Too many best friends (A Jassi-Hardik friendship fanfiction)

Part 1

"The weird dude told me I need to stay away from cricket, can you believe?" whined Hardik for the 98th time during that call.

"That weird dude is your physio, Hardik," said Rahul sternly. "Don't gripe, you'll be ok soon..."

"But I am already ok," said Hardik, still more whinily. "This is no reason why I should stop batting!"

Rahul did not have words for Hardik. He just didn't.

He had never, ever heard anyone complaining about a physio's assessment, especially since in cricket, an injury could break your career forever.

"Wait," he told Hardik, and swiftly added the captain to the call.

"Hello, Moi," said Virat brightly.

"Whatever," said Rahul grouchily. "Tell Hardik to listen to the doctor's instructions, Virat, he's been eating my head all evening."

"Ah," said Virat. "You've got to listen to..."

"Virat," interrupted Hardik. "He explicitly said batting will not aggravate the injury. And he still told me to stay away from cricket. How is that fair?"

The call went for another 98 repetitions of Hardik's whiny complains.

"Wait," said Virat, giving up, and added Bhuvi to the call.

"Virat?" said Bhuvi.

"Bhuvi, deal with Hardik," said Virat. "Please."

********

It was quite by chance Jassi came to know of the existence of Hardik's injury from a third person (t didn't even matter how) and the news did not go down well with him.

If the news had reached Google, why had it not reached him yet?

The next time he happened to be talking to Bhuvi, he asked at some point, "Is Hardik injured, Bhuvi bhaiya?"

"Yes, but he has managed to convince us that he'll play the IPL as an exlusive batsman," said Bhuvi, sounding like he was grinning.

Jassi only heard the 'us' as Bhuvi bhaiya continued, "Apparently it's only bowling that'll aggravate it."

"How did you get to know about it?" asked Jassi, before he could stop himself.

Bhuvi, for once, failed to detect the hurt in Jassi's voice—or maybe Jassi had hidden it really well—and he laughed and said, "He had been bothering Rahul, who added Virat to the call, and Virat added me and Rohit...we pretty much combined all our wits to try to convince him to rest, and he still won the debate. Single handedly."

Bhuvi bhaiya laughed again at the memory, but it was not funny for Jassi. Apparently Hardik had bothered to tell the whole team, just not him.

And he was supposed to be Hardik's best friend.

But obviously, Hardik threw out words like 'best friend' just like that. It was a habit with him. Fakeness. Like before Natasha he used to call every girl pretty. And he still called everyone on the planet his brother.

Pollard, Rahul, Ishan, Surya, you name it.

Huh.

What were the sensible people always telling you? Beware of fake people.

So, quite forgetting that he had been the first person Hardik had called when Agastya was born, Jassi fumed in silence all through the lockdown.

************

IPL 2020

Hardik was suddenly feeling all confused as the MI camp started gathering.

He was a father now, like Rohit and Shikki and Jinks. Did that mean he had to act grown up?