EXTENDED SUMMARY:

Never ask Q what the limits of his powers are, because he just might try to show you.

At Starfleet Academy, William Riker used the detailed journals of a historical figure to keep him focused on his studies. This 'long distance girlfriend' seemed real to his classmates, didn't get jealous when he strayed a little, and thanks to her thorough documentation of her own life, he knew enough about her to fool even himself, sometimes. Will left her behind as he moved on with his career.

When Q joked about fooling around with time, dressing himself up in the clothing of the same woman's eventual husband, Will worried that her tumultuous life was influenced by the omnipotent trickster. What he didn't expect was for Q to attempt to pull her from the 21st century into their own- and succeed.

Q had assumed he failed. Now Will's ideal woman was on the Enterprise, and she seemed to hate him.

NOTES:

I used to write this in my head when I had insomnia, and now I have decided to write it down. This is self-indulgence, yes, with somewhat of a ridiculous premise, but at the same time, it's a fun slow burn, enemies to lovers kind of celebration of the characters of The Next Generation. In the first few chapters, Riker is pretty stressed out from the whole situation, so bear with me if you think his character seems off balance a bit (because he is). Then again, he was hostile as heck to Ensign Ro, so maybe not so ooc after all!

Chapter One: Earthquake

Windsor, Elizabeth Anne Frances

(also known as Sarah Holmes)

Early Life:

The circumstances of Elizabeth's birth are still shrouded in mystery even centuries later. Historians agree that her parents had a brief, intense affair during which she was conceived. Much like Anne Boleyn, Diana appears to have refused to consummate the relationship before marriage. The certificate, long thought to be lost, is now preserved in the Royal Collection.

Seeing the potential of the relationship if the child could be concealed, the birth was hushed up and the child given an American family to be raised. Diana was introduced to the royal family as a suitable bride for the future king a few months later as if the prior marriage had never happened.

After the turn of the century, a proposal was made to change the rule of male primogeniture, and as a result, the Prince of Wales' secret 'love child' was discovered. A former employee of the Spencer family spoke to reporters after stealing key documents that were meant to have been destroyed. A DNA test proved that the woman in question was indeed a full-blooded sister to Princes William and Harry.

Elizabeth was treated as an example of the problems inherent in a system of hereditary monarchy when she was discovered, but her intelligence, kindness, and natural diplomacy endeared her to the people. The speech she gave on her second day in the country, widely reported to be written by Elizabeth herself, is regarded as the moment that changed the opinions of many. Her first twenty-five years as an American are detailed in a separate section titled 'The Life of Sarah Holmes.'

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Commander William Riker was profoundly uncomfortable.

The Tagrans were, to a man, completely overcome with emotion at the unexpected cleansing of their atmosphere. Their technology, designed to overcome the powerful ionization caused by unchecked pollution, was now exceedingly powerful without it. This meant that when a message about their location was sent out, it reached far more citizens than usual, and all of them wanted to see their saviors. Barely five minutes had passed before the control room Will, Geordi, and Orn Lote were located in was full of jubilant and tearful Tagrans. It wasn't hard to figure out what really happened, but Will was not sure about the morality (or legality, for that matter) of explaining it to them.

"Sir?" Geordi touched his arm. With a respectful nod, Will looked away from the effusive gratitude of another pair of government officials. "Diplomacy is one thing, Commander, but if you'd like, I'm sure I can come up with something to excuse you. I can't imagine the captain is interested in sharing any details on an open comm."

"Sparing your curiosity or your embarrassment, Mr. LaForge?" Will couldn't resist teasing him. "I won't ask just how terrible my facial expressions must look for you to suggest as much, but I'll definitely take you up on it."

"If it's what I think it is, sir, you'll be able to beam right out." Geordi's smile was sympathetic, and Will clapped him on the shoulder before calling up to the ship.

A few minutes later, Will was in Transporter Room Three. He spent a few minutes speaking over his comm, first to Captain Picard, getting a run-down of the events (which had proceeded as he'd imagined they had, with Amanda embracing her powers as a Q). Next, he requested a team of ship counselors and diplomats to be amassed in order to help the Tagran people cope with the enormity of the miracle that had been granted to them.

He was in the midst of a discussion with Data about the possibility of gathering some engineering crewmembers to help the Tagrans adjust to their new normal when two figures appeared in front of him.

"We expected you on the main bridge, Riker," Q said in a voice of grand irritation.

"Stop," Amanda said to Q. Her tone was equal parts annoyed and commanding.

Will could see the change in her confidence level, saw how the balance of power between the two Q entities ebbed and flowed in a way that probably explained Q's impatience. He approved.

"Well, go on!" Q said to Amanda.

"Commander," Amanda said, stepping forward, her old uncertainty showing itself in the way she bit her lip. "I wanted to apologize. I… used you to understand my powers. You were very patient in your explanation of why that was wrong, and I didn't want to leave before I told you that I heard and understood what you were saying."

"It takes a lot of courage to say that. I have no doubt that your human upbringing-" here, Will made direct eye contact with Q, "-will benefit the Continuum every bit as much as they'll benefit you."

"Well now that that's out of the way, run along and say goodbye to your parents, will you? I'll be there shortly," Q said dismissively.

Amanda was faced away from Q and her eye-roll was completely perfect. Will allowed himself to smile brightly at her, and her cheeks reddened a bit as she made a complicated-looking gesture and disappeared.

"There, now you'll get your human influence without having to give anything away," Will said to Q.

"'And nothing of value was lost,'" Q said, looking Will up and down before raising one elegant eyebrow.

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'Sarah Holmes' had always been one to look at the bright side. She'd hated her first name as too common (there were so many Sarahs), but turning her back on that name wasn't a problem when it turned out she was actually named something else in secret and sent away to another country.

The funny thing was that she'd always loved the name Elizabeth. 'Sarah' had precious few nicknames, but Elizabeth abounded in them. On the airplane over to the UK, she'd tried a few out for size. Did she want to go full Elizabeth Bennet and use 'Eliza' or 'Lizzy?' She didn't feel like a 'Liz,' and 'Beth' made her feel like she was destined to die of scarlet fever while her more vivacious siblings went on to write books and marry the rich boy from next door.

That was the other thing. She wasn't an only child anymore. She had brothers, two of them. Would they dislike her? Her accent was American, her manners that of a lower middle class household (this had been explained to her as necessary, because any money sent to her family would have been traced, of course, and she was supposed to have stayed a secret. As if they couldn't have sent her with money as a baby in the first place. As if they hadn't really intended for her to be discovered, and thus she was meant to live in relative poverty in comparison with her full-blood family…).

As the wheels touched down, the woman formerly known as Sarah Holmes decided that she liked the idea of being called Lilly. It was an Elizabeth-adjacent nickname, but different enough that she hoped she wouldn't be thought of as 'putting on airs' or attempting to claim a close association with the most famous of her relatives.

By some major miracle, their flight hadn't been picked up in the press, but Lilly supposed that the news of her existence had only broken eight hours before, and she'd only found out about everything the day before that. There hadn't been time to stake out every single airport looking for a twenty-five year old woman with blue eyes and brown or red hair. Hers was blonde, much like her true mother's had been, but according to the discreet handlers that had come to speak with her and spirit her away to the UK, none of the reports speculating on her appearance had guessed that. She was shorter than her true mother, too, at five feet, six inches.

Lilly drew the line at trying to figure out how many 'stone' she weighed. She'd figure that out when she felt British enough to care.

Before Lilly had exited the plane, her hair had been braided expertly and tucked into a baseball cap. None of the clothes she wore on the journey were in any way expensive. The car she was hurried into was, however, and so was the woman who was already riding in it. She looked like a movie version of a no-nonsense private assistant or PR guru, and Lilly was incredibly intimidated by her, especially when she realized that her 'handlers' had done their duty by delivering her, and were flying back to the States without even saying goodbye.

"Bless me, but you look like the Queen! Set a brown wig on you and no one will question it," the woman said, her severe expression opening up into one of approval and surprise as soon as Lilly removed her hat. "I'm May. It's my job to get you inside without a lot of press attention. You've been lucky so far, and not much ground left to cover!"

May turned out to be a delightful dichotomy of matronly good humor and starched severity, depending on who she was speaking to. To further throw off any undue attention, she and Lilly spent the evening at a posh hotel, and Lilly kept her mouth shut the entire time she was in public, just in case her American accent set anyone's suspicions off. Lilly and May spent the rest of that first day enjoying room service as Lilly basically told the other woman her life story. Certain aspects of it set May off into exclamations of delight- the fact that her American mother looked a lot like the Queen, Lilly's love of the name Elizabeth throughout grade school, and her job as a primary school teacher. Other aspects earned Lilly heartfelt hand squeezes, especially the fact that she'd lost her American parents in a car accident six years prior.

By far the thing that seemed to surprise May the most was Lilly's lack of romantic attachments. She'd been too bookish in high school to bother with boys, mostly, and the loss of her parents just as she'd finished her second year of college had derailed her burgeoning interest in her classmates.

"Don't get me wrong, I liked a few guys," Lilly told May, half-way through their second box of chocolate-covered strawberries. "They were just all on the television or in movies. None of the real boys seemed anywhere near as interesting." She pointed at May with the leafy stem, all that remained of her strawberry. "Tell the truth: how grateful are you that I'm not divorced with four kids, or something?"

"Immensely," May admitted.

The majority of the attention on the 'love child' case had been in America, right up until Lilly woke up on her first morning in the UK to find that her name and picture were in the news.

"I think we'll stay in for a few hours," May said. She spent those hours on the phone (several of them, actually, each with their own specific ring. Lilly didn't want to know if any of them were a direct line to her birth family), and Lilly spent those same hours on a speech. She doubted she'd be able to actually give it, assuming that the real thing would be written for her and then handed over, but Lilly told herself that the speechwriters had nothing to go on in terms of knowing what she was like and her speech patterns. It wasn't really in speech form, just a list of things she was grateful for about her life as it was before, things she imagined were more or less universal between their two countries, like the joy of hearing child successfully sound out an unfamiliar word themselves, or finally filling in the mental map of the streets you grew up on as a driver. She tied everything together in her last paragraph by writing about the way it felt to connect to someone over the internet and find commonality with them even though they were in a different time zone and may have had an entirely different upbringing.

When she was done, it was one PM and she was exhausted. May had let her sleep in, since she'd stayed up till past twelve AM and still had felt like she was going to bed early, in American time. Getting up at ten was still like being awake at an ungodly hour, and spending her subsequent awake time hunched over a desk writing instead of typing had worn Lilly out.

"I don't know why I am so worried about this, there's no way anyone on either continent would allow me to give this as a speech," she told May.

"Can I read it?"

"Yes, but first, give me the phone you said was supposed to be mine?" Lilly asked. May handed it over, and she took a few minutes to work out where the camera was. After taking pictures of each page of her writing, zoomed in to be readable as half-pages, she finally handed it to May.

Not eighteen hours later, Lilly had met her estranged family (and mostly loved them, to her complete shock) and, dressed in clothes that had probably cost more money than her adoptive mother could have made in a year, she gave the speech, word for word.

Six hours after that, Lilly held a newspaper in her hands with a giant picture of her covering the whole front page, with the headline, 'Welcome Home.'

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Q's smugness was almost a physical presence in the room, and while Will knew he shouldn't goad someone with omnipotent powers, he was far too human to deny himself the pleasure.

"You should have been paying closer attention to her. She could teach you a lot about being gracious when you don't get what you want," Will said, resisting the urge to cross his arms. He didn't want to look uncomfortable in front of Q.

"Surely by now you know that I always get what I want. You just managed to persuade me that you weren't worthy of my gift," Q said.

"Always?" Will asked quietly. He hated to engage Q, but he also didn't want Amanda's goodbye to be cut short by his reckless impatience. Will felt like he owed her that much for the way she'd saved his life.

"Yes, always. Eventually."

"When you're immortal, 'eventually' can take forever, but whatever you need to tell yourself to get by," Will said, trying to sound disinterested. He started for the door, but Q appeared directly in front of him, just as he expected.

"You think you handled it better than she did, don't you? Just because you didn't participate in any romantic liaisons or conjure secret puppies doesn't make you the morally superior race!"

Q's comment was so incongruous to their previous conversation that Will was confused for a few seconds. Then, he realized what must have prompted it.

"Been talking to the captain, I see," Will said, allowing himself to grin impudently.

Q's expression turned to one of utter disgust. "I don't understand what she found so attractive in you."

"Don't worry, Q, I don't think there are any humans who are worried about the fact that you don't find us attractive." Will walked over to the transporter controls to check the hour. Did Amanda know that as Q she could halt time? If she didn't, had he left her enough time for a proper goodbye?

"How ironic then that my interest in your pathetic race was prompted by finding one of your leaders attractive! Do you get tired of being wrong, Riker?"

There was something in the quality of Q's voice that sounded almost defensive, or possibly vulnerable. Will didn't necessarily believe his revelation, but he was interested in giving Q every possible reason to be too embarrassed to come back to the Enterprise.

"I don't think immortality would be enough time to persuade Captain Picard to reciprocate, Q. I suggest you give up and move on." Will looked up only at the very last two words of his statement. Q looked positively affronted.

"You think your attempts at baiting me will succeed? The notion is as ridiculous as your facial hair," Q said, walking over to the console Will was standing at. "No, Riker, I know what you're doing. It's almost sweet, in a way. Maybe she could have won you over in the end." With a snap of his fingers, Q was wearing a 21st century tuxedo. Another snap, and Will was dressed like a groom in a wedding, again in the 21st century style.

"I'm still on duty, Q," Will said evenly. He narrowed his eyes in confusion and gestured at his chest. "Why this time period?"

"Amanda chose the Regency, I chose this." Q snapped his fingers again, and Will's uniform was back. Knowing the way Q liked to cause trouble, Will checked that his rank was correct at his throat. As usual, Q had chosen a Starfleet uniform for himself, his rank set at 'only' a captain, for once.

"Does the Continuum have rules about time travel? Do you harass historical figures just as you harass us?"

"Oh, Riker, you're showing off the limitations of your imagination, again! With omnipotence comes infinite power, remember? Why bother with rules, if someone else can simply reverse any undesirable changes that were made?" Q smiled and snapped his fingers, transforming his outfit into an exact replica of an image Will remembered from his history lessons. It was also from the 21st century. He knew he'd shown recognition because Q's expression turned predatory, and he started walking over to stand uncomfortably close to Will. "You recognize this?" Q asked, running his fingertips across the medals on his chest.

"I'd rather I didn't," Will said truthfully. The outfit was that of a Prince Consort, the wedding uniform of the man that married a particular historical figure Will himself had always been partial to. Her life story was about as unusual as it could be, and Will felt a bit sick at the idea that perhaps that turmoil had come from Q's influence, that he'd meddled in her life.

"Your face is completely transparent. I can almost read your thoughts! That kind of time travel is boring, Commander. I'm more interested in the unattainable." Q's glee was sinister; he seemed to love the idea of turning Will's stomach. A frisson of adrenaline shot through his chest. Would Q seek to damage humanity's timeline just to get a reaction? Will wouldn't put it past him. "Here, Riker, drink this, you'll feel better."

Q thrust a crystal goblet filled with a bright pink viscous liquid into his hand. It smelled, awfully, of peppermint. Will simply raised his eyebrows.

"What? You don't trust me? I'm wounded."

Will would have loved to pour the liquid out in defiance of Q as Worf had, once. Instead, he took the cup and placed it in the matter deconverter where it fell out of sight, the molecules that made up its existence torn apart.

"The Queen would have drunk it," Q said, his voice sulky. "That's all it was! A 20th century remedy for nausea." Q's laughter sounded hollow, and Will's patience was running thin.

"I think I've stalled enough. I'm sure Amanda is looking for you."

"You really did put up with me just to give her more time with her parents! How adorable." Q put one hand on his hip and angled the other as if he were placing his arm around a woman standing beside him. It was a perfect reproduction of the picture Will had seen in world history class. "Your sacrifice requires a sacrifice of my own. I will tell you a secret."

"I couldn't possibly be less interested in-"

"Yes you are. It's related to her," Q said. A hazy, ghost-like reproduction of the woman in the photograph appeared exactly where she belonged. Q looked down at her, and for the first time since Will had encountered him, the Q entity looked almost haunted. His hungry, longing expression was almost too private to witness. Will took a step back.

"Q…" Will started to say, shaking his head. He didn't know what to say, except perhaps 'stop, no,' or 'this is too much,' but that would show the exact kind of weakness that would encourage him to continue.

"There's a legend," Q said in a hushed voice, his eyes tracing over the woman's semi-transparent face. "In the Continuum. It's one thing to stop time- that creates a mess, especially on an inhabited planet. It's entirely another thing to interfere in history itself, too little interaction, the events too predictable."

Unwillingly, Will let himself look at the apparition that seemed to be patiently waiting for Q to finish his story. Despite her transparency, she looked real; her chest moved as she breathed, her hair moved when she turned her head to look at Q. She reminded Will of the holofilms of her life that he'd watched as a young man. He hadn't liked the man she'd married, not after he'd watched every holofilm in sequence up until that point. She deserved better then, and she definitely deserved better now. He clenched his jaw and looked back at Q instead.

"Looks real, doesn't she?" Q asked. He gestured, and her transparency filled in, leaving what looked like the real woman standing there quietly. "I wanted that to be enough, but of course it wasn't. Even if I spent eons building an apparatus that could project a version of her that I wasn't in control of, it wouldn't be enough." Q dropped his arm and stepped back. The woman lifted a hand and pushed back a blonde curl that had fallen into her face. "No, if I want the real thing, I need to do the one thing that the Q can't. I need to bring her to me."

"What, pull her out of her own century? Won't that destroy her timeline? Without her-" Will stopped talking before Q had a chance to interrupt. Her leadership was important to Earth during WWIII.

"Not if I send her back." Q looked away from the woman toward Will for the first time since he'd conjured her. "I'd make her immortal, just like me. I would send her back a split second before the end of the universe. That might, might be enough."

All Will could do was shake his head. This was a Q whose insanity was even more incomprehensible than it had been in the past.

"I've only tried once, so far," Q said, snapping his fingers. His outfit and the historical Queen that matched it both disappeared. Q was once again wearing his Starfleet uniform and a disgruntled expression. "I could do it, though."

"I think if you could do it, you'd have done it already," Will said impulsively. He wanted to quash Q's frightening ambition. "That kind of obsession isn't healthy, even for you."

"Jealous, Riker? Don't think I didn't see recognition in your eyes. When I succeed, I'll be sure to introduce you."

"Don't bother," Will said gruffly. "Go find Amanda and try to let her influence you at least half the amount you try to corrupt her, will you?"

Q didn't respond. He stood quietly, his eyes shut, brows furrowed. He let out a long, slow breath, and Will couldn't suppress his eye roll. The second Will turned to leave the room and its insane alien being behind, Q let out a frustrated grunt and snapped his fingers, disappearing in his signature flash of light.

In the doorway, Will reached up to tap his communicator, meaning to tell Geordi that his team of engineers would be ready to beam down within the hour. Behind him, in the empty room, a female voice with an American accent spoke.

"Excuse me?"