Chapter Text
It was eight o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, and Paul should've been asleep.
It was going to be a quiet day of relaxation, and there was nothing in particular that had to be done. Normally his actual responsibilities could barely coax him out of bed before eleven, but in all fairness it wasn't any of his actual responsibilities which had roused him this morning.
It had been a dream.
A dream that was fading now, and quickly, as though his brain wanted to forget what it had revealed to him only moments before, and so instead of enjoying a restful morning of slumber he was currently rummaging through the drawer of his nightstand with such urgency that his life might as well have depended on it. No sooner had his hand found the object of his desire that his feet, tense and unsteady, had hit the hardwood floor beneath the bed and carried him swiftly to the bathroom, the delicate item clutched protectively in his fingers as he brought it into privacy. He didn't want to, for some reason, let anybody else know that it existed.
Frantically the old Beatle shut his eyes, barely hearing the click of the door locking behind him as he desperately tried to remember the dream that was slipping further away with each passing moment. Normally he'd be content to let it go—less to think about, fewer worries. But this was different, because it wasn't just a dream. He was absolutely sure of that. It was a memory.
He focused his eyes with urgency on his hands, which were carefully smoothing out the wrinkles of a deteriorating black-and-white photograph. Its subject was at first unclear; both its age and the quality with which it had been taken rendered the image almost unrecognizable as anything in particular, but the fuzzy lines and blending contours made immediate sense in Paul's mind. It was a man, his face unconscious and relaxed, sleeping crookedly on a twin bed with his arms dangling off the side. The exposure of the photograph was so poor that it was hard to discern most of his features, but Paul knew exactly what he looked like. Because it wasn't just any man in that photograph.
It was John.
Paul hadn't thought about this picture in decades. He hadn't even thought about John in weeks up until yesterday, when the ancient photograph had happened to slip out of his wallet as he sifted through it looking for something he couldn't even remember why he had needed.
And why should he be thinking about him? John Lennon had been dead for years. Every thought relating to him had been thunk already, and every possible memory had been relived countless times. There was nothing left to recall, nothing new to ponder. No papers this morning, because they'd run out in 1985. No chance there was anything John-related that Paul hadn't already spent hours scraping over at one point or another.
Or so he'd thought.
Because when he'd seen that picture, for the first time in God knows how many years, it had brought something back with it. Something that he'd forgotten long ago—or maybe just didn't want to remember. Something that made Paul second-guess the story he'd been telling himself about their friendship for decades, and something which he still didn't know how to feel about now.
And it had just happened again.
As Paul's eyes took in the grainy details of the picture before him, a series of ancient images flooded his mind. The lights of a city, street signs left a mystery in their foreign language. A lit cigarette glowing in a dark room; the scent of smoke, the taste of it. The face of the man in the picture, much clearer in his head, looking at him from beneath the brim of a brown bowler hat. That man's bright hazel eyes, the stubble peppering his chin, and the expression of awe as he stared at Paul for what felt like an eternity. Finally, the brush of a foreign breath against his face, the touch of fingers on his jaw, and a freeze frame of John closing the distance.
Paul sat in silence for a second when the series ended, the blackness inside his eyelids keeping him just calm enough that his mind didn't start to boil over like a steaming kettle. A thousand questions were swirling around his head like specks of dust in the throes of a tornado, but trying to focus on any of them long enough to consider an answer was like trying to grasp a cloud. Prominently among them, had any of that been real? Had it really been what he thought it was? The Paris trip had taken place over three decades ago, and even the details in which he was most confident were beginning to fade from his memory. Was he recalling this correctly, or could he possibly have made a mistake? Had John... had John kissed him?
No. No.
It couldn't be true. John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been friends, very good friends. They had spent their time together writing music and getting high, not snogging each other in grimy Paris hotel rooms. Paul should know; he'd lived through it, and he definitely would've recalled something like that happening between him and his best mate.
Wouldn't he?
The more he thought about it, the less sure he felt. Wracking his brain for answers left him with even more questions, some of them new and some which he had been passively pondering for decades. For one, why had John never wanted to talk about that trip? Paul always thought it was strange that he would speak so fondly of the times they'd spent together, but change the subject instantly if he tried to bring up specifics. He'd chalked it up to embarrassment or boredom, but John Lennon was never the type of man to be bored reminiscing about the past. It had struck Paul as odd for years, but he'd never really thought about it until now.
Something else which raised fresh curiosity in him was another memory, not quite forgotten but never really remembered, which Paul managed to dredge up from his mind in the minutes that followed his recollection of the night in Paris. It was only one still image, captured in his head like the photograph of John and preserved with similar quality, just crackling between the recognizable and the abstract. The picture had entered his mind (once or twice) in the space of the last several decades, but it seemed clearer now, more vivid, as though the dream had shaken it free. Before he could question why it had come to mind, the memory had taken center stage in his head.
The room was pitch-black and indiscernible, Paul saw, though he felt fairly sure they were still in Paris—the scent of cigarette smoke was the same, and tobacco tasted different there. Paul felt uncharacteristically cold; the bed beneath him was scratchy and the sheets too thin, but there was something else touching his body that brought much more comfort.
Huddled next to him, the twin bed creaking under the weight of two, was another warm body which corralled his own in a soft embrace. Nothing odd about that; John and Paul had shared many beds throughout the course of their friendship, and this time had not been the first nor the last. It was simply two friends keeping warm in a very efficient sort of spooning position—not to say that's what it was. Paul just remembered feeling tired and freezing, moreso than should be expected of autumnal French nights, and was consequently happy to accept the embrace of John's warm body against his back. He recalled how the other man's breath tingled on his neck, and the way he could feel each of his fingers individually as they pressed into his sides. It was a decidedly pleasant thing, and a mellow sense enveloped Paul as the gentle candescence of the memory soothed his mind.
But there was, distinctly, something else. Something which he couldn't quite discern about the scene that set off alarm bells in his head and made his spine tingle now that he could weigh it against the dream. There was some detail of the moment, to which Paul was consciously oblivious, that his gut was picking up on. What it could be was beyond his imagination, but he was almost positive that it was there. Quickly, the thought was filed away—but it was not discarded, and it lingered in Paul's mind for minutes afterward.
The old Beatle set the photograph down on the bathroom counter, propping himself up with his forearms on its marbled surface. A few shaky breaths rattled his chest, and he reached over the sink to turn on the faucet. Cold water should help him sober up, he decided, splashing a little on his face and letting it run down the loose skin of his neck. He looked in the mirror, and he kept looking for quite some time.
Paul McCartney was an aging man. He felt no shame in that fact, but there was still a loss to be spoken of when comparing his sixties teenage heartthrob days to the face that stared back at him in the mirror today. Time had not been its most gentle on him, and while that was nothing lamentable in his eyes, he did often wonder if it really had been only a few decades since he was such a spright.
The Beatles had aged him, he suspected. He had started going gray in the seventies, and by now that decade was further away than the new millennium. His eyes had always drooped, but now they sagged, and his whole face was full of loose skin that dripped down his skull like so much molasses. His hair was a very certain shade of gray by now, tinged in some places by white, and his mouth, which had once rested in a neutrally flat shape, was bent in an almost permanent frown. Thank The Beatles, he thought to himself. That's what comes of all that pressure eventually.
Paul wondered, with an almost-audible chuckle, what John would say if he saw him now. Probably a lot of jokes (although that wasn't a tough guess) in typical John Lennon fashion, with an I'm-better-than-you tone laced through the veins of every word. Lucky bastard, John Lennon was, in at least one way. He never had to watch himself grow hopelessly older, never played the impartial spectator as his body turned dull and brittle like a stalk of dying grass. He'd had the satisfaction (if satisfaction was something one could feel beyond the grave) of dying pretty.
The thought of John jolted something in Paul's mind, and suddenly the kissing memory was playing out again behind his eyes. He didn't call it the 'kissing memory' in his head, because he couldn't really think about that without physically recoiling, and so instead he thought to himself that this was 'the Paris memory' playing as he relived images of a twenty-one-year-old John Lennon leaning so incredibly close. He noticed the youth in his old friend's features; the brightness in his eyes, the softness of his skin, the fullness of the brown hair which peaked out from underneath the bowler hat, and he thought to himself that this was exactly how he wanted to remember John. So young and happy and full of life that it was palpable even when brought to mind more than thirty years post factum. All Paul wanted was for him to exist like this forever; eternally a nymph, preserved in only his most joyful and carefree moments. He wanted this John—youthful, unspoiled, content—to be the one that inhabited his mind and memory; just his best mate, armed with his wit and a guitar, facing life like it had never hurt him.
And at the same time, Paul would have given anything for the chance to watch John Lennon turn gray.