Chapter Text
The silence of a locker room after a final is never truly silence.
It is a dull noise made of showers running at the end of the corridor, the sharp hiss of medical tape being ripped away from bare skin, the low hum of refrigerators packed with lukewarm isotonic drinks.
Carlos sat on the wooden bench, legs stretched out in front of him, feet still trapped in tennis shoes caked in Madrid’s red clay.
He had lost in three sets.
A bad, edgy match where his arm wouldn't swing the way he wanted, and his stomach had knotted with frustration from the very first game.
But it wasn't the defeat burning behind his eyes. It was the scent.
The locker room air was thick with Alphas. Heavy sweat, chemical testosterone—the sweet, aggressive musk of men who had spent three hours marking territory on a baseline rectangle. It was a scent Carlos had known since he was twelve, a trail of dominance that usually fired him up, made him feel at home.
Tonight, it made him sick to his stomach.
Across the corridor, half-hidden by the shadow of the Head kit bags, Darren Cahill was speaking in low tones to an ATP delegate.
They didn't use names, but they didn't need to. Darren kept his hands buried deep in his tracksuit pockets, his head down, his jaw tight. When the delegate handed over a sheet of paper—the press conference schedule—Darren took it without looking, folded it into quarters, and shoved it into his pocket.
A sharp, definitive movement.
Carlos strained his ears, pretending to fiddle with the strings of his racket.
"Is he already inside?" Darren asked.
His voice was flat, stripped of that warm, Australian drawl he usually shared on the practice courts.
"Yes," the delegate replied, looking down at his tablet. "Press Room 1 is packed. They even let in journalists from non-sporting outlets. Orders from the top."
Darren didn't answer. He simply turned, catching Carlos's eye for a single second. There was no reproach in his gaze, only an immense, ancient exhaustion that had nothing to do with miles traveled or hours of sleep lost.
Then, with a nod to Simone Vagnozzi waiting by the back door, he headed down the media tunnel.
Carlos stood up. His body protested, thigh muscles stiff from all the sliding, but he didn't care. He left his bag on the bench, didn't even change his damp shirt. He followed the scent.
There was an internal corridor, narrow and lit by unforgiving neon strips, that connected the locker rooms to the press box of the Caja Mágica.
Normally, players avoided it; it was the territory of technicians, cameramen, and security.
But Carlos slipped behind one of the fire doors, moving with the agility of someone who had known every corner of this tour since he was a kid.
He reached the back of Press Room 1.
There was a small ventilation grate looking directly onto the stage, a blind spot where staff members usually stood to monitor microphones. Gaia, the ATP press officer, was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, the heel of one stiletto tapping a frantic rhythm against the floor.
Carlos peered through the gap.
Jannik was sitting at the center of the long table. In front of him, the nameplate and sponsor logos gleamed under the photographers' flashes. He wore the official white tournament polo, buttoned right to the top, his red hair slightly damp but already combed with a geometric precision that looked almost artificial. His back was dead straight, completely detached from the leather backrest of the chair.
The Red Prince. That’s what the French newspapers called him. The golden boy of Italian tennis.
The Omega who had stopped asking for permission to win.
Seen from here, less than ten meters away, Jannik looked like a painting. Untouchable. Cold in a way that Carlos knew wasn't arrogance.
He possessed that Nordic composure that let nothing leak through: not a stray drop of sweat, not a single tremor in the long fingers gripping a still-sealed bottle of mineral water.
"...we understand the tour's dynamics, Jannik," the voice came from the third row, a middle-aged British journalist with an unbuttoned collar and a heavy, drawn-out accent, "but the fact remains that your scheduling this year has been unusually light. Many of your peers are wondering if a physique unsupported by Alpha biology can truly withstand the pressure of three consecutive Slams. Aren't you worried that your... biological orientation might become a factor of instability at crucial moments?"
A murmur rippled through the room.
A few isolated camera shutters clicked.
Carlos felt a flash of heat rush from his toes straight to the back of his neck. Instability. It was a code word. They used it all the time.
When an Alpha lost his mind and smashed three rackets in a row on the hard courts, the media talked about "pressure," "pure competitive drive," "character." When Jannik skipped a tournament to manage his recovery, his biology became a medical question mark, a structural limitation.
A factory defect.
Jannik didn't blink. He never broke eye contact with the microphone in front of him.
"My schedule is agreed upon with my team," he said. His voice was entirely flat, the clean ring of English learned in lower-tier tournaments, barely rounded by the vowels of his homeland. "I work to be ready for the tournaments that matter. The rest is just your opinion. I play tennis."
"Yes, of course," another journalist cut in, an Italian print reporter this time, wearing a smile meant to look supportive but oozing a slimy condescension.
"But you must agree that the public's reception is shifting. There is a section of the locker room that perceives your presence as... different. An Omega dominating the men's rankings alters traditional balances. Do you feel protected by the ATP, or do you believe there is still cultural resistance towards those who, by nature, should occupy other spaces on the tour?"
Other spaces.
Carlos clenched his fists inside his tracksuit pockets. It meant the dedicated tournaments, the protected categories, the minor circuit where Omegas were confined "for their own safety," smothered in sponsorship deals that sold aesthetics rather than sporting records. They were telling him he was a foreign body.
They were saying it right to his face, in front of a hundred live cameras, masking the insult as sports sociology.
Beside Carlos, Gaia took a step forward, her face taut. But before she could grab the courtesy microphone to cut off the questions, a figure stood up from the front row of the side seats, where veterans usually sat for institutional panels.
It was Djokovic. The sheer authority of his voice filled the room instantly, cutting the journalist off mid-breath.
"I think this question is ridiculous," the champion said, without even looking at the man with the open shirt. "Jannik is number one in the world because he plays better than everyone in this room put together, including me. His biology has nothing to do with the quality of his forehand. Respect the game, or leave the room."
A heavy silence fell over the press room. The journalists traded glances, some typing frantically on their laptops. The tension had been broken, but the air remained dirty.
Jannik gave a tiny nod toward the colleague who had stepped in. A silent, barely perceptible thank you. But when he lowered his eyes back to the table, Carlos saw something the audience from the floor couldn't.
Jannik’s fingers had tightened so hard around the water bottle that the plastic had deformed, producing a tiny, sharp crackle. The microphone didn't catch it, but to Carlos, it sounded like an explosion.
The skin over his knuckles was stark white. Beneath the edge of his polo collar, right at his collarbone, a vein was pulsing way too fast.
He wasn't marble. He was flesh. And he was bleeding on the inside.
Gaia cleared her throat into her microphone. "Thank you, everyone. The press conference is over."
Jannik stood up immediately. He didn't look at anyone. He didn't stop to sign the autograph a local TV tech timidly held out to him. He walked straight toward the back door—the exact one where Carlos was hiding.
Carlos made a move to step back, to vanish into the shadows of the corridor, but his feet wouldn't move. He stood there, frozen, as the door swung open hard.
Jannik stepped into the service corridor. Darren was right behind him, a hand extended without actually touching him, acting as a human shield against the world left outside.
For a second, Jannik’s eyes locked onto Carlos’s.
They were green, a faded green washed out by exhaustion, but inside lay a rage so cold and sharp that it took Carlos’s breath away. It wasn't the rage of someone wanting to strike; it was the rage of someone forced to let people look under his skin, hating the world for allowing it.
He hated that Carlos was standing there—an Alpha, untouched, protected by his very nature—witnessing his humiliation.
Jannik didn't say a word. He brushed past, his arm clearing Carlos’s hoodie by a millimeter, leaving behind a sharp scent of linen, cold sweat, and something chemical—the synthetic blockers he used to mask his true Omega scent, ensuring the media wouldn't get another weapon for tomorrow's headlines.
"Jannik..." Carlos tried to whisper, but the voice died in his throat, too quiet, too useless.
Darren passed Carlos, pausing for just a split second. He placed a hand on Carlos’s arm, a brief, warning weight. He said nothing, but his eyes said it all:
Leave him be. Not now. Not you.
Carlos was left alone in the corridor.
The fading buzz of the emptying press room sounded like a distant drone.
He looked at his hands. They were clean. His tournament credential was gold—the pass of an Alpha top player whom no one would ever dare question about the emotional stability of his body. He felt like trash. A parasite breathing clean air while someone else suffocated just to keep from showing a crack.
The ride back to the hotel was a silent trip in the back seat of the official tournament car. Madrid drifted past the window, a tangle of warm lights and billboards celebrating tennis, competition, the beauty of the sport.
When he entered his hotel room, Carlos didn't turn on the lights. He dropped his kit bag onto the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, pressing the palms of his hands against his forehead.
The silence of the five-star room was identical to the locker room's, but this time, there was no scent of other Alphas to drown out his thoughts. There was only the image of those long, thin fingers squeezing the plastic of a water bottle until it hurt, just to keep from trembling in front of a lens.
The silence of the hotel room was a void that amplified everything: the mechanical ticking of the air conditioner, the heavy thud of his own heart, the orange reflection of the streetlamps on Paseo de la Castellana cutting the white ceiling in two.
Carlos still hadn't taken off his shoes. He remained seated on the edge of the mattress, elbows propped on his knees, staring at the dark parquet floor. There was still a grayish trace of clay on his knuckles, the remnant of a match that now felt light-years away, hollowed of any meaning.
He had always thought of tennis as a linear equation: you train harder than the rest, you hit the court, you execute every ball, you win or you lose. End of story. The tour, with its carbon-copy hotels, private flights, and perfectly manicured courts, had always seemed like a gilded bubble. A safe place.
Tonight, for the first time, that bubble smelled like a trap.
He slid his hand into his tracksuit pocket and pulled out his phone. The screen lit up, casting a bluish glow over his tired face. There were twenty-seven unread messages on WhatsApp. Groups of childhood friends, skyrocketing Instagram notifications, consoling texts from his agent about the loss.
“You still played a great tournament, Carlitos. We’ll get them in Rome.”
He ignored them all. He opened his browser and, almost without realizing it, typed Jannik's name into the search bar. He didn't look up the main draw results or first-serve percentage statistics. He went straight to the "News" section.
The first articles were already online, uploaded in record time by media outlets less than twenty minutes after the conference ended. The headlines were masterpieces of subtle verbal violence.
“Sinner Stung in Press Conference: ‘I play tennis, the rest is just your opinion’.”
“Tension in Madrid: The Red Prince Defended by Veterans. Open Clash Over Omega Schedule Management.”
“The Sinner Case: Can Biology Truly Coexist with Modern ATP Demands?”
Carlos scrolled down, his stomach tightening again. Beneath one of the articles, a comment section was already buzzing. He read the first three before common sense forced him to lock his screen.
“The journalists are right. If he can't handle the physical rhythm, he should go back to playing exhibition matches.”
“An Omega at the top of the rankings is an insult to the history of this sport. Soon he’ll want to halt the tour for his own convenience.”
“Everyone knows he gets favors from tournament directors because he sells tickets. But real tennis is something else.”
"Bunch of idiots," Carlos growled at the empty wall of the room.
He threw the phone onto the bed and stood up, pacing the narrow space between the desk and the wardrobe. Rage pressed hard in his chest, hot and disorganized, typical of his Alpha nature. He wanted to break something. He wanted to track down the man with the open shirt from the press conference and force him to apologize. He wanted to do something, anything, to erase the suffocating sense of helplessness.
But the cold, bitter truth was that he couldn't do a thing. Because he was part of the system. He was the blueprint of the perfect player for the tour's traditionalists: a young, explosive, charismatic Alpha who packed stadiums with raw power and confident smiles.
When Carlos won, it was down to his talent; when Jannik won, there was always a biological "but" hanging over his name like a price tag.
A sharp knock at the door made him jump.
Carlos stood frozen for a second, steadying his breathing, before stepping over to open it.
Standing on the threshold, arms crossed and wearing the stern expression of someone who knew him all too well, was Juan Carlos Ferrero. His coach was still in his team gear, a medical bag slung over one shoulder.
Juanki didn't ask for permission. He walked in, glanced at the tennis bag abandoned on the floor, and turned to his player.
"You haven't showered yet, Carlos. And you haven't eaten anything. Simone told me you didn't pass by the Players' Lounge restaurant."
"I wasn't hungry," Carlos answered, shutting the door with a shove of his shoulder. He leaned against the desk, crossing his arms. "And the locker room sucked tonight."
Ferrero observed him in silence for a few seconds. There was an old wisdom in the eyes of the former world number one, the calm of a man who had spent his entire life inside this circuit and knew its every single crack, every unsaid backdrop.
"You were at the back of Press Room 1, weren't you?" Juanki asked, his voice low, free of scolding but heavy with absolute seriousness.
Carlos didn't lower his gaze. "Yes. I went there by accident. I wanted to see how they managed the interview timings before my turn."
"Nobody goes to that area by accident, Carlitos. Especially after losing a match like that." Ferrero sighed, setting the medical bag down on the desk chair.
He walked over to the window, looking out at the lights of Madrid. "What happened today... happens at almost every tournament. It's just that Team Sinner usually ensures the room is cleaned up before the younger players or unauthorized media can see the mud."
"It's garbage, Juanki," Carlos snapped, taking a step forward. His voice shook with frustration. "They asked him if his body is defective. They told him, implicitly, that he shouldn't be here. In front of everyone. And he just had to sit there, all alone, answering politely while they stared at him like some rare animal."
"Jannik is not alone. He has Darren. He has Simone. He has an entire team that would chop off a hand for him," Ferrero countered, turning slowly. "But your reaction, Carlos... your reaction worries me."
"Why? Because injustice pisses me off?"
"No. Because you are an Alpha, and an Alpha's biological instinct when they see an Omega in trouble is to step in, to protect, to mark territory. But this isn't the real world, Carlos. This is the ATP tour. If you get involved in this, if you make the wrong statement or insert yourself between Jannik and the media, you aren't saving him. You are destroying him."
Carlos froze, the words dying in his throat. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that if Carlos Alcaraz, the golden boy of the ATP, steps in to defend Jannik Sinner, tomorrow's papers won't write that the tour is sexist. They will write that Sinner needs an Alpha to defend him because he can't do it himself. They will write that there's something going on between you two. They will turn his professional dignity into tabloid gossip. Are you aware of that?"
Silence filled the room once more, heavier this time, almost suffocating. Carlos felt his coach's words hit him like a forehand to the center of his chest. They were cold, logical, and damn true. The tour didn't forgive weakness, and it certainly didn't forgive uninvited protection.
"He... he hates being seen like that, doesn't he?" Carlos whispered, remembering that sharp, icy green gaze that had pierced him in the corridor. "He looked at me like I was his worst enemy."
"You are not his enemy, Carlos. But you are the mirror of everything the world doesn't demand him to be." Ferrero stepped closer and placed a hand on his shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze.
"Now go take that shower. We have a flight to Rome at nine tomorrow morning. And let Team Sinner fight their own demons. It's none of your business."
When Juanki left the room, Carlos was alone again.
He walked slowly toward the bathroom, peeling off his shirt, damp with sweat and red clay. He turned on the shower, waiting for the water to heat up, and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink.
The Red Prince. The elegant, untouchable, gelid Jannik Sinner.
Carlos closed his eyes under the stream of hot water. The only thing he could see wasn't the marble statue dominating the courts of half the world, but a twenty-four-year-old guy who, in the darkness of a service corridor, hid his ragged breathing behind the artificial scent of a bottle of suppressors.
And for the first time in his life, Carlos didn't feel the desire to win a tournament or claim a trophy; he felt only a desperate need to understand how anyone could survive a solitude that massive.
After the steam from the shower had finally cleared, leaving only a trail of heavy water droplets sliding down the mirror, streaking the reflection of his face, Carlos rubbed a towel through his hair, leaving it half-damp, and walked out of the bathroom wearing only a pair of tracksuit bottoms.
The room was cold. The hotel's air conditioning, set to those standard, impersonal degrees that defined every hotel room from Melbourne to Paris, sent a chill across his still-warm skin.
He lay flat on his back on the bed, hands laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Juanki's words kept echoing in his mind, heavy like a deep inside-out forehand.
You are not his enemy, Carlos. But you are the mirror of everything the world doesn't demand him to be.
He thought of his father. He thought of how many times, as a kid, he had heard him talk about Omegas on the tour with that dismissive tone typical of old-school Alphas.
"They have the talent, Carlitos, but they don't have the stomach. At the first sign of a real battle, biology comes to collect the debt." If Carlos had grown up without that poison in his veins, he owed it entirely to his mother and his brothers.
They were the ones who had pulled him aside, tearing him away from that primitive, toxic idea of masculinity, teaching him that strength had nothing to do with the right to trample others. His mother always told him: "The world will treat you like a king simply because you were born an Alpha, Carlos. You make sure you remember to stay a man."
But tonight, that privilege burned on his skin like a crime. Jannik was up there, all by himself, defending a kingdom the rest of the world viewed as a biological anomaly.
Carlos rolled onto his side, hugging the pillow. He closed his eyes, but all he could see was the rigidity of that white polo buttoned up to the throat. A uniform.
An armor to keep even a millimeter of humanity from breaking through.
The alarm went off at six-thirty, a brutal electronic beep that shattered what little light sleep he had managed to scrap together by dawn.
Two hours later, Madrid-Barajas airport was the usual anthill of tourists, business travelers, and baggage carts. Around the gates dedicated to domestic and European flights, the professional tennis ecosystem moved like a nomadic tribe.
The Madrid tournament was over, Rome was waiting, and the tour granted no breaks.
Carlos walked alongside Juanki, clutching the strap of his black Babolat bag.
Around them, other middle-class players of the ATP talked loudly about flight connections, hotels at the Foro Italico, and physiotherapy sessions. There was the usual background hum, laughter, light gossip about who had gone out partying after the quarterfinals. The normalcy of the tour.
Then, the tone of the air shifted. It was a transition almost imperceptible to an outsider, but immediate to Carlos's scent and instinct.
A little further ahead, near the priority boarding desk for the Alitalia flight straight to Fiumicino, Team Sinner was moving as a single unit.
They looked like a security detail.
Simone Vagnozzi walked a step ahead, talking intensely on his phone with a dark expression; Darren Cahill closed out the line, his long gaze scanning the crowd, intercepting and preemptively shutting down the raised phones of over-eager fans.
And at the center of it all was him.
Jannik wore a dark hoodie with the hood pulled way up, black sunglasses despite the dull, artificial airport light, and massive noise-canceling headphones clamped over his ears. He didn't look around. He kept his eyes glued to his own sneakers, one hand shoved into his hoodie pocket, the other gripping the handle of his roller bag.
From a distance, he looked like the Red Prince all over again: a remote, icy figure surrounded by an aura of total inaccessibility. Nobody approached.
Not even the other players dared break that bubble. It was the price to pay for being the exception to the rule; it was the wall he had to build to keep the day-before's mud from getting into his lungs.
Carlos slowed his pace. Juanki noticed, placing a hand behind his back to nudge him forward, but Carlos couldn't tear his eyes away from that dark silhouette.
Just as they were about to head down two different corridors for their respective gates, Jannik stopped. For a brief moment, he tilted his head up to check the departure board. As he did, he slid his sunglasses slightly down his nose.
Their gazes locked across the crowded space of the terminal.
It didn't last more than two seconds. But in that fragment of time, Carlos didn't see the coldness of the media or the rage from the Madrid corridor. He saw only a boundless exhaustion, the weight of someone who has to stand straight even when their legs are shaking, the emptiness of a twenty-four-year-old guy traveling toward another country, another tournament, another arena primed to vivisect him.
Jannik adjusted the glasses back onto his face with a quick flick of his fingers and looked back down at the floor, vanishing behind the bulky frame of Vagnozzi opening the boarding tunnel door.
"Carlos, come on. We’re going to miss the flight," Juanki said, his voice softer than the previous night.
Carlos took a deep breath. The airport air smelled of jet fuel and burnt coffee, but underneath, in the primitive memory of his nostrils, there was still that chemical trace of synthetic blockers and clean linen.
"Yeah," Carlos said, turning his back on the gate for the Rome flight. "Let's go."
He boarded the plane fully aware that Italy would be even tougher. Rome was Jannik's home turf, the place where the pressure would double and the vultures would sharpen their knives.
But as the plane lifted its wheels off the Madrid tarmac, Carlos realized something that made him grip the seat's armrest tight: he didn't care about the tournaments, the points, or the rankings anymore. He just wanted to find a way, any clean way, to make that boy with the eyes of ice understand that he didn't have to do it all alone.
As the plane climbed, stabilizing above the thick layer of white clouds blanketing the Madrid sky, a chime signaled that electronic devices could now be used. Carlos snapped open his phone screen.
Juanki’s words and the image of Jannik sheltered by his team at the gate kept short-circuiting his brain. He couldn't act on his own. He couldn't make public statements.
And above all, he couldn't talk about it with Jack Draper, Musetti, or Berrettini. They were already Jannik’s trenches, his armor, and they were too emotionally involved; they would raise a wall to protect his privacy even from him.
No.
Carlos had to talk to the others. The ones on the other side of the net, the ones who shared the summit of the tour and possessed the political, media, and biological weight to shift the tide. The Alphas. And a few Betas who actually carried weight.
Taking a deep breath, he opened WhatsApp and tapped the icon to create a new group.
He selected the numbers one by one, with surgical precision: Holger, Alex, Casper, Zverev, Stefanos, Daniil, Taylor, Andrey and, after a slight hesitation, he included Novak too. He needed the defiance of the youth, the solidity of the top ten, and the political authority of the former number one.
To avoid making it look like some dramatic state summit, he typed out a group name that was typically him, a bit ironic but getting straight to the point:
"SOS: save the fox"
The laughter and teasing of his childhood friends back in Spain had taught him that to get Alphas their age moving, you shouldn't get melodramatic; you had to engage them seriously with a touch of lightness.
He fired off the first message.
Carlos: Guys. Are you all in Rome already? Do not read this message if there is an ATP press officer within three meters of you.
The replies didn't take long to roll in. Daniil Medvedev was first, with his trademark cynical timing.
Daniil: Alcaraz, if you are dragging me into another of your pre-tournament football sessions, the answer is no. Clay already makes me miserable on its own.
Holger: I'm in Rome. What's up, C? Finally realized my backhand is better than yours?
Casper: Just arriving at the hotel. Everything good after Madrid?
Alex: Present. What's going on, mate?
Carlos stared out the window for a second, then brought his fingers back to the keyboard. The cursor blinked. Now came the hard part.
Carlos: No football, Daniil. And keep dreaming, Holger. It's about last night. Jannik's press conference in Madrid. Did you guys see it?
Across the screen, the read receipts ticked over for everyone. But the atmosphere in the chat shifted almost instantaneously. Not everyone was in the mood to play knights in shining armor.
Sascha: I heard it from the hallway. But let's be honest, Carlos. This is the pro tour, not a kindergarten. Sinner is number two in the world, makes millions, and has one of the best teams behind him. He knew what he was getting into when he decided to play the men's tour as an Omega. Everyone handles their own pressure.
Carlos felt a flash of heat hit his neck. He gripped his phone a little tighter. Before he could type a reply, another notification lit up. Holger didn't keep them waiting.
Holger: I agree with Sascha. Why should we act as his shield? If the media stresses him out, that's an advantage for us on court. Tennis is an individual sport, right? If he can't handle the journalists, let him drop in the rankings. I get three hundred stupid questions a press conference and nobody ever made a support group chat for me.
Daniil: Rune, they ask you stupid questions because you give stupid answers. There is a difference between being arrogant and being an Omega targeted for his biology.
Holger: Fuck you, Daniil. I'm just saying Sinner doesn't need Alcaraz playing the white knight. He has Jack for that.
The tone was degenerating fast. Carlos felt his pulse quicken, his Alpha instinct telling him to put Rune in his place hard, but a couple of notifications stifled the feud before it could boil over.
Taylor: Look, Sascha and Holger are exaggerating, but the tour is a meat grinder for everyone. Though last night in Madrid, they definitely crossed the line of decency. Looked like a medical interrogation, not a tennis presser.
Andrey: I felt really bad seeing that scene. Jannik is a good guy, plays unbelievable tennis, and never harms anyone. Why do they have to treat him like that? I'm in if we can do something.
Novak: Holger, Sascha. You are missing the point. I said my piece yesterday in the press room and I will repeat it here: the rhetoric they are using against Jannik damages the image of the entire tour. Today it's him because he's an Omega dominating, tomorrow it will be one of you for something else. Isolating him isn't competitiveness, it's cowardice.
Casper: I'm in, Carlos. It costs nothing to shut down a slimy journalist. It's a matter of respect for the game.
Alex: I'm in too, mate. Count me in.
Carlos reeled his thumbs back in, ignoring Sascha and Holger's provocations. He knew he wouldn't convince everyone, but the majority—and crucially, Nole's authority—was on his side.
Carlos: Thanks, guys. Anyone who doesn't want to participate is free to ignore this, we aren't forcing anyone. But for the rest of us: we form a wall in Rome. If a journalist asks a question about Jannik's biology, we shut it down. If we see him alone in the lounge, we sit with him. Let's show them that the top of the ATP doesn't accept this trash. We need to give him room to breathe.
Neither Zverev nor Rune typed another word, leaving only the double blue checkmark. But the silence of the others, punctuated by a thumbs-up from Medvedev, backing from Fritz, and a heart reaction from Rublev, was enough to confirm the mission was officially live.
Carlos locked his screen and rested his head against the airplane seat, a tight but determined smile finally softening his lips. "SOS: save the fox" was born.
It wouldn't be easy, because he knew Jannik would fight back with every fiber of his proud body, and there were those in the locker room who wanted nothing more than to watch him crumble to take his spot.
As the plane began its descent toward the Italian capital, Carlos watched the Lazio hills rising through the window. Rome was coming, and with it, the most important battle: proving to the Red Prince that, even on the loneliest tour in the world, he was no longer forced to defend himself alone.