Guardian Brother

“Some reunions start with a hug. Ours started with a Portal Key and the kind of silence that tells you someone’s seen something they can’t unsee."”

The heavy door to McDonald’s swung open with a reluctant metallic groan, its weary hinges protesting against the sudden intrusion of movement. A wave of blistering air swept in from the sweltering carpark, slicing uninvited through the chilled interior and momentarily overpowering the restaurant’s straining air-conditioning. The abrupt change in temperature drew a few instinctive glances from nearby diners, but none lingered.

I looked up from my half-devoured sundae just as Josh stepped through the threshold.

He cut a familiar silhouette—broad-shouldered and grounded in that way he always had been, built like someone who never needed to look behind him because he’d never once considered retreat. Yet there was something new, something unmistakably sharpened about him now. His brow was deeply furrowed, glistening with sweat, the flushed pallor of his face suggesting a long, relentless drive through the furnace of the South Australian interior.

He scanned the restaurant with the deliberate economy of someone used to assessing a space quickly, efficiently. His eyes found mine in seconds, locking on with that clinical older-brother precision I’d known all my life. There was no warmth in the initial glance, no fondness. Just appraisal. Verification.

"Still the same," he said as he approached, the corners of his mouth lifting into a sardonic half-smile that carried more fatigue than amusement. "Sat there like the world’s not ending, chips in your sundae, like it’s 2005 and we’re still too young to know any better."

"It’s a classic pairing," I replied, lazily dipping another chip into the glossy swirl of soft-serve and chocolate sauce, deliberately exaggerating the gesture. "Salt and sugar, hot and cold. It’s practically elemental."

Josh let out a quiet, disbelieving huff, the sound halfway between a scoff and a sigh. He pulled out the chair opposite mine and dropped into it with a weight that seemed to shake the entire table. The cheap plastic groaned beneath his frame, scraping loudly against the scratched lino floor.

For a moment, he said nothing. Just leaned back, eyes closed, allowing the air-conditioning to envelop him. His sweat-streaked shirt—white, or something that had once aspired to be white—was visibly damp beneath the arms, collar stained and slightly wilted. The heat had worn him down, eroded the usual precision with which he presented himself. He looked exhausted.

I nudged the tray slightly in his direction with the corner of my spoon. "Fancy trying one?" I asked, tone casual, knowing full well what the answer would be. The sundae had begun to pool at the base of the cup, the vanilla and chocolate bleeding into each other in marbled whorls that looked more like abstract art than dessert.

Josh shot me a look that might’ve curdled milk. His eyebrows lifted in incredulous disdain, the familiar storm clouds of fraternal judgement gathering behind his eyes.

"Are you joking?" he said, the words dripping with the sort of contempt reserved for those who had once, say, convinced him that soy sauce made an excellent soft drink mixer.

"Not in the slightest. You can’t criticise it until you’ve tried it."

He eyed the tray as if it were harbouring a small, unstable explosive device. There was a flicker of something behind the derision—curiosity, perhaps, or that strange sibling logic that occasionally compelled us to humour one another out of sheer muscle memory.

"Revolutionary," I added, deadpan, echoing the exact word we’d once used to describe putting mint sauce on fish fingers. "One bite and you’ll be writing to Parliament demanding it be made compulsory."

"This feels wrong," he muttered, though he reached out anyway, plucking one of the longer chips from the sleeve with theatrical reluctance. He held it between thumb and forefinger like a man disarming a mousetrap.

"Just bloody well do it."

He dipped it slowly, the movement absurdly cautious—part wary exploration, part ceremonial act. The chip twisted delicately through the sundae, catching a generous ribbon of glossy, semi-liquid chocolate as it surfaced. For a moment, he simply held it there, suspended mid-air like a man pausing before a dive into cold water, clearly questioning not just his current life choices but perhaps several that had preceded them. Then, with a long, theatrical sigh—the kind that made it sound like he’d been reluctantly roped into something out of familial duty—he took a bite.

His eyebrows lifted immediately, almost imperceptibly, but enough that I noticed. A flash of unexpected contemplation crossed his face. He chewed slowly, thoughtfully.

"That’s… surprisingly not completely terrible," he said at last, with the measured caution of a man admitting something deeply uncomfortable. His hand reached for another chip even as he spoke, the motion betraying a level of enthusiasm he was clearly attempting to suppress.

"Told you so," I said smugly, reclining slightly and taking a long sip of my Sprite. The fizz danced up the back of my throat, sharp and invigorating. "You’ve always been too quick to dismiss my culinary innovations."

He shook his head, half in resignation, half in reluctant amusement.

"It’s good to have priorities," I added, unable to hide the self-satisfied grin tugging at the corners of my mouth.

Josh leaned back in his plastic chair, which gave a protesting groan beneath him, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He left a small, greasy smear just above his brow, entirely unnoticed. The sweltering afternoon heat still clung to his skin, despite the artificial coolness gradually seeping into his pores.

"I’m not saying it’s a terrible combination," he said, gesturing vaguely to the near-demolished tray between us, "but it’s not exactly the image of adult responsibility, is it? Sitting here, dipping chips into ice cream, like you’re still ten."

"Who needs responsibility," I replied, nonchalant, "when you’ve got undeniable genius?" I dipped another chip into the last swirling remnants of the sundae with exaggerated flourish and popped it into my mouth.

He rolled his eyes with theatrical disdain, though the corners of his mouth twitched despite himself. "You’ve always been disturbingly good at justifying utter bollocks. Do you remember that time you convinced Mum to let you turn the garden shed into a ‘scientific laboratory’? Which, in practice, meant blowing things up for an entire week."

"That was legitimate experimentation," I protested, grinning broadly now. "And I still maintain the water bottle rocket was a work of brilliance."

He barked a short laugh, shaking his head. "Brilliance until you nearly took Mrs Peterson’s cat’s head off."

"It was a minor miscalculation," I replied with mock solemnity, raising my plastic cup in a parody of a toast. "An extraordinarily rare occurrence, I’ll have you know."

His chuckle softened his whole face, crinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes into unmistakable crow’s feet—an inherited feature from our father that always made him look unexpectedly older and gentler at the same time.

The moment stretched pleasantly. Comfortable. Familiar. For a while, we simply existed there, face to face in that strange little pocket of reprieve—two brothers laughing quietly at the idiocies of their shared past. The tension that had been coiled tightly in my chest for most of the day loosened, just a little. The ambient hum of deep fryers and beeping tills faded into the background as the rhythm of our conversation fell into the easy cadence of well-worn patterns.

But nothing lasts.

As I polished off the last of the chips and set the empty packet aside, a subtle shift occurred. The mirage of normality began to dissolve. Like the melting sundae between us, our brief return to childhood silliness had reached its natural end.

I leant forward slightly, elbows resting on the table, and tapped out a quiet, erratic rhythm with my fingers against the edge of the worn laminated surface. The tray between us bore the tattered remnants of comfort—salt crystals, smudged napkins, the half-collapsed plastic sundae cup pooling with the remains of its contents. A messy monument to the briefest of reprieves.

And just like that, it began to return. The weight. The reason I was here. The reason Josh had sent that message.

The real conversation was coming. We both knew it.

"So… Josh," I began, hesitantly, my voice catching on its own uncertainty as I searched in vain for a coherent way to begin. Overhead, the strip lighting hummed its steady, fluorescent monotone, throwing pale, unflattering shadows across his face. His expression was a study in calm expectancy—his eyes sharp, his brow faintly furrowed, though not yet unkind.

"You look like you’re about to confess to tax fraud," Josh interrupted dryly, one eyebrow arching with mock scepticism. That smirk—that aggravating, familiar smirk—settled comfortably across his face. "Let me guess. You’ve accidentally joined a cult and now you’re here to pitch me on their three-step salvation programme? Or you need bail money for something wildly idiotic and criminal?"

"No. It’s not—it’s not that," I replied with a sigh, scrubbing the back of my neck in a nervous gesture that did nothing to relieve the building pressure at the base of my skull. "It’s… complicated."

He leaned in slightly, the plastic chair beneath him creaking in protest. The change in posture was subtle but unmistakably deliberate—closer, more focused, more serious. "That," he murmured, "is never a comforting way to start a sentence."

The sarcasm was familiar, reassuring even, but underneath it lay something else—concern. Real concern. The kind of concern that only a sibling can manage to deliver with both affection and irritation in perfect balance. And it unnerved me more than I wanted to admit.

"I just…" My voice faded again. Words failed me in a way they never usually did, dissolving into a tangled mess somewhere between absurdity and dread. I cast a helpless glance towards the busy counter, as though hoping the answer might be spelled out in the overhead menu between Chicken McNuggets and the Double Quarter Pounder.

Where do you begin a conversation like this? With the portal? With the woman on the plane? With the backpack that wasn’t hers, but might have been meant for her—or for me? Every possible starting point felt ludicrous. Implausible. Insane.

Josh watched me quietly, the amused glint in his eyes fading into something more cautious. He was reading me, carefully, the way he always had—like an older brother performing triage: looking for the real injury beneath all the noise.

Then he reached slowly into his pocket.

The movement was subtle but deliberate. My eyes instinctively tracked it, and time seemed to decelerate around the moment his hand emerged with something enclosed tightly in his fist.

He placed it silently on the sticky table between us.

The Portal Key.

It sat there innocuously, its surface catching the pale restaurant light with an uncanny sheen. Smooth. Familiar. Unmistakable.

My breath caught mid-inhale. My chest seized, and the world narrowed to the object in front of me. My heart seemed to forget its rhythm entirely before hammering back into motion with a sudden, uneven thud.

The Portal Key.

It was here.

Real.

Present.

The room spun for a heartbeat, my eyes refusing to blink as I stared at it, struggling to comprehend its presence.

When I finally looked back at Josh, his expression had changed completely. The traces of humour were gone—scrubbed clean by something far colder. He leaned forward slightly, his fingertips resting lightly on the edge of the Portal Key, grounding himself, or maybe anchoring the conversation.

"Yes," he said simply.

That single syllable dropped into the space between us like a stone into water. Final. Heavy. Absolute.

My pulse thundered. Beneath my excitement, unease began unfurling again, curling like smoke into my chest.

Still, despite everything—despite the surreal day I’d had, the increasingly unnerving chain of events—I couldn’t suppress the flicker of cautious hope.

"So," I asked, voice barely above a whisper, "it actually arrived?"

Josh nodded. The confirmation should have brought relief. Instead, it only tightened the coil in my stomach. There was no triumph in his face—just a weariness that unsettled me.

"You’ve used it, then?" I asked, trying to rein in the edge of hope creeping into my voice. "You activated it properly?"

He hesitated, his jaw tightening just a fraction—an involuntary clench that spoke volumes. I recognised the look: the heaviness in his posture, the barely suppressed unease behind his eyes. The telltale signs that something had gone very wrong.

"I have," he replied at last, voice flat. Tense.

My mind reeled. Possibilities spun outward like a fan of sharp cards. Saint Phillis? Another unknown location? Had he seen what I’d seen? Or something worse?

"And?" I pressed, my breath quickening despite myself. "What was it like?"

"Empty," he said simply. "Utterly desolate."

My heart stuttered.

"That seems to be the norm," I said quickly, my words rushing to fill the silence, to tether something normal to this spiralling conversation. "The one I saw was empty too. Just… terrain. No people. No structures. Just… landscape."

But Josh didn’t respond to my attempt at reassurance. His gaze remained fixed on the device, his thumb absently tracing the edge as though testing whether it might suddenly disappear. His expression remained unchanged—dark, unreadable. A curtain drawn tight.

The moment hung suspended between us, thick with unspoken implications.

"Josh," I pressed again, the name leaving my mouth with more caution now, as I subtly leant back. My earlier urgency softened into something quieter, heavier. "Clivilius... you’ve been there, haven’t you? Our designated location is Saint Phillis."

Even just saying it aloud here—Clivilius—felt surreal. Like invoking a sacred place in a thoroughly mundane temple of grease-stained laminated menus and industrial fryers. I lowered my voice instinctively, as though it were something sacred and fragile.

Josh’s eyes met mine.

And the excitement that had been rising steadily inside me cracked under the pressure of his expression. Something in his face—tired, remote—stalled my next breath. The warmth was gone. The teasing, the wry humour, even the faint exasperation. All of it buried beneath a set jaw and a gaze that didn’t quite want to stay still.

"You’ve have been to Saint Phillis, haven’t you?" I asked again, more softly this time, scanning his face for any flicker of recognition. Any trace of wonder. I’d felt it. That rush of impossible scale, that raw, ancient beauty. I’d expected him to mirror it. Maybe not word for word, but something—anything—that said yes, I saw it too.

But Josh said nothing.

His hands twitched faintly on the table, fingers splayed near the Portal Key. He wasn’t playing with it. Not exactly. Just... resting there. As though he didn’t trust it to stay still unless he physically kept it in place.

"Why aren’t you more—" I stopped, searching for a word. "I don’t know... amazed? This is insane, Josh. You and I—we’ve crossed dimensions. Doesn’t that get to you? Doesn’t that change everything?"

He didn’t answer right away. But the twitch of his jaw said plenty. That familiar little muscle just beneath his ear pulsed—something he’d never been able to control when he was angry or cornered or deliberately biting back what he wanted to say.

"Nathan."

The name came out abruptly. Low. Hard.

I froze. It wasn’t shouted. It wasn’t even loud. But it landed between us with the finality of a slammed door. The excitement in my chest—the warmth, the wonder—evaporated instantly.

I blinked. "What aren’t you telling me?"

Josh looked down, exhaling through his nose with careful deliberation. The silence stretched for several seconds. His eyes were fixed on the table, unmoving, as if the cheap scratched laminate might offer a map through this impossible conversation.

And when he finally looked back up, I didn’t like what I saw in his face.

"There’s a problem," he said.

The words weren’t dramatic. But they didn’t have to be.

My stomach clenched reflexively, and the residual sweetness from the sundae in my mouth suddenly turned cloying.

"What kind of problem?"

Josh didn’t respond immediately. He sat back in his chair, arms crossing over his chest, posture rigid—guarded. Every movement was deliberate, managed, as though he was mentally constructing walls even as he spoke.

"It’s bigger than either of us," he said eventually, each word weighted with something that made my scalp prickle. He tapped the Portal Key once, lightly. A metallic click. The sound was too loud in the space between us.

I stared at him. At it. Then back again. "What do you mean?"

He leant forward again, closer this time, his elbows braced on the table. The old familiar pose. But his voice was lower now, and tighter.

"I mean," he said, "that we have a big problem."

I swallowed. The words felt like stone. My eyes searched his face for more, but there was nothing. Just that same cold focus. The same tension I couldn’t read.

"Josh—" I tried, but the rest of the sentence dissolved into the air.

There were too many questions. Too many possibilities. Too many things he wasn’t saying.

And suddenly, the light in the restaurant felt harsher. The sounds around us felt muffled and indistinct, like they belonged to someone else’s day. Outside, the sun continued to blaze over the asphalt like nothing had happened at all.

But something had.

And my brother—always blunt, always fearless, always the first to charge ahead—was sitting in front of me like a man carrying a weight too large to explain. A man who had seen something.

And hadn’t yet decided how much of it he was willing to share.