Love Reign O'er Me

Fanfiction
Title:	Love Reign O'er Me
Author(s):	Ruth Gifford & Varoneeka
Date(s):	1999
Length:
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Star Trek: TNG
Relationship(s):
External Links:	online here
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Love Reign O'er Me is a Star Trek: TNG Picard/Q story by Ruth Gifford & Varoneeka.

Author's Summary

"Picard finds himself alone in a desert oasis that seems almost too good to be true. When Q shows up professing to have lost his memories and powers, can Picard trust him, or is this all another Q game?"

Reactions and Reviews

Ruth Gifford and Varoneeka. NC-17. Avoids the worst excesses of both writers, neither too soppy nor too obsessed with power games. After Q kidnaps Picard to a world he created, the rest of the Continuum gang up on him and dump him, with complete amnesia, on the same world. Q is OOC, but deliberately so; the authors are going with the apparent assumption that Q is as big an ass as he is after millions of years in the Continuum, and perhaps at the dawn of time he was much more open and a nicer person.

There are remarkably few P/Q fics out there that I actually find believable. Although I'm a fan of the pairing, I'm rather astonished by the amount of outright bad characterization out there in the fic. Part of the problem is that Q, as one person put it, would rather die than admit to any weakness, including being in love with a mere human, and Picard keeps his defenses up on full around Q. This story manages to neatly solve both problems by giving Q amnesia and dumping the two of them in a deserted oasis Q created (it's not a spoiler to say this is a machination of the Continuum's, as it's pretty obvious from the start.) Without aeons of memory of being a defensive, arrogant, prickly asshole, Q has a completely different personality (it's never made explicit, but I imagine the authors are speculating that this was what Q was like when he first came into existence, when he still had a sense of wonder about the universe and a desire to learn, and before he and his people became completely jaded.) Picard finds it hard to believe this isn't all an elaborate prank of Q's, but the slow growth of his belief that it's not, and his realization of his feelings for Q, is drawn out over enough time that it is believable.

a long long epic au with a desert oasis, a loss of identity, some hot sex and lovely wallowy angst, and some mischaracterization that you might be able to ignore in favor of the candy.