A Thousand Small Deaths

"There's no winner in the accounting of mutual destruction—just two people tallying wounds and pretending the scales balance."

Sleep had barely begun its claim when laughter shattered it.

Paul's cackle was the first assault—loud, jarring, penetrating the canvas walls of the tent as if they were made of tissue paper. The sound seemed designed to violate whatever fragile peace I'd managed to carve out in this place.

Then Glenda's voice followed, her words carrying that particular edge of humour that cuts rather than tickles.

"Shh. The zombie is sleeping."

Heat surged through me—a visceral, immediate response that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with rage.

What a rude bitch.

The thought was savage, unfiltered, born from a place that didn't care about fairness or context or the fact that Glenda had helped save Joel's life hours ago. None of that mattered in the face of hearing my son—my son—reduced to a punchline.

Kain's chuckle joined the chorus, twisting the knife deeper. "Well, I didn't know how else to describe him."

Zombie.

They're calling my son a zombie.

The boy who died today. The boy who came back to life through means none of us understand. The boy who just learned to walk again, who whispered 'Dad' in a voice destroyed by violence—and they're making fucking jokes about him.

The pain that lanced through my chest had nothing to do with the healing wound from the coal. This was different. Deeper. The kind of hurt that words inflict when they come from people you'd started to trust.

Anger boiled within me—a tempest that threatened to send me storming out of the tent, confronting them around their cosy fucking fire, demanding to know how they could laugh at someone so vulnerable. My hands clenched into fists against the sleeping bag. My jaw locked so tight my teeth ached.

But I didn't move.

Couldn't move.

Because if I went out there now, I'd say things that couldn't be unsaid. Do things that couldn't be undone. And Joel needed me here, not expelled from the group for assaulting people who'd made a tasteless joke.

Tears came instead—unbidden, hot, blurring my vision in the darkness. I covered my ears like a child trying to block out monsters, but the damage was already done. The laughter, the mocking tone, had etched itself into memory where it would fester.

They don't understand. They can't understand. Joel isn't a zombie. He's a miracle. He's my son. He's everything.

But the words stayed trapped inside, unspoken witnesses to a wound that would take longer to heal than any physical injury.

Movement at the tent flap made my body tense.

Another intrusion. Another violation of the small sanctuary I'd tried to create for Joel and me.

The silhouette that entered was familiar—Luke's shape moving quietly across the floor toward where I lay. The recognition did nothing to ease the tight knot of anxiety coiled in my stomach. If anything, it made things worse.

What does he want?

I hastily wiped at my face, erasing the evidence of tears that the darkness probably hid anyway. Pride demanded I not be seen crying, even by someone who'd witnessed my tears countless times over our decade together.

Luke stopped at my waist.

The positioning was deliberate. Calculated. I knew that stance, knew what it meant, and the knowledge sent a fresh wave of disbelief crashing through me.

Surely not. Not now. Not after everything that's happened today.

But Luke had never been particularly attuned to timing or appropriateness when it came to his needs.

Carefully, he raised his leg and slid it across my body. The rest of him followed in smooth motion until he was straddling my waist, his weight settling onto my hips with the familiarity of countless similar positions over the years.

I glared up at him.

Even in the darkness, I hoped he could feel the heat of my anger, the absolute incredulity that radiated from every pore.

How the fuck can Luke be horny now?

My son was lying on a mattress metres away—a son Luke had known about and hidden from me. Joel had died today. Had been resurrected through means none of us understood. Had taken his first steps since having his throat cut. And Luke's response to all of this was to climb on top of me looking for sex?

Un-fucking-believable.

Luke leaned in and kissed me gently on the neck.

I didn't stir.

The response—or rather, the lack of it—was instinctual. Learned behaviour from years of navigating Luke's moods and desires. Like scared prey avoiding a predator, I'd discovered that if I didn't respond, Luke would usually bore quickly and move on to something else.

Just don't react. Don't encourage. He'll give up.

But Luke wasn't giving up tonight.

His tongue traced a path to the tip of my ear—a technique he knew I'd always responded to in the past, back when touching him didn't feel like betrayal and being touched by him didn't feel like violation. His left hand reached behind his body and enclosed itself firmly around my crotch.

Fuck.

I tried to ignore it. Tried my best to keep my body from responding, to will my dick into indifference.

But fuck, Luke is good with his hands.

Even after everything—the lies, the manipulation, the slow death of everything we'd built—my body remembered. Muscle memory that didn't care about emotional context. Nerve endings that responded to stimulation regardless of whether my heart and mind were screaming for it to stop.

The conflict was maddening. My flesh beginning to betray me while my soul recoiled.

I pushed against Luke's chest—firm, definitive, propelled by a mixture of confusion and indignation that finally found physical expression.

"What the fuck are you doing, Luke?"

The words emerged as a venomous hiss, sharp enough to cut, quiet enough not to wake Joel. A defence mechanism born from the need to maintain control of at least one thing in this situation.

Luke's whisper was meant to convey desire, to bridge the distance that had grown between us with the intimacy of shared want.

"I want you so badly."

The words might have meant something once. Might have sparked heat instead of cold disgust. But now they felt hollow, their sincerity undermined by the unmistakable aroma of whiskey that hung heavy on his breath.

Drunk. Of course he's drunk.

"You're drunk."

The accusation carried no surprise, only resignation. This was Luke's pattern—liquid courage fuelling the advances he'd stopped making sober, alcohol loosening whatever remained of his awareness of how far we'd drifted.

Luke retreated slightly, both physically and emotionally. But his words that followed were designed to wound.

"Oh, come on, Jamie. It's been at least six months since we've been intimate."

Six months.

Had it really been that long?

Yes, I realised. Yes, it had.

The last time we'd had sex had been perfunctory. Going through motions that neither of us had fully believed in. Afterward, I'd felt emptier than before—the physical release providing none of the connection that intimacy was supposed to create.

"I'm not in the mood."

Simple. True. A statement that carried the weight of unspoken grievances stretching back years.

"That's always your excuse."

Luke's accusation was a jab at the wound he knew was there. The frustration in his voice was genuine—I could hear the hurt beneath the anger—but my capacity for sympathy had been exhausted long before we'd arrived in Clivilius.

Then he went for the throat.

"You're never in the mood, are you! Oh, wait. I'm not Ben. Is that it?"

Ben.

The name landed like a blow to the solar plexus. The affair I'd confessed to. The betrayal that had cracked something between us that was already fracturing. The truth I'd offered in a moment of guilt that Luke now wielded as a weapon as we fought.

"That's not fair, Luke!"

My voice broke—volume rising despite my intention to keep Joel asleep. The raw emotion that Luke's words had stirred refused to stay contained.

"I know it's not fair!"

Luke's bitter retort was the breaking point. An acknowledgment of the chasm between us that couldn't be bridged by drunken advances or accusations or even the mutual destruction we'd wrought on each other.

As Luke stormed toward the tent flap, the finality of his exit left a Luke stormed toward the tent flap, his silhouette rigid with anger and hurt.

"Luke!" My sharp whisper was a desperate attempt to salvage something—the conversation, the relationship, some thread of connection that might survive this latest rupture.

But he didn't stop. Didn't turn. The tent flap fell closed behind him, leaving only darkness and the oppressive weight of everything unsaid.

I lay there in the silence that followed, the void his exit had created filling with thoughts I couldn't escape.

This is what we've become.

Two people who can't be in the same space without drawing blood. Who use each other's worst moments as ammunition. Who've forgotten how to touch without hurting.

The catalogue of grievances scrolled through my mind unbidden. Luke's manipulation. His secrets about the Portal, about Joel's death, about bringing us to a dimension we could never leave. The way he'd controlled information, controlled outcomes, controlled everything except the consequences that had spiralled beyond anyone's ability to manage.

And balanced against that—my own sins. The affair with Ben. The slow withdrawal from our relationship that had preceded it. The countless times I'd chosen distance over engagement, silence over confrontation, until we'd become strangers sharing a home.

I may have fucked up our relationship. But Luke has fucked up our lives.

The bitter acknowledgment echoed in the empty tent, an unheard confession to the air itself.

I betrayed him with my body. He betrayed me with everything else.

Which sin is greater?

Does it even matter anymore?

"I guess that makes us fucking even," I told the cool darkness, my voice hollow.

A pathetic attempt at justifying the impasse we'd reached. At finding some balance in the scales of mutual destruction. At making sense of a decade that had ended not with a single dramatic rupture but with a thousand small deaths, each one bleeding us a little more until we'd arrived here—in a tent in another dimension, unable to even occupy the same space without tearing into each other.

Taking a deep, stubborn breath, I rolled onto my side.

The movement pulled at my healing chest wound and sent fresh pain shooting through my injured ankle. Physical discomforts that seemed almost welcome compared to the emotional wreckage of the past few minutes.

The night's silence, which had been a comfort before Luke's intrusion, now echoed with the remnants of our shattered connection. Each breath I took felt like a reminder of the distance between what we'd been and what we could never be again.

Across the tent, Joel's steady breathing continued undisturbed. Somehow, impossibly, he'd slept through it all—the mockery, the confrontation, the destruction. Or perhaps his body was so exhausted from resurrection that nothing short of physical violence could have woken him.

At least he was spared this.

At least one of us doesn't have to carry the memory of what just happened.

I stared at the canvas wall, seeing nothing, thinking too much.

The others were still out there by the fire. I could hear the low murmur of their conversation, the occasional laugh that made me flinch with the memory of "zombie." Luke would be joining them now, probably reaching for the whiskey again, probably finding sympathy in their company that I couldn't provide.

Let him.

Let them all have their fire and their jokes and their easy camaraderie.

I have Joel. I have my son. And tomorrow, when the sun rises over this red hellscape again, I'll figure out how to be his father in a world that makes no sense.