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In the three days Furiosa knows Max Rockatansky, she says goodbye to him five times, though the words are never spoken.
The first time, the only act of acknowledgement is a long, steady look between them. He’s going back for the Bullet Farmer and if he fails, they’ll go on without him. The fool isn’t a War Boy but it’s an act of Witnessing. Furiosa sees him. She understands enough.
*
Their last farewell isn’t so different. Max catches her eye from below the lift and she offers him a nod: it’s alright, we’re still alive, we’ll survive here. One small step on the path to redemption they both walk, now separately again. This farewell aches more than any of the others. It is both the most and the least final.
*
The morning before the salt flats, they say goodbye too. Furiosa wakes in the back of her cab in the dim before the dawn, stretching in abbreviated, controlled motions to test the extent of her injuries and bruises. One movement brings her outstretched hand in contact with the man lying on the floor. She twists to see over the edge of the seat and freezes when she finds him watching her. His face is more relaxed than she’s seen before, for all that there are still two guns in arm’s reach of his position. If he slept, it was without nightmares.
In an hour the Vuvalini will be leaving, and she’ll never see the fool again. He brushes his fingers against hers first, before clasping her fingers in his. Adrenaline rushes through her for a moment: even holding hands is a way of being restrained, less of her available for survival. Furiosa allows it. He presses her knuckles to his lips. A yearning kindles in her chest, but it feels too much like hope. She pulls free. She will get no closer to him than this.
In seven thousand days, it is the hardest goodbye since her mother.
*
What she’d learned from her mother’s death—besides the villainy of the Citadel, besides the hopelessness of the desert—was the power of a final breath. Furiosa had seen every moment of what they did to her, and yet Mary smiled up at her small daughter as Furiosa pressed at her wounds and sobbed. No one can own my Furiosa, she whispered.
Half-conscious and bleeding out in the back of Immortan Joe’s rig, Furiosa tells the fool to get the others home, and she knows he understands. If he can make good on what they promised, they will both be closer to what they’ve been seeking. As she drifts between life and death, his name reaches her, and if she had any words left she’d tell him hers is Furiosa.
*
In the middle of her days with him, Furiosa takes the fool’s hand, palm to palm, takes the word he has offered her: together. It is a farewell to the people they have been, people who refused to acknowledge hope. They stand in silence for a long time, staring into each other’s eyes, witnessing the change. Furiosa has no illusions about their odds of survival, but his palm is warm and rough against hers. His eyes are light, flecked with green. Together feels different than anything has in twenty years. The awe in the fool’s face says he feels it too.
The plains of silence marked the end of their first journey together. When they emerge the change is subtle but absolute. They set out again with a promise, in honor of the people they used to be. Believing in redemption is another kind of hope.
***