Chapter Text
The air in the Signal Iduna Park home dressing room always smelled the same after a session: a mix of damp turf, synthetic fabric, winter rub, and cold sweat. It was early September, but the North Rhine-Westphalia chill was already creeping into the concrete corridors of Brackel.
Carney Chukwuemeka sat on the bench in front of his locker, his head down, methodically untying the laces of his Puma boots. Double-knotted, tight. He pulled the leather loose, slipped his feet out, and let his white grip socks rest flat against the cold tile.
A few lockers down, the noise was loud. Unnecessarily loud.
"Bro, I’m telling you, the housing around Phoenix-See is calm," Jobe Bellingham was saying, his voice carrying clearly over the sound of running showers and hip-hop playing low from a Bluetooth speaker. "You get a spot down there, it’s quiet. Ten minutes to training. You don't need to be living in the middle of the city."
Ethan Nwaneri was sitting on the adjacent bench, still in his full training kit, listening intently. Ethan was nineteen, newly arrived from London on a deal that had the English media talking for three weeks straight, and carrying the quiet, cautious aura of a young Omega navigating a locker room full of established senior players.
Everything about Ethan’s body language was contained, knees tucked, shoulders slightly rounded, listening to Jobe.
"Is it close to where you are?" Ethan asked, his voice low, tinged with a thick North London accent that hadn't been blunted yet by time abroad.
"Yeah, five minutes," Jobe said. He was leaning against the locker frame, broad-shouldered, comfortable, his Alpha presence easy and open. He slapped Ethan on the shoulder, a solid, reassuring weight. "I’ll drive you down there after shower. We'll check two places, then grab food. Don't stress it. I told you before you flew out, I got you."
Ethan nodded, visibly relaxing. "Safe, man. Appreciate it."
Carney didn't look up from his boots. He reached into his locker, pulled out his phone, and tapped the screen alive.
There was a notification from Instagram. Not a DM, not a tag, just the usual stream of team updates. He tapped the app open and refreshed his feed. Right at the top of his main feed was a post from two hours ago, a collaborative upload between BVB’s official account and Jobe’s personal profile.
It was a photo from yesterday's arrival shoot. Jobe stood with his arm slung heavily over Ethan’s shoulder in front of the yellow-and-black crest, both of them grinning. The caption Jobe had added was simple: My brother. Welcome to the family @ethannwaneri 💛🖤.
Underneath it, Jobe had already posted three separate Instagram stories: a video of Ethan taking a shot during rondos, a candid photo of them sitting together in the canteen, and a repost of an fan edit welcoming Ethan to Dortmund.
Carney’s thumb hovered over the glass.
Ethan was just a talented kid from Arsenal making a massive step but an established Alpha like Jobe publicly shielding, tagging, and hovering over a young, unbonded Omega arriving in a foreign league sent a very specific signal.
It looked like claiming. It looked like public protection. It looked like Jobe declaring to the entire league that Ethan was under his personal umbrella.
And Carney? Carney was Jobe’s partner. Had been for eight months, kept low-key, kept quiet, kept strictly between private apartments in Dortmund and quiet dinners when they traveled back to England. An Alpha-Alpha bond wasn't illegal, but it wasn't the kind of thing BVB PR put on billboards. It was heavy, competitive, and complicated.
"Carney."
Carney looked up. Jobe was standing a few feet away now, holding a fresh towel over his shoulder, his dark eyes locked onto Carney.
"You going straight home after?" Jobe asked. His tone was casual, but his eyes searched Carney’s face with that sharp, observant Alpha instinct that Carney usually found grounding.
"Yeah," Carney said, keeping his voice level. "Gotta sort out some stuff for my apartment. Plumber’s coming by."
Jobe frowned slightly, stepping a fraction closer. "You didn't say anything about a plumber this morning."
"Called them at lunch," Carney replied, pulling his hoodie over his head, hiding the brief flare of tension in his jaw. His scent prickled slightly with sharpness, but he kept it reined in. "It’s whatever. Just a leak in the guest bath."
Jobe looked like he wanted to say something else, his eyes dropping to the phone still held firmly in Carney’s right hand, but Ethan called out from the doorway.
"Jobe, you got the keys or am I waiting by the car?"
Jobe blinked, breaking eye contact with Carney. "Yeah, coming. Hold on." He turned back to Carney, his voice dropping an octave, meant only for the two of them. "I’ll come over after I show Ethan the spot. Around eight?"
"Don't worry about it," Carney said, pulling his strap over his shoulder and standing up. "I’m probably just gonna sleep early anyway. Big week coming up. Bayern on Saturday."
Jobe searched his face for three long seconds. "Carney, what's wrong with you today?"
"Nothing," Carney said, patting Jobe once on the chest, a deliberate, platonic gesture. "Go help the kid. See you tomorrow."
Carney walked out of the dressing room before Jobe could answer.
The apartment in the Saarlandstraßenviertel was quiet.
Dortmund at night in autumn had a stillness to it that Carney hadn't quite adjusted to after years in London. In London, there was always background noise, traffic on the A40, sirens, the hum of a city that never completely powered down. In Dortmund, once the sun went down, the streets around his building were dead silent.
Carney sat on his oversized sofa, the only light in the living room coming from the ambient glow of the TV playing a replay of Bayern Munich’s match against Freiburg from the weekend.
On screen, Michael Olise was tearing down the right wing, cutting inside on his left foot with that fluid, languid style that made everything look effortless.
Carney watched Olise’s movement, analyzing the footwork out of habit, but his mind wasn't on the tactics.
He tapped his phone awake.
It was 1:45 AM.
He opened Instagram again. The internet was already doing what it always did. On football Twitter, fan pages were clipping videos of Jobe and Ethan from training, making compilations set to slow music, analyzing every touch, every laugh, every moment Jobe put a hand on Ethan’s back to guide him through a drill.
“Jobe taking care of Ethan already, I’m crying.”
“BVB’s new dynamic duo.”
“The way Jobe looks out for him, proper big brother energy.”
“Honestly they look so good together on and off the pitch.”
Carney scrolled down. Then he opened his own profile.
His grid was clean, curated, professional, mostly match photos, training shots, a few brand partnerships. But scattered throughout the last six months were four specific posts.
One from June: him and Jobe on a yacht during off-season in Ibiza, standing side by side, sun-baked, laughing at something off-camera.
One from July: a quiet shot in a coffee shop in London, Jobe sitting across the table, half-hidden behind a mug, tagged faintly in the corner.
Two others: post-match celebrations from late last season where they were holding each other in a headlock after a late winner at home.
None of the captions explicitly said anything romantic. But for anyone who knew how to read between the lines, for the friends, the teammates, the fans who looked too closely, those posts were the proof.
Carney looked at the screen. Then he tapped Jobe’s profile.
Jobe’s latest story was a repost of Ethan’s latest upload: a photo of their dinner at an Italian spot near the lake. Ethan had tagged Jobe with a small hand-shake emoji. Jobe had reposted it with: Family first.
Family first.
Carney’s chest tightened. It wasn't that he hated Ethan. Ethan was a good kid, quiet, polite, crazy talented. It wasn't about Ethan at all.
It was about the shift. It was about how effortless it was for Jobe to publicly embrace a traditional, comfortable narrative; the strong Alpha protecting the young, vulnerable Omega while their own bond, an Alpha-on-Alpha partnership that required balance, fight, and equal standing, was kept tucked away in the shadows, unmentioned, unacknowledged, like something that couldn't be shown to the world without making people uncomfortable.
Carney felt a sharp, bitter flare surge in his throat. It was petty. He knew it was petty. He was playing for one of the biggest clubs in Europe, earning thousands a week, and he was sitting on a couch in Germany at two in the morning getting pissed off over Instagram posts.
"Fuck this," Carney muttered to the empty room.
He opened his own grid again.
He clicked on the Ibiza photo with Jobe. Tapped the three dots in the top right corner.
Archive.
The photo vanished from his feed.
He clicked on the London coffee shop photo. Tapped the dots.
Archive.
The post-match headlock from April.
Archive.
The training photo from pre-season where they were walking out of the tunnel together.
Archive.
Within forty-five seconds, every single trace of Jobe Bellingham was gone from Carney Chukwuemeka’s public profile. His grid was left with only solo match shots, official club graphics, and a couple of lifestyle photos in Nike gear.
Carney threw the phone onto the cushion beside him, picked up his glass of water, and took a long drink. The room was dead quiet again, save for the muffled commentary from the TV screen where Olise was walking off the pitch after being substituted.
Carney leaned his head back against the leather cushion, staring up at the white ceiling. His heart was beating a little faster than it should have been.
He turned off the TV, grabbed his phone, and walked toward the bedroom, leaving the living room in total darkness.
At 2:18 AM, three hundred kilometers away in a high-rise apartment in Munich, Michael Olise was awake, scrolling idly through his phone while his leg recovered in a pair of compression boots.
His feed refreshed.
A tweet from a popular BVB fan account with 180,000 followers popped up on his timeline, complete with screenshots attached:
“Wait… Carney Chukwuemeka just archived every single picture with Jobe Bellingham on IG??? What just happened? They were fine yesterday??”
Olise paused his thumb. He zoomed in on the screenshots. Then he clicked through to Carney’s actual profile.
It was true. The grid was wiped clean of Jobe.
Olise stared at the screen for a second, a slow, amused smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth.
Olise tapped out of Carney’s profile, opened WhatsApp, and clicked on Carney’s chat.
Olise: You cleanin house late night bro? 😂
He didn't get an answer. Carney’s status showed he was offline.
Olise chuckled quietly to himself, tossing his phone onto the bed. "Saturday’s gonna be fun," he murmured to the quiet room.
By 7:30 AM, the Dortmund local news cycles hadn't picked it up yet, but football Twitter was already in complete melt-down mode.
#Carney, #Jobe, and #BVB were trending across the UK and Germany. The theories were multiplying by the minute: a locker room row, a contract dispute, a personal falling out, or the most popular theory circulating among the fan edits, that Jobe’s instant closeness with Ethan had caused a total breakdown between the two senior players.
In his apartment, Jobe’s alarm went off at 7:45 AM.
He rolled over, reached for his phone on the nightstand, and squinted at the screen.
There were forty-two unread WhatsApp messages. Sixteen missed calls from his brother Jude in Madrid. And over two hundred Instagram tags in the last five hours.
Jobe sat up instantly, the sleep clearing from his eyes as his brow furrowed in confusion. He unlocked the phone and tapped Jude’s chat first.
Jude: Bro what did you do to Carney?
Jude: Call me as soon as you wake up.
Jude: The internet is losing its mind man.
Jobe’s heart hit his ribs hard. He exited WhatsApp and opened Instagram.
His notification tab was an unreadable blur of red numbers and frantic comments. He searched Carney’s handle, opened the profile, and stared at the grid.
It was empty of him. Completely gone.
"What the fuck?" Jobe said aloud, his voice rough with sleep.
He immediately hit Carney’s contact number and held the phone to his ear.
It rang once. Twice. Three times. Four times.
“Your call has been forwarded to automated voice messaging—”
Jobe hung up. He called again.
Straight to voicemail.
Jobe pulled the phone away from his ear, his chest heaving, his Alpha scent flaring sharp and metallic with sudden, unadulterated frustration. He stared at the screen, then at the time.
8:15 AM. Morning meetings at Brackel started at 9:00 AM.
Jobe swung his legs out of bed, grabbed his keys from the counter, and didn't even bother making coffee. He had forty-five minutes to get to the training ground before the entire squad walked into the building.