Wesley found Jake on Deep Space Nine. The station was a hundred years older than the version Jake had grown up on, the Promenade rebuilt twice, the merchants different, the uniforms changed. Jake didn’t belong here in the linear sense — his time on this station ended decades ago — but he was here anyway, sitting in the old replica of his family’s quarters, the rooms the current crew had preserved as a small historical exhibit. A guest no one could see.
He looked up when Wesley appeared and didn’t seem surprised. He said he’d been expecting one of them. Not Wesley specifically — but someone. The math had to land somewhere, and once Wesley left the wreckage of the Andorian moment he’d known one of them would come find the other before it was over.
Wesley sat down across from him on a bunk that had been Jake’s at sixteen. Jake on the bunk that had been Benjamin’s. The room hadn’t been theirs in a hundred years and they sat in it as if it still was.
Wesley told him. Not the long version. The short one. D’Kar’s math, the configuration that worked, the variable whose properties described one being. The part Wesley had spent days trying to argue out of. The part that wasn’t going to argue back.
Jake didn’t say anything at first. His face went the way it had gone in the Andorian wreckage when Wesley described his own condition back to him — the recognition of a wound he’d been carrying without naming. He said one word. When.
Wesley told him soon. After he found someone he needed to find first. Jake asked who. Wesley told him about the commander on Xenex. About the moment that wouldn’t break. About needing to spend his last days with someone who carried weight the way that man carried it, because the weight Wesley was about to carry was heavier than anything he’d ever held and he didn’t know how to do it alone.
Jake nodded the way you nod when someone tells you something you understand all the way down to the bone. Then he said the thing he’d been working out as Wesley talked. He said if Wesley was erased, Jake wouldn’t become Jake. Not the Jake sitting here. The escalation that made him who he was — the Temporal Cold War, the Suliban, the rift, the Temple — all of it tied to the dynamic between them. Without Wesley to push against, Jake’s path bent. A less broken version of him. Maybe better. Maybe worse. But not him.
Wesley said yes. Jake said he hadn’t worked out yet how he felt about being unmade by his only friend’s sacrifice. That it was too clever a problem and not enough time to think about it. Wesley said he hadn’t worked out how he felt about it either.
They sat in the quarters and let the question sit between them. Outside, the Promenade hummed — a hundred years past Jake’s childhood, full of people who didn’t know either of them existed, alive in the way places stay alive when they outlast the families who built them.
Jake said the thing Wesley had been waiting for him to say and dreading at the same time. He asked Wesley not to do it. Wesley told him he had to. Jake said he knew. He said he knew the way Beverly had known. The way Sisko had known about Jake. The way you know something is going to happen and can’t stop yourself from asking anyway, because asking is the only thing left when the answer is already settled.
Then Jake said something Wesley hadn’t expected. He told Wesley he was the first person who had ever made Jake feel less alone in a way Jake hadn’t earned. That every other connection Jake had — his father, the people he’d worked with in the Temporal Cold War — had been built around Jake being useful or being right or being needed. Wesley was the first person who’d shown up after Jake had been wrong about everything and stayed anyway. Stayed, and listened, and sat with him in the wreckage of his work without trying to fix anything. Jake said he didn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t know how to be a friend to someone who’d just told him they were going to disappear and he was about to lose the one thing that had ever shown him what friendship looked like in the first place.
Wesley reached across and put his hand on Jake’s shoulder. He told Jake he didn’t know what to do with it either. That the friendship had been the closest thing to peace Wesley had felt in thirty years. That walking through the Guardian was going to take that away from both of them, and he was sorry, and there wasn’t anything he could give Jake that would make it not true.
They stayed in the quarters longer than they should have. Eventually Wesley stood up. Jake stood up with him. At the door, Jake said he wasn’t going to be okay with this. Wesley said he hadn’t expected him to be. Jake said he didn’t know what he was going to do. Wesley said he didn’t either.
He left Jake standing in the quarters that had been his at sixteen and stepped back out into the timeline, looking for the light. Behind him, he could feel Jake’s signature shift — the destabilization that meant a man was making a decision he wasn’t telling anyone about. Wesley felt it and did not turn around. Whatever Jake was going to do, he was going to do it. The compulsion that drove Wesley to step in was the same one Wesley had been trying not to feed for the last three days, and the only way he knew to honor what Sisko had taught him was to let Jake have the choice he was making, even if the choice was to come find Wesley at the Guardian and try to stop him.