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thatonezombiecosplayer · 7 years

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Corvus cormax part 12

Sorry about the lengthy silence. I went through a bit of a phase where I was either horribly stuck, or just hated everything I tried to write. Much thanks to @singlewhitecatlady for always throwing ideas at me, and helping me get un-stuck.

This story is based off of @icarus-doodles’ raven!Max AU (x, x, x, x, x, x).

Also see further art here, here, and here, and a gifset!

“Max! Max! It’s okay.”

Max awoke with a start, his beak open as he gasped for breath, his heart racing. He wasn’t sure where he was. He had just been in the wastes, hadn’t he? He looked around, disoriented.

“Hey. It’s okay. It’s not real.” Furiosa looked down at him calmly.

Max found her face in the dim light of the room and felt himself start to relax. It had just been a dream.

He had been caught in a hunter’s trap, fluttering frantically inside a steel box, ramming his head into the sides and top in panic. He had watched himself walk right into it, knowing full well what it was, but unable to stop himself. It was like he had been trapped inside his own skull, only able to watch as he zeroed in on the bait. Like he had taken a backseat in his own body, some mindless creature in control of his actions.

Max shook the images away. It wasn’t real. “Sorry. Woke you?” The sun was rising, but it was still early.

“It’s fine,” she replied, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Wouldn’t mind getting an early start today anyway.”

She got up to change clothes, and Max quietly started to preen his feathers, rearranging all the ones that were sticking up wrong, but quickly stopped himself and let them be. He wondered if he had been flailing as badly as he had been in his dream. He grunted to try to clear the lump in his throat, and looked up as Furiosa was strapping her arm on.

She turned to open the door, motioning for him to follow, and he flew across the room and perched on her shoulder as she stepped out into the hallway.

“Nuh-uh,” she said, shoving him off her shoulder. “Today is day seven. I’m not having you sitting there if you’re going to turn into a human again.”

Max squawked quietly and fluttered to the floor. He couldn’t exactly argue with her reasoning, though. He hopped along after her, trying to keep up as she headed down to find some breakfast.

He tried to go about his day with Furiosa, but it was hard not to get anxious as the hours passed. Would he turn back? When? He tried not to think about if it didn’t work. He fidgeted, trying to sort tools while Furiosa worked, then just resorted to pecking at them and arranging them randomly on the floor.

“Max.”

Max stared at the tools at his feet, lost in thought.

“Hey, Max.” A foot nudged him, and Max finally looked up to see Toast standing over him, eyeing his sprawl of tools with a raised eyebrow.

“I think you need something to do. Come on.”

He tilted his head, but when she motioned for him to come, he quickly started grabbing the tools and piling them back into the toolbox from where he had gotten them.

“I’m borrowing Max,” Toast said loudly over her shoulder, presumably to Furiosa, as she started to walk away.

Max tried to finish cleaning up, but Toast was already leaving him behind, so he shoved the last few tools in the general direction of the toolbox and spread his wings to fly after her.

“Mind a little garden work?” Toast asked when he caught up and landed to hop along beside her. “Dag needs the extra help today. She started noticing some bugs on the crops yesterday. Says she wants all available hands getting rid of them before they do too much damage.”

Max croaked a sort of non-answer. Pest control didn’t sound like a particularly fun task, but a part of himself he wasn’t sure he wanted to listen to pointed out that he was getting kind of hungry…

She led him up to the top of the Citadel and into the gardens. Max followed curiously as she approached a row of tomato plants and dug through the leaves a moment.

“These,” she said, holding a small black beetle between her fingers for him to see. Max leaned in and inspected it, gave a nod of acknowledgement, then snatched the beetle from her, crunched it in his beak, and swallowed it down.

Toast snatched her hand back, surprised, then her face wrinkled up in faint disgust. “Ugh, you don’t have to eat—“ She cut herself off as Max blinked at her almost cluelessly. “You know what, fine. Whatever works for you.” She shook her head and turned back toward the plants. Max hopped over to the other side of the row and started searching for more morsels. He snapped them up one by one, and decided that this wasn’t such a bad task after all.

Eventually Toast moved on to a different row of plants, but Max continued his work where he was. The beetles weren’t very big, and there weren’t a ton of them, but he figured he could get a meal’s worth in if he kept at it.

His meal was interrupted suddenly by the blaring of horns, first from one of the Citadel’s watch towers, then echoed by the others. Max looked up and around, alarmed.

Toast leapt up from where she was working on the next row over and ran to the nearby edge of the spire they were on. Max followed and peered out into the desert.

“Attack,” Toast said grimly. Max glanced up at her, then toward the horizon where she was looking. A small cloud of dust rose in the west, the kind Max knew could only be kicked up by a party of vehicles on the move.

“We have to get ready.” Toast was suddenly dashing away toward the steps that led down from the garden, and Max scrambled into the air to follow after her.

“It’s bad?” He asked her simply after he had caught up and perched on her shoulder.

“Those horns are only used if the watches spot a war party. We’ve got maybe half an hour before they’re here.”

The Citadel was abuzz with activity, people running here and there, arming themselves, finding strategic positions. The lifts were working full-tilt to bring as many people up from the ground as possible, and many others down below scrambled into hidden holes in the ground so as not to be caught in the battle to come.

Toast headed straight to the armory, where she took over supervising what weapons and ammunition got handed out to whom, barking orders for certain locations to be covered. Max perched on a crate beside her and fidgeted nervously. The familiar adrenaline of an expected battle was starting to get to him, though he knew he couldn’t take up a gun to help. He glanced over his shoulder at the arms and ammunition that were quickly disappearing from the store room. A War Boy picked up one crate of hand-made explosives to take with him, uncovering another crate below it. Max stared at the grenades packed in neat rows.

He hopped over to the edge of the crate he was on and prodded at Toast’s arm, then flapped his wings impatiently as she finished handing out some guns to a few more people who had volunteered to fight.

“What?” She looked down at him, placing her hands on her hips.

“Those,” he said, nodding his head toward the box of grenades quickly. “I can use them.”

“We can’t use such big explosives around the Citadel. We’d risk damaging the buildings below or hurting the people who might be hiding there.”

“No. Before they get here. Can pick some off.”

Toast’s eyes lit up for a moment with the possibilities, but then she thought about it and shook her head. “I can’t let you do that. If they realize you’re the one dropping them, they could shoot you right out of the sky.”

Max grunted. “Take risks in battle.”

She leaned down toward him and lowered her voice. “Max, you could turn human any minute. What if you’re out there flying when—“

Max’s feathers fluffed out in anger. “People will die when they get here,” he interrupted.

Toast closed her mouth against what she was saying. She looked to the grenades, then to Max, and back, hesitated a bit longer, then spoke. “How many can you carry at once?”

Max considered it. “Maybe four.”

Toast quickly snatched four of the grenades, ordered a War Boy to take her place, and hurried out of the room with Max scrambling after her once again. There was a door to the outside not far away, and she stopped just behind the snipers perched there and looked back at Max. “You sure?”

Max nodded, and indicated the straps of his backpack. “Two here.”

Toast hooked a grenade onto each strap under his wings, and he gripped the other two with his feet. He gave Toast a nod, and hefted himself into the air. It was a heavy load, and the two under his wings made it a little harder to flap, but at least he was airborne, and by the looks of it wouldn’t have far to fly now.

The doubts in the back of his mind about making the first strike against a group with unknown intention were cleared when he saw the bristling guns mounted on the vehicles, and the men already hanging out of windows and perched on top of vehicles with weapons ready. They weren’t here to make trade agreements, that was for sure.

He tried to plan where best to strike them as he approached, but he didn’t have much time, and he would probably only get a couple passes before they spotted him. He didn’t know how quickly they would identify him as an attacker after the explosions started, but didn’t particularly want to risk giving them much of a chance. At least the war party was in a fairly tight formation.

He swooped low at the last minute and pulled the pin on one of the grenades under his wing just before he passed the lead vehicle. It unhooked from the strap as the lever released, and fell away from him. Max didn’t wait, but immediately pulled the pin on the second one as he passed over the center of the group of vehicles and let that one fall away too. He swooped to the side and dropped low to the ground as he came about to try to keep up with the cars.

The explosions happened in quick succession, taking out two of the vehicles and causing one more to crash in their wake. The others swerved around the destruction, and the convoy hesitated, but another vehicle quickly took the lead and the party continued toward the Citadel.

Max stayed low to try to avoid being spotted as he flew alongside them. The momentary confusion and change of leadership was just enough to get him ahead of them, but he’d have to act quickly if he wanted to hit them again. He swung to the side again and climbed quickly as he approached the convoy’s flank. He pulled the pin of his third grenade and dropped it as he passed over the edge of the war party, but mis-estimated, and the explosion fell back behind the racing vehicles, and they quickly left him behind.

Max turned back toward the Citadel and flapped like his life depended on it. They weren’t far now, and as the war party reached the base of the Citadel, they slowed to climb the narrow path into the center of the spires. Max knew he shouldn’t use the last grenade this close to the buildings that lined the road they were now on, but if he could just take out a few more of their attackers, it would mean that much less damage they could do in their attack. As he caught up, he picked out one vehicle with an open hatch on the roof, and he zeroed in on it. He landed on the roof just long enough to pull the pin and drop the last grenade neatly into the hatch, then took off and darted for the nearest mud-and-brick building for cover. Bullets struck the wall right beside him as he dove into a window and ducked down for the explosion as it shook the surrounding buildings.

He hurried through the building and flew out a window in the back, trying to stay out of sight. Bullets were starting to fly between the vehicles and the walls of the Citadel now, but it wasn’t far up to the door he had left through, where he found Toast picking off attackers alongside two other gunmen. He perched at her feet and turned his attention to the battle below.

If there were still people of the Citadel down on the ground, they were well-hidden, and the attackers didn’t seem interested in the buildings anyway. They knew that the power of the Citadel was in the towers above.

“They’ve got some kind of armor,” Toast growled, shooting at one attacker for the fourth time and not bringing him down. Max stepped nearer the edge and looked over carefully. By the looks of it a number of the ones that had left the cover of the vehicles were taking hits that didn’t seem to be stopping them. Ten or so that Max could see stepped up to the walls of the citadel, and one by one fired grappling hooks at the stone above them. Those that found a sturdy anchor started to climb.

“Shit.” Toast aimed at one climbing the spire opposite, but the bullets barely seemed to bother him. “I need bigger rounds.”

Max watched one whose hook had anchored near an opening in the side of the Citadel fall back to the ground as his rope was cut. “Knife.” He looked up at Toast.

“What?”

“Knife. I can cut the ropes.”

“If you go out there…”

Max glared and she cut herself off. They just had this discussion. If he could help in any way, he didn’t see why she should be stopping him.

Toast chewed at her lip and looked back toward the men slowly climbing the walls. Another had fallen by someone else’s hand, but the rest had their hooks anchored somewhere where nobody inside the Citadel could get to them. She pulled the knife from her belt and crouched down to hold it out to Max. Max grabbed it in his beak and hurried back out the open doorway.

He stuck close to the walls, though he knew they would provide little cover from the rain of bullets coming from the vehicles at the base of the Citadel, or a missed shot from the Citadel’s walls. He hurried toward the nearest climber, found a place to perch a few feet below where the hook was anchored, and started hacking at the rope with the knife in his beak.

He cut one down, then found a second. He jumped instinctually away as bullets hit the wall near him, but shook his head and focused back on his task until the rope was cut. Two down. By the time he went looking for a third, he noticed there were no more climbers on the ropes. Attackers fled back to the cars, and the few that hadn’t been hit by War Boy lances turned and hurried back out the way they came. Cheers rose up from the walls of the Citadel. Max stopped on a ledge and blinked, confused.

That seemed too easy.

...To be continued (Part 13)

#mad max fury road #mad max #fury road #max rockatansky #furiosa #raven!max #toast #birb max want more big boom #fic #my fic #ao3

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