Chapter 81. No Familiar Constellations, Just an Unfamiliar Kind of Home
William noticed, somewhere in the accumulation of these small, easy conversations, that Catherine laughed more freely than she had even a week earlier, the careful, measured version of herself giving way, session by session, to something looser and more genuinely present.
He noticed, too, the way her gaze occasionally lingered on him a beat longer than the conversation strictly required, something warm and considering behind her eyes that she didn’t seem fully aware she was showing.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, quietly and without any particular fanfare, the system chimed more than once over those two weeks, each notification a small, steady confirmation of something William had already begun to feel without needing the numbers to tell him.
[Affection Progress: Catherine Blackwood. Fifty-two percent.]
[Affection Progress: Catherine Blackwood. Fifty-eight percent.]
[Affection Progress: Catherine Blackwood. Sixty-three percent.]
He let each one pass without comment, the same way he had the last time something this important had been happening, unwilling to let a percentage cheapen what was building steadily and honestly between them, one ordinary conversation at a time.
The evening arrived quietly, the kind of clear, star-scattered sky that made William stop for a moment on his walk toward Catherine’s house, struck again, as he occasionally still was, by just how different this world’s night sky looked from the one he’d grown up under.
No familiar constellations, no comfortable, half-remembered patterns, just an unfamiliar scatter of light that had slowly, over the weeks, become its own kind of familiar in its unfamiliarity.
Catherine met him at her door already dressed down for the evening, hair loose, the last of the day’s training worked comfortably out of her posture, and she led him not toward the practice yard this time but toward a pair of simple wooden chairs set up near the low garden wall at the back of her house, angled toward the open sky.
"No training tonight," she said, settling into one of the chairs. "I thought we could just sit for once."
"I can do sitting."
"You say that like it requires effort."
"Everything requires effort when you’ve spent as long training people as I have... Stillness is a skill too, believe it or not."
Catherine’s mouth curved into a small, genuine smile, and she gestured toward the empty chair beside her, and William settled into it, the quiet of the evening wrapping comfortably around both of them as the last of the daylight finally bled out of the sky entirely.
They sat together for a while in easy silence, watching the stars gradually sharpen into full visibility overhead, and it was Catherine who eventually broke the quiet, her voice softer and more contemplative than William was used to hearing from her.
"I’ve been thinking," she said, "about how strange it is... the way you understand things most people never manage to understand, even people who’ve lived their entire lives here in Helios."
"Strange...? Like how?"
"The way you talk about loss... about guilt, about freezing, about carrying something you can’t put down." Catherine turned her head to look at him properly, the starlight catching faintly in her pale eyes. "It’s not the kind of understanding that comes from theory, or even from watching other people go through it."
"It’s the kind of understanding that comes from having lived it yourself, over and over, in ways most people are lucky enough to never experience even once."
William felt something in his chest tighten, the familiar, careful weight of the secret he’d carried since his very first morning in this borrowed body settling heavier than it had in weeks.
He’d spent so long deflecting exactly this kind of question, redirecting, offering vague half-truths dressed up as honesty, and sitting here now, under an unfamiliar sky beside a woman who had trusted him with the single heaviest thing she carried, the old instinct to keep deflecting felt, for the first time, genuinely wrong.
"There’s something I haven’t told you," he said quietly. "Something I haven’t told anyone here, actually, not since I arrived."
Catherine’s expression shifted, curiosity and something more careful settling into place, but she said nothing, simply waiting, giving him the same patient space he’d given her so many times over the past weeks.
"I’m not originally from Helios," William said. "The body I’m in... the name I carry... all of it belonged to someone else first..."
"The real William Wade died before I ever arrived here, and I woke up in his place with no explanation beyond whatever brought me here in the first place."
"You’re a... reincarnator...?" Catherine said, quietly, without a trace of the shock William had braced himself for.
"Huh?" He blinked. "You’re not surprised about that?"
"I suspected it," she admitted, something gentle in her voice, "for a while now, actually."
"It’s not an entirely unheard of concept here, even if it’s rare enough that most people never speak of it openly."
"There are old stories... records buried in places like the archive Olivia’s been sneaking into, references to souls crossing between worlds under circumstances nobody fully understands."
"Most people treat it as a myth, but I’ve always found myself less certain than most people."
"What tipped you off?"
"The way you discuss your old life without ever actually describing it... The specific, practiced way you deflect certain questions, exactly like someone who’s had a lifetime of practice hiding something without appearing to hide anything at all."
A faint, knowing smile touched her mouth. "And, if I’m being entirely honest, the fact that a man who supposedly grew up somewhere without magic has never once shown genuine confusion about tactical concepts, only about the specific mechanics of how magic itself works."
"That’s not the pattern of someone unfamiliar with combat... That’s the pattern of someone who already knows war intimately and is only discovering an unfamiliar flavor of it."
William let out a long, slow breath, something in his chest finally, genuinely loosening after weeks of careful, deliberate concealment. "I died in my old life..."
"Betrayed by someone I trusted, someone I’d spent years training and believing in..."
"I don’t know exactly what brought me here afterward, only that I woke up in this body with all of my old memories intact and no explanation waiting for me."
"That’s an extraordinary thing to carry alone..."
"It’s easier than I expected, telling you." William turned to look at her properly, something quietly vulnerable in his own expression now, an openness he hadn’t shown anyone since arriving in this world. "I thought this would feel like losing control of something, but turns out... It doesn’t."
’It just feels like finally putting something down that I’ve been carrying too long."
Catherine reached over, without any hesitation this time, and took his hand in both of hers, her grip warm and steady, entirely unlike the trembling uncertainty that had colored her hands just weeks earlier.
"Thank you," she said softly, "for trusting me with that..."
"I know exactly how heavy it is to carry something like that alone for as long as you have... I’m glad you don’t have to anymore."
They sat together in comfortable silence for a while longer, the weight of the shared secret settling into something that felt less like a burden now and more like a bridge, and eventually Catherine shifted closer, resting her head against his shoulder with a quiet, natural ease that neither of them commented on directly.
"And also... thank you," she said again, after a while, her voice quieter now, more open than William had ever heard it. "For all of it."
"The training, the patience, and tonight... I don’t think I’ve said, properly, how much all of this has meant to me..."
"I spent eight years convinced I was broken beyond fixing, and in the span of a few weeks, you’ve helped me find pieces of myself I genuinely believed were gone forever..."
"You did the work, Catherine... I just made sure you didn’t have to do it alone."
"That’s not nothing... and that’s not nothing at all." She tightened her grip on his hand, and William felt the small, steady weight of her trust settle warmly against his own chest.
"William."
"Yeah?"
There was a pause, brief and slightly uncertain, Catherine gathering something in herself before she finally spoke again, her voice soft and just a little unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with fear this time.
"Stay for the night," she said quietly. "Not because of anything that happened before... not out of obligation or fear of being alone... Just because I want you here."
William looked down at her, at the quiet, open honesty in her expression, at the woman who had spent eight years convinced she didn’t deserve to want anything for herself, finally asking for exactly that.
"Okay," he said simply, and meant it completely.
Above them, the unfamiliar stars of Helios kept their slow, silent watch, and for the first time since he’d woken up in a stranger’s body in a world he hadn’t chosen, William felt, entirely and without reservation, like he’d finally found somewhere that was beginning to feel like home.