Can't promise you the world, but... (A Rohit-Shreyas Fanfiction)

Chapter 14

"I can't say I'm glad you're here," Shreyas told Rahul the day the latter arrived at the NCA after his hamstring surgery. "But I'm glad I'm not going to be alone in this prison."

"This is your idea of a prison, Shreyas?" asked Rahul.

"There are so many rules. Just rules everywhere!"

"They are there so you can recover the earliest and get back to playing, you know," said Rahul patiently.

"Wait till you've been here two weeks," said Shreyas darkly, and bent to help Rahul with one of his suitcases, and paused. "See? I'm not even allowed to lift weights. Not even a suitcase. Come directly to my room without informing anyone, someone unknown was about to shift into my room later today, but you arrived just in time--"

"Maybe we should inform some--"

Shreyas was already hailing a peon and instructing him to take both suitcases to his room, and pretended not to hear Rahul's repeated suggestions of informing someone somewhere.

But after a couple of days following a few hundred rules, Rahul supposed he was glad he was sharing the room with a friend, and not a stranger. 

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That Shreyas was a spoilt brat (which he'd never tried to hide, either) helped Rahul staying level-headed himself with the race against time looming large for both of them: get fit and prove your fitness before Asia Cup selections. With Shreyas grouching at every rule and every part of their existence right then, Rahul didn't have to put an effort to look for the positives; it came naturally.

So they pulled each other along the long days, Shreyas complaining, Rahul evening it out, or when Rahul had a particularly bad day and felt like complaining, Shreyas would even it out by suggesting an outing that would always, without fail, be against the rules. And he'd make Rahul go along with it (spoilt brats, apparently, didn't care about the humiliation if they got caught). Rahul had to admit they did cheer him up, once he'd get over the whole 'it's-against-the-rules-we-shouldn't-should-we?' block.

Mayank and Aashita, whose place was walking distance from the NCA, dropped by every other day. So did some of their other teammates, though the ones who had gone to England for WTC final and suffered the one-sided loss needed some time to recover before they could offer comfort to anyone else.

Virat came first amongst them, of course.

"Have you brought doughnuts for me?" Shreyas asked.

Rahul frowned suspiciously. "Why will he bring doughnuts for you?"

"That's his job, he brought them after my surgery..."

"You didn't bring doughnuts after my surgery," Rahul told Virat with narrow eyes.

"Because we're the health-conscious ones, you and I, Rahuliya," said Virat quickly, and demanded to be taken to their physio immediately so he could get the best account of things, maybe because he knew the doughnuts were going to be a pretty big issue otherwise.

Rohit came a few days later. Rahul found him walking with Shreyas along the sidelines of the boundary when he went for practice one afternoon.

Rahul, who wasn't given to shouting and hailing, and jogged over to greet him. Rohit and Shreyas didn't appear to have noticed him.

"How many hours a day?" Rohit was asking.

"Four."

"How much was it initially?"

"One."

"And you don't feel a niggle even after four hours?"

"I don't want to be interrogated like this, Rohit bhaiya, all right! How many times do I have to tell you!"