The Laughter He Couldn't Join

The camp appears on the horizon like a judgement. Kain's leg has stopped screaming — the wound sealing itself with impossible speed, Clive's end of the bargain fulfilled in flesh if nothing else. But the relief brings no comfort. Only the sick certainty that the price he paid will follow him for the rest of his life.

Fires ring the perimeter now, small blazes positioned at regular intervals, pushing back the darkness that nearly killed them all. Paul explains the logic: visibility, security, the simple mathematics of survival. Nial sits apart with empty eyes, still processing a displacement he can't accept. Everyone has their own grief to carry.

Kain carries something heavier.

Karen asks where Chris is, and the lie comes out smooth — survival instinct hijacking vocal cords, buying time before the reckoning arrives. She heads toward the lagoon to fetch her husband, and Kain's mind spirals through possibilities too horrible to examine. What will Chris say? What does he remember? Will Clive whisper to him the way it whispered to Kain?

Then Karen returns with Chris beside her, walking, upright, apparently intact. And later, through the thin walls of his tent, Kain hears her voice rise above the campfire murmur: "The clumsy bugger slipped on the rocks."

Chris has lied for him. Has kept the secret, claimed an accident, protected the man who violated him. Whether from trauma-wiped memory or conscious choice, Kain can't know. But he's bound now — complicit in silence, partnered in fiction, tied to Chris by threads neither of them wanted.

The fires crackle outside. Laughter drifts through canvas walls. And Kain lies alone in the darkness, leaking tears into his sleeping bag, waiting for sleep to take him somewhere the memories can't follow.

His leg is healing.

Everything else is ash.