Convenient Catastrophe

"Opportunity rarely knocks politely. Sometimes it shows up on your doorstep looking for someone else entirely—and you have to decide how far you're willing to push."

My eyes snapped open, abruptly torn from the clutches of that haunting dream by a knock so discreet it seemed to belong to another reality entirely. The sound was gentle—barely a suggestion of contact between knuckle and wood—and yet it had managed to reach through layers of nightmare and drag me back to the waking world. I lay still for a moment, chest heaving, trying to separate the phantom terrors that still clung to my mind from the ordinary morning attempting to assert itself through the blinds.

Thin slivers of daylight sliced through the gaps in the fabric, casting pale stripes across the ceiling that wavered and danced as my vision adjusted. Shadows pooled in the corners of the bedroom, and for a disorienting heartbeat, I couldn't tell if they were simply darkness or something more—remnants of what had chased me through that dream corridor, echoes of eyes that had burned with impossible fire.

The knock came again. Firmer this time, though still polite. Real.

With a breath that felt more like surrender than preparation, I pulled back the doona. The fabric peeled away from my bare skin with reluctant intimacy, its surface damp with the physical residue of whatever my unconscious had been processing. I'd gone to bed naked—a habit Jamie had encouraged and one I'd maintained even in his absence, though the empty space beside me made the vulnerability feel less sensual and more exposed.

Sweat had pooled in the hollow of my throat, gathered in the creases where my thighs met my hips, left a cold slick across my lower back that made me shiver as the morning air found it. My cock stood hard against my stomach, straining with an urgency that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the body's crude indifference to context—the flesh continuing its ordinary morning business regardless of what nightmares had carved through the mind. Fear and arousal operated on different circuits entirely, and mine had apparently decided that being chased by shadow figures through liquefying streets was no reason to skip the usual dawn salute.

The room's air hit me with unexpected force—cool and slightly stale, carrying that particular morning quality of a house that had been sealed against the Tasmanian winter. I wiped my palms against the sheets, trying to rid them of the slick discomfort that made my own hands feel like strangers attached to my wrists.

Another knock. Patient but persistent.

I slid from the bed and fumbled in the semi-darkness, grabbing the first t-shirt my hands encountered and pulling it over my head. The fabric felt too heavy, adhering to my damp skin rather than sitting properly. A pair of shorts lay crumpled on the floor where I'd discarded them—last night? The night before?—and I stepped into them with the graceless coordination of someone whose body hadn't fully accepted that sleep was over.

The hallway stretched before me as I half-ran, half-stumbled toward the front of the house. My legs carried the leaden quality of interrupted rest, muscles protesting the sudden demand for movement after hours of paralysis. The shorts twisted around my thighs with each step, bunching in ways that would have been merely irritating under normal circumstances but felt like active sabotage in my current state.

I reached the front door and paused, one hand on the handle, forcing myself to take a breath. Then another. I straightened my shirt. Ran fingers through my hair with limited success. Tried to arrange my features into something that resembled a person who had simply been roused from ordinary sleep rather than dragged from the throat of something ancient and hungry.

I opened the door.

The morning air brushed against my face with cool familiarity—Berriedale in winter, that particular quality of dampness that Tasmania wore like a second skin. And standing on my doorstep, looking simultaneously apologetic and determined, was Jamie's nephew.

"Oh. Hey, Kain," I managed. My voice emerged rough-edged, thick with the residue of sleep and the echoes of screaming that had filled my dream. My hand moved automatically to rub at my eyes, fingers encountering that stubborn grit that accumulated in the corners during troubled sleep. I worked at a particularly persistent bit of crusted matter in my right eye, the action both comforting in its mundanity and slightly embarrassing given the audience.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you," Kain said. His voice carried a hesitancy I didn't often hear from him—that particular quality of someone who wasn't entirely comfortable with their own presence, who had perhaps been sent on an errand they hadn't wanted to undertake.

"Nah, I was already awake. Besides, it's about time I got myself out of bed anyway," I replied. The lie came easily, a thin veneer of normality stretched over the still-echoing terror of what I'd fled in my dreams. Something about routine social interaction felt like a lifeline thrown across a churning sea—mundane words serving as anchor points in a world that had felt distinctly unanchored mere minutes ago.

Silence stretched between us. The morning held its breath. Somewhere in the distance, a magpie offered its warbling call to whatever gods governed Australian mornings, but the sound only emphasised how quiet everything else had become.

I'd never been comfortable with Jamie's family. Not truly. My interactions with them had been sparse, awkward affairs characterised by the particular discomfort of two groups who shared a person in common but nothing much else. Jamie usually served as the bridge between us—his natural ease with people smoothing over the gaps that my introversion and their wariness created. But Jamie wasn't here to mediate. Jamie was in Clivilius, nursing an infected wound and unaware that his nephew stood on our doorstep.

I flicked the last bit of sleep crust from my eye, sending it sailing over the porch railing with a small satisfaction that felt disproportionate to the action. It was something. A tiny completion in a morning that was already threatening to spiral beyond my control.

"So, what can I do for you?" The words came out more uncertainly than I'd intended, betraying the unease that writhed in my chest like something trying to escape.

"I'm looking for Jamie," Kain said. Straightforward. Direct. The words landed with the weight of something that should have been simple but absolutely wasn't.

Of course he was here for Jamie. Who else? The thought carried more bitterness than I'd expected.

"Well, I'm not really. But Mum has been trying to get hold of him for the last few days and he's not answering his phone. So, then she told Nan and she had a little freak-out moment and convinced Mum that something must have happened to him. And now, here I am," Kain explained, the words tumbling out with the particular rhythm of someone reciting a justification they'd prepared in advance.

I listened, my mind splitting into parallel tracks. One followed Kain's narrative—Louise's attempts to contact Jamie, her escalating concern, the family machinery of worry that had finally deposited Kain on my porch. The other track, darker and more calculating, was already beginning to assess possibilities.

Kain's presence drew my attention in ways I wasn't entirely proud of. His biceps, visible beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt, spoke of physical capability that our settlement desperately lacked. Early-twenties—young enough to adapt quickly, old enough to be useful. Construction apprentice, if I remembered correctly. The kind of practical skills we needed, wrapped in the kind of body that could actually perform the labour our situation demanded. Jamie was injured, his infection a constant weight of worry I carried through every hour. Paul had never been built for physical work, his contributions intellectual rather than manual. And here stood someone whose very physique answered needs I hadn't quite figured out how to fill.

"So, is Uncle Jamie here?" Kain's question sliced through my wandering thoughts, pulling me back to the present with the sharp urgency of someone who expected an answer.

I closed my eyes. Just briefly, just long enough to reset whatever had scattered inside my skull. My face contorted into a grimace I hoped he couldn't read—the visible evidence of a mind wrestling itself back into focus, away from assessments and calculations and the dark possibilities that were beginning to take shape.

"Right," I began, and the word hung in the air like a held breath, buying me time I desperately needed. My brain churned through options with the urgency of someone searching a burning building for an exit. The challenge was layered—craft an explanation for Jamie's absence that would satisfy Kain's immediate concern while simultaneously dissuading him from returning too soon or alerting the broader family network that something wasn't right.

Every lie needed to serve multiple purposes. Every word had to carry weight in directions I was still trying to map.

And then inspiration struck.

The idea arrived with such intensity that I felt momentarily outside my own body, observing myself from somewhere above and to the left, watching the thought take shape with something approaching wonder. Kain. His physical capabilities. The settlement's desperate need for bodies that could work, lift, build. Jamie's infection keeping him bedridden. Paul's uselessness with anything requiring muscle. The pieces aligned themselves with the sudden clarity of a constellation emerging from random stars.

We needed Kain. More specifically, Clivilius needed Kain.

But the execution—there was the problem. How did one convince a twenty-three-year-old construction apprentice to step through a dimensional portal? How did one even begin to explain that such a thing existed, let alone persuade someone to cross it voluntarily? The complexity loomed vast, a mountain I had no map to climb.

"Umm… well… umm," I stammered, the sounds buying seconds while my brain scrambled for purchase. I needed just a few more moments, just enough time for the initial spark of inspiration to ignite something actionable.

But the well ran dry. The elegant solution refused to materialise, leaving me with nothing but the pressing need to respond and the absence of anything convincing to say.

"He just popped out for a little bit," I blurted. The lie emerged clumsy and unconvincing, the kind of excuse that would satisfy no one with even moderate intelligence. But it was what I had. I clung to the threadbare hope that Kain's evident reluctance to be here at all might make him willing to accept a thin explanation rather than probe deeper.

"But isn't that his car in the driveway?" Kain's question came immediately, his gaze flicking between my face and the unmistakable shape of Jamie's vehicle sitting exactly where it had been for days. The suspicion in his eyes was impossible to miss—I could practically see the gears turning, could almost hear him weighing my flimsy story against the physical evidence contradicting it.

A sinking sensation spread through my chest. This was precisely why I'd never been good at lying. My mind could construct elaborate justifications, could build frameworks of reasoning that satisfied my own conscience, but the actual mechanics of deception—the voice control, the facial expressions, the consistent details—these had always eluded me. I saw the lies other people told and marvelled at their smoothness, the way falsehood flowed from their lips with the same ease as truth. For me, every untruth felt like swallowing broken glass, cutting its way down regardless of how carefully I tried to deliver it.

And yet I couldn't afford to fail. Not now. Not with Kain standing in front of me asking questions about a man who was currently in another dimension nursing an infection that might kill him.

"Ahh, yes, it is," I affirmed, forcing steadiness into my voice through sheer determination. "Gladys picked him up." The name dropped into the conversation like an anchor, something concrete for the story to cling to. Gladys was real. Gladys existed. Gladys was Jamie’s best friend. The lie was specific enough to feel substantial.

"Okay," Kain responded, and something in his posture shifted—a slight relaxation, a decision not to press further. His shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug that carried his scepticism but also his willingness to let the matter rest. He turned to leave, his movements already carrying him away from my doorstep, away from the conversation, away from my reach.

No.

The thought came with unexpected urgency, almost physical in its intensity. I felt my mind pivot, watching Kain's retreating form with something approaching desperation.

Don't leave yet. I still need you.

The words remained unspoken, but they drove what came next with the force of necessity.

"But you are welcome to stay and wait for him to return. He shouldn't be too long," I said, the invitation tumbling out before I could second-guess myself. Another lie, layered atop the first, constructed from the same flimsy materials but serving a different purpose entirely. I didn't need Kain to believe Jamie would return. I needed Kain to stay.

The precariousness of what I was attempting pressed against me from all sides. Each fabrication added weight to a structure that had no foundation, that could collapse at any moment under the pressure of even simple questions. And yet what choice did I have? The settlement needed what Kain represented. Paul needed what Kain could provide. And somewhere in the tangled mess of my reasoning, I was already beginning to tell myself that bringing Kain through the Portal wouldn't be betrayal so much as opportunity—a chance for him to be part of something larger, something meaningful, something that transcended the ordinary limitations of a life spent on a single world.

The justifications were forming even as I recognised their inadequacy. This was how I operated. This was the pattern that had shaped every decision since the Portal first opened—identify the need, locate the resource, construct the reasoning that made taking it acceptable.

Kain paused, considering. His face held that particular expression of someone weighing inconvenience against obligation, calculating how long he might be expected to wait against whatever other plans the day had held.

"I guess," he murmured, his voice carrying resignation more than enthusiasm. He turned back toward me, and I stepped aside to let him enter.

The house felt different with someone else inside it. The silence that had become familiar—that particular quality of emptiness that came from Jamie's absence, from Henri and Duke being in Clivilius, from existing alone in a space built for partnership—shifted into something more charged. More aware of itself. The lounge room, ordinarily just a room, became a stage where I would need to perform normality while my mind raced through possibilities.

"Where are Duke and Henri?" Kain asked, his eyes scanning the space for the dogs that would normally have announced any visitor's arrival with enthusiastic greeting.

"They must be outside," I replied. My voice carried a thoughtful tone, as though I were considering a question I hadn't thought about rather than deflecting from a reality I couldn't explain. The dogs weren't outside. The dogs were in another dimension entirely. But this particular detail wasn't entirely false—they were outside this house, outside this world, outside everything Kain understood about the structure of reality.

I was getting better at lying. The realisation brought neither pride nor shame, merely recognition. Necessity was reshaping me.

Kain settled onto the couch, his body folding into the cushions with the easy physicality of someone comfortable in their own skin. His gaze drifted toward the window, and I watched him watching nothing—perhaps lost in thought about why he'd been sent here, perhaps simply killing time until Jamie's alleged return.

The pause gave me opportunity to study him with the particular attention of someone assessing a resource. His build was exactly what I'd registered earlier—athletic, capable, the kind of frame that spoke of regular physical work rather than gym vanity. His arms, crossed loosely over his chest, showed definition that came from construction sites rather than weight rooms. He would be useful. He would be valuable. The settlement needed bodies that could lift and carry and build, and Kain represented exactly that.

But how to get him through the Portal? The question gnawed at me with increasing urgency.

"Would you like a coffee?" I offered, seizing on hospitality as both strategy and distraction. The gesture served multiple purposes—it maintained the fiction of normality, it gave me something to do with my hands and attention, and it might buy me time to develop something resembling a plan.

"Yeah, thanks," Kain responded, his attention pulling momentarily from the window.

I nodded and moved toward the kitchen, my mind splitting between the mundane task ahead and the extraordinary challenge I was attempting to navigate. The coffee would require perhaps ten minutes of preparation—boiling the kettle, measuring grounds, waiting for the brew. Ten minutes to conceive and refine whatever approach might convince Kain to cross a threshold he didn't know existed.

The kettle's familiar hiss filled the kitchen as I filled it, the sound providing comfort amidst the morning's mounting tension. My hands moved through patterns worn smooth by repetition—reaching for cups, locating the coffee jar, arranging the small machinery of caffeine preparation. Normally, this required no thought whatsoever. Today, every action felt weighted with significance I couldn't quite articulate.

"Can I use your loo?" Kain's voice cut through my concentration with its unexpected gentleness.

"Sure. You know where it is," I responded, gesturing up the hallway despite his familiarity with the layout. He'd been here before, during those occasional family visits that punctuated our relationship with Jamie's relatives. The gesture was reflexive, unnecessary, and I felt foolish the moment my hand completed its motion.

Kain nodded and moved with purpose, his footsteps receding down the hallway until the bathroom door closed behind him.

Alone again, I returned to my task. The coffee jar sat on the bench, its glass surface catching the morning light that had finally begun to assert itself through the kitchen window. I reached for it, my fingers closing around the smooth cylinder, my thoughts drifting toward the problem that refused to solve itself.

And then the jar slipped.

Time stretched like taffy as I watched it fall, my clumsy grip proving inadequate, the glass cylinder tumbling through space with the particular slow-motion quality that accompanies small disasters. It struck the tiles with a sound far too loud for the quiet morning—an explosion of impact that sent cracks webbing outward through the marble-designed surface, fractures spreading from the point of collision like roads radiating from a city I'd never meant to build.

Coffee beans scattered in every direction, fleeing soldiers abandoning a battlefield, their dark forms rolling and spinning across the kitchen floor with chaotic abandon. Some vanished into the newly formed crevices in the tile. Others came to rest against cabinet bases or beneath the refrigerator. The jar itself survived mostly intact, a crack running up one side but the vessel otherwise whole—which felt like metaphor for something I was too tired to identify.

A heavy sigh escaped me as I crouched to address the mess. My fingers began gathering the scattered beans, but their unpredictable movements across the fractured tile proved mesmerising. They rolled one way, encountered a crack, changed direction entirely. Impossible to predict. Impossible to control.

Like everything else in my life recently.

I watched them dance, these small dark objects obeying physics I could observe but not anticipate, and somewhere in that observation, something shifted.

The accident with the coffee—the chaos of it, the randomness—it had created opportunity. The mess that now decorated my kitchen floor wasn't merely a problem to be solved. It was justification. It was explanation. It was the kind of ordinary domestic catastrophe that could lead to conversations, to requests for help, to movements through the house that might position Kain exactly where I needed him.

I stood abruptly, my cleanup efforts abandoned, drawn toward the doorway by the nascent plan beginning to crystallise in my mind. The sound of the flushing toilet signalled Kain's impending return, and with it came a surge of clarity that felt almost chemical—adrenaline and possibility combining.

This might just work.

The thought brought neither comfort nor celebration, merely grim determination. I was about to deceive someone who had done nothing to deserve deception, was about to alter the trajectory of his life without consent or warning. The coffee accident hadn't changed the moral calculus of what I was planning—it had merely provided the means to execute it.

But necessity had its own morality. And in this moment, with Jamie injured and Paul limited and the settlement desperate for bodies that could work, necessity was winning.

With urgency sharpening my movements, I crossed the lounge room toward the far wall while keeping my ears attuned to any sound of Kain's return. The wood-panelled sliding door waited there—an unassuming barrier that visitors would never think twice about, assuming it led to nothing more exciting than the floor beneath.

I reached for it with fingers that trembled only slightly. A gentle pull, and the door glided open on well-oiled tracks, revealing the small landing that served as threshold to the stairs descending to the second entertainment room. Just a landing. Just a wall. Ordinary in every way that mattered to anyone who didn't know what I carried in my pocket.

Extracting the Portal Key from my pocket, its surface caught the dim light with an iridescence that seemed almost organic, almost aware. My thumb found the familiar contours, the activation point I'd pressed so many times it had become reflex rather than decision.

I aimed it at the wall and pressed.

Colours erupted.

The Portal blazed into existence with its characteristic display—rainbow hues cascading and swirling in patterns that defied comfortable observation, light that seemed to originate from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, bleeding across the blank wall like paint spreading through water. Even now, after all the crossings I'd made and orchestrated, the sight stirred something in me that hovered between awe and terror. This wasn't merely unusual. This was a wound in reality, a doorway to somewhere that shouldn't exist, a visual impossibility that my brain continually failed to process into anything resembling understanding.

I'd grown accustomed to it. I hadn't grown comfortable with it.

Footsteps in the hallway announced his return. I turned from the door, arranging my features into something I hoped resembled innocent concern about the mess I'd made.

"Everything okay in here?" Kain asked, his gaze dropping immediately to the chaos of coffee beans still scattered across the kitchen floor.

"Yeah, the stupid coffee lid came off as I was getting it out the cupboard," I explained. My voice emerged steadier than I'd expected, considering what I was preparing to do. One hand brushed across my forehead, wiping away a bead of sweat that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with the weight of imminent betrayal.

"Need some help with it?" Kain offered, because of course he did. He was Jamie's nephew—raised with the same instinct toward helpfulness that characterised Jamie's approach to the world, the same reflexive kindness that made them both so easy to love and so difficult to deceive.

"Nah, it's all good. But I did remember, I wanted to move the TV cabinet downstairs. Jamie keeps saying he is going to help me but never seems to get around to it. Don't suppose you can help? It'll only take a couple of minutes," I said. The request emerged casual, wrapped in the particular tone of someone asking for a small favour rather than orchestrating something that would change Kain's life forever.

He glanced at his watch—a brief flicker of hesitation crossing his features, the calculation of time against obligation visible in the slight furrow of his brow. I held my breath, though I tried not to show it, waiting for the decision that would determine whether my hastily constructed plan would even have the chance to succeed or fail.

"I guess I can," Kain replied, and relief flooded through me with such intensity I nearly swayed.

"That'd be awesome! Thanks heaps," I responded, letting genuine gratitude colour my voice. The gratitude was real—I was grateful he'd agreed, grateful I wouldn't have to devise another approach, grateful the opportunity hadn't slipped away.

The gratitude was also obscene. I was thanking him for walking toward something I was about to do to him without consent or warning.

I led Kain toward the sliding door, my heart hammering against my ribs with the rhythm of a drummer who'd lost all sense of tempo. Each step brought us closer to the threshold, closer to the moment when everything would change. Timing was critical. I needed to delay his awareness of what waited beyond the door for as long as possible, needed to maintain the fiction of ordinary domestic task right up until the instant when fiction became impossible.

To fill the charged silence, I launched into rambling distraction—a story about something I'd allegedly witnessed across the street, building the narrative as I went with whatever details my scrambling mind could conjure. Shadows that had moved strangely. Lights flickering in patterns that seemed deliberate. The odd behaviour of a neighbourhood cat that had been lurking near our letterbox. The words flowed without direction or purpose beyond their primary function: keeping Kain's attention focused on my voice rather than on the door we were approaching.

As we neared the threshold, time seemed to stretch and compress simultaneously, reality warping under the weight of what I was about to do. I became hyperaware of every sensation—the grain of the door's wood beneath my fingertips, the subtle shift of Kain's weight as he positioned himself, the erratic percussion of my own pulse. In moments, I would expose him to something that existed outside every framework he'd constructed for understanding his world. In moments, I would push him through a doorway that led somewhere impossible.

The justifications I'd built felt thin as tissue paper, inadequate barriers against the moral weight of what this was. Kain trusted me. Not deeply, not intimately, but with the everyday trust of someone who assumed I wouldn't harm him, who believed that standing in my house meant standing in safety. I was about to shatter that assumption completely.

But Paul needed help. Jamie needed help. The settlement needed bodies and strength and people capable of doing what needed to be done. And somewhere in the twisted logic of my reasoning, I had convinced myself that this necessity outweighed whatever harm I was about to inflict.

The moment arrived.

I positioned myself behind Kain, waited until he stood aligned with the door, then reached past him and slid it open in a single swift motion.

"What the..." Kain's voice trailed off into confusion as the cascade of impossible colours revealed itself, his brain stuttering through attempts to process what his eyes were reporting.

I pushed.

My hands connected with his back with more force than I'd intended, desperation lending strength I hadn't known I possessed. But I'd miscalculated. Kain's physique—that same capable build I'd been admiring, that same physical competence I wanted for the settlement—responded with reflexes I hadn't anticipated. Despite his surprise, despite the impossibility flooding his vision, his body reacted before his mind could process.

His arms shot outward, hands finding the door frame with unerring accuracy. His grip locked tight, anchoring him against the momentum of my push, preventing the tumble forward that should have sent him through the Portal.

"Fuck!" The word exploded from me, raw and unfiltered, frustration and panic colliding in a single syllable.

Kain turned, his expression a storm of confusion and dawning realisation. His eyes met mine—searching, questioning, demanding explanation for the push he'd felt, for the impossible light display that pulsed behind him, for the complete collapse of whatever he'd believed about this visit.

Our eyes held across that charged space, and in his gaze I saw the reflection of what I was becoming. Someone who manipulated. Someone who deceived. Someone who pushed people through Portals without consent because he'd decided that his vision of necessity outweighed their autonomy.

The colours blazed behind him, the Portal patient and indifferent to human moral calculations, merely waiting.

I saw it then—the slight slip of his right hand, grip faltering on the frame. Perhaps the shock was catching up with his reflexes. Perhaps the impossible light was disorienting his coordination. Perhaps fate or luck or whatever governed such moments had decided to give me one more chance.

I didn't hesitate.

My foot found its way behind his right kneecap with instinct born of desperation rather than any trained technique. The firm nudge I delivered was minimal—barely more than a suggestion of pressure—but it was enough. His already-compromised balance gave way, body tilting forward as his anchor points failed.

Kain's face contorted with shock that was quickly swallowed by the swirling vortex of colours. His figure—solid and defined against the ordinary backdrop of my home just seconds before—dissolved into the spectrum of light with the particular completeness of someone crossing between worlds. One moment he was there, expression still forming around the betrayal he must have felt. The next moment, he was gone.

"Sorry, Kain," I murmured into the sudden silence. The words felt hollow—inadequate response to the magnitude of what I'd just done. But I couldn't find remorse, couldn't locate the guilt that should have accompanied such a clear violation of another person's autonomy. Paul needed help. Jamie needed help. The settlement needed what Kain represented.

Necessity had its own morality, and in this moment, necessity was all I had left.

The Portal's allure beckoned me forward, its colours dancing with invitation that felt almost mocking.

I closed my eyes, gathered whatever remained of my resolve, and stepped into the Portal myself. The familiar-yet-never-comfortable sensation enveloped me as the world I knew faded into memory, as I followed Kain into the realm I'd condemned him to without asking if he wanted to go.