Sick?... Does psychotic count?
Mar. 4th, 2009 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qcontinuumThis is not a funny story. I realize that those of you who bother to read these things probably come here expecting a barrel of yuks. Not today.
Prompts:
176 Tell the story of one of your past scars.
171 What is the biggest mistake you've made in a relationship?
204 Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
271 Talk about a time that you were sick.
You know, the problem with being able to not think about things that bother you to remember is that when you get around to thinking about them, they still really bother you.
I've had terrible things happen to me, more than usual for a Q. I've lost my powers, gotten shot, gotten locked out of the universe, been assaulted by a gang who wanted to rewrite my personality... watched my ex appear to die in front of me, back when we were still together, saw my son turn on me, and when I was able to convince him to stop being an ass, saw what looked like the universe about to end, with me unable to save him (or anyone else, but he was really what I was concerned with at the time)... watched him get seriously hurt, nearly killed, when he attempted to see what was on the other side of the Continuum... You'd really think there'd be nothing that would faze me to remember at this point.
But it's not what happened to me that bothers me about this one. It's what *I* did.
I used to have a best friend. Q relationships don't really translate very well into most mortal languages (our answer to the question "If all men are brothers, would you want your sister to marry one?" was "Yes, except we don't believe in marriage in the first place.") With a small number of exceptions, the pioneers who created the Continuum and our handful of youngest generation beings, we were all created by the Continuum, so we are all siblings. We don't believe in monogamy at all, so we can't even really call the beings we exchange pleasure with our lovers, as that tends to imply that there are people you wouldn't exchange pleasure with, whereas your average Q has had sex with, um, every single other Q in the Continuum aside from my son (they had better not) and Amanda.
Oh, and there's another thing. We actually don't have sex. We exchange energies or merge minds and patterns. It's really much more fun than sex, and involves a lot less mess (and it lends itself a lot better to orgies than anything that tends to emphasize tab A and slot B), but it doesn't lead to reproduction, so we have no reason whatsoever not to be completely promiscuous. In fact one might argue that one of the things that holds the Continuum together is the fact that we're all sleeping with each other (another euphemism that totally doesn't work, since we don't actually sleep in the first place). So when I say I have or had a best friend who's a Q, understand that that being is also my sibling, and also my lover, and all the things that go into those relationships between mortals are present as well. Including the bad parts, like sibling rivalry and people getting mad at you for the metaphorical equivalent of leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube. (Do I even have to point out that we don't have teeth, and wouldn't need to brush them if we did?) And I should also point out that for us, gender is more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast rule... I usually manifest as a male, at least in humanoid shapes, and some of my closest friends usually manifest as females if they bother to manifest at all, and since "it" is kind of rude I need to come up with imaginary genders for everyone I talk about, even beings who have never manifested as a gendered creature at all... so when I talk about "male" friends, or brothers, yes, I've had sex with them too. Often, several of them at the same time. I did mention that the Q form of exchanging pleasure lends itself very well to orgies, right?
So. I had a best friend, who was also my little sister (funny that even after five billion years a difference of several million matters... but it actually does), who was also my second favorite lover. I say second favorite because she had this problem, see. She had an insatiable appetite for total intimacy. It wasn't enough for her to exchange energies, or even partially merge minds together... she wanted to go all the way, fusing completely into a single entity, every single time. Truth was, she felt incomplete, and only total unity with another Q satisfied her.
I suspect I *may* have mentioned, once or twice, that I have... intimacy issues with other Q. The truth is, this kind of total fusion is really dangerous. Two Q who join with one another completely run a terrible risk of never being able to separate... of losing their individual identities entirely in the unity, becoming a new being at the expense of both of the old. You can't be a Q without the ability to merge with other Q at least to the extent that we all do as part of the Continuum overmind, but... I kind of have problems with that too. I like myself. (You think? Maybe a little?) I don't want to be someone new, I don't want to absorb new traits from someone else, and I don't want to lose my individuality in any way.
My friend survived as a singular entity as long as she did because I protected her. What she wanted would have annihilated her sooner or later. She'd have merged with someone whose personality was stronger than hers and lost herself forever. But because she was my friend and I liked her to be who she was too, I kept other Q from taking advantage of her desperate need to lose herself. (A *lot* of Q like the total unity thing. A lot. Apparently the pleasure's much more intense when you go all the way like that. I wouldn't know; the few times I've done it I've had to put so much of my concentration into *not* losing myself completely, making a bread crumb trail I could use to find my way back out again, that people complained I wasn't really doing it right.) I was *not*, whatever you may hear, jealous of her other Q partners. How could I be? They accused me of essentially dog in the manger behavior -- being unable to bring myself to fully join with her myself, I tried generally to keep everyone else from doing it too, and they said this was because I was jealous. No. This was because I was *scared*. I didn't want one of them to *eat* her. I didn't envy them the experience of fully joining with her; I could have had that any time I wanted, and in fact there were numerous occasions when we were enjoying ourselves and she tried to push me in that direction... once or twice, so hard that she broke down my resistance to it, but like I said, I'd be so worried about making sure I had an escape route that it really didn't work the way it was supposed to.
She was miserable, of course. Who wouldn’t be, deprived of what they most needed for an eternity? But at least she was alive, and herself, and I thought that could be enough for her. I mean, I wasn’t getting what *I* most needed either, and I was surviving.
Then she fell in love with a mortal.
Other Q will tell you I was jealous. I *wasn’t*. Oh, maybe a little, but only in the sense that she had found something fun and entertaining, while I was still roaming the universe aimlessly, being bored. I wasn’t jealous of her lover, I was envious of *her* for having one, though at the time I would have declared to all and sundry that the entire concept of falling in love with a mortal was ridiculous. (Oh, how we decry most loudly the things we secretly most want when we’re in the closet…) And I was a bit annoyed that one of my favorite playmates had found something much more worthy of her time than hanging out with *me* for maybe the next thousand years or so, this being a member of a very long-lived mortal species. But jealous? Of a mortal? Ridiculous. A mortal could never truly give Q what she needed and wanted and would be destroyed by. Only other Q were a threat.
And then she proposed to the Continuum that her lover be made a Q.
Well. You wanna talk jealousy, okay, *now* it was on. If her lover became a Q, she would have him for all eternity, and then I wouldn’t be her best friend anymore… Q had *always* had a habit of ignoring me completely any time she found a new Q lover, but those didn’t last, largely because I made any Q lover who was actually willing to join with her suffer until they broke it off. If this guy joined the Continuum to be with her, I wouldn’t be *able* to drive him off… we treat those who join the Continuum from a state of mortality as adolescents, and no more tolerate full adult Q harassing them (or harassing them much, anyway, by Continuum standards) than we currently tolerate adult Q harassing my son. And if he was willing to join with her as a mortal… Mortals all think the idea of becoming one entity with their lover is so *romantic*, because they can’t actually do it. Q would eat him alive in moments, because he wouldn’t know enough to even *try* to defend his sense of self from her. He’d willingly merge into her, and then she would no longer be *her*, she’d be her and him, and my friend would be gone forever.
Quite aside from that fact, on the merits of the case he had no place in the Continuum. She talked about how evolved and peaceful and advanced his species was, and all of this was true but all of this was also a reason why he wouldn’t survive the Continuum for ten seconds. We are the most aggressive of the Powers, because we keep ourselves from losing our identities in the overmind by *fighting* with each other, all the time. His people were gentle and affiliative and telepathic and they formed bonds with each other and all that jazz, and the Continuum would either devour him (if Q didn’t get to it first by joining with him), or he would suffer horribly, forever, the way Q suffered, by never being able to have the depth of closeness with another being that he had been able to have as a mortal. The Q can’t get as close as telepathic mortals, because telepathic mortals aren’t bound together in an overmind and telepathic mortals have physical bodies to anchor themselves to.
So I argued that he should not be allowed to join the Continuum. Yes, I had an ulterior motive, but I was also doing it to keep him from being consumed by Q or the Continuum or being miserable for eternity. And I didn’t want to add those gentle, affiliative traits to the totality of the Continuum because it would weaken us, promote closer bonding and therefore risk the individuality of all of us. I also argued that Q obviously had no objectivity regarding the guy and she should be forbidden to see him or interact with his species until either he died or she got her emotions under control, whichever came first. And being that this was self-evidently *true*, I won.
She was going to go to him anyway. I knew her. I knew how she thought. She was going to disobey a direct order of the Continuum, flagrantly disobey, leaving us no choice but to cut her off and make her mortal. I didn’t want that for her. So I went to her to try to talk her out of it.
She ripped me to pieces. I never saw it coming. I knew she was angry at me, but one minute I was trying to have a conversation and the next… well, actually I don’t know what happened next because I’ve never been able to remember it. The equivalent of brain damage, you see. From the memories of all the Q recorded to the Continuum I know that what happened was she leapt on me and started tearing my pattern, and apparently by the time I realized I was under attack I was already too badly injured to put up any kind of a fight, and she destroyed me to the point where she started doing damage to herself as well, and several Q had to pull her off me because she was berserk. She hadn’t even noticed the damage she was doing to herself. She just wanted me dead.
They exiled her to mortality, of course. At that they did that rather than execute her because when they brought me in as an exhibit in her trial – or what was left of me, anyway, because I was in such bad shape I was barely sentient – she broke down crying and begging my forgiveness, pleading with the Continuum to be allowed to go back in time and stop herself (this is technically *possible*, but would destroy the Continuum if anyone ever tried it; we can travel freely in the mortal timeline, but we’re as bound to paradox in our own timeline as mortals are in theirs. Moreso, in fact.) So they made her mortal, and of course she chose to be her lover’s species and go live with him.
I presented them something of a dilemma. In my tattered, semi-conscious, almost infantile state, any Q could come along and rewrite me into whatever they wanted. I had no defenses anymore at all. Everyone knew that I had an absolute horror of such a thing occurring (not that the rest of the Q don’t, but most of them have never been actually faced with an attempt to do it… sort of the difference between a woman who’s never been raped fearing rape, and a woman who was once gang-raped fearing it happening again.) Everyone also knew that there were a good number of Q out there who would be overwhelmingly tempted to do it. So for my own protection, they created a locked pocket dimension that no one in the Continuum would be able to enter without setting off alarms, and which I couldn’t leave until I was strong enough to teleport again, and tossed me in it.
Alone.
For forty years of your linear time.
Nothing to see. No one to talk to. Nothing to do. Nowhere I could go.
I went insane.
There are other Q who handle sensory deprivation and loneliness better than I do. Q, who killed himself, endured 300 years of imprisonment in a comet for principle’s sake… he could actually have ended his imprisonment at any time by renouncing his attempts to die (and genuinely meaning it; you can’t lie to the Continuum.) But most other Q don’t have, shall we say, my hairtrigger sensitivity to boredom? I healed on my own, slowly, but even the earliest part of the experience I can remember, I remember feeling alone, abandoned, rejected by everyone I cared about, and I remember screaming and begging and crying like a five-year-old locked in a closet, which, given the level of damage I’d suffered in the attack, I kind of was. By the time I gained the ability to see outside my little prison, I had remembered what Q had done to me, and I blamed her for everything I was suffering. So I tracked her down, as soon as I could see… and I saw her being happy. Adapted to her new mortal life. Snuggling up with her mortal lover. Talking about adopting kids. I was in hell, in darkness and silence and loneliness for years, and she who had put me there was all lovey-dovey with the boyfriend she’d assaulted me for.
So I concentrated on getting out. I focused on relearning my teleportation. I maybe should have focused on recovering my sanity, but I didn’t, because I wasn’t aware of how far gone I was. There was *nothing* in my mind but misery and hate and the desire to make her suffer like I had suffered.
And when I got out, I went directly to her, and I told her what I had endured because of her. And I told her that I knew I couldn’t harm her, because it’s against Q law to harm former Q once they’ve been made mortal. But there is actually no Q law against killing mortals, or rather, it’s a misdemeanor, kind of like cruelty to animals. So there was nothing stopping me from killing her lover.
. . .
I don’t like to remember that. I don’t like to remember who I was at that moment, how I thought, what I felt like. I remember seeing my best friend in all the universe, the being I’d been closer to than any other Q, crying and begging in front of me, pleading on her knees, and I remember laughing as I destroyed every reason she had to live.
I don’t actually really know what happened to her after that. I’ve never looked. Guinan ran into her at some point, but… I’d rather not know.
The Continuum knew I was crazy, and they knew that locking me up again would just make matters worse, so they forbade me to think about her. Which sort of works, if you’re a Q. Q thoughts have a way of becoming reality, so we learn how to restrict our thoughts in a way humans just can’t. And I did get better, slowly, though it was maybe two hundred years before I was really recovered… no, actually, now that I think of it, I think I didn’t really recover my former self entirely until after I’d met the humans. Maybe not until after the Continuum had punished *me* with mortality.
But because I couldn’t think of her… even now it hurts to remember, and I have to force myself to bring up any memories of the things we did together before it all fell apart, and you don’t want to know how many aeons of my own time it has taken me to actually express all this. I’ve been stopping and starting and stopping and starting for I don’t know how long. My first best friend and everything about her is a sucking black hole in my mind, a dark pit I fear falling into, a scar that runs through my entire psyche and has never fully healed.
I destroyed her. I kept her from getting what she needed, because *I* was afraid of the consequences, until it snapped her. And then she attacked me, and in my blind lust for vengeance I responded by annihilating everything good, everything positive in her new existence… because, no, she wasn’t really happy, how could she be without the Continuum? I’ve been mortal myself now, I know. It *hurts*. She made the best of it she could by turning to her lover for solace, and I killed him. And I can’t fix it. It’s had too deep an impact on my personal timeline. Going through time to keep myself from doing it, even though it would be *in* mortal timeline, would have a paradox effect on me and could wipe out the Continuum, and I destroyed him too thoroughly to resurrect in conventional ways. I even deleted his record in the Continuum. There might be backups someplace, but… without a *great* deal of effort from people who have no reason to put in such an effort for me *or* for Q, no one will ever bring him back.
I… I condemned my best friend to a fate worse than death. And I have to live with that for the rest of eternity.
The references to Q's mate appearing to die and his son turning on him, and then the universe ending, come from the book by Peter David and John de Lancie, "I, Q".
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG and VOY
Prompts:
176 Tell the story of one of your past scars.
171 What is the biggest mistake you've made in a relationship?
204 Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
271 Talk about a time that you were sick.
You know, the problem with being able to not think about things that bother you to remember is that when you get around to thinking about them, they still really bother you.
I've had terrible things happen to me, more than usual for a Q. I've lost my powers, gotten shot, gotten locked out of the universe, been assaulted by a gang who wanted to rewrite my personality... watched my ex appear to die in front of me, back when we were still together, saw my son turn on me, and when I was able to convince him to stop being an ass, saw what looked like the universe about to end, with me unable to save him (or anyone else, but he was really what I was concerned with at the time)... watched him get seriously hurt, nearly killed, when he attempted to see what was on the other side of the Continuum... You'd really think there'd be nothing that would faze me to remember at this point.
But it's not what happened to me that bothers me about this one. It's what *I* did.
I used to have a best friend. Q relationships don't really translate very well into most mortal languages (our answer to the question "If all men are brothers, would you want your sister to marry one?" was "Yes, except we don't believe in marriage in the first place.") With a small number of exceptions, the pioneers who created the Continuum and our handful of youngest generation beings, we were all created by the Continuum, so we are all siblings. We don't believe in monogamy at all, so we can't even really call the beings we exchange pleasure with our lovers, as that tends to imply that there are people you wouldn't exchange pleasure with, whereas your average Q has had sex with, um, every single other Q in the Continuum aside from my son (they had better not) and Amanda.
Oh, and there's another thing. We actually don't have sex. We exchange energies or merge minds and patterns. It's really much more fun than sex, and involves a lot less mess (and it lends itself a lot better to orgies than anything that tends to emphasize tab A and slot B), but it doesn't lead to reproduction, so we have no reason whatsoever not to be completely promiscuous. In fact one might argue that one of the things that holds the Continuum together is the fact that we're all sleeping with each other (another euphemism that totally doesn't work, since we don't actually sleep in the first place). So when I say I have or had a best friend who's a Q, understand that that being is also my sibling, and also my lover, and all the things that go into those relationships between mortals are present as well. Including the bad parts, like sibling rivalry and people getting mad at you for the metaphorical equivalent of leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube. (Do I even have to point out that we don't have teeth, and wouldn't need to brush them if we did?) And I should also point out that for us, gender is more of a suggestion than a hard-and-fast rule... I usually manifest as a male, at least in humanoid shapes, and some of my closest friends usually manifest as females if they bother to manifest at all, and since "it" is kind of rude I need to come up with imaginary genders for everyone I talk about, even beings who have never manifested as a gendered creature at all... so when I talk about "male" friends, or brothers, yes, I've had sex with them too. Often, several of them at the same time. I did mention that the Q form of exchanging pleasure lends itself very well to orgies, right?
So. I had a best friend, who was also my little sister (funny that even after five billion years a difference of several million matters... but it actually does), who was also my second favorite lover. I say second favorite because she had this problem, see. She had an insatiable appetite for total intimacy. It wasn't enough for her to exchange energies, or even partially merge minds together... she wanted to go all the way, fusing completely into a single entity, every single time. Truth was, she felt incomplete, and only total unity with another Q satisfied her.
I suspect I *may* have mentioned, once or twice, that I have... intimacy issues with other Q. The truth is, this kind of total fusion is really dangerous. Two Q who join with one another completely run a terrible risk of never being able to separate... of losing their individual identities entirely in the unity, becoming a new being at the expense of both of the old. You can't be a Q without the ability to merge with other Q at least to the extent that we all do as part of the Continuum overmind, but... I kind of have problems with that too. I like myself. (You think? Maybe a little?) I don't want to be someone new, I don't want to absorb new traits from someone else, and I don't want to lose my individuality in any way.
My friend survived as a singular entity as long as she did because I protected her. What she wanted would have annihilated her sooner or later. She'd have merged with someone whose personality was stronger than hers and lost herself forever. But because she was my friend and I liked her to be who she was too, I kept other Q from taking advantage of her desperate need to lose herself. (A *lot* of Q like the total unity thing. A lot. Apparently the pleasure's much more intense when you go all the way like that. I wouldn't know; the few times I've done it I've had to put so much of my concentration into *not* losing myself completely, making a bread crumb trail I could use to find my way back out again, that people complained I wasn't really doing it right.) I was *not*, whatever you may hear, jealous of her other Q partners. How could I be? They accused me of essentially dog in the manger behavior -- being unable to bring myself to fully join with her myself, I tried generally to keep everyone else from doing it too, and they said this was because I was jealous. No. This was because I was *scared*. I didn't want one of them to *eat* her. I didn't envy them the experience of fully joining with her; I could have had that any time I wanted, and in fact there were numerous occasions when we were enjoying ourselves and she tried to push me in that direction... once or twice, so hard that she broke down my resistance to it, but like I said, I'd be so worried about making sure I had an escape route that it really didn't work the way it was supposed to.
She was miserable, of course. Who wouldn’t be, deprived of what they most needed for an eternity? But at least she was alive, and herself, and I thought that could be enough for her. I mean, I wasn’t getting what *I* most needed either, and I was surviving.
Then she fell in love with a mortal.
Other Q will tell you I was jealous. I *wasn’t*. Oh, maybe a little, but only in the sense that she had found something fun and entertaining, while I was still roaming the universe aimlessly, being bored. I wasn’t jealous of her lover, I was envious of *her* for having one, though at the time I would have declared to all and sundry that the entire concept of falling in love with a mortal was ridiculous. (Oh, how we decry most loudly the things we secretly most want when we’re in the closet…) And I was a bit annoyed that one of my favorite playmates had found something much more worthy of her time than hanging out with *me* for maybe the next thousand years or so, this being a member of a very long-lived mortal species. But jealous? Of a mortal? Ridiculous. A mortal could never truly give Q what she needed and wanted and would be destroyed by. Only other Q were a threat.
And then she proposed to the Continuum that her lover be made a Q.
Well. You wanna talk jealousy, okay, *now* it was on. If her lover became a Q, she would have him for all eternity, and then I wouldn’t be her best friend anymore… Q had *always* had a habit of ignoring me completely any time she found a new Q lover, but those didn’t last, largely because I made any Q lover who was actually willing to join with her suffer until they broke it off. If this guy joined the Continuum to be with her, I wouldn’t be *able* to drive him off… we treat those who join the Continuum from a state of mortality as adolescents, and no more tolerate full adult Q harassing them (or harassing them much, anyway, by Continuum standards) than we currently tolerate adult Q harassing my son. And if he was willing to join with her as a mortal… Mortals all think the idea of becoming one entity with their lover is so *romantic*, because they can’t actually do it. Q would eat him alive in moments, because he wouldn’t know enough to even *try* to defend his sense of self from her. He’d willingly merge into her, and then she would no longer be *her*, she’d be her and him, and my friend would be gone forever.
Quite aside from that fact, on the merits of the case he had no place in the Continuum. She talked about how evolved and peaceful and advanced his species was, and all of this was true but all of this was also a reason why he wouldn’t survive the Continuum for ten seconds. We are the most aggressive of the Powers, because we keep ourselves from losing our identities in the overmind by *fighting* with each other, all the time. His people were gentle and affiliative and telepathic and they formed bonds with each other and all that jazz, and the Continuum would either devour him (if Q didn’t get to it first by joining with him), or he would suffer horribly, forever, the way Q suffered, by never being able to have the depth of closeness with another being that he had been able to have as a mortal. The Q can’t get as close as telepathic mortals, because telepathic mortals aren’t bound together in an overmind and telepathic mortals have physical bodies to anchor themselves to.
So I argued that he should not be allowed to join the Continuum. Yes, I had an ulterior motive, but I was also doing it to keep him from being consumed by Q or the Continuum or being miserable for eternity. And I didn’t want to add those gentle, affiliative traits to the totality of the Continuum because it would weaken us, promote closer bonding and therefore risk the individuality of all of us. I also argued that Q obviously had no objectivity regarding the guy and she should be forbidden to see him or interact with his species until either he died or she got her emotions under control, whichever came first. And being that this was self-evidently *true*, I won.
She was going to go to him anyway. I knew her. I knew how she thought. She was going to disobey a direct order of the Continuum, flagrantly disobey, leaving us no choice but to cut her off and make her mortal. I didn’t want that for her. So I went to her to try to talk her out of it.
She ripped me to pieces. I never saw it coming. I knew she was angry at me, but one minute I was trying to have a conversation and the next… well, actually I don’t know what happened next because I’ve never been able to remember it. The equivalent of brain damage, you see. From the memories of all the Q recorded to the Continuum I know that what happened was she leapt on me and started tearing my pattern, and apparently by the time I realized I was under attack I was already too badly injured to put up any kind of a fight, and she destroyed me to the point where she started doing damage to herself as well, and several Q had to pull her off me because she was berserk. She hadn’t even noticed the damage she was doing to herself. She just wanted me dead.
They exiled her to mortality, of course. At that they did that rather than execute her because when they brought me in as an exhibit in her trial – or what was left of me, anyway, because I was in such bad shape I was barely sentient – she broke down crying and begging my forgiveness, pleading with the Continuum to be allowed to go back in time and stop herself (this is technically *possible*, but would destroy the Continuum if anyone ever tried it; we can travel freely in the mortal timeline, but we’re as bound to paradox in our own timeline as mortals are in theirs. Moreso, in fact.) So they made her mortal, and of course she chose to be her lover’s species and go live with him.
I presented them something of a dilemma. In my tattered, semi-conscious, almost infantile state, any Q could come along and rewrite me into whatever they wanted. I had no defenses anymore at all. Everyone knew that I had an absolute horror of such a thing occurring (not that the rest of the Q don’t, but most of them have never been actually faced with an attempt to do it… sort of the difference between a woman who’s never been raped fearing rape, and a woman who was once gang-raped fearing it happening again.) Everyone also knew that there were a good number of Q out there who would be overwhelmingly tempted to do it. So for my own protection, they created a locked pocket dimension that no one in the Continuum would be able to enter without setting off alarms, and which I couldn’t leave until I was strong enough to teleport again, and tossed me in it.
Alone.
For forty years of your linear time.
Nothing to see. No one to talk to. Nothing to do. Nowhere I could go.
I went insane.
There are other Q who handle sensory deprivation and loneliness better than I do. Q, who killed himself, endured 300 years of imprisonment in a comet for principle’s sake… he could actually have ended his imprisonment at any time by renouncing his attempts to die (and genuinely meaning it; you can’t lie to the Continuum.) But most other Q don’t have, shall we say, my hairtrigger sensitivity to boredom? I healed on my own, slowly, but even the earliest part of the experience I can remember, I remember feeling alone, abandoned, rejected by everyone I cared about, and I remember screaming and begging and crying like a five-year-old locked in a closet, which, given the level of damage I’d suffered in the attack, I kind of was. By the time I gained the ability to see outside my little prison, I had remembered what Q had done to me, and I blamed her for everything I was suffering. So I tracked her down, as soon as I could see… and I saw her being happy. Adapted to her new mortal life. Snuggling up with her mortal lover. Talking about adopting kids. I was in hell, in darkness and silence and loneliness for years, and she who had put me there was all lovey-dovey with the boyfriend she’d assaulted me for.
So I concentrated on getting out. I focused on relearning my teleportation. I maybe should have focused on recovering my sanity, but I didn’t, because I wasn’t aware of how far gone I was. There was *nothing* in my mind but misery and hate and the desire to make her suffer like I had suffered.
And when I got out, I went directly to her, and I told her what I had endured because of her. And I told her that I knew I couldn’t harm her, because it’s against Q law to harm former Q once they’ve been made mortal. But there is actually no Q law against killing mortals, or rather, it’s a misdemeanor, kind of like cruelty to animals. So there was nothing stopping me from killing her lover.
. . .
I don’t like to remember that. I don’t like to remember who I was at that moment, how I thought, what I felt like. I remember seeing my best friend in all the universe, the being I’d been closer to than any other Q, crying and begging in front of me, pleading on her knees, and I remember laughing as I destroyed every reason she had to live.
I don’t actually really know what happened to her after that. I’ve never looked. Guinan ran into her at some point, but… I’d rather not know.
The Continuum knew I was crazy, and they knew that locking me up again would just make matters worse, so they forbade me to think about her. Which sort of works, if you’re a Q. Q thoughts have a way of becoming reality, so we learn how to restrict our thoughts in a way humans just can’t. And I did get better, slowly, though it was maybe two hundred years before I was really recovered… no, actually, now that I think of it, I think I didn’t really recover my former self entirely until after I’d met the humans. Maybe not until after the Continuum had punished *me* with mortality.
But because I couldn’t think of her… even now it hurts to remember, and I have to force myself to bring up any memories of the things we did together before it all fell apart, and you don’t want to know how many aeons of my own time it has taken me to actually express all this. I’ve been stopping and starting and stopping and starting for I don’t know how long. My first best friend and everything about her is a sucking black hole in my mind, a dark pit I fear falling into, a scar that runs through my entire psyche and has never fully healed.
I destroyed her. I kept her from getting what she needed, because *I* was afraid of the consequences, until it snapped her. And then she attacked me, and in my blind lust for vengeance I responded by annihilating everything good, everything positive in her new existence… because, no, she wasn’t really happy, how could she be without the Continuum? I’ve been mortal myself now, I know. It *hurts*. She made the best of it she could by turning to her lover for solace, and I killed him. And I can’t fix it. It’s had too deep an impact on my personal timeline. Going through time to keep myself from doing it, even though it would be *in* mortal timeline, would have a paradox effect on me and could wipe out the Continuum, and I destroyed him too thoroughly to resurrect in conventional ways. I even deleted his record in the Continuum. There might be backups someplace, but… without a *great* deal of effort from people who have no reason to put in such an effort for me *or* for Q, no one will ever bring him back.
I… I condemned my best friend to a fate worse than death. And I have to live with that for the rest of eternity.
The references to Q's mate appearing to die and his son turning on him, and then the universe ending, come from the book by Peter David and John de Lancie, "I, Q".
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG and VOY