Chapter Text
The first time Erling Haaland saw Jude Bellingham, Jude was seventeen years old and sitting behind an old upright piano in a community centre that smelled of furniture polish, wet coats, and the orange squash served to children in paper cups.
Erling had arrived late.
He was already famous enough that people turned when he entered a room, even when he wore a black cap pulled low over his eyes and a coat large enough to hide the width of his shoulders. He had been invited to attend a charity programme for young musicians, expected to smile for photographs, shake hands, and leave before the reporters grew bored.
Instead, he stopped in the doorway.
Jude was teaching a little girl how to play a C-major scale.
“No, no,” Jude said, nudging her wrist back into place. “Thumb goes under, yeah? Like it’s sneaking past. Don’t be shy about it.”
The girl tried again.
The notes stumbled upward.
Jude grinned like she’d just played at the Royal Albert Hall.
“There you go. See? You had it. Your fingers were just being a bit dramatic, weren’t they?”
The girl giggled.
Erling remained in the doorway long enough for his manager to nudge him.
“Are you coming?”
Erling looked over his shoulder.
“No.”
“You have photographs.”
“Later.”
He sat in the back of the room, knees too high because the chair had been designed for children, and listened to Jude teach.
At seventeen, Jude was all sharp elbows, restless energy, and eyes that gave away far more than he wanted them to. He spoke to adults like he didn’t trust them not to waste his time, and to children like they were the most important people in the room. He wore an old navy jumper with the sleeves pulled over his hands, and whenever one of his students made a mistake, he didn’t treat it like failure.
He just told them to try again.
Erling had never believed in love at first sight.
Instinct, perhaps.
Recognition.
The violent, primitive certainty that something mattered before the mind could explain why.
But not love.
Love, he would later learn, came afterward.
It came in the years of waiting.
It came while Jude finished school and Erling stayed respectfully on the outside of his life. It came through occasional messages, awkward conversations at charity functions, and videos Jude sent of his students performing songs badly but enthusiastically.
It came when Jude turned eighteen and Erling finally allowed himself to ask whether he might take him to dinner.
Jude stared at him for several seconds.
“You’ve won league titles,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve got, what, millions of followers?”
Erling frowned. “Unfortunately.”
“And you’re asking me out?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Erling had prepared several answers.
None survived Jude looking at him.
“Because I think about you every day.”
Jude blinked.
Then scoffed, looking away, ears going red.
“That’s mental. You can’t just say that before dinner.”
“I have thought about you for years.”
“That’s worse, mate. That’s actually worse.”
“Is that a no?”
Jude looked back at him.
“No,” he said quietly. “It isn’t a no.”
Their relationship began carefully.
Erling was twenty-two by then, a superstar whose name echoed through stadiums. Jude was eighteen and studying music education, determined to build a life that belonged entirely to himself.
Even after they moved in together, Jude refused Erling’s money.
He paid for groceries.
He paid his share of the electricity bill.
When Erling bought him an expensive coat because Jude’s old one had a tear in the lining, Jude returned it and appeared the following evening wearing a second-hand coat he had found in a charity shop.
“Twelve quid,” Jude said, proud.
“It is ugly.”
“It’s warm.”
“You look like a retired geography teacher.”
“I am a teacher.”
“You are nineteen.”
“And clearly more mature than you.”
Erling stared at him.
Jude stared right back, chin tipped up like he was daring him.
Then Erling picked him up and carried him toward the bedroom while Jude kicked his legs and complained loudly about “proper authoritarian alpha nonsense” and threatened to report him to an organisation that absolutely did not exist.
They were happy.
That was the cruelty of it.
They were not unhappy people clinging to a relationship that had already begun to rot. They did not spend years shouting at one another through closed doors. Jude did not lie awake wondering whether Erling loved him.
Erling loved him with the unrestrained devotion of a man who had spent years waiting for permission.
He memorised Jude’s teaching schedule.
He learned the names of every child in Jude’s classes.
He attended their yearly recitals wearing tailored suits while six-year-olds played nursery songs with one finger.
When Jude caught the flu, Erling cancelled an interview and sat beside him all night, changing the cold cloth on his forehead despite Jude repeatedly insisting that he was not dying.
When Erling lost an important match, Jude did not tell him that it did not matter.
He sat with him in the dark and said, “I know it matters to you.”
Erling could command an entire football pitch with a glance. He was an apex alpha, excessively dominant even by professional sporting standards. His presence altered rooms. His scent could make weaker alphas lower their eyes, and referees had once accused him of using it deliberately to intimidate opponents.
But with Jude, Erling became gentle.
Not less dominant.
Never that.
He still crowded Jude against kitchen counters simply because he enjoyed watching Jude pretend not to be affected. He still placed a hand on the back of Jude’s neck in public, possessive and unapologetic. He still growled when strangers flirted with him and once carried Jude out of a nightclub after Jude announced that he intended to walk home alone.
Yet Jude had never been afraid of him.
Jude rolled his eyes at Erling’s territorial moods.
“Oi,” Jude would say, batting his hand away. “Pack it in.”
He told him when he was being ridiculous.
And Erling listened.
The world did not understand them.
Perhaps the world did not want to.
A hyper-dominant alpha was expected to choose an omega.
An alpha like Erling was expected to build a dynastic bond, one strong enough to survive distance and stress, one capable of producing children with elite secondary traits. Sports commentators discussed it as though choosing a partner were another professional obligation.
Jude was a beta.
He could not be marked.
He could not form a biological mating bond.
Erling’s teeth could break Jude’s skin, but no permanent mating gland existed beneath it. No shared pulse would emerge. No instinctive tether would warn Jude when Erling was in pain.
There would be no merging of scents that announced them as belonging to one another.
To Jude, none of that had mattered at the beginning.
Then people began teaching him that it should.
It happened gradually.
A journalist asked Erling whether he hoped to “settle properly” with an omega someday.
A former footballer joked during a broadcast that Jude was probably “keeping the seat warm.”
An opposing player, still laughing after a match, asked Erling whether dating a beta made travel easier because there were no heats to accommodate.
Fans analysed photographs of Jude and described him as plain.
Unworthy.
Temporary.
A compromise.
Whenever Erling publicly defended him, it made headlines for a day.
The insults always returned.
Jude claimed he did not read them.
Erling knew he did.
Sometimes he would find Jude sitting on the edge of their bed after midnight, face illuminated by his phone, scrolling with the expression of someone pressing repeatedly against a bruise.
“Give it to me,” Erling would say.
“I’m fine.”
“Jude.”
“I said I’m fine, didn’t I?”
Erling would take the phone anyway.
Jude would let him.
But he never admitted how much it hurt.
Jude rarely admitted when anything hurt.
He worked five days a week at a modest music school, teaching children whose feet did not reach the pedals. He woke early. He took the train. He carried his lunch in a reusable container and transferred his part of the rent into Erling’s account every month, despite Erling repeatedly transferring it back.
Jude always returned the money again.
“I don’t need you to pay rent,” Erling told him once.
“I live here.”
“It is my house.”
“Exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means if you wake up one day and decide you’re done with me, I’m not standing there like some charity case.”
Erling had gone completely still.
“Why would I decide that?”
Jude shrugged.
“You might.”
“I will not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
Jude looked down at the shirt he was folding.
“You’re an alpha, Erling.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s like—everyone keeps banging on about how your body’s waiting for someone else. Like I’m just… filling in.”
Erling crossed the room and took the shirt from Jude’s hands.
“My body is mine.”
Jude gave him a tired smile.
“Yeah. That’s not really how it works, though, is it?”
“It is how I work.”
For years, Erling believed that would be enough.
He believed love could silence instinct.
He believed devotion could overpower biology through sheer repetition.
He believed his certainty was indestructible.
Then, one night, he proved himself wrong.
The omega’s name was Emilia.
Jude would learn that from the news.
Not from Erling.
By the time Erling came home, Jude already knew.
The story had broken twenty minutes earlier. A blurry photograph had been posted online: Erling leaving a private hotel entrance at dawn, shirt buttoned incorrectly, expression hollow. Behind him, partially hidden by security, stood a female omega whose mating scent reportedly covered the entire corridor.
The first reports used words like rumored and alleged.
Then witnesses spoke.
Then a hotel employee leaked information.
Then someone claimed the omega had been taken to a private medical facility with a fresh mating wound.
Jude sat at the kitchen table with his phone in his hand.
He did not cry.
The clock above the oven ticked.
Outside, rain whispered against the glass.
The house smelled wrong.
Erling’s scent had always lived in the walls—cedar, snow, and something metallic that Jude associated with cold air inside a stadium. It was usually comforting.
That morning, another scent clung to it.
Sweet.
Ripe.
Omega.
When the front door opened, Erling did not call Jude’s name.
He walked into the kitchen slowly.
Jude looked at him.
Erling was pale.
There was dried blood beneath his fingernails.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke.
Jude placed his phone face down.
“Is it true?”
Erling’s jaw moved, but no sound came.
“Don’t,” Jude said sharply. “Don’t stand there thinking about how to spin it.”
“I won’t lie.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
Erling closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
The word was quiet.
It still struck like something enormous.
Jude nodded once.
“And you mated her?”
“I bit her.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Erling opened his eyes.
His face crumpled in a way Jude had never seen before.
“Yes.”
Jude stared at him.
He had imagined this moment before.
Not seriously. Never as a prediction. Only in the private, humiliating nightmares created by years of strangers insisting it was inevitable.
In those nightmares, Jude screamed.
He threw things.
He demanded explanations.
In reality, he sat very still.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I was at the club event. Someone brought illegal suppressants. There was something in my drink, or the room, I don’t know. She went into heat unexpectedly. I tried to leave.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Did she force you?”
Erling hesitated.
The hesitation answered.
“No.”
Jude’s fingers tightened around the edge of the table.
“Then don’t hide behind being drugged.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re explaining it like your body simply took over.”
“I remember parts of it.”
“Did you know she wasn’t me?”
Erling’s breathing became uneven.
“Yes.”
Jude nodded again.
That was the answer that destroyed him.
Not because it was cruel.
Because it was honest.
Erling had known.
Somewhere beneath the haze of pheromones, alcohol, chemicals, and instinct, Erling had known the omega was not Jude.
His body had wanted her anyway.
“Was it an accident?” Jude asked.
“Yes.”
“But you chose parts of it.”
Erling’s eyes filled.
“Yes.”
The first tear slipped down Jude’s cheek.
He wiped it away impatiently.
“I need you to leave.”
“No.”
The alpha command came instinctively, deep enough to vibrate through the room.
Jude flinched.
Erling looked horrified with himself.
“Sorry—”
“Get out.”
“Jude—”
“Get out of my house.”
Erling stepped forward.
Jude stood so fast the chair scraped.
“Don’t come near me.”
Erling froze.
Jude had never said those words to him before.
In seven years, Jude had never looked at him with fear.
Erling slowly lowered his hands.
“I love you.”
Jude laughed.
It was a broken, breathless sound.
“Brilliant timing, that.”
“I love you.”
“You mated someone else.”
“I know.”
“You gave her the one thing I could never give you.”
“I don’t want it from her.”
“But you took it.”
Erling’s face twisted.
“I will have the mark medically severed.”
“And then what?”
“I come home.”
Jude stared at him.
“You think you can cut her out of your neck and come back here?”
“I will do anything.”
“You cannot undo it.”
“I know.”
“You cannot unmate her without hurting both of you.”
“I don’t care what happens to me.”
“I do!” Jude shouted.
The sound startled them both.
Jude pressed a hand against his mouth.
His shoulders began to shake.
“That’s the problem,” he whispered. “I still care what happens to you.”
Erling moved before he could stop himself.
Jude backed away so violently that his hip struck the counter.
Erling stopped again.
The distance between them was less than three metres.
It felt impossible to cross.
“I’m sorry,” Erling said.
Jude closed his eyes.
“Go.”
This time, Erling obeyed.
The world found out before Jude had decided how to survive it.
Reporters gathered outside the music school.
Parents cancelled lessons.
A photograph of Jude leaving through the back entrance appeared online beside headlines asking whether he had been “discarded.”
Television panels debated whether Erling’s infidelity was biologically inevitable.
A retired alpha footballer said, “You can’t expect a man like Haaland to suppress his nature forever.”
Another said Jude should have understood the risk.
One host laughed and asked what a beta expected when dating “the most dominant alpha in football.”
Jude turned off the television.
His phone continued vibrating.
Messages arrived from strangers.
Some pitied him.
Some mocked him.
Some accused him of preventing Erling from finding a proper mate.
Others insisted the affair proved Jude had never satisfied him.
Someone sent Jude a photograph of a dead animal.
Someone else sent his work address.
Jude changed his number.
The messages found him again.
He stopped teaching for a week.
Then two.
The children’s parents were sympathetic, but sympathy had its own shape of humiliation. Every conversation softened when he entered. Every pair of eyes seemed to carry knowledge of Erling’s body and Jude’s inadequacy.
He began startling whenever a phone rang.
He stopped opening social media.
When footsteps followed him on the pavement, his heart would race so violently that his vision blurred.
Once, a woman recognised him in a supermarket.
She did nothing cruel.
She merely whispered his name.
Jude dropped the jar in his hand.
Glass shattered over the floor.
He left his basket behind and ran.
At night, he slept in the guest bedroom.
Erling stayed at a private training facility outside the city, surrounded by doctors attempting to manage the unwanted bond.
Because the mark had been completed, his body recognised Emilia.
His instincts reached for her.
When she entered distress, Erling became restless.
When she was sedated, his heart rate dropped.
The doctors called it a normal mating response.
Erling called it a betrayal that continued happening inside his own skin.
He refused to see her except when medically necessary.
He tore apart a treatment room after waking from a drugged sleep with her scent on his clothes.
He begged the doctors to remove the glands.
They refused.
The surgery might damage his nervous system.
Erling told them to do it anyway.
They contacted Jude.
Jude listened to the doctor explain the risks.
Then he said, “Don’t let him.”
“He may not accept that.”
“Tell him I said no.”
When Erling called him afterward, Jude answered for the first time in eleven days.
“You still care,” Erling said.
Jude sat on the floor of the guest bedroom, knees drawn to his chest.
“Course I do.”
“Then let me come home.”
“No.”
“I can fix this.”
“You can’t.”
“I can try.”
“You’re bonded to her.”
“I love you.”
“You keep saying that like it changes what your body does.”
“My body is sick.”
“No,” Jude whispered. “Your body is doing exactly what everyone always said it would.”
Silence spread between them.
Jude immediately regretted the words.
He heard Erling breathe in.
Slowly.
Painfully.
“I never believed them,” Erling said.
“Neither did I.”
“Jude—”
“I have to go.”
“Please don’t hang up.”
Jude’s eyes burned.
“I can’t breathe when I talk to you.”
Erling went silent.
Jude ended the call.
Then he pressed the phone against his forehead and cried until dawn.
Jude moved out three weeks later.
He chose a flat in an old converted building on the other side of the city. It was small, with narrow windows and radiators that complained whenever they were switched on. The kitchen was barely large enough for one person.
Jude loved it immediately.
Nothing in it belonged to Erling.
There were no photographs of stadiums.
No custom furniture built for a man nearly two metres tall.
No expensive security system.
No trace of cedar and winter embedded in the walls.
Jude bought a second-hand piano and placed it beside the window.
Several keys were chipped.
The middle pedal did not work.
It was perfect.
Erling arrived while Jude was unpacking books.
Jude had not given him the address.
Of course Erling had found it anyway.
Jude opened the door but did not invite him inside.
Erling looked terrible.
He had lost weight. Shadows sat beneath his eyes. His hair was tied back carelessly, and the mating mark on his neck had been covered by a medical patch.
The sight of it still made Jude feel as though his ribs were folding inward.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Jude said.
“I needed to see where you live.”
“Why?”
“To know you’re safe.”
“I’m not your responsibility.”
“You are.”
“No.”
Erling’s jaw tightened.
“You will always be my responsibility.”
“That’s not romantic, you know.”
The words struck.
Erling looked away.
From the pavement, someone lifted a phone.
Jude saw the movement over Erling’s shoulder.
His heart lurched.
He stepped backward.
The stranger was only checking a message.
Jude still could not breathe.
Erling noticed.
His entire posture changed.
“Jude?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I said I’m fine.”
Erling reached for him.
Jude recoiled.
The hurt on Erling’s face was immediate.
Jude hated himself for causing it.
He hated Erling for making him care.
“I want to end it,” Jude said.
Erling went still.
“No.”
“We’re already apart.”
“We are taking time.”
“I’m not.”
“Jude.”
“I am ending the relationship.”
“No.”
Erling’s scent intensified, alpha dominance flooding the narrow entrance. The air became heavy enough to press against Jude’s lungs.
Jude gripped the doorframe.
“Stop.”
Erling’s eyes widened.
He pulled his scent back so quickly that his body shuddered.
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
“I will wait.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I waited for you before.”
“This is different.”
“I can wait again.”
Jude swallowed.
His voice came out thin.
“You don’t understand. Every time I look at you, I wonder whether your body is calling for her.”
“It is.”
Jude flinched.
Erling looked sick.
“I won’t lie to you,” he continued. “The bond pulls. I hate it, but it does.”
Jude nodded as tears gathered in his eyes.
“Cheers for being honest.”
“It does not change who I love.”
“It changes me.”
Erling’s expression broke.
Jude looked down because he could not bear to watch.
“I’ve spent years proving I didn’t need your money, your name, or your protection,” Jude said. “I thought that meant I could stand beside you as an equal. But everyone kept telling me I was temporary, and now every part of me believes them.”
“You are not temporary.”
“I feel temporary.”
“You are my life.”
“I don’t want to be your life anymore.”
The lie tore through Jude’s throat.
Erling knew it was a lie.
But love did not make it useless.
Jude removed the key Erling had once given him from his pocket.
The key to their house.
He placed it in Erling’s palm.
Erling closed his fingers around it as if Jude had given him a blade.
“I’m sorry,” Jude whispered.
“You have nothing to apologise for.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t.”
Jude looked at him one last time.
The face he had known from eighteen to twenty-three.
The man who had waited years for him.
The alpha who had loved him loudly enough to make Jude believe biology could be silenced.
“I hope you survive this,” Jude said.
Erling’s lips trembled.
“I don’t want to survive it without you.”
Jude closed the door.
For several minutes, Erling remained on the other side.
Jude could hear him breathing.
Then came the slow retreat of his footsteps.
The fire began four days later.
At 2:13 in the morning, a faulty electrical system sparked inside a storage room on the ground floor.
By 2:17, flames had entered the central stairwell.
The building had old wooden beams, illegally modified fire doors, and insulation that burned faster than investigators later believed possible.
At 2:19, the first emergency call was made.
At 2:22, the windows on the second floor exploded.
At 2:24, the roof began to collapse.
Erling was awake when the news alert appeared on his phone.
He had not been sleeping much.
At first, he saw only the street name.
Then the image loaded.
A building engulfed in orange.
Smoke rising into the black sky.
People gathered behind emergency barriers.
Erling stopped breathing.
He called Jude.
The phone rang.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
No answer.
Erling called again while pulling on shoes.
Again.
Again.
Again.
By the time his security team reached him, Erling was already outside.
The drive took twenty-three minutes.
Erling remembered none of them.
He arrived to find the street filled with smoke, sirens, and people wrapped in emergency blankets.
The building was no longer recognisable.
Flames poured from every window.
Part of the roof had collapsed into the upper floor.
Erling ran toward it.
Three firefighters stopped him.
“My mate is inside!”
“Sir, you need to move back.”
“Jude!”
The alpha roar tore through the street.
People covered their ears.
A firefighter stumbled.
Erling tried to break past them.
More responders came.
It took six people to restrain him.
“My mate is in there!” Erling shouted. “His name is Jude Bellingham. Third floor. Flat thirty-two. He is inside!”
A paramedic attempted to speak to him.
Erling could not hear.
The fire devoured everything.
He watched the windows of Jude’s flat collapse.
He watched the piano fall through the floor in a burst of sparks.
He watched the only home Jude had chosen entirely for himself disappear.
Erling screamed Jude’s name until his voice failed.
At dawn, the fire was still burning.
At noon, the structure was declared unsafe.
By evening, officials confirmed that several residents remained unaccounted for.
Jude was among them.
For three days, Erling stood outside the emergency perimeter.
He refused food.
He refused medication.
He refused to leave.
The bond with Emilia reacted to his distress, sending waves of nausea through his body. Doctors warned him that continued separation from her could cause physical complications.
Erling laughed in their faces.
“Let it.”
On the fourth day, recovery teams entered the ruins.
They found fragments of furniture.
Metal bedframes.
Melted electronics.
Sections of flooring reduced to ash.
They found no trace of Jude.
Not a body.
Not a bone.
Not even the silver ring Jude had always worn on his right hand.
Erling seized upon the absence like a starving animal.
“He escaped.”
The investigators explained that the heat had reached temperatures capable of destroying almost everything.
“He escaped,” Erling repeated.
Witnesses had not seen Jude leave.
Hospitals had no unidentified patients matching his description.
His bank cards had not been used.
His phone had last connected to the building’s network shortly before the fire.
Still, Erling refused.
For two weeks, he funded search teams.
He hired private investigators.
He offered rewards.
He watched hundreds of hours of security footage.
Every figure moving through the smoke became Jude for a fraction of a second.
A dark coat.
A familiar walk.
The angle of someone’s shoulders.
Each time, the image resolved into a stranger.
The authorities declared Jude Bellingham presumed dead twenty-six days after the fire.
The announcement appeared on every major news network.
Photographs of Jude filled screens across the world: Jude leaving the music school, Jude attending matches, Jude standing beside Erling at award ceremonies with one eyebrow raised as though celebrity itself were mildly embarrassing.
Commentators who had mocked him now called him kind.
Private.
Tragic.
Fans who had sent him abuse posted photographs of candles.
The former footballer who had joked that Jude was keeping another omega’s place released a statement about mental health and compassion.
Erling watched the coverage from the floor of Jude’s empty music classroom.
The school had reopened without him.
A row of small keyboards waited against the wall.
Crayon drawings covered the noticeboard.
One said:
MR JUDE TAUGHT ME NOT TO BE SCARED OF WRONG NOTES
Erling pressed the paper to his face.
For years, he had believed the worst thing that could happen was losing Jude’s love.
He had been wrong.
The worst thing was having nowhere left to direct his own.
No phone to call.
No door to stand outside.
No stubborn beta refusing his money.
No impatient voice correcting his grammar.
No one to tell him that dominance was not the same as being right.
The mating bond still lived inside Erling’s body.
It pulled toward a woman he did not love.
It tightened when she was distressed.
It demanded proximity.
It survived.
Jude did not.
That was the obscenity of it.
Biology had preserved the wrong connection.
Months later, Erling returned to football.
People called it brave.
He scored in his first match back.
The stadium erupted.
Thousands of voices shouted his name, but Erling heard only the hollow percussion of the ball striking the net.
Afterward, he did not celebrate.
He stood in the middle of the pitch beneath the white stadium lights and looked toward the seat where Jude used to sit.
For seven years, Jude had watched him from there.
Sometimes smiling.
Sometimes rolling his eyes.
Sometimes pretending not to be proud.
The seat was empty now.
It would remain empty.
Erling lifted his hand to the medical patch on his neck.
Underneath it, the unwanted mark continued to pulse.
Then he closed his eyes and remembered a community centre that smelled of wet coats and orange squash.
A seventeen-year-old boy behind an old piano.
A child stumbling through a scale.
A patient voice saying:
“No, no, your thumb goes under. Like it’s sneaking past the others.”
Erling had once believed he could wait forever for Jude.
Perhaps he had been right.
He would wait through every match.
Every season.
Every year that stretched ahead of him.
He would wait until his body stopped reaching for the wrong person.
He would wait until the mark faded, even if it never did.
He would wait until the world forgot the quiet piano teacher it had destroyed.
And if death was not an ending but merely another locked door, Erling would stand outside that one too.
Calling Jude’s name.
Waiting for him to open it.
TBC.