Fanfiction: Cultural Gaps

[rachel500]

Fandom: Stargate SG1
Series: Five Things
Prompt: Five Things about Jaffa culture Teal'c will never tell his team-mates
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Originally published on sg1-five-things. 
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.  Written for entertainment purposes only.

 

Cultural Gaps

1. Vengenance is Jaffa

They know the Jaffa seek vengeance when wronged but they do not understand what it truly means and Teal’c will never explain how it is about more than simply restoring honour or obtaining justice.

It is about seeing nothing but your enemy; tasting violence; staining hands with their blood; hearing them beg for mercy, and feeling nothing but hate until the light extinguishes in their eyes.

It is about exacting execution with no remorse, no hesitation, no sense of wrong-doing in the kill.

It is doing everything his team-mates fight to overcome.

It is about being everything his team-mates fear.

2. Being sholva means more than being a traitor

It does mean traitor.

He doesn’t lie when Daniel Jackson asks him if the translation is right but words have many meanings and many layers.

Sholva marks Teal’c of Chulak as dead to all Jaffa. A living ghost who will never achieve the glory of afterlife promised by the Goa’uld.

Teal’c had long believed he would never achieve any kind of peace in his afterlife; he had committed too many sins but the word never fails to sting, and he could never bear his team-mates to know and see pity for him in their faces.

At Dakara, Teal’c hears himself reborn as Teal’c of the Tau’ri and considers that perhaps it is right that his other self is considered dead.

3. Jaffa cherish their children because they are so few

The Jaffa life is extended by the Goa’uld larva but just as the presence of a symbiote endangers the life of the unborn child in a pregnant host so too does a Goa’uld larva endanger the life of an unborn child in a pregnant Jaffa. Miscarriages are common. For a Jaffa woman to bear just one child is a gift.

The Goa’uld never sought to correct the problem. If more Jaffa were required they could be created from the human slaves.

It is forbidden to speak of such matters even within the Jaffa community; an unwillingness to face the truth that the Jaffa may be a dying race.

Teal’c sometimes considers if the need to keep their women pregnant isn’t at the heart of the Jaffa distaste for women in battle and wonders if tretonin, or Ishta’s leadership will change anything.

4. Brotherhood is about more than bonds

Teal’c considers O’Neill, Daniel Jackson as brothers; Samantha Carter as a sister. He believes they think it’s a sign of his affection, recognition of the bonds they all share; that SG1 is a family.

It is more than that.

To consider someone as such as a Jaffa is to swear a fealty to them; in this life and the next. He would die for them; bleed for them.

His life is theirs.

He never explains it to them but he shows them every day in every deed.

5. How completely the Goa’uld define them

His team-mates know the Jaffa are slaves. But they do not know how fully the Goa’uld have determined Jaffa culture. Teal’c knows he wasn’t truly aware of it himself until he set out on to free his people. His eyes were opened then to the truth.

The branding on their foreheads was no more than placing a mark of ownership upon their skin; it was not a mark of tribal affiliation.

The sacred ritual of primta was no more than placing a yoke upon their shoulders; it was not a blessing of long life and health.

The honour in dying in battle a false Goa’uld promise of glory to encourage the Jaffa to give their lives; it was not a sacrifice for a worthy God.

So much of their culture is mired in Goa’uld lies. Even when they claim their freedom, Teal’c is left questioning what of their culture is truly Jaffa.

fin.