Seaside (John's Disappearing Act) [s/a]
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: John/Paul
Disclaimer: Fake fake fake.
Summary: “I guess I just wanna see if even a Beatle could be subject to a mouthful of concrete.”
John scoffed, tousling his hair to make his eyes seems more wild as he said, “How much of L.A have we seen, he asks,” in much the disbelieving tone of voice. “How much? How little would be a more valid bloody question. Or how about ‘What haven’t we seen?'”
Ritchie responded rather jaded, though, shutting the hotel door behind the Fabmost Foursome, primal instinct causing him to light a cigarette as soon as he passed the threshold, “Now how would that make the question any less infuriating to answer, John?”
“Because,” John said, as if the question was hardly a genuine question at all, “Saying ‘everything’ would be a lot better than having to say ‘absolutely nothing’.”
“You really don’t make sense sometimes, John.” Ritchie stated; it was a matter-of-fact tone of voice, the one that made John think he was staring right into a mirror sometimes. The latter made his way dejectedly to his room, without first spinning a,
“Aye, but that’s what attracted you to me in the first place,” behind him.
Ritchie rolled his eyes. John shut the door, and George and Paul collaborated on something that John saw (without actually seeing, of course) as rather trivial and utterly pointless.
*
John had taken recently to the habit of looking into an object or events’ symbolic meaning, rather than being satisfied solely with the literal.
“The literal,” he argued with himself (he and himself very seldom got along, what with the ongoing internal warfare), “is the enemy.”
“How so?”
“Well, it’s a lyin’, cheatin’, booze hound bastard, innit? Fuck reality, mate, everything is only a symbol of something, and you just have to find out what that symbol really represents.”
And so on.
So when John closed the door to his very literal room, that very literal room was soon yet another cage in which John had been locked into, and the tie around his neck slowly but surely became a chain, greatly hindering John’s chances of flight (he was a bird in his mind, birds were rather free, right?).
Claustrophobic, that’s what John was. Without even a window, he sat in his room, reflecting upon his phobia. Small spaces. Crowded rooms with too much heat, too much pressure, too much screaming. All the clapping and the laughter and the high pitched ungodly noises and people, oh the people, more than he never imagined seeing. They closed in on him like the crushing wave of an ocean, and all he could do was stare it in the face and answer its’ questions as it engulfed him in what’s commonly known as ‘fame’.
Sometimes he couldn’t fucking stand the concept of it, the thing that made four Teddy boys from Liddypol so goddamned special that you had to force them into suits and make them dance. Mimi didn’t like it either, but that was simply a whole other story on its’ own.
Fame; John’s fame was like a double edged sword, sawing off his wings and forcing his tired song from a sore throat, although he felt sometimes that it made him invincible; fame was his armor as well as his ball and chain, and he would weigh the pros and cons of each until he wasn’t even human anymore. John often devoted all of his humanly resources and exports to the cause of the war inside of his head, although, no one could ever see it past the glint in his eye and the spring in his step.
“Lennon?”
And it was only after John’s eyes opened at the fault of Paul’s abrupt knocking that he was aware of the fact that he closed his eyes in the first place. Sleep was symbolic of dreaming of a way out.
“This’d better be worth you waking me the fuck up, McCartney.”
“Unlock the bloody door, John.” John unscrewed the noose from around his neck and felt air through his lungs (air, real air, there will never be enough of it) as he heard Paul fume like a kettle on the other side of the door. Rather than keeping up a tedious banter, though, John was so taken aback by his breathing that he unlocked the door without another word.
When John swung open the gate, Paul was revealed to him with eyebrows raised and a suspicious look around the room.
“Not even a ‘fuck you’?” He asked John with mild surprise (because John found that he had quite the reputation for an unnecessarily foul mouth), and to that, John very promptly did reply with a ‘fuck you, McCartney’. Paul seemed relieved. John gave him the finger while his back was turned, still quite bitter from the intrusion of Mighty McCartney into his dark pool of thoughts.
There were times that John rather disliked his best friend (although how good of friends could they really be with John feeling so very disconnected?) solely for the fact that Mighty Mean McCartney was far better at making masks than Jentle Johnny could ever hope to be. John reflected upon this through narrowed eyes as Paul flopped carelessly on top of his covers and opened a magazine, which of course had all four of their faces staring back at them. Smiling. How sick.
It made John want to vomit, the whole scenario, but Paul seemed to be oblivious to this fact, blissfully unaware of John’s increasingly robotic state as he felt the wave of nausea and his ever present popularity turn him into something cold and unfeeling. He felt himself become every magazine or news paper with their names printed proudly across the top, each picture and each letter and each scream of his name. he felt himself take on the qualities of all of his media appearances ( fake and utterly unexciting), but none of these things were John. Only John was John, and John could only feel himself slipping, slipping, slipping…
“God dammit, Paul.”
Paul had barely missed a beat at the seemingly unanticipated interjection of silence,
“Yes, John?”
John could begin to undergo the beginning symptoms of having his throat close up again, that same tightness in his chest as he seemed to have breathed all of the fresh air that the loss of his tie had given him.
In, out, in, out.
“Doesn’t this fuckin’ bother you at all?”
“Doesn’t what bother me?” Paul turned idly back to his magazine (what, taking the “Which Beatle are You” quiz again?) and John, in that moment, reflected however briefly how much of a tosser his friend could be.
In, out, in.
“This…this lack of fucking privacy, you know? All the screaming and people and crowds and going everywhere on this bloody planet and not seeing a damned thing.” Paul shrugged. Each nonchalant action from his counterpart was simply another nail in John’s coffin, a constriction on his fragile airways.
“I dunno, John. I guess I’ve just gotten used to it.”
John collapsed on his bed opposite Paul’s, not having the strength nor willpower to stand up and argue, which gained Paul’s attention back; that which could be salvaged.
Paul would never say it, but he truly found John utterly fascinating.
“Paul?”
“Yeah?”
“You know, sometimes I just want to get up on the roof of some tall building and jump.” He sighed almost longingly, and the fact that this glimpse of vulnerability was not surprising or even somewhat worrysome to Paul was astounding in and of itself.
“Why?” He asked, for the first time sincerity resonating through the small room, to which John replied almost expertly; as if he had been practicing this over and over like some sort of macabre performance,
“I guess I just wanna see if even a Beatle could be subject to a mouthful of concrete.”
“You’re not going to try, are you?” John paused here, pensive, almost, as if weighing the pros and the cons of each scenario. He then shook his head slowly, deliberately,
“No, No, I don’t think so.”
And that was that.
*
When Paul fell asleep (which John doubted he even knew he did) the older of the two slipped out of the room and meandered quietly about the apartment to see if George or Ritchie were even the slightest bit as insightful or as compulsive as he (something which he doubted). It was because he needed a partner in crime even more than he needed smoke in his lungs or a backbeat to his heart.
First, John tried Ritchie with a knock on the door. He smiled as he did so, matching the boys’ silly grin as he answered.
“Are you high?” Were the first words out of John’s mouth. It was then that Ritchie smiled even wider, blowing a fog of sweet smelling smoke in John’s face.
“Maybe,” was the jovial reply, which was, in another language, their language, a blatant yes. John felt his airways close up again with that constricting feeling of hopelessness; a snake around his neck, a humming bird sucking the marrow from his bones, rendering him weak. Apathetic.
“Is George?” John said, to which Ritchie smiled again. He laughed.
“We’re writing, John,” He said, which of course, the latter understood completely. He nodded, making a vague gesture with his hands, an approval of sorts.
“Well, er. Have, uh, fun.” But before John could close the door and leave them to their business (however tempting it was), Ritchie stopped him, his face clouded with child-like confusion and a twinge of something that made him seem offended.
He was very obviously high as a kite.
“You don’t wanna join?” But John simply shook his head, concentrated again on his ever-present habit of breathing. How necessary it seemed at that moment.
“No, Rings. But if Paul wakes up, tell him I’m on the roof.”
In, out, in.
“The roof? Why the roof?” Although, by the time Ritchie was finished with his soft-spoken inquiry, John was long gone, out the door and leaving a trail behind of dust and bad intentions in his wake. From the other side of the room, George had asked what was going on, and Ritchie could only say something along the lines of, ‘I’d tell you if I knew.’
John believed that he could very well die if he didn’t get enough air.
*
Just like John had suspected, and just like he had experienced himself, Paul l was not aware that he had drifted off into a much more blissful place, until he awoke from it with a start, to two wide eyes staring at him from a distance far too close for it to be comfortable.
“Paul,” Ritchie whispered, and his breath had made Paul wish that he had locked the door before he fell asleep.
“What the bloody fuck are you doing in my face?”
“Where’s John?” Paul’s eyes widened at the inquisition, suddenly more alert than he would have fancied remaining.
“What do you mean, ‘where’s John’?” Ritchie repeated himself to which Paul grew testy (he could be hot headed if it was called for, thank you), even if the boy had only did what he thought Paul had told him to do. Paul was looked at with wide, innocent, high-as-a-fucking-air-balloon-eyes, to which he looked back only with utter disdain, trudged out of bed and sighed.
After the cogs in his mind were dusted properly, though, the spider webs brushed away by the early morning rays of light creeping quietly through the blinds, they had all the more freedom to turn, as smooth as the tide, a well sung tune, or the sixteenth candle on the cake.
Yes, Paul knew exactly where John went. So, he set out for the roof tops, giving Ritchie a pat on the shoulder (“Where ya goin’?”), grabbing his coat on the way.
*
The air on the top of the hotel nipped at Paul’s nose, lit his cheeks an accommodating shade of reddish-pink. He really disliked the cold, the omnipresent shiver that would crawl over every inch of him, the astringent feeling resting in every crevice of his body upon opening the door and stepping into a winters’ day, or an early fall morning; but by the looks of John standing stolid as concrete not three feet from the edge of the roof, he thrived on this air - it was as if the cold breeze, crisp and unrelenting flowing through his lungs was just enough to make him calm; euphoric.
Most people liked to get high or even take a nap to recharge. Sometimes Paul wondered to himself why John couldn’t be most people.
“It’s rather cold up here, isn’t it?” Paul asked. John didn’t even flinch.
“Awful hot don’t there, isn’t it? Crowded, you know.” Cigarette butts littered the ground around John’s feet, some stomped on, reminiscent of a crooked spine, and some still burning a dull orange. He lit yet another one, though, the cold and the smoke creating the perfect solution of a melancholy mixture fogging his entrails. Paul nearly forgot to respond.
“John, what are you doing up here?”
“Breathing. What does it look like?” The older of the two took a few steps towards the edge; step, step, step - it was as if he was challenging Paul to stop him, as if he thought Paul wouldn’t.
This is when Paul had decided that spontaneity had crossed the line into sheer masochism.
“John. John, what the fuck?”
Step, step, in, out, in.
When Paul grabbed onto John’s sleeve, he had already stopped, but that didn’t give him a reason to let go, per say, rather hang on tighter. When he looked at John’s face, the git was smiling; one of those crazy smiles, and Paul was left to follow his gaze to the ongoing spectacle below.
The crowd of people gathered by the entrance to the hotel was less made up of individuals as it was one massive being, one giant obstruction to their freedom, their public privacy, to their social lives and to John’s esophagus.
The sea swayed and moved and breathed all in synchronization, taking up an entire street if not more, by the glint in John’s eye and how tight Paul was now gripping with both hands onto his arm; causing a strange warmth only paralleled by a summer breeze to radiate throughout John’s body. The older looked down, kept looking down at the slowly swaying snakes, leeches, zoo keepers, until he knew Paul was nicely captivated.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“I…”
“That’s how much we’ve seen of L.A., Paul. Fantastic.”
Paul said nothing for a while, his gaze as captured as he began to feel he was.
“John, why are you up here? Really.” It took him a little while to tear away and meet the other boys’ stare halfway, but when at last he did, he held onto those eyes like he held onto John’s sleeve, a desparate sort of cling, seeming to say rather ‘don’t do anything stupid’ than anything else he could muster with one look.
John sighed, watched his breath escape in a frozen gust and stared long enough to see it disperse and travel where it would.
“Just being human, Paul. I want to know that I’m still human, and not some bloody animal that will just dance for the people with the right amount of cash.” He looked down at the flood in the streets again, feeling as high as drugs would never take them on the top of that building, where they seemed to float in the air rather than being carried by concrete, “Those people down there, well they’re not really people. They’re just robots. We’re just robots.”
“Funny, I had the impression that you were John Lennon.”
“Yeah, cold, hard steel John Lennon.”
Paul frowned. “Come off it, John. Let’s just go back in the hotel, get some kip and complain some more tomorrow.”
John didn’t respond, though, just lit another smoke and stared at his feet, and shuffled them for lack of something to do or say. Paul figured that he was being stubborn again, sighed, let go of John’s sleeve and chucked a rock at the brimming streets below, watching it fall and ultimately disappear among the crashing waves. The sound up and billowed to their ears, a once enticing siren song, turned now to bitter shrieks, strangled cries of wishful thinking, a cage to sleep in at night. Maybe Paul himself had started to see it by then, or maybe John was just rubbing off on him.
“Lennon,” He started, “You’re the most human bloke I know; you know?” John said nothing, looked up with his tired eyes and broken wings, his hollow bones aching for a gust of wind that can only come with flight. “I can assure you that you would crash and die on the concrete if you jumped off this building if the fans didn’t kill you first, and I believe you’d bleed if you got cut and would cry if you were in a bar fight and someone punched you in the face and threatened your family with a gun.”
“You calling me soft, McCartney?” John said with that smile evident in his voice; blissful albeit a trifle bashful for present itself at such an inopportune moment.
Paul laughed, shook his head, put his arm around his counterpart - he didn’t look back down at the (lack of visible) ground below. Neither one of them did, really.
“No, John, I’m calling you what you’ve always wanted to be: Real.”
“Oh,” Was the simple reply.
“Can we go back now?”
“Yeah, I - ah - suppose we should get writing.” It was Paul’s turn to smile - thanks was marked in John’s voice, and that was enough for him.
“Whatever you say.”
The sun was rising. It was still early in the morning, although since neither of the two had really slept all that much, it may as well have been late at night. And write they did, more or less, when John assured Paul copious amounts of times that he wouldn’t ever do something so reckless again, no, not while Ritchie was too stoned to tell Paul where he is when he wakes up to find his friend missing.
John laughed. Paul feigned and unimpressed face.
Both of them, though, thought some time after the incident that maybe it’d be nice to go up there again, just to watch the tide of people sway and bustle below them; to feel utterly above it all; to breathe without constraint. People, they say, often fall in love at the sea side.
Or something along those lines.
Pairing: John/Paul
Disclaimer: Fake fake fake.
Summary: “I guess I just wanna see if even a Beatle could be subject to a mouthful of concrete.”
John scoffed, tousling his hair to make his eyes seems more wild as he said, “How much of L.A have we seen, he asks,” in much the disbelieving tone of voice. “How much? How little would be a more valid bloody question. Or how about ‘What haven’t we seen?'”
Ritchie responded rather jaded, though, shutting the hotel door behind the Fabmost Foursome, primal instinct causing him to light a cigarette as soon as he passed the threshold, “Now how would that make the question any less infuriating to answer, John?”
“Because,” John said, as if the question was hardly a genuine question at all, “Saying ‘everything’ would be a lot better than having to say ‘absolutely nothing’.”
“You really don’t make sense sometimes, John.” Ritchie stated; it was a matter-of-fact tone of voice, the one that made John think he was staring right into a mirror sometimes. The latter made his way dejectedly to his room, without first spinning a,
“Aye, but that’s what attracted you to me in the first place,” behind him.
Ritchie rolled his eyes. John shut the door, and George and Paul collaborated on something that John saw (without actually seeing, of course) as rather trivial and utterly pointless.
*
John had taken recently to the habit of looking into an object or events’ symbolic meaning, rather than being satisfied solely with the literal.
“The literal,” he argued with himself (he and himself very seldom got along, what with the ongoing internal warfare), “is the enemy.”
“How so?”
“Well, it’s a lyin’, cheatin’, booze hound bastard, innit? Fuck reality, mate, everything is only a symbol of something, and you just have to find out what that symbol really represents.”
And so on.
So when John closed the door to his very literal room, that very literal room was soon yet another cage in which John had been locked into, and the tie around his neck slowly but surely became a chain, greatly hindering John’s chances of flight (he was a bird in his mind, birds were rather free, right?).
Claustrophobic, that’s what John was. Without even a window, he sat in his room, reflecting upon his phobia. Small spaces. Crowded rooms with too much heat, too much pressure, too much screaming. All the clapping and the laughter and the high pitched ungodly noises and people, oh the people, more than he never imagined seeing. They closed in on him like the crushing wave of an ocean, and all he could do was stare it in the face and answer its’ questions as it engulfed him in what’s commonly known as ‘fame’.
Sometimes he couldn’t fucking stand the concept of it, the thing that made four Teddy boys from Liddypol so goddamned special that you had to force them into suits and make them dance. Mimi didn’t like it either, but that was simply a whole other story on its’ own.
Fame; John’s fame was like a double edged sword, sawing off his wings and forcing his tired song from a sore throat, although he felt sometimes that it made him invincible; fame was his armor as well as his ball and chain, and he would weigh the pros and cons of each until he wasn’t even human anymore. John often devoted all of his humanly resources and exports to the cause of the war inside of his head, although, no one could ever see it past the glint in his eye and the spring in his step.
“Lennon?”
And it was only after John’s eyes opened at the fault of Paul’s abrupt knocking that he was aware of the fact that he closed his eyes in the first place. Sleep was symbolic of dreaming of a way out.
“This’d better be worth you waking me the fuck up, McCartney.”
“Unlock the bloody door, John.” John unscrewed the noose from around his neck and felt air through his lungs (air, real air, there will never be enough of it) as he heard Paul fume like a kettle on the other side of the door. Rather than keeping up a tedious banter, though, John was so taken aback by his breathing that he unlocked the door without another word.
When John swung open the gate, Paul was revealed to him with eyebrows raised and a suspicious look around the room.
“Not even a ‘fuck you’?” He asked John with mild surprise (because John found that he had quite the reputation for an unnecessarily foul mouth), and to that, John very promptly did reply with a ‘fuck you, McCartney’. Paul seemed relieved. John gave him the finger while his back was turned, still quite bitter from the intrusion of Mighty McCartney into his dark pool of thoughts.
There were times that John rather disliked his best friend (although how good of friends could they really be with John feeling so very disconnected?) solely for the fact that Mighty Mean McCartney was far better at making masks than Jentle Johnny could ever hope to be. John reflected upon this through narrowed eyes as Paul flopped carelessly on top of his covers and opened a magazine, which of course had all four of their faces staring back at them. Smiling. How sick.
It made John want to vomit, the whole scenario, but Paul seemed to be oblivious to this fact, blissfully unaware of John’s increasingly robotic state as he felt the wave of nausea and his ever present popularity turn him into something cold and unfeeling. He felt himself become every magazine or news paper with their names printed proudly across the top, each picture and each letter and each scream of his name. he felt himself take on the qualities of all of his media appearances ( fake and utterly unexciting), but none of these things were John. Only John was John, and John could only feel himself slipping, slipping, slipping…
“God dammit, Paul.”
Paul had barely missed a beat at the seemingly unanticipated interjection of silence,
“Yes, John?”
John could begin to undergo the beginning symptoms of having his throat close up again, that same tightness in his chest as he seemed to have breathed all of the fresh air that the loss of his tie had given him.
In, out, in, out.
“Doesn’t this fuckin’ bother you at all?”
“Doesn’t what bother me?” Paul turned idly back to his magazine (what, taking the “Which Beatle are You” quiz again?) and John, in that moment, reflected however briefly how much of a tosser his friend could be.
In, out, in.
“This…this lack of fucking privacy, you know? All the screaming and people and crowds and going everywhere on this bloody planet and not seeing a damned thing.” Paul shrugged. Each nonchalant action from his counterpart was simply another nail in John’s coffin, a constriction on his fragile airways.
“I dunno, John. I guess I’ve just gotten used to it.”
John collapsed on his bed opposite Paul’s, not having the strength nor willpower to stand up and argue, which gained Paul’s attention back; that which could be salvaged.
Paul would never say it, but he truly found John utterly fascinating.
“Paul?”
“Yeah?”
“You know, sometimes I just want to get up on the roof of some tall building and jump.” He sighed almost longingly, and the fact that this glimpse of vulnerability was not surprising or even somewhat worrysome to Paul was astounding in and of itself.
“Why?” He asked, for the first time sincerity resonating through the small room, to which John replied almost expertly; as if he had been practicing this over and over like some sort of macabre performance,
“I guess I just wanna see if even a Beatle could be subject to a mouthful of concrete.”
“You’re not going to try, are you?” John paused here, pensive, almost, as if weighing the pros and the cons of each scenario. He then shook his head slowly, deliberately,
“No, No, I don’t think so.”
And that was that.
*
When Paul fell asleep (which John doubted he even knew he did) the older of the two slipped out of the room and meandered quietly about the apartment to see if George or Ritchie were even the slightest bit as insightful or as compulsive as he (something which he doubted). It was because he needed a partner in crime even more than he needed smoke in his lungs or a backbeat to his heart.
First, John tried Ritchie with a knock on the door. He smiled as he did so, matching the boys’ silly grin as he answered.
“Are you high?” Were the first words out of John’s mouth. It was then that Ritchie smiled even wider, blowing a fog of sweet smelling smoke in John’s face.
“Maybe,” was the jovial reply, which was, in another language, their language, a blatant yes. John felt his airways close up again with that constricting feeling of hopelessness; a snake around his neck, a humming bird sucking the marrow from his bones, rendering him weak. Apathetic.
“Is George?” John said, to which Ritchie smiled again. He laughed.
“We’re writing, John,” He said, which of course, the latter understood completely. He nodded, making a vague gesture with his hands, an approval of sorts.
“Well, er. Have, uh, fun.” But before John could close the door and leave them to their business (however tempting it was), Ritchie stopped him, his face clouded with child-like confusion and a twinge of something that made him seem offended.
He was very obviously high as a kite.
“You don’t wanna join?” But John simply shook his head, concentrated again on his ever-present habit of breathing. How necessary it seemed at that moment.
“No, Rings. But if Paul wakes up, tell him I’m on the roof.”
In, out, in.
“The roof? Why the roof?” Although, by the time Ritchie was finished with his soft-spoken inquiry, John was long gone, out the door and leaving a trail behind of dust and bad intentions in his wake. From the other side of the room, George had asked what was going on, and Ritchie could only say something along the lines of, ‘I’d tell you if I knew.’
John believed that he could very well die if he didn’t get enough air.
*
Just like John had suspected, and just like he had experienced himself, Paul l was not aware that he had drifted off into a much more blissful place, until he awoke from it with a start, to two wide eyes staring at him from a distance far too close for it to be comfortable.
“Paul,” Ritchie whispered, and his breath had made Paul wish that he had locked the door before he fell asleep.
“What the bloody fuck are you doing in my face?”
“Where’s John?” Paul’s eyes widened at the inquisition, suddenly more alert than he would have fancied remaining.
“What do you mean, ‘where’s John’?” Ritchie repeated himself to which Paul grew testy (he could be hot headed if it was called for, thank you), even if the boy had only did what he thought Paul had told him to do. Paul was looked at with wide, innocent, high-as-a-fucking-air-balloon-eyes, to which he looked back only with utter disdain, trudged out of bed and sighed.
After the cogs in his mind were dusted properly, though, the spider webs brushed away by the early morning rays of light creeping quietly through the blinds, they had all the more freedom to turn, as smooth as the tide, a well sung tune, or the sixteenth candle on the cake.
Yes, Paul knew exactly where John went. So, he set out for the roof tops, giving Ritchie a pat on the shoulder (“Where ya goin’?”), grabbing his coat on the way.
*
The air on the top of the hotel nipped at Paul’s nose, lit his cheeks an accommodating shade of reddish-pink. He really disliked the cold, the omnipresent shiver that would crawl over every inch of him, the astringent feeling resting in every crevice of his body upon opening the door and stepping into a winters’ day, or an early fall morning; but by the looks of John standing stolid as concrete not three feet from the edge of the roof, he thrived on this air - it was as if the cold breeze, crisp and unrelenting flowing through his lungs was just enough to make him calm; euphoric.
Most people liked to get high or even take a nap to recharge. Sometimes Paul wondered to himself why John couldn’t be most people.
“It’s rather cold up here, isn’t it?” Paul asked. John didn’t even flinch.
“Awful hot don’t there, isn’t it? Crowded, you know.” Cigarette butts littered the ground around John’s feet, some stomped on, reminiscent of a crooked spine, and some still burning a dull orange. He lit yet another one, though, the cold and the smoke creating the perfect solution of a melancholy mixture fogging his entrails. Paul nearly forgot to respond.
“John, what are you doing up here?”
“Breathing. What does it look like?” The older of the two took a few steps towards the edge; step, step, step - it was as if he was challenging Paul to stop him, as if he thought Paul wouldn’t.
This is when Paul had decided that spontaneity had crossed the line into sheer masochism.
“John. John, what the fuck?”
Step, step, in, out, in.
When Paul grabbed onto John’s sleeve, he had already stopped, but that didn’t give him a reason to let go, per say, rather hang on tighter. When he looked at John’s face, the git was smiling; one of those crazy smiles, and Paul was left to follow his gaze to the ongoing spectacle below.
The crowd of people gathered by the entrance to the hotel was less made up of individuals as it was one massive being, one giant obstruction to their freedom, their public privacy, to their social lives and to John’s esophagus.
The sea swayed and moved and breathed all in synchronization, taking up an entire street if not more, by the glint in John’s eye and how tight Paul was now gripping with both hands onto his arm; causing a strange warmth only paralleled by a summer breeze to radiate throughout John’s body. The older looked down, kept looking down at the slowly swaying snakes, leeches, zoo keepers, until he knew Paul was nicely captivated.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“I…”
“That’s how much we’ve seen of L.A., Paul. Fantastic.”
Paul said nothing for a while, his gaze as captured as he began to feel he was.
“John, why are you up here? Really.” It took him a little while to tear away and meet the other boys’ stare halfway, but when at last he did, he held onto those eyes like he held onto John’s sleeve, a desparate sort of cling, seeming to say rather ‘don’t do anything stupid’ than anything else he could muster with one look.
John sighed, watched his breath escape in a frozen gust and stared long enough to see it disperse and travel where it would.
“Just being human, Paul. I want to know that I’m still human, and not some bloody animal that will just dance for the people with the right amount of cash.” He looked down at the flood in the streets again, feeling as high as drugs would never take them on the top of that building, where they seemed to float in the air rather than being carried by concrete, “Those people down there, well they’re not really people. They’re just robots. We’re just robots.”
“Funny, I had the impression that you were John Lennon.”
“Yeah, cold, hard steel John Lennon.”
Paul frowned. “Come off it, John. Let’s just go back in the hotel, get some kip and complain some more tomorrow.”
John didn’t respond, though, just lit another smoke and stared at his feet, and shuffled them for lack of something to do or say. Paul figured that he was being stubborn again, sighed, let go of John’s sleeve and chucked a rock at the brimming streets below, watching it fall and ultimately disappear among the crashing waves. The sound up and billowed to their ears, a once enticing siren song, turned now to bitter shrieks, strangled cries of wishful thinking, a cage to sleep in at night. Maybe Paul himself had started to see it by then, or maybe John was just rubbing off on him.
“Lennon,” He started, “You’re the most human bloke I know; you know?” John said nothing, looked up with his tired eyes and broken wings, his hollow bones aching for a gust of wind that can only come with flight. “I can assure you that you would crash and die on the concrete if you jumped off this building if the fans didn’t kill you first, and I believe you’d bleed if you got cut and would cry if you were in a bar fight and someone punched you in the face and threatened your family with a gun.”
“You calling me soft, McCartney?” John said with that smile evident in his voice; blissful albeit a trifle bashful for present itself at such an inopportune moment.
Paul laughed, shook his head, put his arm around his counterpart - he didn’t look back down at the (lack of visible) ground below. Neither one of them did, really.
“No, John, I’m calling you what you’ve always wanted to be: Real.”
“Oh,” Was the simple reply.
“Can we go back now?”
“Yeah, I - ah - suppose we should get writing.” It was Paul’s turn to smile - thanks was marked in John’s voice, and that was enough for him.
“Whatever you say.”
The sun was rising. It was still early in the morning, although since neither of the two had really slept all that much, it may as well have been late at night. And write they did, more or less, when John assured Paul copious amounts of times that he wouldn’t ever do something so reckless again, no, not while Ritchie was too stoned to tell Paul where he is when he wakes up to find his friend missing.
John laughed. Paul feigned and unimpressed face.
Both of them, though, thought some time after the incident that maybe it’d be nice to go up there again, just to watch the tide of people sway and bustle below them; to feel utterly above it all; to breathe without constraint. People, they say, often fall in love at the sea side.
Or something along those lines.