Chapter Text
Jude Bellingham is known to be an aggressive player for a reason.
He lives - breathes, really - in the feeling of control, absolute superiority on the field. The fierce competitiveness, the relentless winning mentality that sees everyone who tries to steal the ball from his possession as more of a threat than an adversary, shedding blood into every single tackle, every press, every surging sprint into the box.
It is what makes him England’s golden boy. The omega no alpha wants to face one-on-one.
His violent nature has always been a subject of wariness. Coaches have praised it as a vital fire, an edge needed for winning. Pundits have dissected it as a tactical anomaly, a ferocity as capable of turning the pitch into a predator’s hunting ground as it is of backfiring and gnawing on the bones of his own team. And Jude has weaponised it; subverting the stereotypes of his secondary gender until the word omega meant nothing in the same sentence as fragile.
Those aspects of his are usually only true on the field, though.
Usually.
But tonight, England’s dream of winning the World Cup is over. Jude Bellingham’s dream is over. Argentina has taken one step closer to lifting the trophy while England will have nothing more to do than fight for scraps of glory, for bronze medals. Hollow congratulations echoed around the stadium, and Jude’s clouded brain could not differentiate between the chants for the Argentinian team, the boos directed at the English performance and the cries over the final outcome - isn’t it all the same, anyway?
He saw the dejected look into every single one of his teammates. The unshed tears a single push away from falling from the youngest eyes; the harsh, heartbroken expression on the face of the most experienced players as they realized they have failed once more; the strained sobs making an ugly, choking sound as they fail to pass their lips and die in their throats .
And Jude?
Jude didn’t feel sadness.
He knew the stinging behind his eyes and the few rebellious tears falling down his cheeks weren’t from sorrow. It was anger. A red-hot, writhing thing coiled inside his chest, tightening with every passing second and threatening to burst from his ribs, making his jaw clamp so hard his teeth ache and his gums bleed.
The game replayed in his head like a maddening loop, less of a memory and more like a bruise he couldn’t help but keep pressing. Argentina hadn’t just beaten them with skill; they’d beaten them with a strategy that felt, to Jude, like a sustained assault on his body. From the first whistle, it felt like half their squad had taken a personal vendetta against him. Paredes, a sturdy alpha with a perpetual sneer, shoved him in the back barely two minutes in, when Jude had already let go of the ball. Hard enough to send him stumbling, and then stood over with a smirk. Fernández arrived late on him. Molina barged into him. Romero dragged him to the ground rugby-style to stop a counter. Each foul designed not just to disrupt play but to provoke - to make him snap. And the referee, more often than not, let it slide.
With each passing minute, each unpunished foul, each time Jude picks himself up off the turf, the sense grows that the rules don’t apply to the men in blue and black. The injustice of it crawled under his skin and made its home on it, a parasite feasting on his rage.
Then the final whistle. The dam broke.
A player, a substitute who hadn’t even played the game, Valentín Barco, sprinted onto the pitch and celebrated directly in front of the shattered England squad; arms flung wide, joy made weapon, mouth shaping dirty words in spanish that none of the players would understand:
“¡Vete a casa, bufón!”
But Jude did, and that was the curse of it.
His spanish, the same spanish he spent countless nights awake to learn, that let him joke with his teammates and charm his alpha in bed, now served only to funnel every venomous syllable straight into his brain.
Jude had moved before he could think. His palm connected with the back of the kid’s head - a stupid slap, all the fury of ninety-seven minutes of being shoved to hell and back condensed into one miserable, desperate swing. Pathetic thing didn’t even hurt. The ginger spun though, hands on Jude immediately, shoving him backward, and suddenly there were faces everywhere - Otamendi, Romero, Fernández - a dark-blue wall closing in, only disrupted when his own teammates pulled him clean.
Even after all of that, he still managed the handshakes at the end. To smile at every camera and microphone put on his face without showing how much of a mockery the flashes sounded like to him. To not swing at the smug faces passing him, smirking not from happiness of the win, but from condescension. Jude’s hands had curled into fists so tight his nails left crescent-cuts in his palms.
And amidst a celebration that had nothing to do with him, facing a world he didn’t belong to vibrating in blue and white - not his colors - Jude saw it.
Erling Haaland.
Chest heaving, eyes wide, smiling from ear to ear, looking at Jude as if he had won.
(He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, he did-)
His alpha, in the stands. The rest of the Norway squad that had decided to come together with Haaland to see their striker’s mate play had already filtered out, but Erling stayed behind. Of course he did. Cheering so loudly for England’s midfielder, using Bellingham’s number 10 shirt for the entire world to see, a small block of white face paint with a red cross on each of his cheeks. Eyes fixed on Jude and Jude only. That steady, unwavering gaze that usually made everything feel manageable, lighter, like Jude could finally breathe.
Jude’s stomach lurched. It made him feel like he was going to be sick.
When their eyes connected across the pitch Haaland raised his hand - a small wave and a minimal tilt on his head that spoke volumes to him, are you okay? - and Jude felt bile rising up his throat. He couldn’t do this. Not right now, not today, not ever. How could he allow his lover to see him in such a barbaric state? Not the feral but whimsical omega who stalked his adversaries across the field, but an unreasonable beast: a raw nerve, a live grenade, a man who’d just slapped a substitute around the back of the head like a darn pub brawler; who didn’t want to have stopped at ‘just a slap’.
Feeling sweat run down his palms, Bellingham decided to do the only thing his body allowed.
He turned around and walked.
Then trotted.
Ran.
Straight past his teammates, down the tunnel, into the locker room, out the back entrance before anyone could stop him, the security guards not even trying to. He fumbled as quickly as he could with his phone, clicking the Taxi app and calling for the first cab he saw available. He couldn’t afford to wait and take the team bus together with the others. Jude knew his loving, adorable and caring boyfriend, he was sure the alpha would sprint straight to the bus to care and dote on his omega.
But Jude does not deserve it. Never did.
The wait is agonizing - Jude does nothing but look around him every single moment, not unlike a deer in the headlights, fearing for a gun sight plastered on his head. He feels his heart jump loudly inside his ribcage and his pulse drops whenever he sees a blonde head passing on the streets, dreading the reality of his mate finding him.
He feels his phone starting to vibrate on his hand, the buzzing impossible to ignore, and looks down on it hoping to see an update of his taxi. Of course it isn’t.
Still on his phone’s lock screen, with the photo of him and Haaland looking directly at the camera with the DFB-Pokal trophy between them - his first trophy now jeering at him - the texts start lighting up. Three, four, five, seven, nine; all from Erling, each more worried than the last. The texts cut before he can read them completely, but something inside Jude refuses to click on and open them - to acknowledge.
- ‘Babe, I saw you running, is everything all right :(-’
- ‘I came to the lockers but can’t find you, did som-’
- ‘Kane told me you ran, feeling unwell? I could he-’
- ‘Jude I’m serious, ur not on the bus. Where are y-’
- ‘This is not funny, answer me right now Jude Bell-’
Jude Bellingham is a terrible fucking mate.
His heart was beating so hard, so fast, so damn suffocating, he feared he might have passed out in broad daylight. Still, he ignored them all. Couldn’t let the concern in those messages - so predictably Erling, so gentle, so undeserved - crack through the wall of fury that was the only thing holding him upright.
Because, if they did, the only thing left of him would be a loser, in all senses of the word.
He doesn’t even see the cab stopping right in front of him, his muddled brain only processing it once he hears the loud honking. He opens the handle and gets inside before he could even start second-guessing his decisions.
“Good evening sir” the voice from the front seat says “where are you headed to?”
“I don’t know.”
-------------------------------------------------------
And that was how he found himself sitting on a swing, swaying himself lightly with a single leg. Wandered the streets near the hotel the English team was staying on until he found the park - a sad little patch of green with a decaying children’s playground, all being illuminated solely by an old, flickering lamp post with nothing around besides old houses made of already rotting wood. Not a nice place, really. But the swing looked like the most stable thing to lie himself on, even if it was too small for his size and obliges him to sit in a very unnatural pose. And the only one who wouldn’t judge him too.
The cold has seeped through his football uniform, numbing his legs and making him feel as if the palms of his hands were about to let go of the swing’s chains at any moment. He had never felt as hot as he did now, though - a low thrum beneath his skin that no amount of air can cool.
The twitching of his nose due to the cold also forces him to take several whiffs of his own scent that now, without the scent patches constricting it, have completely permeated the air. Thick and acrid, like it has never been before. Burnt sugar and bitter cocoa. Smells like something that was overcooked on the outside but still raw inside, so potent it clings on the back of his own throat and he almost chokes on it. Any passerby would turn and walk the other way. There aren’t any.
But the thing is… Jude wishes there was.
He wishes someone would pass by him and complain about his scent. Someone who would be dumb enough to approach him, to scream and spit on his face, and then lay a hand on him. Just a shove a little too hard, make him fall off the swing, maybe. That would be enough for him to proclaim in his heart it was purely self defense and retaliate.
To finally let all his built up turmoil let loose. To bark, snarl and growl at someone so loudly they’ll think he is less of a human and more of an animal. To grip onto their scalp and push back, so harshly some of the hair strands would come off it and remain buried under his nails. Use those same hands and lock them around their throat, contracting until he sees the skin turn purple from lack of air flow. Then, he will push his thumbs right into the jugular vein, forcing its way until it perforates and blood starts to flow down - into the neck, to the scapula, stopping at the ribs.
And then, while thinking about blue, white and a stadium too full, he would lower his head and run his ear through their chest, hunting for the frightened heartbeat. Once he heard it, he would open his jaw as wide as it could and close it around the skin, clenching his teeth until he breached through the epidermis and reached the deepest of their insides. Feeling the smooth, slippery and moist texture of the heart would be the only thing to make him stop his rupture, just to exchange it for stealing it from the confines of the ribcage, breaking bones and veins until he could spit the pulsing, gross organ out into the pavement. His hands, tired of the neck, would then probe on their stomach, clawing at it like a petulant child until he could feel their intestines, pulling them out to pool around in the self-made bloody mess.
The violent thoughts he would never voice out in broad daylight won’t leave him alone, something that is not him seeming to be the one doing the thinking. Jude was never known for being a saint, calm and collected. But this is too much even for him. Disgusting, repulsive, nauseating.
The dumb idiot who decides to approach him is the only person Jude Bellingham would never lay a hand on, though.
“You have approximately ten seconds to tell me how in the hell you found me” he growls without looking up. No need to, he would know that gait anywhere - the steady, heavy thread of a man who has never worried about hurrying in his life “before I get a restraining order.”
“Rude.” Erling Haaland’s voice is low, steady, that familiar Norwegian tilt sharpening on the edges. It usually makes Jude’s chest warm, heart flutter and cheeks redden. Right now, it just makes him grip the swing chains tighter, the cold metal seeming to bite into his palms as if it had heard all of his gruesome thoughts and is now retaliating.
The Norwegian giant stops a few feet away, hands in the pockets of his jacket. He’s dressed differently now, no longer in Jude’s number, instead he wears a black turtleneck and warm, heavy looking crème overcoat. Jude recognizes it as the one he would steal so often from Haaland’s wardrobe in winter, proclaiming to him that it was ‘the one that kept him the warmest’ when, in reality, he only got it to have the pleasure of smelling and engulfing himself on the tranquilizing warm pine and sea salt. The sight of it sends a violent pang in his chest - love; anger; resentment that Haaland can master looking all calm and collected while Jude can’t decide if he’s being eaten alive from the inside out or if he wants to be the one doing the eating.
The alpha doesn’t sit. Doesn’t crowd. Just stands there quietly, a solid silhouette contrasting with the streetlamp glow, giving Jude the option to ignore him completely or turn his head and take him in. Waiting. Because of course he waits. Erling has always been patient to a fault, always knowing exactly where to push and when to let Jude come to him.
Jude doesn’t. His jaw works, the tension on his temples sharpening into a headache he’s been ignoring for hours while he glares his way.
“Your teammates called me.” Haaland’s voice is careful, measured - the same tone he uses when trying to not spook a cornered animal. “Rogers and Kane, specifically. They got scared when they didn’t find you and asked the hotel security for the outside camera footage . Said you went off in this direction a few hours ago, looking like you would kill the first kid you’d see” A pause. “They were worried. So was I. I’ve been looking for you since you left the pitch”.
“Well, you have already looked at me.” Jude’s voice is harsh - cutting, keener than any razor could ever wish to be. “You can go back.”
He doesn’t mean them to hurt, but they do anyway; he can see the faint flicker in Haaland’s eyes, the almost imperceptible tightening around his mouth. “I know I could. But I want to be here.”
“You shouldn’t.” Again, the words coming from Jude’s mouth are sharp-edged and jagged, spoken even when the omega feels awful just thinking them and even worse about actually letting them out. “I’m not safe to be around right now”.
“You would never hurt me”
Haaland says it with absolute certainty, in the same way that he would answer that the sky is blue or the grass is green or that Jude Bellingham is the best thing that has ever happened to him. It makes him want to scream. It also makes him want to bawl his eyes out, which is somehow even worse.
“No Haaland, I don’t mean it in a hot, sexual way” he snickers again, pressing his feet tightly into each other while his gaze stays glued to the ground. It is all he can do to stop the stream of tears from falling. “I mean it in the ‘I wish I could bash someone’s brain out on the cement’ way.”
“I’m aware. You still wouldn’t.”
“For fuck’s sake, you don’t know that!” Jude finally looks up, the expression on his face hovering between thread of upset to wild - his dark, black eyes eyes glazed with something that isn’t yet tears but is just as desperate, just as close to spilling over. His lips are dry, cracked; there’s still a faint smear of blood from one of his falls. “I want to hit something, Haaland. I want to put my fist through a wall. I want to find every single one of those pendejos and-”Jude takes a deep, gurgling breath, before continuing his rampage “They shoved me, left and around, and still got nothing! NOTHING! It took them eight fucking fouls for the first yellow card! Did you- did you see how they punched Anderson on the back of his head? And no red cards! And who do you think left the game with the most yellow cards? US! IT WAS US!”
“And I- I can still feel their hands on me. I can feel all of them - every foul, every cheap shot, every dirty little trick. And I can’t turn these violent urges off. I can’t!” Jude’s frantic, more than a mile-a-minute voice slowly dies out as he mutters the last words, going from the timbre of an enraged authority to a trembling infant in seconds.
Haaland just holds his gaze. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t offer empty platitudes. He just listens. Blue eyes steady and unblinking, waiting for Jude to run out of steam. He sees the omega’s chest heaving with the effort of breathing, the chains creaking into sharply. In Jude’s choice of silence, Haaland speaks.
“I saw it. Every foul, what they did to you.” Haaland’s voice is still calm, but there’s a dangerous, warning thread of steel beneath it now, a restrained anger of his own. “I don’t think I am as passive as you make me out to be, Jude. I wanted to go down on that pitch and tear everyone who got near you apart. I’ve never felt like it, seeing you being hurt and not being able to do anything about it.” Jude knows that tone - heard it so many times back in Borussia Dortmund, when Erling’s protective instincts override his gentle nature “But I couldn't. Because it was your game. Your moment. So I just watched and waited, hoping you’d let me find you afterwards.”
Jude stares at him and he hears something inside his chest shift. The anger doesn’t dissipate, couldn’t possibly, but is now forced to meet, to divide its hold on Jude’s soul with something else, something that feels dangerously like guilt. He looks at his mate’s tranquil, reassuring eyes and thinks back to the worried texts he ignored. How could he have been this stupid?
“You… you are the last person I wanted to see me like this. This disgusting version of myself I hate so much. When your eyes found mine in the stands I just- I couldn’t.”
“Yeah.” Erling’s voice is softer, honeyed now “I saw you look at me, and then you were gone.”
“I’m sorry.” The words run from between his teeth before Jude can stop them, quiet and cracked, coming from a broken place.
“Don’t be.” Haaland takes one step closer. When he sees no negative reaction from the omega, he takes another. And another. Until he’s crouching in front of the swing. Now from up close, Jude can see the exhaustion written on his face - deep and dark circles under his eyes; the tension on his jaw that betrays just how worried he’s been; hair dishevelled as if he has been running for hours. It has been hours, Jude realises. The Norwegian probably hasn’t stopped searching for him ever since he saw Jude disappear into the tunnel. Bellingham doesn’t deserve it - doesn’t deserve him.
And still, he’s here.
In a freezing park past sleeping hour, offering himself up like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like anyone else would have done the same. No one else would. “I’ve seen you at your worst, kjære. Hell, not even a week ago you saw me at my worst. This isn’t new, just bigger.”
“It is not the same!” Jude’s voice breaks on the last word and he absolutely hates, loathes how fragile it sounds “This is the World Cup that I lost. Because I was terrible and played as if it didn’t mean a bloody damn thing! And it’s nothing like you - you were sad about it! That- that is normal, understandable. I’m just angry! I’m so angry I can't even breathe!”
“Then breathe with me.” Haaland’s large, comforting hands cover Jude’s on the chains, not prying them away, just resting there. Grounding. Jude almost hates how safe it makes him feel. The scent Jude adores so much - warm pine and sea salt - cuts through the burnt-sugar haze like lightning through a fog. It is the first thing that has made sense to the omega ever since he left the field. “Inhale; one… two… three… four…Exhale. Come on love, do it for me.”
Jude tries. Really tries. Even when he feels like he isn’t doing it right, or that it’s stupid and useless… he focuses on Haaland’s face, the way his mouth opens just enough to see teeth, his nostrils flaring to take in air, the soft, minty breathing hitting Jude’s face every time he exhales. And Jude decides to trust - to copy, believe and take in everything Haaland is generous enough to give to a disgraceful beast like him.
“That’s it babe, you’re doing great.” he whispers, so softly Jude almost loses it. But it is just the right amount of softness Jude needs. He stops counting to fours, seeing how the smaller can now breathe on his own.
“You are allowed to be angry. To feel like it was unfair. But I' won’t allow you to sit out here alone in the cold, punishing yourself for something that was never your fault."He keeps going, still on the same steady and grounding tone, but now sounds more affirmative “Come back with me, Jude. Let me take care of you.”
Jude’s throat shuts off through the breathing. It clogs so suddenly he isn’t quite sure if he managed to hide the choking sound it made. He wants to argue, to push him away. But his hands are numb. And Haaland’s are so warm, and he’s just so, so tired - so bone-deep tired the fight is starting to drain out of him whether he likes it or not. “I can’t go back to my room.”
“Then we can go to mine. The team hasn’t left, so we still have the hotel, a few more days at least. My room is-”
“No!” Jude’s voice sharpens, sudden and jagged. He pulls - forces - his hands out of Haaland’s grip, shaking his head almost dizzily “I can’t. Your hotel- it’s full of Norway. Full of your teammates. I can’t walk through those corridors smelling like this! And having them smell me, having to smell them-” His breath hitches. The thought of it, so viscerally real, makes his skin crawl: the pitying, patronizing looks; the natural scent of alphas and omegas that aren’t his; the overwhelming wrongness of being surrounded by a team that wasn’t his own when he was already unanchored. He imagines Odegaard’s kind, concerned and unwanted face asking if he’s alright, imagines having to make small talk and explain it in a lift while his scent screams distressed omega to everyone within a ten-foot radius. “I can’t, Erling. I’ll lose it. I’ll say something awful to one of them and you’ll have to apologize for me and then they’ll think I’m some kind of sentimental, delicate omega and I can’t-”
“Okay.” His alpha’s voice cuts his spiraling into madness, gentle but firm. “Okay, not my hotel.” He captures Jude’s hands again, squeezing them tightly, refusing to let him pull away this time. “Then your room. I’m sorry Jude, but I can’t take us to a random hotel, there will be too many unknown scents and too risky of getting caught. We’ll go to your room.”
“But… it’s wrong.” Jude’s voice drops, shame flooding him hot and fast. He can’t hold eye contact with his alpha when he says it, so he just stares at a point past his shoulders, at the empty, ruined playground and the darkness stretching beyond. “The nest- And I- No, you- A wreck- Just wrong.”
“That’s alright. What is wrong, we’ll fix it.” Haaland replies easily, so simple, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And Jude is nothing if not glad he doesn’t push him to say anything else while he feels like no words would be enough to describe it. “You and me, together. I don’t care about whatever is “wrong”, I just care for you not being out here alone anymore”.
Unfair.
Erling Haaland is so damn unfair.
Jude stares at him. The violent, red-hot thing in his chest flickers - just for a moment, crowded out by something that feels terrifyingly like hope. It is such a stupid, fragile and so easily broken thing; hope. But Haaland is guiding him with those steady blue eyes, and his hands are so warm, and for some dumb, stupid reason he still hasn’t run away from Jude even though he has given him every single right to do so. “You’d do that? Back, with me?”
“I’d follow you anywhere.” Haaland gives Jude a small, quick peck to the lips, as if making a promise to what he just said. He then stands up, tugging gently on Jude’s hands until he rises too, unsteady on numb, jelly-like legs. “Let's try it. If you can’t stand being there, we’ll figure something else out. But for now-”
The blonde quietly takes off his overcoat, displaying himself only on his turtleneck while he drapes the warm, crème material over Jude’s shoulders.
“You worry about keeping yourself warm while I guide us back.”
Jude hesitates. The ugly thing inside his head tells him to resist, to push Haaland away, to run, run, run. But the feeling of Haaland’s overcoat blanketing him is so nice, it finally takes the cold and numbness away from his body. And the alpha’s eyes look so sincere - so truthful. His larger hands seep warmth through the cold, and the calming, even scent of his is the first thing that has pierced through the red fog in hours.
He doesn’t nod, but he lets Haaland harden the hold on his hand and walks beside him once he starts walking them back to the hotel, hand in hand. He doesn’t pull away. Doesn’t want to.
-------------------------------------------------------
The keycard beeps. The door swings open.
The smell hits him first - acrid omega distress so bitter it’s borderline physical, burnt sugar and bitter cocoa and something else, something sharp and desperate that makes Haaland’s alpha instincts howl in protest. Jude watches him take it in; the slight flaring of his nostrils, the almost imperceptible tension in his shoulders, the clenching of his fingers. But Haaland doesn’t recoil. Doesn’t comment. He just steps inside, and the sight that greets him is, somehow, even worse.
Jude’s nest - the sanctuary he had built with such care - is destroyed. Pillows have been torn from their cases, white stuffing slipping out like the aftermath of a snowstorm. Blankets lie in snarled heaps on the floor, tangled with discarded clothes. A strange, fluffy and grayish material all over the window. The lamp is on its side, bulb shattered, a constellation of glass fragments glittering on the carpet. Haaland would have described it as pretty, if not so dangerous. A t-shirt of Haaland’s - his Norway uniform, the number nine embroidered on it, the one that smelled the most strongly of alpha - is jumbled with the sheets, its collar stretched and torn as if someone had tried to rip it in half and failed.
Jude stops in the doorway - whole body going rigid and abandoning his hold on the Norwegian’s hand. The shame is immediate, flooding him in a hot wave that makes his eyes sting and his throat contract.
“I did this.” he says and his voice is hollow, empty - not even his own, the ugly thing inside him does the talking “ The park wasn’t the first place I went. I came in here and I just… I couldn’t stand it. Everything was wrong. It felt like the nest was mocking me, like it had been waiting for someone who won, and I couldn’t-” his voice catches, any further words dying heavily on his tongue “I ruined it. I ruined everything".
Looking again at the scene, being forced to see once again the horrible ways his body is able to go, he can’t help but play the film of what ensued in his head, like a broken recording that refuses to die out:
The hour after he took the taxi to his room was a blur - he ended up just asking the cab driver to take him to England's personal hotel, too scared to go anywhere else. Jude had walked straight to his room - past the staff or anyone else on his way. He pressed the keycard. The door clicked shut. And then…
The nest.
He had spent two hours building it before the match - a ritual that had become sacred over the past year, ever since he’d learned that having his alpha’s scent woven into the fabric of his safe space could quiet the pre-match jitters better than any breathing exercise. It wasn’t anywhere near as good as the one on his actual room, but he made what he could at the hotel room with the best he had. Every piece of Erling’s clothing he’d begged for - a hoodie, a Norway number nine T-shirt, a scarf, even a single sock he’d stolen during their last visit and never returned - had been arranged with obsessive precision. Soft blankets cradled it, along with a few items from other scents that were placed more aside for comfort: his mom’s cooking apron, his father’s neck tie, his brother’s beanie, Kane’s gloves…
And in the middle of it, the stupidest, ugliest plushie Jude owned and that had become his lucky item, always taking it with him for whatever game he would play. It was a raccoon, or at least tried to be one. The gray fur was uneven, some bits looking way too fluffy while others lacking any, making it look almost naked in some places; the black and white stripes were different on each side, the right and left side looking as if they were stitched by two completely different people ; the eyes were placed in an oblique angle, the distance between them far too wide and facing two different directions, making it seem to look everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the dumbest thing Jude ever owned. But Haaland was the one to give it to him. Before they even started dating, spending the night at an amusement park, the alpha had tried the claw machine in hopes of getting the cute, deer plushie as his prize. ‘One shot’ became ‘Let me try again’, which turned into ‘Okay, now I’ll get it’ and ended with ‘I swear this one is it!”. He got no deer in the end, instead just the ugly raccoon plushie staring right into his eyes, taunting. He also remembered Haaland placing it forcibly on Jude’s arms, asking him to keep it until they went back to the park again and got the deer plushie - only then he could put the raccoon away. They never went again, and Jude never parted with the stupid, fluffy thing.
He had built himself a sanctuary, a place to return to in victory or defeat, a cocoon of comforting scent and omega-instinct that said you are safe, you are loved, you are home.
Now it mocked him.
He had stood quietly at the foot of the bed, chest heaving, still in his full uniform, looking at the careful arrangement of comfort and at the two-direction facing dumb eyes. And something inside him finally snapped - a clean, cold break, like a bone giving way under too much pressure. A pillow went first, hurled against the wall with a force that split the seam and sent a cloud of white stuffing into the air. Then a blanket, ripped from its draping and flung aside so violently it knocked a lamp off the nightstand, the bulb shattering on the carpet. The stupid raccoon was balled up and thrown against the window, the thing so fragile and badly done it completely ripped at the first contact. He tore at the nest with his bare hands, growling, a sound so low and animal it scraped his throat raw. The shirt that smelled most strongly of Erling was the last thing he touched. He'd grabbed it, meaning to rend it, to destroy the last piece of comfort because he didn't deserve comfort—and then his hands had frozen when face to face with the number nine. He couldn't. Even in the grip of his fury, some part of him couldn't bear to ruin the one thing that was purely, unambiguously Erling, smelling exactly like his mate. So he'd dropped it like as if it burned him and stumbled back, surveying the wreckage with a strange, hollow satisfaction that curdled almost immediately into shame.
He had fled the room after that. And that was how Haaland found him alone in the park.
Haaland steps further inside, his boots crunching softly on a scattered handful of feathers. He looks at the wreckage, his expression unreadable - not angry, not disgusted, just… taking it in. Absorbing the full scope of what Jude did to himself while no one was watching. Something below the window catches his eyes, so he crouches down quietly to look closer at it. Two bulbous eyes look right back at him.
Ah. The raccoon. Damn plushie had been stupid looking even when in a full one piece. Now, when ripped to shreds, it became an even more pitiful and ugly thing. He straightens his back once more, turns towards the door, and his eyes are the softest thing Jude has ever seen.
“It’s not ruined.” he says with all the calmness in the world “Just messy. We can fix it.”
“You… don’t understand.” Jude’s hands begin shaking once more, not exactly anger anymore, but something rawer, something that feels like it will claw him apart from the inside. “I wanted to feel safe. That’s what nests are supposed to do - they’re supposed to be a place where omegas feel safe, that’s the entire reason why I did it. And instead of letting it comfort me, I tore it apart. I couldn’t keep even the one thing supposed to help me feel safe… safe.” His voice breaks on the last word, and he has to look away, blinking hard against the sting in his eyes. It's useless, anyway. The tears he’s held back for so long finally meet his cheeks. “This… this is what I do when I get control over things, I ruin them, but having no control is somehow even worse. I just want the anger to go away, Erling. I want to stop feeling like I could set the whole world on fire and not even care.”
Haaland crosses the room in three strides. He doesn't touch him. Not yet. He just stands in front of him, close enough that Jude can feel the heat radiating off his body, close enough that his scent wraps around them both like a blanket. The pine is stronger now, the sea salt sharper—a deliberate soothing that Jude's hindbrain recognises even if his conscious mind is still thrashing against the walls of its cage.
“Do you trust me?” Haaland asks.
Jude’s laugh, once melodious, is now a bitter, broken thing. “Of course I do. That’s not the problem here, mate.”
“Then… let me help you burn it out.” Erling’s voice drops, taking on that low command tone he rarely uses - the alpha edge that’s usually buried beneath his gentle nature, the part of him that exists only for Jude. “You have been fighting all day. On the pitch, in your head, against me. Let me do to you the same thing you did to me when it was I the one who lost. Let me help exhaust you so completely there will be nothing left. No anger. No thoughts. Just us.”
Jude’s breath catches. He understands what Haaland is offering. It's not gentle. It's not soft. But it might be exactly what he needs - the one thing that has ever quieted the noise in his head when it gets too loud.
“Just for tonight, Jude. Tomorrow you will wake up and we’ll have so many things to talk about.” he explains calmly, still not daring to touch Jude “But tonight? Tonight, I’ll give you a way to sleep without gnawing yourself with guilt.”
“I… I don’t want to be the one in control.” Jude whispers, and the confession feels like surrender and relief all at once, the tension on his shoulders dropping fractionally. “I hurt myself and others when I’m in control. I’m tired.”
Haaland’s hand comes up to cup the back of his neck, firm and grounding, thumb pressing into the tense muscle just below the hairline. “Then give it to me. All of it. Give me the fight, give me the anger. I can take it, Jude. I want to take it.”
Jude's eyes flutter shut. The red-hot thing in his chest is still there, but it's changing shape - turning from destruction into something hungrier, something desperate. When he opens his eyes again, they're dark, burning, fixed on Haaland's.
“Then take all of it. All of me.”