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Title: Human
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing: Picard/Q
Summary: Established relationship. Q finally explains to Picard why he doesn't like talking about that particular incident.
Notes: Mostly angst, with some schmoop at the end.
Wordcount: 2392
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Human
"I don't know why you persist in thinking the best of people, Jean-Luc." Q shook his head wearily as if amazed by his continued optimism. "As if those colonists could ever have been persuaded to your point of view without a serious display of superior force. They are human, after all. As in, arrogant, violent and prone to fits of extreme stubbornness."
Picard sighed heavily, rubbing the bridge of his nose in a vain attempt to ward off the impending headache. "Q, you are actually aware that I am human, right?"
Q looked at him curiously. "Yes?"
"You consider me arrogant, violent and prone to stubborn fits?" Picard ran that back inside his head, and sighed again. "Never mind. Of course you do."
"Jean-Luc," Q smiled, his tone caught somewhere between amused and nostalgic. "You do recall the first few years of our courtship, don't you? I mean, 'Get off my ship, Q!' still brings back the best of memories. We had so much fun following that phrase."
"Fun," he repeated, wearily. "Yes." He was not going to even start on that one. Q looked at him for a second, and then took his turn to sigh.
"What is it, Jean-Luc? What have I done wrong now?" His expression was obviously trying for repentant, but veered closer to long-suffering, and despite himself, Jean-Luc had to smile.
"Nothing, Q," he reassured. "It's just, in the interests of diplomacy, and for possible future reference, when you are in a relationship with someone, it's probably not a good idea to persistently insult their species. Besides, you've been human yourself. Surely it wasn't that bad?"
And then, something rather frightening happened. Q ... froze. Said nothing, his eyes suddenly distant and full of darkness, completely inhuman despite the familiar features. Q was silent.
Jean-Luc stood up, quickly, coming over to where Q sprawled along the back of his sofa. "Q?" he asked, gently. He reached out, with his mind only, sensing that touch was not something his partner desired. "Q?" Q turned his head to look up at him, eyes still frozen in that alien expression, but there was something in it that Picard recognised, something universal. It looked rather like pain.
"I should never have come to you in human form," Q said at last, voice heavy. "Yes, Jean-Luc. I can promise you it was that bad, and worse. It was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me, in fact!"
Jean-Luc blinked, slowly, letting those words, and more importantly the tone with which they were spoken, settle over him. If he was quite honest, he didn't understand it. Because they had spoken of this before, had laughed, while Q waved his hands in the air and pouted at the lack of sympathy he was getting. There was nothing in this conversation that Jean-Luc could see to have changed that.
But then, this was Q. Next of kin to chaos, and as secretive as any creature Jean-Luc had ever met. Even after all this time, even as close as they had become, so much of Q's reasoning was still beyond him. He could only react to what his lover showed him, as best he could.
He sat down, slowly, beneath Q, meeting that alien gaze. "Explain," he said, and it was the command they used between them, soft but implacable. "Tell me what you mean, Q."
His lover's face twisted, losing coherence for a second, and Jean-Luc flinched internally at the indication of the depth of pain he was feeling. Q didn't speak for a long minute, looking at him with that weighing gaze, the judge so long forgotten back in his eyes.
"I am not human, Jean-Luc," he answered finally, flatly. "I never have been. I never want to be."
Jean-Luc shook his head with a frown. "I never thought you were ..." he started, but Q cut him off sharply with an impatient gesture.
"Don't be obtuse, mon capitaine," he snapped. "Of course you have. What I am, what I truly am, is so far beyond your frame of reference that you have no chance of comprehending it. Not even now, after all you've seen. That was why I came to you wearing the form of a mortal creature. That was why I gave you something to face, something to react to that you could grasp, comprehend. That was why I came to you as you still see me. And as a result of it, you think of me as human. Granted, a human with amazing and potentially destructive abilities, but that does not change the fact that your base understanding of me is as if I were one of your own. Something comparable. Something understandable."
Picard frowned heavily. "Alright," he conceded. "There is some logic to that. But, Q, I have always known you were alien. Even if when I think of you, I think of that face, I have always been aware that it is not ... that it is not the true one. If you even have a true face. Do you?"
Q waved a hand at that, dismissing it as inconsequential. "Not in any way you would understand, no," he answered, succinctly. "But you are missing the point, mon capitaine. You do not understand."
"Then tell me!" Picard ground out, familiar frustration rising, the feeling of testing that he had thought they had moved beyond back between them. "Explain yourself, Q, and maybe I might!" Q flashed out, growling with frustration, and reappeared on the other side of the room, pacing behind Picard's desk, his hands fluttering around him in angry agitation. Jean-Luc watched him patiently, waiting.
"I am not human, Jean-Luc!" Q repeated, snarling slightly, but before Jean-Luc could respond, he spun back, his eyes depthless and angry. "And being human was the single most horrifying experience of my existance! I can tell you with complete honesty, there is very little I would not give to avoid even hearing of that incident, let alone repeating it! I am not human. And I never, ever want to be!"
And Picard stood at that, his back stiff, his shoulder's taut as anger flooded through him, and a familiar disappointment that had lurked behind his heart for most of his life. "Then why are you here?" he snapped back, cold and furious. "If humanity is so very horrifying, why do you sully yourself with it?" He stopped, growing quieter, his own pain riding high in his eyes. Q always could spark the strongest emotions in him. He wondered why it had once surprised him. "Why sully yourself with me?" he finished, so quietly none but Q could have heard him.
Q stopped pacing at him to stare in shock, something flashing briefly in his eyes, that might have been a desire to comfort, but Q was as proud and stubborn as any human. He was not going to back down from this. Instead, he sat down wearily on the desk, and sighed, looking up at Jean-Luc as if he were the single stupidest excuse for a lifeform Q had ever encountered.
It was a rather familiar expression.
"Will you please stop being so obtuse, Jean-Luc?" he asked, that long-suffering expression back in force. "You are meant to be human. You're you, magnificently so, occasional bouts of stupidity aside. It was never a question of sullying myself. More one of shoving my fear aside long enough to figure out how to explain myself to you." He looked faintly embarrassed for a second, and then arrogance slipped back in to mask it. "In words of less that two syllables, of course."
Jean-Luc deflated a little. "Of course," he murmured, ruefully. He sat back down, his hand instinctively coming up to worry at the lines on his brow, and shook his head tiredly. "Now could you please explain what this is about, Q, because I really do not understand where you are going with this." And then, as Q opened his mouth, he held up a restraining hand. "Preferably without the repetition of the phrase 'I am not human'?"
Q closed his mouth, blinked, then opened it again, smiling sadly. "Unfortunately, Jean-Luc, that phrase is rather the point of this little argument. But I shall attempt to express myself in more ... imaginative ... terms, if you wish?" Jean-Luc snorted, and Q beamed at him, sketching a little bow in the air.
"No, thank you," Jean-Luc answered dryly. "Given your imagination, I doubt that would be wise. I aim to at least try to understand, after all." And he knew he was not imagining the flash of sadness in Q's eyes as he said it. "Why don't we go with as simple as possible an explanation?" he asked, quietly, gently. "As unisyllabic as possible?" And there, the smallest sliver of a grin.
"As you wish, mon capitaine," his lover murmured, and then looked away, and did not look back as he started speaking. "I don't like speaking of that incident, Jean-Luc, or hearing of it. Because of all my various experiences of war, death and the end of the universe, that was ... that was the worst. I am not human. I was never meant to be human. And, mon capitaine, being human hurt." He looked up, then, his expression pleading, desperate to be understood. "I'm not insulting your species, Jean-Luc. Much, anyway. I am trying to explain that, to me, being human was the single most terrifying, painful and horrible thing I have ever experienced."
Jean-Luc paused, measuring the sincerity that rang inside that voice, inside his mind, feeling the depth of truth Q was trying to show him, trying to understand it. He tried to imagine what it was like, what had happened in that time to so frighten Q. The Calamarain, of course. Being transformed ...
"Imagine, mon capitaine," Q interrupted softly, following Jean-Luc's thoughts effortlessly. "Imagine what it is like. I am not a human with special powers. I am an alien, a completely different entity. It was not a case of losing powers. It was ... Imagine. Imagine you can see all the universe at once, and at the same time every detail of every atom that make up each and every star ... and suddenly you are reduced to the limits of an optic nerve tuned to a very limited spectrum. Imagine you can sense the confluence of energies spanning eternity, traced the branching paths between choices, braid time to your command ... and suddenly you are reduced to barely being able to tell that the pain in your belly is hunger. Imagine you can traverse galaxies at a whim ... and suddenly cannot go from bridge to Engineering in less than five minutes. Imagine you are immortal, with a lifespan measured in aeons ... and suddenly you have years. Imagine, Jean-Luc."
And Jean-Luc could. Suddenly, with absolute clarity, he understood what Q meant. And it chilled him through to the bone.
He stood up, moving to the window, staring sightlessly out, his voice heavy and flat and as cold as the void. "That was what being human meant to me, Jean-Luc. I was blinded, deafened, crippled, paralysed, granted the lifespan of a gnat, and abandoned helpless in a universe filled with my enemies. I was reduced, torn down to something beneath contempt, and it was not because I was suddenly human, but because I had once been Q. Imagine what that is like. Imagine if I took you, if I blinded you, wrapped you in darkness, broke your body until all the things you could once do with utter ease became impossibilities, tore away every defense and capability you ever had ... and left you. Abandoned you to the mercy of everyone who hated you. Imagine ... imagine ..."
"I can," Jean-Luc whispered, behind Q before he knew he was moving, shaking off the stunned shock to reach out and wrap his arms around his lover. But not the horror. That, he couldn't shake. Or the hate. For the Q, for having done this. And for himself, all the rest of them, who had never even thought what it had meant, for this proud, powerful creature to be so helpless and so despised. For himself, most of all. Because he had laughed at this, thought it well deserved for this arrogant creature to be brought down to their level, for once. He hadn't measured the length of the fall, hadn't cared of the pain it had caused, only glad that there had been a fall at all. He had thought Q deserved it.
No-one, no-one, could deserve this. And not Q, not this arrogant, honourable, oddly loving creature in his arms. Not his lover, with all his moods and his jokes and his vast, mind-boggling imagination, and his hesitant caring. Not Q. Never, never Q.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, raggedly. "I'm sorry, Q. I didn't ... I didn't understand." Q made a strangled noise, half a huff, half a cry, and tipped his head back against Jean-Luc's shoulder, his eyes closed against the darkness and the tears.
"I'm not human, Jean-Luc," he whispered. "I can't be. Not even ... not even for you. Even if ... even if you are the one person in the universe for whom I would ... I would try, if you asked. I should never have come to you as a human. But I ... I wanted to. I wanted to be something you could understand, something you could ... something you could love."
And Jean-Luc couldn't bear that, couldn't bear any of it. In one rough, desperate movement, he pulled Q around, tugged that imaginary body until he could meet the eyes that Q had made purely for his benefit, and crush his lips to the mouth that spoke purely for his ears. He kissed him, desperate and afraid, and wrapped his arms around his lover as if afraid Q would disappear. But more, deeper, he was afraid he wouldn't. He tried to imagine it, tried to imagine Q unable to change, unable to flash out, unable to perform his little tricks. He tried to imagine Q limited, Q bound, Q human.
And realised Q was right. It was horrifying.
"I wouldn't ask," he whispered. "Q. I would never, never ask. Never."
And he wouldn't. Because Q was Q, magnificently so, occasional bouts of stupidity aside. And he would never, ever lessen that, never cheapen it, anymore than Q would ever lessen him. They were who they were, and together only more so.
Love did that, he'd found.
