Jake Sisko thought he might be in love. Of course, he had done this before, but never before had he felt such a thrill. This time, this woman, was different.

He was backpacking through Europe, paying his way by writing articles about strange customs and local color for others of his age stuck at home. It wasn't that he was trying to avoid the war, it was just that he was trying to avoid his father, the great Colonel Sisko, defender of freedom.

He got this interview the way he got most others; someone had introduced him to someone who had introduced him to someone else who told him about an old eccentric he just couldn't miss. It was said she was a hermit, but when he sent her a note, he was invited to her chateau. And so here he was, following the sound of her voice and the only light in the house.

She had a sense of theater, he had to give her that. The room itself was something out of a movie--a tall ceiling, frescos above his head, odd corners, molding. Architecture the way it used to be. Against one wall, a fireplace, long ago grown cold. A single painting of some saint or another holding a child.

And in front of the painting she waited for him. From what he had been told he'd thought she'd be older--70, 80, waiting to die--but she couldn't have even been 50. Her hair was flame-red, vibrant against the blank gray walls. Her skin was ghostly pale, and her black ball gown swirled around her legs, lying atop the rubble on which she stood. She stood perfectly still, a portrait of life among the ruins. A metaphor, and his journalistic mind struggle to put it into words.

"Dr. Crusher?" he asked, unnecessarily.

"Please. That was a long time ago. A lifetime. I am called Madame Picard."

It took him a minute to decipher her simple sentence; his French was none too good. "I'm sorry. Do you speak English?"

"Ah, the arrogance of Americans," she answered in the language of his choice, her voice still carrying the tinge of an accent. "I had forgotten it. As I have almost forgotten my English. That, too, was a lifetime ago."

"You're not French?"

"No, no. Nor from England, or anywhere else grand and romantic." She laughed softly, more at herself than anything else. "I am from Ohio."

"Then how on earth did you get here?" Jake asked.

"How did you?"

Jake blushed. A hot girl in a miniskirt and knee high boots, some wanderlust and that parent thing...he couldn't tell this elegant, formidable woman about that. But it seemed he wouldn't have to. "I thought so," she said, reading his expression. "It was that way for me, too. I met Jack Crusher..."

"Your first husband?" Jake interrupted.

Madame Picard looked a bit flustered, a little less formidable. "Please sit."

Jake looked around him, at the benches filled with dust and rubble. It seemed impolite to point this out or refuse, and he'd sat in dirtier place during his travels, so he cleared a space and perched, looking up at his subject.

"My first lover," she continued. "We never married."

"But your name, Doctor?"

"I took his name." She shrugged. "It was easier. And I did tell you I am called Picard."

"Did you at least marry *him*?" Jake asked, and wondered where he had gotten this strain of small-mindedness. Perhaps he thought such free behavior was reserved for his own generation.

"Yes, I married Picard. One does make mistakes."

Jake was torn between asking more about Crusher and asking about Picard, but she made his mind up for him. "Your young lady--she was beautiful?"

Jake smiled. "Very. Last time I saw her, she was working the wheel at a casino in Monte Carlo."

"The last time I saw Jack, he was standing on the docks, waiting to go to Algeria. The last time I saw Picard, it was the same. Life is a circle, like your young lady's wheel."

"They died together?" Jake asked, confused.

"They were born together, worlds apart, and died together, years apart." She turned away, and Jake could see the cords on her neck, her elegant profile. Dust swirled along the ray of light from a distant window and he waited quietly, respectfully.

"But I am confusing you," she said, at last, "so I shall tell you a story. You won't understand any more at the end, but you will have something to write. It may be fiction, but we like fiction more than we like life. That is why we fool our hearts."

He caught her glance over the dusty benches and got up, offering his own cleared space for her to use. It would not matter, he knew, if she soiled her gown in the dirt of years past; it was where her mind lived.

"Jack Crusher was beautiful, a beauty never seen without a uniform. Order. Strength. I was young, a foolish idealist in medical school. I knew everything would be perfect, though he was older, a veteran of the war. *The war.* In those days, we were all foolish enough to think that was a horror we would never revisit. We had forgotten we were men and not angels. And yet, we prepared for barbarity. Jack came to conduct a Civilian Military Training Camp, and I fell in love. I was too young, then, to know about simple lust." For the first time since sitting, Madame Picard looked at him. "At least in that you young people have progressed."

The room was growing dim, twilight invading as Madame Picard spun her tale. An older man, a beautiful young lady. The disapproving parents. Their break for freedom, made as so many of their lost generation made it, to the open air of Europe, a continent so wrapped in its own grief and bitterness it could not see the loss in the newcomers' eyes.

War had already broken out there, and the couple helped out where they could. Jack easily enough found his place, found the circle of friends with whom he'd braved death when Beverly was still an infant. Beverly, fresh out of medical school, found her place tending the ill. She never told her superiors how little training she truly had. A false name was the least of her sins.

A greater sin was Jack's friend. The men had a bond she could never shake, formed on the battlefields of Picardy. She had no idea that the battle over her would be more bloody than the Battle of the Somme.

"You didn't..." Jake whispered. Free love was fine and well for the young, a wonderful emancipatory slogan, but even now he knew that some day he'd find a girl, find a job, have some kids and a dog. Even now, trekking through Europe, he knew he'd never end up like this strange, lonely woman.

"Not then," she reassured him. "I had Jack, and I had come to love him." But then he had shipped out to join the American invasion force on its maiden run, and it was his friend, the Free French general Picard, who had brought her the news. It was his friend, the Frenchman Picard, who had comforted her that night in the only way he knew how.

She never was certain which part of friendship dictated he marry her two months later to give her child a father.

"Whose child was it?" Jake asked.

"Everyone's. No one's. It was never born." She shrugged, such a French gesture. "It wasn't the only one who died. And he never came back to me."

"Picard left you alone?" He didn't know this woman, yet he felt inexplicable anger at the man who had abandoned her.

"He went off to play at war. I didn't mind, not the blood, not the women. We were better friends than lovers."

"You couldn't forget Jack."

She laughed. "I could. He couldn't. He took revenge everywhere. In Algeria. In Germany. When the war was over, against his own people, against the Vichy, the collaborators." He installed her in the family chateau, an American, raw, tall and large-boned, left her to find her own way. He'd come home often enough to sample the family wines and her charms and then he'd be off again to some private little war.

He left her no money and no help, so she'd done the best she could. She repaired some of the house, enough to live in, restored the vineyards. She made a life for herself, transforming into a French country doctor, into her husband's best friend, but it wasn't enough to keep him. She was never sure if she wanted him kept, anyway.

He cut a swath of vengeance across Africa and Asia, a soldier at times, a mercenary at others, until he met his death in 1964. In Algeria, closing the circle. "They say it was a bloodless coup," said Madame Picard, "and perhaps they were right, for Jean-Luc had no heart, and no blood in him to shed."

Night was falling, and the light faded. "Go now, I am tired. I was always tired."

Jake stood to leave, pausing for a last look at the shadows surrounding her before turning away.

"Sisko."

Jake turned back toward her voice. He could no longer distinguish her from the shadows. "Picard had an assistant once, a Sisko. In Korea."

"That was my father." She did not answer, but he was reluctant to leave this mention of home. "My mother was a nurse in Korea." Still she said nothing and he stepped closer. "She died there." She sat still and he advanced until he could see at least her form. "A casualty of war."

"As are we all." She stood then, as she had when he had first come, the only color amongst the ruins.

She had a sense of theater, he had to give her that. And years later, when he brought his wife and children to tour the countryside, he told them, "There lived here a woman who stole my heart. She collected them, men's hearts. Only she never learned, afterwards, how to keep them."