A/N: I have three excuses for why this must exist:
1-I need to get back into the swing of writing.
2-The YJ fandom is severely lacking in fics that deal with the villains of the series. I find this very odd, and feel the need to rectify it somehow.
3-Making up alien races is too much fun. This is only about a 1/3 of the stuff I made up for the Reach (would have added the rest but it was too forced to do so.

However, I do encourage everyone to please smack me upside the head if I begin dabbling in new fandoms again XP Thank you for your charity.

The Identity Plague

Among the Reach, there were no names. There was title and there was rank, but they as a species had long 'outgrown' the need for individual identification. You were what you did, there was nothing more to it. He was a Warrior, so that was how he was addressed. He had achieved a heightened sense rank, so his scarab's color coding had been reprogrammed from white, to various shades of grey, and finally to the near black he had worn until very recently when said scarab was destroyed gloriously in battle. He had always been defined by what he was, what he did, and how successful he was at his given role.

But now that stood to be taken away from him. He sat quietly in a small cell, awaiting trial for the atrocities his unit had committed on Earth. It had taken much concentration, but he'd finally managed to tune out the hysteric mutterings of the Ambassador in the next cell over. Knowing the Reach as he did, the larger empire would scapegoat their assembly. They would wash their hands of any involvement on Earth, claiming the Ambassador had acted on his own accord in a manner that didn't match their greater, benevolent nature. No one would believe them of course, but it was much simpler (and more profitable) to take justice out on a select few than to try and go after an entire system that spanned so much of the galaxy.

He and the others would be completely abandoned by the cause they fought for. In short, they would lose what little identity they had.

With this trial, all rank would be stripped, and his title would not be far behind at any rate. His accomplishments would be amounted to nothing, his very worth dropped lower than dust. Becoming a creature that no longer served a purpose, no longer had a calling, and was incapable of regaining any of what he had lost. He would be nothing, for the only goal a Reach denizen could strive for was first to promote and expand the Reach's will throughout the universe and second to rise in rank until one day they were powerful enough to call the shots.

This bothered the Ambassador terribly. It probably bothered the head Scientist to a lesser extent and down from there as each Soldier or Scientist or otherwise had less and less to lose. Everything they had worked for would be all for naught, and they would have nothing left.

The Warrior, however…was strangely—even alarmingly—unbothered.

He supposed he should be. Not so long ago if he had come to this position, he would likely be in a mindless rage at the thought of losing everything he had tried so hard to build for himself. But something had changed during his time on Earth. There was an alteration to his psych that he could not explain.

It started with the human meat's curious habit of thinking that everything must have a name. If they could get away with it (and more often than not, they did) then things would have multiple names. If someone or something did not offer an already present name, the younger meat in particular would string together descriptive terms and apply that as the unknown's new label with or without consent of the branded individual.

The Warrior had thus received the ever-so-creative tag of "Black Beetle".

At first it had been a point of grim amusement. But the more he crossed paths with the humans, the more the name stuck. Eventually even the Ambassador took to calling him by the alien identification, though mostly as a means of demeaning the larger male. And the more the label of "Black Beetle" was attributed to him, the more he grew accustomed to it, and ultimately adopted it as a second title, even if said title carried nothing in the eyes of his fellow Reach citizens.

So while he now stood upon the cliff of ultimate insignificance, he still had but a kernel left of something he could call his own. Certainly it was trivial. More-so, it was something that would be disregarded and scoffed at by others of his kind. But it was his. An identity apart from the Reach, apart from his accomplishments, apart from all he had worked to achieve and now was about to leave. Black Beetle was a separate entity from all of that. He was someone that was feared by mankind because he was a threat, not because the human meat had any understanding of what he had gone through to be part of the envoy that came to their planet. It was a title and associated merit that the Reach could not take from him.

And so, Black Beetle sat calmly in his cell. On the other side of the wall, the Ambassador's mutterings were turning to frantic shouts, as his world crashed down around him on all sides. He would be tranquilized shortly, before he hurt himself. Elsewhere there were sobs and shouts as their unit's temporary holding area dissolved into hysteria.

A weary patrolling guard stalked by his cell, barely glancing at the languid male within, and then backtracking to do a double-take. The two stared at each other for a moment, and the guard nearly dropped his gun when the prisoner smirked.

"Are you alright in there?" the confused guard asked, wondering if perhaps the former Warrior had cracked completely.

"Never better," Black Beetle shrugged, tucking his hands behind his head.

The guard stared a moment longer, hand hovering over his com. device to call for medical personal before he was distracted by someone else throwing themselves into the force-field wall between them and freedom.

Black Beetle continued to smirk as he leaned back languidly into his bunk.

The state of the Reach didn't matter anymore. His ties to them were severed with this upcoming trial. But unlike so many before him and many more that were sure to follow, Black Beetle would have something left to him once all was said and done. He had discovered what it meant to be an individual. A sense of self that the Reach could never tarnish and that the courts could not steal.

It was not a perfect identity, by any means. If he ever regained freedom, there were many missing pieces he would have to craft for himself. But it was a start, like a virus spreading through his system. An infection that was steadily rewriting the way he viewed himself. A disease for which there was no cure.

The beginnings of a plague that changed everything.