They start on a busy day on the Promenade with its exotic smells and familiar sights and dreary near-Gothic designs, so Jake thinks it's only fair that they end up in Paris together.
Not the clean, cultivated tourist-trap Paris of the 24th century, the Federation Capital with its safe streets, sleek trains, and pedantic nostalgia, but the Paris of the 1930s, as true and bustling and smoke-smelling as holographic design can make it, and one of the only historical holoprograms Jake's felt at home in since his background research for a serialized set of 20th century detective story fleshed out the nastier bits of his mid-level history courses.
He's sitting in his spot, well, his and Nog's spot, on the Promenade hoping his friend is adjusting to Earth and Starfleet Academy while trying to write something new and staring at an empty PADD, keying in every single clichéd opening he can think of. This new tension with the Dominion means he's watching the same daily routines he's seen for years conducted at a slightly increased speed and fueled by chaotic frissons of nervousness. He remembers Ajilon Prime. He remembers Saratoga. He remembers his mother's smile.
Then he sees Ziyal. She's standing below him and painting. Of course she's painting. She's set up off to the side of the lower walkway, standing in front of a sleek, replicated easel and thick, parchment-like paper, zipping inks across with verve as she creates a speed painting of Major Kira enjoying a morning Jumja stick, recreating the world around front of her with smooth, sure brushstrokes and a small smile on her face.
They've talked a bit, as anyone with their backgrounds and gregarious personalities might, but they've always danced delicately around each other as if waiting for some sort of signal.
Jake stands still, feeling first the butterflies, and then the heat in his cheeks as she feels his gaze, and pauses, leaving the Major's face half-done as she turns, glances up at him and favors him with a small, secret smile.
Something flips in his stomach, and its all he can do to keep hold of his PADD as his face heats up with a warm burst of self-awareness and he knows what he has to do.
It's the work of a moment to conduct an allergen screen for Cardassian and Bajorans on his PADD, and then he's off to the Replimat.
They're artists. Artists and writers should have COFFEE. Nay. Espresso. There are RULES.
She smiles at his return as he strides up confidently, arm draped with a replicated towel and two demitasse cups of espresso balanced professionally on a tray. His Grandpa taught him well.
Uncertain sips, faces made at bitter beans, and a new sense of adventure. Everything seems newly discovered as they take Quark's holodecks by storm amid a shower of latinum he's hustled from countless dom-jot games.
He's been playing with a few holoprograms for historical verisimilitude, but somehow, after a few false starts in Delhi and Brooklyn, it's always Paris.
And as much as Jake feels a sense of peace here as he writes, sitting at a cafe table where the Commune died, smelling the simulation of fresh baked bread and taking small sips of a recreation of a strong espresso out of the same sort of delicate demitasse cups he offered her on that one remarkable day, she's the one who makes it all feel real.
As Ziyal paints passerby mere meters away, Jake's mind flashes to the sheer uncertainty of this time, burdened by knowledge that these simulacra of people don't have. Of the Paris that welcomed all the refugees and artists and bold creative forces who had been disregarded or murdered elsewhere would turn again. He knows it's just over a decade after the Hellfighters, a time for Josephine Baker and Loïs Mailou Jones and a visiting Louis Armstrong and so many more, and a few short years before the roundups and Vichy and the shame of collaboration and the Resistance.
Before the Allies, and among them, the men of the 761st and the 442nd, so scorned in their own country, and so welcomed in this one put an end to the fascists in grey and black who paraded so proudly down the Champs-Élysées like conquerors of old.
Jake has a momentary start as the phantoms in his imagination morph from the orderly figures in Feldgrau with high collars to perfect lines of Jem'Hadar shock troops, of the angular iron crosses and braid that adorned the chests of the German invaders exchanged for pulsating plastic veins of ketracel-white coursing into a thousand bloodstreams.
He glances around for reassurance, and meets Ziyal's gaze. She's momentarily uncertain at his vacant expression, and he marshals himself and gives her a reassuring smile before she resumes painting and he resumes his writing.
And they dance and dine and paint and explore, and they build Paris together. Not the Paris of the nighttime, of fizzy champagne and blazing filaments, for they pass the nights in one or the other's quarters, discovering each other all over again, but the sleepy, luxurious Paris of the mornings and the golden afternoons.
And through it all, Quark just rolls his eyes and doesn't manage charge them nearly as much as he should.
And of course they wind time forward and join the Resistance. Of course they do.
And of course when the Dominion come and they steal their moments with even more circumspection, Ziyal picks up a phaser and joins in when it happens for real.
And this time there are no holodeck safeties.
And he mourns her. And he mourns with Kira. And he considers very carefully a myriad of ways to kill Gul Dukat in Federation custody, and Gul Damar on Cardassia.
When he gets back to Earth, Jake takes a walk around the real Pairs. It's cleaner, safer. Some of the old building fronts exist, but it's nothing like the Paris he built out of light and air, in stolen moments trading stolen kisses and murmured endearments with the one other person in the galaxy who knew what it was like to live in the overpowering shadow cast by their large-looming father.
And, years later, when he tells their story, one of Ziyal's ink self-portraits graces its cover plate. It's one of several captured from a holodeck archive he insisted on saving, of her in a simple white smock with a rough-textured button-down shirt peeking out through the collar, softened neck ridges standing out proud as a lasting laugh, captured in amber, wrinkles her nose just a bit more.
He has his own family now, a stepmother, a younger brother, a wife he adores, and a new school of Siskos journeying out from the wards of New Orleans through Federation Space and beyond, a doting Uncle Nog and numerous other chosen family to guide their steps.
Still. Every time Jake looks at it, he smiles, remembering back, just for a moment as he tastes her name on his tongue.
Somewhere, a Bajoran Vedek with more gray in her hair than brown happens to read his story over a fragrant mug of raktajino, silently remembering and still able to shed a tear for a young woman who never got to earn her own wrinkles and gray hairs. And while chuckling at the escapades, Kira Nerys still manages a fond smile at the heartfelt self-importance of the young man who gave someone she has come to consider her daughter a precious summer in her very own Paris in the stars.
Jake's Grandpa Joe always used to say you die twice. Once when you pass, and then a second time when people stop speaking your name.
Interbellum is no Anslem, but copies move, people feel, and cry in turn, and decades on, they still speak the name of Tora Ziyal, the Cardassian in Paris.
And they still lay bundles of lilies at the feet of a tasteful bronze relief of her depiction on the cover plate outside a small cafe as her memory lives on in Paris for a very long time.