#i made this a week ago + was on the fence abt posting it bc its v self indulgent but the new ep drops tonight so. why nottt

[harbingersecho]

countless days pass by immeasurably;

anniversaries gutter in the maelstrom

[livwritesstuff]

for @steddie-week day 5 | exes to lovers

fully and completely inspired by @emchant3d's divorced dad's post [x] from a few weeks ago bc i did not once stop thinking abt it

tags: modern day, artist!eddie, finance guy!steve, steddie as rich gay divorcees, sort of an accidental parent trap situation

They were too young, Steve thinks in retrospect – married at twenty-three, their daughter born when they were twenty-five, and then divorced before his twenty-seventh birthday.

He gets to think retrospectively because in a few years it’ll be a full decade since the papers for that last bit got signed. Now, Steve is thirty-four and sweating his ass off in a red polo and crisp jeans, the stiflingly hot July sun beating down on him as he scans the perimeter of a crowded playground for a familiar head of curly brown hair – not his nine-year-old. He found Rosalind already, wreaking havoc on the jungle gym. No, he’s looking for his ex (-husband, technically, but Steve usually stops at ex; the -husband part just makes him sad these days).

It’s custody swap day, which is either his favorite or least favorite day of the week depending on who the swap is favoring.

Today it’s favoring him which is why he’s slowly making his way around the edge of a playground in Bushwick, keeping an eye out for his ex, Eddie.

“Steve,” he hears from somewhere behind him. Steve turns towards the sound and sees not that curly head of hair he’d expected. Eddie’s hair is completely buzzed (which, for the record, was not the case last week when Steve dropped Rozzy off with him) and he’s wearing a paint-splattered white t-shirt tucked into old jeans and all that combined is making it reeeally hard for Steve to pretend he’s not crushing hard on the guy he divorced eight years ago.

“Dude,” Steve started, eyeing Eddie’s hair (or lack thereof) as he made his way to the section of fence that Eddie was occupying, “What–”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie rolled his eyes, “Rozzy already hit me with all the good zingers so you’re too late.”

“No, I don’t –” Steve stopped, “It’s…not a bad look, just…you know. Why the change?”

Eddie looked away.

“Long story,” he replied as Steve remembered (yet again) that he doesn’t get full access to Eddie’s world the way he used to.

Luckily for Steve, Rozzy runs up to them and spares him from having to figure out a response for that.

“We should get pizza,” she says. Steve’s eyebrows fly up.

“We should get pizza?” he repeats.

“Please,” she adds, her eyes shining, “At Dad’s? And we play Mario Kart? Dad said I’m getting good at 200!”

“He said that?” Steve asked, and he glances over Rosalind's head to see that Eddie is making a so-so gesture with his hand.

He’s never been all that good at saying no to his daughter (or anyone), so it doesn’t take much more convincing on Rozzy’s part for the three of them to head off in the direction of Eddie’s loft, with a pitstop planned for the pizza shop down the block.

They actually have a nice time.

It’s true that Rozzy is getting better at 200cc – good might be a bit generous, but Steve’s fine with that (he doesn’t know if his ego could handle getting crushed by a fourth-grader).

Just as they’re finishing their second grand prix (the Star Cup, because Rozzy likes the dolphin race), one of the other kids in the building knocks on the door and invites Rozzy over for a sleepover, which Steve agrees to because he remembers the illicit kind of joy in a summertime Monday night sleepover.

Eddie doesn't show Steve the door after Rozzy's gone. Rather, he pulls a bottle of wine from the fridge – an expensive Sémillon he says was given to him by a client.

“So the art biz is still going well, I assume,” Steve comments as Eddie pulls two vintage wine glasses out of a cabinet and pours them each a healthy serving.

Conversation about work manages to sustain them through the first few glasses (Eddie actually remembered that it’s been just over a year since Steve left his dad’s Fortune 1000 for a CFO position at a marketing company that had just graduated from small to midsize status). They work through the second quarter of the bottle talking about Rozzy, and the third vanishes even quicker while Steve spills some of the latest Harrington family drama.

While Eddie is updating him on how Wayne is doing, Steve finds that he isn’t really listening, distracted in the way he can’t help but notice how Eddie’s paint-stained t-shirt is actually more like an undershirt, and a size too small for him, the torso and sleeves tight around lean muscle, and there’s a thin silver chain around his neck and a scruff of facial hair around his jaw, and –

Steve doesn’t immediately realize when Eddie stopped talking. When he does, when his eyes finally unstick themselves from the buzzcut and drop back down to Eddie’s, he sees that Eddie is staring at him too.

Eddie’s tongue darts out to wet his lip.

“Ask me again why I buzzed my hair,” he tells him.

“Why’d you buzz your hair,” Steve asks, because he’s obedient like that (and because he really does want to know).

“Steve–” Eddie stops, a giggly, wine-induced hiccup of a laugh slipping out before he shakes his head, “An entire can of paint tipped ov–” He cuts himself off with another half-hysterical laugh, barely managing to say, “Spilled on my head,” before he was completely doubled over, and Steve is laughing too because he can totally picture it and because he had a bit more wine than he planned to and this is honestly the first time that he and Eddie have hung out without their daughter in…Steve doesn’t even know how long.

“Steve,” Eddie says again when they finally both recover, and his tone is completely different this time around and there’s a vulnerability in his eyes that wasn’t there before and something is happening, something is happening, “Please don’t kill me for saying this, but…fuck, it’s really kinda pathetic how badly I still want it to be you and me.”

Steve thinks he tries to respond, but then he was too busy kissing Eddie to do anything else, too busy scraping fingernails over Eddie’s scalp, too busy choking back a moan as Eddie sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, too busy tugging Eddie’s shirt out of his waistband to shove a hand up underneath and finding that he’s built more solidly than Steve remembers from the last time they touched like this, but something is telling him that’s true about Eddie – true about himself too – in more ways than one.

And if Rosalind comes home the next morning ready to ask how she’s getting back to Daddy’s house only to find that he’s already there, stealing Dad’s mug out of his hand for a sip of coffee when his own is right there…that’s a conversation for another day.

part 2

[miami2k17]

My bad, I don't think I quite got it right about Debbie and Start Anew. I found a link to the interview where he claims Start Anew is nothing to do with Noel: https://thequietus.com/articles/12418-beady-eye-be-interview The interview was posted May 31 2013, not sure exactly when Nicole and Liam split, but he was papped on vacation with Debbie in July 2013 https://uk.news.yahoo.com/news/liam-gallagher-enjoys-topless-holiday-friends-ibiza-amid-134342364.html. I don't know when the songs for BE were written but it seems he & Debbie had something going on for a while, so if he was already done with Nicole (at least emotionally), it's hard to believe he would've written a song about starting again for her, since didn't he break up with her via phone call or text? Like I know he expressed regret later but he seemed pretty harsh and uncaring about it at the time.

I think I figured he said it was about Debbie because they played Start Anew while gushing about their relationship and how she supposedly saved him in the As it Was documentary. I know they couldn't use Oasis songs but it seemed an odd choice to use that one if the song was about Nicole 😬. So yeah, either it was about Debbie ("Hey, sorry we had a rocky start since I was married and also sleeping with another woman whom I impregnated but let's try again") or it was about Noel and he just doesn't want to admit it. I prefer the latter.

i'm really not sure bc...it was a long time ago and i cant find the posts i made abt it back then, but i feel like i remember them splitting like either RIGHT before or after the album came out that year (p sure it was after) and he IMMEDIATELY started dating debbie publically lol so i always assumed he was sleeping with her the entire time anyway.

that's why i always thought any of those songs like start anew being about nicole (or debbie!!) was super weird because, by the time that whole scandal happened and they split, would the album not be already written and completed, if not released already? who knos if they split up behind closed doors sooner than the baby scandal actually went public to all of us but i doubt it. even if they did that's still a VERY narrow window to write and record songs for an album you're meant to be releasing in a few weeks. i remember them splitting being news at the time too. but idk id have to go back and like actually fact check and i'm lazy rn lol

that being said ive definitely always just assumed it's about noel because the timeline didn't work out for it to be about anyone else yet at that point. and it's suuper romantic and tender LOL so i would imagine he would deny it's about noel. like ik we're talking about the same guy who wrote a song that opens with "you could be my lover" and openly admitted it was about his brother but this is one is different, idk. it's very soft. i mean he calls them Darling 👁️👁️. it just would come across v differently and i think he knew that.

i think he just didn't want to give noel the satisfaction of openly admitting he's still writing about him, even though he must know that neither of them will ever write about anything else. or maybe he didn't want to give the press the satisfaction of dissecting it? i think the songs on there like start anew and ballroom figured served one purpose n that was for Whoever 👁️👁️ they're about to hear them, bc they were things he couldn't or didn't want to say out loud in person. it's just that he only seems to write songs for that purpose about noel, even now (with the limited songwriting he actually does lol) noel is still making up a large chunk of the lyrical content on both albums, everything else seems like it's about debbie. so now i'm kinda like on the fence about it.

so idk if it had been written later or if we had some kind of more indepth timeline id be more inclined to say it was about debbie (or nicole even?) but it's not only a weird song to write for your "new" girlfriend (he is a Whore who regardless of all of this was almost definitely sleeping with her all along anyway) but also the timeline for it being about nicole like ive seen some people say just doesn't make sense. that leaves....one other person 🤔