Chapter 73. Eight Years of Guilt and One Poorly Timed Percentage
William let the silence sit for a moment, allowing her the space to get the worst of it out before he spoke again, and when he finally did, he kept his voice deliberately gentle, careful not to let it carry the shape of an argument.
"What did you see?" he asked. "When you froze..."
"It wasn’t the creature in front of you, was it?"
Catherine’s breath caught, the question landing somewhere raw and unguarded, and for a long moment she didn’t answer at all, staring at some fixed point on the ground between them.
"Aldric," she said finally, barely above a whisper. "I saw Aldric, the way he looked right before the ceiling came down on him..."
"And Mira, reaching for me, telling me to run before I could even process what was happening..."
"It wasn’t the monster, William, but... It was them."
"It’s always them... every single time something moves too fast for me to process properly, it’s not the actual threat I see, it’s the last thing I saw before I lost everyone I was supposed to protect."
William absorbed that in silence, the shape of it settling into place alongside everything Albert had told him, everything Grock had told him, and the full, complete picture finally resolving itself with a clarity that made his chest ache.
"That’s not weakness," he said quietly. "You understand that, right?"
"That’s not a flaw in your skill, or your speed, or anything a hundred more hours of sword drills are going to fix."
"That’s a wound... A real one, the kind that doesn’t heal just because you’ve decided you should be over it by now."
"I’m the vice headmaster of a combat academy..." Catherine clenched her fists. "I supervise student training, and I can’t afford to freeze every time something moves faster than I can control."
"I know. And you will find a way through this, eventually. I genuinely believe that."
"But it’s not going to come from pretending the freeze is a discipline problem you can drill your way out of... It’s survivor’s guilt, Catherine."
"An actual, clinical, deeply rooted survivor’s guilt, and it doesn’t respond to the same kind of training that fixes a sloppy footwork habit."
Catherine looked at him then, something raw and exposed in her expression, the careful composure she usually wore stripped away entirely by the events of the afternoon. "How do you know so much about this...?"
"Because I’ve watched it happen to other people... Good people, capable people, people who survived something they shouldn’t have and spent years afterward convinced that surviving made them broken instead of lucky." William held her gaze steadily. "It’s not something you fix by trying harder."
"It’s something you work through, slowly, with people who understand what it actually is instead of treating it like a failure of nerve."
"I used to think I just needed to get faster again... and sharper..."
"If I trained hard enough and drilled enough hours, eventually my body would simply stop betraying me at the worst possible moment." Catherine’s laugh came out thin and humorless. "Eight years, William..."
"Eight years of telling myself that, and today proved... in front of my own students, that none of it ever actually worked."
"Because you were solving the wrong problem..."
"You don’t have a speed problem, and in fact... you’ve never really had a speed problem."
"What happened today wasn’t your body failing to move fast enough... It was your mind pulling you somewhere else entirely, somewhere eight years old, and no amount of physical conditioning reaches a wound that’s stored somewhere training can’t touch."
"Then what does?"
"Honestly? I don’t have a clean answer for that... I wish I did." William’s voice stayed steady despite the admission, unwilling to offer false comfort even now. "But I know it starts with not pretending the wound isn’t there."
"You’ve spent eight years building an entire life around avoiding exactly the kind of moment that happened today, and it caught up with you anyway, the first time it genuinely mattered."
"Hiding from it clearly isn’t the answer either."
"And if I never work through it? If this happens again, next time with worse consequences?"
"Then we’ll be there to cover for you when it does, the same way I was today, and we’ll keep working on it anyway, because giving up on getting better isn’t actually a real option for either of us." William’s voice stayed steady, certain. "You’re not broken, Catherine."
"You’re just wounded from the inside... Those aren’t the same thing, no matter how much they might feel identical from the inside."
Catherine’s composure finally cracked fully, tears spilling silently down her face, and this time, without needing to think about it, William closed the last of the distance between them and pulled her into a careful, steady embrace, giving her somewhere solid to stand while whatever she was carrying at last found room to move through her instead of staying locked in place.
She didn’t pull away. For a long moment she simply stood there, held, breathing unsteadily against his shoulder, and William stayed exactly where he was, patient and unmoving, offering nothing more complicated than his own steady presence.
"I don’t know... how to fix this," she admitted eventually, muffled against his shoulder.
"You don’t have to know yet..."
"Nobody figures this kind of thing out in a single afternoon." William’s voice stayed low and gentle. "We’ll figure it out together..."
"One step at a time, however long it takes."
Catherine finally pulled back, just enough to look up at him, eyes red-rimmed but steadier now than they’d been since the corridor. "You keep saying... we..."
"Because it is us, at this point, whether either of us planned on that happening or not."
Something in her expression softened at that, a fragile, uncertain warmth breaking through the exhaustion and grief still evident underneath it, and for a long moment neither of them said anything else at all, standing together in the quiet, fading light of the evening, the weight of the day settled but not yet resolved between them.
They eventually made their way to her front step, and Catherine lingered there a moment, one hand resting on the doorframe, looking back at him with an expression that carried more openness than William had seen from her at any point since they’d met.
"Thank you for not treating me like I’m made of glass," she said quietly. "Everyone who’s ever found out even a fragment of what happened down there has treated me that way afterward..."
"Careful, gentle, like the wrong word might shatter me completely, but... you didn’t do that today." Catherine blushed. "You just told me the truth and stayed..."
"You’re not made of glass, Catherine," William smiled. "You’re made of the same stubborn material that got you out of that dungeon alive in the first place."
"I’m not going to insult that by pretending you need careful handling."
"That’s an oddly generous way to describe someone who froze while a student was nearly hurt."
"It’s an accurate way to describe someone who’s been carrying eight years of guilt alone and still gets up every single day to run an entire academy anyway." William held her gaze steadily. "That’s not weakness..."
"Whatever tonight felt like, that’s not what it actually was."
Catherine studied him for a long moment, something working itself loose behind her eyes, and finally, quietly, she nodded. "I don’t think I believe that yet..."
"But I think, for the first time in a long while, I want to..."
"That’s a start."
"It is, isn’t it?" A faint, tired smile touched her mouth, more genuine than anything she’d managed since the corridor. "Goodnight, William..."
"And thank you..." Catherine smiled. "Truly."
"Goodnight, Catherine."
He waited until she’d gone inside and the soft glow of a lamp flickered to life behind her curtained windows before finally turning to make his own way back toward the academy, the events of the day settling slowly into something he could carry rather than something still actively unfolding.
Somewhere in the back of William’s mind, quiet and unobtrusive, a soft chime finally sounded.
[Affection Progress: Catherine Blackwood. Forty-five percent.]
He let it pass without comment, the moment far too important to interrupt with anything as trivial as a percentage, and simply kept walking, steady and unhurried, already turning over in his mind everything he still didn’t know about how to help someone carry a wound like hers. He didn’t have an answer yet.
He suspected there wasn’t a quick one to find. But for the first time since he’d first heard the name "White Sword of Astoria" whispered in a lounge full of instructors who thought no one was listening, William felt like he finally understood exactly what he was fighting for and exactly how long that fight was probably going to take.
He intended to be there for every bit of it.