@gravityslingshot / Furiosa whispered, ❝ tell me about the stars like it’s the last time we see them. ❞
“They're all chrome,” he says, and means it.
He looks up because she asked him to, because she's looking at him like the answer matters, like he matters, and the sky above the Wasteland is enormous and cold and full of burning things that don't care whether War Boys live or die. He knows that. He's always known that. But tonight the knowing sits different in his chest.
His eyes track the scatter of light. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. More than he has words for.
He thinks of Valhalla. About what the older boys used to say when the sickness came for someone too soon— half-life, half-life, he burned so bright— and how it was supposed to be comfort but never quite was. He used to believe in that. The burning. The glory. The witnessing.
“There's one,” and lifts a hand, the fingers still wrapped in cloth where the wound hasn't finished closing, points; “That one, right there— d'you see it? Brighter n’ the rest.”
He doesn't know its name. He never learned names for stars. The Imperator probably knows. She knows the kind of things that get passed down from mothers to daughters, from green places to memory, and he knows the kind of things that get passed down from War Boys to War Boys, which is mostly how to die well and not much else.
But he keeps his finger up. Keeps pointing. Because she asked.
“All chrome, all chrome and shiny. And that cluster there—" his finger moves left, traces a loose shape in the dark, "—a gear. See the teeth of it? And that one, long and bright, that's a drive shaft. Straight as anything. They’re the biggest— an eternal engine."