What Lies Within (Star Trek: TNG story)

Star Trek TNG Fanfiction
Title:	What Lies Within
Author(s):	JM
Date(s):
Length:
Genre:
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Next Generation
External Links:	was at Geocities (Wayback Machine)
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

What Lies Within is Star Trek: TNG Picard/Guinan, P/Q implied story by JM.

Reactions and Reviews

On the show, Guinan was a deliberately enigmatic character, and as a result had little character development. Most of the time, she was the Nurturer as Crone, the wise, grandmotherly woman who's always kind, always gentle, always listening to others' troubles and dispensing profound advice. We almost never got to see the *human* side of her, her flaws and her passions. All we know is that there is one person she loves, Jean-Luc Picard, who is "closer than friends, closer than family" to her. And one person she hates, Q. JM takes this and weaves a triangle of passion, hatred and betrayal, which shows us a very plausible dark side to this character without falling into the usual trap fanwriters make when they decide to give a "nice" character a dark side. Which is to say, there's no one eeevil here, no one twirling mustachios... just people who love, and people who hate, and people who use the ones they love against people they hate.