almostdefinitelydying:

fuckyeahisawthat:

Toast trades away her Wife whites the first chance she gets. Within the first week of the New Citadel she’s wearing a patched and greasy shirt, swapped with a wide-eyed kitchen worker for the flimsy white linen, a pair of War Boy trousers, and the leather moccasins Eves had been carrying tucked in her storage bags since there was no one left alive among the Vuvalini with small enough feet to fit them. She puts tools in her pockets and her gun in a holster and accumulates enough belts that they seem to be spawning amongst themselves.

Capable keeps her cloth, fashions a practical blouse with long sleeves to keep her skin from burning in the sun. She makes underwear and a wrap for her breasts and a scarf to keep the sand out of her mouth or her hair tied back while she works in the infirmary. The remainder gets turned into bandages.

Dag makes a clever wrapped dress out of a Vuvalini shawl, turns scraps into pockets that are full of seeds and pebbles. She twines lizard bones into her hair, and when her daughter is born, her whites get shredded for nappies and burping cloths.

Cheedo, born Wretched, saves everything. But on top of her whites that flow like morning fog she adds a red-and-ochre scarf and a leather vest stamped with leaves and flowers. (Janey tells her the names, and how they used to grow in the Green Place, and which ones might be among the newest seedlings Dag is planting up above.) She lets the old women show her ten different ways to braid her hair up, and when she starts writing history, not on her skin but in bound sheafs of hemp-paper, she is rarely without a pen behind her ear and a bottle of ink in her pocket.

Furiosa takes off the sigil and chains, hands them over to be melted down into something useful without a second thought. She mostly doesn’t wear the grease, except when she thinks it will tip the situation in her favor. She changes nothing else.

“Oh, this was Mellie’s, it would fit you, child,” says Eves, extracting a linen tunic from the depths of a bag during an evening of sock-darning and hair-braiding.

“I don’t need anything,” Furiosa says. Her once-white wrapped top stopped being anything more than a shirt to her long ago, and she’s practiced in tugging it off and pulling it on with one hand. Changing her clothes won’t change the past.

“If you decided to grow your hair out…” Janey muses another night, smoothing a fine woven headband across her knee.

“It’s practical this way.” Nothing to get caught in a fight or an engine.

The Vuvalini give gifts. It’s an honor to receive a gift when no one has anything, a sign of connection to the tribe. The Wives and the Milkers and eventually a War Boy or two end up with tokens passed down from mother to daughter, reclaimed from a fallen sister when it was time to return her body to the earth. Even Max accepts a pair of hand-knitted socks with a surprised grunt and a slight flush in his cheeks.

Furiosa is aware that she’s taken nothing. Even the blanket she’d wrapped around her shoulders that night on the edge of the salt was packed into Janey’s motorcycle bag the next morning.

I am one of the Vuvalini, of the Many Mothers. My initiate mother was Katie Concannon. I am the daughter of Mary JoBassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog.

How many times had she whispered it to herself, in the Vault or the War Boy bunks, reciting her lineage like an invocation? When had she stopped?

She had been Vuvalini, and then she had been Joe’s, and now…

When Janey takes the rifle strap out of a hidden pocket Furiosa recognizes it instantly, the cloth woven with a repeating pattern of leaves, faded and sun-bleached but still reliable and strong after all these years.

“It was Katie’s,” Janey says.

Furiosa swallows. “I remember.” She had learned to shoot with it over her shoulder, the weight of Katie’s ancient Winchester heavy in her ten-year-old hands.

“She would have loved to see you,” Janey says with a wistful smile, and she holds out the strap in the flickering light of the terrace campfire. And Furiosa cannot say that she is sure of that at all, not with thousands of days of Imperator blood on her hands. But she takes the piece of cloth and tucks it into a pocket.