The Golden Rule of Parenting

"When your partner describes your cosmic imprisonment as 'destiny' rather than 'the worst thing he's ever done to you', you know the relationship has hit a rough patch."

The colours swirled, parted, and deposited Luke back into Clivilius as casually as if he'd stepped through a doorway to the kitchen rather than traversed the boundary between dimensions.

He stood there in his absurd boardshorts, blinking in the sunlight, apparently oblivious to the storm of rage and terror he'd walked back into. The Portal behind him continued its serene dance, beautiful and hateful, a door that opened for some and slammed shut for others.

For him. Not for us.

Paul moved first. He'd been kneeling in the dust, but now he was on his feet, closing the distance between himself and his brother with the kind of focused intensity I'd never seen from him. The usual deference, the habitual patience that marked his interactions with Luke—all of it had burned away, leaving something rawer underneath.

"Did you know?" The accusation landed between them like a thrown punch. Paul's voice carried no room for evasion, no tolerance for the mystical deflection Luke was so skilled at deploying.

"Know what?" Luke's confusion seemed genuine, which only made it worse. The possibility that he'd trapped us without understanding he was doing so wasn't comforting—it was horrifying. It suggested we were prisoners of incompetence as much as malevolence.

"That we couldn't leave, Luke. Did you know the Portal wouldn't let us through?"

Something shifted in Luke's expression. Not guilt, exactly. More like the slow dawn of understanding—the realisation that consequences existed for actions he'd taken without considering them.

"I've been able to come and go freely," he said, and the words hung there in the Clivilius air, dripping with implication. He'd been visiting. Exploring. Building his pile of boxes and his dreams of civilisation. And all the while, the Portal had been welcoming him back to Earth like a faithful dog, while it prepared to trap the rest of us here forever.

The envy hit me like a physical blow. Luke could leave. Luke could walk through that wall of light and be home—our home, the home we'd built together—within seconds. He could pet Duke and Henri, sleep in our bed, make himself a cup of tea in our kitchen. And we couldn't.

The unfairness of it was almost funny. Almost.

I found myself speaking before I'd consciously decided to, the words pulled from somewhere deep in my chest where despair had begun to curdle into something bleaker.

"So, this is it then?" My voice came out flat, stripped of the anger I'd been throwing around. Anger required hope. Anger assumed something could change. This was beyond anger. "This is our fate. To die in this godforsaken dust?"

Luke's response was immediate and infuriating in its certainty.

"Not fate. Destiny."

The word landed with the weight of revelation, delivered with the fervour of someone who'd spent too long in his own head, building castles of meaning from the rubble of chance. Destiny. As if our imprisonment in this barren wasteland was part of some grand cosmic plan. As if suffocating in red dust was a privilege we should be grateful for.

I wanted to hit him. The urge was so strong I could feel it in my hands, a tremor of violence that I barely contained. Ten years. Ten fucking years I'd given to this man, and he was standing there in his boardshorts, talking about destiny while I faced the prospect of never seeing home again.

Paul beat me to the verbal assault, his words landing with a precision that surprised me.

"You're so full of shit sometimes."

The casualness of the delivery was its own kind of violence—the older brother dismissing the younger's grandiosity with the weary contempt of someone who'd been hearing this nonsense for decades. Paul's voice carried no heat, no drama. Just the flat observation of someone stating an obvious fact.

I glanced at him, unable to hide my surprise. Paul was the peacemaker, the responsible one, the eldest child who'd spent his life smoothing over family conflicts and maintaining harmony. Hearing him curse at Luke—hearing that sharp edge in his voice—was like watching a vicar spit on the communion wine. It didn't happen. It wasn't done.

But here we were, in a place where the normal rules had already been shredded, and apparently Paul had decided that courtesy could die alongside everything else we'd lost.

The silence that followed was heavy with the weight of things unsaid. Luke's face crumpled into something approaching hurt, the expression of a man who'd expected applause and received rejection instead. Good. Let him feel something. Let him understand that his mystical revelations weren't landing the way he'd hoped.

The standoff between the brothers stretched until I thought it might snap. Luke stood rigid, wounded by Paul's dismissal. Paul stared back with an intensity that seemed to age him years in seconds. The endless blue sky pressed down on all of us, witness to a family fracturing under impossible circumstances.

Then something in Paul's face shifted. The anger drained away, replaced by something worse. Something I recognised from the nursing home, from the families gathered around dying patients, from the moments when hope finally surrendered to reality.

His shoulders dropped. His jaw unclenched. And when he spoke, his voice had lost its edge entirely, leaving only the raw wound of a father's desperation.

"What about my children? Am I ever going to see them again?"

The question hit me in a place I hadn't known was vulnerable. Paul had children. Of course he did—I knew that, had known it for years, had seen photos and heard stories. But in the chaos of the last hours, I'd been so consumed with my own imprisonment that I'd forgotten about the people he'd left behind. A wife. Two kids. A whole life in Broken Hill that had been ripped away without warning, without consent, without even a fucking goodbye.

Mack and Rose. I remembered their names now, dredged up from some Christmas conversation years ago. Young kids, perhaps primary school age. Kids who would wake up tomorrow and the next day and the day after that wondering where their father had gone.

The thought made my chest ache.

Luke's response came too quickly, delivered with a naivety that bordered on cruelty.

"I can arrange to have them come here?"

For a moment, the words didn't register. I stared at Luke, waiting for the punchline, the acknowledgment that he was joking, that no one could possibly be stupid enough to suggest what he'd just suggested.

But his face was earnest. Hopeful, even. As if he genuinely believed he'd found a solution, a way to ease Paul's pain. As if bringing children to a wasteland was an act of kindness rather than an atrocity.

Paul's reaction was everything mine couldn't be. All the rage I'd been struggling to articulate, all the horror at what Luke had become, all the desperate disbelief at the situation we found ourselves in—Paul channelled it into a single, devastating response.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" The words exploded from him, propelled by an intensity that made Luke take a physical step backward. "I know you don't have the first clue about parenting Luke, but here's the number one golden rule for how to be a dad. You ready?"

He didn't wait for an answer.

"Don't, under any circumstances, bring your children through a one-way inter-dimensional Portal to an alien wasteland where there is literally nothing but dust and a tent!"

The tirade echoed across the empty landscape, absorbed by the silence that surrounded us. Paul's face had flushed crimson, veins visible in his neck, his whole body rigid with the force of his outrage. He wasn't just angry—he was terrified. Terrified that Luke might actually do it. Terrified that his children might end up here, in this prison of red dirt and impossible sky, because their uncle had decided destiny required their presence.

I watched the exchange with a strange sense of detachment. Paul's words had stripped something bare, exposed a truth I'd been circling without quite grasping. Luke wasn't just delusional. He was dangerous. His certainty about this place, about his purpose here, about the grand design he believed he was serving—it had blinded him to the human cost of his actions. He'd trapped us here without apparent guilt. He'd offered to trap children with the same casual enthusiasm.

What would he do next?

The thought sent a chill through me despite the warmth of the sun.

Paul's outburst had burned through him like flash paper. He stood now in its aftermath, hollowed out, the hopelessness I'd glimpsed earlier now etched permanently into his features. His children were on Earth. He was here. And the distance between those two realities was measured in dimensions rather than kilometres.

I found my own anger rising to fill the silence. Someone needed to demand answers. Someone needed to make Luke understand what he'd done, even if that understanding couldn't undo it.

"I can't believe you've gotten us stuck in this bloody place!" The accusation felt inadequate to the scale of what had happened, but it was all I had. "How long have you known about this?"

Luke's response was halting, uncertain—a stark contrast to his earlier messianic confidence. He spoke of dozing off. Of the device falling from his hand. Of waking to find the Portal active, the colours swirling, the doorway between worlds standing open in his study like an invitation.

The explanation was so mundane, so pathetically ordinary, that it almost made things worse. Our lives hadn't been upended by grand cosmic forces or deliberate malice. They'd been destroyed by a fucking nap. By Luke's inability to keep hold of a device while sleeping. By the kind of clumsy accident that would be comedy in any other context.

"Portal Key?" Paul's voice carried the incredulity I felt. "You do realise you sound like we're all living inside a bad sci-fi novel, right?"

Luke bristled, defensive in the way people get when they've named something and don't appreciate having that naming questioned. "Well, that's what it is, isn't it? A key to the Portal?"

The logic was infuriatingly sound, which made me hate it more. Yes, it was a key. Yes, it operated a Portal. But the terminology belonged to fiction, to stories, to things that happened to other people in imaginary worlds. Not to us. Not to me and my partner in what should have been our ordinary suburban life.

"Yeah, but... Portal?" Paul couldn't let it go, still wrestling with the semantic absurdity of our situation. We were standing in an alien desert, discussing whether to call the thing that had brought us here a Portal as if nomenclature mattered, as if finding the right word would somehow make any of this make sense.

"What else would you call it?" Luke asked, turning to face the shimmering wall of colours that hung in the air behind him. The question was genuine—he really wanted to know what alternative terminology might suit the phenomenon that had destroyed our lives.

I stared at the Portal. At the dancing lights that concealed a passage home I couldn't access. At the beautiful, terrible thing that Luke could walk through and I couldn't.

"A piece of shit," I said, the words flat and final. "One giant piece of shit."

Paul snorted.

The sound was so unexpected, so wildly inappropriate to the moment, that for a second I thought I'd imagined it. But no—Paul's shoulders were shaking, his face contorted with the effort of suppressing laughter that clearly wanted out. Another snort escaped, louder this time, his attempts to contain it only making things worse.

"Sorry," he managed, the word strangled by the laughter he was trying to swallow. "Sorry, I just—"

He turned away, shoulders heaving, apparently unable to face us while his body betrayed him. The snorts kept coming, each one more pronounced than the last, his apology doing nothing to stem the tide.

I rolled my eyes. The absurdity of it—Paul dissolving into hysterics while we stood in an inter-dimensional prison, discussing the semantics of our entrapment—was either the funniest thing that had ever happened or the most tragic. Possibly both.

I shot Luke a look that I hoped conveyed the depth of my contempt. For the situation. For his response to it. For the fact that my partner's brother was giggling in the dust while I contemplated dying in a place called fucking Clivilius.

Luke had the grace to look uncomfortable, at least. Small mercies.

The laughter eventually subsided, leaving behind a silence that felt different from the ones before. Something had shifted—the hysterical edge that had been building since our arrival had finally crested and broken. We were still trapped. We were still fucked. But the manic energy of denial had burned itself out, leaving only the flat acceptance of our situation.

Luke cleared his throat, stepping into the void with the hesitant manner of someone trying to be helpful when help was no longer possible.

"I guess I'd better start bringing you some supplies."

Supplies. The word felt clinical, detached—the kind of thing you said about stocking a camping trip rather than provisioning an indefinite exile. But it was also the first practical statement anyone had made since we'd arrived. Food. Water. Shelter beyond those ominous boxes. The basic requirements of survival that would apparently need to be ferried through a Portal by the only person who could traverse it.

My gaze, which had been fixed on Paul's still-heaving shoulders, drifted back to Luke. He stood there in his boardshorts, looking smaller somehow, diminished by the confrontations that had stripped away his prophetic confidence. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

"Is there really no going back?" The question escaped before I could stop it, carrying an unexpected weight of sadness that surprised me. I'd been angry—was still angry—but beneath the rage lay something more fragile. Hope, perhaps. The desperate, dying kind that clings to possibilities even as they evaporate.

Luke's face said everything his words would only confirm.

"I guess not." His voice was heavy, resigned. Whatever certainty he'd possessed about destiny and new civilisations had collided with the reality of what he'd done to the people he loved. "I'm sorry, Jamie."

The apology hung between us like smoke. I wanted to scream at him, to demand that sorry do something useful, that it open the Portal or rewind time or undo this catastrophe he'd created. But sorry was just a word, and words couldn't fix dimensions.

I closed my eyes. Behind my lids, I saw our house in Berriedale. The study where this had all begun. Duke and Henri, waiting by the door with the patient loyalty of dogs who didn't understand that their human wasn't coming home. Ten years of photographs and furniture and shared meals and stupid arguments about whose turn it was to vacuum. A life I'd built, however imperfectly, now lost on the other side of a barrier I couldn't breach.

The anger I'd been wielding like a weapon finally guttered out. What replaced it was worse. Quieter. The kind of emotion that didn't know its own name.

"Just go," I told Luke softly, my voice barely audible against the vast silence of Clivilius.

The request wasn't entirely about him. It was about needing space to process what couldn't be processed. It was about not being able to look at his face—the face I'd loved, had shared a bed with, had imagined growing old beside—while the magnitude of his betrayal continued to crystallise.

He'd trapped me. Whether he'd meant to or not, whether he'd understood the consequences or not, the result was the same. I was here. I couldn't leave. And the man responsible was the man I'd given a decade of my life to.

Luke nodded, accepting the dismissal with a humility that felt new. He turned toward the Portal, paused for a moment at its edge—perhaps considering what to say, perhaps simply gathering himself for the transition—and then stepped through.

The colours embraced him. Swallowed him. And then he was gone, leaving Paul and me alone in the dust with only the echo of his departure and the weight of an unknown future pressing down on our shoulders.

The silence that followed Luke's departure was absolute.

Paul had finally stopped laughing. He stood a few metres away, staring at the horizon with the glazed expression of someone whose mind had temporarily left the premises. I couldn't blame him. His children were unreachable now, separated by a barrier that no amount of parental love could penetrate. Whatever complicated life he'd been living in Broken Hill—the marriage, the responsibilities, the carefully constructed normalcy—all of it had been amputated without anaesthetic.

And me? I stood in the dust of an alien world, wearing the remnants of a shirt the Portal had singed, my arm stripped bare of hair, trying to find my footing in a reality that refused to make sense.

The boxes Luke had mentioned sat in their pile nearby, silent testimony to plans that had been made without our consent. Somewhere in there were the materials for a shelter. For a life, if you could call survival in a wasteland a life. Luke would return with supplies—food, water, the necessities of existence—and we would be expected to build something from the nothing that surrounded us.

I thought about Ben.

The thought arrived unbidden, inappropriate, and I tried to push it away. But it lodged there anyway, a splinter I couldn't extract. Yesterday—was it only yesterday?—I'd been in a nursing home bathroom with a man who wasn't my partner, betraying a relationship I'd already been struggling to save. Now that relationship existed across an unbridgeable gulf, and the betrayal felt simultaneously more monstrous and more meaningless.

What did it matter what I'd done with Ben? Luke was over there. I was over here. Whatever we'd been building together, whatever remained of us after the distance and the secrets and the slow erosion of intimacy—it was now literally in another dimension. Our problems had become cosmic in scale, too vast for guilt or confession or reconciliation.

I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt hollow.

Paul moved, finally. He walked toward the pile of boxes with the shambling gait of someone operating on autopilot. I watched him go, too exhausted to follow, too numb to offer help. Whatever he was looking for in those containers—distraction, maybe, or simply something to do with his hands—he'd find it or he wouldn't.

I sank to the ground where I stood. The dust was surprisingly soft, almost warm, like sitting on sun-heated sand at a beach. I pulled my knees to my chest and stared at the Portal, still swirling its beautiful colours, still mocking me with its inaccessibility.

Somewhere beyond that light, Duke was probably wondering why I hadn't come home. Henri would be circling his bed, preparing for a nap that wouldn't be interrupted by my return. The house would sit empty, or maybe Luke would be there now, making his first supply run, gathering the things we'd need to survive our exile.

He'd walk through our home. Touch our things. Sleep in the bed we'd shared. And I wouldn't be there, might never be there again, because the universe had decided that destiny meant imprisonment and there was nothing I could do about it.

The first tear caught me by surprise. It traced a path down my dusty cheek and fell to the Clivilius earth, absorbed instantly by the thirsty ground. Another followed. And another. Until I was crying in a way I hadn't cried since childhood, the kind of sobbing that comes from somewhere deeper than thought, that bypasses the conscious mind entirely and simply happens.

Paul didn't turn around. Maybe he was crying too. Maybe he was just giving me privacy. Either way, I was grateful. Some things were too raw to share, even with a fellow prisoner.