alara_r

Although Q wouldn't stick to just five, so this is now Seventeen Things That Might Have Happened To Q. I have numbers 4 - 7 here.

I have derived inspiration from Atara Stein's Q-Struck in the entire concept behind this story-- "the possibilities are endless." There are ideas drawn directly from other people's fanfics thrown in with entirely original AUs, but I can promise you I do things differently even when I borrow other people's ideas.

Any resemblance to the mockery of a plot of a well-known work of P/Q fanfic is... well, entirely intentional, actually.



Q usually prefers to avoid meeting alternates of himself. It's very frustrating for an entity that prides himself on his strength of will and his ability to forge his own path to be reminded how different he could have been under other circumstances. When the nutcase from a parallel universe shows up ranting about Picard, however, and declaring that Q's own universe is obviously doomed, the mixed feelings of pity and disgust drive him to try to help.


The nutcase believes that every alternate version of Q has to be involved in a relationship with that universe's version of Picard. (Q doesn't manage to avoid making the sarcastic comment about what about universes where there *is* no Picard. The nutcase claims there is *always* one, although sometimes he's not bald, French, human, named Picard, or male. Q does manage to avoid asking how, then, he could possibly be defined as Picard.) He believes that if he doesn't manage to form a relationship with his version of Picard, his universe will be destroyed, and that Q's universe is obviously doomed, because Q is destined to have a romantic relationship with Picard and it will cause the timeline to be resorbed into mainline if he doesn't.


This is not the most insane thing Q has ever heard, but it's the most insane thing he's ever heard from a fellow Q, and certainly he's horrified to hear it coming from his own alternate. Quite aside from the absurdity of a romantic relationship with Picard, the notion that there is any such thing as destiny, that something as minor as a romantic relationship could possibly define whether or not a timeline is "real" enough to avoid resorption, or that a timeline could in fact be resorbed into mainline for being too different from other timelines, are all ideas that are simply wrong, and a Q should know better. Clearly the strain of being in love with an unworthy mortal who couldn't even be bothered to reciprocate despite the great honor of being loved by a Q had unhinged the poor entity.


So despite his natural instinct to avoid asking the Continuum's aid at all costs, Q calls them in to help him capture and rehabilitate his alternate. An insane Q really can't be allowed to roam spacetime freely. Of course, the alternate resists-- he may be insane, but he's still an alternate of Q, the most stubborn entity in the Continuum, and he won't allow his perception of reality to be forcibly overwritten even if it is plainly psychotic. So they lock him up in a comet to keep him from doing any damage, and ignore his hysterical ranting about how both their universes will be destroyed.


A thousand years later Q lets his alternate out. Congenitally unable to resist saying "I told you so," he indulges himself by pointing out in excruciating detail that Picard is over nine hundred years dead and neither of their universes have been destroyed. The alternate ignores him and promptly returns to his own universe, jumping back through the intervening thousand years to intersect his home universe at the time he left it. Q sighs, realizing the nutcase still believes he has to get involved with Picard to save his universe, and decides to write the whole thing off and pretend it didn't happen.


**


Every day he walks on knives.


This is not a perfect analogy. Unlike the mermaid of the tale, he can talk to the one he loves, and he would hardly have made a sacrifice like this in the first place if there were anyone else in the picture. But he's a fish out of water, cast up onto land to gasp and eventually die, and every human activity that seemed so interesting, so different from the tedium of immortality once, has come to be excruciatingly painful.


It was the only way he could get permission to have what he wanted and the only way he could persuade Picard that he was serious about his feelings. He still thinks the man was inherently worthy of the sacrifice. When things are going well, he doesn't regret his decision. Well, mostly not. But every day the mirror shows him another gray hair, a slightly further receded hairline, another wrinkle. Every mission Picard goes on fills him with absolute terror, that this might be the one his lover won't return from. Starfleet is a dangerous business. It's not all that safe for him either, even as a civilian science advisor-- entire starships can be destroyed by enemy fire-- but at least he doesn't ever have to go on dangerous jaunts onto unknown planets or get involved with ridiculous diplomatic charades. Picard does. And someday he might not come back from one.


And that's when things are going well.


Sometimes he looks out at the stars and realizes he will never see them in their true glory again. Sometimes he tries to remember something he should be deeply familiar with, only to find the memory has disintegrated under the pressure of mortality. Sometimes he's bored, and alone, and unlike before there's Nowhere he can go and nothing he can do to alleviate the boredom. He can become furiously resentful then, can take it out on Picard for driving him to this, or on anyone who happens to cross his path. Picard usually tries to avoid him when he's like this, which only makes him angrier, but he can't exactly teleport into Picard's ready room anymore. One time he hijacked the transporter to do it, but he was told that if he tried it again he really would end up in the brig, captain's domestic partner or no.


Frequently he hates Picard for driving him to this, for leading him astray so badly, for making him fall into this weak emotion and sacrifice everything for it. Rationally he knows this is unfair; Picard didn't ask for his love, didn't do anything to solicit it except be himself. When Q is upset, though, he's rarely capable of being rational about it. The mermaid was a fool, and he is a bigger fool, since he has no excuse for having decided to do something as idiotic as throw away power and immortality for love. His society didn't encourage him in it; in fact every single one of them advised him against it. It doesn't matter. He hates them too, for putting him in a position where he had to make this choice, for forcing him to decide between Picard and his powers. But most of all he hates himself.


He doesn't know how to deal with this, how to handle the twisting threads of love and hate, passion and resentment, the overwhelming need he has for Picard and his furious jealousy of the work that his lover lives for and his desperate need to pretend he's still independent, still in control of himself. Sometimes he thinks of killing himself. Sometimes he thinks of killing Picard. Effectively in his mind they're the same thing, and he won't do either one. But it hurts so very much.


Unlike the mermaid, he can talk to the one he loves. But he knows his own pain, and the way it makes him lash out, is driving away the one reason he made this sacrifice. If Picard leaves him because he's become impossible to live with, then he will have nothing to live for and no reason at all to have done this to himself. And it will happen. He sees the signs. Picard is withdrawing from him, turning on his captain façade, creating distance. Someday there will be so much distance that Q will be unable to breach it, and then his life will be over. But he doesn't know how to fix it.


Knives cut him to bloody ribbons, but they're not under his feet, they're in his heart.


**


A lizard swims uncertainly through the shallows of an ocean on Markoff Prime. There's something it's trying to remember, some sense of terrible wrongness. This is not where it was moments ago. This is not what it was. It doesn't belong here.


It struggles to remember what it really is, where it really belongs. Something incomprehensible to its lizard mind lurks, buried deep in its tiny mind. Something huge, ineffable, something it simply can't focus its minimal intelligence on no matter how hard it tries.


As its quest for its memories distracts it, a bird descends to the water and snaps the lizard up with its beak. Dragged out of the water into blinding bright sunlight and harsh dry air, with the horrible cutting pain of the beak digging into its middle, the lizard has time to realize that somewhere, somehow, it has made a terrible mistake. Somewhere it made a choice, and the choice was wrong, and has led it to this.


And then the beak snaps its back in half, and it knows nothing more.


**


"How can you condemn us?" Q asks him, impassioned, demanding. "You've never even looked at her. You have no idea what she is, why she's worth this to us. None of you do."


He has to admit that the passion gets to him. He can't understand why Q and Q find these mortals so fascinating as to pretend to be of them, like a Douwd or something, nor why they've taken their obsession to such ridiculous lengths. But he can't deny that they feel, in a way that he himself hasn't felt in... centuries? Millennia? When was the last time he cared about anything the way Q and Q care about this project of theirs?


"All right," he says grudgingly. "I'll take a look. But honestly, you see one squalling infant, you've seen them all. It's just a mortal, isn't it?"


"See for yourself," the other Q says, as his companion-- and now, mate? What an absurd concept-- thrusts a bundle at him.


His first reaction-- human infant, sleeping. Oversize head, underdeveloped brain, helpless and pathetic. How any species manages to survive with such weak, dependent young, he can't imagine.


And then he sees what lies within the infant.


Shocked, he takes the infant from its mother, staring into its depths. That's not a human pattern lurking in the psychespace generated by this primitive brain. The pattern responds to his probe with an eager grasp, suicidally trying to merge with him. He pushes it away, keeping it from melding into and disappearing into his far more complex pattern.


"How...?"


"You do see," the female-shaped Q says, beaming at him. "You can tell what she really is."


Yes. He can see, enfolded in this tiny mortal shell, the kernel of a Q. It's something he's never seen before, never imagined seeing-- every time he's been present at the creation of one of their kind, they have
come into existence almost fully formed, with nearly adult complexity. This is simple, stripped-down, primitive, and yet it's obvious what it is-- the fundamental essence of a Q, in the most basic form possible. He never even imagined something so simplistic could look like a Q... but he can't deny what this is.


Horror and revulsion-- a naked Q, a broken fragment of a Q, a thing that should not exist-- war with fascination and even protectiveness. It could grow. He has never seen a Q grow. This is a new thing in an existence he thought would never encounter a truly new thing again. He has to fight the instinct to devour it-- there's a reason, he suspects, why his kind don't reproduce in this lowly way, why the Q are generally created as adolescents rather than infants. It's obvious the creature couldn't survive the Continuum, not with its complete lack of defenses against being absorbed by its more powerful elders. It's also obvious that it needs to incubate within this mortal flesh; without a matter-based form anchoring it, it would probably dissipate on its own. But if it grows and develops as its mortal body does...


...In 18 years they might have a brand-new adolescent Q, not created full-blown by the Continuum but allowed to evolve and grow on its own, from the template designed by these two.


What is new is too precious to him. Fascination and protectiveness win out over the revulsion at looking at an unfinished Q. "This is amazing," he says softly. "How did you do it?"


"Well, we let random chance dictate the genome of the body, based on a standard human reproductive act," the male-shaped Q says. He grins. "Which, by the way, is surprisingly entertaining. You ought to try it."


Q makes a face. "Sounds grotesque, actually. I'm far more interested in how you accomplished the creation of an... infant Q." Even saying it sounds wrong. There has never been an infant Q.


"We'd be glad to show you," the female-shaped one says. "We're willing to show all of you. But we can't come to the Continuum until she can handle it."


"Leave her here. Surely you can get babysitting?"


"We can't. See how she's tied to us?"


And he does see. The child's creation is an ongoing collaborative effort. Her Q nature is still too simple to survive on its own; she needs a feed of processed energy, as Q in the Continuum do, but she can't take it in the form it comes from in the Continuum. If her parents were to enter the Continuum the child would be overloaded, and her Q-self would disintegrate under the strain. The mortal body might live, but what animates it and makes it more than human would be gone.


Q shakes his head. "If you don't go home and explain yourself, they're going to charge you with causing a discontinuity. They'll exile you or something. And they'll forbid you to draw on the Continuum at all."


He can sense the shock the other two feel even before he sees it reflected in their mortal forms. "We haven't caused a discontinuity! We're on the verge of the greatest discovery the Continuum has experienced in a few million years, and they can't wait a mere handful of years until our daughter is ready?" the female-shaped Q explodes.


He shrugs. "I didn't make the decision."


"But can't you tell them--"


"Tell them what? Have they ever listened to me? If I take up championing your cause I might well doom it."


"But there is something you can do," his friend in the male form says.


"What-- no. Oh, no. I'm not getting involved."


"It would be the perfect solution. We can go home and argue our case, and show them what we're trying to do here, and why she's so important. You can stay here--"


"And feed your kid? Do I look like a babysitter?"


"But you could do it. They aren't accusing you of anything. And if you would do it it helps to argue our case, that if a Q who previously thought we were being complete idiots has agreed to help us it must mean there's something worthwhile here."


"Please," his female-formed friend says. "We can't cut our connection to her unless she's got a link to another Q, and we can't go into the Continuum without cutting that connection first. It doesn't have to be very long; just long enough for us to argue our case and get them to give us more time."


"Oh, that could take centuries."


"No, it can't. Because she'll be ready in two decades or less, no matter what, so if it takes that long the point would be moot."


"I hope you don't expect me to raise her."


"No, of course not. That's our job."


The other one says, "All we're asking is for you to stay outside the Continuum while we're in it, and vice versa, until she's old enough that she either doesn't need the energy feed, or she can survive the Continuum."


He looks again at the child, at the nascent Q she is. Now that he's no longer seeing her as an unfinished project, he perceives her as having a weird beauty, a purity in her simplicity. It hits him then that his friends have found a way to create something truly worthy of a Q's creative talents, something that will last as long as they will... so long as the Continuum doesn't cut them off prematurely. He's been so frustrated by the fact that nothing he does seems to have any long-term impact, nothing he creates can last as long as he can, and he knows many Q feel the same way. In a way he actually envies them.


And as bizarre as the notion of him protecting and sheltering a child, of all things, is... he wants to be part of this creation. He wants to participate in what they're doing. The Continuum might be changed permanently by this project, and change is what he lives for.


"Oh, all right," he sighs with mock petulance. "Show me what to do."


In a moment, the two have shown him exactly how they created her, and how they are linked to her, and helped him form a link of his own. He can feel the child's mind, such as it is-- a primitive soup of emotion, no higher mentation at all, and yet there's something curiously satisfying about the way her raw emotions turn to embracing him as he forms the link. She trusts him. Mortals don't trust him, and certainly his fellow Q don't. She's too stupid to know any better, and yet, it feels pleasant nonetheless.


The Q in female form bends over and kisses the baby. "We'll be back soon, sweetheart. You be good for your Uncle Q, okay?"


"Uncle." Q shudders. "Please don't use that term in my hearing ever again."


The male-shaped Q smirks. "Would you rather be her godfather?"


There's something awfully silly about naming a god as a godfather to the child of two gods. "Just go," he says. "Leave me to my fate."


The other smiles. "She's really not that bad."


The two of them flash out, disappearing back to the Continuum. Q looks down at the baby, who has woken up and is attempting to grab his nose. "Well. I seem to be stuck with you for the moment."


He doesn't understand why he feels what he feels. He doesn't understand why he suddenly believes he would defy the entire Continuum to protect this helpless creature. He's a Q. They're not known for protecting the weak. And yet.


Q holds the first child of his species in his arms, bemusedly. Without quite noticing what he's doing, he begins to rock her back and forth.