OFFSIDE

by lenaaa_aa

Summary:

Four years ago, they chose football over each other.

Two days before the World Cup final, someone gives them an impossible choice.

Or: Erling gets blackmailed, Jude gets dragged back into his life, and pretending they're over each other turns out to be much harder than either of them expected.

Notes:

Hiii! It's my first time writing a football fic, so please bear with me if I got anything wrong. Hope you enjoy!!!
also, english is not my first language sooo again sorry:cccc

New York, United States 

July 17, 2026 

Two days before the World Cup final

Silence never lasted very long during a World Cup, not even at seven in the morning, when the city still seemed to be waking up amidst the steam rising from the manholes and the distant hum of starting traffic.

Erling Haaland realized this the moment he stepped off the Norwegian national team bus. Before he could even place a foot on the pavement, a wave of camera flashes erupted from the other side of the metal barricades, so intense that he had to squint for a moment. Journalists shouted his name and those of his teammates in different languages, jostling each other for the best angle; fans waved red and blue flags as if the wind depended entirely on their arms, and a group of children, pressed against the fence, held up number nine jerseys, hoping for an autograph that would probably never come, though none of them seemed ready to give up just yet.

He responded the way he always did. A brief, barely perceptible nod. A half-smile practiced so many times in front of the mirror that he didn't even need to think about it anymore. Over the years, he had learned that giving anything more than that was like opening a door to his life that would later be incredibly difficult to close again.

Security personnel quickly guided them inside the stadium, bypassing cameras and microphones, into a side corridor where the street noise suddenly cut out, as if someone had slammed a door shut. That morning, the official photo shoot for the two finalists was scheduled to take place there.

Norway and England.

The final that no one had predicted four weeks ago, and which now occupied every sports cover on the planet, every radio show, every bar conversation across half the world.

Erling walked through the tunnel with his headphones on, even though the music had been paused for several minutes. He liked to pretend he couldn't hear anyone; it was his only way of protecting himself from the constant noise that had surrounded his life for years, that permanent hum of voices, cameras, and expectations that seemed to follow him even when he closed his eyes. When he emerged at the edge of the pitch, the stadium was still empty. No fans, no chanting. Just the distant sound of sprinklers watering the corners of the field and the unmistakable smell of freshly cut grass, still damp, which settled in his chest like an old memory. He took a deep breath, letting the fresh morning air fill his lungs.

In fortyeight hours, he would step onto this very grass again to play the most important match of his career, the one he had dreamed of since he was eight years old. Any other footballer in his position would be thinking about the trophy, the ninety minutes, the pressure of seventy thousand throats screaming his name or insulting him depending on the result and the truth was, he should have been thinking about that too. However, for days he had been feeling an discomfort he couldn't quite explain, a kind of weight settled right beneath his sternum, as if something were about to break and he was the only one who didn't know what it was yet.

—Erling.

The voice of the FIFA press officer snapped him out of his thoughts, cutting the thread just before he could pull on it.

—The English arrive in ten minutes, and then we'll do the official photos.

Erling nodded. He didn't ask questions; he never did. He preferred to keep his doubts to himself rather than offer them as conversation material to a stranger holding a timetable.

The players began taking their positions around the trophy according to instructions from the photographers, who moved from one side of the pitch to the other with the urgency of someone who knows they have a very brief window of time to capture the perfect image. The cameras never stopped clicking, a constant shutter snap blending with orders barked in English.

—A bit closer. —Look straight ahead. —Captains to the center, please.

Erling stepped forward, adjusting his shoulders the way he had been taught to do without thinking, almost by instinct. That was when he saw them enter. White uniforms. Gold crests gleaming under the morning light. Laughter. Scattered conversations drifting over in fragments, English words dissolving into the echo of the empty stadium. And, walking a few meters ahead of the rest, with that way of his of occupying space without looking like he was even trying...

Jude Bellingham.

Four years. Four years were enough to change a lot of things, and yet, the instant he saw him, it felt to Erling as if time had compressed until it disappeared entirely. His hair was a bit shorter, combed back in a style he didn't use before. His shoulders looked broader, as though years of professional training had finished sculpting what back then was still a body in formation. His jawline was sharper, more adult. There was a small scar next to his left eyebrow that Erling didn't remember a thin, pale line that must have its own story, a story he was no longer a part of.

But his way of walking was still exactly the same. Confident. Relaxed. As if the whole world could watch him without managing to alter the rhythm of his steps, as if nothing happening around him, cameras, shouting, an entire World Cup hanging on his every move could truly touch him.

Jude looked up for just a split second.

Their eyes met.

There was no surprise. Only a silent, brief recognition, the kind exchanged between two people who once knew each other entirely too well and who can now only afford that single second before the rest of the world steps back in between. Then he kept walking, as if Erling were just another stranger among dozens of footballers scattered across the pitch.

Something tightened inside his chest. It wasn't pain; he already knew that, he had carried it for so long it had almost become familiar. It was something else. A much older sensation, much harder to ignore, something he had been trying to bury for four years under training sessions, titles, and kilometers of distance.

—Erling.

A photographer called him again, waving a hand to get his attention.

—Here, please.

He looked away. It was the smartest thing to do. The only thing possible.

The session lasted barely twenty minutes, though to Erling it felt much longer. Twenty minutes of forced smiles, protocol handshakes that felt colder than they appeared, and questions repeated over and over by different microphones.

“How do you feel before the final? Who goes in as the favorite? What does it mean to represent your country?”

Erling answered with brief, carefully neutral phrases, the kind that gave journalists nothing they could turn into a headline. Jude, on the other hand, spoke with his usual ease, dropping a joke that made the English reporters laugh, moving his hands as he spoke as if he were telling a story among friends rather than in front of thirty cameras. The journalists laughed. He laughed too, a little, unable to entirely help himself. He looked comfortable. He always looked comfortable. And Erling caught himself wondering if that smile was real, or if it was still the same one he had learned to distinguish years ago; that perfect smile that hid nerves, exhaustion, or sadness behind a gesture practiced to perfection, the same one that only he, once upon a time, had known how to read past the surface.

He forced himself to stop looking at him. He didn't have the right.

Not anymore.

The open training session began an hour later, under a sun that was starting to beat down harder on the freshly watered pitch. Norway took the left half of the field. England, the right. They were separated by just a few meters of grass and an imaginary line that no sign pointed out but everyone respected. And a whole lifetime, the one they had both built separately since the last time they had said anything to each other that wasn't protocol.

While doing activation drills, short jumps, changes of direction, the repetitive rhythm of a warmup Erling could do with his eyes closed, he caught a burst of laughter that rose above the rest of the training sounds. He didn't need to turn around to know whose it was. He could still recognize it among hundreds of voices, as if his body had stored that information in a place conscious memory couldn't reach.

That annoyed him more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.

At the end of the day, the national team returned to the hotel in a convoy of dark vehicles escorted by police motorcycles. Security measures were extreme: exclusive elevators programmed only for the team, entire floors reserved and emptied of any other guests, staff checking every entrance with printed lists and radios that crackled nonstop. Everything was designed to protect the finalists.

Or so it seemed.

Erling dropped his backpack onto the bed in his room, a spacious but impersonal room, the kind that could be in any city in the world without anything giving away where they actually were. He kicked off his sneakers and left them by the door. He turned on the television just to fill the silence, that thick silence that, after a day so heavy with noise, was almost harder to bear than the racket itself.

Every channel was talking about the same thing. The final. The statistics of both teams, repeated to the point of exhaustion. The historical background between the two sides. The stars, their names pronounced with the same reverence used for something that hasn't happened yet but everyone is certain will be memorable.

He turned off the TV. He needed to rest, though he knew sleep would be a long time coming. The phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Unknown number.

He frowned. He thought about ignoring it, letting the screen go dark on its own the way he did with so many messages from numbers he didn't recognize. It buzzed again. And again, with an insistence that began to feel unsettling.

Finally, he opened the message.

There was no text. Only a photograph.

The air left his lungs all at once, as if someone had slammed both hands into his chest. The image showed two boys sitting on the balcony of a small hotel in Dortmund. It was summer. Both were wearing training gear, still with their socks on and their hair damp from the shower. One was laughing with his head resting on the other's shoulder, in a gesture so intimate, so carefree, that it seemed to belong to another lifetime.

Erling knew that night perfectly well. He even remembered the smell of the rain that had fallen minutes before, the sound of the distant traffic, the way the streetlights reflected off the wet balcony. But that wasn't the important part. The important part was that this photograph had never left his phone. No one else was supposed to have it.

The phone buzzed again. This time it was a video of barely six seconds.

Jude, asleep on an apartment couch, one arm hanging off the cushion. Erling appeared at the end of the video, leaning in to cover him with a blanket before turning off the camera, taking care not to wake him.

Another message. Another photograph: a stolen kiss in an apartment kitchen, the warm light of a hanging lamp dimly illuminating the scene. Another video. Another selfie. Whole years of a life he thought buried began to parade across the screen, one after another, without a pause, as if someone had decided to show him all at once everything he had tried to leave behind.

His hands were shaking.

Then the first text appeared.

“Do you know how much a secret is worth when the whole world is watching?”

Erling felt a knot in his stomach, thick and cold. With fingers that barely responded, he typed a single word.

“Who are you?”

The message was sent, the double gray checkmarks indicating it had gone through but without confirming if it had been read. He got no reply.

Thirty seconds passed. One minute, which felt like ten.

Then another file arrived. A folder. One hundred and forty-seven photographs. Twenty-three videos.

And underneath, one last phrase, written with the same clinical coldness as everything else:

“Lose the final.”

“Or he loses everything.”

The silence of the room became unbearable, a different silence than minutes ago, now loaded with a weight Erling didn't know how to carry.

He closed the folder, his heart racing, his pulse pounding in his ears with a force he couldn't remember ever feeling before, not even before a final.

He didn't think about himself. He didn't think about his career. He didn't even think about the World Cup.

He thought about Jude.

If those images came to light, they wouldn't destroy just one life. They would destroy two, dragging down everything they had both built with so much effort since they decided the safest thing to do was pretend that none of it had ever existed.

He breathed deeply, trying to organize the thoughts colliding inside his head. He tried to convince himself that he could solve it alone. That he didn't need to involve him again. That four years of silence still meant something, that it was still possible to maintain that distance it had cost him so much to build.

But his body had already made a decision before his head did.

He opened his messages. He scrolled down the screen, past his usual conversations, until he reached a section he almost never visited. Archived chats.

One. Just one.

Jude.

The last conversation was from four years ago, frozen in time like a photograph no one had dared to delete. There was no profile picture, no status visible. Just a read message that had never received a reply, sitting there, waiting ever since. Erling pressed his thumb against the keyboard. He typed slowly, as if each letter required a different kind of effort.

“We have a problem.”

He froze, his eyes fixed on the screen. The send button glowed in the bottom corner, a small blue triangle that seemed to wait with the same patience he had lacked for years. All it took was a tap, and everything he had spent four years trying to leave behind would start all over again.

Erling stared at the message for forty-two seconds, long enough for the screen to dim once and force him to tap it again to keep it awake.

“We have a problem.”

The words sat there motionless, so simple they seemed ridiculous given everything they were trying to hold. Years of silence, of unanswered questions, piling up like letters never sent, years spent learning, training session after training session, trip after trip, to live as if Jude Bellingham had never been the most important person in his life. Years to end up writing just that.

“We have a problem.”

His thumb trembled slightly before pressing send, a tiny tremor that nonetheless felt deafening in the middle of that quiet room. The double checkmark took less than a second to appear and his heart stopped, or at least that's how it felt, as if something inside his chest had decided to pause, waiting for whatever came next.

The number was still the same. Jude was still using the same number, four years later, as if in some corner of his life he too had left a door ajar. Erling laid the phone face down on the bed, as if hiding it from view could prevent the consequences of what he had just done. He didn't sleep. He didn't check his phone, though every few minutes he felt the urge to reach out for it.

He didn't turn on the television. He just sat by the hotel window, knees pulled up against his chest, watching the city lights turn off slowly, window by window, until the sky began to clear over the buildings and morning broke without him having closed his eyes even once.

 

New York, United States 

July 18, 2026 

One day before the World Cup final

The team breakfast was at seven, in a private dining room at the hotel decorated with white tablecloths and discreet floral arrangements that no one seemed to notice. Everyone was in a good mood. The World Cup final had that effect: it turned even the clattering of cutlery into something resembling contained euphoria. The defenders laughed as they argued over who would mark England first, throwing jokes from one end of the table to the other. The coach circulated among the players, repeating with his usual, rehearsed calmness the importance of keeping a cool head. The physiotherapists placed quiet bets on who would cry first if they won, pointing at one another amidst bursts of laughter. Erling barely touched his coffee, which grew cold in front of him without him noticing. He checked his phone three times, each time with the same subtle movement beneath the table.

No messages.

Part of him felt relief, a brief, fragile breath of air. The other part felt something much worse: the certainty that the silence did not mean the problem had disappeared, but rather that it was merely catching its breath.

—Everything good? —Martin, the team's midfielder, asked, resting a hand on his shoulder as he walked past his chair.

Erling nodded automatically, with the same ease he had been doing it for years.

That morning's training session was open to the press for the first fifteen minutes, a customary ritual before any major final. Photographers crowded along the sidelines, jostling one another slightly, capturing every run, every smile, every gesture of tension leading up to the most important match of the year.

Erling was practicing shots, focused on the trajectory of the ball, when he looked up for no apparent reason. England had just entered the adjacent pitch, in a single file line, with the characteristic sound of cleats striking the synthetic floor of the tunnel.

He wasn't looking for Jude. That was what he told himself, with the same conviction he used to tell himself so many other things that later turned out to be lies. And yet, he found him immediately, as if his eyes had memorized the exact position where he was supposed to appear. He wore a white training shirt and his hair was slightly damp, still clinging to his forehead from the warmup. He was laughing at something a teammate had said, his head thrown back. He had that same way of tilting his head when he listened to someone intently. The same almost unconscious habit of touching his wrist when he was nervous.

There he saw it, the same black bracelet.

Erling let his breath out slowly, as if he had been holding it without realizing. It couldn't be. The bracelet they had bought in Austria back in 2021, in some random market, amidst laughter and a makeshift excuse to separate themselves from the group for twenty minutes. The very same one he still kept hidden beneath the athletic tape on his ankle, where no one could see it or ask about it. Jude was still wearing it, even five years later.

The shot he attempted flew far over the crossbar, completely off target, landing somewhere in the empty stands.

The cameras captured him smiling sheepishly, the perfect expression of a player who had simply missed an unimportant shot. No one knew that he had just lost his balance over something much smaller than a football.

✰

The phone vibrated as he was returning to the hotel, sitting in the back of the team vehicle, his gaze lost in the New York traffic.

Unknown number. This time there was an audio file. 

Duration: 00:08.

Erling put on his headphones with hands that were already starting to tremble again. At first, he only heard static, a low hiss that seemed to drag on longer than it actually did. Then a laugh, soft, barely contained. And a voice.

His own.

“Don't sleep here or your back is going to hurt.”

The sound of a blanket settling, the rustle of fabric against fabric. And, very low, Jude’s sleepy voice:

“Five more minutes.”

Erling stopped the audio with his thumb, as if he could abruptly cut off the memory that had just replayed inside his head. He stood motionless in the elevator, staring at the numbers going up one by one above the door. He didn't remember that conversation being recorded. He didn't remember saving it anywhere. But he recognized every detail.

The Dortmund apartment. The gray sofa, worn at the armrests. The broken lamp they never got around to fixing because there was always something more urgent, something more important, something to do together before time ran out.

The elevator reached his floor with a soft chime, and his phone vibrated again before he could put it away.

“Tomorrow, 21:00. The whole world will be watching.”

Another message arrived just a few seconds later.

“Lose. Or he loses more.”

Erling felt nauseous, a sudden wave of dizziness that forced him to lean against the hallway wall. Jude's message arrived at four in the afternoon, while Erling was trying, without much success, to take a nap that had turned into half an hour of staring at the ceiling. It contained only four words.

“What kind of problem?”

Erling read the reply so many times it stopped looking real, the letters blurring a bit each time he went over them. There was no greeting. No how have you been. Just the question, practical, direct, exactly how he would have responded to any crisis, with that ability of his to go straight to the center of the issue without wasting time beating around the bush.

As if years hadn't passed, as if they were still a team.

Erling typed a reply. He deleted it. He typed another. He deleted it again, his fingers moving almost desperately across the screen, and in the end, he sent:

“I need to talk to you in person. It’s important.”

The reply took eleven minutes. Eleven incredibly long minutes in which Erling imagined every possibility, each one worse than the last. That Jude would say no. That he would just block him without explanation. That he would tell him to talk to a lawyer, to the communications team, to anyone who wasn't him. That he would ask, with entirely good reason, why now, after all this time. Instead, he replied.

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

Erling gripped the phone tightly, feeling the edge of the device dig into his palm. He knew Jude was right. But he also knew he couldn't carry this alone, that there were limits even to what one could endure in silence. He opened the photo folder. He scrolled through the images with his thumb until he found the most innocent one: the two of them sitting on a balcony, sharing a cup of coffee, with the morning light falling over them. He sent it.

Thirty seconds passed. One minute. each one longer than the last. Until the typing indicator appeared. It disappeared. It appeared again, as if Jude were typing and deleting just as many times as he himself had done minutes prior.

“Who else has that?”

Erling closed his eyes. The question wasn't whether the photo was real. It wasn't why he had it. It was who else had seen it. Because Jude understood the danger just as quickly as he did, with that same capacity for anticipation that made him almost impossible to mark on the pitch.

“I don't know. They are blackmailing me to lose the final.”

The message was read immediately. There was no reply. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen, each one weighing heavier than the last upon Erling's chest. He began to think he had made a mistake, that perhaps he should have carried all of this in silence, the way he had been doing from the very beginning. Until the phone vibrated.

“Greenwich Hotel. Service entrance. 22:30.”

Nothing else. No period. No greeting. Just like before. Just like when they used to meet in secret between Champions League matches, coordinating encounters with messages so brief they hardly seemed like messages at all.

Erling felt his stomach tighten.

For years he had imagined what it would be like to see Jude again; he had constructed that scene in his head a thousand different ways during nights of insomnia. He never thought it would be like this, that fear would be stronger than nostalgia.

At 22:24, Erling stepped out of the taxi in front of the English national team's hotel, two blocks away from where the vehicle could stop without drawing attention. He wore a black beanie pulled down to his eyebrows and a track jacket with no crests or markings, the most anonymous clothing he had been able to find in his suitcase. The service entrance was nearly empty at that hour, lit only by a couple of fluorescent lights flickering faintly overhead.

Only a single guard, sitting on a bench by the door, barely looked up as he entered, far more interested in his phone than in anyone crossing that corridor.

The hallway smelled of industrial detergent and freshly brewed coffee, a strangely domestic scent for the situation he found himself in. Everything seemed oddly normal. Too normal for the most significant moment of his life.

Erling stood waiting beside a metal door, hands buried deep in his jacket pockets, his heart hammering hard against his ribs.

Five minutes. Ten.

He began to think that perhaps Jude had changed his mind, that the prolonged silence was, in reality, an answer in itself. Then he heard footsteps. He would know those footsteps anywhere, among a thousand people walking at the same time.

He looked up.

Jude stood at the end of the hallway, silhouetted against the fluorescent light. A gray hoodie, sweatpants. The same straight posture Erling remembered from every walk down the tunnel, from every training session, from every shared morning. The same difficult-to-read expression. But more tired. More adult. More distant, as if something in him had closed off with the passing of the years.

They stood motionless, each at opposite ends of the hallway, neither daring to close the distance. Four years compressed into the space between them, as though all that time could fit, all at once, into just a few meters of an empty corridor.

Neither knew what to say. Neither moved. And, for the first time since everything ended, Erling understood, with a clarity that hurt physically, that the worst part hadn't been losing Jude. It had been learning to live without him.

Jude opened his mouth, as if he were about to say something, and for a second Erling thought he would finally hear an explanation, a reproach, anything. But before he could do so, Erling pulled the phone from his pocket and showed him the screen, his hand still trembling a little.

The photograph. The threat. The real reason for his presence there, in that service hallway, at that hour of the night. Jude looked at it, first with bewilderment, then with something that hardened behind his eyes as he understood. And for the first time all night, he lost his composure.

He looked up at Erling.

His eyes were filled with something Erling hadn't seen in years, something he recognized instantly even though he hadn't witnessed it in so long. Fear.

—We need to talk —Jude said quietly, in a voice that was no longer the one from the interviews or the laughter in front of the cameras.

And this time, neither of them tried to leave.

 

Dortmund, Germany

July 2020

6 years before the World Cup

The air smelled of wet grass even before Erling stepped out of the car, a scent that drifted through the cracked window several meters before reaching the training center entrance, as if the entire city had decided to welcome him with the only thing he truly understood. The sports complex's glass building loomed ahead, massive, reflecting the gray July sky in each of its panels, so vastly different from the modest facilities where he had grown up playing that for a moment he felt like he was entering a place where he didn't belong. Journalists waited outside, clustered along the barricade, cameras already poised and microphones thrust toward the vehicle door before he had even finished opening it.

 

Erling walked toward the entrance trying to look composed, his shoulders square and his stride firm, just as he had mentally rehearsed throughout the entire flight from Oslo. Inside, however, he was scared to death. He was twenty years old, carrying a suitcase that didn't quite feel like his own, and holding a contract he still found hard to believe bore his name.

 

At twenty, Erling had already learned that football was a universal language. What he didn't know yet was how to feel at home when no one knew his name outside of a team lineup.

 

A club employee greeted him at the door with a professional smile and a binder under his arm, guiding him through corridors that smelled of fresh paint and disinfectant, pointing out rooms whose names Erling would barely retain half of. He walked a few steps behind, taking everything in with the same careful attention he used to memorize plays, trying to ensure none of his unease showed on his face. The locker room was more crowded than he had imagined. Overlapping laughter in German, English, and a hurried French someone was using to crack a joke; the metallic clang of locker doors swinging open and shut; the blended scent of deodorant spray and shampoo that Erling would recognize in any locker room in the world.

 

He was introduced to his teammates one by one, firm handshakes, names that slipped away the moment he heard them, welcoming smiles that wavered between courtesy and genuine curiosity about the new Norwegian signing who was being talked about so much in the local press. They pointed out his locker, near the end of the row, with his last name already printed on a gleaming plaque. Erling dropped his bag on the floor and noticed that the space right next to his was completely empty, with no name, no nothing, just a metal rectangle waiting for someone to claim it.

 

—We're still missing the English kid —someone called out from the other side of the locker room, paying it little mind, like someone mentioning a weather update.

 

No one else said anything on the matter. The conversation moved on to another topic, and Erling finished arranging his things without giving that empty locker another thought, not yet knowing that within a week that space would no longer be vacant, and that nothing would ever be quite the same after that.

 

Jude arrived a week later, wearing a suit that was visibly too large in the shoulders, as if it had been bought with the man he would one day become in mind rather than the eighteen year old boy he still was.

He dragged a suitcase that was entirely too heavy for the arm holding it, carrying that particular expression of someone trying, with all their might, to appear older than they feel.

 

The coach greeted him in the middle of the locker room, in front of the entire squad, and with a wave of his hand pointed to the empty locker next to Erling's.

 

—Jude, your locker is next to Erling's.

 

Jude walked over, carefully set his suitcase on the floor, and turned toward the boy who already had a week's head start in that locker room unfamiliar to them both.

—Hi.

—Hi.

—I'm Jude.

—I know.

The silence that followed was awkward, the kind that stretches out longer than necessary because neither of them quite knows what phrase should fill it. Highly human, at its core: two teenagers recently transplanted into an adult world, measuring each other up, not yet knowing that this clumsy four-sentence exchange would, in time, become one of the memories they would both guard with the utmost care.

 

Jude finished putting his things away in silence. Erling pretended to check something inside his own bag. Neither spoke again until the coach called everyone out to the pitch.

 

The coach set up an attacking drill, a small sided five on five where finding space was rewarded over brute force. Jude received the ball between the lines, controlling it with the outside of his foot almost without looking at it, and lifted his head. He saw an impossible gap, one of those openings that only exist for a fraction of a second before the defense closes it down. He played a pass. Erling appeared exactly where no one expected him, as if he had read the play a second before it happened, adjusting his run with a natural ease that surprised even his own teammates.

 

Goal.

 

Everyone stared, some with raised eyebrows, others laughing in disbelief. The coach, standing by the touchline with his arms crossed, didn't say a single word about what he had just seen. He only said:

—Again.

They repeated it.

Goal.

—Again.

Goal.

One of the defenders, hands on his hips and chest heaving from the sprint, muttered under his breath, looking at one and then the other:

—Did you guys rehearse that?

And both answered at the exact same time, almost without thinking, with the same genuine surprise in their voices:

—No.

The first real conversation came that very afternoon, in the training complex's dining hall, amidst trays of food and the constant murmur of overlapping conversations in different languages. Jude walked in with his tray in his hands, scanning the room, and found nowhere to sit. All the groups were already formed, locked into conversations carrying weeks or months of shared history, and he was still, just hours after his arrival, a stranger with the wrong accent and a suit he had already swapped for the club tracksuit.

 

Erling, sitting alone at a table by the window, pointed to the chair across from him. He didn't smile. He just said:

—It's free.

Jude sat down without asking questions, grateful to have a place to set his tray. They started by talking about the weather, about the unusual chill for July, about how different everything was compared to their respective countries. Then they talked about Norway, about the fjords Jude had never seen and Erling described without much enthusiasm, like someone talking about something so ordinary to them that they no longer know how to make it sound interesting to a stranger. Then about England, about London, about a northern accent Erling couldn't quite place. Then about the German language, about how little either of them understood yet, about the words they had learned wrong on purpose just to make their teammates laugh.

 

None of it was important in itself. None of the sentences they exchanged that afternoon would have survived a summary of the day. But Erling, even if he didn't fully know it yet, began to feel that the two of them, sitting face to face over half-finished trays of food, might just become something like friends.

 

That night, back in his apartment, Erling dropped onto the sofa with his training clothes still on, too tired to change right away. He opened Instagram aimlessly, just to have something in his hands while the silence of the new apartment finished settling around him. Dortmund had posted, just a few minutes prior, an official photograph of the new English signing.

 

Welcome, Jude Bellingham.

 

Erling looked at the image a second longer than necessary. He liked it, almost without thinking, with the same automatic gesture he used to like any of the club's posts. He turned off the phone and left it on the table. Not even a minute passed before he looked at the photograph one more time before the phone locked itself.

 

The apartment fell back into silence. The next morning they would have another training session. And, for the first time since he had arrived in Germany, Erling discovered that he was looking forward to going back.

 

Dortmund, Germany

September 2020

6 years before the World Cup

Nearly two months had passed since Jude arrived at Borussia Dortmund, two months that, from the outside, could be summed up as training sessions, trips, and the occasional pre-season match, but which on the inside had been weaving something much more difficult to define.

 

The German summer was beginning to slowly say goodbye. The mornings remained mild, with that lazy, golden light that still promised warmth, but by late afternoon the air took on that sharp, sudden chill that forced players to put on their club track jackets the moment they finished training, as if autumn were waiting its turn behind every sunset.

 

By then, Erling and Jude already shared more than just a locker room. They shared silences, those particular silences that only exist between two people who no longer need to fill every pause with words.

 

It wasn't an obvious friendship, at least not in the way other teammates built theirs amidst loud jokes and group outings. Neither of them was particularly talkative, and from the outside, it would be hard for anyone to say they were inseparable. Yet, there were small things that began to repeat with an almost imperceptible naturalness, gestures so tiny that they themselves didn't seem to fully notice them.

 

Jude no longer looked for a place to sit in the dining hall, scanning the room the way he did during that first week. He simply set his tray down across from Erling, without asking, without hesitating, as if that spot had been reserved for him all along. And Erling, without ever asking him what he wanted to drink, already knew to bring two glasses of water, one for each of them, placed in the exact same spot on the table every single time. They never spoke about it. It simply happened, in the same quiet way customs do, which later, looking back in hindsight, turn out to be the beginning of something much bigger.

That morning's training session ended an hour later than scheduled, the sun already high and the grass beginning to dry from the morning dew.

 

The coaching staff had insisted over and over on the attacking movements, stopping play every few minutes, trying to automate runs that still seemed too mechanical, too thought out.

—Again.

The coach stopped the play once more, with a hand gesture everyone already recognized by heart.

—Erling, you're attacking the space too early.

Erling huffed, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his forearm.

—I thought I'd get there.

—You get there... but you get there alone.

Jude stood a few meters back, hands on his hips, catching his breath as he watched the exchange without intervening.

 

The coach pointed at them both, first one and then the other, with a sharp flick of his index finger.

—You two. Stay ten minutes extra when we're finished.

A few teammates let out a sympathetic "oof" while gathering the balls scattered across the pitch, grateful the order wasn't meant for them.

 

When the rest disappeared toward the locker room, amidst laughter and comments about the hot shower waiting for them, the pitch fell nearly empty, quiet, interrupted only by the distant hum of traffic outside the facilities.

 

Only the two of them remained. And the coach.

—Again.

Jude received the ball, controlling it with a single touch.

 

He lifted his head.

 

He waited half a second longer than his instinct demanded, holding back the urge to play the pass immediately.

 

He slipped the pass through, with the exact precision the play required.

 

This time Erling appeared exactly when he was supposed to, without jumping the gun, completely synchronized with the moment of the pass. Goal.

—See? —the coach said, with a satisfied half-smile—. It wasn't a matter of speed. It was a matter of trusting that the pass was going to arrive.

Erling retrieved the ball from the net with a barely visible smile, the kind of gesture that, for him, already represented a considerable celebration.

—Another one.

The coach crossed his arms, unable to hide a certain satisfaction. For twenty minutes they repeated the same play over and over, with slight variations in pace and positioning, until it stopped looking like a directed drill and began to feel like something much simpler: pure instinct, the kind of understanding that isn't taught, only discovered.

 

The coach left first, gathering his binder and whistling a low melody that neither of them recognized.

—Don't be late tomorrow.

The two answered at the same time, almost like an echo.

—Yes.

Silence settled over the pitch once more, a different kind of silence than before, more relaxed, without the tension of a directed drill. Jude rested his hands on his knees to catch his breath, still winded from the effort.

—Do you always train extra?

Erling gathered the cones scattered across the field as he answered, without stopping.

—Almost always.

—Because you like it?

Erling took a few seconds to respond, weighing the question with the same seriousness he used to weigh any decision on the pitch.

—Because I know there's always something I can do better.

Jude smiled, shaking his head slightly.

—That sounds exhausting.

—It is.

It was probably the longest conversation they had had since meeting, just a handful of short phrases exchanged while picking up training gear from the pitch. And yet, in a way neither of them stopped to analyze, it still felt like enough.

 

When they reached the locker room, almost everyone had already left, leaving behind the echo of laughter and the steam still drifting from the showers. Only a kit man remained, sorting jerseys into neat piles, and the physiotherapist, packing gear into plastic bins. Jude rummaged around the benches, moving bags and towels with growing impatience. He frowned.

—Lose something? —Erling asked, barely looking up from his own bag.

—My bottle.

Erling pointed toward the pitch without having to think about it.

—You left it by the goal.

Jude retraced his steps, walking back down the corridor toward the exit, and found it exactly where Erling had said, lying next to the left post.

—How did you...?

—You always leave it there.

Jude stared at him for a few seconds, with an expression that wavered between surprise and something harder to name.

—I've only been here two months.

Erling shrugged, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

—I noticed.

He didn't seem to give it much thought, already busy packing his own things.

But Jude did. He stood a moment longer than necessary with the bottle in his hand, thinking about how strange it felt that someone had memorized, without even trying, such a small detail of his routine.

 

A fine rain began to fall as they left the building, just a gray drizzle that blurred the parking lot lights. It wasn't enough to run through. Just steady enough to slowly darken the asphalt and coat the parking lot in a glossy layer, almost like a mirror.

 

Jude pulled up the hood of his jacket, shrugging his shoulders against the sudden cold.

—Aren't you going to cover up?

Erling shook his head, without quickening his pace.

—In Norway, this doesn't even count as rain.

Jude let out a laugh, incredulous.

—Sure.

—What?

—That's the most Norwegian answer I've ever heard.

Erling frowned, genuinely confused.

—Was that an insult?

—I haven't decided yet.

For the first time since they had met, Erling laughed. It wasn't a loud laugh, or anything close to it. Just a brief, dry chuckle, almost surprised by itself. But it was enough for Jude to feel like he had just discovered a completely different version of the serious striker everyone knew, a tiny crack in that facade of perpetual concentration.

 

The weeks began to blend into one another in that swift succession of routines that characterizes the life of any professional footballer. Training sessions. Trips. Matches. Hotels. Recovery. Without anyone planning it, without either of them ever making a conscious decision about it, they both began staying a few minutes after every practice, long after the rest of the team had disappeared toward the showers. Sometimes they practiced finishing, repeating the same shot over and over until perfecting the angle. Other times long passes, measuring the distance with the precision of someone who was already starting to know the other's limits. Occasionally, they simply competed to see who could hit the crossbar the most times, in improvised games that arose without any prior plan.

—Five attempts —Jude proposed one afternoon, placing the ball on the penalty spot with a solemn gesture.

—What does the winner get?

—To pick the locker room music tomorrow.

Erling arched an eyebrow, considering the proposal with more seriousness than it warranted.

—That sounds important.

—It is.

Jude shot first. The ball struck the crossbar with a clean, metallic thud that echoed throughout the empty stadium.

 

He smiled, satisfied.

—One.

Erling placed his calmly, adjusting the ball's position with the tip of his boot.

He took three steps back.

He shot.

The ball kissed the metal, in almost the exact same spot.

—One.

For half an hour, neither would accept defeat, extending the competition with increasingly boisterous attempts, amidst complaints and exaggerated celebrations.

When they finally returned to the building, almost no one was left, and the corridor to the locker room seemed to have been left just for them.

 

One of the kit men saw them walk in soaked in sweat, hair clinging to their foreheads, and shook his head in a gesture of amused resignation.

—You two again?

Jude answered before Erling could, with a sidelong smile.

—He's a very sore loser.

Erling let out an incredulous laugh, nudging him lightly with his shoulder.

—Says the guy who needed seventeen shots to hit one.

—It was fifteen.

—Sixteen.

—Fifteen.

The kit man watched them walk away down the hall as they kept arguing over the exact number, their voices fading into the distance amidst laughter.

He waited a few seconds, still holding the jerseys in his hands. Then he smiled to himself, shaking his head.

✰

 

That night, back in his apartment, with his training clothes still on and exhaustion settled into every muscle, Erling opened his phone calendar to check the schedule for the next day's training.

 

He stared at it for a few seconds, the screen illuminating the dimness of the living room.

 

It was no different from any other training session. There was nothing special marked on that date, no important match, no session different from those on any other day of the week. And yet, he closed his phone with a strangely light feeling, something akin to an anticipation he couldn't entirely explain to himself. Since he had arrived in Dortmund, the days had stopped feeling identical to one another, as if something in his routine had begun to take on a different color without him realizing the exact moment it happened.

 

Without realizing it, he began to discover that there was a part of every training session he looked forward to more than the rest. And it had nothing to do with football.

 

Leverkusen, Germany

October 2020

6 years before the World Cup

The first European trip of the season arrived before either of them felt they had truly settled in Germany, as if the calendar had decided not to give them time to finish unpacking before demanding their suitcases be ready once again.

 

Erling discovered, almost without meaning to, that a footballer's life was not measured by calendar days, but by airports, hotels, and cities he barely got to know from a bus window, fragments of landscapes that followed one another too quickly to fully retain.

Prague. Munich. Brussels. Then Dortmund again, as if the entire world had been reduced to a closed circuit of boarding terminals and hotel lounges indistinguishable from one another.

 

The weeks passed too quickly, blending into one another until losing their contours. And amidst so much movement, amidst so many changes of city and hotel, a silent certainty began to exist, something Erling had not consciously decided on, but which repeated with a regularity he could no longer ignore. He always found Jude. It did not matter if the team had just stepped off the plane, bodies still numb from the hours of flight, or if the coach had just finished an endless tactical talk in front of a whiteboard full of arrows. Somehow, upon looking up, Jude was nearby, as if their trajectories had synchronized without either of them planning it.

 

They never looked for each other. They simply ended up side by side, with the naturalness of two magnets that have already stopped resisting one another.

 

The hotel where they stayed for the first European match was exactly like all the hotels Erling had slept in since turning professional: thick carpets that muffled any sound, endless corridors that repeated like a mirror, rooms identical down to the arrangement of the furniture. The kind of place you forgot the moment you left, without a single distinctive memory of the site remaining.

—Double rooms this time —the delegate announced while handing out keys from a makeshift desk in the lobby, checking a list on his iPad.

The players immediately began to joke, gathering around the desk and tossing comments back and forth.

—Don't send me with him, he snores too loud.

—I don't snore.

—You talk in your sleep.

Jude watched the scene leaning against a suitcase, arms crossed and a half-smile, not yet intervening in the discussion.

Erling remained silent, a bit apart from the group, waiting his turn with the usual patience with his which he waited for anything.

 

The delegate held up the next card, reading the names aloud without adding any drama.

—Haaland... Bellingham.

There was a second of silence, barely perceptible, before someone commented from the back of the lobby, provoking a new round of laughter:

—Perfect. That way at least one will be able to shut the other up.

Laughter filled the lobby, bouncing off the marble walls.

 

Jude walked over to Erling and took one of the cards from the desk, checking it briefly.

—I suppose we'll survive.

Erling nodded, showing no more enthusiasm in the gesture than he actually felt.

—I suppose.

The room was small, functional, with the austerity typical of any sports concentration hotel. Two single beds separated by a shared nightstand. A desk against the wall, with a chair no one would use. A television mounted in the upper corner. A window from which you could barely catch a glimpse of the river cutting through the city, a gray line between the buildings.

 

Jude dropped his backpack onto one of the beds, the one closer to the window, and turned toward Erling with an almost timid expression.

—Do you mind if I sleep by the window?

—No.

—Thanks.

Erling occupied the other without argument, leaving his own bag beside the bed with the same methodical order with which he did everything.

 

That ease of sharing space with Jude felt strange to him, something that did not quite fit with what he knew about himself. He had never been a person particularly comfortable around others, not even with teammates he had known for years. He needed silence. He needed order, his things exactly where he had left them, without anyone moving them. And yet, the Englishman's presence did not alter any of those things, it did not interrupt anything, it did not generate that subtle friction he usually felt when sharing space with another person for too long.

 

It was as if, for weeks now, his head had decided, without consulting him, that Jude was already part of the routine, as naturally incorporated into his days as morning training or dinner at eight.

 

The pre-match training session ended near nightfall, with the sky tinting orange over the empty stands of the stadium.

 

While the rest of the team returned to the hotel, dragging their feet with exhaustion and talking about the dinner that awaited them, Jude stayed behind for a few seconds, observing the empty stadium with an attention that seemed almost ritual.

—Are you coming?

Erling had already reached the tunnel, bag over his shoulder, ready to follow the rest of the group.

Jude shook his head.

—Five minutes.

Erling hesitated, with one foot already inside the dark tunnel. He could leave. It was the logical thing to do, what any other teammate would have done without a second thought. Instead, he retraced his steps and sat in the first row of the stands, setting his bag aside.

They said nothing for a while. The stadium remained completely empty, the stands plunged into shadows that lengthened with the sunset. Only the wind moving the nets of the goals could be heard a soft, constant sound that filled the silence without breaking it.

—I always do this before playing —Jude said after a while, his gaze fixed on the pitch.

Erling barely turned his head toward him.

—What's that?

—Staying when everyone leaves.

—Why?

Jude took a few seconds to respond, as if he were looking for the exact words.

—Because I like the silence and the calm of the stadium before it fills with fans and turns into a whole show.

Erling smiled faintly an almost imperceptible gesture in the dim light. It was a strange answer, different from anything he had heard from a teammate before. But he liked it. Far more than he was willing to admit at that moment.

 

After dinner, several players gathered in one room to play video games, dragging consoles and controllers from one room to another amidst laughter and protests. The laughter could be heard from the hallway, cutting through the thin walls of the hotel.

 

Jude appeared at the door of Erling's room, hair still damp from the shower.

He carried a console under his arm.

—I need a partner.

—For what?

—To prove they are cheating.

—That sounds a bit biased.

—It is.

Erling ended up putting his sneakers back on, resigned, with an expression that wavered between resistance and genuine curiosity.

 

Half an hour later, he was sitting on the floor of another room, surrounded by teammates arguing over a non-existent goal in a video game, with sweaty controllers and increasingly loud voices.

 

Jude celebrated a victory by raising both arms, with an euphoria disproportionate to what was actually at stake.

—See? I told you you were my lucky charm.

Erling rolled his eyes, unable to entirely hide a smile.

—You won because the goalkeeper was terrible.

—Don't ruin my moment.

One of the team's defenders, sitting on the bed watching the scene, let out a laugh.

—Do you two always argue like this?

Jude answered before Erling, without thinking.

—Yes.

The two fell silent for an instant, looking at each other out of the corner of their eyes. It was a lie. They had known each other for barely three months, a ridiculously brief time compared to the naturalness with which they treated each other. But the word always had slipped out with an unsettling naturalness, as if both had assumed, without ever discussing it, that this had been going on for much longer than it actually had.

 

In the dead of night, when the corridor fell silent again and the laughter of the rest of the team had died down behind their doors, Jude turned off the lamp on his side of the room. Only the dim light entering from the street remained on, filtering through the poorly closed curtains and drawing soft shadows on the ceiling.

—Erling?

—Yeah?

—Do you miss Norway?

There was a long silence—the kind of silence that fills with things left unsaid.

—Sometimes.

—I miss England every day.

Erling turned his head toward the ceiling, not really seeing it, lost in his own thoughts.

—Why did you come then?

Jude smiled in the dark, a gesture Erling could not see but somehow felt in the tone of his voice.

—Because some dreams only exist far from home.

Erling did not respond. He thought about that phrase for several minutes, turning it over in his head, finding layers he did not expect to find in such a brief comment. Until he heard Jude's breathing become slow, regular, deep. He had fallen asleep.

 

The next morning, when the alarm went off at seven, Erling was the first to get up, turning off the sound before it could wake his roommate. He went into the bathroom to change, moving with the stealth of someone who has already learned, without realizing it, not to make noise in the other's presence. Upon coming out, he found Jude still sound asleep, with his arm hanging off the bed and the duvet tangled at his feet, completely oblivious to the world. He shook his head, amused, watching him for a moment from the bathroom door. He approached quietly, making no sound, and adjusted the blanket over his shoulders so he wouldn't be cold, a careful, almost delicate movement. It was a completely automatic gesture, so small that he didn't even think about it while doing it, as if his body had acted before his mind had a chance to intervene. Only when he returned to his bed to put on his sneakers did he realize, all at once, what he had just done.

The match itself was not memorable for anyone other than those watching from the stands or from the comfort of a sofa in front of the television. A pre-season friendly without much consequence, the kind forgotten as soon as the following week ends. The goal arrived twenty-three minutes into the first half. Jude received the ball near the center circle, turned on his axis evading an opposing midfielder with a movement that barely seemed to cost him effort, and lifted his head in that gesture Erling was already beginning to recognize by heart, the exact instant before something happened. The pass arrived filtered between two defenders, exactly into the space Erling was already occupying before the ball was struck.

And with one touch, Goal.

1-0.

The celebration was not effusive, no prolonged hugs or wild shouting in front of the away stands. Just a shoulder bump as they trotted back to their own half, a brief, almost contained gesture, as if both knew that it did not need anything grander to mean what it meant. From the broadcast booth, the commentator, with that habit of narrating even the silences, let drop a comment that would pass unnoticed by most of those listening that afternoon.

“They seem to understand each other by heart.”

That goal had not been born in the twenty-third minute of that unimportant match. It had been born months ago, on an empty pitch, under the watchful gaze of a coach who only said again as many times as necessary, until it stopped being a drill and began to be instinct.

 

After the match, everyone passed through the ice and physiotherapy area, in that silent and somewhat awkward ritual that followed every game, amidst the smell of liniment and the splashing of cold water in the recovery tubs. Erling had a knock on his ankle, nothing serious, just a discomfort the physiotherapist was already checking with expert fingers while he remained sitting on the table, his face tense from the cold of the ice applied to the area. Jude passed nearby, match shirt still clinging to his body from sweat, and without asking anything, without saying a single word, handed him a bottle of water and left a towel by his side before continuing his way toward the physiotherapist waiting for him on the next table. They did not speak. No exchange of words was needed for the gesture to be complete. No one else in that room full of players, physiotherapists, and ice bags seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. It was, after all, just a bottle of water and a towel, the kind of gesture any teammate could have with another without it meaning absolutely anything. And yet, between the routine and the detail, that small gesture was already beginning to accumulate a weight that did not yet have a name.

 

The coaching staff gave them an hour of free time that night, a brief respite before the return flight scheduled for the following morning. Most of the team went out in a group, looking for some quiet bar near the hotel where they could have something to eat other than the concentration food. Erling and Jude, without having planned it, ended up walking alone, a bit lagged behind the rest, until the distance from the group became large enough that it no longer made sense to quicken their pace to catch up. They did not talk about football, for the first time since they had met, the conversation drifted somewhere completely different. They talked about the music they listened to, about artists one knew and the other didn't, about playlists shared halfway amidst laughter over the bad musical taste each attributed to the other. They talked about how strange it was to live far from home, about that odd sensation of always having a suitcase half-unpacked, of waking up some mornings not knowing for a second what city they were in. They talked about what food they missed, about dishes their mothers prepared that no German restaurant managed to replicate fully, no matter how hard they tried.

 

It was the first conversation where they got to know each other as people and not as teammates, with no footballs involved, no coach giving instructions, nothing more than two boys walking through a city that still didn't quite feel like their own for either of them. As they walked, Jude laughed at something he himself had said—a silly joke about a teammate's German accent, and out of habit, without thinking, gave Erling a light nudge with his shoulder. It was a completely normal gesture between friends, the kind of casual contact that happens hundreds of times a day between teammates without anyone paying the slightest attention. But both remained a second more aware of the contact than they would have expected an extra second, barely perceptible, in which neither pulled his shoulder away nor changed the rhythm of his step. Neither commented on it; they kept walking as if nothing had happened, picking up the conversation exactly where they had left it, but something, in the brief silence that followed that contact, remained floating between them for the rest of the way back to the hotel.

 

Back at the hotel, in the room, with Jude in the shower and the sound of running water in the background, Erling received a message from his mother asking how everything was going, the same old question, written with the same old emojis. He looked at the screen for a moment, thinking about how to summarize entire weeks of training sessions, trips, matches, and something else he still did not know how to name.

He replied with something very simple.

“All good. I think I finally found my place.”

He sent the message and left the phone on the nightstand, satisfied with the answer, convinced he had said exactly what he wanted to say. He thinks he is talking about Dortmund, about the city, about the club, about the life he was finally beginning to feel as his own after months of adaptation. He did not think of Jude while writing those words. Or at least that is what he told himself, turning off the nightstand light, while the sound of running water kept coming from the bathroom and, with it, that same light feeling he had spent weeks not knowing how to name.

Dortmund, Germany

October 2021

5 years before the World Cup

The entire team was going through a season that was hard to match, the kind that years later is remembered as a turning point in a club's history. The press had begun to speak of Erling and Jude as the best young duo in Europe, a label repeated on every front page, in every television analysis, in every comparison with historic striking partnerships that neither of them, deep down, felt they quite deserved yet.

 

They were weeks that followed one another almost without pause, in a sort of continuous montage of goals celebrated with the same usual fist bump, assists that cameras replayed over and over from different angles, press conferences where no one asked about them separately anymore, and training sessions that extended beyond the official schedule. Everything seemed perfect, sustained by a streak that they themselves didn't fully understand.

 

But there was a detail that began to repeat with a frequency that some of the most attentive journalists had already started to notice. The cameras caught them constantly searching for each other with their eyes. After a goal, before the celebration with the rest of the team even ended. After a mistake, when any other player would have lowered their head toward the grass. Before stepping onto the pitch, in that brief moment in the tunnel where it is still possible to exchange a glance without anyone else noticing.

 

It wasn't yet anything resembling romance behind those looks, at least not to those watching from the outside. It was simply that at some point during those months, each had become the other's safe place, the fixed point to return their gaze to when everything else was too much, the noise, the pressure, and the expectations of an entire club.

 

Before every match, without fail, the exact same thing happened. Jude would step out of the dressing room first, his studs echoing against the floor of the tunnel. Erling, a step behind, would adjust the collar of Jude's shirt, a quick and precise gesture he no longer even had to think about. Jude, in return, would strike Erling's shoulder twice with a closed fist, two sharp taps, no more, no less. Then they would step onto the pitch together, the entire ritual completed in just five seconds.

 

They never spoke about that ritual. No one consciously proposed it at any point; it simply appeared, on some random day, and became installed in their prematch routine as if it had always been there. As the weeks passed, the whole team began to accept it with the same naturalness with which one accepts any habit that has become part of the usual landscape, that was just how they were, and no one bothered to ask why.

 

Jude took a hard tackle near the touchline, one of those plays that looks worse in the moment than it turns out to be, and had to limp off, leaning on the shoulder of the physiotherapist who ran out to treat him. From that point on, Erling completely stopped playing well. He lost balls that in any other match he would have controlled effortlessly. He misplaced easy passes, the kind that didn't even require thinking, with a clumsiness that didn't belong to him. The manager, from the bench, began to gesture with growing frustration, shouting instructions that Erling barely seemed to hear.

 

From the bench, with ice already applied to his ankle, Jude realized something he had never thought about with such clarity until that moment: Erling played differently when he wasn't on the pitch. Not just a little different. Considerably different, as if an essential piece of his game depended on a reference point that was no longer there. And that idea kept turning over in his mind for the rest of the match, long after the pain in his ankle had begun to subside.

 

After the match, with the result finally secured despite Erling's slump in the second half, Jude was in the physiotherapy room, his ankle bandaged and elevated on a cushion. Erling appeared at the door carrying two coffees, unannounced, without even knocking before entering. He didn't ask "how are you?". He just left one of the cups on the table next to the treatment table and sat in the nearest chair, saying nothing else. He sat there for a few minutes in silence, while Jude watched the steam rise from the cup without touching it yet.

 

Jude broke the ice first.

 

—I thought you'd be celebrating.

—I didn't feel like it.

—We won.

—I know.

And once again, silence reigned.

 

✰

 

The first external conflict arrived in the most unexpected way: a joke, made with no ill intent, in the middle of a routine interview for a sports program.

 

—If you keep going like this, you're going to end up living together.

 

Everyone laughed, including the technical staff watching from the side. Erling laughed too. Jude did as well. But when they got onto the team bus on the way to the hotel, neither of them mentioned the joke again at any point during the journey. Because, for the first time since they had known each other, it hadn't completely amused them, and both knew it without needing to say a word.

 

This was probably the night that neither of them would ever fully forget. They were staying over for a Champions League match, sharing a room like so many other times, and neither could sleep; the joke had cut deep into both of them. They talked. Not about football, for the first time in a long while. They talked about childhood, about memories that neither had shared with anyone else at the club; about fear, that vague fear that neither of them quite knew how to name. About growing up too fast, pushed by a world that did not forgive mistakes. About the expectations they had carried since they were children, long before they had ever signed a professional contract.

 

Jude asked, his voice low, directed toward the darkness of the ceiling:

 

—Do you ever feel like your whole life is already decided?

 

Erling took a long time to answer, so long that Jude began to think he wouldn't.

 

—Every day.

 

Jude laughed, a brief sound, almost of relief.

 

—Me too.

 

Then came the silence. One of those silences where neither of them wanted to fall asleep, because they knew that doing so would mean the end of the conversation, and neither was ready for it to finish just yet.

 

The next day, after training, it began to rain, a sudden downpour that quickly scattered the rest of their teammates toward the dressing room. They kept gathering footballs, taking their time, getting soaked bit by bit. Jude said something, some random joke about how bad he was at carrying so many balls at once. Erling laughed. The two of whom ended up very close. Too close for what the task itself required. Neither moved. The kiss lasted just a few seconds, clumsy, almost accidental in the way it happened, without any prearranged gesture. When it ended, both stepped back, each taking a step, as if the space between them needed to be reaffirmed. No one knew what to say for several seconds. Jude broke the silence with a nervous laugh that didn't quite match the expression on his face.

 

—Well, I guess that wasn't in the plan.

Erling lowered his eyes toward the ball he was still holding in his hands.

 

—No.

 

Silence, very long this time. Jude asked, almost whispering, with a vulnerability he rarely let show:

 

—Do you regret it?

Erling looked at him. He shook his head.

—No.

 

And that single word seemed to be worth, in that instant, much more than any declaration of love either of them could have improvised.

They didn't start an official relationship, at least not with any of the words that usually accompany such beginnings. They didn't talk about labels, or what name to give to whatever was happening between them. They only agreed on one thing: that no one could know. Not because they were ashamed of each other, nor because there was anything to regret. But because both understood, better than anyone, the world they lived in. The cameras that followed them everywhere, the contracts that depended on a carefully constructed image, the sponsors who demanded discretion regarding anything that could generate controversy, and above all, the fans, capable of turning any rumor into a scandal of uncontrollable proportions.

 

A few weeks passed. Their relationship existed, secret, sustained barely by small moments stolen between training sessions and trips. A glance crossed in the middle of a press conference. A hand accidentally brushing under the table while the rest of the team slept or watched a movie. Five more minutes on the pitch, when everyone else had already left and the field was theirs alone.

 

The sun was setting slowly over the rooftops of Dortmund, painting the sky a deep orange that reflected in the windows of the building. They didn't speak. Jude leaned his head just slightly against Erling's shoulder, only for a few seconds, just long enough to feel the quiet weight of that gesture without anyone else being able to see them from up there.

Then Erling's phone vibrated on the metal table in front of them. It was his agent. He didn't answer. He slipped the phone back into his pocket without even looking at the full screen.

Jude asked, without much real interest in the answer:

—Aren't you going to answer?

Erling shook his head.

—It can wait.

The phone fell silent inside his pocket, dark for now, but with that call still pending. That ignored notice didn't simply disappear because the screen had gone black; it remained there, like a dull weight reminding them that the outside world, sooner or later, would reclaim its place.

Dortmund, Germany

January 2022

4 years before the World Cup

January brought with it a different light, something lighter than what the previous year had left behind. There was no sadness in the days that followed, but a quiet, everyday happiness that didn't need to be announced with any grand gesture. They were already a couple, without any explanation being necessary. There was no need to say when it had formally started, nor how they had reached this point since that rainy afternoon on the training pitch. It was enough to see them, in the intimacy of ordinary days, to understand that they had been together for months, settled into each other's lives with the same silent naturalness as always.

They cooked together almost every night, taking turns at the stove in Erling's apartment, arguing humorously over how much salt any given dish actually needed. They would fall asleep watching a movie that neither of them would finish, the sound of the television in the background while their heads leaned toward each other on the sofa. Jude would arrive unannounced at Erling's apartment because he already had his own key, walking in with the same tranquility as if entering his own home. Erling, for his part, would leave a clean t-shirt on the bed whenever he knew Jude would be staying over without having packed clothes, a gesture so small he no longer even bothered to mention it. They trained five minutes longer than necessary, not because extra work was needed, but simply to be together a little while longer before the rest of the day claimed them each on their own side.

They didn't make grand declarations. They didn't need to utter solemn phrases about what they felt for each other. They simply lived, day after day, with that kind of shared normalcy that is far more eloquent than any speech. And that normalcy, seen from the outside, left a clear impression: it worked.

It was during a random training session, one of those that no longer distinguished itself much from any other, when Erling's agent called again. This time, unlike the last, Erling answered. The complete conversation wasn't overheard. Only a few scattered phrases, spoken in a low voice as he walked a few steps away from the rest of the group.

—Manchester.

Silence.

—It's a lot of money.

Silence.

—I'll think about it.

Erling slipped the phone into his track pants pocket, his face serious, his gaze fixed for a moment on an indefinite point on the pitch. He didn't say anything to Jude. Not that afternoon, not the next day, nor in the days that followed. And in that deliberate silence appeared, without anyone pointing it out at the time, the first lie of the relationship, not a lie spoken aloud, but a lie built on everything Erling decided not to tell.

For weeks, Erling tried to act normally. But it cost him more and more to maintain the facade. He was distracted at times when he never used to be, his gaze lost mid-conversation. He replied late to messages he used to answer immediately, letting hours pass without any explanation. He stayed quiet at moments when he previously would have made a comment, a joke, anything to break the silence. Jude noticed perfectly well that something was going on, with that capacity of his to read the smallest details of Erling's behavior, sharpened after so much time together. But every time he asked, Erling insisted with the same short, almost mechanical phrases.

—I'm tired.

—It's nothing.

Anyone watching them closely would have noticed the lie behind those words. And that lie, sustained day after day, was beginning to weigh much more than Erling was willing to admit, even to himself.

Jude ended up confronting him, not because he suspected the transfer itself, but because he felt, with a certainty he could no longer ignore, that Erling was no longer entirely present, even though his body was still there, in the same room, in the same bed. Then Erling said it, almost without preamble, like someone dropping a heavy burden all at once because he couldn't stand carrying it for one more second.

—An offer came in.

Silence. Very long one of those silences that stretches until it becomes almost physical. Jude asked, his voice lower than usual.

—Are you going to take it?

Erling didn't answer immediately. Because, deep down, he didn't know yet himself. And that prolonged silence, without a single word to fill it, already answered everything that needed to be answered.

There was a lot of football in those final days, as if the entire club wanted to say goodbye the only way it truly knew how. The last match. The last training session, with group photos in front of the club crest. The last official photo of the complete team, everyone lined up with the usual protocol smiles. The journalists asked the standard questions about the transfer, about expectations in the new league, about what it meant to leave Dortmund after so much time. Teammates made the usual jokes, pats on the back and comments about how much they would miss him in training. Everyone, in general, celebrated the transfer for what it represented from the outside: a massive step forward in the career of a player already considered one of the best of his generation. Only Jude seemed incapable of fully rejoicing, maintaining a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes throughout the entire photo session.

When no one was looking, in the corridor leading to the parking lot, they hugged. A completely normal embrace to anyone seeing them from afar, the kind any pair of teammates would share in a farewell. But they took too long to let go far longer than any farewell between teammates would have required.

 

Manchester, England

May 2022

4 years before the World Cup

The change was radical. Everything was different: the city, the new locker room with faces he still couldn't entirely distinguish, the language spoken in the hallways, the training schedules that followed a different logic than the one he had memorized for years in Dortmund. For the first time in almost two years, they no longer trained together.

Erling arrived at his new apartment that first night, still surrounded by unpacked boxes, and looked at his phone almost out of instinct. He had a message from Jude.

Jude

“Did you make it?”

Erling smiled, a small but genuine gesture in the midst of so much change and replied immediately, without letting a single second pass.

The first few weeks were, in many ways, beautiful. Video calls that stretched until dawn without either wanting to hang up first. Entire nights falling asleep talking, with the phone still on next to the pillow. Movies watched at the same time, each from his own city, commenting on every scene via text. Photos sent for no particular reason, just for the pleasure of sharing any random moment of the day. Everything told, every detail, every little novelty, with the same dedication as always. During those weeks, anyone observing them closely would have come to think that perhaps they could make it, that the distance, after all, wouldn't be so different from any other obstacle they had already overcome together.

 

Madrid, Spain

June 2023

3 years before the World Cup

A year later, it was Jude's turn. Madrid. Erling tried to be happy, and he succeeded for the first few seconds, with a sincere hug and a genuine congratulation for the massive step that represented in Jude's career. Then he understood what it actually meant. Now there would be another country in between, another league with its own calendar, another time zone that would complicate every video call, another match schedule that would rarely coincide with his own. And, above all, much less time than they already had, which wasn't much to begin with.

Months would pass without them seeing each other, each trapped in his own calendar of matches, trips, and commitments. Until the Champions League drew them against each other, placing their teams in the same knockout tie. After the match, neither of them would board the bus with his team. Each would invent a different excuse an extra interview, a family visit, anything that sounded believable enough, and they would meet at a discreet hotel, far from the cameras and anyone who might recognize them together. They would spend the night together, without talking about the future, without mentioning the distance or the schedules that kept separating them. They only tried to recover, for just a few hours, that feeling of being home that they no longer found anywhere else. At dawn, each would return to his team, as if nothing had happened the night before. And that dynamic began to repeat every time their teams crossed paths again, over and over, throughout the entire season.

October 2023

3 years before the World Cup

There was no grand fight that marked the breakup. There were, instead, many small fights, so small that on their own they barely seemed to matter. Erling would fall asleep and forget a video call agreed upon days in advance. Jude would cancel a trip because the team's schedule changed without warning. One would reply hours later than usual, without any satisfactory explanation. The other, little by little, simply began to assume he was busy, without questioning it further. They no longer told each other everything like before. They began to miss important things, a goal celebrated without the other watching it live, an injury they found out about through the press before a direct text, a birthday that passed almost unnoticed in the midst of their respective routines. Not for lack of love. For lack of time, that resource neither of them seemed to have enough of to sustain what they had built.

They met again, in a hotel, after another Champions League match. But this time was different from the start. They didn't laugh like before. They didn't cook anything together, even though the room had a small kitchenette. They didn't make plans for the next encounter, that custom that used to close each of those stolen nights. They were simply lying down, side by side, staring at the ceiling in silence.

Then Jude spoke.

—Do you remember when we thought the hardest part was going to be hiding?

Erling smiled, with sadness.

—What idiots we were.

Silence. Very long. Jude continued.

—I think I don't know how to make this work anymore.

Erling closed his eyes. Because he knew he didn't know either.

November 2023

3 years before the World Cup

There were no dramatic tears, no shouting, no reproaches thrown in anger. There was, instead, exhaustion, the kind of tiredness that accumulates over months until there is no energy left to sustain anything else.

Jude said:

—I still love you.

Erling replied:

—Me too.

—But I don't know how to be with you anymore.

Silence.

Erling nodded. Not because he agreed with every word, but because he was too tired to argue, too tired to look for an argument that could change anything. They didn't end things angry. They ended things defeated. And that, somehow, hurt much more than any shouting match ever could have.

A few months passed. Their teams played each other again, as happens sooner or later in European football. They crossed paths in the tunnel before the match and greeted each other with a brief, polite handshake, like any two professionals who once shared a locker room. The cameras focused on them, of course, looking for some gesture to confirm what the entire football world suspected at some point, that they had been, for years, the best duo on the continent. The commentators spoke of their old footballing partnership, of those goals constructed almost by memory, without anyone imagining, even remotely, that until just a few months ago they had been, for each other, the only safe place in the middle of so much noise.

When the match ended, each left with his team, without looking back.

 

New York, United States

July 18, 2026

Ome day before the final

Jude opened the door to a private room at the end of the service hallway, a small office the hotel normally reserved for staff meetings, with a metal table in the center and a couple of folding chairs leaning against the wall. The light came from a fluorescent tube that hummed faintly above their heads.

They entered without saying anything. Erling stood by the door for a moment, as if he were still deciding whether this was actually a good idea, before finally closing it behind him. Neither of them sat down immediately. Jude rested his hands on the back of one of the chairs without actually taking a seat. Erling stayed near the opposite wall, arms crossed, looking at anything other than directly at Jude.

They still weren't talking about themselves. There was no room for that, not yet, and both seemed to know it without needing to say a word. All the tension filling that tiny room came from the simple fact of sharing the same space after so much time, of breathing the same heavy air without quite knowing where to rest their eyes. They knew each other too well to act like strangers. Every gesture, every silence, remained readable to the other with an ease that neither had managed to unlearn in four years. And yet, they had been apart for too long to act naturally, as if the body remembered the choreography but the legs no longer knew how to execute it without tripping.

Jude was the first to sit down, letting his weight fall onto the chair with more bluntness than necessary. Erling followed a second later, taking the opposite seat, the metal table between them like a border that neither dared to cross just yet.

Erling left his phone on the table, the screen still lit up with the image folder open.

—Let's start with what we know, —he said, his voice firmer than he felt inside.

Jude took the phone, sliding his thumb across the screen with a caution that seemed to take physical effort. He went through each image, each video, his jaw tightening more and more with each one.

—How many messages did you get?

—Counting this last one, six. The first one arrived late last night.

—When exactly did it start?

—Yesterday. Before that, nothing. Not a single sign.

Jude looked up from the phone.

—Are the photos all real?

—As far as I can see, yes. None of them look edited.

—Are there videos?

—Two. You saw them.

Jude nodded slowly, leaving the phone back on the table, face down, as if he needed to move the screen out of his sight for a moment.

—What exactly do they want?

—For me to lose the final. That's the only clear thing.

—Why wait until now? —Jude asked, his gaze fixed on a point on the table. —If they had all this for so long, why wait precisely for the final?

Neither had an immediate answer for that. The silence that followed was filled, little by little, by an idea that both began to understand at the same time, without needing to say it aloud just yet: that person hadn't stumbled upon those photographs by accident. The images covered different countries, different years, different hotels, different moments of a relationship they themselves had believed perfectly hidden. That meant someone had been watching them for a very long time, with a methodical patience that didn't fit a casual blackmailer. And that certainty, more than anything else, was what truly frightened them.

—Wait, —Jude said, sitting up in his chair, something different in his voice, an energy Erling recognized instantly, even though he hadn't heard it directed at him in years. —Let's think about this like a match. Who knew?

—About us? Almost no one.

—Exactly. Almost no one. So let's start there. Who was present for each of these photos?

Erling reached across the table, taking the phone back, and they began to review the images one by one, now with a different attitude, something closer to the cold analysis of an opponent's play than the panic of the last twenty-four hours.

—This one is from Dortmund, 2021. We were alone in the apartment.

—But someone had to get in to see it from that angle, or have access to a device.

—The building had security cameras in the hallway, never inside.

—And this one? —Jude pointed to another image, the hotel balcony in Dortmund, summer of 2020. —This is from the team hotel. There was club staff coming and going all the time.

They began to reconstruct dates, crossing calendars that both carried burned into their memories with the same precision they used to recall tactical lineups. Training sessions. Trips. Team hotels before major matches. Finals. Names of agents who had passed through their lives at different points. Drivers assigned by the clubs. Security personnel who changed depending on the city and the tournament. They piece together the puzzle bit by bit, pinpointing dates, crossing out possibilities, without realizing they were talking exactly like before. They interrupted each other without apologizing for it. They understood each other with just half a phrase. They finished each other's thoughts before they were fully formulated aloud, with that synchronicity that had once made entire stadiums roar and that now, in that tiny room, served a completely different purpose. It was, almost, like being back on that empty pitch in Dortmund, six years ago, when the manager would say again and they simply knew, without any additional instructions, exactly what to do. It was a small respite, brief but real, before the conversation took a much more difficult turn.

—Why didn't you call me sooner?

Jude didn't sound angry. He sounded hurt, with a vulnerability that had slipped out before he could contain it. Erling took a moment to reply, his eyes fixed on the phone he wasn't really looking at anymore.

—I didn't know if you would answer.

Silence.

And then, without either of them having planned it, things from the past began to surface. Not the whole breakup, not yet. Just small wounds, the kind that are kept for years without ever being named.

—You always tried to handle everything alone, —Jude said, his voice low. —Even now. It was twentyfour hours before you wrote to me.

—I never knew if you actually wanted to leave, —Erling replied, almost at the same time, as if he had been holding onto that sentence for four years, waiting for the moment to say it. — Manchester, everything, me.

—I thought you didn't need me anymore, —Jude said. —After the transfer. It seemed like you were doing fine without me there every day.

—I thought you'd be better off without me, —Erling said. —Without the distance complicating everything for you.

Neither was looking to settle scores. There were no reproaches thrown in anger, no attempts to find a single culprit for what had happened. They were just, for the first time in four years, beginning to understand what had actually occurred between them, each from his own version of the facts. And in that brief, almost clumsy exchange, both discovered something neither had suspected until that moment: they had interpreted the breakup in completely different ways, each constructing his own explanation in the other's silence, without either of those explanations aligning at all with what the other had truly felt.

—I'm sorry, —Erling said, looking directly at Jude for the first time since they had walked in there.

It wasn't about Manchester. It wasn't about the transfer, or the offer he had accepted without consulting him first. It was for not talking. For disappearing, without giving any real explanation, letting the subsequent silence grow larger and larger until it became four whole years.

Jude didn't reply with an "I'm sorry too." He stayed quiet for a moment, holding Erling's gaze, and then just nodded, a small, barely perceptible gesture.

Because he wasn't ready to say more than that yet. And, as strange as it seemed given the circumstances, that was okay.

They returned to the immediate problem, the one that had brought them to that room in the first place. They had a massive problem on their hands, and the wounds of the past, important as they were, would have to wait their turn.

—We need to find out who is behind this, —Jude said, picking up the phone again and starting a mental list aloud.

They agreed to check, each on their own side, who had access to the hotels where the oldest photographs had been taken, starting with the staff who regularly worked the team stays. They agreed to contact, with the utmost discretion, someone of absolute trust who could help them without leaking anything to the press or the club. They agreed not to say anything, for now, to either federation, aware that any leak could make everything worse before they had clarity on who was threatening them. And they agreed, above all, not to reply to any more messages from the blackmailer until they had something concrete to act on. They were no longer two exes trying to understand what had gone wrong between them. They were two people facing, together, a real threat that could destroy much more than a final.

Before separating, Jude paused for a moment by the door, his hand already on the handle.

—Get some rest, —he said.

Erling smiled, a gesture so small it didn't quite become a full smile.

—You too.

Neither of them added anything else. No embrace was needed, no gesture larger than that brief exchange of words by the door. Both knew, with the same silent certainty with which they knew so many other things about each other, that neither of them was going to sleep that night.

 

New York, United States

July 19, 2026

World Cup Final

The morning of the final, Erling woke up after an entire night without sleep, his eyes burning and his body heavy in a way that no training session had ever taught him to handle. The light coming through the hotel window was still gray, barely the beginning of the morning. He fumbled for his phone on the nightstand. There was a new message, but he didn't open it right away. He stared at the screen for a moment, breathing slowly, his thumb hovering over the glass. He opened it.

Unknown Number.

“Last chance.”

“We know you talked to him.”

Erling felt the air get trapped in his chest. That changed everything. The blackmailer was no longer a distant threat hidden behind an unknown number and old photographs. They knew they had met the previous night in that private room at the end of the service hallway. They were watching them in real time, somewhere in that very hotel, perhaps in that same city, perhaps much closer than either of them had ever wanted to imagine.

A few floors away, Jude received his own message that same morning, different from Erling's but just as precise, just as unsettling.

Unknown Number.

“You can still convince him.”

Jude read the sentence twice, a cold certainty settling into his stomach. The blackmailer was trying to separate them again, using the fracture that already existed between them as one more tool, the exact same silent way fear had kept them apart for four years without needing any message in between.

They met again that morning, in the same small room as the night before, but this time there was no awkwardness upon entering. There was no need to break any ice, nor to look for a place to rest their eyes. They began talking directly about the problem, showing each other the messages received, comparing every word in search of some clue. After a while of analysis, they reached a conclusion that neither needed to defend to the other. They could no longer obey. It didn't matter if Norway won that afternoon. It didn't matter if England lifted the trophy. They were not going to let a person hidden behind an unknown number decide the outcome of the most important final of their careers.

It was Jude who saw it first, reviewing the image folder for the umpteenth time in search of something they might have missed.

—Wait, —he said, stopping his thumb over a specific image taken years ago in a hotel hallway. —Look at this.

In the background of the photograph, barely visible, the reflection of a credential hanging from someone's neck could be distinguished a lanyard with the blurry logo of a minor media outlet, almost illegible except for one detail: the same lanyard design appeared, now that they were looking closely, in two other images taken in completely different cities, years apart from each other.

—That lanyard, —Erling said, moving closer to the screen. —I've seen it before. In Munich, I think. A freelance photographer, always in the same spots, never with the club's official press.

They began connecting the dots with the same speed with which they had previously reconstructed dates and trips. It wasn't someone close to them, nor anyone inside the inner circle of trust of either team. It was someone obsessed, an independent photographer who had followed them since Dortmund after suspecting, at some early point in their careers, that there was a story there no one else had uncovered yet. For years, he had been gathering material, patient, waiting for the moment when that material would be worth enough to justify the risk of selling it. He hadn't done it before because no previous opportunity came anywhere close to what a World Cup final represented.

 

New York, United States

July 19, 2026

Before the Final Match

The teams went out to check the pitch that afternoon under a clear sky that contrasted with the tension they carried inside. Thousands of people were already beginning to fill the stands, practicing chants and waving flags, while television cameras panned the field, capturing every detail before the official kickoff.

Erling and Jude crossed paths near the center of the pitch, each surrounded by his own team, with the eyes of tens of thousands of people fixed on the grass. For the first time since that awkward reunion at the photo shoot two days prior, neither looked away immediately. They didn't do anything strange, nothing that would draw anyone's attention amid so much movement. They only held each other's gaze for two seconds longer than usual, a gesture so small it was lost among thousands of other gestures that day. And, for the first time in a long time, neither felt fear in that shared instant. That, in itself, was already a victory.

The anthem played with its usual solemnity, both teams lined up face to face, hands over their hearts, some voices firmer than others. Erling's hands were shaking slightly—a tremor he tried to hide by clenching his fists at his sides.

The match progressed through plays that neither of them, at that moment, could fully process as simple football. A sequence shared between the two, an instant of the old synchronicity reappearing without either having consciously sought it out. A collision of bodies in midfield, hard but clean. An assist that came close to becoming a goal. A providential save in the final minute of the first half that kept the score level. No one in the stands knew that while the scoreboard remained at zero, a phone vibrated in a pocket with the blackmailer's final message.

“Time's up.”

They had managed to get the photographer's identity to a contact of absolute trust within the tournament organization, hoping the authorities could intervene in time. But that morning's message was not an empty threat. At some point during the second half, while the score remained tied and both teams fought for every ball as if their lives depended on it, the material began to circulate.

First it was a few anonymous accounts. Then a sensationalist news portal that didn't bother to verify anything before publishing. Then everything, all at once, like a dam bursting without warning: photographs, video captures, dates, and cities ordered on a timeline someone had assembled with the same obsessive patience with which each image had been taken over the years. Neither of them knew while they were playing. Their agents' phones began to vibrate non-stop in the stands, in the boxes, in any corner of the stadium where someone could get reception. Accredited journalists felt the tremor of the news ripple through the press room minutes before the referee blew the final whistle. The federations of both countries received their first calls before a winner was even decided.

Erling found out upon reaching the tunnel, his breath still ragged from the ninety minutes just completed, when his agent intercepted him, pale-faced, phone already in hand. Jude knew almost at the same time a few meters away, watching the expressions of the people around him change one by one as the news reached them.

And then something happened that neither of them had been able to fully anticipate.

The world did not end.

There were horrible headlines, of course. There were hate-filled comments circulating with the same speed as the photographs. There was controversy, demanded interviews, uncomfortable questions thrown by journalists who had never before shown any interest in their private lives. But there was also something else, something neither of them had known how much they needed until it arrived. Teammates who approached that very night, without any need for grand speeches, just to say that nothing changed between them. Managers who came out to back them publicly without anyone asking them to. Fans who flooded social media with messages of support, far outweighing the most hostile noise. Families who called that same night, not to ask what had happened, but to ask how they were doing.

And there, in the middle of all that noise, they understood something that four years of silence had never let them see clearly: they had lived in fear for years of something that, however painful it turned out to be now, was never going to be worse than ceasing to live entirely.

The stadium was almost empty when they met again, this time in the tunnel, far from the chaos of ringing phones and journalists demanding statements that could still be heard in the distance, muffled by the concrete walls. Already without jerseys, without cameras waiting for the perfect reaction, without anything left but the two of them and the strange weight, both heavy and light at the same time, of no longer having anything to hide.

—I never stopped loving you, —Erling said, with a calmness it took him whole weeks to build up to that moment.

Jude smiled, not with surprise, but with something akin to the relief of hearing out loud what he had already known for a long time.

—Me too.

Silence, one of those silences that no longer weighed like before.

—And now? —Erling asked.

Jude thought about his answer calmly, without rushing, as if for the first time in years he had all the time in the world to find the right words.

—Now, I think for the first time we can decide without being afraid.

They didn't talk about starting over right where they had left off. They didn't make grand promises, nor did they embrace with the urgency of someone trying to reclaim four lost years all at once. They both knew the love they felt was not enough on its own to rebuild everything that silence had worn away over time. It required something slower, something built from scratch, without shortcuts.

—Do you want to grab dinner when all of this is over? —Jude asked, with a simplicity that contrasted with the weight of everything they had been through those days.

Erling smiled, the first completely relaxed smile of that whole week, with no shadow behind it.

—Yes.

No more words were needed that night. The future, for the first time in a long while, belonged to them again. Open, without any deadline or condition imposed from the outside. They had spent years believing that silence was the only way to protect what they felt. Only at the end did they realize that silence had never protected them; it had only kept them apart.

Notes:

I hope you guys enjoyed it!!! 😭💗 Don't forget to leave a kudos and a comment if you liked it. I love reading your thoughts!!
Good luck to both teams today!!! I'm terrified lmao 😭

Love you all, kisses <3

@chittapluv (twt)