Chapter 4: Beware how you give your heart.

He’s back in the plane.

The impact on the left propeller is still ringing in his ears as he attempts to find a landmass – any landmass – to touchdown on.

From the back cabin, he hears a scream. A definite, terrified scream. Not the tortured metallic ripping of a punctured hull, or even the deafening shriek of the cabin depressurising. A scream pained and fearful enough that it has him abandoning his console and the remainder of his wits to see to the source.

No sooner has he left the cockpit than they begin to drop – and drop fast.

The scream becomes inaudible over his own, the rushing air, the tumbling of bodies and gurneys and medical equipment. The darkness begins to rush in around him and he prepares himself for the end. His final moments, spent in terror.

The parachute doesn’t so much occur to him as it smacks him upside the head in the chaos of the fall. With nothing left to lose, he battles to strap himself into it, praying that he might still survive – might still make it home to Mum and Dad and Harry.

He pulls the ripcord.

The plane hitting the island is Armageddon. The very air around him vibrates with the impact; the ground unsteady and his legs not quite under him yet.

He falls to his knees as the craft explodes in hellfire and deadly shrapnel. There is nothing that isn’t smoke and petrol and suffocation and delirium.

And despite all that, his only injuries are of the mind and the heart.

As he rises to walk, to find help, he hears that piercing, petrified scream again. It’s coming from the wreckage and has him bearing down on it without a second’s forethought.

Lying in the crater, clothes burnt off and birdlike bones shattered, crying out his pain, is Aidan Wynne. Every agonising sob sends wet soot from his eyes and blood from his nose and mouth.

* * *

Edmund has no doubt about what woke him. His eyes fly open and he finds himself shifting out of bed on impulse.

His dream-addled mind convinces him that his route must be worn into the old floorboards by now, but the thought only serves to spur him on, dragging him into the darkened depths behind the door at the end of the corridor.

He’s never conscious enough for the screaming to cease when Edmund enters the room. Every night – every time he sleeps – Edmund is ill at ease; restless for the moment Aidan Wynne’s own mind tortures him into hellish wakefulness. He kneels at Aidan’s bedside.

“Aidan?” he murmurs between them, knowing by now that screaming won’t help. “Aidan, sshh… Ssshhhh… It’s only a dream. You’re safe. You’re home.”

“E-Edmund,” Aidan gasps out, ragged, as though the simple word causes him immeasurable pain.

“Perfectly safe,” Edmund soothes, dabbing at the sweat on Aidan’s feverish face with a cool cloth. “Alright. Tell me what you remember. Tell me where you are.”

“Wynne House,” Aidan breathes, trying to get his erratic heart rate in order, but the frailty does not leave his voice. “Aeron brought me home. I’ve been ill. You and Aures have been caring for me. You’re Dr Edmund Bolton, a military doctor, whose plane went down on the island after being shot at by an enemy vessel. I am in my room. I’m safe.”

It’s not a perfectly practised little mantra by any means, but Edmund has found that forcing someone in the midst of a panic attack to situate themselves in the present helps keep their mind from spiralling.

“That’s it. Look how brilliant you are. Perfectly calm again, all by yourself.” Edmund smiles at him.

Aidan brushes the damp hair off his own forehead, sighing heavily.

Days of this now.

Days of nightmares and screaming and torment and self-loathing.

Days of isolation in this room and taking meals by himself and crying wretchedly when he thinks no one can see him.

Days of his family fretting and worrying and getting no answers from him.

Days of Aures bringing up, again and again, how they should just ship Aidan off to a facility on the mainland.

Days of Edmund standing idly by and treating only the physical symptoms, the pain Aidan lets him see, the bruises on his skin – while the bruises, the darkness blooming in the man’s mind, remain untouched.

“Tell you what,” Edmund says, then, “I’ll sort you out with three of those little morphine pouches if you let me take you outside for a walk.”

“It’s the middle of the night. It’ll be freezing,” Aidan deadpans, honestly sounding much too tired for any form of excitement.

“Then we bundle up, but, Wynne, we are going out there.”

Edmund fetches the wheelchair they’ve been using for him, grabbing three blankets off Aidan’s bureau.

Two of them go snugly around Aidan, over his dressing gown and a winter coat. The other, a slightly smaller one, Edmund notices now, goes around his own shoulders.

Prowling out of the house turns up only Aures, writing furiously by the fire in the lounge, but she pays them no mind and they move out into the icy ocean air unimpeded.

“Your sister,” Edmund says, wheeling Aidan down the garden path.

“Aures,” Aidan says listlessly.

“Yes. Is she… I mean to say, she’s rather… I–– Well…”

“She can and will turn you into pig feed and sell you wholesale to the highest bidder,” Aidan puts him out of his misery.

“Right. Yes. She’s just…”

“Beautiful?” Aidan finishes, voice flat as his eyes roam the shore.

The waves are restless tonight. An off-shore wind is kicking up a fuss, sending fine spray through the air far enough to reach even them, who aren’t anywhere near the water.

Edmund feels the cold seep into his bones in an almost detached manner. Too fixated to notice, his gaze is caught by Aidan.

The bright moon turns the delicate, sharp features of the middle Wynne sibling into opal, revealing the tones of blue and purple brought on by veins spidering too close to the surface. He’s a storybook depiction of a fae, and the wind stirring his crown of wild inky tufts appears to animate him as if by magic.

There is no emotion on Aidan’s face – there never is – but Edmund is suddenly seeing him anew.

The life within him is not betrayed by a twist of mouth or a turn of brow. Aidan is far too clever, too controlled for that. With Aidan Wynne, one look at the eyes: they show nothing short of pure and agonising yearning. Yearning to be as beautiful as his sister, or as put together as his brother, or as loved as he loves.

He yearns for a life he is already convinced he cannot have.

Edmund does not ask the question he himself yearns so much to ask: what happened to Aidan Wynne?

What has occurred in this poor man’s life to have led already to his relent of joy and contentment? Was he simply born unhappy? So, now he starves himself, refuses care, rejects life, isolates himself so bitterly that even his voice fails from disuse.

“So are you.”

The words tumble from Edmund’s lips before he quite knows how they got there. But he is: Aidan Wynne is beautiful. Aures and Aeron, if comparisons are to be made, are handsome children, surely. Pretty and wilful and strong and grounded. But Aidan is beautiful in the same way as the ocean is beautiful: in its mystery and its rare displays of power – in its etherealness.

Aidan clears his throat, but even in the silvery light of the moon, Edmund can see a blush attempting to colour those sallow cheeks.

Thankful to be the one pushing the wheelchair, Edmund is shielded from his own embarrassment being reflected back at him.

He doesn’t regret his words. Couldn’t bring himself to, despite not knowing what exactly had overcome him to say them.

“I do believe I was promised compensation for the undertaking of this foolhardy trip,” Aidan breaks through his reverie.

His whispery, low voice is carried back to Edmund on the wind, the way magic often is. Aidan might be a fae king.

“And I am nothing if not a man of my word,” Edmund replies, handing Aidan the first pouch over his shoulder.

“Maybe a man of a few too many. It is, in fact, the f*cking tundra out here.”

Aidan jabs the first pouch, unflinchingly, into his thigh and then snuggles deeper into his blankets.

Flexing his hands where they had gone numb on the wheelchair’s handles, Edmund is inclined to agree.

“Shall we head back and challenge Aures to a game of cards by the fire? I make a decent cup of hot cocoa.”

“My God. Stellar advice, indeed. Have you ever considered a career in patient care?”

The quiet smile in Aidan’s voice somehow dissipates the odd tightness in Edmund’s chest and he promptly changes their course.