A/N 2/13/21 Happy Valentine's weekend! Chapter 23 is in the works and I expect to post something by Tuesday, February 16, but it could be earlier, you all know how things go. I am working mostly on a two-week schedule it appears.

My personal life is very busy, and I have many plans for this story. To be frank, I get a little overwhelmed when I think about everything that I need to happen here. Especially as each chapter seems to take on a life of its own. Plugging along is all I can do, however. I do thank you for your patience, and lovely reviews, and I hope these little notes help you to know that I am eager to move things forward as well.

Inspiration this time around:

"You can play the game and you can act out the part

Though you know it wasn't written for you

But tell me, how can you stand there with your broken heart

Ashamed of playing the fool?"

James Taylor, Shower The People

Disclaimer: I own nothing of Margaret Mitchell's. Pat Conroy refers to Rhett's 'wounded masculinity' in his preface to the 75th edition of GWTW, and I don't think any other term in the English language sums up the situation better.

Chapter 22

A little more than a hundred miles off the South Carolina coast a sudden fierce thunder and lightning storm rose with the dawn, combining with the bulging forces of the Pink Moon's spring high tide and buoying Rhett's anchored schooner roughly about, waking him from a fitful slumber.

Another squall, he thought blearily. Just my luck. He peered out the cabin window just as lightning struck in the not-so-far distance. Almost by habit, he began counting the seconds between the electric flash and the next clap of thunder, then divided the result by five; that number would be the distance in miles from the storm. It was close, less than four miles away. Too close.

He lurched from his bed across the slanting floor to his desk and proceeded to light a candle in order to view his maps and compass; it promptly went out and he cursed. Too dangerous to light a kerosene lamp with the boat's unsteadiness. He'd have to make it in the dark.

His thoughts cleared as his waking mind began to quicken. He needed to travel ten or so miles across the rest of the Gulf Stream and then the Charleston Bump would protect his ship if he could get there; he would be racing the storm. The more pragmatic decision would be to lower his masts and hunker down in his cabin. Rhett Butler did not find himself in a pragmatic frame of mind, however. He wanted, wanted more than anything else at the moment, to run with the high winds.

He pulled on his canvas pants as he climbed up on deck, the lashing waters immediately drenching his bare torso with brackish sheets of the sea. Lightning lit the horizon up, setting it on fire against the sunrise.

He quickly judged this to be a rogue storm, one more than likely to pass swiftly further out to sea but also one quite capable of leaving much damage in its path. The winds were blowing in the right direction, and if he caught them just right nothing would be lost.

He hoisted the sails as speedily as one man could, silently cursing once again, this time his fair-weather sailing friends who'd abandoned the trip in Nassau. Just as he pulled the anchor up an energized bolt from the last of the midnight blue sky struck not far from the boat, sending it reeling lightly in a semi-circle. He'd taken too long already, and the storm arrived and raged around him.

The same grandfather who gave him his swarthy skin and exceedingly flexible code of ethics had gifted him with a congenital ceraunophilia - a complete and unabiding love of lightning and thunder, a devotion to the beautiful danger of it. He felt calm at his center as his body vibrated with exhilaration.

He loved the instability, the wildness of a storm. It reminded him of blockading, made him feel young again. He felt the well-known surge of adrenaline; his element, indeed. Another strike hit the water in front of him and then another. He was in a minuscule eye of the beast for the moment, saved by an atmospheric hiccup that would end at any second, and he could feel his pulse course mightily at the thought.

"I will open my mouth and close my eyes and see what Zeus sends me!" he yelled at the sky. It seemed a highly appropriate time to quote Aristophanes, even if he was quite literally shouting into the wind.

Which seemed to hear him and call his bluff, as it increased - forty, sixty, eighty knots. His presence on the deck became dangerous, reckless. He heard the lower mast crack, and his level of enjoyment took a downward plunge.

He felt a rising as the situation ratcheted up, more perilous by the instant. A rage built quickly inside of him matched by the escalation of the atmosphere, This was not a simple storm - his boat was in peril - he found himself in peril. And openly sneered at fate.

"Is that all you have for me?" he shouted. "Surely you can do better than this!"

He heard the lower mast crack again and the urge to laugh bubbled up inside.

"You think a storm can break me? I'm already broken you son of a bitch," he roared at the fleeing night. "You want to kill me just do it. Stop playing around and do it."

Tempest-driven insanity had him running to the helm, where he climbed up and hooked his bare feet under the iron rail and spread his arms wide above his head in simultaneous defiance and supplication. "What else can you do? Hit me, you coward, take me too!

"You've done all you can to end me. I fought and fought and crawled on my belly but it was never enough. Never enough."

His voice rose to its loudest, darkest pitch as desolation overwhelmed him. "You took my baby girl, you ruined me. I'm dead already don't you see? I'm dead already!"

The exceptional Rhett Butler, born of fragmented gentility and steeped in utter infamy, stood at the helm of his boat and sobbed and screamed and raged and yelled, hollering until his throat ached with hoarseness like a madman, for he was a madman, an injured and dying animal, and he could take no more.

The churning ocean of tears within him fought to join the ocean without; and there was nothing he could do but be a conduit, just as the iron rail braced against his feet would be a conduit should lightning strike it; nothing to do but to stand there and let the tears flow up and out, it a seemingly never-ending rush of pain, a birth and a cleansing mitigated by the rain, his own cries juxtaposed against the hue and cry of the sky.

Water, water everywhere … .

He'd wept for days when Scarlett was hurt and for weeks after Bonnie died. He'd tried to suppress the tears but could not. It had distressed him absolutely and to no end. Men didn't cry but there he was twisting his face in Melly's skirts, the wife of the man who cuckolded him, and he, the cuckold, giving himself over to emotion, weeping and sobbing, a shadow of his former self. How does a proud man lose his pride? When it's a part of him, like his hand or his heart?

After Bonnie it had been a shameful release, one he tried to squelch but couldn't control and couldn't stop; the tears leaked out of his eyes unwelcome and unbidden. So he stayed at Belle's so he could weep over his daughter, and consume and consume as only getting falling-down drunk seemed to halt the tears and pain even for a moment.

She wouldn't let him drink alone, would sit across from him and look at him like he was someone else's lost dog, too pitiful, yet too rare a breed to put back on the street. She'd prop him up in her private parlor and try to comfort him the best she could, lending an ear, patting him on the hand, cutting him off before he did fatal damage, as she possessed considerable experience in that type of thing.

Not that anything or anyone could have helped, but she didn't judge like other people would - whores are excellent at not judging - and that was what he'd needed more than anything. Even so, he continued to drink beyond all reason as long as she or anyone else would let him because he'd rather be regarded as an unrepentant sot than unman himself with tears.

Here in this storm, though, no one existed but himself, no one there to hear or see; he could not outcry the thunder, and so he let loose the soul-wrenching fury and the all-encompassing grief.

Rage at the impotence emanated from deep within as he stood there, braced against the railing, dripping with stinging seawater and wounded masculinity; rejected as a son by his cold father and his weak mother, rejected by society, rejected as a husband and a lover by his thoughtless wife, and - above it all - failed as a father to his one, wondrous offspring; robbed along with the world of that single, tiny, beyond precious being, the child whom he loved more than life itself.

The storm appeared to abate just a bit, as quickly as it had moved in, just as he'd figured, yet he stayed at the helm with the still churning waters, wet to his core but not wanting to move as catharsis set in, some type of twisted peace. He couldn't be hurt because he had nothing left, nothing left to care for, nothing left to love. But even as he thought these words, his heart whispered, his cruel, vengeful, betraying heart.

Untrue.

Bastard heart.

You still have her.

Her. The bane of that growing fire in his long-apathetic belly, the banished light of his soul.

How he'd punished her for his weakness, how he'd cherished the darkness of his indifference to her, reveled in how it hurt her. And he knew it hurt her, could see it in her eyes.

How the cruelty made him feel strong.

And you still have them.

Those two children, whom he'd considered his own before he cut himself off from her and anything with her blood paid the price of that decision. Their eyes - oh he saw their eyes! He wanted to hold them and talk to them, these children, the sister and brother to the child he missed so much.

He found to his surprise how much he missed them, just them, all on their own, just as they appeared before his mind's eye. Not with the same bitter stomach-dropping sadness as his lost child, but one that was still somehow bittersweet for the time they had lost.

And then they rose, the words he despised, the ones that had bubbled beneath the surface of his consciousness, in his heart and the back of his mind for weeks, perhaps even months, and in the rawness of the moment he could push them away no more. Once a question in his mind, now indisputably a statement of fact -

It wasn't all her fault.

It was his last thought before the damaged lower mast finally broke free from its ropes, swinging the boom around to crack soundly against his skull.

OOOOooooOOOOoooo

A/N Forgive me. I just had to knock some sense into Rhett. He is a man, and therefore, he needs our help. He's not completely changed by these events, however. Consider it a slight shift of axis ... .

Fun Facts:

Charleston Bump

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Charleston Bump is a deepwater rocky ocean bottom feature approximately 90 miles (140 km) southeast of Charleston, South Carolina. The Bump, rising from the Blake Plateau, lies in the path of the Gulf Stream and deflects the Gulf Stream offshore away from the coast of the eastern United States. This deflection amplifies downstream eddies and gyres and enhances the upwelling of nutrient-rich waters onto the continental shelf. These nutrient inputs support an ecosystem of plankton, fish, and other sea life. Large populations of wreckfish can be found in the cave systems in this area. The Charleston Bump is approximately 25 million years old.

More of my inspiration:

"American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet." - Pat Conroy

FYI … you probably already know but in case you don't ….

Emotionally-triggered tear production also releases endorphins and oxytocin, which are natural pain relievers.

Soon, folks. Very soon. Expect a touch of Rhett next chapter, a lot more the next if it all goes to plan :)

Thank you for expressing your thoughts and feelings; they mean the world to me.