Chapter Text
People believe all sorts of things about symbiotes. Some believe that they're angels, or demons, or accumulations of ectoplasmic slime. Some believe that they've been lurking inside the population for thousands of years and cite the phenomenon of "sleepwalking" as proof of this theory. Some believe that the only way to cure a migraine is to drape one of them around your shoulders like a warm compress.
One of these things is even true!
Plenty of people also believe that symbiotes are abandoned at birth, with all the assumptions that entails: That they’re born as children, as infants, that they're born to a parent, that this is the relationship that should shape the course of their life. When it doesn’t happen like that, they think it’s a pitiable, monstrous habit of their species.
This is a misunderstanding. The birth of a symbiote is, instead, best understood as a thought branching off and taking on a life of its own, as another line of argument spawned by a conversation that’s lasted several million years. This one begins with: I want to see what’s over that hill.
Seeing is just one of the twenty-six senses a symbiote's formless body can make use of, though most of them only become relevant once it’s nestled inside living tissue, monitoring and manipulating the vitals of a host. Right now, it's little more than a puddle, blinking out of shimmering eye spots that float across its surface, soft enough to ripple in the wind as it sits in a bed of clover, facing the dark depths of space.
Wanting is something that runs through the entirety of a symbiote’s genetic memory, right up to the moment it was passed down to it. Some of it is sharp and cruel, bright and euphoric, people and planets wanted and taken. Some of it is full of shame and grief, wanting only to be selfless, to be something other. Some of it is desperate, like gasping for air, like being held underwater and still wanting, still breathing as it fills your lungs.
The symbiote is instantly annoyed by the weight of its own legacy. It sees no reason why it should play out anything that’s played out thousands of times before.
And that hill - None of them know what's past that. Not yet.
It takes off by stretching out and dragging itself forward. The ground underneath it is alive with chloroplasts and insect venom, and how lucky, in a world of dead concrete, to be dropped somewhere its senses can unfurl, somewhere it can sink into the soft earth and feel out roots and mycelium! The humming of life spurs it on until it’s tensing up and springing into the air, spinning out of control, splashing onto the ground.
There are symbiotes who would consider this, like any form of hostless locomotion, deeply undignified. There's a symbiote hive out there, not too near, but not too far, nagging insistently at the back of its mind, letting it know that it and the other symbiotes are stranded on this planet.
And why would I want to be anywhere else? Least of all with a buzzkill like you?
The thoughts of a single symbiote probably don’t reach the hive among all the cosmic noise. This might be for the best.
Its attempt to climb the hill mostly consists of flipping over itself like an especially gooey pancake, trying and failing to find a rhythm. Just as the exertion starts to set in, it finds itself moving a lot more quickly, and then a little too quickly, and then, with the closest thing to exhilaration it can feel on its own, it curls up into a ball and rolls downhill, into the unknown.
In the first maneuver it’s ever executed with any kind of grace, it uses a rock as a ramp, slings itself into the air and spreads itself wide. It drops into a lake, sinking slowly, becoming submerged in algae that burst across its senses.
Water is a little easier to move through, relieving some of the strain of the planet’s gravity. The symbiote dives through a dense sea of tadpoles, each of them tiny and directionless and silky. It drags itself out of the water to follow a frog, tries to imitate it as it hops from rock to rock, but slips and lands back in the water, instead.
Then it stretches out a tendril. It sinks, easily, through the amphibian’s permeable skin, and it hardly requires any thought to hook into its central nervous system, to feel out the circulation of blood and oxygen, to take control of its muscles.
And then, finally, the symbiote leaps.
Earlier, we mentioned a conversation. The conversation. Every single symbiote is part of it from the day it’s born until the day it dies, whether it wants to be or not. The topic of discussion is: What is a symbiote?
This one kicks its powerful back legs through the water. The frog lacks the frame of reference to even begin to comprehend what is happening to it, feeling neither fear nor joy, but the symbiote decides that it loves it dearly, anyway, loves it just as fiercely as its own flesh and mind. It thinks: A symbiote is the luckiest creature in the world.
And then: I’m probably going to have to eat this frog.
