bakerstreet | wake up, wake up

Cheedo stares at him in surprise, then can't help the little laugh that burst out of her mouth. She hunches forwards, shoulders jerking as she sniggers, hands reaching too late to cover her lips. She hopes he doesn't mind.

"That's not what I meant," she says eventually, and gives him a proper, wide smile this time. "I meant thank you for cheering me up."

The laugh is startling, such a foreign sound, and the attempt at a smile slips a little. He doesn't look bothered, though, just a little bemused. He didn't expect to be successful at cheering her up that much.

Max gives a nod, and straightens slowly from the railing, moving back to the wall and sliding down it carefully to sit. He stretches out his left leg, and looks up at the sky again. "Good. This place... needs to..." His hands gesture vaguely in the air, as if he could find the words there and grab them. "Needs filling up with good things."

"Yeah."

She looks over at him almost warily as he moves, but relaxes when he only lowers himself to sit on the ground. She follows suit after a moment's hesitance, gathering her shawl tight about her shoulders and lifting her head to look at the sky again.

"Dag's been planting," she says, and drops her head to the ground, tracing a finger through the dirt in wiggly, indistinct patterns. "Have you seen?"

He grunts and nods, letting his head rest back against the wall for better stargazing. "Hope it grows." There used to be so much more green, in the world. Some days he can dimly remember a place near the edge of the sea, where there were so many things growing green and an endless stretch of water, back before it all dried up and left only poison and salt.

"...Any of 'em trees?" He knows she has seeds, and all plants start from seeds, but he couldn't tell what any of those seeds are or have the potential to become.

"Maybe. They're still babies right now, so it's hard to tell." The Dag loves them. Cheedo's seen her singing over the sprouts, raking weeds so carefully with her fingers as she plants and waters and waits for her seeds to grow.

Maybe they will grow tall like trees, smash through the ceiling of the Vault, and extend up towards the sky. The mental image of this pleases her, and she smiles to herself, hiking her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them.

"Maybe we can fill up the rock with flowers," she suggests, warming to the idea of it. "I think I'd like it more, that way."

"Hmmh." Hearing her refer to plants as babies is a little odd, but then he thinks maybe that's just how it should be, here. The green things are the children they choose to raise, and that's got to be a better course for their lives than babies that were thrust upon them, unwilling.

"You don't... mm. Like it here..." It's not really a question, because even as he manages to get the words out he finds that he is not so surprised at that. Why would she? Max doesn't like it here at all. It's a place of ugly memories, and not just for him.

"No."

She looks at him nervously, as if she thinks he might judge her for thinking it. When he says nothing in return, she looks at her hands, twists the fabric of her shawl between her fingers as she thinks.

"It's so big. I don't like how open it is. I wish it was just us, sometimes. Capable, Toast, Dag, Furiosa and the Vuvalini, and you."

He looks thoughtful rather than judgmental, gaze falling to her hands. He fidgets a lot, himself, and it's strange to see somebody else doing it. One hand rises to the back of his neck, to rub at the blurred brand there, and he grimaces. "Open. Feels close, to me. Tunnels closing in..." They're in agreement that the masses of people are too much. He'd feel easier, too, if it was just the women he knows, instead of all those sickly war boys and pups and the people that used to be below now finding places up higher in the rocky towers. They couldn't turn this place into anything without all those helping hands, but Just a few people is enough to make a tunnel feel crowded, to him.

She nods, rolling her words around in her mouth before she speaks, darting a quick little look at him before she does.

"I think that– what's scary about it being open is not knowing what's out there." She's lived in the Vault for years, of course. She's used to closed in spaces, and being trapped. While she didn't like it some of the time, trading it abruptly for a world she knows nothing about is scary, and something she still struggles with every so often. It's why she hangs about the Vault even now that they don't have to stay inside of it, even though Capable won't come near it, and Toast spits onto the ground if somebody mentions it.

"If you don't like the tunnels," she continues, curiously this time, "Why are you here?" This place is mostly tunnels, after all. He can't possibly enjoy living in them. Cheedo likes the tunnels. They are good for hiding.

Edited 2015-06-30 03:06 (UTC)

When she looks at him, he's not looking at her, gaze dropped low and expression slightly awkward and sheepish. Social contact does not come easily, and he sometimes seems almost shy, unable to meet people's eyes. Licking his lips, fidgeting, he fights for words again. "I don't like... what I remember in them. Mmhn. But if I...mm, make new memories- good ones..." Maybe Cheedo needs to do the same.

Then the earlier comment about what's out there strikes him, and Max rummages in his battered leather jacket, in the pockets he's sewn inside, and pulls out a rolled-up scrap of fabric. What he unfurls is his homemade map, marked with symbols and a few words marked out in blood or oil or, in a few rare spots, actual ink. It's mostly indecipherable to anyone but him, but he gestures at it, inviting her to look. "That's what's out there." The only symbol she's likely to recognize is Joe's, marked in blood, then later scratched over with a vague kind of plant shape in oil.

She blinks, then scoots in towards him to take the little square of fabric, smoothing it out curiously on her knee.

"Oh," she says, in soft recognition, squinting down at the little oil symbol of the plant. She touches it very gently with her fingertip, traces her nail across the little dots, away towards the edge. He's been mapping the Wastes. So many questions flood to the forefront of her mind: has he been everywhere on this little map? Why is he making it? How long has he been making it? She looks up to ask him, but falls silent when she notices him still staring at the ground.

That's right. He's quite quiet, when he wants to be. She rolls up his little map carefully, and hands it back to him.

"Could... make you a copy. So you'll... mm. Know what's out there." It's his map, so everything on it is somewhere he's been, something he felt was worth marking down to help him find his way. He gets lost, sometimes, in the hallucinations. The map helps him find his way back. He darts a little glance up at her, and tries for a small smile again.

"It's big. Not all bad."

She nods immediately, then backpedals almost instantly, touched as she is by his kindness. "Oh– no, that's okay. You don't need to do that."

He's so nice. She remembers faintly (with a touch of shame) that not too long she had stared at the back of his head from her seat in Furiosa's war rig and hated him, for taking the spot in their party that had belonged to Angharad. She'd been so desperately sad, then. Max hadn't deserved the anger she flung onto him silently, even if it was without his notice.

Both eyebrows lift, and he smiles a little and nods back, seeing the answer behind the answer. "Need ink..." Or oil, maybe. He's fairly sure she'd prefer to have a copy that isn't written in blood, and he'd rather not open up scabs just for the sake of a map. Oblivious to any guilty looks, he forges on thinking of the map. "Can you read?" He could add words that will make more sense than his symbols, but not everyone knows how to read, anymore. Come to that, they may not expect that he can.

It's a little ironic, considering how much more feral than them that he seems, that Max actually came from one of the last pockets of civilization before the old world crumbled completely.

"I have ink," she murmurs, shy again, but pleased that he's apparently insisting on replicating the map for her. She likes the idea of having something to herself about the Wastes– though, maybe she'll share it with the Dag, some day.

She nods to his second question, although she's unable to help giving him a suspicious little squint in return. Strange question, to ask if she can read. Of course she can read. She remembers sitting with Miss Giddy and reading slowly along the wandering tattoos covering her arms.

Max nods and grunts, satisfied. "Good. I'll add words." She may learn, when she starts to interact more with the War Pups and the Wretched, that reading is not so common a skill anymore. Not everyone had a Miss Giddy to teach them, or books to learn the words out of.

"Other towns, out there." He nods, half to himself, thoughts drifting a little. Max is more widely traveled than most people in their current world.

She looks out towards the sky, fingers splaying over her knees as she thinks about that. Her town is out there, somewhere, lost to the desert. She can't remember how many days it's been since she left it. She can't remember a lot of things about home.

"Have you been to many?"

"Been to too many." He nods, playing with the frayed edge of his map absently. "None like here, though. Noplace this green." Most of the towns and settlements he's been to are more like Gastown or the Bullet Farm, dirty, crowded places where resources are hoarded and human life is cheap. That's par for the course, in the Wasteland, and he can tell that what they're trying to build here is something very unique.

Cheedo likes the idea of that, that they're cultivating something in the Citadel that can't be found elsewhere. The green covering the tops of the rocks and growing within it is lovely. Why wouldn't everybody be striving for a patch of it? Her next question is a little more personal than the last:

"Did you come from one of them?"

It takes him a moment to even understand the question, and when he does he frowns a little, but she's so young, she's never known a world where the soil wasn't poisoned, and the ocean was still deep and full of life. Someday, nobody is going to remember the way it once was, if they're not told about it from those that saw it before.

The thought makes him feel old.

Still frowning, he scrubs at his jaw and shifts, drawing up the good knee. "Came from... The coast. When there was one. When... Before..." He makes a vague gesture, then a quiet grunt of frustration over his own difficulty speaking. "Memory is all broken. So are my words. Sorry."

So his town is gone, too. Cheedo doesn't know for sure if her town is really gone or not, but when she can't find some way to go back and check on it, it feels like it's gone. She puts her cheek on her knee and goes silent, lifting a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear.

The Coast. It sounds quite dreamy.

She shakes her head at his explanation, giving him a hesitant smile to show that she understands, that she doesn't need an apology. "Um, it's okay. I don't remember much about my home either."

"Remembering hurts." He sighs, and gives her an apologetic look. He knows the reason his memories come so hard is because of how many things got broken along the way. He had a life, in the old world, and it was torn apart piece by piece while he grasped helplessly at the ruins. His old life went under the wheels.

"It was different. Before. So different sometimes... Mm. Sometimes I think I dreamed it up."

"Miss Giddy told us about it, a bit," she remembers, "But not too much. She said we couldn't go around wishin' for things to go back to how they were, just in case they never did."

At the time she had felt cheated out of the extra information, but listening to Max has changed that. He's right, after all: remembering does hurt. Maybe Miss Giddy didn't really want to talk to anybody about Before either.

"She's... Not here, now?" He's very cautious asking, because losing people is so common in their world, but no less terrible for that. He doesn't remember meeting her, though. If she were here, they wouldn't bother to compare notes. The old world has been firmly left in the past, and this one is too far gone to come back to what it was in their lifetimes.

"Was right." He adds in a grunt.

"No..."

Her expression crumples, just a little, but she's careful to hide it. She looks down at the ground again, at the swirls she had drawn earlier in the dirt. "She didn't come with us. I thought she would be here when we got back, but the Vault was empty."

She sucks in a little, shuddery sigh, and presses her forehead against her knees. "... I miss her. And I miss Angharad."

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