Work Text:
Hogg Hill Mill, 2022
Paul should go to bed, but he doesn’t.
Can’t.
He fires off a quick text to Nancy—don’t wait up, love—then turns back to the glowing monoliths in front of him. The tea’s stone cold in a dozen forgotten mugs; the editors had slipped out not long ago, down the gravel path like they were leaving a chapel.
The room hums with the soft murmur of machines, a mechanical lullaby, while Paul sits in the half-light staring at two Johns.
Well—no.
It’s one John, really. John on the massive, twin screens, side by side like ghosts in stereo. John in 8K, colour-corrected, noise-reduced. Not in the flesh, but close enough to fool that stubborn part of Paul’s brain still hoping for miracles.
They’d been working on it for months—this rooftop footage from Get Back that Paul wanted to carry to the stage. Most of the heavy lifting had happened in London. These last few days had been here, just him, the screens, and the editors. They're already running late, weeks behind schedule. He wanted it finished before Glastonbury, or else.
Or else what? He wasn’t sure.
It’s done now. Funny how things always seem to fall into place once he stumps his foot and gets a bit overbearing. He’s not proud of it, but it works. Tomorrow, the band arrives. They’ll run through syncing the footage to I’ve Got a Feeling before taking it on the road.
“You ready, Johnny?” he asks the man caught mid-breath on the screen.
AI, they call it. Deep learning, algorithms, neural whatever. Paul doesn’t care about the jargon. What matters is what it does: a resurrection made of pixels and math. It’s the closest he’s come to seeing him in all his glory after all these years—close enough to trick the heart, if not the head.
That bloody nose—always turned pink when the wind picked up. Made him look like a little boy out on his first snow day. He’s got that fur coat on, the one from New York. Paul’s pretty sure he bought it for himself, but John nicked it like he did everything else he fancied. Said it was warm. Paul remembers him trembling like a leaf that day.
He remembers holding out his gloves while the cameramen faffed about with their gear. Remembers John shaking his head, saying no—’cos then his fingers wouldn’t work right on the guitar, would they?
Stupid, stubborn John.
God, he was beautiful.
He taps a button on the keyboard and realises he misses knobs. Levers. That soft whirr when you rewound a reel or skipped ahead—like the machine was thinking with you. Now it’s just buttons. Cold, silent things.
He misses the feel of art made by hand. Splicing film, threading reels, slicing tape to press an acetate. Paul had always been hands-on—taught himself everything over the years, just in case. That way, there was never any doubt whose work it was.
His. Theirs.
Now it all happens inside some blank, soulless box—and most days, it doesn’t even feel like it belongs to anyone. Not many left in the business who’ve ridden out as many format shifts as Paul has and come out the other side still loving it.
Not that Paul’s a fuddy-duddy. He’s no museum piece, he adapts. Always has. He was mucking about with synths back when most folks still thought they were science fiction. There’s creativity to be found in anything, if you know where to look.
Dave Grohl called him a few years back, banging on about a film he was making—something about an old mixing console, waxing poetic to Paul about it: “They don’t make them like that anymore, man, y’know?”
Paul wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
Dave’s what, half his age? Already getting misty over analog like it’s ancient history. He gets it, sure, but Dave’s got the money to buy every console from here to Madagascar and stack them like Lego if he wanted.
“You’ve got to get on with it, David,” Paul had told him. Not exactly profound, but it was honest—and yeah, maybe he’d felt a bit smug. Not that he’d ever admit it. Yes, Paul misses reel to reels and the smooth surfaces of vinyl held reverently so you didn't scratch it, but he’s not bitter about it. And honestly, without these blinking little machines, John wouldn’t be in the room right now.
The ghosts live in the circuits now, and that’s good enough for him—even if it takes a pack of gangly, hoodie-clad twenty-year-olds to bring them to life. He’d love to muck in, figure it out for himself, but let’s be honest, he hasn’t got the years to waste learning code. They’ve grown up fluent in this world. He’s just hoping for a few more sharp-minded years to enjoy it.
He knows what they say, the whispers behind his back. He’s seen the eye-rolls, heard the sighs. Even the polite ones, the journalists with the smiles, ask, “Why are you still at it?” As if it’s something shameful. As if love, music, and passion have an expiration date.
The others moan Billionaire Paul McCartney—greedy old sod, still flogging the lot: vinyls, box sets, streaming exclusives, special editions with restored footage, 180-gram pressings, glossy booklets no one bothers to open, gallery retrospectives—and always that same tired yarn about Ed Sullivan or him and John crying in Florida.
People think he’s obsessed with his legacy, polishing the past because he’s scared of fading out.
But that’s not it. Never was.
He’s Orpheus, reaching back through silence and static, trying to call John back. The Gods gave Orpheus a lyre; Paul's got AI.
Beacuse he needs the world to understand what he'd lost that December night. To remind them that, once—when he was just a boy—Paul met someone who reshaped the entire course of his life. Everything before that moment feels like a prologue now.
John was a burst of impossible colour in a slate-grey world, with a mind like fireworks and a heart split straight down the centre—one Paul tried to mend, again and again, and never quite could. Together, they cracked the sky open and brought something good into the world.
Paul's greedy, yeah; in that he's desperate that the world doesn't forget a single song, a single note, a single melody that came from John’s heart.
That boy that Paul had met had gone somewhere Paul couldn’t follow—so he keeps descending, into the archives, into reels untouched for decades.
Maybe, buried in all that silence and static, he’ll find him.
He exhausts producers, tweaks colour grades, sends notes on vocal mixes. Smiles for cameras, red carpet after red carpet, with Linda, then Heather, and now Nancy on his arm.
But in the car, on the way home, he always falls quiet. Because no matter how much he gives, no matter how much he makes, John’s still not there.
He taps a button and the video plays, silent and clean. The sound’s been muted for hours, left off while the team fussed over final edits. Now it’s just John’s face—magnified to fill the frame, his hair and chin vanishing at the edges as he sings and moves—alive in everything but voice.
Rewind.
John sniffles, flicks his hair out of his face.
Rewind.
John looks sideways at Paul, grinning.
Rewind.
“Everybody had a bad year...” He looks so bloody serious singing it. Tight in the jaw, throat jumping with every line.
Bloody hell, what a song.
Paul’s bright-eyed optimism, and John’s stark, grounded realism. Opposites, they were—but God, they fit. They always harmonised well enough, but singing against each other like this? Side by side in a real duet, not stacked on top? That was rare.
Rewind.
He's grown a bit obsessed with it, yeah. Has been since Peter gave him a rough cut of Get Back, so Paul could watch it alone.
Alone, alone.
Not his usual way, but this was different. Ten hours of him and John falling to pieces, in hi-def no less? Couldn’t stomach that with anyone else around. He watched himself bouncing off the walls at Twickenham—just twenty-six, still a boy really—tired, twitchy, because what even was all this? Saw, with an aching knot in his stomach, how the moment they actually started playing, his eyes locked on John like nothing else in the world mattered.
He sat there and wept until it felt like his chest might split wide open. It was like stumbling into a fever dream, or one of those shaky home videos taken seconds before disaster, when everyone’s still young and thin and stupidly beautiful.
He cried for all of them. But mostly, he cried for John.
That rooftop show had been their first real gig in years and Paul was falling in love with it all again. Falling for John again, right there for all to see.
And that’s when it hit him.
That was it. The last chance to fix what was breaking, and he’d let it slip through his fingers.
He’d gone over it so many times, trying to pinpoint the moment he lost John. Was it when Yesterday came too easy, and he took that stage alone? When he wandered off after Robert and Tara and Peter, caught up in their world while John wasted away in Weybridge? When he left India too soon, thinking John would be safe in George’s capable hands?
Somewhere in there, it broke.
If he had a time machine, he’d go straight to that rooftop, take hold of that younger version of himself and tell him—really tell him—this is it. Fix it now. Say what matters, ’cause this is the last time you’re up here together like this, and you’ve no idea what’s waiting around the bend.
But how could he have?
At the time, he’d chalked it all up to too much at once. It was a bleak, miserable winter. John was high on a mix of Yoko and too many chemicals, but Linda was growing round with life and the farm was calling. Paul had figured that once spring broke, John would come back to his senses and smile again.
How was he meant to know John and Yoko would actually get married? That Kyoko would disappear into thin air? That they'd bolt off to America looking for her on half a plan and no paperwork and John’d end up stuck, one year bleeding into the next?
Paul couldn’t have seen it coming. Wouldn’t have believed it, that John would spend years exiled by circumstance, and then by choice, as if the life he’d walked away from was too heavy to look at, let alone return to.
All that time, all those years, Paul watched John pick every path but the one back to him. And always, he clung to the same thought: Just give it time.
He’d mend a fence on the farm and tell himself, Let him do the New York thing. Let them nest. Let him vanish into it for a bit. Give it time.
He’ll come back.
He’d play a solo on stage and tell himself, Let him run wild in L.A. with those wankers, it’s just his way of shaking Yoko off. Let him get it out of his system. Give it time.
He’ll come back.
In the studio, stuck on a lyric that didn’t land, he’d take a deep breath: Let him hold the baby. Let him walk the floor at night. Let him find himself in fatherhood, he deserves that much. Give it time.
Paul had done it all—raised his babies, formed new bands, buried his father, coaxed life from soil. And through it all, he clung to the same quiet mantra: John’ll come back. And when he does, we’ll get it right.
But they never did.
No, it was that rooftop gig on Savile Row—when Paul looked over at John, singing in the wind, and thought, Christ, I’ve missed this. Missed you. That was the moment. His last real chance to fix it.
Only, that’s not actually true.
They’d driven out to Montauk sometime in ’79—or maybe it was already ’80. One of those bone-grey winters when New York stayed cold no matter how high you cranked the heat.
By then, they’d been talking regularly again, on and off, for about a year. Paul never really knew what had brought it about; John didn’t offer, and Paul knew better than to ask. That was how it was between them in those days: careful, like easing back onto a frozen pond they’d both once fallen through.
John rang mostly in the middle of the night. Paul didn’t mind. Half the time he wasn’t sleeping anyway. John would talk in circles, name-dropping people Paul could barely place—stray faces from a former life. Paul loved it. Never wanted to hang up. John’d play Paul something on the piano; scraps of songs, and never with any lyrics. Fragile things, melancholic and unfinished.
John never asked what he thought about them. Just played the tune, let it linger, and went quiet, and Paul—like clockwork—would say, It’s beautiful. Because it was, and because it kept him from doing something reckless like asking Do you love me? Don’t you miss me? Is that what all the bloody drama’s about? Just say it. Please, say it.
He knew, deep down. Knew the answer like he knew his own name. But if John ever actually said it—if he’d said yes—
What then?
What the hell would Paul have done with something that real?
In those sleepless years, Paul would lie in the dark, haunted by the hollowness in John’s voice. There’d been rumours flying around that Yoko had moved in with someone else—still at the Dakota, but not with John. That they lived apart, floors between them. That lawyers were circling.
He’d brushed it off at first, but when the same story reached him from three different directions, he stopped laughing.
Whatever was going on between John and Yoko, that was their business. Paul didn’t meddle. But if lawyers were circling—if that hollow tone in John’s voice meant he was scared of being abandoned, of losing Sean—
Paul couldn’t just watch it happen.
One early morning, while they were staying at Lin’s dad’s, Paul couldn’t be bothered trying to sleep. He got dressed, grabbed the keys to one of Lee’s Astons, and headed into the city.
John answered in a rumpled T-shirt, eyes red-rimmed and glassy, like he hadn’t slept either. Paul offered a drive, more reflex than hope, fully expecting a tirade and/or the door shut in his face. But John just said, “Alright,” and got in the car.
Somehow, that scared Paul more than anything else.
It was the first time in years they’d been alone together and it was… brutal. One wrong word could snap whatever fragile thing was forming between them before it had a chance to take shape.
John mumbled something about a house in Cold Spring Harbor, but they never headed that way. Paul just kept driving, like he always did, until the road gave out and there was nothing left but beach and sky.
Paul sat on the frosty sand, hands stuffed in his coat pockets as John meandered along the shore, letting the waves chase him away and back again. There was a lighthouse in the distance standing guard over the choppy sea and a row of holiday rentals, closed up for winter. Bet it’s beautiful in July, he thought, the words drifting across his mind like seafoam.
He knew what depression looked like—had seen it, lived through bits of it himself, but no one wore it the way John did. There were parts of John that no one, not even Paul, could touch.
He could see it creeping behind his eyes, like black ivy, unfurling in slow, strangling tendrils. John looked like he was trying to vanish in plain sight. Paul wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake loose all his secrets: Just say something, for God’s sake. Give me a way in.
He’d stared at John’s feet instead, half-buried in the sand. The same feet that kicked the air when John laughed too hard. That tapped out rhythms on the studio floor, stomping nonsense lyrics just to wind up Brian. But that day, they looked… old. Pale, pruned, a little gnarled around the toes. There was a moment—a trick of light—when John’s face turned just so, and Paul saw Alf’s face.
He’d glanced down at his own feet, absurdly tanned by comparison. What did John see when he looked at him? The wrinkles, the sag, the years pulling everything downward?
Did he see the man Paul had become, or only the fading shape of someone he used to know? What were they now, with the soil between them salted and dead? What was he to John now? An interruption? A walking reminder of the man he used to be?
Paul kept his mouth shut and his questions to himself. He’d never been fond of questions he couldn’t bear to hear answered.
It was already dark by the time they got back to the city.
John hadn’t moved during the last leg of the drive. He’d gone quiet just past the Midtown Tunnel and never came back up for air, like something had shut off inside him. Even after Paul killed the engine, he didn’t move. They sat together, wrapped in the hush of the Dakota’s parking garage, where the lower levels were nearly swallowed by dark.
Maybe it was the darkness that gave Paul permission to speak. He’d already torn his thumbnail to the quick but he chewed at it anyway, until he tasted blood and forced his hand into his lap.
“We’ve got a flat in London,” Paul said, like it was the housing crisis keeping John away. “For when Lee and John come down. When they’re visiting.”
“So?”
Paul opened his mouth and then closed it again.
“Piss off, Paul. Sick of you meddling.”
“You could come back,” Paul swallowed hard. “You could always come home, you know?”
“Home,” John scoffed, dry and distant. “Come back to what?”
“To m—” Paul stalled.
To me.
John let out a sharp, awful laugh. Looked at Paul like he’d said something violent, something obscene. Then his face broke, the laugh turning into something raw and broken. He turned toward the window, pressed his forehead to the glass. His shoulders shook in silence.
He cried like he didn’t want Paul to hear it, but couldn’t stop it either.
Paul suddenly felt very, very tired. He’d remembered, suddenly, how heavy it was to love someone who never stopped bleeding. He reached out, just to place a hand on John’s shoulder—just to be close, to offer something, but John slapped it away.
“Don’t. Just—don’t touch me.”
Paul froze. He stared ahead into the dark until John, quiet and spent, wiped his face with the heel of his hand and climbed out of the car without a word.
He drove the winding streets back north nearly blinded by rage, biting hard at every thought that rose in his throat. He’d really gone and bollocksed it. After all that waiting, after years of hoping for a real chance—he’d finally got one, a proper one, and he'd gone and wrecked it.
Back upstate he slipped in beside Linda’s warm, sleeping body. She didn’t stir at first, but Paul’s body craved touch, a reminder that he was loved, wanted. He coaxed her awake with slow, familiar fingers down her cotton knickers. They made love, slow and messy, neither fully present.
She fell back asleep. Paul didn’t. He lay there, blinking at the ceiling, the whole night unfolding behind his eyes.
They had a flight to catch the next morning. Paul spent it corralling the kids, chasing them through half-packed bags and lost shoes, and somehow, the normality of it all grounded him.
That’s how it had always been with John: Plant a seed, walk away. Let it rest. Let it find the light on its own. Like the orchids he kept in the greenhouse—touchy little bastards, but give them time, and they’d surprise you.
John would come around. Paul just had to be patient.
One afternoon, out of nowhere, John rang him up. Paul was up to his elbows in missing school forms and kids and dogs and God-knows-what-else in the kitchen and snatched the receiver from its cradle. “Yeah, wha’?”
“Alright?”
Paul leaned against the sink, heart thudding like mad. “Christ. Didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“Yeah, well, surprise.” He let the silence stretch before asking, “That flat you were on about—someplace decent, is it?”
Paul wiped his hand on a tea towel. “Up in Primrose Hill, so I’d say so, aye. Why?”
“Might crash a night or two. Think you’ve got space for a bed for Sean?”
Paul almost laughed. Like he wouldn’t knock down half of London to make space for a bed for Sean.
His limbs needed something to do, so they did what they knew—he turned, ushered two kids, a barking dog, and what might’ve been a goat out the kitchen door, whispering, “Out, go on, scram!”
“Paul?”
“When?” Paul asked, his voice flat but his hand clenched white on the counter.
“Christmas, from the looks of it. Mimi’s been chewing my head off about it. Thinking about popping up north, too, see Jacquie and Julia.”
He turned away from the receiver and mouthed yes yes yes yes into the toaster. “Good,” he said, voice tight. “Yeah. Sounds grand.”
“Yeah?”
“You could come here. Bring everyone. Make a proper thing of it.”
There was a pause.
“Just lunch,” Paul added quickly. “Nothing fancy. We’ve got ponies here, Sean’d love that. Kids and ponies, always a win. I can send a driver down or come get you myself—”
“Paul…”
“Or we’ll come your way, if that’s better. Honest, no pressure. Just thought it’d be nice, that’s all.”
John’s voice came back after a beat. “Let’s just roll with it, yeah?”
“Sure, yeah. Course.”
“Go easy on me, alright? Been a weird bloody year.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t even want you here, do I?”
“Wanker,” John shot back and laughed, properly this time, like a window cracking open after too many years shut.
Linda came in from the paddocks to find him already in a state—biro in one hand, a phone bill in the other, scribbling call julia, extra bed, spare heater into the margin.
He told her John had called. Said maybe they could go down to London for Christmas—make it easier, meet him halfway.
Linda raised her eyebrows, owl-like, a joint pinched between her fingers. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Yoko too?”
Paul glanced up. Her face gave nothing away.
“Didn’t say,” he replied, placing both hands on his hips and giving the house a long, assessing look, like it had suddenly become a puzzle to solve. Paul’s always been a planner. What if John came and the roads ice over? What if they got stuck? They’d need a proper setup—contingencies. “The cottage’ll do for John, won’t it? Sean can kip with James. They’ll get on like a house on fire. Proper little nutters, the pair of them.”
Paul’s mind got ahead of him, as it always did. Him and John in the pub down the road. Their boys tearing through the pasture in hand-me-down macs and mismatched wellies; beaming at Lin’s camera beside James’ pony like something off a bloody postcard.
Now that’d be something. Talk about a sight for sore eyes.
Then he paused, brows knitting.
“Hang on—is he still veggie?”
“Who?”
“John. Last time we were there, were they still doing veggie, or had he gone off it? Is Sean veggie?” Paul hadn’t considered that. “He must be, right?” He snapped his fingers. "Lasagne!" The one with the courgettes. It was James’ favourite. Christ, but he couldn't wait.
“Paul,” Linda said gently.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe wait for him to book the flight before you tear down half the house.”
Paul finally looked up.
“Yeah,” he said, after a pause. “No, yeah.”
It was the silence that hurt more than anything she might’ve said. The doubt, the pity. And for a split second, he hated her for it. For seeing too much. For deflating his little bubble.
He stood there, pen still in hand, staring down at his list: call julia, extra bed, spare heater then, added in a rush of optimism and underlined for good measure, courgettes.
They looked daft now. Childish.
He stuffed the paper into a drawer and slammed it shut, hard enough to rattle the cutlery, then turned on his heel and stormed out of the kitchen.
When John rang again and asked for the London flat’s address, Paul could’ve wept. He didn’t, but he could’ve. That alone was enough to make him swear, hand on his mother’s grave, that if John did come back—if he truly set foot in London again—Paul would behave himself.
He wouldn’t poke the bear. Wouldn’t bring up Yoko, or ask John about writing together, or dare breathe a word about music.
All he wanted was John home for Christmas, under dove-grey English skies, cuppa in hand and nothing between them but smiles for one small, merciful moment.
If silence was what it took, he’d give it. If it meant patience, he’d sit in it as long as it took.
He’d waited, through the noise and the years and the hurt and finally, John was coming back to him. But mostly, he’d waited because he’d thought there’d be time. That they still had the rest of their lives to get it right.
He’d earned this.
John rang again on the first day of December, just as Paul was peeling potatoes.
“Bit of a change in plans,” John said without preamble.
Paul wiped his hands on a tea towel, suddenly alert. “Oh?”
“Yoko’s gran’s not well. Her mum says she might not make it to the new year.”
“Ah—bloody hell. That’s—yeah. Sorry. That’s awful.”
“So, we’re probably heading to Tokyo. For Christmas, I mean.”
Paul shifted the receiver from one ear to the other, just to buy a second.
“Right. So… That’s alright. You do what you need to—safe travels, yeah—”
“Was thinking maybe New Year’s instead.”
“What?”
“What?”
“You said—New Year’s?”
The only thing Paul loves more than Christmas is New Year's.
“If things settle. Might swing back through London with Sean.”
“Christ, John. Don’t say that if you don’t mean it.”
“Would I be ringing if I didn’t?”
Paul fumbled across the table, shoved aside an empty teacup and a half-finished crossword, grabbed the back of a curry menu. “Where you flying into? When?”
“Hang on.” Paul could hear rustling, a pause. “Heath— no, Luton. 28th. Think it’s the evening.”
“I’ll come get you.”
A pause. “Paul…”
“What’s the plan after that? Mimi’s?”
“Yeah.”
“And after that…?”
He let the question dangle, knowing John would hear what he meant without needing it spelled out.
“We’ll see,” John said.
“Yeah. We’ll see.”
Paul hesitated, then asked, “When are you flying back?”
There was the faint sound of John licking his lips, a nervous habit that hadn’t changed.
“We’ll see.”
“Right. Right, good,” he said, too quickly. So John was coming to London with Sean and had no return date. Interesting.
He hung up and shoved the menu aside. No point sitting around. There were rooms to be aired out, meals to be imagined, playlists to be made.
There was work to be done.
A week later, Linda did the school run for once, wrangling the kids and leaving Paul with a blessedly empty house and just enough quiet to make a few calls about the London flat.
He rang the office, pad in hand.
“Hobnobs, Jaffa Cakes. Cornflakes, yeah. And milk, full-fat. PG Tips. Not that bergamot rubbish. And beans—Heinz only,” he scratched the list with quick, nervous strokes.
He couldn’t have John coming back to Britain and wasting away—he was far too thin already.
He flipped a bit of post over. “Oh—and he wants a turntable. Take the Rega from my office, yeah, that’s the one. And a few records. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. That other one he likes, Rock Lobster—”
The line clicked. Another call was coming in.
“Hang on a mo, love. Someone else coming through.”
He hit the switch and…
Well.
He can’t remember what he said, or if he said anything at all. Just that his pen stayed right there in his hand, tight in his grip. And later, that was the thing he remembered most - that the pen didn’t drop, and the quiet, desperate protest looping in his mind: No, but he was coming back.
The rest fell away.
When they gathered to listen to the demos for the first time—the ones George had somehow rescued out of the black box that was the Dakota—Paul noticed the envelope.
For Paul, it read. He still doesn’t know who wrote it. Still doesn’t know if it was John or someone on his behalf, or if someone had just written it in pity. A gesture to ease the edge.
Inside, there were four tapes.
Four.
That was what it all came down to in the end: there was no funeral for John. No headstone, no moment where time stood still for him. Yoko was the widow and had the final say in such things—she kept his memory locked away under her strict orders, and in doing so, left Paul with nothing: no place to lay the weight of his loss, no patch of ground to kneel beside and set his sorrow down.
All that love, all those years—reduced to a handful of plastic. And maybe that’s why, when Linda died, Paul did the opposite. He gave her two memorials. Threw open the gates and invited anyone who had ever loved her—even her ex-husband—to come, to cry, to remember. He brought them all up to the farm, where her ashes were scattered into the wild grass she used to walk through barefoot. And though the ache of losing her never really dulled, she’d gone with his love wrapped around her, knowing just how thankful he was for every joy, every moment, every part of her.
If only it could have been that way with John.
No, with John, all Paul had were tapes in an envelope. And so the four of them sat packed tight around a tiny table—Paul, George, Ritchie, and Sean—in a dull Los Angeles hotel suite, curtains drawn against the sun. It felt like a séance. Paul couldn’t stop staring. Sean was the image of John. Not the older John, not the New York one, but Liverpool John: crooked tie, scruffy jeans, that half-smirk he wore whenever he was taking the piss. Paul kept glancing at Ritchie, just to keep himself steady.
The moment Sean pressed play and that first note rang out, Paul’s heart gave out beneath it.
He knew that melody. It had haunted their late-night phone calls, drifting across oceans at God-knows-what hour. But now it had shape—words, a weight behind it that hadn’t been there before.
It was Real Love.
Sean turned the tape over and pressed play again. Paul knew that one, too. Now and Then rose between them—hazy, unfinished, like smoke curling through a quiet room.
I’m still in love with you…
His head was swimming.
By the time Free as a Bird came on, he wasn’t really listening anymore.
Through all those bleary, midnight calls, Paul never found the courage to ask—do you love me? Is that what this is? Is that what it’s always been?
Only then, with the tapes whirring quietly in the deck, did Paul understand—John had been saying it all along. Not in plain words, but in music, in melodies half-formed and aching. Paul hadn’t seen it then, but at least he’d said what counted: They’re beautiful, John. He was thankful for that. Thankful John might’ve known he was listening.
That was the moment Paul became Orpheus, though he hadn’t yet recognised the shape of it. He realised then how foolish he’d been for so long. John’s death had spawned stories, half-truths, fabrications—but John had spoken his truth, and his truth was love. He’d loved Paul. He’d recorded tape after tape, telling the world just that.
Paul stopped caring what people said—what they thought about him and John, what myths they spun. None of it mattered anymore. All that mattered was bringing John back, and if all he had left were four fragile tapes, then they’d have to do. Challenge accepted. Back then, he still had two other Beatles standing, and a famously—some might say notoriously—stubborn sense of purpose. And if doing it his way happened to prove a few doubters wrong? All the better.
So he did what he always did: he got to work. Carefully. Tenderly. Obsessively. Day after day, he lived with John’s voice in his ears, his heart full of the joy and ache of singing with him again. And somehow, out of the grief, two songs—soon to be three—came into the world.
He was singing John back.
He’d trade every last penny if it meant convincing those faceless gods to bring John back. But if he couldn’t—if no magic or myth would make it so—then he’d wait. His own day would come, and when it did, he’d join John, wherever he was.
He imagines it sometimes, more vividly than he’d ever admit: walking through whatever comes next, shedding the weight of years, becoming that Forthlin Road lad again, guitar slung over his shoulder. That was the version of them he returned to most in his dreams—the ones from before Hamburg, before they had the faintest inkling of what was coming.
There, in that next place, he’d find John waiting—cross-legged on a bench, chewing a nail, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. He’d flash that old grin and say, “Took you long enough,” like Paul was the one who buggered off for forty years.
Paul would grin back. “Got a new one. Wanna hear?”
And that’s how it would go, for the rest of forever: Paul trailing after him through the afterlife, playing his daft little tunes.
At last, they’d have all the time in the world.