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Chapter Text

A friend of mine once asked me what I would do when Jean-Luc Picard died. "What will you play with then?" he said, shimmering and expanding his essence in an expression I knew to be a smile.

I shimmered and expanded back. I was expected to make light of it, to think light of it, to never be seriously worried at the prospect of a death, being unable to die myself. I said something clever, something to put him laughing and to forget about whatever concern had prompted him to ask. Something like, "I'm counting down the days. It's then I can start playing."

What will I do when Jean-Luc dies? Truthfully? I have no idea.

I have pondered the day when he no longer permits me to save his life. I have saved his life twice, once from a faulty heart malfunction compliments of a Nausican in a bar, once from an explosion of the Enterprise. During the latter I saved his entire crew in the process which softened the deal for him. I have pondered the day when it goes further than that, when I will save his life despite his knowledge, despite even his explicit instructions to the contrary, the day when he becomes aware of my doing that, having lived to one-hundred and fifty or so without dying, without even aging. The day when he orders me to let him age—to, essentially, watch him die. We'll argue. I have imagined that argument with amusement, yes, but usually with an aching dread.

And how quickly it will come! In thirty years he's a hundred. Fifty years, a hundred and twenty. Fifty years is nothing to me, a speck of dust floating through the glow of my life.

You can understand why I've been bothering him more than usual lately.

Nothing intrusive. Nothing dramatic. Simply this: I have taken to being in his quarters when he retires for the evening.

That first night when he came through the door, I was lying across his bed. The way he startled, you'd think I was naked instead of clothed in my usual Starfleet reds.

"You," he said.

But I explained to him, and pleasantly, that I would remain with him for one hour, only one hour, that he had no choice in the matter and no time would be lost anyway. I had slipped him out of time. He wouldn't age, nothing would change, no one would miss him and once the hour was done I would resume the clock and vanish into the stars, whereupon he could go about his business as he pleased.

"Win-win," I said with an amicable shrug, having stood from the bed.

He laughed at me, a belly laugh making his head tilt back. I stood straighter. It was as if he saw exactly what I was doing, and I didn't want to admit to anything. I didn't want to alarm him with his own mortality, I told myself, not wanting to think about my feelings more than that.

"What the hell is this about, Q?"

"Exactly what I said it was about. Shall I replay it for you?"

"You… want to speak with me… for one hour's time."

"Speak, whisper, intone, sit and stare at each other over candlelight. I don't care what. The main condition is that we are both here."

He rolled his eyes at the floor. Shuffling around me, he called Earl Gray tea out of his computer. "I see no winning here, Q."

"You have an entire hour with a Q." I held out my hands. "Exclusively. My undivided attention. You don't see how that might be good for you?"

He shot me a look to say he did not. He sat on a couch against the window, clasping his tea like it was a beggar's cup, like it was raining and he was in for a long, cold war against the elements. He turned away from me.

"Oh, I know," I groaned. "It's sheer torture being in the same room with me, but I'm flattered you're making the best of it." I paused for him to note the sarcasm. He didn't.

I tried to reason with him. "Compared to anything else we've done together, this is nothing. Usually I take you somewhere. Somewhere exciting. Do you think your pedantic starship excites me? But you're comfortable here. You see? I'm doing what I always do, except I'm meeting you halfway."

"Halfway," he said, unconvinced.

"Compromise. It's what one does when there are two incompatible wishes. I wish to speak with you. And you wish for anything but."

That last part wasn't true. I knew it wasn't true, but I was starting with the image he projected and working from there.

He glanced up at me, suspicion all over his features.

I might have told him I knew how he really felt. I might have revealed I had heard him twice confess to Riker that I was capable of kindness, which for Jean-Luc Picard to confess of me betrayed something more than mere interest. I might have argued I wasn't acting without provocation, considering.

He lowered his eyes. He was too proud to answer.

As was I, I suppose—too proud to go further than he would. I was Q. I could drain his mind in an instant and have it spread between us on the floor, the facts, there, where he would have to acknowledge them. "We could be friends," I might have said. "We are friends, aren't we?"

Instead, I lay on the bed. The bed as if to tell him he would not be sleeping during my hour. During my hour, he would talk to me or he would do nothing.

Total silence prevailed except for those few quiet slurps he made with his tea. I left him after an hour as I had promised.

The next evening, I greeted him at the door. He didn't react, going straight to the replicator.

"You remembered," I said pleasantly.

"I've alerted the staff to your presence. I can't stop you, Q, but I can ask you to stay away from my ship, my crew. You've honored that in the past."

"I have no intention of touching your crew. I'm not here for them, I'm here for you."

He nodded to himself. "Thank you." And said nothing else for the hour.

And nothing for the next two evenings either. He was sending me a message. But I knew him, and I knew that he would break eventually. I was playing the long game. A Q can afford to do that.

There was a wooden sculpture on the coffee table where he took his tea. When he came through the door, I was sitting on the table, examining it. "What's this?" I asked him. When he didn't reply, I waited until he sat. Then I slid my finger along the sculpture. He sipped his tea to show how unfazed he was. A flame burst from my thumb. I held it under, and with a little nudge from me part of the sculpture began to smoke and catch fire.

He stiffened. "Q."

"Hm?"

"Stop that. Q, you're going to fix that."

The air smelled of burnt cedar. "I am?"

"Dammit, Q." He shoved his tea on the table, spilling it in the process. He went to the windows, adjusting his uniform, squeezing his hands into fists. Finally, there was that frustration that had been brewing underneath.

I surged with pleasure. Externally, however, I revealed nothing.

"I'll fix it if you tell me where it came from," I said over the whooshing of the flame. Half of the sculpture was engulfed.

He mumbled something, something any normal human ear wouldn't have picked up. Mine did.

"You and your false compromises," he said.

I couldn't resist a response. "It isn't fair. I admit that. But nothing with me ever is. That's the difference between you and between me." I didn't mean it spitefully, and I hoped he heard it in my voice. It was the difference between us, between having power and having none.

I blew the flame out and restored the sculpture to what it had been. I even cleaned up the mess he'd made with his tea.

He looked at me, hard and long. Half of his face glowed white with starlight, half in shade.

"From my father," he said. "One of the few gifts he gave me."

"You didn't have to answer, you know. You called my bluff, you won that round. What was the occasion?"

He paused to remember. "For working my first year in the winery. I was twelve. Maybe thirteen. He wanted to encourage me on in the family business, if I remember correctly."

I nodded and cupped my hands around my knee.

"He never wanted me to join Starfleet," Picard said. "We argued about that often…"

It was more than he'd wanted to say. His stopping point, that night.

The next night, he continued to behave as if I wasn't there—even after I took a book out of his hands and put it back on the shelf, then five minutes later began to read it myself. He preferred staring at the floor to speaking with me. It must have been difficult for him, walking through a door and transforming from a captain of a thousand into… this. But I couldn't help that.

The seventh night I was in my usual spot on the bed. He asked me from the doorway after he was sure it had closed, the weariness in his voice palpable, "Q, how long will this continue?"

"Does it matter? You lose nothing by my presence here. Not time, not reputation, not rest."

"My sanity."

I smiled at the ceiling. "After a ten hour shift with your bumbling crew, if you're not already foaming at the mouth nothing I say will harm you. Mon capitaine, you are iron." I laughed a puff through my nose. "Sanity."

Fifteen minutes later, I rolled to my side and asked him, "Why didn't your father want you in Starfleet? Not that I don't wholeheartedly agree with him."

I heard the slow exhale of him realizing something. "If my past is what you want, help yourself. I can't stop you from looking. You would see anything you wanted better than I could relay it."

"Maybe I want to hear you tell me."

"Ah," he said. "You could probably arrange that too."

"True, I could force you to tell me..."

"You could also conjure up some other version of myself. Some alternate reality. Can't you do that, Q? Don't you skip through the multiverses as deftly as we do the stars? Can't you manipulate them as this one?"

"It's cute how you remind me of my power."

"It was a question."

"Yes to all the above. This is fun. Ask me something else about me."

He slurped his tea. His silence amused and sobered me all at once. I strolled towards him.

"Memories are different from facts,” I said. “Facts die with the past. It's only the memories that live on, that mean anything to anyone. I want to know what you think of your father, Jean-Luc, not how your father actually was. Your memory is all that matters as far as that is concerned. And yes, I could pester some other version of you, but I'd probably run into some over version of me. I don't love doing that."

He glared at me. "Is that really how it works?"

I smiled. "Would you like to see?"

"No. No, I would not like to see. Q, I'm trying to get rid of you." He laughed. "You're the scorned lover who won't take a hint."

"That's an interesting simile."

"You're Titiana, deeply confused."

"Which makes you the fool with the ass's head?"

"You keep telling me how insignificant I am—"

"When have I ever called you that?" I interjected.

"—how flattered I should be that you lock me up like this."

"When I say flattered I don't mean flattered." I sat across from him. "Jean-Luc, why is it every time I see you it ends in an argument?"

"You. You create chaos wherever you go. You force your will on others."

"What am I forcing? I am yours, Jean-Luc, yours for this hour, to talk to, to ignore. Ask me anything, I'll give it to you. I want to give it to you. You must know it's always been this way."

"Very well. I ask you to leave the Enterprise."

"Unfair. You're only ever on the Enterprise."

"Yes. I ask for you to leave me alone."

I wasn't going to play that game again. "You pretend to despise me, but I know it isn't true."

His jaw was tense as he stared me down. His eyes were narrowed, bead-like. He wanted me to believe him. All of his posture screamed it: I am telling you the truth dammit. I went deeper than that.

I've never made a habit of invading human minds. I like to gloat that I can, but in practice I'm far more conservative. Most humans are boring anyway, and with Jean-Luc I suppose I had never felt comfortable taking the liberty. It was the first time I had touched his mind since Farpoint, the first time I had wanted to, and so I was there, instantly, feeling his thoughts like so many fibers of a cloth. I found the area I wanted—the threads that spoke of me in muted colors and flimsier strands—and I pushed in, past the thoughts he was having now to the thoughts he'd had two or three years ago, after I had spared his life and the lives of his race. The thoughts nine years ago, when we had first met. Everything in between. I saw all of it at once.

It was as I expected. He didn't hate me. Some of the time he thought well of me. I found amusement at my quips. I found disappointment at my apathy for the mortals he held so dear. There, I thought, he wants me to improve. That means something.

And then I saw what I was looking for, the reason for his distance. Fear. It lurked in his subconscious—Jean-Luc could never consciously be afraid—but it was there, fueling him now. I was too powerful. Too risky to keep around for long. What would I meddle in next? What would be the cost?

But more importantly than seeing his mind, I let him feel that I was seeing it. It felt less like I was violating him if he knew.

His head twitched to the side. His eyes fell. "Stop," he said darkly.

So I did.

In the silence that followed, I leaned toward him. I spoke very quietly, although no one but he was listening. "You don't have to fear me, Jean-Luc. I would never harm you."

His voice was venom. "Get out. Get out of my quarters, now. I never want to see you again. Get out, Q. You look again, you see how I serious I am about that."

Finally. I had shaken him at last.

I stood, feeling as though I had won a great victory. I plopped into his bed. My fingers slipped over my mouth, hiding my smile.

Chapter Text

Picard guessed he was due for a confrontation when Counselor Troi followed him out of the observation lounge and across the bridge. She hung back when he entered his ready room, giving him time to settle, likely. The tell-tale chime followed a few moments later.

"Come," Picard said, sounding as irritated as he felt. It wasn't as if he could hide his irritation from her anyway.

She entered, silent until the door swished shut. Cool and straight-backed, the image of formality. "There's no easy way to say this, so I'll just come out and say it. I think we should schedule a time for us to talk."

Picard raised his eyebrows and pretended to be busy at his desk. "Talk."

"Yes. An hour, maybe longer if it's needed. Captain," she joined her hands at her waist, "I'm concerned you're under a great deal of stress."

"Stress."

"I'm sensing that, yes. For the last several days. It seems to be getting worse."

And it seemed that everyone was invading his mind lately. Had they no thoughts of their own to entertain them? He struggled for a response, a way to reassure her that he would be just fine and there was no need for any sort of psychoanalysis, thank you.

He managed a thin smile. "Thank you for your concern, Counselor. It's appreciated. But I can assure you I am under no more stress than that which normally besets a captain of a starship."

She came forward and slipped into one of his chairs. Merde, he thought. She folded her hands on the desk, calmly, while he tried to read Lieutenant La Forge's report on a scheduled engine maintenance. He kept re-reading the first sentence.

"Does this have anything to do with Q?" she asked.

"Q?"

"You mentioned last week that he had visited you. I haven't felt you leave the ship, but of course where Q is concerned that doesn't mean much. Is he still visiting you?"

"Still visiting me?"

Troi lowered her chin, pressing him with a glare. "Captain, you're repeating me."

"Repeating you," he said, simply to be annoying.

"Yes, it's a common defensive mechanism. It usually indicates you aren't comfortable with the line of questioning."

He set the report aside. "I'm sorry. I'm a little busy, Counselor."

"I understand. And we can speak at another time…"

"We don't need to speak at all."

His voice snapped a little more than he would have liked. She didn't flinch. She had raised her chin again, her eyes all-understanding, all-patient, betraying, he was sure, more telepathy on her end. Though empathy was the correct word, wasn't it.

Picard wished they would stay out of his mind. He wished empaths and telepaths and Qs never existed, that he could simply mind his starship as it pleased him. Years he had spent working for this place of authority only to be treated like a child. Worse: a thing, with a mind as accessible as one of Mr. La Forge's reports.

"I'm sensing anger," the Counselor said coolly.

Picard rolled back in his chair. An emotion had taken him, a need, suddenly, to flee the room. He controlled it, suppressed it expertly, and looked to Deanna to see if she'd noticed.

She had. Her surprise was unmistakable in her slightly cocked eyebrow.

"If you'll excuse me, Counselor. I ah—I remember I've missed an appointment." He took Mr. La Forge's report and left.

In the turbolift the inevitable embarrassment washed over him. She can see you're lying, you fool. And here, now, she could even see he was embarrassed. He hid in his quarters for a half an hour until the invented appointment was "finished," and then with all the nerves of a tawdry schoolboy he returned to the bridge.

She was leaning over his chair saying something to Riker. Riker laughed, and she was smirking as she leaned back to make room for Picard. Picard took his seat, trying to ignore his insecurity about the situation. "Stressed," the Counselor had described him earlier. Had the others noticed? Was he the butt of every crewmember's joke?

"Hello to you too, sir," Riker said.

"Oh. Sorry, Number One. Preoccupied."

Counselor Troi said nothing, always the consummate professional. It occurred to Picard that the paranioa he was feeling only strengthened her argument. Then, all at once, he admitted to himself she was right. He was stressed. And moreso than usual; she was right about that too.

Q had been getting to him. Every evening Picard had nowhere to go but straight into Q's mousetrap. Even an idea of switching rooms or avoiding his quarters altogether he knew to be futile. If the point of Q being here was their interaction, and Q had said it was, he would simply readjust to get what he wanted.

Picard sighed, loud and long, and leaned to his left.

"Tomorrow," he whispered to Deanna. "0800 hours?"

He could hear the smugness in her voice. "I'll clear my schedule."

Picard leaned back, but instead of melting like he had expected the stress was still there, still a palpable band around his rib cage. He realized why: 'tomorrow' was after 'tonight,' and tonight was the source of all his problems.

He leaned left again. Deanna straightened and inclined her head.

"On second thought, do you think we could speak now?"

They met in the observation lounge. It was less formal, less worrisome considering the sudden nature of their leaving the bridge. The last thing Picard wanted was to worry the crew. They took their usual seats, Picard at the head, Deanna on his left, and she gave him ample time to collect his thoughts.

He stared at their reflections in the long, obsidian table and soon realized it was easier just to start.

"It's as you guessed. Q has been visiting me beyond that first night. Nothing I say will put him off. The reason you haven't sensed my ah, disconcertion… is because he's been taking me out of time." He paused to see if she understood, although of course she didn't. This was Q and therefore nothing about it made sense. "He removes me from the timeline for the space of an hour. I'm still in my quarters; nothing's changed as far as I'm concerned. We talk. Sometimes we say nothing at all. And then, after an hour… he leaves." Picard shrugged, not sure how else to elaborate.

"You talk," she said.

"Yes. He seems to want to talk to me. He's said it isn't about the crew, I made sure of that, but why me is anyone's guess." He muttered the last part, finding it difficult to make eye contact with her anymore. He searched the room for something else, beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake in coming here. Perhaps a morning appointment would have been more discreet.

"Q has always singled you out. In some circumstances I would say he even thought of you as a friend."

Picard laughed. "We are not friends."

"No. But like-minded, perhaps?"

"Counselor. This is the entity who was threatening to wipe out humanity, and could have done it. Like-minded? Even now he's informed me he will visit me indefinitely, whether I acknowledge him or not. I have no choice in the matter. No options. No recourse."

Her lips thinned. "Is Q… intimate with you?"

"Good lord no!" Shock raised his eyebrows. "Certainly not."

"So you're telling me these advances are purely platonic."

"It would seem. Rather it is."

She nodded. "Has he told you what he wants? Some reason for these meetings?"

That was usually the case, wasn't it. Q had always made his intentions known before, and now it was some vague “talk.” Picard perused through his memories of the last week, but all the visits seemed to meld into one. He remembered demanding for Q to leave, angrier than he'd been in a long time, and the sunken feeling when Q had not. It had been two evenings since that one, since the evening when Q had invaded his mind.

"He seemed interested in a sculpture on my table. He wanted me to tell him where I received it. He lectured me on memories and claimed to be curious about my own. Some test of his, I'm sure. Now that you mention it, this seems to be a common theme with him. Him wanting to prove we are more alike than I realize. It's preposterous."

"It is."

At her plain, unabashed agreement, Picard felt relieved.

"I don't know why he's visiting me, no. I wish I did."

She asked what he had told Q about the sculpture, and Picard answered her tactfully. And her next question about what Q had said about memories, he was tactful with that one too. He wasn't being dishonest, just wringing all possible emotion from the story. There were some things too personal to reveal, even to a Counselor. Q’s invasion of his mind was one of those. And what Q had said after.

You don't have to fear me, Jean-Luc. I would never hurt you.

Was fear what this was about? About Q ridding Picard of his fear of him? Picard wasn't even sure he did fear Q.

Troi was saying something. "…not to think of him only in terms of his power, to treat him like anyone else, a person with thoughts, with feelings. And as such this seems to be a classic case of one person reaching out to another."

"But why?" Picard said. "And despite my express wishes to the contrary? Surely if he wanted to teach me something he would come out and say it. He's done that before." Picard shook his head. "I wish I could know how to…" He searched for the words. "How to discourage him in this."

"Maybe," she said, folding her hands on the table. "Maybe that's a good place to start."

Picard frowned.

"To stop trying to discourage him," she said.

Chapter Text

Counselor Troi had giving him good, solid advice. But for two days Jean-Luc Picard hadn't taken it. He didn't feel mentally prepared, and a part of him hoped the situation would resolve on its own.

It didn't. Every day Picard felt the strain of having something so maddening as Q cap off his evening, knowing full well that Q felt just the opposite. Q probably felt rejuvenated, not tired; encouraged, not dissuaded. Picard couldn’t stand it any longer.

The door swished open. Q was on the bed, motionless as though his mind were elsewhere, as though he were steeling himself for Picard to ignore him yet again. Not tonight. Picard stood over him.

"Q, could I speak with you a moment?"

The entity's eyes snaked to Picard's. They were alien eyes, dangerous eyes, eyes that always served an unspoken reminder for Picard to tread carefully. Yet despite the intensity of the eyes, Q replied with an air of casual interest, "Isn't that why I'm here?"

Picard nodded. One hour. The last hour, he hoped.

He ordered two cups of Earl Gray from the replicator, extending one of them to Q.

With a quick inhale, Q rolled to his feet. "You seem chipper. Pleasant day at the office?" He accepted the tea.

Picard gestured to the couch and chair. "Would you like to sit down?"

When he had rehearsed this in his mind earlier that day, Picard had envisioned Q taking the chair. He was caught off guard when Q didn't, sitting instead in the couch with his feet on the table. Picard, who had already sat in the couch, inched as far away as possible. He didn't care if Q noticed.

"What's on your mind, Jean-Luc?" Q asked, closing his eyes. Reclining, he set the tea in his lap. "Don't worry, I'm not looking anymore."

Picard felt a surge of annoyance he tried to ignore. He tried to focus on what ground could be gained. Discerning Q's motives. How had the Counselor phrased it? Picard was a captain of Starfleet, a diplomat and envoy, and yet she had said it far better than he ever would.

"I wanted to apologize, Q, for my, ah. For my lack of hospitality."

Q's eyes snapped open, focusing on nothing.

Pleased to be on this side of things for once, Picard continued. "The universe is dynamic, vast. There are a lot of places you could be, but you're here, and I suppose there's some significance in that, some compliment to be had. You've offered me gifts, 'anything,' you said, and I'm aware that's an opportunity most never receive. Even the attention…" That line of thinking felt awkward. He abandoned it. "In summary, I think the time has come for me to… to offer you anything. Anything within my power, that is. To return the favor."

It was also the only way to end this. He waited for Q to speak, to react, anything. Q's eyes had fallen to the cup of tea in his lap. He drank, and then promptly spat the liquid back into the cup.

"Disgusting," he said. He set the cup aside, souring over the aftertaste as if he might lick it out of his mouth.

Picard knew stalling when he saw it. "There must be something you want from me. Why else would you be here?"

"I told you. Conversation. How do you drink this every day?"

"You develop a taste. Q, I'm offering you anything."

"Yes, yes, I heard."

And then Q was on his feet, pacing the room. He seemed as unsettled as the time Amanda Rodgers had hurled him against the wall. "You? Offer me anything?"

"I'm pleased the proposition interests you."

"Only in the sense that I have never been offered 'anything' so sincerely, so unironically by a mortal. It's baffling. It's downright funny. This is why I visit you, Jean-Luc. The way your mind works."

"Well, you seemed so certain that I'm afraid of you, that I'm beneath you, and yet here you are. I thought I would extend the olive branch."

"You are afraid of me. It was plainly in your thoughts.”

“I disagree.”

Q laughed weakly.

Picard kept his expression as cool as possible. And yet how wonderful it felt to have upset Q. The roles reversed at last.

"For nine years you've followed me," Picard said. "You introduced me to new ideas, new species. You wanted to join my crew. You came to me when mortal for protection. You saved my life when my heart malfunctioned, or so I was left to assume. You call yourself a god, the God on more than one occasion. And so perhaps I am dense for only realizing this now, but after nine years it has occurred to me there must be something you lack. Something you think I, or the Enterprise, or humanity perhaps, can give you."

Q had stopped pacing, was glaring at the stars. Sulking really. He could be so much like a child.

"You know what I want,” Q said.

"I would never presume. In all of your heavy-handed lessons, that is one thing I've learned. To never presume where you are concerned."

"Jean-Luc, can we table this for a moment? I'd like to take you somewhere. I know my terms were that we would stay to this room, so I'm asking you. Let me take you somewhere."

"Where?"

Q didn't answer. He sat in the chair where Picard had imagined him sitting before, fully engaged now. As if everything before this had been play. The child was gone and all that remained was power, charisma, age. Sometimes Picard felt Q switched personalities like this to disarm him.

"You joined Starfleet to explore,” Q said. “A noble goal. I share it. But for the last forty years you've been stumbling around in the dark."

"I'm not going to argue over the merits of my career with you, Q."

"Good. You'd lose." He gestured to the wooden sculpture on the table. "You put that there as a monument to your past, some marker as to how far you've come, but captain though you are your ship rarely takes you out of this section of the quadrant. You haven't seen the whole quadrant, much less the galaxy. Much less anything beyond that. Intergalactic space? There's a trove of life there too, if you know how to look for it. So I'm not being hyperbolic when I say you’ve hardly left the vineyard."

Picard tried to finish his tea in an attempt to appear unruffled. Q had hinted at this before, at his desire to see Picard explore beyond what Starfleet had assigned him, beyond "the limits of the human mind," but Picard had never taken it very seriously. He always assumed Q had used such statements as another way to lord his omnipotence over them, nothing more.

"Let me take you somewhere,” Q said. “Show you what you're missing. At least make an informed decision before you write off exploring forever."

"I am hardly writing off exploring forever. Thank you, but no."

"Why?"

"Because there is value in doing something yourself."

"Only as long as you're doing something valuable."

Picard sighed. He cleared both of their cups, leaving them in the replicator. On the way back he caught his face in the mirror. It looked old, tired. Nine years he had known Q. The age showed on him. On Q, nothing showed.

He poured himself a Saurian brandy—the real thing, a birthday gift from Riker—and thought about how it would be to explore. To really explore, without all the constraints and worries and rules of Starfleet. He liked those rules—he believed in them—but what would it feel like to worry only about himself? To boldly go with eyes ever forward, not split between the ship and its crew. When was the last time he had seen anything new?

He wished Q would leave. It was unpleasant thinking about things that would never, could never, happen.

"Since you've offered to give me something," Q said from the next room, "I shouldn't give you the choice. I should make you go with me. It is the only thing I want."

Picard strode into the room to find Q lying on his bed again. "No. Absolutely not."

"I don't mean forever."

"I offered you something within my power."

"Yes, and it's within your power to come with me."

"It would still be your doing."

"How sad to see it like that." Q sat up, an elbow on his knee.

"I should recant the offer," Picard said.

"Fine. Recant it."

Picard said nothing. The Counselor's advice blinked "red alert" across his thoughts. As terrible as it would be, this was the only way to get rid of Q. Humoring him.

"So we're going?" Q asked.

"This is not what I meant when I offered."

Q stood, straightening his shirt, looming over Picard who gave no ground. "You'll be happy you did. It'll be like that time with the Borg. You were thankful afterward."

"That time with the Borg indeed, that drives home the point. You claim you saw fear in my mind? I think you've mistaken caution for fear—"

It became instantly dark. And the air was now humid, bone-chillingly cold. A moonless sky glowed with stars, navy against the pitch black of the ground, so pitch Picard couldn't see his own hands in front of him. He felt disembodied. At the same time, he was afraid to step anywhere lest he stub his toe.

He could breath. That was something.

"Damn you, Q," he thought but did not say. Instead he called out, "Q?" His voice was swallowed in the darkness, leading him to believe they were in some wide, open plain.

"Right here."

The voice bore from Picard's right. He was immensely relieved to hear it. Knowing Q, he was impossibly far from home. Where no one has gone before.

He felt a thrill, but tried his best to work past it.

"Q, is it possible on this planet, or will we self-combust, that you give us some form of light?"

"But the stars are so lovely. And so 'never been seen by a human before.'"

"I'd like to see the planet. If this is a planet."

A hazy, sourceless glow grew across the landscape. It illuminated the distant mountains and the topography cluttered with short craggy rocks. The only landmark in sight was about three hundred meters away: a single pine tree.

"It is a planet," Q said. "An endangered one. It's the only one left in this star system after the sun burned through its core."

Picard started toward the pine tree. He felt drawn toward it, the only sign of life on a lifeless plain. A thousand questions boiled in his mind, bubbling to the surface, battling for primacy—questions about the planet, about its location, about this pine tree flourishing in the light of a dying sun, assuming Q hadn't planted it here himself. They were breathing oxygen, but had Q added that part? Picard knew that to ask any questions would fly in the face of the fact that he had insisted he did not want to be here, and so he kept silent. Tried to seem only mildly interested.

It was a struggle, one he wondered if Q could see right through. Probably he could.

"Everything's died but this tree," Q said. "And no, that's none of my doing. It's an anomaly of nature. I wonder what's causing it. I know, but your scientists would have a field day. It's night here. You should see the dayside, where everything else on this rock burned to shreds."

Picard stopped walking. He scanned the horizon for signs of civilization.

"Of course there are billions of more interesting planets than this one, but I chose this one for two reasons. One, that tree. I wonder what’s kept it alive? Two, this." Q stomped on the ground. "There used to be human-like creatures here before the sun burned them out. I think you'd find it fascinating having a peek underneath this rubble. This exact pile, actually."

Picard looked longingly at the pile. "Don't tempt me."

"Well if that isn't exactly what I want to do."

"I don't have time, Q. Dammit there are thousands of worlds I might explore."

"So explore them. I'll take you out of time, if that's what's bothering you. Just like we are now."

Picard looked from the rubble to Q and back. He scanned the fifteen or twenty steps he had taken toward the tree. And he scanned the tree, so closely resembling a pine tree of Earth.

He thought about how many weeks it would take to explore this planet, this one planet, whose flora and fauna were already dead. And how many planets after this? If they took a planet a day, how quickly would his leave add up? He thought about notifying Starfleet he was going off with Q.

That last thought made his stomach pang with dread. He realized he didn't want to be here anymore, needed to be anywhere but. Deanna had been wrong. This wasn't going to work.

"How convenient it would be," he said, "if this were merely a planet of your creation. If you had put that tree there. If you were inventing those ruins."

"Not convenient. Pointless. Do you know how many planets have ruins?"

"Countless, I suppose."

"And so does this one."

"Where did you say this is?"

"I didn't say. It's the far side of the Delta Quadrant. It would take a lifetime for any of your ships to reach it, and by then it will be gone. Poof, when the sun goes nova. That's the third reason I chose it, for a limited time only."

"How do I know this is the Delta Quadrant? I didn't plot a course here."

"I'll show you on a map when I take you back."

"Wonderful. Do it now."

A PADD appeared in Q's hand. He extended it to Picard, who grabbed it and without looking at it said, wearily, "I mean take us back."

Q touched his forehead as if he had a headache coming on. He was smiling, wincing to himself. "You've been here less than five minutes."

"I know. I'm sorry. Please, take me back."

Q’s eyes withered. “I should leave you here. This is not what you offered me and you know it."

"Then how long?" Picard held out his hands. "How long until you're satisfied? I'm telling you I've had my fill of this place. Now if you wish to force me to stay…"

"I do. I should. A lifetime. Then you have no one and nothing to go back to."

Picard knew Q wasn't serious, but the threat angered him just the same. It brought up memories of before, and remembering before, Picard could not contain his opinion any longer.

"I'm not afraid of you. You hear me, Q? I'm not afraid of you, I loathe you. If you are a god, you are the god of contradiction. The day you showed us the Borg you told me that if I couldn't take a bloody nose I ought to go home and crawl under my bed. Oh yes, I remember. Eighteen of my crew died that day to teach me some lesson you thought was important. Now this charade in my quarters, you trying to tell me you're safe? Nothing is safe with you. You are a trickster, a fickle child at best. So much power on your hands God help us all if we're in the path of one of your tantrums again. Or one of your lessons."

Picard felt propelled through the tirade like a sailboat in a wind. He was relieved to have finally said it. He felt adrenaline flowing from his fingertips. He felt four inches taller.

Q had been staring at the ground through the duration, smiling to himself. Picard thought it appropriate, the smile, revealing how little Q cared. He almost laughed, too light to feel angry anymore.

"You. Loathe me?" Q said. "That's funny, because I didn't see that when I saw everything else."

"Why don't you look again?"

"I believe you I'd see it now. I don't question your honesty, in this moment." Q eyed the vista around them, the pine tree. He sighed. "If I take you back, can we be friends again?" The question was lifeless, nothing to be taken seriously. Q lifted his hand, looking at it for a moment as if he saw something there he did not understand. Then, he snapped.

They appeared in Picard's quarters, still facing each other.

Picard was going to sleep. He didn't care if Q prevented him or hung around to watch. He went to his closet to change out of his uniform into his bed clothes even as Q leaned in the doorway.

"The time we were gone doesn't count. You still have an hour to make up."

Picard didn't answer.

"Speaking of things I once told you," Q said. “I once told you in all of the universe you were the closest thing I had to a friend."

Silence.

"I do consider you a friend, even if you don't consider me one. I'm not offended by the discrepancy; I don't think you have any friends."

Picard busied himself opening and shutting drawers.

"I have a proposition for you, which I’d like to formally request of you now. Somehow knowing you’ll reject me makes it easier to ask.”

"Enough of this," Picard said, turning. "No, Q, I do not want to go gallivanting around the universe with you.”

Q looked annoyed. "Be careful when you say that. You aren't getting any younger."

"Oh, I am aware. Of course I'm aware. How dare you think you're more aware of that than I."

"And are you aware that this is why you joined Starfleet? Exploring? And Starfleet has allowed you to do anything but?"

"You're repeating yourself.”

Q looked flustered. Picard took that chance to slip past him, through the doorway, towards the bed. He could taste the ending now. The Counselor had been right after all.

"Jean-Luc, please at least consider the offer. Don't dismiss it after a moment's thought."

"Goodnight, Q. Computer, lights."

The lights didn't go out. Picard pretended they did, turning over, pulling the covers around him. When he opened his eyes he wasn't startled to find Q crouched on the floor, his face mere inches away. He simply shut his eyes again.

"You don't know what you're saying," Q said. "You can't know."

Picard began to fantasize about the peaceful morning he was going to have. Let Q respond how he may. Picard was done answering him. No more encouraging it. No more circling the carcass of whatever their relationship had been.

When he opened his eyes five minutes later, the room was dark and Q was gone.

Chapter Text

Q never returned for his hour after that. Now that he’d posed his proposition, and been denied, he had obviously decided there was no point anymore.

In the three months afterward, Picard mulled over Q's words more than he liked to admit. He came to two realizations.

The first, most bitter of his realizations was that Q had been right. Picard wasn't an explorer anymore. He might have started out that way, but his job description had morphed sometime after becoming Captain. Maybe when the first crewmember had died as a direct result of his orders. It had never felt like exploring after that. It had felt irresponsible to think of it so.

He was a caretaker. A shepherd. A representative of freedom, equality, of everything the Federation stood for. Any exploring that happened as a result of those things was incidental. Unintentional even. Yes, he sailed the outer edges of charted space, and that was far more exploring than he would have done in a vineyard back on Earth, no matter what Q said otherwise—but there was a very clear, very real out of bounds. Signs which warned "Here There Be Monsters." Starfleet had more important things for him, most notably keeping its flagship (and top warship) close.

The second realization: if he had wanted to be an explorer, he shouldn't have become a captain. He should have become a scientist. Less responsibility there, except the responsibility to learn, to discover. Perhaps a small part of him had wanted the power that came with a command position and that was why he'd compromised along the way. Regardless, he couldn't live in both worlds, not unless…

Unless Q.

Q's proposition was tantalizing. A way to have both the Enterprise and the thrill of the new. He had given his answer, but he was not so foolish as to think Q wouldn't accept another.

When Picard was younger, he had been thrilled to eschew his responsibility and drift wherever he may. Now that he was older, it was almost the opposite. Picard's responsibility to the Enterprise was a palpable presence in his life, as comforting as a friendship, as valuable as an aged wine. Without the Enterprise, what did he have? And what sort of life? Without the Enterprise, Picard would be faced with questions—and with demons—he had nearly forgotten about.

So it was decided. This was the life he had chosen. He wouldn't leave. Not even on occasion. Not even to think about leaving lest he stir up feelings of discontent, which may in turn stir up something worse.

It left one more decision to be made.

Q had left the star charts of the Delta Quadrant in Picard's quarters. It was a thousand solar systems unknown to the Federation, with the planet Picard had visited marked in bold, bright red. What was Picard to do with it? He couldn't bear to erase it, and had in fact added it to the computer's memory in case the PADD's memory failed. Cartographers might spend hundreds of years compiling that amount of information… Or Picard might hand it over. There would be no doubt as to its legitimacy. He wasn't some loafer claiming history with Q—he had history with Q, documented—and he had the credibility that being Captain of the Enterprise lent him. When Picard had been thrown to the edge of the galaxy by Wesley Crusher's Traveller, he had logged a full report to the Federation then. Why was this any different? He would tell them for progress and for science, not for glory.

But what held him back, every time he went to do it, was Q. Q and Picard's own regret about Q. Picard had mulled that over too.

Q was capable of deplorable things and had done deplorable things on several of their meetings, but that did not mean everything Q did was deplorable. It did not make him some un-person who had waived all his claim to dignity and acknowledgment. If Picard was to ever boast to the Federation about the Delta quadrant, for his conscience's sake he needed to apologize to Q. He had been honest, but he had not been kind.

Perhaps with this, the cord would be cut. The chapter of their relationship would be closed forever. Perhaps, as the Counselor had implied, Picard had only ever encouraged Q by being stubborn.

The trouble of the apology was getting Q's attention, an activity at which some might say Picard was proficient. If only it had ever been in his control.

Riker was leaning over Commander Data's shoulder at ops, conferring on some report or another, when Picard approached. They broke off conversation. Riker stood straight.

"Mr. Data, I have a rather unusual request. I would like you to send out a hail on all frequencies. It should read, 'Captain calling Delta pine.' Nothing more."

"Delta pine, sir? If this is a person you wish for me to hail, perhaps—"

"It isn't. It's a bit of an inside joke. Just Delta pine will do."

Riker raised his chin, narrowed his eyes.

"It's personal in nature," Picard clarified. "And I'm aware that subspace communications should not be used in this manner but I think we'll all overlook it just this time, yes?"

Data raised his eyebrows and blinked several times, then with insect-like agility tapped the console.

"You'll have to enlighten me, sir. I'm curious," Riker said.

"Oh no, Number One. You are never to ask me about this again, Captain's orders." Picard smiled to let him know it was a joke—an order and a joke in one—and retreated to the turbolift, pleased all of that business was over with.

He hoped it would work. He wasn't sure what else to try.

The turbolift hummed to life. There was a hissing sound afterwards. For a second Picard thought it was a malfunction. Then he realized it was Q’s flash.

"Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Starfleet, what can the Q Continuum do for you today?" Q was leaning against the wall, arms folded, both looking and sounding bored.

"You must be watching us perpetually," Picard marveled, making sure to say "us."

"A very, very small part of my mind keeps an ear tuned. Usually I forget I'm doing it."

"I see," Picard said, wondering if there was an inoffensive way of asking Q to stop.

"Did you want something?" Q asked.

"Yes. To talk."

"Here?"

"No. My ready room would be better."

They appeared there. Picard, standing behind his desk. Q tapped a console to lock the door then strolled over to inspect the fish.

"Thank you," Picard said.

"Anything I can do for your precious privacy."

A reference to the anonymous hail. At least Picard hoped that was all it was. He sat, trying to remember what he was going to say. Oh yes: the apology. He had to gather his thoughts. He had not expected Q to appear so soon.

"I've been observing humans lately," Q said.

"Oh?"

"Yes. On Earth. Straight to the source. I've paid very special attention to friendships." Q ordered two Earl Grays at the replicator, giving one to Picard. A tin of sugar appeared and Q stirred in three spoonfulls. "Acquiring a taste," he explained.

Picard sipped the tea. He wasn't sure he wanted to ask, but he did. He needed Q in a good mood. "Friendships?"

"Right, yes. They're not so different from friendships among my own kind. Although given our self-sufficient nature, the Q tend to be more reclusive."

In the lull that followed, Picard wasn't sure what to add. He wasn't sure how to move on either, not without a jarring change of subject that might be interpreted as stubborn. He sipped the tea, taking his time with it.

"So," Q said, "why am I here?"

"Of course." Picard set down the cup. "I wanted to apologize. What I said to you, three months ago, I meant. But I shouldn't have said it like that."

"You shouldn't have lost your cool."

"Yes."

"Your cool." Q intoned the word as if he were tasting it. "I don't notice things like that. I was pleased you were being honest with me. Well, not altogether pleased. Apology accepted."

"Thank you."

Q looked away, looking distracted. He took the tea to the window, showing no sign of leaving.

Picard had not planned on asking Q for permission, merely on apologizing and proceeding on his own. The lull coaxed it out of him.

"Would you mind if I—?"

Q interrupted him. "If you told Starfleet about our little trip? Of course you want to. I had assumed, if you had taken my offer, you would want to. You love knowledge, but you have a deep and disgusting streak of responsibility. Which, I suspect, is why you didn't take me up on my offer to begin with. Maybe when you're done with Starfleet."

They locked eyes. It was only for a second, as if Q was ensuring Picard had understood his meaning.

Picard did understand, but he wished he hadn't. He resented that the offer was being extended like this, not that he was going to encourage Q by telling him. He looked down. Rotated the tea cup a full circle. He wanted Q to leave.

He decided a question wouldn't be out of order. "Is there something on your mind?"

“You're the one that brought me here."

"I did, yes. And I, ah… appreciate you coming."

"Look at you, squirming. You think it will be like last time where I never go away. You've got what you wanted, and now I'm supposed to leave."

Q snapped and the teacups vanished with a hiss that startled Picard. So tense today. He disguised the flinch with movement, readjusting himself in his chair. He could feel Q studying him as though he saw right through it.

"I wasn't going to say this now," Q said. "I was going to think about it a while longer. But let's have it over with, shall we? Since my presence unnerves you so."

He sat opposite the desk. Quite the reverse from what Picard would have expected, he looked more comfortable, more relaxed than before. "You remember when I looked into your mind and saw fear? I assumed it had to do with me. Everyone fears me, why not you? I don't say this but once a billion years, so, brace yourself: I was wrong.”

Q continued, “I've had time to think about just how wrong I was. Jean-Luc Picard is different from mere mortals. Jean-Luc Picard is the captain of a starship, and he's far more afraid about his image. It's not even about being a captain, really. I think even if you were pan handling on a street corner you would resent each and every penny I gave you. God forbid anyone look at your accomplishments and see me."

Q leaned back as though giving Picard a moment to let this revelation sink in. By the time he continued, Picard was beginning to worry that he had somehow gone too far earlier.

"I thought of you as a friend," Q said. “I told you as much. I wasn’t sure why you couldn’t understand that, so I observed them. Well, I realize now what a fool I've been. You are nothing like a friend.”

Their eyes locked.

Without movement, without smugness, without any reaction at all, Q continued. "I don't think you've ever been in a room with me without wanting to leave. Never accepted a gift without wishing you'd gotten it some other way. You've never even thanked me for saving your life. Not that I crave sycophancy, because I don't, but it just sort of… stuck out to me, that's all. I save your life, and nothing."

"The heart," Picard murmured. "I didn't know it was you."

"You knew."

"I did not know, not explicitly.”

"You could have asked. And when your ship exploded and I put a stop to that, you said nothing."

"I did. I did thank you."

"'On behalf of my crew, thank you.' Those exact words. I watched it again, dumbfounded I had seen any warmth in you at all."

Picard had no response. He supposed it was true that he hadn't thanked Q personally.

"But I didn't come here to beg an apology," Q said, "although I guess I already got one. A different one."

"Thank you for saving my life," Picard said quickly. "Twice. Thank you."

Q's eyes remained dangerous even as he smiled. "You're very welcome, Jean-Luc. I'm glad I did, considering how I felt back then. But frankly, considering how I feel now, it isn't something you should ever expect again."

"Of course not," Picard said, feeling that Q had just slapped him.

"And I should thank you, really," Q said.

"Why is that?"

"Because I came here, three-and-something months ago, for a purpose. For some nagging doubt in me. But it's gone now. And I think you had a part in expunging it. So, thank you."

It wasn't the sort of thing you said 'you're welcome' to.

Picard watched Q stand with a worrying mix of helplessness, confusion, expectancy. He could see things spinning out of control but was frozen against reaching out and stopping them. How could he, when he hardly understood what he was stopping? And Q's expression was nearly his opposite, a peaceful fragility Picard had first seen at Farpoint and had not seen any time since. It was as though Picard was an insect and Q was the eternal, unfailing sun and anything might happen.

"Q, if it was anything I said…"

Q's laugh was slight. "Why would it be anything you said? No, rest easy. It's better for both of us this way."

"What is?"

Q lowered his eyes, lowered his hand to tap the desk three times. "Do what you like. With what I've told you, showed you, I don't mind. I'm leaving you now. Forever this time."

And with that, he vanished.

Picard sat there for a long moment, stunned. Someone paged him, but he neither acknowledged the message nor remembered later who had done it. He looked around for things to clear away, tea cups and so forth, but Q had taken all of the mess with him. There was nothing for Picard to do but… go on. Unimpeded. Unrestrained.

Finally what he had asked for. He waited for the surge of energy, the rush that accompanies long-awaited gratification. But it didn't come. Instead he felt an emptiness he was afraid to confont.

His bridge outside. The crew, the Federation, the entirety of space to himself. And it had been so easy, as easy as not caring what happened anymore, as easy as looking the danger straight in the eye and shrugging.

What Q had said about Picard resenting Q's help, about being overly concerned with his image? It was years before Picard even remembered that part of the conversation, much less considered if it was true.

Chapter Text

Waste, waste, waste. It was the single word on my mind the whole of our last little chat. How much time I had spent on him. How much effort and thought—me. Me. Whole planets beg for my attention, now and billions of years to come. Me, who breathes stars into existence. Me, who parts nebulae with a wave of my hand.

And he was saying no to me. He was speaking to me only for the betterment of his conscience, otherwise he did not care.

Me.

Well I would have no more of it. I would not play the stairs to his moral high ground. I didn't even tell him to what extent he'd offended me, merely gave him my adieus and left. The vale over my eyes, which I'd been pulling back so slowly, so cautiously for the last three months, was ripped off to the blinding shine of clarity.

And anger. And shame, for I could see exactly why the Q had been laughing at me for the last few years. And then anger again, hot and strong.

The first thing I did upon leaving him was look up some planet where they worshipped me and let them go about it. It was a planet his beloved Starfleet might refer to as Class Y. The occupants were made entirely of living rock. I appeared to them as a crystal and they oohed and ahhed over me, attending to my whims while I sat there for weeks and thought. Sometimes I tried not to think, and being worshipped was good for that. They told me how perfect I was. They reminded me I was not anyone to be denied. They erected a temple of themselves around me before I left. By then, I had come to accept my anger and contain it.

It’s a crucial step for a Q. Otherwise I might annihilate something without ever realizing it. Especially if my anger was affixed on one person, one mortal, one nobody anybody would miss.

Jean-Luc Picard. I'd said I'd leave him alone and yet in the years that followed he never left me alone, frolicking around the universe in his speck of a starship, always only a thought away. He could forget me, cleanly. He did not have the burden of policing his mind.

Time passed. I distracted myself. I played in the far edges of the Gamma Quadrant mostly, some place where they've never heard of Starfleet. Eventually my anger faded, and then came the day I realized it was gone altogether. Whether eliminated or buried, I did not care.

Only when the need arose did I slip back into Federation space, knowing he was in the neighborhood and shrugging it off. Who was he to me? A past curiosity, that was all. In fifty years he would probably be dead.

Fifty years is nothing to me.

And so it was that I abandoned all my interest in humanity, flicked it to the ground like the poisonous cigarette it was.

A little story you might find interesting. The setting? The Alpha Quadrant. The characters? Me and the closest of my associates, Q.

It was his turn to pick a place and he chose Alpha III. I complained, but I didn't get very far with him since I couldn't verbalize exactly why I didn't want Alpha III, just that I didn't. He'd put up with my last choice, some underwater photonic spa on the other side of the galaxy—dull by all his standards—and so here we were. Alpha III.

The bar he chose was crowded and loud and colored lights roved everywhere. Blues and pinks and yellows flashed across our faces, an effect I supposed was meant to be stylish but was mostly just blinding. Worse, the bar was swarming with Starfleet cadets. I wished they weren't there. Not enough to unmake them, but enough to blacken my mood.

It's an unpleasant sensation, remembering humans exist. As I was scowling at them from across the bar, and thinking of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the worlds, Q handed me a drink and asked me whatever happened to that Starfleet officer I used to talk to. "The old one without any hair." The trouble with Q is I can never tell if he's staged all of this to elicit information from me or is just… serendipitously curious.

Either way, it was bound to come up eventually.

"Him?" I said over the music. "I haven't thought of him in fifteen years."

"No way! He was your favorite little toy!"

"Toys break, Q."

"Whoa. Now what I wouldn't give to hear more about that."

"Sorry. I've forgotten most of it."

"That's a shame. You know we were all so surprised you liked a human so much, and now you just don't even care. And you don't even know why!"

"I was bored."

"You're going to make me investigate, aren't you?"

There was a jolt of fear in my stomach when I realized he might summon Jean-Luc immediately to "investigate." After all, I had just declared I didn't care. As Q etiquette went, he was no longer my property. Up for grabs. And what would I do then, face to face with him so suddenly, so out of my control? Would he turn to accuse me? Surely he would. And what feeble defense pointing at Q would be then.

I swallowed, and forced myself to relax, and reminded myself that whatever Q did I would play it cool and uncaring as I was. If Picard accused me, I would simply refuse to answer.

Q was grinning at me. He beckoned with his index finger and one of the more sultry cadets strutted across the room and slipped into his arm. Whispering in her ear, he got everything out of her.

Such as: Captain Picard? No, Admiral Picard, and he was retiring next month. There were rumors of a forced resignation or some sort of fallout with the leadership, although they were having a big ceremony as a send-off. Also he was "so inspiring and I would give anything to shake his hand and have you met him? I would kill to meet him" and other such unhelpful nonsense that bubbles forth when you loosen up a human like that. I never did that, for the same reason I didn't make a habit of reading their minds. It was never interesting that way.

"Wow, look at that," Q said after he shooed her off. He turned his attentions on me. "You really had no idea about any of that."

"No," I said.

"You just… got bored?"

"Yes," I said, and said nothing else.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Q didn't press the issue further than that.

But as the night waned on and I drank more and more, far more than I usually did, retaining my humanoid form to feel all the stupor and calm of a compromised central nervous system, to the point of actually enjoying the flashing lights, I kept remembering something the cadet had said. That he was resigning.

Leaving Starfleet.

I wanted to throw a drink in Q's face for sticking that in my head, and for starting this whole charade in the first place by reminding me that Picard would die soon, way back when. One might almost say he was concerned for me, but probably he just wanted the laugh.

One thing I swore to myself, and I even drank to it to seal the deal: I wasn't going anywhere near that ceremony.

Which of course means I went.

In another life it was a day I had looked forward to, the casting off of Starfleet by the once-favored Picard, and so for nostalgia's sake it seemed imperative that I attend—even if just for the excuse to try out a human body again, and that old captain's uniform. Fifteen years had passed, plenty of time for indifference to have won out between us. That was what I told myself anyway. I would have a look around and I would leave. Who among the Continuum could fault me for that?

The ceremony had already begun when I appeared there, standing in the back of the room without fanfare or announcement. The building was an old Earth church, a place where humans like Picard used to worship beings like me. There were about four hundred persons of various species scattered around the pews, and yet the room wasn't half full. As music wafted from the orchestra pit, the lords of Starfleet paraded across the stage in all of their lackluster mediocrity. Grey heads, all of them.

And then Picard came out. Everyone stood and clapped, everyone but me. He moved slowly, carefully to his seat on the stage, which made me wonder if he'd had some sort of accident. He stooped more, had gone completely bald, all of those omens of impending death. At the age of eighty-something he had, what, thirty more years left? Maybe less considering his mechanical heart. And the stress of command, too, would have its cost.

It was strange seeing him again. I had expected to feel something, some shiver up my arms, a pang of sadness perhaps. But I felt nothing. No desire to speak to him. Not even to let him know I was here. I was considering leaving when some man on the stage got up and rattled off a list of Picard's accomplishments. The man finished the list and moved on with some general statement about how much Picard had meant to Starfleet, how much they would miss him as a leader, etcetera, etcetera, but I wasn't following. I was back with the list, replaying it in my mind, just to be sure. No. It was definitely, very wrong. And I wasn't just going to stand there and let them be wrong about something like that.

I strode up the aisle.

I heard a few gasps once they began to recognize me, probably from when I put the entire species on trial or something.

"Stop, stop, stop," I said, and at my bidding the man at the podium went mute. Picard was watching me. I could see him in my peripheral.

"That's wrong," I said. "That's all wrong. You can't just list the man's accomplishments and leave out the most important one. Now try it again. I'll help."

The man began speaking, alarmed to be doing so. It was all over his face, and yet his voice did not falter. "Of course I neglected to mention Admiral Picard's most significant accomplishment of all, that of emissary to the Q Continuum. When the Q Continuum decided to destroy humanity, Admiral Picard, then Captain Picard, singlehandedly changed their minds by impressing the great entity Q, who graciously went on to plead humanity's case. If it weren't for the Admiral, all of us, all we know here and all we have yet to know would be gone."

"Q, I think that’s enough," said a voice behind me.

It was Riker. Pudgy and balding; time had treated him worse than Picard. He opened his mouth to say more, but never did, because I froze him in place. How many times I had wanted to do that…

"Go on," I said to the speaker.

"Q!" That was from Picard, who stood to his feet.

"I have no business with you," I replied without looking at him.

"Right, you don't. So be gone."

"Be gone? And let this travesty continue? No, someone should intervene. There aren't nearly enough guests here, for one." I snapped and the pews were packed with various cadets in uniform, snatched from a nearby library. "And is this a funeral or celebration?" With a flash, a thousand streamers hung from the chandeliers to the rafters to the windows. Confetti rained over the crowd. "And the speech. The speech is the thing. Once we get that right, I'll be on my way."

Picard didn't miss a beat. "Are we to believe you happened here on coincidence? That you roam the galaxy arbitrating quality?"

"Where I am concerned, yes."

Some in the audience had started to leave. Without turning, I slammed the back doors shut. The windows, too, one after the other. Pom, pom, pom. I think I made my point clear, for the shirkers shrunk back to their seats.

Picard stepped forward, spoke at lower volume. "You said this was done, Q. You said you no longer—"

"Oh I'm barely speaking to you." For I had still not even glanced at him. He had noticed.

"Look at me, Q," he growled from the stage.

It amused me how he always dared to order me. Well, Riker dared, but only after taking cues from Picard. It was even more amusing here, in this room, after what I had just done, with such a larger audience than he'd ever had on the Enterprise.

Jean-Luc Picard, still too brave for his own good.

My eyes shifted to his.

He was scowling. His age made his scowl that much more formidable; something about all the wrinkles. A single scrap of confetti had landed on his shoulder. "Please. Leave."

I folded my arms. Smiled. "No."

He seemed surprised by that answer, but like any good tactician nimbly came around. "If you wish to attend, you will attend as anyone else. You will sit, there. And let Riker go.”

"And hear him wasp at me? I don't think so."

"I will wasp at you."

"And you do it so much better."

He inhaled shakily, angrily. "What do you want?"

I strolled to Riker, around him, relishing the tension and fear, all eyes on me. I tapped my finger up Riker's shoulder, his neck, through his hair then down to the other shoulder. I leaned against him and squinted at Picard.

"Isn't there a president of your little Federation? Seeing as you're the most important human in, oh, quite some time, I'm surprised he isn't here giving the speech instead of… this." I gestured to the man at the podium, who flinched away. In microseconds I located the President—on the other side of the planet, attending some soirée—and summoned him to the side of the stage. When he realized what had happened, he blanched.

"Oh you've all heard of me, have you?" I said with disappointment. More golden silence. I played with one of Riker's pips—four of them now—while Jean-Luc limped down the steps. The confetti flicked off his shoulder.

"Don't hurt yourself," I joked, but my smile fell the closer he got. He was entering my space now, and there was something about that I didn't like, something different than anyone else entering my space. I was leaning on Riker after all, and yet Picard, two feet away, felt the more palpable of a presence.

He spoke at a whisper. "I want you to leave."

I remembered what this was. What I was. I leaned even closer.

"You? You think you can ask me for anything?"

He nodded as if he had understood something I had not meant to imply. "If you wish to punish me, Q, punish me. Not these."

I raised my chin and pushed off of Riker. "Punish you?" I wanted to say, but glared instead like I was actually considering it.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years we had not spoken, had not even seen each other, and still we were stuck in the same old rut, repeating the same old game, over and over, nauseous, spent. I glanced at the streamers above, then at Riker, the President, the podium. I made a hard turn on my heels and left the room. The doors opened for me and shut behind.

He was right. Doing anything more would be punishing him, and I had not come here for him at all. He had distracted me.

There was a wet bar on the lawn outside. The bartender skittered away upon seeing me. Was I on a 'Wanted' poster somewhere? I was keenly aware that I should make my exit, that it would be the Q thing to do, but instead I poured a drink and downed it in one swallow.

The trouble was I was feeling something now, something much stronger and more permanent than a pang of sadness or a chill up the arms. And it irked me that I didn’t know what it was.

Chapter Text

The lowest moment in Picard's life had been the year 2366 after the incident with the Borg. Locutus had controlled his thoughts and his actions, had destroyed him so thoroughly it had taken years to put the pieces back together. Counselor Troi had told him back then that the worst was over, that he would live the remainder of his life in control of himself—his mind, his body—that he would never feel such helplessness again.

She'd forgotten about aging.

There were obvious differences, of course. Instead of all at once, his mind was lost in bits and pieces as the memories faded. The loss of his captainship was not forced but strongly coerced, with the need for spry minds and malleable wills on the fringes of the Federation after the Dominion war. And it was not from the Borg cube but from Earth Picard watched his declining significance, watched his once-close colleagues adapt and move on without him.

That was not to say being an admiral was miserable. It was just different and less pleasant than being a captain. All the maddening bureaucracy, the near-inability to simply give an order and see something done. The politics, the rivalries, the arguments. There were moments when Picard was lying in his bed, staring at the dark, blank ceiling—or during one of the unending arguments, cold cups of coffee, Admirals politely insulting each other across broad tables—when Picard had regretted not accepting Q's offer.

He missed exploring that much. That he thought even Q worth it.

He had not seen Q once since the Enterprise. It seemed another life now, another person who had conducted those affairs. Now he walked places instead of transporting, and after hurting his hip in a skiing accident, he limped places too.

There was one factor involved in Picard's decision to retire and one factor only. The official explanation was that he was about the age to do so. The actual reason was Picard's distaste for compromise. An unsettling change had shadowed Starfleet in the last decade as the Federation morphed from a paragon of justice into a soulless war machine. Officers would do seemingly anything in the name of winning, even selling out on their principles. Not Picard.

The saying was, Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. Fading away was exactly what Picard wanted to do, to retreat to France and his brother's family, to study science or history in whatever capacity he could. He had not envisioned that his career would end in this way, with his desiring to be ignored by Starfleet, but that was what the universe had become. Foreign. Something he could neither change nor explore and so something he no longer saw himself as much a part of.

He asked for a small ceremony. It was telling that no one in the leadership argued with him. He had not invited many of his friends beyond Riker, requesting that the others—Geordi, Worf, Beverly, Data, Deanna and so forth—visit him in France when he knew he would feel more at peace. It was not easy, fading away, but he was slowly coming to accept it, the move from power to powerlessness, from fame to obsolescence.

And then Q.

Q, who embodied power, who bookended Picard's most significant time on the Enterprise—Q like the turning of a lens threw his life into clear definition. Q, who had sworn they would never see each other again. Q, the single person in the universe who could give Picard a second chance.

Q, who was acting exactly as puerile as he always had.

Picard watched in stunned silence as Q fed Admiral Santos new words all in praise of himself. Apparently he thought he deserved full credit for Picard's career. He watched the way Q upgraded the ceremony, making it a more momentous occasion than if Picard had asked for a momentous occasion, an act that would be gossiped about among Starfleet leadership for years, knowing them. He saw Q's amusement at the chaos he was causing, his unflinching immobilization of Riker, his gleeful disrespect of the President. He watched all of it, and he couldn't help but become angry.

It wasn't about Starfleet decorum; to hell with all of that. Q had barged in without asking—and wasn't that always the problem? Not only did Picard feel belittled by Starfleet, he felt belittled by Q, who did not even find him worthy enough to dictate the terms of his own Starfleet-belittled retirement ceremony.

Q had left Picard with open scorn all those years ago. While Picard had wondered if that scorn would turn to bite him with a vengeance, he had never dreamed it would stew for so long. He was especially unsettled when Q exited the building, leaving Picard's request for substitutionary punishment hanging between them unanswered, the box unchecked. And how long would that keep, then?

What was left of the ceremony was a disaster. Admiral Jacobs stuttered so badly presenting Picard with an award that Picard simply took the medal and seated himself, leaving the admiral standing there, hands still extended and pale-faced.

What they didn't know, what they would never believe even if Picard told them, was that Q wouldn't be back for them. He never played the same trick twice. Yet they whispered and fidgeted as if in a sudden expression of Q's anger the roof would fall in.

The president glared at Picard from across the stage. Their last meeting had not ended on good terms—an argument about the morality of trading medical supplies for war criminals. In front of twelve councilors, Picard had thickly implied the president was a snake. Today's development certainly didn't help their relationship.

When at last the ceremony staggered to an end with all the grace of a reanimated corpse, Picard wished he could slip unnoticed out the back door. He held himself in place, however, and shook the hands that shook his. Theirs trembled in fear; his own, in barely-suppressed rage.

Q had promised he'd stay away. It was as if he'd said it solely to get Picard off his guard so he could shock him all over again.

"Are you all right, sir?" Riker asked from the bottom of the steps. Picard welcomed the excuse to leave the line, descending as nimbly as his hip would allow him. They had not seen each other in four months. Picard was more glad than usual to have a friend nearby.

Riker's hand was not shaking.

"Perturbed," Picard answered, "that's all."

"I thought he'd stopped bothering you."

"I thought so as well. I should have known better. He was never beneath these tricks before."

"Well, I doubt your knowing would have changed anything."

"They think I did this. That I've been talking to him all this time." Picard leaned closer. "That's what the president thinks, I'm certain. That I planned this."

Riker frowned, a concerned expression, not what Picard had expected.

"What is it?" Picard asked.

"I was told he's out there, sir. Q."

"What?"

"Where the reception's supposed to be. I can have the Titan beam you out if you'd prefer to avoid him."

"Do you really think that would work?"

Picard unclasped his pips of admiralty from his collar, one other thing Admiral Jacobs had forgotten to do. He dropped those and his medal onto a passing pew as he started toward the door.

"And it isn't 'sir' anymore, Captain. It's Jean-Luc, if you can manage."

Hundreds of people choked the aisle in the back, trying to leave but failing. If anything, more of them seemed to be coming inside than out. Fortunately when they saw what ex-admiral was pushing through them they made room. Q, no doubt, was to blame for this.

Picard felt a thrill of adrenaline that caught him off guard. The only emotion he recalled feeling before a confrontation with Q was keen and bitter annoyance. He decided it was not about Q himself, rather the situation, which reminded him of the Enterprise. No paperwork, no committees, just the mission before him. There was pride, too, at the way the crowd parted for him—Picard, the only human in the galaxy Q ever remotely obeyed.

Picard broke through the crowd into the blinding flame of sunlight. Covering his eyes, he spotted Q at a bar on the lawn at least fifty meters away. Nothing seemed to occupy the entity's attention more than the drink in his hand. Odd. Considering the crowd, Picard had expected much worse.

They were jittery. He couldn't blame them.

"I'll take it from here," he said to Riker.

"With all due respect, Jean-Luc, I don't think you can order me anymore."

"Riker. Will. He's already made it clear…" Picard wasn't sure how to finish that thought, as Q hadn't made anything clear. "I have a feeling the worst is yet to come."

"I'd like to be there for it, if you don't mind."

"If you're trying to—"

In a flash of light, Riker vanished.

It went downhill from there. All of those onlookers who were scattered around Picard—those who probably thought themselves braver than the others to be baring themselves—they hurried back inside the cathedral.

Picard watched them wryly, thinking better of the idea that they saw him as a hero. More accurate, some virgin offered up to a god's fury. The doors groaned shut behind them.

There was no other person in sight. A dozen glistening skyscrapers hedged the field. Q was watching him, though it was too far away to see any specific expression.

"Enjoying yourself, Q?" Picard shouted. The question bounced off the skyscrapers.

Q looked away, sipping his drink as if that were his reply: yes.

Picard saw nothing else to do but approach. The reception area was a tragedy: empty tables, melting ice sculptures, platters of food stagnating in the heat. And Q, not giving a damn, just as always.

Picard had already noted this in the cathedral, but he was impressed again by how very young Q looked. It gave him the uncanny feeling he had slipped into the past.

But Picard had a job to do. This wasn't the time for nostalgia. He was still wearing the uniform.

He barked out a second question, and a third.

"Where is he? What have you done with Riker?"

Q raised the tumbler, turning it in his hand. "He's in here. I've made him just as small as I think he is." After a beat, he added, "I jest of course." He gestured upward with his eyes. "He's on the Titan. Orbiting. …They've locked a transporter on you. Oops. Not in an orbit anymore."

This news was delivered so calmly Picard wasn't sure whether to be concerned or not. "And where is he now?"

Q shrugged. "About ten hours away, maximum warp."

The band of tension around Picard's shoulders started to relax. There'd been no telling which Q he was dealing with: the Q playing nice or the Q willing to make a point no matter the cost. At least this Q didn't seem to be on any sadistic killing mission.

"Was that really necessary?" Picard asked.

"You would have brought him down here."

"All of it, Q! You being here. You flaunting yourself like this! You said you would never show yourself again."

Q studied the tumbler, unfazed by Picard's tone. "That's a different question. Necessary? Nothing I do is necessary. And I told you why I'm here. They were getting me all wrong."

"Yet here you are still. Now make your point and leave."

"Moi? Mon capitaine! Or should I say mon amiral? Ou mon citoyen?"

"Va te faire foutre."

Q laughed. "Touche. C'est tres bien! And how are you, Jean-Luc? I should have asked you that back there. I'm sorry."

"Angry."

"Anger." Q licked his lips, seeming to ponder the word. "I thought I was the only one who felt anger."

"You must feel something, Q, to go to all this trouble."

"Did I ever tell you I like the way you say my name?" Q slipped behind the bar and washed out his glass. "What are you drinking now? Not Earl Grey still?"

"If you think you're going to charm me into letting you stay here, you're wrong."

"I don't think you'll let me do anything, because that it isn't how it works. Why are you acting like this? Relax. Get out of that uniform, why don't you? You're done with all of that."

Q flicked his hand and Picard's uniform changed into something tan and casual, something he might wear at the vineyard in France. It was a simple yet firm example of what Q had said: there was no letting him or not letting him, no matter what their relationship used to be.

Picard glanced back at the cathedral. The bold black doors. The tower bell swaying in the breeze. "Very well, Q. If you're not going to leave, I am."

"Oh you can't tell me you honestly care what happens to them?"

"I care very much."

"After that interment you call a ceremony? What was that medal they gave you, for commendable service? That's the best they can do? In some cultures that sort of mental laziness is a crime. I should blight them all."

"You will do no such thing!"

Q nodded slowly. "It's good to see you're still excitable. But you needn't worry. I had my fit up there, and I'm calm now. The picture of politesse. You can even call them down if you like, I promise to behave."

"As you promised I would never see you again."

"I never promised. Besides it was more about me never seeing you than you never seeing me."

Over a decade had passed, yet Q was speaking to him as though it were days. Worse, Picard was encouraging him by responding in kind. He needed to divert the course of this conversation, and soon, or else deal with the consequences of his resolve beginning to crack.

"You're so old," Q said. "When did that happen?"

"About the same time as everything else."

"Does it hurt?"

"Does what?"

"Your hip. You hobble like a Risian crab. Would you like me to fix it?"

"No."

"I should. You're painful just to watch. Haven't you seen a doctor?"

"I have. It's healing now."

"And how long will that take?"

"Is there something on your mind, Q?"

"Q," Q repeated, mimicking Picard's frustrated tone. "If you're worried about them watching us, they are. Thousands of them in these skyscrapers, crowded at the windows. No one's allowed onto the field lest they go the way of Riker. Still afraid of being seen with me in public?"

"Is that what this is about?"

Q picked almonds from a bowl of nuts, splitting them with his front teeth. "So you're telling me I should go, are you? You want your reception and I should—" He gestured with an almond half. "—va te faire foutre?"

"That is exactly what I'm saying."

"I hear the words, but they sound a little rehearsed and frankly I'm having trouble believing them. Then again the lack of conviction in your voice could be... self-defeat. You don't think I'll obey anyway. But I know a way to tell the difference! I'll give you another chance. This time, Picard, if you ask me to leave, I'll leave. Be careful, though." Q held up his finger. "I will vanish on the spot."

Picard was inclined to believe he would. After having wished to speak to him more than once, he realized he would regret it if Q did vanish. But here? With so many inconvenienced—so many lives at stake? The decision seemed obvious; the needs of the many prevailed.

"Don't do this now, Q. Not in the middle of Starfleet."

"That's strange. I didn't hear a command to leave in there."

"If I ask you to leave, will you return? Say tomorrow?"

"No."

"You're asking me to choose between my retirement reception and you."

"I'm merely asking if you mean what you've been saying all this time."

Picard had no more room to argue. Q had turned the criticism onto him. It was either admit he was a hypocrite or goodbye to Q. He pulled out a bar stool and sat.

Q eyes lit up. There was a twist of a smile just beginning to form before he started with the almonds again. "You're not betraying anyone, you know. If Starfleet had the chance to sidle up to me at your expense, I'm sure they would."

"Is there some expense I should know about?"

"I already told you they were safe."

"Then perhaps we could go elsewhere? I see no need to remain here."

Q gestured to the tables. "And let all of this food go to waste? Come, you can stop pretending this isn't what you want. You put on a spectacle for Starfleet, and for me… but you're glad I came today."

"Under other circumstances perhaps I could say 'glad.' The emotion is not nearly so positive. You're making this as difficult as possible for me when it's the same to you if it wasn't."

"So I'll go then?"

"That isn't what I said."

"Thirsty?"

Q set a drink on the bar. Ice in some clear liquid. Then he leaned forward so that their temples touched and whispered in Picard's ear, "I am making this difficult."

He vanished.

Picard's stomach dropped. He turned and saw Q at one of the food tables and felt such a flood of relief it disturbed him. He needed to control himself. He was supposed to be getting rid of Q, for his own safety, for everyone's. Even if he was temporarily deviating from the plan, that was the plan.

Picard sniffed the drink Q had poured only to set it aside. Vodka. He poured himself a whiskey—better for his nerves—and made for the table where Q was eating.

He felt the adrenaline again. Now he understood what it was: an anticipation fueled by years of wondering, of what if. When he reached the table, he did not sit. Not yet.

"You told them you were the shining moment of my career," Picard said.

Q was licking some sticky food off his fingertips. "I was."

"No, you weren't. You intervened once or twice."

"You mean the once or twice I saved your life? Or do you mean the Borg? Or the anomaly?"

"Both of those your creations."

"I, create the Borg? Jean-Luc." Q bit into a strawberry, tossed the green away.

"You may have told yourself you were improving the ceremony, giving me some voice I didn't have before, but you never asked me what I wanted. You did what you wanted. And you know good and well that in doing that, up there, they'll remember this day for you, not for me."

"History tends to remember the person who's still around."

"I mean your display, and you know that. Don't argue a point I'm not making."

For a moment Q looked like he might bite back. "What point are you making?"

"If you wanted to attend, you could have done it as inconspicuously as anyone else. If you wanted to change anything, you could have asked."

"I'm not anyone else. I couldn't have just attended."

"Then you shouldn't have attended at all. You weren't even invited, Q."

Q turned his palms upward. "And I humbly ask for your exoneration. There. Do we feel better now?"

"I might consider that apology if it had been at all genuine."

"Would you like me to get on my knees?"

"I know you think me stubborn. Belligerent even. You once asked me why I can't talk to you as I would anyone else. The truth is I found it difficult to talk to someone who lives in a fantasy world, or at best, is so wholly removed from the consequences of his actions that he need never consider his actions at all. I know it surprised you when I considered them. I know it chafed you when I told you how poorly you'd come across."

Q didn't reply. He was just silent, just watching Picard.

"You kill without thought. The memories of those who have died under my command still haunt me. You rearrange people as though we were trinkets on a side table—Riker, me more than once… when even as captain of the Enterprise, even with that authority, although I know you never recognized it… I always minded people's personal desires first."

"I can see you've given this some thought."

"I've had time to."

"But you've not considered the most important thing. My interest. Jean-Luc, please. It's been fifteen years. Let's not renew some dreadful argument we both grew bored of. Sit. Drink that… whatever it is you're holding. I'm trying very hard to play nice."

"As am I."

"Pontificating is a terrible place to start. Sit."

Picard complied. A plate of food appeared in front of him, but he didn't touch it.

"I do live in a fantasy world," Q said. "Everything I am is fantasy to you. Would I be interesting to you otherwise?"

"I didn't mean what you are. What you do."

"Where I come from they're the same."

"So every one of the Q behaves exactly the same as you?"

"I'd rather not bring the Continuum into this."

"Why not?"

Q picked at his food and said nothing.

Picard sighed, shifting direction. "I'm not afraid of being seen with you in public. You mistook that for what it really was, that being seen with you would be a tacit approval of your behavior, would impugn my credibility as captain of the Enterprise. And yes, I feared for my credibility. I feared for anything related to my command. That was the fear you saw. It wasn't you; it was how you behaved. But as you said, perhaps those are the same."

When Q didn't reply to that, Picard moved the subject along.

"Why did you come?"

"If there's one question I loathe it's that one."

Picard sighed, grasping for a rephrase. "What was it you were doing before this?"

"I was warming my hands against the heart of a star. I was cascading through a string of Andorian ice tunnels. I was on a planet full of monkeys, soaking my feet. What does it matter to you what I was doing? Something exciting. Something you couldn't comprehend."

"But you saw I was retiring."

"Oh, that's what you're getting at. No. I was told about that. I haven't been watching you. All of that promptly stopped. No, it's a coincidence, my knowing."

"Your uniform's out of issue."

"Is it?" Q said in a way that meant he knew.

There had been so many lulls in the conversation, one after the other, that Picard decided he had better get it over with. He picked at his food before pushing the plate away. "There's something I should tell you. The reason I'm here. I would… consider that offer you gave me. If you extended it again."

The air felt electric. Q made only the slightest movement, folding his hands in front of him, and yet Picard could sense a wall of energy behind it. It was something deadly and dark. As if Picard had split an atom and created the bomb.

"Of course you would," Q said. "You've nowhere else to go. And what am I, supposed to take Starfleet's sloppy seconds?"

"I was only informing you. I would regret it if I hadn't."

"Well I'm glad I could be here to unburden you.”

The sarcasm stung. Picard felt the need to defend himself. "It's only natural I might wonder. You spoke of my retirement when you offered."

"After which I made very clear I had lost all desire in that direction."

"I regret that conversation, Q. I wish... things had not ended like that."

"Of course you do. You never saw me again."

"It isn't that. More that you were obviously upset."

"Don't you dare." The word had weight. It swelled in volume, reverberated in the air so that a flock of birds on the other side of the field took flight. Picard remembered how many hundreds were watching them, and perhaps so did Q, because he leaned forward and continued more quietly, his finger stabbing the table, "Don't you dare feign to know my thoughts on anything."

Something about the threat in Q's eyes reminded him of how icily Q, in their last meeting, had told him he didn't care if he lived or died. Picard wished he could leave. A catch-22: too dangerous to stay in Q's presence, too dangerous to risk any sudden movement. He was beginning to feel fortunate things had not worked out.

"I could have made you ruler of the Alpha Quadrant," Q said. "I could have made you a god. I could have given you anything you wanted, things you couldn't have wanted, things you haven't imagined, and fifteen years later we would only be starting. I wouldn't have left you out to dry like this. I wouldn't have sent you skulking back to France."

"You're right. I suppose I must live with the consequences of my decision."

Q laughed. "Don't pretend to be taking this easy either. It's obvious you're desperate for me."

Picard was startled only momentarily. "It's obvious you are bitter even years after the fact. Desperate? You came to me today, Q, let's not forget that."

"I can see it was a mistake. I can see my mere appearance gave you a less-than-favorable impression."

Picard finished his whiskey. He didn't trust himself to answer wisely.

"The truth is I should have never picked you up as a hobby," Q said. "The Continuum mocked me for it. The jokes they tell, you should hear them. They're very funny. More than once I've considered going back in time and warning myself."

Picard murmured, "You should warn me as well." In the middle of the sentiment he realized it was a mistake, that it would do more harm than good, but the words were out. He gleaned the worst from the suffocating silence that followed. Then the meticulous, almost shaky quality in Q's reply.

"Maybe we should both go back so as to remove any doubt. Then again what would warning you do? I created this. It was I who bent down and shaped the mud."

Picard was in the process of shaking his head at the ridiculous God metaphor, when several things happened in rapid succession. Q slid his hand under Picard's chin, despite the table in between them, which must have disappeared. Picard was being guided up by his chin as though he were some kind of animal. When he resisted, Q's fingers became searing hot.

Picard hissed and stood, fumbling with the chair. Even then Q's pressure did not relent. Picard realized what Q wanted and refused to give it, lifting his chin away from the heat of the entity's hand, keeping his eyes fixed on a cloud above.

"The great Captain Picard. Decomposing into the annals of history. Who worked so hard to escape daddy's vineyard only to retreat there tail tucked between his legs. Look at me."

Picard was shocked as his eyes moved against his will, fixing on Q’s. He tried moving them away. Nothing. He tried to retort, to bite back at Q's smugly understated smile, but his jaw would not open either. He felt such fury his arms grew light. His breath rasped through his nose.

Q, on the other hand, was the image of calm. "So saggy, your eyes. Does it frighten you seeing them in the mirror each morning? It's no wonder you latched onto—"

Q staggered backwards, clutching his jaw where Picard had struck it. He looked at his hand, blotted with red, then he touched his face again.

It was Picard's turn to sport the smug, understated smile. He shook the pain out of his fingers, waiting for whatever punishment would come. Something a hundred times worse, he suspected. But he didn't care. He would do it all over again, just for the sight of Q's face under his fist.

Chapter Text

He'd hit me. I should have seen it coming, but how would I? He'd never been so feral before.

It was an oversight not pinning down his arms. I'd expected holding his jaw would be warning enough. No mortal had ever dared hit me like that, without invitation or provocation, and so my first thought upon lurching backwards was that I would kill him. My second thought was how many hundreds of humans had just witnessed this embarrassment, but I fixed that as soon as thought it, snatching the memory from all of their minds: two thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine of them. Poof. My third thought was the stinging in my lip, the blood in my hand.

I looked up at him, and I let him see all of my anger.

He was favoring his hand as if that decrepit limb was of more worth than my perfect, ageless face. The infuriating thing was he didn't look at all worried.

"What an incredibly," I spat blood onto the grass, "stupid thing to do." My mind seemed foggy, numbed by shock.

"I'm not afraid of dying. I'm not afraid of age. It was you who were terrified when faced with it." He announced this as if it were a rebuttal, as if I had said something to this effect when clearly I had not.

"What ever are you talking about?" I said.

"You crossed a line, Q. Were you in my place you would not stand for this. I will not stand for it. And I don't deny you can snuff out my life for saying it."

I wished the blood and swelling away, sick of enunciating through a fat lip. "Yes you'd love to die now, wouldn't you? The martyr, cut down by the malevolent Q. That's always been your favorite story.”

He started to leave, but I brought him back with a flash.

He fumed. “If you're going to retaliate, do it. Punish me. Anything you like. Let me go or have this over with, now."

He held open his arms as if making himself a target. I was too angry to laugh, and so astounded by his invitation that I considered it. Considered giving him so much pain his mind would bail into permanent insanity. The thought was not unpleasant.

"You have no idea how much I’m tempted,” I said.

“Good. Because I would rather die now than prolong this conversation, and since you won't allow me to leave…”

"I wouldn't kill you, you pathetic, bald ape. I would torture you.”

“Whatever gives you closure, Q. What a shame you couldn’t find it these fifteen years.”

I was so livid I could not think until I saw the wet of his tear ducts, until we were so close he could not mistake my whisper.

"I am Q. Infinite. Ageless. You are a speck on a speck of my existence. Why kill you when you’ve already died? They're lowering you into your grave."

I was hoping he would try to hit me again. He did. I caught his fist and slammed it to his side. I spun him, catching both of his hands behind his back. He gave a little grunt of surprise. And then I pulled him into me and leaned down into his ear.

“This is what you are. A weak old man. Everything you love has moved on, not a soul to say goodbye to you. But I cared, for a time.”

He tried to break away, wiggling, but I yanked him against me again and he went still. I turned to his other ear. "I did this for you. I did everything for you. So let’s be very clear what’s going on here. If I really wanted you, Jean-Luc, I could have had you."

I released him. He took off without a passing glance, hobbling towards the church.

This was why I had come. This was what I had stayed for. A better memory of him than the last, a memory where I was the controlling vote. He was so blotchy and weak, like a shrunken vegetable. And so unremarkable without a uniform. In that moment, I think I finally understood what the Continuum had been laughing about.

Thus was our ending. A clumsy collapse of an ending, an ending which bore too many similarities to our last ending for my taste. But at least in the similarities I found comfort. I found reassurance that there could be no other ending between us.

How long until the guilt struck me? Not long. Days maybe. I was strolling through the hydrogen rainforests of Altari Four when the sun hit the underbrush just right and I realized… I had done it all wrong. I had crossed a line. It was exactly as sudden as that, too, as if my subconscious had been mulling on it, had found it indigestible and vomited it up. I couldn't reason myself out of it—the guilt, I mean. It grew in me with all the conspicuous vibrance of an Altari hydrogen flower. Our quarrel went beyond him being human and me being Q. There had been moments when I had gone out of my way to be spiteful.

Several days later and the guilt was still there, glowing, growing, more bold and astonishing than ever.

But I was so sick of dealing with him. That more than pride held me back from fixing anything. Exhaustion. The ennui of treading the same ground again and again. I was worried, too, worried that if I tried to move beyond him I would stumble, or worse, that I was incapable of moving beyond him. An irrational fear, but it haunted me the same as a rational one. Perhaps I should cut my losses, embrace the guilt forever.

But he had a space in my head I desperately wanted back. I needed to forget him; it wouldn't work unless I did. I needed nothing between us either positive or negative, a neutrality to be lost in the noise. I could do that, couldn't I? There had been a time not fifty years ago when I'd never thought of him at all. How hard would it be to achieve that again?

Suddenly nothing felt more important. I told Q our weekend plans were off. I went to a place that was good for thinking, the heart of a bilious, violet-colored nebula tucked away in a hollow of the galaxy. Quiet there. Spreading thin my essence, I mapped out the possibilities. Everything on the table, nothing out of the question. Even visiting him again, if that's what I needed to do. Even falling on my knees and begging for clemency. This was the difference between now and his retirement party, and this was how I knew it would work. I thought of everything. Things so disgustingly humble they would probably unmake me. No more hiding from the Federation. No more flinching at the very name of Jean-Luc Picard.

It was he who gave me the solution, a tactic I had once accused him of using on me. Courtesy. Was anything more impersonal than that?

First, I healed his hip, and I healed it better than any of his primitive doctors would have done. It would last him well beyond the grave. Second, I gave him something I knew he would enjoy. It was an extravagance he would probably donate or destruct rather than use, but it was the meaning more than the object itself that mattered. I trusted he would weight it more heavily than my recent words.

It was painful, remembering that exchange. I had said so much about his insignificance. I had pounded him with it. I needed to tell him it wasn't true; it was the last thing from true. Once I had put it into words, then and only then did I feel free.

My third and final gift. Honesty.

Chapter Text

Picard was stargazing in the family vineyard on his second week of retirement when the ease in his step startled him. He tested his leg, first putting a little weight on it, then all of it. One minute later he was jogging through the vines. It was the next day at the insistence of his sister-in-law Marie that he had his hip checked out with a medic. When the scans showed neither signs of injury nor operation—not even the normal wear and tear evident in a man of Picard's age—he had no doubts about what had happened.

But Q didn’t stop there.

For the second incident, or intrusion as Picard liked to think of it, Commander Data was visiting. They were dining at a café in Vesoul when the waiter relayed a message from Marie saying they had better come home immediately. Dessert was abandoned, tea left to go cold. Marie met them outside the villa with a communiqué from Starfleet marked classified. Picard keyed in his command code and the insignia vanished. Under other circumstances he would have been amused his code still worked; he would have placed a bet on Starfleet changing it faster. What the PADD revealed drained his humor dry. It was a ship. A ship in Earth's space dock, slender and obsidian against the cloud-swirled oceans. And beneath the image of the ship, a block of text.

"It appeared three hours ago," he read aloud, "in a great flash of light. Other ships currently in dock were shifted aside to make room. The ship is listed in the registrar, Prospero, commissioned this year, today. Ownership under… Under my name."

Picard dropped the PADD onto a settee and smoothed his hand over his head. He could feel the dazed eyes of Marie and the steely, knowing eyes of Commander Data.

"Dammit, Q," he whispered.

"It would appear so," Data said.

"If I wanted a ship, I would have requested one."

"Unlikely, sir. Interstellar ships are rarely commissioned for civilians. Since the advent of the Dominion war, some private ships were even seized—"

"Yes, thank you, Data. I know."

It took them the better part of an hour brief Marie on Q, even with Data's crystalline recollection of the facts. She was understandably alarmed, so they had to convince her that, no, no one was going to disappear to Sherwood Forest, the Borg were not going to attack and they were all perfectly safe here otherwise. Data was wise enough not to mention how many species Q had tormented or how cavalier he was with humanoid life. Q had not visited Picard once in the last fifteen years, outside of the retirement ceremony, and so with some credibility Picard could reassure Marie that the next fifteen would prove just as uneventful.

When that was settled — when Picard was exhausted of hearing, speaking, even thinking the name Q — he retired to his flat separate from the main house. There the reality which confronted him was worse than the one he'd been tired of, so much so that he longed to return to the simplicity of merely describing Q.

What to do now? What should be said to Starfleet, first of all? A ship. He could hardly believe it but there it was, plain as day on the PADD. What in the hell was Q playing at?

Data knew about the incident at the retirement ceremony. Everyone in Starfleet knew. There was surveillance footage, though Q had blotted out the audio. He had blotted out Picard’s punch too, disappointingly. And so while Data knew about the visitation from Q, knew that words had passed between Picard and Q culminating in the cancellation of the reception, he did not know the full extent.

How much worse it had gotten after Picard had asked Q to reconsider his offer. It was as if Q had appeared just to reject him. The entire conversation had felt a trap. Once Picard had come home and calmed himself to a few glasses of brandy, he had purposed to forget about Q for good. Close out the remainder of his life in peace.

And then these "gifts." Reminders of the power Picard might have taken advantage of had he played his cards better. Clearly that was Q's intent. To taunt Picard, flaunt what might have been.

A ship. More like a petty reminder of Q's reach.

Picard poured a glass of wine and collapsed into a chair in front of the fire. The glow of the flames soothed him, as did the tapping of Data's fingers on the corner console.

Data had been generous enough to pen the reply to Starfleet, whole paragraphs of well-worded, noncommittal nothing which might delay the need for a decision. Starfleet claimed to want use of their space dock again, but considering a new docking port had appeared and the old docks still serviced the same amount of ships, Picard wasn't sure what they were anxious about. Perhaps they missed the extra space. Perhaps they wanted to order someone around as a way to ease their nerves, a knee-jerk reaction to Q's whims Picard was intimately familiar with.

"It's like before," Picard said toward the fire. "Like the first time we encountered him. He has me under a microscope, wants to see me jump through hoops like some dancing toy. And what if he never tires of it? What so-called gift will I be given next? He healed a fracture in my hip against my express wishes, were you aware of that?"

Data replied that he was not.

"I suppose I hadn’t told you yet. I told Marie, but I didn’t tell her how. Now she's putting two-and-two together."

Data keyed off the console and seated himself in the opposite armchair, fingers woven together, expectant. He had not much changed since the Enterprise. He was wearing the informal Starfleet reds and three full pips instead of two and a half. Grey streaked along the right side of his hair just as Picard remembered from the future, or should he call it the present now? Back when Q had sent him spinning through time, "saving humanity."

"I should be angry,” Picard said. “On the Enterprise I was angry. Now that it’s only me..."

Picard’s eyes focused on the flames. He continued, "What universe is there free of Q? I choose that one. Meeting him has been the single most unfortunate event of my life."

"Were it not for you, sir, Q might have committed xenocide,” Data offered.

"If he was telling the truth about that."

"Q has exhibited questionable moral judgment on many an occasion, but I have no record of him ever directly speaking a lie."

"It would be impossible to catch him in one."

"Would not the burden of proof lie with us?"

"Commander, whose side are you on?"

"The side of the facts. And yet I apologize if I appear unsympathetic."

"No. No, your candor is appreciated. But if you could be a little less candid in Q's defense?" Picard smiled, hoping Data recognized the joke. Data gave no indication besides one quick nod, which could really go either way.

"I have one confusion, sir,” Data said.

"What is it?"

"If you are upset your hip was healed, you may simply fracture it again. I would not suggest this, but there are doctors on Qo'noS who may prescribe it as a matter of honor."

"It isn't 'sir' anymore, Data. It's Jean-Luc."

"I do not mean it as a statement of rank."

Picard sighed. He didn't feel up to arguing. Nor did he feel up to explaining why a mended hip bothered him so. Too much of it was entangled in the past, too much about Q. He set the wine aside.

"I should probably get some sleep."

"Did you send the message?" Picard asked Data the next morning.

"I did not, sir. I was waiting on your clearance."

"Good. Wonderful. I appreciate you writing the reply, but I don't think we need it anymore. You may inform Starfleet I don't want the ship. I don't care what they do with it."

"It is registered under your name."

"And they can treat it as any other civilian ship which docks without permission."

"I do not think there is a precedent."

"I'm sure they'll figure something out. I accept the gift of my mobility because apart from some lunacy I can't help but accept it. But this ship, I will have nothing to do with. I will not dance for his leisure."

For a moment Data's eyes remained intent on Picard, thinking. Or was processing the correct word? Any other friend might have peppered Picard with questions, drowned him with concern instead of allowing him the space to think. Picard was grateful for Data's restraint.

Later, he felt a sink of guilt. They had planned this morning to see a presentation on a promising vaccine made from Juniper berries. It was more Data's field of interest than Picard's, but since Picard missed even the aura of scientific discussion he had readily agreed to accompany him. They were walking to breakfast, gravel crunching underfoot, when Picard halted.

"Good lord, it completely slipped my mind. I'm sorry, Data."

"Sir?"

"We were supposed to leave for Greenland. And I overslept."

Data showed no surprise. On the contrary, he seemed prepared with an answer. "I am not sorry. The concerns of a friend are as imperative as my own. You were obviously lacking the focus needed to attend. I have always found it more efficient to deal with the reality one is given rather than the reality one had planned for."

Another moment of clarity, compliments of Mr. Data. So many of those on the Enterprise. Picard smiled sadly. “I’ve missed your cool perspective. It’s an attitude I could stand to adopt.”

Starfleet didn't like Picard's answer. One might think they would be glad of the acquisition of a new, fully-functional and probably state-of-the-art ship, Picard grumbled to himself, and as if they had heard him thinking this from afar they sent down the ship's full specifications, or as much as could be determined.

The ship was simply impenetrable. Scans couldn't breach it, lasers couldn't bore into it, and neither could one of their officers so much as walk through the front door. It was secured with what looked to be, as far as they could tell, a DNA-encrypted lock. They had tried using a sample of Picard's DNA—he didn't ask what lengths they had gone to to get that—but to no avail. Their engineers concluded the DNA needed to be standing there, alive, in the flesh, and requested that Picard get himself to the space dock immediately.

Picard sent back a one-word answer. No. He might have added something about how they shouldn't be so sure it was his DNA they needed, but since he agreed they were probably correct about that, he didn't bother. He knew they wouldn't force him. The mere fact that Q had instigated this along with the worrisome notion that he might still be hovering around was enough to wither their annoyance into polite, pithy observances.

The ship might be dangerous, they said. He told them they should move it then. But they couldn't move it for the same reason they couldn't scan it or breach it; it was not responding to any of their technology and short of physically pushing it they didn't know what else to try. Then leave it there, Picard replied. Didn't they have the same amount of docks as before? Yes, but it was a security matter now and in fact they had been operating for the past few days with the entire wing shut down, diagnostics being run on everything. Every port had been shifted aside to accommodate the new one. If anything so much as a self-sealing stem bolt was out of place they could lose most of the dock.

Picard felt an eye roll coming on. He managed to send back a now four-word reply.

I don't want it.

Eventually he signed the ship's registration over to Data. It could stay in the dock; he didn’t care if Starfleet destroyed it. Knowing their opinion of Q, he guessed they eventually would. In the meantime he trusted Data would be as resourceful as he was discreet. As a Starfleet officer, Data brought the matter wholly in Starfleet's jurisdiction, leaving Picard to enjoy the remainder of his retirement in peace.

Picard was burdened only with two things. First, that he owed Commander Data a rather large favor for taking the ship under his wing. Second, the knowledge that Q was still out there, ready to torment him.

A month passed, and nothing. His paranoia about Q meddling in his life waxed and waned. He wasn’t proud of it. Anytime something remotely coincidental happened, it was the first place his mind went.

Two months passed. Still nothing. He grew less paranoid.

One night he dreamed Q had reinstated him as captain of the Enterprise. After snapping Picard into his uniform, the entity created a mission tailor-fit for him, something related to both archeology and diplomacy. Picard tried to resist, but the whole of Starfleet was begging him to accept. Everyone from the old Enterprise was there, even Pulaski and Crusher, who had never served at the same time. The true oddity was none of the crew seemed to remember or perceive Q, not even when a fourth seat was added to the bridge on Picard's right hand, and Q ambled from the turbolift and slumped there. On Q's collar were three pips now, not four…

Picard awoke with a start. He made a cup of Earl Gray and tried to forget the dream. It had been three months since the infernal Prospero, three months and not one interference from Q so blatant as those first two. He'd had his suspicions, but they remained just that: suspicions. It was as if his subconscious had been speaking to him through the dream, saying, This. This is what an act of Q looks like, since you're forgetting. It isn’t paranoia. It’s tangible.

Picard had been certain Q would continue to torment him. He did not like being wrong, but it was becoming more and more blatant that he was. Even Data had stopped contacting him to ask with meaning-laced subtext if everything was well.

Picard had been forming a second hypothesis in light of his first one standing still, that the ship and the healing of his hip might have been meant as apologies. There was a poetry to them, since they addressed two of the weaknesses Q had particularly mocked him for: his foolishness since leaving the Enterprise (the Prospero) and his age (the hip). Perhaps Q wasn't continuing to point out Picard's impotence but was, instead, trying to move forward?

Picard liked this hypothesis the least. He rarely reflected on it. No, it was better to think there was something more.

Picard had never planned on acknowledging the ship, but after four months of questioning he wanted answers. He asked Data where he might be able to find it, if he might be able to find it. The commander replied they had still been unable to move the Prospero from port.

Picard beamed up to the dock. No reception was waiting for him when the transporter room materialized around him. Only Data was standing there, holding a glass of champagne which he offered to Picard.

"It's your ship, Commander," Picard replied, "you should be breaking this across the hull, not drinking it. Not me drinking it. Where's your glass?"

"I thought it imprudent to damage the carpet. And as I do not drink myself…"

Data led the way toward Prospero's port. “It is docking port 91. Previously the ports stopped at 90.”

Picard sipped the champagne. “What’s the gossip about me, Commander?”

"The consensus is you are a stubborn old man,” Data replied. “The consensus is also since you have an omnipotent entity at your disposal, it is wiser to let you remain as such."

"Hardly at my disposal. Though they wouldn't believe it if I told them. So that's why they've left the ship here, hm?"

"I believe there were multiple factors in the decision."

They passed several of Picard's old colleagues, exchanging niceties with them before continuing on. Each of them was fidgety or brief, and Picard knew the reason for his coming here was as obvious as an alert light flashing over his head. Q, Q, Q. Four months on, and they were still tiptoeing around him. Would he ever escape it?

Docking port 91 was as much an advertisement for Q as Picard probably was. Sleek, low-lighted, organic… essentially nothing like the standardized ports around it. Only a month had passed since Starfleet had reopened the wing—so said Data. Except for the occasional cadet wafting past they were alone.

A green square glowed to the right of the hatch.

"I suppose this is it," Picard said, but before he pressed his hand to the panel he added, "You said there were multiple factors in this decision. Do you have any orders you should tell me about, Data?"

Data did not blink. "None that I should tell you about."

Picard thought he understood. "As soon as I open this, you're going to knock me out, aren't you?" He didn't wait for an answer. It wasn't fair to force one. He knew how thorough Starfleet could be, how loyal Data was in return, and so he pressed down his hand.

The hatch rolled open. A purple light glowed from within, staining their faces. Picard moved inside, feeling less the excitement of discovery than the urgency for privacy. After Data followed, the hatch shut behind them.

They had encountered a similar technology on the Enterprise when a man from the past had stolen a time capsule from the future. Rasputen? Picard couldn't remember the name. They'd been unable to scan the interior of his ship too, and so it was a solid bet Starfleet could not overhear them, even with Data's comm badge.

"Now would be the time, Data,” Picard said.

"To knock you out," Data acknowledged the joke. "I was given orders, sir, but only to see the ship's removal from port. That is assuming I can pilot the ship, which is assuming a great deal. I understand these orders are primarily due to the ship being in my ownership. Otherwise I was told to accede to your wishes, even if you wish I return the ship to you."

"Fascinating,” Picard said truthfully.

"I believe Admiral Atchinson trusts your judgment, as do many of the others."

"That's," Picard searched for the word, "interesting to note. But don't you think some of their lenient attitude has to do with Q?"

Data frowned. "I have considered this. I have also considered Starfleet may be curious about the ship's technology."

"I've considered that as well."

Picard continued forward.

"May I ask your intent in coming?" Data said.

"I suppose I'm looking for something." He added before Data could ask, "I don't know what it is."

A door swished open. Picard startled, his stomach dropping as if Q had just appeared in front of him. Beyond the door were three identical corridors forming a T. He scanned these branches quickly as if he might find Q standing here or leaning there. But there was no one.

Naturally, he thought. His paranoia was flairing up again, like a bad cough.

He started down the right branch, which opened into a modestly-sized dining and observation lounge. Its style matched the docking port outside, low-lit and peaceful, like a grotto. The next branch led them to a room not unlike Picard's quarters had been on the Enterprise. It made sense Q would choose something familiar there. The branch continued further, and at Picard's request Data went on ahead while Picard traced his steps back and took the third branch, to the left, which he had guessed would lead him to the bridge. He wanted to be alone for that one. The door did not open automatically. Like the main hatch, it seemed to require his touch.

He pressed his finger into the sensor. And there it was. The bridge.

It was surreal seeing it. He had thought of the Prospero so little he had no preconceived ideas, was simply experiencing it fresh. It was half the size of the Enterprise's bridge and almost completely bare. A single chair. A side table. A low shelf on the back wall. The most stunning feature was the ceiling, a dome made entirely of transparent aluminum. Were it not for the space dock, obscuring three-quarters of the sky, the room could be lit by starlight alone.

It was a bridge very much like one Q would dream up, a viewing room more than a command center, comfort more than utility.

Picard ran his hand along the ship’s plaque on the wall. It read, simply, “The Prospero” with an outline of the ship underneath.

Picard had not let himself really analyze the name, but he was familiar with the character of Prospero: an old man whose claim to the throne had been stolen from him, forced to live out his days on a secluded island plotting revenge. Was that how Q saw him? Shipwrecked and powerless? The similarities between Q and Prospero's sprite Ariel were also pointed.

There was a box sitting in the captain's chair. Grey, unwrapped, an afterthought. It was tightly sealed, budging only when pressured a certain way. Picard could smell its contents before he saw them: loose leaves for tea, Earl Gray. He knew there had to be more.

He poured the leaves into the lid and—there it is—a yellow card on the bottom of the box. A few lines of calligraphy. Picard knew it was Q's handwriting though he had never seen Q's handwriting. It was too formal, too neat. He held the card to the starlight.

Jean-Luc, it began. Picard shut his eyes a moment.

He steeled himself to begin again.

Jean-Luc. You're the best human I've met, and you're too good for rotting in some French villa like you haven't been an explorer all your life. Go outside. Look around. There really is so much more.

Picard put the box aside. He sat in the captain's chair. It was comfortable, more comfortable than his chair on the Enterprise had been, damn Q. He heard someone at the door.

"It is a large ship for the amount of passengers it would accommodate. There are beds for six people and six separate quarters, all as large as the first one. A luxury vessel at first glance, and yet there are two laboratories fully equipped with Starfleet's current research technology. The alien technology pertains to privacy, speed and communications, and I could not decipher it. I did discover a panel which suggests at current consumption the ship's power would last for 2.5 millennia. Even at peak power consumption I believe that number would remain impressive."

"Of course it would," Picard said.

He waited for Data to tell him he was wrong about Q taunting him. Wrong about Q caring. It seemed so obvious now, what this ship was for.

"Have you located the ship's piloting mechanism?"

"What?" Picard said. "Oh. Not yet."

Data's eyes shifted to the opened box of tea.

"It's an apology," Picard said. "Not just that, the whole ship. And I don't think he cares whether or not I accept it."

Picard pressed his fingers into his eyelids, because he didn't know what to do. The ship was beyond worth. He couldn't destroy it, at least not without lengthy contemplation. He couldn't give it to Starfleet, not with technology such as this, so overtly ahead of its time. He didn't feel right using it either.

He was getting old, weak, delusional. For he saw now what a fool he'd been. All signs pointed to Q being gone forever.

The guidance systems on the Prospero were automated. Picard had only to turn on the computer and say where he wanted to go and, with a negligible margin of error, the ship went. They located an available dock orbiting Titan, a private port where the ship might elude the Federation's interest. The more Picard interacted with the ship's technology, the more he wanted to scold Q for ever bringing it here. The potential for abuse from a species so recently marred by war…

He had thought the Q were more responsible than that.

Picard asked Data to transfer the registration back to him. He made sure the ship was locked tight and booked a passage back to Earth. It was as if he was operating on autopilot, not really thinking about these decisions, simply doing what felt right until he could mull them over at some later, more lucid time. Along with the certainty of Q's absence came the ability to act as he wanted to, no pride, no need to make a statement.

When he arrived home, he put Q's note in a chest with some of his other keepsakes from the Enterprise, and marveled again that Q had given him a ship, of all things. Didn't that just epitomize his arrogance? Always Q presumed to know what Picard wanted only to land shockingly far from the mark.

Picard did not need to explore anymore. Nostalgia was a power enough for old age.

Within the year, Picard was using her regularly.

He rationalized it at first with a dual-pronged argument. First, he had not much else to do with his time, and second, why not exploit the Prospero for the betterment of mankind? He took a few scientists with him, choosing colleagues who knew as little about a ship's underpinnings as he did so as to ensure everyone was on the same page about researching what the ship could show them and not the ship itself. On these expeditions, advances were made in astrometry, cosmology, exobiology and so forth, after which Picard no longer needed to rationalize anything. He starting thinking of the ship not as a personal gift but as a consolation prize left over from years of Q's bullying. It felt a better fit, this mindset, a reminder of Q's true nature and how they were all better off without it. It also had the desirable side effect of Picard not feeling in any way indebted for his present happiness.

And he was happy. Some days he enjoyed himself as much as he had on the Enterprise. The Prospero was as fast as any warship, as comfortable as any luxury liner, and the shields and sensors allowed him to survey nearly any phenomenon he wished. More and more often he took her out by himself, gone for weeks at a time. Marie worried, but after a few instances of him returning home in one piece she seemed to forget to. He brought back souvenirs for her, holo-images of some of the events he had witnessed.

One such event was a sun going supernova. In one second's time the star consumed all the matter it had faithfully nurtured for two hundred million years. A wave of energy, a massive surge of light which sparked through ancient planets as though they were specks of lint. For anyone else it would have been a remarkable but not unheard-of phenomenon, worthy of data collection for academic study but not much more than that.

For Picard, it stirred something profound within him.

It gave him idea.

He was an explorer, after all. He needed to explore.

He went back to Earth, remaining there for as long as it took to see the old sights again and to correspond with anyone willing and available. He ate a comfortable dinner with his family. Packing his things late that night, he set out. When they asked him how long he would be gone this time, he didn't say. He didn't know the answer himself.

He set his destination according to the star charts, and then all that remained was getting there. The Prospero would do that. He could rest. Reading, research, whatever would pass the time.

Every week he scheduled a meeting with himself and every week he kept it. In these meetings, he asked himself if he wanted to press on, giving each and every one of his doubts a fair hearing. He brought logs of the ship’s progress to determine exactly how long it would take to arrive at the destination and how long it would take to return home if he turned around immediately. Thirty-one times now he had answered the same. Press on. One more week.

He was confident, but that did not mean he didn't worry. At night when his mind settled into sleep the tendrils of doubt pushed their way through. He would remember the conversation he'd had with Riker a few weeks ago over the comm, his old friend painstakingly trying to understand his reasoning, and failing that, trying to argue him out of it. The conversation with Marie had been tender and tear-filled. Picard’s dreams would be restless too, friends he had not spoken to since leaving, friends he'd avoided, a parade of faces not unlike what one might experience the moment before death.

He dreamed many times of the Enterprise. Q was there, still a member of the crew.

In one such dream, a Klingon ship had opened fire on them. Picard ordered Q to board the enemy vessel to put an end to it. He expected no issues. Q was omnipotent and rarely encountered resistance, even from Klingons. When Picard hailed the ship to see Q's progress, Q appeared on the view-screen. His face was hardened in an expression of cold fury. "Wake up," he said.

The air on the bridge felt like the inside of a bell which had just been struck. Picard’s vision blurred and focused again. "What?" he asked, wondering what waking up had to do with the Klingons.

"Wake up,” Q repeated. He appeared in front of Picard and slapped him. Picard recoiled…

And in that motion hurled himself off the bed and onto the floor. He groaned with the impact, his sheets tangled in his legs. He could still hear Q's voice as plainly as though he were standing in the room, so real he couldn't relax.

"Computer, lights,” Picard muttered.

He scanned the room, exhaling a shuddery breath when he saw.

Q was standing in the doorway. Glaring.

Picard had hoped this would happen. He had even prepared himself for it, but for the life of him he couldn't remember a single thing he had planned to say.

Chapter Text

And so once again I find myself in the tedious position of having to explain why it is a being who can control anything, be anything, do anything would discover himself doing the very thing he wanted to do the least.

It would seem I have a penchant for torturing myself. I would have to talk to someone about that, maybe keep a journal, research medication. Later, though. In that exact moment I was too distracted to consider the ramifications of any of this; Picard was there, here, in front of me, and I demanded to know what he was doing. Alone. Half a year away from Earth and still going strong. There was not even scientific research that I could see, unless he was doing it all in his head.

When he didn't answer I repeated the question again, more slowly, more furiously. "What are you doing?"

He lifted himself back onto the bed and touched his forehead. He was still waking up. Humans had to do that, had to will themselves to full consciousness, the helpless little dears.

"Would you care for some tea?" I said. "A long shower? Shall I wait outside? Maybe I should return at a more convenient time, because please, don't let me interrupt your morning routine."

"It isn't morning." His voice was coarse. "It's the middle of the night."

"I asked you a question."

He looked at me. Not at all intimidated. Not at all surprised. If anything there was a glimmer of amusement. "Tea, please. You know how I take it."

Thoughts of why I tortured myself flitted past a second time. I was angry, angry that he was making jokes at a time like this and angry that he knew it made me angry. As if he wasn't having some sort of crisis. As if I wasn't, humoring him like this. The longer I stayed, the messier things would become. 

I started talking, and quickly.

“I don't need you to tell me what you think you're doing, here's what you are doing. You've pointed this little ship I gave you toward that little planet I showed you based on the little charts I left you. The ship will reach it, because I created it to reach anything, except you'll be long dead by the time it arrives. The further out you go the longer it will take you to return until your age catches up to you and you're quite literally in a dead zone. Add to this another layer of insanity—even if you were to somehow survive this journey, defying all the genetic predeterminates of your race, the planet won't be there. I told you the system was going supernova before anyone from the Alpha Quadrant would see it, and I specifically used those words. Well? Please correct me if I'm wrong. For once I'd like to be wrong.”

He went to the replicator, ignoring me.

"If it's suicide you want,” I said, “why not do it? This is a waste of a perfectly good ship."

"A waste that did not exist before you gave it to me,” he said.

"I gave you a ship, not a coffin. It's a reflection on me when you behave like this, did you ever think of that?”

“In fact I did.” He turned, tea in hand. "I hoped you would have an opinion, Q.”

I dropped my hands to my side, straightened. "So that's what this is. Let the record be amended, you're not insane, you're pathetic."

"No. No, I do want to see the planet again."

"Knowing all the while you won't get there in time."

He met my gaze, not denying it.

“And if I hadn’t noticed? Just straight on until you fall over dead?”

"I… Q…." He seemed not quite ready to speak, but I waited. I would out-patience him if that's what I needed to do.

He didn’t look suicidal. Too kempt, too recently-shaved—and so horribly deformed, now that I was looking at him. Wrinkled, frail, shorter than he used to be. If I thought about why, I felt a pang of existential horror which was relieved only by reminding myself I was Q and need never think of it at all. Death was his burden, not mine.

He sat on the edge of his unmade bed. There his face fumbled through the expressions—puzzlement, worry, urgency, resolve—and just as he opened his mouth to speak I answered him.

"No."

He frowned. "No to what? I didn’t ask a question."

"Will I whisk you off to that planet? No. Will I rig this ship so you get there faster? No. Will I reconsider what I told you years ago? No, no, no. I wouldn't even be here except you accosted me. Fifty light years that way I was salvaging a civilization from a string of volcanic eruptions, when a speck of light flickered in the night sky, and I looked up, and it was you. What's the saying? Any closer I would have bit you."

"It's unfair!” He shouted it. Not to me, towards the room as a whole. In a fit of energy, he stood. “It’s unfair for you mock me for this display. Yes, display. I have no way of contacting you. Of course I resort to this, you left me nothing else. You certainly come and go as you please."

"We have nothing left to say to each other. I gave you a ship. Not for suicide, though if that's how you wish to use it. I gave you that bone, the femur your doctors botched. There was a time I had to twist your arm to give you anything so much as advice, and now I don't know what you want from me, or why you think you deserve it.”

"I'm asking for a little time."

“I can see why, after you wasted so much getting here.”

"As I told you, I didn’t have any other option. And perhaps I am asking for more. I am asking you, for once, to listen to something other than the sound of your own voice!” He had shouted again. Seeing the heat in my eyes, he wisely shifted his tact. “Don't you think it's interesting, Q, that we're always arguing? In fact, I struggle to recall one conversation that did not devolve into this… this bitter prattle."

"'Don't you think it's interesting,' he says, as if we're having a pleasant lunch together.”

"It's something I've noticed."

"Well, forgive me if I don't care what you've noticed.”

"It’s worse than that. We've never talked."

“There’s another one! Tell me, Picard, do you often reflect on your memories of me like this? Is it a symptom of self-exile? Or just a consequence of my munificence?”

"Don't deny it. You yourself once asked me to simply talk, on the Enterprise. You held me hostage in my own room for that end.”

"I will not entertain this."

"Of course you won't. You're a frightened child."

I had nothing more to say to him. He was a fool, wasting what little attention I had given him only to insult me. He would have done better begging. My very appearance was an immense kindness, and if he would not recognize it—

"Q, wait, don't."

My arms were folded, and he reached out and clutched one of them. His fingers pressed into the top of my hand.

I looked at where our skin touched. His skin was corpse-cold, blotched with age. I couldn't remember a time he had ever touched me.

"Don't leave," he said. "Not yet."

I laughed, part chortle, part cough. As if him grabbing me would do anything. As if asking me would do anything. He had forgotten his place, forgotten what our relationship had only ever been. How had Data once put it? A master and his beloved pet? And that was at its zenith.

My eyes lifted to his, and I vanished.

His reaction was not what I would call entertaining. His hand, the one that had clasped my arm, fell slowly to his side. His shoulders slumped. He put his tea away, and took a sonic shower, and changed into his day clothes. Besides the ambiguity of his shoulders slumping, I could not detect any mourning over the time and effort he had wasted. Admittedly I wasn't looking too closely.

I felt an energy running through me, like nerves, which I was trying to shake off into the wide blackness of space. It wasn’t very effective. I needed to go somewhere calming, and lately that had been the Continuum. But before I left for the Continuum, I needed to get him home and keep him there. I needed to stop this from ever happening again.

There were a thousand ways I might go about it. I was Q, I could conceive of them, categorize them, prioritize them in a moment. I did so, noticing a few issues immediately. First, any way of blockading his ship would invariably affect other ships in the area, which would only make matters worse. Second, any way of grounding his ship felt like I was reneging my gift. I wouldn’t do that. Third, any way of enforcing the rule beyond this — whether involving a third party or altering reality — started to seem cold.

What was I supposed to do, police him myself? Unthinkable.

It was his damned love of exploration that was the cause of this, so integral to his being I couldn’t adjust it or alter it. Now he was forcing me to choose. His freedom or mine.

He was being interesting now — and I needed a distraction. He'd gone to the bridge and was running a scan in a fifty light-year perimeter from the point in space when I had appeared. No guesswork for this Magellan; he had asked the computer for the timestamp of my appearance, searching for M-class planets with volcanic activity.

This show of protest, futile though it was, amused me so much I didn't care about whether or not he had earned another interaction with me. I appeared on the ship's viewscreen.

"You're as small-minded as ever,” I said. “It's P-class. And did you think I would be there when you arrived?"

When he saw me his chin tilted up with a nervous energy I found uncomfortably familiar. I was wearing the judge's garb, pale skin, plummed lips. My fingers touched to form a cage.

"Q," he said, greeting me. "It’s a rank search according to planets I could plausibly visit. And yes, I hoped you would be there."

"I'm not sure if I should be flattered or file a restraining order. Speaking of restraining orders, you will not be permitted to stray beyond Federation space again. I'm sorry but that's how it’s going to be.”

He took two steps toward the screen. "And how do you plan on enforcing that?"

“I’ve had a few ideas. I’m still workshopping the best one.”

He shook his head. “I won’t allow it. I do not consent to your meddling.”

I smiled, concealing a budding annoyance. “You never have, and it hasn’t seemed to matter yet.”

“I came here of my own free will. This is still my ship, is it not?”

“For the moment.”

“You would take her away from me, Q?”

I rolled my eyes, angrier now. “I would do nothing to you, if it were up to me. But you insist on throwing yourself at my feet, demanding a response. I won’t be blamed for giving you one.”

He stared at me. I stared back, waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, I felt the plunging sensation of having no idea what came next.

Oh, of course I knew what I might say. I could insult him, especially the fish-like way he was gawking at me. I could wax poetic about my control over the universe and the meaninglessness of his resistance. I could tell him how much he exhausted me. I knew this script by heart, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? I could see the lines I would say, the lines he would say in return, and how it would all end. Then we would repeat ourselves, again and again. Rehearsing for some unknown catharsis, some conclusion that would never come.

It was pointless. Last time I had finally admitted that to myself, realizing that if there was any hope of breaking the pattern, I needed to try something new. So I had been kind to him. Yet, here we were again.

How could I have been so certain it was solved? And if I had been so wrong about this, what else was I deceiving myself about?

Some of these thoughts must have flitted across the judge’s makeup.

He stepped closer to the viewscreen. “Are you as tired of this as I am?” he said.

I glared at him, ignoring the fact that he had somehow seen my mind. “Tired of what?”

“Tired of this argument. Tired of those robes you’re wearing. Tired of not getting what you want.”

The urge to humble him was as keen as ever. But how to hurt him? The Enterprise was gone. So was his crew, and his Starfleet. His family? Most of them were gone too. His pride, gone.

“What a sad man you’ve become,” I said, appearing on the bridge behind him. Abandoning the judge’s clothes, I wore a robe as black and insubstantial as the vacuum of space. I looked quite formidable, if I do say so myself.

He swiveled and took me in, momentarily mesmerized by the robe. Then he blinked, eyes up to my face, brows hardened.

“Normally I’d threaten you,” I continued, “barter you into obedience, but you have nothing left, do you? You’ve lost everything. I suppose I could hurt you, directly, but the thought of watching an old man writhe in pain? Just watching an old man is painful enough.”

He nodded, understanding me. “There is one way to hurt me, Q.”

I chuckled. “Please, enlighten me.”

“You could leave me.”

My smile froze, started to fall. He watched this calmly, and repeated himself, at a lower volume, “If you left me now, I would be hurt.”

He looked away, like it had been difficult for him to say.

I felt a raw, primal rage that startled me. I wanted to unmake him; I wanted to shut him up forever; to never hear him speak another word again. At the same time, I was used to not letting such emotions get the better of me — and in a sort of survival mode, I suppressed the anger and simply raised my hand, snapped.

The ship went hurtling across the galaxy toward Federation space. I let some of the momentum through the bubble, and watched with a soothing sense of justice as he slipped to the floor and careened into the wall, grunting miserably.

When the ship stabilized, he picked himself up and tenderly walked to the panel to verify the location. I was nowhere to be seen now, vanished away — not because I wanted to “hurt” him (what a ridiculous thought!), but because I felt calmer on the outside of the ship, large and disembodied, with him so tiny and unimportant by comparison.

“It won’t work, Q.” He keyed in a course to the same spot. “Engage,” he muttered by habit.

I raised a metaphorical finger against the front of the ship’s hull, stalling out the engine.

He read his instruments and sighed determinedly through his nose. “I’ll find another ship. Will you strip the Federation of its ships, hm? Will you thwart me until the end? Now doesn’t that sound familiar.”

I didn’t respond.

He swiveled, searching the ceiling. Quietly he asked, “Are you there?”

It would have been amusing to keep him waiting. Some instinct of mine wouldn’t allow it. I answered almost immediately, “Yes,” my voice filling the bridge.

He was visibly relieved. “I appreciate that. Thank you.”

I chuckled darkly. “What a gentleman you’ve become sans Starfleet. But I’m not staying for long. Once I’ve solved this sticky wicket you’ve come up with — very good, by the way — then I will be gone.”

“I have a solution, if you’re interested.”

I was interested. And surprised. “Go on.”

“A trade. Something you want for something I want.”

I waited, and he continued.

“I will agree to stay in Federation space for the rest of my life. I will even agree to do nothing else to warrant your attention or concern. I ask in return that you… that you have a conversation with me.”

Some of the anger I was suppressing slipped out then, as stubbornness. A stubborn compulsion to refuse him. At the same time, I wanted this to be over, craved it.

“Only for an hour,” he continued. “It’s the same hour you forced me into years ago. And only a single instance, now, and then you’re done. It’s quite simple, you see. Something even you would be able to manage, with your abbreviated attention span. Oh, and importantly, I want no arguing between us. I don’t want to waste the hour. We will be civil. And then you can do whatever you wish, and I will do exactly as you wish. Is that something you can agree to, Q?”

Damn him. I appeared on the bridge, wearing the robe as black as my mood.

“Well,” I said, "your brain’s still sharp.”

He looked at me with an expression so full of longing I wanted to look away. Instead I raised my chin, maintaining my gaze, maintaining dominance.

“You did it to me,” he said. “Forced it on me. You can’t fault me for attempting the same.”

“You’re right to keep trying to persuade me. I don’t need to take your deal, or any deal. I’m Q. I could make you obey.”

“It’s only an hour, Q. Or is that suddenly unpalatable to you now?”

I nodded, registering the irony, approving of it even. “You don’t know what you’re asking for. You think I’m the same, but I’m not. Things are different, Jean-Luc.” Oh, that name! It tasted sweet, and at the same time, it almost stabbed into me. I shouldn’t have uttered it.

“If that’s true,” he said, “I would like to see it for myself.”

I nodded again. Maybe he was right. Maybe if he saw it for himself, how little I cared for him, that would break the cycle. That would free the both of us.

"One hour,” I said. “No arguments. And when we are done you will remain in Federation space, no more hysterics, basking in the devotion of your family and friends until at long last your light goes out. I believe those were your terms.”

"Close enough." He stood straighter, almost twitching with excitement. "And you? You agree?”

He had such confidence in my word. All I had to do was agree, and I might as well have it writ in stone for him. I used to be fond of that.

“Agreed,” I said, holding out my hand.

As he took my hand, determination sparkled in his eyes. I looked down at him with great pity. He had set himself against my will, and even if I were not omnipotent, immortal, and all the rest, he could not possibly get what he wanted from me.

I had moved on.

Chapter Text

How to describe the Q Continuum to you? Lower your expectations. Language can’t capture this, so we’re doomed before we start.

A very large room.

An ant hill, both its structure and contents.

The feeling when you stick your hand under cool water.

The tang of tartar sauce, just when the flavor spikes.

A contented yawn.

A board room at the office the moment when they call you in and let you go. “Times are tough, it’s not personal,” they say, and your sudden awareness of the fluidity of the future, and of time.

Lastly, a lounge chair with proper back support.

The Continuum is more a feeling than a place, although it’s most definitely still a place — but the feelings are more accurate to convey. If you need an image, “a very large room” is the closest.

In the recent years of Picard’s life, I had returned more and more to the Continuum, and in the last year I was spending most of my time there. For me, a great deal more time than a few years had passed. Timeless time. Time out of time.

A Q doesn’t measure their life in years but in their position within the Continuum. In a continuum of individuals there are always the outliers, those of us nearest the edge, some of us on the edge itself — the last of the line. We Q are constantly scooping up the outliers, folding them back into the center, similar to the process of slowly kneading dough. Very slowly. Working through our lumps and air bubbles over billions and trillions of years. It keeps us uniform, which is what’s best for the universe; a predictability which won’t upset every other species’ evolution.

I’ve been in the center of the Continuum before. In the distant past, I was the most central member, the god of the universe, designing policy, dictating assignments, meting out judgment. All of us have done that at some point. But in the latest eon, I’ve been the furthest of the outliers, about to be flopped over and kneaded back into the center. Changed, but so slowly it wouldn’t seem like change.

Lately I’ve been craving it. I can feel the shift starting.

I went before the Continuum’s most central group to discuss my excitement. I talked a big talk about the momentum of my life, how I could feel it picking up in a different direction, towards the Continuum and not away. How I was starting to intuit the so-called “superior morality” of the Continuum (as I had once badly labeled it for Picard) as being no different from my own morality, and this a natural consequence of nurturing my own omniscience instead of ignoring it. It was a very lovely speech. One of the Q wiped away a tear when he thought no one was looking.

The consensus afterwards was that everyone was glad I was feeling more responsible these days. They told me they looked forward to the natural course of things unfolding. “More than we usually do,” said the Q with the tear.

Q met me outside afterwards — the same Q who needled me about Jean-Luc. He was not one of the central Q, but he was working his way there, a few million years further along in the process than I. He was leaning against a blazar at the center of a galaxy, arms folded.

“Well you can fool them,” he said, “but some of us know the full story.”

The blazar was shooting ionized matter all around us. I brushed it off my shoulders, watching it fall like glitter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Your favorite toy’s about to expire, so here you are. Maybe you’ve even convinced yourself this is all your own idea. The timing is convenient, isn’t it?”

I frowned at him. Or more accurately, I frowned at the insinuation that I had deceived myself. “Of course it’s not my own idea. I’m Q. A Q shifts through the Continuum. The change would happen even if I resisted it.”

He patted me on the back. I think he was being comforting. But the ionized matter that had collected on me fluffed into space again, and set me coughing.

“You are resisting it,” he said. “What you are, right now, is the least Q of the Q. If you’re respectable you’re not doing it right. Go and be weird, huh? That’s why we like you, you’re a freak.”

I couldn’t respond for coughing. He patted me once more.

“Embrace the edge,” he whispered energetically, and then he was gone.

I doubled over, hacking up raw plasma. It was a miserable few moments, made worse by my miserable thoughts. I was thinking how wrong Q was. I hadn’t even seen Picard lately. The last time I had seen him, we had fought. How did that qualify him as my toy? What a miserable toy to have, a toy which only infuriates you.

Maybe they’d all been on the edge before, but they forgot what it was like. I was tired of being the odd Q out, no one on the other side of me to make me look tamer by comparison. I wanted normalcy, and being folded into the Continuum, over and over? The thought was a balm on the sting of my loneliness.

When Picard took my hand on the bridge of the Prospero, I tugged him forward a step. At the same time, I transported us to his villa in France, so that his foot landed onto the crunch of the graveled courtyard.

He spun around, registering his new surroundings. It was the twilight hour. Earth’s air was humid, almost wet compared to the stuffy ship air.

“My ship,” he said. “Where is it?”

“Docked. Not that you could argue with me if it wasn’t. It’s an interesting stipulation, this not arguing. I think it will hurt you more than it will me.”

He looked me up and down, as if reminding himself what he should be concerned about. Me, not the planet, not his ship. “This is your first time here,” he said. “At least, I think it is.”

“In this century.” I inhaled, exhaled, enjoying the sensation in my human lungs. I smelled mint, oregano… and something else, something citrusy. “The place where you grew up. Are you going to show me around?”

“It’s a little dark.”

“I can fix that,” I said, starting to raise my hand.

“Don’t.” He caught himself. “I mean, I’d prefer it if you didn’t. Come this way. Please.”

He led me away from the main building to a cottage in the opposite direction, murky in the pinking dusk. A bat swooped over his head, there and gone again.

He went inside first, not holding the door open for me. “The lights,” he explained, finding the switch further inside.

I heard him sneeze. When I stepped across the threshold, I felt the itch myself, but wriggled my nose and it was gone. Dust coated every surface inside. Cobwebs laced the stair railing. A dead bug lay upside-down in the corner.

He continued into the cottage, turning on most of the lights. He showed me into the main room, where chairs were gathered around a fireplace opposite a wall of books. Most of the furniture was covered in dust sheets. He uncovered two chairs, gesturing to one of them.

“Have a seat,” he said, wrapping up the sheet. “What wine would you like? White or red?”

I stood behind the chair; I didn’t sit. “You go to great lengths to trick me into an hour, and this is what you’re going to do with it? The clock’s ticking, you know.”

“I’ll bring a red,” he said ruefully, and went off.

I looked at the room again. Of course I was perfectly happy for him to waste his time sneezing and fidgeting with his filthy belongings — an unintended benefit of bringing him here. He’d certainly put me through worse, back when I’d had my hour. But I was curious what the place looked like normally.

I snapped, and the house went back in time about thirty weeks or so. I glanced at the fireplace, and it roared to life.

My long shadow fluttered against his wall of books. Interspersed in the books were knick-knacks from Starfleet and artifacts crumbling with age. One book (really, a pamphlet) caught my attention, The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Pressed into the pages was the note I had written for him.

I had forgotten about it.

I read it again. The best human I've met. Too good for rotting. Go explore. My final words to him. My goodbye. I had given more extravagant goodbyes to people I liked half as much. Still, I could feel myself recoiling from the words; it was as though another person had written them. I took the note towards the fire, flicking it into the flames, except only my wrist made the motion. My fingers did not release, and so the note remained in my hand. Curious.

When he came back, I was reclined in the chair, thinking intently. He set the wine on the table next to me.

“Thank you,” he said, sitting.

“What for,” I asked matter-of-factly.

“For tidying up, and for the fire.”

I acknowledged this with a moody grunt. Then I said, “I shouldn’t chide you for wasting your time. Speaking to me will be a waste of time no matter what you do. So you should enjoy yourself, right?”

“I don’t really have a goal here, Q.”

I laughed. I knew neither of us believed that.

“I might have a single goal,” he said, “but it’s not what you think.”

“I can’t argue with you, Picard, so you can claim whatever you wish.” I nodded to the mantel. “When you bought that clock, you couldn’t have known it would count down our final conversation. A conversation with one of the most dangerous beings in the universe. Had we met yet?”

“Marie bought it.”

“Well, you’ve wasted ten minutes. Better get going.”

He settled comfortably in his chair, sipping his wine. “Here’s a question for you then. What is it you do? I have only heard about your dishonorable exploits, but I’m sure that isn’t all you get up to. You mentioned you were orchestrating something when you saw me. Something about volcanoes.”

“What is it I do?” I frowned at the question and answered broadly. “I amuse myself.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really, no. I doubt you’d understand any of it.”

“With a superior intellect like yours, I should hope you could handle the translation. What was happening with the people you were saving from the volcanoes?”

“It was an assignment.”

“From the Continuum?”

“Yes.”

“Do they often assign you things like that? I suppose the trial of humanity was an assignment. I’ll confess to being curious about them.”

“The Continuum is none of your business. You’re speaking to me, not them.”

“I apologize,” he said, not very apologetically. “I’ve simply wondered exactly how you spend your time, how an entity like you amuses yourself, as you say.”

I lifted my legs and an ottoman appeared beneath them. Reclining, I sighed at the ceiling, really throwing all of my ennui behind the sound.

“I suppose it’s inevitable I would bore you,” he said. “That’s why I needed you to agree to an hour.”

“How tedious,” I said, sipping the wine. It was my first taste, and my face wrinkled from the sharpness of it. “Is this really the best you have?”

“To be honest? No. But what’s the point in pouring my best for you? I’m sure you’d find fault in that too. I’m not trying to impress you, Q.”

“I like us not arguing. I feel very appreciated.”

We were silent for a moment. The chirping of crickets outside mingled with the whooshing of the fireplace.

“The ship you gave me,” he said, “why did you name it the Prospero?”

“That play on your shelf, of course.”

“Why that play?”

“Shakespeare, obviously.”

“Could you elaborate?”

“It’s been so long since I thought of it. Ariel, me. A storm. An old man doing something important before he died. You fill in the blanks."

"How did you know I'd want a ship?"

He was so insistent. He had obviously prepared for this, the way he was blurting out questions then hunting down my answers. He must have several ready to go. I wondered how I felt about this hour devolving into an interrogation.

"I agreed not to argue,” I said. “I did not agree to answer every question you posed."

"Very well. Introduce some other topic."

"Where in your rules am I required to talk at all?"

"Don't be difficult." He put his wine glass aside. "It's an hour of your time. You can control time, can’t you? So you can have it back when I’m done with it.”

"Which is why it's more accurate to say it's an hour of my attention."

"Yes. Talking.”

"Or listening."

"Both."

I sat up in the chair, kicked the ottoman forward. "At the risk of appearing argumentative, I’d like to point out the fact that, moments ago, you accused me of being a bad listener.”

"I did?"

"You implied I love the sound of my own voice. It is a lovely voice, but I don't think you were speaking literally.”

“Well.” He leaned forward, matching my posture. “If I said that, which I’m not disputing… I probably said it in anger. It’s not an excuse, but you can make me angry on occasion, Q. In fact, most of the times I’ve been unfair to you, I did it out of anger, or frustration.”

I stared at him, surprised and a little horrified. The firelight illuminated one half of his face, the other half in shadow. He grinned at my expression and continued.

“Those hours you wanted to talk to me, and I refused? I was angry. It isn’t easy for someone like me to be so… outmaneuvered. And I didn’t believe you were interested, back then. I thought it was a game, a chance to humiliate me. These days I have the benefit of hindsight. A very human compulsion, to look back on one’s past and wish one had behaved better…” He caught himself. “That was one of your lessons for me, wasn’t it? So it isn’t merely a human compulsion.”

I was growing more uncomfortable the longer he spoke, and when he was done speaking I rolled my eyes, trying to feign indifference. “Foolish. I never once wanted to humiliate you, not as an end.”

“Yes. By the time I realized that, you had left. And at my retirement ceremony, well, you made me angry again.”

“Did I?” I said, still feigning indifference.

“In some ways I feel justified for that reaction. It wasn’t easy. You didn’t make it easy. But there were other moments of that exchange in the reception area… I could have been different. Cooler under pressure.”

I felt the tug of something, some emotion I didn’t want to identify. It wasn’t anger. It was something else, something long neglected. And I went on neglecting it.

“Sometimes, Q,” Picard said, angling slightly towards me, “it’s as if you are so very powerful, I can conveniently forget,” he breathed, sighed, “you’re still an individual.”

Too much. I stood.

“This is all very interesting,” I said casually, “but I’d prefer your best wine.”

The wine cellar was on the far side of his kitchen, a short room lined with criss-crossed alcoves and bottles. I ducked through the doorway, and once inside my head nearly touched the ceiling. I put out a tendril of my omniscience — something I was doing more often these days, acting more in line with the other Q. I found his favorite bottle. I opened it, poured a glass.

It wasn't very good. Not because it was sharp like the last one, but there was so much pepper in the aftertaste.

"You’re right, I hate it,” I said when his shadow darkened the doorway.

“You should aerate it.”

“I did. No, this is as good as it gets. And what it deserves…” I poured the bottle into a trashcan, staring at him as I did, as if daring him to tell me otherwise.

He watched, frowning. "Someone somewhere would call this a form of arguing."

“I’m saving you from a terrible fate.” I dropped the entire bottle into the can with a loud thunk. I snapped. A new bottle appeared on the high wooden table between us.

“My best wine,” I said, “from my cellar, the universe. Something to remember me by.”

He grabbed the bottle and immediately started opening it. “Going forward I hope to remember you by you being here, in person.”

There was that neglected emotion again. It bubbled forth pleasantly, but I resented that he could do that. That he was going to keep doing that, evidently, unless I put a stop to it.

He was twisting the corkscrew onto the wine bottle when the bottle became impossibly heavy. He had just enough time and strength to set it back onto the table again, and just enough sense to frown at me for an explanation. Smirking, I plucked the bottle away from him and started opening it myself.

“Allow me,” I said, materializing new wine glasses. “Maybe while we drink this I’ll tell you about the Continuum, human. If you can understand it.”

“I’m told my brain is still sharp,” he retorted. Clever, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.

“You’re so eager. But you must know drinking this wine will most definitely spoil you on, oh, everything in this cellar. Everything on this planet really. Perhaps every wine in the Federation. You’re not concerned?”

He watched me, and I could see he knew I meant more than the wine I was pouring. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Really? It took you decades to collect all of this. Wine is what you do. And it isn’t as if I would enjoy it any more if you drank. Tastes all the same to me.”

He shook his head, with a fraction of an eye roll. “Even the best wines don’t spoil me on the others. There is something to appreciate in all of them. Sometimes one appreciates the old things more for having tasted new ones.” Moodily he added, “Assuming I have the handle on the metaphor.”

His arrogance was palpable. I remembered the feeling of being rebuffed like this before, and just when I was being so careful, so thoughtful in ways he would never appreciate.

He reached for his glass, but I slid it away from him. I drank mine, swilling it, making him wait for my explanation.

“I used to think you and your crew were cute, like children playing pretend. I’d caught you in a game of ‘starships and aliens.’ You created your rules, swore by them, then forgot about them day-to-day. The worst was your prime directive. Encounter an inferior species and you’d bend over backwards finding excuses for their savagery. But a truly new species, a superior species like the Q Continuum, something a thousand times beyond your comprehension, and you’re claiming to be better than us and telling us what to do.”

He was wisely considered in his reply. “If I claimed to be an authority over the Continuum, that was imprudent. Of course I am not.”

“Oh, but you are, in your own mind. You’ve always been opinionated about my power. Even now. What else is this?”

“A conversation,” he insisted.

A mirthless laugh escaped me. He was still insisting that talking was all this was.

By now, I had put my finger on the emotion, the one I was neglecting. It was affection. It vexed me to admit, but that was the truth. Affection. I couldn’t seem to help feeling it for him. Couldn’t change it, couldn’t get rid of it. It was a silly thing, because he was a silly thing.

But silly things should be neglected. They should make room for important things.

Again I heard Q telling me to be weird, to embrace it. Easy for him to say when his place within the Continuum was sound. The Continuum wouldn’t punish me for anything I did — not with a single human — but I had my own higher standard to contend with.

I was Q. Picard was not.

Maybe if he could see it like that he would finally lose interest.

My eyes turned to his. A conversation, he had just said.

“I don’t feel like discussing the Continuum,” I said, “so why don’t you see for yourself?”

He started to react, started to open his mouth to respond. I didn’t wait.

I showed him the Continuum. Not a peek either — I took him there, plopped him right down into the middle of it. I had a hunch it would ruin him. At the very least it would change him, and he would need help getting back to normal afterwards.

I was tired of pulling my punches, tired of perpetually sparing him only for him to claim I was being difficult, or worse, playing games. He needed a reminder of just how simple he was.

Chapter Text

Picard felt relief upon first seeing the Continuum. He had expected it to be, somehow, beyond his comprehension, but it was simple enough.

He was standing in a large room. Inside the room, almost as if it were drawn onto the floor, was a single straight line that connected a sequence of points. There were people on or near each point, which must be the members of the Continuum, he realized. The other Q.

“A line of them, a continuum, of course,” he thought with a refreshing sense of clarity.

As he looked closer however, the line shifted, the points shifted. Nothing was straight anymore. The line wasn’t even there anymore, although nothing had moved and nothing had changed. Picard blinked at this, startled, waiting for it to make sense again and growing more and more disturbed when it did not.

In an attempt to start over fresh, he shut his eyes. He knew he was intelligent. He could understand what he was seeing, because he’d already understood it a moment ago. He just needed to consider it more carefully.

He opened his eyes.

There it was. The line, the Q, the large room around him. As he noticed the individual parts, however, he also noticed how impossible they were, that these elements when combined would not create the image he had initially observed. Yet it had seemed so obvious at the time.

Everything shifted. He became confused. He started over.

Again and again, he went through it. His mind began to ache. He wanted to stop thinking, to rest. But he was so certain. Each time all of his intuition shouted at him that it would be simple to figure out. And each time, it became apparent he was deriving meaning from nonsense.

It began to dawn on him what his fate would be. He was going to mull on this visual puzzle for the rest of his life. It would haunt him, the knowledge that he understood what he was seeing, and at the same time, that he did not.

He would doubt everything. He would go insane.

He heard Q boredly say, “Oh? Too much for you?”

He was frantic to be done with it. Against his will, his mind kept wheeling through the motions.

“Help,” he whispered.

“Really, Picard. That’s only the form of the Continuum. You haven’t begun to consider what it means. And the Q are right there. Talk to them, maybe they’ll notice you.”

He shut his eyes, tried to think of something else, but his memory still offered up the image, and the image itself tormented him. How could he forget something he’d clearly seen?

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He could feel a wall behind him, wine bottle necks digging into his back. His cellar.

The room he’d just visited, the Continuum, he remembered it…

“Help me,” he whispered.

“I did,” Q said. “You’re not there anymore.”

“I see it.”

“So stop seeing it.” There was an amused frustration in Q’s voice.

“I can’t. Dammit, make this stop!”

“You’re the one doing it.”

“Q!”

“Ugh, fine,” Q moped. “Isn’t this arguing?”

Q gave him a thread of yarn, which Picard grasped onto with both hands. It was a line. Like the Continuum was, yes! He spread the yarn straight, then folded it onto itself. He set the yarn on the nearby table, arranging it into every shape he could imagine.

Q left the room, but Picard stayed there to puzzle it out. Before forming each new shape, he would stretch the yarn into a line again, finding an intense, primal satisfaction by how line-like it was.

He wasn’t sure if Q had done anything else to help him. He couldn’t remember the Continuum now, only the shapes he was making with the yarn, which had everything to do with the Continuum, although he couldn’t remember why. Eventually, gradually, he realized what he was doing was nonsense, and he dropped the yarn to the floor with weary relief.

His pulse had slowed. The cold adrenaline was tapering off. He took in the sight of the cellar, relieved at it: a room he could understand. He could move about it, use it, and it did not perplex him in the least. In fact, he felt new gratitude towards it. 

He remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

Winning over Q.

He hurried to check the clock over his kitchen sink. Five minutes left in the hour. The hour he had spent thirty-one weeks getting. Picard grew brittle with anger: it seemed Q would have been content to let him wile away the entire evening making shapes out of yarn.

But he had to be careful. He couldn’t simply express his anger. It might seem easier, yet it could undo all the progress he had made.

So far, he’d been performing a balancing act between showing he was interested but not being too interested; meek, but still trying to honor the insolence that had lured Q so long ago.

Q was sitting in front of the fire, drinking his own wine. “Feeling better?” he asked, showing no physical sign of having noticed Picard’s approach.

“Why?” Picard demanded from the doorway.

Q turned the wine glass in the firelight. “New life, new civilizations. You wanted to know, didn’t you? Now you’ve seen it. Now you can stop asking. Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to endure your curiosity forever?”

“An explanation would have sufficed.”

“No, you want more than words. That’s why you want me.”

“An explanation would have been superior, since I don’t… I didn’t understand it.”

“Well, that isn’t my fault.”

Picard would have been glad to tell Q exactly how much his fault it was, but he remembered the clock. “You’ve wasted the hour with that. Is that fair?”

“You’re arguing, is that fair,” Q parroted.

Another flimsy response. A part of Picard wanted to cut Q open on this. It was a cheap trick, a cousin of leaving the hour early on a technicality. But when faced with the prospect of Q gone, forever, Picard knew how little it mattered that he be proved right.

He sat in the opposite chair. “Five minutes? You won’t extend it?”

“Four minutes,” Q said, without glancing at the clock.

Picard hadn’t thought he would get an extension, but years of experience negotiating had taught him it was worth the ask. He drew on his experience again: summoning his calm, forgetting the stakes for a moment, focusing on the truth. “Then I say my final word. If you’ll let me?”

Q sipped his wine, which Picard took as a yes.

His throat was dry. He swallowed. “If you have changed, as you say, then I truly have wasted my time. But based on our shared history, I had to make the attempt.”

Q rested his chin in his hand, leaning on the chair arm — the body language of boredom. But his eyebrows were raised slightly, betraying an interest that Picard knew to be encouraged by.

“Learning is my primary passion,” Picard continued. “Discovery, exploration, knowledge. It’s not only about where a ship may take me; I find species like yours fascinating as well. I find you fascinating. Your company, I find diverting — once I understood it. And on a personal level, no one else can spar with me quite like you. There is a simple pleasure in our arguing, I won’t deny.”

Q’s eyebrows had settled. He was still staring, but his expression was wholly inscrutable. Cool, all-seeing eyes. His attention might be galaxies away, for all Picard knew.

“I am simultaneously aware,” Picard said, “that the universe is far more interesting than I, and aware you have far greater exploits on which to expend your interest. But if you do desire my company like you used to once, I am willing now. I am wiser. Otherwise, I thank you for what you could give.”

Q seemed to understand that the speech was done. He inhaled, straightening to his full height in the chair. A muscle in his chin flinched, as though a hint of feeling had slipped out. He said, imperiously, “Time’s up,” and he didn’t even glance at Picard again before he vanished, the wine with him.

Picard looked at the clock, confirming it.

He rubbed his eyelids, listening to the fire crack and settle. His last words to Q. He had said everything he meant to, and for that he was glad.

He stood, feeling a great heaviness. Because it had not been successful. Q was really gone — somehow he understood that, that it would be their last time speaking. He recognized the coolness with which Q had left him before.

He knew what he should feel. Proud. He had accomplished something that most people could never. Even if it had not been successful, there was a relief in knowing one had tried one’s hardest. If he told the story to his friends and even some of his enemies, they would marvel at his success in taking Q this far. No one would say he should have done differently.

Yet he had failed. Why should it matter how anyone else saw it, if it hadn't worked?

“Q,” he said to the empty room, feeling foolish and desperate and small for uttering it. And yet, feeling that he deserved to feel all of those miserable things. They were the truth.

He was a fool. A trivial old man, to lay his heart’s desire at Q’s feet only to be so easily brushed aside.

Maybe that was Q’s last lesson for him.

“This is about Q, isn’t it?” Deanna asked him after Riker had left the call.

It was several weeks earlier. Picard had not yet spoken to Q. He did not even know if he would. He was just entering his twenty-fifth week on the Prospero after shooting away from Earth at top speed.

Will had stormed off the call, distraught that he couldn’t talk his old captain off the ledge. Picard should have known Deanna would piece together Picard's full motivations. She more than the others had been privy to Q’s interest on the Enterprise.

“It’s about drawing his attention,” Picard admitted. “No one knows that, that he’s ignored me. All of the Federation probably thinks I can summon him whenever I like. But he doesn’t answer, he… nothing. I’ve tried.”

“Let’s leave aside what the all of the Federation thinks. What do you think?”

“Are you going to counsel me, hm?”

“Never without your permission.”

“Here’s what I think. I think just because I have entered old age, my life is not over. Until the moment of my death, it is my time to spend however I wish.”

“Good,” she said.

The solitary living of the Prospero must be getting to Picard, because he found himself elaborating. “Most of my life I’ve compromised on what I’ve wanted; I’ve considered the full picture. I still wish to do that, but perhaps less regimented going forward. It would be easier with Q’s help. If I can get it.”

“In what aspect would Q make it easier?”

“There’s an obvious answer to that,” Picard said, in a lighter tone.

“And is his power the only aspect?”

“You’re right, there is another. I’ve realized that lately. Q is more aligned than most with living a life free of compromise. With indulging in what he wants. I could never emulate him, but I could learn a thing or two. If the Picard of the Enterprise could hear me say that, he would be horrified.”

“That’s a common theme for most people. We change, we learn.”

“I don’t like dwelling on the past normally, but Deanna, the very thing I am craving now, he so very candidly offered to me on the Enterprise. And I refused to hear him. Perhaps the hardest pill to swallow is if he refuses to hear me now, it’s… what I deserve.”

“Q has often been generous.”

“Q has often been troublesome too. To put it mildly, his insistence on participating in my life has made my future more difficult to navigate now, not less. A kind of trauma to be overcome.”

“I can agree with that.”

“I always thought I experienced more kinds of trauma than was normal. But I suppose I never wanted a normal life.”

After Q had left, Picard shuffled around his house, trying to feel some sense of home after being away for so long. Trying to take his mind off his dark mood, too. The last thing he wanted was to linger in self-pity.

Eventually he decided there was nothing for him to do but sleep. He hadn’t slept the previous night through, and the morning would afford him more clarity — or so he hoped.

He turned on the light to his bedroom, and he saw it in the mirror first: two legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded on a lap. His heart clenched in shock at the sight.

He stepped in the room to confirm it: Q, sitting on his bed.

Q looked at him like he used to do, quietly, intently. His gaze unwavering, he began to rotate a folded piece of paper in his hands.

Picard was aware of a growing pressure in his eyes. He had been so certain Q was gone. Had it worked after all? He managed to find his words.

“Of course, this should have been the first place I checked for you. Shall I pretend to be upset for old time’s sake?”

Q didn’t answer, but his mouth shifted like he was suppressing a show of amusement.

“The truth is,” Picard said, “you’re welcome wherever you want to be.”

Q flexed his eyebrows in approval. He slid into a flatter position on the bed, humming a sigh.

If this was a trick, Picard would have expected the reveal then. When nothing happened, he continued with his nightly routine. He was dazed as he went about it; everything seemed to require his full attention to complete, like he was doing it for the first time. Washing his face, cleaning his teeth.

He didn’t want to annoy Q with questions; neither did he want to anger him or startle him off. A tiny bird had just lighted on his windowsill, demanding a unique degree of caution. Often Picard glanced back towards his bed — not enough to catch Q’s attention, but enough to verify he was still there. And Q was content to be silent, seemingly, as if being in the same room together was meaning enough.

It still felt like a trick. Q had been so closed off before leaving. When had he changed his mind? Had he been bluffing for some of it? What parts? Why bluff? Perhaps Picard could turn and ask now, a small single question to relieve his curiosity… but no, no, there would be time for that later. If it was a trick, the answer would not save him anyway.

He was changing his shirt in his closet when he noticed Q in the doorway, leaning on the frame.

Q set his chin high. “You were always good at talking.” He wrist-flicked the card towards Picard, who caught it against his bare chest. “It was smart to save that. Such a meager farewell. I couldn’t put it back, couldn’t rescind it, and when pressed I—”

Q caught himself, seeming to think about his words. His voice was softer when he finished, “I didn’t particularly want to improve upon it. Do you understand, Jean-Luc?”

Picard nodded.

It was real. It was no trick. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief, and his eyes started to sting again. He cleared his throat, forcing himself calm, and waved the letter. “Of course I saved this. As to its form, it was better than any farewell I gave you.”

“Well. That’s certainly true.”

Picard shook his head, caught up in gratitude again. “Thank you for coming back. I thought you had gone.”

Q grinned skeptically, without warmth. “Where was all this sugary sweetness twenty years ago? I always knew you had it in you somewhere. But all at once like this, I think I’m getting a toothache.”

Touching his cheek tenderly, Q vanished.

Picard smiled at the empty doorway.

He wasn’t sure what had happened, or how, or what it would mean. But he believed he had never felt quite this excited to find out.

Chapter Text

Picard half-expected Q to appear the next morning, urging him towards an adventure with the same gusto that he normally exhibited. When a day passed and Q did not appear, he was not too surprised. Q had been so resolute against him for so long. It was like expecting an old Earth steamship to change course as easily as one of its tugboats.

So Picard decided to wait for him.

Two days passed, then three. He tried to put it out of mind — to enjoy being on Earth again, being home again, seeing old friends and helping out around the vineyard. On the seventh day, the suspense became acute. Picard no longer merely wished to talk to Q; he needed to. He was growing paranoid that he had only imagined the reconciliation, that Q never intended to resume a relationship, and he doubted that was the effect even Q had intended.

He was washing a pot in his kitchen when he decided to get it over with. He raised his chin and spoke plainly: “Q.”

This had never worked for him since the Enterprise — and only rarely even then. Immediately he heard Q’s airy reply behind him.

“Mon capitaine.”

He smiled instinctively. Minding Q’s joke about sugary sweetness, he flexed the smile from his face and turned. “This year I persuaded the last of my old crew to stop calling me captain, and here you are. It seems I have one final challenge.”

Q was standing near the refrigerator, mirroring Picard’s clothes. His hands were clutched behind his back, his chin high. “Well, you’re still a captain of a sort. I have a feeling you’re about to issue me some orders. So that’s what this is now, I’m just supposed to take you wherever you want to go? A cabbie, a concierge and a god, all in one.”

Picard let a thoughtful grunt. He had wondered if this was the problem: Q’s pride. Of course it wouldn't just go away.

He decided to use humor. “Correct, I’m going to issue orders. Sit down, I’ve made you dinner.”

There was an obstinate edge in Q’s expression at first, but it tempered into amusement. “I don’t really do eating."

"Have you had coq au vin? Don't answer that — you've never had my coq au vin. It's a new experience. Don't you like those? Please, Q. Sit."

Q sat at the raised counter, resting his chin on his folded arms. Picard thought he spotted some caution in Q’s expression, although to anyone else he would seem like a sullen child.

“Strange to see you here." Picard pulled a pot out of the oven. “A part of me thinks this isn’t real, that you’re going to change your mind. Or that you didn’t change your mind to begin with, and I’m going to find that out instead.”

As he set the pot down, he watched Q in his peripheral vision. He caught the entity’s slow smile.

“How uncomfortable,” Q agreed. “Surely I’m not meant to do anything to allay it? No, I think you’ll have to get used to that feeling, the feeling of taking a risk.”

It was difficult by design, then. Just like his retirement party. That told Picard two things; first, that Q must still have some objection to him, one even he might not be aware of; and two, that it still wasn’t the right time for questions. He supposed he could wait a little while longer.

“You seem to relish being a mystery,” he said.

Q reached out and picked at a blemish in the wood. “Oh, I don’t think it’s as fun as that.”

Draining the water from a boiling sauce pan, Picard’s vision clouded with steam. “Continuing to work under the assumption that you are interested in my life, I’ll tell you about the week I’ve had. Shall I?”

And that’s what he did. While he finished mashing and seasoning the potatoes, he summarized for Q all the highs and lows of the week. He even included the parts where he had wondered where Q was, hoping Q might address the mystery of his absence without Picard needing to ask about it — but Q said nothing. He kept his head cradled in his arms, his half-lidded eyes staring into the middle distance.

Picard found himself missing the old eager Q. He knew he would treat that Q much more kindly today. He also knew how the past could take on a false, brilliant shine, which if allowed might outshine even the present. Better to appreciate the present for what it was. He might rediscover the eager Q yet.

Q seemed to be thinking along similar lines. “If I had suggested anything as domestic as this scene before, you would have mocked me off your ship.”

“Hm. Perhaps so.” Picard began to plate both of their dinners.

“Comfortable living suits you, Jean-Luc. You have a glow.”

“I appreciate the comforts of home more these days. Retirement has treated me well, once I got used to it. Perhaps the ship — your ship — aided in the transition.” Picard slid Q’s plate forward and Q straightened up to eat. Before Picard could hand him a fork and knife, Q had already created a pair and was prodding at the chicken dubiously.

“Or perhaps it was because I was born here,” Picard continued. “There is something healing about returning to the place you once called home.”

“I wholeheartedly agree. That’s right, you’ve visited the Continuum now, haven’t you?”

Picard let a heady sigh. “I wouldn’t call it a visit.” He felt annoyance rising in his chest, but he suppressed it. Later, he told himself.

Earlier, he had been intentionally guiding Q into revealing information, and it had not worked. Of course, the time he had not been trying, then it would be successful.

Q shot him a weary look, and at first Picard expected to hear some quip about the smell or arrangement of the dinner. Q dropped his fork and folded his arms over his chest. He launched into an explanation of the Continuum.

Listening to it, Picard felt a kind of wonder that reminded him of the feeling of standing on a beach looking at the ocean, or on the bridge of the Enterprise watching a cosmic event. He ate his dinner without really tasting it.

Q told him about the form of the Continuum: an actual continuum, a line of individuals with only small differences between the adjacent and greater differences further apart. He told him how long ago he had once ruled the Q, the most powerful being in existence. He told him about his present circumstance, how he was on the edge of the continuum. There were two edges, but he was on the side closest to material reality, which was why he was always the spokesperson, and always pushing the envelope of acceptable Q-like behavior.

At last Q stood, his food untouched, and started slowly circling the kitchen. “An outsider has its value, so the Continuum doesn’t mind me too much. Maybe I’m the canary in the coal mine, or maybe I’m like the geese flying in formation kilometers above us, one goose out in front taking the brunt of the wind. Still, being the black sheep can become exhausting. I am exhausted. I plan to be back with them as soon as it's possible for me.”

His eyes fell on Picard, and he smiled. “It isn’t ‘soon’ for you; the timescale I mean is longer than your species has been alive. But for me, it’s soon.”

“And you’ll be different then?”

“Yes,” Q said quietly. His mouth opened like he wanted to say more. Pain flickered in his eyes, then was gone. Again, Picard wished their conservation were not so fragile he could have asked what it was.

Q noticed Picard’s empty plate. Remembering his own plate, he walked over and stabbed a bite of chicken, chewing it deliberately, swallowing.

“Fine,” he said with a slight shrug, dropping the fork.

Picard laughed. There was a moment when his laughter died, but thinking about it, he began to laugh again. He felt equal parts touched and offended.

Q watched this like he couldn't decide if it bothered him.

After that day, Q began to show up on his own. The first time he appeared when Picard was having breakfast. After a hearty hello, he snapped, turning Picard’s toast and eggs into enough scones and pastries for ten men, then he whisked him away to the Prospero where they watched the merging of two black holes.

The second time, Q showed him an anomalous solar system in the Gamma quadrant. For that, they were gone for several days.

Q offered to slow the passage of time for this, to condense Picard’s absence into a neat twenty-four hours for convenience’s sake. Picard refused.

Q had been absolutely right with the wine analogy he had used. Picard knew he could quickly become spoiled to his own humanity in this relationship — just as drinking a rare wine might ruin one’s tolerance for the banal. He wanted to avoid losing himself inside the grandeur of the Q, and so he insisted Q take things slowly not only in how frequently they interacted but also in the type of interaction. No temporal shifts, no state changes, no reveals that might eclipse Federation knowledge. When he told Q this, he saw the same pain in Q’s eyes he had seen in his kitchen. Q nodded in acquiescence and turned away.

This was not to say Picard did not enjoy his time with Q. He enjoyed it immensely. That was why caution was imperative.

Sometimes a few days passed between Q's visits. Sometimes it went as long as a month. Always Q initiated. Picard had not yet felt confident enough to do so. Even if he had known of some sight or activity which might amuse Q, he was too aware he was still in some kind of trial period. Q had not eased up around him. He was either wry or polite; either giving voice to some interior pain or else pretending it did not exist.

Whenever he said farewell — for example, “Bonsoir, mon capitaine” on a recent evening — there was an edge to the nickname that had not been there before. An emphasis on “capitaine.” Once Picard would have preferred it that way, but now it only rang as an insult.

How could Picard complain about any of this? Q was always so calm, so powerful, so impenetrable. “Tell me about what’s bothering you, Q,” he may say, yet all his instincts told him Q would not respond to such a question. If Picard wanted to dictate the pace of their exploration, then Q was certainly allowed his own reservations, whatever they were.

Sometimes Q seemed to relax, however. Whenever Picard told him a story about some goings-on in his life, those sharp eyes would soften. Or when Picard was observing or learning, he would look up and see a contented smile on the entity’s face.

He began to realize: perhaps in wanting the eager Q, what he really wanted was not that level of energy but the authenticity that had created it.

He did not have long to wait before Q’s manner became a clear issue. He had no warning of it save a casual question from Q. “What do you think of a game, Jean-Luc? Every once in a blue moon? Well, no need for details. We’ll talk next time.”

The talk never happened.

Picard was on the train to Paris to meet a friend for lunch, an appointment he had scheduled the previous week. He was turning a page in his book when everything changed. He was standing in the middle of a snowy, desolate landscape. The book was gone. Everything was gone, except his person and his clothes.

The wind slammed into him, deathly cold. There was a cluster of gray trees as possible shelter. Beyond that, the blizzard obscured his vision.

He saw a pair of footprints leading away from him over the hilltop, a plume of smoke beyond it merging into the angry sky. The snowfall was quickly erasing the footprints. Instinctively, he began to follow them, and then pulled himself to a halt.

“Q,” he said. Then he shouted it, over the storm. "Q!"

There was no answer. No sign anything had changed or anyone had heard.

A doubt sprang into his mind: was this Q? If it was some other cause, refusing the warmth of a fire might actually hurt him.

But of course it was Q, or Q would have shown up when called. He had been doing that quite reliably lately. It shouldn’t matter where in the universe Picard found himself.

“I know you can hear me. This isn’t the time for a game. I have plans.” He was struck by how odd that string of words sounded in his surroundings.

Q’s voice carried easily over the din — only his voice. Not strained in the slightest. “Lunch with a human over me?”

Picard felt relieved to hear it. “Yes. Exactly that.” A gust blew snowfall into his mouth. “This can wait.”

“Oh I’m just supposed to wait, am I? Why can’t she wait?”

“Yes, you’re supposed to wait.”

“I don’t seem to be waiting.”

Picard was astonished. Each time he had answered, he expected Q to give in, growing more and more surprised when he didn’t. He didn’t know what was wrong, but he knew he couldn’t encourage it.

In response, he turned round and sat down in the snow. There was a long silence, the wind whistling, snow stinging his cheek and neck, and then Q’s low reply:

“Then die there.”

Picard chuckled. The chuckle turned into a shiver. His extremities were already prickling. Soon they would be numb. He told himself he had endured worse, although there was nothing quite so awful as the pain you were enduring now. He didn’t know how bad this was going to get, but the worse — Picard stopped the thought, realizing it was the sort of persuasive thing he should say aloud.

“I don’t know how long you intend to stretch this out,” he muttered through chattering teeth, “but the worse it gets for me, it will be just as bad for you.”

He concentrated on rubbing his hands together, although it wasn’t helping.

A warm coat fell over his shoulders. He tugged it around himself, groaning with relief.

Q was standing a little ways down the hill, eye-level with him, wearing a thick coat of his own. His expression was firm, his eyes dark with power. His words, though muttered, were still perfectly audible.

“I don’t know why I bother trying to please you.”

“So don’t,” Picard spat.

Q’s smile was slim, taut. He didn’t move, but everything changed again.

Picard found himself in the middle of a bustling cafe, still numb with frost, still wearing the coat. His friend waved at him from a distant table, the Parisian skyline framed in the window behind her.

Picard held up his finger, mouthing “one moment,” and made for the restroom. It was a large tiled room, thankfully empty. He removed the coat, dumping it into a corner, and washed his face with warm water. He let the water run over his fingers, sighing contentedly. The more recovered he felt, the more his anger returned.

He checked again to make sure he was alone. “This isn’t done,” he said to no one. “Q! You can’t just strong-arm me into whatever—”

Someone walked in. It was not Q. A short round man with a perplexed expression. Picard turned away and washed his hands again, knowing full well Q was probably laughing.

He left the restroom, trying to get into the mindset of lunch. It would be a waste to return home now; easier to get it over with, although it was hardly fair to his friend. She would almost certainly notice he was not feeling himself, and it wasn’t as if he could vent about Q to her. He would have to pretend nothing had happened.

He was aware of someone watching him from a table bordering the walkway, and he double-took Q. His rosy hands were interlaced on the table, his expression easy and entertained, as though he was perfectly willing to watch Picard walk past.

Picard doubled back and slid into the chair across from him. “What are you doing?”

“You seemed upset,” Q said, bobbing his head to the side.

“You — you’re still playing your damned game!” He hadn’t shouted it, but he had raised his voice. Those at the tables around him turned. He didn’t care. 

“We’re going to talk, now," Picard said. "Alone.” Lunch would be impossible; at least he could salvage this.

Q set two elbows on the table, getting comfortable. “Here?”

“No, elsewhere.” In a sharp tone he added, “If you don’t mind.”

“Any preference?”

“No!”

Q raised his eyebrows in surprise. Picard realized his error and started to correct course, to say the word, “Home,” but Q had already snapped.

Chapter Text

As Picard began to speak the word “home,” the “h” sound on his breath seemed to be taken up by the air around him in a loud constant wind. He swiveled around and saw he was standing on a metal platform somewhere quite high. Beneath him was a city of some kind. Earth?

He stepped to the edge of the metal platform and realized what it was. He hadn’t left Earth at all, not even the city. It was the Eiffel Tower.

His vision blurred, part vertigo and part anger.

There was not another soul in sight on the deck, except Q. Picard knew enough of Paris to know the top floor of the Eiffel Tower should be brimming with tourists.

When Picard turned to accuse him, Q was watching his reaction, as usual. As if he’d been caught, Q slid on a pair of sunglasses and strolled away down the deck. His trench coat flipped and folded in the wind.

Picard went after him. “Once again, everyone else at your whim! I said that we should speak alone, that was all. Certainly not—”

“We are alone,” Q said over his shoulder.

“Certainly not that you should displace a crowd of people.” Picard hurried around him, blocking his path. “What are you doing? Why are you acting like this?”

Q looked at him over the top of his sunglasses, his expression bemused. “I might ask the same of you, mon capitaine.”

Pushing his sunglasses back, Q stepped towards the view. “You’ve never been up here before, have you? Those interminable lines. It’s quite a powerful feeling, looking over Paris in miniature. Maybe I wanted to be the one to show you.”

“This isn’t about me; this is about you. If it were about me, you would have asked.”

“I did ask.”

“All of it, Q.”

A gust ruffled Q’s dark hair. Picard felt the chill of it, still damp from the weather of the last place Q had thrown him.

Q raised his hand and snapped: Picard was enveloped by a trench coat identical to Q’s own.

It made Picard angrier. Dressed and coddled like a child. Moved around like a game piece. Overruled. These were among the very actions that had made him despise Q on the Enterprise. Had Q forgotten that?

Picard knew he should ask where the tourists had gone, if they were safe. He also knew Q would be put off by the insinuation behind the question and it would sidetrack the conversation. It was as if Q did that on purpose, keeping Picard distracted and content to compromise so that he could never make his full point.

Why should he wait? No, the people could wait. Now was his chance. But if he was to act so uncharacteristically, so selfishly, so Q-like, he knew to be sure of everything.

“Before I speak further, I need your word.”

Q raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

“I need you to promise you’ll stay here, with me, until I’ve had my say.”

“Need, Jean-Luc? Or want?”

“Require.”

Q hummed a chuckle. “Let’s say for the sake of your argument you are at liberty to detain me, what does that make me, your servant? One of your crew? How about ‘one hour of your time, Q,’ are we back there again?”

Picard let his anger get the better of him. “I don’t know if I can survive another hour with you. The last one didn’t go very well for me.”

Q had been avoiding him thus far, but hearing this, he turned smoothly to face him. Whatever emotion propelled him was hidden behind his sunglasses: twin mirrors that showed Picard a warped view of his head and Paris on the horizon. Q rolled his jaw, as if pushing aside the emotion, and replied evenly, “Your request that I stay is noted.”

Picard nodded. It would have to suffice. He steadied himself against the cold railing. “I’d like to recall something for both of our sakes. This sudden behavior of yours is not dissimilar to how you behaved on the Enterprise, and you know what I thought of you then.”

Q turned away, considering the tower. “All this metal blocking everything, just to keep a few humans from jumping? Hardly seems worth it.”

He snapped. The entire deck changed.

The upper bell tower was gone now, as were all of its supports. The floor under their feet was tiled in marble and furnished with various tables and couches. Sleek railings lined the perimeter, low and very unsafe, framing the city perfectly on all sides. Even the wind had stopped gusting.

Q reclined on a red chaise lounge, an arm flung over his forehead.

Picard stood over him, trying to keep to the point. “Do you expect me to treat you any differently, Q? Than I did on the Enterprise.”

“Why are we talking about the Enterprise? Why are you always dragging us back there? Sit. Relax. How often will you be up here like this? No one’s been up here like this.”

“I have a larger concern at the moment.”

Q hooked his sunglasses on his shirt and folded his arms. “You know, if I could impart upon you one single emotion it would be satisfaction. You’ve done very well for yourself. You should enjoy it. You’ve more power at your disposal than anyone of your species — of most species.”

“Because of you.”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Someone else may rightly tell me to relax and count my blessings, but you cannot hold yourself against me. That isn’t exactly fair.”

Squinting, Q motioned towards the sun. “Could you take one big step to your left?”

Picard sat on the edge of an armchair, leaning forwards. “I need to trust you.”

“You can trust me.”

“When I make plans, I need you to respect them.”

Q sighed at the sky.

“Why is that so difficult?” Picard asked.

Q sat up, shaking his head with an exhausted smirk. “Sometimes I think if it weren’t for my power you wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” He slid on his sunglasses and left for the railing.

At last, Picard thought, they were getting somewhere. This had the ring of truth that nothing before it had. Even Q’s manner when he had said it changed: he had abandoned the playful tone, become serious again.

Picard was glad. He was tired of skirmishing. It was easier if they were both honest.

He followed Q to the railing.

“What would you have me say to that, Q? Of course I value your power. Should I not? Would you have as high a regard for yourself if not for that?”

Q scanned the city before answering. “No.”

“Q, look at me.”

Q turned, sitting against the railing.

“Please take those off.”

Q took the sunglasses off, tossing them into a nearby chair. There was a sadness in his eyes. There was a spark there too, as there usually was with him; always ready for a fight. But the sadness, the sorrow, was overpowering it.

“I consider you my friend,” Picard said. “Whatever that’s worth to you.”

Q snorted, a sour smile twisting his lips. He looked down at the cage he was forming with his fingers. “Not much. You’re about to die, Jean-Luc.”

Another one, Picard thought. A ring of truth, a second piece into the puzzle. But even as Picard realized the importance of the confession, it still struck him as funny. He knew Q was speaking in general, but a part of him wondered if Q knew something he did not.

“About to die… now?” he asked, grinning.

Q’s brows furrowed. “Don’t be glib.” He vanished.

Picard turned. He could see Q on the opposite side of the platform. It was interesting that in that brief moment Picard hadn't been at all concerned that Q had left him.

He circled the outside of the platform. The view seemed to taunt him as he passed, and he wished he could enjoy it under easier circumstances. Since he was a boy, he’d wanted to summit this tower.

Q was lying on a coach, on his stomach. “I know you have to laugh about it, but I’d rather not.”

Picard leaned against the rail, grasping it on either side. The unguarded height gave him a pulse of adrenaline, but he didn’t mind. Alertness felt useful for this moment. He watched Q, either waiting for him to say more or to give some signal he wanted a response. He felt ready for anything now.

Q was scratching at the tile with his thumbnail. His lips were pursed moodily. “You should enjoy my power. I didn’t mean it like that. You should enjoy everything you can while there’s still time. After you wasted so much of it.”

His voice was bitter, yet Picard did not hear any criticism in the subtext. He heard loneliness. It was the very emotion Q was exuding when, several months ago in Picard’s kitchen, he’d spoken of joining the Continuum — and after that, how he looked at Picard with pain. Picard had expected to encounter this again, eventually.

He waited for Q to say more.

“It goes without saying, I consider you my friend.”

Picard had heard that from Q before, but for the first time he was ready for it. He smiled. He was glad Q wasn’t watching him so he could keep smiling for as long as he wanted. Silence was working for him, so he didn’t reply, but he would have if Q had shown a sign of needing it.

“It’s so easy for you. I offer you the universe, and you take whatever you want. Sometimes you want something, sometimes you don’t, but I’m always there accommodating you. And you? One day, you’re gone. That’s it. And I’m left to miss you. I will miss you, you know. On and on and on, I’ll miss you.” Q’s lips stretched tight. “And you’ll never feel any of that.”

Picard’s smile had fallen. Without thinking about it, he found himself moving forward, crouching down to Q’s level, so that the entity’s burning eyes lifted to his.

“I’m truly sorry,” Picard said.

Q folded his arms under his chin, facing away. “Why should you be sorry? Nothing changes.”

“Well. To some extent I’m the cause of it. Aren’t I?”

Q didn’t speak. Didn’t move.

Picard felt he understood now. Q’s regression, the avoidance, the forcefulness, all of it made sense in the context of this. Not excusable, but sense.

If Picard let himself, he could have marveled at it; that someone like Q would profess this of him. Could he believe it? Was it even possible? Yet this line of contemplation, as always, seemed frivolous to him. It was easier to think of it as beyond his comprehension, as Q often said, and then to grant Q some space to process it on his own.

He lost track of time enjoying the view. Sunlight flashed on the Seine. A flock of pigeons swelled and darted beneath him. And no crowd either; he could move wherever he wanted, stare as long as he liked. He allowed himself some slight giddiness knowing how different everyone else’s experience with this view was.

Eventually Q slid beside him at the rail. His voice was easy again. “I’ll return you to your friend when you’re ready. I don’t want to presume.”

Picard recognized the apology. It was a skilled one. It did not resemble the kind of apology someone would normally make, but it precisely demonstrated an understanding of the problem and a resolve to change. He was pleased.

“Good," he replied. "I’d hate to be stranded up here, or left to die in the snow.” There, two could play at this game.

“Ah,” Q said, understanding him. “Would never happen. Not on my watch.”

That part was not as strong of an apology, but Picard supposed he didn't really need one for it now.

He smiled at the city. “This is beautiful, Q.”

Q nodded slightly, shrugged slightly, like of course it was. He leaned over the railing, his hair stirring in the open air.

Eventually they came to the planet Picard had always thought of as Delta Pine. Q told him the name the occupants had used, but it confounded Picard’s universal translator. Q laughed and refused to translate it further, so Picard left it at that: Delta Pine.

The surface of the planet was as Picard remembered it. Humid and frigid, pitch black until Q snapped an artificial light into the sky that dimmed the twinkling stars behind it. The tree was still there, exactly as in his memory, solitary in an infinite field of barren rocks.

“In a few weeks the sun will expand into all of this,” Q said, adding wryly, “Better hurry.”

Picard worked with an assortment of equipment Q provided, examining both the tree and the area around it. Q watched him from the comfort of a hammock swing tied to the lowest branch.

As usual, Q seemed to have no inhibitions about openly staring: a calm, contented expression. Picard felt an itch to break the silence.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Q. When we were talking that night you discovered me traveling here… When did you decide you would give me a second chance? At what point?”

“Why is that bothering you?”

“I’m curious.”

“I realized it before your bed, of course; I have some self-respect. If you must know, it didn’t happen all at once. The largest shift was after I sent you to the Continuum. I wasn’t proud of that. After that, it was like running downhill. I couldn’t stop it.”

“So when you left me in the drawing room, when I thought you had left for good… you were bluffing.”

“Is that why you’re asking? There’s no neat answer, Jean-Luc, it’s more complicated than that.”

“The wine, you took it with you, yet you had gifted it to me originally. Will I ever have the chance to try it, or was it simply a prop?”

In response, a side table appeared with an open bottle and a glass. Picard closed his tricorder. After a moment of savoring the last of his supposedly innocent state, he poured a glass and sipped.

It was smooth. It seemed to glide through his mouth and yet the flavor penetrated perfectly. As for the flavor itself, it was as compelling as the best wines Picard had tasted: fruity and smoky, jammy in the throat. He sipped again, enjoying it as much as the first taste. He could see why Q had praised it. But at the same time, it was still wine, and he was still himself afterwards.

He frowned at the glass. “Is it possible you overrated this?”

“Are you telling me you aren’t impressed, mon capitaine? Incredible.” Q said the nickname easily, like he used to.

Picard started to argue with him, but he saw Q’s smirk and realized it was sarcasm.

He returned to his work.

Perhaps he was being stubborn about how normal the wine was. Perhaps it would ruin his taste, in time. He realized, worryingly, it was the sort of thing that could only be observed in retrospect. It was beyond his control now.

Chapter Text

Epilogue

I have been rather silent lately. I used to have so much to say, so many opinions and complaints. I have less of those these days.

My mind is calmer.

Still, I should catch you up, shouldn’t I? Before I leave you.

I think back on the last time we spoke. I was so adamant against him, so certain I knew why. How ignorant of myself I was. Telling everyone I was done with him, and then striking up a conversation at the first hint of his presence.

And that sly plan of his; he pulled it off without a hitch. He adulated me with that lilting accent, and I went soft. I abandoned my pride about the Continuum. I abandoned my pride when it came to him. I was too intrigued with the thought of being equals.

Friends. What would that feel like? No one in existence had ever called me their friend, not without fear of me destroying them. He didn’t fear me. That’s something that brought me back to him, after that one hour plea in his home, that even when I had tried to teach him some vague lesson about his place — again, so dishonest with myself, since I was clearly furious— that even then, in the face of my furious outburst, he still wasn’t afraid of me.

I didn’t think there was anyone else in the universe who was like that. Who understood me so well. Whose company I enjoyed. Who could keep up. So whatever he wanted, it was his. We would be friends.

I was still angry. Like I told him, it was so easy for him. I was carrying the brunt of it. I didn’t want to confess that; I wanted our friendship to work out; I would have much preferred not to be angry. Once again, I was so ignorant of myself. And even that little clash, he handled deftly.

He was so damn impressive sometimes. If I wasn’t Q, I’m sure I would feel utterly unworthy.

He wanted the universe? I would give it to him, and I would enjoy giving it to him because I was better than anyone else in existence at doing that. And I would enjoy us, enjoy the oddity of us, this friendship phenomenon that had thus far seemed as beyond my grasp as mortality. He was fascinated with the rings of Ylessian, but I, with the long silences between his awestruck observations. He contemplated the merging of the black holes, and I, the absent-minded way he glanced back at me to make sure I was still standing with him. He asked me where we were off to next; I felt the wonder of hearing such a question from him.

The years went on. He was getting older, about to turn a new number. Ninety. 9-0. One decade more and he would be a century old.

I didn’t think about it.

Picard was installing a chicken coop into the side of his barn. He called for Q, muttering his name as he nailed wire to a post.

Q appeared further up the post, laying on the fence railing over him. “Bonjour, mon capitaine,” he said lazily.

Picard focused on the chicken wire. “I’m having a birthday party next week. I want you to come.”

“I don’t have a choice?”

“Of course you always have a choice. And you’ll have to behave yourself.”

Q leaped down from the fence, brushing his hands together. “Is it misbehaving to gift you the Louvre and everything in it? I need to find wrapping paper.”

“No gifts.”

“Aww. Doesn’t sound like a very fun party.”

“No fun either. In fact I expect you’ll be bored, but I would like you there.”

“I’ll have to check my schedule.” Q kicked at the straw on the ground, sending a puff of dirt into the air.

Eight adolescent chicks hobbled from the barn and pecked around Q’s feet. Q watched them a moment, his hands shoved into his pockets. Then he vanished.

Picard waited for the chick’s reaction to the disappearance, but they seemed no more startled or jittery than usual. When had they gotten so big? he marveled. It seemed only yesterday they had hatched from a box at the foot of his bed: wet shivering things. Soon they would be making eggs of their own.

He wasn’t sure if Q was coming to the party or not. He didn’t see him until the day of. As he boarded a shuttle to the space dock, he discovered Q sitting in the assigned seat beside his.

“You’re late,” Q said. “They’re already waiting for you up there. Not me, I have better things to do.”

“I’m 90 years old today. It takes a little longer getting ready than at 60.”

“Why keep them? I can take us there.”

Picard smiled. “I know you can, Q.”

Q’s expression morphed into something doubtful, scheming. He vanished.

Picard glanced at the other shuttle occupants, wondering if Q’s presence or else his disappearance had alarmed them, but none of them seemed to have noticed. Even if they had, Picard had enough on his agenda. He was determined to enjoy this day. Q was probably the one person that could ruin that, but that was also why it had felt right to invite him.

Q reappeared when Picard was taking the turbolift through the space dock. They were alone.

“I’ll be honest,” Q confessed, “I don’t feel like celebrating. There’s nothing happy about one of your birthdays. I trust you’ll understand why.”

“And do you understand why I consider it cause for celebration, hm?”

Q groaned moodily.

“I’m sure you will also celebrate your twilight years, Q. I know your age now doesn’t amaze you — it amazes me, but not you. One day the number will grow so large it will seem like an accomplishment to you, and you will welcome a little frivolity.”

Q raised his chin, seeming to think about it. His retort never came. The doors swished open.

Almost everyone was there. From each stage of his life someone was represented, though most of them were from his time on the Enterprise. There were even one or two children scurrying around at knee-level.

Picard turned to give a pointed glance to Q, a reminder to behave.

Q met the look, his eyebrows raised quizzically at first. As he seemed to understand, his expression relaxed. Without breaking eye contact, he angled his head slightly, amusement twitching his lips, as if to say, “Well? Will I behave?”

Picard patted him on the back, two hard claps which he hoped conveyed a warning. Then he went into the room.

When Jean-Luc left me in the elevator, I became a lone figure watching a panoply of greeting taking place in front of me. My mood soured. I considered going somewhere else. Usually I was in his place in these moments, the focus of all kindness and awe. I had no idea what to do as an onlooker. Apart from a few furtive glances, everyone was ignoring me.

In the end I did vanish — only to reappear reluctantly in the room beyond.

It was a tall, cozy gallery. Half of the windows were open to Earth, the other half to the stars. Those guests not crowding towards Picard were scattered across couches or else gathered at the bar. I positioned myself in front of one of the windows.

I hadn’t really wanted to come. I knew what he was doing; I had once accused him of never wanting to be seen with me, so he was fixing that, but it wasn’t necessary. The invitation would have been gesture enough. I didn’t need more.

I thought about going into that horribly cheerful crowd and telling him that. Then I could leave; then it wouldn’t be rude, by his standards. I kept the option ready, just in case.

As the party wore on, I grew more and more bored. Data found me, which was kind of him. He was good for a few minutes’ chat. The half-Betazoid counselor walked by, and I called out to her. I thanked her for having some hand in warming up Picard for me. He had told me a little about that. She was gracious and polite, but I could see she had her personal dislike of me to contend with, and she turned down my offer of a gift.

Speaking of gifts, there were many for Jean-Luc — despite him having told me there wouldn’t be. Had that rule been for me only? Was it my joke about the Louvre? Did it pain him to imagine publicly accepting a gift from me?

My mood soured further. I stood at the edge of the group, watching him open each gift and finding insurmountable flaws with them all.

It was in this state that Riker sidled up to me. He had shrunken a few inches in his old age, and he was fat. Yes, I mentally took him apart, like one of the gifts.

Riker said, not at all quietly, “Nice to see you here, Q. I didn’t think you were one for minor birthday parties.”

Not wanting to seem timid, I matched his volume. “For him I’ve made an exception.”

“You certainly have. So, what does the Continuum think about you associating with a human?”

“The Continuum doesn’t think about humans.”

“They used to.”

I’d handed him that reply. Being more careful, I answered, “Only because there was a scent of the unknown about you. All of that’s accounted for now.”

“What’s your excuse then? Or are you just slow?”

We had been saying these things while watching Jean-Luc, not looking at each other, as if neither of us deserved the other’s full attention. Riker was speaking so loudly and there was a natural lull in the chatter so that when he asked if I was slow, it was practically a shout. Many faces turned to us, including Jean-Luc’s. His eyes held my own, giving me an unspoken command: don’t.

Poor Jean-Luc, my eyes said back, I don’t think I can obey that.

Riker went on, “I guess I’m a little surprised to see you here. You were always regaling us about having a thousand better places to be than anywhere near us.”

I turned to Riker. “I can think of a thousand better places for you to be than anywhere near me.”

“Q,” Picard called, a plain scold. But why not Riker? Now I was annoyed. I stood tall.

Riker grinned at me. “I know this is your first, but the rest of us have been coming to these for a while. Threatening the guests isn’t usually what’s done.”

“If you think that was a threat, I pity you when you hear the real thing.”

“It also helps the general mood if anyone likes you.”

I smiled. Inwardly, I flailed for a response. He was right. Most of them hated me; I had sensed that all along.

Picard placed a hand on my arm. I pulled it away, but he held it again. While smirking at Riker, I steeled myself to be more thoroughly scolded. It was as if this had been Picard’s plan all along — to invite me here and make a display of how far he had risen above me, to rest his boot on my head while all of them applauded. And I had no option but to let him.

“Enough,” Picard said, loud enough for the room. “Now let’s get one thing straight here. Q is my friend. Do you understand, Will? And if anyone else doesn’t like that, I will respect their decision to leave.”

I looked down at Picard, stunned. So much emotion was welling in me, I could barely contain it. Had he glanced at me, I might have truly embarrassed myself, but fortunately he did not. His hand was already on my arm, and he squeezed it once before going back to open his gifts.

The stiffness in the room began to fade, conversation began to flower again, and Riker sulked off to the bar. But I was frozen in that spot. Too much was happening inside me, as if I had become a conduit for feelings I had never felt before and was only beginning to understand. I didn’t want to move too suddenly lest I break the flow of it somehow.

In that trance, I watched Jean-Luc for the rest of his long, dull party, and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else in the universe.

Picard was used to Q staring at him by now. It was sometimes a studious look, sometimes a look of ownership. Instead of being annoyed by it, he had decided to find it amusing, a quirk of Q’s alien nature. The price of doing business.

At the party, Q’s stare had something warmer in it after Picard defended him. Perhaps it was the lighting. The entity sunk into a chair, sitting in it sideways, and hardly moved the rest of the time. Picard paused on the way to refilling his drink to say to him, “You’re doing well.”

And never one to be patronized, Q replied, “I might say the same of you.”

Picard patted his shoulder before continuing on.

Eventually the party ended. Q lingered in front of the windows again, not watching anymore. Waiting.

When the last guest had left, and Picard had turned down a dozen offers to escort him home, and the cleaning crew were taking care of the buffet and the place where the children had thrown their food (Picard never discovered which adventurous parent was responsible for bringing them to a party with Q), Picard stood at Q’s side.

Staring out at the stars, he didn’t feel ninety anymore. The universe felt smaller too, these days.

Q spoke to his reflection in the window. “No gifts, Picard?”

Picard smiled. “I told them that. Only you listened.”

“May I give you something?”

“Yes.”

Q shrugged. “The problem is, I’m not sure you’ll enjoy it. Only because I don’t know anything about it. It’s someplace I’ve never been before, a planet that was recommended to me a long time ago. I never got around to it. Does it interest you?”

Picard felt his breath catch. He hadn’t known that was an option, had assumed otherwise. The idea of exploring a place even Q had not seen before intrigued him greatly.

“Yes, please,” he said.

Q grinned. “‘Yes please.’ I’ll take that.”

Picard realized how preposterous he looked, if any of his guests could see him. To be smiling at Q like this, and Q smiling back at him.

But Q really had behaved well, better than Picard would have guessed. If Q had taken his anger out on Riker, assuming no one was worse for wear, Picard would have forgiven him on account of Riker being the aggressor. But he hadn’t. He had resisted. A long time ago, he wouldn't have done that. Couldn't have.

Picard was proud of him. A deep enthusiastic pride, like something a father might feel.

He wondered what Q was thinking, what schemes were dancing behind Q’s pleasant gaze as he raised up his hand to snap.

Here I am. Here we are.

We are about to go on an adventure. I have no idea what form it will take, but I look forward to navigating it as his equal. He’s earned this. He’s ready.

As I snap, I reach out with my power, scooping him up tenderly, preparing to whisk him across the galaxy. Usually this is instantaneous, but I slow time to savor the feeling. Of holding him, as if in the palm of my hand.

My Jean-Luc. Mine. Mine.

My heart catches at the thought of the moment’s shadow — that it’s ending, that it isn’t forever. That it isn’t much longer and he won’t be mine. He won’t be at all.

I look down at his face, those wrinkles I once bitterly mocked. They drape over his eyes, dimple at his cheeks. I tolerate them now because they are his, yet I hate what they portend. In this slowed moment, I imagine them gone. My imagination tips over into want, as it often does, and it happens.

I push his aging into the other direction, and I am greeted with a face so young my heart catches again. His youth is perfect, mesmerizing. It’s also what his youth means that mesmerizes me, that we might have more and more time together.

I know he would never allow it. So I revert him back to what he was.

As I do this, I have an idea.

A fear of failure drowns the idea immediately, but “No, no,” I think to myself, pulling it back, nourishing it.

I think harder.

I am Q, I remind myself.

I am Q, and I shape universes and matter and reality. I bend all things in the absolute force of my will. I am Q of the Q Continuum, and I can do anything I want merely by wanting it. I have altered the simplest molecule with a whim. With the same whim, I have set courses to align the entire Continuum to my will. I am me. I am Q.

And he… Is he so much greater than all that? He wanted to ignore me, but I stood up to him too. I made this happen, and I could do it again, I could talk sense into him again.

We will argue. He thinks the arguments are behind us. So did I. He’s going to feel tricked. Well, you’ve felt tricked by me before, Jean-Luc Picard, and look at us here, standing side by side anyway, smiling like fools. Friends.

I did this, and I will again, not the friendship but his death, I can convince him out of it. I am Q. I can convince him…