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January settled over Twickenham in a pale, reluctant haze that never seemed to lift completely, even beneath the white glare of the studio lamps, and every morning John arrived with the uneasy feeling that he had wandered into a place that existed slightly outside of ordinary time, a place where hours stretched thin and brittle beneath the weight of observation, where conversations dissolved into the cavernous air before they could fully take shape, and where the simple act of crossing the soundstage felt like traversing some enormous abandoned hall whose original purpose had long ago been forgotten.
The ceilings disappeared into darkness high above them, swallowing the steel beams and cables until they seemed suspended in nothing at all, while the lights cast their harsh artificial daylight across concrete floors stained by decades of movement, of equipment dragged from one end of the building to another, of people arriving full of plans and departing with whatever remained of them. Voices traveled strangely through the space. A laugh from the opposite side of the room reached him several seconds later, detached from its source and softened by distance, as though the studio itself had decided to keep part of it.
John sat on an amplifier near the edge of the set and watched the morning assemble itself around him.
Someone adjusted a microphone stand.
Someone else rolled a camera into position.
The familiar ritual unfolded with the weary precision of something performed too many times to require thought.
Across the room, Paul was already in motion, talking to a technician while gesturing towards the piano, every inch of him animated by purpose, and John found himself watching with the faint bewilderment of a man observing a phenomenon he no longer entirely understood. There had always been something inexhaustible about Paul, some private reservoir from which he could draw energy no matter how strained the circumstances became, and lately that quality seemed almost unreal beneath the unforgiving brightness of Twickenham, where every uncertainty was illuminated and every silence felt larger than it ought to.
The sessions had acquired a peculiar atmosphere during the previous weeks, something difficult to describe without sounding melodramatic. Nothing disastrous had occurred. No single argument could be pointed to, no dramatic rupture held up as evidence. The discomfort lived in smaller things. It lingered in unfinished conversations and glances exchanged across the room. It surfaced whenever someone suggested a song and someone else immediately looked tired. It settled over them during the pauses, those brief stretches of quiet when nobody seemed quite sure what came next.
John lowered his gaze and rubbed absentmindedly at a scratch in the amplifier's worn black covering.
His sleep had been poor again.
The dreams themselves had dissolved shortly after waking, leaving only fragments behind, the impression of long corridors, a door standing open somewhere ahead, and the strange certainty that he had forgotten something important. The feeling had followed him into the morning and remained lodged somewhere beneath his ribs, stubborn as a bruise.
He glanced up once more and found Rich - or Ringo, as everybody else called him, sitting beside the drum riser with a paper cup balanced carefully between his hands.
There was nothing remarkable about the sight. Ringo wasn't speaking. He wasn't attempting to mediate whatever fresh disagreement had emerged that day. He was simply sitting there, his shoulders slightly hunched against the cold, quietly drinking tea while the machinery of the session whirred around him, and John felt a surprising rush of relief at the sight of him, so immediate and instinctive that it almost embarrassed him.
The world seemed increasingly full of movement. People drifted in and out of John's life with alarming regularity. Circumstances shifted. Relationships changed shape. Entire futures rearranged themselves overnight. Yet, Ringo possessed a steadiness that resisted all of it, a quality so deeply woven into him that it often escaped notice altogether, like the reassuring weight of a familiar object one only becomes aware of after it has gone missing.
Perhaps he stared a moment too long, because Ringo eventually glanced across the room and caught him looking.
One eyebrow lifted.
The expression was so unmistakably him that a reluctant smile tugged at the corner of John's mouth before he could stop it.
A few minutes later, footsteps approached.
"Y'alright?"
John looked up.
Ringo remained standing for a moment, tea in hand, waiting with the patience of someone who already suspected the answer and wasn't particularly concerned with being lied to.
The studio lights reflected faintly in the lenses of John's glasses. Somewhere behind them, a guitar rang out as somebody tested a chord. The sound echoed briefly and faded.
"Course I am," John said.
Ringo's expression suggested he knew John was lying.
Without another word, he lowered himself onto the amplifier beside him.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The silence felt unexpectedly welcome.
John stared out across the soundstage, listening to the distant murmur of voices and the soft hum of electrical equipment, aware of Ringo's presence beside him in the same way one becomes aware of a fire in a cold room, not simply because it demands attention, but rather because some part of the body recognized comfort before the mind did.
The realization settled over him and brought with it an uncomfortable thought.
Nothing stayed.
The knowledge had followed him for so long that it no longer arrived as grief. It existed more like weather, a fact of the landscape through which he moved. People left. They always had. Sometimes they chose to leave and sometimes the choice was made for them, but the result remained the same. Rooms emptied. Voices disappeared. Entire chapters of life closed without warning.
He watched a technician cross the far side of the room and found himself thinking, with sudden and irrational clarity, about what Twickenham might look like without Ringo sitting beside the drums.
The thought lodged somewhere deep enough to hurt.
He looked down at his hands.
When had that fear appeared?
How long had it been there, waiting for him to notice it?
Beside him, Ringo took another sip of tea.
"You've gone somewhere again."
John laughed softly.
"Have I?"
"Yeah."
Ringo glanced sideways at him.
"You look like you're tryin' to solve a murder."
The laugh came easier this time, and for a brief moment, the oppressive brightness of the studio seemed less severe, the vast empty space less lonely than it had been a few minutes earlier.
The smile lingered for only a moment before the room reclaimed his attention, because somewhere near the piano, Paul had begun discussing arrangements again and the familiar current of activity spread outwards through the soundstage, drawing technicians and musicians back into motion while cables were shifted across the concrete and microphones adjusted beneath the relentless brightness of the overhead lamps, yet John remained seated for several seconds after Ringo rose from the amplifier, watching the retreating shape of him as he crossed the floor towards the drum riser with the same unhurried gait he carried everywhere, neither rushing nor lingering, as though he alone had discovered some secret pace at which life became manageable.
John often found himself watching people leave.
The realization arrived unexpectedly and settled somewhere uncomfortable.
He watched people leave rooms, leave conversations, and leave entire periods of his life.
Perhaps everyone did this to some extent, yet there were moments when it felt as though his mind had been built around the anticipation of absence, around the certainty that anything good would eventually move beyond reach if given enough time.
The thought remained with him throughout the morning.
It followed him through rehearsals, through half-finished discussions about songs that changed shape every ten minutes, through Paul's increasingly animated attempts to steer the sessions towards something productive, through George's growing irritation and the quiet patience with which Ringo occupied the space between them all. By lunchtime, the sensation had settled beneath his skin like a splinter, small enough to ignore and impossible to forget.
Twickenham seemed larger after meals.
The studio emptied briefly while people wandered off in search of tea or cigarettes or a few minutes away from one another, and during those intervals, the vastness of the place revealed itself again. John stood near one of the cameras and looked across the soundstage towards the far wall, where shadows gathered in the corners beyond the reach of the lamps, and felt a strange impulse to walk until he reached them, to keep walking until the voices behind him disappeared entirely.
Instead, he chose to light a cigarette.
The smoke rose slowly in the cold air.
Across the room, Ringo sat alone on the edge of the drum riser, turning a drumstick between his fingers while staring towards nothing in particular.
The sight of him produced the same quiet it always seemed to lately.
John frowned.
That was becoming a problem.
It wasn't because there was anything wrong with the man - if anything, Ringo's greatest flaw had to be the ease with which people trusted him. There was a steadiness to him that invited dependence before one realized it was happening, a quality that made sitting beside him feel strangely similar to returning home after spending too long elsewhere.
No.
The problem was John, because once he noticed himself relying upon something, he immediately became aware of the possibility of losing it.
Once that possibility appeared, it never entirely left.
The cigarette burned slowly between his fingers while the studio continued its endless rearrangement around him, people drifting in and out of view as equipment was moved and conversations began and ended with the strange, dreamlike rhythm that had become characteristic of Twickenham, where everyday seemed to stretch beyond its natural limits until morning and evening felt less like separate things and more like different shades of the same exhausted hour.
Someone called Paul's name from the far side of the room.
Someone else laughed.
The sound echoed upward into the darkness hanging above the rafters.
John watched Ringo spin the drumstick once more between his fingers, then look up.
The movement was completely ordinary, as nothing significant happened, yet John felt something tighten painfully beneath his ribs all the same.
Perhaps it was because he suddenly became aware of how many years had passed.
Not in an abstract sense or number, but rather as a collection of images.
Hamburg.
The smell of cigarettes trapped in club curtains, long nights, and cold mornings.
RIngo sitting behind a drum kit in places so small that every wall seemed to vibrate with the sound.
Then came London, tours, films, and endless rooms full of people.
Somehow, through all of it, Ringo remained as a fixed point, a constant figure in John's life.
An anchor so familiar that John rarely noticed himself orienting around it until moments like this, when the realization surfaced unexpectedly and left him feeling exposed.
He looked away first.
The rest of the afternoon unfolded with the weary inevitability of weather.
Songs appeared and disappeared.
Fragments of arrangements emerged only to be discarded an hour later.
Paul pushed forward with increasingly visible determination, his enthusiasm carrying a faint edge of desperation now, as though momentum itself had become a thing that required constant maintenance lest it collapse entirely.
John knew the feeling far too well.
The cameras rolled, and the lights remained bright.
Everyone continued behaving as though the future still existed in a form they could recognize, and yet, there were moments when he caught George staring into the middle distance with an expression that suggested he had already left the room in every way except physically.
There were moments when even Paul fell silent.
There were moments when the enormous soundstage seemed so empty that the conversations taking place inside of it felt absurdly small.
By the time evening approached, John's head had begun to ache.
The artificial lights weren't helping. Nothing in Twickenham helped.
The place seemed actively hostile to comfort. The cold remained constant, the air smelled faintly of dust and electrical equipment, and every surface felt temporary. All the chairs seemed borrowed from somewhere else.
John sat on a stool near one of the microphones and rubbed his eyes behind his glasses.
For several minutes, he remained completely still.
The ache behind his forehead pulsed gently.
Someone sat beside him. He didn't need to look to know who it was.
"You look knackered."
John let out a quiet laugh.
"You've said that three times today."
"Because you do!"
"Maybe it's just my face."
Ringo considered this.
"Could be."
That earned another laugh, a small one, but real nonetheless.
When John lowered his hand from his eyes, he found Ringo watching the studio floor rather than him, his expression thoughtful in the quiet way it often became when he wasn't actively participating in conversation.
For a while, neither spoke.
The silence stretched comfortably between them.
It wasn't empty. It never was between them.
John had spent enough time around people to recognize the difference.
Most silences carried expectation.
Somebody always wanted something - whether that was a response, or even something physical.
This one required nothing.
The realization settled over him with surprising force.
He could sit beside Ringo for hours and never feel compelled to perform.
It shouldn't have felt remarkable, and yet it did, simply because so much of John's life had become performance.
People expected a version of John Lennon whenever he entered a room, whether it was the sharp one, the funny one, the difficult one, the clever one, or the loud one.
Expectations accumulated over time until they formed something almost solid.
A role he slipped into automatically.
With Ringo though, the effort seemed unnecessary.
The thought made him unexpectedly tired with a fatigue that seemed to originate somewhere beneath language.
Beside him, Ringo stretched his legs out in front of him.
"Want tea?"
The question arrived so suddenly that John blinked.
"What?"
"Tea."
"You offering or threatening?"
"I'm serious."
John smiled faintly.
"Yeah."
"Right then."
Ringo stood, then paused.
"You staying here?"
"Where else am I going?"
Ringo nodded.
A moment later, he disappeared towards whatever corner of Twickenham currently housed tea.
John watched him go, and the ache returned immediately.
It was as though Ringo's presence had been occupying enough space in his awareness to distract him from it. The realization was unsettling.
He disliked it intensely. He disliked needing things, to depend upon people. He disliked the way affection always seemed to arrive hand in hand with fear, because affection created stakes, and stakes created loss.
The equation remained frustratingly consistent.
He stared at the floor.
A cable stretched across the concrete near his feet. Someone had marked its path with strips of tape, and the tape was beginning to peel away at the edges. John found himself watching one corner lift slightly whenever a draft crossed the room.
Lift.
Settle.
Lift.
Settle.
The repetition became strangely hypnotic.
For several moments, nothing else but the movement and rhythm existed.
His thoughts drifted, and the room blurred softly at the edges.
For a split second, he was remembering Brian.
Not the end of him - never the end, of course, but his laugh and voice. The way he'd walk into a room already carrying three plans and two worries. The certainty that Brian would always be somewhere nearby, until one day he wasn't.
The memory arrived with such unexpected clarity that John physically flinched.
His eyes snapped back into focus and the tape remained exactly where it had been before, yet his chest felt tight. Dangerously tight.
He swallowed.
The feeling refused to leave.
Before he could stop himself, his gaze moved across the room searching for Ringo, just to check and confirm he was still there.
Ringo emerged a moment later carrying two paper cups.
The knot beneath John's ribs loosened slightly. It wasn't enough to get rid of it all, but enough that he hated himself a little for it. Enough that he immediately looked away before Ringo could notice.
Enough that, somewhere deep inside himself, a thought began taking shape that he would spend the next several days trying very hard not to examine, because if people always left, and if the band itself felt increasingly fragile beneath the bright merciless lights of Twickenham, then perhaps the thing frightening him wasn't the possibility of change, but perhaps it was the realization that he no longer knew who would be when the changing finally stopped.
The thought remained with him long after it should've dissolved.
It lingered through the evening, through another succession of half-finished songs and repeated takes, with conversations that seemed to circle themselves endlessly, never quite arriving where they intended to go. The hours accumulated with the peculiar weightlessness that had become characteristic of all the others, until John occasionally experienced the uncomfortable sensation that he had already lived through certain moments before.
A joke would repeat.
A disagreement would resurface.
Someone suggested an arrangement.
Someone else objected.
The cycle resumed, and the cameras observed everything.
That, more than anything else, seemed to contribute to the dreamlike quality of the days. There was always the faint awareness of being watched, not merely by the people physically present, but by some future audience occupying an invisible place just beyond the edge of the room, people who would one day study these moments searching for meanings none of them currently possessed.
John wondered what they'd see, some days.
Would they see a band? A family? Or a slow-motion collapse?
Perhaps all three.
The thought tired him.
By the time they finally packed away their instruments, darkness had already settled beyond the studio walls, though darkness and daylight meant very little inside Twickenham. The lamps remained equally bright regardless of the hour. Time became theoretical there.
People began filtering towards the exits.
Voices echoed through the cavernous space.
Coats appeared.
Conversations continued in fragments.
John lingered near the piano, absently running his fingers across a sequence of notes without any real intention behind them. The sound drifted softly through the emptying room.
A few keys were stuck slightly.
He pressed them anyway.
The note seemed to hang in the air longer than expected.
Everything seemed to hang in the air longer than expected lately.
Across the room, Paul was speaking with one of the crew members. George had already disappeared, and several technicians were coiling cables.
Ringo was just waiting.
He leaned against a wall near the exit with his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat, and John felt a strange warmth spread through his chest at the sight.
The feeling arrived so naturally that he nearly missed it, before he noticed. He immediately wished he hadn't, because awareness changed things. Awareness seemed to transform comfort into vulnerability.
The moment one recognized how much something mattered, one simultaneously could recognize how much it could hurt.
John rose from the piano bench.
Ringo straightened slightly.
"You coming?"
The question was entirely ordinary, and yet, something about it caught John off guard.
Coming.
As though it were obvious. As though there had never been a possibility that he wouldn't.
The strange warmth returned, stronger than ever.
"Yeah," John said.
His voice sounded rougher than intended.
Together, the cold struck the duo immediately as they stepped out into the January evening.
The sky above London had settled into a deep charcoal gray, and the city lights glimmered faintly through the winter haze while traffic moved along distant roads in ribbons of gold and white.
For a few moments, neither spoke.
Their footsteps echoed softly against the pavement.
The city seemed to possess its own rhythm after dark. A quiet one. The buildings here seemed to become larger than life itself after hours, with shadows gathered in doorways and beneath awnings.
The world, simply put, felt less crowded.
John preferred it.
Daylight invited observation, and the night allowed disappearance.
He shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets. Beside him, Ringo exhaled a visible cloud of breath.
"You know," Ringo said eventually, "you've been acting strange."
John laughed, bitterly.
"Only recently?"
".. 'm serious."
There was no accusation in the statement, which made it harder to dismiss.
John glanced sideways, as Ringo's expression remained neutral, patient, and waiting.
John looked away first as traffic hissed somewhere nearby.
The city continued moving around them, without any care.
"I don't know," John said finally.
The admission surprised him, because for once in his life, he had been honest without any fighting.
Ringo nodded once, as though that answer made perfect sense.
For several moments, they walked in silence.
The cold stung John's face. His thoughts kept drifting and returning in a vicious cycle.
The conversation should've ended there, and yet, he found himself speaking.
"I keep thinking.. about things ending."
The words appeared before he could reconsider them.
Ringo glanced towards him as John kept looking ahead. The pavement stretched before them beneath the amber glow of the streetlights. The city seemed very far away.
"Things always end," Ringo said quietly.
The response wasn't dismissive, nor was it pessimistic. Just factual, which made it worse.
John laughed softly.
A sickly humorless sound.
"That's meant to help, is it?"
Ringo smiled faintly.
"No."
The honesty of it startled another laugh from him, a real laugh this time.
The sound vanished into the night air. They continued walking.
John became aware of how easy the conversation felt. He felt as though for the first time in years, there was the absence of performance. There was the freedom to leave sentences unfinished, and trust that the words would be understood anyway.
A dangerous sort of comfort.
One capable of becoming essential without permission.
By the time he recognized the extent of it, the realization had already rooted itself too deeply to remove, and beneath that realization lurked another, darker one that seemed increasingly difficult to ignore.
The thing frightening him was no longer merely the possibility of losing the band - the band he no longer cared for, the band that tired and bore him out, but rather the possibility of losing the future. Losing whatever version of himself existed inside the Beatles.
Those fears remained, of course, but another had begun quietly eclipsing them - the fear of waking one morning and discovering that the very few people he still had and trusted had grown tired of carrying him.
The fear that eventually even Rich - his drummer and his best friend would decide that he was too much work.
The thought of it all was difficult.
John hated the thought the moment it appeared. He hated the childishness of it, the vulnerability, and the nakedness.
Yet, it remained.
For the first time, he found himself wondering whether that fear had been living inside him all along, beneath years of jokes and anger and noise, waiting patiently for a winter cold enough to bring it into the light.
The thought accompanied him home.
It didn't arrive as a revelation, nor did it transform itself into some neat, devastating conclusion that could be examined and understood. Instead, it lingered at the edge of his awareness throughout the following days, surfacing unexpectedly in quiet moments before slipping away again whenever the noise around him became loud enough to drown it out.
The trouble was that noise no longer worked the way it used to.
For most of his life, movement had been sufficient. If something hurt, he moved. If something frightened him, he made a joke about it. If a thought became uncomfortable, there was always another room, another conversation, another song waiting somewhere ahead.
Lately, however, the spaces between things seemed larger.
The pauses lasted longer, and the distractions no longer held. And so, his thoughts kept finding their way back.
Twickenham remained unchanged. Every morning, the enormous studio would greet him with the same cold air and the same glaring lights, and every morning John crossed the soundstage feeling as though he were returning to a dream he had left unfinished.
The cameras continued their patient observation, the conversations continued, and the tensions remained.
John found himself paying less attention to the arguments than to the silence surrounding them.
One afternoon, he found himself sitting cross-legged on the floor near the drum riser whilst Paul worked through a sequence of chords at the piano. The music seemed to drift through the studio in fragments, verses repeating, bridges altered slightly, and a handful of notes rearranged.
Paul's concentration seemed almost feverish at times, driven by a determination that bordered on desperation. John watched him for a while, then looked away. He couldn't handle seeing Paul this disheveled, but at the same time he didn't really care. His gaze settled on Ringo instead.
Ringo was adjusting part of his drum kit, his attention entirely focused upon the task in front of him. There was something reassuring about the sight, seeing the simply ordinary nature of it all seemed to soothe John's restless mind.
Someone said his name, suddenly.
John blinked.
Paul was looking at him from across the room.
"You listening?"
The question drew a few glances from nearby crew members.
John grinned automatically, the expression appearing before he consciously decided to produce it.
It was merely years of habit.
"Always."
Paul, per usual, looked unconvinced. Alas, the conversation moved on. However, the exchange lingered unpleasantly in the air, only because he hadn't been really listening. His attention kept drifting elsewhere, instead.
That evening, after another day that seemed simultaneously endless and unfinished, the studio emptied gradually around them. One by one, people disappeared into the gathering darkness beyond the doors.
Equipment stood abandoned beneath the lights. The vast room became quieter, and the shadows seemed to expand.
John remained seated at the piano long after he had stopped playing. His fingers rested motionless upon the keys, the final note faded several minutes earlier. Still, he sat there. The silence felt as though it was physical.
Across the room, Ringo was gathering his things. The sight produced the now-familiar tightening in John's chest - it wasn't pain exactly, but something adjacent to it. Perhaps, the awareness of an ending.
Although it was an ordinary ending - Ringo leaving for the evening - some irrational part of John's mind reacted as though the departure carried greater significance, as though every goodbye contained traces of all the others. Maybe it was as though every person walking out of a room became connected somehow to every person who had walked away before.
The thought was ridiculous - even he knew it was ridiculous.. and yet, the knowledge didn't help ease the pain inside of him.
Ringo slung his coat over one arm, then their eyes met briefly across the room.
"You staying?"
John glanced around.
The studio looked strangely beautiful this way, when it was nearly empty, with its bright oppressive lights casting long shadows across the floor, rows of equipment sitting motionless. The enormous ceiling vanished into darkness above them, and for a moment, the place resembled a stage after the audience had gone, a visual John could still recall perfectly.
"Maybe a bit."
Ringo nodded. He didn't bother to pressure John, nor question him, which was the thing John found most dangerous about him.
"Don't stay all night."
John smiled faintly.
"I'll try."
Then, Ringo left, the doors closing behind him leaving a loud, echoing sound through the enormous studio.
The room felt colder.
John stared at the spot where Ringo had disappeared, the silence expanding.
Minutes passed. Perhaps longer. Eventually, he stood and wandered towards the drum riser without any clear intention of doing so. The kit remained exactly as Ringo had left it - his drumsticks resting neatly nearby, a cup with a small amount of cold tea still lingering at the bottom. Tiny evidence of recent presence was all it was, but it still meant the world to John, for these were the sort of details people rarely noticed until they became important.
John lowered himself onto the edge of the riser, the studio lights humming softly overhead. The air smelled faintly of dust and old wood. He sat there, listening to the vast quiet around him. For reasons he couldn't entirely explain, a memory surfaced. It wasn't a recent one. The memory was possibly years old, with a hotel room somewhere (he couldn't remember the city - they were moving too fast for his mind to catch up) during touring.
He remembered, faintly, waking unexpectedly in the middle of the night and becoming briefly convinced that everyone else had left him. The room had been dark, the building quiet, a rare scene during the Beatles' prime - til he heard someone moving in the next room. He couldn't quite recall what the noise was, perhaps it was a door closing or a familiar voice, but he could remember how the fear had evaporated immediately. Even now, he remembered the relief, and the disproportionate intensity of it. He could even remember the certainty that something terrible had almost happened, although nothing had happened at all.
John rubbed a hand across his face.
The memory left him unsettled, because it felt familiar. Too familiar for his liking. It was as though the same fear had simply followed him into adulthood and learned new disguises. Outside, somewhere beyond the studio walls, a car passed.
The distant sound faded, and the silence returned.
Sitting there alone beside Ringo's abandoned drumkit, surrounded by the immense hollow stillness of Twickenham, John found himself forced to confront a truth that he had spent years avoiding - through distractions or simply ignoring it.
His fear wasn't people leaving him - for it was inevitable. Life had taught him that lesson repeatedly, through his mother, and even his lovers.
His fear was simply that one day, everyone would leave, and he'd discover that there hadn't been anything worth staying for in the first place. That he was simply put, not worth it all.
The thought arrived quietly - so quietly in fact, that for several moments, he simply sat there staring into the distance, unable to move.
Somewhere deep inside the cavernous darkness above the studio rafters, metal creaked softly as the building settled around him. The sound echoed through the empty room.
John looked up, and despite the lights and cameras, despite all of the people who had occupied the space only an hour earlier, he had never felt quite so alone.
The sound of a single tear falling onto the concrete floor usurped the silence of it all.