Q's Midlife Crisis

Chapter 1

Picard was too used to Q popping in whenever he felt like it. He knew he was too used to it when a body flashed into existence on his desk, and he didn't even bother looking up from his padd when he snapped, "Q, get off my desk!"

"Greetings, Mon Capitán!" Q crowed, flashing over to a corner of the room. He waited very patiently — for two entire seconds — for the captain to look over at him. When Picard continued to work and ignored him instead, he piped up with, "My, aren't we busy today?"

"I am, actually," Picard confirmed. "Whatever it is you want to bother me with will just have to wait for another day. Or preferably never," he added under his breath.

"It will only take a second, my dear Jean-Luc," Q promised.

"Later, Q. I don't have time for you right now," Picard grumbled, continuing to read over his Padd and occasionally push something on it.

Frowning, Q walked back over to the desk and leaned over, trying to see what held the captain's attention. "What is so important that you can ignore an omnipotent being demanding your attention?"

"I would think that an 'omnipotent being' could figure that out for himself," Picard huffed.

"Well, yes," Q agreed, "but where would be the fun in that? So, come on, what's stolen all your focus away from me?"

"I'd rather give my focus to anything but you," Picard told him absently, still giving most of his mind to the padd in his hand, "but right now I have an unexplained malfunction in the warp core to investigate, so if you could please come back another time–"

"Don't you have minions for things like that?" Q interrupted, rocking back on his heels.

"They aren't minions, Q," Picard sighed, not for the first time, as he finally looked up. He blinked a few times, as if double checking that his eyes weren't playing a trick on him, before addressing Q once more "...why are you blonde?"

Q grinned, clapping his hands. "Do you like it?"

"I... It's fine." Picard shrugged.

"'Fine'?" Q repeated, scowling, "Careful, wouldn't want to lay it on too thickly, now."

"You look just like you did before, but blonde," Picard told him. Firmly, he added, "I don't understand why you felt the need to interrupt my very important work just to show me that you changed your hair."

"It's important!" Q whined, pouting. "You're supposed to tell the people in your life when you make a big change."

"'A big change'?" Picard repeated incredulously, his padd fully forgotten. "Q, you can take any shape you want. This isn't even your true form. As far as I can tell, this is equivalent to you deciding to wear a different shirt. Now, unless you have a reason why I should care, I'd like it if you would leave."

"You're so mean," Q told him playfully, smirking briefly. He threw his arms in the air, suddenly annoyed, and said imploringly, "Can't you see that I'm going through something?"

"'Going through someth'– going through what?" Picard asked, sighing. He wished Q would just cut to the chase with whatever whim had brought him once more to the Enterprise.

"A midlife crisis!" Q answered, entirely too cheerfully.

"A mid life crisis," Picard repeated flatly. He gave the immortal in front of him a glare that quite plainly said 'I am in no mood to deal with your nonsense'.

Q, unbothered by the glare, explained, "I heard about them a few centuries ago — well, technically I've always known about them and simultaneously I have yet to hear about them, but I doubt your primitive monkey brain could–"

"Q," Picard interrupted, his tone exasperated.

"Anyways, I heard about them," Q continued, "and I realized that since I don't have a natural lifespan, I don't have a middle of my life, and therefore I won't experience a midlife crisis. And this, of course, simply wouldn't do; as a member of the almighty Q Continuum, there shouldn't be anything outside of my experience."

"So you're playacting a midlife crisis," Picard concluded.

"Exactly!" Q nodded, pointing at the captain as if he'd stumbled upon some great truth.

Silence passed for a moment. Picard wracked his brain for what he could remember about the archaic concept of a midlife crisis.

"If you try to paint my ship red," Picard began with a growl.

Q quickly hid the paintbrush and can, which hadn't been in his hands a second ago, behind his back. "Mon Capitán, I would never!" he lied.

"I'm sorry to hear about what you're going through," Picard said truthfully, for he was terribly sorry that he had to hear about it, "but I really am very busy, so you'll have to go play with someone else."

"Janeway got my mate to block me from her ship and Sisko's too easy to rile up," Q answered immediately, unconsciously rubbing at his chin where he'd once been punched.

(Ever since that incident where he'd been turned human, he'd developed little habits like that, acting as if his body could actually feel things. Q found it simultaneously very fascinating and incredibly annoying.)

"There are trillions upon trillions of people in this galaxy," Picard argued, "surely there's someone else you could visit?"

"Vash isn't speaking to me right now." Q shrugged.

"Q!" Picard snapped, his voice whinier than he would've liked.

"Oh alright, alright," Q said irately, crossing his arms, "I'm going."

And with a flash of light, he was gone.

Picard sighed, leaning back in his chair and looking back to his padd. Everything was quiet and peaceful again, or as peaceful as it ever got in the life of Starfleet's flagship's captain.

A moment later, Picard's comm beeped. "La Forge to Captain Picard."

"Picard here," Picard answered, tapping his badge, "what is it, Geordi?"

"There's an update with the warp core, Sir," Geordi informed him, a strange note in his voice.

"What's wrong with it now?" Picard asked, fearing the worst.

"It's, um..." Geordi began, "well, it's gone, Sir."

"Gone?" Picard repeated, sitting up straighter in his chair. "What do you mean, it's gone?"

"I mean, one second it was there, and the next second it wasn't," Geordi informed him simply, a shrug audible in his voice.

"What happened to it?" Picard demanded sharply.

"I don't know!" Geordi sounded even more frustrated than he did, and Picard reminded himself to calm down. Whatever this was, it wasn't his Chief Engineer's fault. "That's not all, though, Sir."

"There's more?" Picard pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed at it, feeling beyond tired. He was so over this entire week.

"There's a chicken coop where the warp core used to be," Geordi said in a way that suggested he knew exactly how ridiculous that sentence was and wanted to get it out as quickly as possible.

"...excuse me?" Picard blinked, hoping he had heard that wrong.

"There's a chicken coop in the engine room, Sir," Geordi confirmed, "And the chickens don't seem to be any happier that they're here than we are."

In the background of the comm link, Picard could faintly hear a loud crash, Data's voice yelling something, and the sound of angry clucking.

"Q!" Picard shouted, not caring that the line was still open.

With a giggle, Q flashed back onto his desk, this time wearing a truly garish suit and overly decorated sunglasses. "Look on the bright side, Jean-Luc," he told the captain, "without a warp core to fix, you'll have time to spend with me!"

Picard buried his head in his hands. Over the sound of flapping feathers from the increasingly irate chickens and the cackling of an increasingly amused overgrown manchild of an immortal, he wondered if he was too old to have a midlife crisis of his own.