Biting the Hand That Heals

"It's remarkably difficult to feel grateful when you wake up screaming—even when the person causing the pain is the only reason you'll wake up at all tomorrow."

The pain arrived before consciousness.

It ripped through the darkness like lightning splitting a night sky—white-hot, absolute, originating from the centre of my chest and radiating outward in waves that seemed to set every nerve ending in my body ablaze. My eyes flew open involuntarily, the muscles responding to trauma before my brain could catch up. A scream tore from my throat—raw, animal, carrying every ounce of suffering that had accumulated since I'd first set foot in this fucking dimension.

What the fuck—

Strong hands pressed against my shoulders, pinning me to the mattress as my body instinctively tried to arch away from the source of the agony. Someone was holding me down. Someone was hurting me. The primal part of my brain—the lizard remnant that predated language and reason—screamed at me to fight, to flee, to escape whatever was being done to my chest.

But my head spun with such violence that reality fractured at the edges. The tent's canvas walls tilted and swam. Colours bled into each other. The pressure on my shoulders felt like anchors dragging me down into depths I couldn't see.

Duke's barking pierced the chaos—sharp, frantic yaps that added another layer to the assault on my senses. His voice was the only familiar thing in this nightmare, and even it felt distorted, stretched thin by the pain that consumed every other thought.

"Jamie!"

My name, bellowed with urgency, thundered through my already throbbing skull. The sound bounced around inside my head like a ricocheting bullet, adding concussive force to the agony already present.

"Stay out!" A woman's voice—shrill, commanding, cutting through the commotion with the authority of someone accustomed to crisis. "Get them the fuck out!"

The words barely registered. My focus had narrowed to a single, overwhelming sensation: something heavy was pressing down on my waist, immobilising my lower body with a weight that felt crushing. I tried to move my legs. Nothing responded.

Paralysed!

The thought screamed through my mind with the force of a klaxon. Panic—pure, white, blinding panic—flooded my nervous system. My lungs seized. Each attempt at breath became a Herculean effort against the invisible force pinning me to the mattress. I couldn't feel my legs. I couldn't move. Something had happened, something catastrophic, and I was trapped in my own useless body while strangers did things to me I couldn't see or understand.

Then the second wave hit.

If the first assault had been lightning, this was a nuclear detonation. Pain erupted from my chest with such savage intensity that my vision whited out completely. The scream that tore from my throat belonged to someone else—some wounded creature I'd never met, producing sounds no human should make. It was primal. Visceral. The auditory embodiment of suffering pushed past all reasonable limits.

"Hold him!" The command sliced through the haze, sharp and desperate. "Last time!"

Last time of what? What are you doing to me?

I wanted to writhe, to buck, to throw off whatever held me and escape the torture being inflicted on my body. But the connection between intention and action had severed completely. My limbs remained motionless while my mind screamed orders they couldn't receive.

The panic that had gripped me tightened its hold, a relentless tide threatening to pull me under entirely. Every instinct demanded the voices stop, the pain end, the nightmare conclude. Yet somewhere in the chaos, a thread of awareness clung to those voices—to the presence of others—as a lifeline in the overwhelming darkness.

The agony began to ebb like a storm passing over open water.

Not gone—the pain was still there, throbbing with my heartbeat, a constant reminder that something catastrophic had just occurred—but the acute, world-destroying intensity faded enough for other sensations to filter through. The hands on my shoulders relaxed their pressure. The weight on my waist shifted.

"I need some clean water." A softer voice now, the same woman from before but with the urgency replaced by something calmer. A request rather than a command.

My mind, which had been spinning like a compass near a magnet, began to find its footing. The fractured pieces of awareness started clicking back into place, each one bringing with it a new scrap of context.

"I'll get it." Paul's voice. Familiar. Grounding. A tether to reality I could grab onto.

The pressure around my waist released suddenly, and it felt like chains falling away. I gulped air—deep, desperate breaths that filled lungs I hadn't realised had been compressed. Oxygen flooded my system, bringing with it a clarity that had been absent moments before.

I can breathe. I can feel my legs. I'm not paralysed—someone was just sitting on me.

My eyes, blurred by tears I hadn't been aware of shedding, cracked open. The world swam into focus with agonising slowness. My brain reconnected with my body in stages, each limb reporting for duty with varying degrees of reluctance. I raised a hand—my hand, responding to my command—and wiped the moisture from my cheeks with the back of my wrist.

The first thing I saw clearly was a face framed by long, golden hair. A woman I'd never seen before, mid-forties maybe, with features set in an expression of professional detachment. She was watching me with the assessing gaze of someone cataloguing symptoms, not emotions.

Confusion and residual anger collided in my chest, fuelling words that erupted before I could consider their wisdom.

"Who the fuck are you?"

The question came out as a defensive snarl—a wounded animal baring its teeth at the nearest potential threat. Part of me knew it was unfair, knew that whoever this woman was, she'd probably just saved my life. But the part of me that had been pinned down and tortured while my body refused to cooperate wasn't interested in fairness.

"I'm a doctor." The reply was stripped of emotion, a statement of fact delivered with clinical precision.

Luke's entrance added context I desperately needed. He stepped into my field of vision, his face carrying an expression that mixed concern with something that looked uncomfortably like relief.

"And she just saved your life. You should be grateful."

The word hit me like a slap.

"Grateful!" I spat it back at him, along with a ball of bile that had accumulated during the ordeal. The bitter taste filled my mouth, a physical manifestation of the turmoil churning in my gut. "You expect me to be fucking grateful?"

The question hung in the air, charged with everything I couldn't articulate—the pain, the fear, the violation of being held down while strangers did things to my body without my consent or understanding. Yes, logically, I should be grateful. Logically, this woman had apparently done something necessary to save me. But logic had nothing to do with the raw, ragged emotion that pulsed through me with each laboured breath.

Duke's growl cut through the tension—low, menacing, a vibration that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in his small body. His protective instincts, usually dormant beneath layers of playful enthusiasm, had fully engaged. His lips pulled back from his teeth, and for the first time, I saw my ridiculous little Shih Tzu as something potentially dangerous.

"Duke! Stop it!" Luke's voice carried a note of alarm beneath the command.

But Duke wasn't listening. Duke was operating on pure instinct now, reading the room with canine accuracy and deciding that the stranger who'd been hurting his human needed to understand the consequences.

I tried to push myself upright, driven by some combination of defiance and the desperate need to regain control over my own body. My arms trembled with the effort. My chest wound screamed in protest. But I needed to sit up, needed to prove to myself that I could still move, that I wasn't as helpless as I'd felt moments ago.

The doctor—I still didn't know her name, hadn't processed anything beyond "doctor" and "golden hair"—moved to intervene. Her hand reached for my shoulder with professional authority, pressing me back down toward the mattress. The touch, though gentle, felt like another restraint. Another pair of hands deciding what my body should do.

Duke's reaction was instantaneous.

One sharp bark, then a flash of movement as he launched himself at her arm. His teeth found purchase on her forearm, clamping down with a determination that surprised even me. The woman jerked back, swatting at his head with her free hand.

"Get off me!" Her voice had lost its clinical calm, sharpened now by adrenaline and pain.

The impact forced Duke to release his grip. He stumbled back, shaking his head, but the protective fury in his eyes hadn't diminished.

Luke was already in motion, scooping Duke into his arms with the desperate speed of someone trying to prevent a disaster from escalating further. "Oh Glenda," he began, his voice heavy with apology, but the woman—Glenda, apparently—cut him off with a glare.

"Back away, Luke."

Her authority was undisputed in that moment. Whatever their relationship, whatever history existed between them, Glenda had just established that she wasn't someone to be trifled with.

Luke's response was soft, conciliatory. "I'll lock him out."

He retreated through the tent flap with Duke still squirming in his arms, leaving me alone with the woman my dog had just attacked.

Glenda.

The name echoed in my mind with a mixture of irony and disdain. That's the name for a witch. Or just a bitch.

The thought was uncharitable. Unfair. But I was beyond fairness, beyond charitable thoughts, beyond anything except the throbbing in my chest and the bitter taste still coating my tongue.

My eyes tracked Glenda's movements as she examined her arm, wiping at the saliva Duke had left behind. The skin looked red where his teeth had gripped, but from what I could see, he hadn't managed to break through. A small mercy—the last thing any of us needed was a puncture wound in a place with no proper medical supplies.

Well, maybe not no medical supplies. She's apparently a doctor.

The details were filtering through slowly, pieces of a puzzle I'd been too incapacitated to assemble until now.

"It's your own fault, you know."

The words slipped out before I could consider their wisdom, propelled by pain-fuelled irritation and a stubborn refusal to accept that I was the only one at fault here. I wanted a reaction. Some acknowledgment that the chaos hadn't been entirely one-sided.

Glenda didn't respond.

Her silence was a wall—impenetrable, deliberate, designed to deny me the engagement I was seeking. She simply continued examining her arm with the same clinical detachment she'd brought to everything else, refusing to rise to my provocation.

The lack of response only stoked my frustration. I lay there, anger and pain and a grudging sliver of shame swirling together into something I couldn't easily categorise. The tent felt smaller now, the canvas walls pressing in, the air thick with tension that had no outlet.

"Luke." Glenda's voice broke the silence with sharp purpose. Luke re-entered, having apparently secured Duke somewhere outside. "Listen carefully. I need you to return to the Medical Centre and get me a few supplies."

"Sure." Luke's response was immediate, a soldier receiving orders. "What do you need?"

I watched as Glenda grabbed a t-shirt and began wrapping it around the bite mark with what I couldn't help but perceive as unnecessary theatricality. The wound couldn't be that serious—Duke weighed maybe six kilos soaking wet, and his teeth were blunted by years of chewing on soft toys rather than anything that might actually sharpen them.

A little dramatic. And you call yourself a doctor?

The thought was reflex, another defensive jab born from my own discomfort and the absurdity of a situation that seemed to grow more bizarre by the hour.

"I need..." Glenda paused, her request hanging in the air. "Do you have any paper and a pen?"

Luke's smile was a small beacon of normalcy. "Actually, we do."

He rummaged through the tent's accumulated supplies while Glenda readjusted her makeshift bandage. When he presented the items, Glenda accepted them with a short nod.

"Here."

"Thanks." Her brief smile was the first crack in her professional armour—a glimpse of the human beneath the doctor.

While Glenda wrote and Luke hovered, I found my attention drifting downward.

The sight that greeted me was unexpected. The angry swelling that had distorted my chest since the coal burn—the raised, weeping welt that had represented everything wrong with my situation—had subsided dramatically. The skin beneath looked almost normal. Clean. As if someone had performed surgery while I was unconscious.

Someone did perform surgery while I was unconscious.

The realisation crystallised with uncomfortable clarity. That agony I'd woken to hadn't been random torture. It had been medical intervention. Brutal, primitive, performed without anaesthesia or warning—but intervention nonetheless.

Beside me, crumpled and forgotten, lay my shirt. Or what remained of it. I reached for the fabric, my fingers encountering a texture that made my stomach lurch. Grey gunk—there was no other way to describe it—coated the material with the consistency of congealed grease. The smell hit me a moment later: rot, infection, the unmistakable reek of tissue that had gone wrong.

And there, embedded in the grey mess like a splinter of pure malevolence, was a long piece of charcoal.

I stared at it for a long moment, my brain struggling to process what I was seeing. That had been inside me. That piece of burnt wood, that accumulation of infection, that grey horror—all of it had been festering beneath my skin, poisoning my blood, slowly killing me while I complained about headaches and exhaustion.

The urge to gag rose unbidden. I swallowed it down, but the reality of what I was looking at—what had been extracted from my own body—left me shaken in ways the pain itself hadn't managed.

My eyes found Glenda again, seeing her now through a different lens. The skepticism that had coloured my perception began to dissolve, replaced by something more complicated. She had done this. Had opened me up, extracted the poison, cleaned what could be cleaned. Without her intervention, that charcoal would have continued its work. The infection would have spread. I would have died on this mattress in this tent in this impossible dimension, and no one could have done anything to stop it.

She really has just saved my life.

The thought resonated with uncomfortable truth. I'd been hostile, defensive, ungrateful—and she'd saved me anyway.

"A lot of this you can actually find in my examination room," Glenda said, her eyes meeting Luke's as she handed over the list she'd been writing. Luke squatted beside her, taking the paper with a solemnity that seemed weighted with significance I didn't understand.

"The rest," Glenda continued, her gaze unwavering, "the ones with the asterisks, you'll have to take from the shared supply room."

Luke's head snapped up at her words, some implication registering that I couldn't follow. There was a moment—brief but charged—where the unsaid seemed to fill the tent with its own presence.

"I'm sorry, Luke, but we are going to need it all." Glenda's voice carried both apology and resolve, a difficult combination that suggested she understood the cost of what she was asking.

Luke's nod was silent, his acceptance visible in the set of his shoulders rather than any verbal response. "I'll be quick. I promise."

Then Glenda reached out and grasped Luke's arm, her grip speaking volumes. "Luke." Her voice was soft but firm, carrying the weight of warning. "Be careful."

Luke's expression tightened, the lines of his face deepening with whatever he was processing. The seriousness with which he received her words was unmistakable—not casual acknowledgment, but genuine acceptance of danger.

With a final nod, he left the tent.

I stared at the empty space where he'd been, a myriad of questions racing through my mind with no answers in sight.

What the hell is going on? Where is this Medical Centre? Why does Luke need to be careful?

In the quiet that settled after Luke's departure, Duke positioned himself at my side with the unwavering vigilance of a sentry.

Someone—Luke, presumably—had let him back in, but the little Shih Tzu showed no interest in reconciliation. His body remained tense, his eyes tracking Glenda's every movement with suspicion that bordered on hostility. He'd made his judgment and wasn't about to revise it based on new evidence.

Glenda, for her part, kept a respectful distance. Whether this was professional wisdom or simple self-preservation, I couldn't say. But the space between us remained carefully maintained, an unspoken agreement that suited everyone involved.

I suggested, perhaps naively, that she might try offering Duke a treat. An olive branch. A gesture that might smooth over the violence of their first encounter. But Duke, with the stubbornness that defined his breed, refused to be swayed. He turned his nose away from her hesitant offer, his message clear: forgiveness was not for sale, not even at the price of his favourite snacks.

Watching his refusal sparked an uncomfortable reflection. I had been hostile too—arguably more so than Duke, who at least had the excuse of pure instinct. I'd hurled accusations, questioned her competence, met lifesaving intervention with snarled profanity. If Duke couldn't forgive, what hope did I have of earning Glenda's understanding?

The tent flap rustled, announcing Paul's return with the water Glenda had requested. His gasp upon entering was almost theatrical.

"Are you okay, Glenda? What happened?"

The concern in his voice was genuine, his eyes moving between the makeshift bandage on her arm and the tension that still hung in the air.

"I'm fine," Glenda assured him, her voice calm. "It's just a surface wound. This shirt is just a precaution until Luke gets back with some antiseptic."

Oh, fuck off.

The thought was involuntary, my internal skeptic refusing to be silenced. Surface wound my arse. There's not even any blood!

But even as I thought it, I knew I was being unfair. Duke's teeth hadn't broken the skin—that was a good thing, not evidence of deception. I was just looking for reasons to maintain my hostility because letting go of it meant acknowledging my own behaviour.

Paul still looked confused. "But, what..."

"Duke doesn't like her." The words came out flat, stripped of emotion I didn't have the energy to perform. There was a pause, heavy with implications, before I added what I couldn't quite keep myself from saying. "And neither do I."

"Jamie!" Paul's voice carried clear scolding.

"She shouldn't be here," I persisted, the stubbornness that had kept me alive this long refusing to yield. I didn't even fully believe what I was saying anymore—not after seeing what she'd extracted from my chest—but the words kept coming anyway.

Paul's retort was swift and cutting. "If she wasn't here, you'd be bloody dead within a few days!"

The truth of it landed like a punch. I turned away, moaning softly, attempting to roll onto my side in a physical manifestation of retreat. My body protested the movement, but I needed to escape—from Paul's accurate assessment, from Glenda's silence, from my own shame.

"You'd best stay on your back for now." Glenda's voice cut through my attempted escape, the command wrapped in clinical concern.

Reluctantly, I settled back, surrendering to a position that felt like defeat on multiple levels. The tent had become simultaneously sanctuary and prison. A place of healing bound by chains of my own making—my injuries, yes, but also my pride, my hostility, my inability to accept help gracefully.

Paul approached Glenda with determined purpose, pushing past Duke with a gentle nudge of his foot to deposit a small bucket of water before her.

"Well, I've brought you some clean water."

His departure was abrupt—no lingering for thanks, no further conversation. Just the delivery completed and a prompt exit that left a strange echo in its wake.

Well, that was a bit dramatic and odd.

But I didn't have time to dwell on Paul's behaviour. Glenda had already dipped a fresh t-shirt into the bucket, and I watched as clear water dripped from the fabric, each droplet catching the filtered light that penetrated the tent's canvas.

"Do you want to hold him?" Her question, accompanied by a glance toward Duke, caught me off guard.

My response was instinctual. I patted the mattress beside me, and Duke—reading my invitation without hesitation—joined me immediately. "It's okay," I whispered, my voice a blend of reassurance and resignation as I cradled his small body lovingly but firmly.

Glenda approached with the wet t-shirt. Her movements were focused, purposeful, free of any hesitation that might have betrayed uncertainty. The first touch of cool water against my chest was startling in its intensity—not painful, but somehow penetrating, the liquid seeming to reach deeper than mere skin.

I allowed myself the luxury of closing my eyes.

The tension that had gripped my muscles since waking to agony began to release, fibre by fibre. The cool water seeped into the wound with what felt like intention, each droplet a small promise of healing. Duke's warmth pressed against my side—familiar, grounding. The smell of clean water replaced the lingering memory of infected tissue.

New life, Jamie.

The voice of Clivilius echoed within my mind—not heard exactly, but present. Felt more than perceived, carrying an odd wisdom that seemed to originate from somewhere other than my own thoughts.

And this is just the beginning.

The words resonated in the quiet space between heartbeats. I didn't know if I believed them—didn't know if Clivilius's promises were genuine or just another form of manipulation in a place that seemed designed to strip away everything I thought I knew.

But lying there, with Duke beside me and clean water seeping into wounds that had been poisoning me, I couldn't deny that something had shifted. The hostile stranger who'd extracted a charcoal splinter from my chest had, despite my resistance, given me a chance at survival. The voice that had demanded my surrender in the lagoon was now whispering of new beginnings.

Was this indeed a new beginning? A turning point from which things might actually improve?

The thought was both terrifying and cautiously hopeful. I'd been fighting since the moment I arrived—fighting Luke, fighting the Portal, fighting my own body as it failed me piece by piece. The idea of surrender had felt like defeat.

But maybe surrender wasn't the same as giving up. Maybe it was just... letting go of the things I couldn't control so I could focus on the things I could.

The cool water continued its work. Duke's breathing slowed into the rhythm of contentment. Somewhere outside, Paul was presumably continuing whatever task he'd set himself, and Luke was venturing into dangers I didn't understand to retrieve supplies that might save my life.

And I was still here. Still breathing. Still alive.