Jude bellingham x Fem!Reader
sy: jude discovers your childhood One Direction collection and somehow ends up jealous.
a/n: just a silly little thing I felt like writing
sorry if there are any writing or translation mistakes
The move had started with organisation and was clearly descending into chaos. Not the bad kind of chaos — the chaos of two people in a small room with boxes stacked and decisions to be made about every object that had existed since before you knew you'd need to decide what to do with it.
Jude was theoretically helping, which in practice meant he carried the heavy things with a helpfulness you appreciated and snooped through absolutely everything with a curiosity you pretended not to appreciate but did.
"Are you taking this?" he had asked about the pink lampshade your mum had put in the room when you were twelve and that had stayed there by force of habit.
"Good," he said, with a seriousness that wasn't entirely serious.
You were folding clothes into a pile while he went through the highest shelf of the wardrobe — the part you used as storage for things you didn't know where to put but also couldn't throw away, which was the practical definition of half of everything you owned.
That was where he found the box.
You weren't watching when he pulled it out, so you only noticed something had happened when the sound of rummaging stopped and silence took its place, when someone comes across something interesting. You turned.
Jude was sitting on the edge of the bed with the box in his lap, wearing that expression.
It was a cardboard box with a printed photo on the lid — five boys, the Frat Boy era photo, the one you had been completely obsessed with — and you knew before he opened it what was going to happen.
He had already opened it.
The problem with the box was that it was too complete to be ignored.
There were polaroids of them, collectible cards, an old school notebook that was well-used but that you had kept simply because they were on the cover and therefore it was important. There were t-shirts folded with the same care you kept things that genuinely mattered, were CDs with those covers you knew by heart, with the scratches of heavy use and there was, scattered throughout the entire box with the clear evidence of someone who wasn't trying to hide it, the indisputable fact that Zayn was your favourite — a poster carefully folded, the t-shirt with his name on the back, one specific photo kept in a plastic sleeve as though it were a document.
Jude was going through all of it with an attention proportionate to the amount of material available, which was a lot of attention.
You went to sit beside him because there was nowhere else to go and because standing in a defensive posture would have been worse. You picked up the CD he had been holding and looked at the cover for a second with that specific feeling of rediscovering something that was once very important at some point in your life and that time had kept in a place you hadn't visited in a while.
"God…" you said, more to yourself than to him, with the tone of someone arriving at a memory they hadn't expected to find so intact. "I loved them so much."
Jude raised his eyes from the poster he was unfolding with a comic delicacy, like an archaeologist handling a fragile artefact.
"I miss them so much," you continued, running your thumb along the edge of the CD with a tone that was slightly tearful and completely honest. "I'm never going to get over this infinite hiatus..."
He looked at you. You didn't look back because you were holding the t-shirt now, recognising the fabric.
"And Liam," you said, with the specific quality of genuine nostalgia. "God. I miss Liam."
Jude was standing with the semi-folded poster in his hand, looking at you with an expression that was the honest attempt to appear neutral and which was failing quite visibly. There was something in it that was simultaneously genuine tenderness — the kind belonging to someone finding it endearing to see you so vulnerable about something that had clearly mattered a great deal — and something that was, recognisably, jealousy. The kind that appears when you lose someone's attention to a cardboard box with five boys on the lid.
"Excuse me," he said, with the tone of someone arriving at an important conclusion.
"Hm?" you said, distracted, because you had found a specific photo and were processing it.
"You are clearly not remembering that right now."
You looked at him properly for the first time since the box had appeared, and there was something on his face that was so genuinely defeated in a way he clearly found funny but which was also not completely funny, that you had to bite the inside of your cheek.
"No," he said, solemnly. "You don't have to. I understand. You'll stay here with your five British boys and I'll finish packing things up by myself."
"There are four British ones," you said. "Niall is Irish."
He looked at you for a second.
"You know that off the top of your head."
"I knew a lot of things off the top of my head," you said, with the dignity of someone defending a formative phase.
Jude put down the poster, turned his body toward you and looked at you with that expression that was his when he was allowing himself to be mildly ridiculous and knew it. There was something in it you loved about him — the ability to make drama in a completely self-aware way, to be the comic version of jealous without losing the self-awareness.
"So," he said, with completely fabricated seriousness, "you spent years in love with a group of British boys."
"It's an excellent answer."
He tilted his body slightly toward you, his knee pressing against yours, and there was in that adjustment of position someone getting closer for reasons that had zero to do with the available physical space. His eyes were that way — direct, mildly amused, with that layer underneath that was more serious than the surface suggested.
"And now?" he said. "Still in love?"
You looked at him for a second. At the face you knew better than any photo in any box, at the way he was looking at you with that specific mix of teasing and something more honest than the teasing.
"My love," you said, with the calm of someone delivering the final argument, "I haven't felt something this strong for an English person since One Direction." You said you were referring to him.
The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took him to process that.
And then he laughed — genuine, that laugh you had memorised better than any song on any CD in that box — and before you had finished appreciating the laugh he had pulled you close by the shoulder, his arm wrapping around you with that familiar firmness, his face near yours in a way that didn't ask permission because it didn't need to.
"Okay, I'm flattered," he said, with the smile still in place. "I love you."
You looked at him up close, with the box still open beside you and the CDs scattered and the semi-folded poster, and there was in all of it something that was simultaneously completely silly and completely real — the version of you that was thirteen and kept posters and the version that was the age you are now in a moving-day room with a man who made jealous drama about British pop groups because he knew it would make you laugh.
You rested your head on his shoulder.
He left a kiss on the top of your head — soft, absentminded, the kind that happens without specific intention because it's simply what he does when you're close.
"Are you still taking that box?" he asked.
"Right," he said, with completely fake resignation. "They're coming too then."
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