Negative Space
Chapter 1: Adium
Disclaimer: I do not own Galactik Football and I make no money from this fanfiction.
Adium looks down at her holo-phone.
No new messages.
Since the incident the phone lines have been so patchy but she has signal now (then again, who knows whether that was the case for other areas of the planet). Sighing, she pulls on her snow boots (she'd only ever worn them twice before the incident, now she wears them everyday) and heads out the door.
She doesn't know why she keeps going back there; the volunteers have already completely cleared that area, there's no-one left there – not even corpses. But here she stands, in the middle of the pitch, everything once familiar now encased in ice.
Initially people had left flowers to commemorate the dead but the flowers have all rotted away now, their plastic wrappers blown away by the gale force winds. No-one comes here anymore. They say the place is cursed but Adium has never been the superstitious type.
Besides, it's not like anything worse can happen; the pitch holds no danger for her now, it's just a skeleton, a shell.
She doesn't know why she keeps coming here, it's like when you've lost your keys and you were sure that you left them in your pocket, so sure that you keep checking that pocket even though you know that they aren't there (because in your head they are there).
Being here doesn't even seem to help her remember. The first time she came she was kind of anxious that just setting foot in the stadium would trigger a sudden burst of memory. But it hadn't.
She remembers stepping on the pitch at the start of the match, she remembers the faces of her teammates (a mix of excitement and terror on their faces) and she remembers the football being shot into the air.
Her next memory is of sitting in the hospital, her mother holding her hand, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She's since seen the explosion in television footage, she's seen herself running from the wall of white, the image of what happened is quite clear in her mind. But she doesn't remember - she sees it from the camera's perspective; it feels more like a movie than anything else.
The after-effects though – those are real. This isn't some consequence-free action flick. The memory of going into Norata's room for the first time after the accident will stick with her the rest of her life. That's when it all became real.
The team is scattered for the most part – some have family to search for but mostly it was too hard being together, the weight of their missing members was just so overwhelmingly heavy. Playing together, with the Breath, had always been like floating so easily on air – the memory of that almost makes everything worse.
But she still goes to see Norata; they feel closer to him when they are together- less lonely. She thinks maybe she'll go see him today, the operation is coming up soon and she knows that he is nervous. He puts a brave face on it though, Keira is depending on him and after all it could all still turn out alright in the end.
She realises that in wandering around, just letting her thoughts meander, she's gotten awfully cold (she's still not used to it). She gives the stadium one last look before she exits out the side gate.
She hurries on home, her breath forming miniature white clouds in the air. She just intends to warm up for a little while, to throw on a couple more layers, before heading out again but she should know by know that things rarely go to plan.
Her mother stands up when she enters the room, her face pale and solemn – that's never a good sign.
"I tried to call you," her mother says.
Adium looks down at her holo-phone- it hasn't registered any missed calls.
She shrugs. "I think the network was down again."
"You think they'd have that fixed," her mother says, shaking her head.
"I think it's just going to take some time."
"Adium, I don't know how to tell you this…I suppose I'd say that there's good news and bad news."
"There's good news?" she hears herself say, faintly- these days just finding a body to bury was classed as 'good news'.
"He's alive…in fact they both are."
Adium lets out of breath she hadn't even been aware that she had been holding the in the first place. He's not dead. The fear that she had been holding onto for the past few weeks but had been afraid to voice just melted away.
"And the bad news?" she asks, vaguely – there's nothing her mother can say that would diminish the feeling she has in this moment.
"He's left the planet, Adium." Her mother reaches out and takes her hand.
This wasn't what she had expected to hear, she'd been prepared for an injury (perhaps something even worse than Norata's) – she felt her mind adjusting to what her mother had said.
"He's offworld? Is he getting medical treatment?" That would make sense, right?
Her mother shakes her head. "The news was just announced - the Coach of the Shadows had managed to keep it under wraps until just now – they've joined the Shadows."
"The Shadows?"
"I'm so sorry, Adium." Her mother steps forward and envelops her in a hug but Adium doesn't feel it; she doesn't feel anything.
She goes back to her room and just flops on her bed; she won't be going anywhere today. She stares at her phone; she now has plenty of messages from friends and (ex)-teammates – it's clear they don't know what to say but she appreciates them for trying. She replies to every single one; they will be worried if she doesn't.
There's only one person she wants a message from.
She dials his number, she doesn't know what she expects, she'd called him many times before in the past couple of weeks and she'd gotten no response, but for a second the call seems to go through. Her heart leaps but before she has a chance to speak the phone drones and she knows that he has hung-up.
'It's all a big misunderstanding,' she tells herself. 'He wouldn't do this to us, to me.'
She watches his first match with the Shadows two days later. He looks different in a Shadows' uniform, with the Smog all curled around him – but more than that, his face looks harder, colder. She doesn't know whether she's imagining it. The Shadows lose, 3-2, she's not sure how she's supposed to feel about that.
She forces herself to get up off the sofa and to go and see Norata – she hasn't seen him since before it had been announced, she knows she's been avoiding him.
'You can't just abandon him; he needs his friends around him, especially now. And besides, some people have it worse than you, people have died!'
She always was good at guilting herself into doing things she'd rather not do.
Her heart was pounding by the time she got to the hospital, an odd sense of fear running through her veins – in what state would she find Norata? Had he managed to speak to him?
She knocks on the door and enters when he says 'come in.'
She looks at him, trying to assess his emotional state but he's giving nothing away, it doesn't look like he has been crying at least. Apparently, he can see something in her facial expression though.
"Adium, why are you pulling that face? What's going on? Everyone keeps looking at me weirdly," Norata says.
The realisation that no-one has told him dawns upon her – and why would they? His surgery is in two days, he shouldn't be more worried than he already is. If Keira hasn't told him then surely it's not her place to.
"I just wanted to wish you good luck for your surgery."
Author's note: That's it for this chapter; I was kind of conflicted about where exactly to end it, I wasn't happy with any of the versions I came up with but this one annoyed me the least so here it is. This fic will basically switch perspectives for each chapter and I want them to feel semi-complete in of themselves rather than being like a traditional chaptered fic – the basic theme being the events after the explosion on Akillian from the perspective of characters left on Akillian (for the most part).
I've wanted to tell this story for a while and it's existed in various different forms – in the Summer I wrote about 5000 words of Norata-centric fic covering that period before I realised that the fic was full of holes and gave up on writing it. There've also been several attempts to write fic from Adium's perspective but I find it difficult to catch her voice. But here this fic is and I'm glad I'm getting it written at last, even if it isn't completely perfect.
The main inspiration for the title comes from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called The Body, in which the motif of negative space is used very effectively in relation to grief.
Gosh, that was a long author's note, wasn't it? I know that the fandom is quite quiet nowadays but I would very much appreciate a review from anyone who is still around! And hopefully, I'll update soon (although knowing me lately, soon might be a somewhat loose term XD).