Q isn't in the room when Picard wakes up. If he were there, Picard would know that he was hovering, and might be able to guess at his desperation, and Q hasn't sunk that low yet. Besides, he can see Picard just fine if he's not in the same room. After materializing Picard on the bed he's created, and putting him into a very very light sleep just to give the human something to ease his disorientation, Q materializes himself out on the porch, in a chair, ostensibly looking down over the mountainside and out at the ocean below. In actuality, of course, he's still watching Picard.
Picard wakes up, plainly startled to find himself here. He explores for a bit, attempts to work his communicator – Q reflects that he probably should have gotten rid of that, but then, maybe getting no response will more quickly drive it home to Picard that the Enterprise isn't around anymore than the lack of the device would have – and finally ends up out on the porch. In a voice that conveys a total lack of surprise, he says, "Q."
Q turns in his chair to face Picard. "Bonjour, mon ami! Sleep well?"
"I'm not your friend. Send me back to my ship."
Q shakes his head. "I can't do that, Jean-Luc. Not this time."
"You mean you won't."
"I mean I won't, because when you understand the situation, you won't want me to. Sanctity of the timeline and the Temporal Prime Directive and all that jazz."
Picard frowns. "What do you mean by that? Are we in a different time?"
"Well, you are. From what you remember, anyway. I'm not, though."
"How can I be in a different time, and not you, when you're right here?"
"You gotta ask yourself, Jean-Luc, different from what? You aren't in the time you remember being because time has passed, and I'm not in a different time because I've been here the whole time it was passing. Immortal, remember?" Well, mostly immortal. He pulls his memory away from that. He doesn't want to think about the exceptions.
"Wait, so… you are your future self? You've pulled me into the future?"
"Mmm… not exactly. What's the last thing you remember?"
"I was beaming down to Sagasea V, with the ambassador and her party. The last thing I remember is the transport beam."
"That's what I figured," Q says, who actually arranged it that way but he's not exactly going to tell Picard that. "See, you never got there."
"Because you intercepted me?"
"No, because there was a pinpoint wormhole in the way and you beamed straight into it. You were declared dead 300 years ago, Picard. The Enterprise had no hope of finding you – they couldn't even detect the wormhole, or the pocket universe it was an opening into. You've been bouncing around a microverse as a beam of energy for the past 300 years, until I finally got around to noticing what had happened to you and pulled you out." There is only one true statement in what he has just said, technically, but the important thing is that Picard understands that he's been dead for 300 years. Knowing the exact details would only cause him unnecessary angst. Picard doesn't know how his own transporter works well enough to know how impossible the story Q has just told him is.
"I've been… dead… for 300 years."
"Is there an echo in here?"
Picard shakes his head. "I don't believe you."
"What's not to believe? I cut you some slack on the whole not believing I was God, Jean-Luc, since I must admit I don't really resemble either a jealous god of wrath or a loving god of fluffy bunnies, ponies and kittens, which are the two major forms of the monotheistic god most of you don't really believe in anyway but it's part of your culture. But exactly what don't you believe about a transporter accident? You people seemed to have one every other day, back in the old days."
"If I suffered a transporter accident 300 years ago, why would you choose to remove me from the pocket universe now? Surely you'd have been more interested in doing so when our acquaintanceship was fresher; if you didn't do it then, why do it now?"
"I was sort of busy at the time." Unwanted, memory trickles back of what he was doing at the time. He forces it down. "Now I've got nothing going on. Six quadrillion channels and nothing good's on the holo. So, you know, I'm kind of bored and I think to myself, 'Hey, Jean-Luc was always good for a few chuckles. Wonder what ever happened to him?' And I checked into it and found out that technically you'd never actually died. So here you are! Aren't you glad I rescued you?"
"Thrilled," Picard says, in that tone that indicates that he isn't thrilled at all. But that's okay. He doesn't have to like Q, he never had to do that. He just has to distract Q from the blackness lurking behind the barriers Q keeps having to fortify in his own mind.
"You should be." Q stands up. "Everyone you know is dead, Picard. Well, except for Guinan, but she hasn't aged well since the Borg destroyed her homeworld; she's only eleven hundred but she's looking nearly two millennia old nowadays. Your Federation still exists, and Earth, but they've changed so much you'd be an anachronism if you went back. You have no one depending on you, no duties to perform, nothing in the universe to hold you back. There's absolutely no reason you can't go exploring the galaxy with me."
"Aside from the obvious reason that I really would rather not?"
"Oh, come on now. When I offered it to you the first time you were tempted, I could tell. But oh, no, Captain Jean-Luc Picard can't go off and do anything fun. He has duties to his ship. He has several crewmates whose good opinion he cares about who really, truly can't stand me and he doesn't want to face having to tell them, 'oh, yes, actually I do trust Q, sort of, at least a little bit,' and end up with Beverly Crusher assessing him for mental illness. Well, there's no more Crusher or Riker or Worf to look at you funny, Picard. There's no more Enterprise to command, no more duties to Starfleet to carry out. They discharged you of all that the day Crusher signed your death certificate, three hundred and twelve years, six months, two weeks and four days ago."
"Q… your power is tempting. I've never denied that. The freedom to travel the universe on a whim, traverse space and time, with a guide who knows his way… I'm not going to tell you that isn't an attractive idea. But I am going to tell you that I don't think it's worth it to have to put up with you as a companion for all that time. Especially since I saw what you did to Vash. You're arrogant, obnoxious, overbearing and selfish."
"True, all true. But you also think I'm hilarious, fascinating, and exciting. You just have never been willing to admit to any of that in front of your crew. Or in front of anyone. I have news for you, though; I can, in fact, read your mind any time I want to. Yes, I don't use the ability as often as, say, Lwaxana Troi did, since knowing what you're going to do before you do it takes away some of the excitement, and I live for excitement. But I've indulged myself enough to know what you really think."
Picard shakes his head. "All right… if you're going to pull my own thoughts out of my mind to try to win an argument, I will admit it. I do consider you fascinating. I always have. You're an utterly alien life form, and yet, unlike every other life form of your nature, you actually choose to interact with us humans on our own level. I have no way of knowing what parts of you are a performance and what parts truly represent who you are, but you seem to have a surprisingly… human mind for all your power and all the alien aspects of your nature. Understanding you could be the study of a lifetime." He looks out at the sun setting on the ocean far below, before looking back at Q. "But it would be a terribly dangerous study to undertake. You are capable of feeling anger, jealousy, and hurt, and of acting on those emotions. You refused to leave Vash be when she told you she wanted nothing more to do with you; in fact you tortured her on Deep Space Nine to try to get her to return to you. For all I know, you're capable of wiping Earth out of existence because I made you angry."
"And how is any of that a good argument for rejecting me?" Q asks. "I'm not going to try to tell you I'm a tame lion, because I certainly am not. But if I was going to do something terrible to you because of something you said or did that hurt my poor wittle feewings… you spent years telling me to get off your ship, refusing any gifts I tried to give you unless I forced them on you, insulting me to my face, actually giving me orders and moreover having the temerity to believe I might actually obey them, and outright rejecting my company over and over. If I was going to do something terrible to you, Picard, wouldn't I have done it already?"
"You did," Picard says stiffly. "The Borg."
"That." Q shakes his head. "Yeah… that was pretty bad. I'm… you may have noticed I never did anything like that again."
"You did threaten to kill me for trying to keep Vash from marrying a figment of your imagination."
"What, and you took me seriously? I'm pretty sure that if you'd actually thought you were about to die you might not have spent the last minutes of your life bickering with her."
"And you threatened to destroy the entire Alpha Quadrant if I couldn't pass your test."
"In fact, I wouldn't have destroyed the Alpha Quadrant. I would have only destroyed humanity, and I would have done it because the Continuum was making me do it, and in retrospect I'm not completely convinced I would have gone through with it at all, but if I'd actively planned at the time to tell the Continuum to go jump off a cliff they'd have known about it, and for some reason, ever since they took away my powers I hadn't been feeling much like rebelling against my orders, not openly anyway." Q shrugs. "Anyway, humanity got declared sentient as the result of that test. So there won't be any more tests from the Continuum. And at this point I'm—" not talking to them ever again. "—not really worried about their opinion."
"That may be as it may be, but you're not trustworthy. And it may be that I'd prefer to take my chances with what humanity has become. Perhaps there's some role in Starfleet or the Federation for a man out of time, after all."
"I really doubt it. I mean, Scotty was kind of useless when you found him, and he was only eighty years out of date. You've been gone for three hundred. Do you really think Starfleet would have given a commission to, say, Zephram Cochrane?"
"This is too convenient," Picard says. "Oh, I've been floating in a transporter beam for three hundred years. No, of course you can't return me to my own time, because that would violate the timeline. Why, yes, that does mean that I am a displaced person, a man without a home, and the only person left alive who hasn't changed beyond my recognition… is you. Oh, of course all of this is a great coincidence and couldn't possibly have been faked or arranged by you for your benefit. The fact that this sets me up so that the most logical thing to do with my life is exactly what you want me to do doesn't in any way imply that you are lying to me or that you set me up, oh no."
Q can't help the small, twisted smile of embarrassed recognition. He wonders if it would be better to tell Picard the truth. But that would involve telling him about – and he shuts down again because he doesn't want to remember that. "How little you think of me, Jean-Luc. I think I'm hurt."
"How do I know any of this is true? For all I know you just removed me from the transporter beam and took me to one of your manufactured realities, and my crew is frantically looking for me right now."
"I suppose you don't know. I could be lying to you right now." The accusation stings, when it shouldn't. Picard does have some reason to think Q might not be truthful, since, in fact, Q is lying to him, just not about what Picard thinks the lie is about. "But it's not as if you're going anywhere, now is it?"
"Are you going to hold me hostage until I agree to your demands, again?" Picard snaps.
"Picard. I saved your life. I brought you here – which is a real planet, by the way, it just isn't anywhere near Federation space and it doesn't have sentient inhabitants – to give you time to adjust to being among the living again. And I don't appreciate you accusing me of pretending that you were dead, of pretending that three hundred years has passed, lying about all that when in fact we're conveniently in the time you know and nothing bad has happened to you? No. You're dead, Picard."
"This isn't the first time you've told me that."
"It was true the last time, too, but since it hadn't been 300 years since you died, I was able to hold you together through your momentary period of brain death until Crusher was able to get your heart started again. I can't do that now. If I send you back to your own time, three hundred years of history will be wiped out. And frankly, I don't care. They haven't been a great three hundred years, in my opinion." The keening blackness presses up against the walls Q holds it back with, demanding his attention. He shoves it away again. "But you consider it a moral imperative not to alter the timeline… maybe you'd do it if something horrible had happened, the Borg conquest of Earth or the Vulcans being wiped out or something like that, but nothing like that has happened. Your Federation is alive and healthy, humans are still meddling in the affairs of other races, there's even still a Starfleet. You have no good reason to want to alter history except that you want to go back to the people you left behind. Well, sorry, Picard, but you died. They mourned you, they got over you, they went on with their lives, and in the fullness of time, they died too. Sending you back, undoing your death, would wipe out three hundred years of history. You want to do that? You want the only truly selfish act you ever commit to be one of that magnitude?"
"No, I don't," Picard says sharply. "If it's true that I died three hundred years ago, and if it's true that in the past three hundred years my people have continued to live and thrive and our history has gone on, then no, I don't want to wipe any of that out. But I have only your word for it that any of this has happened!"
"Fine. Check." Q gestures, and there's a terminal connected to Federation records sitting in the living. "Go back in the living room and look up whatever you want."
"And what prevents you from faking the records?"
"What prevented me from faking your entire life after you died on the table when your heart was damaged, and actually, everything that's happened to you since has been a play I invented for you out of pity?"
"You don't have that much pity in you."
"Very true. And I don't have that much patience, either. If I wanted you to come with me badly enough to invent an entire fictional future for you to inhabit, I could just have told you 'come with me or I'll blow up your starship.' Since I didn't do that, what makes you think I want you with me badly enough to invent a whole universe for your sake? I'm bored, Picard, but I'm not desperate." This is a lie. He is that desperate. But he doesn't want Picard to know that, because then he might have to explain why, and he never wants to remember—
"Very well. I'll check. And I intend to be thorough, Q."
Maybe this is a mistake. But if this is what it takes to convince Picard that he's been dead for three hundred years, Q has to take the risk.
Over the next four days, Picard explores the mountain that Q has snuggled this little bungalow into, and the island that consists mostly of the mountain itself and a small strip of beach at its foot, when he's not doing research.
He peppers Q with questions about the modern day, to orient himself so he knows what to research, and Q answers him. Q tells him about how the Federation finally defeated the Borg – how the Borg were, essentially, assimilated by the Federation, various pockets of individualized resistance coming together to take the Collective over after the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant powers united to deal the Borg a crippling blow, and now, the Borg consist of two groups, the Network and the Unity, one individualized and one collective but both assimilating new members only by invitation. Picard has a hard time accepting the notion that anyone would choose assimilation, but Q points out that in the meantime the Federation had become more Borglike themselves, getting over their resistance to cybernetic implants and enhancing their minds and memories with technology. Q explains the circumstances that led to the Cardassians joining the Federation, and what has happened since the Vulcan/Romulan reunification, and why the Andorians are close to extinction now. He talks about the Starfleet mission to the Andromeda galaxy, with the aid of the Kelvans, who no longer think that turning people into styrofoam dodecahedrons is a good idea at all. On a personal level, he tells Picard how one of the other French vintners bought up the Picard winemaking operation after there were no Picards left, and continued to keep the Picard name on the bottle, so the wines his family used to make are still made even though no descendants of the original Picard vintners exist any longer.
He tells Picard nothing about the Continuum, and Picard doesn't ask.
Picard researches the lives and deaths of the people he'd known. He discovers that B4 had eventually grown up into a person much like, though not identical to, Data, and had joined Starfleet, and had only died twenty years ago while attempting to evacuate a colony world facing a sun going nova. H reads about Riker and Troi's four children and their various careers, and points out to Q, who really doesn't care, that in fact there is still a Daughter of the Fifth House of Betazed, who uses technological implants to give herself artificial telepathy because in fact she's three quarters human, one quarter Klingon, and not at all recognizably Betazoid anymore. Troi's children had all been much more human than Betazoid, apparently, much to Lwaxana's chagrin. He sees that Crusher became a director of Starfleet Medical, remarried, and eventually died of great old age, and that Wesley disappeared repeatedly over the course of his life to go on missions for the Travelers but finally returned to Earth to die when he was an old man. He learns that LaForge became a professor of engineering at Starfleet Academy, and Worf was the right hand man to the Klingon Emperor for years before being assassinated. He checks up on the fate of everyone else he cared about. And he seems to be coming around, talking of his friends in the past tense, asking Q questions about what's out there in the universe that suggest that maybe he's seriously thinking about Q's offer.
But then he reads his death certificate.
Q senses the spike of emotion, and turns his attention to read over Picard's shoulder, though from Picard's perspective he's still in the kitchen eating grapes he really doesn't need but likes the taste of. He sees Picard reading over the details of his own death, pulling up the holos of the body, and he leaves the room, teleporting back onto the porch. It doesn't change anything because he can still read over Picard's shoulder, and he's compelled to do it, viewing all the same damning information Picard is seeing, but he doesn't want Picard to be able to look at him.
But eventually Picard comes out to the porch to confront him. And if Q dematerializes or flees to the other side of the island, Picard will rightly think him a coward. So Q simply sits in the chair, pretending to look out at the waves, not turning toward Picard.
"You lied to me," Picard says quietly.
Straight to the point. "About what?" Q asks, toneless.
"You said I had a transporter accident, that I was bouncing around in a pocket wormhole for years, and you just happened to notice me and pull me out because you were bored." Picard approaches the chair. "I checked my own death records. Apparently as soon as the landing party materialized, we were all blown to bits by a classic explosive, the kind that shreds flesh to bits rather than the kind that vaporizes the bodies. Beverly had to do the forensic autopsy so they could track down where on the planet the materials had come from, and find who planted the bomb." He puts a hand on the arm of Q's chair and looks down on him. "I wasn't merely thought dead or declared dead, Q. I was dead. I've seen the holos. I was torn to pieces instantly in the explosion."
"So? What's your point?"
"My point?" Picard is working himself up into a cold rage. "You couldn't be bothered to resurrect me then. Why now? Why lie about it? And what am I? Given that I was quite, quite dead… am I even Jean-Luc Picard? Or am I some sort of unholy simulacrum you created to pass the time with?"
"If you were a simulacrum you'd have already agreed to explore the universe with me." Q turns to face Picard and looks up at him. "I lied to you because I knew you'd react like this. Because you can accept being torn into your component molecules and turned into energy and reassembled off the pattern carried in the wave, and you even know that the beam can be split and re-assemble into more than one copy, but I could only be making some sort of simulation of you, not the real thing. Even though your own technology can make two of you out of a transporter beam, but I can't do the same thing, although my technology is, oh, billions of years more advanced than yours. No, I have to create some sort of soulless fake, because of course Q doesn't understand the human mind well enough to create a real person… even though your damn replicators don't understand a damn thing and they can still make you a perfect chocolate cake. Even though your transporters understand nothing and they can still reassemble a blob of amorphous energy into you. I can't possibly be able to go back 300 years ago, and analyze the pattern that was you, when your transporter disassembled you, and come back and recreate it as precisely as the transporter recreated you on top of the bomb that killed you. Even though you know I can do anything. And you were never really worried about whether Thomas Riker had a soul or not, you were fully willing to accept him as a real person and an identical copy of your Number One, but no, you've got to angst over whether you, a copy made by a much more sophisticated and technologically advanced entity than your goddamn transporter, could possibly have a soul. Even though you don't even believe in souls."
"You never even tried. You assumed I would believe the worst of you."
"Because you always do! If I'd told you from the beginning, yes, Jean-Luc, you landed on a bomb and it ripped you to shreds, but don't worry, I made a copy of you from the transporter signal and brought it to the present with me, which is your future, and that's why the last thing you remember is beaming down to the planet… you'd have spent the last several days angsting over whether or not you were real, and can you trust your own feelings, and could I have reprogrammed you to do what I want you to do, and so on ad nauseam."
"And what stops me from angsting over these things now? How do I know you didn't reprogram me?"
"Because I didn't do it three hundred years ago, so why would I do it now? If I'd wanted to create my very own slave-Picard to be my pet and fawn on me worshipfully, I could have done that at any time. Feel like being my harem boy, Picard? Gonna go back in the kitchen and get me some grapes?"
"No, of course not!"
"Then why do you think I've taken your free will? Trust me, if I had, we wouldn't be having this argument!"
Picard steps back. "If you can ask if you have a soul," he says softly, "the answer to the question must be yes."
"Chronicles of Narnia, isn't that?"
"Yes. One of the Talking Animals asked Aslan if he had a soul. I suppose… if I can ask the question as to whether or not you have left me free will… you must have."
"Good. Great. So you're not going to go whining about how you're a soulless undead thing or something? Because you're not." Q stands up and paces. "You're the exact same Picard that dissolved in that transporter beam as the one who got himself blown to bits when he materialized. I went out of my way to take the pattern from that point." He sighs. "Maybe I should have given you the benefit of the doubt and told you the truth, but I was afraid you'd whine at me that if you're really dead I should have left you dead and 'humans are meant to die, Q, you didn't have the right to interfere with my natural fate' and blah blah blah. Are you going to do any of that? Because if you are, let me know and I'll just make a puppet me you can blather to until you're done, and I'll go, I don't know, blow up a few stars or something. Uninhabited ones, just so you feel better about it."
"I'm not going to tell you you should have left me dead. Obviously you know me well enough to know I disapprove of your meddling, and I'm not wholly convinced I'm better off alive in a century I no longer fit into than I was dead… but I've always thought that where there's life, there's hope, and I've never shrunk away from a challenge. Besides, I imagine that if I wanted to be dead badly enough, I could push you into obliging me."
"You could maybe push me into looking the other way as you jump off the cliff, if you whine enough about it. But I'm not going to kill you. Not even if you beg me to. I went to too much effort to bring you back to kill you."
"And that's the missing piece of this puzzle." Picard walks behind Q's chair, putting it between himself and Q. "When you claimed that I was bouncing around in a pocket universe, it made a certain amount of sense that you wouldn't notice until you had nothing better to do, and then on a whim you might rescue me. That fit my understanding of you. But it makes no sense at all that you would resurrect me three hundred years after my death, unless you planned it that way so that I would have no alternative but to go with you. You could have brought me back then and there – I'm sure you noticed my death when it happened."
Q opens his hands and separates them in a gesture almost like a shrug. "Yeah, I guess you could say that."
"So why now? Why bring me back three hundred years after my death? Were you planning this all along? You thought to bring me back after I died, but then you thought, 'wait, if I wait until all of Picard's friends and family are dead to bring him back, he'll have no choice but to turn to me?'"
"You're not that important. I didn't bring you back then because I had better things to do. Yeah, okay, I wasn't very happy that you were dead, but you were mortal, and mortals die. I had things to do. I didn't need you. And you wouldn't have appreciated it if I had brought you back. So I didn't bother."
"Then why now? What changed?"
"I told you. Bored now."
"Mm-hmm. You lived without me for millions, perhaps billions of years. But now you can't imagine anything entertaining to do without me. Instead of going and bothering one of the many, many mortals who are alive today, you had to resurrect me."
This is dangerously close to the truth. The pain comes back, and this time Q almost lets it show. Not because he can't control this human body he wears – he's a Q. He's nigh-omnipotent. Of course he can make this human body do anything he wants it to do, including showing none of the black grief that threatens to swamp him. But his own mind almost betrays him. Some part of him actually wants to show Picard what he's really feeling. And that's dangerous, and ridiculous, because he has millions of years in training in never showing anyone what he really feels because they'll just mock him with it or use it to hurt him or use it to destroy him, invade his mind, make him remember things that never happened and feel things he never felt and no he will not think about that!
"You remember when I told you that in the entire universe, you were the closest thing I had to a friend, Jean-Luc?"
"Of course I do."
"It's still true."
"That's even sadder now than it was then. In three hundred years, you haven't met a single other person you feel something for?"
"I've been busy."
"Yes, you've mentioned that. Busy doing what?"
And that's exactly what he doesn't want to think about. "I was in the Continuum," he says dismissively. "Not much opportunity to meet new mortals."
"Oh. Oh, of course." Picard suddenly smiles. "I remember now. Admiral Janeway reported that you'd had a child. So is this empty nest syndrome, Q? Your son's grown up now and you need something else to occupy your time?"
Q opens his mouth to lie and say yes. If he lies and says yes, Picard will have a plausible explanation and won't dig any deeper. He won't ask any more questions and Q won't have to think about the truth.
Except that the direct mention of his son has broken through the wall of denial in Q's mind, and the screaming blackness is sweeping over him, and his own self betrays him. He is paralyzed, unable to make the human mouth move, unable to make the lying words, unable even to muster up his powers to turn the body into a puppet and do it that way. He stands, frozen, mouth open, trying to force something, anything, to come out, but the anguish he's pushed away for so long has him full in its grip and he can't move, can't speak, can't do anything.
"Q?" Picard asks, and then nearly runs to him, around the chair and across the patio to stand in front of Q. "Q, what's wrong? Is something wrong? What's happened?"
The concern in Picard's voice undoes him. It's what he wished for years he might hear from Picard, and laughed at himself for wanting because no Q needs concern from mortals, no Q needs affection, no Q needs someone to care about him and certainly not a mortal, and now he hears it and it's what he always wanted and he would throw it away in a minute, in a picosecond, to only have the reasons for it be no longer true, and he breaks. He smiles a bright cheery smile as if he's going to lie, and it twists on his face as he tells the truth. "Actually, he's dead," Q says, his tone a bright and sunny parody of itself.
Picard looks stunned. "Dead? Oh my God. I'm so sorry. How…?"
"He—" The human throat is closing, the human eyes are welling with tears. The Q mind is drowning under the weight of black grief and guilt. "I— He—"
He can't, he can't say it, he can't remember it but he can't stop the memories, his little boy looking up at him with accusation and pain in his face as he crumbles, unraveling back into the Continuum, and Q desperately tries to gather the pieces back together and force them back together, reknit the unraveling pattern, stop the child's uncreation, but there's nothing he can do and in moments nothing left in his hands but a faint trickle of energies where there used to be his living sentient baby, and he screams. He can crumple the sun into a black hole, tear space and time into shreds in his hands. Or he can fill the air with a billion voices keening in grief and horror. Or he can channel the pain through the human body rather than the Q powers, let himself express his pain the human way, and as humiliating as that might be it seems safer and saner than letting his grief and his powers mix. Q crumples to the floor, kneeling doubled over, and howls.
Distantly he is aware of Picard kneeling beside him, one arm around his back. "It's all right," Picard says softly. "It's all right, Q."
This seems absurd and he rejects it. He looks up at Picard, seeing him with powers rather than his human eyes because his human eyes are completely blinded by tears. "It's not all right," he chokes out. "He's dead. It'll never be all right again."
Picard lets go of him, simply kneeling next to him on the floor, looking at him. "I don't mean that your son's death is all right. Of course not. I mean that it's all right to grieve. You can weep for him if you wish. No one will mock you or think less of you or try to embarrass you with it."
Oh, that's funny, that Picard actually knows him that well to say that. And he's telling the truth, Q knows, because the Continuum cannot see Q here and Picard himself might enjoy the mocking banter that usually characterizes their relationship, but he won't kick an entity when he's down. He's always known that if Picard would ever see him as enough of a person to understand that he can feel pain, Picard could feel compassion for him. The thing about being a god, of course, is that you're usually invulnerable, which means mortals don't think they need to feel compassion for you. It takes something like this, something like the death of a child, and he remembers his son's disintegration again and loses his train of thought. Hysterical sobs wrack the human form he wears and he can't distance himself, can't try to separate himself from it, because the human form is only expressing what the Q mind feels and if he tries to pull himself out of the human body the grief will just follow him.
"I tried," he says. "I tried to save him."
"I understand."
"No you don't. Because it's a lie. I didn't try. Didn't try hard enough. Because the one thing he needed, the one thing he needed me to do, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't keep opening myself up to her, I couldn't let her in anymore, and he wasn't done, he wasn't ready, we needed to keep working together and I couldn't, I couldn't… so he fell apart. He fell apart in my hands. And he knew, he knew it was my fault. He knew."
This time Picard doesn't say anything. He just sits there, looking at Q with an expression of concern and sorrow on his face. Q never expected to be in this position; back in the old days, once or twice he considered showing up to try to comfort Picard after a tragedy, the death of Picard's brother and nephew for instance… but he couldn't do it, because he didn't know how, and he didn't want to make matters worse. At the time he never imagined that someday he would be the one who needed comfort. But now Picard is here, doing very little, probably profoundly uncomfortable with the situation, but here and trying to help, which is more than Q ever did for him and he feels guilty about that, too, though not nearly as guilty as he does for the child's death.
After a while he has himself under enough control to talk, although his words are still punctuated by occasional sobs. "Do you remember the war in the Continuum? The one Janeway told you about?"
"Yes. The one that was destroying stars in our dimension?"
"Funny about that. When you were alive those stars were in the Delta Quadrant and you couldn't get there, couldn't see the light for another 70,000 years, you people had no way of knowing. Janeway didn't know. They lied to her, they lied to her sensors. But they didn't keep it up. When you, you humans, not you personally, you were dead, but when your Starfleet went to the Delta Quadrant finally those stars were all still there. Just fine. Didn't go anywhere. Because it never happened."
"Did you… did the Continuum somehow undo the war? Reverse time?"
"We can't do that to ourselves, Picard. It was much, much simpler than that." He crumples up for another few moments, remembering. "She wasn't really my companion for billions of years. I didn't love her. Not really. But we'd been together a few hundred years ago. I was arguing with the Continuum, insisting that if we didn't all have greater freedoms, if there was no change, we'd all want to die. Like Q did. He told me before he killed himself, he told me to shake up the Continuum, try to make things change. So I tried. And they couldn't shut me up, and I was gathering support. So they stopped me."
Picard says nothing, waits for Q to get enough control of himself again to go on with his story. Q uses his powers to manifest a handkerchief and wipes his face with it – he could just teleport the tears off his face, or restructure the human body so it's not crying, but he doesn't think he has that level of fine concentration right now.
"She seduced me. Told me she was interested in my ideas, and did I want to get back together for a while. It had been fun, back then, and we ended it mutually, I had no reason to say no. And when I was open to her, when we were joined, she… she…"
"What, Q? What did she do?" Picard asks gently.
Q can't even put into human words what she did to him, then. The closest human concept that approaches the horror of what she did is "rape", but even that doesn't begin to cover it. But he tries. "She… she called in her allies. My enemies. The people who didn't want me to rock the boat. She held me… held my shields open… long enough that they could get there… they could force it, keep me in place, open where they could, could rewrite me… and I couldn't stop them. They planted the fake memories, they made me think there was a war going on. They invented completely imaginary Qs for me to mourn so I'd believe that some of us had been killed. They… they made me fall in love with her. So I'd stay open to her, so she could keep, keep tweaking me, every time it looked like I might remember. And then… and then… they gave me a compulsion. They thought a child would distract me. I would be too occupied with raising a kid to raise hell, and I'd have to stay open to her through an entire childhood, and it would fulfill my need for change and variety in my life without affecting the Continuum…"
"They made you want a child?"
"I thought it would end the war. I don't know why. Nothing I thought was rational. My mind had been edited, I was being mind controlled, everything was like one of you mortals' dreams where everything makes perfect sense at the time and then you wake up and look back and go 'but why would putting butter on Data's cat stop the Borg?' But part of me knew what she'd done. I didn't, I didn't really know, I wasn't conscious of anything, but instinctively I wanted to stay away from her. I went to Janeway to have the baby. And Q showed up to intimidate Janeway into staying away from me.
"And then they, the Continuum, they set up this whole thing, this whole little play where they showed Janeway what they were showing me, and her belief could reinforce mine, because I was fallen so far I was checking my perceptions against mortals', and they pretended to try to kill me. And she, she brought the entire Voyager in, made them all see the same show, and pretended to rescue me, and I believed it. I thought she saved me. I thought I loved her, and she loved me. So when Janeway suggested I have the kid with Q, of course she went for it, it was what she and her cohorts had been angling for all along.
"We don't have children like you do. There's no, no, sperm and egg and hey you're done. It's a collaboration. You open your mind to the other parent, totally, you become almost one person and you weave the child together out of your own combined mind. And they become a person, they become sentient, they can think for themselves and have feelings long before they can be cut off from the feed from their parents. Like what if you could have a conversation with your mother about feeding the ducks or why is the sky blue while you're still attached to her umbilical cord. Except the umbilicals go to your father and your mother and they're connected to each other as well and if any of the links break, any of the circuits cut, the energy stops flowing and the child dissolves, if they're not ready to be separated they dissolve, they can't maintain their integrity anymore, and he… and he…"
"Is that what happened to your son?"
"I found out." He laughs, bitterly, brokenly. "The child was to keep me open to her so she could keep editing me. But it kept her open to me too. And you can't keep a secret in the Continuum forever. It took me three hundred years but I found out. They lied to me, they edited my mind, they controlled me. They made me think I loved her so she could keep me under control. I found out."
Another sob escapes him. "My baby… he wasn't old enough. He couldn't be cut off. But I couldn't keep my mind open to her. I tried, but I hated her… I hated her so much, I hated the entire Continuum for what they did but especially her, and my hate… my hate…" He breaks down completely again, for several minutes unable to do anything but sob.
"Because you came to hate your lover, for enslaving your mind… your son died?"
"Yes. Yes. Exactly. I couldn't… I would have done anything to keep him alive, Picard, anything, anything except the one thing he needed me to do because I couldn't, it was like handing yourself over to be raped, or like the Borg, could you have deliberately given yourself to the Borg to save another person?" Too late he remembers that Picard once tried exactly that to save Data, and cries harder, because if he'd been a better person, a person more like Picard, a more selfless person, he might have been able to endure the intrusion into his mind after he learned the truth, he might have been able to forgive the person he had been brainwashed into loving who had betrayed him so horribly, and then maybe his son would be alive. His child is dead because Q was selfish, because he couldn't bear her touch in his mind anymore when he knew what she'd done, and his shields had come up and he'd closed himself to her even though he knew the child needed him to stay open and he couldn't open them again, the horror and nausea surging through him at how his mind had been violated and he'd tried so hard to hold the child together anyway and he had failed, so terribly…
"Q… I am so sorry."
"Don't pity me, Picard!" He looks up at Picard's face, almost snarling. "Tell me what a horrible person I am. Tell me I should have sacrificed more, I should have tried harder. I should have forgiven her for what she did. I should have opened myself up and let her do it again, because that would have kept our baby alive. Tell me what a selfish monster I am, tell me you'd have done better in my place. Tell me!"
"No." Picard shakes his head, and puts a hand on Q's trembling shoulder. "No, I… I can't judge you. Human biology doesn't work that way. I can never be in a position where I must choose between the rape of my mind at the hands of someone I trusted, and the life of a child. I cannot experience what you experienced, so I cannot judge you. I have no way of knowing what I would have done in your place. But I don't think you should blame yourself. You were assaulted… I gather from some of what you've said that your people consider such telepathic brainwashing to be an even more horrific crime than we humans do, perhaps because you all have the power to commit it. You were reeling from betrayal, from the knowledge that your mind and memories weren't your own. And you reacted in an entirely natural way, shutting yourself away from your tormentor, trying to protect yourself. If I understand you correctly, it was a side effect of your self protection that your child died… not what you intended, perhaps not even what you expected, and by the time you understood what was happening, it was too late, wasn't it?"
Q nods. Funny how Picard can extract all that from the things Q has said. "I didn't… I didn't even think of the effect it would have on him. We hardly ever have children; I barely remember the last one. Amanda was able to cut free of her parents while she was still an infant. I didn't remember how long it takes when they aren't anchored in a mortal body, when they're pure Q and raised in the Continuum the whole time. I took him from her, I left, I was going to confront the Continuum… and then he started to disintegrate. And I couldn't open myself up to the link to her again." He looks down at the floor. "It happened so fast, Jean-Luc… but I'm a Q, I'm supposed to be able to think fast. I should have been able to react faster, I should have realized… something. There must have been something I could have done."
"Perhaps there was. But if you had the power to go back and do it over, I'm sure you'd have done so by now, so… it doesn't appear that tormenting yourself with what you could have done better is any more effective for the Q than it is for humans."
"He was my child. I was supposed to protect him."
"I know. I know." Even though he doesn't, because he never had a child, and Q is going to point that out to him, but he's so tired from the outpouring of emotion and it feels good to simply stay there, kneeling on the floor, with Picard's hand squeezing his shoulder. "Is that you wanted me here? You thought I would accuse you of killing your own son? Did you want me to serve as your conscience, somehow?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. I didn't want to tell you about any of this, but… I had to. I couldn't stop myself."
"You wanted someone to talk to."
Q has himself enough under control that he can sit up, stop sobbing, wipe the tears away again and this time have them stay away. "I did. Not just about this. I… I'm never going back to the Continuum, Jean-Luc. I can't. All of them… even the ones who didn't actively participate in holding me down and ripping my mind open and brainwashing me, they let it stand. They didn't defend me, they didn't say anything to me, they didn't even drop hints. I hate them all. I'm never going back."
"Can you actually do that?"
"Oh, eventually it'll kill me if I never return." Q shrugs. "If I never return to the Continuum I'll live another ten thousand years at most before I run out of energy or accumulate too much damage. But I don't really care, I mean, at this point I don't even really want eternity. It's been hell living through the last five years." He shakes his head. "I tried to find something else to do, you know. After I left the Continuum, I wandered around looking for something to occupy my attention, but… all the mortals I was working with three hundred years ago are dead, or they've changed too much to be interesting anymore. And I couldn't get interested in any new projects." His throat tightens again, but this time, he's in enough control of his powers to suppress it. "You know… what's the point to discovering something mildly interesting if I can't go home and share it with the Continuum? I can explore all I want, but at the end of the day it means nothing if I've got no one to talk to, and it was hard to find things to interest me before this happened. Everything…"
He closes his eyes. "I can't stand to look at mortal children, and they're everywhere. Can't get away from them if you're going to watch mortals. I see mortals who are friends, teammates, shipmates, comrades, whatever… people who work together… and I hate them, because their friends and family didn't betray them and brainwash them and use a baby to keep control of them. The idea of raining death and destruction down on innocent people is getting to be more and more appealing. Why should they be happy when my life's been ruined and my son is dead? But, you know, I never wanted to be a creature like Armus. I always thought I had more sophistication than that, that when I tormented mortals it should have a point to it. There's no point to anything anymore. It's all empty. And I can't even kill myself without crawling back to the Continuum to beg for permission to die, and the stars will burn out and the galactic core will fall in on itself before I give them the satisfaction."
"So why me?"
"Because I want something else to do." Q stands up, looking at Picard the whole time. "Someone to talk to. Not about this whole sordid business, necessarily, but anything. If I can't explore strange new worlds because there aren't any, I can take you there and let you see something you've never seen before, get some vicarious enjoyment out of your experience. I told Vash, when I saw the universe through her eyes it looked new again. Even more so for you. You actually are an explorer; you don't look at new experiences with an eye to what you can get out of them, you just enjoy them for what they are. That's what I need, Jean-Luc. I need someone who isn't a Q I can talk to. Someone I can show things to."
Picard nods, slowly. "I… think I understand. But why me? If you were willing to resurrect a dead man, surely in all the time you've existed there have been other mortals, and obviously the fact that they are dead now wouldn't be a barrier to you any more than my death was, so why me?"
"Fishing for compliments, mon ami?" His smile is a ghost of itself.
"I simply want to understand."
"Well, understand how unusual you are then." Q paces a bit. "Before I met you, Picard, I had only three kinds of relationships with mortals. Some thought of me as a god, some thought of me as a demon, and some thought I was a mortal like them. No one who knew what I was, who knew the power I wield, could look at me as if I were a person, like them. No one, until you."
"Really?"
"Absolutely. Well, no. There was Guinan. But she hates me almost as much as I hate the Continuum. So I guess you were the second, technically."
"But since you met me, there were others. Captain Janeway, among others."
"Yeah, you know… none of what happened was Janeway's fault. I know this. But I can't..." He closes his eyes again. "If she were still alive I wouldn't go to her. Because I couldn't look at her without remembering the lies the Continuum forced on both of us. And she'd remind me of my son." He looks at Picard. "Sorry, Jeannot. It's you. In all the universe, in all of time and space… you're the only mortal who knows what I am and treats me like an equal anyway, whose presence I can tolerate and vice versa." He smiles sadly. "You remember when I made you tell me you needed me? Well, you may not be holding the Borg to my head, but I'll say it anyway. I need you, Jean-Luc."
"And what if I were to say no? That I would prefer to go to Earth and do what I can to build a new life in this new world? Would you try to force me?"
Q scowls. "Picard, if after I have ripped my guts out to lay them at your feet and painted this entire patio with the aortal blood from my still-beating heart, you still can say 'no' to me, then I don't want you, and you can go to Earth, or to hell, or wherever."
"I haven't said no. But I want to know that you will allow me to say no. I'm not going to tolerate being your pet, Q. If you've chosen me because I'm the only mortal who treats you as an equal, then you treat me as an equal, or you send me to Earth and let me make my own way. No game playing, no 'we'll do it my way because I'm the Q and you're the lowly human', no pretending you're doing me a huge favor when you've just admitted this is about what you need."
"Well, I did bring you back to life. That's a pretty huge favor, you gotta admit."
"But I didn't need you to do that. I was quite peacefully dead for three hundred years and I imagine I could have remained so eternally without it bothering me," Picard says sardonically. "You, on the other hand, have just admitted that you can't bear your existence as it is, and you've resurrected me as your only hope of escaping your own loneliness and the weight of your emotions. And… yes. What you offer is tempting. I'm willing to help you; what you want of me…" he smiles softly. "Well, actually, I do have to admit it sounds very appealing. I'd love to explore the galaxy, to see things no human has seen. But not as your lapdog."
"What about my cat?" Q asks. "Will you be my cat? Rub up against me when you're hungry, stalk off when I want to pet you and you're not interested, pee all over my furniture because you're mad that I took you off Vega Sigma before you were done looking at the artwork?"
Picard almost laughs. He seems to catch himself just in time. "Not your cat, either. I'll consider being your friend, though, if you're willing to behave like a friend would. It sounds like you could use one."
"Just as well. Hairless cats look even stupider than hairless monkeys."
"So, do we have an agreement? You will behave toward me as if you have some respect for my autonomy and intelligence – regardless of your actual opinion of said intelligence?"
"I'll try. I can't promise I'll do it perfectly – you know, I've been dealing with mortals for millions of years, and like I said, you're only the second one ever who knows what I am and doesn't worship or demonize me for it. It's not very easy to adjust to that, even though it's what I want."
"Well, try all you like, but if you consistently fail to succeed I will insist you end our relationship and return me to Earth."
"Fair enough." He holds out his hand. After a moment, Picard reaches out and shakes it.
"So," Q says to him. "Where in the universe do you want to go?"
"Just this one time," Picard says, "surprise me."
"Oh, I think I can do that."