{ Tragic Honesty }

Name a time you failed something and disappointed many people and/or embarrassed yourself. – Hume from @harriedwritings

It was not hard to reach – the familiar sensation of shame crushing against his chest and making it difficult to breathe as the weight of judgemental stares bore down upon him, the admiralty’s displeasure with his offering of a damned woman as opposed to the notorious pirate he had been sent to retrieve. 

Oh, he had been able to spin his excuses under trial – Hennessey refused to back him in any way shape or form as he stood upon the stand, but that did nothing to change the years of training and shaping and moulding beneath that man’s hand to make him anything less than a compelling force in his own defense. Yet for all he sold them, the initial displeasure hung palpable through the air, and he knew that he had slipped from his grace as the darling to many of those esteemed men. He would have to prove himself to them once again, and he felt the iron weight in the pit of his stomach sink lower at the prospect. 

“Beneficial though the capture of Eleanor Guthrie proved to be for my career, the price of her arrest was not particularly welcome or sustainable when weighed against whom I was meant to be paying for. I disappointed my superiours greatly in bringing her, not to mention in pardoning men to do so – it was a great embarrassment indeed to reconcile my error before the admiralty and argue the woman’s worth, but I would argue – at great personal risk to myself – that the greatest injustice of it all lay in how much the failure to capture Flint cost to my men. I cannot forgive myself for laying them low, and I will not rest until I have regained the grace necessary to serve them properly once again.”