The pitch feels alive under his boots tonight—springy and just the right amounts of slippery. It’s a good game. One of those rare ones where everything clicks early, where the passes bite clean and the press feels coordinated instead of frantic. England are playing so well. Trent knows it in his bones, in the way his lungs burn without complaint, in the way the ball keeps finding him like it trusts him.

He’d clocked them earlier. His partner—they’re close enough that he can find them without searching. That steadiness settles him. It always does. Every run down the right feels anchored by the knowledge that someone he loves is watching him not as a footballer, but as him.

The stadium hums as expected. Roars crest and fall. Then, suddenly, it doesn’t.

The silence hits like a pulled plug. Not gradual. Not respectful. Abrupt. Unnatural.

Trent slows mid-jog, confusion slicing through his focus. For a split second, he thinks it’s a VAR check he’s missed, a foul he didn’t feel. He glances at the ref. Nothing. The ball’s still live. The crowd—tens of thousands strong—is quiet in a way he’s never heard before.

He looks up at the stands.

Everywhere he turns, heads are bowed—not in disappointment of prayer—but lit from below. Phones glowing. Screens instead of faces.

“What the hell…?” he mutters, breath fogging the words into nothing.

Play continues, disjointed. The noise doesn’t return. He feels it then, the wrongness of it, crawling under his skin. Football without sound is a different sport. Hollow. He sends a cross anyway—habit, muscle memory—and keeps moving because stopping would mean thinking.

Then England score.

It’s clean. Beautiful. The kind of goal that should detonate the night.

Nothing happens.

No eruption. No chant. No release.

Something has happened. He doesn’t know what. He only knows it’s big enough to steal a goal’s roar.