Archive of Our Own

“Reckon that ought to do it for today, lads,” John announced to the cramped Kenwood music room at large. He rubbed at his eyes and stretched, joints cracking and popping loud and satisfying, once he had lowered his Rickenbacker to the floor. The air had gone a bit muggy and stale with too much time and too much smoke, endless ciggies and the fat roach Shotton had lit up and passed ‘round. They’d been running through one of his newer songs, take after take until somewhere along the way music was murdered, lost and buried, and all that was left were his sore fingers and pounding head. It was with such relief that he got up from his chair, ready to get out of it, finally—

“Hang on, I’ve got something.”

John groaned. Paul. He should’ve known. Paul’d been too quiet during the session, content to just stick to his part, rather than messing about with everyone else’s as well. George shifted restless as a kid kept after the bell; rebellion kicked up quick in John’s gut, blowing up futile against the steel of Paul’s expectation until he was back in the chair and waiting. Leaning forward in his seat to rest his head on one hand, he fixed Paul with a pointed look. Paul, whose face was still fixed with a distant, vacant expression, oblivious to their resentment, which, y’know, might’ve obliged him to just get on with it.

“Well, come on then, son,” John prodded after barely a moment had passed, leaning forward further and letting his hand drop. “Let’s have it.”

Abruptly Paul’s eyes slid back into focus, meeting his for a solid moment before he lifted his bass over his head and moved to the piano.

“It’s not quite finished yet,” Paul warned them as he slid onto the bench. “The words, y’know—but the melody’s quite good, I think.” He flexed fingers already poised over the keys, offering them a smile John knew (thought) was for him especially, before ducking his head and turning his attention fully to the instrument. “But anyway, you’ll see in just a second…”

John felt a flash of impatience as time hung at Paul’s fingertips. Then the first tinkle of keys, cascading into something fraught and urgent and fuck, it wasn’t what John expected at all. He’d thought maybe an elaboration on the “Daydream”-ish thing Paul’d shown him a few weeks earlier, but not this, not this song that cut through the silence so relentlessly. So beautifully. And that was what stuck John more than anything, what snapped him taut in his chair, ears straining unnaturally—

How fucking good it was.

As Paul ran out of words to match the tune and slid into random lyrical babble, John made a conscious effort to relax back again, mind alive in a way it hadn’t been all day as the potential of the song hit him—add some finishing lyrics, and they had another masterpiece on their hands. Professional satisfaction: Lennon/McCartney does it again. Bitterness stung through him; Paul had been holding out on him for a long time, must’ve been, to bring it in now, this far along. If he could bring in that fucking Loving Spoonful thing, ask for help and everything, then why the hell couldn’t he be arsed to show this to him?

The song swept on but John no longer had the appetite for it. He’d always loved watching Paul sing, had never felt closer to him than when he was yelling into his ear at the same mic or when they were hunched closely over their guitars, but now…nothing. His ears rang and his chest clenched with building antipathy and the music washed over him, the specifics lost to him. He realized only hazily when Paul finished and began brushing off the nonsense lyrics. Not finding much use in listening to the specifics of that, either (would’ve been no need for them at all if he’d bothered to share), John glanced around at the rest of them and felt the glower settle leaden over his features. Pete had been roused from his slightly stoned stupor by the song; George and Rings were laughing at something Paul had said as he returned to his seat. Fuck that.

“Are you bloody finished by now, Paul?”

The words came out harsher than he’d intended, brutal and heavy and twisted up with the resentment burning low in his gut. If he were in a better mood, he might’ve felt ashamed, but as the chatter died off to a murmur in their wake and Paul turned to him finally (George was giving him a sidelong glance, too, and Ringo had looked down at his feet carefully, but none of that mattered), he only felt a stab of black satisfaction.

“Not quite, John,” Paul said, a slight smile still hovering about his lips, and his voice was…what? The same as it had been with the others a moment before, a glint of humor, good-natured with barely a hint of strain. And patronizing, John thought, the beginnings of real anger curling and contorting within him—as if he were a kid tugging at Paul’s sleeve, interrupting adult conversation. Paul continued gamely, “The song’s got some things left—” He hummed a few bars of the song as if to demonstrate, “—and all that, y’know, the words ‘n everythin’…”

“We’ll get to that—” John began, brow knitting, irritated that Paul was pushing him into working the whole thing out right now, with the whole lot of them looking on— would be like having sex in public, for fuck’s sake—but Paul plowed on, oblivious—

“—Then there’s that Father McCartney fella, can’t decide what t’do with ‘im, and the end bit…” Paul trailed off thoughtfully, not in the least putout by John’s annoyance, much less aware of it. He wasn’t even looking at John, not really; he’d snagged a guitar and was fussing with it, bringing it up to McCartney Standards. As he finished speaking and lifted his face to them, his expression was expectant. “Well, come on then. Any ideas?”

He still wasn’t looking at John, he was looking at George’s left ear, or thereabouts. Which meant…Christ, was he even talking to him anymore? A yawning pit was opening in his stomach at the thought. He scrabbled to fill it up; there was no way he could’ve been addressing everyone, it’d been just the two of them for years…but there was Paul, looking around at them all, eyes wide and dark and earnest, even sparing a glance at Pete—and now he could feel George and Ringo’s eyes on him, frozen in their seats—fuck—he opened his mouth, to tell Paul to shut up and pack in and wait till they had them-time—

“Change the name ‘round, for starters, Father McCartney,” Pete Shotton innocently suggested, dragging his chair closer and stepping over the one unspoken line never to be crossed. George and Ringo would never have done it, no matter how much they begrudged them the exclusivity of Lennon/McCartney. The tension was so thick he could’ve cut it with a knife, but Paul alone seemed blissfully unaware; he was Paul the Artist now, the Cute Beatle and John’s Other Half slipping back.

“I only used it because it had the proper amount of syllables, McCartney. Mc-Cart-ney. ‘s gonna change, though, yeah.” He tipped his head towards Pete gravely, musingly; it would’ve been funny, given the inanity of it—the name of the goddamn priest—but instead John was seized with a sudden, savage opposition to having it as anything other than Father McCartney.

“Why change it?” he interjected, struggling to keep his voice calm from where it was, detached from him. “One name’s as good as another, isn’t it? Sounds better with it in.”

Paul looked over at him, brow still furrowed. “I don’t want people thinking it’s Da I’m singin’ about.”

“So let ‘em think that, ‘s not like it fucking matters.” His voice was low and insistent; his anger seared at the absence in Paul’s tone. Where the fuck did he get off? John shifted forward again, tense and wired, hands clenching and gaze boring into Paul’s face as he tried in vain to catch his eyes, hold them. But Paul had shaken his head vaguely and was already turning from him.

“I’ll just have a look through the phonebook later,” he said, mind already off in the rest of the song, fingers already, obsessively picking out the melody on his guitar. “Doesn’t matter, either, when he hasn’t got anything to do. Father McCartney, da da da dum da da da…”

“Have him writin’ a sermon,” Ringo said suddenly. John’s gaze whipped across to him and he had the good grace to look apologetic, shuffling in his chair awkwardly, but then he turned to Paul and continued anyway. “Y’know…” He flourished his arms a bit and proceeded to sing off key, Paul joining him midway through, “Father McCartney, writing a sermon…”

“….Writing a sermon…a sermon…the words of a sermon…Father McCartney, writing the words of a sermon…Ta, Rings…” Paul was delighted with the verse, John knew—he could see the telltale shine coming into his eyes, though he was sure Ringo couldn’t. But Ringo, all of the sudden a bloody poet, didn’t stop there:

“Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear,” he concluded.

John felt George stir beside him. “Bloody hell, a sermon?”

His voice belied his words though, all light and teasing with an undercurrent of interest. He stretched and readjusted the guitar on his lap, nodding at Ringo. John forced himself to keep from staring George down, he just fucking knew that the little throwaway comment was his way of weaseling into the songwriting now that he hadn’t snapped Ringo’s head off for doing it. As it was his eyes were trained on to Paul, painfully, couldn’t look away.

“Well, he’s a bloody priest, isn’t he?” Ringo retorted toothlessly. George and Paul chuckled and John forced a smile that felt twisted and unnatural. “What else ‘s he got to do? Sides darnin’ his socks and all that shit.”

“There you go,” George said and at Ringo’s splutter he persisted through a smile, “No, I’m serious. That’s another one then for you, Paul. ‘ere, let’s hear it—”

And then he was scooting towards Paul and he was off, running through it with him. And it was the three of them, working through a few more verses, George contributing the “look at all the lonely people,” Paul taking the lead, working through the song repeatedly as they crowed over their successes, less and less aware of John’s seeming disinterest. Less aware of John. At first, George and Ringo ignored him out of nerves, but not Paul. Paul had turned to him after a while, diplomatically (like, “George and Rings have got something in, so go on already, John”). He’d managed to offer up “the face in a jar” or something, speaking through the drone of anger and fuck knows; Paul heard the words but couldn’t hear him. And since then. Nothing. Paul—Paul hadn’t even looked at him in a fucking eternity.

By now Pete had joined in the fun; Father McCartney had become Father McKenzie by virtue of the phone book he’d hunted up (and fuck whoever they pinched the name from). The song had filled out, bit by bit, because Paul had fucking decided it would; filled out, except for the end. Ringo, whose brilliance had burned out after his first idea, suggested the two characters should wind up together. Which had the others taking the piss out of him, had Ringo taking the piss out of himself, but which turned Pete onto something else:

“’s a good idea, that,” he said.

“Come off it!” Paul scoffed through his laughter.

“No, ‘s good,” Pete persisted. “Only bring ‘em together too late.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Have Eleanor Rigby die or what have you, and then it’s Father McKenzie off to do ‘er funeral,” Pete explained.

“Good on, Pete!” Paul trilled.

And then Paul smiled his thanks before hunching over his guitar again and fiddling through Pete’s stroke of inspiration. And that sincere little quirk of his mouth ripped through John—that was HIS smile, the smile Paul’d give him when he proposed a clever chord change or came up with something good or somehow knew what Paul needed to hear.

His fury burst off inside him like a grenade; he shook from the effort to contain the blast, bits of heart clinging bloody to his too-tight ribs and brain up in smoke; to keep himself from shouting at Paul or smashing his guitar or just fucking hitting him, he didn’t know. For God’s sake, it was just a smile. But it wasn’t just a smile; it was something precious, a little part of Paul that was locked and filed under John, who has also swallowed the key—that was his. An affirmation of Lennon/McCartney (johnandpaul). To see it meant for someone else made him crazy, was like watching his wife get fucked by another man, Paul wasn’t his wife, but Paul was his—Paul was…He’d have given anything to look away, but his eyes zeroed in on Paul’s face; he waited, waited for eye contact, for Paul to realize what he’d done—and then Paul’s eyes flitted vaguely towards him before drifting away. And that was it. He went back to that fucking thing of Shotton’s. That was it.

And suddenly John hated the idea of that fucking priest doing that fucking woman’s funeral with an intensity beyond reason, hated it with everything that had been building up in him; it flashed up through him, he couldn’t keep it in anymore—

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever fuckin’ heard, Shotton,” John sneered. His voice was ugly and trembling with the effort to keep off shouting. Seemed oddly resonant to his ears in the sudden silence. He couldn’t bring himself to address Paul, somehow, couldn’t…

Paul froze at last. His face lifted towards John, his body tensing defiantly, imperceptibly, so slightly John was the only one who could tell.

“Oh, fuck off, John,” he said before Pete could reply. “If you think the song’s shit, just bloody well say so.”

John stared, staggered with disbelief sharp and raw. The idea that Paul could even think that he was sulking over the SONG, that he was ignorant of the shit he’d put him through, that he’d no idea that John’s gut was stuck through with razors and his heartbeat was choking him high in his throat—

“That’s not the fuckin’ point. The point is, that last fucking thing is shit—” His voice was rising now and he couldn’t control himself—

“Well, as you think the whole thing’s shit—”

“—some old bint getting buried, for fuck’s sake—”

“Maybe if you’d fucking come up with something yourself, John!” Paul snarled. The room was deadly silent, silent except for the wild pounding of his heart; he was vaguely aware they’d both stood up. Paul ran a hand through his hair fiercely and exhaled as it slipped gracefully back across his forehead. “What do YOU know about it?”

And that set John off, sent him fucking mad—the song was brilliant but it WAS shit, more of the same Paul shit, Paul off being Artist Paul and fucking Genius Paul and Paul McCartney—he was shaking violently, he took a cruel breath—he could barely think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t—fuck, couldn’t—

“It’s your same old fuckin’ granny shit!” John exploded, and then it all came tearing loose, his voice lowering and twisting spitefully. “I fucking know, PAUL. Here we’re a rock band and you’re off warbling away about some goddamn old biddy, and what—a fucking priest? That’s not fuckin’ rock ‘n roll, son, that’s shit, that’s fucking granny shit. And what’s worse is you don’t even fucking know it, do you? You probably fancy yourself a fuckin’ artist, like Groovy Bob and the lot you go round with. Well, let me tell you, Paul, that’s not you being artistic, that’s you going fucking soft.”

A deathly silence descended, but John didn’t care. Savage triumph filled him; Paul was finally, FINALLY looking at him, really looking at him for the first time all day, hell for the first time all week, all huge dark glistening eyes. He felt vicious satisfaction at the hurt he saw there for one supreme moment, gloried in his power over Paul. And then—

“I’ll just run it by you when I’m finished, shall I?” Paul said coolly, coldly, cold and distant and hard. His face was carved of marble as he looked at John and his eyes stared at him from a thousand miles further than John could ever reach on this earth.

They remained with John later, kept him company along with the bottle of rum without coke and God knows what else he’d had by now; the minute he’d finally gotten Pete the fuck out of his house he’d started drinking, noon till night and whatever the fuck time it was now. Cyn knew to steer clear of him when he was in a mood like this and Julian knew to steer clear of him period; he wanted to be left alone, and yet…She was his fucking wife, even his fucking wife didn’t couldn’t stand him like this. But then, she’d never really loved him for the real him, the jealous, ugly, insecure John Lennon hiding behind the cardboard Technicolor illusion everybody else saw. The John Lennon who broke his guitar over Pete’s head and beat Bob Wooler half to death, who got fucked up on pills and booze and marijuana and acid (the best) whenever he could, because life was so fucked up. Fucked him up. Only Paul had ever stayed by his side when all the masks were off, only Paul had ever loved John for John and only Paul could fuck him up worse than he could for himself.

Only Paul.

John took a deep slug of rum—been drinking straight from the bottle, started off that way—and slammed it down onto the piano top. He hacked from the burn; his elbow slipped and a discordant note jarred the silence. He’d wanted to tear up the whole fucking room that afternoon, to shred up the bits of song they’d been working out and put his foot through the bass Paul’d left. But then later he’d calmed down (gotten drunker) and the nasty wrench of guilt set in, so he’d morbidly gone back up, returned to the scene of the crime. Best place to revel in his agony.

Paul.

Because Paul didn’t love him the same way he used to, not now, now that they were the Beatles and he cared more about those four bastards than he did about John or himself. They weren’t just John and Paul now, not even John and Paul and sometimes George and Ringo, now they were Beatle John and Beatle Paul, Lennon and McCartney. When the fuck had it changed?—seemed so far away now.

When I was younger, so much younger than today. ⁴

John snorted bitterly and jerked the rum to his lips again. Alcohol flowed down his throat, raw and harsh and honest; he hefted the bottle, “Cheers to Lennon/McCartney,” before slamming it down again.

Fuck, could Paul even see what was happening to them? Could he even see JOHN anymore?

Not like John wished he saw him, could see him. Not the way John wished he could see Paul. He found himself staring at the large picture of them over on the cabinet, the lone photograph gracing the room. It was from last year already, but Paul’d changed so little that it could’ve been from the other day (from this afternoon). Fuck he was drunk, but it was as if Paul was really staring back at him, eyes dark with knowing. That was why he’d chosen that picture of the lot—Paul looked more real, somehow; he looked like his Paul, when it was just the two of them and John could count on him to just know. To just…

John’s eyes followed the curve of Paul’s jaw, the tilt of his head and the way it leaned close against his own face—

And then there was the sheer intimacy of it, sending his mind to places where he scarcely allowed it to go, but then it followed that no one could begin to control John Lennon’s mind, least of all John himself.

It had never struck John as strange that he would crave deeper intimacy with Paul, even when his desires bled into something dark and primal and sexual, had never occurred to him that Paul couldn’t feel it too (wouldn’t let it occur to him). There had been times when he, they slipped, a hand lingering too long or a look that said too much. That drunken kiss in the Top Ten’s back room and whatever the fuck would have happened if George hadn’t stumbled in, just pissed enough that they could laugh it off. Whatever the fuck would have happened. Fuck. Each time, he was left blinded by frustration, a moth singing itself trying to get closer to that white burning electric light—just the idea of it, of them together, turned him on like nothing else.

It was never enough but he’d learned to live with it, with the longing and the waiting and the pretending, because Paul would always come back to him—in some ways, at least, Paul would always be his.

Always.

John threw back another shot, then another.

But things had changed between them, had been changing for a long time; he wasn’t sure of the present, let alone the future, insecurities clawing up his gut as things got deeper and messier and impossible. He felt Paul pulling away from him, didn’t know how to call him back, couldn’t yank him back, and fuck, what was back? Paul had ripped into him like The Bomb going off, burnt him inside out, raged along his nerves and left the fire licking high in his mind. Couldn’t bottle up Hiroshima the way he’d done Stuart’s death, his mum’s death even. How in the fuck was he supposed to keep it in, hold it back, hide it?—When his insides were a nuclear wasteland, nowhere deeper he could go to freeze it all out. Paul. The ultimate feeling of his life. Paul. Paul. How the fuck was he supposed to keep himself from wanting something from it? Consummation, or just—just SOMETHING, for fuck’s…

Paul’s eyes, Paul’s smile, Paul laughing at something he said, the feel of him pressed subtly against him, the silk of his hair and his cold smooth cheek, a heartbeat in time and an image in black and white that would last forever.

FUCK.

He couldn’t do anything, just got angrier and angrier the more Paul seemed to be slipping away; just waited, with dread anticipation, subconsciously but on some level he knew it, he knew it, just waited for the day it would all boil over. Long before he’d realized what he was doing, how he was feeling, he’d begun to take it out on Paul. Paul, who was like a knife stuck in his chest, killing him but keeping him from bleeding out; Paul, who he could never step back from and see as anything else.

Paul got a house in London instead of the suburbs with the other three—with him—and John felt abandoned, left to rot in domesticity and daytime programming and the sickly technicolor underbelly of his brain.

Paul fell in (love) with Jane Asher and that arty crowd, Dunbar and that arsehole Fraser, and John was still struggling with it, struggling with his jealousy, even now, years later.

Paul wrote “Yesterday.”

Fucking hell. Fucking, fucking…

Granny shite.

John emptied the bottle and tossed the bottle away from bloodless fingers. He heard it clatter over in the corner somewhere, maybe it’d shattered, maybe not. Better if it did. He stared unseeingly in front of him.

He couldn’t remember the first time he’d heard “Yesterday” but he could see Paul sitting alone in the studio, perched on a stool with his guitar and voice and the look on George Martin’s face, the way Paul’s song pierced into him.

Without thinking about it, his hands descended to the keys; he sat still for a moment and then his finger slipped and the first note plunked out. Then the next. The melody seemed childlike in the dark, slow and disjointed as he picked it out, note by note.

Yesterday…Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away… ¹

Blackpool, a sudden memory. Christ, he hadn’t thought…

His fingers tripped over the keys and the song built up until he fumbled and then jammed down a chord that didn’t fit, didn’t fit into Paul’s beautiful, too perfect ballad.

Blackpool.

Paul was still pissed at him. He knew he shouldn’t have said what he’d said, but who could bloody well blame him? George for one was sick and tired of Paul strutting around as if he were Beethoven. It made no difference that he hadn’t added it to the set himself—it still came to Paul in the end, Paul who had composed the damn thing in the first place, Paul who had obsessed over it and agonized over it for months while the rest of them had to put up with it. Dick Lester had gone so far as threatening to have the piano moved off set if Paul didn’t give it a bloody rest; John might’ve been sympathetic back then, when the song was just a doodle called “Scrambled Eggs,” but since “Yesterday” came along he was getting fucking sick of it.

“So it’s ‘I Feel Fine,’ ‘I’m Down’—” Neil began, before John cut in—

“Featuring our own Little Macca!” He nodded at Paul, knew the Little Richard joke was fucking stupid but Christ, if they had to go over this again…

“Ta,” Paul said appreciatively. Neil glanced at him and then John.

“Well?” John blustered, putting on a posh accent as Neil sighed and his mouth twitched and the Beatles laughed around him. “Do carry on!”

“Then there’s ‘Act Naturally’—”

“That would be you, Mr. Starkey,” Paul intoned, picking up where John left off; Ringo grinned but Neil plowed on.

“And of course we’ll be finishing up with ‘Help!’ but first Paul’s up.” Neil paused, and then gave in to their mock quizzical looks, “For ‘Yesterday.’”

Ah, of course, John thought bitterly, biting back a sneer. “Are we getting Engelbert Humperdinck special for that, then?”

He was coming on too strong for teasing now, maybe, but Paul played along and if he played along...well, fuck it.

“I’ll be doing that one, John, I’m afraid. You see, I wrote it myself.”

“Really?” John said, affecting great surprise. Fuck it, fuck Paul. “Because I had no bloody idea until just now! Why didn’t you say something, Paul?”

“Oh, piss off,” Paul said, eyebrows furrowing slightly. John felt a surge of savage glee, knowing he was getting to him; he turned to George.

“Did you know it was Paul who wrote ‘Yesterday,’ George?”

“Why, no, John, I didn’t!” George replied; his delivery was stilted, perfect, but didn’t have the same edge. “Rings?”

Ringo shifted uneasily, glancing at Paul. “Come off it, lads,” he muttered, but that did nothing to deter John.

“I can’t believe you kept this to yourself for so long, Paul! How modest!”

“Amazing, really,” George deadpanned, breaking form to snigger. John almost let it go there, but Paul was looking so schoolteacherish, patronizingly disapproving and withdrawn from it, that he couldn’t resist one final, brutal dig.

“But then, it’s not much to be proud of, is it?”

George shut up mid laugh and Ringo muttered something about going to far, but John ignored them, sharp to the smell of blood. He felt a peculiar little smirk curling his lip as Paul blinked at him, wounded, before his face slipped into a bland mask. And then of all things he tried to reason with him, as if John was still having a bit of fun and it was time to cut it out.

“You know it’s down as Lennon/McCartney, John, not just McCartney, so it reflects on both of us—”

But John wasn’t having a bit of fun anymore.

“Yeah, well, maybe you should think of my end of it, then, the next time you stick us with one of your weepy fuckin’ granny songs.”

John stared at Paul sidelong, stomach knotting every time Paul leaned in to sing and then swung away. Sharing a mic with Paul was like a marriage bed; never gave it much thought until overnight the bloody Great Wall was built and the wife left a man cold, told him finally that he snored and his breath stank in the morning.

It was all wrong, now, he sensed more than knew, but he just fucking knew, that Paul was keeping away from him, that Paul didn’t want to be close to him. He’d been trying to catch Paul’s eye since the concert began, get around Paul’s tunnel vision and dead eyes. His bass throbbed low and steady as a heartbeat and his voice threaded sweetly through their harmonies, but it wasn’t the same, it was like Paul wasn’t there, left a perfect statue behind on automatic. John’d never felt isolated in their music before, never felt so alone singing their fucking words. Not their words, maybe; just Paul’s bits and John’s bits slapped in together.

He’d tried to draw Paul out with laughter, too, teasing him when he spoke to the audience and clowning around, but Paul’s mouth tightened business-like and dispensed with McCartney-charming the audience to get as far away from John as his smile already was.

John had been trying to catch his eye, to get him to laugh. To let him know that it was just a fucking joke, even if John was pretty sure himself that it wasn’t.

John felt a sharp stab of resentment.

Paul would’ve been in stitches over his jokes (it was ridiculously easy to get him laughing but John barely had to try), Paul would’ve been grinning over at him, alive and crazy with it as they tore through one song after another, Paul would’ve been fucking meeting his eyes right now, if it weren’t for “Yesterday” being stuck so far up his arse.

And maybe John wouldn’t have this feeling twisting up his gut.

“Where’s Paul?” Mal asked when he popped into the dressing room. John looked up moodily from his cigarette.

“The fuck should I know, son?”

Mal blinked at him in surprise, even more confused when George gave him a meaningful look from where he was sitting with Ringo.

“Well all right then,” he said blankly, and as he stepped fully into the room John saw that he was carrying Paul’s acoustic guitar. “I’ll just leave this ‘ere, I guess.”

He leaned the case against the wall and then left as quickly as possible. Silence trailed in his wake before Ringo spoke up.

“Where is Paul?” He sounded uncomfortable. No answer. Ringo cleared his throat slightly. “Show’s in half an hour,” he mumbled, reaching over to stub out his cigarette. George looked at him. Shrugged. Ringo straightened, sat for a minute, then stood up.

With a muttered, “Right, well, I’m off to find him,” he too disappeared. Now it was down to just John and George. John smoked in silence; it was a minute before he felt George’s eyes on him, sidelong and furtive.

“If anybody should know where Paul is, should be you,” he said suddenly. John glowered at him but George didn’t flinch. He was looking oddly tight in the face, and it took John a while to realize that was George angry with him.

“You shouldn’t have said it, John,” George continued. “That was low, even for you.”

John snorted and blew smoke through his nostrils. “He should learn to take a fucking joke,” he said finally.

George didn’t say another word, but John could sense the disapproval in his silence.

He wasn’t sure how he felt. He hadn’t meant t to be some big thing, just a little comment to take Paul down a size, bring him back to earth. Nasty, yeah, but not some horrible vendetta. But then Paul had to be such a fucking girl about it; he’d stood there defiantly for a few minutes after John had said it, mouth trembling and then tight and bitten, eyes huge endless tunnels into black. He’d even engaged in conversation with Neil, turned away from the other three as if they didn’t exist, before he’d excused himself to the loo. John couldn’t keep his eyes off the spectacle, much in the way he couldn’t keep his eyes off the gruesome cripples sometimes wheeled in to see them when they were on tour. Maybe it made him feel guilty, but could never really tell because the anger always took over, rescued him from any deeper feelings.

Fuck.

He was angry, but it was more than that. It was…he couldn’t even begin to think about it, fuck, maybe he just didn’t want to but in the end it was the same thing. He struggled with himself as he sat in the wings, in the dark, and the haunting melody cascaded over him; despite everything he found himself listening so hard his head ached, squinting at Paul’s lone figure. And fuck, he was so fucking angry, but something in the song—something in Paul’s voice, so sweet and poignant that John ached to heart it—something….

John’s chest tightened as his insides welled up heavy against gravity, and fuck, he couldn’t, he couldn’t…

He was jealous.

Not of the song, which was beautiful, but not his style—fuck, it was too fucking beautiful, and it was Paul’s; it was Paul, was beautiful like Paul. And it wasn’t his, wasn’t his and Paul’s, he couldn’t even pretend that somehow it was theirs. John would fuck it up, bruise it with dirty fingerprints and leave a thousand tiny fractures, if he touched it.

It was Paul, and it was the most beautiful song he’d written.

John felt like the little boy running back to his mother on the beach again, hugging her like she was solid and she wasn’t going to fuck him up and leave him herself; like she wasn’t always going to be buried quicksilver in his memory or six feet under John’s feet.

His spine crumpled in on itself and John couldn’t get up, couldn’t walk away anymore.

Tell me about it, Paul, John thought bitterly. John had been fucked up fearless, cocksure of himself. Paul’d taken whatever he’d give him, try to get him back twice as good; back there in his mind somewhere was a snapshot of Paul showing him “I Lost My Little Girl,” watching John with eyes narrowed against cheekbones flushed high with pink and lighting up like a Christmas tree at his approval. It had been just the two of them then, smoking tea in Paul’s dad’s pipe and picking out chords till their fingers bled and singing lyrics sickly sweet and dafter than shit. Just the two of them and the music they made.

But now those days were gone, so long gone motes of dust billowed up when John dragged them back up front and center, grit in his eyes and choked in his throat. Paul might have been a fat baby-faced schoolboy with a shabby guitar and something to prove then, but now he was a Beatle and the whole world was in love with him. They were older, knew each other in ways they hadn’t before and lost each other in a lot of others John was just finding out about now. Paul didn’t need John anymore, the way John still needed him and would always need him. And as that voice swept over him, lamenting a loss Paul didn’t feel, heartbreak had never seemed so lonely. Isolated. He’d figured it was messy and bloody and nobody got away clean and whole, that when people broke apart they broke together and at least they both had that. But here John was and there was Paul. And John was totally fucking alone as his heart broke little by little year by year and word by word.

There were other memories, other memories within that memory (giving Paul the fake bouquet, less fake than the zombie grin on his face, watching Paul snore against George’s shoulder in the car back to the hotel), details that meant fuck all burned brighter than neon signs into his skull. That meant fuck all because the damage was done, the end.

John went from hoping the rum bottle was smashed in a corner to wishing it were gripped tight and sweating in his hand, liquor sloshing against the glass as he twisted the cap off for the first time. So he opened another bottle, took a draught that didn’t burn fierce enough, and so another.

He had fucked things up bad that time, hurt Paul and hurt himself maybe as much as Paul had been hurting him that whole time. And yeah he’d hurt Paul, knew him well enough that he could tell even when they both tried so fucking hard not to let him. Had hit bone that time, maybe pierced into that soft sensitive part deeper inside Paul than John ever got except once or twice. And maybe if Paul would just let him in, show him everything inside him so raw and ugly and alien that John couldn’t think of anything more beautiful—

Because John would rip and claw at Paul until there was nothing left of them, of John or Paul or them, until he got at it, and he knew just how fucked up crazy and desperate that was, knew he’d bring them to the point where there was no going back and that maybe he’d leave them in too many pieces to stitch either of them back whole.

Right now that sounded pretty good.

The whiskey was a two ton weight crushing his skull and pressing his brain into a pancake until the tension broke and everything oozed out—the memories, the hurt and the pain and the regret, tragic like he was grieving for something that wasn’t dead, because fuck it was going to like everything else and bloodier than most.

“Paul,” John muttered, voice grating like gravel and broken beer bottles up his throat so that his eyes pricked in hot sympathy pain, tears. “Paul.”

“John?”

In a drunken dreaming haze he swung his head round, felt the blood rushing in his ears at the movement, taking a moment until his vision tunneled in on Cyn, eyes puffy and tired, the swell of her breast soft and indifferent under her saggy old nighty. His gut crashed to his toes in disappointment. He didn’t want curves and loose hair and motherhood, he wanted big doe eyes, black Irish eyes that stared into his soul but wouldn’t let him look back, wanted something he wanted so much he hated it, hated him and loved him and fuck fuck how had he ended up this drunk.

“Come to bed, dear,” she said, gently, and there was a hand in his, not so much strong as competent, sure. “You shouldn’t drink like this, you see how you get now.”

“Cyn?” John said dumbly, squinting up into her face, trying to put the features together so that it looked like the Cyn he’d fallen so hard and sweet for in art class. “Izzat you?”

“Who else would it be?” she replied, sounding brittle, but John had already turned away. Maybe Cyn-from-art-class was in there somewhere, but he wasn’t going to get his hands bloody over her. Save it for Paul…Paul. He could get bloody with Paul. Paul. John grimaced. Squeezed his eyes shut tight.

Who else would it be?

There was no reason Paul would be in his music room in Kenwood at half past three in the morning. Disappointment and tears unshed curdled acidic in his mouth.

“No one,” John said bitterly.

The next morning gouged into pupils like bright light surgery and sledgehammered his fragmented skull. Fuck fuck fuck. What had he done to himself?

It took a moment to confirm he was human and another to realize he was in bed, and then he rolled over onto his side, hugged his pillow against the nausea that rose up clammy in his gut and closing his eyes against the harsh bright yellow reality that burned his eyelids orange. No use. Reality always won. As did nausea, which was how he found himself kneeling before the porcelain god at fuck-knows o’clock in the morning.

He smelled stronger than death and upon inspection in the bathroom mirror looked a sight worse. Had to get clean, soap and scalding water and then fresh clothes.

Cyn had gone shopping, said the note pinned under the ugly old teapot in the kitchen; a brief picture snapped behind his eyes, Cyn with bags under her arms and bags under eyes. His eyelashes were crusty with sleep and his eyes were like two holes in his head, letting light in to fry his brain that buzzed and clanked like a dried up engine carcass. When he closed his eyes, the memory of yesterday seared his mind more brightly than toxic hungover sunshine.

His anger seared brighter still, pounding against its skeleton cage until his dry brittle bones rattled and his head shrunk further against his mind. He’d purged his body of alcohol and sunlight had purged him of his tears and tragedy, but nothing could purge last night from him so this was all he had left, this sickening sickly burning fury.

Paul had breached their songwriting partnership; McCartney had buggered Lennon well and good and there was a time when John could have kicked his stupid-pretty head in for it. Paul had spit in John’s face and Paul had turned his back on John and Paul had made it perfectly clear what he thought of John, that he didn’t think of John. But now Lennon would bloody himself, bring that gun to the knife fight, so that John wouldn’t have to and maybe later when Lennon and McCartney had finished each other off there would still be a johnandpaul to go back to.

A few hours later he had nothing but bits of paper scored and scratched out viciously and poison dripping from his pen and onto his fingers and his brain screwed up against his skull to keep them both together and four bags of fresh groceries in his kitchen.

He went into the studio two days later and saw Paul for the first time since. He’d arrived early and Paul had arrived earlier. At first he thought the Paul was some kind of flash acid vision because Paul’d suffered from chronic lateness his whole life and there was no cure, but the music swelling from the piano wasn’t something acid could dream up, was something only Paul could.

It took him a while longer to recognize “Eleanor Rigby.”

John was going to barge in, rude as all hell, but the splinter image of Paul from the half open door stopped him in his tracks. He looked perfect as ever but too perfect, too perfect for Paul, even, as distant from human as the face of the moon. Paul lived in his music (couldn’t live without it), and he should have been humming daftly along, smile soft but supple, resilient so long as the music kept playing. Not so…subdued, lifeless. Mechanical.

A curious feeling crept over John, almost like regret. Had he done this to Paul?

John slammed the door behind him and stomped on the creaking floorboard as he stepped into the room.

No worse than what he did to me.

The image played like grainy film in his mind’s eye when the lights were down and his pen was in hand, like fucking war footage, old women starving and bits of their grandkids strewn across the street and madmen living out their dream in black and white and grisly red, and everywhere hollows eyes staring back past the camera and straight at him.

Fucked with him so hard and he didn’t even know how. Paul wasn’t defenseless, he had everything, life so beautiful it was ugly, but that he could be dying inside and still want all this shit, that was what killed John too.

Because they’d always been in it together to the point where John couldn’t fucking breathe without him, but somewhere along the way the world had crushed them in so close there wasn’t enough oxygen for two people. John clawed Paul closer until they were the same person, to get them both free and easy and just fucking alive again, and Paul shoved him back harder and harder every time until John felt like they’d die together or live apart. And this time John wanted to shove back, so hard Paul’d end up across the universe from him with no way back again. Because John was sick of people leaving him. His mum, his dad, his uncle George, Stu, his mum again—Elvis, gone to seed; Cyn, well-mapped and no secret behind the sparkle in her eyes; Paul, swotty and indifferent and getting a little further with each push—

Because he couldn’t stand the pain of Paul gone for good, of Paul leaving him—the thought alone sent him out of his mind and into some mad frothing bombed out fiery pit of hell and left his body in a pile of ash—

With savage effort John turned his attention wholly to the page in front of him and called Lennon to the forefront—here could be proof for all the world to see that John had been the one to take the great big shit on the dream, to end it all, so there would be no doubt for anyone when this gloriously mad hellish ride reached its inevitable conclusion.

No doubt for Paul, either.

John threw his pen down in disgust after barely half an hour.

It was always hardest to lie to himself.

A week or so after their argument John couldn’t tell if Paul thought they were all right again because Paul was acting as though the row had never occurred. He might have been a little colder to John than before, but then it had been so long since they’d really talked that John felt pathetically unsure of what footing they were on. It was the ambiguity he despised more than anything else, that Paul could keep to himself so well and that without Paul John’s own compass was useless, due-northless. For himself, John knew that when it all came crashing down he’d hate him just as intensely as he’d loved him—he owed Paul and everything they’d been through nothing less.

The song was strewn across his desk in little bits of crumpled paper, an itch in his mind he couldn’t scratch but kept going after, fingernails raking along his brain. Of course this was where he’d have taken it to Paul and Paul would’ve put him out of his misery with a pen or a lighter. But nothing could make him break on this one, and there was no fucking putting him out of his misery, because his misery was the point.

Feelings curdled in a week, made everything a little less black and white and somehow mundane and day-to-day eclipsed apocalyptic until it all bled back to the same dull heartache and stationary anger he’d felt for half his life.

Rage would have been, should have been so easy to write, but John’s songs were nothing if not honest—if he was going to sing it he’d bloody well fucking feel it, he’d done his time with saccharine and stupid to get where he was now.

John’s songs were nothing if they weren’t written either though.

John missed Paul for Paul, too, and whatever the bullshit they’d always been able to look each other in the eye and see past it. Now…well, hell. Paul was the wildest craziest drug he’d ever been on and his tolerance for it stopped somewhere short of heaven, so it followed that the come down was straight from hell and shivved into every little moment. Getting stoned went flat without Paul’s shrill high giggles to snap his nerves with irritation. The news held no portent now that he wasn’t sculling for oddities to tell Paul later. People were fuckers and life was a drag. Music was shite.

He couldn’t say if Paul was suffering from John-withdrawal, didn’t think so. John twirled his pen, scowl twisting his mouth harsh and sour. Paul McCartney, Beatle of Wimpole Street and lately Cavendish, collector of fine art and dabbler in the avant-garde, prince of Swinging London with his very own princess, beautiful accomplished Miss Jane Asher—he was god of his own little world and spread his religion everywhere he went. Paul had it made but he was so fucking blind to bullshit, head stuck so far up his own ass he couldn’t even see himself anymore.

Couldn’t see the difference between back then and right now. Couldn’t see John.

You tell me that you’ve got everything you want, but you don’t get me, John mused, doodling. It dawned on him slow that he might have something there. He wrote it down, inspecting the line. You tell me that you’ve got everything you want…

Not a stroke of genius but it was a start and he’d settle for it.

It didn’t come easy but it fucking came and now it was in John’s head and flexing uncertain in his chest. It was no “Eleanor Rigby,” that much he knew. They weren’t in grammar school anymore, Paul teaching him chords John pretended he’d already known, afterwards. This was something—else, like a stab in the back or a punch in the face and John didn’t know which, just knew it would get in somewhere.

He’d worked out a limited melody, a rocker to give the words the raw honest edge he needed from them. Words that were bit poetry and babble metaphors, psychedelic rubbish that nobody spoke or understood as precisely as John; words that John felt gun-shy of because if he looked too hard they might tell him some ugly truth.

John’s brow furrowed as he agonized over his words.

Blah blah blah, your girlfriend thinks you’re cooking your brain every time you light up and that every time you take a trip you come back further away. Nasty cheap shots about Paul and Jane and their plastic-perfect relationship. About Paul the day-tripper, so full of his own shit whenever he got back and missing what’s right fucking there.

John shifted in his chair to ease the dull ache in his ass and read on.

John’s spine prickled and his eyes grew huge and bulbous, too big for his head; he felt like a voyeur looking in on himself, looking in the mirror and spying on some inner-John he didn’t recognize, too dark to and deep inside him to have ever known light. The song wasn’t Lennon, it was this fucker, this John, voice shredded desperate from just screaming to be heard.

John’d written, “I’ve been right this whole time, Paul, you arsehole, and by the time you realize it it’ll be too late for you”—but plain as day it read back, “When you stop burying yourself in all this shit and realize, I’ll be waiting and we can go back to being just johnandpaul.”

Only Paul could do this to him—no should no could no would, no choice because he was always going to fall back into this mess they’d made, trading bits and pieces of themselves until only vital organs and separate struggling wills were left—he’d say one thing, but he’d mean another—

“Yeah, well, maybe you should think of my end of it, then, the next time you stick us with one of your weepy fucking granny songs.”

don’t leave me paul, jesus christ just don’t fucking leave me. i need you. i love you. why don’t you need me anymore? why don’t you love me?

John stared at the paper. He had no thoughts, mind suspended alone in isolation as his ribs squeezed like an iron fist across his lungs and heart—he wanted to scream and rage and rant, reach inside himself and just fucking rip John out of him—

Stupid fucking bastard, can’t even write a song properly, can’t even say what you mean because you don’t know what you mean—pathetic—

What did he want to say? John bit down on his lip and tasted blood, thinking—

Thinking about whether he should show it to Paul.

He should have trusted Paul to make up his mind for him.

He showed up at Abbey Road a few days later to strains of “Eleanor Rigby” on piano and then Paul’s singing. It crumbled swiftly into the low murmur of conversation and John hung back in the hallway as George Martin spoke:

“You’ve discussed all this with Geoff, I presume?”

“No, I though it’d be better to talk to you about it first, because, y’know, the arrangement and all that stuff,” replied Paul, punctuated by the plunk of a few keys. After a moment he elaborated, the slow drifting cadence of Paul’s voice punching into John like sense memory. “I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but I can’t tell him what I want specifically when I’m not sure how it’s all going to work.”

“Well, what have you got in mind—some ideas, you said?” George asked patiently.

“It’s more a tonal thing—I’ve got this tone in my head, like really urgent and fraught and, fuck!” John sees the tense line of his fingers and the choppy gestures like he’s in the room with them, then the hand raking frustratedly through his hair. “—But I can’t really get into it until there’s something to get into. Do you see what I’m—?” There was another pause and Paul gives up his struggle to explain. “Or we could just leave off till I get the vocals done, which is what we’re supposed to be doing right now anyway, isn’t it.”

“Yes, of course,” George acquiesced, though it didn’t sound like he agreed excessively. “How do we get into these discussions?”

How did John get into listening at the door of his own damn studio?

Uncertainty pulsed in his gut but he went to the door and walked inside. Paul was seated at the piano, dressed immaculately and all in black. George Martin stood at his side, but looked up when he came in.

“John! You’re early.”

Paul’s eyes slid back into focus and turned up to his face. “’Lo, John.”

John couldn’t be arsed for all this good afternoon bullshit so he merely nodded, “Paul, Henry.”

“Have you seen Rings or George yet?” Paul asked, then clarified, so John would know he was being addressed, “John?”

John rankled at that. Paul had been doing it all week, say his name carefully when he was talking to him so John knew he was making every effort to be civil and knew that he’d better not wander off script.

“Why no, Paul, can’t say I have,” John said with even louder affectation, getting the most out of what he had open to him.

“Looks we’ll have time for another take then, George,” Paul said cheerfully, done with John, and stood up from the piano.

“And you’re quite sure you’ll need another one?”

John’s thoughts twitched in sympathy. George’d probably been cooped up all morning with good old Perfectionist Paul, rubbishing good take after good take and sitting through hours of more of the same. And when George Martin had had enough…

Paul either didn’t notice or didn’t give a fuck, “Just one more take, George,” but then, what else was new. Paul was anal about everything, had ears that picked up every twanged guitar and fumbled beat, and somehow the rest of them ended up bending over for it. It made John crazy—that was what made rock ‘n roll sing and spit in his veins and seethe fiery in his heart, the idea that it was fucking human, it wasn’t nice and pretty and wrapped up in a bow and nobody had to fucking pretend.

George allowed himself a thin, indulgent smile and met John’s eyes for a brief moment of acknowledgement, we’re in the foxhole together again, before ascending to the control room, and it was then that John realized what was about to happen, that he was about to hear the lyrics in full and see how that ended.

To see what Paul chose.

His insides roiled like a pit of snakes, spitting up venom until his heart seized up and there was nothing to do but wait. He watched through glass eyes as Paul slipped on his headphones and George got ready and then it was all systems go and John’s breath was a stitch in his chest.

Paul’s voice soared and sank, black and white until his voice was iron clad gray, forward, forward like a funeral dirge until the casket reached the hole in the ground and John’s stomach opened up as he approached the final verse.

Everything that had twisted up and fermented and tortured John welled up inside him like the levee broke, spiked up fierce and monstrous into his throat, a scream that was trying to find his voice; he turned back to Paul, not quite sure what he would do, but then he caught Paul staring at him and there was something in Paul’s eyes, his face—something that smashed that feeling back down into him and bristle his innards with a thousand tiny knives—

Cheeks flushed, eyes wide and flashing, a kaleidoscope of green and brown—glossy black hair falling gracefully across his forehead about perfectly arched brows—his soft, supple mouth, set firm—

He was beautiful.

And he was angry.

It thrilled him to look at Paul like this. His blood boiled and surged but his brain was cold because there was a connection there, and it was like the punch line John’d been waiting on tenterhooks to hear his whole life, that he wasn’t the only one who was mad and they were both crazier than they know what to do with. Paul’s eyes lingered for a second, caught out but meeting John’s steadily, letting him see, a minute, a lifetime, and then—

“Well, if you’re not satisfied with that one, Paul, I’m sure I won’t know what to do with you,” George Martin said over the control room mike.

The moment was broken.

“I could think of a few things,” John muttered, words leapfrogging out of his mouth. To do to either Paul or George, really, but Paul’s eyes narrowed and John followed the turn of his head and the scarlet creeping high up his cheekbones, embarrassed but still angry. John couldn’t look away; couldn’t let it pass, take his finger off that pulse however faint. He stood up, went up to Paul.

“You put it in,” he said after a beat.

Paul glanced over at him coolly, headphones half off. “Put what in?”

“You know bloody well what, son,” he said, half-gleeful in the glower that bruised his brow and the maddening calm of his mind.

“Piss off,” Paul sneered, coiling the wire up around the headset. “Got one track in that head of yours, just keep circling back when the rest of us could give a shit.”

He sounded carefully mild, fond almost, just short of contemptuous and that was just the way Paul liked it, an inch shy of the real fight but just as vicious.

John gritted his teeth. “I don’t see why you couldn’t just, you knew that I—”

“Christ, you just can’t leave well enough alone, can you?” Paul cried in irritation, flush deepening. He bit his lip, kept himself silent for a second before continuing in a lower voice. “It was best for the song, and you must know that too, so I don’t get why you’re being so—”

“Why didn’t you show it to me, then, Paul? After.”

Paul’s spine stiffened, imperceptible, but John saw him for a tightly coiled spring from the way he avoided John’s eyes and the tense set of his hands as he balanced the headphones on the microphone, the curl of his fists as he dropped his arms to his sides.

“I finished it fine on my own—you made yourself clear enough on what you thought, anyway.”

His voice quavered thinly against clamped-down resentment, but his eyes slid out of focus somewhere along John’s right shoulder. Sudden rage blew up inside him and he thought of going up there and just wrenching Paul’s chin around, eyeball to eyeball—

“Will you fucking look at me,” he hissed, Paul gave him a long sidelong glance from under his lashes before turning fully, mouth plucked petulantly and eyebrows knotted fierce as all hell. Just a shade of the expression Paul’d shown before, but it struck him a little bit like that again.

“What?”

“I’ve got something now,” John heard himself say, words out of his mouth before he had time to reconsider. In a blink Paul’s spine had screwed looser again and his fingers twitched open against his thighs.

“A song, you mean,” he said, ever-so-careful. They looked at each other and panic stabbed at John, prolonged and heady and slightly sick—oh God, what had he gone and done? One minute they were on the verge of making up or scrabbling back down from it in a tangled bloody heap, and now. Now he came in with this like they could just skip that part and fuck. What if Paul—?

John drew out the silence and scuffed his boot against the floor, feeling abruptly, hideously awkward when he realized he was going to have to say more.

“I want you to take a look at it,” he offered, feeling like he was from another planet watching this.

Paul hesitated.

“Are you sure—?”

“Don’t be daft,” John said, cold with the snowy rush of relief. “Tonight, after recording.”

Paul thought fast, pulling his bottom lip with his teeth. “I dunno. Jane’s got dinner planned—friends from the theatre—”

John’s organs sunk horribly until he’d have to scoop his kidneys out of his kneecaps and tried desperately to pretend to himself that Paul putting his girlfriend first was cool with him, with them. Paul considered him briefly before his face set, oddly resolute.

“Oh well, bugger the lot of them,” he said dismissively. “Only we’ll have to go to your place. Is that—?”

“It’s fine,” he said, organs buoying back up like balloons, and as if on cue, George and Ringo’s voices carried in from the hallway and the sound of booted feet grew closer.

Paul bit his lip and nodded, and it struck John all over again how strange and strained things had gotten between them, thought maybe the strain was a strain in itself. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d scheduled a writing session; usually they just sort of transpired at one point or another in John and Paul’s endless rollover of days together.

Paul nodded at him and John stepped forward to greet the lot of them, but was detained by Paul’s hand on his arm.

“John, I—” his face and voice were clouded by something John wanted so badly to name regret, but his expression cleared and his voice died as the others entered. “Nothing.”

“So, what have you got?”

Paul was seated across from John in the far corner of the Kenwood music room, legs folded under him like a schoolgirl. His fingers twisted and clenched on his sleeve, the tiniest crack in his arctic calm that John felt like pressing his eyeball up to, so maybe he could see if there was life underneath.

John was half in ecstasy half in agony as the thousands of reactions he’d imagined shifted before his eyes like vertigo, trying to settle and combine into the moment that had arrived not soon enough and way too fucking soon.

“I thought I’d read from a selection of poetry first, son,” he said, and never had he wished for Paul to laugh as pathetically as he did after that.

Paul curled a hand under his chin and scrunched his brows briefly, waiting him out.

“Maybe some Ginsberg,” John continued unheedingly, and desperation made him twist sharper into cruelty. “Really put the beat back in Beatles.”

Paul’s eyes flared dangerously and John was at the edge and this close to teetering off, an inch between him and flinging the old granny shite fallback back in Paul’s face. The truce would be ripped to shreds and Paul would freeze over quicker than the North Pole and John could slip back to quietly hating everything he loved about him.

“Just get on with it, John,” Paul said sharply, finally, a do-or-die order that in the end John couldn’t find it in him to refuse. Could never refuse Paul.

“Okay,” he said. Promptly rearranged the guitar in his lap. And made a great show of getting comfortable. And cleared his throat. And looked at Paul, who was watching him cold and reptilian. Real anxiety hooked huge talons in his heart and ripped, but confrontation—confrontation was Paul on his turf, and if it came to a fight he knew he could take it—take Paul—

He blistered through the intro and launched into the vocals, hoarse voice drawing strength from the diamond glint in the dark endless caves that were Paul’s eyes. Paul, who was ashen, drawing red to his lip where his teeth had sunk in and pressed rigid back against his chair against the sonic boom erupted between them.

Then suddenly the song was over and silence reigned heavier than air and tight as a steel drum. Long moments were lost between them, unnoticed.

“What did you think of it?” John said at last.

Paul cleared his throat, fingers picking at his cuff, some small part of Paul rebelling against his control. “’s a good song—great guitar riff.”

And abruptly his chest cavity was spitting fire that flecked molten white hot in his throat, singing words away and choking him with indignation and disbelief. His hands had been shaking this whole time, he realized; he clutched them against the solid wooden bulk of his guitar. How far did he have to go before Paul would come forward himself, give up all the bullshit?

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” he seethed, and he kept his voice low but his arms were rattling with it now too.

“Maybe I don’t know anymore, John,” Paul said and smiled, and there was the edge he’d gritted back from his voice, in the sharp serrated flash of his teeth and the way his eyes stayed cold. “And you don’t think I do, either, do you?”

That was so like Paul—passive aggressive, flowers in gun barrels, one minute letting John’s words crash over polished stone indifference, the next minute throwing them back into his face. His control snapped and the next minute his insides exploded with a woken fury that surged up his windpipe, turned his brain to ash and left his mind to ricochet about his skull—

From a very great distance Paul sighed. “Look, if there’s something you need help with—“

“It’s about you, Paul,” John spat, couldn’t recognize his voice in the scorched-raw half-human sound rising up from the carnage. “And you know it too, but that’s so fucking you, isn’t? Aw shucks plastic little princess fucking himself over, and that’s what this song is, so fucking Paul. But why don’t you just stop pretending for one bloody fucking second and say something real—”

“Like you, you mean?” Paul snapped, face bloodless because all the blood was there, lacerated and spat up in his voice as he laughed razorblades, and John felt a huge jolt of shock leap back bulging into his spinal cord. “Rotting away in Weybridge? Don’t hate me for having a life, man—only way you ever get out of here is on a fucking acid trip—”

“And you’re so afraid of your own fucking head you won’t even trip with ME! Yeah, THAT’S living, man!” John laughed jagged and crazy and he was so fucking out of control and Jesus fucking Christ he was alive in there after all. “You afraid you might see something up there that fucks you up? ‘Cos you know what Paul, there’s nothing that could fuck you up worse than you already did yourself, you and your little perfect fake fucking world and your fake fucking YOU—”

“You don’t fucking know me, John!” Paul shouted, and suddenly they were on their feet, faces rigid and pale with rage close enough to kiss and wide livid eyes staring into each other and John realized out of his skull and mad with pain that cascaded through him like a river of blood that this was Paul, that Paul had fucking snapped. “You—you fucking…” Paul’s eyes flashed and he stepped back, eyes of a man ready to kill or be killed. “God, if I had never met you.”

John didn’t realize he was broken till he tried to breathe and his twisted ribs stabbed thick into his lungs and his heart throbbed wildly, fit to burst in a tight cage of crushed bone and by then the last of his voice had exploded into the air.

“IF YOU’D NEVER MET ME YOU WOULDN’T BE BEATLE PAUL OR JUST FUCKING PAUL OR ANYBODY, PAUL, YOU WOULND’T BE YOU, YOU WOULDN’T BE ANYBODY WITHOUT ME!” John sobbed up a huge breath, felt like it was his last but then it all came out and his breath hitched fast and hysterical and his mind might have been gone but the words spilled out of him anyway, the last bits of him left inside, maybe. His eyes were dry but they were burning up in his head. “You, of all people…You don’t get to say that to me. TO FUCKING ME, PAUL!”

The silence was louder than his ruined voice. John came back to himself to find Paul small and pale and huge-eyed, ridiculously beautiful in the wreckage. Ridiculously beautiful when he wasn’t there to keep John together but had let him break till at last he’d broken Paul too.

“Why did you get the others in on ‘Eleanor Rigby’?”

Paul froze, stared at him with eyes that seemed no more than surface-deep, only as deep as John could get. “Is that what this is all about?"

John’s voice died in his throat; he felt like his mother had caught him dragging his crayon along her suitor’s jacket, smacking him but then coming to him amidst the bitterness of his tears and pulling him to her, enveloping him in her soft bosom, “Don’t want to share me, do you? Is that what this is about?” Like his mother hadn’t realized that running to his dad was a way of loving his mum too much and wanting her to come after him so bad he ended up going back after her.

His limbs weighed a thousand pounds, crushing him back into his chair.

“John, I…” Paul began, understanding pulling his soft rosebud mouth taut as his jaw hardened. “John…? I hadn’t thought…God, I didn’t mean it like that, not like that.”

Paul considered him cautiously, the only warning before his arms slipped heavily around John’s shoulders, his cheek pressed smooth and warm against John’s as he looked unseeingly over his shoulder. John felt Paul apologize, wasn’t sure if he wanted to. But it felt too good, having Paul so close, a chink in his anger and hurt.

“Where the fuck are you, Paul?” he asked brokenly. “Where did you go?"

The arms around him tightened. “I’m right here, John.” Soft and earnest with understanding, because after everything Paul still got him.

Golden warmth seeped through John, filling his chest and healing the disaster zone he’d created till everything smoothed back normal. He reached up and put his arms around Paul, dragged him careful down against him until Paul was more or less straddling John’s knee and crushed awkward and bony up against him. It was strange that someone who would be the death of John, who could squeeze his heart till it burst into a bloody mess or bend his mind back so far he didn’t snap, just broke down and died, could be delicate flesh and blood same as him, soft and solid and so very warm, pressed close to his chest. John buried his face into the crook of Paul’s neck and breathed deeply. Paul hummed small and low before lowering his head to John’s shoulder, fingers digging in against the knobs of John’s spine.

There was a moment long and restful that neither of them wanted to end. Both fought hard not to make a move; John’s leg fell asleep under Paul’s weight and then Paul shifted with a grunt.

“John,” Paul murmured against him. “John, I’m sorry I…I just, I didn’t want…”

“I know, Paul,” he said heavily, rubbing a hand down Paul’s back, had never spoke truer words.

“John?”

He couldn’t help the smile that curled slow and secret against Paul’s neck or the way it lingered in his voice. “Yeah?”

“How long has it been like this for us?”

Couldn’t help it when the smile faded a little slower than it should have against the sinking stone of his stomach. “Who the fuck knows, Paul."

“Because I…sometimes I…” Paul laughed jaggedly, shook his head so that his nose bumped against John’s collarbone. John lifted one hand to Paul’s hair, watched fascinated as the silky black locks slipped through his fingers. Paul bit off his laugh, sighed long and hard and tired, all old man on the inside. “Fuck, sometimes I don’t even know who we are anymore.”

John closed his eyes, Paul’s hair tickling his nostrils as his lips grazed the silken skin of his neck. He felt closer than they’d been in weeks, months even, a lifetime or two in bullshit. He could taste Paul’s steady heartbeat and felt Paul’s hot breath on his neck and that told him he was alive, they both were alive.

Unbidden an image arose in John’s mind of them naked together—of Paul naked with him, soft smooth creamy skin thicker than life could get at and fine bones keeping him whole inside. He bit down on his lip and opened his eyes.

Another minute passed quietly before Paul spoke again.

“John?"

“What, Paul?"

He was half annoyed half amused.

“My bum hurts—could you…?”

“Christ, Paul, just let us have this…”

He released Paul even as he said it. Paul straightened awkwardly, face flushed but eyes still sincere. John felt the distance between them lengthening; he wanted to call Paul back but he was already too far gone to come back, chances were too good.

Paul dragged his chair over so that it was right next to John’s and bent to pick up the guitar that had crashed from John’s lap. As he sat down, his thigh pressed along John’s

“Let’s play something,” he suggested gently, and John felt the full force of his shame now, skulking back and keeping him guessing while Paul was tight against him, heart to heart, but now.

But now.

“Y’mean you still want to—?”

“No,” Paul interjected quickly, then seemed to think better of it. “We could, I mean—but I was thinking we could do some Elvis, you know, that kind of thing.”

The idea was abstractly attractive, a pastel picture of nostalgia and scenes from the past they’d always share. He knocked Paul’s knee with his own as he picked up another guitar. Paul barked with laughter, short and exuberant, and when John straightened to face him he was smiling, expectant, grasping his guitar comfortable as an old friend.

John felt the corners of his mouth tug up.

“Be-Bop-A-Lula, then,” he determined, watched breath caught as Paul’s smile faded into just a little wistful winsome quirk of his lips until Paul cocked his head and poked him hard in the side.

“What’s the matter, John? Forget the words, did you?”

The smile widened teasingly.

“Yeah, might’ve,” he said. “But piss off, they’ll come to me. Well?”

Paul laughed and nudged John’s knee with his own again.

“All right,” he said.

“Okay,” John said, realized they were both waiting for the other to start. He looked to Paul to count them in, who held out till John dug his knee back into Paul’s harder.

“All right,” Paul said again, and the moment hung still between them, waiting for his word. “A one—two—three—four—”

John welcomed the music of their childhood, the music that had brought him and Paul together and wound them up so tight and crazy together that it was the only thing in the world that could tear them apart, that craziness. It felt better with the past stretched out in front of them, vibrant between them, the present a vague memory and the future twisted up hideous at their backs.

He hadn’t forgotten the words.

John tried so hard to make it be enough.

Even when he knew it could never be.