Just Human
Title: Just Human
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1227
Disclaimer: I don't own the Beatles, this has never happened before, this is all a product of my imagination.
A/N: This was meant as a short and simple, cute and fluffy fic. It's not. It's left me shaky and with a feeling I usually never feel after I've written a story, so weird. It's emotional, or at least it was emotional for me to write. I hope you like it.
John.
Yeah, I thought he was cool. Cool, in the way he was standing on stage, shoulders slumped, sloppily playing the guitar chords, not really caring about the words he was singing; not quite the right lyrics. He was looking around with a glare in his eyes, telling other people to fuck off because he didn't care about them anyway. The people on the front row were getting most of the load, John couldn't possibly have seen any further than that.
His eyes never turned angry when I was looking at him, though, or rather said; when he was looking at me. Not in a way that told 'fuck off', not even the first day we met. They showed pain and frustration and perhaps annoyance at times, when he was testing my patience with stubborn behaviour, but never the same glare I'd seen him give other people, people he perhaps hadn't even met before.
I got to know him better as the weeks passed and turned into months, and by the time I'd known him for about a year I had it clear for myself: even though John's eyes didn't always show the anger but also other emotions, he never showed himself. I had no idea how to get to him, and I didn't know whether I wanted to, so I let it be.
More months passed, and those months slowly turned into years; years in which a lot of things changed. We disbanded the first band, then got together another, saw drummers come and leave until we eventually, when we were playing our Hamburg gigs, found someone who fitted in the band seamlessly. We found a manager, found a producer and a label, and put out an album, and then, when it proved to be moderately successful, another.
More people started to visit our performances, we filled bigger halls on more nights, we earned more money and step-by-step, ever so slowly as it seemed at first, we gained more success and more fans and even though at first the shared hotel rooms stayed, the hotels weren't as cheap anymore and we were able to eat proper food instead of the cheapest of the cheapest.
Throughout all of it, me and John were still friends, and every time we were writing a song we'd be sitting opposite of each other or sometimes next to each other, staring into each other's eyes, but John never showed any other emotion than I'd seen before - still hiding himself from me, and I grew more and more aware of it.
I never did anything with it though. I knew he wouldn't like hearing about it, and I didn't have the guts to bring it up, fearing the hierarchy within the band would shift and the future success that was ahead of us would stay out. Instead we kept writing, and I kept wondering why John was trying to hide himself from the rest of the world, even though he acted so open. Why he wanted to keep on the mask, while I had a feeling he was a different person underneath - why he preferred to act like a doll or an actor in his role.
Sometimes I even wondered whether John wasn't, maybe, an actor who got too obsessed with his role and forgot how he really was. Who kept playing the part, forever into eternity. It scared me, the way he would be sometimes, how fake while others wouldn't even notice.
Other times, I caught a glint in his eyes, in the short moment between a change of emotion, that told me something different.
And even though I didn't tell him directly, I tried and tried and tried and then some more atop of that, only to get to the core of the man that had intrigued me from the very beginning, but was starting to become so much more interesting as I started to notice the very small moments, so precious, in which he seemed to be close to himself, but never fully. Sometimes I grew so frustrated with him that I might have given my life to be able to look in John's eyes and think to myself - know for sure - John wasn't wearing the mask.
In my mind I even started to name it like that - the mask. I pictured it as colourful, with all of his features covered up, except for his ears. He never spoke the entire truth and his eyes never told all of his emotions. And where I'd been satisfied with the few translucent holes I imagined in the mask, I started to wish for him to unhook the mask from behind his ears and give all of himself away.
I didn't even realise what it meant for me - why I needed him to open up, why I wanted it this badly.
Unconsciously, as I still was getting to know him better and better, and other people who said that John and I knew each other completely, understood each other so well were wrong, I started to ask about deeper things, maybe trying to find out a little more about how John's mechanisms worked and how I would be able to get him to put off the mask. Peel it off, if necessary.
Consciously, I was realising something; the reason why I wanted him to show himself. I wasn't only developing more of an interest in him on a psychological level, in our heads, but I was also developing feelings for him. I cared a lot about him, and as I was talking with him in an intense way, about things you wouldn't talk about with a friend you'd consider to be a “good friend”, only your “best friend”, someone so dear to your heart you can't live without, somewhere along that very line it happened. I ignored it.
By the time Beatlemania was raging and we were forced to stay inside, we wouldn't always act as kind around each other anymore, especially John would get moody because he needed to see something of the world. I knew he appreciated the freedom to go wherever he wanted to go - it was one of his most important values, even then: freedom.
One day, when I was searching for him once again, staying up until late at night and sometimes until the next morning, it got too much, for the both of us. John got violent and I was so sure he would go as far as beat me up, leaving me battered and bruised; he even got as far as pushing me up against the wall, his arm at my throat so I couldn't breathe anymore.
I still don't know what I did at that moment, but it must have been the look in my eyes. John's eyes widened and he let go of me, his hands going limb next to his body. He looked defeated. I pulled him up and helped him to sit down on the couch, while I whispered how much I cared for him- I think he got the hint, I think he understood I, in reality, told him - master of disguises even though he pretended to be disgusted of them - that it was him who I loved most of all.
But then, suddenly it happened.
Because then, I was looking into the human eyes of John Lennon.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1227
Disclaimer: I don't own the Beatles, this has never happened before, this is all a product of my imagination.
A/N: This was meant as a short and simple, cute and fluffy fic. It's not. It's left me shaky and with a feeling I usually never feel after I've written a story, so weird. It's emotional, or at least it was emotional for me to write. I hope you like it.
John.
Yeah, I thought he was cool. Cool, in the way he was standing on stage, shoulders slumped, sloppily playing the guitar chords, not really caring about the words he was singing; not quite the right lyrics. He was looking around with a glare in his eyes, telling other people to fuck off because he didn't care about them anyway. The people on the front row were getting most of the load, John couldn't possibly have seen any further than that.
His eyes never turned angry when I was looking at him, though, or rather said; when he was looking at me. Not in a way that told 'fuck off', not even the first day we met. They showed pain and frustration and perhaps annoyance at times, when he was testing my patience with stubborn behaviour, but never the same glare I'd seen him give other people, people he perhaps hadn't even met before.
I got to know him better as the weeks passed and turned into months, and by the time I'd known him for about a year I had it clear for myself: even though John's eyes didn't always show the anger but also other emotions, he never showed himself. I had no idea how to get to him, and I didn't know whether I wanted to, so I let it be.
More months passed, and those months slowly turned into years; years in which a lot of things changed. We disbanded the first band, then got together another, saw drummers come and leave until we eventually, when we were playing our Hamburg gigs, found someone who fitted in the band seamlessly. We found a manager, found a producer and a label, and put out an album, and then, when it proved to be moderately successful, another.
More people started to visit our performances, we filled bigger halls on more nights, we earned more money and step-by-step, ever so slowly as it seemed at first, we gained more success and more fans and even though at first the shared hotel rooms stayed, the hotels weren't as cheap anymore and we were able to eat proper food instead of the cheapest of the cheapest.
Throughout all of it, me and John were still friends, and every time we were writing a song we'd be sitting opposite of each other or sometimes next to each other, staring into each other's eyes, but John never showed any other emotion than I'd seen before - still hiding himself from me, and I grew more and more aware of it.
I never did anything with it though. I knew he wouldn't like hearing about it, and I didn't have the guts to bring it up, fearing the hierarchy within the band would shift and the future success that was ahead of us would stay out. Instead we kept writing, and I kept wondering why John was trying to hide himself from the rest of the world, even though he acted so open. Why he wanted to keep on the mask, while I had a feeling he was a different person underneath - why he preferred to act like a doll or an actor in his role.
Sometimes I even wondered whether John wasn't, maybe, an actor who got too obsessed with his role and forgot how he really was. Who kept playing the part, forever into eternity. It scared me, the way he would be sometimes, how fake while others wouldn't even notice.
Other times, I caught a glint in his eyes, in the short moment between a change of emotion, that told me something different.
And even though I didn't tell him directly, I tried and tried and tried and then some more atop of that, only to get to the core of the man that had intrigued me from the very beginning, but was starting to become so much more interesting as I started to notice the very small moments, so precious, in which he seemed to be close to himself, but never fully. Sometimes I grew so frustrated with him that I might have given my life to be able to look in John's eyes and think to myself - know for sure - John wasn't wearing the mask.
In my mind I even started to name it like that - the mask. I pictured it as colourful, with all of his features covered up, except for his ears. He never spoke the entire truth and his eyes never told all of his emotions. And where I'd been satisfied with the few translucent holes I imagined in the mask, I started to wish for him to unhook the mask from behind his ears and give all of himself away.
I didn't even realise what it meant for me - why I needed him to open up, why I wanted it this badly.
Unconsciously, as I still was getting to know him better and better, and other people who said that John and I knew each other completely, understood each other so well were wrong, I started to ask about deeper things, maybe trying to find out a little more about how John's mechanisms worked and how I would be able to get him to put off the mask. Peel it off, if necessary.
Consciously, I was realising something; the reason why I wanted him to show himself. I wasn't only developing more of an interest in him on a psychological level, in our heads, but I was also developing feelings for him. I cared a lot about him, and as I was talking with him in an intense way, about things you wouldn't talk about with a friend you'd consider to be a “good friend”, only your “best friend”, someone so dear to your heart you can't live without, somewhere along that very line it happened. I ignored it.
By the time Beatlemania was raging and we were forced to stay inside, we wouldn't always act as kind around each other anymore, especially John would get moody because he needed to see something of the world. I knew he appreciated the freedom to go wherever he wanted to go - it was one of his most important values, even then: freedom.
One day, when I was searching for him once again, staying up until late at night and sometimes until the next morning, it got too much, for the both of us. John got violent and I was so sure he would go as far as beat me up, leaving me battered and bruised; he even got as far as pushing me up against the wall, his arm at my throat so I couldn't breathe anymore.
I still don't know what I did at that moment, but it must have been the look in my eyes. John's eyes widened and he let go of me, his hands going limb next to his body. He looked defeated. I pulled him up and helped him to sit down on the couch, while I whispered how much I cared for him- I think he got the hint, I think he understood I, in reality, told him - master of disguises even though he pretended to be disgusted of them - that it was him who I loved most of all.
But then, suddenly it happened.
Because then, I was looking into the human eyes of John Lennon.