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You are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine – and terrors to freeze your soul.
He’s getting tired of having his own words thrown back at him.
He sits on the floor by your bed, listening to you breathe, on high alert for even the slightest sign that you are dreaming again. The front of your shirt is dotted with blood, and he keeps a close eye on your hands where they quietly rest on the blankets.
The concept of terror once held such little meaning.
He certainly hadn’t been spying on you, or even monitoring, really. One moment he was yawning his way through the Continuum’s bi-millennial council meeting, and the next he felt a niggling buzz at the back of his mind telling him it was of utmost importance he be at your side that instant.
As such, he was in your quarters a moment later.
It had been nighttime when he arrived. A sour stench hit his nostrils the instant as soon as he materialized, and although his human eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness, he didn’t need his sight to know that something was terribly wrong.
He bolted straight to your bed, barking at the computer to illuminate the lights, and rapidly surveyed the scene that greeted him.
You were asleep, eyes screwed shut, lying on your back with the sheets twisted around you — dreaming of something unpleasant, obviously. Strange gurgling noises were coming from your throat, and you persisted in trying to dig at your chest through the fabric of your shirt.
He leaned over you, trying to get a better look at your face. A frown puckered his brow.
Had your lips always been...bluish?
Omnipotence did him no favors in instances such as these; his mind invariably took him to higher planes of logic as he searched for cause and effect – shifting gravitational constants wreaking havoc upon your central nervous system, or perhaps an amorphous variety of plague, when all the while the answer was staring him in the face:
You were choking.
He seized you by the shoulders, roughly pulling you upright, and did not flinch when the change in position had the intended result. You were able to expel the vomit that had been caught in your throat, but it took several rounds of coughing until your airway was finally clear, and by the time you could breathe easily again, his uniform front was covered in a cascade of what little you had eaten that day.
“Are you sick?” he angrily demanded when the worst seemed to be over. “Or was that the dream?”
(An idiotic question, in hindsight. The circles under your eyes were enough of an answer)
“Dream,” you croaked, panting. You went to wipe your face on the blankets, then squinted at his chest. Next he knew, you were curled up into a ball and moaning, “Oh, God – your shirt, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
He took an impatient glance down at his front, annoyed. Why were you apologizing? He could care less about the state of his clothes. Yours, however, were in dire need of attention.
Well…all of you was in need of attention, really.
Split-second bath via teleportation, change of nightwear, and fresh sheets, and everything was set back to rights with a finger snap – his own uniform included. This seemed to calm you, much to his relief, and after a few wobbly attempts, you managed to sit up.
“Has the zoloxyzine stopped working?” he asked tersely, moving to sit beside you on the bed. A cup of water appeared in his hand, and he passed it to you.
You took a cautious sip and shook your head.
“Didn’t take it.”
His eyes narrowed to slits.
“Why?”
“It makes me really groggy,” you explained hoarsely. You had another careful drink of water, adding, “The choking isn’t as bad if I go twelve hours without eating, so I just try to take it every other day and stay awake as much as I can until the dreams stop.”
This is quite possibly one of the stupidest utterances to have ever left your mouth. Had he not been so disgusted he would have noted the stardate and time and made a commemorative plaque to hang on the wall.
And then destroyed it.
“You’re telling me you prefer to risk aspirating on your own vomit because you dislike feeling groggy?”
You bit your lip.
“Really, really groggy?”
Two commemorative plaques.
“Where is it?” he demanded through gritted teeth.
Chastened, you motioned to your nightstand.
His fury was such that he physically reached for the drawer and fetched the hypospray, rather simply producing one out of thin air.
“You have three choices,” he tightly informed you, angrily pressing the device to your neck. He fumbled the trigger, causing you to wince as the medication absorbed into your skin, but he was too livid to show any sympathy. “One: You cease being so stupidly obstinate and allow me to fix this.”
Your chin immediately lifted in stubborn defiance.
“No.”
His face hardened.
“Two…” He set the hypospray aside, and gently rubbed his fingertips against the injection site on your neck to help ease the soreness. “You spend some quality time with the illustrious Counselor Troi in hopes of her being able to help you unscramble the night terrors.”
“What’s door…number…three?” you mumbled. The medication already had your head swimming, and your eyelids were beginning to droop.
He caught himself wearily scrubbing a hand down his face – a gesture so unequivocally human that he finally gave up on trying to employ reverse psychology as a means of convincing himself he wasn’t being unduly influenced and surrendered to dreadful reality.
“You permit me to keep a closer eye on you.”
You weren’t so far gone as to not question his motives and squinted at him suspiciously.
“Whassat mean?” you slurred.
He sighed, already regretting what he was about to suggest.
“It means I stay with you at night, the next time the dreams come back. You would still need the zoloxyzine, but you shouldn’t require as high a dose. I can wake you up if this,” he made a vague gesture in your direction, “starts to happen.”
You blinked at him solemnly and said nothing. The combination of sleep deprivation and drugs were causing your addled primate brain to run at even more of a snail’s pace than usual.
Wonderful.
“Well?” he pressed, growing impatient. This wasn’t supposed to be a hard question!
(Was it a hard question?)
After what was – in his opinion – unnecessarily great deliberation, you came to a decision.
“Three,” you mumbled, then passed out cold on your bed.
He had tucked the blankets around you, and counted to a hundred, wanting to be certain you had fully succumbed to the zoloxyzine’s sedating effects.
(Well…it had been eleven, really – but he had counted slowly to make up for skipping the remaining eighty-nine, so what difference was it anyway? It wasn’t his fault you existed on a timeline that was oppressively linear.)
Once he was certain you were deeply asleep, he had dashed out to run an errand (it had been too long since he’d over-starched Guinan’s favorite hat). He admittedly had become distracted on the way back to your quarters (likewise, it had been too long since he had turned Picard’s fish into an Alterrean sea monkey), but how was he supposed to know zoloxyzine’s primary function was to suppress the emetic chemoreceptors in your brain, and not prevent you entering REM sleep?
Regardless, he had returned within a matter of minutes, assuming he would find you as he left you, still in a state of peaceful, drug-induced slumber.
Well, he’d been half-right, at least. You were still asleep. But the nightmare had ensnared you again, and you were clawing at your chest as you frantically tried to fight off the eight-legged phantom attacking you in your subconscious. He had grabbed your hands, trying to stop you, only for you mistake him as your assailant and wake up screaming.
In the three hours since, his eyes have strayed from you only once. You continue to sleep fitfully, making the occasional thrash. Ordinarily you sleep on your side, but tonight you persist in trying to roll onto your back, which retriggers the nightmare – a symptom he had the misfortune to discover the one time he happened to glance away, in order to look at the clock to check the time.
(Another mortal compulsion. You are rubbing off on him like the plague.)
Thankfully, his touch, and saying your name seems to stop the dream in its tracks, and its reoccurrences lessen as the night goes on. You never fully wake up, but you appear to sense his presence. Each time you wriggle closer to the edge of the mattress, until finally you are hugging his arm to your chest, gifting him intimate familiarity with the phenomenon of having a limb fall asleep.
Fixing this would be so simple. This is a waste of his time, not to mention needlessly squandering your own energy. Wasn’t stress supposed to have an adverse impact on the human lifespan? How many years of your life is your stubbornness stealing away from him?
An image of LaConte appears in his mind’s eye, and he scowls. Oh, he had extracted his pound of flesh – metaphorically, of course, much as he would have preferred to do so literally, several times over. In the months since learning of your sordid tale, LaConte has been forced to change residences multiple times due to spontaneous infestations of Wolf spiders in his abode.
(The current count stands at five. He’ll stop at sixteen. Eight for the real spider, and another eight for the creature in your nightmares. And then another eight, just for spite, at which point he will remember he hasn’t been using base-ten math and has no choice but to start over.)
“No special treatment,” he grumbles derisively, brooding.
He neglects to be mindful about the volume of his voice, and you blearily lift your head from the pillow with a whimper.
“Q?”
“Yes?”
“Will you stay?” Stomach acid has ravaged your throat, and you speak in a rasp.
He lifts an eyebrow.
“You picked door number three, did you not?”
You peer at him, brow puckering in a worried frown.
“Was that the right one?”
“I suppose so,” he shrugs.
Your fathomless eyes are glazed over, and your voice shifts to a higher pitch as you ask again, “Will you stay?”
His face softens.
“Yes. I’ll stay.”
“But what about the door?” you persist.
“What about it?”
“Is it open?” you want to know.
“There’s no door,” he says with mounting exasperation. “I was speaking figuratively.”
“But if there’s no door, then how can I come in?” you ask in confusion.
“For the last time, there is no door!”
Your face crumples, and tears fill your eyes as you shrink away. He has made you cry, and something twists painfully in his chest. Panicking, he tries to think of what he can say that might reassure you, but his mind is drawing a blank.
“There is a — a…”
A looking glass.
The voice comes out of seemingly nowhere, silently whispered in his ear, and a first edition copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There appears in his hand.
“A looking glass,” he says aloud, blinking down at the gold-embossed illustration of the Red Queen.
He glances back up at you in time to see a spark of recognition flicker briefly in your eyes.
“Like in Alice?”
“Uh, yes. Like in Alice.”
Where had the book come from? He’s never read it in his entire existence.
Figure it out later, the same voice tells him – his voice, coming to him from years in the distant future.
He freezes.
Prior to meeting you, he had encountered his future and past selves numerous times, even held the occasional family reunion, but this self…
Who is this entity?
Only one way to find out.
An uneasy prickle makes its way down his spine. For the first time it occurs to him that he has not run into another version of himself since…
He swallows hard. He thinks he knows what this means, but if it actually means what he thinks it means, then it means he should permanently banish himself from the Enterprise – more specifically, away from you.
The nightstand pressing uncomfortably into his back gives him the perfect excuse to abandon dwelling upon the implications of this newfound discovery. Besides – he knows a coincidence when he sees one, and this is a complete coincidence.
Thusly decided, he reappears on top of the blankets beside you with book in hand and turns to the first page.
“One thing was certain,” he begins, reading quietly aloud, “that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it – it was the black kitten’s fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its faced washed by the old cat for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn’t have had any hand in the mischief…”
He pauses. You’ve moved closer and curl up against him with your head in his lap. His hand comes to rest lightly upon your hair.
“The way Dinah washed her children’s faces was this: first she held the poor thing down by its ear with one paw, and then with the other paw she rubbed its face all over, the wrong way, beginning at the nose…”
He reads until you fall asleep – a deep, natural sleep, lost in peaceful dreams where there are no spiders or shadows, only chessboards and tea parties, and a Mad Hatter who wears his face – and a Starfleet uniform.