The Festering Truth

“Some wounds don’t scream when they open—they whisper, fester, and wait for the moment you can no longer pretend they’re not there.”

The Portal spat me out into Clivilius with Duke squirming in my arms and the dust already clinging to my clothes. The transition left my ears ringing, that familiar disorientation of crossing between worlds still not something my body had learned to accept gracefully. Before I could even orient myself, Jamie's voice struck me like a whip.

"Luke! What the fuck are you doing?! Why did you bring them here?"

His fury rang out across the barren expanse, raw and unfiltered. I flinched—not from the volume but from the contempt beneath it, the way he spat my name like it tasted of something rotten. The sharpness hit harder than the dry heat wrapping itself around us, harder than the still-simmering panic coursing through my veins from Henri's escape.

For a fleeting instant, though, his tirade faltered. Henri, oblivious as ever to the tension crackling between the humans in his life, was bounding in circles nearby, his little legs kicking up plumes of ochre dust as though he'd just stumbled into paradise. His tongue lolled with stupid joy. His tail carved ecstatic arcs through the air. The absurd contrast between canine delight and human rage carved a momentary crack in Jamie's anger—I saw his lips twitch, saw something softer threaten to surface—though it sealed over almost instantly, his jaw resetting into that hard line I'd come to recognise as the prelude to worse.

I crouched, setting Duke down, and he bolted with equal enthusiasm, nose pressed to the ground, tail wagging like a triumphant flag. For them, this was nothing but a grand adventure—new smells, new terrain, the thrilling novelty of somewhere that wasn't home. They had no concept of dimensional barriers or survival logistics or the fact that their presence here complicated everything I was trying to build.

For me, it was a powder keg with the fuse already lit.

Jamie's fury reignited, hotter than before. His whole body seemed to bristle as he strode toward me, closing the distance between us with steps that ate the ground. I could see the tendons standing out in his neck, the flush climbing his cheeks, the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides.

"What the fuck, Luke?!" he roared again, and before I could brace myself, before I could raise my hands or step back or do anything at all to prepare, he shoved me hard.

The unexpected force knocked me back a step, dust sliding treacherously under my feet, balance momentarily lost. My arms windmilled stupidly as I fought to stay upright, and something hot and ugly surged through my chest—not hurt, not yet, but the precursor to hurt, that split-second before pain when your body recognises it's been violated.

He'd pushed me. Jamie had actually, physically pushed me.

In ten years together, through arguments that had rattled the walls and silences that had stretched for days, through all the accumulated grievances and disappointments that any long relationship accrues, he had never once put his hands on me in anger. That line had held. That boundary had remained sacred.

Until now.

Something in me snapped. Not loudly, not dramatically—more like a rope that had been fraying for hours finally giving way, the tension releasing all at once into something dangerous. The exhaustion of the day, the betrayal still raw in my chest, the relentless logistics and impossible choices—I could bear them. I had been bearing them. But this? This lashing out, this violence from the man who'd already gutted me with his confession about Ben?

No. Absolutely fucking not.

The stern set of my jaw hardened into something colder, and as I straightened, my eyes locked on his with a fury I usually kept buried so deep even I forgot it existed.

"Fuck off, Jamie! They'll be fine!" The words tore from my throat, edged with a ferocity I hadn't unleashed in years—maybe ever. My palms pressed against his chest, and this time it was me who shoved, my force deliberate, fuelled not by surprise but by the simple, searing refusal to be his punching bag. Not today. Not after everything. Not when I was holding this entire venture together with nothing but willpower and lies while he got to be the victim, the wounded party, the one whose feelings mattered.

He staggered back, caught off guard by my retaliation.

For a heartbeat, the air between us pulsed with unspoken history—love, betrayal, survival—all condensed into the violent push and pull of our bodies. It was no longer just about the dogs. It was about us. About the confession this morning, about Ben's name hanging between us like smoke, about the ten years we'd built and the foundation that now felt riddled with cracks. Every resentment I'd swallowed, every compromise I'd made, every time I'd set aside my own needs for the sake of harmony—all of it surged up in that single shove.

The world seemed to contract. The dust hung suspended in the air, each mote illuminated by the sunlight slanting across the landscape, and in that strange stillness I watched Jamie's face change.

His hands pressed tight against his chest. His expression contorted—not with anger now, but with something else entirely. Pain. Real pain, the kind that comes from inside rather than impact, the kind that twists your features because your body is screaming at you and you can't make it stop.

A chill ripped down my spine.

My stomach dropped, dread clawing its way up my throat. The anger drained out of me so fast it left me hollow, replaced by something worse: the dawning recognition that I had missed something, that there was a piece of this picture I hadn't seen, that his fury might have been masking something other than simple rage.

"Is that blood?"

My voice emerged hoarse and broken, the words scraping past a throat suddenly tight with fear. I inched toward him, every step heavy with the weight of what I feared I'd find. My legs resisted, some animal part of me wanting to turn away, to not know, to preserve the comfortable ignorance of a few seconds ago.

But I couldn't. Whatever was wrong, I had to see it.

"It's nothing," Jamie's head snapped side to side in frantic denial, his eyes wild with an insistence I knew too well—that particular desperation to maintain a fiction even as it crumbled. He wanted to downplay it, to brush it aside, to convince both of us that whatever was happening beneath his hands didn't matter.

But his face was grey. Actually grey, the colour leached from his skin, and there was sweat beading at his temples that had nothing to do with the heat.

"Nothing?" I echoed, my voice cracking with incredulity. The sharpness couldn't conceal the rising panic flooding my chest. "It doesn't look like nothing."

The words felt jagged leaving my throat, torn between anger at his stubbornness and the icy terror of what his denial might be hiding. My hands, trembling yet resolute, moved almost without my permission. I gripped his wrist, forcing his arm away despite his weak resistance. He tried to pull back, tried to keep me out, but there was no strength behind it—just the gesture of refusal, empty of actual force.

I lifted his shirt.

And then I saw it.

The sight was a gut punch. A wound I hadn't known existed, swollen and angry, the flesh around it raised and hot-looking. Blood and pus oozed from the rupture with grotesque persistence, the fluids mixing into something that glistened wetly in the light. This wasn't fresh. This wasn't from our scuffle. This was something that had been brewing for days, hidden beneath his clothes, festering while he'd said nothing, did nothing, let it consume him from the inside.

The smell hit a second later—sharp, metallic, with an undertone of something rotten that made my gorge rise. I'd smelled infection before, in contexts I didn't want to remember, and this was unmistakably that: the particular reek of a body turning against itself, of tissue going bad, of wounds that had crossed the line from injury into something systemic.

How long had he been carrying this? How many times had I been close enough to notice—close enough to smell it, to feel the heat radiating from his skin—and simply hadn't looked?

Jamie's voice, quiet yet cutting, shattered the paralysis of my horror. "You've sentenced us to death, Luke."

His eyes locked onto mine, unflinching. There was no anger left in them now—just pain, and beneath the pain, something worse: a resigned certainty that settled into my bones like lead. He had already done the calculations. He had already reached his conclusions. And he was looking at me not with hope for contradiction but with the terrible patience of someone delivering a verdict.

"Welcome to the fucking nightmare."

The syllables lingered in the air between us, acrid and final.

I stood there, frozen, staring at the wound that proved everything I'd told myself about managing this situation had been fantasy. I'd been so focused on logistics—tents and supplies and the mechanics of survival—that I'd missed what was actually killing us. Not the lack of shelter. Not the alien environment. But something as mundane as an untreated injury, infection spreading through Jamie's body while I'd been too preoccupied with my own grief and my grand plans to notice.

The nightmare he spoke of was no longer a figure of speech. It had taken form, embodied in the angry wound carved into his flesh. And as I stared at the festering evidence of my failure—my failure to see, my failure to ask, my failure to be present enough to recognise that something was deeply, dangerously wrong—I understood with horrible clarity that the stakes were higher, sharper, and more lethal than I had ever let myself imagine.

I had brought them here. I had orchestrated this entire situation. And now Jamie might die for it, might already be dying, his body surrendering to bacteria I couldn't fight while I'd been busy playing god with portals and settlements and the future of humanity.

Somewhere behind us, the dogs continued their joyful exploration, oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding between the humans they loved. Duke barked at something in the dust, and the sound seemed to come from very far away, from a world where problems were simple and survival was certain and no one you loved was looking at you with dying eyes.