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Picard was asleep in his quarters. Picard was asleep in the Med bay. Both of these were true at the same time.
Picard experienced sleep in two different rooms, in two different bodies, alike in that they were both HIS, but they were completely separate.
Two different dreams. Two different bodies experiencing a wide variety of different sensations, Picard perceiving them both simultaneously and without confusion as to which was which.
Picard was awake and having the computer make his morning tea. Picard was awake and staring at the ceiling of the Med bay. Both of these were true at the same time.
A gift gone awry was Beverly's explanation for Picard's state, although no one really knew what was going on in his head. The visiting ambassadors from planet Vonn-5 each had one eye as big as their entire face, no mouth but the ability to speak, and had wished to thank Picard by giving him a gift. They were sure to apologize when their gift made Picard collapse onto the floor, as apologizing was the customary human thing to do when a misfortune happened, but really they couldn't have begun to feel sorry at all. They knew what was going to happen before it happened. So it goes.
He sat up on the bed while he also was putting his shoes on and walking out of his quarters. Two ensigns in the hallway nodded at him while only he and Beverly were the only ones around. Picard knew they were both completely true scenarios, actually happening as he could perceive them both as being two separate realities, with their own sensations and realness that confirmed to him he wasn't hallucinating the other.
"You believe you're in two different places at once?" Beverly asked, in her usual caring-but-concerned manner of speaking that tended to make Picard feel like he was 2 feet tall.
"I don't believe, I know," Picard answered. He felt the bed below his hands. He felt a cup of tea and a saucer in his hands. "I'm not just here, currently. I'm on the bridge, somewhere else, on some other Enterprise."
"When I scanned your temporal lobe, I didn't come across any of the signs of time travel. No traces left behind, and as far back as your breath analysis can see, you've only been breathing here."
"I'm not jumping back and forth, I'm there. Right now."
Picard stood up. Picard sat down. Beverly promised to run another diagnostic on the data from Picard's brain scan, but Picard wasn't listening. He was listening to what the 'other Picard' was listening to on the bridge, which sounded like Riker snickering and Worf groaning while someone told Picard "your friend is here." Data proceeded to correct the yeoman that Q was the Captain's boyfriend, not his friend. Picard thought he was lying and Picard knew he was right.
Picard got two different pits in his stomach simultaneously. He walked down the hallway while he also got on the elevator. He left the bridge and left Med bay at the same time.
Q, of course it was Q, he of all people could construct a reality that felt so real Picard would think it was true, and of course he'd plant himself in it like *that.* Picard closed the door to his quarters and said spoke into the empty room, in the reality where he was not Q's...lover – even that word made him sick to think about.
"You can come out of hiding, I've already figured out it's you."
The room in the reality where he hated Q said nothing back. The room in the reality where he loved Q was full of talking and smiling and sarcasm and wit as Guinan rolled her eyes again at Picard for falling for someone like that.
Of course, that one wasn't real. Q was good enough to make it seem real, and of course he would. Picard felt a twinge of regret for blaming the ambassadors from Vonn-5, but the feeling of anger as he walked around his quarters talking to no one was stronger.
"I'm serious Q, enough of this! Come out here and knock it off!"
Q wasn't there. Q was in front of him, smiling. These were both true at the same time.
Picard sat on his bed while he was also sitting in Ten Forward and just watched what was happening to this other Picard, this Picard that couldn't be him. He'd been himself his whole life and Picard knew this wasn't him.
He could hear a conversation, which seemed to be one of Q and his usual debates about humanity, are humans as a whole good by nature, peppered in with bits of Shakespeare and Q asking (seemingly with genuine interest, but Picard knew this was fake as he simultaneously knew it was not) if Picard had finished that book he had been reading, you know where, at the end, Winston and Julia betray-
Picard rolled his eyes in both his quarters and in Ten Forward, and told Q he had to stop spoiling the endings of novels to him, please. Q laughed and said he couldn't help it, and tried explaining again that books didn't have endings to him. All the book happened at once as all books happened at once, and every story happened all at once and not at all. Two stories were happening at once, both real, very real, and Picard could see them both.
"Like looking at a mountain range and seeing all the peaks ahead of you," came a voice inside his quarters, and Picard turned his head. He didn't know how he missed the flash of light – he was probably paying too much attention to the fact that in Ten Forward he and Q were holding hands (he didn't notice Guinan shaking her head with a soft smile, either.)
"What are you talking about?" Picard said, in a calmer tone than the one he usually used when addressing Q.
"You're seeing multiple realities, I can tell. You've got that wide-eyed, terrified expression mortals wear so well, but especially when you're seeing things you don't understand." Q smiled and sat on Picard's desk, the captain staying in his place with his fists clenched at his sides.
"But only one? Now THAT's boring," Q continued, "you can't even handle seeing one other reality, even that's too confusing for you. I bet you don't even think it's real!" Q laughed and played with a desk toy given to Picard by Beverly, a top that spun endlessly on a magnetic plate.
"So this it is real, then, the other me that I'm seeing."
"Come now, mon capitaine, I thought we had moved past this denseness. I figured you wouldn't have stayed in that rut for this long. I assumed you were smarter than that."
Picard walked closer to Q. "I don't think it's dense of me to assume that it was one of your tricks, I believe that's taking all the variables into account. Especially with something as unusual as this."
Q laughed and stood up, his voice becoming louder and even more aggressive. "Unusual? Please, Picard, spare me the reminder of how limited your mind truly is. One alternate reality, that's it?" Q smirked at Picard, getting in his face. Somewhere else, Q smirked at Picard and kissed him after an unsuccessful attempt to get Picard to dine and dash. (Money doesn't really mean anything anyway, darling, you assign these meaningless values to-) "Welcome to one trillionth of what I see."
Q walked around Picard and over to his book shelf, pulling off random novels and waiting for Picard to reply the way Q already knew he would reply, and had replied a couple thousand times before.
"One trillionth?" Picard said, following after him. "So you've seen what I'm seeing too, then."
"Seen it, currently seeing it, will be seeing it for the rest of time, in addition to a number of universes you can't wrap your head around. All being broadcast into my head at once, Picard, I've seen your face so many times I could carve it into Or-W Delta." He glanced at Picard, "Fitting, too, considering how much your head already looks like a planet."
Picard chose to ignore the jab and stayed silent for a minute, watching the 'other' him and Q walk down the hallway and actually smiling at each other. He saw the look he had seen in his own Q's eyes so many times that he thought was a sign of dominance, a sign that he himself was just so amusing with how stupid and trivial his existence once, a look that Picard had interpreted as amusement at watching someone squirm- but he simultaneously knew, because the 'other' Picard knew, that was a look of love.
Maybe for the Q in Picard's quarters, that look hadn't gotten there yet, but for the one walking with Picard down the hallway to the elevator, the interest wasn't in watching a lesser being try and fail to comprehend the unfathomable, it was a genuine interest in, well, Picard.
"So, then, you can see what I'm seeing," Picard said.
"A thousand times over, yes. I'm guessing the one in particular you're watching is...oh, that one, one of the more boring of the 'usses' if I can be frank." Q opened up an illustrated collection of the works of Shakespeare, looking at a picture of a man with his arms bound behind his back and a hand over his eyes accompanied by a passage from Macbeth.
"And you don't find it odd in any way, I'm assuming, th-"
"That we're dating in that one, I assure you, I've seen it all before." He glanced at Picard's vacant expression and smirked at his bewilderment. "Sometimes we're married, sometimes we're not married but we've had an agreement for years and years to keep that thing going, sometimes I've watched you die and didn't do much about it- lots of realities that are just blank and devoid of you and lots of others where you're there quite a lot for me. Basically, where there's a Picard there's inevitably, at some time, me. What we end up doing with that dynamic changes, sometimes teetering on the romantic and sometimes more similar to what you and I've got now. And don't be getting any ideas that you and I are the center of the universe, Jean-Luc, I'm just contextualizing my omnipotence to you. There are plenty of universes that get along just fine without you."
There were universes where Q and himself were...He had the capacity to love? That had always been an option? Of course, Picard didn't know if he himself take the option if presented to him, but Q knew it could happen and had allowed it to happen thousands of times.
Picard was experiencing one of those instances simultaneously with the one he was in right now, one where he knew, and always had knew, Q loved him and he didn't want to change that. That Picard's reality was loving Q, and since this Picard was experiencing that reality with all the vividness and fullness as this one, he felt it, too. Somewhere in his gut he felt the love that 'other' Picard was feeling too, because that WAS him. It was him in a different set of circumstances, but it was him.
"’Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’," Q said, snapping Picard out of his train of thought. He realized Q was reading from the book. "’Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yestersdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.’" Q smirked and held up the illustration to Picard. "Sometimes your people had some great ideas, Jean-Luc. I especially like this line 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.'"
Picard picked up, in a hurried, memorized tone, "'It is a tale ,told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'- I know the line, Q. And I understand why you'd like it so much." Picard walked over to his desk to sit down, and walked into the bridge to sit down, both of these being true at the same time, "Maybe you should go into the holodeck sometime and have a chat with the bard, see how similar your world views are."
"I appreciate the invitation, Jean-Luc, but a glitchy, simulated version based on your preconceived notions of what he was really like just wouldn't cut it, don't you agree?"
Picard just shrugged one shoulder and nodded, sitting down.
"If you don't mind, it's becoming dizzying concentrating back and forth between a reality where I despise you and a reality where I love you, I'd like to stay where my feelings are more concrete."
Picard knew now Q wasn't the one who did this, it was just an attempt by the aliens of Vonn-5 to share something they thought of as meaningful and beautiful with the captain who was so kind to them, but he did know Q could turn it off.
Q sat with one leg on Picard's desk and smiled at him again, that look of finding this all very amusing creeping back into his eyes. Q was watching his boyfriend on the bridge with the exact same look, but with a different (different?) meaning.
"Can't handle even just two at once, Picard? Pity, you know I could show you what I see, give you a glimpse of what viewing time is for me- show you those millions of lines of mountains, able to see each peak with absolute clarity, never standing on one but merely floating above them all. I could do that for you, you know."
Picard smirked at Q in both universes. "No thank you," he said in this one, "I'd rather live in the one where I'm certain I deplore you."
Q licked his top lip and raised a finger, snapping it. With a flash of light both he and the reality Picard was perceiving were gone, Q's voice echoing,
"You're certain about that?"
Picard hated Q. Picard loved Q. These were both true at the same time.