Netherworld: Chapter 2 Title: Netherworld Fandom: Galactik Football Characters: Rocket, Sinedd, Tia, D'Jok, Warren Rating: PG Summary: The Smog changes people for the worse. Netherball changes people for the worse. What happens when you put two unstable boys in close proximity? Sinedd x Rocket, Tia x Rocket, D’Jok x Mei, past Aarch x Artegor referenced. Micro-Ice x Yuki, possibly. Definite slash warning, anyway! Darkish.
Netherworld: Roommates Again
“This is it?” Rocket had never seen such an empty room. True, it was a hotel room, but still, everyone in the Snow Kids had decorated their room as soon as they’d moved in.
D’Jok put up a poster of Warren, then a poster of himself over it. Rocket had photos of his parents and of Tia on the bedside table. Mei had posters of herself from various commercials, and one of herself with D’Jok. Ahito and Thran had family photos everywhere, most of which featured Ahito and his father both being asleep at the time the photo was taken. Tia had photos of herself with Rocket and a poster of the entire team. Micro-Ice had team photos everywhere.
Sinedd’s room had nothing. It didn’t even have clothes anywhere. It looked as pristine as if Sinedd had just checked in.
A defensive shrug, and Sinedd shot back, “What, it’s not good for you? Galactik Football Cup Champions get better suites?”
”No, it’s fine.” Rocket didn’t care about how palatial the room was or wasn’t. It was a good room anyway. Spacious. “It’s just so … plain.”
“There’s a TV there.” Sinedd pointed to it as he gave Rocket an odd look, “And computer over there.”
Was he going to be expected to entertain Rocket now? One of the reasons that he’d offered to share a room with Rocket was that when he’d been with the Snow Kids, he’d managed to share a room with Rocket and do a minimum of talking. Both of them had been loners, so they’d gotten on fine in silence.
“Yeah, I know, I just--” Rocket shook his head, deciding it’d do no good to pry. “Never mind.”
Sinedd’s blood was up now, though, temper manifesting itself as it always did when he thought someone else was acting as if they were superior to him, “What, Rocket? If this isn’t good enough for you, you can go sleep in the Sphere, or go crawling back to the--”
“I meant, there are no posters here. Or photos.” Rocket interrupted Sinedd before Sinedd said something that’d make Rocket want to leave. From observing his interaction with D’Jok and Micro-Ice, Rocket knew that Sinedd had a knack for getting under people’s skin.
“Oh.” Sinedd visibly deflated, the tantrum he’d been working himself into shunted aside. Looking around the room, he had to admit that the hotel décor had been left alone. Heavy black curtains to block out the sun (apparently they didn’t realize that he hadn’t mutated as much as the rest of the players and didn’t mind sunshine), white carpet, white walls, white ceiling, two double beds that the maids had made up while he was gone. And all his clothing was still inside a suitcase.
He shrugged, “I’m out practicing most of the day. Or down at the Sphere. No need to fancy this up when I’m never here.”
Rocket nodded in response to that, taking it as a fair explanation. He didn’t feel any need to put out his photos of the team or Tia either. Or his parents. Having them lie around would just make him feel even more of a disgrace for having gotten himself suspended from the Cup (but he still didn’t regret anything, it was worth it to have saved Tia).
“You want anything to eat?” Sinedd asked, sitting down on the bed closest to the door to make it clear to Rocket which bed was his and which Rocket could take.
Rocket dumped his duffle bag on the other bed, near the window, and started to pull his clothes out, “You’re going to order room service?”
“Can’t take you down to the restaurant, can I?” The familiar note of mockery was back in Sinedd’s voice, but it seemed less personal than with D’Jok or Micro-Ice. He did, after all, truly think that Rocket was the best player on the Snow Kids. “And if you order anything, they’ll notice it’s not me. So if you want anything, tell me and I’ll order it. The League’s paying for all our hotel expenses anyway. Room service included.”
Rocket’s grin was savage at that. The League was paying for everything? Fine. He’d be petty for a moment and order all the most expensive dishes he could. There’d be enough food that he could pack some up and take it with him tomorrow morning while Sinedd practiced and the maids cleaned the room. And it’d make him feel a little better to at least have that much of revenge on the League for suspending him.
“I want whatever the most expensive dishes are. Six of them.” Rocket looked at the wardrobe, then thought better of it. If Sinedd hadn’t unpacked, he shouldn’t either. Else the maids would notice that there was suddenly clothing where there hadn’t been.
Sinedd’s smirk was like a curl of smoke, but sharp, vaguely vicious but contained within the pale curve of his mouth, “Revenge is a dish best served by room service?”
Rocket said nothing in response to that; the hard lines of his mouth did all the talking for him. Sinedd lifted up the phone and repeated Rocket’s order to room service, not bothering to look through a menu to find what the most expensive dishes actually were.
That was why, when the food finally arrived and was set out on the table, Rocket found himself staring at six plates of what he would’ve never considered as food if it hadn’t been sent up by room service.
One pile was blue, steaming hot, and looked vaguely like mashed up potatoes, if a key ingredient in mashed potatoes was glitter.
The next plate had chips of metal on it. At least, it looked like metal, felt like metal, and when Rocket gingerly tapped it with a fork, the sound that rang was like that of metal on metal.
The third pile, Rocket thought, looked as if the footballs of all the different teams had been shrunk down, multiplied, and then covered in a sauce made of all the different Fluxes. Creative, but not exactly appetizing.
The fourth plate was either a live rodent trapped under a glass box, or – there was no or. Rocket was convinced that it was a mouse.
The fifth plate had chunks of what could be raw meat. If meat bled green and was supposed to have mushrooms growing on it.
The sixth plate contained a soup made of wires floating in an oil-like substance. Rocket wasn’t even going to touch it.
As he stood there, staring at the ‘meals’, Sinedd came up over his shoulder and laughed, “You gonna eat that, Rocket, or stare at it and wait for it to turn into something you can actually digest?”
Instead of answering the clearly rhetorical question, Rocket poked the lumps of could-be meat with a fork, quickly withdrawing it when the meat actually moved. “Have you ever seen any of these before?”
Maybe they were just the food of other planets. Like the Wambas. Rocket still remembered how strange that had looked at first.
“That’s the flesh of a Mrikat beast.” Sinedd pointed at the apparently-still-living meat. “That white stuff is actually the babies inside their shells. When they break free, they eat their way out.”
Rocket was not going to touch that dish now. Definitely not.
“It’s a Shadows delicacy.” Sinedd’s smirk was more than a little wicked as he picked up a knife and stabbed it into one of the white mushroom-like sacs, cutting it open to reveal the squirming white grub inside. “They only breed once a year.”
“Don’t eat it!” If Sinedd actually ate that thing, Rocket vowed he’d find a new place to sleep. He wasn’t going to be woken up by Sinedd screaming as Mrikats ate their way out of him. He needed his sleep to be a Netherball champion.
“Do I look stupid to you?” Savagely, Sinedd stabbed the grub with the knife, just before it managed to rear up and latch into his fingers.
Micro-Ice or D’Jok would’ve never let that opportunity to insult Sinedd pass. Rocket was more diplomatic than that.
“What about that?” He pointed at what he really hoped was not a mouse.
Cue Sinedd giving him an odd look, eyebrows arched, “That’s a mouse, Rocket.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.” Rocket cringed, watching the mouse sit on its haunches and twitch its nose at them. “Why did they send me a mouse?”
“Delicacy for the Xenons. Don’t touch it; its bite is poisonous to anyone that’s not a Xenon.” Sinedd poked the glass box with a fork, sending the mouse jumping back. “Reptiles eat insects and little mammals. Like this. Or Micro-Ice.”
He grinned, waiting for Rocket to rise to the bait and defend Micro-Ice as not being that short.
Instead, Rocket shrugged it off. He wasn’t in the mood for a fight. The food was fascinating him (and though he wouldn’t admit it, it was a good distraction from thinking about the League and his suspension). “Insult him to his face, Sinedd. You can’t see his reaction if you waste those lines on me.”
Two meals identified. Four left to go. “The metal – that’s for the Rykers?”
Sinedd nodded confirmation, gesturing at the sixth plate with a fork. “Yeah. And the soup’s for Technoid ‘bots.”
The mention of the Technoid team made Rocket’s stomach turn for a brief moment. The All-Stars were going to play against Technoid. He should’ve been an All-Star! He should’ve played in that match!
But the Sphere was better. He clung to that thought, dark glee rising in him at the thought of Kernor’s expression when the ball had shot past her for that final shot. For a moment, his tongue darted past his lips, as if he could taste her defeat in his mouth, and Rocket heard the crowd cheer for him once more.
“Rocket?” Sinedd wasn’t worried, exactly. It was just that Rocket had picked up a knife and was now holding it so tightly that his knuckles were starting to turn white. Not a reassuring sight. “You gonna eat the mouse or the Mrikat babies?”
Coming back to himself, Sinedd’s wry joke snapping him out of his reverie, Rocket shook his head and looked down at the plates. He put the knife down without thinking about it, then nodded at the glittery blue mush. “What’s that?”
Sinedd’s smirk grew wide enough that if it weren’t for the malice that honed its edges knife-sharp, it could almost be called a smile. “That’s for the Lightnings. Very rare and effective mood boosting dessert.”
“…” Rocket stared at it for a few moments, then at Sinedd. “But it glitters.”
“Yeah.” Sinedd agreed, and for a moment, his smirk looked more like a grin, wicked but amused instead of mocking. “I know. Think D’Jok knows his hero eats glitter?”
Rocket’s laugh was short, but it was genuine. It was the first time he’d laughed since he’d heard the League’s sentence. He hadn’t expected it to be Sinedd, of all people, that’d make him laugh. Then again, it was Sinedd that had introduced him to the Sphere. And offered him a place to stay. Those hadn’t been things he’d expected either, when he’d been about to return to Akillian with his tail between his legs.
“What about those?” To recover from his momentary fit of thoughtfulness, Rocket pointed at the little footballs. The only team left that he could think of were the Cyclops and the Wambas, but he’d eaten Wambasian food. And he couldn’t see how this could count as the sort of brain food that’d help the Cyclops team.
“I don’t know.” Sinedd admitted, using his fork to prod them. “They look like some sort of Galactik Football special dish.”
Grabbing a spoon as he put the fork down, Sinedd picked out a tiny Shadows ball. It was smaller than the top joint of his little finger, but perfectly detailed, sauce sticky and raspberry-black around it. “Made for midgets.”
“Next Cup match, we’ll face players so small that we can’t see them until they block us.” Rocket agreed, refusing to fish out a Snow Kids football. Aarch had made it clear that he wasn’t wanted on the team. He picked out a Lightning’s ball instead, squeezing it between his fingers. The texture was firm, a little like cake, but more squishy. Jam-filled cake, perhaps.
He looked up to see if Sinedd had eaten his football yet, only to see that Sinedd was watching him to see if he was about to eat it.
Rocket bounced the little football on the back of his hand instead of eating it, and Sinedd followed suit. Soon, a silent but serious competition had ensued about who could keep the ball on their hand the longest.
Rocket was winning when Sinedd got sick of it and used his thumb to flick his ball into Rocket’s, making both of them hit Rocket’s shirt.
“Hey! That’s cheating!” Rocket protested, wiping them off with a disgusted curl to his lip.
“There are no rules in the Sphere.” Sinedd intoned, smirking again at his victory.
“We’re not in the Sphere.” Rocket lunged into Sinedd’s personal space and wiped his hand against Sinedd’s shirt as revenge, getting him dirty too.
“Hey!” Outraged – he’d won! Even if by cheating! – Sinedd grabbed a handful of the little footballs and threw them at Rocket so that they stuck on his face, his clothes and even his hair. Rocket retaliated by slamming his hand on the side of the plate of blue mush so that the contents launched themselves at Sinedd’s face.
Sinedd ducked, only to be tackled by Rocket who had a fistful of little footballs and was intent on getting them into Sinedd’s hair as well. The two of them struggled on the floor, Sinedd trying to keep Rocket’s hands away from his hair, Rocket trying to push the footballs into Sinedd – and then they rolled into a leg of the table and knocked it down on top of them.
There was a loud crash, a sensation of brief but intense pain accompanied by disorientation, and then Sinedd and Rocket had to flail their way out of a tablecloth, covered in food, and push the table off themselves.
“Are any of the bugs on me?!” Sinedd asked Rocket frantically as soon as they were free. He’d seen what the Mrikat babies could do. He wasn’t about to get eaten by them. He looked himself up and down, trying to make sure that none of them were hidden inside the mess of food that was splattered all over him.
Rocket wiped a hand over his face, trying to get rid of the Technoid oil that had gone straight for his hair. “No--” He couldn’t quite see properly, but another wipe to his eyes with a clean corner of the tablecloth took care of that. “No.”
“Good.” Sinedd turned around, and looked Rocket over, then grabbed him by the shoulder to turn him and check his back. There weren’t any Mrikat babies on Rocket either, but Sinedd pinched him anyway. “Got one.”
“Thanks.” It might’ve occurred to Rocket to doubt that statement but just then, a banging came at the door, followed by the sound of Artegor yelling, “SINEDD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?! IS AARCH KIDNAPPING YOU?”
Sinedd froze for a moment, then shoved Rocket in the direction of the beds, “Quick! Under the bed!”
Dropping to his hands and knees, Rocket wriggled under the bed, sticky clothes adhering to him uncomfortably as he did so and leaving a very obvious trail that led to the bed he hid under. Sinedd bolted for the door and opened it, hair matted with blue wet glitter and face decorated with tiny footballs like strange pimples. Despite that, he still tried to act innocent, “Nothing happened! I just had a nightmare.”
Artegor stared at his star striker, some of the strength of his glare lost thanks to the thickness of his sunglasses. “And that left you covered in food?”
“I left some food by the bed in case I got hungry in the night. Then I fell out of bed. Then I tried to stand up and crashed into the table.” The fact that Sinedd could say all of that with a straight face was a testament to how much practice he’d had lying.
Artegor peered at Sinedd suspiciously behind the sunglasses for a few moments, but when Sinedd didn’t show any sign of breaking, he seemed to accept it. “Very well. But be on the lookout. Aarch’ll do anything to see us defeated! And take you back.”
“Yes, sir.” Sinedd answered, closing the door in Artegor’s face. He waited until the sound of footsteps died away, then beckoned for Rocket to come out from under the bed.
Rocket’s expression was frankly incredulous, even as he tried to use a napkin to soak up the oil from his hair, “He thinks Aarch’ll try to kidnap you?”
The disbelief in his voice was hardly flattering.
“The man wears sunglasses in the middle of the night.” Sinedd pointed out, “He’s not exactly sane.”
Rocket had to admit that Sinedd had a point, even if he wasn’t sure that Sinedd should be talking about his coach like that. “You said he never came up here.”
“Well, I’d never overtoppled a table before! So I guess he never comes up here unless property destruction is involved.” Sinedd shot back, scratching at his cheeks to peel off the little footballs.
Then he froze and looked around, “Wait. Where’d the mouse go?”
Rocket couldn’t see it either.
And he remembered Sinedd saying that its bite was poisonous to all non-Xenons.
Clearly, neither of them were going to get much sleep tonight.