I have tried to collect the thread and cleaned it up slightly. If I’ve missed something you’ve written for this 60-car headcanon pileup, please point me to it. If you’re in there and you have an AO3 handle, please tell me and I will add you as co-author.
Oh my god THAT’s why she’s willing to sacrifice her crew, because she’s tried any variation of telling them, of asking their help, and there’s always somehow a weak link, they’re not good at secrets, at acting. They don’t even come away from the Citadel, or her crew is suddenly replaced by Joe, or she’s taken off the War Rig, or– In desperation she tries not telling them one time, and it’s gut-wrenching, but then she gets much further, and now she has to get them killed over and over again, punch Ace off of her running board like he’s one of the Wretched over and over again–
She only ever reaches the other Vuvalini once, on their final run, which is why it was so crushing when she found out that there were only a few left, and that her home was gone. The run through we saw was the furthest she ever got, after hundreds of times watching her crew and the sisters die in different ways. Maybe she even killed Max many times before, or left him to die in the desert.
What. Make him stay?? That would probably make him run faster, especially given the ‘I just known you for three days’ thing and ‘who is this wierdo’ and ‘wtf is there about me to like, they’re clearly looking for something’ and ‘what the hell kind of person even says those things’, and y’know, instant escalation of doubt and distrust.
But what if more things happened in one of those runs than just what we saw. Is what I’m getting at.
But wait…what if the new loop doesn’t restart with him offering her his hand on the Plains of Silence? What if it starts with “can I talk to you?”
That means she’s had endless versions of this conversation. That little half-smile she has on her face when he says “I’ll make my own way” is because she already knows he’s going to say that. Because he says that every time.
Maybe she learns that if she’s too honest about wanting him to stay, it scares him off and he doesn’t come back the next morning. In some of those versions, they ride across the salt until they run out of food and water. In others, someone figures out they have to go back–maybe Furiosa figures it out herself, or Val suggests it, or Toast does, or Nux and Capable have been talking on the back of their bike and come up with the idea. But it never works without him there.
Then, one time, almost by chance, she says the right thing and he catches up to them the next morning, and they get much further, and she realizes, oh. She can never make him stay, but if she’s cautious and lucky, he’ll figure it out himself and come back to her. It’s still a hard day, a really hard day, and she does it hundreds of times over, and she always dies, but slowly she learns all the other pieces that have to fall in place.
She doesn’t realize until the last time through that the reason he needs to be there is not as an extra fighter, although that helps, but so he can give her his blood and keep her alive to reach the Citadel. Because the part at the Citadel never works without her.
