VOY: A Tale of Two Q (Janeway/Q, female Q) 2/2
Warnings and headers in the first post.
The Q folded her arms in front of her chest and looked at Janeway assessingly, as if studying a life form under a microscope. "Interesting," she said. "I'd have expected you to throw the emotional well-being of a Q overboard in a heartbeat if it meant you could accomplish something for the benefit of your crew or your people. You genuinely care about him, don't you?"
"That's not the point," Janeway said. "I do consider Q a friend, but I wouldn't let him use me to harm you, either, and I don't like you."
"You think you're so righteous," Q said. Her tone was more amused than anything else. "But the truth is you're much more like me than you recognize."
"I'm like you?" Janeway wanted to point out that she had never attempted to coerce anyone into sex, but she already knew from her dealings with Q that the Q concept of consent simply didn't recognize power differentials as anything problematic. Q would probably say that the fact that Janeway had said no proved that she could have said no all along and therefore what she'd just done to Janeway hadn't been coercive at all. "Forgive me if I have a hard time seeing the resemblance." Now that she was free of Q's grasp, the unwanted arousal had almost entirely faded, as if it had always been illusory, but she was still shaking with anger and the after-reaction from what Q had done to her.
"Of course you don't," Q said. "You don't know what you're capable of, Janeway."
"And you do?"
"As a matter of fact, yes, I do," the entity said. She unfolded her arms. "Tell me something. Let's say that humanity is dying, the Federation is falling, one of your crew has committed suicide, one is locked in violent battle against the organization you pledged your life to, several of them are lost forever thousands of light years away and you believe you'll never see them again... would you do something you've been forbidden to do, in order to save them?"
Janeway didn't particularly want to entertain the entity's hypothetical, or continue to have a conversation with her at all, but she knew from experience that when you were dealing with the Q, they would leave when they felt like it, and wasting your time demanding that they do so instead of playing along with them usually just extended the time you had to deal with them. "That... would depend on what I'd been forbidden to do."
"If the only way to save them was to go back in time and wipe out the timeline you'd been living in, you'd do it in a nanosecond, wouldn't you."
Janeway felt cold. "Are you saying I did do this?"
"You and I broke the universe, Kathryn Janeway," the Q said, and there was something hollow, something haunted, in her voice. "Knowing what we were doing, knowing that we risked a paradox that could destroy everything there is, we still did it. And the universe... was destroyed. Because of what we did."
"Paradox doesn't destroy the universe," Janeway said, feeling out of her depth and clinging to the part of Q's statement that she could prove made no sense. She destroyed the universe, with Q, to save humanity? Why would she have done that? How could that have even happened? Mathematically it made no sense. "Paradox merely causes timelines to split."
"Your timeline, yes. Your timeline's fungible; it splits if you look at it cross-eyed." Q sat down on the bed. "But I'm not bound to your timeline. The Q can move freely in your time because we are bound to a different one; we exist outside your causality, but we are still entities that can grow, change, evolve, and to be such, we needed to be linear. So we're bound to our own timeline, the timeline of the Q Continuum. And the timeline of the Q Continuum cannot be looped without setting up a reaction that would destroy time, and thus the universe."
"You're saying you can't travel in your own time? Or that if you did, you'd destroy yourselves?"
"Both. And I'm not saying we'd destroy ourselves, I'm saying we'd destroy everything. Your timeline can loop all you want; it can split, it can divide, it can turn in on itself, but the timeline of the Q Continuum is sacrosanct. So we're taught. We don't have the power to travel backward in the timeline of the Continuum, and when we meet one another in your timeline, if we're out of temporal phase it takes an act of power to even see each other. There could be three of me from different points in the future here in this room with us, but unless I believe there might be, and work hard to be able to see them, I'd never know. They could appear to you more easily than they could appear to me."
"If it's impossible then how..."
Q smiled fiercely, bitterly. "It turns out it's not," she said. "There's a loophole. A mortal granted a measure of the power of the Q, but who is not a Q, can travel freely in your timeline using our power, and can be seen by Q who are in phase with that past time." She leaned back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. "You came back to warn me, bearing my own memories to me."
"When did this happen?"
"Which when?" Q asked mockingly, then looked at Janeway. "In a moment between moments. At the very second that Q took you to the Continuum, in the moment that I was about to follow you both, you from the future came to me, bringing a package of my own memories. If you'd been merely mortal at the time, I might have thought you had no idea of the potential consequences of your actions, that you would have believed changing the timeline of the Continuum would have no more consequence than changing the timeline of humanity ever has. But you had a measure of my power in you, and my memories. You knew better. You did it anyway. As did I."
"What did... we... do? What changed?" Janeway asked, almost whispering. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
Q's eyes grew haunted. She sat up on the bed. "We lost the war, Janeway," she said. "The Continuum was burning, and I was the one who'd lit the flame. Everyone I'd ever loved was either dead or complicit in the murder of the others. I brought mortals to the Continuum, led by a mortal hero, with Q-killing weapons I'd redesigned so that mortals could use them, and I was Loki at Ragnarok, I was Death on a pale horse, I was the apocalypse and I was trying to kill them all. And if the destruction of the Q Continuum should result in the destabilization of the entire universe, let it. I had nothing left. But you found your own way into the Continuum then, and you had another idea."
"If the alternative could be the destruction of the universe either way, I suppose I had no choice," Janeway said.
"You could have stopped me. A few Q surviving could have kept the Continuum from destabilizing. The universe would only have been destroyed if we all died, and there was a Q working with you who had the trick of reproduction, and could have repopulated the Continuum if it came to it. But it wouldn't have changed the deaths and suffering of those you loved, or the millions of humans who'd died, or the fall of the Federation. To restore the world to the way you thought it should be, you were willing to take the risk." Q leaned forward. "And when you came to me and showed me my memories... I could have let things play out the same way they had, I could have let the fate I saw ahead of me dictate my actions. Continuum law says I should have, that I should have erased those memories so I wouldn't be tempted to change the future."
"But you didn't," Janeway said.
Q nodded. "I stayed. I didn't follow you to the Continuum immediately, even though I knew it was a trap, because I knew I would need mortals. And then I lost my powers as the weapons formed a dead zone around us, and I thought everything might be lost. But your people proved resourceful enough that I was able to use their resources to get us all into the Continuum. I armed them with the weapons, and the war ended without another shot fired, without another Q dead, because at that stage, so early in the war, before any of the atrocities... arming mortals was like bringing bio-weapons into a conflict being fought with muskets. You were like an army of stinging insects with potentially fatal bites, and it didn't matter that any one Q could kill any of you that he could see; in the Continuum you mortals are so very small, no one felt they could be certain they could find all of you before you could kill them."
"So that's why it worked," Janeway said wonderingly. "I always wondered how it was that Tom was able to draw a gun on the leader of the enemy forces, and he couldn't just... wish Tom dead. He acted as if he'd been taken hostage, and the rest of the Q acted as if taking him hostage ended the war."
"Yes. It wasn't that you'd taken him hostage, you understand, it was that they had no idea how many there were of you and how many weapons I'd given you. He could have swatted Tom Paris like an insect, but who knew how many insects were lurking around, too small to see, carrying weapons and ready to gun them all down? They were outnumbered by an infinistesmal enemy who were each as capable of dealing death as any Q. Of course they surrendered."
"So it really was my crew, and you, who won Q's war for him," Janeway said.
"And saved both your lives."
"I haven't forgotten that, no."
Q got to her feet. "The Q hate me for it, of course," she said. "Even the freedom faction are appalled at the measures I was willing to go to, to win. They have the luxury of believing they might have won any other way. They don't know what I know. So they can revile me for unleashing such a terrible weapon on the Continuum, and heap all their praise on Q for his idea to have a child to end the war -- as if he isn't my child too, but if Q and I disagree on what to do for our son, they take his side. Always. And the order faction hates me as passionately as they hate him, and the undecideds don't care about the war and never did, but they do care about the sanctity of the Continuum being violated, of mortals being empowered to kill Q. All of them hate me. Except for Q. But that was all right. I could live with that. At least they viewed me as someone dangerous, someone to be respected." She stalked over to Janeway. "And then you took that from me."
"How could I change whether or not you're respected in the Continuum?" Janeway asked. "If this is because Q was going behind your back to sleep with me... I told you, I thought you had broken up with him, and as soon as I learned differently I broke it off with him."
"Yes!" Q shouted. Janeway took a step back, involuntarily. She hadn't expected the entity's sudden vehemence. "That's exactly what you did! Poor, poor, pitiful Q, with her jealousy hang-ups and her quaint belief that it might be nice if her lover actually loved her; poor pathetic Q, who wants one Q to think she's special and significant important, instead of being willing to live with just being part of the Continuum; poor Q's so degraded and weak that mortals feel sorry for her! You wouldn't fight me for him; you threw the contest, conceded to me because you felt sorry for me, as if I couldn't possibly take him back from you on my own merits, and they all know it! I am a laughingstock now because of you!"
Janeway shook her head. "That isn't it at all! Q, I don't want to be fighting you for the father of your child. I don't even love him. You do. I'll be dead in seventy years or less and you'll be there for the rest of time. I didn't want him to involve me in doing something that would hurt your feelings because I don't sleep with married men and I don't want to be competing with another woman for a man I care about... especially if she was with him before me, especially if she loves him, and most especially if they have a child together!"
"It doesn't matter what you want," Q said brutally. "No one in the Continuum cares about your feelings, except for Q and our son, on occasion. Everyone thinks it's just so hilarious that I'm such a damaged and pathetic excuse for a Q that I've actually let my jealousy inspire a mortal to take pity on me. Or that Q is going out of his way to be so terribly considerate of my idiotic emotional problems that he'd actually comply, and leave his mortal lovers alone because it bothers me."
"And that's why you wanted to seduce me?" Janeway asked skeptically. "Because the Q think that I feel sorry for you?"
"He doesn't care what his mortals do with other mortals," Q said. "But let another Q show interest in them, and he's capable of a jealous tantrum that makes anything I've done or said look completely respectable. And the other one would never do it, but you're pragmatic. You're like me. You'll do anything, anything at all, to save the people you love, even if it violates every ethical belief you have. So I thought you would be bribable."
"Because you wanted to make Q jealous." The thought occurred to Janeway that usually, the way that was supposed to work was that the jilted lover was supposed to inspire jealousy in their lost love by making the lost love fear losing them to another, not by fearing that the jilted lover would take the new lover for herself. "Hurting him isn't the answer, Q. Surely the two of you have had problems before; can't you work something out without trying to get revenge on him?"
"There's no point to getting revenge on him," Q said. "It doesn't teach him anything. But I wanted him to remind the Continuum how much of a jealous ass he can be, so they'll stop taking his side all the time and laughing at me. If I can't be loved, or liked, I at least want my respect back. I won't be a laughingstock." She leaned forward into Janeway's personal space. "You'll take him back."
"I will?" Janeway asked skeptically, not sure if this was a prediction of the future or supposed to be an order.
"If you refuse me, my choices are either to gain my face back by proving that I am not jealous and you are not pitying me... or to avenge myself on you and Q both for humiliating me, and I can most easily accomplish that by hurting you. He's not allowed to help you and the Continuum, in general, feel much the same way about you and your crew that they do about me -- they despise you as the insects who dared to threaten their lives. If I set out to hurt you, he won't be able to fix it. He can fight me, but that won't undo the damage."
Janeway went cold. "Are you telling me that if I don't sleep with Q again, you're going to kill me?"
"I would never kill you, Janeway," Q purred. "You brought me my memories of the future. You helped me save the Continuum and destroy the universe. I will just hurt you. I will find the thing that would cause you the most suffering, and I will make it happen... unless you stop factoring whether or not I am involved with Q into your relationship with him. You can continue to humiliate me by denying yourself what you want out of some misguided attempt to transpose human morality onto Q relationships, if you wish... but it won't be good for you. Or anyone around you."
"I don't respond well to threats."
"I tried bribes. That didn't work so well."
Janeway took a deep breath. "You don't have to do either. I told Q I was ending our sexual relationship because I didn't want to hurt you. From what you've said, though, it sounds like I inadvertently hurt you worse by doing that than I would have by staying with him. So... why don't you just ask me? If you order me, or threaten me, I won't do what you want me to do, but you could ask."
Q sneered at her. "Ask a mortal to graciously agree to do something to avoid hurting my feelings? That would miss the entire point."
"No. Ask a mortal who cares about your son's well-being to do something that will benefit him. It doesn't do young q any good if his mother is the laughingstock of the Continuum, or if she's so angry at his father that the two of you fight all the time instead of cooperating to raise your boy. Q asked me to be your son's godmother; I'm honor-bound to do what would be good for him. I thought that the best thing to do for him was to give up my relationship with Q. If you tell me that the best thing for your son is to retract that... because we can assume that what's good for your reputation in the Continuum is also good for your son... I can do that."
Q stared at her, and then laughed harshly. "You are much more like a Q than you'll admit, Janeway. Fine. For the sake of my son, I want you to take Q back."
It wasn't exactly a polite request, but it was certainly better than orders and threats. "For the sake of your son, I'll promise you that I will take Q back, and if I break up with him in the future it'll be for my own reasons, not out of any desire to spare you any pain."
"Good," Q said. "Then we understand each other."
"Excellent. Then you can leave."
"Only one other thing," Q said, and touched Janeway's forehead. Janeway frowned; the electric sensuality of Q's prior touches was gone, but her touch did feel mildly electric, as if a tiny shock had jumped from her fingers when she touched Janeway's skin. "The Q do not know what would have been their future, and they cannot. Not even Q. What one of us knows, we all know, and if the elders of the Continuum were to learn what I've done... they might think they need to repair the damage to the universe by rolling it back."
"What is the damage to the universe?" Janeway asked. "You and Q both mentioned the universe ending, but... obviously, it didn't end."
Q shrugged. "I have no idea. I was dead," she said. "Someone saved the universe from the consequences of our folly, Janeway. We were fortunate. But the rest of the Q don't remember the end of the universe, and I don't trust them to make the right decision when their information is incomplete."
"If what one Q knows, all Q know... how is this information you can hide?" Janeway asked.
Q smiled mirthlessly. "They hate me," she said. "There are only two Q close enough to me that they could learn the truth. I only need to keep it from them. Which means that when you are in the presence of a Q who isn't me, you will forget what I've told you. If Q power touches your mind, the memory will bury itself."
"That's going to make it difficult to explain to Q why I changed my mind."
"No. You'll have no trouble remembering the rest of our conversation. Only what I've told you about the future that we undid." And she was gone.
Janeway took a deep breath. She wasn't shaking anymore, but she was shaken. Q's attempt to bribe her into sex in order to hurt the other Q had made her infuriated... but Q's confession that she and Janeway had altered time, in a way that had run a significant risk of destroying the universe and may in fact have actually done so, with the damage undone somehow by parties unknown in ways that the female Q didn't know about and the male Q refused to talk about, in order to save their respective peoples and the people they cared for... that frightened her. Because she knew, instinctively, that it was all true. She knew that the person she was right at this minute would never do such a thing, never take such a risk... and she knew from the overwhelming temptation she'd felt at the chance to make Seven live again that if she had to live through an event that killed or harmed most of her crew and threatened all of humanity, all of the Federation, that yes, she would change time. In a heartbeat. Even if she thought it might threaten the entire universe. Because if there was a chance that it wouldn't, she would take that chance, to save her people and the people she loved.
And it sounded as if the consequences might have already come home to roost.
She needed to find out from Q what he knew about the universe ending. Of course, if she forgot everything the female Q had told her the moment he showed up, that would make it hard to remember why she wanted to remember. She picked up a PADD from her desk and scrawled on it, "Details, universe ending?" and then set it down.
"Q?" she said.
She hadn't known if he was listening or not, had had no idea if simply calling him would work or not, but she wasn't terribly surprised when there was a brilliant flash of light in front of her. "My sweet Kathy! I knew Q would be able to persuade you to change your mind," he said.
Janeway scowled at him. "You sent her to me?"
Q shook his head. "The last time I sent her to you to talk you into anything, she tied me up on your bed, stripped of my clothes and my powers. Which, mind you, has its entertainment value when you're actually planning to screw my brains out, but when it results in me being stuck there for five hours before you even show up and doesn't get me so much as a kiss, it really wasn't so pleasant. So I am more than done with asking her to convince you to do anything. No, she went entirely on her own recognizance, but she did tell me when she got back that you were willing to take me back." He smirked at her and waggled his eyebrows. "Which, I hope, translates into you being willing to take me now."
Janeway noted the PADD, but couldn't remember what she'd meant. The universe ending? She'd had a weird dream about that, but aside from that, what did the universe ending have anything to do with anything? "I don't like to be rushed into anything," Janeway said. "What happened to wining and dining me first?"
They were suddenly sitting at an Italian restaurant, at a table with a red and white checkered tablecloth, a bottle of wine on the table and two plates of seafood fra diavolo in front of them. Q was dressed in a 20th century period black suit; Janeway was still wearing her uniform, since she had long ago ordered Q not to change her clothes without permission. "Does this meet your standards for wining and dining, o captain, my captain?" Q asked. "Or would you prefer something more exotic?"
After everything she'd been dealing with, the illusion of being home, on Earth, was more comforting and pleasant than she was prepared to admit. "This is just fine, Q," she said, taking a bite of her meal.
"Only 'just fine'?"
She grinned at him. "It's delightful, and you know it. Why do you need me to feed your ego by telling you so?"
"My ego's got a very large appetite," Q said mournfully. "You'd think having such a big ego would be wonderful all the time, and it mostly is, I admit, but you would not believe how often I need to feed the damn thing."
Janeway laughed. "I suppose that makes sense," she said. She took another bite. It really was delicious. She'd gotten over her guilt at eating delicious food with Q while the rest of the crew was stuck with what Mr. Chell could come up with by convincing herself that letting him feed her left more of Voyager's scarce stores for the rest of the crew. He wasn't allowed to replenish their stores or feed the rest of the crew, lest his political opponents in the Continuum interpret that as "helping" Voyager. She leaned forward and smiled seductively. "But would you rather have me feed your ego, or would you rather me reward you for good behavior later?"
Q's eyes widened slightly, and then he grinned. "Well, if I have to have one or the other, I suppose I can agree to delayed gratification," he said.
"I thought that might be your answer," she said with a satisfied grin.
The Q folded her arms in front of her chest and looked at Janeway assessingly, as if studying a life form under a microscope. "Interesting," she said. "I'd have expected you to throw the emotional well-being of a Q overboard in a heartbeat if it meant you could accomplish something for the benefit of your crew or your people. You genuinely care about him, don't you?"
"That's not the point," Janeway said. "I do consider Q a friend, but I wouldn't let him use me to harm you, either, and I don't like you."
"You think you're so righteous," Q said. Her tone was more amused than anything else. "But the truth is you're much more like me than you recognize."
"I'm like you?" Janeway wanted to point out that she had never attempted to coerce anyone into sex, but she already knew from her dealings with Q that the Q concept of consent simply didn't recognize power differentials as anything problematic. Q would probably say that the fact that Janeway had said no proved that she could have said no all along and therefore what she'd just done to Janeway hadn't been coercive at all. "Forgive me if I have a hard time seeing the resemblance." Now that she was free of Q's grasp, the unwanted arousal had almost entirely faded, as if it had always been illusory, but she was still shaking with anger and the after-reaction from what Q had done to her.
"Of course you don't," Q said. "You don't know what you're capable of, Janeway."
"And you do?"
"As a matter of fact, yes, I do," the entity said. She unfolded her arms. "Tell me something. Let's say that humanity is dying, the Federation is falling, one of your crew has committed suicide, one is locked in violent battle against the organization you pledged your life to, several of them are lost forever thousands of light years away and you believe you'll never see them again... would you do something you've been forbidden to do, in order to save them?"
Janeway didn't particularly want to entertain the entity's hypothetical, or continue to have a conversation with her at all, but she knew from experience that when you were dealing with the Q, they would leave when they felt like it, and wasting your time demanding that they do so instead of playing along with them usually just extended the time you had to deal with them. "That... would depend on what I'd been forbidden to do."
"If the only way to save them was to go back in time and wipe out the timeline you'd been living in, you'd do it in a nanosecond, wouldn't you."
Janeway felt cold. "Are you saying I did do this?"
"You and I broke the universe, Kathryn Janeway," the Q said, and there was something hollow, something haunted, in her voice. "Knowing what we were doing, knowing that we risked a paradox that could destroy everything there is, we still did it. And the universe... was destroyed. Because of what we did."
"Paradox doesn't destroy the universe," Janeway said, feeling out of her depth and clinging to the part of Q's statement that she could prove made no sense. She destroyed the universe, with Q, to save humanity? Why would she have done that? How could that have even happened? Mathematically it made no sense. "Paradox merely causes timelines to split."
"Your timeline, yes. Your timeline's fungible; it splits if you look at it cross-eyed." Q sat down on the bed. "But I'm not bound to your timeline. The Q can move freely in your time because we are bound to a different one; we exist outside your causality, but we are still entities that can grow, change, evolve, and to be such, we needed to be linear. So we're bound to our own timeline, the timeline of the Q Continuum. And the timeline of the Q Continuum cannot be looped without setting up a reaction that would destroy time, and thus the universe."
"You're saying you can't travel in your own time? Or that if you did, you'd destroy yourselves?"
"Both. And I'm not saying we'd destroy ourselves, I'm saying we'd destroy everything. Your timeline can loop all you want; it can split, it can divide, it can turn in on itself, but the timeline of the Q Continuum is sacrosanct. So we're taught. We don't have the power to travel backward in the timeline of the Continuum, and when we meet one another in your timeline, if we're out of temporal phase it takes an act of power to even see each other. There could be three of me from different points in the future here in this room with us, but unless I believe there might be, and work hard to be able to see them, I'd never know. They could appear to you more easily than they could appear to me."
"If it's impossible then how..."
Q smiled fiercely, bitterly. "It turns out it's not," she said. "There's a loophole. A mortal granted a measure of the power of the Q, but who is not a Q, can travel freely in your timeline using our power, and can be seen by Q who are in phase with that past time." She leaned back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. "You came back to warn me, bearing my own memories to me."
"When did this happen?"
"Which when?" Q asked mockingly, then looked at Janeway. "In a moment between moments. At the very second that Q took you to the Continuum, in the moment that I was about to follow you both, you from the future came to me, bringing a package of my own memories. If you'd been merely mortal at the time, I might have thought you had no idea of the potential consequences of your actions, that you would have believed changing the timeline of the Continuum would have no more consequence than changing the timeline of humanity ever has. But you had a measure of my power in you, and my memories. You knew better. You did it anyway. As did I."
"What did... we... do? What changed?" Janeway asked, almost whispering. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
Q's eyes grew haunted. She sat up on the bed. "We lost the war, Janeway," she said. "The Continuum was burning, and I was the one who'd lit the flame. Everyone I'd ever loved was either dead or complicit in the murder of the others. I brought mortals to the Continuum, led by a mortal hero, with Q-killing weapons I'd redesigned so that mortals could use them, and I was Loki at Ragnarok, I was Death on a pale horse, I was the apocalypse and I was trying to kill them all. And if the destruction of the Q Continuum should result in the destabilization of the entire universe, let it. I had nothing left. But you found your own way into the Continuum then, and you had another idea."
"If the alternative could be the destruction of the universe either way, I suppose I had no choice," Janeway said.
"You could have stopped me. A few Q surviving could have kept the Continuum from destabilizing. The universe would only have been destroyed if we all died, and there was a Q working with you who had the trick of reproduction, and could have repopulated the Continuum if it came to it. But it wouldn't have changed the deaths and suffering of those you loved, or the millions of humans who'd died, or the fall of the Federation. To restore the world to the way you thought it should be, you were willing to take the risk." Q leaned forward. "And when you came to me and showed me my memories... I could have let things play out the same way they had, I could have let the fate I saw ahead of me dictate my actions. Continuum law says I should have, that I should have erased those memories so I wouldn't be tempted to change the future."
"But you didn't," Janeway said.
Q nodded. "I stayed. I didn't follow you to the Continuum immediately, even though I knew it was a trap, because I knew I would need mortals. And then I lost my powers as the weapons formed a dead zone around us, and I thought everything might be lost. But your people proved resourceful enough that I was able to use their resources to get us all into the Continuum. I armed them with the weapons, and the war ended without another shot fired, without another Q dead, because at that stage, so early in the war, before any of the atrocities... arming mortals was like bringing bio-weapons into a conflict being fought with muskets. You were like an army of stinging insects with potentially fatal bites, and it didn't matter that any one Q could kill any of you that he could see; in the Continuum you mortals are so very small, no one felt they could be certain they could find all of you before you could kill them."
"So that's why it worked," Janeway said wonderingly. "I always wondered how it was that Tom was able to draw a gun on the leader of the enemy forces, and he couldn't just... wish Tom dead. He acted as if he'd been taken hostage, and the rest of the Q acted as if taking him hostage ended the war."
"Yes. It wasn't that you'd taken him hostage, you understand, it was that they had no idea how many there were of you and how many weapons I'd given you. He could have swatted Tom Paris like an insect, but who knew how many insects were lurking around, too small to see, carrying weapons and ready to gun them all down? They were outnumbered by an infinistesmal enemy who were each as capable of dealing death as any Q. Of course they surrendered."
"So it really was my crew, and you, who won Q's war for him," Janeway said.
"And saved both your lives."
"I haven't forgotten that, no."
Q got to her feet. "The Q hate me for it, of course," she said. "Even the freedom faction are appalled at the measures I was willing to go to, to win. They have the luxury of believing they might have won any other way. They don't know what I know. So they can revile me for unleashing such a terrible weapon on the Continuum, and heap all their praise on Q for his idea to have a child to end the war -- as if he isn't my child too, but if Q and I disagree on what to do for our son, they take his side. Always. And the order faction hates me as passionately as they hate him, and the undecideds don't care about the war and never did, but they do care about the sanctity of the Continuum being violated, of mortals being empowered to kill Q. All of them hate me. Except for Q. But that was all right. I could live with that. At least they viewed me as someone dangerous, someone to be respected." She stalked over to Janeway. "And then you took that from me."
"How could I change whether or not you're respected in the Continuum?" Janeway asked. "If this is because Q was going behind your back to sleep with me... I told you, I thought you had broken up with him, and as soon as I learned differently I broke it off with him."
"Yes!" Q shouted. Janeway took a step back, involuntarily. She hadn't expected the entity's sudden vehemence. "That's exactly what you did! Poor, poor, pitiful Q, with her jealousy hang-ups and her quaint belief that it might be nice if her lover actually loved her; poor pathetic Q, who wants one Q to think she's special and significant important, instead of being willing to live with just being part of the Continuum; poor Q's so degraded and weak that mortals feel sorry for her! You wouldn't fight me for him; you threw the contest, conceded to me because you felt sorry for me, as if I couldn't possibly take him back from you on my own merits, and they all know it! I am a laughingstock now because of you!"
Janeway shook her head. "That isn't it at all! Q, I don't want to be fighting you for the father of your child. I don't even love him. You do. I'll be dead in seventy years or less and you'll be there for the rest of time. I didn't want him to involve me in doing something that would hurt your feelings because I don't sleep with married men and I don't want to be competing with another woman for a man I care about... especially if she was with him before me, especially if she loves him, and most especially if they have a child together!"
"It doesn't matter what you want," Q said brutally. "No one in the Continuum cares about your feelings, except for Q and our son, on occasion. Everyone thinks it's just so hilarious that I'm such a damaged and pathetic excuse for a Q that I've actually let my jealousy inspire a mortal to take pity on me. Or that Q is going out of his way to be so terribly considerate of my idiotic emotional problems that he'd actually comply, and leave his mortal lovers alone because it bothers me."
"And that's why you wanted to seduce me?" Janeway asked skeptically. "Because the Q think that I feel sorry for you?"
"He doesn't care what his mortals do with other mortals," Q said. "But let another Q show interest in them, and he's capable of a jealous tantrum that makes anything I've done or said look completely respectable. And the other one would never do it, but you're pragmatic. You're like me. You'll do anything, anything at all, to save the people you love, even if it violates every ethical belief you have. So I thought you would be bribable."
"Because you wanted to make Q jealous." The thought occurred to Janeway that usually, the way that was supposed to work was that the jilted lover was supposed to inspire jealousy in their lost love by making the lost love fear losing them to another, not by fearing that the jilted lover would take the new lover for herself. "Hurting him isn't the answer, Q. Surely the two of you have had problems before; can't you work something out without trying to get revenge on him?"
"There's no point to getting revenge on him," Q said. "It doesn't teach him anything. But I wanted him to remind the Continuum how much of a jealous ass he can be, so they'll stop taking his side all the time and laughing at me. If I can't be loved, or liked, I at least want my respect back. I won't be a laughingstock." She leaned forward into Janeway's personal space. "You'll take him back."
"I will?" Janeway asked skeptically, not sure if this was a prediction of the future or supposed to be an order.
"If you refuse me, my choices are either to gain my face back by proving that I am not jealous and you are not pitying me... or to avenge myself on you and Q both for humiliating me, and I can most easily accomplish that by hurting you. He's not allowed to help you and the Continuum, in general, feel much the same way about you and your crew that they do about me -- they despise you as the insects who dared to threaten their lives. If I set out to hurt you, he won't be able to fix it. He can fight me, but that won't undo the damage."
Janeway went cold. "Are you telling me that if I don't sleep with Q again, you're going to kill me?"
"I would never kill you, Janeway," Q purred. "You brought me my memories of the future. You helped me save the Continuum and destroy the universe. I will just hurt you. I will find the thing that would cause you the most suffering, and I will make it happen... unless you stop factoring whether or not I am involved with Q into your relationship with him. You can continue to humiliate me by denying yourself what you want out of some misguided attempt to transpose human morality onto Q relationships, if you wish... but it won't be good for you. Or anyone around you."
"I don't respond well to threats."
"I tried bribes. That didn't work so well."
Janeway took a deep breath. "You don't have to do either. I told Q I was ending our sexual relationship because I didn't want to hurt you. From what you've said, though, it sounds like I inadvertently hurt you worse by doing that than I would have by staying with him. So... why don't you just ask me? If you order me, or threaten me, I won't do what you want me to do, but you could ask."
Q sneered at her. "Ask a mortal to graciously agree to do something to avoid hurting my feelings? That would miss the entire point."
"No. Ask a mortal who cares about your son's well-being to do something that will benefit him. It doesn't do young q any good if his mother is the laughingstock of the Continuum, or if she's so angry at his father that the two of you fight all the time instead of cooperating to raise your boy. Q asked me to be your son's godmother; I'm honor-bound to do what would be good for him. I thought that the best thing to do for him was to give up my relationship with Q. If you tell me that the best thing for your son is to retract that... because we can assume that what's good for your reputation in the Continuum is also good for your son... I can do that."
Q stared at her, and then laughed harshly. "You are much more like a Q than you'll admit, Janeway. Fine. For the sake of my son, I want you to take Q back."
It wasn't exactly a polite request, but it was certainly better than orders and threats. "For the sake of your son, I'll promise you that I will take Q back, and if I break up with him in the future it'll be for my own reasons, not out of any desire to spare you any pain."
"Good," Q said. "Then we understand each other."
"Excellent. Then you can leave."
"Only one other thing," Q said, and touched Janeway's forehead. Janeway frowned; the electric sensuality of Q's prior touches was gone, but her touch did feel mildly electric, as if a tiny shock had jumped from her fingers when she touched Janeway's skin. "The Q do not know what would have been their future, and they cannot. Not even Q. What one of us knows, we all know, and if the elders of the Continuum were to learn what I've done... they might think they need to repair the damage to the universe by rolling it back."
"What is the damage to the universe?" Janeway asked. "You and Q both mentioned the universe ending, but... obviously, it didn't end."
Q shrugged. "I have no idea. I was dead," she said. "Someone saved the universe from the consequences of our folly, Janeway. We were fortunate. But the rest of the Q don't remember the end of the universe, and I don't trust them to make the right decision when their information is incomplete."
"If what one Q knows, all Q know... how is this information you can hide?" Janeway asked.
Q smiled mirthlessly. "They hate me," she said. "There are only two Q close enough to me that they could learn the truth. I only need to keep it from them. Which means that when you are in the presence of a Q who isn't me, you will forget what I've told you. If Q power touches your mind, the memory will bury itself."
"That's going to make it difficult to explain to Q why I changed my mind."
"No. You'll have no trouble remembering the rest of our conversation. Only what I've told you about the future that we undid." And she was gone.
Janeway took a deep breath. She wasn't shaking anymore, but she was shaken. Q's attempt to bribe her into sex in order to hurt the other Q had made her infuriated... but Q's confession that she and Janeway had altered time, in a way that had run a significant risk of destroying the universe and may in fact have actually done so, with the damage undone somehow by parties unknown in ways that the female Q didn't know about and the male Q refused to talk about, in order to save their respective peoples and the people they cared for... that frightened her. Because she knew, instinctively, that it was all true. She knew that the person she was right at this minute would never do such a thing, never take such a risk... and she knew from the overwhelming temptation she'd felt at the chance to make Seven live again that if she had to live through an event that killed or harmed most of her crew and threatened all of humanity, all of the Federation, that yes, she would change time. In a heartbeat. Even if she thought it might threaten the entire universe. Because if there was a chance that it wouldn't, she would take that chance, to save her people and the people she loved.
And it sounded as if the consequences might have already come home to roost.
She needed to find out from Q what he knew about the universe ending. Of course, if she forgot everything the female Q had told her the moment he showed up, that would make it hard to remember why she wanted to remember. She picked up a PADD from her desk and scrawled on it, "Details, universe ending?" and then set it down.
"Q?" she said.
She hadn't known if he was listening or not, had had no idea if simply calling him would work or not, but she wasn't terribly surprised when there was a brilliant flash of light in front of her. "My sweet Kathy! I knew Q would be able to persuade you to change your mind," he said.
Janeway scowled at him. "You sent her to me?"
Q shook his head. "The last time I sent her to you to talk you into anything, she tied me up on your bed, stripped of my clothes and my powers. Which, mind you, has its entertainment value when you're actually planning to screw my brains out, but when it results in me being stuck there for five hours before you even show up and doesn't get me so much as a kiss, it really wasn't so pleasant. So I am more than done with asking her to convince you to do anything. No, she went entirely on her own recognizance, but she did tell me when she got back that you were willing to take me back." He smirked at her and waggled his eyebrows. "Which, I hope, translates into you being willing to take me now."
Janeway noted the PADD, but couldn't remember what she'd meant. The universe ending? She'd had a weird dream about that, but aside from that, what did the universe ending have anything to do with anything? "I don't like to be rushed into anything," Janeway said. "What happened to wining and dining me first?"
They were suddenly sitting at an Italian restaurant, at a table with a red and white checkered tablecloth, a bottle of wine on the table and two plates of seafood fra diavolo in front of them. Q was dressed in a 20th century period black suit; Janeway was still wearing her uniform, since she had long ago ordered Q not to change her clothes without permission. "Does this meet your standards for wining and dining, o captain, my captain?" Q asked. "Or would you prefer something more exotic?"
After everything she'd been dealing with, the illusion of being home, on Earth, was more comforting and pleasant than she was prepared to admit. "This is just fine, Q," she said, taking a bite of her meal.
"Only 'just fine'?"
She grinned at him. "It's delightful, and you know it. Why do you need me to feed your ego by telling you so?"
"My ego's got a very large appetite," Q said mournfully. "You'd think having such a big ego would be wonderful all the time, and it mostly is, I admit, but you would not believe how often I need to feed the damn thing."
Janeway laughed. "I suppose that makes sense," she said. She took another bite. It really was delicious. She'd gotten over her guilt at eating delicious food with Q while the rest of the crew was stuck with what Mr. Chell could come up with by convincing herself that letting him feed her left more of Voyager's scarce stores for the rest of the crew. He wasn't allowed to replenish their stores or feed the rest of the crew, lest his political opponents in the Continuum interpret that as "helping" Voyager. She leaned forward and smiled seductively. "But would you rather have me feed your ego, or would you rather me reward you for good behavior later?"
Q's eyes widened slightly, and then he grinned. "Well, if I have to have one or the other, I suppose I can agree to delayed gratification," he said.
"I thought that might be your answer," she said with a satisfied grin.