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musing_way.
(Warnings: From a human perspective the things that happen in this story would be upsetting, but are too fantastical, too much unlike the reality humans live with, to trigger most people. From Q's own perspective, however, this ficlet deals with gang rape and attempted murder, and his emotional state conveyed in the ficlet will reflect that. Be forewarned.)
Among the Q, stupidity is generally considered a crime deserving of death. So when the other Q surrounding him block him from teleporting, and the walls of the dimension around him thicken to keep him from fleeing even if he manages to break free, the first thing Q thinks is that this is his own fault for being stupid enough to trust Q.
Q -- the one who lured him here -- is an entity who despises Q, and the feeling is mutual... but Q has no problem with being hated. He rather enjoys it, in fact. And in the Continuum, two Q hating one another is not considered any kind of barrier to them exchanging pleasure -- it ends up working more like a contest than any kind of intimacy, but it's a contest Q is good at, and whether you win or lose, you experience pleasure and the thrill of knowing that someone who doesn't even like you wanted you. So when the other Q approached him with an offer, he agreed, and agreed as well to take their pleasures into a private subdimension because he really didn't want the entire Continuum watching if he ended up losing the contest. It never occurred to him that he might be in danger. Q simply don't harm each other. Usually.
But the moment he materialized in the subdimension, four Q already there moved to block him from escaping, four Q who all also despise him. And now Q is trapped here, surrounded by five Q who hate him, and as strong-willed as he is he knows he can't fight off five other Q. He throws up the most powerful shield he can, anyway... but if they're here to kill him, it won't do him any good. The Q can destroy each other by focusing hatred and a will to annihilate against another Q, if they outnumber the other Q by enough, and five against one is more than enough. "Premeditation? Luring me off to my doom? Oh, the Continuum is going to throw the book at you guys," he says, projecting a flippant bravado he doesn’t feel.
"Oh, we're not going to kill you," one of them says, the aura he projects sleazy and gloating. "We're just going to give you an attitude adjustment."
"You're such an asshole," another one of them says. "If you started spontaneously acting like a decent Q and made any attempt whatsoever to get along with the rest of us, the Continuum would be so thrilled with the change, they're not going to make an issue over what we had to do to you to get you to change."
"This is for your own good," the one who lured him here says, but his aura -- the Q equivalent of his facial expression and body language -- projects too much sadistic glee and perverse anticipation for Q to believe for a moment that he actually believes what he just said.
"No," Q says, scanning the dimension with every sense he has, looking for the tiniest chink in the walls of his prison, the tiniest weakness in the barrier they're holding around him. He shrinks in on himself to allocate more of his essence to his personal shields, the Q equivalent of putting out his hands in a useless defensive posture. "No, you can't do this. They'll throw you out of the Continuum. You can't hate me so much you want to destroy your own existences just to rewrite mine!"
"They won't throw us out of the Continuum," the one who'd called him an asshole said. "Like I said. They'll be so happy they don't have to deal with your bullshit and that you've become a half-decent Q, no one's going to worry about how you got that way."
One of the two who hasn't directly spoken to him grabs him, wrapping energies around him. Q throws all of his power into breaking free, but even as he pulls loose from that one, two others are on him, pinning him with their power. He screams for help, struggling wildly, but his screams echo against the walls of the pocket dimension – the whole point to pocket dimensions is that they isolate information from the rest of the Continuum. If he can’t break the dimension’s walls, no one outside this dimension will ever hear him, no matter how loudly he screams. The one who'd first grabbed him whispers, on a low channel that wouldn't have been heard by the rest of the Continuum even if there weren't a barrier in the way, "Don't worry, you'll thank us when we're done. You'll even enjoy it."
Q is still screaming, all the energy he has going into calling for help, fighting them off, keeping his shields up. It doesn't do him any good. Three Q holding him are more than powerful enough to keep him immobile and helpless no matter how hard he fights, and no one can hear him through the barrier. Desperately he focuses a narrow, almost microscopic point attack against the barrier, trying to at least get a message out through the dimension, to call for help. For a nanosecond, he triumphs, the pinpoint hole forming, but before he has a chance to use it to scream to the Continuum for help, the other two have grabbed and muffled him, and now all five are holding him and forcing their way through his shields, and he's screaming as hard as he can but he knows that it's just flowing into his attackers and stopping there. He stops screaming for help because there's no point, and pleads with the five Q pinning him instead, even though he's fairly sure that won't help either, because there's nothing else he can do. "No, no, please, you can't do this, please, you're wrong, the Continuum *will* punish you for this, please don't do this to me, please..."
"Oh, shut up," one of the other Q says. "You think you're so special, your own individuality is so important. You're a damaged piece of shit who should never have been created as you are, and it's about time someone fixed you."
They're going to rewrite him into someone else.
It's the worst thing he can imagine, the worst thing any Q can do to another Q, and he would have preferred being hated to death to this. There'll be a Q in his place when they're done with him, but it won't be him -- it'll be another Q, with his memories and his skills, but his essential ego, his personality, his sense of selfness, will be destroyed. He's going to be dead and there'll be another Q running around in the shell of his essence and his attackers may well be right, the Continuum might not even care. If they turn him into a zombie Q, a Stepford Q, a good little Q who never disagrees with the Continuum and always plays well with others and is properly obedient to authority, it's entirely possible that the Continuum will turn a blind eye to the obvious fact that other Q rewrote him by force, because they'll prefer him that way.
Q channels most of his energy to his shields, trying to keep the other Q out of him, but he can’t fight off five of them indefinitely; the outer layer of his defenses crack open, and his captors flow into the outer edges of his essence, violating the boundaries of his selfhood. They’re laughing, sharing information with each other as they identify the weaker points in his inner shields and push at him there, or just batter against them with raw force, cracking them and pushing their way further into him. The sensation of other Q inside his essence, their energies melding with his, normally feels good, but the force they’re using to break his shields hurts and the malice they feel toward him burns like acid would on a mortal’s skin in every place they’ve penetrated him. He keeps struggling, frantically, keeps begging them not to do this, but he's beyond terrified because he knows it won't help.
And then they've broken through the last of his shields, and they're all the way inside him.
He has nothing private left, no part of him that's not merged with one of them, and they overlap through most of him, and it *hurts*. Quite aside from the pain they caused him when they tore through all his barriers, he’s trying frantically, half- involuntarily to recoil away from their touch, but they’re literally touching him everywhere, so he’s ripping up his own essence inside in a useless effort to free himself from them, and he can’t stop himself from doing it even though he knows it’s hurting him and it won’t help, and they don't care. They're enjoying this. He can feel their excitement, their pleasure -- *they* aren't merged unwillingly, so to them, this feels like a joining and not an invasion -- their cruel enjoyment of their power over him. Each of them can keep a significant part of their selfhood out of the joining; because they outnumber him, they can overlap *him* completely, hold all of him inside their own joining, while still leaving themselves enough that they remain individuals, and he can barely influence them. They aren’t channeling their hatred into a weapon to burn and kill him, but the hatred exists, and is dominant in their emotions, so it’s everywhere inside him and it burns, not badly enough to kill him but badly enough that it hurts horribly.
And they're in control of every part of him. He can't scream, can't struggle anymore, as much as he wants to, because they're intercepting his ego's commands to the parts of his essence that wield his powers, effectively paralyzing him. Inside, he's crying, terrified and in pain, but only his captors can hear him, because he can't send any signal outside of himself and he can't even control his own essence. They're laughing at him, enjoying his fear, the fact that they've broken him so thoroughly he can't even put up a facade of bravado anymore.
They start analyzing him, moving through his essence, pulling knowledge of him and his structure and his memories into themselves, and it would have felt delicious and depraved and exciting if it was a different five Q and he'd wanted this, but he hates this and he hates them and it hurts, it hurts so much, and the humiliation is worse than the pain and the terror is worse than the humiliation. His thoughts are reduced to a simple mantra of denial, "no stop no stop please stop please no please stop", and the despairing thread of knowledge weaving through it that he knows they won't stop no matter how desperately he wants them to. He can't compose the equivalent of Q words, coherent thoughtforms; they’ve cut him off from too much of himself, and he can’t think straight anymore. There’s nothing he can perceive but the feeling of his captors inside him, and the vicarious reflection of their perceptions because they’ve cut him off from all of his own external sensors. He's babbling, pure emotion, the Q equivalent of crying and even that only inside where only the Q tormenting him can hear it.
Then they start plotting out their changes.
He's as much Q as they are and they're part of him at this moment and he can feel their thoughts as much as they can feel his. He can see every change they want to wreak on him, every pattern of thought that they want to wrench out of its correct shape and remake it into the form they prefer. As clearly as they can, he can see the shape of the person they're going to turn him into, and he hates and despises that person as much as or maybe even more than he hates the five of them. They converse among themselves, discussing the changes they want to make, making suggestions and arguing as if he’s merely a project to work on, a canvas to draw on, not a fellow Q. Periodically he pulls together enough of himself to beg again, but they completely ignore him, treating his pleas as additional data to be studied and modified instead of communication from a sentient being. He’s nothing but an object to them right now. They’re not even taking sadistic joy in his pain anymore; they’re studying him and mapping their changes on his mind like he’s a thing to create or re-create, not a person they’ve attacked and defeated, and that’s actually worse than when they were enjoying his suffering and laughing at him.
If anyone could see him from the outside, anyone who wasn’t currently violating him and working on re-making him, he would look catatonic and silent. Inside, he sobs brokenly, despairingly. He’s completely defeated. He would do anything to stop this, but there’s nothing he can do except watch in ever increasing terror as they map out who he's going to be as soon as they release the changes, as soon as they execute the plans they are drawing all over him. And he can't even scream.
Suddenly the walls of the dimension around them tear open, and a Q he thinks of as his annoying older sister is standing there. He can't even sense her himself, he can't feel anything outside his own essence, but his essence is completely permeated by five other Q and all of *them* can see her. "What is going on here?"
It's a rhetorical question. As soon as she tore open the dimension, she must have learned exactly what’s going on, because she would have automatically absorbed the information filling this dimension, the information that couldn't get through the walls and out to the main Continuum until she tore her way in. And now, every Q in the Continuum knows exactly what was going on, too.
The five release him and teleport, trying to run. It won't do them any good. What they did, what they tried to do, was one of the worst crimes in the Continuum, and while it might have been overlooked if they'd succeeded and everyone had preferred the new being that they would have made him into, the fact that he's still him gives the Continuum no motive to look the other way. And there is nowhere a Q can hide from the Continuum. They will be found, and they will either be exiled or outright executed.
His sister is at his side, not touching him, holding a light shield around him as he pulls his own shields back together. He’s overwhelmed by gratitude, joy and relief that she’s come to his rescue and appreciation for her not letting the entire Continuum see him raw and naked. He doesn't acknowledge any of this, of course, doesn’t even speak to her as he rebuilds his shields… but he doesn't need to acknowledge it, because without his shields he's completely transparent and she knows everything he's thinking and feeling. When he's re-armored himself, she lets the shield she'd had around him fade.
Other Q are surrounding them, shocked, absorbing the knowledge of what just happened. He can actually feel an outpouring of sympathy from them, toward him. He *never* feels large numbers of other Q caring about him or feeling sympathy for him. This is the first time in millions of years. His shields are weak enough from having been smashed by force that they almost buckle under the force of mixed emotions, the gratitude he feels that they care and the humiliation that they know exactly how frightened he was, exactly how badly the others hurt him.
But he holds himself together, hardening and strengthening his shields. "Well?" he asks the audience of Q gathered around him. "Are you just going to gawk at me all day, or is someone actually going to go after those guys?"
musing_way.(Warnings: From a human perspective the things that happen in this story would be upsetting, but are too fantastical, too much unlike the reality humans live with, to trigger most people. From Q's own perspective, however, this ficlet deals with gang rape and attempted murder, and his emotional state conveyed in the ficlet will reflect that. Be forewarned.)
Among the Q, stupidity is generally considered a crime deserving of death. So when the other Q surrounding him block him from teleporting, and the walls of the dimension around him thicken to keep him from fleeing even if he manages to break free, the first thing Q thinks is that this is his own fault for being stupid enough to trust Q.
Q -- the one who lured him here -- is an entity who despises Q, and the feeling is mutual... but Q has no problem with being hated. He rather enjoys it, in fact. And in the Continuum, two Q hating one another is not considered any kind of barrier to them exchanging pleasure -- it ends up working more like a contest than any kind of intimacy, but it's a contest Q is good at, and whether you win or lose, you experience pleasure and the thrill of knowing that someone who doesn't even like you wanted you. So when the other Q approached him with an offer, he agreed, and agreed as well to take their pleasures into a private subdimension because he really didn't want the entire Continuum watching if he ended up losing the contest. It never occurred to him that he might be in danger. Q simply don't harm each other. Usually.
But the moment he materialized in the subdimension, four Q already there moved to block him from escaping, four Q who all also despise him. And now Q is trapped here, surrounded by five Q who hate him, and as strong-willed as he is he knows he can't fight off five other Q. He throws up the most powerful shield he can, anyway... but if they're here to kill him, it won't do him any good. The Q can destroy each other by focusing hatred and a will to annihilate against another Q, if they outnumber the other Q by enough, and five against one is more than enough. "Premeditation? Luring me off to my doom? Oh, the Continuum is going to throw the book at you guys," he says, projecting a flippant bravado he doesn’t feel.
"Oh, we're not going to kill you," one of them says, the aura he projects sleazy and gloating. "We're just going to give you an attitude adjustment."
"You're such an asshole," another one of them says. "If you started spontaneously acting like a decent Q and made any attempt whatsoever to get along with the rest of us, the Continuum would be so thrilled with the change, they're not going to make an issue over what we had to do to you to get you to change."
"This is for your own good," the one who lured him here says, but his aura -- the Q equivalent of his facial expression and body language -- projects too much sadistic glee and perverse anticipation for Q to believe for a moment that he actually believes what he just said.
"No," Q says, scanning the dimension with every sense he has, looking for the tiniest chink in the walls of his prison, the tiniest weakness in the barrier they're holding around him. He shrinks in on himself to allocate more of his essence to his personal shields, the Q equivalent of putting out his hands in a useless defensive posture. "No, you can't do this. They'll throw you out of the Continuum. You can't hate me so much you want to destroy your own existences just to rewrite mine!"
"They won't throw us out of the Continuum," the one who'd called him an asshole said. "Like I said. They'll be so happy they don't have to deal with your bullshit and that you've become a half-decent Q, no one's going to worry about how you got that way."
One of the two who hasn't directly spoken to him grabs him, wrapping energies around him. Q throws all of his power into breaking free, but even as he pulls loose from that one, two others are on him, pinning him with their power. He screams for help, struggling wildly, but his screams echo against the walls of the pocket dimension – the whole point to pocket dimensions is that they isolate information from the rest of the Continuum. If he can’t break the dimension’s walls, no one outside this dimension will ever hear him, no matter how loudly he screams. The one who'd first grabbed him whispers, on a low channel that wouldn't have been heard by the rest of the Continuum even if there weren't a barrier in the way, "Don't worry, you'll thank us when we're done. You'll even enjoy it."
Q is still screaming, all the energy he has going into calling for help, fighting them off, keeping his shields up. It doesn't do him any good. Three Q holding him are more than powerful enough to keep him immobile and helpless no matter how hard he fights, and no one can hear him through the barrier. Desperately he focuses a narrow, almost microscopic point attack against the barrier, trying to at least get a message out through the dimension, to call for help. For a nanosecond, he triumphs, the pinpoint hole forming, but before he has a chance to use it to scream to the Continuum for help, the other two have grabbed and muffled him, and now all five are holding him and forcing their way through his shields, and he's screaming as hard as he can but he knows that it's just flowing into his attackers and stopping there. He stops screaming for help because there's no point, and pleads with the five Q pinning him instead, even though he's fairly sure that won't help either, because there's nothing else he can do. "No, no, please, you can't do this, please, you're wrong, the Continuum *will* punish you for this, please don't do this to me, please..."
"Oh, shut up," one of the other Q says. "You think you're so special, your own individuality is so important. You're a damaged piece of shit who should never have been created as you are, and it's about time someone fixed you."
They're going to rewrite him into someone else.
It's the worst thing he can imagine, the worst thing any Q can do to another Q, and he would have preferred being hated to death to this. There'll be a Q in his place when they're done with him, but it won't be him -- it'll be another Q, with his memories and his skills, but his essential ego, his personality, his sense of selfness, will be destroyed. He's going to be dead and there'll be another Q running around in the shell of his essence and his attackers may well be right, the Continuum might not even care. If they turn him into a zombie Q, a Stepford Q, a good little Q who never disagrees with the Continuum and always plays well with others and is properly obedient to authority, it's entirely possible that the Continuum will turn a blind eye to the obvious fact that other Q rewrote him by force, because they'll prefer him that way.
Q channels most of his energy to his shields, trying to keep the other Q out of him, but he can’t fight off five of them indefinitely; the outer layer of his defenses crack open, and his captors flow into the outer edges of his essence, violating the boundaries of his selfhood. They’re laughing, sharing information with each other as they identify the weaker points in his inner shields and push at him there, or just batter against them with raw force, cracking them and pushing their way further into him. The sensation of other Q inside his essence, their energies melding with his, normally feels good, but the force they’re using to break his shields hurts and the malice they feel toward him burns like acid would on a mortal’s skin in every place they’ve penetrated him. He keeps struggling, frantically, keeps begging them not to do this, but he's beyond terrified because he knows it won't help.
And then they've broken through the last of his shields, and they're all the way inside him.
He has nothing private left, no part of him that's not merged with one of them, and they overlap through most of him, and it *hurts*. Quite aside from the pain they caused him when they tore through all his barriers, he’s trying frantically, half- involuntarily to recoil away from their touch, but they’re literally touching him everywhere, so he’s ripping up his own essence inside in a useless effort to free himself from them, and he can’t stop himself from doing it even though he knows it’s hurting him and it won’t help, and they don't care. They're enjoying this. He can feel their excitement, their pleasure -- *they* aren't merged unwillingly, so to them, this feels like a joining and not an invasion -- their cruel enjoyment of their power over him. Each of them can keep a significant part of their selfhood out of the joining; because they outnumber him, they can overlap *him* completely, hold all of him inside their own joining, while still leaving themselves enough that they remain individuals, and he can barely influence them. They aren’t channeling their hatred into a weapon to burn and kill him, but the hatred exists, and is dominant in their emotions, so it’s everywhere inside him and it burns, not badly enough to kill him but badly enough that it hurts horribly.
And they're in control of every part of him. He can't scream, can't struggle anymore, as much as he wants to, because they're intercepting his ego's commands to the parts of his essence that wield his powers, effectively paralyzing him. Inside, he's crying, terrified and in pain, but only his captors can hear him, because he can't send any signal outside of himself and he can't even control his own essence. They're laughing at him, enjoying his fear, the fact that they've broken him so thoroughly he can't even put up a facade of bravado anymore.
They start analyzing him, moving through his essence, pulling knowledge of him and his structure and his memories into themselves, and it would have felt delicious and depraved and exciting if it was a different five Q and he'd wanted this, but he hates this and he hates them and it hurts, it hurts so much, and the humiliation is worse than the pain and the terror is worse than the humiliation. His thoughts are reduced to a simple mantra of denial, "no stop no stop please stop please no please stop", and the despairing thread of knowledge weaving through it that he knows they won't stop no matter how desperately he wants them to. He can't compose the equivalent of Q words, coherent thoughtforms; they’ve cut him off from too much of himself, and he can’t think straight anymore. There’s nothing he can perceive but the feeling of his captors inside him, and the vicarious reflection of their perceptions because they’ve cut him off from all of his own external sensors. He's babbling, pure emotion, the Q equivalent of crying and even that only inside where only the Q tormenting him can hear it.
Then they start plotting out their changes.
He's as much Q as they are and they're part of him at this moment and he can feel their thoughts as much as they can feel his. He can see every change they want to wreak on him, every pattern of thought that they want to wrench out of its correct shape and remake it into the form they prefer. As clearly as they can, he can see the shape of the person they're going to turn him into, and he hates and despises that person as much as or maybe even more than he hates the five of them. They converse among themselves, discussing the changes they want to make, making suggestions and arguing as if he’s merely a project to work on, a canvas to draw on, not a fellow Q. Periodically he pulls together enough of himself to beg again, but they completely ignore him, treating his pleas as additional data to be studied and modified instead of communication from a sentient being. He’s nothing but an object to them right now. They’re not even taking sadistic joy in his pain anymore; they’re studying him and mapping their changes on his mind like he’s a thing to create or re-create, not a person they’ve attacked and defeated, and that’s actually worse than when they were enjoying his suffering and laughing at him.
If anyone could see him from the outside, anyone who wasn’t currently violating him and working on re-making him, he would look catatonic and silent. Inside, he sobs brokenly, despairingly. He’s completely defeated. He would do anything to stop this, but there’s nothing he can do except watch in ever increasing terror as they map out who he's going to be as soon as they release the changes, as soon as they execute the plans they are drawing all over him. And he can't even scream.
Suddenly the walls of the dimension around them tear open, and a Q he thinks of as his annoying older sister is standing there. He can't even sense her himself, he can't feel anything outside his own essence, but his essence is completely permeated by five other Q and all of *them* can see her. "What is going on here?"
It's a rhetorical question. As soon as she tore open the dimension, she must have learned exactly what’s going on, because she would have automatically absorbed the information filling this dimension, the information that couldn't get through the walls and out to the main Continuum until she tore her way in. And now, every Q in the Continuum knows exactly what was going on, too.
The five release him and teleport, trying to run. It won't do them any good. What they did, what they tried to do, was one of the worst crimes in the Continuum, and while it might have been overlooked if they'd succeeded and everyone had preferred the new being that they would have made him into, the fact that he's still him gives the Continuum no motive to look the other way. And there is nowhere a Q can hide from the Continuum. They will be found, and they will either be exiled or outright executed.
His sister is at his side, not touching him, holding a light shield around him as he pulls his own shields back together. He’s overwhelmed by gratitude, joy and relief that she’s come to his rescue and appreciation for her not letting the entire Continuum see him raw and naked. He doesn't acknowledge any of this, of course, doesn’t even speak to her as he rebuilds his shields… but he doesn't need to acknowledge it, because without his shields he's completely transparent and she knows everything he's thinking and feeling. When he's re-armored himself, she lets the shield she'd had around him fade.
Other Q are surrounding them, shocked, absorbing the knowledge of what just happened. He can actually feel an outpouring of sympathy from them, toward him. He *never* feels large numbers of other Q caring about him or feeling sympathy for him. This is the first time in millions of years. His shields are weak enough from having been smashed by force that they almost buckle under the force of mixed emotions, the gratitude he feels that they care and the humiliation that they know exactly how frightened he was, exactly how badly the others hurt him.
But he holds himself together, hardening and strengthening his shields. "Well?" he asks the audience of Q gathered around him. "Are you just going to gawk at me all day, or is someone actually going to go after those guys?"
Wow!
Date: 2011-02-11 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 12:54 pm (UTC)Well, they will be found, as you said.