"Oh my God, Jargus! What the hell happened last night?”

The words tore from my throat like gravel scraped across raw concrete. Every syllable rasped with effort, my tongue thick and immobile, as though it had been left out to dry beside a dead fire. My mouth was a barren wasteland—parched, bitter, and reeking of regret. The coppery sting of old alcohol and guilt lingered, coating the back of my throat like a crime I couldn't wash away.

Somehow, Hobart’s winter chill had wormed its way through the brick and plaster of my flat, yet sweat glued the sheets to my skin in clammy defiance. I forced a groan past cracked lips, rolling over with the cautious choreography of a man who suspected his body had mutinied overnight. Every muscle fibre screamed protest—tight, inflamed, vengeful.

Jargus lay beside me, his body curled close, radiating warmth. Solid. Unmoving. Real. In a world narrowed to nausea, pounding light, and the lingering taste of shame, he was the one constant that hadn’t shifted. His presence offered a strange comfort—like waking up at the crime scene but finding your partner already there, waiting.

Light sliced through the curtain's gap with surgical precision, lancing directly into my skull. I winced and turned away, but there was no real escape. July in Tasmania—where even the bloody sun comes at you like it’s got a score to settle.

The night before had started with such innocent intent—just a few drinks at Salamanca to mark the occasion. Colleagues, familiar faces, the casual clink of glasses over polished timber. The kind of thing that’s supposed to feel earned. But at some murky point—somewhere between “just one more” and the silence that comes after slurred farewells—I’d lost my grip. The drinks had lined up like dominos: tall, gleaming, filled with poison disguised as celebration. One after another, each shot traced a slow burn down my throat, leaving behind a trail of fire and something heavier. Something sharp-edged and invisible.

I’d aced it. The senior detective exam. Not just passed—aced. Top of the list. The promotion into Major Crimes wasn’t just another title or pay bump. It was a launchpad. Escape velocity from the grind of general duties, the politics, the whispered doubts. With the right cases, the right headlines, I’d be looking at sergeant stripes before I hit fifty. A future worth raising a glass to—maybe even worth obliterating myself for, apparently.

Faces from the night flitted through memory, hazy and distorted—like watching CCTV footage through a rain-slicked lens. Laughter, louder with each round. Slaps on the back that started as celebratory and became punishing. Somewhere in there, my restraint had vanished, replaced by a version of myself I barely recognised. Reckless. Desperate. Hungry.

The irony was, I knew better. I was a bloody detective. I’d seen what happened when people lost control. And still—I’d done it anyway.

Now I lay in the aftermath, temples drumming in sync with my pulse, feeling like I'd been dragged backwards through every bad decision I’d ever made. The future—promising as it might have seemed last night—was no longer on my mind. I needed water. Grease. Silence. A confessional, maybe.

Jargus hadn’t moved. His body, powerful and warm, was nestled tight against me. I reached out with a hand that shook slightly, brushing his head with the tenderness I couldn’t yet afford myself.

He whimpered softly, then opened his eyes. Those usually sharp, alert amber eyes were dulled now—glazed, accusatory. It was a look I'd seen countless times, just never directed at me.

“You too, huh?” I muttered, my voice a dry scrape, and scratched behind his ear. His head tilted incrementally, acknowledging the gesture, tolerating it more than enjoying it.

He wasn’t just a dog. Not to me. Jargus was my partner—on paper and beyond. His K9 unit record already read like something reserved for veterans twice his age. Intelligence, intuition, obedience laced with independence. There were moments I’d looked at him and wondered what he saw in me. Still, we were climbing together, weren’t we? Two overachievers in a department that never quite knew what to do with men like us.

And now here we were—one man, one mutt—both wrecked, one hungover, and silently regretting choices he couldn’t take back.

“We need to get up,” I groaned, kneeing him gently.

The words were dragged through rust and razorblades. The room held that strange, padded silence that follows a heavy night—curtains drawn, time suspended. For a brief, merciful moment, it was easy to pretend the world hadn’t resumed without me.

Jargus raised his head with the speed and enthusiasm of the recently embalmed. His gaze found mine and held it. In those amber eyes, I saw something startlingly human. Judgement, yes. But also loyalty. Understanding. Disappointment.

There was something primal in that look—older than law, older than regret. A silent rebuke, perhaps, but not abandonment.

“Come on then,” I said again, with more authority, trying to inject life into the command.

He sniffed the air, as if confirming there was no bacon, no danger, no tennis ball. He surveyed the room with the slow disinterest of a seasoned detective revisiting a cold case, then dropped his head back down with a finality that would’ve impressed a magistrate.

“Fine, you lazy pup,” I murmured, fingers moving again to the soft place behind his ear, tracing circles that grounded me more than they comforted him.

For a moment, the room was still. No sound but our breathing—his steady, mine ragged. My head throbbed, my stomach churned, but the guilt... the guilt was the loudest thing in the room.

I tried to extract myself from the tangle of sweat-drenched sheets with some semblance of dignity. That illusion lasted about as long as it took gravity to intervene.

My limbs, acting entirely of their own accord, ignored every command issued by my brain. Coordination—once a reliable ally—had clearly taken the morning off. I lurched sideways, graceless and off-kilter, and crashed to the floor with the balletic elegance of a tranquillised rhinoceros.

Carpet fibres scratched at my skin as I sprawled inelegantly across the floor, breath coming in short, uneven bursts. I reached out blindly, palm flailing for some form of support—bed frame, wall, anything—and instead made contact with something slick, lukewarm, and unquestionably out of place.

The sensation registered before sight could catch up. My fingers recoiled, but not before the texture imprinted itself on my memory like a boot on wet concrete.

“Eeew!”

The word burst from my mouth unbidden, halfway between a gag and a whimper. I brought my hand into view, and there it was—slack and glistening, dangling from my fingers with grotesque indifference: a used condom. Its viscous contents oozed downward in slow defiance, strands of fluid stretching toward the carpet with the consistency of three-day-old rice pudding.

It clung to my skin like it knew exactly what it represented.

I stared at it, horror unfurling in my chest with the cold precision of a morgue drawer sliding open. Shame prickled beneath my skin, momentarily eclipsing the nausea that had been mounting since consciousness returned.

"That had better not be mine," I muttered under my breath, frowning as if the condom might feel compelled to answer.

Sarah’s face came to me like a ghost—Detective Sarah Lahey, my partner in ways not yet official but undeniably intimate. Complicated didn’t begin to cover it. Our relationship had been evolving in those unspoken spaces between duty and desire, and despite every whispered rumour that stalked my name through the corridors of the Hobart police, I had been trying—genuinely trying—to remain loyal. Monogamy wasn’t a natural state for me, but with her, I’d made a quiet commitment to change.

So then... if this wasn’t a memory of us, who the hell had I been with?

My brain, still fogged by a hangover that felt like it had been crafted by vengeful chemists, refused to supply the missing details. The maths wouldn’t work. The timeline wouldn’t reconcile. I was staring down an equation that didn’t balance.

I held the latex monstrosity aloft, as if in courtroom presentation.

"This isn't yours, is it, Jargus?"

The dog raised his head with theatrical slowness, ears pricked with vague interest. His amber eyes—still cloudy with disapproval—narrowed at the offending object. He studied it with the detached curiosity of a museum curator confronted with an artefact too obscene for public display. After a few seconds of unimpressed inspection, he let his head fall back with a low huff, nestling once again into the sheets. Disinterested. Judging.

I rubbed my temples, trying to force coherence from the broken film reel spinning in my mind. Flashes came in fragments. Strobing lights. Bass that thudded against my ribcage like it meant to break in. Heat. Bodies packed tight in chemical proximity. A woman’s hand sliding down my sternum, fingernails tracing the edge of my abdominal muscle like she was reading braille. But no face. No voice. Just the sensation of someone.

And that was what frightened me most—that it was a someone, and I didn’t know who.

The nausea, until now held at bay like a distant drumbeat, surged forward in organised attack. It began with a warm tide in my throat and that familiar, sour taste that precluded disaster. My tongue felt foreign in my mouth—too thick, too dry, coated with the residue of spirits I couldn’t name and choices I couldn’t defend.

Pain bloomed in my abdomen. A violent cramp seized me, folding my body inwards. The bile rose without mercy. There was no time for hesitation.

I scrambled to my feet with the desperation of a man whose body had declared open rebellion, legs buckling beneath me as I stumbled towards the bathroom. Every step was an argument with physics. When I finally reached the toilet, there was no ceremony—only surrender.

My stomach heaved. The sound that escaped me was low, wet, and wholly indecent. I expelled something thick and bitter, the exact composition of which I didn’t care to examine. My body convulsed with each retch, throat raw from the violence of it, muscles contracting in rhythm with remembered mistakes. Several dry heaves followed, my abdomen now an echo chamber of futility.

Eventually, the spasms faded, leaving behind a dull, throbbing ache and a bitter tang on my tongue.

I slumped sideways, panting against the cool tiles. I didn’t bother to wipe the sweat from my forehead. I didn’t speak. This was punishment. It was penance. It was also familiar—far too familiar.

Dragging myself across the floor like some wounded animal, I reached the shower and activated the water without glancing at the tap. Hot, cold—who cared? It just needed to wash everything off. Every particle of failure clinging to my skin. Every trace of someone I couldn't remember. Every lie I hadn't yet told.

I slumped against the tiles, spine pressed flat against cold ceramic. The contrast was brutal but necessary. Water beat down on me in relentless rhythm, each droplet a percussion of atonement against my skin. My eyes slid shut. For a moment, I was just breath and water and pain.

Then the tide began to pull me under.

Consciousness blurred. My limbs grew leaden. My thoughts turned to fog, impossible to hold. Faces flickered in the black—Sarah’s eyes, her disapproval, her silence. And behind her, something darker. Something formless, yet watching.

I drifted, weightless in a storm of half-formed memories and the gut-tight certainty that last night had been more than just another blackout.

It had been a mistake.

And like all mistakes worth fearing—it wasn’t going to stay buried.

Consciousness didn’t return gently. It slammed into me with the force of a sledgehammer, shattering whatever temporary sanctuary I'd found in unconsciousness. My eyes snapped open. Breath hitched. Reality crashed in like a rogue wave, drowning me in sensation.

For a moment, confusion reigned. Disorientation spun the world on a tilted axis. Where the hell was I? Why was I wet? Why was every inch of me colder than a morgue slab?

Then came the answer: the shower. I’d passed out. In the sodding shower.

Panic scrambled through me. Limbs half-numb, I clawed at the tiles, the surface slick and treacherous beneath my hands. My fingers found the tap and twisted, killing the stream of water that had gone from therapeutic to torturous. What had once been a blessed reprieve had transformed into an icy onslaught, as if Hobart’s merciless winter had crept through the pipes with intent.

“Shit!"

The curse cracked from my throat between chattering teeth. My voice sounded alien—thin, brittle. Unmoored.

I looked down. My hands were pale and pruned, the skin shrivelled and grey, as though they'd aged decades in a single sitting. I followed the visual trail south and winced at the state of a particular appendage, now reduced to a rather pitiful monument to hypothermia. Even in this state, some part of me—the part not entirely ravaged by nausea and shame—winced at the indignity.

Surely I haven't been in here that long!

It was a ridiculous thing to care about, but vanity has a way of asserting itself even through pain and confusion. Time had dissolved in that strange, liminal space between waking and blackout—where thoughts ran thin and shadows played tricks. I couldn’t say how long I’d been unconscious, only that I’d drifted too far, for too long.

Standing felt like a dare. Every muscle fibre stiffened in protest, my body more corpse than man. But I pushed through the fog, rising slowly and without ceremony, one trembling leg at a time. I stumbled from the shower, my hand reaching instinctively for the towel rack.

Nothing.

The usual precision of my bathroom—everything in its place, everything accounted for—was absent. Like the rest of my life, apparently.

"Jargus, I need a towel!"

The command rang out with an edge of clarity that startled even me. For a brief moment, it was as if muscle memory had overridden disaster, drawing on the calm and control that once defined me in interrogation rooms and standoff negotiations. It was the voice of the old Karl—the reliable one. The version before everything blurred at the edges.

Water dripped from me in steady rhythm, collecting in expanding puddles on the tiles. I stood there—naked, shivering, and somehow still proud—awaiting a miracle.

Sixty seconds. I counted. Somewhere, beneath all the chaos, I was still capable of measuring time.

Sure enough, Jargus appeared in the doorway with professional punctuality. The sight might’ve drawn laughter if my teeth hadn’t been rattling in my skull.

There he was—my partner, my shadow—standing with a neatly folded grey towel clutched delicately between his teeth, like a sommelier presenting a 1998 pinot noir. The absurdity of it hit me square in the chest. A highly decorated police dog, trained in search and rescue, scent tracking, suspect apprehension… and towel delivery.

"Thank you, Jargus," I murmured, voice softened now, stripped of bravado.

I took the towel from his mouth and, for a moment, we just stared at one another. His amber eyes were penetrating in their assessment, clinical almost. That look—intelligent, alert, vaguely disapproving—was one I’d come to both respect and resent. In those eyes, I saw more than concern. I saw the weight of judgement. He didn’t need to say it. The sentiment was carved into the tilt of his head, the slow blink, the patient stillness. You’ve done it again, haven’t you?

A reluctant smile curled at the edge of my mouth. It felt foreign. Fragile.

I began to dry myself with urgency, friction translating to warmth. The towel rasped over my skin, bringing blood back to the surface, chasing away the cold but dragging the nausea with it. Each stroke felt like an affront to my stomach. A warning. The next wave was already building—waiting for a lapse in concentration to crash down.

But I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. This wasn’t about comfort anymore—it was about survival.

Every motion felt like a negotiation. Each breath came with strings attached. But beneath it all, beneath the hangover, the cold, the humiliation, one thought returned with brutal clarity:

Something’s wrong.

It lingered behind my eyes, in the corners of the room, in the fragments of memory I couldn’t stitch together. A shape in the fog. A whisper I couldn’t decipher.

And I had the sinking feeling that when it finally revealed itself—it wouldn’t be kind.

The distinctive ring of my mobile sliced through the flat like a scalpel—sharp, jarring, and surgically precise. That tone—reserved exclusively for work—was Pavlovian in its effect. No matter the hour, no matter my state, it set my pulse racing. Even now, half-dead and wholly disgraced, my body responded to the sound with the urgency of a soldier roused by gunfire.

"Shit."

Gone was any remaining pretence of dignity. I bolted from the bathroom stark naked, trailing wet footprints like some amphibious cryptid freshly emerged from the depths of Hobart’s harbour. The flat's cold air slammed into my damp skin, raising gooseflesh as I stumbled into the bedroom, scanning the chaos.

Miraculously, Drunk Karl had managed one redeeming act—placing the phone visibly on the bedside table rather than letting it disappear into the black hole beneath the bed or hiding it in a trouser pocket halfway to the laundry. A rare glimmer of foresight from a man usually guided by impulse and poor decisions.

I lunged, catching the call just as the final ring began to fade. My fingers left a slick smear across the screen as I brought the phone to my ear.

"Yeah."

The word emerged hoarse, cracked—barely human. My vocal cords, still raw from last night’s abuse and this morning’s biological revolt, struggled to comply. I tried to inject a thread of professionalism into that single syllable. It fell flat, shrouded in rasp and ruin. The room did a lazy tilt around me. I braced one hand against the bedside table to steady the spin.

"Where the hell are you, Karl?"

Sarah’s voice burst through the speaker—clipped, sharp, and tight with contained panic. Under normal conditions, Detective Sarah Lahey was the epitome of calculated composure, her demeanour cool enough to put forensic chillers to shame. But not this morning. That tension, buried just beneath the surface, set alarm bells ringing louder than any ringtone.

"I'm still at home. The alarm didn’t go off," I replied.

It was a lie. A smooth one, honed through years of necessity—but even to my own ears, it sounded feeble. Slurred at the edges. Pathetic. The excuse of a man who knew the game and was fumbling it all the same.

"Bullshit. I know you went out with the boys last night."

There it was. No room for ambiguity. She knew. And worse—she cared. Not the dispassionate disdain of a colleague, but the quiet betrayal of someone who’d started to believe I might finally get my act together. Her voice cut clean through the layers of denial I’d been wearing like armour.

I closed my eyes and let out a long, gravelly sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose. The gesture was automatic, habitual—a futile attempt to press the shame back into hiding. I had imagined today differently. My first morning as Senior Detective Karl Jenkins. A new title. A fresh start. Instead, I was barely upright, breath still tainted with last night’s rot, surrounded by evidence of a celebration that had already turned sour.

"What is it, Sarah?"

Focus. I needed to focus. The room was still tilting. My stomach was a riot of churning acid and remorse. But beneath all that noise, the faint hum of duty still pulsed. I needed to find it. I needed to be it.

"You need to get your ass down to the station right now."

Her voice had that unmistakable authority—the tone that killed arguments before they were born. She wasn't asking. She was mobilising.

"Can’t it wait until later?" I groaned.

The plea slipped out before I could catch it. It sounded weaker than I intended—childish, almost. But the idea of braving Hobart’s bitter streets, of facing my colleagues’ glances under the interrogation glare of office fluorescents, felt... impossible.

"No, Karl. It can't. This could be your big case."

The words hit with surgical force. The fog in my head didn’t lift, but it thinned—enough for something sharp to slip through. That old, familiar stir. The first pulse of adrenaline, just enough to kickstart the machine. The ambition I’d carried like a secret weapon. The hunger for the case—the right case—the one that made or broke careers.

I paused, letting her words settle. Sarah wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. Something serious had happened. Serious enough to override my hangover, to summon me from the dregs of my worst self. The kind of case that changed trajectories. Or ended them.

"Fine. I’ll be there in half an hour," I said.

It was more than a promise. It was a self-imposed order. A spoken contract. By saying it aloud, I’d bound myself to action—because the man on the other end of the line needed to be Karl Jenkins, Senior Detective. Not this half-dressed, barely functioning mess swaying in the middle of his bedroom.

I ended the call and stood still for a moment, phone clenched in one hand, breath fogging in the cool morning air.

Reality closed in.

The sheets behind me still lay tangled, holding secrets I couldn’t name. The condom—still unexplained—rested like an accusation on the floor. Evidence of someone. Something. The clothes strewn across the room whispered of abandon, of celebration gone wrong.

And yet... opportunity had knocked anyway. Fate, it seemed, was not waiting for me to be at my best. It had come regardless, dressed in the cold voice of Detective Sarah Lahey.

A new case. A big one.

I drew a breath—slow, painful—and reached for my clothes.

No more stalling.

Hobart was waking, wrapped in its winter gloom. Somewhere out there, in the grey streets and shadowed alleys, something dark had unfolded. And it wouldn’t wait for me to shake off the last remnants of regret.

Time to get dressed.

Time to become him again.

Detective Karl Jenkins.