Chapter 27 Jack
They’re not dead.
Sol and Oscar.
It takes an age for me to realise that, and by then, the world is moving too fast for me to keep up.
They’re critically injured.
Unconscious. Cold.
Blue lights reach the harbour.
Skylar jumps into the ambulance with Oscar. Which means something I can’t grasp. Then they’re gone and life blurs again. A vehicle that smells of leather and smoke. A driver I can’t focus on enough to identify. The only thing I truly understand is that Mal is right there with me.
We reach the hospital. Mal plants me in a chair, but he can’t sit. Without Skylar to regulate him, he paces in front of me, like Sev did at the harbour, and I’m out of energy to calm anyone down.
We’re in A&E. And we stay there for a lifetime before we’re moved to a relatives’ room. Me and Mal. I don’t know where Sev is. “Is Lisa here?”
Mal’s at the window. He turns to me with a shake of his head. “Sev took one for the team and drove her home. He’s going fetch Fiadh to wait by the phone.”
“What about Dav?”
“He’s not around, remember?”
Mal speaks gently, for him, at least. And it’s enough for me to recall what had Sol sailing into a storm with anger in his veins in the first place.
“I fucking hate him.”
“Good. He deserves it tonight. But if he gets his act together, he’ll come back, and Sol won’t ever turn him away, so maybe work on your resting murder face, eh?”
I don’t know what my face is doing. Just that every ounce of control I possess is currently engaged keeping the terror in my chest at a manageable burn.
It wants to spike, wants to flood me, and a warning hums at the base of my skull, reminding me what’ll happen if I let it.
I clamp it down.
Take Mal’s place at the window and breathe in and out. Contain it while I strip where we are right now into simple facts.
Sol and Oscar aren’t in the water anymore.
They’re not dead.
A truth I cling to like a handhold over a sheer drop, as that terror keeps pressing down on me. They’re so wet and cold. Sol’s laughter fills my head. The words he’s proclaimed so many times. Water isn’t going to hurt me—
“Jack?”
I turn. A familiar face is right there, but it takes me a moment to place him as Marc Ramsay, a Regiment medic I’ve known longer than I’ve known Skylar.
He’s an NHS doc these days. He stitched my eyebrow when I smashed it open in a seizure. Came to the Joker, so I didn’t have to be here, in this place of death and pain.
He looks tired, favouring one leg like I do sometimes, and it should jog my memory to remember something vital about him. But as ever, nothing happens.
“Have you been with Sol?”
Marc nods. “For a while. My colleague has him now. No other relatives here?”
“No.”
“All right then. Take a seat, Jack.”
No. But I do it anyway, because even I can see that maybe Marc needs the chair he sinks into beside me.
“Sol’s stable,” he says quickly, cutting to the meat of it. “But he was in the water far longer than we’d want him to be when it’s this cold. And he’s got some bruising I’m not happy with. We’re sending him to CT once we’ve cleared the water from his lungs and closed that gash on his head.”
I swallow hard. “Is he awake?”
“Not really, but I wouldn’t expect him to be. It’s been a rough night for him.”
“Is he going to die?”
“No.”
“Can I see him?”
“After the CT, when he’s cleared from RESUS and we get him a bed in HDU.”
“He’ll…be okay, though?”
Marc nods again. “I think so. Being young and fit works in his favour. Can’t say the next few days and weeks are going to be much fun for him, but I’d expect him to make a full recovery if he looks after himself.”
“I’ll look after him.”
“I know, mate.”
Marc rises from his chair. I snap out a hand to stop him. “What about Oscar?”
“We’re waiting for his brother.”
Subtext overwhelms me. I look to Mal for reassurance, but there is none. And that’s how it hits—Sol’s not in danger, but Oscar is, and the fear Sol’s prognosis has calmed comes roaring back.
A fear Marc can’t temper.
He leaves.
At some point, Mal does too. He tells me why and that he’ll be back, but I barely hear him, and I know I’ll have to sleep soon if I have any hope of being upright when Sol needs me most.
It takes me a while to realise I’m not alone in the relatives’ room. That of all people tasked with babysitting me, I’m sharing space with Cam O’Brian. “Why are you here?”
The Rebel Kings president sits close to the door, giving me a wide berth.
He’s not wearing leather or even boots. Honestly, he looks like any other man who’s rolled out of his family Christmas to mitigate a disaster.
“Oscar and Sol are kin. Even if I wasn’t in here with you, I’d be haunting the car park of this damn-fucking place. ”
I absorb that. Accept it. Let it hang in the air as I go back to staring out the window, watching the night fade and daylight take shape in skies that are tauntingly clear. At some point, we get word that Oscar has moved to ICU, that he’s still unstable and the next few hours will be critical.
“He’s fucking sick,” the Rebel King who brings the news says to Cam without seeming to notice me. “Matis just got here, but they’ll only let Skylar in.”
Skylar. A flashback of him climbing into Oscar’s ambulance instead of Sol’s solidifies. Delayed understanding washes over me and leaves me dizzy.
I lean forward, bracing my elbows on my knees. The Rebel King soldier fades away and Cam moves closer to me.
He doesn’t try to comfort me and I’m glad of it.
We’re not friends and we never will be. But a mutual respect hangs between us and even if I hate that he claimed a part of Sol I lived without for so many years, I’m glad he showed up for him.
That Mal can be wherever he needs to be and leave me with the man who scooped Sol’s father from the streets and dumped him in rehab.
“Why did you do it?”
I can tell it’s been silent so long Cam’s forgotten I have a voice. He tears his own stare from the window and gives me his attention, brows pleating as he figures out what I mean.
“Dav?”
“Aye.”
“How much do you know?”
“As much as I’ll likely forget by tomorrow.”
Cam considers this as he stretches his legs out.
Then he shrugs. “All right. It’s like this.
The loanie Dav messed with doesn’t play about.
The boat thing…it was bollocks. They were never going to take it.
It was Sol they were after, because they thought Dav gave a fuck, and I’d have killed them before I let that happen.
But I’m not—we’re not—about that life anymore.
So we found another way to make it right and I ain’t gonna apologise for that. ”
It’s a lot to take in. And without Sol or Mal with me, I can only focus on one thing. “You think Dav doesn’t give a fuck about Sol?”
Cam tilts his head, like he’s rethinking his harsh words. “I want to believe he does, but I’m not sure he can while he’s this deep into addiction, and his ma’s fucking useless.”
Can’t argue with that. But the urge to defend Sol’s family is strong. It has to be. He’s everything to me and these people who’ve let him down so badly will always matter to him.
As it happens, though. I don’t get the chance. I take a breath to say who the hell knows what, but a nurse ghosting through the door cuts me off. “Jack? You can see Sol now.”
You can see him now.
They say it like it’s nothing. As if the hours and hours I’ve waited to truly believe Sol’s alive haven’t stretched my soul thin over my bones.
He’s in HDU.
“Stable,” the nurse tells me. “CT was clear. He was sleeping when I left.”
Sleeping.
I nod and follow her down a corridor and up a flight of stairs quicker than waiting for the lift, and I don’t take much notice of my surroundings.
Hospitals are familiar to me. The smell.
The low hums and beeps of monitors and machines.
Sights and sounds engrained on me deeper than actual memories.
That I’m running toward someone I love more than away from myself seems incidental. Maybe I’ll think about it later.
Maybe I won’t.
I slip into the high dependency ward. Where the patients are poorly enough to need close monitoring but not full life support. The nurse points to the last bed in the corner and tells me to keep going.
As if I need telling.
I approach the bed. The curtain is half drawn back, and there he is, and I’m not ready for the lurch in my chest. For the rush of emotion threatening to fell me.
Fuck, Sol. What happened to you?
He’s so still.
So pale.
A hospital gown covers his tattooed skin, but doesn’t hide the bruises and scrapes on his face, neck, and collarbones.
I take in the cannulas taped to his hands. The oxygen looped under his nose. The room tilts and I grip the bed rail, grounding myself in the cool metal as I clock everything I can in one sweep.
Assess.
Repeat.
Accept.
He’s here.
Sol is alive. And…he looks uncomfortable. Even unconscious—not sleeping—I see it in his tight jaw. In the crease of his brow and the way his shoulder hitches every time he takes a precious breath.
I release the bed rail and allow my hand to go where it wants. To his bruised face and tangled hair. “Hey.”
It’s a murmur. I don’t know what else to do with my voice. And he doesn’t respond. But I’m not worried about it. If he’s in pain, I don’t want him awake for it. And yet…I know what it’s like to be trapped in a black hole with nothing but agony for company, and I can’t live with that either.
The bed is too flat. I raise it a fraction at the head, easing the pressure on Sol’s neck and shoulders.
Then I check the lines in his hands for kinks.
Free his ear from the oxygen tubing there.
Rescue his arm from the odd and subtle angle it’s bent at.
Small mercies I remember him and Skylar gifting me when beds like this were all I knew for weeks and months at a time.
I remember being cold. And even though I know rewarming Sol was a priority from the moment rescuers scooped him from the ocean, it bothers me thinking they might not have done enough.
I pull the weighted blanket tighter around him.
Rub my own warmth into his hands and deal with the answering flare in my skull.
A warning I’m letting too much emotion in at once.
Then I sit and lean forward, lowering the bed rail so I can rest my elbows on the bed, as close as I can be without lying there with him. “I love you.”
His lips twitch and I wonder if he hears me.
So I say it again, like I’ll keep saying it long after he wakes up and this nightmare is over.
Which isn’t happening anytime soon. Time ticks by and Sol doesn’t wake up. Instead he flinches in his sleep, cringing in pain, fighting it, and watching him suffer is the harshest reality I’ve ever lived through.
“I’m here,” I tell him over and over. “You’re safe. Stop fighting and rest.”
There are moments I think he hears me and tries to obey. I spend those moments studying his face. The laughter lines and sun-stained skin. The mouth that was mine the night we fucked like we had all the time in the world.
I brush my thumb over knuckles that are almost as scarred and beat-up as Mal’s. Slow and deliberate, like I can reach him with my touch.
Maybe I do, but it doesn’t last. After a while, I notice he’s paler than ever. That his stomach concaves every so often, a subtle spasm, like his body needs to purge itself of saltwater and sand, but he’s too tired and broken to do it, and it’s in this moment something inside me breaks.
Am I crying?
I’m not sure.
Or how long it lasts before I feel my brother at my side.
It’s dark in Sol’s little corner of the HDU ward. I’m distantly aware that day has faded to night again, and that Cam O’Brian never left. That he’s been watching over me the whole time Mal has been somewhere else.
Somewhere important. I see it in our mam’s eyes as he stares hard at me and passes me the meds I’ve clean forgotten about. “You need to eat something and take a fucking nap.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Not what I said.”
Mal presses food and water on me and watches me consume it like an overwrought parent.
It should be funny, but there’s no humour to be found in this horrid space. No pleasant dreams as I fold my arms on Sol’s bed and rest my head on them.
I don’t know how long I sleep for. Just that it’s still night when I wake up and Mal is talking to someone six feet away.
Sometimes I wake up like I’m swimming through clay. Now, I wake like I was never asleep and I’m laser-focused on Sol before I’m upright.
Something’s different.
But Mal is on me before I can decipher what.
“You okay?”
“Aye.”
“Sure?”
“Aye.”
“Good lad.” Mal nods with the barest hint of a smile. “Oscar is too, eh? Least he will be. They’re booting him from ICU.”
I absorb that. And for the first time since lifeboat lights cut through Porth Ewan harbour, the horror in my chest becomes something I can face.
Something I do face until I feel a shift. A change in the air more than sound.
I break away from Mal and look down.
A bronze-brown gaze greets me.
Sol’s eyes are open. Not enough to consider him conscious, but he’s right there, on the cusp, as if he’s heard Oscar’s name and it’s enough to pull him to the surface.
His gaze hovers on me, then drifts to Mal, and his lips part, and I know what he needs.
I lean down so he doesn’t have to strain. “He’s okay, Sol. Oscar’s okay.”
Another faint shift flickers in Sol’s face. A release. Tension unwinds in his whole body and his eyes close again.
But it isn’t retreat.
It isn’t fear.
This time, finally it’s rest.