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“I would do it, you know.”
Q’s voice broke through the cozy darkness of your quarters, pulling you out of a doze.
“Hm?”
“Renounce my powers. Become human.”
Your eyes shot open.
“Computer, lights, thirty percent.” Wide awake now, you turned over and propped yourself up on both elbows to face him. “What brought this on?”
He peered at you, hair more rumpled than usual from restlessly tossing and turning against the pillow. Technically he didn’t require sleep but found dreaming to be an amusing enough diversion that most nights he chose to lapse into a slumber beside you.
(Surprisingly, he never hogged the blankets.)
After a long moment’s deliberation, Q finally spoke.
“I’m saying that if you wanted me to be human…I would do it.”
“But I don’t want you to be human,” you protested, baffled. “You said you hated it.”
“I more than hated it,” he said acidly. His mouth twisted into a grimace as he recalled his brief, involuntary stint in mortality. “I despised it. Without my powers, I was frightened of everything. I was a coward, and I was miserable. But with you…”
He paused and reached up to tuck a few strands of your sleep-mussed hair behind your ear, frowning thoughtfully. Everyday gestures of affection were becoming more innate to him, but there were still times when his touch seemed more experimental versus being truly demonstrative.
“With you, I could adjust to living with it,” he finished, drawing back.
“Okay, but how long would that take?” you prompted.
“Most of our lives, probably,” he answered gloomily.
“Then why the hell would I want to spend that long waiting for you to not be miserable?” you exclaimed.
Q huffed.
“Without bringing up the subject that shall not be named –”
You choked and firmly told yourself that you were too old to hide under the bed. One day, in the far-off, hazy, distant future, you would be ready to shuffle off the mortal coil and skip over the choir invisible. But right now the thought about any of it gave you the screaming heebie-jeebies.
“My dear, I simply want you to know I’d do the same for you,” he said with mounting frustration.
You peeped out at him from the shelter of your blankets, puzzled.
“I don’t understand.”
Q rolled his eyes and sat up, muttering, “Must I explain everything…?”
He went to yank the bedclothes from over your head, but you dodged him and scooted further down beneath the covers.
A long arm hauled you back up again.
“I want you to know that I would do the same for you,” he repeated once he had finished dragging you out from your cocoon. “That selfish as I am, this isn’t one sided.”
You blinked at him in confusion. It hadn’t occurred to you to view the matter as being one or the other – you knew that he would never be human, and so you never had reason to think about it at all.
Still puzzled, you finally said, “I know it’s not one sided.”
Q had grown tired of waiting for you to reply and was fussing with your hair again, trying to smooth it down so it laid flat.
Giving it up as a bad job, he drew back and fixed you with a quizzical eye.
“How could you possibly know that?” he sniffed. “I’ve yet to even tell you those three little words.”
“Make it so?” you innocently inquired.
He arched an eyebrow.
“Would you be serious for once?”
“I thought that was my line,” you said, straight-faced.
He continued glaring.
You let out a frustrated sigh. Dealing with navel-gazing entities had not been in the brochure when you enlisted in Starfleet, yet here you were, joined at the hip with the apex predator.
“Reach for the stars,” you muttered derisively, recalling the Academy’s unofficial slogan.
Yeah, you’d reached, all right.
“That’s four words.”
Q’s voice pulled you out of your train of thought.
“Huh?”
“Reach for the stars,” he repeated, looking annoyed. “That’s four words.”
“What…? Oh, right…” You shoved your hair out of your eyes and returned the subject at hand. “Do you?”
“Yes,” he said with a brisk nod. “All the time.”
Your face brightened, and you felt a tingling flush of happiness – which was instantly doused by a surge of acute alarm.
“No! No, no, no, Q, that’s not…”
You flung out an arm to try and stop him, but he had already plucked a twinkling object from the air and was holding it to you.
“…what I meant,” you finished dully.
A triple star system quietly sat cradled in his palm.
Why hadn’t you just pretended to stay asleep?
“What’s that?” you inquired, dreading the answer.
“Alpha Centauri.”
Letting out a half-scream of frustration you grabbed your pillow and took a wild swing.
“Q! We’ve talked about this!” you yelled, smacking him upside the head.
He permitted you to land the single blow, and then transformed your pillow into a tribble.
“Au contraire, my dear,” he haughtily declared as you scowled down at the vermin that had just appeared in your lap. He casually twirled Alpha Centauri around a finger as he would a set of keys. “We’ve talked about gifts, and this is not a gift.” He paused, and the star system froze mid-spin. “Unless you’d like it to be.”
Your fluffy little pest had snuggled against you and was starting to purr.
“No,” you said flatly.
Q let out a dramatic sigh and snapped his fingers. Alpha Centauri vanished, hopefully restored to its original location, along with the tribble (also hopefully restored to its original location, unless that location was within ten feet of Lieutenant Worf, and if that was the case, you hoped the damn thing ended up in the warp core).
“Can we at least agree that it was scaled back in comparison to my last gift?” he complained as you grouchily stole his pillow and went to lie back down.
You winced, remembering the debacle that had been your birthday present.
It was a beautiful necklace – a 20th century antique, with a shimmery stone pendant carved in the shape of an asymmetrical circle, hanging from a silver chain strung through the center.
You were thrilled with his choice. It was simple, it was easy to conceal under your uniform, and it was normal.
(The mariachi band singing Feliz cumpleaños in the background when he clasped it around your neck hadbeen a nice touch, too.)
Then you started hearing rumors that the Guardian of Forever had gone missing.
It didn’t take long for you to figure out that Q had kidnapped a sentient time portal, stamped Tiffany & Co. on the back of it and then had the nerve to call it heirloom jewelry.
As always, solving the matter involved going ten rounds – he kept insisting that it had simply shrunk in the wash, and he couldn’t possibly return it anyway because someone named Carl had misplaced the receipt back in 1997. Desperate, you finally resorted to ‘losing’ your necklace in front of Commander Data’s quarters along with a note that read, ‘If found, please return to the City on the Edge of Forever.’
“Set a course, Mr. Data,” Captain Picard had wearily instructed upon receiving the news. He spent most of the journey holding his head clasped in a hand, and you had quietly removed yourself from the Bridge maintenance duty roster for the rest of the week.
(Commander Riker humming I’ve Got the World On a String hadn’t helped the mood, either.)
“I was simply just trying to answer your question!” Q said defensively when you didn’t answer.
“But that wasn’t the actual question!”
He threw his hands and exclaimed, “Then what is your question?”
You went to reply – and clammed up the moment you opened your mouth, second guessing yourself.
You had never actually uttered the word yourself, at least not in reference to the two of you. Oh, you had verbalized the sentiment to a few others in the past, here and there, when you thought you might have met The One, and they turned out to be The Absolutely Not That One. But with Q, saying it out loud felt…juvenile.
“I forgot,” you decisively announced.
Q smirked.
“You are a terrible liar,” he chuckled. “Oh, don’t scowl, my dear – it’s one of my very favorite qualities about you. Most of the away missions on this ship involve some form of espionage. I never have to concern myself with you being assigned to any of them; the jig would be up the moment you opened your mouth.”
“Fine,” you muttered. You swallowed hard, mustered up every ounce of courage you possessed, and mumbled, “Do you love me?”
He put a hand to his ear.
“Come again?”
“Do you love me,” you shouted, fed up.
Q’s gaze darkened and locked on your face. A peculiar smile touched his mouth, and for the first time in months, the mischief in his eyes refracted and grew flat.
You looked back at him warily. You had yet to figure out if this quirk was a design flaw in his corporeal form, when whatever he was thinking didn’t translate quite right. But the moment his eyes shifted into that otherworldly spectrum of light, his perception of you changed along with it. He wasn’t seeing you. You were a curiosity – not a toy, not a pet, but a novelty that fascinated him and happened to be his favorite.
And you still weren’t sure whether you liked it.
“You humans are so endlessly shortsighted,” he said thoughtfully, studying you. “Language is such a static and narrow concept. Whereas the construct of what you people call ‘emotion’ – it’s messy. Amorphous. A trait that up until recently, I admit I always perceived as a flaw.”
His tone was strangely detached – polite, yet so off-putting that the blood in your veins had started to chill and run cold.
“Strange, isn’t it?” he mused. “Humanity is capable of defining every component of almost anything, from the sublime to the ridiculous – even a lifeform as trivial as a treefrog…”
He held out a hand. R appeared in his palm, and he brought her up close to examine her in greater detail, continuing, “Each individual element, divided into its respective parts, right down to sequencing its DNA.”
His voice was a void, exiled by his human form. You had never seen this side of him; he was an entity again, not a person – a lifeforce too vast to perceive you as anything more flotsam that had briefly caught his attention. As soon as something more interesting came along, you would cease to exist. Out of sight, out of mind.
You would have preferred his cruelty over the pleasant indifference you heard now. Cruelty in and of itself was human. Cruelty meant you still held enough significance to be worth hurting at all. This was purely other.
“Tidy,” he continued, slowly turning his wrist back and forth, forcing R to scrabble along his fingers. He wasn’t holding a pet; he was toying with a specimen under a microscope, and if you didn’t know him so well, you would have snatched her away. “Thorough. You can replicate endless copies, their molecules in perfect alignment with the genuine article. And yet…”
R flashed back into the terrarium — along with the reward of fat cricket for her trouble. You shuddered in relief; a part of him was still there, even if the rest of him was beyond your reach.
“You cannot truly pin down that which is a ‘feeling,’” he concluded. “Appropriate, somehow.”
His attention shifted back to you. He still wore that unnerving smile, and it took conscious effort not to edge away as he leaned forward.
“The essence of feelings cannot be packaged into individual parts,” he informed you. His eyes roved over your face, your body, looking you up and down as if you alone represented all of humanity. “Yet you and your ilk still insist upon cramming them all into words like one would stuff a Christmas goose. Joy, avarice, hate…” The mockery in his voice made you flinch as he finished, “love.”
Tears stung your eyes. You squeezed them shut, not wanting him to see, but the crisp snap of his fingers came before the crying could start in earnest. Silver light filled your vision and faded into the breathtaking sight of black night and endless stars, suspended above the grey expanse of the ship’s hull.
Q stood beside you, chin held high. He had brought you outside plenty of times, but you were always wearing gravity boots. The footwear was for psychological purposes only – he acted as your environmental suit – but you had quickly learned that the extra weight on your feet made you feel a little more secure as you explored the nooks and crannies of the hull or climbed up a warp nacelle to peek inside the plasma injector.
Right now, the only things anchoring you to the saucer section were your socks.
You flung yourself at him. He stiffened as you shamelessly threw your arms around his middle, mashed your face into his chest, and held on tight. Thank God the ship was only moving at sublight. Any faster and you would have been trying to climb him like a tree and losing your lunch.
Gravity boots materialized around your ankles, followed by the reassuring whirr of the magnets as they engaged and sealed. You loosened your death grip, but Q gave you no time to catch your balance and stepped back so sharply that you stumbled and tripped.
You landed hard on your knees, right between the 1 and 7 in the Enterprise’s serial number painted beneath you. Cold, miserable, and sore, you sat back on your heels to study the enormous navy-and-red lettering surrounding you and tried not to cry.
He never let you fall. Right from the very first moment you met, he had always helped you up.
Q dropped into a crouch on one knee and lunged forward, seizing your chin in his hand before you could react.
“My dear, I have not said those three little words, and now I’ll tell you why,” he sneered. “They’re nothing. My regard for you cannot be expressed in any form that your brain can comprehend. One cannot define a phenomenon that transcends time and space and meaning; it simply is.”
Happy memories were all that kept you from cowering before him. You doggedly gathered them up as his eyes bore into you, blanketing yourself in his laughter and every smirk and smile, and how his face lit up each time he found the middle ground between trying to please and going completely overboard; or him anxiously looking you over for bumps and bruises after you returned from an away mission, all the while complaining about the many frailties of your species; and his feigned ignorance when every record containing the term ‘arachnid’ was mysteriously expunged from Starfleet’s database, his fury when he discovered you had undone his handiwork, and his patience as he read you to sleep after the nightmares came back.
He cared. He just went about it in the most lunatic ways possible.
The logic behind this entire stunt suddenly became abundantly, hilariously obvious.
Q barked your name.
“Someday, you'll be able to understand,” he said fiercely when he saw you were paying attention again. “You need only say the word. But until that day, you will simply have to trust me that it is there, and it is very real.”
It took a few failed attempts before you were able to speak. The starfield silhouetted behind him only added to his unreality, and you still didn’t recognize him…but you’d know him anywhere.
“I do trust you, dummy,” you said shakily. “Now would you shut up and please answer my question?”
Your reckless insolence crept through the veil. The flint in his eyes warmed and shifted back to their usual shade of blue. He still held your chin cupped in his palm, but his grip eased as the remnants of his other self rapidly faded away, and when he leaned over and kissed your forehead, his touch was familiar again.
“Of course I do, you ridiculous creature,” he quietly told you.
Needing more, you rose up on your knees before he could draw back and slid your arms around his neck as he pulled you into a hug.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, just now,” you heard him say. “I might as well have spelled it out.”
“We need to have a very, very long talk about clear communication in healthy relationships,” you mumbled into his shoulder.
“I know every language and form of communication in the universe,” he said with a snort. The acerbic frown in his voice was palpable. “What could there possibly be more for me to learn?”
You slumped against him. All you wanted was to crawl into his lap and go back to sleep. This was Q. There would be other teachable moments. Many, many, many other teachable moments. For the rest of your life. And the rest of your life after that.
But there would not be this teachable moment.
Resigning yourself to your fate, you reluctantly sat back and tried to think of the most diplomatic way of broaching the topic.
“This whole…thing, just now,” you said finally, “You were trying to reassure me, right? About how this all isn’t one-sided.”
“Well, obviously,” he exclaimed. Exasperation was written all over his face. “I want you to know that my – ”
“Feelings,” you interjected. If he launched into another sermon about language and words and mortals and constructs, you were going to throw yourself into the impulse engines.
“Yes, those,” he dismissively waved a hand. “You’ve forbidden me from making grand gestures, if you remember – ” He threw you a dirty look, “Which doesn’t exactly leave me with a wealth of options. Conveying my devotion whenever the opportunity presents itself in casual conversation seemed to be benign enough – or should I strike that one from the list, too?”
You absently making made a mental note to ask him about the rest of this ‘list’ tomorrow. “But you were kind of…”
“Kind of…?” Q pressed impatiently when you hesitated.
You were struggling to come up with a word other than ‘terrifying.’ He was trying.
“You were kind of…intense?” Still not right, but it was the best you could do. “I didn’t know you were trying to show me your, er, devotion, and I was so confused that it took me awhile to figure out what you were actually trying to say.”
The wheels in Q’s head spun at warp speed as he puzzled over your reasoning, fumbling his way through the process of trying to see a situation from your perspective.
(You had given him step-by-step instructions. Step One: Don’t provoke the Borg. Step Two: Starting every sentence with ‘you mortals’ is insulting, so stop. *Please refer to accompanying definition of what does and does not constitute ‘insulting.’ Step Three: If you have reached Step Three, come and get me because there is the very real possibility you are about to start a land war in Asia. Step Four: Bloodwine.)
His eyes widened.
“That’s why you were crying,” he realized.
“Why else did you think I was crying?” you asked blankly.
He arched an eyebrow.
“I had assumed they were tears of joy, of course.”
You clapped both hands over your mouth to try and suppress a wild snort of laughter. The last thing you wanted to do was hurt his feelings, but he seemed to take it all in stride and looked on in amusement as you dissolved into giggles.
“I really am quite terrible at this, aren’t I?” he remarked when you finally stopped laughing.
“You’re learning,” you corrected. “And you haven’t had to do that in a really long time.”
“Eons,” he dryly replied. “I haven’t had to do it in eons.”
“Then that makes the learning curve even more…” You were interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn.
He smirked.
“Oh, dear. I’m afraid I’ve kept you out past your curfew, Ensign.”
The stars coalesced into swirls of silver and black as Q brought you back home to bed, minus your gravity boots. He agreeably tolerated you arranging him how you wanted, and you settled in together with your head on his shoulder as he pulled the blankets over you both and dimmed the lights.
You had just drifted off when his arm suddenly came out from under you. He gave you a quick shake, ignoring your whine of objection.
“Do you?”
You peered up at him blearily. The only light came from the dim glow of R and U’s terrarium, but even in the dark, you could read the conflict in his eyes – his eyes.
“Yes,” you told him softly. “Very, very much.”
He studied you in silence, pondering your answer. When he didn’t reply, you assumed you were headed towards another lengthy discussion and stoically geared yourself up for more midnight philosophizing.
Instead, Q pulled you against him and curled around you from behind, keeping an arm draped over your waist.
You gawked at the terrarium, speechless.
Spooning in bed? With Q? While you were both awake? You would have pinched yourself to see if you were dreaming, but you were afraid to move. He didn’t object to cuddling, per say, but he never initiated.
A warm hand slyly slid up the front of your shirt and began to wander, distracting you.
“If you do ‘very, very much,’” a velvety voice whispered in your ear, “Then show me.”
“I’m supposed to be in Engineering tomorrow at oh-six-hundred,” you said flatly, adding a muttered, “jerk,” under your breath. Of course he'd had an ulterior motive.
He leisurely kissed the nape of your neck, making you gasp.
“I have it on very good authority that a coolant leak will be taking place in Engineering tomorrow at precisely quarter to six,” he murmured into your skin. “You can take the day off.”
Your breathing was beginning to stutter, but you were determined to not give into baser, human instincts, and stubbornly rolled onto your stomach to lie face-down on the mattress.
Which only gave him better access to your neck.
“Or I could just wind the clocks back,” he drawled a moment later, nuzzling you.
You whimpered. Your resolve was starting to waver, and he knew it.
Q had assured you on countless occasions that his tweaks had no impact on your timeline. You believed him but you were not going to let him seduce you into altering the flow of time. Again.
No special treatment. No special treatment. No special treatment…
The bed shifted.
Sedition and treason are always profitable…A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all…Win or lose, there’s always Hupyrian beetle snuff…
He snaked his arm under your waist and leaned down to put his mouth to your ear.
“Just this once,” he coaxed.
“It’s never ‘just this once,’” you muffledly shot back.
“I know,” he snickered, delighted, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
An image of your last ‘just this once’ invited itself into your head.
“Yes?” you gulped. “I mean, no! It’s…”
There was a dark chuckle. Another ‘just this once’ appeared in your mind’s eye, and a strangled noise came from your throat.
His hand came around your shoulder. He swiftly turned you back over and looked at you expectantly, smirking.
“Well?”
“You’ve got an hour,” you blurted out.
Q smugly arched a brow.
“My dear, the things I can do to you in an hour are above and beyond what a mortal could hope to achieve in an entire lifetime.”
The gleam in his eyes was wicked, and his smile held an eternity’s worth of sin.
“Then show me,” you weakly replied.
He did.