Tomorrow's Lies

"The stories we tell ourselves about tomorrow being better are the only currency that buys us through today—even when we know the exchange rate is fiction."

Duke's barking ripped through my unconsciousness like a chainsaw through wet cardboard.

One moment I was floating in that blessed emptiness where pain couldn't reach me—the next, sharp, insistent yaps were drilling into my skull with the subtlety of a jackhammer. My eyes flew open, or tried to. The lids felt glued together, crusted with sleep and whatever else my body had been leaking while I was under.

"Shut up, Duke."

The words came out harsher than I intended, more snarl than speech, driven by the immediate assault on my senses rather than any real anger at the dog. He ignored me completely, of course. Duke had never been one to take orders when something more interesting was happening.

The barking continued, punctuated by rustling sounds filtering through the tent's fabric walls—bags, maybe, or boxes being moved. Henri had joined the chorus now, his deeper bark harmonising with Duke's frantic soprano in a cacophony that made me want to crawl back into unconsciousness and pull the darkness over my head like a blanket.

My hands moved automatically to my face, fingers pressing against eyelids, trying to force functionality into a body that seemed to have forgotten how to work. The grogginess clung to me like wet clothes, heavy and uncomfortable, resisting every attempt to shake it loose.

Voices outside. Muffled, indistinct—Paul, probably, and maybe Luke if he'd returned. Both dogs interpreted the sounds as their cue to investigate, scampering out of the tent with an enthusiasm I couldn't begin to match. Their departure left sudden, ringing silence in their wake.

I lay there in that quiet, cataloguing damage.

My forehead throbbed. No—my temples. No, that wasn't right either. The realisation crept over me with sickening clarity: my entire fucking head was pounding. Not a headache in the traditional sense, but something deeper and more insistent. Like someone had detonated a small explosive inside my skull and the shockwaves were still reverberating through the tissue, each pulse synchronising with my heartbeat in a rhythm of pure misery.

Brilliant. As if the chest wound wasn't enough.

The burn between my pecs chose that moment to reassert its presence, throbbing in counterpoint to the percussion in my head. I was a symphony of pain now, different instruments playing different notes, all of them discordant. The question of which hurt worse became an absurd mental exercise—like asking whether you'd prefer to be stabbed or bludgeoned. Neither option appealed.

I tried to assess my condition objectively, the way a mechanic might evaluate a car that had been in a serious accident. The results weren't encouraging. Head: fucked. Chest: fucked. Energy levels: nonexistent. Morale: somewhere in the negative numbers, hovering around "what's the point of anything."

The sleep hadn't fixed me. It had merely pressed pause on the deterioration, and now that I was awake, everything came flooding back with interest.

Duke burst back into the tent before I could sink too deeply into self-pity.

His tail was a blur of motion—wagging so fast and hard that his entire backend swung with it, a furry pendulum of excitement. His eyes were bright with the particular gleam of a dog who had discovered something wonderful and needed to share it immediately.

Clamped in his jaws was a small packet of dog treats.

The paper wrapping glistened with saliva, thoroughly soaked from his proud carrying. Drool dripped from the corners of his mouth as he approached, leaving a trail of wet spots on the tent floor. He stopped beside the mattress and stared at me with an expression that could only be described as triumphant.

Look what I found, Dad. Look what I brought you. Aren't I the best dog?

Despite everything—the pounding head, the burning chest, the general sense that my body was staging a mutiny against continued existence—a smile tugged at the corners of my mouth.

"You absolute menace," I muttered, though there was no heat in it.

Duke's tail wagged harder, apparently interpreting this as praise. He pushed the soggy packet toward me with his nose, an offering, a gift from dog to human in the ancient tradition of their species.

I reached out and snatched the wet packet from his mouth before he could decide to eat the whole thing himself.

The packet squelched unpleasantly in my grip. Dog saliva coated my fingers, warm and slightly sticky. Under normal circumstances, I might have been disgusted. But normal circumstances had evaporated days ago, and finding disgust felt like too much effort.

Duke sat back on his haunches, tongue lolling, radiating satisfaction. He'd done his job. He'd found the thing and brought it to his human. Whatever happened next was someone else's problem.

Henri appeared moments later, drawn by the prospect of treats. He waddled over with considerably less urgency than his brother, his food-motivated soul apparently calculating whether the energy expenditure was worth the potential reward. He settled beside Duke, both of them staring at the soggy packet in my hand with the intense focus of creatures whose entire worldview revolved around the next meal.

Paul's entrance interrupted the canine staring contest.

"Luke's brought us a heap of groceries," he announced, and the words hit me like a wave of cool water after a long drought.

"Thank fuck."

The relief that washed through me was visceral—a full-body release of tension I hadn't even realised I'd been carrying. Food. Actual food. After the failed search at the Drop Zone, after the disaster with the concrete, after collapsing in the dust and nearly dying of whatever combination of heat stroke and infection was currently trying to claim me, the promise of sustenance felt almost miraculous.

My stomach, which had been maintaining a sort of resigned silence, suddenly remembered its purpose. Hunger gnawed at my insides with renewed vigour—a hollow, insistent ache that competed for attention with all my other discomforts.

Basic needs, I thought. Water, food, shelter. The hierarchy of survival that reduces everything else to background noise.

I attempted to sit up.

The movement was catastrophic.

Every muscle in my body screamed in protest, a chorus of objection that started in my abdomen and radiated outward like cracks spreading through ice. My chest wound flared with a heat that made my vision swim. A soft moan escaped my lips before I could stop it—an involuntary sound of pure suffering that I would have been embarrassed by if I'd had the energy for embarrassment.

Head or chest? Head or chest?

The question reasserted itself with new urgency. The pounding in my skull had intensified with the attempted movement, each heartbeat driving a spike of pain through my temples. But the burn between my pecs was actively throbbing now, angry and insistent, sending tendrils of fire across my ribcage with every breath.

Neither. Both. The answer was that I was comprehensively fucked, damaged in multiple places simultaneously, and trying to determine which injury was "worse" was an exercise in futility that served no purpose except to distract me from the reality that I couldn't actually do anything about any of it.

But distraction was what I needed. Anything to keep my mind from spiralling into the dark places that waited at the edges of consciousness—the whispered certainties that this wound was infected, that without proper medical care I was slowly dying, that Clivilius had claimed me and there was no escape.

I reached for the grocery bag that Paul had carried in, my fingers gingerly exploring its contents. The movement sent fresh waves of pain through my chest, but I gritted my teeth and pushed through. Finding the treat packet—the dry one, not Duke's soggy offering—provided a small sense of purpose.

Duke and Henri watched my every motion with laser focus, their bodies quivering with anticipation. When I finally extracted a handful of treats and distributed them, their joy was pure and uncomplicated. Tails wagged. Teeth crunched. Contentment radiated from their small furry forms.

I found myself envying them. Their world was simple: food appeared, happiness followed. No existential dread, no fear of infection, no questions about inter-dimensional imprisonment or complicated relationships or the slow unravelling of everything that had once made sense.

Just treats. Just now. Just the simple pleasure of being fed by someone who loved them.

"So, you're feeling better then?"

Paul's question pulled me back from the edge of wherever my thoughts had been drifting. I blinked at him, trying to assemble an appropriate response from the scattered pieces of my consciousness.

"I think so."

The lie came easily—too easily, perhaps. A polished surface hiding the chaos underneath. I couldn't let him see the full extent of my struggle. Pride, maybe. Or the remnants of masculine conditioning that insisted showing weakness was worse than actually being weak. Or simply the exhaustion of explaining, of translating internal experience into words that might be understood.

"I think I actually fell asleep," I added, as if this were some kind of accomplishment rather than a symptom of how thoroughly my body had given up on consciousness.

Paul's laughter was light, carefree—a sound from a different world than the one I currently inhabited. "Yeah. You did."

No shit. I'd gathered that much from the way time had jumped and my mouth tastes like something died in it.

I offered a smile, the expression feeling foreign on my face. It was a mask, constructed with the last reserves of social energy I possessed. A veneer of normality stretched over the turmoil beneath. I hoped it looked convincing. I wasn't sure it did.

"Well, now that you're awake, I may as well bring these bags inside," Paul declared, already moving toward the tent entrance with the practical purpose that seemed to define his every action. "Better than leaving them outside in the heat."

The offer emerged from my mouth before my brain could intercept it.

"I'll help you."

I tried to rise.

My body's response was immediate and unambiguous. Every system that had been merely complaining before now escalated to full rebellion. The edges of my vision darkened. The tent seemed to tilt at an angle that couldn't be real. My arms, which I'd attempted to use for leverage, trembled and gave out beneath me.

"No."

Paul's voice was firm, brooking no argument. He'd crossed the space between us before I could attempt another futile effort, his hand on my shoulder pressing me back down with gentle but absolute authority.

I wanted to argue. Wanted to insist that I was fine, that I could help, that lying here while the world continued without me was its own form of torture. But the fight had drained out of me with that failed attempt to rise, leaving only the cold reality of my limitations.

I eased back onto the mattress with the caution of someone handling explosives.

Every motion required negotiation with my damaged body—a careful calculation of which movements would trigger the least agony, which positions might allow the wound some rest, which angle might reduce the pounding in my skull to something merely unbearable rather than actively murderous.

The darkness that had threatened at the edges of my vision during my attempt to rise still lurked there, patient and waiting. A reminder of how thin the line was between consciousness and collapse, between functional (if barely) and completely incapacitated.

I nearly died today, I reminded myself. Collapsed in the middle of nowhere, would have stayed there forever if Duke hadn't found me. I'm not okay. Pretending otherwise isn't strength—it's stupidity.

"Maybe just for the rest of today," I conceded, the words barely above a whisper.

It was surrender. Acknowledgment of defeat by my own body. The acceptance that there were limits I couldn't push through, obstacles I couldn't simply ignore into nonexistence.

The tent settled around me in the aftermath of that admission—simultaneously sanctuary and prison. The fabric walls filtered the harsh Clivilius light into something softer, almost gentle. Duke and Henri had finished their treats and were settling into their own positions, Duke with Horsey tucked under his chin, Henri already snoring softly in his corner.

Outside, I could hear Paul moving bags, the soft thuds and rustles of supplies being organised. The sounds of someone building something, maintaining something, keeping the machinery of survival running while I lay here useless.

Just for today, I told myself. Tomorrow I'll be stronger. Tomorrow the wound will have healed a little more. Tomorrow the headache will have faded.

The lies were comforting, even if I didn't believe them. They were the kind of stories we tell ourselves to get through moments that would otherwise be unbearable—tomorrow will be better, this too shall pass, the darkness is temporary.

My eyes drifted closed, not because I chose to sleep but because keeping them open had become more effort than I could manage. The headache pulsed behind my temples. The burn on my chest throbbed with each heartbeat. My body felt foreign, unfamiliar, a broken machine I'd been forced to inhabit.

But the dogs were here. Duke's warmth pressed against my leg, familiar and grounding. Henri's snoring provided a rhythm that was almost soothing in its mundane normality.

Just for today.