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The rain arrived first.
It always did.
London carried rain the way old cathedrals carried incense, permanently soaked into stone, lungs, and the memory of everyone trapped beneath it. By August, the city felt less like a place and more like a living thing decaying beautifully in slow motion.
George thought the Beatles were beginning to decay the same way.
EMI Studios glowed dimly against the storm outside. Cigarette smoke drifted through the recording room in thin pale ribbons whilst amplifiers hummed low enough to resemble distant bees. Somewhere beyond the glass, Paul was arguing with an engineer in that maddening bright voice of his, clipped and restless.
John laughed at something nobody else heard.
The sound bounced strangely off the walls.
George sat cross-legged on the floor with his guitar resting silent across his lap.
There was an empty drum stool in the center of the room, and god did he hate looking at it.
It looked wrong, like a church after the candles had burned out.
Ringo had left two days ago.
Nobody knew how to speak about it directly.
Paul simply called it "time away".
John called it madness.
George called it absolutely nothing at all, because saying it aloud would make it real, and George had spent most of his life pretending terrible things were temporary.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
Paul finally emerged from the control room looking exhausted already, his eyes sharp beneath the shadows gathered there. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced towards the drum riser before quickly looking away again.
No one mentioned it.
Somehow, it made it all the worse.
George watched rain crawl downward across the windows.
The studio felt hollow without Ringo in it.
Ringo filled spaces in ways people rarely noticed, til he vanished from them. He seemed to soften rooms simply by existing inside of them. Arguments never sounded quite as vicious when Ringo laughed softly under his breath afterwards. Long recording sessions became survivable, simply because he sat there patiently drumming against his knees while everyone else seemed to spiral into ego and exhaustion.
Without him, even the air itself seemed brittle.
John wandered over eventually, dressed entirely in white again, looking ghostly beneath the studio lights.
"You look miserable," he said.
George shrugged.
"Feel miserable."
"Healthy, hm?"
George stared at the empty drum stool again.
John followed his gaze.
Something softer crossed his face briefly, before it vanished.
"We'll sort it," John muttered.
George laughed once, his laughter short and bitter.
"Will we?"
John didn't answer immediately.
Outside, thunder rolled somewhere deep over the city.
Finally, John sighed and dropped onto the sofa beside him.
"He'll come back."
"You sound certain."
"He'll always come back to us."
George looked towards John, then.
John's expression had gone strangely distant, almost like he was trying to convince himself too.
That night, George drove through London for nearly three hours without purpose.
Rainwater blurred the streets silver beneath his headlights, and neon signs seemed to glow like bruises in puddles. The city after midnight always looked vaguely underwater to him, drowned in light, fog, and loneliness.
He eventually stopped beside the Thames, and sat in the car without moving.
The band had become impossible lately. Everything felt strained, like old lace being pulled too tight. Delicate.
Paul pushed everyone relentlessly because he was terrified the music would stop if he didn't.
John drifted further away each week, wrapped in himself and Yoko and whatever strange private weather lived inside him now.
George felt trapped between resentment and grief so constantly he barely recognized himself anymore.
And Ringo..
George shut his eyes.
Ringo had simply gotten tired.
That somehow hurt more.
He wasn't motivated by anger nor betrayal, but exhaustion.
George rested his forehead against the steering wheel.
Rain hammered softly overhead.
He remembered Hamburg suddenly.
He did that often, lately.
Maybe it was because the past looked so holy compared to the present.
They'd been boys then. Hungry, stupid, and inseparable. George remembered nights crammed together in tiny rooms, half asleep against one another while dawn bled gray through dirty windows.
He always remembered Ringo, too.
Even before Ringo officially became theirs.
Always slightly apart from the chaos.
Watching quietly.
George liked the man immediately, simply because the older man always made him feel safe.
George rarely admitted to himself how much that mattered to him.
The rain eased slightly.
George lit another cigarette.
Suddenly - horribly - he wondered whether Ringo knew any of this.
Whether anyone had ever properly told him, or if they'd all simply assumed he understood.
The realization made George feel sick.
By the third day, the studio had begun resembling a mausoleum.
Nobody seemed to sleep enough.
Paul kept trying to force momentum back into the sessions with frantic determination, bouncing between instruments like a man trying to outrun collapse itself.
John grew quieter.
George became unbearable.
He sat through most conversations with his arms folded tightly across his chest, irritation simmering beneath his skin constantly. Every small sound grated against him.
Especially Paul's optimism.
"Come on," Paul insisted while adjusting microphones late one evening. "We can still finish the track, y'know."
George looked up sharply.
"Without Rich?"
Paul exhaled hard.
"George–"
"No, be honest. You're acting like nothing happened."
"I'm trying to keep us working."
"You're just trying to pretend this isn't awful."
Paul's jaw tightened immediately.
The room shifted colder.
John watched from the corner sofa with visible dread. Maybe from all that coke he snorted.
"You know what the problem is?" He snapped. "Nobody - and I mean nobody noticed he was miserable til he finally left."
Paul looked wounded for exactly one second before anger covered it over.
"That's unfair."
"Is it?"
"Yes, actually."
George laughed bitterly.
"Oh, brilliant. Glad we've solved that then."
"Christ," John muttered quietly.
Paul crossed his arms.
"What exactly is it that you want me to do?"
George opened his mouth, then stopped.
That was the problem. He didn't know.
There was no solution anymore, but fractures people kept trying to tape back together while pretending they weren't widening beneath their hands.
The studio door opened suddenly.
An assistant entered carrying tea.
Everyone fell silent immediately.
Polite smiles were plastered onto careful faces, pretending that everything was fine.
George hated pretending more than anything.
Once the assistant left, the silence returned heavier than before.
Finally, John stood.
"I'm getting ciggies before one of you murders the other."
The door slammed behind him.
George remained standing across from Paul.
Rain whispered against the windows.
Paul suddenly looked more exhausted than angry - looking more like the boy George had known since childhood than the celebrity the media had created.
George felt cruel immediately.
He looked away first.
"Sorry," he muttered.
Paul rubbed both hands over his face.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Me too."
Another pause, then softer:
"I miss him."
The honesty of it nearly undid George completely, because there it was. The terrible truth none of them could stop circling around.
They missed him.
The studio missed him.
And even the songs missed him.
George sat back down slowly.
Outside, London drowned itself in rain again.
That night, George dreamed of cathedrals with endless dark corridors, candlelight flickering against stone walls, and choir music echoing somewhere distant.
Suddenly, there Ringo was, standing beneath stained glass windows flooded in blue light, looking small and unbearably alone.
George tried reaching him, but the cathedral kept changing its shape.
The floors seemed to flood black with seawater, the ceilings stretching higher and higher until they disappeared into darkness entirely.
"Rich," George yelped.
Ringo smiled faintly.. then vanished.
George woke before dawn with his heart pounding viciously.
Moonlight stained the bedroom silver-blue, as Pattie slept peacefully beneath tangled sheets.
George sat upright breathing hard.
Something awful pressed against his ribs, something grief-adjacent.
He climbed out of bed quietly, and went downstairs barefoot through dark hallways while rain battered the windows again.
The house felt cavernous at this hour, and empty in the wrong places.
George reached the telephone before he could reconsider it.
The ringing seemed endless.
Finally,
"Hello?"
Relief hit George so suddenly he nearly laughed aloud.
"It's me," he said quietly.
A pause.
"Georgie?"
Nobody else called him that anymore.
George leaned against the wall.
"You left," he said.
"Bit observant tonight."
"You're irritating."
"Missed you too."
George smiled despite himself.
The silence afterwards felt strangely intimate.
Hundreds of miles stretched between them and somehow George could still picture him perfectly - messy hair, half-awake, with one hand curled loosely around the receiver.
"How are you?" George asked softly.
Ringo hesitated.
"Fine."
A lie.
George recognized it instantly.
"You sound awful."
"Cheers."
"I mean it."
Another pause, then Ringo sighed.
The exhaustion in the sound nearly broke George's heart.
"I don't know," Ringo admitted quietly. "Just felt like.. nobody needed me there anymore."
George shut his eyes hard as pain twisted sharply through his chest.
"That's… stupid," he whispered.
"Probably."
"Seriously. I mean it. 'S the stupidest thing you've ever said."
Ringo laughed softly.
George felt absurdly relieved hearing it.
"You really miss me that much?" Ringo asked after a while.
George looked towards the rain-dark windows.
"The studio feels haunted with you," he admitted.
Silence.
"Haunted?"
"Mm."
"Bit dramatic, no?"
"I'm bein' sincere."
"That's worse."
George laughed quietly.
He could hear waves faintly through the telephone line.
Ringo must've been near the sea somewhere.
"Come back," George said suddenly.
The words escaped before he could stop them.
Long silence encompassed the two.
George's heartbeat stumbled, then Ringo asked softly,
"You askin' as a Beatle or as my friend?"
George swallowed hard.
"Both."
Rain whispered against the house.
Finally, after what felt like forever,
"Alright," Ringo said.
George nearly cried from relief.