Chapter Text
ROGER: It's like flying, a little, except you end up with a really bad headache and the kind of dizziness that never really goes away. On a plane you choose your destination, and you put your fate in the hands of the pilot. When you time travel, though, everything is up to fate, and there's a very big chance that you're going to spin into huge amounts of danger.
So I guess that analogy doesn't work too well. So – what it's like?
First there's a wave of dizziness. Everything shifts in and out of focus, like you're slipping through the air, like your vision is glazing over, like you're an out-of-focus blurred photo. A whirl and a jump and suddenly everything's dissolved, and you're somewhere else entirely. Another place, another time. I'll be standing in the kitchen, newspaper in hand, willing the kettle to boil and suddenly everything will flicker and I'll suddenly be naked and shivering in a white-tiled changing room, waiting for my other self to finish his game and come back in. Rafa and I will be in bed, exchanging jokes and teasing each other, his warm toes pressed into my shin and his elbow in my stomach, and then I'll be twenty-five years into the past, eye to eye with a small Spanish boy offering me clothes and requesting help on how to perfect his serve.
When I was younger I tried to look for patterns in all this starting and stopping, all this coming and going in time, but found nothing. There are things that exacerbate it, like late nights and a lack of exercise and too much caffeine, and things that help a little, like sex and the weary ache of muscles that have been worked hard and good food. Sometimes I meet my past self, over-confident or concerned or triumphant or miserable, and I talk to him, and sometimes I go into Rafa's past and talk to him, help him where I can, listen to him where I can't. Sometimes I see our past, the years we were together and the years we were apart, the years we were happy and the years we were not. I see sleepy brown eyes and hear rapid-fire Spanish and watch a gleamingly muscled twenty-four year old at the top of his game racing around a court like he owns it, like he belongs there. I see him shuddering tears into his hands after defeats, pinning posters bearing my face onto his wall as a teenager, I see him at thirty at night-time curled up in bed, and I join him there and press soft kisses onto the back of his neck until he shudders and gasps and wakes. I see him thirty-five and scarred and tired, and I love him even then.
I've seen our future – although I've promised myself that I'll try to keep things as normal as I can for him. There are things I can't tell him, like the crash and the little girl and the changes, and easier simpler things like what's going to happen with our careers. I want him to be happy. I want him to be normal. I wish that I could take him with me, but I can't, and so I live for the moments that I return and he is there.
RAFA Is difficult, describing it. Is like a storm, living with Roger – sometimes he there, sometimes he vanish. I don't know where he goes. I think about him, I watch the space he left and I wait for him to come back. I dream him some nights, when the moon is full and the bed is empty. In the morning when the sun has risen, he still does not return and I worry about him. When he is gone I pray for him. I pray that he is in no danger. I pray that he is with someone kind. I pray that he will come back to me.
Roger is 22, and Rafa is 17.
RAFA: As I walk down the corridor towards the changing rooms, my shoes are squeaking on the floor. My bag is heavy on my shoulder and I have ten minutes by myself until Toni joins me. The fourth round of the Miami Masters and I'm playing against Roger Federer, the new number one and a man who plays tennis with the grace and strength of a ballet dancer. My stomach's jittering, butterflies, as the English say, and I'm breathing deeply to calm myself. I'm telling myself to think about the tennis, to think about my game, the match.
He doesn't know, after all, and I'm not supposed to tell him.
I just can't imagine seeing him. How he'll be different, how he's going to change into the man that I know from the future. I can't imagine him standing there in front of me, not knowing, and me not telling him. I'm not good with secrets. I don't like keeping them and I have a bad habit of giving them all away. In her whole life, my mother has never received a birthday present from me that was an actual surprise.
I push a hand through my hair. This match I should concentrate on my serve, footwork—
And I push the door of the changing room open.
He isn't there. It's impossible not to grin at my own stupidity, building this up as though it was a big deal, and I shake my head as I start to get changed. I only stepped out of the shower in my hotel room ten minutes ago and my hair's still wet, and I'm shaking cold drips of water onto my shoulders as I unpack my bag. I take out my trainers and place them neatly under the bench, I take out my socks and my spare socks and straighten them out before putting them on the bench next to my neatly folded shorts.
Then there's a creak of a door and footsteps behind me.
I turn around and there he is, walking into the room with a frown like he's thinking and the thoughts aren't about me. Younger than I've seen him, a lot younger, hair too long and pulled back, face less lined but just as sweet as the face I've seen so many times before.
Suddenly I realise I'm staring and the impression that I want to give him is certainly not that of a creep. I turn on a smile and he walks towards me, hand outstretched.
"Roger Federer," he says. He's more friendly than most of the players on the circuit, he'll talk in the changing room and smile at his opponents and be polite to the ballboys.
"Rafa Nadal," I tell him, and suddenly I wish my English was better. I try to think of words I once knew from school, from him, but I never paid attention in English class, eyes fixated on the dusty sunbeams streaming through the window instead, dreaming of sunbaked playgrounds and cracked leather footballs, and when I saw him he only spoke Spanish to me. And right now it's too early for him to have learned my language.
"Um – so, do you speak much English?" he asks, turning around to glance at me as he starts to pull out his things from his bag.
"I –" I begin, trying to find the words. "Ah – I no speak good – a small." I hold up my thumb and my index finger a few millimetres from each other to show what I mean.
"Okay." He nods, reassuringly, and smiles slightly as he sits down on another bench and pulls off his shoes. Then he looks thoughtful, and appears to come up with one of the only Spanish phrases he knows. "Buena suerte."
Good luck indeed. Nerves are still fluttering around my stomach. Not because I have to play Roger Federer, the great Federer, World Number One, but because Roger's here, Roger who I've loved and missed, but he's not my Roger. Not yet, anyway.
ROGER: I didn't know the kid was that good.
I'd heard about him, that he was good on clay, but Miami's hardcourt, and I wasn't expecting a seventeen year old to beat me. I know that sounds like arrogance and I don't mean it to, but I'd just been made Number One. I was young and at that time I felt infallible.
The first sign that something was up that day was the look he gave me when he first saw me. I'd seen a similar look before in the eyes of people I'd encountered in the future or the past. A lot of the time it hadn't fazed me too much. I'd just smiled and moved on. But with this boy it was different. I think I'll always remember what he looked like when I walked in – like a deer caught in the headlamps. I thought that maybe it was just because of the difference in our rankings, our different levels of fame, but there was something about him that just caught me there, in his dark brown gaze, his uneven-featured face, his wide anxious smile and that nervous energy that meant he never stopped shifting around.
It was just something about his face. He was handsome, sure, but that wasn't it. I knew he'd recognised me but I had no idea where from, what could have happened to make him look at me like that. Like I was vital, important, crucial to him. Like he knew me so well already. I couldn't ask in case I'd read the whole situation wrong and wound up sounding like a nut. Instead I just smiled and exchanged pleasantries. He had a deep voice, very broken English and a heavy accent. He was the new boy from Mallorca, who loved fishing and sand and his mother's cooking, and although I didn't dislike any of those things, we were very different from each other. I'd honed my game smooth, he was full of sudden flurries of movement. I thought about the expressions on my face, the impression I wanted to give off. His smile was bright and unguarded, like opening curtains at dawn and letting sunlight flood the room.
And he beat me.
I hadn't been anticipating that. It wasn't a particularly embarrassing or difficult loss but it was a blow nonetheless.
Still, I was glad even then that if I had to be beaten, it was by this boy with his sleeveless shirt and messy dark hair and crinkles between his eyebrows when he frowned. He was easy to care about, even way back then.
Roger is 6, and 23.
ROGER: It happened for the first time when I was six. I got into bed, felt the familiar press of my mother's lips to my forehead, her reassuring whisper – "Good night, sweetheart" – and my eyes drifted shut, I drifted away, comfortable, warm. When I woke again, I wasn't in bed. I was somewhere that was damp, spiky, fresh, and my eyes were still screwed shut as I shifted around, trying to work out what was happening.
To start with, I was scared, guts churning, breath coming in pants. Frozen still, hands twisted into the wet spiky stuff until I was almost tearing it out. I finally forced myself to open my eyes and saw that what I was lying on was green; grass, I realised suddenly, and sat up quickly, heart pounding. I felt sick with nerves as I looked frantically around. And then I heard the voice.
"Roger! Is that you?"
The words were quiet, in a voice that I had not heard before, and it was getting difficult to fight away the tears. I heard myself let out a whimper, hands scratching themselves even deeper into the thick grass. There were bright lights to my left, and a dark shadow advancing towards me. A tear trickled down my cheek and I screwed my eyes shut, hoping that this bad dream would end.
"Roger..." The figure was over me now as I somehow found the courage to peek upwards. How does he know my name? He was tall, dark, his long hair tied back, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sneakers. Then the man was bending down, looking into my face, and suddenly I wasn't scared any more. The man had kind eyes, dark brown, and he was smiling at me. "Hello. You're Roger, aren't you?" he asked. "How old are you?"
"Six," I stuttered back, altogether relieved by the sort of normal conversation I tended to have with older people. "What's your name?"
"I'm called Roger too. We're going to be friends," the man said, still gazing frankly at me, and I nodded, and believed him. Then I blinked and all of a sudden I was at home in bed, sheets tangled around me, and I really did begin to cry.
Roger is 6, and 17.
ROGER: When it happened again a few days later I wasn't as scared. I'd taken a torch with me to bed in case it happened again, and so I was a little gratified when I felt dizzy and a little sick and then I woke up somewhere else completely different, naked and abrupt and completely without my torch or pyjamas
Like the first time it had happened, I couldn't bring myself to open my eyes.
"Hello?" I said, cautiously.
"Open your eyes," a patient voice said. "It's me again. Roger. Your friend."
So I opened his eyes and there in front of me was Big Roger, except younger, wearing a t-shirt and jeans and sprawled on a single bed surrounded with magazines. "What are you doing?"
"Reading about Pete Sampras. You want some clothes?"
"Yes, please." I shifted, uncomfortably.
Big Roger reached over and pulled out a heap of clothes from beneath his bed before tossing them gently to me. "Take what you want."
I sorted through them, found some shorts and a t-shirt that were only a little too big for me. It was a relief to get clothes on, and then I moved forwards towards him, perching on the end of his bed when he indicated for me to do so.
"We need to talk," he said, sounding serious as he put his magazine down. "Do you know how you got here?"
I shrugged. Honestly, I hadn't thought about it much. "A dream," I ventured.
He shook his head. "Nope. This is real. You're special. You can do a special trick. You can time travel."
I squinted at him. "What?" As far as I knew, time travel didn't exist. It was in books and movies sometimes, but it wasn't actually possible, like the way I knew that Superman could fly but I couldn't. It didn't make sense.
"I know it sounds crazy. But it's true." He smiled slightly, leaning closer to me. "And it's kind of awesome sometimes."
"You do it too?"
He frowned for a moment. "I... yeah. Sometimes it's tricky, though. We need to talk about it. Sometimes difficult things might happen, like you might close your eyes and wind up somewhere that isn't with me. And you have to know what to do then."
"Because I'd be naked and I can't just walk around without any clothes."
He grinned. "Exactly. So you have to learn how to take clothes."
"Steal them?"
"Sometimes." He shrugged. "I know what you're thinking, your mother says stealing's wrong, and she's right, it is, most of the time. But it'd be worse if you didn't do it. You just need to make sure that no one notices you. It's easy to do."
I nodded, and with the motion there was a sudden whirling of the room around me, like seasickness, my head swirling. "Whoa." I reached out, grabbed onto the corner of his bedclothes. As everything faded I heard him say my name and then with a thump I was back in my own bed, blinking up at the ceiling. So that was what it was. I was special.
It was a strange night. I didn't realise then that the older Roger was me, eleven years in the future, tall and lanky and awkwardly graceful. Over the course of the next few months I travelled more. He told me all about his time travelling, the places he'd been, what he'd seen. He said that it was kind of tough sometimes but if you kept your wits about you, it was easier. He said that it happened less when he was relaxed or tired, that I should exercise as much as I could in order to stay put in the present. When he told me that he was me, I was crushed. It was then that I knew I was alone, that I was the only traveller out there, that I had only myself for company. I was special, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing.
Roger is 36, and Rafa is 6.
ROGER: The first time that he meets me, I'm waiting down by the pond for him. At the bottom of their back garden the Nadal family have a little area that's almost closed away for the kids, unviewable from the house. It's messy, shaded by trees, bedraggled and covered in weeds, totally different from the rest of their sundrenched beautiful garden. It's cool weather, not quite a baking Mallorcan summer, and there's no bag of clothes there yet, beneath the plant with the thick glossy green leaves and bright magenta blossoms.
I hear him before I see him. Running footsteps veering from side to side and a 'neee-owwwww' noise like he's pretending to be an aeroplane. For a moment I imagine him, arms stretched out as he teeters from side to side, running at top speed, and I can't help but smile. The pattering footsteps get closer and closer until finally he's crashing through into this clearing at the back, a white sheet clutched in his hands, streaming out behind him like it's his superhero cape. When he sees me he falters, halts, takes a step back.
"Who are you?" he asks, glancing back towards the house like he's about to shout for his parents.
"My name's Roger. I, um... I lost my clothes. Could you hand me that sheet?" I ask, mentally thanking God for the flights and fantasies of six-year-olds.
He does so, and looks away as I wrap it around my waist, twice, and tie a knot in it to keep it up. Then I emerge from the bush I was crouched in, and hold my hand out to him, so that he can shake it. "Hi. I'm Roger. It's nice to meet you."
He nods, frowning up at me, before tentatively reaching out to take my proffered hand. "I'm Rafa."
Years into the future, when he's an adult and grown and mine, this bedraggled little boy will teach me Spanish, casual fast-spoken Spanish, and right now I couldn't be more thankful for it. "Hi, Rafa," I say. "I need to tell you some things about me. Some secrets."
He stares at me for a moment longer, before turning decisively away. "I'm getting Mama," he announces.
"No! No, don't." Any other time, any other time I'd be glad that Rafa had principles and that he was taught how to keep himself safe as a little kid. Right now I'm hating Señora Nadal for browbeating common sense into her only son. "My secret's not scary or anything. It's kind of cool. I'm a time traveller."
His eyes widen. "No. That only happens on TV and in movies."
"No. I promise you, it happens to me as well."
"I don't believe you."
"I promise you, it's true. Your name is Rafael Nadal. You're six. You were born on June 3rd, 1986. You have a little sister. You like playing sports, like tennis and football, and you like to go fishing with your dad and your uncle." It all comes out of me in a big rush and he squints up at me, the expression so familiar and sweet that I can't help but smile.
"How do you know that?" he asks, slowly.
"In my past, and in your future, I'm going to see you again," I tell him honestly. "We're going to be friends."
"We're already friends in the future?" he asks, perplexed as he plops down onto the floor, crossing his legs and looking up at me, brow furrowed. "So I can't change that."
"No, you can't. And I don't think you'd want to change it, either. In the future we're going to get to do a lot of cool stuff. Like play tennis and football. And you'll get to see me disappear, too."
"You're going to disappear?" And now he's surprised, eyebrows shooting up so high they're practically hitting his hairline.
"Yeah. I've got to go back to my own time." I shrug, and kneel down next to him. "But I'm going to come back, and we'll talk some more then." In fact, my vision's already beginning to blur and I'm getting dizzy. I place a hand on the ground to steady myself. "I need to ask you to do something for me, okay, Rafa? If your dad has some clothes he doesn't want, you could bring them down here and put them safely in a box for me, for the next time I come. Could you do that?"
He nods, eyes wide. "Okay!"
"I think I'm going to go now. I'll be back soon..." I concentrate for a moment, thinking of the list that older Rafa gave me, all of the dates and times that I'll be popping up in his past. "Come back next Wednesday, okay? After school. And don't tell anyone."
"No one?"
"No one," I clarify, and before I disappear there's time for just one more smile as I gaze into his puzzled brown eyes before home, home I go.
Roger is 35, and Rafa is 30.
RAFA: He vanished just after I got to sleep. I know that because I woke up at the sudden emptiness in the bed, and went back to sleep a few minutes later. Roger vanishing in the night, it happens a lot. Other people would get jealous, but I understand. I get it. I just wait here for him, and always, he comes back to me.
Tonight he lands back in bed with a thump and I roll over, instantly awake. He's sprawled there grinning at the ceiling, and when I look at him, stretch out a gentle hand and rub it over his stomach, he grabs it and laces his fingers through mine. "Rafa! I just met you."
"You travelled to meet me, no?" It's happened before a few times, he's finally started to see me when I was a child, the way that's vivid from my childhood and that I remember like it was yesterday.
"For the first time! Your first time." He's laughing now, letting go of my hand and rolling over to wrap his arms around me, to squeeze me tightly. "I think you were playing Superman. Or you were being an aeroplane." He kisses my cheek roughly once, then again on the mouth, and even though I'm still half asleep I'm smiling widely, his happiness infectious. "Rafa, you were such a funny kid!" He's laughing again and I'm tickling him and pouting like I'm offended by that.
"I was not. You were a weird guy who appeared in my garden! What am I supposed to do, welcome you?" He's squirming on top of me, trying to grab my hands and stop the tickling, but I'm too fast for him and he falls off me, wriggling before I finally acquiesce and cease the assault. The famously dignified Roger Federer, reduced to a heap of laughter in bed. No one could have imagined this, and it's probably not possible for me to love him any more than I do in this moment, to feel any more affection.
I reach out and press my lips to his, feeling his smile under my mouth, and after a moment the smile disintegrates and the kiss grows deeper and more intense, breathing heavier, his hands pushing at the waistband of my shorts. I'm suddenly very aware that he's naked, and as he moves closer to me I lose myself in him, and all our laughter is finished for the night.