Chapter Text
Working with the Lanteans is, if nothing else, never dull. The Commander returns from his latest brush with them in a bit of a mood, retrieving the ones who had stayed behind at the research facility, and while most of them end up working to refurbish an old, abandoned hive ship, Wisp finds himself bundled off to Atlantis to help develop the gene therapy quicker. At first, he spends a lot of time locked up, which doesn't bother him as much as the Lanteans want it to, but eventually, he begins spending more and more time in the infirmary, working alongside the human doctors.
By the time he's spent a month there, and Frost has been by to share life with him once, keeping him healthy and fed, they seem to have almost forgotten he's Wraith. Foolish, of course, but he knows why the Commander sent him and not one of the others. Not only is he the closest thing the Hive has to an expert in these matters, he is also less intimidating physically. Wisp was born twinned to a Queen, and he shares his sister's stature. He shares other traits of hers, too, and if the Lanteans knew what he could do, they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss him as being small and delicate.
But he says nothing, because it benefits him if they think him safer than his kin.
And so Wisp finds himself in the infirmary most days, mostly ignored as long as he wears his restraints and stays away from the networked computers. He keeps his head down and runs his tests, and listens with both ears and mind, learning the ways of the Atlantis hive without them noticing. And what he learns, his Hive will know.
The twelfth Lantean day of the current month, he finds himself listening as Dr. Jennifer Keller speaks to one of the geologists, who is obviously gravid. Wisp knows how human reproduction works, though he often wishes he didn't. Like everything else they do, it seems so inefficient and needlessly complicated. They are discussing the child she carries, apparently a male, and what she wishes to call the child once he is born.
Human naming rules are so strange. To let the parent name a child before knowing the child's mind and who they are seems all wrong to him.
Wisp was born to a clutch of seven, six males and a Queen. They were all just "child" in the Hive's mind until they were old enough to earn their hive-name. Hive-names are simplifications, shorthand forms of their true names. Most Wraith still retain theirs, still use that form over the longer mind-names.
A human name is nothing but a label that a child has to learn to fit into.
Wraith names do the opposite. The child forms the name.
Wisp is not defined by his name. He defines it. Wisp is a tendril of mist curling over the deep waters of an dark, foreboding world in the morning, hiding something deep within. His mind-name is Mistwhisper, his mind a soft, quiet caress cloaked in swirling mist, misdirecting and diverting, obscuring and alluring, with hidden depths beneath the misty shroud. That is the nature of Wraith, their names based on who they are, and not the other way around.
His Hive is no different. There is Storm, whose mind-name is Cloudanvil, a thunderstorm on the brink of breaking out, heavy in pressure and electrical charge. Rust's mind-name is Irontaint, his mind crackling with the dry whispers of rust on metal, creeping steadily on. Frost is Winterblade, the stabbing cold of the winter air on a frost planet, sharp and to the point. Wisp's sister-Queen is Darkwater, because her mind is like deep waters of a forest pond at night, with nothing visible but the very surface, the darkness beneath a mystery.
It is not as though human names lack meaning. It just seems so strange to Wisp that they apply the name to the child without knowing if it would fit, to risk giving a child a name that will not match the child's personality. Wraith have pride in their names, and the way they represent them.
Of course, in some cases, humans can name true.
Wisp discovers the meaning of the human name given to the Commander by accident, and though it takes him a bit of time to unravel, considering that he knows preciously little about the human home world, he is quite amused when he does.
A symbol of cunning and trickery, and one of the most adaptable creatures on Earth.
It is quite fitting for the Commander.