raven | Ficlet:: Mississippi [DS9]

Back from Nine Worlds. Mostly deaded.

Happy birthday,

silly_cleo! Something short and sweet for you.

Fic:: Mississippi
by Raven
1000w, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Kira and Sisko. "She'll have the jambalaya."

It's hot as hell here, swamp-hot so the fans only disturb the flies. They're eating beignets spun in icing sugar at a riverside table just where the Mississippi dumps a continent's worth of silt into the Gulf of Mexico. "Place called Minnesota," Captain Sisko says. "Way up north, where it gets cold, it's just a little mountain stream. It takes its sweet time getting here, goes through all the old United States, brings down all that rain back to the sea. There are people who never feel right out of the sight of the river. Is there something like it on Bajor?"

Kira can taste the salt in the air, the brackish inflow from the open water. She shakes her head. "Bajor is different."

Bajor is smaller, flatter, less tectonically active. Different. She looks up at the fans stirring the leaves of the palms, the view out to the water. Sisko's fingers are all-over icing sugar and she smiles at the sight of it.

"Some people say," she adds after a moment, "that's why we went into space relatively early, for a humanoid civilisation. We didn't have the deep oceans, the polar regions. At least, not to the same degree."

Sisko nods, leans back in his chair. "Every culture has its own frontiers."

"Sir," Kira says, after another moment, "why did you bring me here?"

"Well," he says, grinning at her, "you hadn't ever been to New Orleans."

Later, in the cool of the evening after the rain, she looks at her reflection flashing back from puddles in cambers, kicks through the standing water, and she wonders again what she's doing here, but not too loudly. They take in some jazz at the Preservation Hall and walk to dinner through the quiet streets still sweet with rain, droplets hanging fragile off the curls of wrought iron. Joseph Sisko meets them at the door and smiles and says, "Ben, Major Kira, what kept you?" and Captain Sisko throws his jacket on a hook without looking, and leads them to their table.

"Ben, you'll have the jambalaya, I know," Joseph says, as they sit down. "Major, just wait one moment, I'll get you your menu."

He's like that with everyone, Kira notes, not just with them: pays private attention to every diner in the place, though the restaurant is thronging with people talking, laughing, eating with both hands. When she sees her menu it's obvious it's different from the other menus on the tables: some items are asterisked and crossed-out, and the sheets of paper are loose with no binding. "Some of the spices we use won't sit well with you, Major," Joseph says, off her questioning look. "It's physiology and such."

Kira understands, but the paper is worn at the edges, as though it's been in other hands. "Do you get many Bajoran customers?"

"We've had some," Joseph acknowledges. "But Ben said his first officer was Bajoran, and I knew you'd come sometime."

She can't decide what she wants for a minute or two. Captain Sisko says, "She'll have the jambalaya."

"Maybe she wants the catfish," Joseph retorts. When Kira tries to point out it's one of the items on the menu that's crossed through on account of her physiology, he shakes his head irritably. "I'm a chef, not a replicator. If the lady wants catfish, we make it so the lady has catfish."

In the end she does go for the jambalaya, because the heat of it reminds her of the swamp-heat of the riverbanks, comforting and palpable, and when it comes it's delicious. "You just wanted to come home, I guess," she tells her captain, when she sets down her fork. "I can see why."

Because, she's thinking, New Orleans is beautiful and like nothing she's ever seen, and the Bajorans have claimed Benjamin Sisko as their own without ever seeing this place from where their Emissary came. That thought makes her slightly sad.

"I thought you'd like it," Sisko says, putting down his own fork, twirled through with collard greens. "Although, Major" - and his eyes are serious - "I'm still planning to retire on Bajor."

"We went out into space so early," Kira says, earnestly, the warmth of the night inviting this confidence, "but then the Cardassians came. We never travelled the stars like peaceful explorers. I guess we never really learned how to be from more than one place at once."

"One day - one day soon - Bajor will be part of the Federation." Sisko smiles at the waiter, who seems to know exactly what's wanted and goes to fetch the dessert menu. "You'll be part of something bigger than Bajor. Bigger than anything any of us are."

It's the girl inside Kira - the angry teenager, the Resistance fighter - who asks, then: "What if I don't want to be? What if I don't want to be anything other than Bajoran?"

Sisko smiles at her. "No one asks to be Emissary of the Prophets, Nerys."

Dessert, when it comes, is an Earth dish she hasn't seen before – flour and sugar baked together with roasted fruit. The vedeks have been speaking of this recently, of the Emissary and his place in history, of the far future when he lives only in the ancient religious texts. She will be then, as she is now, at his right hand – Kira Nerys, the Bajoran woman who fought for something greater than herself.

Joseph gives her a clean fork and gestures at the turnover. "It's good," he assures her, "just crack it open" – and there's a jug of cream, and steam curling hot and sweet from the pastry.

end.