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It was the night-shift, and Picard was on course down the corridors to engineering for some urgent problem which just had to happen after he had eaten, showered, drank multiple glasses of wine and hunkered down in his bed for the night. He had only passed a couple crewmen on the corridors, which gave the impression that this problem really could not be that urgent. Captain’s prerogative, he said to himself. He would have to schedule tomorrow morning’s meeting for- Odd. A dove had just flown past. Then a second one came like the last, fluttering up from behind him, barely skimming its wing over Picard’s head. He looked back, no apparent cause for the spontaneous generation of doves and, feeling a little foolish said,
‘Who’s, er… doves are these?’
No reply. Though that was to be expected – there didn’t appear to be anyone else in the corridor. The doves were now playfully circling each other, quite ignorant of how incongruous they were, and making little tittering noises as they cheerfully flapped their wings in an unknowable exchange. Someone’s escaped pets. Harmless enough, Picard supposed, and rather amusing too. He carried on his way, and was halfway done the corridor when he was stopped by the sight of, yes, another dove. This time the dove didn’t bother to appear somewhere out of his line of sight but simply popped into existence right in front of him – though the bird wasn’t aware of that and happily made its way over to join the rest of the group. And then another burst into life from the void. And then another. Then another. Then another. Then-
Of course. Picard sighed and bowed his head.
Who else could it have been but Q, his specially chosen, obnoxiously tall, corporeal form looming over Picard’s head, hunched, his nose hanging just above Picard’s scalp looking expectantly, unblinkingly into his eyes.
‘Sooo…’ He said, drawing out the ‘O’ for far longer than was needed to create emphasis, ‘Do you f-’
‘No.’
‘Oh come on!’
With a click the number of doves doubled, tripled, dividing again and again like cells cultivating in a Petri dish.
‘Look at all these doves! I made them just for you, Jean-Luc. Aren’t they nice?’ Q frowned, speaking very seriously. The amount of doves were such as to completely smother the view of the corridor in a brilliant white, including the two people entirely except for, rather conveniently, their faces. Both of them stood perfectly still and solemn even despite being covered in birds. The answer to Q’s question was evident as Picard turned about, disturbing a number of birds which had taken the captain for an excellent perch, and ploughed on ahead through the thicket of doves.Preceding Q’s passage, the doves prematurely cleared the way for him and Q followed as closely to Picard’s back as he could, occasionally nipping his heels with his boots.
A great creaking rattled through the air as Q’s right-arm sprouted out from underneath his sleeve and twisted into a rough, gnarled wooden trunk with little dainty branches at the end, olives dangling off them. It extended all the way to touch Picard’s hand.
‘Geddit? It’s an olive branch. You need to accept it. I am extending an olive branch to you. D’you geddit? Jean-Luc? Picard?’ Picard responded by coughing out a bit of feather fluff that had caught in his throat – as much as that could be considered a response.
‘I’m not going to go away, you know. I can do this all century. My patience is inexhaustible,’ Q crossed his arms, ‘All century… All millennia… All ‘billenia’… All ‘trilliena’… Look you know it wasn’t my fault, but I’m asking anyway. Do you? Go on. Say something. Jean-Luc. Go on.’
…
‘Oh wow,’ said he, drumming on his upper arm with the spindly twigs at the end of his trunk, ‘That’s very mature.’
…
‘I mean don’t you want tooo… bury the hatchet?’ Placed in Picard’s fists were a hatchet and a shovel, both of which were promptly released to the floor with a clunk.
‘Wipe the slate clean?’ A soiled quartz slate and a wet handkerchief became part of the trail collecting on the floor.
‘Or maybe draw a line in the sand?’ The soft shag carpet of the corridor melted into a shifting pit of white-hot sand smothering the soles of Picard’s shoes as they sunk slowly into the ground. A large wooden pointer emerged out of the floor. Unflappable and unfazed, he raised his leg up out of the sand and continued to plod along to the end of the corridor, which seemed to be getting further and further away the more he approached. Q simply hovered his feet an inch above ground, watching intently the expression on Picard’s face for any cracks – which were infuriatingly absent as he looked back at Q with that it’s-painfully-obvious-that-I’m-not-going-to-give in- and-do-what-you’re-trying-to-get-me-to-do look he was so found of doing.
And Q couldn’t have him doing that. What about…
The sands rose up out of the ground and became attracted to each other, rolling into hardened spheres of rock as more wisps of sand curled up and then fed into the mass until there were dozens of little stones about the size of a fist floating in the air which then blackened, then fell down to the floor. They sizzled, orange sparks flicking out, and flushed red. Q’s shoes faded into his feet and he walked, barefoot, over the hot coals.
‘Look at this, Jean-Luc.’ said he, pointing down at his feet, though Picard could barely manage a passing shot of annoyance, ‘Although… I think this material is penance enough.’
He tugged at the mud-coloured, sack-cloth habit which had seamlessly replaced the captain’s uniform that had been there before. A rosary of ridiculous length was laid on top, and drooped all the way to the floor where it coiled up into a pile.
‘I like the necklace though.’ With a frivolity that would make a Franciscan friar seethe, Q raised a knotted cat o’ nine tails with a lot more than nine tails and started to flog himself on the back.
‘Dominus inter dominai urinas domineye et dominaimus faeces Ave-Ave-Ave Reconciliatio et paenitentia… You watching?’
In between the incoherent Latin, angry swarming doves and the leather whips waggling about in the air, Picard held his chin high and his lips tight, braving the ongoing storm of petty, petulant annoyance.
‘Is this more your style?’
A grand wooden confessional, carved with grotesque figures of martyred saints in the throes of violent death, sprouted out of the ground and embosomed them inside it’s walls. Picard’s uniform had been replaced with the cassock of a priest and he was sat on a bench looking at a latticed screen behind which Q was half-visible kneeling with that impossibly long rosary in his hands.
‘Father forgive me for I have sinned. It has been nought weeks since my last confession – seeing as I have never been to confession before. You see I have committed the sin of- Hey wait! I never kneel – except for you, Jean-Luc.’
If Picard, now once again marching down the corridor, could not see Q winking, he knew it was a sure thing he was. His pace quickened, the skirts of his cassock whirling around him, though Picard must have know walking slightly faster away probably wouldn’t do much good. With a flash of light, Q was in front of him, back in the captain’s uniform.
‘Look I’m sorry about all those frogs and the barbershop quartet and the living waxworks,’ Q clicked and the cassock was gone, and Picard’s uniform lay back where it should be, ‘Do you forgive-’
‘Yes.’
‘What!? That’s what I’ve been saying this entire time. If you had just said that at the beginning I wouldn’t have needed to-’
Picard arched an eyebrow.
‘Oh shut up.’
A flash of light, and Q went away.