Work Text:
It’s not like he flees Paris in a flurry of smoke and screeching tires. That’ll be how they paint it, later, he knows: it has to be dramatic, like a movie climax, for it to be believable, justifiable, to everyone watching from the outside. Flying guitars and bloodied knuckles and knocked over furniture. Shouting. Plums, even. The fucking vultures fucking love details like that.
But the real logistics of it don’t work like in the movies. In reality, Noel quits the band and goes back to his hotel. Noel quits the band and switches off his phone. Noel quits the band and sits in the creaky plastic chair at the desk and stares at the wall for a long time.
Everything is muted, like he’s underwater. Like his ears haven’t popped yet.
He’d thought he’d feel angry. He wishes he was— wishes he could cling to that anger like a lifeline, the tether to keep him from plummeting a hundred stories downward into the tiredness and the uncertainty and the loss. He should feel angry. It’s his livelihood too, crumbling apart in his hands, even if he’s got enough money in the bank to last him till rapture, and even if Noel’s mind is always working, always trying to keep two steps in front of his heart, and so it’s already tapping at the windows and whispering dark, dangerous words like headlining and solo career.
He also thought he’d be heartbroken. Until today, if you’d’ve asked him, Noel had thought he’d never had a broken heart. Even with the girls who’d dumped him back in Burnage before he was somebody, or Clint, who’d left right when he was becoming somebody, or the divorce under his belt— they’d stung, yes, but nothing had ever really crippled him, frozen him, knocked him so sideways he wasn’t sure he could stand straight again, the way maybe they were supposed to. After a while he’d just assumed there was something wrong with him. Some missing part in the mechanism of his heart that everyone else had but him. Sometimes he’d been grateful. Other times he’d been frightened, wondering how big something would have to be to make him feel it.
Oasis had seemed big enough. But, thing is— he doesn’t feel knocked sideways now, either. Doesn’t feel like the floor’s dropped out from underneath him. He feels the same as he’s always done. Which makes him realize his heart’s never been anything but broken. And he knows that because there’s only one thing in his world bigger than Oasis, and it’s the one thing that’s been with him longer, from the very beginning. Liam.
It makes sense, really, now that Noel’s let himself look at it. It’s not that there’s something missing inside him, it’s that he was just made wrong. Stitched together with a piece that wasn’t supposed to be there, a piece that bore his little brother’s name, a piece that was alive and hungry, swallowing up everything else and leaching into his bloodstream until the only thing he was full of was that wrong kind of love and Liam.
And because Noel has always known it was wrong, wrong to want what he wants, his heart has always been broken, because he’s always known that Liam is the thing he can’t keep. Even when he’d held it in his hands, smoothed his thumbs over its cheekbones and pressed his lips to its forehead, pulled it closer to him in darkened rooms till it was the only thing he could breathe, it had never truly been his. Love in the shadows just means it can’t exist in the daylight.
He can’t feel the loss now because they’ve always been a lost cause. This is just Noel opening his eyes.
He knows there are things that have to be done. There are festival people to apologize to, tickets to be refunded. He has to get himself a ticket home, or not home, considering there’s probably going to be a small army of press waiting for him at the airport as soon as the word gets out. Somewhere, then. Somewhere that isn’t fucking Paris, God, why did it have to be Paris? Paris was theirs, had been long before everything went so fucking sour—
There’s a litany of cities, really, that have Liam sewn into their seams now, and Noel almost tells his head to go fuck itself because there’s no way he could ever one day come back to these places alone and sing songs he’d written about Liam, for Liam, without Liam.
Maybe he could just stay in this room forever. Waste away. Live off room service and minibar vodka. There’s still some welcome basket the hotel had provided when they’d arrived perched on the dresser, grape leaves already wilting—
There’s legal shit to be done, too. Unraveling a band is messy work. Maybe he could go to Disney, like Lennon did, sign his identity away there. He’d always thought that was a morbidly funny place for the Beatles to die, and it’d be just another way for him to plagiarize them. The press would have a field day with that. It’d be easier, too, to borrow someone else’s ending, rather than have to figure out his own.
Fuck. Is this really the ending? It seems impossible. They’ve never not come back to each other before. Every fight— even ones that ended in real blood, broken feet and smashed heads— and every declaration of this is it, I’m done, there’s no hope left— none of them had ever stuck. They would always wind up at each other’s door eventually, one or the other, fall into bed, fuck until they weren’t angry anymore, or fuck until they were even angrier, but always so full of each other, so overflowing with the horrible, doomed love. If Noel’s heart is Liam then Liam’s heart is Noel and he’s just as broken as Noel is, which means the kid’s probably feeling this exact same way right now, maybe even having the same revelation if he could just pull his head out of his arse for two fucking seconds. Part of Noel never wants to see the bastard ever again, and the other, louder, brimming-over part doesn’t know what it would do if it didn’t have Liam in arm’s reach, what either of them would be without the other. If they could even survive like that at all.
Maybe that’s why Noel hasn’t left Paris yet. Because he could’ve, really. Fuck the movies, but he’s Noel fucking Gallagher. He could’ve phoned up any number of people and had a jet roaring on a runway in a heartbeat, could be long gone by now. But instead he’s here, in the silence, waiting. Hadn’t even turned on a fucking lamp or the TV, just in case that’d keep him from hearing a knock or seeing a shadow in the light under the door.
And then, as if he’d summoned it— there one is: a shadow in the hallway, breaking up the strip of gold, and Noel’s up and moving without thinking, feet carrying him to the door on furious, relieved adrenaline, and then his hand is on the knob and he flings it open—
Only to badly startle the housekeeper on the other side. She’s not even at his door, but the one across the hall— not Liam’s, Noel knows, his was down further, and is surely still standing empty; Liam likes to linger in the chaos he’s wreaked. It’s why he’s so deeply ingrained in Noel even now, because what bigger mess has he made than Noel?
He apologizes and closes the door again. But he doesn’t move back to the chair. Instead he stands there in the black room with his hand on the knob, listening to her putter away and the silence that follows, feels it grow big and drowning, like an ocean, and when he closes his eyes it’s still just as dark, and he still listens.