Title: Only Human Part IV Author: Alara Rogers Series: TNG Rating: NC-17 Codes: Q/f, AU Part: 8/12+1 Summary: Q and T'Laren are taken captive aboard their own ship by the Ferengi. Get herself under control? That was an impossibility. As soon as she heard the door shut, as soon as the maddening scent of him and the sound of his voice were gone, T'Laren collapsed to her knees in the dark closet and sobbed. Every effort she had made to get it under control had failed. While he'd been gone yesterday, the need had grown stronger and stronger. She'd even gone to the bathroom, put on the shower to hide any sounds from the Ferengi, and masturbated... three times, and it hadn't helped. The desire had come back each time, stronger than ever. All the calming exercises she tried, all the meditation, all the martial arts katas, were nothing to the need. Her skin was a raw nerve, longing for touch. She was burning up, and all she could think of was quenching the heat with cool, wet human flesh pressed against hers. Mindlessly, she did her exercises, because the only thing that could hold off the need at all was to lose herself in imaginary violence, use her body hard and savagely. And then Q had come back to the room, and the urge to throw him down and fling herself on top of him, enter his mind and meld with him, set him on fire with the heat burning through her and fuck him wildly, was overwhelming. It was so powerful, so demanding a need that she had to ignore him completely, didn't dare even so much as speak to him. Of course this meant that she hadn't had a way to warn Q of the problem, so he had actually come up to her and touched her... and if she hadn't thrown him far away from her, out of her reach or even out of the reach she could have if she lunged, she would have raped him then and there. There had been no help for it, nothing else that could be done. She had to be locked away, or she *would* assault Q. Her control was gone, her need was consuming her, and none of the disciplines were helping in the slightest anymore. Her body, her mind, her survival drive, all conspired to betray her higher emotions and her ethics, and if she were not physically kept away from Q she wouldn't be able to stop herself. Of course when Q had asked her how long it would be before he could let her out, she hadn't told him that if she didn't fulfill her need within a few days, she would die, burned out on adrenaline and lust. She'd told him that in three days she wouldn't be a threat to him anymore. Which was quite true, because by then she'd be dead, unconscious or too weak to move. But when it was done and she was locked up in the dark, the emotions she could no longer control overwhelmed her. She'd masturbated again, just to get enough control over the lust that she could feel *anything* else, and when orgasm had lulled her overwhelming need into temporary remission, despair and grief had taken over. She was going to die, horribly. Perhaps no one could *see* her humiliation anymore, but they could all hear her. She had thought that she cared little for her own life -- she had cast it away, after all, and Lhoviri had had to go to great effort to convince her to live at all. The most important thing had been doing the job Lhoviri had required of her, repaying the debt for his work in undoing her crime. If she had to die protecting Q, she had thought that that would be perfectly acceptable. But no, it seemed she had developed much more attachment to her existence than that. She didn't want to leave Q behind, alone, and she didn't want to lose Tris and Sovaz again when she had just been reunited with them and mended the rift caused by the crimes no one but she remembered anymore. And at the base of it, she just didn't want to die. She had died before, and knew there was nothing beyond it, regardless of what Q said. It was not something to be feared, particularly -- it was nonexistence, oblivion. The dead didn't care that they were dead. But it was the end of experience, the end of thinking, the end of *being*. What she felt when she thought of her own impending death was much more grief than fear; if she died, she would be separated from everything she enjoyed by the simple fact that she wouldn't exist to enjoy them anymore. And it was so horribly unfair that she should die this way, that something the Ferengi thought was a practical joke they could use to humiliate Q by tormenting "his woman" would *kill* her, because they were ignorant and because they couldn't give her what she needed and because neither could Q, not without paying a price she was not willing to make him pay. The entire night she did not sleep. She swung back and forth between rage at the Ferengi, grief for herself, and her horrifyingly mind-destroying lust for Q. She masturbated so often her clitoris was raw, but it gave her less and less relief each time, until finally she couldn't even *have* orgasms from it anymore, her body stretched tight on the rack of need, wound tighter and tighter and unable to achieve even the tiniest modicum of relief. She paced in the closet, energy coiling through her that had no release, and punched the walls until her already sore and bloody knuckles tore again, kicked the wall with her bare feet until they were so bruised and battered she could barely still walk on them, and still the energy would not allow her to be still. She was so exhausted, so weary, but when she tried to lie down her entire body twitched and jerked and writhed until she had to get up again and keep pacing, exercising, doing what few martial arts she could in such a tiny space. She begged Lhoviri for some way out of this, some last-minute miraculous recovery, and laughed mockingly at herself because she knew perfectly well Lhoviri wasn't her god and wasn't going to intervene directly to save her. Given how much recovered Q was from his suicidal depression, in fact, Lhoviri might actually have no further use for her. For all she knew Lhoviri had engineered this whole thing to remove her from Q's life now that her purpose was done. And with all the terrible things Lhoviri had allowed to happen to Q, who he was ostensibly watching out for, it was impossible to imagine that he would actually do anything for *her*. By the time morning came she was broken, desperate. She pleaded with Q to give her the release she needed, knowing that he wasn't actually even in the room to hear her because she couldn't hear or smell him. And then she'd heard the outer door open, the Ferengi come in the room and announce himself, and knew it meant Q would come out where he could hear her, but she couldn't stop. In fact knowing that Q would hear her now made her beg more desperately, forcing a voice hoarse from exhaustion and dehydration and too much screaming to keep talking, keep begging, because if he heard her surely he would come to her and open the door and save her, surely he would satisfy her, and she couldn't stop thinking of what it would be like if she could finally touch him and get some relief from this. Fantasies of flinging Q to the floor, ripping his clothes off, plunging her tongue into his mouth and her telepathy into his mind and swallowing his penis with her hungry vagina, grinding against him and pounding herself against his body and feeling his mind in hers, forcing her pleasure into him and then satisfying the needs she'd impose on him as she'd use his body to satisfy her needs, consumed her. When she'd heard him say that he would open the door, that was all she could think of doing, all she could want. Only at the last possible moment did she remember why she didn't want to do that, why doing that to Q was the worst possible betrayal she could commit. She'd pulled herself together just enough to warn him off, to tell him what kind of danger he'd be in if he did let her out. And then he hadn't let her out. He'd asked her what was wrong with her, as if she could actually tell him where the Ferengi could hear, and all she could think was that he wasn't letting her out, he wasn't giving her what she needed to live, and her mood had swung back to rage and lust and she'd started throwing herself at the door, screaming at him to let her out, to give her the release she needed so desperately. And now he was gone, and she was broken again, overwhelmed with grief and exhaustion. Q wouldn't save her, because she had stopped him from doing so. He would stand by and let her die, because she had never told him what was at stake. It was all her own fault, all things she had done to protect him, but it meant there would never ever ever be a release from this pain and need until she was dead of it. She thought of the red shoes in the Terran children's story, of being compelled to dance until you dropped dead of exhaustion. It didn't sound like such a horrible death to a small child; in fact it had sounded kind of funny. But it wasn't funny at all, was it. Being driven to move until your body burned out, being exhausted and wanting sleep and being wholly unable to until you died of it... this was a truly terrible way to die. And the humiliation of it, the fact that she could barely talk, that she couldn't have a sane and rational conversation with a fellow sentient being for longer than five minutes before her need would compel her to do something completely irrational, the fact that other people could hear her total loss of emotional control... she almost wished death would come faster, would free her of this horror. If she *did* live through this, she would never be able to bear the humiliation; almost better to die. But she still didn't want to die. At least, she thought, Q would be safe. If there was anything she could cling to for comfort, it was that she couldn't harm him. She wanted him so very badly, but it would destroy him if she took him; now she was locked away to die, and he had no idea she was dying, would never know what she was going through until it was too late and she could not harm him. &&& In engineering, Q met with Yalit. She immediately fixated on his papers. "What are those?" "The solution to your little problem," Q said. "Of course, I've altered the diagrams in crucial ways so that if you try to follow what I've written down, *just* the way I've written it down, you really will blow us all up. You'll need me to interpret the design for you, but this is the basic outline of how we would remodel the transwarp drive so that it would actually work. In fact you could build one from scratch with these notes, if you had me to tell you what the diagrams are actually supposed to look like. You don't even need to modify the one on this ship; you could use the replicators to build a new one and install it on your own ship." Yalit glared at the papers. "And exactly why am I supposed to believe you'd do such a thing? You've cooperated, if I can even call it that, *very* reluctantly. Even after I disciplined you for lying to me, you sat back and blithely let us run into a failure that blew out the power net." "Well, since you made it clear yesterday that even if I *warn* you that you're making a mistake, you'll completely ignore me, make the mistake, and then blame me and threaten to torture me for *your* failure, I thought it was fairly imperative to make sure you don't make any more mistakes. With this, I can ensure that if you follow my instructions, you can build the thing you want to sell without any more problems. And I've made decoding the thing properly complicated enough that if I'm in too much pain or fear to think straight, I won't be able to decipher my own notes correctly, which will probably result in all of us dying. So you have incentive, now, *not* to hurt me." "And how do I know you're not going to blow up the ship anyway?" "Well, firstly, because you can test any component I show you. And secondly... given what you and I discussed about *why* I didn't blow up the ship yesterday..." His expression hardened. "You're going to treat T'Laren for whatever you've done to her, because that's the only way you can be sure that *any* advice I give you won't blow up the ship. She's gone insane from whatever you did, and I know for a fact she would rather die than live that way. So unless you have a way to undo it, give her the antidote to your drugs or fix whatever it is you've done... you have no more leverage against me, and you won't be able to trust *anything* I tell you." "You so sure I have no leverage against you? I have *this*." She patted the neurowhip coiled on the belt that was the only article of clothing she was wearing at all. He would not show her fear. Not now. "All that little device is going to do for you is make me *more* dedicated to the cause of killing myself, or you, or all of us," Q said softly. "Yes, you can make me break down and promise you anything. We've seen that much. But we've also seen that you can't actually check my work well enough to be *certain* I'm not lying to you. So unless you have a way to make sure T'Laren survives, and gets well, you may as well just sell me off now and forget about transwarp, because you can't solve it without me and you can't trust me if she dies or loses her mind permanently." And then Yalit laughed. Q was taken aback. "Even to your puerile sense of humor, I'm sure what I said was not *that* hilarious." "We can save your pal," Yalit said, sneering and giggling at the same time. "We'd need to wait a day or so until she's weaker for it to be safe, but my boys would be perfectly happy to help her out, even after everything she's done. But if you want to speed things up, you can take matters into your own hands any time you want to take the risk." Q stared. "What are you talking about?" Yalit was still laughing. "You don't even know what's wrong with her, do you?" She grinned even more broadly. "It's that Romulan aphrodisiac stuff. Far togan, or whatever its name was. It's actually true, all she needs is a good fuck." His blood went ice cold, remembering what T'Laren had said about that drug. *"The drug they spoke of would have killed me..." "I can't discuss this any further, Q. But yes. A drug that makes Romulans feel desire, kills Vulcans. I cannot explain..."* "You've killed her," he whispered in absolute horror. "She said... she said that stuff *kills* Vulcans." "Oh, she was full of it," Yalit snapped. "It wouldn't do the Romulans a damn bit of good to use it to breed *female* Vulcans if it killed them, now would it?" "What?" "It's that stuff they use, you know. When they take Vulcan prisoners and they breed them, to get halfbreeds with Vulcan telepathy. They give it to the men to make them fuck, and they give it to the women to keep 'em from blocking their own fertility with their minds, or whatever they do. All it does is make them need to have sex. Yeah, they'll die if they don't get fucked, but as long as they get a good long screw they'll be fine." She grinned at Q again. "Now, see, my boys were all ready to help your pal out, but she got violent with them, tried to kill them. So none of them want to go anywhere near her until she's just about passed out from it. But, you know, she's *such* a good friend of yours... and she's really suffering, you know. The way this stuff does for them, all she can think about is sex. You multiply the horniest you've ever been by about twenty thousand... well, according to you you're never horny, so maybe you don't get it, but the point is she's crawling out of her skin. She needs a fuck so bad she can't even *think* about anything else... and maybe you're man enough to give it to her. Or maybe you're not, and she'll have to suffer another day or two till my boys can take care of her." Q's eyes were fixed on Yalit's face, the horror he felt only growing with everything she said. He believed her completely, or at least, believed that she believed it. But if T'Laren had tried to kill the Ferengi rather than have sex with them, then it didn't actually make it *better* if they were saving her life. "You do realize that putting a person in a position where if they don't have sex with you they'll die is *still* raping them, if they wouldn't have touched you with someone else's ten-meter pole before you drugged them." She scowled fiercely. "You don't know a goddamn thing about it. You're a man. What the fuck do you know about rape?" "I know that it's not what happens when your client stiffs you on the bill," he snapped back. "Which seems to be more than you would know about it." Her face went purple. "How *dare* you!" she snarled. She grabbed the neurowhip and poked it at him. Despite his rage at her for what she'd just admitted doing to T'Laren, he stepped back in sudden fear. "You think you have some concept of what rape is? How about I have my boys fuck *you* up the ass? Then you might have some idea!" "Don't be a bigger moron than you already are," Q snarled back. "I'm perfectly aware that violent sexual assault constitutes rape. You wouldn't be teaching me anything I didn't know already, you'd just be proving what a barbarian you are. But a*ny* violation of your will, of what you've *chosen* to do when you were in your right mind, any attempt to coerce your will or control you... it doesn't matter if your body wants it at the moment because you're drunk or drugged or because you're going to die if you don't do it, it is *still* rape. Which is the part you don't seem to be grasping, but I would imagine that a woman who voluntarily chose to live on a planet of virulently misogynistic cretins who have no concept that she has a mind, or a value outside of being a sexual orifice, might have some difficulty with the concept of *consent.* I could pity you for the things you've presumably endured at their hands, if it weren't for the fact that you seem perfectly comfortable with turning around and inflicting those things on other people... not just on people who've done nothing except insult you, but on people who have literally done *nothing* to you at *all.* T'Laren never harmed you, she never insulted you, she even tried to talk me into being slightly less vocal in my disgust with you, back on *Yamato*. But you're quite fine with the notion of giving her a drug that compels her to have sex, so she can be a whore for your sons and grandsons, and you think this is perfectly okay because if she needs to have sex to save her life, she'd actually be *grateful* for their abuses, or something. Or you actually just don't think she's a person and you don't care, at all." "You really want me to whip you, don't you?" "Why don't you just kill me? You've just ensured that I won't do anything to help you achieve transwarp. Even if T'Laren lives through this... do you think she's really going to want to remember being violated by your trollish offspring, even if that's what's needed to save her life from the problem *you* caused her?" "Well, if you're so eager to protect her honor, you *could* do her yourself. Assuming you can. She's been begging for you for hours. *Maybe* that means she won't rip your lobes off and stomp your ribs in like she did to my grandsons." "I can't believe you did this to her. I... even the *Ferengi* are supposed to be more civilized than this. *Why?* Why did you do this to someone who did you no harm? Just because it was fun?" "I didn't do you any goddamn harm before you started trying to destroy me!" And that brought him up horribly short, because she was right. He had started insulting Yalit for his personal amusement, and to test her and see if she was worth his time, as soon as he met her, and he'd kept doing it because she kept rising to the bait and it was hilarious. He took a deep breath. "Maybe so. But there's really several astronomical units' worth of difference between tormenting someone with a few insults, and tormenting them with a drug that forces them to be raped or die." "It wouldn't be rape if you did it for her. She wants *you*." Her grin came back, more malicious than ever. "But you can't, can you? Because having sex with a mortal's like fucking a Klingon targ, for you. You couldn't even get it up for her, could you?" That would not be the problem. "Whether or not I can do what she needs isn't the point. You've *already* done the damage. She didn't want me, before she was drugged; she made that perfectly clear. So you've changed what she wants, by force, with a drug. It won't be any *less* rape if I do it." "She doesn't need it any less because you think it'd be raping her," Yalit said. "And if you don't, my boys will. We don't kill prisoners if we don't have to; that's a waste of latinum. I can ransom her back to the Federation; they'll think she knows something about where you're going, and they'll pay a pretty penny to have that information back in their hands, even if they weren't soft enough to pay the ransom anyway. We'll make sure she lives. We just have to wait until she can't fight back. But whether you do her or not, *someone's* gonna give the poor Vulcan bitch the fuck of her life, and I bet she'd rather it be you. Too bad you're a eunuch." Q swallowed. The thought of letting T'Laren suffer, for days, and then be raped by the Ferengi, after apparently she'd been so upset and frightened by the possibility that she had tried to *kill* some of them, was completely unpalatable. But the other alternative really wasn't appealing. Not when T'Laren had made it so very clear that if he let her out, she would hurt him. He strongly suspected the Ferengi were actually wrong about some part of this; T'Laren had been certain the drug would kill her, not just set her up to be raped. Something Yalit thought about this whole situation was wrong -- not just morally wrong, which all of it was, but factually wrong. But he didn't know what. What if he went to T'Laren, and she broke his bones and beat him senseless, and then she died anyway? What if she'd been both truthful and knowledgeable when she'd said with conviction that the drug would kill her? If all she wanted from him was sex, she would never have asked him to lock her away. He'd *told* T'Laren, when they'd been together aboard *Ketaya* before docking with *Yamato*, that he'd be willing to give up his virginity for something more meaningful than the mere gratification of lust, and certainly saving a friend's life qualified. He didn't know whether she knew how attractive his body found her -- he'd tried his best to hide that -- but it wouldn't have mattered anyway, not with her life at stake. Of course he'd have agreed to help her, if sex was the only thing she needed. But she'd been convinced she would hurt him, and had begged him to lock her away, and given that T'Laren was not a moron and knew him better than any other mortal alive, he had to assume there was a reason for that. There was something she needed besides just sex. "I tell you what. I'll let you out of work today -- you were burning the midnight oil last night to make those documents, I know. And if they're what you say they are they'll speed us up a lot. You wanna go back to your cell and see what you can do for your pal, I'll let you do that." And watch every minute of it, Q realized. Possibly record it for posterity. Damn T'Laren and her decision to hide monitors in his room, anyway. But what could he do? She was letting him go back to the cell to try to help T'Laren. He had no idea if he even *could* help her -- what if the reason she hadn't come to him was that she knew her Vulcan strength and the irrationality the drug had pushed on her would cause her to break his fragile human body if they did have sex? What if there was nothing he could do to save her? But he couldn't turn down the opportunity to at least *try* to help his friend, and there was no way he could do anything for her at all if he wasn't in the cell with her. "Fine. You do that. If she lives, you'll still have something to hold over me to get me to give you transwarp without blowing up the ship." "I told you already, she'll live. My boys are *more* than capable of giving her what she needs." Yalit leered. "Even with Vulcan stamina I'm sure twenty or so Ferengi boys can quiet her down just fine." He hadn't thought it was possible to be more horrified by this situation. "*Twenty*?" Three Ferengi had taken her to the swimming pool, five had threatened her on the bridge, and he'd thought those things were terrible, but gang rape by twenty men was an order of magnitude worse than three or five. "Sure, everyone aboard's gonna want to take a turn. Of course, if you think you can be man enough for her, feel free to try. If you're not enough for her, my boys don't mind taking your leftovers." He really would find a way to blow up the ship before it came to that. Rape, per se, wasn't a fate worse than death in his opinion, but being gang-raped by twenty men, and tortured with a drug that made your body betray you and *want* it, after being made to suffer such horrible need that you literally lost your mind, really sounded like it might qualify. "If she's actually been *asking* for me, I'm sure she considers me far superior in any ability to meet her needs than your hideous brood." "I'm going to be *very* interested in seeing if that's true or not." She waved at one of the male Ferengi. "Yark, Takim -- take him back to his cell for the day. I'm taking the day off to go to the control room and watch the show." &&& All the way back to the cell, Q's mind raced, trying to figure out what the catch was, why T'Laren hadn't simply told him what she needed, what it was she needed besides sex. If it really was only sex, if that was all it had ever been, she would have been a fool to let herself suffer like this. He'd have helped her -- not only willingly, but, he had to admit, happily. Not that anything made the Ferengi's actions justifiable or better or a good thing in any sense, but... Q's fear of mortal sexuality had never been about sex per se. Yes, it was disgusting, but so was eating and he'd gotten used to that. The problem had always been his fear of vulnerability, of humiliation, of what humans did to those who sought pleasure without having any idea how to return it. And if it was about saving a friend's life, not about his personal pleasures, then there was no issue there. He didn't need to be attractive, he didn't need to be skilled, he could be completely inept and totally naïve and he'd still be a big hero for doing something distasteful for his friend's sake. T'Laren wouldn't humiliate him, or reject him, or give him a completely confusing speech about how he was attractive except he wasn't, or give him patronizing advice, or look down on him... No, if all she needed was sex there was no downside to saving her. But she had to *know* that. He'd told her what his problems with sex were, he'd told her the conditions he'd need before he'd end his celibacy, and she'd know that saving her life would absolutely qualify. To be frank, in fact, saving her from extreme but not life-threatening discomfort would have qualified... to be brutally and totally frank, this was T'Laren, and he trusted her as much as he could trust any mortal being, and her opening up her mouth and telling him that she found him desirable and wanted to sleep with him *might* quite possibly have qualified. Actually, as long as he could be sure that she wasn't doing it because she thought he needed to learn about sex or as some sort of therapy, it almost certainly would have qualified. He didn't know if T'Laren had known exactly how pleased he'd have been at the opportunity to help her with her problem if it was only sex she needed, since he'd done his best to hide his body's reactions to her, but he was sure she knew that he'd at least be willing. If he was willing to give himself up to a fairly agonizing death at the hands of the Calamarain to save people who had given him the most grudging of sanctuary, of course he'd be willing to have sex to save his best friend's life. So there absolutely had to be more to it than that. But what? She had been violent to him -- had thrown him across the room when all he'd done was touch her, had warned him not to open the door or she would attack him. And she'd tried to kill the Ferengi. Was she afraid of accidentally killing him, or maiming him? It seemed possible, given the evidence, but... Q knew that Vulcan males had married human females. The famous scientist, diplomat and sidekick to the always amusing James T. Kirk, Spock, was the product of such a union. And if this drug worked by triggering the cycle T'Laren had said Vulcan males and the Vulcan women bonded to them suffered from anyway, then obviously humans could survive sex with Vulcans in its throes without getting badly hurt. Q might feel more fragile than the average human, having had invulnerability to compare his current mortality to, but he knew, intellectually, that the average human woman was weaker than he was, or at least weaker than he was when he wasn't starving himself to death. If human women could survive sex with Vulcan men in *pon farr*, he should be able to survive sex with a Vulcan woman, particularly one who claimed she was weaker than the average Vulcan from being raised in Earth gravity. It was possible that the drug made its victims *more* violent than the regular *pon farr* did, but then it would be a remarkably stupid drug for the Romulans to give to the captives they wanted to rape and breed... especially the women, who they could probably rape and impregnate without help from a drug. And then he remembered, from the information he'd seen in tr'Sahlassiu's mind, *why* Romulans wanted to breed with Vulcan captives, and he remembered exactly what T'Laren had said about what the drug would do to her, and everything clicked horribly into place. *"The need to mate or die appears linked to the genes that control telepathy. So evolutionarily, telepathy must have conveyed enough of an advantage that the trait did not die out."* *"...you would make a very unpleasant meld partner. My sexuality is inextricably tied to my telepathy-- I am better off with my own imagination than with a man I can't meld with."* *"...a Vulcan male will endure... a mating cycle. That is... he becomes incapable of thinking about much else. And if he does not, during this time, mate with someone and establish a telepathic bond with them, he will die."* *"...It arouses the _plak tow_, the blood fever. Only a combination of sex and a mind meld would save my life then, and I cannot meld with Ferengi. But before I died I would be consumed with madness-- violence as much as lust..."* It wasn't about sex. Not only sex, anyway. She needed sex *and* a mindmeld. The door to his room opened, and Q stumbled in, completely ignoring the innuendo of the Ferengi guards behind him and their snickering. It made sense, it made horrifying sense, because Ferengi were psi-null. Power like the Q had could read their minds, of course, but ordinary mortal telepaths couldn't make any kind of connection; their four-lobed brains set up interference patterns of psi and antipsi such that no mortal telepath could read them. If T'Laren needed sex *and* a telepathic connection, it wouldn't matter how many Ferengi men had intercourse with her. The cycle wouldn't complete, and it would never end. The horror of it was stunning. Yalit didn't know, none of the Ferengi knew, but what they thought was a hilarious practical joke, and an opportunity to gang-rape T'Laren while making her react as if she found it pleasurable, would kill her. She'd been right, and Yalit was wrong. Twenty Ferengi goons could gang-rape her and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. She'd still need, and need, until she died of it. And it made sense why T'Laren had been begging for him, why she had made him lock her away. Maybe her throwing him across the room hadn't been an act of violence like he'd thought; maybe she'd been trying to get him out of range so she wouldn't force a mindmeld on him. Because if what he suspected was true... and he was becoming more and more sure that it was... he was the only other being on this ship with a psionic presence of any kind. He was the *only* person here who could give T'Laren what she needed to live. If only it had been anything else. He sat down at the table and slumped, supporting his head by resting his forehead on his open palm, his elbow on the table and his arm pointing up to brace his head. In the closet, T'Laren had been crying weakly when he came in, and now she was begging again, her voice even more hoarse and broken than it had sounded earlier this morning. He could even have borne the threat of physical violence more easily than this. If he'd thought T'Laren would break his ribs or his limbs or make him engage in sex acts so rough he ended up bruised and battered, that would have been better than this. Frankly, if he'd thought T'Laren would grow a penis and need to rape him anally like Yalit had threatened to have her goons do to him, it would have been better than this. A Q had no particular attachment to genital integrity as opposed to any other body part; pain was pain, and while pain caused by someone else using you for sexual pleasure was certainly horribly humiliating, so was pain caused by someone else beating and kicking and stomping on you, or pain caused by someone pinning you down and flogging you with a neurowhip. Being made helpless, suffering pain at someone else's hands and being made to beg and scream... that was about equally horrible whether they did it by stripping you naked and forcing you into sex acts or by cutting your skin with bone knives while you were tied down and gagged or by covering you with stinging insects. Q had perhaps picked up more of the unique emotional charge mortals applied to sexuality from having been among humans so long than he'd have felt when he first became human, and certainly being sexually molested held its own horrors and humiliations for him after what he'd learned from the incident with Amy Frasier, but he didn't have thousands of years of being afraid of physical rape. Mental rape, the mind and self being invaded against one's will, *was* what the Q considered rape, with anything anyone could do to his body only the palest shadow. And if he was right, then T'Laren didn't just need to use his body. She needed to invade his mind. No. He couldn't do it. Maybe if he hadn't been attacked by tr'Sahlassiu *and* if T'Laren was obviously in her right mind, in control of herself, able to take things slow and pull back if he needed her to and leave the parts of him he really wanted to keep private alone. Maybe he'd have been able to bring himself to do it then. But the point was moot. T'Laren was totally out of control, and wanted to merge that raging force of id, that consuming madness, with *his* mind, take his rationality from him and infect him with her diseased mind. What tr'Sahlassiu had done to him had been terrible, but by Q standards what T'Laren wanted from him, needed from him, was actually *worse.* In the Continuum most pleasures, and most intimacies, were shared by joining energies, touching minds together in whatever level of depth and intensity the two or more Q engaged in it should desire. The deepest, most profound intimacy was the total joining of two minds. It was also the deepest, most profound horror, because children devoured each other that way and it ran the terrible risk of destroying the two separate entities involved, creating a new being with the strongest traits of both. Generally speaking, any Q who could possibly find such a fate attractive met it very young, but most Q did, sooner or later, engage in the total joining with another Q as an act of love and trust, both parties relying on their own and the other's strength of will and ego to be able to disengage again. A life history of millions of years meant that there were very few things that the Q were capable of that Q himself had not engaged in at least a few times, but he had always been very reluctant to engage in a deep joining. He'd done it occasionally, of course, but not in a very, very long time... in fact, now that he thought about it, he realized that while he'd always been reluctant to engage in deep joining, he'd completely stopped after five older Q had jumped him, forced a joining on him with all of them, and used his mental defenselessness after they'd invaded him completely to try to rewrite him into someone else, and he'd felt what they felt and known what they'd known and seen every operation they planned to perform, every change they were sketching out in pencil on his consciousness before they committed it to ink, and they had penetrated and controlled him so completely that he couldn't even scream. Funny, that. After Queria had saved him, and his assailants had been banished from the Continuum, he'd thought the whole thing was over with and he would never be bothered by it again. It had never occurred to him while he was still a Q, and in fact it probably couldn't possibly have occurred to him before he did therapy with T'Laren, that there was in fact a direct causal connection between the attack he'd suffered fifty thousand years ago and the utter shallowness of his romantic/friendly relations with other Q for his entire adult life. In the Continuum, Q had been an expert on giving other Q pleasure, making them lose control, yield all their defenses *to* him, while giving very, very little ground himself. He'd been very good at losing control in a completely controlled way, channeling all the pleasure they could make *him* feel back at them in a feedback loop, letting his surface thoughts be completely swept away by sublime ecstasies while keeping his deeper places private and untouched. He had not been good at all at true intimacy, and in fact one of the reasons he'd learned to be so good at overwhelming other Q with pleasure was that when other Q were utterly lost in pleasure, completely in your power, they couldn't muster up the concentration to try to penetrate *you* more deeply or even complain about the fact that you still had shields up inside. The other Q, not being exactly stupid, knew precisely what he was up to -- though most likely few of them had ever bothered to think about why either; the Q simply did not think in terms of past trauma affecting individuals' behavior in the present, given how untraumatic most of their lives had been. They had just always assumed he had no interest in deep intimacy with them... which, he suspected now, was one of the reasons he was here today. A Q who could only join fully with the entire Continuum at once, and only at the moments when they were entirely the overmind, wasn't nearly as *continuous* as the Q who could freely share most of themselves most of the time with most of the others. He certainly had broken rules, flouted authority and even committed crimes, but if there were any Q who considered him an intimate friend, he'd probably have gotten probation or a less serious exile, with powers. Funny when you put it that way. He'd been condemned to humanity for being too shallow, too focused on pure pleasure, and not loving enough in bed, in human terms. And when tr'Sahlassiu had mindmelded with him, the very *first* thing the Romulan had tried was a merging of minds, just like a Q joining, except with him as the obviously weaker and less powerful target, which made it a lot more like a devouring. Or a lot more like the attack the five older ones had perpetrated on him. And then when Q had fought that off, he'd been able to see in the other's mind that it had been intended to be *exactly* like the attack the five older ones had perpetrated on him... he hadn't thought about that at the time, hadn't articulated *why* this was so familiar and so completely terrifying, but tr'Sahlassiu had wanted to merge minds with him and then use his own position as the telepathically stronger one to rewrite Q's personality and perceptions, make him into a person who would welcome repeated future violations so tr'Sahlassiu could steal every last drop of his vast knowledge. Q had fought back against that, kept his ego separate from tr'Sahlassiu's and forced the man to go after his knowledge directly... but that had been fighting back against a combat telepath who meant him nothing but harm. T'Laren wasn't after his memories or his knowledge. If she needed a mindmeld, what she needed was *him*. His self, his emotions, his consciousness. He wouldn't be able to keep his ego separate. Giving himself over to her would involve being intimate with another mind in a way he hadn't surrendered to since he'd been forced to by the Q who had attacked him. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn't something he'd *ever* liked doing. Oh, it wasn't that it hadn't been enjoyable; the Q were evolved to like joining with each other for similar reasons to why humans had evolved to like sex. The Continuum overmind wasn't possible without the Q naturally seeking connections with one another. But it had been terrifying *before* it had been used as a weapon against him. It was out of the question. There was absolutely no way he could do this. He'd rather be beaten to death. He might have contemplated surrendering to *that* if that was the issue; he wasn't overly attached to his life, especially not a life where he would most likely be sold into slavery or to enemies who wanted to execute him. But no matter what the Ferengi did to him or who they sold him to, his mind would remain his own, untouched. That wouldn't be true if he went to T'Laren. His breathing grew ragged. If he didn't go to her, she would die. Horribly. After being gang-raped, since he had no power to stop the Ferengi from carrying through Yalit's threat if he didn't provide her with the entertainment she was obviously expecting, and T'Laren would be in no shape to defend herself. He couldn't let that happen. But there didn't seem to be any way to avoid it aside from the thing he couldn't bring himself to do. He couldn't give T'Laren a mercy killing -- Yalit wasn't going to be stupid enough to take any of his advice on transwarp until the situation with T'Laren was resolved. Which, according to T'Laren, it would be in three days. Why hadn't he seen it? She hadn't said "I'll be better in three days", she'd said "I'll be no threat to you in three days." Meaning she'd be dead. And there was no way he could get the ship blown up before then. There was no way he could physically put her out of her misery -- if he went anywhere near her she'd take what she needed from him. He couldn't heal her, he couldn't cure her, he couldn't singlehandedly overpower the Ferengi and get her medical help. He probably couldn't get the Ferengi to find some random human man who wouldn't have a problem with mindmelds to help her out. There was no other way. But he couldn't. He couldn't possibly. If it had been a Q who needed him to join with her or die, he still couldn't have done it. And then he stopped breathing, his throat closing and his lungs paralyzed as if he'd been kicked in the solar plexus, as he realized... he *hadn't* done it when a Q he'd loved had needed him to, to save her life. He had shut Azi out for how many millennia? And worse, he hadn't let her get what she needed from other Q either, driving off anyone *else* willing to join fully with her, because he obviously knew better what was good for her than she did and he couldn't imagine that she knew what she was doing and could handle the danger and he couldn't face his dearest friend, practically the only being in the universe who he actually felt protective toward, willingly subjecting herself to *his* greatest fear. He had had millions of opportunities to give her what she'd needed, or let her get it somewhere else, and he'd been too afraid, and he'd convinced himself he was doing it for her sake and he knew best, and he'd driven her to insanity. Of course she had attacked him. He had thought that at least he'd been justified in the things he'd done that she'd tried to kill him for, that his only crime in the whole sordid mess had been what *he'd* done when *she* had driven him to insanity with her attack and its aftermath, but no. No. It was his fault from the beginning. Q forced himself to start breathing normally again. He was not going to break down and cry in front of the Ferengi's monitors. It had been easy enough to offer himself up to the Calamarain -- he'd known that if he hadn't done it he would eventually die anyway, and drag the *Enterprise* and possibly the entire world of Bre'el IV down with him. It had been easy enough to give himself up to the Borg -- he had known for an absolute certainty that the Continuum would never let him be assimilated, so even if the Borg had disabled whatever suicide capsule he used to kill himself, the Continuum would have made sure he died first. If they had been less concerned than he was about his knowledge being used to empower the Borg over the other species in the galaxy, they would at least be worried about his knowledge of the weaknesses of the *Q* falling into Borg hands. So the only thing he'd risked was his mortal life, which would have ended anyway if the Borg had destroyed Starbase 56. All the times he'd risked his life or contemplated self-sacrifice, it had always been only his life at stake, and after becoming mortal it wasn't as if his life was really all that valuable anymore, and often the situation was one that would kill him anyway if no one else stepped in to save the day. Yielding his mind... was different. It was a sacrifice he *could* have made when he was still Q, when the life and sanity of the Q he most loved had been on the line, and despite his countless opportunities he never had. It wasn't inevitable, unlike death as a mortal. It would make him vulnerable to the thing he most feared, the thing he had feared for millennia, the thing he'd feared even when he'd been immortal, omnipotent, virtually invulnerable and fearless. And if he didn't do it, the only person who had showed him any genuine compassion since Data had saved his life on the *Enterprise* would die a hideous, degrading death. There really wasn't a choice here, was there? Almost mechanically, barely aware of the motions he was making, he got up and walked to the closet door. His heart was pounding so hard he felt as if it might break his ribs open and fall out, and his vision had tunneled and he wasn't exactly looking at anything anyway, finding his way to the door more by muscle memory than by paying any attention to the world outside the screaming terror in his head. His stomach had clenched so hard he might have thrown up if he weren't almost completely detached from his own body and its sensations, like he was still a Q and the mortal avatar was a puppet he was manipulating from a distance rather than actually *him* now. This was like the kind of nightmare where part of your mind knew exactly what horror awaited you if you did that thing, and you were screaming at yourself not to do it, but the part of your mind that controlled your dream-body was completely oblivious and just went ahead and did whatever it was, Q thought. Except that the part of his mind screaming was being overridden by the part of him that had a conscience. How strange. Before he became mortal, if anyone had actually *asked* him if he'd had a conscience he would have laughed. Who knew? He pressed the button and the door opened. T'Laren threw herself on him, knocking him to the floor, before he really had a chance to even see her. Q screamed -- he'd been braced for *something*, but having someone jump on him and bear him down to the floor was still shocking. She was completely naked, writhing against him, and her hands reached up for his face, her fingers reaching to his temples and forehead. He tried to bat her hand away, but it did him no good; as he pushed her hands away from his face she lowered her head to his and kissed him, and he was too startled to try to twist away. Her lips on his sent tingles through his body like random, tiny shocks of pleasure all throughout him, and then he felt the same cold fire burning that he'd felt when tr'Sahlassiu was attacking him. The sensation wasn't localized anywhere in his skin; it seemed to be coming from within his mind, like the sensation of swooning or becoming dizzy did. When tr'Sahlassiu had attacked him his body had fallen away, and he'd lost any sense of it. That didn't happen now. As he felt T'Laren's presence pressing against his mind, he became hyper-aware of his own body *and* of hers, her skin fiery against his, every place that her body pressed against his burning with both real and metaphorical heat. T'Laren's skin had always been warmer than his own, as if she had a fever, but now she was so hot touching her would be uncomfortable if she weren't pure sex. This was like the disturbing dreams he'd had aboard *Yamato*, where he was essentially paralyzed, pinned down and helpless and T'Laren was touching him and all he could feel was pleasure, drowning him. Her hands, instead of trying to touch his face anymore, were tugging at his shirt, hard enough that the collar was digging into the skin at the back of his neck and it might have hurt if there weren't so many other sensations pouring through him. Q moaned, involuntarily pressing his hips up against her, and she pushed into his mind, a swirling almost mindless morass of arousal and need, and he felt his sense of himself slipping under the assault and he screamed again, trying to struggle, trying to shield himself against her, but the needs of his body flooding through him made it impossible to concentrate and he couldn't pull up his shields and he was losing himself and the old terror surged, memory of other Q inside him taking his self away and making him someone else. The fear took him completely, and he screamed and screamed, unable to stop the invasion of his mind in any way and equally unable to stop being terrified of it. And then T'Laren's presence was gone, along with the hyperawareness of both their bodies' surfaces that had completely confused his proprioception and made him lose his sense of which body was his. He was himself, alone, lying on the floor and T'Laren had backed away, was kneeling on the floor half a meter away from him, crawling backward. He sat up. She was crying, silently, her face twisted with pain, her cheeks wet and her eyes spilling over with tears. "I... will not... harm you," she whispered, the words slow and hoarse and sounding as if she was dragging them up and out against some kind of impossible gravity. "Lock... me... away..." Q stood up. He was shaking, but it wasn't all fear. The sensations she'd awakened in his body hadn't simply gone away when her mind had; he was so hard it hurt and his skin so sensitive, so needy, that his own shirt brushing against his nipples and stomach made him want to breathe heavily with reaction. He looked down at T'Laren, and his heart turned over in his chest. Having shared her mind for just the briefest of moments made him want sex more badly than he'd ever had in his human life, including when Amy Frasier had been actively fondling his genitals and hadn't yet told him that he was just a particularly exotic notch on her belt. He *knew* how hard it was for her to back away, to stay away from him; he knew how desperately she wanted, needed him. But she had pulled herself away because he'd been terrified and she didn't want him to suffer. She was *dying*, but she still refused to simply take what she needed at his expense. If it weren't for the fact that he was fairly certain he was incapable of the emotion, at least as humans understood it, he might have thought he loved her then. He swallowed. "No, T'Laren. I'm not going to lock you up." A sob broke in her voice. "*Please*... lock me... away... I... I will *not*... I will not *harm* you.." "It's... it's all right, T'Laren. I know what I'm doing." His mouth was completely dry. Q swallowed again, and still couldn't get rid of the hoarseness in his own voice. "You... you can have what you need. It's all right. I'm... willing." For moderate and completely confused values of willing, anyway. His body wanted her more than he'd imagined possible, and he was still terrified of losing his self in her, and he was overwhelmed with fierce and tender protectiveness toward her, that she could actually overcome her need long enough to think of his fears. Q backed away from her toward the door of the bedroom, and then at the look of utter confusion on her face, he undid the fasteners on his shirt and pulled it off. Her eyes fixed on him hungrily, desperately, and the look was as terrifying and arousing as everything else that had happened since he opened the door. In his entire human existence, no one had looked at him like that; no one had wanted him like that, even when he'd been attractive from much more recent godhood. The back of his neck actually hurt quite a bit where her yanking on his shirt had dug into his skin, and the cool air of the room on his hungry skin made him shudder. "I'd rather we did this in a bed than on the floor, don't you think? I mean, traditionally, that *is* where such things are done, aren't they?" She got to her feet slowly, looking at him as if he were a mirage she expected to pop any minute. "You... you fear this," she whispered. "Yeah." Damn this dry mouth anyway. He wondered if he had a chance to get a glass of water before she jumped him again. "Yeah, I... I'm not particularly fond of mind melds, you know that. But Yalit explained what's going on. You need me, or you'll die. So..." he shrugged, trying to pretend to be nonchalant and well aware he was failing utterly, "here I am. Come and get some." She followed him, her eyes fixed on him as if she were completely mesmerized by him. He didn't dare turn around, afraid she'd lunge at him once his back was turned. Q backed into the bedroom -- where there probably were still monitors, he knew, but at least he could lock the door so they couldn't *physically* get in -- and up to the bed. Even with her hair wild and mussed like the worst bed head ever and her eyes bright green and bloodshot, T'Laren was beautiful. Aesthetically, she was form and grace and power, the energy coiled in her graceful movements reminiscent of a giant cat, padding toward its prey. In senses rather more visceral than pure aesthetic appreciation, her tan skin was sheened with sweat, glistening, and her breasts were firm and round and perfect, brown nipples hard against greenish-brown areolae, and her legs and hips brought images to his mind that any other day he would have declared disgusting and castigated himself for even being able to think of, but right now it was his body that wanted to do the right thing and his mind that was cringing away in terror, and if he could shut his own terror out for a moment by thinking of what he hoped her body might feel like against his, he'd get through this a lot easier. His pants were painfully tight. Q undid the somewhat complicated fastenings that held them on, and let them drop to the floor. To be honest his underwear was painfully tight too, but he simply couldn't bring himself to just take them off in front of another person, particularly not when he was so very hard, although at the moment it wasn't exactly as if T'Laren would laugh at him for having an erection. She came toward him. Q sat down on the bed. "It's all right, T'Laren," he said again. "I'll do whatever you need me to do. I'm not going to let you die." "I... don't want... to hurt... you..." "I'd rather you didn't hurt me either, but you know, we can't always get what we want. You need this, you'll die without it... fine, I'm offering." And then she was reaching to touch his face again. Q trembled, but didn't try to push her away. This time he was better prepared. He'd made the decision to offer himself up before but he hadn't known what it would feel like, and she'd moved so fast, so brutally, he hadn't had time to emotionally accept what intellectually he'd already decided to endure. He was ready now, or as ready as anyone ever got to face the thing they were most afraid of in the entire universe. The cold fire washed over him again, and with it, his sense of her mind and her body and her overwhelming need, making him want as badly as she did. He pulled her down onto the bed next to him, and her mind poured into him, entering him and mingling with his mind, and the physical desire and the power of her mind swamped his consciousness again. He was going down, losing himself, and there was utter terror and there was overwhelming desire and then he was not.