Chapter Text
There were two things Jude knew for sure about his final year at Hogwarts. One, it was going to be the biggest year the school had seen in a long time. Two, Erling was going to try his hardest to ruin the experience for him.
He didn't know yet how right he'd be about both of them.
But that morning he didn't know much of anything, because he was still asleep, and his alarm had been wailing into an empty room for the past 10 minutes without any effect whatsoever.
"HEY, JUDE!!!"
The door slammed open. Jude flinched under the covers and shut his eyes, as if keeping them closed would somehow make the sudden noise go away, and he heard it then. That very specific creak of his little brother crossing the room with a plan already in motion.
He should've known. He always should've known, and yet somehow every single year he forgot until it was WAY too late.
The water suddenly hit him like he'd been thrown into a lake.
"WHAT-" Jude jolted out of his blanket as he sat up, his hair stuck to his forehead, glaring absolute murder at the 13 year old standing there, holding an empty bucket and the biggest grin plastered on his face.
"What is wrong with you!?" Jude exclaimed, his hand running down on his face as the water twinkled down.
"You sleep like you're dead, mate. Honestly, it's a public service." Jobe was already backing toward the window, way too proud of himself. He yanked the curtains open and let the morning light spill over Jude, who was still sitting there, dripping onto his mattress, seriously weighing whether he had the energy to kill his brother before breakfast.
Every year. Six years running. You'd think Jude would've learned to lock the door by now.
"The spell backfired on an actual dark lord for us," Jude muttered, wringing out the bottom of his shirt, "and YOU'RE going to be the thing that finally does me in. A. Bucket. Of. Water."
"Kind of poetic though, isn't it?" Jobe tossed him a towel, "Taxi's here in twenty minutes. Get up before I go find a bigger one."
By the time Jude made it downstairs, mostly dry, Jobe at least had the decency to only laugh a little bit.
"Sleep well?"
"I swear to god. I'm putting a locking charm on my door. I mean it this time."
"Blah blah blah, you say that every year." Jobe snarked, then dug around in his pockets for a second and came out with a slightly squished pastry from yesterday, Jude's favorite.
"Here, Peace offering. Kay?"
Jude took it because he had the principles, but he wasn't stupid.
They locked up the house behind them. The empty house, the one that had been empty for 6 years now, ever since the night their mother traded her life for a shield that ended up crumbling a Dark Lord into ash through the arms of her oldest son. Jude was ten when it happened. Old enough to remember all of it, unfortunately. The warmth and then the cold, his little brother's weight against his chest, the sound of their mother made and then the sound she didn't. His brain hadn't done him the favor of hiding any of it away. Six years later he could still pull up that night in full whenever it decided to surface out on its own, usually when he least wanted it to.
Either way, he didn't want to remember that moment.
. . .
"Ready, Jude?"
Jobe asked at the barrier, grinning the same way he did every year.
"Ready, Jobe."
They ran at the wall together and came out of the other side into steam and noise and the huge scarlet shape of the Hogwarts Express, and for just a second, despite everything, the old excitement caught in Jude's chest.
"Hey, Jobe. I'm gonna go ahead and find some friends. Is that all good for you?"
"Boooo...." Jobe responded; his tone seemed like he didn't care, so Jude went off to find his friends anyway.
As Jude went off to find his friends, he wasn't watching where he was going even for a little bit and walked directly into what felt like a brick wall shaped like a person.
"Sorry, I wasn't-" He looked up at the person. The apology died in his own throat.
Of course, it was him. Six years and the universe still couldn't resist the joke.
Erling Haaland looked down at him with that same flat, unbothered expression that always made Jude want to do something he'd probably regret. Tall, blonde, a whole head taller than him, wearing the faint amusement of someone who had never once in his life been the one to bump into somebody else.
"Watch it, Bellingham." A pause, then that stupid smile, the one Jude had learned to hate somewhere around the age of 12.
"Didn't think you'd make it back this year. Figured you'd finally sleep through a whole term and save us all the trouble."
Jude gritted his teeth as his eyebrows furrowed. "Funny..." His words came out flatter than he wanted to.
"Is your brother still running the wake-up service for you? What is it this year, a foghorn?"
And there it was: Erling had a REAL talent, a genuinely honed skill for finding the exact spot and pressing his thumb right into it while smiling the whole time. Jude felt like a bull getting agitated by a bull rider. He opened his mouth with absolutely no idea what was about to come out of it, either profanity or hexing him-
"Jude!" Someone called out, and Jude turned his head to see where it came from.
The cabin door slid open as Buyako leaned out. He took in the entire situation in about half a second, and his whole face went cold.
"There you are, man. We're in here!"
Erling held Jude's eyes for a second longer, unbothered as ever, then just shrugged and drifted off down the corridor like the whole thing hadn't cost him a single thing. It probably hadn't at all.
Buyako watched him go with his jaw set tight; he knew their history. All of it, the parts Jude had actually told him and the parts he'd figured out on his own over the years. "One of these years I'm actually gonna hex him into a wall damnit," he said.
"Get in line."
Inside the cabin, it was warm and a little crammed, but honestly? It was exactly what Jude needed after all of that. Jude looked around the booth as Trent was reading from his Kindle. He didn't even exchange a look with Jude.
"Did your brother throw water at you again?"
"You know how it goes by now," Jude responded as he slouched back on the seat,
"Mm." Trent turned a page. "You've got a leaf on you, by the way."
Jude did not check, purely on principle.
Buyako, who could never sit still for even a full minute, launched straight into his Quidditch World Cup predictions, which wasn't really a conversation so much as a weather system Jude had learned to just live inside. He nodded in the right spots. Jude lasted maybe four minutes before the warmth and the gentle rocking of the train dragged his eyes shut, and he was out cold against Trent's shoulder before the conversation would even hit its peak.
Trent glanced over at him, thought about it, and then just decided to let him sleep...
Jude woke up to the breaks and the deep blue of evening pressing against the windows. "We're here," Trent said, still reading from his Kindle. "You drooled by the way."
"No, I didn't."
"You did; it's fine. I've made my peace with it anyway."
They spilled out onto the platform with the rest of the school, this whole slow river of trunks, owl cages, and people shouting over each other. Annoying at first, but it's quite nostalgic. Jude stepped down and stopped,
And there it was, Hogwarts up on the far hill, every window burning gold against the dark, the towers cut out black against the sky. He'd seen it 6 times now. Six first nights, six versions of this exact walk up from the station. It should've felt ordinary by that point.
But it didn't. If anything, it hit harder because this was the last one. The last time he'd ever step off this train with a whole year stretched out in front of him and no clue what was actually in it.
Except this year, he sort of did have a clue. There'd been letters over the summer. Whispers. Something big was, in fact, coming to Hogwarts, something the school hadn't done in a really long time. He didn't know the details just yet.
He figured he'd find out soon enough, though.
"You good?" Buyako asked, following his eyes up to the castle.
"Yeah." Jude shifted the owl cage in his grip.
"Just. Last one, you know?"
Buyako went quiet, which was rare enough coming from him to actually mean something. "Yeah, I know." Then he knocked their shoulders together. "We can cry about it in June. Right now I want to eat my entire body weight in treacle tart."
That got a real laugh out of Jude, and the knot in his chest loosened up a notch. They headed up the path with the crowd, the castle getting bigger with every step, right up until the group started splitting off toward the different houses.
"This is us," Trent said, tipping his head towards the Gryffindors already entering.
Jude took one last look back at the little glowing station behind them as he turned and followed his friends up into the castle, where the whole year, and everything packed into it, was already waiting.
The Gryffindor common room hadn't changed a single day. Red gold and loud fire were already going, the good kind of chaos. Jude hauled his stuff up to the dorm, where Marcus Rashford, Anthony Gordon, and Djed Spence were somehow already in the middle of unpacking and in the middle of an argument at the same time.
"France is going to win, I'm telling you," Marcus insisted.
"Not a chance, Germany's got the better squad, you know? It doesn't even compare!" Anthony wasn't budging an inch.
"Better squad? Did we watch the same qualifier's match!? Germany folds the second they go a goal down, man!"
"That was one match-" "It's always one match with you!"
Jude just let it wash over him. He'd heard this exact fight like four times already, and it never actually resolved; it just kept running until somebody got hungry or fell asleep. He dropped onto his bed, pulled out his phone, and started doomscrolling through Instagram without really taking in a single thing. And suddenly, a photo stopped his thumb.
Erling. Obviously. Came on his page. He clicked his profile before he could talk himself out of it.
Some summer picture, sun behind him, blonde hair, that same easy look, basically appearing as if he'd never had one bad day in his entire life. Jude stared at it a beat too long, and his traitor brain wandered somewhere he really hadn't permitted it to go.
What if they'd actually gotten along?
What if four years ago, standing in a corridor honestly not that different from the one they'd crashed into each other today, Jude hadn't looked at a genuine offer and an outstretched hand and said no?
He still remembered Erling's face when he turned him down. That was the part that stuck, weirdly. Not anger, nothing dramatic. Just something quietly closing, final, like a door.
"Looking at your enemy, I see..."
Jude nearly launched his phone across the room. Djed was leaning right over his shoulder and had very clearly been standing there a while. cheeky bastard.
"Shush."
"You're not falling in love, are you? Like one of those fantasy fanfictions people write?"
"Shut it. I don't even like him, man. Hell, we aren't even friends..." Jude spoke quietly as he powered off his phone, shoving it under his pillow. "I'm going to sleep."
"It's literally half five."
"Goodnight, Djed."
Djed put his hands up, grinning, and wandered off back towards the ongoing France vs Germany hostilities. Jude pulled the blanket up over his head as he shut his eyes. Too early to sleep and he knew it, but it had been a long day, and the one person alive who could get under his skin without trying had left him feeling wrung out and kind of strange.
He lay there in the dark a lot longer than he meant to, thinking about a door quietly closing and a year he couldn't quite see the shape of yet.
Whatever it was, it started tomorrow.