Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 295: It’s the weight of choosing for others. Of knowing what happens when I choose wrong.

The morning after New Year’s.

The streets were quiet.

Étienne stood at the window in his old room, shirt sleeves rolled, watching the stillness outside.

He heard a quiet knock on the doorframe and turned.

His father stood there, coat in hand.

"Come walk with me," he said.

Étienne nodded, took his heavier wool coat from the chair, and followed.

They said nothing at first.

The city was just beginning to wake up bakers opening shutters, dogs stretching beside quiet doorsteps, a newspaper boy around the corner.

His security details spread around everywhere but still giving enough space to both father and son.

His father led him down familiar roads.

Past the boulangerie where Étienne had once saved coins to buy croissants after school.

Past the little bookstore with the green awning.

They walked slowly with a kind of silence shared by men who had never been strangers but had never quite learned how to say everything, either.

They turned into a small park.

The same one with the wooden benches and iron fence where Étienne had learned to ride a bicycle and crashed gloriously into a mulberry bush.

"Still here," his father said, brushing frost from the bench before sitting.

Étienne sat beside him.

"You were quiet last night," his father said after a while.

"I’m often quiet these days."

"Not in parliament. Not on the radio."

"That’s the performance," Étienne said. "This is... the pause."

His father nodded slowly, hands clasped in his lap.

"I watched you speak last week. That address in Madrid. I didn’t recognize the man on the stage."

Étienne glanced at him. "Because he speaks Spanish?"

His father didn’t smile. "Because he looked like someone who’s already halfway to becoming marble."

A silence fell again, heavier this time.

"Is that what you think?" Étienne asked finally. "That I’m disappearing?"

His father looked out at the trees. "I think... power is a strange storm. It doesn’t just destroy what’s outside. Sometimes it erodes the man holding the umbrella."

Étienne didn’t answer.

A bird chirped somewhere in the trees, confused by the cold.

"When I was young," his father continued, "we had a neighbor. Monsieur Aubry. Owned a shop, made cabinets. Fine hands. Always smelled of pine. He was elected to the council one year. Came back after two years quieter, richer... and angry all the time. We never found out why. But his laugh disappeared."

"Do you think that’s me?" Étienne said, voice softer.

His father turned, finally meeting his eyes. "No. Not yet. But I think your laugh has to work harder now."

Étienne let out a short breath, close to a smile.

"I don’t always recognize myself either."

His father nodded again. "That’s good."

"Is it?"

"It means there’s something left to protect."

They sat in silence again.

ÉSomewhere nearby, a bell chimed once.

"I didn’t want this, you know," Étienne said. "Not exactly. I didn’t dream of flags and maps and speeches. I wanted to teach. History. Maybe write."

"You were a terrible writer," his father said gently.

"Still am."

"But you were good with questions."

Étienne looked down at his hands. "It wasn’t ambition that drove me, Papa. It was the noise. The vacuum. No one was saying what needed to be said. I thought, if I could fill that silence..."

"But words can trap too," his father said. "They become walls. Especially when people start carving them in stone."

Étienne sighed. "I don’t know how to stop. I don’t think the world would let me."

"You don’t have to stop. You just have to remember."

"Remember what?"

His father turned slightly, resting one arm on the back of the bench.

"Remember what your brother sees when he looks at you. Not the medals or the newspapers. But the man who flew a paper kite in this park until it hit a nun in the shoulder."

Étienne chuckled. "I forgot about that."

"She didn’t."

They laughed quietly for a moment.

"I’m proud of you," his father said then, softly. "You should know that. Even if I don’t always understand you."

"I don’t always understand me either."

"I imagine the world makes it hard."

"It’s not the world," Étienne said after a pause. "It’s the weight of choosing for others. Of knowing what happens when I choose wrong."

His father studied him. "And when you choose right?"

"It doesn’t always feel different."

After a while, his father spoke again.

"When you were small, maybe five or six, you asked me what it meant to be good. Do you remember?"

Étienne shook his head.

"You asked if it meant following rules. Or helping people. Or telling the truth."

"What did you say?"

"I said it meant being able to sleep at night."

Étienne looked at him. "Do you still believe that?"

"I do. And you?"

There was a long pause.

"I sleep," Étienne said. "But not always peacefully."

His father nodded. "Then keep the door open. Don’t let the man who comes home once a year become a stranger to the boy who once ran through this park."

The wind picked up slightly, rustling the dry branches.

"I don’t want to be a statue," Étienne said quietly.

"Then stay human."

He stood slowly, brushing his coat.

Étienne rose with him.

As they walked back through the park, the frost beginning to melt slightly beneath their boots, the world felt momentarily balanced between memory and future, between father and son.

At the gate of the house, his father paused.

"You’ll be gone by tomorrow?"

Étienne nodded. "Early. Too much work to do, Europe is technically on fire."

His father didn’t say more.

Just clasped his shoulder, held it for a moment longer than necessary, then turned back toward the warmth of home.

Étienne stood alone at the gate for a while longer.

Watching the house.

Listening to the sounds of a family not yet fully awake.

So much has changed within him.

He came from the future and he changed the world.

But somewhere along the line this world changed himself.

There are too many questions he dare not ask himself.

For he is worried if one day if someone asked him this question, what kind of strategy required the death of his soilder when he could take over Spain easily.

Was it really necessary because today those families celebrate New year without them.