Ah, Picard/Q. A ship that is so very, very, very canon, so very much in its own way the core of Star Trek: TNG. A relationship between a fairly ordinary human Starship Captain and an immortal pandimensional near-omnipotent trickster, in which the starship captain is somehow always the one with all the power anyway.

It's very very good.

It was so self-evidently good that they tried very hard to set Q up first with Picard's ex and then with a female starship captain instead, but it of course did not work, because he is also pretty clearly an immortal pandimensional near-omnipotent trickster who believes in the idea of One True Nemesis and he has definitely already picked his, and it's Picard.

It's one of those pairings that hit its peak on the 90s internet, not only pre-AO3 but also pre-LJ and pre-FF.net and to some extent pre-WWW. A lot of the older fic has gathered back to AO3 anyway, which is really amazing, but there's always the haunting feeling that there's a lot of fic I can't see. In particular I have this distinct memory of having had my mind blown by one particular Picard/Q fic, at least fifteen years ago, but all I can remember is that it was set after "All Good Things...", it wasn't particularly trope-y, it ended with Picard and Q being together if not forever than an implied very, very long time, I am pretty sure I read it as a series of ASCII files, it was via a recs page, and it was long, in the hundreds of thousands of kb if not words. (Remember when you knew how long a fic was by its filesize and not its wordcount? There's still some Picard/Q sites out there like that.) Anyway the odds I will find it based on that when I haven't yet are very, very low, so here are some other good Picard/Q stories!

• A Kiss Before The War (6795 words) by Alara J Rogers
  Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Jean-Luc Picard/Q
  Additional Tags: Romance, Community: lgbtfest
  
  Humanity reaches the end of Q's tests - they passed! - and now that they're on more equal ground, Picard realizes he finally has a chance to get some truths from Q.



• A Touch of Eternity (20345 words) by Anonymous_Ostrich
  Chapters: 5/5
  Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Jean-Luc Picard/Q
  Characters: Jean-Luc Picard, Q (Star Trek), Data (Star Trek), Beverly Crusher, William Riker, Deanna Troi
  Additional Tags: Developing Relationship, In Character, Q being vague and lovesick, picard being done with him as always, time-travelling first dates, fluff and eventual smut, romantic schmoop
  Series: Part 1 of See You Out There - Picard/Q series
  
  It starts with a riddle, and ends with a date.



• Love Reign O'er Me (63045 words) by internetname
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Star Trek: The Next Generation
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Jean-Luc Picard/Q
  
  Picard should probably be more taken aback at being suddenly and mysteriously transported to a paradisical desert oasis, but honestly, it's the sort of thing you get used to after awhile when there is a Q in your life.