Tears in the Study

“Betrayal doesn’t kill you outright—it hollows you, leaves you gasping in the silence of rooms that once felt safe.”

The moment I crossed back into the study, the familiar hum of the Portal died away behind me, its colours folding into nothingness.

Darkness swallowed the room, and with it came a silence so complete it pressed against my ears. This space—once a refuge, a place of order and control—now felt suffocating, the air thick with the weight of secrets too heavy to bear. The walls loomed closer than they ever had before, their stillness mocking my unrest, their solidity a cruel reminder that I was trapped, not just in this room but in the prison of what Jamie had revealed.

The study had always been my sanctuary. The place where I retreated to think, to plan, to marshal my thoughts into something resembling order. Now it felt like a tomb. The books on the shelves watched me with their mute spines. The desk sat patient and indifferent. Even the air tasted different—stale, accusatory, as though the room itself knew what I'd just learned and was waiting to see how I would crumble.

I made it only a few steps before my body betrayed me.

My legs gave out, as though the truth had cut the strings that held me upright. I collapsed, crumpling gracelessly onto the floor. The impact jolted through my bones, but the physical sting was nothing compared to the hollowness gnawing at my chest.

A sound rose from deep inside me, a raw and guttural moan I couldn't suppress, filling the air like a wounded animal's cry. It reverberated off the walls, a pitiful echo in the void, and for a moment, I almost hated myself for the weakness it betrayed.

But the tears would not be denied.

They spilled freely, hot and endless, carving tracks down my cheeks until the fabric of my shirt clung damply to my chest. Each tear was a shard of grief, of betrayal, of love twisted into something painful and uncertain. My hands clutched at my arms as I rocked, an instinctive, childlike attempt to soothe the ache that raged within. The rhythm was frantic, desperate, but it brought no comfort.

Jamie's confession replayed over and over in my mind, each iteration more piercing than the last.

I was with Ben.

Four words. Four syllables that had torn through everything I thought I knew about us.

His voice—usually so assured, so solid—had cracked beneath the weight of guilt, and that crack had torn something inside me too. I had thought us unshakable, even in our darkest moments. We had weathered arguments that lasted days. We had survived his temper and my withdrawals, his sharp tongue and my silent resentments. I had believed, foolishly perhaps, that the years had forged something unbreakable between us.

Now, I couldn't tell whether the thread that bound us still existed, or if it had already snapped, leaving only the ghost of what had once been love.

The uncertainty was unbearable.

The future, once imagined as a shared horizon, now loomed as a jagged, shifting landscape. Was there still a path for us to walk together, or had the confession cleaved it beyond repair? In the stillness of the study, with only the sound of my own sobbing to fill the void, the question seemed unanswerable.

I thought of all the nights I'd reached for him and been gently rebuffed. All the excuses—work stress, tiredness, not tonight. I had accepted them, had told myself that intimacy ebbed and flowed in long relationships, that we would find our way back to each other eventually. I had been patient. I had been understanding.

And all that time, he had been with Ben.

The thought was a blade, and it twisted.

In the quiet wreckage of my despair, a cruel truth surfaced with startling sharpness.

Had we been living beneath the familiar sky of Berriedale, under the ordinary weight of earthly expectation, Jamie's betrayal would have been the end. No hesitation, no blurred reasoning—just an unravelling of everything we had built, the thread cut clean. The certainty of that would have left me hollow, yes, but also resolute.

I would have packed his bags. Changed the locks. Divided the furniture with the cold precision of a man determined to excise a tumour from his life. There would have been tears, of course—nights spent staring at the ceiling, mornings that felt like wading through wet concrete—but there would also have been clarity. An ending, clean if not painless.

But this wasn't Earth.

This was Clivilius, and here the world bent and twisted under a different logic. In this strange new reality, nothing was simple. Lines of right and wrong blurred as if drawn in dust, erased by the faintest gust of wind.

Betrayal still hurt like fire pressed to my skin, but survival demanded something more complex than outrage, something more calculating.

My mind, unbidden, conjured an image of Jamie alone in that barren expanse, left to rot in the merciless sands—a punishment proportionate to the wound he had carved in me.

The thought jolted me, cold and vicious.

I could do it. The realisation slithered through me like something venomous. I held the Portal Key. I controlled the crossings, the supplies, the flow of everything that kept them alive. If I wanted Jamie to suffer, truly suffer, I had the means. I could strand him. Starve him slowly of resources. Watch from a distance as the consequence of his choices caught up with him, as the dust and the darkness and the isolation stripped away everything until there was nothing left but regret.

That I could even entertain such cruelty made me recoil from myself.

A part of me, a part I barely recognised, whispered of vengeance. It painted pictures in shades of satisfaction—Jamie begging, Jamie broken, Jamie finally understanding what it felt like to be abandoned by someone you loved.

I shivered, hugging my arms tight against the ghost of that impulse.

No.

That wasn't who I was—or at least, it wasn't who I wanted to be.

Beneath the storm of fury and betrayal, a tether still held me fast to Jamie, a bond forged long before this collapse, a bond not easily erased.

Ten years. Ten years of shared meals and quiet evenings, of arguments resolved and grievances forgiven, of building something together that felt, for all its imperfections, like home. That couldn't be erased by a confession, no matter how devastating. The love was still there, buried beneath the rubble of my broken trust, bruised and battered but stubbornly alive.

And beyond him, there was Paul.

My brother's fate was chained irrevocably to Jamie's. To condemn one was to imperil the other. The equation, once stripped of sentiment, was clear: no matter what Jamie had done, leaving him behind would be unthinkable.

Paul had done nothing wrong. Paul had followed me through the Portal in good faith, had trusted me to keep him safe, had believed in this impossible venture because I had asked him to. If I abandoned Jamie to spite and suffering, Paul would be caught in the crossfire. He would watch his companion—his only companion in that alien world—wither and fade. He would be forced to witness cruelty enacted by his own brother.

I couldn't do that to him. I wouldn't.

To abandon any soul to that fate would be a cruelty beyond measure. That wasn't vengeance—it was execution.

And I was not an executioner. Not yet. Not ever, if I had any say in the matter.

Slowly, shakily, I pushed myself upright.

My legs trembled under the strain, but I forced them steady. I wiped the streaks of wetness from my face with the back of my hand, smearing salt and grief across my skin. The tears had left their tracks, visible evidence of the storm that had passed through me, but I refused to let them define what came next.

Breath by breath, despair gave way to a steely resolve.

I couldn't undo Jamie's betrayal. I couldn't untangle the knots of doubt it had tied within me. The wound would scar—it might never fully heal—but I could choose not to let it destroy us all.

I stared into the shadowed corners of the study, my voice barely a whisper yet filled with the weight of a vow.

"But death," I swore, my words trembling but true, "I will not allow."