Work Text:
ONE.
Paul’s hands, John always said, paint pictures while he’s talking. These are the kind that swing and sway, curl through the air in front of him like they’re asking you to answer—“Your mouth’s got competition, son,” John’d say, and Paul would blush bright red and John would cackle uncontrollably, his fingers on strings but his eyes on Paul. Paul’s got beautiful hands. (Or maybe John didn’t put it so nicely. No. Probably not.)
When Paul settles down next to him on the bus, he starts talking with his hands—the hands say he’s got this friend of his, Georgie, who’s in this little old band, who plays guitar not too bad and likes to listen to Elvis when he comes on the radio and has Carl Perkins on vinyl. George’s eyes trail after Paul’s hands, and he keeps forgetting to make eye contact, keeps forgetting it’s the words and not the hands that are telling him this story. He’s just a boy. He’s a little bit in awe of a lot of things, and one of them is Paul.
And for the record, the proverbial one, he was fourteen. He was young and hardly knew how anything worked yet, and so there were a few moments, yes, all right, where he thought (Paul’s fingers sliding up the neck of a guitar, Paul’s palms painting pictures in the sky): I wonder what he can do with those hands. Just a few.
TWO.
Pattie, he realizes, is like a girl straight out of the pages of a glossy magazine, curled blonde hair in waves and big almond eyes and a small mouth, tin smile. She’s The Beautiful People, is Pattie. He’d never assume she would want him at all. He’d assume, and he did assume, if he is being honest, which he is, that she had her sights set immovably on Paul.
On the set of their first film she sidles up close to him, her stomach pressing into his side, her fingertips light at the nape of his neck, her breath hot so close to his ear, and she whispers, “I like imperfect things,” and smiles at him. There’s a gap between her two front teeth.
THREE.
The first words John ever said about him, cold in the chill airy backroom of some club, were he’s just a kid. Not even to him—just directed at everyone there in the room who had ears, ciggie gritted tight between his teeth and guitar slung low around his neck. George clung tight to his own guitar, felt the comforting shape of it in his grip, felt his stomach lurch in fear as he geared himself up to say, “But Paul’s not even that much older, inne?” And he glanced, wide-eyed, at Paul, who remained impassive, throwing together cold chords in the corner. George looked down.
“Yeah, but Paul’s…” John said, looking over at Paul on the couch as a smile, a sort of smirk tugged up on his lips, the cigarette tilting upward in his mouth. Paul looked up as if by instinct and stared innocently from John to George, back, back again. John was looking at him with that devilish near-grin on his face, either not conscious of it or painfully so, but grinning all the same, and Paul was playing Switzerland, Mister Fucking Neutral pretending not to notice while he looked down again, Paul, he looked down again at his guitar and as he ducked his head there was just this smile, this tiny little quirk of one corner of his lips that was entirely, wholeheartedly involuntary. John grinned a minute longer, sideways sly, and looked away.
And the thing is, the stupidest part of it all is John never even finished that sentence.
That’s why it’s no surprise, really, no, it’s no surprise the pang of ice-cold joy, the guilty glow of what John calls schadenfreude itching at the back of his mind when he’s on a trip with John and John leans over whispering, “Can you believe Paul, the fucker…can you believe he won’t even try it once with me?” And sometimes, “Not you, Geo,” the best of all.
And Paul’s face later when John inevitably brings it up. He isn’t talking with his hands, then. The hands stay silent.
FOUR.
Eric says before he met George he used to hear him on the radio, used to turn up the volume on all his solos, listen to them on repeat over and over and over again like Beethoven in Buckingham Palace on a Saturday morning. Eric says this months in like it’s nothing, little smirk, little joke on the hand-off of a joint. George laughs, says truthfully that he did the same for him.
The first time he meets him, Eric shakes his hand, cigarette between his teeth, scruffy beard at his chin, and his hand rough and calloused in his grip.
“You’re good, kid. I hope you know that,” Eric says (even though he’s younger, so the thing, the kid thing never really made sense. Eric never really cared). He lets go of his hand, still nodding. “You’re really fucking good.”
It’s only later, as George is standing up to leave, shaking all the hands again, turning over his shoulder, that Eric grabs his wrist and turns him around. “Scratch that,” he says, and despite hours and hours of conversation, small talk, up and coming, Hare Krishna, George knows immediately what he’s talking about. “I hope they know that.”
FIVE.
It was sometime pretty close to when Ringo first joined the band, George remembers, that he leaned back into the seat of a sofa, popped a cigarette in his mouth and eyed George critically for a moment or two.
He leaned forward then. “So,” he whispered, conspiratorial. “D’you ever get in the middle of one of the marrieds’ quarrels, then?”
And George, “The what?”
“The marrieds, son,” Ringo repeated like it was obvious, motioning oddly with his hand. “Your John and Paul.”
“I—” George started, flabbergasted. “I—no. I don’t.” He tilted his head to one side. Tried not to smile. “I’ve just, I’ve never called them that before, like. Never.”
“Well,” said Ringo, letting out a sigh of breath and smoke as he suavely offered George a fag. “We ought to.” We.
He leaned sideways, his shoulder pressing into George’s, his face crowding George’s space, and he brought out his lighter, meticulously lit up the end of George’s ciggie and sighed, leaning back again. His shoulder was still touching George. He turned his head, surveying. “I don’t know how you’ve lasted this long without me,” he said, and George laughed suddenly, caught off-guard.
“Yeah,” he said, grinning back. “Me neither.”