The Reality of the Situation (May Not Be So Bad)
Title: The Reality of the Situation (May Not Be So Bad)
Pairing: George/Ringo, Paul/George, John/Paul
Rating: PG13
Summary: John tries to warn Ringo that playing may not be the best way to deal with his situation.
Author notes: Yeah, it's me dashall , but I'm gonna be using this account for a couple months. Thanks to alsolexiwashere , larainefan , hannahkp93 , and tssktssktssk for encouraging me to write a sequel. I love you guys!
Disclaimer: Completely fictional, do not own The Beatles.
Part 1
Ringo could hear them through the walls, from the walls, and in the walls. The gentle thud. thud, thud and the squeak! squeak! and the grunts, of course, but the walls did all they could to at least mask those. It didn’t take many nights for Ringo to catch on that George was the louder one, and in a way that made it easier. It made it easier to play if he only heard George’s cries of pleasure and if Ringo could insert his own sounds using his mouth and his practiced fingers.
Ringo couldn’t wank here, not with John sleeping on the adjacent bed. But he could still play. He could imagine it was him who was eliciting those sounds from between George’s lips and him who was touching George in places only he knew George liked and licking up his neck and stroking the back of his head-
“They’ve been at it for hours, it seems,” John mumbled.
Ringo turned to the newly awakened John and said, “Oh. Yeah.”
“Kind of distracting, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.”
John cracked one eye open, took in Ringo’s alert eyes, and said, “Shit, Rings, have you been awake this whole time?”
“No,” Ringo lied. And John opened his other eye and stared at him because Ringo was a shit liar and John was a brilliant lie detector.
Then suddenly John sat up, fully awake, and gasped, “You’re playing!”
“I’m what?”
“You’re playing! You’re pretending you’re over there having fun with George and Paul!”
“Not George and Paul,” Ringo said before he could stop himself.
John looked at Ringo for a second before he got up and padded over to Ringo’s bed. Ringo scooted over for John to comfortably seat himself criss-cross-apple-sauce upon the thick cloud of blanket.
“You need to stop that,” John commanded.
“Stop what?”
“Playing. I’ve been there before, you know. You need to stop.”
Ringo frowned. “Been there before? With whom?”
“What do you mean, ‘with whom’?” John snapped. “With Paul, of course.”
Ringo blinked and mumbled, “I’m sorry, I hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh sure, little Richard hiding behind his bloody drum kit,” John sneered, “Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, much less to your best mates.”
“Oh, lay off, will you?” Ringo sulked.
A bed post knocked noisily against the wall in front of them. John paused and then repeated, “You’ve gotta stop it, Ringo.”
“Why?” Ringo asked.
“Because-” John sighed. He gave Ringo a look and said matter-of-factly, “Look, it’s nice, innit? Pretending you’re the one holding George and telling him he’s beautiful?”
Ringo rebutted, “Well, I wouldn’t say nice exactly-”
“Yeah, well,” John interrupted. He shifted closer to Ringo and leaned in so that their noses were inches apart and said in a low voice, “What happens when you’re this close? Or when you’re alone and he smiles at you?” John leaned in closer still and touched his lips to Ringo’s ear. “Or when you’re at a loud party and you have to be this close in order to hear each other?”
Ringo shuddered at John’s light breath teasing his ear, and immediately his mind bombarded his eyesight with images of George and his goofy crooked smile, stumbling over to him with a glass in his hand and tripping over absolutely nothing except for maybe poor judgement and falling forward into Ringo and holding out his hand onto Ringo’s hip to steady himself and whispering, “Whoops, sorry, love,” into Ringo’s ear. But was that a dream or a distant memory?
John moved back to a comfortable distance and fumbled for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. He lazily lit a cigarette and explained, “You’ll start to get dream mixed with reality,” He noticed Ringo’s lost expression and added, “If you haven’t already. It messes with your head, and at the end of it all, you’re even more lost than when you started.”
John paused and muttered, “Departed,” and then, with a ghost of a smile, “Uncharted.” And then John howled a laugh and yelped, “Richard, get me my notebook! I’ve got a song idea coursing through my veins!”
“You’re a swine, Lennon, get it yourself.” Ringo chuckled despite himself and his current emotional toil.
John dismissed the potential song, as developing it involved getting up from the comfy confines of the bed, and he settled for whispering words and rhymes in between thoughtful puffs of the cigarette.
Eventually, John crushed the cigarette against the bedside ashtray, looked at Ringo, and pressed, “Seriously, Ritchie, you’ve got to let it go. Paul and George have a lovely-” Ringo didn’t miss the way he spat out that word, “-thing going on there, and we don’t want to screw that up. They’re happy-bleeding ecstatic-and I’ll fuck myself before I let anyone get in the way of their happiness. We’ve just got to accept it and move on, Rings.”
Ringo stared at John, and when John finally trudged back to his bed, he instead stared at the blank, white wall. The noise behind it had stopped a while ago; it was now silent on the other side save for a few murmured words every so often.
As he listened to John’s quiet breathing, Ringo wondered how he was supposed to move on when his feet couldn’t seem to touch the ground.
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The next night Ringo found himself at a party with an atmosphere so thick with alcohol that he felt tipsy simply by being there. Ringo got up from the couch and watched as Paul flirted with some bird and John played some ridiculous drinking game with a couple lads.
“Hey, Ringo!”
Ringo turned just in time to catch an armful of George, who dropped a fizzing beer can to the littered floor.
George murmured against Ringo’s neck, “Sorry about that, love.”
Ringo’s skin tingled and he swallowed hard, and his mind chucked at him a warning sense of déjà vu and half-hearted consciousness as he gently held onto George’s shoulders and pushed him slightly away and mumbled, “No worries, mate, I’m always looking out for you.”
George gripped Ringo’s shoulders and leaned in and said, with red all around his eyes, “I love you, Rings. You know that?”
Ringo stared and then immediately glanced at John, who was glaring and pleading with his eyes from across the room. But Ringo felt the hands on his body and heard George slur, “I love you, Rings,” over and over in his head-
Ringo turned back to George and held his face with his clammy drummer hands and said, looking straight into George’s dark, dark eyes, “I do, George. I love you, too. Let’s get you to bed, eh?”
George grinned and let Ringo curl his fingers around his hand and lead him away. Ringo moved forward and didn’t look back at a disappointed John.
Because, Ringo thought, maybe he could play for just a little longer.