Chapter Text
Snow had begun to fall early that afternoon, soft and silent, as if the dying year wanted to slip away without making a sound. Liam watched the snowflakes from the living-room window, leaning against the frame, a cup of hot tea cradled between his hands.
It was strange.
Truly strange—to feel calm without distrusting it. Without waiting for the blow. Without the certainty that something, at any moment, would ruin everything.
For years, peace had felt like a cruel joke. Something he didn’t deserve.
His life had never been a straight line, but a violent roller coaster: highs where he felt invincible, brilliant, overflowing… followed by brutal, silent drops where sadness dragged him into corners no one ever saw. Onstage he was fire; in the shadows, ash.
Years ago, on a date like this, he would have been high, drunk, shouting at strangers or smashing something just to feel that he still existed. Rage was easier than silence. Chaos more honest than stillness.
But not anymore.
Now the tea was real.
The calm was real.
And the life he had… was real too.
His children, after a loud and glorious Christmas, had gone skiing in France. He had stayed in London to keep his mother company; she no longer felt able to travel that far. Behind him, the voices of his mother and Debbie filled the house with a warm murmur. They were in the kitchen, preparing dinner for the guests, talking as if time had never been a threat. Debbie laughed; his mother nodded—an utterly beautiful postcard before his eyes.
Liam watched the scene reflected in the glass and felt dizzy.
This is life, he thought.
This is mine.
And this…I should have destroyed it too.
Because for far too long he had believed that everything he touched ended up broken: family, friends, people, bands. Himself.
He had tried to forget his childhood in Manchester. As if that were possible. As if growing up in a home marked by tension, fear, visible and invisible blows left no scars. As if the child who learned to survive by shouting didn’t still live inside the adult. As if that child had escaped.
Those things don’t disappear.
They hide.
And then they come back.
He remembered Knebworth 2022, still pounding in his chest: the roar of the crowd, the impossible return, the proof that it hadn’t been a mistake, that he wasn’t just the other Gallagher, the untalented one.
And yet…
He thought of Noel.
He always thought of Noel—and he knew he always would.
All his life, Noel had been the gravitational center of his guilt. The exact point where all his good and bad decisions seemed to converge. Every fight, every excess, every word said too much piled up inside Liam like an endless bill.
For years he told himself:
If I had been less impulsive.
If I hadn’t shouted so much.
If I had known when to shut up.
If I hadn’t been me.
Guilt didn’t just accompany him—it defined him.
He woke up with it.
He fell asleep with it.
He carried it onto stages, into interviews, and especially into relapses.
When Oasis broke apart, Liam didn’t just lose his brother—whom he admired more than anyone—he lost the version of himself that still believed he deserved love. And since then he lived like someone sentenced to life.
Noel was the judge.
Silence, the sentence.
For more than a decade, Noel made sure Liam didn’t have access to his personal number. No one could give it to him. No one dared. Each refusal reinforced the idea he had been repeating for years: I earned this by being a bastard.
Emails without replies.
Messages to dead addresses.
Attempts that died before they existed.
Noel’s team hated him, and that exclusive buffet of lawyers who managed all his brother’s affairs seemed to feed on his pain.
The few communications that did exist always came through those lawyers. Legal language. Cold. Distant. Carefully measured words that left no room for memory or affection. As if Liam were a stranger trying to sneak into a story that no longer belonged to him. They reminded him of that with every refusal, every carefully drafted silence.
And then Covid arrived.
The world stopped.
People began to die. Fear became routine. And his mother—more fragile than ever—called him, her voice breaking, barely held together by urgency.
“Son… if I die,” she said, “you’ll regret it for the rest of your lives. I don’t want to go knowing my two sons don’t speak to each other.”
That sentence stabbed him like a knife—not because it was cruel, but because it was true.
Liam cried inconsolably after hanging up. He cried like he hadn’t since he was a child. Not for Noel, but for her. For having been, in some way, the cause of that pain. For having failed as a son even before failing as a brother.
When his mother managed to get Noel to agree to give him his number, Liam felt something he didn’t allow himself to fully enjoy. A dirty, selfish gratitude. For one second—just one—he thanked the pandemic for giving him the chance at expiation he had wanted for years. And immediately, remembering the global tragedy, the bodies reduced to numbers, he felt even more miserable for having thought it at all.
He trembled as he typed.
It took him barely ten seconds. Ten seconds not to ruin everything again.
The message was clumsy. Human. Desperately honest.
The reply came the next day.
A spelling correction.
Nothing more.
He felt something break inside him—a small but final fracture. Still, he didn’t allow himself to get angry. It’s the least I deserve, he thought. And he kept writing.
Days.
Weeks.
Months.
Messages that didn’t always get replies. Shared memories cast like hooks into the water. Jokes only they understood. Photos of his kids, his pets. Attempts at normality. Pieces of himself offered again, without armor, without guarantees.
Every time he shared something especially sad or vulnerable, he added a note, almost joking, almost like an offering:
If you want, you can use this for a song.
It was his way of saying I still see you, I still know you, I still trust you.
It was also a way of bleeding with permission.
And he kept writing.
Noel replied with a politeness that hurt. Correct, brief, functional messages. As if answering were just another task on a weekly checklist to tick off and move on. He never offered details of his life. Never opened a crack Liam could peer through. Was there communication? Yes. But it was almost entirely one-sided, sustained by one person’s effort.
Until one day Noel told him bluntly to dial it down—that this was Twitter material, not for his phone. That he couldn’t have the bloody mobile buzzing all day.
Liam apologized.
He always apologized.
As if saying sorry were the only language they still shared.
Until one morning he woke up and realized he had been blocked.
That day he didn’t shout. He didn’t break anything. He didn’t call anyone. He sat on the floor, leaned his back against the wall, and thought with devastating clarity, clean as a verdict:
Not even my remorse is welcome.
From then on, Noel only unblocked him faithfully for Christmas. Part of the tacit agreement he had promised their mother—to keep contact with Liam. One message a year. Always identical. Correct. Empty. Phrases that left no mark, opened no conversation, asked for no reply.
For two years, Liam answered those Christmas messages with the same intensity as always—with overflowing, almost childlike joy. As if every December were still an open door.
Until he decided not to do it this past Christmas, just a week ago.
It wasn’t sudden.
It wasn’t dramatic.
The decision had begun to take shape months earlier, after the lawyers struck again exactly where it hurt most. After feeling once more like an intruder in his own story. After finally understanding that insisting could also be a way of betraying himself.
And this time, the silence wasn’t a punishment.
It was a tired surrender.
Only then did he think something new—something he had never fully allowed himself to articulate: What if I had defended myself?
Because when it all began—when Oasis was barely an idea, a name he had spoken first—Liam wasn’t thinking about contracts, percentages, or intellectual property. He was thinking about looking cool with his brother. He was thinking about us.
Noel was the smart one.
And Liam trusted him. That’s why, in the first place, he asked him to be his manager.
He signed without reading.
He believed them when they said, “This is how it’s done.”
He never asked about royalties or rights. To him, Oasis was everyone. The songs belonged to everyone. Didn’t they?
You don’t sign carefully when you love deeply.
Over the years he understood it hadn’t just been naivety. There had been silence. Omission. Advantage. The signatures became gags. Each song, foreign territory. Each attempt at tribute, a veiled threat. The law used not to protect, but to draw lines, to punish.
Until Noel and his lawyers blocked his participation in the Taylor Hawkins tribute when it was released on video.
Something broke then—differently. Deeper. More personal.
Taylor wasn’t just a musician he admired. He had been a real friend. One of the ones who look at you without judging. Who understand chaos without explanations. With him, there was no need to pretend strength or hide the cracks. They shared laughter, excess, stages… and also that uncomfortable knowledge of how close you can get to the edge without realizing it.
Taylor’s death hit him with a silent violence. Not only because of the loss, but because it handed him back an image he knew all too well. Because more than once, in other years, with other people around and other nights that ran too long, he had been dangerously close to leaving the same way—not as something romantic or tragic, but as something clumsy, avoidable, absurd. Like a door left ajar.
Taylor had walked off the stage and never came back.
And Liam knew, with a clarity that hurt, that it could have been him.
That’s why the tribute wasn’t a public gesture or a provocation. It was grief. It was gratitude. It was saying I’m still here for both of us. It was honoring a friend who didn’t get another chance to change the ending.
Being blocked was devastating.
Because that’s when he understood the true pettiness. It wasn’t money. It never had been. It was control. Using the law to forbid even mourning. To dictate how, when, and whether he had the right to grieve. To strip the gesture of its humanity and reduce everything to ownership and permissions.
He loved Live Forever, but at that point he understood something unbearable: he hadn’t lived. He had survived. The excesses. The guilt. The persistent idea that he had to punish himself to deserve to keep breathing.
Too many years had passed, and forgiveness never came.
And it never would.
And then he understood it fully:
It wasn’t that he hadn’t paid.
It was that there would never be absolution.
Because some wounds don’t close with justice.
They’re carried.
And he thought that guilt should belong to both of them—no matter how much Noel had spent years convincing the world, and himself, that everything fell on Liam. Looking at the whole story, he could no longer sustain the idea of Noel as the victim. And when Liam finally managed to take him down from the pedestal he had placed him on after the split—that impossible, almost sacred place—what remained wasn’t an untouchable figure, but a man who chose to walk through the door and leave, even when Liam begged him not to.
And that memory, right as the year was changing, hurt like a wound time had never learned to close.
Debbie’s laughter from the kitchen cut through him—a light, almost ethereal sound that pulled him out of his mind, like an echo of something forgotten. Not as reproach, but as a gentle reminder. No one there was asking for penance.
He went into the kitchen and set cookies on the table as if they were small offerings— tiny gestures before everything he had survived. His mother looked at him with a deep, proud gaze. And Debbie, with her wide, unguarded smile, as if she had loved him forever, without judgment or conditions.
Not like someone forgiven.
But like someone loved.
Later, when the doorbell rang, he welcomed Debbie’s family and they all shared the evening together. They toasted and celebrated the year beginning. Everything was laughter and joy. Everything was closeness and complicity.
Minutes before midnight, he stepped into the garden. The snow kept falling, as if the world had paused to wait. Each snowflake that touched his skin was cold, but inside him there was a faint, warm, unexpected fire.
He thought of Noel. He knew he always would—that he wished him well, wherever he was—but no longer from guilt. He had loved his brother above all else; with him he had shared an intimacy that went beyond what brothers are meant to share. A bond so deep that for a time he believed they didn’t need words to understand each other, before everything was reduced to ruins. And he, carrying that emotional dependence like a ghost.
He had lived half a life dragging the weight of an invisible debt, convinced that his existence had to be a punishment. Now he understood he could move forward without absolution.
In the moment when one year ended and another began, he held a single determination in his mind: he could accept his mistakes without waiting for forgiveness. He could live, even if Noel never came back.
Debbie came out and wrapped him in her arms just as the fireworks exploded, painting the sky in fleeting, bright, golden colors, marking the start of 2023. Liam kissed her and rested his head on her shoulder, breathing in that scent of home he never knew he needed so badly. He loved Debbie, and above all, he loved the peace she gave him. She took care of him, the way Noel once had.
“I love you, you’re my favorite person,” he told her, to remind Debbie how important she was to him, and because it was simply true. No exaggeration. He owed her so much.
The snow kept falling, wrapping the world in its blanket of silence.
And Liam, with his sadness intact, his guilt broken, and his voice still his own, stayed there. Watching, without speaking, as the lights burst across the sky one after another—small sparks of a fire that never goes out.
He wasn’t whole.
He hadn’t been absolved.
But he was still alive.
And free.
He remembered how exactly ten years earlier there had been nights—the kind no one sees—when exhaustion dragged him so deep that the idea of disappearing slipped in like a dangerous whisper, a fleeting exit. And it terrified him, because he knew where that thought came from: the wounded child, the guilty man, the silence that had choked him.
And he recalled how he had repeated, like a mantra, like a whisper against the wind:
“I won’t give them that satisfaction. Not the press. Not the headlines. Not anyone waiting to see me fall completely.”
For years, staying alive became an act of defiance. Of pride. Of self-love, learned the hard way, through years of pain.
And after a lifetime of fighting his own demons, he had done something he never thought possible:
He had chosen to stay and live.
And that was the greatest act of rebellion of his entire life.