Fragments of Rest

“Rest doesn’t come whole anymore—it comes in fragments, sharp-edged and fleeting, never enough to quiet what I’ve done.”

Lying sprawled on the black leather couch in the living room, my body seemed to melt into its contours. My head was propped on one arm of the couch, my legs stretched long enough that my feet touched the other end. The posture was one of surrender, the kind of boneless collapse that comes after the body has been pushed past its limits and finally, mercifully, been allowed to stop.

But inside, surrender felt impossible. Every part of me—body, heart, mind—was threadbare, pulled apart by the last two days like fabric that had been tugged beyond its tensile strength.

The leather was cool beneath my skin, the faint creak of it shifting as I exhaled. It smelled of home, of ordinary evenings spent watching television with Jamie, of lazy Sunday mornings with coffee and newspapers, of a life that now felt as distant as a half-remembered dream. I'd bought this couch three years ago, haggled over the price at a furniture warehouse in Moonah, wrestled it through the front door with Jamie laughing at my spatial reasoning failures.

It should have been comforting, a small luxury in the midst of all this chaos. But the comfort only clashed with the turbulence inside me. It mocked me, really. The stillness of this room, the softness of the couch, belonged to another life—a life that no longer existed, had perhaps never really existed at all. Just a façade I'd built whilst hiding from truths I hadn't yet discovered.

The television sat dark and silent on the wall. The kitchen hummed with the refrigerator's steady drone. Somewhere outside, a car passed on the street, its engine fading into the ordinary sounds of a Hobart evening. All of it so normal. So jarringly, impossibly normal.

Whilst Jamie lay in a tent in another dimension with an infection that could still kill him.

I let my eyes close, but behind the lids there was no peace. Darkness didn't come gently; it seared with images that I couldn't outrun no matter how far I retreated into stillness.

Jamie's face pale and sweating, his eyes fever-bright with a rage that wasn't really aimed at me even though it felt like it was. The wound on his chest, swollen and angry, leaking fluid that shouldn't have been that colour. Glenda's hands steady under impossible pressure, her composure a lifeline we were all clinging to. The hostile corridor at the medical centre, the receptionist's voice cutting through the air—I'll keep him distracted—the echo of boots chasing me.

Each fragment snapped into focus, vivid, merciless. They played on repeat behind my closed eyelids, a slideshow of horrors I couldn't pause or skip.

Clivilius had a way of wringing out every last drop of strength, leaving nothing behind but an aching husk. The place demanded everything and offered so little in return—just dust and alien sky and the constant, grinding work of survival. And yet I kept going back. Kept stepping through the Portal into that harsh, unforgiving world, because the people I loved were there, and without me they would have even less.

It's almost taken Jamie's life.

The thought hammered at me, unrelenting. Jamie—so often the steady one, resilient, sharp-tongued, the man who could find humour in anything—now reduced to fragility, his survival hanging on the supplies I'd risked everything to bring back. Supplies I'd stolen from a doctor's practice and a hospital supply room. Supplies that had sent police chasing me through corridors, that had forced me to tear open a Portal with officers' footsteps closing in.

My chest tightened, as if the guilt itself pressed down on me with physical weight. I could still feel the adrenaline echoes in my bloodstream, the residual trembling in my hands that hadn't quite stopped even now, lying in safety.

Safety. What a joke. There was no safety anymore. Not really. Just varying degrees of danger, some more immediate than others.

And the worst part—the thought that gnawed at me with rodent persistence—was that Jamie's condition was partly my fault. I'd shoved him. In my anger, in my hurt over his betrayal with Ben, I'd pushed him and he'd fallen and the wound had torn open and the infection had set in. Cause and effect, traced back to a moment of rage I couldn't undo.

I'd nearly killed the man I loved because he'd wounded me first.

I shifted on the couch, restless despite my exhaustion, and guilt cut deeper. Here I was, lying in comparative comfort while those I loved struggled. My body craved this couch, this stillness, this moment of reprieve—but my heart rejected it, insisting I had no right to ease whilst Jamie lay suffering in a canvas shell, whilst Paul tried to stitch some order out of chaos with nothing but determination and a burn-scarred foot, whilst Glenda shouldered burdens she never asked for.

They were in Clivilius right now. Dealing with the heat and the dust and the constant low-grade fear that came with being stranded in an alien world. And I was here, on a leather couch, in a house with running water and electricity and a refrigerator full of food I hadn't yet brought through the Portal.

The air felt thick, heavy. I swallowed against it, chest tight with the knowledge that even in this small reprieve, I was failing them. Every second I spent lying here was a second I wasn't working to improve their situation. Every moment of comfort was a betrayal of the sacrifice they were making.

But my body wouldn't move. Couldn't move. The exhaustion had sunk into my bones like lead, weighing me down, pinning me to this couch as surely as if I'd been chained there. Two days of crisis, of Portal crossings, of emotional whiplash between love and fury and terror—it had taken everything I had. There was nothing left in the reserve tanks.

So I lay there, caught between guilt and exhaustion, neither able to rest properly nor able to force myself back into motion.

"There has to be a better way, Clivilius," I muttered, my voice breaking the silence, barely more than breath. The words slipped into the air like a prayer, fragile and uncertain.

I wasn't sure if I was addressing the dimension itself, or whatever force had created it, or just the empty room around me. It didn't matter. The plea was real. The desperation was real. The need for something—anything—to ease the burden was real.

We couldn't keep going like this. Scraping by on stolen supplies, building a settlement with inadequate tools, surviving crisis after crisis with nothing but luck and stubbornness. Sooner or later, the luck would run out. Sooner or later, someone would die—really die, not just nearly die like Jamie—and there would be no magic supply run, no last-minute rescue, no Portal escape.

There had to be a better way.

There had to be.