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Jake opens his eyes as first light diffuses into his room. He’s never been a morning person before - Dad used to say that once he got his own quarters, he’d become fully nocturnal. And he was proven right once Jake had moved in with Nog. Since they moved to Grandpa’s, though, Jake’s been getting up earlier and earlier. He’s stopped setting an alarm. He doesn’t need it. Jake has spent most of his life on a starship or a space station, with artificial light dictating the confines of his day. Even on Utopia Planitia, seeing the sun had never aligned with his waking hours. Now he allows himself to be trapped by it. He can feel the summer solstice approaching, in the angles of the light through his window, in the way the timing of the sunrise is decelerating, about to swing back around. Even as the days get longer, Jake dreads their shortening.
Now that he gets up even before Grandpa, Jake is the one to start the coffee pot. It burbles as Jake leans against one of the kitchen counters, skimming messages on his padd. The usual from the station this morning - he responds as patiently as he can. Yes, they’re all fine. Yes, he told his father about that shipyard or troop movement or shifting of the front lines. No, he doesn’t know when they’re coming back.
If.
He pours himself a coffee - extra sugar, since Grandpa isn’t watching - tosses the padd into his pack, and heads out into the street.
Living sunrise to sunset, Jake inhabits an inverted New Orleans, up before the tourists and heading for bed when most of the revelers are gaining momentum. The streets are empty, except for a few bar owners hosing down the sidewalks outside of their establishments. Jake smells bleach with an undertone of vomit.
Jake walks down Bourbon Street, sipping his coffee. The buildings in the French Quarter aren’t technically original, of course. Even the sign outside Sisko’s Creole Kitchen - “Established 1924” - is a little misleading. Not only is the date meaningless to most offworld tourists, the original restaurant bought by some forgotten Sisko ancestor is about 50 meters underwater. The family moved to Jackson a couple hundred years ago, when New Orleans flooded for the last time. But times on Earth have been easy since the Federation was established. Plans materialized to rebuild the city on rafts in the Gulf of Mexico, and Jake’s great-great-grandmother had moved the restaurant right back where it was. She’d even hired divers to recover some of the original ironwork. Everything as it should be. Problem solved.
Jake started his morning walks when Grandpa practically banned him from helping in the kitchen after the dinner rush. “I can hire my own staff!” he’d said. “You say you want to write. Get out there and write something!” But Jake has noticed Grandpa’s strictures don’t apply to Dad. Usually the picture of military discipline, Dad has started sleeping until the afternoon, getting up in time to help with dinner prep and working with a zenlike intensity until past closing. Jake and his father now occupy entirely different time zones.
Jake tells himself, as he does every morning, that he’s not avoiding him.
He turns to follow his usual route along the New Mississippi River south through Crescent Park. The “river” is saltwater - just a gap between two sections of floating city. Gulf water rebranded to restore the original geography.
Jake often feels like he’s stumbling through his life - not like Nog, with his Starfleet career, his every transfer and promotion mapped out in his head. Jake’s sense of purpose comes in bursts: fleeting inspiration for a new story, some investigative insight or harebrained idea that consumes him and then leaves him again aimless. He’s always been more interested in reporting on the war than influencing it. But when Jadzia died, he knew with absolute certainty what the next step in his life would be - he would follow his father. Wherever he went; whatever he needed.
It’s not as if this is the first time this has happened.
Dad has always been there for him, no exceptions. But when they were living on Mars, when Jake was little, he’d known something wasn’t right. Something beyond Dad being sad about Mom. Dad told Jake it was okay to cry or to get angry, but Jake never saw Dad crying or angry. Dad would just get quiet. Something in the half-remembered overheard conversations between Dad and Grandpa, the way Dad’s friends would look at Dad when they thought Jake wasn’t watching, scared him.
Things had gotten better on the station - which, at the time, Jake thought was weird. Everything on Deep Space Nine was more serious, more dangerous, less comfortable. But Dad’s pensive stretches had gotten less frequent and their baseball games more so. At first, Jake had been nervous that things would get bad again the next day or the next week. Sometimes they were. Mostly, though, they got better.
Now Jake wonders if that other Dad wasn’t always there, biding his time, waiting to resurface.
Jake passes the St. Louis Cathedral without looking at it. It’s multi-denominational, now - multi-religion, actually, since off-worlders tend to be more faithful than New Orleans natives. Jake figures that as life gets easier, so does atheism. It would explain the Bajorans, anyway. The Prophets have gained traction throughout the Federation in the past couple years - there’s even a Bajoran shrine in the cathedral now. It’s why Jake picks up his pace on this block.
Lying awake at night, Jake has considered going in to pray. What’s the worst that could happen, he figures. But in daylight, he’s never been desperate enough to risk it. He can think of a lot that could go wrong in there. He’s still not convinced he won’t be smited just for stepping through the door, for one thing. Kira’s tried to tell him that the Prophets aren’t like that. Easy for her to say; she wasn’t the one with glowing red eyes.
But more than that, Jake is no longer convinced that the Prophets have the corporeal world’s best interests at heart. Certainly not Dad’s. They never seem to fix problems; only modify them. Jake pitched this idea in a communique to Kira a few weeks ago, buried in a paragraph about station gossip. Something along the lines of “most of our prisons are of our own making.” She’d been a little too sympathetic, advising him that it was natural for faith to wax and wane - “especially given recent events.”
Jake knew then that she was referring not to Jadzia but to the Kosst Amogen. Like questioning the motives of the omniscient, omnipotent beings in the sky was a result of the corruption of the Pah-Wraith. I know the embodiment of evil when I see it, Major, he didn’t respond. Especially when it’s occupying my body. The embodiment of good, though - that, Jake hasn’t seen.
Jake can’t shake the suspicion that it was always going to be him or Jadzia. What he didn’t tell Kira - but she has to have known, he thinks - was that neither he nor Kira would have survived the fight on the Promenade. Regardless of the outcome. Jake had been struggling just to stay afloat, to stay aware of what was happening, but he’d judged it an acceptable loss. His most lucid thought had been wishing Dad would get off the station.
But naturally, Dad doubled down. Dad had had faith that the Prophets would save Jake, and Jake had been saved, and a couple months later, Jadzia hadn’t been. On the Prophets’ home turf, no less. Solve one problem; make a new one.
Which only makes Jake think that for some unholy reason, the Prophets want Dad in this city, at this moment. Partially submerged.
Jake turns onto the Riverwalk and slows his pace a little. When they’d heard that Jadzia was dying, his first thought had been of Dad. That this could send him spiraling again, send him careening away from the war, from Bajor. From Jake. The pain of losing his aunt-meets-older-brother had hit second.
And Jake had been right. It’s almost a relief that the worst has happened - to know that these past few years on the station were an anomaly, not the norm. Jake makes a point of talking to Dad every night before bed, while he’s scrubbing clams out back. He tells Dad about something he saw on his walk, a new story he’s working on. Dad listens, he does, but he never truly responds. He’s disengaged from everything but the clams, the customers, the confines of the restaurant.
Jake doesn’t like to think about what Dad would do if something happened to him.
Jake climbs onto the levee wall and dangles his legs over the sides. He ends up here most mornings; it reminds him of his and Nog’s spot on the Promenade. He peers into the murk, imagining the original Riverwalk mirrored somewhere below him, holding back the flood until it couldn’t anymore. He takes out his padd. When he’s not working on a project, he writes down things about Jadzia, missions she went on or things she said at dinner. He thinks Dad might be trying to forget them. He’s holding onto hope that someday, Dad will want to remember. Today, he just taps his fingers on the padd and watches the fishing ships coming back from the Gulf.
Some nights, Jake tries to get Dad to crack. “I miss her too,” he’ll say. But Dad just looks pitying; gives him a long hug, like it’s Jake who needs help. “I still miss Mom,” he doesn’t say. “I still make lists of things I’m going to tell her the next time I see her.”
Some nights, Jake can barely speak at all - the anxiety crushing his chest and clogging his lungs is too great. The fear that after Wolf 359 and years of war, after skirmishes and terrorists and station accidents, this is how he loses his father.
Some nights, Jake just wants to yell at him. To tell him to snap out of it. To shout that the station, that Starfleet is counting on him. To scream that in a war that’s killed millions, Ben Sisko does not have a monopoly on grief.
Jadzia would have yelled, he knows. He can hear her voice - Oh, things didn’t turn out like you wanted, Benjamin? Why don’t you get off your ass and do something about it?
But Jake is not Jadzia. It’s what he keeps coming back to; the root of the problem that is his father. Jake wants to be enough to replace Jadzia. He wants to be enough to replace Mom. Jake is never enough.
Jake flicks a loose bit of concrete off the top of the levee. It sails into the gap, splashes in the current, sinks. Jake watches it disappear, falling down toward the drowned city.