Picard stirs restlessly in his sleep. Q, sitting on the bed next to him, looks down at him with concern. He's pale and drained; sleep no longer revitalizes him, which is directly Q's fault, but it's not as if there's an alternative.

Reluctantly, because it would be better for Picard to let him sleep unmolested but this has to be done, Q draws free a small amount of Picard's mental energy in the shape of the pattern of his mind, and weaves it into the new pattern growing inside the human fetus.

Picard coughs and opens his eyes. Exhausted eyes fix blearily on Q. "Surprised... you're... still here."

"It's not as if I have anywhere else vitally important to be at the moment."

"Yes, but." He carefully levers himself to a sitting position. "It can't be very entertaining to watch me sleep." He sounds tired, but now that he's awake and alert, much less bleary and slurred than he was a moment ago. Funny how humans replenish their mental energy so swiftly.

"Oh, I'm hard at work, believe me," Q says.

"Really? Doing what?"

"Knitting."

Picard laughs. "Even under the... current circumstances, I have difficulty imagining you knitting baby booties, Q."

"Oh, the foolishness of humanity." Q grins sardonically. "I'm not knitting booties, Picard. I'm knitting the baby."

Picard blinks. "I rather thought it would assemble itself on its own. The same as if... you were human. Or it was."

"Amanda's parents did much more work than I first realized. The human fetus is just a human fetus. The child's Q-nature is growing concurrently in its brain, but since I'm the only Q parent it's got, it was coming out as a clone of me, which would totally miss the point. So..." Q sighs. "I'm afraid I must admit, I'm responsible for your current state of exhaustion. I need to add your... well, your mental energies. Your personality, your nature as a mind. Otherwise it won't matter that the human DNA is half yours; the personality will still be only mine, and frankly, one of me is quite enough for the Continuum."

Picard sits up properly. "Well, I don't doubt that," he says wryly. "But... explain. You're taking away parts of my mind?" In his tone is the clear message That's not what I signed on for when I agreed to this.

"No, no. I'm taking your energy, which you replenish every time you eat and breathe, from your brain, where it's formed in the shape of your mental pattern. Think of it as mental DNA. The trouble is that you're human, so your energy's finite, unlike mine. You need to burn food and air to restore your energy, and normally sleep lets you order your pattern properly to maximize the flow of energy, but I'm disrupting that." Q shrugs. "On the other hand, I can't breathe, have turned into something grotesque and misshapen even for a human form, and I keep actually needing to eat even though I am supposed to have infinite energy. And by the way, you humans have no concept of how disgusting that is."

Picard laughs again. "Oh, yes, this whole thing is just a terrible humiliation for you. I'm so very sorry."

"Well, if Janeway had done what by all rules of fairness and logic she should have done, given that this entire war is her fault..."

"But she was right, Q. It was wrong of you to ask her to make all the sacrifices to solve your problem."

"And in what sense is stars blowing up not humanity's problem too?"

"Well, of course it is. That's why I agreed to do this with you. And why I still agree, despite the fact that you didn't warn me you'd be donating my life force to the child while I slept without telling me." His eyes soften. "You know, you're much harder on yourself than you need to be. For once. Human female bodies aren't grotesque or misshapen in pregnancy at all. You're still quite beautiful."

"I'll never get over how shallow you humans are. Grow a pair of breasts, decrease the size of my nose and browline, add a little fat to soften my face and grow my hair a bit, and all of a sudden someone you couldn't stand to see before is beautiful. Doesn't that strike you as a tad hypocritical?"

"Not really. I couldn't stand to see you because you kept putting my ship in danger or humiliating me. And the one other time you did come to me for help, it was to save your own skin from the repercussions of a well-deserved punishment, not to stop a war that threatens the safety of the universe. If you'd asked, I would have admitted that you were a reasonably handsome man, but you rarely left me in much of a mood to appreciate that fact. And, I confess, my small, underevolved human brain does experience a much stronger appreciation for female beauty than male. I admit it, that's a flaw I don't seem to be able to overcome. But if you hadn't wanted to deal with someone of such a primitive species, you didn't have to ask me to father your child."

She grins. "Well, yes, but after Janeway turned me down who else was I supposed to ask?"

"I'm sure I can't imagine. You had an entire universe of options."

"Ah, yes, but this war is humanity's fault. If Janeway hadn't ruled in Q's favor to allow him to kill himself, we wouldn't be fighting now. And as you've noticed, even if I have made the fantastic sacrifice of enduring this hideous state you humans call pregnancy, the mortal parent of the child must make sacrifices as well. It would be terribly unfair to drain some poor hapless Romulan male of his lifeforce and ruin his sleep to create a baby to stop a war that humans were instrumental in starting."

"And, of course, you've always had such grave concern for fairness," Picard says, deadpan.

"I'm fairness incarnate, Picard. Couldn't you tell?"

"I don't know how I ever missed that."

"It's because you have a small, underevolved and primitive mind, but I forgive you, mon capitaine. You are, after all, only human."

He slides closer to her, sitting right next to her, almost whispering in her ear – a stunt he can only pull off while they're both sitting on the bed, because even in her female form she's taller than he is when they're standing. "It had nothing whatsoever to do with any emotional weakness, any soft spot in your heart for a specific human."

"Of course not. I'm as logical as a Vulcan." She looks at him with an expression full of fake sincerity, which is one way to disguise the impact of the truth in her words. "I picked the human who had the best genetic traits to contribute to my child. Since she will need to stop a war, after all. A human with a track record of diplomacy –"

"Mm-hmm." He puts an arm around her shoulders. She's been in this body, unable to change form or return to the Continuum or even use her powers in any significant way lest her enemies figure out where she is, for months of solid, linear time, longer than she's ever been in matter before. The body's biological reactions have started to seriously affect her mental state. She can't stop herself shivering with pleasure, leaning into his touch. It's an artifact, a mere side effect of wearing a mammalian body, let alone one surging with hormones, for so long, but it feels good and after so much death, so much fear and horror and the blood of brother and sister Q on her hands, Q has very little ability to resist anything that feels good. Especially because most of what this body has made her put up with during this pregnancy has been so very annoying.

But she continues anyway, pretending she hasn't just given herself away. "—with leadership qualities, who can win a war but despises having to fight one... why, if it weren't for the difficulties with your human genders and the fact that my enemies were staking you out, I'd have come here first. It's simply about what's best for the Continuum, you see."

"Of course it is," he says blandly.

And then she's tired of pretending. She kisses him, or lets him kiss her – she's not entirely sure who started it, and doesn't really care. Her best friend and closest companion of billions of years died to help Q reach this ship and talk to Picard, and Riker is currently wielding her powers in the Continuum, advising her friends and fellow believers in the cause of change on how to make and win war, and they're facing death and atrocity while she has a parasite feeding off her. She hates everything about this stupid plan, except for the fact that it might work and for the fact that human sex, hell, human affection from Picard turned out to feel so very good.

The enemy stakeout and the not-wanting-to-be-pregnant thing weren't her only reasons for not coming to Picard in the first place; after putting him on trial for being grievously savage, she really hadn't wanted to admit that the Q were having a civil war. But Picard had taken it very well, with the barest minimum of throwing the hypocrisy in her face, and since she took a female form he's been... not soppy, not weak and ridiculous like he'd been with Vash or Kamala, still a worthy opponent in a battle of wits, but gentle and affectionate as well. Maybe it's the human body talking and not the superior hyper-evolved mind, but she's found she likes it when Picard calls her beautiful, even though it's objectively not true since this human female body now resembles a balloon more than a humanoid, or when he leans against her or caresses her or rubs the back she has to constantly use a low-grade level of her power on to keep it from hurting like it did the one day she was truly human.

"Since your knitting project seems to be keeping me awake," Picard says, "perhaps we could find something entertaining to do to pass the time and help me get back to sleep?"

"I was thinking something similar," Q says. "Except for the part about you going back to sleep. We can do without that."

"I'm not exactly a young man anymore, Q. I doubt very much I could manage to do anything all night. And I do have a ship to command."

"We're in the space between galaxies, five hundred thousand years in the past, thirty thousand light years away from any inhabited star." Where no Q would ever think to look for her, or the Enterprise. She hopes. As long as Riker's using her powers in the Continuum, and she doesn't use them here, her enemies will probably think she's in the Continuum and not bother to look in the matter universe; at least, that's the plan. "I don't think anything's going to come up in the morning that Data can't handle."

"Perhaps so, but I am tired. I haven't been sleeping well, if you recall."

She buries her face against his ear. "Oh, you'll sleep, Jean-Luc. Eventually. But this body's currently being subjected to all kinds of interesting hormonal states, and I do have enough power that without alerting the Continuum I can still make sure you stay wide awake until I'm satisfied."

"Well, it'd be very ungentlemanly of me to leave a lady unsatisfied in any case. Though, as feminine as you may be at the moment, I'm not sure you qualify for the term 'lady.'"

Q grins. "This from a man who slept with Vash."

"I never said Vash qualified for the term 'lady', either. But I'm not interested in discussing other women at the moment."

"Of course not." She can't dematerialize his sleepwear – that would involve drawing enough power that it could alert the enemy-- but it's a robe and boxers, and it's almost more fun to slide her hands inside it. "Right now we should only be discussing you and me."

"I've a better idea. Discussing things at all involves the use of our mouths. There's certainly better uses we could be putting them to than having a discussion."

She opens her mouth to say that she agrees, and he demonstrates by kissing her before she can get the words out. Normally she doesn't let other people get the last word in, but this one time, perhaps she can make an exception.