Title: Only Human Part IV
Author: Alara Rogers
Series: TNG
Rating: NC-17
Codes: Q/f, AU
Part: 7/12+1
Summary: Q and T'Laren are taken captive aboard their own ship by the Ferengi.

Today working with the Ferengi was sheer torture. Not quite as literal a torture as he'd endured yesterday, but Q had already pushed that experience into the small black box he kept things like the attack by the Ceulan assassin or the beating from Starfleet. It wasn't that he had forgotten any of those things-- if he had reason to, he could remember any of the various horrible things that had happened to him as a human in terrifying clarity-- but he simply couldn't function on a daily basis if he couldn't push those memories out of his head most of the time. Being bored, humiliated and having to struggle to make himself understood to morons while not being permitted to treat them as the morons they were, however, was pretty much the story of his entire life on Starbase 56, which made it largely impossible to push *those* experiences into a black box.  And this was the worst it had ever been.  It was one thing not to be permitted to refuse to teach someone, but permitted to tell them in excruciating detail how stupid they were.  It was another thing entirely to have to choke back every insulting thing he wanted to say, swallow his pride when they insulted *him*, and be forced to try to hide his frustration almost completely, out of fear of what they'd do to him if he did so much as roll his eyes at them.

When they decided to run a test, he told them the drive wasn't ready, that there was a good chance the crystals would blow.  And they ignored him.  And he didn't push.  If he'd been back in the Federation, if it was still yesterday and Yalit hadn't beaten him with a neurowhip yet, he would have pushed it -- would have pointed out what morons they were being, insulted their lineage and their level of evolution, and his voice would have dripped with contempt as he explained everything that was wrong with their ideas.  But he didn't know how to argue for the truth *without* insulting people, and he was afraid.  When the crystals blew, then they'd know he was telling the truth and maybe next time they'd listen to him.  

So they fired up the transwarp drive, despite Q's advice, and for the first several minutes, it looked as if the test would be successful. Q knew better, but there was nothing he could do except brace for the inevitable stop. Yalit laughed at him. "Oh, we're so doomed. We can't possibly run a working test of the drive! Do you really even know anything, or are you actually completely overrated?"

He swallowed everything he wanted to say in response, and simply mumbled, "Maybe you'll get lucky."

Of course, ten minutes after the test began, the crystals blew and the power went out.

For several minutes there was nothing but chaos. Q stood to one side, arms folded, resentful that he had to be trapped here in the dark as the Ferengi scurried around madly, trying to get their power restored. They were using the lights on their hand scanners, which actually provided almost no light but it was better than total darkness, in a pathetic attempt to illuminate the room enough that they could accomplish something, or at least figure out that they couldn't accomplish anything. He wished there was a way he could contact T'Laren, but he couldn't, and she probably wouldn't try to take advantage of the power failure without him.  

"We've shattered three crystals!  We only had two replacements!"

"There's no emergency power!  We don't even have life support!"

"The *Profit Margin* was pacing us until we hit transwarp, but at warp-equivalent 13 they're going to be half a day behind us. We can't expect any assistance!"

And then Yalit was in his personal space, holding the neurowhip coiled in her hand for light.  At least he hoped it was on for light. He took an involuntary step back against the wall. "Do you think this is funny?" she snarled at him. 

Where was she even getting that?  He didn't think this was funny at all, just incredibly irritating.  "No, of course not," he snapped, before he remembered that he was supposed to speak to her deferentially. 

"I think you do! Lie to us, give us misinformation, and watch us stumbling around in the dark when the power blows out.  You must be happy with what you've done.  Maybe you need another lesson?"  She brandished the whip at him.

All the blood rushed out of Q's face.  "No!" he gasped, pressing back further against the wall.  "I warned you about the crystals!  I said they might blow, and you didn't listen to me!  You can't blame me for your failure when I tried to warn you -- "

"Oh, yes, mention casually 'that will probably blow the crystals', like you're talking about the rain!  That was so very helpful.  I remember what you did when you thought things wouldn't work at the conference.  You barely opened your mouth this time!"

"Because I was afraid you'd hit me if I insisted you were wrong!"

"Well, now I'm going to hit you because you didn't make it clear what the problem was.  Is that any better?"

There was nowhere to go.  He was backed up all the way against the wall, and while Yalit was barely half his size, even if he shoved her and ran before she hit him, her goons would easily catch him -- engineering was too crowded, too dark, and the doors wouldn't open.  "Please, no!  I -- I can fix it.  Let me help you get the power back on line!"

"How are you going to do that?  We haven't *got* three spare crystals!"

"There's extra crystals in the locker under the main engineering console.  I put some in there the night before we left *Yamato*, when we were prepping for departure and loading our bags, because I knew about the issue with the crystals blowing under transwarp."

"Boys!" Yalit shouted, and the panicked chatter going on all throughout the room instantly stopped.  "Check under the main engineering console.  Q here says there's extra dilithium crystals in a locker there."  She looked up at him, the light from the neurowhip throwing eerie shadows across her face.  "And you'd better be telling the truth, or I'll whip you until you'll lick my toes to make it stop."

That really wouldn't take very long, Q thought, terrified.  He'd do *anything*, no matter how disgusting or humiliating, to keep her from starting, let alone to make her stop.  It horrified him that he was this weak, but the box he'd put his memory of the pain from yesterday in had broken open and leaked all over his brain the moment she'd threatened him with the whip again, and he couldn't stop remembering how much it had hurt, how broken and humiliated he'd felt to be lying crumpled at her feet sobbing for mercy.  His back ached with shadow pain, the memory of his agony translating into some degree of literal pain now.  "I'm not lying," he said desperately.  "Go ahead and check it!"

"Grandmother, I can't get it open!  There's no power!"

"The emergency release for the locker is right under the lip of the console," Q said quickly, his words almost tripping on themselves.

"Okay, that's done it.  Yes!  Grandmother, there are ten crystals in here!"

"*Ten*?"  She looked up at Q again.  "What, did you steal them from Starfleet?"

"I requisitioned them!" Q snapped hotly.  "I didn't *need* to steal them.  My safety and security's important enough to the Federation that they just gave me ten dilithium crystals because I asked."

"Well, if they'd just *give* you something worth three or four bars of gold-pressed latinum because you *asked*, that bodes well for how much they'll pay to get you back safely."  She nodded in satisfaction.  "Keep our extra crystals!  Hook up three of his ten; the Federation uses the highest grade dilithium, so his will probably last better than our discount crystals."

"But Grandmother, if we use the discount crystals plus *one* of his ten, we get to save the better crystals, and maybe we could sell them for a profit!"

"Don't be an idiot, Lurm. We make much more from transwarp than we do from dilithium crystals.  Being able to run the tests successfully is more important."

The Ferengi installed the crystals, with much jostling each other in the dark and demanding light from each other.  Then one of them -- apparently Yalit's second in engineering, he had been one of the two who'd helped her torture Q yesterday -- said, "There's a problem, Mother.  The system's completely shut down.  We'll have to do a cold start."

"So do an emergency intermix, Gon."

"We *can't* without computers.  The calculations are so complicated we'd blow up the ship.  But if we do it the normal way, a cold start could take a day, maybe more, and we won't have power until the engine's back on line."

"We'll survive for a day without life support.  The air volume aboard this ship's enough that we could survive three days or more.  There's only twenty of us aboard right now, plus Q and his Vulcan, and the ship's almost as big as *Profit Margin*."  She shakes her head.  "We'll be out of water faster than that, but in half a day *Profit Margin* should catch up with us, and they can beam all but a few guards for the prisoners and a skeleton crew for engineering out of here, and beam those that stay behind over some water and food.  Maybe extra oxygen.  So we'll live.  Start the process."  She took a deep breath, and then turned back to Q, her face suddenly distorting with rage.  "But *you!*  It's your fault we have to be stuck in the dark, without air circulation or warmth or even *water*, for half a day!  I should beat you until you forget your name!"

"I can get the intermix formula right," Q babbled, almost hysterical with terror.  "Please, please don't hurt me.  If you leave me free to concentrate I can get you the formula for the emergency intermix and you can be back up in less than an hour.  Please."

Her scowl grew even more fierce.  "And how in the name of the River do you think you can do that without computer assistance?"

"It's math.  The day I need computer assistance to do math is the day I jump out an airlock."

"There's no way a person can do that kind of math," Gon said.  "There's something like twenty different calculations you need to do, in sequence."

"Actually, it's between seven and twenty-three," Q said, "and some of them iterate up to ten times before you have your final answer, and how many separate calculations you have to do depends on the results of the ones you've already done.  So yes, I'm aware that most mortals can't manage this without computer assistance.  But I've been doing math for *millions of years*.  I can perform the calculations in my head."

"And if you're wrong the ship blows up," Yalit snapped.

"I won't be wrong."  

Q's brain was optimized for doing math -- an ability like a savant's, although without the deficits that would typically come with that.  It wasn't a side effect of being a Q -- he'd actually chosen this as his standard humanoid form in the first place because, among other things like his general aesthetic appreciation of the form, the man who'd had it first, a human physicist named Jason Hartfeil who'd died over a century ago, had that talent, and being able to offload much of the math involved in any use of his Q powers onto the mortal brain he was using rather than having to send all of it to the part of his self still within the Continuum had increased the speed with which he could make things happen -- at least to his perceptions, although a human would never have noticed a difference of a tenth of a picosecond.  When the Continuum had locked him into this body, he had not only acquired its annoying deficits like its bad back, but its positive traits as well, and that, fortunately, included the trait he'd acquired the body *for.*  

The end result, aside from the fact that an elderly Vulcan physicist had once mistaken him for Hartfeil's grandson, was that Q didn't have to think to do math.  His brain just *did* it for him, leaving his mind free to think about the implications of the results he was getting.  Q wasn't up there with an actual computer, or, say, Data, but he was as adept with pure computation as a highly intelligent Vulcan who, unlike T'Laren, had actually been fully trained in the disciplines.  He pointed that out.  "I'm as capable of performing advanced computation in my head as a Vulcan.  It won't go as fast as it would have with computer assistance -- for this number of calculations, it'll take even me half an hour to an hour -- but it'll be as accurate.  You can run your emergency intermix in an hour.  The air won't even have a chance to dry out."

Her scowl, which had been evening out as he spoke, returned full force.  "How stupid do you think I am?  I know what you're trying to do here!"  She lifted the whip.  

Q threw his hands out in front of his body, trying to block her from being able to hit his torso or groin.  "I'm telling the truth!  Please!  The only thing I'm 'trying' to do here is keep you from hurting me!  I don't have any other agenda, I promise!"

"Oh, so it didn't even occur to you that if you persuaded me to let you calculate the intermix formula, you could use it to *blow us all up?*"  She grabbed his shirt collar and dragged him down, forcing him to bend down where she could get in his face.  "You've threatened to kill yourself again and again, and we both know now it was a crock, after you begged your Vulcan friend to break your neck last night.  You can't kill yourself with your mind.  But if I let you calculate an intermix formula, you could kill us *all*, including yourself."

"If I did that T'Laren would die too."

"You're not even *fucking* her.  I'm supposed to think you care so goddamn much about a woman you won't even screw that you'd pass up a chance to kill me and my family and yourself?"

Despite his fear, Q could not keep the look of utter disgust off his face.  "Just because you come from a society where men consider you utterly worthless except as a receptacle for their genitals, doesn't mean all mortal men have the same nauseating attitudes.  I don't *need* to be engaged in sordid copulatory practices with a woman to value her life."

Yalit released him, allowing Q to stand up straight again.  "Oh, is that the way you are, then?" she sneered.  "You're one of those that doesn't even *like* women, aren't you?  Rather have some big strong fellow do you up the ass?"

Q blinked at the non sequitur, then scowled.  "I am not *human*, if you'll recall.  I haven't the slightest interest in any permutation of mortal sexuality; once you've enjoyed the sublime pleasure of joining energies, the idea of inserting tab A into slot B seems about as entertaining as cutting your toenails.  But if I *did* have such an interest, I can't see why the gender of my partner would concern me; once you've made the decision to commit bestiality, does it really matter whether the animal you're copulating with is male or female?"

"Wait, so you think fucking another human -- or your Vulcan pal, or anyone else -- is *bestiality?*  And you expect me to think that you care so much about the life of an animal that you'll sacrifice what you want to save its life?"

He sighed.  "I don't think T'Laren is an animal."  *You, on the other hand, absolutely qualify*.  "But she's not my species.  Not the way you humanoids aren't each other's species; she's not even my *form* of life.  You could be great friends with a sentient tree and still not want to have sex with it.  T'Laren is my friend.  And you're absolutely right, if it were only me in this situation I would be willing to blow us all to bits in a heartbeat.  But I won't do anything to harm T'Laren, or allow her to come to harm if it's in my power to stop.  And you *know* this, because you've been using it against me since you took me captive, so why put on an elaborate show of ignorance?"  It worried him, having to admit so baldly that T'Laren was his weakness, but if he didn't convince her to let him calculate the intermix formula, she would almost certainly take out her frustration at the lack of power on him *sometime* today before they got the engines back on, since apparently she'd rather blame him for her failure than her own idiocy.  And it was true that Yalit and the Ferengi had been using T'Laren against him since their capture, so really, was he admitting anything they didn't already know?

She was quiet for a moment. "Let me see if I understand you correctly," she said finally.  "You consider sex with mortal humanoids disgusting, equivalent to having sex with an animal.  You have *no* desire for that Vulcan woman at all.  But she's your only friend in the universe, since your nasty attitude has driven off anyone who wasn't paid to be your friend, so you'll do anything to keep her alive and healthy and unhurt.  And that's why I'm supposed to trust that you won't blow us all up.  Right?"

"I could quibble at individual details, but you have the big picture more or less correct," Q said.

And then Yalit smiled.

It was a "gotcha" smile, and Q cringed.  In the unholy glow of the neurowhip, her huge, toothy grin was monstrous, terrifying, because it looked exactly as if she thought she'd just tricked him into saying something that betrayed himself, or something she could use against him.  But she didn't hit him.  "Fine," she said, still with the huge evil grin.  "You make us an intermix formula.  But you write down your steps -- I'll give you a self-powered slate to write on -- and I'll check your work.  Don't forget I caught that you were lying to me yesterday.  If you lie to me again, and I catch it, I'll tear strips off your back with this -- " she waved the neurowhip in his face -- "and I'll have my boys tie your *friend* down and fuck her till she bleeds, and I'll make you watch.  And if you lie to me and I don't catch it, or if you screw up, you'll blow your dear friend to pieces."  

Her grin got bigger.  "I'll even give you an extra incentive.  Succeed here, and I promise the Vulcan will go back to the Federation once I'm done selling you, maybe even before I'm done now that I know you can't really kill yourself.  The Romulan Neutral Zone is too far away just to sell off a whore, and no one else would buy a Vulcan for that... and she's disrupting my boys' concentration.  They don't normally have women aboard they can't fuck, aside from me.  So I'll dump her at my first opportunity, drop her off on a Federation world and let her get on with her life."  Yalit pulled his shirt again, dragging his face down to her level.  "You understand?  She'll live and go free, just as long as *you* don't do anything that kills her."

Q's first reaction was surprise, and disbelief -- why would Yalit make him any promises of carrots, when they both knew she had him completely cowed by her stick?  And then he realized why she was promising him T'Laren's freedom -- T'Laren's continued life became much more valuable if she would go free back to the Federation than if she were sold to the Romulans as a breeding slave.  By promising him T'Laren's freedom she gave him a much more powerful incentive *not* to blow them all up; he might have convinced himself that killing T'Laren in a quick clean explosion was a kinder fate to grant her than to let her be sold to the Romulans, but if the alternative was her freedom instead, it would be impossible for him to justify killing her.  And with working transwarp, Yalit would probably feel that the risk of T'Laren successfully getting Federation law enforcement to capture *Ketaya* and rescue Q was extremely low, so she could afford to release T'Laren.

Which would leave Q completely alone, even more helpless than he was now, but he refused to think about that.  He had promised to get T'Laren out of this situation, and if Yalit would promise her freedom to him for something he was going to do anyway so she wouldn't whip him... now he was committed.  He couldn't change his mind and decide to blow them all up anyway.  He *had* to do all he could to save T'Laren, which definitely included not killing her himself.

"All right.  Give me the slate you want me to show my work on, and a light."

"We don't have any light."

"I can do the calculations in the dark, but I can't write them down without light.  And you couldn't read them without light.  So if you want to check my work, you're going to need to get me a light."

"Sed.  Go to my office and get the slate off my desk.  Frej, Pag, bring your scanner lights over here and leave them with Q.  He's going to calculate our intermix formula so we can do an emergency cold start."

Since Q remembered what the matter and antimatter levels had been before the power blew, he could begin the calculations right away.  When the slate arrived, he wrote down the matter and antimatter levels, the rating of the dilithium crystals, and the equation for balancing them all together, and then wrote down the answer.  He then wrote down the next equation, describing the density of space-time in this area and the relative amount of energy that would thus be required to make a subspace bubble, plugged in the number from the last equation and wrote down the answer.

"You're not showing your work," Yalit snapped.

"I can't.  I do the calculations in my head -- I'm not carrying the three and shifting the decimal point the way you'd do it.  I just *know* the answer.  I'm writing down all the calculations and all the intermediate results I'm getting, but that *is* all the work I'm doing."

"And how do you expect me to follow that without a calculator?"

"I don't.  That's why I'm doing this and not you, remember?"

"If I think you're deliberately fudging your answers..." she said menacingly.

Q took a deep breath.  "You promised me T'Laren's freedom.  I won't jeopardize that.  About the only thing that could go wrong is if you keep waving that thing in my face and disrupting my concentration; I don't know about Ferengi, but one *sure* way to make even superintelligent human beings a whole lot stupider is to terrorize them and make them spend all their mental energy on trying to appease you instead of trying to solve your problem."

Yalit hissed at him, but backed off.  With her no longer pressed up against him, looking over his shoulder, he was much better able to concentrate -- the math only solved itself when his mind was relatively calm.  He'd worked through horrific headaches, the fear of impending Borg invasion, two hours of sleep in thirty-six, and the belief that Security would kill him any minute now, but there were limits, and a neurowhip being waved in his face after he was just tortured with one yesterday went beyond them.  Q worked steadily, although to the Ferengi it probably looked like several minutes of doing nothing followed by frantically writing numbers down; most of the work he was doing, including the iterations he had to perform on some of the calculations, was in his head.  

For a moment before he wrote down the final numbers, he hesitated.  According to T'Laren herself, she had been dead before Lhoviri had resurrected her to be his therapist.  So if he was going to die, would it be such a great deal if she died at the same time?  It really would be so much easier if he could just write the intermix formula down wrong, and die in a clean, instantaneous burst of energy, and it would be deeply satisfying to know he was taking his tormentors with him.  Living with the terror of what Yalit might do, who she would sell him to, not to mention how willing she seemed to be to use the neurowhip on him, had been horrible so far.  A quick death was much more appealing.  Surely T'Laren would understand...

Except that she wouldn't.  Because she'd never have a chance to.  He had no time to ask her, to warn her or explain the situation; if she died now it would take her completely by surprise, and she'd have no idea why she was dying, or that it was his fault, and he couldn't do that to her.  Not if the Ferengi really were going to let her go.  She could go back to her life in Starfleet, or back to her boyfriend and sister-in-law on *Yamato*, and rebuild, her obligation to Lhoviri discharged unless he took it on himself to rescue Q personally and reunite them, and Q considered it rather more likely that Lhoviri would spontaneously make pigs fly on the bridge of *Ketaya* than directly intervene to save him.  The thought of facing his captivity without her, of facing Yalit and the weapons she wielded against him, was awful... but if T'Laren was set free, then the Ferengi wouldn't be able to rape her or kill her or do anything to her.  It would just be them and Q, no collateral damage, no innocent people to suffer for any mistakes he might make.  As awful as he found the prospect of facing his captivity and eventual fate alone, the idea that T'Laren might be made to suffer for his actions was much, much worse.  And if she could be set free, then he couldn't kill her, no matter how much he wanted to die right now.

Besides, he really didn't believe Lhoviri had been telling her the truth about revising the universe for her.  Which meant it was quite possible that she'd never actually been dead.

He wrote down the correct formula.  "Here.  Use this ratio and this timing, and you should have the engines back online within fifteen minutes."

"You'd better be right," Yalit snarled.

"I'm always right," Q said tiredly, suddenly exhausted.  He'd been so afraid today, for so long, he was completely worn out.  The lack of food wasn't helping, probably.

When the power came back on, the Ferengi whooped and danced around the warp core.  Yalit acknowledged him with a nod.  "Well.  You were telling the truth after all.  Will wonders never cease?"

And then it was back to work, back to trying to design modifications for the warp engine so that transwarp wouldn't destroy the crystals again.

&&&

By the time he was allowed to return to his room, he was desperate to do so.  There had been no shortage of coffee, or water, which he'd drunk enough of to counteract the diuretic effects of the coffee and avoid getting a headache.  But there hadn't been any food, since he didn't consider bowls of grubworms to be food.  He hadn't eaten anything substantial since breakfast yesterday, and by now he was genuinely extremely hungry.  He didn't voluntarily go without food for this long, ordinarily.  All the coffee and no food had made him slightly hyper, but hollow, shaking.  And the emotional stress of the day wasn't helping.

He wanted to talk to T'Laren, but she was doing more of her endless exercising, not looking at him.  "Have you been doing that all day?" he asked disbelievingly.  "I realize it must be horrifically boring to be stuck in this room by yourself all day, but surely there's *something* you could be doing that doesn't involve kicking phantoms in the throat?"

She said nothing.  She didn't even look at him.  "Yoo-hoo, *Ketaya* to T'Laren.  Come in, T'Laren."

She was still ignoring him.  What the hell?  "Fine," he said, genuinely upset.  "Be that way.  I don't need you."

He watched her for a minute.  She might as well be a zombie.  Her concentration seemed to be completely fixed on the exercise she was doing, which appeared to involve pretending to kill Ferengi -- at least the kicks and punches she was delivering were much more in line with where the Ferengi vulnerable points would be than where his would be.  And then Q noticed that her knuckles were green.  And even worse, there were green spots on the wall.  She was hitting the wall hard enough to split her own skin and bleed all over everything.  Quite aside from how unsanitary that was, he was worried for her.  What was wrong with her, that she had to exercise so hard as to cause herself physical damage, and she couldn't even talk to him?

"Yo, T'Laren."  He got up off the couch and walked over to her, reaching out for her.  "Is there a reason -- "

He never got to finish the sentence.  As he came up to her and put a friendly hand on her shoulder, she stiffened under his touch, her head falling back and her back arching slightly.  And then she spun to face him, and shoved him, so hard he went flying across the room. "Don't touch me!"

Q landed hard on the carpet, winded, stunned and utterly betrayed.  T'Laren had no expression on her face, her eyes glazed, her fists clenched against her chest.  "I kept us alive for you!" Q shouted, as soon as he had the ability to speak.  "I could have destroyed us all with the cold intermix formula, but I couldn't kill you!"

She looked down at him and took a step backward.  Her eyes focused, staring at him.  "Lock me away," she said hoarsely, sounding as if she hadn't actually spoken in a week.  "I will not *harm* you... Lock me away."

"Gladly."  He stormed over to his closet.  It was a little late for her to not harm him, wasn't it?  He was going to have bruises on his buttocks and back from that.  Her demand that he lock her up made him feel a tiny bit better in some senses -- it had to be the drugs doing this to her.  Surely if T'Laren were in control of herself, she wouldn't have shoved him across the room.  But he was even more terrified now, if less betrayed.  He knew T'Laren had killed someone she loved in the midst of an emotional maelstrom before, or at least she believed she had.  If T'Laren was willing to throw him across the room, what else might she do?  No, he'd happily lock her up.  He threw everything out of the walk-in closet, as rapidly as he could.  

He filled a couple of vases, with no flowers in them, with water from the bathroom and put them in the closet.  Then he found a large brass urn in amidst his unpacked boxes of antiques, and put that in there, his face twisting in a bitter smile.  He was offering T'Laren a priceless, thousand-year-old antique for a chamberpot.  But he wasn't willing to make her piddle on the carpet in there, after all.  

She watched his preparations from her position against the wall, her eyes flickering back and forth as she followed his motions.  She said nothing, and Q didn't try to say anything to her.  What could he say, after all?  She was obviously completely non-rational.

When his preparations were complete, he backed away from the closet.  "How am I supposed to feed you when the Ferengi bring dinner?" he asked.

"I will not eat," she said, still hoarse.

"That doesn't sound very smart.  How about we figure out some way to get you the food that doesn't involve you violently assaulting me?"

T'Laren shook her head rapidly.  "I mean I cannot eat.  Until... until this is past... I will not feel hunger, or be able to keep food down."

"Oh.  Well, I guess that simplifies things.  You want to get in there now?"  He motioned at the closet.

She didn't look at him.  She turned her head to focus on the closet, and she walked to it and knelt down on the floor inside, still not looking at him.

"How long do I need to keep you in there?" Q asked.

She was silent for a moment.  He was about to repeat the question when she said, "In... three days... I should no longer be a danger to you."

"Okay.  Three days it is, then." He went back to the closet and hit the button to shut the door.  The closet didn't have a button to open it on the other side; if there was voice control a person could ask the computer to open the door if they accidentally got stuck in the closet, but without voice control only the buttons would allow the closet door to open or shut.

As soon as the door was shut, T'Laren started moaning.  Q had never heard her make any sound like it -- she sounded like she was in agony.  Did she need medical attention?  Could he even *get* medical attention for her?  She seemed to think she needed to be locked up so she wouldn't hurt him; was her body in so much pain that she would react with violence to even a slight touch?  Maybe Yalit had hit *her* with the neurowhip, or someone else had while he was gone?  

He swallowed hard.  She might have been raped.  She might have been tortured, beaten, whipped with the neurowhip, held down and violated by half a dozen Ferengi, and he had no way to know.  And at this point, no way to ask her.  Well, maybe he could just go up to the closet and ask her, but her moans were so loud he wasn't sure she'd be able to hear him, and besides she'd ignored almost everything he'd said since he came home.  If something terrible had been done to her while he was gone, she obviously wasn't willing to talk about it.  

While he was standing there, staring at the door to the closet and frantically trying to decide what he should do, the door opened and a Ferengi entered with a bowl.  "Dinnertime, human!  Hope you're hungry!"

With a sinking feeling, Q walked over to the bowl, fairly sure of what he'd see, and he wasn't disappointed.  Grubworms.  He took the bowl from the Ferengi and set it down on the coffee table.  "Let me explain something to you," he said, too tired for outrage or anything other than a falsely conversational tone.  "I haven't eaten anything since yesterday morning.  Your matriarch, your grandma, whatever she is to you, wants me to use my mind, in very complex ways that really do require a steady supply of fuel.  But I am not going to eat grubworms."  He put the lid back on the bowl and turned away from it.  "Now, you may think to yourself that I can be forced to eat grubworms, and you'd be correct.  I'm sure you know by now that Yalit has me over a barrel and can force me to do anything at this point.  But see, the last time you people made me eat insects, I threw up.  And the last time Yalit used the neurowhip on me, I threw up.  So I'm inclined to think that if you torture me to force me to eat the grubworms, I might actually *eat* them but I'll never keep them down.  And if I throw up everything I eat, I will *still* have no fuel for my brain."  By now he was standing over the Ferengi, glaring down at him.  "So why don't you get me some decent food, that I *can* eat, or you can explain to grandma why I keep passing out when she's trying to get me to build her a transwarp engine that works."

"The Lady Yalit says it's fine to feed you grubworms."

"The Lady Yalit will figure out that it really wasn't fine after all when I keel over and lose consciousness sometime tomorrow morning.  I cannot go without food indefinitely and still use my mind, and I won't eat grubworms.  And I won't be able to keep myself from upchucking them if I do.  So how about you get me food I won't immediately vomit back up."

The Ferengi scowled and left the room.  Q collapsed on the couch.  "Well, I guess we'll see if I'm going to starve to death, or be kept alive long enough to betray every principle I have and be condemned to mortality forever," he muttered.

The sounds T'Laren was making were disturbing him badly.  If he didn't know better, he'd almost think they sounded like pleasure.  Not that he was exactly an expert on the sounds mortals made when experiencing pleasure -- as a Q he'd really had very little interest in mortal reproductive activities, and as a human the only sounds of pleasure he'd had opportunity to hear were the ones he couldn't stop himself from making when he was driven to masturbate -- but he *was* an expert on cries of pain, having heard a lot more of those from a greater variety of people than just himself while he was human, and this... sounded just a bit more like pleasure than pain.  Which didn't make any sense and he was probably making a mistake, but it was bothering him immensely because he didn't know whether to be horrified for his friend's pain or nauseated, and every so often something would sound so much like a moan of pleasure that it would send shocks through his groin, making his own body stir in wholly unwanted ways, and then he'd remember that in fact the sound probably meant T'Laren was in agony and he'd feel completely disgusted with himself.  She'd said the dicydrenaline lowered her emotional control and in essence was making her drunk, but it seemed too far a shift between violently exercising, shoving him, and then -- what, masturbating?  Exactly *how* could those sounds mean pleasure, anyway?  No, they were probably cries of pain and he was a thoroughly disgusting person for finding any of them even slightly arousing, even involuntarily.

Her moans turned into cries and crescendoed in a series of short, sharp shrieks.  And then she was silent.  And then she started crying.  Q almost went to the door to let her out then, overwhelmed by the need to do something, anything to help her, but what the hell could he do?  If she was in terrible physical pain, *he* couldn't do anything for her -- he didn't know how to do so much as a backrub, and if she'd been tortured that probably wouldn't be helpful anyway.  If something awful and traumatic had happened to her, what could he do?  What could he say?  He was abrasive, selfish, completely unempathic -- he didn't know what to say to give comfort, what to do, and T'Laren had already told him she thought he'd probably be inept at it and she didn't want to turn to him with her problems, back when they'd argued because she'd talked to Tris about her feelings when tr'Sahlassiu had attacked them both.  If she'd wanted his help, she would have asked for it, wouldn't she have?

Besides, if she thought she needed to be locked away to keep from hurting him, maybe it wasn't a good idea to let her out.

The door opened again, and a different Ferengi came in with a tray.  This time it was spaghetti with meatballs, again.  Q disliked eating the same food in the same week unless he was so depressed that absolutely nothing tasted good and he was choosing food solely for its blandness and inoffensiveness, and he wasn't in that situation now... but it didn't matter.  He was starving.  He'd eat spaghetti with meatballs every night this week if they'd just feed that to him instead of grubworms; he may have been in the habit, for the past two years or so, of eating only one meal a day, but T'Laren had gotten him used to more food than that, so being forced to skip lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again had actually *hurt.*  Q retreated into the bedroom with the spaghetti so that he wouldn't have to hear T'Laren crying.  Nothing could spoil his appetite right now, but he felt too guilty eating instead of doing whatever unspecified thing he should be doing for her when he could hear her.  

Only, after his food was gone, he had nothing else to do.  He couldn't read any of his books -- technically he'd never read most of them, they were antiques and generally chosen for aesthetic and historical value, but when he'd been a Q researching humanity he had consumed the entire Terran canon of great literature, and all the physical books he owned were in that category.  And his memory for what he'd read was too good to get any pleasure out of re-reading anything.  But what was he supposed to do?  He was in the same position he'd been in every time Anderson had cut off his computer access -- without the computer he couldn't pull up new books, couldn't listen to music, couldn't read news or watch flat recordings or play computer games or investigate current research or troll Terran civilian anonytext forums on controversial subjects to stir up arguments or *anything*.  As long as T'Laren had been here, he'd had the opportunity to talk to her or play chess with her, and that had given him enough mental stimulation that he hadn't missed the computer access that much... but now he didn't have her to talk to, and he was left with literally nothing to do but brood on his situation and worry about T'Laren.

He thought he heard screaming.  Quickly he went out into the common room where he was closer to the closet and could hear T'Laren better.  And he immediately thought better of it and went back into his bedroom.  She was screaming obscenities -- he would be impressed under other circumstances; he hadn't even known T'Laren *knew* all those words.  When they'd been aboard *Yamato* together and he'd seen chinks in her perfect Vulcan armor, evidence of her somewhat sordid personal life, he'd been amused and delighted... but this was too much vulnerability, too much exposure.  He was deeply embarrassed for her, and the only thing he could think to do was to remove himself from the situation so she wouldn't have to deal with knowing that he'd seen and heard every out of control thing she did, once this was over.

What did she mean by three days, anyway?  Was it going to take *that* long for the drug to leave her system, when she was fasting?  Or had they done something else to her?

This was getting him nowhere.  His stomach clenched with so much tension that he was afraid he might throw up anyway, he couldn't sit still, and he was still absolutely bored, unable to stop obsessing over T'Laren's problems because he had nothing else he could do.  He *had* to find something to distract himself.

The self-powered slate from earlier today gave him an idea.  Q had an antique fountain pen, an ink bottle, and a pad of parchment, for absolutely no good reason except that some antiques dealer had been using them to add period flair to her receipts, and Q had demanded that she sell him a set too.  He had never used them for anything; he'd always thought that if he ever wanted to send a letter to Picard, he'd use the archaic paper and pen rather than a recording because Picard would appreciate the gesture, except now Picard was dead and the letter Q had been putting off writing to him for three years would never be written.  The Continuum would be horrified at him doing this, the Federation might well put him on trial for giving the Ferengi secrets he wouldn't give *them*, but if Yalit was going to blame him and threaten to whip him every time something went wrong, he needed to make sure nothing ever went wrong again.  And that meant figuring out, on his own, how to redesign the Thetaran transwarp drive so it could run on dilithium crystals, or some alternate fuel that everyone in the Alpha Quadrant had easy access to.  

Because transwarp was far too great an advance to give the primitive peoples of the Alpha Quadrant, including his hosts, Q had never worked on it or dug too deeply into how he would go about creating a transwarp drive; it wasn't his job to invent new technology, it was his job to give Starfleet engineers ideas that *they* could implement in inventing new technology.  He was, mostly, supposed to be doing pure science, not applied theory.  But it was, most assuredly, part of his job description to find problems with other people's implementations, and offer solutions.  He couldn't have built a transwarp drive from scratch, not without a month or two to work on the problem, but with a Thetaran drive in front of him he could identify the problems with *it* and figure out how to fix them.  

So.  He had a drive that required six-dimensional helical crystals, and he didn't have any.  What he had was dilithium, which were four-dimensional transverse helices, and he couldn't teach anyone in this part of space how to manufacture six-dim crystals without giving them even more vastly disruptive scientific advances than transwarp itself.  Technologies that existed around here included the quantum singularities that the Romulans used to power their warp drives, but while he understood the principle behind that perfectly well he didn't have the faintest idea how the Romulans actually implemented the fiddly engineering details.  There were other substances around that had similar properties to dilithium -- trilithium, which would almost work except that it was extremely unstable and would probably blow up *without* a transwarp field; quadronium, which would be great except that it was highly radioactive; seletherium, which could handle the transwarp stresses well but was mostly only found in the Delta Quadrant, and which the Borg went out of their way to monopolize.  None of them seemed quite feasible to use instead.  But if he was stuck with the dilithium, what could he do to keep the transwarp field stable and keep the crystals from blowing?

For hours, Q wrote notes to himself and drew schematics.  The schematics, of course, had numerous portions randomly rotated, with notation in the Vizoran mathematical system describing the angle and direction of rotation -- something the Ferengi were never likely to figure out, as not only did Vizoran math use base 12 and have a system of 432 degrees to describe angles instead of 360, but their numbers looked like doodles of cute fuzzy alien animals.  (They *were* actually doodles of cute fuzzy alien animals.  Q no longer remembered *why* the Vizoran number 1 looked like a meerkat with tentacles or why 2 looked something like a lemur, but he did remember that for some reason the Vizorans had assigned all of their digits to stylized sketches of their most common pet creatures.) With the random rotations there was no way that anyone but him could possibly use the schematics safely to build anything.  The notes couldn't be disguised so easily, since Q no longer remembered any non-Terran alphabet well enough to write in it, but he did randomly shift between Roman, Cyrillic and Arabic writing systems, and since the Arabic was written backwards that would add some additional confusion.  Any human analyst could easily enough decipher the notes, but the Universal Translator didn't handle writing nearly as well as it handled speech and the only Terran writing system found commonly off of Earth was the Roman alphabet, so likely the Ferengi would never have seen either Cyrillic or Arabic.

By morning, his eyes were burning and his limbs felt leaden, but he had made substantial progress toward redesigning the entire transwarp power matrix and he'd managed to temporarily ignore T'Laren's issues and his fear for his own fate, at least for the night.  He was still working when he heard the door in the main room open, either with breakfast or with his escort to engineering.  Q got up and went out to the other room; he didn't particularly want to -- the work he was doing was much more engaging than having to deal with Ferengi, and he didn't really want to stop to eat -- but he couldn't afford to have the Ferengi hanging around in the room with the closet that T'Laren was locked in.  It wasn't really locked per se -- anyone on this side of the door could open it, it was just that there was no means to open it from the inside.

T'Laren was whimpering.  The sound stabbed him in the heart, and twisted the knife when he realized that there were words, and the words were "please... Q... please, I need you..."  He swallowed hard; he couldn't deal with this in front of the Ferengi.  "What do you want?" he asked the Ferengi harshly.

"Here's your breakfast," the guard said.  "Eat quickly; the Lady Yalit wants to see you in engineering in half an hour."

"Fine.  This had better be edible; I spent all night doing work for her, and if I don't get real food, that I can eat, I will most likely pass out from starvation later today."  He opened the lid of the tray.  Eggs and bacon again.  If all they ever fed him was eggs and bacon for breakfast, and spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, he would eventually come down with some sort of vitamin deficiency disease.  But then, it was unlikely that he'd remain a captive of the Ferengi long enough for it to become a problem.  "Is there coffee?"

"There'll be coffee in engineering."

"That'll have to do, I suppose," he said with bad grace.  He took the food over as far as the table, waiting for the Ferengi to leave.  The Ferengi didn't.

"Is there a problem?" Q asked.

The Ferengi grinned cruelly.  "Aren't you going to do something about your friend in there?  She's begging for you."

Another thrust to the heart.  Q had to ignore it, had to pretend he didn't care, that T'Laren's pleas weren't tearing him apart inside.  "As I'm not a doctor, I fail to see what I could possibly do for her.  Now, was there some reason you needed to continue to be here, or can I eat my breakfast in peace?"

"I know what she needs," the Ferengi said, snickering.  "You don't need to be a *doctor* for that."

"Are you making some sort of sordid innuendo?" Q said.  "Because the last time I checked, mortal genitalia don't actually cure anything in other people except possibly sexual frustration, and I rather think there's a bit more wrong with T'Laren than that."

The Ferengi still snickered.  "You don't even know what's wrong with her, do you?"

"Well, enlighten me then, o sadistic font of wisdom.  What did you people do to her?"  

"Guess."

He could guess far too many possibilities.  *Did you rape her?  Did you torture her?  Is she having a reaction to your drugs?  Did you stun her too many times, did you hit her with your neurowhips?*  But he couldn't actually ask any of those things, because if the answer to any of those guesses was 'yes', he wasn't sure he could stop himself from trying to commit physical violence on the Ferengi, and given that the fellow had a phaser and Yalit had a neurowhip she was eager to use on him, that would probably accomplish absolutely nothing except to get him stunned and tortured, which would do T'Laren no good whatsoever, and do him even less.  "I'm not interested in playing Twenty Questions with you.  Tell me what you did to her, or get out of my room so I can eat."

"I guess you can just eat your breakfast, then," the Ferengi said, still with that malicious grin, and left the room.

As soon as he was gone, Q went to the closet door.  "T'Laren?  T'Laren, can you hear me?"

The response was weak, hoarse.  "...Q?"

"You were asking for me.  Is there anything I can do to help you?"

Nothing.  "T'Laren?  Can you hear me?"

"...please... I need you... please..."

"Okay.  I'm going to let you out and we can figure out what I can realistically do for you, all right?"

His hand went to the button, and then she yelled, "Don't!"  

He jerked away from it, startled.  "I don't understand.  Don't what?  You don't *want* me to let you out?"

"don't... I will not *harm* you... I will not..."

"If you aren't going to harm me, then I think I should let you out."

"not safe... my control..."

"So you think you *are* going to harm me?  Look, T'Laren, should I let you out or not?  I can't help you with a door between us."

"...yes... please, help me... I must... I need you... please..."

"Fine.  I'm going to let you out."

"Don't!"

He was getting very, very frustrated with this conversation.  "T'Laren, do you want me to help you or don't you?"

For several seconds there was silence.  "T'Laren?  Are you still there?"

"What I need... what I want... will hurt you."  She sounded almost normal, for exhausted and hoarse values of normal.  

Q swallowed.  "What, have you turned into a vampire or something?  You need to drink the blood of the living?"  No answer.  Of course T'Laren hadn't much of a sense of humor at the best of times.  "If you need to commit some violence, I could let you out when the Ferengi are in the room.  It doesn't have to be *me* you beat up."

"no... I've chosen and I cannot unchoose... it must be you... I need you..."  The last was a plea, heartbreakingly desperate, that almost drove him to open the door anyway.  But then she said, "I will not... I will not allow myself... to harm you... so don't let me out.  Whatever I say, whatever I do, however much I beg you... ignore me.  Don't let me out."

He closed his eyes.  She was the one who'd know how much of a threat she was to him, so the only smart thing to do was to honor her wishes.  But it was tearing him apart *having* to ignore her, even though he should be very, very adept at ignoring other people's needs... but since he'd become mortal no one had ever needed him.  Well, during the battle with the Borg, yes, but no one had needed him personally.  Being needed by a fellow mortal when you were mortal yourself was much more like being needed by a fellow Q when you were Q than being needed by mortals when you were Q, a condition Q had generally despised when he found it in mortals, except when he'd engineered the lack of self-sufficiency himself like when he'd used the Borg to make Picard admit to needing him.  Which, come to think of it, had *also* felt dangerously like being needed, or unneeded, by fellow Q.  In the Continuum no one had needed him since Azi... and he really didn't need to think about *that* now.  

"Can you just tell me what the *problem* is?  I mean, the night before last you were just acting like you were overtired or a little drunk or something, and then you barely talked to me in the morning, and when I came back you threw me across the room for touching your shoulder.  Did the Ferengi do something to you while I was gone?"

She said something in Vulcan that the translator refused to catch. And then there was a loud thump, and another, like she was throwing herself at the closed door.  "Let me *out!*"  she screamed.  "I need you, oh god, I need to *fuck* you, let me out, I'll swallow you whole, I need to *have* you, let me *OUT*..."

Q didn't hear the rest of it, whatever she was saying.  It sounded far too much like the obscenities she'd been shouting at the Ferengi yesterday, rage-filled promises of sexual violence, or just plain violence.  He didn't know why she wanted to hurt him, but the shouting and the throwing herself at the door made it much more clear that in fact she was totally not in control of herself than her confused mishmash of pleading for him and warning him off had done.  He grabbed his food and ran for the bedroom, hiding there, forcing himself to eat even though the food was tasteless and his appetite was gone, because if he wasn't at his best in dealing with Yalit she'd torture him and so he couldn't afford the distraction of hunger.  He was breathing heavily, his hands shaking.  Whatever they'd done to T'Laren had driven her insane.  His only friend in the universe wanted to hurt him, and obviously was restraining herself by the thinnest, frailest remnant of control imaginable.  He couldn't imagine what was going through her head, but he was desperately grateful that she'd managed to pull enough of herself together to tell him that if she let him out she'd hurt him, that the thing she was pleading for *was* apparently his suffering, before he'd made the mistake of opening the door.

Of course, maybe he should.  Vulcans were much stronger than humans, and when their emotional control broke down, much more violent.  T'Laren would probably beat him to death much, much faster than two human security guards had done, and with considerably less pain than he'd suffered from the neurowhip.  But there was always the chance that she'd manage to restrain herself *after* breaking several of his bones but before killing him, leaving him in a limbo of living agony until Yalit got around to getting him medical treatment, which, given how Yalit seemed to think he could work through any level of pain or terror, would probably be never.  No, suicide-by-crazy-Vulcan wasn't reliable enough a method of death to try it.  

The door chimed.  He wondered why they were bothering to chime him when usually they just walked in, and then realized that T'Laren was screaming loudly enough that he might not hear it if the door simply opened.  Q grabbed his notes and walked out.  The two Ferengi were paying much too much attention to the closet, and the obscene things T'Laren was yelling.  She was still throwing herself at the door.  "I'm leaving now!" Q shouted at the closet.  "Try to get yourself under control!"

And then he left with his escort, headed for Engineering.