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At the tender age of three, Cale’s mother dies.
She doesn’t die smiling nor peacefully, but she doesn’t die alone. Instead, she dies with her arms wrapped around a small boy with red fiery hair, and with cries of soft apologies and jumbled words.
It would take years for Cale to realize that she was calling out his father’s name.
Cale’s mother dies but she doesn’t die alone. She dies embracing her son, dies comforting her son—or perhaps she was comforting herself from reality and everything in it but Cale wouldn’t ever know—she’s dead.
Cale is three when he loses his mother but he loses her not in her embrace but through a letter. A letter wrapped in a neat and crisp envelope with pretty little scribbles called writing and a photograph of his father with another woman.
(Cale didn’t get to see the woman, her face was marred with rips and tears, and all the inks and oils of black and scribbles.)
Cale is three when he loses his mother and it is through a photograph of his father. Three-year-old Cale doesn’t understand, but the photo makes his mother cry. Cale was a good son and good sons made sure their mothers didn’t cry, so he opted to push forward and tug his mother’s skirt, eager for her attention and desperate to comfort her.
His mother hadn’t even looked at him.
Cale is three and he’s unsure of what to do. And just like all little children at the tender age of three, when they were upset or uncomfortable, they cried. Cale cried and his mother cried with him. They both cried ugly tears but perhaps for different reasons. But they cried with heartily desperation—one seeking for a mother’s comfort and the other for her lover’s affairs.
In hindsight, Cale shouldn’t have cried. Because maybe then, his mother wouldn’t have been forced to wipe his tears. Because maybe then she wouldn’t have been forced to put on a brave face and rock her son to sleep. Maybe he should have stayed up to comfort his mother instead—should have been the big boy his absent father always told him to be, should have played the role of the man of the house because father was gone.
Because maybe then, three-year-old Cale wouldn’t have lost his mother. Maybe then his mother wouldn’t have died, wouldn’t have left him alone—trapped in arms of warmth that were growing colder by the second. In hindsight, Cale realizes his faults and what could have been done.
But three-year-old Cale was different. He didn’t understand his mother’s woes, didn’t know the cause of his father’s absence. Three-year-old Cale was naive to think his mother was enough when his mother wanted more of his father than what a small child resembled.
In that sense, three-year-old Cale was too young to understand what happened and is only aware of what he lost.
A mother.
loved
and love
And yet,
it wasn’t
enough.
Sometimes Cale wonders if he lost his father too, or perhaps he never had a father in the first place. He wonders what it was like to be called ‘son’ with such pride or to be taught and protected by the man his mother admired.
He wonders what it was like to have a father that was present.
Cale wonders if he even had a father.
The young boy, at the tender age of four, sees the way his ‘father’ looks at another—his brother, Basen. He sees the way his father carries the child, the way he makes time, and pushes away all the papers on the office desk. He sees the way his father looks at Basen and wonders if ‘his’ father ever held him to the same high regard.
But Cale remembers his mother. He remembers the picture.
He remembers his father’s absence, his mother’s tears, and desperate attempts to call for a man Cale barely saw. He remembers the way his mother’s eyes shook when she held him, remembers the warmth that was now lost.
(Or perhaps there wasn’t any warmth in the first place.)
Cale peeks through his father’s office, a small gap between the door’s entrance, enough space for Cale to be in—to see through.
(He wishes he didn’t remember.)
Cale sees his father and a young babe in his arms. Paperwork was forgotten and a woman was sitting across his father’s desk.
(But he does.)
He sees a picturesque family whose silhouettes stood happily against the light, whose soft smiles reflected on their faces, and whose love and affection were directed to a small bundle of a child.
It is in this instance Cale remembers finds out that he does not have a space in this family. It is at this moment where the four-year-old realizes that he is anything but family.
(And he’ll never forget it.)
These
memories are
a
funny
thing.
They are
fleeting
unforgiving
and are
the most pain
—ful thing
Cale supposes that family was arbitrary. It was never constant, always changing in any shape or form; with a flick of a wrist or a good sum of money, people could change their parents, their children, and even their blood. Cale supposes that blood only mattered politically, but never truly—not in the genuine mushy feeling way that most fairytale books set them out to be.
Perhaps it is that intangibility and indefiniteness that prompts Cale to push Basen. To push him forward and tell him that he was a Henituse—the heir to the Count.
(Never mind if Cale forgets himself.)
He tells the young boy, who was at the tender age of three, that he was born worthy. Born of love and of birthright. He tells Basen that no one could ever take that away from him, and he should never feel ashamed of his name nor blood.
(Never mind if Cale’s birthright is robbed or freely given.)
He tells the boy of a responsibility that Cale had been groomed to take care of. He tells the boy that there is more than just the blood between relatives—he tells Basen that he is the future heir who will rule their territory, and blood be damned.
Cale tells the three-year-old Basen that he will be the future count and heir of the family. But then Basen asks what about him and Cale only answers with silence.
Because Cale doesn't know, quite frankly doesn’t want to know.
(Never mind Cale.)
But Cale feels that regardless, it shouldn’t be him who becomes the count. He feels more than any other six-year-old should.
(He feels that he should disappear and that he does not belong. He feels that he is unworthy of something that will never be directed at him.)
Cale doesn’t answer Basen. He doesn’t have the heart to. But it is only when chubby little hands wander to his face does Cale realize that he had started to cry, and his baby brother was attempting to wipe his tears away.
Cale thinks about how unfair everything was. Yet, despite his silent tears, he could never blame the three-year-old in front of him. He could never blame another for something that was never his, to begin with.
(And yet, he wished he could.)
The space in which Cale found himself was now cramped, taken by a child three years younger, who was fearless and brave to wipe the tears that were overflowing out of the red-haired boy. Cale wishes he could stop his own tears, to push this child—his own baby brother away—away from him.
(And yet, he still couldn’t.)
There was
no more space
left for
him
Cale doesn’t talk to his stepmother very much. He avoids her as much as possible, in fear of getting in her way and in hopes of preserving himself from a long mental debacle of deciding what to call her. After all, mother was too intimate and countess was too formal. And both seemed like an erasure to the existence of Cale’s birth mother.
Cale doesn’t really talk to his stepmother but when he does, he does so with purpose. Today’s instance is that full of meaning, full of life and a new, as Cale’s new sister had been born. Cale is eleven when he becomes the eldest of the three children in the Henituse household, and the oldest brother to two.
Cale is full of feelings that bundle themselves in tangles and messes, of things mixed of joy, pain, and sadness. But the congratulations he gives to Violan—his father’s second wife—is nothing but wholehearted. The red-haired child does not lie when he wishes both his newborn sister and Violan good health and long life, does not lie when he says that he is happy for them and how joyous this occasion is.
But Cale does not tell them that his father is absent, gone for the moment, and unable to celebrate the birth of his sister. He does not tell them that his father is currently cleaning up Cale’s mistakes for a previous noble gathering he was once forced to attend.
So Cale fills in for the man that was barely even there for him. He hardly fits but Cale is given the chance to carry his father’s daughter—Lily, and Cale ignores his own awkwardness and intrusion into the family. He instead relishes in the given small but hopeful moment of belongingness, and the almost cute-like features of such a tiny baby.
The moment is broken when his father does eventually make it. Cale greets his father and promptly gives back Lily to Violan, and walks away from the family that wasn’t his, to begin with.
Neither his father, Violan, nor Basen, try to stop him.
(But a small part of Cale wishes that they did.)
(But of course, they didn’t.)
Perhaps this is
where they
apologize
but it's not.
it may mean nothing now
but
i’ll say it for them
i’m sorry
At the golden age of fifteen, Cale gets drunk. It was an accident at first, having ordered a bottle during his escapades in town but not really knowing what was inside of it. He supposes that it was a small thing, a small insignificant warmth that embraced him all over, a feeling he never knew he could feel.
The first sip he thinks tastes horrible. The second sip he defines as absolutely repugnant. But by the third, he thinks that it fits him just right and that whatever burning it caused on the insides of his throat was nothing compared to anything he ever felt before. The liquor was conflicting and confusing—it was weird in all the bad and good ways, and somehow the thought reminds him of a family too well-off and too close to home.
At the golden age of fifteen, Cale gets drunk. It was an accident at first, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Not when it makes the red-haired boy—teen—warm all over, numb to the core, and light-headed enough to not really process anything. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been if it meant it gave Cale the courage to go back home and demand to see his father, to ask about the picture. Perhaps it shouldn’t have happened but the fifteen-year-old Cale was drunk on this newfound feeling, and whether it really was the liquor-backed bravery or Cale finally reaching his breaking point, he asks his father about the photograph and the mother he once had, his real mother.
Cale was naive to think that he could have handled the truth under the influence, Deruth even voicing out this said sentiment. But Cale knows that this had been his father’s way to dodge the conversation and drunk Cale doesn’t relent, doesn’t give his father the chance; he persists and rampages, and throws the tantrums he’d never thrown when he was a child.
Cale is drunk and fifteen, he is under the influence, angry, frustrated, and heartbroken, and for what he does not know. But that fueled him all the more to find the truth about the photograph his mother held because the older Cale got, the more he realized that perhaps it was a catalyst for something—a cause for her death. Perhaps he could start blaming something more tangible than himself and maybe get through it if he just knew the truth.
He doesn’t tell his father this though. Instead, Cale rampages, throws items around, and screams at his father’s face.
Cale is drunk and fifteen, and he is angry.
But his father wasn’t, didn’t even bother to scream back at him. And throughout the entire rage that Cale was feeling, the numbness, the warmth all around, and the blood rush to his ears, he still heard the mumble of his father that just left more questions than answers.
“I’m sorry.” His father had said.
And even with all the rage that burned and punctured through Cale, he somehow manages to laugh.
“For what?” And if Cale’s voice hitched and tears started to gather at the corner of his eyes, he didn’t mind. His father refused to look at him anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered.
Cale is drunk and fifteen, and he is nowhere near happy. He does what he does best and that is to leave his father alone, to walk out and lock himself in his room, all drunk and angry. The servants don’t even bother to look at him but that is to be expected.
Even his own father couldn’t look at him. What more of the people that served the bastard?
But before Cale gets to his room, he hears small thuds and footsteps. And Cale hears her before he even sees her.
“Hyung-nim?” The four-year-old little girl looks at him from a distance, rubbing her eyes as if newly awakened. Cale freezes but turns to look at the child and he ends up making direct eye contact with her.
Lily was different from Cale, both appearance and personality-wise. She didn’t have red hair like his birth mother, didn’t have brown or amber eyes like his father or himself. She was a bundle of energy that was way too reckless but more rambunctious than children her age. She was too different from Cale, but was just like Basen, just like Violan, and just like—
Oh.
Cale doesn’t want to think that his mother was unfaithful.
Jour Thames. The only direct descendant of a particular noble family that had gone under and fell—
But perhaps she wasn’t all too great either. Perhaps it wasn’t Basen who was his father’s bastard. Perhaps Violan was Deruth’s first wife and perhaps it was Cale that was the bastard.
Cale wants to cry. He really does.
But instead, he says goodnight to the child who was too young to understand, too naïve to realize that her father’s bastard was under the influence and raging.
Cale doesn’t bother to wait for her reply and enters his room, locking the doors behind him.
At the golden age of fifteen, Cale gets drunk. He loses his bearings and rages. But it is when he is drunk and fifteen does he realize that perhaps he was never really family, never really his father’s son . It is when Cale is drunk and fifteen does he realize that he never had a space in this home to begin with.
(And it is with that overwhelming realization does Cale start to break.)
I’m sorry
and goodbye.
Sometimes Cale wonders if it would be better to disappear entirely. Sometimes he wonders if anyone would miss him, or if his disappearance would be treated as a blessing. He muses that perhaps he’d been imposing on a family that never had any space for him in the first place, and maybe it’d be better to just leave.
But despite everything, Cale wishes to stay. He refuses to leave.
Count Henituse may have not wanted him but he hasn’t thrown Cale out yet and maybe that meant something.
(Cale hopes it did.)
Maybe it did.
Cale knows that he’s been the bane towards Violan’s existence as a countess, an irritation and absolute garbage towards the Henituse name and territory. He knows that he was never going to be anything but these things.
(But Cale still hopes.)
And yet
Sometimes Cale wonders if alternate realities existed, he wonders if the dreams of a happy family were real somewhere else, or be real for him. Sometimes Cale wonders if he’d let himself disappear in time, and change his and his mother’s fate—making sure she’d never have met the Count and consummated to create Cale.
He still doubted.
Sometimes Cale wonders if it would be better to disappear or not exist at all. Maybe then things would be better, maybe then he’d either be missed or not be treated as a nuisance. Perhaps it would have all worked out and he wouldn’t have to feel all these messy tangled emotions that swirl inside of him like a storm. Maybe then it’d be alright.
(Cale just wanted to belong—in here, somewhere.)
But he doesn’t.
(Yet he doesn’t.)
And so Cale does what he had done when he was fifteen, to get drunk and shitfaced so hard that he’d feel numb all over. He drinks and drinks till he can’t even think and wonder no more. He chugs a bottle down, shoots a burn right through his throat, and shrugs off anyone that tries to tell him off and attempts to manhandle him back to the household he can’t even call home.
He threatens the bartender to never cut him off—offers to buy the remaining bottle of liquor and shares to anyone who’d make sure his escorts never touch him and separate him from the alcohol. Cale drowns in money and liquor so he thinks that he might as well make use of it.
And so he does.
After all, what else was there to lose?
Money and a roof over his head were one thing. But a family and a home? He never had those things in the first place.
Cale drinks like there are no tomorrow. Cures his hangover with more alcohol. The red-haired boy drinks till he drowns himself in numbness. He drowns till he can’t breathe, till he can’t feel the way he does normally. He drowns till he can pretend to feel that he was okay and courageously convince himself that he doesn’t need or want anything like the Henituse family name, recognition, and what have you.
He drowns himself for three years and perhaps, even more, had he not disappeared.
(But Cale doesn’t have to wonder anymore. His disappearance didn’t make anyone miss him.)
(After all, everyone preferred the new Kim Rok Soo.)
I’m sorry.
But he doesn’t regret disappearing though.
(He doesn’t. He really doesn’t.)
Not when he finally has the chance to make a space for himself—even if it meant replacing someone else’s existence entirely.
But that was okay. Cale may finally belong somewhere. It may not be the Henituse household, it may not be with a newfound family composed of mythical creatures and heroes, but he belonged somewhere.
It just wasn’t there .
It just wasn’t as Cale Henituse.
It just wasn’t as a red-haired eighteen-year-old boy, but as a thirty-six-year-old man named Kim Rok Soo.
But this was fine. This time there was a space entirely carved out for him and him alone. And it was enough.
“ i’m sorry. ”
Cale wakes up. He blinks his eyes open, his view still bleary and tears threatening to fall from the corner of his eyes. He’d been dreaming of memories that weren’t his but of the original Cale Henituse. He wakes up with cold sweat and with terror, not from a nightmare but from memories, memories so real and felt but were never his in the first place.
The memories and the feelings are like a tidal wave he’d never seen coming. A wave too big, too overwhelming, and absolutely suffocating. They felt too raw, too real, and the thoughts he heard felt too similar to his own—too similar to a small child that just wanted to forget things but couldn’t. It is with this new wash of awareness does Cale begin to think that Kim Rok Soo and Cale Henituse may have been the same in some aspects.
But was a neglected child really the same as a beaten kid?
(It is not.)
No it wasn’t.
(And yet)
They just wanted the same thing.
(To be free of pain. To be happy. To find peace, security, and comfort. To have a family.)
Cale sits up and lets the tears flow, he doesn’t bother wiping them away.
(To be safe. To feel alright. To be able to sleep without any worries of night terrors and demons. To stay alive and to feel alive—)
I just wanted to be a slacker.
(—To live. To belong. To be loved, and to love.)
I just wanted to live long without pain. To enjoy the small joys in life. To live a peaceful life.
(To belong in a space that is mine, to belong in a life worth living.)
Cale sobs and he doesn’t bother to keep it quiet. He doesn’t think he can, not with another person’s memories intruding on him like this, not when the thoughts of another are screaming loudly in his head. The original Cale Henituse’s thoughts are so loud he barely hears Raon call out to him.
“Human?” The dragon’s voice is tired and sleepy, but then his breath hitches when he catches sight of the red-haired man, and panic begins to settle within the child. “What’s wrong?”
Cale can feel the paws of the young dragon come up to him, can feel the way the child shakes with worry and panic. Yet for all of Cale’s stoicness and apatheticness, he can’t bother himself to reassure the child, not when he felt like this. Not when he felt like a small child again, waiting for something, anything, to just happen and to save him.
Not when he felt like he was three years old again, having lost his parents to a car crash and forced to make do in an orphanage while he was being beaten every day.
Not when he just replayed the memories of a younger Cale Henituse and felt too much like a younger Kim Rok Soo. Not when he feels so powerless—
(But you have them.)
Two dragon paws begin to squish Cale’s face.
(You have a family and a place where you belong.)
“Human! Who made you cry? I’ll beat them up for you!”
(Don’t you dare forget it.)
“I’m sorry.” Cale chokes out.
(Don’t be.)
I’m so sorry.
Cale visibly begins to shake and Raon scrambles out of the young man’s bedroom, shouting.
(I’m happy with where I am now.)
And Cale cries harder but this time a bit more aware of his surroundings. He can hear rushed footfalls from a distance, probably making way to his room. This time, the twenty-year-old does try to wipe his tears away, does try to erase any evidence of visible emotion, and does try to get a grip of himself. Cale hears them before he even sees them.
“Cale-nim!”
“Human!”
“Young master.”
And Cale finally thinks to himself, I am too.
FIN.