The entire bridge crew of the Enterprise gaped in very un-Starfleetish shock. Even Data tilted his head and ran a program to calculate the probability of such an event. Worf turned his phaser on the 'kill' setting without even thinking about it. Several ensigns working on the computers in the background tried to melt into the brightly-lit deck, their eyes as wide as saucers - Q! They had just seen Q! - and already embellishing the story they were going to tell their friends. The helmsman completely forgot about her work and just stared, mouth hanging open.
The prone body of the unconscious Q was still. His head lay to one side, one arm was thrown across his chest, and except for the injuries, he looked almost peaceful. In his sleep, he could have been mistaken for harmless.
Riker stared down at the sleeping god sprawled at his feet. His hand was frozen in the act of calling the captain, fingers hovering just millimeters from his communicator. He'd never gotten a chance to look at the man up close. He could see Q's eyes flicking back and forth under his eyelids at a rate he wouldn't call human. He wouldn't have known how to describe it, but there was a sort of haze to Q's edges, like he was always just out of focus. And, the commander noticed, he cast no shadow.
The trickster's face was blotched with purple and red bruising, concentrated around his left cheek and jawline. There was a long, and very deep from the look of it, gash over his right eye, which had dripped blood all over his face and down onto his uniform. Beads of it were still running along his chin, and there was a strangely disturbing quality to the blood, something about its color or its viscosity, that he wouldn't have known how to explain.
Both of his eyes were swollen, like a black eye, but instead of being mottled purple, the skin around the eyes was a stark white, shaded in with a sort of sickly green-yellow. They made his eyes look bugged and reptilian. His lashes brushed his cheeks, but Riker noticed with quite a start that the eyelashes were not actually connected to his lids, but rather floated about two millimeters away from them.
More gashes, all of them deep, long, and perfectly straight, as if made with a scalpel, continued down his neck, and were visible on his chest, shoulders and legs through the tears in his stolen uniform.
Large swaths of the uniform were crisped and shaded golden and black. The right side of his face was shiny and red with burns; up near his temple, the skin had bubbled and blackened.
And probably worst of all, a huge chunk of his face - half of his nose, a part of his cheek, the lower half of his eye socket, and a piece of his chin - had been ripped clean away, leaving a strange assortment of muscles and silver threads he could only assume were nerves, that curled and rippled over one another in spiral patterns - jagged geometric shapes - floral - was that paisley?
He realized, wide-eyed, that the inside of Q's face appeared to be moving, writhing and constantly rearranging their patterns. And there was something -
something in there -
something huge -
- the void, the neverending abyss of circles going 'round and 'round and 'round while children cry backwards, shining cities gleaming on the edge of the inferno, dragons made of mirrors that reflect things that never were -
Riker straightened up. "That's quite enough of that," he muttered. He locked down the feeling that his mind was burning and saved it for another time. Duty. He tapped his communicator.