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i was a younger man then (now) (post hoc)

Summary:

John’s twelve when a bloke appears from a flaming pie and says, “From this day forward you are Beatles with an ‘a.’” The bloke is Paul.

Or: paul and john meet at all ages and eras and john is the time-traveler’s wife the way only john lennon can be

Notes:

You can read a mini primer of the time-traveler's wife trope HERE

Chapter title from James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

John digs fingers into the wet earth behind his house. A sack of stolen odds and ends sits beside him, pinched from Mimi’s figurine collection and squirreled away from nasty, no-good Colin Small’s bookbag after he called John a waste whose own Da doesn’t like him. It’s fine, at twelve, John’s grown out of playing with dirt and bugs and into the way fire eats up the line of anything. The lighter in his pocket is courtesy of Jim Blair’s older brother and he’s excited to see how his haul of items fares against the heat.

Being a boy scout has taught him handy tricks about burning others’ things responsibly; hence how he claws out clumps of earth to make a fire pit, though it looks more of a pie crust. He pours in the filling, smiling at the jangle of paper notes and plastic before lowering his lite to the mess of it.

It’s smoldering wonderfully, baking into a fine pie of ruin when a pair of shoes land right in the middle.

“Christ! What— what’s all this then?”

John’s wide eyes dart up and find a bloke standing in his flaming pie. The man’s older than John but younger than Mimi and George. His hair flaps as he stamps a mad shuffle out of the fire and onto the grass, looking all kinds of cross even though he’s the one what’s ruined it by popping from nowhere.

“Where’d you come from?”

The bloke doesn’t answer, though John admits, he swears wonderfully as he scrapes shoes and pats out a smoking patch from his dark pant leg. “Fucking Christ, I’m a bleeding beetle, I shouldn’t have to put up with this muck!”

“Who’s a beetle?” John asks, thinking that men who wear nice suits like this don’t usually say the kind of nonsense John himself does.

“I am, or will be.” The bloke gauges the mess of his boots before calling it a loss. He looks up to see John squeezing his dirty hands like pincers and laughs. “No, Beatles with an ‘a’.” His eyes flicker over John, taking in the young bend of his scraped knees and the lighter in his hand. “We will be,” he corrects, a wide grin stretching over either end of his smooth face like something from the magazines. “I’ll be putting up with your muck then, too.”

“What? How’s that? And where did you come from?” John asks again earning a wink. When he leans back to call for George to come and have a see, the bloke vanishes, leaving John alone with his smoking crime-scene just as his uncle arrives.

 

 

John’s fourteen and leaving school when he spies the bloke again, standing across the street wearing a train-wreck of knitted colors calling itself a vest. He pops against the brick and mortar grey of Liverpool and John goggles behind his glasses. He always thought he imagined the bloke, but the bloke is staring at John too, familiar like he remembers stepping in a flaming trash-pie. His little fingers twitter in a wave and John half-raises his own hand, sure his mouth is hanging open.

 A bus passes between them and the bloke’s disappeared again.

John’s neck cranks as he looks left, right and anywhere to see if someone noticed the blotting out of some eerie bright thing in the street, but heads are craned down towards children and newspapers, and John catches his breath, feeling daft and light limbed. His lips tighten and he keeps his nose clean the whole way home. Last time he wrote up the incident, but Mimi, reading it over his shoulder, said the language was creative. John was literal back then, and he’s even more literal now when he murmurs to himself, “I’ve seen a ghost.”

John’s never been the most all right of any lads, but there’s being odd, being odd, and being the bloke what sees people appear and vanish. It keeps happening too. John spies a haunting presence scraping against his periphery, sitting on benches or leaning over the book stacks. It’s always dark-haired with big lazy eyes that John can draw even with only having seen them for seconds all put together. He doodles the slant of them among the wandering curling figures congregating in margins in his notebooks and carries on. If he is a mad lad, there’s a certain way to do it in John’s opinion. Though sometimes he’d really like a scream.

In this way, John accepts he’s the other end of daft; it doesn’t stop him from forming a skiffle group and aiming to be as big as Elvis. In fact, his daftness is a credit, letting him gun down lyrics with only half the words and vocal decoupage.

The Quarrymen trample and giggle the earth behind the church, drunk more on the thrilling memory of a crowd than the beer shared between them. John barely turns when Ivan appears, some lad trailing behind.

“Got someone for you to meet,” Ivan says, and the short bloke in a white sports coat steps up.

“I’m Paul,” a voice lilts. “You’re…”

“I am that,” John says squinting at the blurred face, shapeless as the rest of the world without his goggles. “And who are you when you’re at home?”

There’s a pause, something uncertain in the air before Paul says, “I play guitar.” He seems muted.

“Aye, like me then?” John bares his teeth. “We’ve a guitarist already.”

“Sing too, with more of the words,” Paul corrects and there’s a tense beat before John lets his smile drift into something dismissive.

“Congratulations,” he says. “You must do your group proud.”

Ivan scratches his head and Paul shuffles vague in his sight. Fucking typical. “I brought him to see about joining yours. Give us a song, Paul.”

Even with his nasty vision, John can tell when someone’s holding the guitar wrong way round and says as such.

“Not for a left-hander,” Paul corrects. He takes his time, tuning John’s over-strung guitar with a focus that renders him blind to the other’s chuckles and John’s grudging admiration. He does it right faster than John could. Then, smooth as Elvis, Paul drops into Twenty-Flight Rock and the words are right too, and not the way that John makes them right. John tells him he’ll think about it, but before the end of the day, he’s decided to make Ivan invite him sometime next week. Better to let everyone stew. Later, John laughs as Paul makes him stew for four days before agreeing to join the band.

Paul turns out to be the right kind of addition. He’s serious about music in a way no one in John’s life has been except maybe his Mam, Julia. That she’s a busy housewife says something of the musical desert John lives in. Paul’s canny with chords and tuning and he promises to teach John what he knows when John presses the matter.

Paul comes to Menlove, looking very clean and greeting Mimi with the full force of his charm. “Paul McCartney, how do ye do?”

John doesn’t need his glasses to see Mimi’s thin lips flattening and the cool assessment of her face, having witnessed it enough to stamp over his memory. Paul’s face he wishes he could see because the way he stumbles through the rest of the introduction belies his utter shock at being evenly snubbed. His dark vague features are still twisted as they head up the stairs.

“Don’t take it personally, she’s a treat to everyone.” John perches on his bedcovers, nestling his guitar over one thigh. Paul seems even more put-out by this, and John looks forward to seeing him struggle to get on her non-existent good side. They settle across from each other, and John likes the way they echo the other like a mirror because of Paul’s wrong-handedness.

They work for a few minutes before John’s stumbling causes him to curse. “Jesus, just wait.” He takes out his glasses and slides them up his nose. He’s aware of the defensive twist of his lips, half a mean jab sits in his mouth. It falls back into the abyss of his throat as he sees Paul for the first time with clarity.

He knew Paul had big dark eyes, but he didn’t realize the way they cut such long lines in the corners of his face or how the color straddles an in-between place of brown and green. It’s softer, but without question he’s the unbaked version of the daft bloke passing through John’s life.

Paul smiles, and it’s the same as then too, all peaks, crescents, and even teeth. “There you are,” he says, and adds, impossibly, “I never seen you without your glasses before. Thought I had the wrong bloke.”

John drops his guitar and really screams.

 

 

Accidental time-travel is what Paul trots out when John pushes him, now sitting in the garden after Mimi chased them outside. “You’ve seen me before then?” Paul asks. Those familiar eyes shimmer and John almost wants to rip his lenses off and retreat into the vague shapelessness of ten minutes ago.

“Not this you,” John admits, rubbing his head.

“How was I?” Paul straightens into a forward lean. John only shakes his head, wordless. “You never tell me in the future either,” Paul complains.

“You’ve seen me, then?” John asks, curious.

“Not saying a word, am I? One turn deserves another.” Paul brings his leg into the garden chair with him, eyes still staring at John with something like nostalgia despite being two years younger. It unnerves John, the whole business, and his eyes flicker over to the house, anticipating some unseen punchline.

Wary, he still wonders, “Still, time-travel. How’s that?”

“Me mother gave it me. Her mother her, and the father before that.” Paul waves a hand. “Goes to the first-born, you see. Been doing it as long as I can remember, and I’ll keep on ‘til I die.”

“And how’s it that you keeping popping in on me?” John wonders. “We hadn’t even met. I mean, in our time. This time.” A ruddy flush spills over the wide of Paul’s cheeks, and John swears. “Jesus, is it only me, then?” Discontent creeps under his skin and it feels heavy, too much for a lad he’s just met properly to own the eyes haunting him for years.

“I guess we’re to be mates. You’re supposed to follow someone important in your life.”

“Who’d your mam follow?”

“…Me father.”

John’s too mature to kick someone out so he blows out of the garden cursing the day he ever burned Mimi’s bric-a-brac. He avoids Paul for a week, skiving off and missing hang-outs and band practice with the lads. Can’t well show up with crazy little Paulie hanging around, being odd.  It’s easier said than done avoiding someone who can pop into your timeline, and John spends a reluctant afternoon in a graveyard with another Paul.

This one is in his thirties, easily, and when he sees John, he doesn’t kick a fuss or follow him with his eyes. Instead, he taps a cigarette out from his clean suit and lays out on one of the long gravestones, like he’s done it all his life.

“Have one for me?” John asks after a long effort of ignoring the bloke. The man lights it with his own and extends it to John, barely lifting his head. White and black leather shoes poke from the man’s feet, and John muses that Paul’s made something of himself, and matured too, from the way he seems content to pass the visit in silence.

Somehow, it’s just the thing to get John’s mouth running. “I’m not a bloody queer, and I sure as hell didn’t sign up to be someone else’s, time-traveler or no.”

Paul hums, a mere spiral of smoke denoting his continued presence.

It’s permission for John to unload the worst of his thoughts and anxieties painted as hate and disgust. The man takes it in with his cigarette, moving onto a second with the barest pause, letting John expel the most violent of his miseries, before saying, “It isn’t like I chose either.”

John blinks hard, shocked at how it smarts. They don’t know each other, or at least John doesn’t, but he’d made an assumption, taken for granted the intent interest of those eyes. John hasn’t said anything, but Paul lifts his head, hair clipping his shoulders as he rubs his face. “Not like that. I mean… I mean that choosing isn’t what matters. There are people in your life who are just important. You don’t pick your parents, do ye? And for this time-tripping, well, you’re it for me.” There’s nothing canting about his hips, or the way his eyes glance over and John finds himself relaxing.

“We’re mates?” Relief slips through his breaking voice.

“Labels, John,” Paul scoffs. “You’ve always hated them.”

Paul, so much older, would know, wouldn’t he? A little thrill shoots through John’s spine. He finds himself squatting beside the other, looking at the man with crow’s feet like a promise. Paul looks back, long-suffering. His eyes chase over the sky before he reaches to his pocket and lights another cigarette.

John smokes it with unfolding glee. So, this is the pleasure in knowing, he thinks, and being known.

 

 

He swings to Allerton and knocks up the McCartney door. Paul appears in the gap, pale-faced as he steps out with him.

“I’m not daft, you are!” John crows and Paul blanches further, skin taking on a deathly tinge. John lowers his voice. “I mean, I thought I was going soft, you know? This time-travel stuff, it’s a lucky turn for me.”

Paul watches him a moment more, looking inscrutable and distant and John thinks about what the older Paul said about it being neither of their choices. Then, Paul’s expression eases. “You are soft, Johnny. Can’t blame your mad thoughts on me. You’ve a twisted nature.”

“Have the facts, do you?” John asks, leaning forward and earning flickers of emotions playing over Paul’s eyes. Knowing, John thinks, shivers… wants.

“Even if I hadn’t,” Paul says, and John laughs.

“Show us G again?” John waggles his guitar.

 

 

John tries to balance the way Paul feels like the set-up to his biggest failure and also the only sure thing in his life. He does his uneven best with mixed but swelling results.

Paul keeps appearing, in all manner of dress and John starts thinking about the future as some concrete place he lives in, one with embroidered satin jackets and long wide pants. He asks all of them what year they’re from, but they laugh and ignore him in turn. It’s interesting to think about how they can be cast so far in the future and still be on the ins and outs with each other. John tries to pry details from his Paul about what he’s seen, but he shakes his head, eyes shining.

The future is neat, but the past is less. Once, John opens the pantry and finds a toddler sitting on the ground, reaching for the tins of beans to rap on. Big eyes goggle ‘neath thick dark hair and John shuts the door. He smokes a cigarette and after when he returns, he’s glad to see the pantry has decided to empty itself of any children. He makes himself toast with hands that only just tremble.

Christ, if Paul shows up as a baby, John’s not sure what he’d do besides send him down the Mersey river in a bleedin’ basket.

“Your mam doesn’t know the way to stop it, does she?” he asks. They’re clipping along Blackpool, having taken in a movie and now prowling about for birds. “Just because my life is awkward and a bloke could do with some privacy…”

Paul’s face does this shuttering dance, lips twisting beyond what John can parse. “She’s not likely to say, being dead.”

His knowledge about Paul rearranges itself, and he has to look out to the sea for a second. “D’ye ever see her traveling? Since she’s along with your Da?” His voice is soft and unfamiliar to himself. John always has to duck under the eyes of old Jim McCartney, feeling too self-conscious and fearing a kindred look. Now he has another reason to avoid those eyes. How must it be to have a dead wife pop in on you? John really wouldn’t like to know.

Paul shrugs, peeling John out of his thoughts. “Not yet. I guess the good thing about it is I never really know for sure, do I? Might do.”

John smiles and Paul returns it, gentler. “How does it work, the tripping, I mean?” John’s taken on the older Paul’s phrase for the swing in it, and the Paul of now follows. A paradox, John muses, something about bootstraps he’d read before in a space-fiction anthology.

“I don’t know, not like I can ask anyone now…” Paul makes a face, shaking off the vague self-pity. His stride picks up. “For me, I think it’s about concentration. If I’m focused on something, I’m not liable to wander off, but if me head drifts…” He snaps his fingers.

“Christ, if it were me, I’d be gone every day!” John goggles. How much concentration must it take not to lose concentration? “How do you sleep?”

Paul laughs. “Sleep takes a lot of focus, you gotten relax your mind, think of something pleasant.”

“Someones, more like.” John elbows him and Paul laughs.

“Your words. Sleep is easy, it’s the rest of the time that’s harder. S’why music is so good. If I’m thinking about it, I’m concentrating.”

That certainly explains the way it plays on Paul’s mind like unending vinyl. Still, John bumps his hip into Paul’s. “Show us, then?”

“What, now?” Paul’s face twists.

“Yes now! How do I know this isn’t an elaborate plot set up with your freaky extended family?” John hazards wildly. “Anything’s possible with make-up these days, have you seen the birds? Can’t tell the real from the fake.”

Paul rolls his eyes, seeing the excuse for exactly what it is. “No, I’m not traveling for you.”

“Thought you liked performing under pressure,” John purrs, enjoying Paul’s prickle. “Come on!”

“But…”

“But what?”

“But we’re at Blackpool already,” Paul says like it’s an answer. John swallows his next words and grows aware of the pale sky looming above, the rattling lap of waves and the hint of heat at his elbow where Paul hovers to and fro. If John were the time-traveler, he’d skive off into his own timeline as often as possible. There’d hardly be any of it to visit, that’s how often he’d like to disconnect from this nonsensical, rotten mistake of a world. But Paul… Paul looks at a day with John at Blackpool and sees it better, sees it worthy. Unexpected affection looms over John like a wave and he only has a moment to marvel before it sweeps through him like a flood.

He takes Paul by the shoulders, steering him away from noticing the soppy expression drenching John’s face. “We better make the most of it, while you’re here. Who knows when next you’ll—” He snaps.

“Well, I’ll try to stay focused, but dull company…” Paul shakes his head.

John’s teeth flash. “If I hold on, d’you think I’d come along?”

“More like get dropped in a void,” Paul threatens, but he’s smiling too.

Labels, John muses, looking at the curl of Paul’s hair against his cheek.

 

 

Paul turns out to be the best choice he doesn’t make. They get older together and start writing their own music. Lots of it is shite but being able to turn to someone and share a song and have it treated seriously is a thrill John hasn’t adjusted to. The time-travel becomes a consistent background companion. While never the focus of their friendship, it does add flavor to it, an excitement that, along with the music, keeps him running back to Paul when others phase-out of John’s life. Despite his protests never to show, Paul’s disappeared once or twice when John blinks and appears minutes later, looking distracted and dizzy. He once reappears on John’s bed completely soaked through, face flush and dazed.

“Christ, catch the rain, then?” John fumbles for a towel.

Paul shivers, smile uncurling. “No, the Bahamas.”

“The Bahamas!” John crows, throwing the linen at Paul’s face. “The bleeding Bahamas?!”

If Paul tripped there, then John must be in the Bahamas. He looks down at his guitar, feeling it a brighter thing. Paul’s never said one way or the other about whether they make it big, saying he usually lands in odd places anyways, that it’s hard to tell… But the Bahamas are something, aren’t they?

“You best be careful. With all my future travels you’re likely to drop outside of an airplane.” John grins.

Paul rubs the towel over his hair, peeking out from underneath it. “Shouldn’t happen. I should only go places which are safe. There’s some self-preservation in this madness or so me mam said.”

“S’at why you don’t appear by other people,” John asks.

“Crowd's are all right, but few people are safe as houses, John,” Paul mutters, and John feels an unearned thrill that drops hot as Paul tries to air out the shirt clinging stubborn to his pale chest. John isn’t trying to stare, but the wet skin and curling hair prove distracting. A flush works over Paul’s face when they meet eyes and John tunes his guitar.

“Do you ever go back, then?” John asks, to distract himself. “Seems like you’re always tripping forward.”

Paul shrugs, scratching his warm cheek. “Not much to trip back for is there? You’re only what, seventeen? There’s way more future than past at this point.”

John wonders how far Paul’s gone, how long John lives, but he can’t quite force the words from his mouth. They feel callous somehow and frighteningly finite. For now, he trusts that he at least makes it to the Bahamas, however many years that takes… Between thinking of the Bahamas or his death and whether Paul’s seen it, John picks the Bahamas every time.

 

 

When he hears the news, John spends thirty seconds numb to the world. Bicycle bells clamor in his ear over a rising swell of crashing water. Thirty seconds pass before he cranks his head towards Paul. “Did you know? Did you know about this?!”

Paul’s face glows glossy and wan in light of the news, his breath a shaking rattle. “No, Johnny. I… No.” John believes him. Someone, Pete, undoes the hands gripping Paul by the cuff and John realizes at length they’re his own.

Paul staggers back, slumps into the wall and stares at John. Horrible comprehension lurks there, understanding, and the knowing is too much for John who wrenches away to scream and kick at the shelves near him. They break and tumble at his touch, spilling books over the floor and John hopes to never read another word again.

It should get easier with practice, the losing. Instead, Mimi’s cold tears and pursed lips ache all the more a second time around. Watching the coffin lay down not far from Uncle George’s is terrifying, so John doesn’t think about it; he waits and scans the attendees’ faces, looking for someone only just familiar.

He’s smoking a cigarette in Strawberry Fields when it comes. There’s the thud-drop of someone meeting the ground and then John is on him, tacking him onto the grass and writhing and beating against his chest.

“How could you! How could you, you ruddy bastard!”

“John, John!” Hands work around his arms, pulling them back. “Calm down, love!”

John blinks through the deluge of tears painting his face to see Paul, hair a pale brown and face carved with age-lines. Forty if more, and he shouldn’t be able to hold John off the way he is, but John finds himself weak and ineffectual, struggling in the grasp but staying there still.

Paul scans his face, dark eyes roving the planes and tearstains, soaking up his black shirt and he sighs. “Oh, is this about your mam?”

Ire thunders through his mouth.

“Yes, it’s me mam!” John shouts. “Of course it is! What else would it be!” How could he talk about her with surprise? Think of her as some event long past? How could it ever be possible? “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have stopped it!”

“You’d just have likely gotten yourself killed trying.” He holds up a hand to John’s frothing protest. “Stopping death is not why I’m here John, it isn’t why I travel.” His eyes are mired and John shivers, suddenly aware that he’s standing before something other.

“Are you even human?” John spits. “Do you even think of your own dead mam, Paul?!”

He’s expecting a good licking or at least a kick. Instead, Paul eyes him with empathy so aged it seems sympathetic. John tries to knee him, but Paul sits them up. “All the time, John.”

That answer is somehow more shocking. “What? Even now? Even old as dirt?” John gasps, he’s breathing too hard.

“Even older,” Paul murmurs.

“It doesn’t get better then? It never stops?!”

“It changes.” Paul even dares to sound reasonable about it.

“I don’t want to live with this.” John cries. He shakes Paul. “You should have let me try.”

“You’re too precious to waste here in Liverpool.” His old eyes are too much and John looks away. Paul sighs. “You don’t want to talk to me, John.” He tilts his head, and John follows the motion in time to see a figure in blue dart behind the brick gate and out of sight.

He looks down and finds only grass. His feet stumble over each other as he lurches up and clambers his way around the corner to find his Paul.

It’s no one’s fault, but he smacks his Paul in the nose anyway and feels cartilage give.

“Fuck off, John!” Paul screams, blood dripping into his teeth. “Fuck right off!” John isn’t going anywhere, has a grip now and won’t let go; Paul’s got one too.

“How do you do it, sitting there with your Mam dead, going to school, putting the kettle on? How do you do it?!” It’s half accusatory half revelation-seeking, and Paul spits the blood from his cheek.

“I don’t know, do I? When I heard… when I heard the first thing I asked was about the money.” His eyes are wild and John’s heart kicks in his chest. “I don’t know how I go on, just that I do.”

Everything in John slackens and the tears are coming harder, fueled only by misery.

“You’ll do it too,” Paul whispers, putting a hand over his back, rubbing the fragile tension frayed to snapping and somehow making it better. “You’ll do it too, John.”

As the time-tripper, John supposes he’d know. They take shelter beneath the gate and weep, rubbing bloodied hands over their faces in the plain public of anyone passing and when John moans and keens Paul tells him, “You’ll do it,” and it’s so much a  promise and a threat that it soothes some feral strangeness dwelling in his chest.

 

 

John goes on, in spite of his daft mam and the daft world, John goes on. He goes to art college to get Mimi off his back, but his mind dwells on the music scarping about the corners of his mind, waiting to be pulled into intelligibility. John’s living with Stu now and the freedom to play guitar and write ditties without the looming threat of Mimi’s proper nosiness is a freeing thing.

Stu’s a good bloke, though he and Paul seem often at ends. It amuses John, because they’re both poncy, just in different directions. Unsurprisingly, Paul’s never tripped off or in while Stu’s around, supposes he isn’t safe as houses, but that raises the question about who is?

“How many people know you trip?” John asks as Paul takes the kettle from the creaky stove. He’s wearing an old sweater that stretches against his recent height.

“Me family and you. Some girl I told when I was eight I think.” Paul doesn’t volunteer information about his condition, but he’s willing to answer John’s questions. It seems more than fair since John has his equal, unasked part in this.

“No one else’s seen you or noticed?” John asks. “I know children are always popping up from nowhere undesired, but that’s hard to imagine!” That Paul doesn’t rise to his age bait proves he has finally grown up some. He’s grown more than just some if John’s being fair. Paul leans back against the counter, bending along his increasingly leaner and longer lines. His face is still daft, soft and curved like something that might fit in John’s hand and he’s been trying not to notice as much. It’s worse knowing how much he’ll stay the same, how those lips keep their boyish bubble and his smile its toothy slant. It’s not the first time, the way John notices things about blokes. It’s easier with his glasses off, the desire becomes less defined, but with Paul he’s always seeing too much.

John Lennon is no one’s queer, not even a mad time-traveler’s… but Paul… Paul is something else, isn’t he? Clean and masculine, hair curling out on the edges of his proper cut and eyes that straddle colors. He’s music and John can’t help but have feelings about that.

They knock out half a song and then Paul fucks off to put the kettle on for his da or pet George or some toss like that.

John tries to finish the song before slapping it down and slinking on top of his sheets. Stu is out, and only the walls see him kicking his pants off. He starts, as he usually does with good old Bridget, come fuck-me lips and breasts enough to farm on. She’s smooth under his grip, little hands on his prick and he’s gasping even as the hands grow more callused in his imagination, the lips less painted and more scuffed with little hair that would rasp across his cheek—

“Oh, John.” A tittering, familiar laugh knocks John’s eyes open and he nearly flips off the bed as he sees Paul swaying in front of the locked door. It takes John a half-second to realize it isn’t his imagination and another half before he’s cursing to high heaven.

“Jesus fucking Churchill, Paul!” he cries. “Can you not see I’m in the middle of something??”

Paul blinks, eyes glazed and shiny. His mouth falls open a little and John finds himself distracted by the mustache crossing the upper part of his lip. His dick twitches beneath his hand, he just imagined it…

“I’m sorry Johnny, no need to stop on my account,” Paul says, arms swinging wide beneath his blue embroidered sleeves. “’Specially when you’ve such racy material as Jesus fucking Churchill.”

“Not going to continue, am I?” John growls, pulling the blanket over his hips and glaring, betrayed.

“Didn’t mean to pop in while you were popping off.” Paul chuckles and stretches his hands up. “But this? This is good stuff, the best stuff. I could run a country on it. Not surprised I lost me focus.”

“What kind of stuff?” John asks, despite himself.

A lazy smile pulls on either corner of his face. “The cocaine kind.” He’s laughing again. “Can’t remember feeling so good, we thought Bob’s stash was fine, but this, but this!” He spins a little where he stands and then flops onto the bed, heedless of John curling his legs up. Paul slumps, leaning down. “I could do anything, it’s wide open, anything!”

There’s a heaviness in Paul’s gaze, even as blitzed as he is. It’s weighted with expectation that John is not yet privy too. He suspects… no, maybe he hopes that it’s to do with Paul noticing John noticing Paul. Electricity stirs in the air and if John’s dick twitches in fear and excitement it’s only his business.

“Shouldn’t make promises like anything.” The words are out of John before he really thinks of it. He toes the line, waits and sees and is rewarded by the way Paul’s hand slinks up the blankets and curls around his ankle.

“Can too,” Paul murmurs. He watches John, smiles when John’s leg slackens and pulls straight ‘neath his grip. The other leg is next and then Paul sidles on up, digging elbows into the mattress as he takes a position John’s only seen from loose birds.

John shivers. Paul seems… practiced; so comfortable with how he taps the erection and grins at John’s groan. He shuffles the blanket down, eyeing John for signs but John knows his eyes are bleeding a FUCK YES across his face. Paul sees it, laughs and it's hot breath blowing over John’s prick and those dark teeming eyes glittering like it’s a treat.

“Are you or aren’t you?” John asks, panting. Paul winks and then those thick lips curl around the head and John throws his head back. “Christ, Paul!”

Paul hums, and it wretches a sound deep from John’s chest. It’s so intense John feels his eyes fluttering, but he can’t bring himself to look away from the dark silky head dropping up and down, the way his mustache butts against John’s pubic hair and tangles for a moment. The eyes, watching him, reaping pleasure even as Paul’s own hips squirm and shimmy over the bedspread.

Paul’s experienced, John thinks again, much better than any bird and someone had to show him how to do this. John fucking hopes it’s him— will make it him, because queer or whatever else hardly matters when Paul’s lips spread and a finger circles the rim of John’s ass.

He blows, and Paul sucks up thick globs, spilling a little on his chin, licking up the edges of his lips. He smiles again, showing a chipped tooth and then says, “See, wide open.”

John collapses against the bed and when he looks up again, he’s alone.

“Bloody hell,” he utters, trying to still his throbbing heart.

 

 

John means to put it out of his head, to leave it on the sheets with the little damp spot Paul had rubbed in. He can’t. When he sees Paul at the Jacardia, his face runs hot and he can’t help but duck eyes. What are they in the future that Paul can stop in and drop for a blow job? What is John that he wants that? He watches Paul in his leathers, hips bobbing and twisting the backbeat and wonders if older John’s had him yet. It sends a shiver of twisted jealousy over his spine. That more than anything lets him crowd Paul’s space after the set, crushing him into an alcove in the backstage.

“John?” Paul boggles at him, something bubbling behind his eyes. “I’m not…”

“I don’t care, do I?” John replies, stepping closer and knocking his hips into Paul’s. They’re high from performing and his hardness bumps against Paul’s. John leans closer, courageous now for a future set in stone and lets his mouth whisper over Paul’s ear. “We don’t have to call it this or the other. But the way I see it, we’re missing out on something very obvious.”

He gasps when Paul ruts forward a little, but the hips still and he’s treated to the flush crawling around Paul’s face. “I don’t know what I’ve said to you,” Paul says, hands meeting John’s elbows. “But we don’t have to.”

Ho, ho, so future John has done or said a thing or two to the lad, putting ideas into his head. Wicked clever, he is, and encroaching on John’s territory too.

“All the more reason.”

Paul isn’t immune, hasn’t been immune, and as John senses his gaze on him, he feels the familiar pull of hazel eyes tracing his features, appreciating. John lets out a little sigh. “Could be good,” John says. “More than.”

His hand slips down, tracing ribs and back before stopping on hip and Paul leans forward into the touch, his erection brushing against John’s again. John grins. “Doesn’t have to be anything, does it?”

Paul’s eyes are complex, but the thought vanishes as he leans in, lips curling and left hand drifting down.

 

Notes:

...this may be the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written. This fic is COMPLETE and will be posted in three chapters every week around this time for a total of 20,000 words.

 

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