Rough Blankets and Careful Hands

"Nineteen years I managed to dress myself. Takes dying in another dimension to finally get some help with the buttons."

The campfire flickered, casting elongated shadows that danced across the dust-laden ground like restless spirits.

I watched the flames without really seeing them. My body had reached some threshold beyond exhaustion—a place where the signals simply stopped making sense. I was awake, but barely. Present, but fading.

The others moved around the camp in patterns I couldn't follow. Paul and Kain, as I had come to learn their names, doing something with food. Glenda and Luke talking near a tent. The ordinary routines of survival continuing as if today hadn't been impossible.

As if I hadn't died.

Jamie sat beside me on the rough log, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him even through the chill that had settled into my bones. He ate something—I couldn't tell what—while I stared at the fire and tried to remember how to exist inside a body.

Someone offered me food. I think it was Kain. I couldn't make myself eat. The mechanics of chewing, swallowing—they seemed impossibly complex. My throat still ached from the few words I'd managed, and the thought of forcing anything down it made me want to weep.

So I sat. Watched the flames dance. Felt myself slipping further and further from consciousness with each passing moment.

The sky had deepened from twilight's painted strokes into full, inky blackness.

Not the familiar darkness of Tasmania, where city lights always created a faint amber glow on the horizon and the stars were filtered through layers of atmosphere. This darkness was absolute. Oppressive. A weight pressing down from above like a physical thing.

No streetlights. No distant cars. No planes blinking across the sky.

Just darkness, and fire, and the crushing awareness that everything I had known was unreachable.

"Come on," Jamie said quietly, rising despite what I had noticed was a limp he was trying to hide. "Let's get you to bed."

Bed.

The word conjured images of my house in Glenorchy. The narrow single bed with the blue sheets Mum had bought me. The window that looked out over the overgrown backyard. The familiar creak of springs when I shifted in the night.

None of that existed here.

But sleep—any form of sleep—sounded like mercy.

I tried to stand. My legs had other ideas. The muscles simply refused to engage properly, leaving me swaying on the log like a drunk at closing time.

Jamie's arm came around me immediately, steadying, supporting. We had done this before—the walk from the lagoon, the fall down the hill, the endless trudge to camp. His body knew how to carry my weight now. Mine knew how to lean into his support.

Our steps toward the tent were slow, measured—the careful progress of two people who'd already pushed their bodies past reasonable limits.

Each footfall felt like an achievement. Each metre of ground covered was a victory against the exhaustion threatening to drag me down into the dust.

The tent loomed ahead—canvas stretched over a frame, darker than the darkness around it. Home, they kept calling this place. But this wasn't home. This was a tent in an alien world, and I was about to sleep in it with a father I had never known.

The absurdity of my situation struck me with fresh force.

Twenty-four hours ago—was it only twenty-four hours?—I had been loading tent boxes onto a truck in Hobart. Worried about nothing more significant than my delivery schedule and whether Mum would want fish and chips for dinner.

Now I was here. Wherever here was. Being helped into a tent by the man whose name I had discovered on a birth certificate mere days ago.

Life, I thought with something approaching hysteria, has a sick sense of humour.

Inside the tent, darkness enveloped us.

The canvas walls blocked what little firelight might have offered guidance, leaving me blinking uselessly as my eyes tried to adjust to nothing. I could make out shapes—vague darker patches that might have been supplies, bedding, the walls themselves—but no detail.

"You take the mattress."

Jamie's instruction was firm. Not a suggestion but a decision made on my behalf.

There was a mattress? In this place? The luxury seemed almost obscene given everything else.

I felt his hands guiding me—gentle pressure on my shoulders, steering me toward something I couldn't see. My shins hit a soft edge and I understood: the mattress. Real. Waiting for me.

I started to lower myself down, and that's when I became aware of my clothes.

The work shirt I'd worn for the delivery. The trousers with the reinforced knees. Both were stiff now—crusted with dried lagoon water and dust, rough against skin that had become hypersensitive in my weakened state. The fabric chafed. Scratched. Felt like wearing sandpaper.

I couldn't sleep in this.

"Clothes."

The whisper escaped before I could think it through. A simple word. A basic need. But it carried weight I hadn't intended—the vulnerability of asking for help with something so fundamental.

I had dressed myself since I was three years old. Had never needed anyone to help me with buttons or zips or the basic mechanics of getting fabric on and off my body.

But I couldn't do it now. My fingers were clumsy, uncoordinated. My arms felt like they belonged to someone else. The simple act of lifting my hands to my collar seemed to require more energy than I possessed.

"Oh." Jamie's realisation was soft in the darkness. "Do you want help taking them off?"

The offer was tentative. Careful. I could hear the uncertainty in his voice—the awareness that this was intimate territory, that we were essentially strangers despite the blood we shared.

Did I want help?

I wanted to say no. Wanted to preserve some shred of dignity, some illusion of capability. I was nineteen years old, not an infant. I should be able to undress myself.

But I couldn't.

And he was offering.

And he was my father.

"Yes."

The admission cost me something I couldn't name. Pride, maybe. The image of myself as competent and independent. The careful walls I had built around my vulnerability over nineteen years of being the man of the house, of taking care of Mum, of never asking for help because there was no one to ask.

"Okay."

Jamie's hands found me in the darkness.

His fingers worked at my shirt buttons—movements I could feel but couldn't see. The intimacy of it was almost overwhelming. This man I had never met, whose face I had only seen today, was undressing me with a gentleness that made my throat ache.

The buttons gave way one by one. Jamie eased the fabric back from my shoulders, careful not to jar my injured throat, treating me with the kind of attention I had seen nurses give to their most fragile patients.

The shirt came away, and cool air touched my skin.

I shivered. Not from cold—the tent still held residual warmth from the day—but from the strangeness of it all. From the sensation of being tended to. From the vulnerability of sitting half-naked in darkness while someone I barely knew removed my clothes.

His hands found my trousers next.

This was harder. More awkward. Jamie had to help me lift my hips, had to work the fabric down legs that wouldn't cooperate. I felt like a child. Felt like an invalid. Felt like everything I had never wanted to be.

But I also felt... something else.

Cared for.

The realisation crept through me like warmth from a fire. This man—this stranger who was also my father—was taking care of me. Was doing something difficult and awkward and undignified because I needed it done. Was treating my helplessness not as a burden but as... what? An opportunity? A privilege?

The thought was too complicated for my exhausted brain to process. I filed it away for later, for a time when I could think clearly enough to understand what was happening between us.

"You should be able to fit into some of my clothes," Jamie suggested. "I have spare shirts, trousers..."

I appreciated the offer. Understood what he was trying to do—provide comfort, make sure I was warm enough, take care of practical needs.

But I couldn't bear the thought of more fabric against my skin. Couldn't face the effort of putting on clothes even if someone else did all the work. My body wanted nothing but rest. No additional fussing. No extended care.

"No. No clothes."

The refusal was soft but clear. I hoped he understood. Hoped he didn't take it as rejection of his kindness.

"Okay."

His acceptance was immediate. No argument. No insistence that I needed to be sensible, be practical, think about the cold. Just acceptance of my decision, my autonomy, my right to make choices even in my diminished state.

The blanket came next.

I felt him pulling it up over my body, tucking it around my shoulders with movements that were almost... tender. The fabric was rough—nothing like the sheets at home—but it was warmth, and warmth was everything.

"Thanks."

The word was inadequate. Impossibly inadequate. How did you thank someone for something like this? For dignity preserved despite indignity? For gentleness in the face of awkwardness? For fatherhood offered to a stranger who happened to share your blood?

You couldn't. Not with words. Not with anything.

But I tried.

My eyes were closing before I could stop them.

The exhaustion I had been fighting all day finally claimed its victory, dragging me down toward sleep with irresistible force. The darkness of the tent merged with the darkness behind my eyelids until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

I felt Jamie move away—felt the mattress shift as his weight left it, heard his footsteps crossing the tent floor. Giving me space. Giving me privacy. Respecting the fact that I was a grown man, not a child who needed constant supervision.

But even as he moved away, I was aware of his presence. Aware that he was there, somewhere in the darkness, watching over me. The knowledge was comforting in a way I hadn't expected.

I had never had a father.

Had grown up without that presence, that protection, that particular form of security that other children seemed to take for granted. Had been the man of the house since I was old enough to understand what that meant, responsible rather than protected.

But now, lying in darkness in an alien world with my newly-discovered father keeping vigil nearby, I felt something I had never felt before.

Safe.

Not safe from Clivilius. Not safe from the voice that had claimed me in the void. Not safe from whatever horrors this place might hold.

But safe in this moment. Safe in this tent. Safe with this man who had carried me across a red wasteland and undressed me with careful hands and covered me with a rough blanket and given me a mattress when he probably had nothing but hard ground for himself.

Safe with my father.

Dad.

The word drifted through my fading consciousness. Still strange. Still new. Still something I was trying to fit into the shape of my understanding.

But less foreign now than it had been this morning.

Less like a word for other people.

More like... mine.

Sleep took me gently.

For the first time since I had died—since I had woken in the void and been claimed by a voice that called itself Clivilius—I surrendered to unconsciousness without fear.

Because I wasn't alone anymore.

Because my father was here.