Path: newsspool2.news.atl.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!elnk-atl-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!cyclone.tampabay.rr.com!cyclone.southeast.rr.com!news-east.rr.com!news.rr.com!newsprint.newsread.com!newsread.com!newsstand.newsread.com!POSTED.monger.newsread.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated Approved: ascem@earthlink.net Organization: Better Living Thru TrekSmut Sender: ascem@earthlink.net Message-ID: From: "Nick" MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list ASCEML@yahoogroups.com; contact ASCEML-owner@yahoogroups.com Subject: NEW TNG: "Hard Won: Reflections" 3/3 (P/Q) [R] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 416 Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:55:08 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.198.142.218 X-Complaints-To: Abuse Role , We Care X-Trace: monger.newsread.com 1100274908 209.198.142.218 (Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:55:08 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:55:08 EST Xref: news.earthlink.net alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated:85549 X-Received-Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 07:55:17 PST (newsspool2.news.atl.earthlink.net) Summary, etc in part 1/3. "Facts? Q has the power to *create* facts!" "Beverly, if Q wants to turn me into some sort of sex slave, why has he left me on my ship in the meantime? Beyond that, if he went to the trouble of brainwashing Deanna to keep his game a secret, why is he allowing you to see through it?" "I don't know! I don't know why Q does anything and neither do you, no matter how much you like to pretend otherwise. Do you even hear yourself, Jean-Luc? Did it occur to *you* that he's a man? I don't care what he looks like in the Continuum; he's a man as far as we're concerned." "I had noticed that, yes." "And that doesn't make you think he might have brainwashed you?" The doctor had her hands on her hips now, and she was looking at him with such an exasperatedly patronizing expression that he was almost shocked until he saw something glint in her eyes that went a long way toward explaining it. Beverly was afraid. He cursed himself for not seeing it earlier, but at his core he knew that he was in no condition to be sensitive or astute. Shaking his head slowly, Picard struggled to balance the strong wave of remorse that washed over him at knowing that he was somehow responsible for her fear with his desire to assert himself in defense of his feelings, finally. "No, it doesn't." Jean-Luc's voice was quiet and calm, and he was careful to soften his expression as he met the doctor's nervous gaze. "There are things you don't know about me, Beverly." The woman stared at him, her brow twitching delicately, and his mechanical heart seemed to pause in anticipation of her reaction. As he watched, her eyes glazed and widened and his heart restarted, thumping almost painfully in his confusion. He had expected that she would at least manage to pretend some grace at this point in his revelation, but the grimace of shock and disgust on her face was more like what he had supposed he would see there when he finally told her... "You fucked Jack." "What?" Picard stared stupidly, almost forgetting that it was true in his inability to imagine how she could possibly know now when she hadn't known before. "It wasn't a dream. You really did it, didn't you?" She was backing away slowly, a shaky hand trailing mindlessly along the wall of his handball program, looking at him as though he were brandishing a disruptor pistol. "I... you had a dream? About... Jack and me?" "Goddamnit, Jean-Luc! Deny it! Tell me it wasn't real... tell me you didn't lead me on like that without bothering to mention that you'd fucked my dead husband. Please, Jean-Luc." The words came out in a rush, losing momentum as they went, until Beverly was huddled against the wall just out of the door's sensor range, with her fist clamped over her mouth and her nostrils flaring in distress. Picard lurched toward her, planting his own hand on the wall and halting awkwardly when he arrived and realized he had no idea what to do. Should he touch her? Would she want him to? "Beverly, I..." He clamped his mouth around the imbecilic stuttering it seemed to want to vomit at her. Inhaling and starting again, he tried to sound rational. "It was long before the two of you --" "Oh God." Beverly stared at him numbly, the hollow way that her eyes looked through him twisting at his stomach. It was all so bizarre, so outside of his current ability to comprehend. Jean-Luc had known Beverly Crusher for over ten years. As their working relationship had evolved into a friendship, he had begun to feel a certain obligation to be completely honest with her about how well he had known her dead husband, but every signal she had given him screamed that the past was better left there, at least where he and Jack were concerned. She had never seemed to suspect, and he had decided that it would be useless and cruel to force the information on her. So, where had this sudden insight come from? And then, asking it that way suddenly made the answer seem so simple. His upper lip curling, Picard turned away from Beverly to stare up at the ceiling and through it, seeing empty space in his mind's eye and growling, "Why, Q?" The mindless hum of the Enterprise's engines and Beverly's elevated breathing answered him. "Damn it!" Snarling, he slammed his fist against the holodeck wall. Beverly jumped, seemingly jolted out of her daze, and focused her hard, critical eyes on him. "You're going to blame Q now?" Coming away from the wall, the woman folded her arms across her chest as she spoke. "You did it, Jean- Luc. Q apparently just thought I deserved to know." Picard shook his head, his gaze pulling reluctantly away from the ceiling to settle stormily on the doctor. "Believe me, Beverly, I very much regret that you had to find out this way -- or at all, to be perfectly honest -- but I do not regret my relationship with Jack... And Q had no right to --" "YOU had no right, Jean-Luc," the woman interrupted, unnerving him with the barely restrained passion in her voice. "You had no right to dance with me and have dinner with me knowing what you'd done." "You've danced with Data and had dinner with Will... Are you saying that my having had a relationship with Jack before he ever met you should have precluded us from being friends?" Jean-Luc made a short, exasperated gesture. His guilt was dissipating fast and leaving a streak of fatigue and indignation in its place. "I was *teaching* Data how to dance, and Will had dinner with me to get advice about how to approach Deanna! It's hardly the same thing and you know it. Are you going to pretend the subtleties of human interaction are lost on you, great explorer of the cosmos and representative of all humankind?" Beverly's voice was tired and raw, but the watery venom still stung him. Without taking his eyes from her face, Picard slumped against the wall and brushed a palm lethargically over his mouth. "No, you're right..." Jean-Luc murmured, glancing down at the illusory rubber floor where his feet were planted firmly to keep him from sliding down the illusory wall. When he looked back up at her his expression was resigned, regretful. "But we both needed someone and I honestly thought I was sparing you." "And it never occurred to you to ask me whether I wanted to be spared?" Beverly bristled, taking a step toward him. It felt inappropriate to be menaced by that seemingly involuntary movement, but Picard couldn't help wanting to shrink away and melt into the wall like a holo-novel character. He wouldn't have known how to deal with the situation if he had been at his best, but he sure as hell didn't know now. "No... yes... I don't know, but there's not a lot I can do about it now. I was trying to do the right thing." Jean-Luc's chin jutted just slightly, and he winced away a defensive frown. It was too much. Oh, it was too much for her to expect him to have this conversation when he could hardly stand, when he hadn't been able to think straight for three days. The woman's shock and dismay might prevent her from being concerned about his emotional or mental health at the moment, but she couldn't think she was going to get whatever it was she wanted from him under these circumstances. "No, there isn't anything you can do about it now, unless you can persuade Q to take you back in time so that you can NOT sleep with my husband." "I would never!" Picard growled, coming away from the wall and staring at the woman in hard incomprehension. The idea was appalling for so many reasons. How could she even suggest it? "Oh, I know, the *timeline* is --" "Forget the timeline!" Flailing an arm exasperatedly, Jean-Luc gritted his teeth as though he could trap the last remnants of his self-control between them. "I would never wish away what I had with Jack. Damn it, Beverly... I had no way of knowing that you would rather I had told you, and I'm sorry that it had to come out this way, but I do like to think that our friendship is strong enough to withstand this." "I'm sure it is... hero worship of the great Jean-Luc Picard is practically mandatory on this ship. I'm sure I'll come around eventually." "Beverly..." "Know when to walk away, Jean-Luc." --- Picard had to be on the bridge in four hours and he couldn't sleep. Giving up even the illusion of trying, he had gotten out of bed and curled up in his armchair with a book. The volume hadn't captured his interest long enough for him to read the title, though, and it now wedged itself between his thigh and the armrest, forgotten. Beverly's face loomed in front of him, whether he closed his eyes or not, and it scowled. He had felt guilty about lying to her for years, but her spiteful anger had seemed such an overreaction that he was no longer sure how he felt about any of it. How could he have known what she wanted him to do with his secret? He couldn't very well have asked her without spilling it. Grunting softly, Jean-Luc closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, pleased with the way the uncomfortable pressure seemed to impede the function of his overactive brain. "Why so glum, Johnny?" "Q!" The book flying unnoticed onto the floor, Picard surged up from his chair and nearly stumbled when his numb and tingling feet planted themselves in front of it. Q stood tall in the doorway, with his arms crossed and his features lost in the dim light. Despite the hurt and confusion left over from his confrontation with Beverly, Jean-Luc couldn't help the way his heart fluttered at the sight of that strong silhouette across the room. It all made a sickening soup in his stomach, and he tried to steady himself, to remind himself of eight days worth of misgivings and second thoughts. Promptly, Q took the reins of that operation from him. "Bev didn't like my present, I take it," the entity murmured indifferently, leaning on the doorframe and crossing his ankles. "I should have known. Humans are so ungrateful." Q's posture was excruciatingly nonchalant, and pain, deep and hot, splattered up from Picard's chest to redden his cheeks. Trying to suppress it, and fumbling at what remained of his hope with slippery emotional fingers, Jean-Luc took a step forward. "Q, what the hell did you think you were doing? And where have you been?" "Nag, nag, nag. 'What did you think you were doing, Q?' 'Where have you been, Q?' If I wanted a wife I wouldn't pick you, Jean-Luc." It was difficult to tell in the dark, but Q seemed to be studying his fingernails. //This can't be... how can he...// Suddenly Q's cowardice became unacceptable to Picard, and he stormed forward, intent on looking into those terrifying dark eyes while he dared the entity to go on acting as though nothing significant had happened between them. Q took a step back, seeming at first to shrink from the man's approach, but ending up in a more illuminating position with his face open to the blue lights that ran the length of Jean- Luc's quarters. Picard had expected to see ferocity there, or mockery, some facade that might suggest tender hidden emotions, but Q's expression was desolate. //Oh God.// "In a manner of speaking." That silky voice crawled over him like spiders, and Jean-Luc had to fight himself to keep from shivering. How was it possible that two of his worst fears were being realized in the same damn day? The answer was so obvious that it made him laugh a broken, dark, defeated laugh. It was possible because Q wished it to be so. When Picard spoke, he did it directly into Q's disinterested brown eyes. "Did you have this all planned out from the beginning, or did you simply tire of me, Q?" Seeming not to have heard him, Q curled his lips upward faintly and leaned back against the wall, his near complete lack of expression more sinister in the otherworldly blue tint of the running lights. "I can't decide which part I enjoyed the most... 'Jean-Luc... mon amour...' Convincing, oui? But, no, I think my favorite part was when I got you to admit that you loved me." "I never said that!" Jean-Luc roared, trembling slightly as he opened every receptive channel in his brain to the righteous anger that wanted to come spewing out and hoped that by some miracle it would keep him from dropping into the fetal position at Q's feet. The entity pouted his lips and nodded patronizingly at Picard's fury. "If you want to think of it that way. I imagine it will help you sleep at night, and you certainly do seem to need all the help you can get in *that* area." Everything Q said hit Jean-Luc like a physical blow to the throat, making him swallow thickly and try in vain to keep from falling back against the opposite side of the doorframe. The gagging pain in his throat stayed, though, and he was distantly aware that it was a sob trying to force its way up and into the open air. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have been so arrogant and so blind? How could he have looked into Q's terrified, painsick eyes and seen anything other than deceit? "Don't be too hard on yourself, Mon Capitaine," Q said, tapping his own temple. "You didn't have an awful lot to work with." Growling wordlessly as the room spun around him, Picard lurched out of the doorway and back into his bedroom proper, turning his back on the entity. He heard nothing, not even the constant hum of the ship's engines, but as he passed his hands shakily over his face he felt hot breath on his ear. "Hurts, doesn't it, Johnny?" Shuddering, Jean- Luc entertained a brief fantasy of gouging out his eyes to stop the tears that stabbed at the backs of them. He wouldn't give Q the satisfaction. Never. "Tell me why," he said quietly, his voice infused with a surprising steadiness that gave him the strength to turn around. Infuriated and humiliated by the way Q towered over him at this proximity, Picard felt his anger rise up again. "I demand that you tell me why you did this!" Unblinking, the entity showed his teeth in a cryptic, grimacing smile. "How easily you forget the gulf that separates us." As he spoke, Q turned away from Jean-Luc to pace the room, gesturing theatrically. "You're a human, Jean-Luc, and I am a Q. You're an insect gathering breadcrumbs only to collapse under your load one day and die, thinking that at least *this* day will be different from the last. I am a god, soaring through the cosmos, shaping the cosmos, *being* the cosmos. You can make all the demands you like, but your voice is as the buzzing of a terran fly in the ear of the Continuum." Not turning his head, Picard watched the entity out of the corner of his eye. He absolutely would not hang on Q's every movement like some sort of heartbroken puppy. "You've always told me why before," he said, staring numbly ahead of him. There was something wrong with this conversation, something that didn't make sense, but the agony in his chest and the effort required of him to maintain his composure were too distracting. "Every time you've put me or my crew through some hell you've had a grandiose rationalization for it, and you've fallen all over yourself to tell me so that I would see how clever you were." Q shifted quickly in his peripheral vision and then appeared in front of him, bearing down on the man as his eyes flared with the passion that had been so maddeningly absent before. "Hell? Surely you don't think this is Hell, Jean-Luc! Surely you can't be as melodramatic as that." Nostrils flaring and teeth chipping themselves in an effort to remain clamped together, Picard stared all of his outrage and devastation into those dark, narrowed eyes. Q's upper lip twitched ironically. "You have no idea what Hell is. To you, this is a love affair in tatters, an emotional rejection, the sort of thing humans deal with all the time. You've done so many extraordinary things according to the rickety and limited scales by which your species judges its members; don't tell me you can't handle being dumped, Picard." And it was true, wasn't it? Q was some sort of god thing and he was only a man -- a rejected, humiliated man who should have known better. He had brought this agony on himself by submitting so completely to the tempting hubris of his exalted position as to imagine that Q might really want him. Now he was going to cry and faint like a teenager? With a shaky, painful exhalation, the man passed a clumsy hand over his face. "All right, Q," he murmured dully, not worrying that the omniscient entity might have trouble understanding his muffled, quiet words. Q knew anything Q wished to know, and it made Jean-Luc feel stripped, with his emotional skin drawn open and pinned at his sides while his emotional organs stung in the open air. "You've made your point. I... accept my place in the Universe. Please. Leave." When no response came, he glanced up almost fearfully to find that he was alone again in his bedroom. No ostentatious flash, no last derision; he was simply alone. Stumbling slightly, as though he had been borrowing strength he hadn't had to keep himself upright in Q's presence, Picard slumped against his armchair. The room was spinning in earnest now, and his vision blurred with hateful tears that couldn't fall because he wouldn't allow them to fall. Q might still be watching. Q might never stop watching. //How disgustingly arrogant, Picard! He'll probably never give you another thought.// A wave of nausea swept up from his guts at the thought, sending him staggering into his bathroom to fall against the pristine metal basin there. He retched pitifully, dimly thankful that his reflection was obscured by his regurgitated dinner when the tears broke his crumbling dam of self- control. His body convulsed one last time and he collapsed onto the floor, his head hitting the rounded underside of the basin and making it sing mutedly. Imagining that Q could see him leaning that way, wedged into the corner of his bathroom as the waste processing and ventilation systems eliminated all evidence of his intestinal rebellion, Jean-Luc shivered. //No! Haven't you learned anything from this? He's not watching because he doesn't care. He never cared. He is Q. He is Q. He is Q...// The man grimaced and clutched at his scalp, hiding his swollen, red eyes from the universe with a skewed forearm. "...great explorer of the cosmos and representative of all humankind..." Crusher's voice purred in his mind, thicker and crueler than it had been, and he choked, slamming his fist into the basin. His legs kicked spastically once, in his grief, scrabbling across the floor and making him feel like a child. Hating himself more, he knitted his fingers hard behind his neck and trembled, closing his eyes against his grotesque, distorted reflection in the curved metal. How, how could he have let this happen? Once he had, how could he let himself wallow in it, hunched on the floor and crying for something so foolish, so impossible? Q had been right; it was only a love affair, and humans did endure them all the time. It was perfectly possible to have one's heart broken without losing the ability to function. It was, it was. Love, sex, intimate companionship -- all things he had done without for years, all things that paled in comparison to learning, to exploring, to being respected and trusted by superiors and subordinates alike. Then why couldn't he calm down? Why couldn't he stop gulping and trembling? Why was he sure that if he unlocked his fingers they would claw mindlessly at his face until he was unrecognizable? Picard kicked his feet again, this time in anger at himself for being so weak. His big toe jammed hard against the wall but he hardly felt it. All of his nerves, every part of him, seemed dead except for the fiery pain in his chest and the shuddering pressure between his temples. It had been like this when Adrian had left him. He had performed a calculated experiment to see how much synthehol he might need to drink to kill himself in one night, and then he had failed all of his midterm exams. His instructors, shocked by the sudden plunge and sure that he must be going through a difficult time, had gotten together to offer him an opportunity to mitigate the damage. He might have failed that, too, if a young cadet called Julia hadn't dragged him out of his violent depression with the offer of a simple, pleasant relationship that was wholly unengulfing. Of course, as far as she had known an attempt to help someone in need had become a sweet, low-flame romance that she would remember fondly into old age. For Picard, though, it had been a revelation. How could he ever have thought that he could reach out and touch a star without being seared to bits? Looking at a holographic recreation wasn't at all the same, but it was nice enough, and absolutely safe. And Q wasn't any star; he was a blue giant, the barest flash of which burned Jean-Luc into nothing and left an ashen silhouette on the wall. He had been so sure that he had learned his lesson, so sure that had set his priorities in order. Duty, enrichment, personal honor, compassion, friendship. He had considered himself happy, even given the lonely nights and the frustration of outranking everyone he might consider confiding in, showing weakness to. Now he was crumpled and ashamed, exhausted from having seen too many flashes of his true reflection in too short a period of time, hating himself and missing Q. [End.] ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ ASCEM messages are copied to a mailing list. Most recent messages can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASCEML. NewMessage: