Trans boy Nux being all jittery the day he gets his chest scars from a surgery that some of the war boys like him have to go through. He’s excited to get the shiny raised scars, shiny like chrome, but it hurts.
He knows it will hurt when they cut off the two lumps of flesh–the large raised tumors that only some boys get that need to be shorn off and sanded flat. But he is excited when he is led to the work bench and lets the black thumbs have at his exterior–making him sanded and shiny.
After it’s over the front of his body is as smooth as the hood of a scavenger racer car and he spends hours rolling chalk over his chest. Nux growing uncontrollably terrified after around his twelfth life cycle where he starts to bleed out. He panics when Slit, only a few years older than him, points to the drippings of red that mix in with yellow when they stop to releave themselves along the piled Dunes after collecting metal ore lodged in the mines.
Terrified, and knowing that they wouldn’t waste a blood bag on a young and unimportant repair boy, he mourns his luck, knowing full well that the color red is less prized than that of silvery chrome. Slit calls him a bleeder, mournfully almost, but with his smile the word sounds cruel. After reluctantly going to the Organic Mechanic, on Slits insistence, Nux is told he could have his insides either be scooped out or could be confined to eating a type of desert root with his daily rations of gritty sand gruel that would stop the monthly bleeding.
Nux gladly gobbles down the root, its wiry tail tickling his throat as he chews it. It’s like eating brittle bones and it makes his nauseous each night he takes it but soon enough it does the trick. The only bleeding he gets are those from his work with the repair boys on the javelin cars.
Trans boy Nux on the day he switches over to the black thumbs he thinks he’s about 14. It was high time he got promoted, but he’s not going to complain too much. He’s just honestly pleased he could put the remainder of his half life to good use before Larry and Barry suffocated him, or he died, ribs up, from a lack of nourishment. Black thumbs and repair boys and war boys didn’t care about eating or sleeping, only about working and proving their worth on Fury Road.
Nux was almost there, on the historic road to Valhalla the gilded Hall. The day he got his engine sigil scarred upon his chest in painfully amazing detail, where the curve of his two previous scars made up the exhaust pipes, he wanted to cry milky tears he was so overjoyed. It was the first time no one saw his scars and thought something bad of him, that he was a bleeder. Now, he was stead fast on his way to becoming a war boy.
Nux thinking the wives were odd, beautiful but odd. He knows they are in high esteem, precious things glittery like chrome–but, they don’t like to be called that. Things. They don’t like to be called Breeder, either. Like how for all his smiles and wide eyes open to witness each of his comrades and friends ascend, he still lets a word reach him that makes him retch. Bleeder.
He learns to deal with the chalk flaking off his back, learns to not poke at the two lumps of growth on his shoulder because Capable and Cheedo worry about them and what they are doing attatched to him, feeding off of him. He learns to quiet his thruming and widen his eyes because the women trust him more that way and he now wants to make them comfortable, in any way he can.
What he doesn’t understand is why they watch him, unabashedly.
Whether it be when repairs are made, when the night calls for sleep, when lizards are caught and roasted on a small yellow lanterns flame because anything bigger would surely give them way, they always watched him. When they all pause to drink up the reserved ration of water for the day, and when he goes to piss around the other side of the Rig with Max, they watch.
The wives, or, as Nux has taken to call them, the chrome women, always watch him. He used to go with Max instead, around any flock of burnt sage brush, but the older man seemed to wander a ways away from him after the first time Nux dropped his pants.
At first Nux thought he was separated from their company during their resting period because they still viewed him as a threat, but whenever he returned and saw the whispering faces of the chrome women, eyes on his pants zipper as he trudged back, they’d smile akwardly before helping him to a mouth full of hose water. Kind and flighty as ever, though Toast and Capable were quiet for a few moments longer.
It was when he started to bleed again that his panicking set in. His piss turns orange and his body seemingly starts to take its time disintegrating into wet clumps. Little curls of blood smack along the inside of his wiry thighs in the big leather pants each war boy is given, an armor that invokes the feeling of tar coated tires and machine gun chains. His suppressant is fading, leaving his body.
When he was dangling on the Rig by chain and sinew earlier, he would made desperate little noises by the hour that his enemies drove, looking for the shriveled roots he used to consume, attached to plants not bigger than a splayed hand. Now, a friend to those he should be hunting, he sat quietly along the cubby hole of the Rig, letting the chrome women sleep on him like piles of breathing dead.
He only had three root tails left when he went awol. The second night he swallowed all three out of desperation and almost vomited them up–Capable watched, saddened. In the morning he was embarrassed when he had to move to go out for water rations with the others, and he felt his own slick water run red.
Capable, watching him with seemingly hard eyes, took his hand that was rough and dirty with cracked nails, and led him to the bowle of the Rig. There he watched her tear at her flowing white shawl turned Sandy yellow, and hand him three long curled strips. She left him with instructions, put on her goggles that used to be his, and climbed back out leaving him in uncomfortable but knowing silence.
That day he moved better, slept more comfortable, and was his dizzying chipper self, not only because of the bunched up cloth but because it had been a gift from her.
She told him things, too.
That she was not chrome, not a thing, not even a woman. She felt tricked by the title of wife, felt confused by most everything this life had forced on her but sure in herself and purpose. She told him firmly to stop calling her a woman, and he nodded, not understanding but wanting to. She held his thinned face in her hands for a long time, watching his eyes stay wide in the gaze of her own.
Then she slipped next to him, tucking her head against his neck, and slept. Capable slept in his arms that night, easily and as if she trusted him. He was puzzled as to why, but he didn’t complain. She didn’t kiss him like he had, but having her sleep soundly in his loose embrace was one of the best rewards he could have received.
He wondered if Valhalla was only for war boys or if people like her could ascend too. But surely, she was already divine, he thought. She was already beautiful and adored by him, like red gold dunes on a wasteland of death. She brought with her to his life lovely days.
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