Work Text:
It all comes back to this.
Back to this tiny room, in a council estate, buried away in the insipid backwaters of Burnage.
Noel’s eyes widened uncharacteristically when he entered and narrowed when he closed, then locked, the door behind him. His brother was trying to look composed but the tight set of his lips and tiny hitch in his breathing gave everything away.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Noel said, breaking the silence.
“No,” Liam agreed, “Or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”
Noel looked away with a pained expression, the same one that featured often in their later years together. The familiarity of it hurt, but like the dull ache of an old wound rather than the sting of a fresh one. That look on Noel’s face used to push him over the edge, back in those days. Turn a routine argument into something raw and destructive. Now it merely echoed along the throbbing in his veins.
Noel startled when he took the first step towards him, his whole body tensing and drawing together. No doubt he’d jump out of the window if he could do so without looking undignified. Still very much a man who would give his soul before letting go of his pride.
It gave him a certain sense of pleasure to take his time stalking across the room, watching Noel try his best to not show any fear. Because yeah, as much as it still killed a bit of him to admit it, as the end approached, Noel had become genuinely scared of him.
It was another one of those self-fulfilling prophesies, really. The more Noel would flinch away, the more he wanted to wreck him. Things came to a stage where he actually wanted to hit his brother. Like properly lay one on him, not the kind of play-fighting and foreplay-esque wrestling they’ve been getting up to for as long as he could remember.
No, he only really started wanting to hurt him when Noel fucking started believing that he would.
“Liam,” Noel murmured, a desperate bid to halt his advance across the room, “Not here. Not now.”
“What do you think I’m gonna do?” He taunted, toeing his way slowly around the bed that his brother used to spend hours on, just mindlessly strumming the guitar while fucking high. “D'you think I’m gonna kill my own brother in our childhood bedroom? In our mother’s house?”
“Liam,” Noel said again, sharply. There was rebuke and something plaintive in his voice. He looked defeated, backed up against the wall of faded posters and childish scribbles that documented their childhood. His wonderwall against their wonderwall. It was almost poetic. Maybe he should take a fucking photo.
“Hello Noel,” he replied, stepping right up to his brother’s face, using his height advantage to loom over the other man.
As much as Noel liked to pretend that he will always have the upper hand in their relationship, both of them knew that Noel would be no match for him in a fair fight ever since he’d hit his growth spurt at sixteen. Tony used to make snide remarks about Noel having small man syndrome, and yeah, he was inclined to agree. But he still gave Tony a good bollocking for it because wankers shouldn’t talk shit about our kid.
Noel stood absolutely still, fists and teeth clenched, stony gaze fixed on some vague point above his left shoulder. Waiting for the rapture, as you were.
Their mother had kept their room in perfect order. It looked the same as it did in his memories and dreams.
But Noel had changed. He now looked out of place in their childhood room, with his respectable haircut and skinny jeans. He also smelled different – like expensive moisturizer and leather instead of that sinful, addictive combination of cigarettes, alcohol and drugs.
He wondered if he’d still be able to smell the Benson & Hedges and Jack Daniel’s under Noel’s skin and in his blood if he were to bury his face into the crook of his neck. He wanted to touch his brother, to utterly ruin that picture of middle-class asininity, but didn’t know where to start. For now, it was sufficient to just look at Noel, consider the wrinkles now so deeply etched into his skin and reacquaint himself with the light fuzz on the shell of his ears. It made him feel heady with power, just watching the tips of Noel’s ears flush red under his inspection.
Noel was quick to impatience, as always.
“Are you going to do something or are you just gonna fucking stand there?” His brother huffed, finally meeting his eyes in an act of resignation disguised as annoyance.
Noel’s eyes were always honest where his mouth was not. Probably a good thing that they were born under the shelter of those heavy brows; cause they’re like chinks in the steel cold armour of his painstakingly cultivated 'I don’t give a fuck' façade, allowing others to glimpse the fears and insecurities underneath.
He leaned down slowly and pressed their foreheads together like old times, close enough to feel Noel’s halting breath against his cheek.
“What do you want me to do?” He asked and felt Noel shiver at the question.
The air around them had changed, turning heated and murky. It brought back memories of afternoons spent sprawled lazily across Noel’s bare back as he wrote lyrics to fill his countless melodies, their days before that fateful gig at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.
It was simple. Noel just had to tip his head up to let their lips meet, then everything would unwind itself. And at the very centre, would be just the two of them, entwined together in this tiny room.
“I want you,” Noel said when he finally answered, his voice breaking a little over the word 'you', “To stop this nonsense."
"Nonsense? Is that what it is now?" Liam sneered, perhaps more aggressively than he meant to. But he has had a lot of time to think things over and, this time, he intended to let Noel have a piece of his mind. Didn’t matter if the other man wanted it or not. “When I was eighteen, you said it was just a phase right. You’re gonna grow out of it just like you’re gonna grow outta this fucking room," he mimicked Noel in a ridiculously high voice, "Well, fuck that. When I was twenty-two and I still wanted you, you said it was the cocaine getting to my brain.”
“You were on a lot of drugs,” Noel interjected miserably, “And so was I.”
“The coke’s got fuck all to do with this,” Liam snapped. It was just so typical of Noel to try to dismiss everything by blaming it on drugs. Heavens forbid that he ever take anything seriously, ascribe any personal meaning to his lyrics, or harbour any feelings besides disdain for his brother. “You’re worse than anything I’ve ever been addicted to, I’ll fucking give you that.”
Noel stared at him, brows furrowed, eyes like flint. But then as the words seeped in, he closed his eyes and laughed.
“Wish I knew how to quit you huh,” he quipped, clearly finding some kind of perverse humour in their situation. “Brokeback Mountain, what a classic.”
That’s the first grin he’d seen on Noel’s face for too fucking long and his instinctive response was to swoop down and claim it with his lips. He was a little too eager and ended up knocking their teeth together. It hurt like a bitch, but then their lips slid together perfectly and nothing else mattered.
He could taste blood but didn’t know whose it was. It could be either of theirs; it could be both. Didn’t matter. Noel could change his hair, his clothes, his entire way of life; but in the end, he would always still taste of cigarettes, alcohol and sin.
They always kissed like they were fighting - why nuzzle gently when you can head-butt each other? As much as his brother was terrified of and detested physical violence, he knew that Noel found some form of twisted comfort in their savagery with each other. It was as if he felt a need to constantly pay penance for any form of pleasure received. But that suited Liam fine because the fire he felt for Noel burnt as easily as rage as it did as love.
He’d managed to get his fingers under Noel’s jumper and up on their way along his ribcage when Noel came back to his senses and tried to break the kiss, resulting in a small scuffle. Noel’s hands, which had been grabbing onto his jacket like he was drowning, were now shoving him away. He tried to pin them against the wall with a snarl of frustration, but was pushed aside when Noel proceeded to knee him in the gut.
“I need to leave,” Noel declared, still panting. He looked debauched, with his flushed face and swollen lips.
“You already did,” Liam spat out. Again, if he sounded bitter, he didn’t mean it. He had long resolved to come to terms with Noel being a cunt, but his temper often got the better of him. He must accept it eventually though, because he -- like Noel -- was just made this way and, no matter how much they may despise their maker, they will always carry the defects that were left in them.
“Yeah,” Noel agreed flatly, “And you should too.”
“What? And make things easier for you to live your white-fenced middle-class dream with the likes of Russell Bland and that vagina from Coldplay? I don’t fucking think so.”
“No, to make things easier for yourself, you cunt.”
“Things are always easy for me,” Liam shrugged, dropping onto Noel’s old bed and lighting up a cigarette, “Because I know what I want and I do what I want, right. I’m not ashamed of it, not ashamed of nothing, me. And most days, I actually like myself.”
Noel fell silent.
“You gotta be yourself, you can’t be no one else, right?” He was never one to hold back when it came to taunting his brother. “Wonder why when I sang it, it became an anthem for the ages, but when you sing it, it just sounds sad?”
“Fuck you,” Noel finally mustered, but there was no heat behind his voice. He looked old and brittle in his rumpled jumper, with his deep frown lines and unhealthily pale skin. That’s his Noel, hidden behind all that artificial arrogance and nonchalance, the one who wanted to live forever because he’d never really felt alive.
“Come here, Noel,” he beckoned, patting the bed and dropping cigarette ash all over the nice, clean sheets. “Come here.”
Noel shook his head. He rubbed tiredly over one eye and looked glumly out of the window. “Remember our last time in Ireland?”
Of course he did. That was the summer Noel devoted himself to Oasis full-time, after being fired by the Inspirals and kicked out of the India House apartment by Louise. She would take him back before the winter, but for that one summer, he had Noel all to himself. They’d been sent up to spend the summer with their uncle as usual, but he was called away on business at the last minute and left them alone in the little cottage. There would never be a more perfect time – they had no future, no aspirations and nothing to lose; they were utterly fearless.
Those were the days where he got to explore every single inch of Noel’s body, where he could fall asleep to the strumming of Noel’s guitar and wake up with his face buried in his hair. It left him with a longing for his brother that could never be fully sated again, only temporarily relieved by the subsequent encounters that Noel would allow in his rare moments of weakness.
“It should have stopped there,” Noel said, still looking out of the window wistfully. “That was our Knebworth, the best we could ever get. We should have had one last shag, said thank you for the good times and gone back to Manchester as normal brothers in a rock and roll band.”
“That’s bullshit,” Liam hissed, viciously stabbing out his cigarette in the ashtray beside Noel’s bed. “You don’t believe that. That thing you’ve been going around saying about Knebworth, that’s fucking bullshit. You’ve got too many songs in you. What would you have done after Knebworth? Wander the earth as a country and western singer? Perform to 4 people and a dog at some village pub?”
“The music will take me where it takes me,” Noel argued sullenly.
“Not without me singing it, it won’t.”
There was a long silence between them. A moment of acquiesce, as it were. Then, Liam was up and shoving Noel back against the wall, peppering kisses all over his face, from his eyes to the tip of his nose to tightly sealed lips.
Noel leaned back and offered neither resistance nor response. When the moment of frenzy had passed, he felt Noel’s hand on the back of his head, stroking his hair and pressing him down into the crook of his neck like a child. It made him want to weep.
“I gave you my music, I let you sing my songs,” Noel whispered into his hair, “I took you to Knebworth and Maine Road and Argentina and Japan. Isn’t that enough? What more do you want of me?”
No, it’s not enough. He shook off his brother’s hand and straightened up to look him in the eye.
“You’re my Knebworth. And my Maine Road, and my Slane Castle and Wembley Stadium. You’re my Irish summer and Manchester rain,” he confessed incoherently to an inscrutable Noel who could be either petrified or enthralled, it was anyone’s guess. “You’re my wet dreams and my worst nightmares. You’re my fucking religion if I ever had one. And you’re a cunt.”
“You’re a knobhead,” Noel replied, as if by reflex. “We make a right pair, don’t we?” He laughed, but that was soon swallowed up in another hungry kiss.
How can you stop once you’ve had it all? How can you throw it all away after you’ve reached your Knebworth? You’ll keep chasing it, wanting to have it all over again, even if you know that the only way things could go was down. Well, if you had to go then you'd go down in fucking flames. That’s rock and roll, ain’t it? Coming in a mess, going out in style.
They weren’t meant to drive respectable German sedans and be good role models for a new generation of coffee-drinking soft rockers. That was all well and nice, but it certainly wouldn't make anyone want to live forever.
No, their forever was here, falling in a messy tangle of limbs onto Noel’s tiny bed in their tiny room in Burnage, next to their Wonderwall scribbled and taped over with their childhood heroes and dreams. It was Noel surrendering himself like a fucking nun breaking her vows and letting him take him away for just another day.
But even through the haze of lust and euphoria, he knew well at the back of his mind that Noel would be gone the minute reality sets in. And if that niggling knowledge made him rougher than necessary, if it made him leave more bruises and use more teeth, then good. Noel deserved it, the bastard. If Liam had his way, Noel would be so thoroughly fucked he wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed come morning time.
Cause in the morning, we won’t know what to do. Like fuck, he knew exactly what his brother would do and that would be to run away, lock himself in a room with his 99 guitars, and probably play Running to Stand Still for about 20 times to himself in the dark.
And him? He would take his ma out for lunch, go to the pub with Paul maybe, see his kids for the weekend, feed some ducks. Whiling his time away as the multi-millionaire ex-frontman of one of the best bands no longer in the world and learning to quit his brother.
Fuck. This was their forever.