Hold on.
Something just moved out there. Different from before — closer, or smarter, or both.
All clear. For now.
Where was I.
The son and the father. The fight in the Temple. A kid beating the hell out of his dad because he couldn’t figure out how else to say I miss you.
I need to tell you something about that part of the story, something that’s harder to narrate from a distance than I expected.
I know what it’s like to kill someone you love because you believe the cause requires it. To stand over a man who raised you and do the thing your people need to see done, because if you don’t, the mission falls apart and everyone who’s counting on you loses the one thing holding them together. I made that choice when I was barely old enough to understand what choice meant, and I’ve been carrying it since.
What Sisko did was different from what I did. I acted. He didn’t. I chose the cause over the man. Sisko chose something that doesn’t have a clean name — something between action and restraint that only makes sense if you’ve been inside it. Watching his son beat him and not fighting back wasn’t weakness. It was the hardest kind of strength there is, the kind where you absorb the cost in your own body so nobody else has to carry it.
I didn’t understand any of this when the information was first dumped into me. Didn’t understand it for decades. But telling this story is making me process things I carried without examining. That’s what happens when you finally open a door you’ve been walking past your whole life.
They’re getting closer. I can hear them in the corridor now — not running, not rushing. Walking. Methodical. Checking compartments one by one. A minute ago I heard a door open three sections down. Now two. They’re not in a hurry because they don’t need to be. They know I’m on this ship and they know I can’t leave.
I need to finish this.
But the next part — the conversation between Wesley and the boy — that matters. That’s where they stopped being enemies and started being the same person standing on different sides of the same wound.
Stay with me.