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Two months after the Borg attack and into their extended stay in San Francisco courtesy of Starfleet, Jack is surprised he doesn’t want to run straight to the stars just yet. Part of that is definitely the trauma; he doesn’t even need his appointed counselor (non-telepathic, no disrespect intended to Deanna Troi) to tell him that. The other part is, well, a different kind of trauma: the kind spent from living a life on the run, never quite settling down, just him and his mum for the longest time.
Helping people, but never really connecting with them. Always cut off, distant, because they had to be.
Now, for better or worse, he has roots anchoring him planetside. The legacy of his father, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, savior of the galaxy numerous times over. And his mother, Dr. Beverly Crusher, newly recommissioned into Starfleet with admiral pips herself and an appointment to Starfleet Medical. It’s a lot to live up to, especially here in the heart of San Francisco, the heart of Starfleet.
Everyone knows who he is, and that’s… different. He chafes against it, just a little, but there’s so much going on still between his mother’s research to solve both the Borg and Changeling problems, and his father’s constant meetings with Starfleet’s highest-ups to absolve everyone involved in the commandeering of the Titan (especially in light of the actual conspiracy uncovered), and Jack’s not-Irumodic Syndrome and therapy sessions — truthfully, he barely has time to think about it.
He makes time for his parents: willingly provides himself for any and all tests his mother might want to run; even makes an effort to catch a drink with his father or have a meal together when meetings allow.
It becomes easier as his parents fall back into a rhythm he’s unfamiliar with, but can tell that they know all too well. Breakfasts, coffee and croissants now shared among three people, and then dinners, too, until Jack begins to feel like he might be inadvertently blocking something. His parents are always so focused on him when the three of them are together — so he starts making excuses to miss breakfast, or dinner, or whatever.
Sidney La Forge, also currently stationed planetside along with everyone else affected by the Borg’s DNA changes, becomes his ally in that. Well, an inadvertent ally, but an ally nonetheless.
(“You want to Parent Trap your parents together?” she says incredulously, the first time he asks if they could do something together — anything to get him out of the apartment so that maybe his parents could be alone.
“Parent Trap?” he repeats, not getting the reference. After she explains about separated twins and divorced parents, he says, “No! Not exactly, anyway. I just feel like they don’t get to really talk when I’m around. I think it’d do them some good to hash things out.”
Sidney raises her eyebrows in a bit of a dubious expression, but relents and comes up with something they could do. “Just don’t let my dad find out we’re spending time together,” she teases with a smirk.)
Sidney becomes his excuse, hanging out around Starfleet Academy and with the other ensigns from the Titan, until the day comes that he asks what she’s doing that weekend and she looks at him oddly.
She reaches out across the table they’re at, lightly touching his hand. “Sunday is Father’s Day,” she says softly, and he finally recognizes her expression.
A bit of sadness, a bit of pity.
“Allie and I are going to take Dad out to his favorite restaurant and this museum he loves in Detroit.”
Jack withdraws his hand to take a swig from his beer. “Ah,” he says eventually, staring off at the back of the bar.
She waits a moment and then asks, “Are you going to do anything with — the Admiral?”
He shrugs. “Hadn’t really thought about it.”
Sidney plays with a straw. “You know, you’ve spent a lot of time trying to get your parents alone together,” she says, somewhat hesitantly. “But maybe you should try spending some time alone with him?”
“I’ve spent time with him!” he protests, turning to look at her with wide eyes. “We’ve had… lunches. And drinks!”
“Maybe you should spend time with him that’s longer than an hour.” Sidney rolls her eyes. She slides her hand across the tabletop, but doesn’t touch him this time. Gives him space, even as she says, “I know it’s complicated—”
“You have no idea,” Jack interrupts, but Sidney presses on.
“Relationships with fathers always are. And yours certainly has a lot of complications, but maybe it’s time to work past some of that?”
He clenches his jaw, and looks away again, until Sidney lightly nudges his hand. He momentarily relaxes, lets their fingers touch just long enough to draw some comfort from his friend, and then he downs what’s left of his beer. “Thanks, Sid. Have fun with your dad,” he says, standing up and walking out.
Jack returns to the apartment he’s currently sharing with his mum — it’s larger than any of the living quarters on the Eleos combined, so calling it “the apartment” seems like a misnomer. He enters slowly, trying to listen out for any signs of conversation. Everything is quiet, though, and he finds his mother curled on the couch, reading a physical book.
It’s something she’s acquired since they got back to Earth, as most everything they owned was destroyed with the Eleos. Jack compartmentalizes that trauma with everything else.
Beverly looks up, raising her eyebrows at him. “I wasn’t expecting you back so early,” she says, bookmarking her page and setting it aside. “How did things go with Sidney?”
Jack noncommittally waves a hand, glancing around the apartment as if Jean-Luc might be a specter lurking in the corners. “Where’s—” He hesitates, still figuring out what he’s calling his father. Nothing has felt right yet.
“Gone back to La Barre for the evening.” Beverly fixes her son with a knowing look. “You know, Jack, I know what you’re doing when you leave us alone for the evening.”
Face carefully blank, he says, “Oh?”
She sighs, uncurling her legs and placing her feet on the floor. “C’mere, kid,” she says, like she used to when he was a small child, and though Jack balks at the nickname, he sits next to her on the couch. “You haven’t really told me what your thoughts are on Jean-Luc and me.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” he replies, still keeping everything neutral.
“There’s not, at least, not exactly.” Beverly’s face twists in concentration, and Jack knows what she looks like when she’s trying to puzzle something out. “I’m worried that you might have hopes for something that might not… happen.”
“Despite you calling me kid a moment ago, I’m not a child anymore, Mum. I’m not under any delusions about things.”
“So you’re not leaving your father and I alone in the hopes that we might get back together?”
Under the challenge and her pointedly raised eyebrows, Jack sighs and relents a little. “Not exactly,” he says, echoing her. “I’ve felt like you two focus mostly on me when we’re all together, and I thought that maybe you could use some time for yourselves. To talk things out, or… something.”
Beverly looks away from him, linking her fingers together on her knees. “I appreciate that, Jack, but you’ve missed out on a lot of time with your father. I’d rather you worry about that than our relationship.”
“Well. Speaking of that,” he says, taking the chance, “Sidney mentioned something about Father’s Day this weekend… I, erm, I know we’ve never celebrated but maybe…”
“You should absolutely do something with Jean-Luc. Just the two of you,” Beverly is quick to say. “Something more significant than having just a meal together.”
Jack chews the inside of his lip, ignoring the little insecure part of him that wonders if Picard would even be interested. Instead, he pats his mother’s hand and says, “I’ll do that. I’ll come up with something and ring him in the morning to see what he thinks.”
Beverly’s smile is wide, and she catches Jack’s hand, squeezing it. “Great,” she murmurs, leaning in to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Now. I’m going to head off to bed.”
Jack nods and stays on the couch for a long while, considering his options.
By Father’s Day weekend, Jack is saying goodbye to his mother from a transporter pad. His atoms disassemble from San Francisco and reassemble in La Barre, and his father is there to greet him.
“Jack, welcome,” Picard says, smiling at him in an unguarded manner. He’s not always so open, but Jack thinks he’s been trying ever since the Borg cube.
“Thanks,” he replies, hoisting his bag up and following him out.
The plan is simple: a weekend at the château, just the two of them. This isn’t the first time Jack’s visited, but it’s the first time he’s come alone. There’s a bit of awkwardness, which he supposes is to be expected, and they ride back to the château in silence.
Picard shows him to his room, and as he leaves him to unpack his things, he says, “Jack — thank you for coming.”
Jack is caught off guard by the uncharacteristic show of emotion, and for a minute he flounders with the shirts he’s unpacked. “Oh, right,” he says, a hand at the back of his head, ruffling his hair nervously. “No-no problem!”
If Picard is put off by his son’s fumbling, he doesn’t show it. “See you for lunch,” he says with a little nod.
The day passes quickly, perhaps too quickly. Picard shows him around the vineyards, and La Barre, lunching in the town and then returning to the house. Everyone knows Jean-Luc Picard here, too, and quite a few people talk to Jack like he’s the son of a hero and not the voice of the Borg.
It’s like San Francisco, but different, and somehow more overwhelming by how everyone seems starstruck and down-to-Earth in one. In San Francisco, he’s the son of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, former captain of the USS Enterprise. In La Barre, he’s the son of Jean-Luc Picard, retired admiral and current vintner.
He kind of likes the difference.
Back at the château, Picard pulls out numerous mementos from storage to share with his son. A painting of the Enterprise-D hangs above the mantle, and Jack has a newfound appreciation for the Galaxy-class after everything. He admires it as Picard calls him back over.
“What’s this?” Jack asks, coming to sit on the chair next to him.
“A photo album,” he replies as he opens it up and shows Jack various photos of the Enterprise crew. “I thought you might want to take it back with you; I know your mother is still trying to rebuild her collection.”
Jack thumbs idly through the pages; most of them are official shots of the crew, though for them to be physical photos and not just holos, he knows they must have meant something. He stops when he sees one of his mother, red hair as bright as her smile, and his father is beside her, their arms linked. They’re both wearing fancy clothes, and an inscription beside the photo notes the stardate and event as some banquet at Starfleet Command.
“Ah,” Jean-Luc says as he notices the one he stopped on. “That was just after your mother returned to the Enterprise after her year at Starfleet Medical.”
“Were you together at that point?”
“Oh, no.” He chuckles. “We were just colleagues and finding our way back to friendship then. The banquet required that I bring a plus one and naturally, I asked Beverly.”
Jack nods, and though he suspects he knows the answer, he asks anyway. “Why not someone else?”
Jean-Luc smiles, lightly touching the album page. “Because I didn’t want to take anyone else.” He stands up, brushing his hands on his trousers. “Let’s go see about dinner.”
Dinner is an understated affair; Jean-Luc had reduced most of his Romulan staff in the leadup to Chaltok IV, and after the Borg crisis he saw no reason to undo that. Most had either chosen to go to Chaltok IV with Laris or move on to other positions. The two talk, about nothing mostly, and it’s the one thing Jack has not quite figured out how to get over with his father.
Though Jean-Luc is more open than he typically has been in the past, Jack sometimes feels like he’s working uphill to talk to his old man. Of course, things are complicated right now: there is a lot that Jean-Luc can’t say about the ongoing investigations, in the same way that his mother can only talk so much about where she’s at in the Borg and Changeling research.
Perhaps it’s selfish, but Jack wants that connection he felt with his father on the Borg cube back.
After dinner, Jack sits outside, looking up at the stars. He’s got a glass of whiskey from his father’s stash (not nearly as cheap as he likes, but at least it’s not synthesized) and the song his mother always listened to playing. He’s surprised when the door behind him opens and his father walks out.
Jack sits up a bit, setting the glass down. “Sorry,” he says, reaching over and manually turning the volume down on the music player. “I thought you’d gone to bed already.”
Jean-Luc chuckles wryly. “I had. It’s the curse of being an old man, you know. Getting up several times during the night,” he says, sitting in the chair opposite of Jack. He reaches over and adjusts the volume, raising it just a bit so he can hear it too.
For a moment, they sit in silence. Jean-Luc helps himself to the bottle of whiskey Jack opened up, pouring a glass.
“Do you miss them?” Jean-Luc asks, and when Jack looks at him, he gestures to the stars.
He looks up, considering. “It’s complicated,” he says, swirling the whiskey in his glass absently. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a home on solid ground. I’ve sort of forgotten what it’s like to be down here instead of up there.”
Jean-Luc nods. “Once, I had considered the stars my home above everything else,” he says, in that manner that he has when he’s making an important proclamation about something. “I realized too late how wrong I was.”
Jack bites his lip. “Did you look for her? For Mum, when she left all those years ago without a word?”
He sighs heavily and shakes his head. “No,” he admits, his face haggard. “Not at first. At the time, I thought she’d come back in a few weeks, maybe months. By the time a year had gone by and no one had heard from her, not even Deanna, I thought about looking. I checked with Starfleet to see what she had told them when she resigned, but she hadn’t explained where she was going. I checked on Caldos and discovered she had been there, but she had left already. At that point, I stopped looking because I figured she didn’t want to be found.”
Jack is silent, and after a while Jean-Luc sighs again. “Actually, that’s only a part of it. I stopped because I was angry at her. I was hurt that she could so easily leave everyone behind and I was upset that I didn’t know what I had done to cause it. For all the times your mother and I tried and failed at a romantic relationship, I thought we were at the heart of it still friends… But then she left, and I thought she did it with so little care for me, or the rest of us…”
He looks up at Jack, and says, “Only to realize twenty years later that she wasn’t thinking of herself at all, but of our son. I can’t believe I thought so little of her and so much of myself that I believed our romantic failure would be the cause of her running away from the life she had built.”
Jack takes a long swallow from his whiskey glass, as his father does the same. “She, uh, she didn’t want to be found,” Jack says haltingly. “But by the same token, she brought me back to Earth when I was teenager. She’s the one who chose London — and I’d hazard a guess that it’s because you were here by that time. It’s the longest we spent in one place, long enough for me to complete my schooling, and that’s around the time she told me who you were.”
“And that’s how you ended up at Ten Forward Avenue.” Jean-Luc’s face is shadowed, haunted as Jack nods.
“After that, I told Mum I had decided against meeting you and that I didn’t want anything to do with you,” he says softly. “In the next week, we had joined the Mariposas and left London behind for the edges of Federation space. Been running ever since.”
“Until now,” Jean-Luc says, setting down his glass and looking out at the expansive vineyard before them.
“Until now,” he agrees. Everything is dark, just the moon and stars and the soft glow of some lights scattered about the grounds. Jack doesn’t look at his father as he asks, “What made you settle down here? After Starfleet?”
Jean-Luc hums and glances at him, slightly askance. “It was the only home I had left.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I had lost Starfleet. I had lost your mother. Where else was I going to go?”
Jack considers this for a minute. He thinks about the village, and the people who recognized his father there. He thinks about San Francisco, and the cadets and ensigns who still look up to Admiral Picard.
“Tell me about why you joined Starfleet,” he says finally. He sits back in the chair, with his whiskey, and looks earnestly at his father.
Jean-Luc blinks in surprise, reaching for his own glass, and he says, “Well. Believe it or not, I wanted to be an archaeologist…”
He sits and listens as Jean-Luc explains his love for exploration and old things, and how eventually that turned into looking toward the stars. He alludes to, but does not go into great detail, about his parents and their philosophical differences and something darker at the edges. He talks about Starfleet Academy, and meeting Jack Crusher, his namesake, and how Beverly was already dating him by the time they were introduced. About the Stargazer and the Enterprise and family found and lost and how he let it all slip through his fingers without even realizing it.
It’s a story that is amusing and heartfelt, bringing the hint of tears to his old man’s eyes more than once in laughter and regret, and Jack listens with rapt attention. He thinks about his mum, and how she never talked much about the past, and the way Jean-Luc lays it all out for him now.
“Would you change any of it? If you could?”
Jean-Luc sighs, mulling it over. He stares into the glass, empty now except for a few dregs of whiskey. “There are many things I wish I could do differently,” he says, looking up at him. “I learned long ago that changing even one decision can have a radically adverse effect on one’s life. Instead, I have to look forward and be thankful that I’ve gotten something of a second chance: a synthetic body, the chance to have a relationship with you, Data brought back to us, and even your mother back in my life in whatever capacity she’ll have me.”
Jack reaches across the table and grasps his father’s arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t properly reach out to you all those years ago,” he says, squeezing, “but I’m glad we’ve got now.”
He smiles at him and pats his hand. “Me too, son,” he says, looking back at the sky. It’s brightening now, the stars fading as morning begins to dawn.
Jack follows his gaze to the sunrise. “Happy Father’s Day, old man,” he says with a grin, pouring out some more whiskey for both of them. He raises his glass in salute and clinks their glasses as they enjoy the rising sun together.