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pauls1967moustache · 1 year

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Perspective flip for Slip Of the Tongue pls! (Any part)

I had to blow the dust off this one tbh, but this fic is actually so interesting to me now, because I was still new-ish to the fandom when I wrote it. It’s such an apt introduction. It’s only my first kink meme fill (!!), but all the mo-esque elements are in there. I showed up to the kink meme like, “this is what I’m about”, and then wrote like 20 more angsty fights lol.

"Fuck, Stu," John moans, and Paul feels everything inside himself go dead.

John stops moving, instantly. It’s so fucking conspicuous that Paul feels it like a pinch, building pressure behind his eyes. John said it. Paul knows John said it because Paul heard him say it, but John’s stopped moving too, so he knows he said it. He said it, and now he’s not saying anything else. He’s left it hanging over Paul like a noose.

“Get off,” Paul says. It’s a plea, really, though he hopes it doesn’t sound like a plea.

John’s still wrapped all around him. Paul can feel his nose poking into his neck. He can feel his own pulse bouncing off John’s skin, and it sounds like his own voice. It sounds like stupid, stupid, stupid, and Paul really can’t be here anymore. He can feel the panic building in his veins. He feels some sort of animal instinct take over; caught in a trap—nervy, and scared—and liable to bite at any approach. If he has to spend another second with John touching him he thinks he might bite John’s skin off.

He yanks John’s body away from him, rough and desperate, and flees to the bathroom, gathering his clothes as he goes.

He can’t stop moving—pacing in front of the bathtub, forwards and back, as he stumbles into his underwear, and tries to shoves his arms through his half inside-out sleeves, still feeling too fucking naked, like an idiot. Letting John see him naked. Letting John just touch him like that, moaning for him, moaning out his name.

His name.

And he still hasn’t gotten his arm through his bloody sleeve, fuck.

Paul punches his hand through the knot of fabric. His fury only makes him feel like a useless child, so he curls himself down on the floor to sit still, sinking his face in his hands as he huffs out his frustrations. Except—being still gives him a moment to think about it.

Discomfort rises up his spine, sparking all the latent humiliation of being 19 and dismissed. It’s all so fucking embarrassing. He’s toured further than he’d ever imagined going, and he’s written multiple number one songs, and Stuart’s dead.

They don’t even really talk about him, anymore. He doesn’t even think about him, anymore. Sometimes, when he does, he feels guilty for not thinking about him. For treating him so unforgiving, when hindsight proved him to have been a bit of an insecure cunt about the whole thing.

Except, he’s not, is he? Not if John’s been thinking about Stuart while Paul had a hand wrapped around his cock.

An honest mistake, Paul thinks bitterly. One bassist hand for another. And fury washes over him again, at that, because it’s not like Stuart even put in enough of an effort to have bassist hands, so Paul’s a poor fucking substitute, in that regard.

If that’s what he is.

Paul feels it, again—that pressure behind his eyes.

Is that what he is?

“Paul?” he hears John call softly, from the other side of the door.

The panic from earlier comes with him, coiling tight in Paul’s shoulders. John doesn’t say anything else, and Paul can’t guess at what he might do. He has an image in his head of John opening the door, smirking down at him, cruel and sharp. Laughing at Paul for believing in him for so long.

There’s a rational part of himself that knows John wouldn’t do that. But he used to think he was the only person John’d ever shown this part of himself to—and, evidently, he isn’t—so what the fuck does he know?

Unease bubbles up his throat, forcing him to swallow the thick lump of it down.

“Paul?” John says again, and this time it’s followed by the sound of the door swinging open.

Paul looks up. John stands there, looking skinny and flushed with nothing but his flagging hard-on, and his underwear. For a moment, Paul forgets. John’s thighs are beautiful, and his rumpled bedhead is charming, and Paul still likes seeing him like this as much as he did when he was 20, and stupid, and the only boy in the world John had ever dared to touch. The only boy that mattered that much to him.

Paul feels a seething contempt for himself—bitter in the back of his throat.

“What?” he snaps.

John blinks, as if he didn’t come in with a plan, which only makes Paul hate him more, because John wouldn’t need a plan if it was as simple as I didn’t mean it, but John hasn’t fucking said that yet.

“It wasn’t—” John starts. “I was only thinking about—”

Paul’s anger cools into something else—distant and savage.

“Oh, were you?”

John squirms, clearly annoyed with Paul’s reaction. Not obtuse or demure enough for whatever sorry excuse he had. Paul wonders if John always thought Paul was that easy, or if it’s just that Paul never thought to question John’s motives before. Well, that would make him that easy, wouldn’t it? An easy little fool, he was.

“I was thinking of Hamburg. It wasn’t like that,” John tries—patronising. Like he talks to Cyn, sometimes. It tastes acidic on Paul’s tongue.

“That boring, was I?” Paul says.

“Obviously not,” John protests, weakly, waving a hand to his prick, as if that’s supposed to be a compliment. As if Paul hasn’t seen him get off with girls he barely even liked, a hundred times before.

It’s so bloody tactless, it has Paul blurting out: “Would Stuart have taken care of that for you?”

John blinks at him, surprised. “What?”

Whatever defense mechanism was keeping Paul feeling dead inside falters, his anger starting to simmer up again.

“Did you do this with him?” Paul asks.

John just keeps fucking blinking at him, like he can’t comprehend anything Paul’s said. Caught red-handed in whatever lark he and Stuart set up for Paul.

Paul can see them in his head—in that dingy, little flat on Gambier Terrace, on that shared fucking mattress. The way they’d laugh together, sometimes, when they talked about art, and left Paul out of it, as if Paul couldn’t understand just because he wasn’t in art school, and he was only a kid.

If John tries to lie to him Paul thinks he might actually punch him.

John only shrugs.

“Was it better?” Paul goads him, something nasty forcing him to spit it out. Forcing him to make John admit it. Just fucking tell him it was all a joke.

John frowns. “What?”

“With him, John.”

John looks away. Retreating. “Christ, the lad's already dead. Isn’t the jealousy getting a bit old?”

Jealousy. Like that’s all it was—petty, teenage jealousy. Like John didn’t spend years making Paul think it was real. “Are you serious?”

“Are you?” John snaps back.

“Must’ve been good, no? If you're still thinking about it,” Paul shoots at him.

“I was thinking of you,” John all but shouts. And that’s really beyond the threshold of what Paul can take.

“Oh, fuck off!”

He storms out, feeling wired and claustrophobic, trapped in the oppressive little bathroom with John insulting him to his face, like Paul’s too thick to know better.

He’s aware as he stands there, fuming, that he’s still barely dressed, and tries to button himself up—tries to insert some goddamn dignity into the situation—but he can feel John getting all fired up next to him, and he doesn’t want to bloody do it anymore. There’s no point. The ruse is up. Paul gets it now.

“He said you didn’t, you know.”

Whatever words were hanging on the tip of John’s tongue, die there. His mouth snaps shut, and he stares at Paul, looking confused and startled. Like he wasn’t expecting it. It only fuels Paul’s contempt.

It was one of those days: John and Stuart in Gambier Terrace, excluding him.

Paul had been trying to coax John into playing a bit, and John was sick of Paul pestering him about it so he’d hissed something cruel and stormed off, leaving Paul alone with Stuart, stewing in his own humiliation. Made all the worse by the look Stuart had thrown him, after John left—like he felt sorry for him.

Stuart said: “Just give him some breathing room, yeah? You know what he’s like.”

It irritated Paul so much, he’d spat out, “What do you care? You get to wank each other off about art more, now. Isn’t that what you want?”

And Stuart turned even more fucking sympathetic, like he could see the thing Paul really wanted—that embarrassing, forbidden thing Paul barely even let himself look at—and he said, “You don’t have to worry about that, you know.”

“I’m not worried,” Paul protested, feeling seen and ashamed for it. “I’m not a bloody poof. You can blow him all you like. I just— I only want the group to—”

But he could feel his voice shaking, and his cheeks burning, fire-hot, and Stuart kept looking at him like he wanted to give Paul a pat on the head or something, and all Paul could think about was how badly he wanted to shove him into the wall and smash the look off his smug fucking face.

“It’s really not like that,” Stuart said, kindly.

“I don’t fucking care, mate,” Paul snapped, caring a lot and hating himself for it.

“I swear. We never, mate,” Stuart promised, annoyed with Paul, but clearly not letting it put him off this mortifying conversation.

And just as Paul was about to tell him again how much he didn’t fucking care what Stuard and John did together, Stuart said, “It’s not like with you two. We never needed each other like that.”

It had cut through the anger. Reached deep into something vulnerable and terrified inside Paul and soothed it, despite how much Paul didn’t want it to. Paul wanted to dismiss it—pretend like it didn’t matter as much as it did—but he couldn’t get the words out. And in the end, all he’d ended up saying was, “Yeah?”

Like a fucking imbecile.

“Looked me in the eye and said: ‘Never, mate. Didn't need each other like that,’” Paul continues, trying to figure out what the problem is with his fucking shirt, and realising he’s missed a button, because of course he did. Because this is how inadequate he is, clearly.

Paul blows out an angry sigh through his nose.

“Fucking Stuart.”

“It stopped before you, if you want to be so fucking precious about it,” John says—all attempts at placation gone, apparently.

“Right around when he found Astrid, was it?” Paul shoots back.

As if that’s supposed to make him feel better—being the second choice, after Stuart fell in love. A convenient little consolation prize. Paul wonders, acidly, if John would’ve ever cared for him at all had Stuart not gone and bloody died on him.

“What do you care? You had every bird in Hamburg, in the meantime,” John says.

“That’s different!”

“How?” John snaps, stepping closer towards Paul. “What—you can have me, but he can’t? I’m not a fucking monk outside of you.”

Paul can feels his eyes—sharp and intent—and he can’t do it. He can’t stand here and explain to John that while John saw him as the second-best available mouth to suck his cock, Paul had spent the entire time feeling. That Paul gave something up to John that he’d thought John had given back.

Paul swallows. “Fuck off, John. Honestly,” he spits, and shoves past him, back to the safety of the John-less bathroom.

#fic specific ask meme #a thing about me is I love writing an argument #and that is the root of every angsty fic I’ve ever written #they literally all started with a note in my phone with argument dialogue lol #anyway please enjoy tonight's installment of Paul Freaks Out in a Bathroom #taking a break on the perspective flips tomorrow cause you guys sent like 10 of them lol #thank you but you all have updated fics and i haven't had time to read them!!!#fic tag

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