A Love Twice Told (ishman) (shubish)

Improvement

Shubman had recently started watching the cricket matches he had missed over the years. Coincidentally, all of the matches that he watched somehow had Ishan in them. He totally didn't search for those specific ones to watch at all.

Shubman had sat through the night, surfing through the early matches of Ishan's career. He was an impeccable player, Shubman realized. His playing style, stance, and everything on the whole were admirable. But Shubman wasn't just watching these matches for Ishan now, was he?

He was watching it to learn more about his co-players and to learn more about their cricketing careers. At least this is what he told his sister when she asked about this new hobby of his. She made a weird face but didn't question it any further. The doctors and physiotherapists had reduced their scheduled checkups from daily to every two days and now once a week.

Things were going brilliantly for Shubman, and everyone was quite happy with it. Ishan didn't visit Shubman as much as he used to because now there was an upcoming tournament that he had to practice for. He got busier with these practices as the days passed. But Ishan religiously called Shubman. Everyday.

No matter at what time, there wasn't a day that Ishan didn't call. Their conversations earlier limited to cricket and Shubman's health improvement were now open to mental health and personal lives also. Shubman realized that he loved talking to Ishan. Maybe a bit too much. To the point that he didn't miss any of his calls.

Shubman had stopped sleeping at weird times just so he wouldn't accidentally miss one of Ishan's calls. He knew that if he missed the call, it would be tough for Ishan to call him again; he was busy after all. And it warmed his heart to know that despite being so busy, Ishan never once forgot calling him.

Shubman in the times when he didn't have to do his routine exercises watched cricket matches and made notes. Don't get him wrong, he did watch other people play too, but he got this idea of watching the now-old matches because he wanted to see Ishan playing. So, he watched one match, then he watched two matches, and now it has given way to a series of matches watched and numerous players analyzed.

Now, Shubman had a brief knowledge of almost all the players on the team with him and a sea of knowledge about Ishan Kishan. Somebody can wake him up in the middle of the night and ask about the cricketing career of Ishan Kishan, and Shubman would still say it all correctly. It was all itching at the back of his brain; he didn't know that it was there. Now, after watching all these matches, these memories were unlocking themselves.

Sometimes he would search for some specific match because his conscious told him that it was an amazing match, and when watched, it would indeed be an amazing match. Sometimes, he would randomly remember some incident that didn't happen in the recent past of his broken memories and spend hours thinking more about that incident.

Shubman didn't dislike this outburst of random information at random times, but he wasn't a fan of it either, because then he would spend the majority of his time thinking about it, and it honestly gave him a headache almost always.

He told about it to his doctors of course, and they said that it was completely normal and asked Shubman to refrain from preying too much about the details of these scenarios. Sometimes, when done with all the thinking, he would ask about them to Ishan, and Ishan, like the good friend he was, almost always knew the details of these scenarios.

Shubman loved listening about his life from Ishan's point of view. He didn't know why, but he did like it. These conversations were fun when they lasted, but Shubman would feel the air shifting a bit at the end of all of these conversations, it wasn't like he didn't ask Ishan about it, but Ishan would just change the topic, and then they would resume talking like nothing happened.