Work Text:
1.
He fell in love, first, with a redhead. This he and the history books look back on with a shrug, as though to say, oh, well, you know—in such a grating lilt—it was only puppy love. Puppy love, and you were young. There’s a retrospective disdain that comes with age, that comes with emerging from the thick sweet fog that was the sixties, that were his twenties, and he’s guilty of disdain, always has been. Still. They were young but it was more than that, really, though he can’t quite remember it right. Neither can the papers.
She was young but she was also smart, talented, had hair that lit up like fire in the sun, vibrant orange and flyaway strands that made her look absolutely mad. That ever calm, ever composed expression of her soft-edged face coupled with that mad, mad hair—at times it made her extraordinary.
And of course she complained; of course. At picnics and the like. “Impossible to be taken seriously when my hair can’t even keep itself from making off every which way.” But he liked it, really, and he tucked it behind her ears, and he kissed her between the eyes. Her skin was smooth.
She was such a posh girl. Such a pretty one.
2.
He romanticizes a lot of things—too many, he’s been told. (Repeatedly. By certain people. Never mind.) Something in him still has his eyes stuck wide-open for fancy theatre, for movie stars like magazine polish right in front of him on the red carpet, for posh art dealt by a thin modern hand. And New York City. He romanticizes that.
Linda says: “It isn’t all that great, really,” and Paul wants to believe her, Paul McCartney so wants to believe her. Still. There’s this part of him he’s gotten less and less good at choking down since he met her, this part that’s still a midwife’s son from Liverpool, still wants to see the lights over Broadway, city skylines yellow and red and white like cut-outs on the night sky. It’s all part of her—it’s in her the way Liverpool is in him, and she makes it beautiful.
Linda says: “You've been there, anyway, Paul. You’ve seen it.”
He doesn't say it, but he thinks it. That he wants her to show it to him like for the first time.
3.
Paul fell in love with the Beatles when he was nineteen years old, in the sweat and the dirt and the grind with scars on his hands and hecklers and whores and the mud, all the mud in Hamburg. He hated it, and he hated it, and he hated it, and then he didn’t, because he was in love. And he didn’t hate it, really. Not at all.
John says, in a quiet moment: “You said you fell in love with the Beatles when we were in Hamburg.” He is bent over a sheet of paper on a low glass table in the studio, legs splayed out in front of him like a child. He’s scribbling with a half-broken pencil, round-headed doodles and made-up words, and Paul would call it utter nonsense if it were anyone but John. (Paul had said, just before they recorded it, I pick a moon-dog, that's nice, and it was a peace offering, sort of, for a fight before; and John, It’s utter bollocks, really, though. But he is the only one who says so.)
Paul’d said the thing about Hamburg out loud only once, a long time ago. Indirectly, in a crowded backroom or an interview or some such. Surprised at John’s remembrance.
“Yeah,” he answers, baffled. “It was a great time in Hamburg, we were shaking, we were moving... we were really becoming something.” And John’s in a good mood, or at the very least he seems to be, so he slips into the sentimental this time, “We were becoming the Beatles then. I’d’ve been about nineteen.”
John’s always quick with his answer, doesn’t look up. “We were the Beatles when you were fifteen, son.”
And Paul on the defensive (it’s more reflex, now, than anything) “We were the Quarrymen.”
John finishes something, caps it off with a big swoosh of his pencil, and stares for a moment at his finished work. Paul can’t see it from here. Has no idea what it is. “I was sixteen,” he says, which means nothing, really. It must.
Later, he is screaming:
“... isn’t about you, isn’t about me, I’m not—I’m not fucking thinking of me, I’m only fucking thinking of the band—”
“The band, the band,” —John waves his hand, quick swipe of red, and takes off his glasses. His eyes narrow to slits, his voice lowers. “Would you stop fucking pretending this is about the band, Paul,” which means nothing, really, nothing at all. He puts his glasses back on. They yell some more, uncomfortably conscious of the act of falling apart. They are hardly even thirty years old, and at some indistinguishable point along the road that started at twenty and ends here this band started to break and it broke and it’s breaking now and it will keep breaking until it’s broken. This is true in most ways, except:
Paul fell in love with the Beatles when he was fifteen years old. Just fifteen.