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There are so many realities where Jean-Luc is dead.
The ones where another Q meets him at Farpoint with an impossible challenge and an unsolvable puzzle. The ones where the Borg win. The ones — oh so many of them — where he's killed in line of duty, shot point blank, his mechanical heart fried, his body left an empty watery husk. Sometimes there are realities where Jean-Luc hears Q, really hears them, reduced to human and miserable, when they say they can't go on this way, and Q never manages to escape, and Jean-Luc's tiny ship is obliterated.
The possibilities, the timelines, the bifurcation points blur in Q's mind. They aren't used to concentrating for so long on something so small, and all the tiny sparks of Jean-Luc's existences, every single one of them ending in death, are a sprawling field of gold around them.
Q keeps searching. Keeps travelling the human linearities: a golden spark expands in front of them and swallows them whole, and they see Jean-Luc again, and sometimes this is the reality where Jean-Luc dies in front of their quasi-human eyes.
To be on Starfleet's front lines and live to something that humans consider old age is a miracle, and it doesn't happen to Jean-Luc. He manages to get himself killed — or to kill himself, but Q doesn't think about these realities, throws them to the very distant edge of the glittering field — even in retirement.
Q is infinite, but is also exhausted when they first find something promising. Two sparks bound together in a paradox by a single lifeline, unusually long, twisted and looping around itself.
Looks like someone there needs just a bit of divine intervention.
Q holds the warm brittle paradox inside themselves, protecting it from anything else, and dives in.
“What the hell is happening here?”
The different, yet familiar voice washes over Q. Small talk. Time to do small talk. Time and again.
Q makes their human look reflect all the timelines they've walked to get here. Nothing too unsightly, though: Jean-Luc is stunning, and Q is certainly not going to be one-upped by him.
“Mon capitaine,” Q says, “how I've missed you.”