Chapter Text
It begins with the innocent, naive bloom of childhood love: Jude (7) all crooked teeth and unshakable confidence, proudly declaring to his mum that he’s going to marry Michael (8) one day. She only laughs, ruffles his curls, and tells him that’s very sweet.
At the Birmingham City Academy, all the kids want to become alphas—football is still seen as an alpha sport, and their idols are all alphas. So greatness must be an alpha trait.
Then Michael (13) presents as an omega. His young mind buckles under the weight of it, convincing itself that his dream is over before it even begins.
Jude (12) refuses the verdict. He barrels into Michael’s space with the clumsy conviction of a child who has never once doubted his own eyes and insists that nothing has changed. Michael is still the coolest player he knows, still the boy he’s admired for years. Jude genuinely can’t understand how one word could erase everything Michael already is.
Jude becomes fiercely protective of Michael, throwing himself at any kid who mocks him for his secondary gender.
A year later Jude (13) presents as an alpha and the protectiveness sharpens into something wilder and less negotiable. He starts growling. Literally. Every instinct screams the same thing: Michael is his.
They never bother to put a label on what they have. It simply is. It’s normal for Jude to scent Michael, for Michael to steal bites from Jude’s plate without asking, for their teammates to see Michael showing up to training in Jude’s hoodies, and for them to kiss as casually as they hold hands—just another ordinary display of affection.
Then an older alpha joins the academy and starts openly pursuing Michael (15). Jude (14) completely loses it. The confrontation ends in a fight that nearly gets both alphas suspended.
Days later, still burning with territorial instincts he barely understands, Jude blurts out that he wants to mark Michael so no one will ever question who he belongs to.
Michael, ever the cooler head, counters with a compromise: ten years from now, when they are both established internationals. Jude grudgingly accepts the delay only because the promise doubles as a vow. A shared destination. A future they’ll build together, or not at all.
Birmingham offers both of them scholarships. Michael (16) turns his down and signs with Reading instead. To Jude (15) it feels like nothing short of betrayal. Michael tries to explain the career opportunity and his parents’ advice; Jude hears only abandonment.
The bond snaps.
Eight years of silence follow.
April 2026. Champions League quarter-final.
For the first time in nearly a decade, they stand on the same pitch again. Bayern Munich eliminate Real Madrid.
Years of unresolved history, lingering resentment, and feelings long buried come crashing back to the surface. They end up in bed together the night Bayern themselves are knocked out by PSG.
Neither of them can stay away. Neither of them can manage an adult conversation. They use the short window before national-team camps for two more reckless nights.
On the last of those nights the official squad lists still haven’t dropped. Jude allows himself one dangerous hope: this time they will wear the same kit. This reunion must mean they finally stop ending up on opposite sides of every crossroads.
Michael quietly tells him he has chosen France.
To Jude it feels like the same betrayal all over again. He walks away furious, leaving everything between them in ruins once more.
It takes the agony of both losing their semi-finals, a much-needed intervention from Harry Kane, and the brutal clarity of football’s biggest stage to finally force them to grow—not just as players, but as people.
And slowly, painfully, Jude begins to understand why every one of Michael’s departures felt like a betrayal: he had built his entire sense of belonging around the idea of them being inseparable—two halves of the same dream, planted in the same soil.
Michael never saw belonging that way.
Raised between cultures, between identities, he had always understood himself as someone who could belong to more than one place at once. Choosing Reading wasn’t abandoning Jude. Choosing France wasn’t rejecting England. They were simply different expressions of who Michael had always been.
The irony was that Jude was the one who taught him that lesson all those years ago—the first and only time Michael came close to giving up on his dreams.
The road back to each other is anything but easy. There are arguments that reopen old wounds before they finally begin to heal. There are painful silences, difficult apologies, and years of missed growth to catch up on. They have to fall in love with versions of one another they never got to witness becoming.
Their schedules are relentless, their time together cruelly limited, but they fight for every moment they can steal. Because beneath all the hurt, all the resentment, and all the years lost, the love never truly disappeared.
Michael is 24, Jude 23. The ten-year promise still stands.
This time they intend to reach it together.