Chapter 15 #2
Laertes was sitting in the corner reading poetry, which he liked to do after a good training session.
He said it kept him balanced from warrior to wounded soul. Calchas thought it rather ridiculous because none of his younger cousins knew what it was really like to have a wounded soul. Not in the true sense.
Oh, they might in the sense that every human had great conversations with God, or the universe, or whatever anyone wanted to call that thing out there that had created all of them and then left them to struggle mightily and find their way by sheer chance.
“Hit me,” he ground out again.
Laertes looked up from his book and shook his head. “No.”
Calchas ground his teeth together, crossed to his cousin, grabbed him by the waistcoat lapels, and hauled him to his feet.
Laertes was no small man, and he knew Laertes was exceptionally good with his fists and evasion. His cousin would prove an excellent source for a fight.
“I need you to hit me,” Calchas begged.
Laertes glared at him with cold, dark eyes, letting the book drop, which he knew Laertes hated doing.
His cousin grabbed his hands, twisted with shocking skill, finding a weak point.
Pain shot up Calchas’s arms, and he knew his wrists were about to break. It was a welcome feeling, but he could no longer hold Laertes’s waistcoat as his cousin shoved him aside.
“Not like this, not when you’re clearly on edge,” he said with a grim calm.
“I need,” Calchas bit out, “to be punished.”
Laertes studied him in the dark night, the light from a few tapers that he had positioned about the room spilling over them. “I can see that you want me to hurt you. I’m not going to do that.”
“Please,” Calchas begged. “Please.”
Laertes studied him for a long moment before he replied, “I love you, Calchas, and I love you so much that I’m not going to do this.”
Calchas let out a wild note of frustration and threw out his arms. “If you love me, then you will do this.”
“I’ll do it, old boy,” Ajax called from the doorway.
“Uncle,” Calchas said with a breath of relief.
Ajax was by far the biggest of his relatives. He wasn’t necessarily the most razor-sharp of the fighters, but what he did was make up for it in brute force.
Ajax slowly sauntered into the room. “Come on then, boy, you need a pounding. I’ll give it to you.”
Laertes looked between both of them. “Uncle, I don’t think…”
Ajax looked at his nephew and raised an assuring hand. “Don’t worry about it, puppy. When I’m tired, you can step in. We’ll make sure that he’s worked through and through.”
Calchas closed his eyes for a moment, anticipating the physical pain that was about to take away the streak of agony ripping him apart inside. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
Ajax nodded. “Of course.”
Calchas stepped forward and lifted his hands into fists, ready to be beaten and pounded into the ground.
Ajax circled him, assessing, eyeing him like a predator in his power. And then another uncle slipped into the room.
Hector.
Then Zephyr.
And then his father, Leander.
Lowering his hands, confused, Calchas looked from man to man. “What are you all doing here?”
“Your wife, like so many other wise Briarwood wives before her, told us that you needed help,” his father said softly.
“She didn’t,” he ground out, coursing with frustration. How could he be such a failure? How could he have gotten to this place?
“Oh, she did,” Ajax said. “We love her.”
Zephyr nodded. “She’s a wonderful woman.”
“Thank God she became a Briarwood. She is exactly what you need,” Hector said.
Calchas felt sick. He’d been here before.
More than once. Only, it had been him with his cousins and uncles who had been helping a man in need.
He’d joined his family to lift so many of the other men in his life to rise above their pain.
He’d actively helped to circle a fellow and make him see what needed to be done.
What needed to be surrendered. That there was hope.
He was never supposed to be the one who needed to be surrounded by Briarwood men and shown the light. He was supposed to be the light. The beacon. Guiding others. Keeping everything safe.
Now, he was the source of the pain, the fear. And he hated it. It made him feel worse. It made him feel like a complete failure that he had fallen so low.
The Briarwood men never let other fellows fall. They always appeared at the right moment to offer their hands, their embrace, their wisdom. But Calchas’s mind was struggling to accept that he deserved that help too.
“I am destroying her life,” Calchas roared, hating the way he was ruled by emotion. Most of his life, he’d been so able to channel this. But now, there was nowhere for it to go.
“Now I need someone to help me the way I need to be helped. Hit me. Someone. Anyone. Please,” he begged. “Give me the strength to continue as I’m continuing.”
“Continuing as you’re continuing,” his father said, his dark eyes full of emotion, “is the path of madness.”
Calchas lifted his fists again, determined, holding on so tight. “I’m already almost there. And this is the only way.”
Laertes took a step towards him. “You are trapped in your own thinking, Calchas. Let us help you as you truly need and not by inflicting pain.”
Calchas looked about him, a riot of feeling and confusion. “Why won’t any of you help me? Not like you all think I need help. Not like we help everyone else. I’m different. This gentle nonsense that you all use on other men won’t work with me.”
The intensity of what was going through him was so hard, so crushing, that he just wanted someone to strike him in the face so that he felt something, anything else.
His father looked at him, cocked his head to the side, and said gently, “This is my fault, and my father’s, and perhaps his father’s.
It is a long line of men who are born different and who must pay the price.
Men who are born to rail and rage and feel low and like hell and change the world, Calchas.
You are paying it now. For we are not going to beat that out of you, no matter how hard you beg.
You are underestimating your wife. I know you can’t really hear that right now, considering how you feel, but she’s strong and she can take this.
She’s perhaps one of the strongest women I have ever met.
As strong as your mother, and you must not give up, and you must not give in. ”
“I’m not going to give up,” Calchas said, “but I need—”
“I know what you need,” his father said.
He drew in a breath right then, but his father crossed to him and grabbed his arm. But instead of embracing his son as Calchas expected him to do, the duke leveled him with a hard stare and said pointedly, “You need to ask her to go with you.”
Go with him? Where was the hug? The veritable pat on the back. The assurance all would be well. This was different. This help was a call to action and a beam of light slipped into his darkness.
“But her shop,” Calchas protested, his brain revolting at the very idea of asking her to give up so much for him.
“Her shop will be here,” his father said simply. “And you cannot stay. And she will go with you.”
Calchas shook his head, his head pounding, still clinging to the darkness, but tempted by the light his father was offering. “But shouldn’t I force myself to settle down? Surely I need to stop this feeling inside me. I need to control it.”
“You need to let it be free,” his father said.
“Or else,” Ajax added gently, “it will control you.”
“It’ll eat you alive,” Zephyr supplied.
Hector nodded. “Your father knew. We all knew that he couldn’t will it away.
It’s why he’d go away when it overtook him.
He’d run from everyone else. We all knew, and then your mother came, and she helped him through it.
And we are going to help you through this, old boy, by telling you it’s all right to go when you need to. It’s all right to be who you are.”
“I always thought I was being who I am,” Calchas said, defeated, but letting his fists drop as he tried to take it all in. “But I had no idea it was going to be like this when the war was finally done.”
Maximus and Octavian slipped through the door, as if they had been waiting for exactly this comment. Both of them were soldiers; both had fought hard battles.
And Octavian most recently had been at Waterloo.
“No one ever knows what it’s going to be like at the end of a war,” Octavian said.
“We all think that love is going to be enough. Love is just the start,” Maximus said.
“Love is the foundation, which lets us grow and heal,” said Octavian.
“But if you ignore this,” warned Maximus, “it’s going to destroy you.”
Calchas was surrounded. Surrounded by his family. By support. By men who would not let him fall when he felt like he was towering at the edge of the abyss. “I should have known you’d all bloody do this.”
The duke laughed, but he did not relent. “It is a family tactic, so yes, you should have known. Now you have to go to the one person who can truly help you.”
He ground his teeth and blinked. Over the years, most of his family went to one person for advice.
“Grandmama?” he asked.
“No,” his father said gently with a rueful smile. “To the person you just ran away from.”