Tittle: The Fifth Member
by Tiffany May Harrsch
Summary: This series is my attempt to get into the head of the oft used but seldom seen fifth member of SG1.
Spoilers: Various episodes up to and including Firing Line.
Set: Season 1 (so far)
Rating: PG1 3
Spoilers: Goa'uld back history. Bloodlines, Bane
Status: Each story is complete. I haven't seen all the episodes, in fact I haven't seen much beyond S3 or 4, so there is a good possibility the series may be a wip.
Credits: Thank you to Ivanova for betaing for me.
Thus far I four part/stories. You'll find them as a separate chapters here on Fanfiction.net.
The Unwilling Symbiote (Date: 27 June 2000), Loneliness (Date: 27 June 2000), Naming (Date: 31 July 2000), Bane (Date: 31 July 2000)
Disclaimer: © 2000 The characters mentioned in this story are the property of Showtime and Gekko Film Corp. The Stargate, SG-I, the Goa'uld and all other characters who have appeared in the series STARGATE SG-1 together with the names, titles and backstory are the sole copyright property of MGM-UA Worldwide Television, Gekko Film Corp, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions and Stargate SG-I Prod. Ltd. Partnership. This fanfic is not intended as an infringement upon those rights and solely meant for entertainment. All other characters, the story idea and the story itself are the sole property of the author.
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The Fifth Member:
Loneliness:
For the first time in my life, I know loneliness. Since my kidnapping, I have been alone physically, mentally, and emotionally. The company of my siblings and cousins had been taken from me the moment I was deposited into this living cave. Even if what I fear they did to my siblings had not happened, I still would never again know their touch or hear their voices. Now I need this body, the same way the host needs me. If I leave, or if I can find a way to refuse to heal, we both die. It is that simple.
At first I blamed my host for putting me into this situation. I was certain the host had ordered it's slaves to abduct me so that it could live. I know the kidnappers were the cause of the thunder and crackle that haunt my dreams. I had thought they were retaliating against their master by harming my siblings.
It did not take long to realize I was wrong. As soon as the need for revenge cleared my mind enough to focus, I started to pay attention to the world outside. I listened to the voices with great care, hoping to learn the alien speech. I needed information to fulfill my one goal in life. Something was not quite right with what I heard. The ones who spoke in the presence of my host did not do so with the shades of fear, awe, loathing, or reverence one would expect slaves to speak in. Instead, I heard conversational tones, curiosity, demands, anger, pain and even humor from those outside.
The implications came as a great shock to me. My host is not master over them. They are not slaves, not underlings, not even servants. Everything in their tones indicate that they are, at the very least, equals to my host. Occasionally, my host speaks as if to a superior. It is the comradeship my host shares with the three it most associates with that concern me. They are it's friends.
While I had it in my head that they were slaves, it did not occur to me to hate my kidnappers and the murderers of my siblings. Slaves, after all, are not responsible for their actions, their masters are. However, if my host does not have slaves, then it must have been it's friends who have caused me such grief. Though I have not yet seen any of their faces, I have no doubt the voices belong to the same friends who put me into this life of solitary confinement.
Friends of my enemy are also my enemy.
Feelings I had only for my host expanded to include the three voices I hear most. It is easier to spread the animosity around, less painful to focus it on only one being. Unfortunately, stuck in here, there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way I can get back at them until I can leave this body. That will not happen until I am grown, and then only when I have become a part of another body.
Or so says the strange, tingly, knowing. It is my only source of information other than my memories and the outside sounds. Sometimes it comes as flickering, disjointed images in my mind. Sometimes a snatch of music or a voice which does not originate outside my host. Sometimes it is merely sourceless knowledge, no imagery or feeling to accompany it. And sometimes, particularly in my dreams, it is like a vivid memory that had never been mine.
I may have had a glimmer of the knowing before, I am not sure. The tingle has a distantly familiar quality to it. It might have been behind some of the heated discussions my siblings and I would all get into. Or maybe even the source of the stranger bits of speculations we would enjoy tantalizing each other with.
If the knowing occurred before I was taken from my siblings, it had never happened with such intensity or frequency. Perhaps it needs long periods of solitude to be activated properly. Or strong emotions like hate or fear. All I know is I can't will it to happen.
Maybe this is what my ancestors had in mind when they were modifying these beings to house their offspring. Perhaps they hoped to activate the knowing before it would normally be ready. Maybe it was a survival trait at a time when we needed the survival traits the most. Certainly they would not have inflicted this on their young except in the name of survival. Would they?
Did my ancestors realize what they were doing when they modified the hosts to carry the young?
I know our numbers were dismally small when these beings, the humans, were discovered. By the time the first of them were successfully altered to become Jaffa, the population of our original hosts had dwindled to near nothingness. The knowing does not say what caused their decline, if it even knows. We had come too close to the point of no return ourselves. A few more decades or a small disaster and nothing would have been able to save us from extinction: not time, not knowledge, not gods, and certainly not foundling technology.
So why, then, did the they make it so hard to heal that which was supposed to protect the young? Why make these… incubators from warriors - the ones who would die in wars and rebellions, taking the children along with them?
Had they thought to weed out the weak? But even the weakest adds to the population, adds to the hope of growing and continuing. Even now we are not so many as the humans, and the human forms that the ancestors have spread across the galaxy.
And why make it so the host can carry just one? The humans reproduce too slowly, in only ones and twos. When our kind mate, a great many are born. I realize that few ever survive past infancy, but would it not increase our chances if there were multiple children per host? At the very least it would make our lives less painful.
What about the others? Don't the adults remember the terrible loneliness of this existence? Of hearing and knowing of the outside world and those who people it without being able to interact? Of not being able to communicate and share with any one for those long years between larva-hood and maturity? Even communication with the Jaffa who carries me is minimal at best.
Maybe the current generation of adults do remember but do not know how to change it. Perhaps they are working on a way of raising the young together as the knowing said it had been done in the beginning. Maybe they just have not found a way to do so after the young reach a certain age, hence the continued need for the hosts. I hope so. Because if they do find a way, I might be rescued from this host and it's hateful friends.
I have the bad feeling, however, that, after being alone for too long, one gets to like being alone. If so, the adults may not remember swimming with their sibling and cousins, and the exchange of information and touch that is not by proxy. They may not see anything wrong with this existence.
I can think of an even worse possibility. It is one that would fit the bits of history the knowing has provided so far. There is the terrifying notion that maybe, just maybe, the adults do not care.
No wonder then, if either of the last two are the case, the other intelligences of the universe think we are crazy.
I try not to think of that idea. I have enough hate for my host and it's friends. I am not sure I can handle the notion of being abandoned by my own kind.
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