#zombie!max

[angsty-nerd]

I should be getting to bed, but I’ve been feeling a little neglectful with my minimal posting about the new episode. Got caught up trying to do good by my other fandom project post-episode. Which is challenging because if there’s one thing that anyone knows about me, it’s that I feel the feels... all of them. Hugely muchly. It’s hard for me to turn the feels off, and that other project is super clinical and factual and I’m trying to keep the feels out of it.

So. As long as I am briefly here, I just want to share a few things that the feels are getting me on.

1. “I’m going where you’re going.” Just kill me now with that one. It huuuuurts. And feels wonderful. And huuuurts.

2. “You smell like rain.” It’s such a weird kinda cheesy line, and yet...Jeanine is so good and SOLD it. She seems so content and happy when she says it, and it’s still ridiculous and Max’s reaction is perfect for the absurd side of the line. And yet... ouch.

3. “You look different.” I probably watched the trailer 25 times, and every single time I felt that line cut to my soul. I don’t know why. It’s so simple and to the point, and yet...i think it might be Amber’s delivery, or the fact that she’s catching up to Liz’s reaction on the weirdness of it all. I dunno.

4. Liz pulling a Rosa in for that hug after their argument and just clinging to her. Really that whole scene. We’ve talked about it before with Max and Isobel, but god this show does sibling relationships well.

5. Heather Hemmens and Sherri Saum... the mystery with Mamma Deluca grows! And dear God, Heather is a friggin goddess. She looked just so lovely all throughout this episode!

6. Singing Bitch. I mean, it’s so good. And, I mean, every woman of my generation will relate to that scene. I’ve definitely sang loudly along to that song while road tripping with friends. And while I’m on the subject...

7. The MUSIC!!!!!!! Peak Anne Music, y’all. I actually was thinking a while back that it was a shame they didn’t use Zombie as an episode title while they could, but this was SO MUCH BETTER. Plus STP.

8. The shower scene. Even hearing Carina talk about it in advance...even seeing the clip in the trailer... none of that prepared me for it. It huuuuurts! The way Liz grips the spot where Max marked her over her heart, like she’s clawing for him, grasping for that connection... god Jeanine Mason is good. So good. We are so lucky to have her.

9. Liz’s speech... spit on by protesters, told to stay in my lane... fuck she is amazing.

10. The whole Mamma Deluca disappearance and the cinematography in that sequence. The distant lights of the Wild Pony. That shot of Maria and the sign... that was a magical sequence. Can’t wait for more of that plot.

You know what didn’t give me the feels? That I totally expected to give me feels? Zombie!Max. It kinda made me cringe. Hopefully it was just the nature of the reveal and he will be less cringey later.

[thatonezombiecosplayer]

Hey pal you gonna continue that zombie!Max fic? It's so good, I need another fix!

Here ya go - I’m glad you’re enjoying it! (Part 1 is here, parts 2-5 are in this post)

She goes back the following day.

She’s been trying to figure out what to do with the corpse, but her options are limited. She can’t exactly trust it outside of the cage and isn’t prepared to give it back to the Organic Mechanic. To make the matter worse, her plans to break free and take Joe’s wives with her are falling into place, and she certainly can’t do anything with the corpse then. It’s looking like this particular zombie only has one good option. She puts her hand reflexively to the gun at her hip as she walks.

The corpse is standing idly in the center of its cage as she approaches, and it stares at her. It’s a little unnerving, to be honest. Most dead don’t just stare like this.

She pulls out the pistol and levels it at its head. This is for the best. She told it she wouldn’t kill it unless it gave her a reason to, but sometimes things are just out of one’s control. There’s something different about this corpse, and if she leaves it without killing it, it’ll eventually end up back in the Organic’s hands, and she fears he might learn too much from it. It’s more alive than any zombie she’s ever seen, and if it is somehow a key to figuring out the plague of undead, some step between dead and living, she can’t let the Organic or Joe find out about it. Joe must die, and what better way than the ticking time bomb he’s already got over his head?

The corpse almost looks afraid, she thinks, and it stumbles clumsily away from her, but doesn’t say anything. Its mouth, still bloodied from its meal yesterday, twists behind the muzzle into a shape she can only interpret as apprehension.

She hesitates, but steadies her grip on the gun. She’s killed plenty of innocent people, plenty of people in cold blood in the name of the Citadel. How is this any different? If anything, it’s better. This monster isn’t exactly innocent of much, and this is in the interest of stopping Joe’s reign. Better to just put it out of its misery now. But her mind comes back to the possibility of this corpse being the start of something new. She has to keep it out of Joe’s hands, but can she really just put an end to it? Can she live with being responsible for removing a possibility for the world to heal?

Her aim falters as she questions her choice further. Can she blame this thing for killing people when that’s the only way it has to survive? Can she really just put it to death knowing there’s a mind in there, a consciousness that may be no different from that of a living person? Does it really need to die?

The look of fear is what gets to her the most. This corpse does feel.

She slowly lowers the pistol, letting out a frustrated sigh as she does. The corpse’s body gradually goes from tense to loose again, and after she puts the gun back in her holster, it lets out a raspy breath that it must have been holding since she pointed the gun at it. It still looks a little afraid, though, and doesn’t approach her.

She meets its gaze as she steps up to the bars of the cage. She has to admit she is curious about it. Maybe there’s more to it that she doesn’t know. Maybe there’s more to what’s wrong with the world as a whole. “Do you know why you’re different from the others?”

It doesn’t move, doesn’t answer.

Furiosa sighs. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to kill you. I thought it would be best, but… Maybe there’s something to you.”

The corpse blinks slowly at her, and cautiously takes a step forward.

“Do you know why you’re different?” She repeats.

The corpse shakes its head.

“Have you always been able to talk?”

“Not… well.”

She wouldn’t say it speaks particularly well right now either, but maybe this is still better than usual for it. “Has anything else changed?”

It looks to the side, thinking. “Feel…” But it doesn’t seem to know how to complete what it wants to say. It stumbles around a few words, either deciding they’re not right, or jut failing to say them regardless. “Feel… new things. Stronger things,” it finally completes. “Don’t want to… kill you.”

“And you’ve never felt that before.”

“…No.”

“Can I trust you around others?”

It hesitates. “I… can try.”

“That’s not good enough.”

It looks down. Silence stretches out uncomfortably.

She sighs. “I have duties to attend to.” She doesn’t have time to be standing around chatting with a dead man right now. She came here to kill it, nothing more. The corpse gives a regretful nod, and she turns and leaves. She’ll figure this out, she just needs a bit more time.

[thatonezombiecosplayer]

Warm Bodies Anon, because your response was beautiful: Were you thinking the War Boys captured Max as part of a "make the feral dead fight each other" or some kind of against-the-dead fight club?

Thank you so much!Yeah, the original idea was that they’d hold sort of War-Boy-vs-corpse pit fights, but then I started trying to figure out how to make more of a story out of this, and it changed a bit -

(squick warning on this one for a bit of (pseudo) medical stuff)(and for anybody just tuning in, you can find part one here)

Furiosa sighs. She hates going to the Blood Shed because that’s where the Organic Mechanic works on his ‘cure.’ Zombies may be just mindless corpses, but they were people once, and what the Organic Mechanic does to them is sick, even to her numbed sensibilities. She’ll shoot one in the head any day to defend herself, but at least she doesn’t experiment on them.

It’s bad enough that one of her duties is to keep them alive long enough for him to work on them. Sometimes the War Boys wrangle in an entire group of them, but there are periods where sightings of the dead in this territory are few and far between, and it would be a waste to let any of the ones they have simply wither away, at least before the Organic gets to them. And of course Joe thought she would be the perfect person to handle them. Who better than someone with a metal arm, who can grab a corpse and easily subdue it without worrying about getting a hand bitten?

She’s glad that at least the Organic isn’t cutting one open again when she gets there this time, but he does have one tied down to a makeshift table. It groans and tries to get up, seeming to not be aware that its limbs are bound, as he slowly injects something into it. Furiosa walks past the row of others hanging by their feet and tries not to look at them as they move and groan and snap their teeth at her. One hangs completely motionless, though, and she can’t help but stop and glance at it, thinking at first that it must have expired.

It stares at her, eyes unblinking but somehow still alive in their own way. She’d almost say they hold a look of fear if she didn’t know better. She doesn’t recognize this one, a scruffy thing in a leather jacket with a higher than average number of old bullet and knife wounds. It must have been brought in recently. The corpse moves, just the slightest bit, a little grunt coming from it but nothing more, and she shakes her head. Something’s wrong with that one. Maybe Organic has already experimented on it. Maybe one of his random guesses finally did something.

She turns her mind back to the task at hand. “Latest shipment from Gastown,” she says to the Mechanic as she strides toward him and holds out the small crate of clinking glass bottles she had received on her recent trade run. More rare chemicals and medications to try on his dead test subjects, she guesses.

She never believed for an instant that Joe ordered him to find a cure because he wants to save humanity, and the day she put together that the tyrant had been bitten, it all made sense. She’s not supposed to know, of course. She’s sure he’s told nobody but the Organic Mechanic and the Prime Imperator. He’d lose control of his little empire if more people knew.

She’s pretty sure the only thing keeping him from turning into one of them (she glances over her shoulder at the writhing, groaning dead and shudders) is the medication the Organic Mechanic gives him every day, probably something left from the Before Times, developed before everything went completely to hell, to keep a person human after a bite. But the Organic Mechanic has gotten a little more fervent in his experimentation lately, and Furiosa guesses that the supply of old world medication Joe is taking is starting to run out. Truth be told, she looks forward to the day he turns into a corpse and she can shoot him in the head. In the mean time, she keeps her expression stony, pretends to be loyal, and does her job.

The Organic Mechanic is looking eagerly through the crate, glancing up now and then at the row of hanging dead, probably deciding which one is going to get which treatment. Furiosa turns away, her task done. The living men hanging by their feet and stuffed into cages to be bled for Joe’s War Boys aren’t much more comforting than the dead.

“Feeding time tomorrow,” the Organic reminds her off-handedly as she starts to walk away.

Furiosa pauses only briefly. “I know my job,” she says with a forced calm. She continues on, but can’t help but look at the new corpse as it stares at her again. She stops. “Did you do something to this one?” She points to it.

The Organic Mechanic looks up again. “Hm? Just got that one in yesterday, haven’t touched it yet.”

Furiosa steps toward it. It watches, but doesn’t move. She reaches for it, and it doesn’t even snap its teeth. “There’s something wrong with it,” she comments. The others around her groan in desperation and try to reach her. “Take this one down,” she orders of a nearby War Boy. “I’m putting it in quarantine for now.”

[thatonezombiecosplayer]

Have you seen Warm Bodies? What do you think of the idea of Zombie!Max compared to Ghost!Max?

So apparently my AU weakness is just [anything]!Max……I regret nothing

He isn’t quite sure how this all happened. He knows he must have been alive at one point, probably had friends and family and maybe even a job, but he doesn’t remember any of that now. There are others like him, he knows that, but as far as he’s aware they don’t know how this happened either. If he had ever been much of a talker, he certainly isn’t now, and most of the others barely seem capable of speech. Groans and grunts are about the extent of their minimal communication with each other, on the rare chances that he happens across one.

The one thing he does know is that life (or unlife, he supposes) isn’t that easy out here. There aren’t a whole lot of dead like him, and not a whole lot of living left, either. The living that do remain tend to keep themselves pretty well defended. Some are enclosed within walls, some hide out in landscapes that aren’t particularly easy to traverse when you’re dead, and the ones that aren’t hiding in safety move through the wastes in modified, armored cars, often hunting the dead for sport.

His kind used to congregate around cities and towns, any collection of people they could prey on, but bit by bit they had picked them off, until the dead were forced to wander in search of what living might remain. Many groups found nothing, and probably withered and died out in the desert without the flesh of the living to sustain them, and many others were picked off by roaming bands of living. He himself had been shot and run over more times than he could count anymore, but he discovered it was easy to pretend you were completely dead when you were already mostly dead, and later found that staying away from groups of his own kind tended to be safer. A shambling herd of corpses was hard to hide (often too stupid to hide as well) and made an easy target, whereas a single dead man on his own was less likely to attract attention and it was much easier to duck away if he heard vehicles coming. Plus, on the rare occasions he caught a person (or animal, or honestly just found anything dead) he didn’t have to fight over it with other corpses. It was all his, and he could hide out and live off it for as long as it lasted.

And so he wanders, waiting and searching for the next meal to come along, just trying to survive even when the odds are mostly against him.

When he’s discovered by a group of living he assumes are roaming hunters, he hopes they’re bad shots and gets ready to play dead-dead as they start to zoom around him. Strangely enough, not a single one fires shots, but they stop their vehicles in a circle around him, and climb out to fight him by hand. They look a little dead themselves, pale and painted up like skeletons, but he knows the scent of the living when he smells it.

They seem to have this down to a routine, one baiting him in front while another tackles him from behind, and sooner than he knows it, he’s on the ground, arms behind his back, and they’re fitting a metal muzzle over his head.

A corpse is hardly a threat to the living if it can’t bite, and he knows this, but he’s just hungry enough to lunge and snap his teeth at them when they let him back up. They fight him off for a while, seeming to have fun with it more than anything, but eventually one drags him back by the chain on his muzzle and hitches him up to the back of one of their cars.

They drive away slowly, a few on the back yelling at him and baiting him as they move, drawing him forward by the deep hunger that he feels in his bones more than his stomach. He keeps up for a little while, stumbling forward as quickly as he can, but when he loses his footing and falls, none of them seem to care, and they continue to drag him along behind them.

His clothes are even more torn up than usual when they finally stop, but he’s only missing a bit of skin and is generally glad he doesn’t feel pain anymore because that probably would have hurt. They hold his chain leash tight and the ground under them suddenly lifts into the air, carrying him and the living men and a couple cars with it. It takes him a while to orient and realize it’s a lift. They bring him up into a massive, natural stone tower and then lead him, laughing and taunting and shoving all the while, through numerous tunnels until they reach a room where they fight him to the ground again, chain his feet together, and hoist him up into the air. He’s so beyond overwhelmed by everything going on around him, his brain mostly processing it but his body hardly able to keep up with what he wants it to do, that he doesn’t manage to put up much of a fight. He’s mostly disappointed that the muzzle means he can’t manage even a single bite, despite his desperate need for sustenance.

They leave him hanging like that, and he heaves a raspy sigh. He doesn’t know what they want with him, but he doesn’t anticipate that it’s going to involve feeding him.

(continuation is here)

[ask-apocalyptic-au-dadvid-blog]

I'm sure max will get better David. He just needs to rest a little. Just keep him calm and hydrated

“He kind of… Doesn’t want it.”*soft confused growling*

[thatonezombiecosplayer]

Oh hey, that would be me forgetting to link things (again)

The zombie!Max fic is already on AO3 as Fix What’s Broken :)

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