[Metal Tsubasa]: 95.The Story of Paris Legal.In the end

He sat there, just sat there. His sat with a book in his lap, which was always open to the same page, the window open the same way, everything stood as if it had been the same way for years. Not that the time ever really mattered to eyes that couldn’t see. The sun could remain behind the horizon for all of eternity and he would never notice, nor care.
All that reminded him of the time passing were the gentle footsteps constantly trotting through the house. They were light footsteps, gentle as a shutter tapping against a wall in a summer’s breeze. He knew those footsteps well, and the laughs that followed after.
He would hear the children laughing and their mother trying to coax them into their clothes, or out of them when a bath was in mind. Nonetheless, he never felt as though he was a part of it. Even with his wife talking to him or his children calling, without his sight he felt as though they were miles away, too far for him to ever reach, no matter how far his legs would carry him.
This was the reason why he sat at that window, with the book he couldn’t read, and the sun he couldn’t see. Even so, he continued to smile, or what he thought was smiling, because he wanted his family to be happy and that was all he needed to smile.
“Paris,” a gentle voice called, drifting through the air like a bird itself, “do you want me to read to you?”
Slowly, as if his neck were on old door hinges, Paris turned towards the voice. He smiled, as best he thought he could, pulling all the muscles in his face to show it to himself. “Of course,” he replied, though it sounded raspy. “You know I always do.”
The floor creaked gently under his wife’s feet as she moved toward the chair, which was right across from his own. He could feel her sitting down and he could feel the book lifting from his lap. The pages slipped gently through his wife’s fingers as she tried to find her place again.
However, there was no need for her to read to him. He knew the story well; he had read it several times before, when he was younger, when they were younger. As he heard his wife’s soft voice begin to read, Paris remembered the time when he had read it to her, several years earlier. It had been back about twelve years, before he had children, before he had married, before he had lost his sight.
It had been a day, much different from what was no out that window. It was cold, very cold, but still, Paris had made it to Sarabeth, hands frozen and body shaking. Later, Lilly yelled at him for choosing not to ride a horse. The young man, only a little over twenty-one, sat shaking in the front room of Lilly’s office, waiting for her to come out from her last appointment. When she did, Lilly was less than pleased.
“Paris!” the young doctor exclaimed as she watched Paris shutter and shiver for the cold. “What did you do?!”
He was kept in bed for many days, his clothes and possessions were set aside. While he was recovering however, Lilly came in, questioning about a red bound book. At that time however, this book was in French.
“I-it w-w-was my m-mothers,” the bounty hunter stuttered, huddling under piles of blankets. “W-when I w-was l-l-little, s-she used t-t-to r-r-read it t-to me. It’s t-the only thing of h-hers I h-have.”
Even though he was still shaking, in more ways than one, Lilly asked the young bounty hunter to read it. It took a long time to get even a few pages down, due to the fact that Paris would have to read it to himself in French and then read it to Lilly in English, stuttering the entire time. However, when Paris had gone blind, his wife had the book translated, so she could read it to him.
Years had passed since then. Since he had gone blind, Paris had been married and his wife had had two children and through all that time, he listened to the story. It was a long novel, especially for how young he was when he first heard it. His mother read it to him for the first time when he was four and from then on he never wanted her to stop.
It was the story of two soldiers who had become lost on their way home from a war. Neither had truly known the other before hand, but along their journey the two became close friends, never straying too far from the other. They struggled through life and death situations, with only their friendship and the hope of returning to their loved ones to help them. Tragically however, when they finally found their home, the two soldiers found out that they had been ghosts ever since the war. In the end, the two soldiers parted with their families in emotional goodbyes and returned to the battlefield, where their bodies were buried. Paris had cried the first fifteen times he heard the story, but after that, he knew how it would end. It was as if it was telling of his life. While he was certainly not a ghost soldier, he was a phantom. Though he loved his children and his wife very much, they were detached from him, because he had no way of attaching to them. Being blind had made him a wraith, simply drifting in and out of life when someone finally showed him the way home, only to send him into the darkness again. This was possibly not a wise reason for wanting the book read to him, but Paris felt that it made his life a little more noticeable.
Even after telling the story so many times, Lilly always discussed it with Paris at the end of the day, when she had to get the children ready for bed. “It is quite amazing,” she told him, “that they can’t even remember dying. Do you think it was because they didn’t want to remember? That they just wanted to go home and be alive?”
“Perhaps,” Paris replied, “ghosts are mysterious creatures.”
With the book read and the children to tend to, Lilly gently rose form her chair and paused in front of Paris. He knew she was looking at him, he could feel it, and so he tilted his head upward, in the general direction. He then felt a soft, feminine hand touching his cheek as his wife spoke. “You should get some sleep,” she told him. “You look so tired. I’ll put the children to bed and be up in a little bit.”
“Of course,” the old bounty hunter replied as he slowly began to stand. The chair under him creaked as it was released from the weight and Paris groped his way to the doorway.
He had been through the house many times and he knew where everything was, excluding the occasionally discarded toy left behind by his children. They were still too young to know what that did to their father, which was the reason that whenever Paris found himself stepping or tripping over something of theirs he merely picked it up and moved it to the chest with the rest. Slowly, Paris made his way to the staircase and tightly gripped the railing as he took each step, hoping that his children wouldn’t be his end.