet reach.

At this moment, her presence is welcome. She's not trying to talk to him about his Manifest Destiny or worrying over his half-life, and though he's happy to hear her voice any time, these moments where their closeness isn't confused by things like the phantom taste of chrome lingering on his gums, these times are best.

She feeds him remedies which are every bit as awful as the treatments he used to get when his more long-term illness was just setting in. But she also gives him water, cool and blessed to his parched throat, and she fills the silence and presses a cool hand to the shaved slope of his head every so often to calm the aching and the heat.

She also makes these curious little worried faces whenever he turns away from her to crumble into the too-soft sheets with a violent sneeze. Which is often. Her expression hovers somewhere between sympathy and intrigue and Nux mentally stores away the reaction to deal with at another date.

As colds go, this is a fairly mild one, mostly settled in his head and leaving his still-recovering lungs alone. Every so often he'll let out a particularly wrenching sneeze, one of those ones that's slow coming and bends him near in half when it finally arrives, and he'll have to resist the urge to clutch reflexively at his sore ribs, for Capable's sake.

“Hh-!” A sharp inhale shivers through him unbidden, shaking his shoulders as it comes. “ih... hahh” He lets it out slowly, knuckling at the chapped, sensitive skin.

“You keep doing that,” says Capable. “I keep thinking you'll run out of air or something.”

She says it fondly, but it makes Nux wonder how much she knows about sickness and the things it does, clean as she is. The women don't know much about things like lumps and Bloodbags, all the things which were a necessary part of his own meager education. But of all of them, Capable is the most perplexingly eager to learn. He knows it bothers her, not just because of him but because of all the boys whom have become her charges in his brief absence.

“If it hurts you, why bother?” he tried to ask once as she sat hunched over a tattered old medical book discovered deep in the Citadel vaults. He tried to ask, but then she looked at him and he didn't have the courage. Maybe some pursuits, impossible as they might seem, are just worth the pain they put themselves through to reach it. That's a lesson that hardly needs explaining to an (ex-)kami-crazy Warboy.

While he's gradually learning to accept that they may not be as different as he once thought, he still can't shake the ingrained belief that Capable is too clean, too precious, too protected by the gods themselves to suffer sickness the way ordinary folk do. He can't even begin imagine her with a cold or fever. But then again, not too long ago he couldn't imagine her with a gun in her hands and the all-too-familiar slurry of dirt, blood, and oil gummed up under her nails as the Citadel as he knew it fell.

Her name is Capable for a reason. He expects she could weather even the worst headcold with total grace.

Another breathy hitch distracts him from his thinking. It's probably good. He's never done so much heavy thinking as he has these last few weeks and he suspects it's not helping his headache any. Once again, nothing comes of the needling itch. He frowns. He's never had this much trouble sneezing before.

“I think you tired it out,” Capable says, tapping a finger against the blackened tip of his nose. She has to fight a grin when it squirms under her touch.

“Sneezing's good,” he says, just in case she doesn't know. “It means I'm getting all the sick out. Like sweating after a fever's passed.”

Nux once thought she would be put off by talk of sweat and blood and sickness, all the things she never had to endure until he came along. Well, him and all the others of course. Truly they played a bigger part in it than him, but Capable never seemed to think so. Nux loved imagining himself as the axis her wheel turned around, just as she was his, even if it felt like wishful thinking on his part. At this moment however he could do with a little less of her attention.

“Hhh...” he starts up again. And yet again, the impulse goes out of him. He deflates. “You scared it away,” he complains petulantly.

Capable smiles, gentle (always so gentle) and huffs a laugh.

“'S not funny. Nng, it's right...” He hovers a hand above his nose feathering a touch over the bridge in hopes of coaxing out a reaction.

Nux's hands are rough and precise, attuned to the needs of metal but less so to those of the flesh. Capable bats his hand away when his touches become more rough.

The powdery clay-based paint the Warboys (and Nux, whatever exactly he is now) wear protects the skin from the harsh sunlight and heat of the desert, but it also dries out and cakes into the skin until it's hard to tell flesh from clay anymore. Capable could only persuade him to either wash it off or drink the water she gave him, not both. A waste of precious clean water, he insisted. So when she drags her index finger down the path of his septum and around the curve of each nostril, mapping out their slopes and angles as Nux's glassy eyes cross to try and watch her, her hand comes away dusted with white.

“guh...” The sound catches at the back of his throat, sounding like one of those rumbling grunts Max makes, and suddenly grows frantic with his building desperation. “uh-! uh-!”

Capable moves away to give him room and pretends not to look just in case she “scares it away” again. However she can't help sneaking a few wayward glances as his brow bunches and fever-bright eyes go into fits of rapid blinking.

Too often Capable has witnessed Nux's most vulnerable moments in times when she was too afraid for him and herself both to enjoy the strangely endearing look on his face, the helpless downturn of his pink lips, the full-body tremble, a byproduct of all that nervous energy which always seems to be coiled within him like a too-tight spring. When he finally manages to get it out, she watches with no small amount of satisfaction as that spring finally comes loose.

“uh? huh-! Huh-huhshIEEH!” The sneeze shakes free more violently than either of them expected, and there's only time for a breath in between before Nux collapses into a fit of smaller, rapid-fire expulsions, bursting out of him like bullets from a gun. “USH! HUSHUH! ISH! ISH! ISH-huh! Hahh...”

He finishes up the fit with a sigh that seems dragged up from the depths of him, the gasp of a body on empty, before dropping back into bed like a puppet with cut strings.

Through watery eyes Nux sees Capable watching him. He can't read her expression, but feels shy under her gaze. Which makes no sense, he thinks, because if anything she should see now that he's ridding himself of the sick on his own and she has nothing to worry about. Maybe that's it. She had to help him. Maybe she thinks he's too weak to purge it on his own. He flushes under his paint and runs his wrist under his streaming nose.

“Oh wait, use this.” Capable fishes around the folds of her dress, a much more practical outfit than the so-called bridal attire Immortan Joe had her and the others wearing. She retrieves a bit of white fabric, the closest thing to a proper handkerchief she could get her hands on, and offers it to him.

Nux isn't stupid. He knows what she intends for him to do, but he just can't. It's too soft, too fine, a far cry from the chafing rag he'd swiped from the garage on the last such occasion. Just touching it, dirtying it with careless hands, feels like something he should be punished for, would be punished for no doubt if Joe were still around.

But Capable gave it to him, and he knows well enough by now that when she's got some idea in her head about him deserving shiny things like this there's no talking her out of it. She won't ever force him though. He knows this too. She's never said so but he suspects giving him any sort of command, even when she has every right to (and even when privately he thinks he might enjoy it), reminds her too much of her past in captivity. Even gifts can be a form of chain when they're given in such a way. She won't become like him. Never like him. It'll take some time before she realizes it though, before she can parse leadership from oppression. Nux hopes that day is soon. He thinks the Citadel might need her and her Sisters' kindness just as much he does.

Capable rewards Nux's few tentative blows by slotting herself into the empty space that's waiting for her at his side. It's been harder, since his return, for them to just let themselves have this the way they did before. When they were on the road, everything was simpler. Everything's always simpler to him when it's cars and bullets and the thrill of battle. Now everything's too quiet. Even when Furiosa gives him orders like he's used to or the girls ask for help in the greenhouse, he often feels too idle, shifty in his skin.

He sniffles and turns to bury his face in her shoulder. If there's one good thing about being sick, it's that the slow chug of his mind stalls those thoughts and the anxious nerves that come with them. He sighs against her and feels her shift underneath him as his breath flutters against her skin.

“Hey Capable are you still- whoa, am I interrupting something?”

Nux starts, and then settles again when he's greeted with the sight of Toast's cheeky grin. She offers to leave them alone, though not without sneaking in an innuendo or two. Capable looks to Nux. He shrugs and shifts over so Toast can join them.

It's not uncommon for them to end up like this. The ex-Breeders' preference for closeness isn't so different than the close-quarters of the Warboy barracks, and there's a sort of fond nostalgia that comes with cozying up like this. In time Cheedo and Dag come to join in as well, fresh out of the gardens and still smelling of green and earth. It's nothing like the sharp, sweet scent of grease and fuel he's used to, but he decides this is good too.

They talk of the gardens, the people, the changes they see from day to day. Nux says nothing, content to listen and enjoy the company. Oddly enough, the time he spends half-dozing in softness doesn't feel like time wasted when they are near, the softest not-things of all.

“hsshuh!”

“Nux! Gross!” Dag squeaks and squirms out of the way. Capable leans over to give her a light smack on the arm.

Nux sniffs and smiles. He's still far from adjusted to all these creature comforts, clean water and medicines and all that, the luxuries which the women here treat as necessities. But the weight and heat of a sickpile is something that makes sense to him and he thinks just maybe there are some traditions he hasn't outgrown after all.

[Garnet]

Oh my god, oh the feels. You just kept piling them on and I'm drowning but so very happy about it. Beautiful descriptions and little sensory and environmental details that root this firmly in the established world. I wanted to pull out a few favorite lines and insights, but they're all too good! Ugh, I have to re-read now, and tapdance excitedly.

Edited June 1, 2015 by Garnet

[Salamander]

Waaaah. This was great too. Just the right antidote to the first part!

[Sass]

So happy there are already Mad Max fics! I saw it recently and loved it! I really like the back story you worked in here! I love the idea of a sickpile!