Author's Note: This segment is based on the pro novel by Peter David, "Q-Squared". It bears very little resemblance to current canon regarding Q reproduction, because at the time Peter David wrote the book, none of the Voyager episodes dealing with reproduction in the Continuum had aired. If you have not read the book, this segment won't make much sense, and it also contains spoilers for the book. Which I heartily recommend you read if you like Q, and if you don't like Q, I don't get why you're reading this fanfic. So if you want to skip this segment, go to the library, get "Q-Squared" and read it first, go right ahead. I'll wait. :-)

Q sits on the dead, empty world, staring into nothing. He senses one of his two oldest friends appear behind him, but he makes no attempt to shift his focus in that direction or acknowledge the other's appearance in any way.

"When were you going to tell me?" Trelane's other father says.

Q considers, and discards, several answers, among them Never and When I was sure you wouldn't promptly rat him out to the Continuum because you disapprove of breaking rules. What he says, finally, is, "I can't believe you didn't know. I mean, it's not as if the parts of his pattern that were mine were exactly hidden. A human guessed the truth because of the similarity between him and me." Or the part of the truth a human could understand, anyway. "Did you ever even look at the kid?"

"Forgive me for assuming that my two best friends would not have gone behind my back to add the pattern of an unauthorized parent to my child without my knowledge or approval."

He has a point. "It was Q's decision not to tell you," Q says. "And she spends more time with you than I do anymore, ever since you two had the kid, so… I figured she knew what she was talking about."

"I see," the other Q says. "I had wondered if you even realize how much his death is your fault. From your defensive tone, it seems you don't."

"I know I killed him. It's hard to get to be more my fault than that," Q snaps. "But what else could I have done? The multiverse would have been destroyed! I wanted to protect him, to separate him from the mad one and return him to sanity, and he ripped me to pieces for my trouble and threw me in a temporal pit it took me six billion years to escape from. You tell me, Q. What else could I have done?"

"I'm not talking about that. Of course you had to kill him. By that point, any of us would have done the same, if we'd been free to do it. In that, and that alone, you did the right thing."

"Well, then, what? Yes, I took my eye off him for a few minutes, and while I was cooling off from the latest stupid stunt he'd pulled, his mad cognate ate him. But first of all, how could I possibly have expected such a thing to happen? And secondly, your cognate was right there when his cognate built the device and went mad with it. I was there as an amnesiac fraction of myself; you had your full intellect, your full power, and you still let him plunge himself into the Heart of the Storm."

"I'm not talking about that, either. Though I think it is disingenuous of you to claim that I share as much blame as you because of something my cognate did. When my Trelane talked about the Heart of the Storm, I explained the danger to him, and he never built such a device. It wasn't your cognate that let my Trelane be devoured by his mad cognate; it was you, personally."

"Yes. And I paid for it."

"Yes. You did." Trelane's father draws next to Q, but does not touch him. His mindvoice is very cold, very controlled, few emotions leaking through his shields. "That isn't what I blame you for anyway."

Q shifts his attention to look at his best friend – or possibly, former best friend – hard. "Then what?"

"You poisoned him, from the moment of his creation, with your pattern." The other Q's mindvoice is soft, cold, relentless. "You were an unauthorized parent. You had no right to reproduce, and the Continuum as a whole thought your pattern in a child would be a danger, to the child or to the Continuum, but you just didn't care because you always know best. You added your own parentage to a child who should have been only mine and Q's. And the worst of it is, even if you had been authorized to reproduce I would never have chosen to have a child with you. You were my best friend, but I could see the danger in adding your pattern to mine. Create a child with my intellect, my curiosity, my desire to push the boundaries of knowledge… and your rebelliousness, your cavalier disregard for rules that stand between you and your desires? How could any Q not see what a terrible combination that would be?"

Q says nothing, because the truth is, he'd never considered the issue when Q had asked him to contribute himself to Trelane's pattern. He'd been flattered, and excited, and he'd felt that he was putting one over on the Continuum. The consequences of getting caught did haunt him throughout Trelane's life, but the consequences of his pattern shaping Trelane's nature never struck him as a potential problem… not until he saw the cognate build his device and plunge into the Heart of the Storm and go mad, anyway.

"Tell me," Trelane's acknowledged father says, "why did you do it? Why did Q ask you, or allow you, to involve yourself?"

"Why don't you ask her?" Q asks bitterly.

"Because she's gone. She left our timeline to try to find some track in the multiverse where Trelane isn't dead."

"And it never occurred to her that if she finds one, he'll already have her own cognate there to be his mother?"

"I'm sure it occurred to her, Q. She just doesn't care. She'll merge herself with her own cognate and disappear forever. Either way, we will never see her again."

So. Trelane is dead, and Trelane's mother is gone, and might as well be dead. Q thinks he should feel grief at this, but can only feel a sense of overwhelming numbness, a despairing resignation. Of course she is gone. Anything that could possibly make this situation worse must be what has happened, or will happen. He may have saved the universe, but the universe isn't done making him pay for what he did to cause the problem in the first place.

When he denied, to Picard, that he was Trelane's father, in a way that would confirm the exact thing he was ostensibly denying, he didn't go into details, didn't explain the difference between Q and human reproduction or attitudes toward sexuality. He didn't need to; he could use shorthand, play on the human's understanding of sex and the human's prejudices, to get across the basic idea of the problem with his being Trelane's father and why he had never admitted it. So he strongly implied that he had cuckolded his friend, as if the Q have a concept of monogamy, which they don't, or can accidentally create a child as the result of a love affair, which they can't, or as if the Q next to him right now isn't Trelane's father, which he is. Picard had no referent for a species that can have any number of parents involved in the creation of the same child. But Picard also had no referent for a society of immortals that would ruthlessly restrict reproduction.

Q's crime was not in loving Trelane's mother. Had Trelane's father, the scientist, returned from his researches to find his two best friends making love to each other, sharing pleasure and intimacy in a joining of minds and patterns, the worst reaction he might have had would have been to be a trifle miffed that they hadn't waited for him to be free to join in. More likely, he would have been pleased that his friends were enjoying themselves in his absence, both because his friends' emotional well-being had been important to him and because that decreased the demands either of them might have put on him. In the Continuum, no Q owns another Q; no one expects, or even wants, exclusive relations with a partner in love. And even had monogamy existed in the Continuum, it would have been moot in the case of their relationship, which had been much more like a human threesome than a marriage.

Trelane's mother is – was, Q supposes, now that she is likely gone forever – well-loved by the Continuum, because she is, was, lovable. A goddess of love on a thousand mortal worlds, she was genuinely kind, compassionate and giving to her fellow Q, so much so that even in a species that considers love and intimacy dangerous and somewhat ridiculous, few Q could feel anything but joy in her presence. But her great talent at love came with a significant weakness. She needed more love, more intimacy, than any one Q could ever give her, lest they merge together into a single entity, devouring each other the way Trelane's mad cognate had devoured him.

So her childhood best friend, the bad boy rebel who couldn't quite make himself fully vulnerable to any other Q, and his other best friend, the aloof genius who could never love any Q more than he loved his quest for knowledge, had come up with a plan, uncounted millennia ago. The scientist would share himself fully with her, joining with her as deeply as she needed and sharing as much intimacy as she required… for the time he could give her, but most of his time would still go to his research. And the rebel, the trickster, would give her as much time as they could both stand, and as much love as he was capable of sharing with any Q, but it would never be as deep as she needed because he simply couldn't. Between the two of them, they thought, they could almost fill her needs.

And then she wanted a child.

An immortal species must closely control its own reproduction. The only Q who were permitted to reproduce were those who had traits the Continuum felt it needed or considered valuable. The scientist, of course, was considered a very worthy Q – while the Q have appointed themselves guardians of the Heart of the Storm simply because they live next to it and tap a tiny fraction of its power for their omnipotence, avoiding insanity by sharing the strain out amongst an entire Continuum, that role isn't truly what they think of as their reason for existing. It's the quest for greater knowledge that made the Continuum in the first place, and it's that quest they still see as driving them as a species, even now – or perhaps especially now – that they already know so very much. So of course one of their greatest geniuses and inventors was considered worthy to reproduce. And quite aside from the fact that everyone loved Trelane's mother and didn't want to disappoint her, the truth is that Q like her are needed by the Continuum, the emotional glue that holds a fractious, selfish species together. Love is dangerous to individual Q but vitally necessary to the Continuum as a whole… and because it's dangerous, there is more need for new Q capable of great love than there is for many other archetypes. Also, letting such Q have children helps to keep them sane and happy and alive, continuing to preserve the "continuous" part of the Continuum.

But since Q's own birth, rebels and tricksters and questioners of authority are no longer seen as nearly as valuable, necessary or worth having around as the Continuum thought when his own creation was authorized. So he was not granted the right to reproduce. And if an unauthorized parent should contribute their pattern to a child, that child would be destroyed, no questions asked. An adult with unauthorized parents could be tested for worthiness to be a Q, and destroyed only if they should fail the tests, as Q himself had done for Amanda Rogers, whose parents had certainly been unauthorized but who hadn't been known for sure to be a Q until she was so close to adulthood that Q had successfully been able to argue that she should be treated the way Q who'd survived to adulthood with unauthorized parents were. But if a child were found to have an unauthorized parent, the child would simply be killed.

That didn't stop Q from asking him to contribute to her child, and it didn't stop him from accepting. Perhaps it should have. But Q had reasons for what he did.

"You were never there," he says to his friend, answering the accusatory question with another accusation. "You agreed to have a child with her, yes, very big of you. And then you left her with all the work. You handed her a piece of your pattern and said, here, dear, see what kind of a baby you can knit out of this, and then you ran back to your work."

"Q knew I had work to do. She knew my work would always be my priority."

"Of course she knew it, but that didn't make her any happier about it." Q shrugs. "So, she asked me to help her. And I pointed out that I couldn't violate the pattern of a baby Q by working with its weave unless my pattern was part of it. So she asked me to contribute. Because she wanted someone to work with her on Trelane's creation, and you weren't there."

"And why did you agree? You've always said you had no desire to have children!"

Q shakes his head. "I had no desire to raise children. I'd have begged out on being Trelane's godfather if I'd known a way to say no without offending both of you. But… you may have noticed, most of my loudest declarations of a total lack of desire to procreate came after Trelane was created? Because I could see my pattern in him… admittedly, I knew to look for it, but if I could see it surely any other Q who really looked at him could see it. I never imagined, when I participated in his creation, that so much of me would be expressed in him… so, you know, if everyone in the Continuum thinks I'd rather be a Rigellian slugworm than make a baby, no one's going to think it's anything more than coincidence that my best friends' kid looks just like me. I mean, no one would really have wanted to accuse Q of doing something so disreputable as asking an unauthorized parent to participate in her baby-making anyway, but just in case."

"You should have told me. One of you should have told me."

"I suppose she was afraid that you'd be too much of a stickler for the rules. Tell the Continuum all about Trelane having an unauthorized third parent and try to console her by offering to make a new one with her once they'd dissolved him."

He is abruptly halfway across the planet, his friend's power crushing his pattern into a ball, before Q has time to realize he's being attacked. "How dare you!" the scientist snarls. "Trelane was my son! I would never have – would never—"

Q pushes the other's power away, freeing himself without attacking in retaliation. "You barely seemed to notice the kid was there half the time. I had to take him exploring when Q got sick of dealing with him, long before I was supposed to take him under my wing formally. Half the time you two just stuck him in some nursery and let him play with whatever hapless toys happened to drift into his path. I know why Q did it – with her emotional problems, she had to back off, she couldn't risk smothering the poor thing. But why did you agree to actually have a kid if you weren't willing to raise it? You left Q alone with him more and more of the time. It was looking to me like you were sick of dealing with him and using the fact that you had research as an excuse to avoid your obligations."

"Yes. I was a failure as a father. I acknowledge that. I can't avoid acknowledging that – anyone whose son attempts to destroy the multiverse is a failure as a parent, by definition. But I would never have risked my son's life. You, though…" The other Q's mindspeech is ice cold. "Mentors are supposed to be different from parents because children need the perspective of a Q whose pattern is unrelated. You were too similar to him, and too similar to some of his worst qualities. If I had known you were also his father I could have avoided the mistake of making you his mentor."

"Again. I looked away for a moment, and his mad cognate ate him. You looked away from him for many, many moments; if he hadn't been in my care the same thing would have happened. And the cognate was in your care, or your cognate's care, when he built his device and transported himself to the Heart of the Storm." Q shakes his head, or rather, since he hasn't got a head, does the Q equivalent. "Trelane didn't become corrupted because my mentorship accentuated errors in his pattern. He was devoured by a cognate who had experienced the Heart of the Storm. The exact same thing would have happened if he'd stayed at home with you."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. You took him to a ship full of mortals, with no sensors, no barriers, no way to detect the presence of a cognate. But even that is not your worst sin." The other Q pushes his power against Q, only briefly, forcing Q to focus attention on him. "You had him in your hands. The tiniest fragment of his pattern survived the Heart of the Storm, and you caught him. You could have saved him, helped him to grow. Instead you sent him back to merge with his earlier self. You turned him into a loop, when he could have healed and regained his immortality."

"I thought… that that might fix it. That he'd remember, and it would change time, and he'd live."

"You unconscionable moron. Didn't you remember that Q nicknamed him Trelane because she said he was destined to control three timelines? When you prepared to send him back, how did it not occur to you that you were just looping, that your action must naturally be the reason she knew something of what would become of him, and that the way to change time was to not send him back?"

"No, that never occurred to me, for the simple reason that I've known for centuries that Q was bullshitting all of you when she claimed that was the reason he was called Trelane. Yes, yes, three paths of time in the future. Who nicknames a kid based on the future? Ever? It's not stable." Q glares at his friend. "Three ways, Q. Three paths, three patterns… three parents. He was nicknamed for how he was created, and she just made that crap up about three lanes of time so no one would guess what she really meant." The Q are all called Q, in mortal speech (or whatever the name of their species translates to, in any particular mortal language), and to each other, in the Continuum, their "names" are untranslatable multi-dimensional constructs that are, essentially, pictures of their essence. But it doesn't stop them from giving each other nicknames. "Trelane" is actually a fairly terrible translation of Trelane's nickname in the Continuum, Q reflects -- the "lane" part is better translated as "way" or "path", and of course to really get "three" in English it should have been Trey or Tri – but the boy was just a small child when he put together a translation of his nickname for the benefit of his human, English-speaking toys, based on the form of English spoken several hundred years ago. It was forgivable that he hadn't produced the most accurate translation, at the time, and after that it was his name among humans, so he was stuck with it.

"Why would she nickname him in a way that expressed, in plain sight, the truth he could have been killed for, if anyone else guessed? Q loved Trelane. She wouldn't have risked him that way."

Q shutters his shields down on a sudden wave of guilt and exhausted sorrow, looking inside himself rather than at the other. "We thought… at the time, we thought I had some chance of getting the Continuum to grant me parental rights. We didn't realize when we added me to him that we'd have to keep it secret his entire childhood, that the Continuum would… despise me quite as much as they do. I thought I could prove myself by doing my job better. I didn't realize until much later that they just don't want anyone actually doing the job they let me be created to do, anymore."

He refocuses his attention on his friend. "Anyway, do you seriously think that if I hadn't sent him back in time they wouldn't have killed him? They killed Q and Q for spending too much time with mortals and trying to commit unauthorized procreation in a mortal form. They threw me out of the Continuum and nearly got me killed for much less than attempting to destroy the multiverse. And by now everyone knows he's mine as much as yours and Q's. The Continuum would have executed a being who used the Heart of the Storm to lock them up and then proceeded to try to destroy the multiverse anyway, child or no, accident or no, and my parentage would give them double the justification. Sending what was left of him back to rejoin the rest of his self was the only way I could preserve even that tiny piece of him."

"You didn't consult me. Or Q. We were the ones who were his acknowledged parents, who raised him from infancy. And you simply took it on yourself to try to alter time, and instead created the loop we have always existed in, because you knew better. Because you thought you knew the only reason for his nickname, without considering for a moment that perhaps Q had more than one reason for calling him Trelane, and perhaps she was telling the truth about what she'd seen of his future."

The Q don't specifically have the ability to see their own future – they live in the linear timeline of the Continuum, and can't go forward in it any more than the average human can go forward in their timeline – but because the Q interact with the universe the mortals live in, and can move freely in that timeline, they often meet Q from the Continuum's future or past, and so they all accept that any given Q might have been granted some insight from the future. Obviously what Trelane's mother learned from the future fragment of her son wasn't that he would die, consumed by the Heart of the Storm after his integrity was breached by one of his own fathers; all she apparently learned from the piece was that someday Trelane would control three timelines. This wouldn't have inherently implied that he would try to merge them; a Q controlling three timelines would merely be an impressive feat, not the blow for chaos and destruction it had proven to be.

"If I'd consulted you, what would you have done? Kept him around here until the Continuum tore him from your hands and dissolved him? What I did was the only way possible to save that fragment of his existence at all."

"You don't know that. You didn't discuss it with us, we didn't make plans, I did no research on the matter… you went with your impulse, the way you always do. The way you created him in the first place. And now he is dead, and Q may as well be dead, and I blame you. If you hadn't added your pattern to his, he wouldn't have been unstable enough to do what he did. If I had known your pattern was in his, if you hadn't kept the knowledge from me, I'd have better known what to watch out for. If you hadn't sent the fragment back, it would have changed the timeline, since it's obvious in retrospect that we live in the timeline where you did send it back, and maybe none of this would have happened. But you did all of these things. And now my son is dead and my love is gone forever."

Really there's nothing Q can say to that. He's tried to defend himself, but the truth is, he knows his friend is right. Of all the people who could have stopped this, who could have saved Trelane somewhere along the way, he's the one who had the most opportunities to act, and the one who failed to act on any of them. He killed his little boy with his own hands – well, literally, with Picard's hands, but with his own powers, his own essence – because by that time, there had been nothing else he could have done. But it is his fault that matters ever came to that, at all. Trelane's mother and acknowledged father share some of the guilt, yes, but in the end he's the one who could most easily have prevented the situation, and didn't.

"What do you want me to say?" he whispers. "Yes, fine. It was my fault. I shouldn't have made him as he was, I should have trusted you with the truth, I shouldn't have mentored him, I should have watched him more closely… I should have recovered faster, regained my memories more quickly, so I could have stopped his cognate from using the machine in the first place… I should have found a way. But I didn't. Do you think it accomplishes anything to tell me any of this? Do you truly think I don't know?"

"I think there is something you don't know, yes," Trelane's father says softly.

"And that would be what?"

"That I am going to make you pay for this," the other says, still in that horribly quiet mindvoice with all the emotion stripped from it. "That I will be watching, waiting for an opportunity. And if you make another mistake, if you give me a single opening in all of eternity, I will lead the Continuum against you, I will bring all of this up to the Convocation and argue for your destruction. And if I can persuade the Continuum to strip you of your power and exile you again, I will make sure that some enemy far more dire and cruel than the Calamarain learns exactly where you are. And if I can persuade the Continuum to execute you outright, I will be the one to carry out the sentence, and I will make sure you die in as much pain as my little boy suffered. I will stand in the way of your plans, I will argue against anything you propose, and I will make you a laughingstock in the Continuum. And you will make a mistake. You're careless, and impulsive, and I have all of eternity. Someday you will give me an opening, and I will use it to crush you completely."

The words hit Q like a blow. Not because of the threats per se – he's heard such threats from other Q before. But because of who they come from. This entity before him swearing eternal vengeance was once one of his two best friends. So of his closest friends in the Continuum, one is gone forever and one has just declared himself an enemy for all of time.

It hurts more than he would ever have imagined, almost as much as killing Trelane hurt. He's effectively alone in the Continuum now – any of his other friends will probably take the scientist's side, or already hate him for the grief he brought to Q, never mind how much of it she brought on herself by asking him to join her in the first place. But then, he has caused the death of the child who depended on him… the child who was his own, as much as Q and Q's… the child he loved. If the entire Continuum hates him for what he's done… maybe it's what he deserves.

He has enough pride, enough defensiveness, not to admit this. Instead he says, flippantly, "Stand in line, Q. There's no shortage of others in the Continuum who've already sworn their eternal vengeance. What's one more?"

"Yes, this is hardly the first time you've made an enemy." The other steps back from him slightly. "But, Q? This is the first time you've made an enemy who knows your weak points as well as I do."

And he vanishes.

And he's right. A friendship of millions of years gives two beings plenty of time to learn every weakness, every fear and sorrow and broken place, of the other. If it were to be him that the Continuum sided with, and if he were to have the stomach for it, he is quite capable of destroying his former friend completely. But the guilt, the grief, overwhelm him so totally he knows he can't recruit allies against his old friend… he's not even sure he'll be able to fight back, when it comes to it. And his old friend will have no such compunctions against him.

Perhaps, if he manages to survive the next few millennia, someday Trelane's other father will forgive him, and they can at least be civil to each other, even if their friendship is gone forever. But to be honest, he doubts it. Q is quick to anger and quick to forgive; he doesn't hold grudges, not for eternity anyway. His old friend, though… It is very, very hard to anger him, but when he hates, he hates forever.

Again Q stares into nothing, and wishes he could summon up his usual talent for scapegoating, wishes he could blame any of this on anyone other than himself. But he can't find a way to escape the guilt.

Perhaps, if his friend does destroy him someday, it will be a mercy.