Work Text:
I. in times beyond our heartbeat
In the beginning, Paul remembers rhythm.
Even in the scattered slips of memory he has of his earliest years, fuzzy snapshots and broken bits of dialogue lazing around the corners of his mind, he could recall his formative years as a disjointed rhythm he kept against his knee or a desk. Life was a constant beat that his fingertips danced to across counters and cabinets, causing his mother to smile, his father to frown, and other family and friends to stare at in puzzlement (Or sometimes laugh at in wonder or amusement). It was steady, it was weak, it was loud or soft or imperceptible to anyone but him depending on his mood or flight of fancy. But whatever it was, wherever or whenever it was, it was as constant and life-defining to him as the pulse beat of his heart.
He was waiting, he had known that even then. The thing he was waiting for though, well, it turned out that thing was something he could never have fathomed at such a young and tender age. As it turned out, he would be hard-pressed to understand it even when he had found it.
II. those melodies come back to me
If John hadn’t been real, he wouldn’t have been someone Paul dared to create. Here was a boy who shared Paul’s love of the unity of melody and word. At that time, Paul still hadn’t quite figured out what to do with his obsession. John’s cocksure demeanor had seemed endless and beautiful, and Paul had believed in John fully with the foolishness and innocence of youth, and had looked to John to create something exquisite and brilliant out of the chaotic beat of his life.
It took him years to figure out John’s mind was a chaos all of it’s own, and by that time it didn’t matter anyway, because Paul didn’t have a hand to tell him which way was up, which way was light, and it was easier to stay sequestered in John’s world then to find his own way out.
III. but you said anytime of the day was fine
The physical extension of their relationship had always seemed but an arm’s reach away, sometimes not even that, and so close that neither dared breath or the moment would collapse under them. But one day when Paul inevitably felt John’s hand on his hip, it was with shaking relief that he finally turned and kiss his friend.
Later, his head against John’s chest, he strangely felt no fear, no worry or trepidation. Writing together had already stripped away all pretense, laid their souls bare to each other, and nothing they could do physically could scare him more than that.
Paul turned 21 that June. There was happiness ahead of him to be sure, family and success and global recognition, but he couldn’t see any of it from where he was, and he couldn’t fathom that he could ever be as happy and carefree as he was in that moment.
IV. it's not like we were best friends
Things did change though. The thing was, sometimes when you’re dead eye in the center of something you don’t realize it until the storm has died down and all that’s left to do is count the casualties and assess the damage.
Physically, things remained perfect, a bubble that seemed to envelope everything else at times, shielding Paul from the harsh reality of just how fucked up things were. It wasn’t until much later that Paul could see how that one seemingly infinitesimal point in time had changed everything, how John’s lips on his sealed their fate, had mapped out everything that was to come.
John proved nothing but scornful and unwavering in his final opinions on The Everything of Life and Their Relationship, jumping ship with the same gusto and fuck-all attitude that he had began everything with, and Paul found that even he couldn’t find it in himself to care about much of anything anymore.