Beyond the Meadows (A HulRat Fanfiction)

Chapter 14

Rahul was right; nothing had been nice or happy or bearable in the past few months.

It was as if all the joy and sorrow he should have felt since May came rushing to Virat at once: sorrow for RCB getting eliminated, joy with Anushka's pregnancy test coming positive, heartbreak over the WTC final; feverish hope about them getting the ideal team for the Asia Cup and World Cup...

No.

Life, as a whole, was not meant to go through without certain people at all. It was not living. It was simply existing. Like a robot.

The boy crying convulsively on his shoulder was right at the top amongst those central people without whom Virat could only exist, never live.

_________________

It was several hours before Rahul's tears dried out.

When they did, Virat got him sit down and went to great lengths to reach the intercom without retracting his arm around Rahul and ordered two cappuccinos.

"Do you really think we need more caffeine today?" Rahul said, sniffling.

"Ah, yes--decaf," Virat told into the phone quickly.

"With chocolate."

"With chocolate," Virat repeated. "Anything else?" he asked Rahul, who shook his head.

Virat put down the phone and was gratified to see that the mention of coffee had made Rahul look a little less miserable.

"How's the hamstring, by the way, Moi?"

"It's normal now, but it wasn't while I was batting."

"Yeah, I could see that," said Virat pointedly. "D'you feel it's going to heal in time?"

"I don't expect so." Rahul sounded bad-tempered now, and Virat knew almost exactly what he was going to say before he did. "I hate my hamstring. I hate my luck. I should never have fought my parents to get into cricket at all, I'd have been better off being a professor like my dad--"

"You can be a professor like Ro in cricket, too. Plus, if you didn't fight them to get into cricket, you wouldn't know me. Would you take that?"

Rahul didn't look very pleased with the logic.

"Would you?" persisted Virat.

"No," muttered Rahul.

"There you are." Smiling, Virat ruffled his hair again.

"Stop doing that," said Rahul, moving away and scowling.

"Scowliya," said Virat, promptly. "God, you haven't even given me this scowl in months."

Which was the wrong thing to say, because Rahul's face started to crumple again.

"No, don't," said Virat. "We have a lifetime for you to scowl at me."

Which, it turned out, was also the wrong thing to say, because it made Rahul cling to Virat and cry some more.

"Virat?" he said eventually.

"Yes?"

"You know there was that time when no one would have shown the faith in me that you did. I never doubted that if it was anyone but you, I would have been out of the Indian cricket circuit long back. And I used to associate a lot of things with you--gratitude, a bit of complacency, too, and faith in your faith in me that never faltered..."

A baffled Virat realized that there were parts of Rahul he could predict to the dot, but then there were some parts he couldn't, too.

"But now it's like...every day, that feeling slips away from me, bit by bit. I know it happened, but I can't feel it again, not till I'm that alone and screwing up that bad."