Work Text:
Lottie cursed softly to herself as the yarn slipped off of her crochet hook. This was supposed to be a calming hobby. However, she reflected, it was not a hobby with tools designed for use by an eight foot tall fish person with webbed fingers. She sighed, setting the half-finished granny square to the side. She cast a glance over her shoulder, out towards where the Gleek Arena’s parking lot would normally be visible from her seat in the stands.
It wasn’t. Instead, fog so thick one could drown in it (and probably would, given the nature of these things) lapped at the stadium walls. Her gaze slid away from the sea of grey and swept down the rows of seating to where a metal-coated figure sat. She was certain that Nova was attempting to look otherwise preoccupied, but the way her knee bounced up and down indicated otherwise.
As did the fact that she kept swivelling the head of her suit slightly towards Lottie in a way that might have been subtle if the sunlight - was it sunlight anymore? Didn’t matter - didn’t keep catching her obsessively-polished exosuit hull and reflecting directly into Lottie’s eyes.
“If you wanna say something, Gesundheit,” Lottie said, “come here and say it. You’re making me anxious.”
Nova stood up so quickly she nearly fell over, but recovered quickly, giving Lottie a crooked grin. “Me?” she replied, picking her way across and over the seating between them. “Make you nervous? I’m not the one with the anglerfish vibes. How much do you spend on toothpaste each month?”
“Oh, it’s a rodentia kinda deal,” Lottie replied. “I chew on snarky cyborgs to keep my pearly whites pearly and. Um. White.” She flashed Nova a grin that was probably less reassuring than she meant it to be, a notion confirmed by the sight of the girl frozen halfway through clambering over a seat back. “Jeez, kid, I’m kidding. What’s up?”
“I wanted to ask you something about Greer,” Nova said.
Lottie frowned. “Why not just ask her, then?”
“Believe it or not,” Nova replied, chagrined, “between the two of you, you’re the less intimidating one. I mean…” she gestured at the tangle of yarn beside Lottie.
“Point taken,” the taller pitcher grunted. “So, your question is…”
“Why the Hall?”
“Oh.” Lottie frowned. “See, I’m still confused. You wouldn’t ask Greer because she’s too scary, but Eugenia’s harmless. She’d probably bake you cookies for storytime, though I wouldn’t recommend asking her what was in them.”
Nova shook her head. “She’s been… Well. The Hall was hard on her, I think. I mean. Because Ziwa wasn’t there.”
Again, Lottie replied with “ Oh. ” She felt somewhat guilty for not realizing the connection first. Of course Eugenia wouldn’t want to talk about it. Her partner had been Redacted, and even after defying death itself, that seemed to be the one thing that nobody came back from after the end of everything. She sighed and leaned back, bracing herself against the hard plastic with trunklike arms. “So, the Hall. You remember Polkammunion, right?”
Nova looked almost offended. “Of course I do Lottie. I can tell you the pitching stats from Season One. Season. One. Can anyone else you know-” she stopped abruptly, shrinking a little bit under Lottie’s stony look. She cleared her throat. “Anyways. Yes. I remember.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“PolkaDot Patterson was Shelled by The Shelled One. Rather than forcing the Tacos to sacrifice one of their players, the Moist Talkers elected to trust the Hall Monitor-”
“No one calls him that.”
“I know, but…” Nova sighed. “I guess that’s what I don’t get. The gods have been almost unilaterally evil . They’ve hated us. But we chose to trust this giant squid, this Moist God , with our lives. Back then, they let it try to eat one of their friends. It doesn’t make sense.” She frowned, staring at some point in the middle distance. “There’s no logic to it. I can trace statlines, I can guess at the results of upcoming games with, as Jenkins puts it,” she raised her fingers to make air quotes, “ startling accuracy . But we didn’t even have a proper dataset to work from. We knew that one time, this god-thing tried to eat our pitcher and decided that they didn’t taste good. That was it.”
“I think that’s just… faith.” Lottie said.
“Faith is dangerous, here,” Nova replied. “You know that. Greer knows that, I’m sure. So, when it came down to it, why the Hall?”
Lottie cocked her head. “I guess it was the only thing that made sense. Between you and me, us Lotts aren’t much for decision-making. But Ziwa was gone, and Eugenia was a mess, so she made the call. You gotta remember, she’s been here since day one. She saw Polkamunnion. Neither of us did. Maybe there was more to it than the stories can tell us. But because of it, she believed it would work.” She shrugged.
“That’s not really an answer.”
“I guess I don’t really have one.”
“You know,” and here, Nova finally sat, rather than standing and bouncing on the balls of her feet, “when I came back, outta the Shadows… I think that was the most scared I’ve ever been. More than all those games against unstable teams, more than when we were trying to outrun a giant black hole. Because I came back under a sky full of colour and void, Supernova Black Hole, and nothing made sense. Just like going to the Hall didn’t make sense. Records and patterns comfort me, but nothing I knew - and I know a lot - explained anything that was happening in that moment.” She rested her elbows on her knees, her chin on her balled fists. “I just want things to make sense again.”
Despite herself Lottie chuckled, eliciting a glare from Nova. She cleared her throat and awkwardly patted the exosuit’s back. “I dunno if it will, Nova. But we can hope.” She looked at Nova, and while her robotic face couldn’t really cry, it looked like it was about to. “Christ, are you okay?” Lottie said, panicked. “Oh god, kid, what do you need, I’m not good with-” she stopped short as Nova choked out a laugh.
“No, Lottie, it’s fine, it’s-” she straightened up, somewhat more composed. “It’s good. It’s just… It’s been a long time since anyone said my name.”
“Really?” Lottie’s said, face screwed up in confusion. “Why wouldn’t anyone say-” realization dawned. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Christ, Nova, I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” Nova smiled weakly. “It made sense, I don’t hold it against anyone.”
“Still wasn’t right.”
They sat for a while. It was, Lottie reflected, somewhat comforting. Maybe Nova had a point about wanting things to make sense. Not that Lottie was tremendously bothered by confusion, but everyone had something that brought them comfort amidst the uncertainty. Maybe, Lottie realized, for her, it was being around someone like herself. Someone to whom not everything made sense, who was missing the greater context of the events that had transpired over the last season. Someone who cared deeply about the team that went through those events with them, regardless of those unknowns.
Movement down on the field caught Lottie’s eye. “Hey, Nova,” she said.
Nova glanced over at her. “Yeah?”
“You wanna see if we can get some answers outta my Alternate?”
Nova sat bolt upright. “What do you-” without waiting for an answer, Lottie stood, reached down, and slung the cyborg over her shoulder.
“Hey LOTT,” she yelled at the figure she had spotted walking across the diamond below. Greer looked up sharply, and Lottie could hear the faint, faraway stream of curses begin as she turned abruptly and started heading back toward the locker room.
Lottie began charging down the stands, listening to Nova laugh as they bounded down the steps. “Don’t you run from me!” Lottie called between her own breathless laughter. “We’ve got some questions for ya!”