@ lulu ! (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)
she / minor / INTJ / EN & AR / queer
lennon / voormann / starr lvr ‹𝟹
basic dni ₍^. .^₎⟆ more info & interests ᢉ𐭩
https://interlighted.straw.page
i am an ao3 author , and i write primarily about the beatles . . . i take requests through my strawpage . . there is a fee for fics over 10k , a 5 dollar roblox giftcard .
disclaimers:
payment and submission of fic will be done at the same time .
i do not take yumeships , for now .
❨ 𑣲₍ ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ❩ fifth btls , btls , john lennon / brian epstein › lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love
tags ✧ 1960s era ; emotional hurt ; complicated relationships ; angst ; hurt no comfort ; break up ; ambiguous / open ending ; emotional manipulation
lulu’s summary ⊹ only in damp streets and quiet offices does love and longing twist in ways that nobody can fully name . . .
⌜ ༄ ⌟
♫ lilac wine - jeff buckley
London never really slept.
It only changed its temperature.
At night, it cooled into something watchful, all damp brick and sodium light, cigarette smoke drifting like lost prayers above the pavements.
Brian had always loved it most then. To be precise, he loved the quiet hours. They gave the illusion that the world could be arranged into something orderly, only if one simply stayed awake long enough.
He sat in his office with the lamps turned low, his collar loosened with his tie abandoned somewhere on the back of a chair. The window was cracked open despite the cold. He needed the air and proof that there was still a city out there and not just this small, humming room where his thoughts seemed to echo loudly.
He was reading the same paragraph for the fourth time when the door opened, with no knock.
"Christ, Bri, you look like you've been embalmed."
John's voice came in before he did, his sharp Liverpool edges softened by amusement. Brian didn't look up straight away, since he could already feel him.
"You.. have a key that you're not meant to have," Brian said calmly.
"Borrowed," John replied. "Spiritually, of course."
Brian finally raised his head.
It was always a mistake when he did.
John was flushed from the cold, his hair damp and curling around his forehead, those buddy holly glasses of his fogged at the edges. He had a look about him, one that wasn't drunk exactly, but not sober either. It was alive in a way that made the rest of the world seem like a graveyard.
He shut the door with his heel and leaned back against it like he'd barricaded himself inside.
"You working yourself into an early grave again?"
"I'm working," Brian said.
"Yeah, well.. stop."
It wasn't a suggestion.
John never did suggestions, anyway.
Brian watched him cross the room in long strides with careless grace, his coat half falling off of one shoulder.
"You smell like rain," Brian murmured before he could stop himself.
John grinned.
"Been rolling about in puddles. Didn't you hear it's good for the complexion?"
He dropped into the chair opposite from Brian and stretched his legs out so that their shoes almost touched.
Brian folded his hands together to keep them still.
"What do you want, John?"
There was a beat of silence for merely a minute, then, softly,
"You."
The word landed between them like something fragile and explosive at once.
John watched him closely, his head tilted. He waited for Brian's reaction, like always.
Brian gave him the smallest smile he could muster.
"You have me. Professionally."
"Oh don't start that," John muttered. "You go all posh and distant and I feel like I'm at school getting told off."
"You were probably told off at school," Brian said with a small smile.
"Constantly. Mostly deserved."
He leaned forward suddenly, his elbows on his knees, his gaze intent in the way that made Brian feel dissected.
"You been avoiding me?"
Brian could've lied.
Afterall, he had been rehearsing lies for days.
"Yes."
John blinked.
"Well.. that's rude, don't you think?"
"It's necessary, John."
"Necessary for who?"
"For me."
John let out a short laugh that wasn't really a laugh at all.
"Bloody hell, Bri. You sound like a bird breaking up with me."
Brian looked at him properly then and took in the faint tremor in John's hands he pretended not to notice and the way fame sat on him like an ill-fitting coat he refused to take off.
"I'm trying.. not to ruin.. this." Brian said quietly.
"Ruin what?"
"Us."
Something in John's face flickered.
He stood abruptly and began pacing, his fingers dragging through his short, damp hair.
"You always do this," he muttered. "Get all tragic and intense. Makes me feel like I've kicked a puppy or something."
"You're very good at making people feel things," Brian replied.
"Yeah? Well maybe they shouldn't feel so much."
He stopped directly in front of him.
Too close for Brian's liking.
Brian could see the scars littered on John's face now, all from years of rough housing with his friends and the pulse in John's throat. He saw for a brief second, the restless brilliance in John's eyes that had ruined him from the first night in Liverpool when he'd walked into the Cavern and watched this sharp tongued boy bend an entire room to his will.
"You love me," John said.
It wasn't really a question.
Brian's breath caught.
"You shouldn't say things like that, John."
"Why not? It's true, isn't it?"
John's voice lost some of its bravado as it softened.
"Everytime you look at me… I dunno, it's like I'm something holy."
Brian laughed then, helpless and brittle.
"You're many things John, but holy isn't one of them."
"Yeah, well. I like it. Holiness is overrated, isn't it?"
He crouched suddenly, bringing them eye to eye.
"I like being wanted by you," he admitted. "Makes me feel important."
John's honesty hurt more than cruelty ever could.
"And what do I get?" Brian asked before he could stop himself.
John frowned slightly, genuinely considering.
"Me," he said.
Brian closed his eyes.
"That's exactly the problem."
For a moment, neither of them moved.
The office seemed to contract around the words, the lamplight dimming into something almost ecclesiastical. Outside, a bus groaned past like an animal in pain. Somewhere far below, a bottle shattered and laughter followed it, thin, bright, and indifferent.
John stayed crouched in front of him, watching.
He always watched like that when he sensed something important was about to break. Curious, alert, and a little cruel in his patience.
Brian could feel his own pulse in his throat.
"You make it sound like I'm a bad bargain," John said after a while, attempting lightness and not quite managing it
"You're an impossible one," Brian replied.
John huffed.
"Same thing."
He shifted closer without thinking, one hand braced on the arm of Brian's chair. His movement was so instinctive and familiar, that Brian's body reacted before his mind could intervene as he leaned, just slightly, into John's warmth.
It was unbearable how natural it still felt.
"You knew what I was like," John went on. "From the start. I never pretended to be.. whatever it is you want."
"I never asked you to pretend."
"Well I feel like you did."
Their eyes met.
There it was again, that strange, flickering current that had followed them across cities, hotel rooms, and endless nights. It wasn't tenderness nor violence, but something suspended between.
Brian swallowed.
"I wanted you to choose," he said.
John's mouth twitched.
"I choose all sorts of things."
"Not me."
The honesty startled them both.
John sat back on his heels as though struck. For once, there was no quick remark waiting behind his teeth, no cleverness to deflect the weight of what had been said.
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
"Bloody hell, Bri," he muttered. "You don't half go for the throat."
"I'm very tired," Brian said quietly. "Tired of circling."
Silence again.
The clock on the wall ticked with surgical precision. Smoke from the forgotten cigarette in the ashtray curled upward in a slow, ghostly ribbon.
John reached for it without asking and took a drag, then grimaced.
"Gone out."
"Yes."
He turned it between his fingers for a moment, studying the ash like it might offer guidance.
"I don't know how to be what you want," he admitted at last.
It was said simply, without defense. Almost like a child confessing to a broken window.
Brian felt something inside him soften and shatter at the same time.
"I know," he said.
John looked up sharply.
"Then why do you keep–"
"Because I loved you," Brian interrupted.
The past tense didn't go unnoticed by the two of them.
The word landed with a dull, irreversible finality.
John went very still.
Outside, the wind rattled faintly at the cracked window as if trying to get in.
"You don't… now?" he asked, quieter than Brian had ever heard him.
Brian considered the question with painful care.
"It is no longer something I can afford."
John laughed once under his breath. It sounded nothing like amusement.
"Christ. Listen to you. Always turning feelings into business decisions."
"It's the only way I know how to survive."
Something raw flared briefly in John's expression – anger, perhaps. Or fear. He pushed himself to his feet and began pacing, faster this time, energy sparking off him in restless waves.
"You make it sound like I've been trying to kill you," he shouted.
"No," Brian replied. "You've simply been living."
John stopped.
That, more than anything else, seemed to wound him.
He stared at Brian for a long moment, his eyes bright and unreadable behind his fogging lenses.
"You're not going to answer the phone anymore, are you?" he said finally.
"I don't know."
"That means no."
"It means I'm trying."
John gave a small, crooked smile.
"You were always rubbish halfway."
"So were you."
They stood like that, two silhouettes in amber light, years of "almosts" gathering between them like dust.
At last, John reached for his coat.
The movement felt unreal and final in a way none of his previous departures had ever been.
He shrugged into it slowly, still watching Brian as though expecting him to call him back, to make some grand, foolish gesture that would restore the familiar gravity of their orbit.
Brian did not move.
His hands remained folded on the desk, his knuckles pale but steayd.
John nodded once, as if confirming a private conclusion.
"Right then," he said. "Don't work yourself into that grave just yet. Would be inconvenient."
"I'll do my best."
A beat.
"You'll be brilliant," John added, almost absently. "You always are."
He opened the door.
Cold air slipped into the room like a warning.
For a terrible second, Brian thought he might've said something else, something reckless and salvaging. That he might turn around and close the distance and prove that all of this had been merely another of their elaborate performances.
Instead, John stepped out into the corridor.
The door shut with a soft, decisive click.
Brian remained very still.
He listened to the echo of retreating footsteps until they dissolved into the vast machinery of the building, into the wider breathing of London itself.
Only then did he allow himself to lean back in his chair.
The office felt larger and emptier now. As though some persistent storm had finally moved offshore.
Outside, the city continued its quiet vigil – damp brick and sodium light with smoke rising like unanswered prayers.
Brian reached for the cigarette John had extinguished and relit it with careful hands.
He stood at the window and watched the night begin, almost imperceptibly, to loosen its hold.
lulu’s summary ⊹ ringo and klaus in a 'draw me like one of your french girls!" scene . . .
⌜ ༄ ⌟
♫ xerces - radiohead
Hamburg didn't sleep.
It only seemed to loosen its grip.
After midnight, the streets seemed to grow porous, with fog seeping out of the river and into the bones of the city, wrapping itself around doorsways and streetlamps and the ankles of boys who had not yet learned the danger of being looked at too long. Neon bled into puddles, and laughter drifted upward and dissolved before it could reach the roofs. Somewhere, a ship horn blasted the ears of all close by.
Klaus lived in the Altona district, in a room that smelled faintly of cold iron, charcoal, and damp wool. The walls slanted inward, as if the building was tired of standing upright, and a single bulb hung from the ceiling on a wire that trembled whenever a lorry passed by, turning the shadows into long, penitential shapes that crawled across the floor.
The room was crowded with faces.
They stared from every surface, from sketches tacked to the walls, loose sheets curling at the corners, and notebooks splayed open like exhausted birds. Boys with hollow cheeks and too-large eyes, with mouths half-open, caught between laughter and prayer. Klaus drew them endlessly and obsessively, as if afraid that if he stopped they would vanish back into the fog that had delivered them to him in the first place.
He was sharpening a pencil when he heard the footsteps on the stairs.
He knew them by then.
They were careless, uneven and carrying the echo of drink, exhaustion, and the particular rhythm of someone who moved through the world as if there was no danger. Klaus didn't bother to look up immediately as he finished sharpening the pencil and wiped the graphite carefully onto his sleeve then turned.
Ringo stood in the doorway, his coat hanging open and his curly hair damp with mist, his blue eyes bright in that particular way they got when the night had not decided what it wanted from him.
"Christ," Ringo said, surveying the room with exaggerated solemnity. "Every time I come up here, I think you've finally gone mad."
Klaus smiled. "You always say that."
"And one of these days I'll be right."
Ringo stepped inside, nudging the door closed with his boot. The room seemed to contract around him, accommodating his presence with a kind of reluctant grace. He shrugged out of his coat and draped it over the back of the chair without being asked, as if he belonged there.
Klaus, obviously, noticed that. He noticed everything.
"You draw tonight?" Ringo asked, nodding towards the papers.
"Always," Klaus said.
Ringo crossed the room, peering at one of the sketches taped near the window.
"That one looks like me."
"It isn't."
Ringo squinted.
"Liar."
Klaus didn't correct him.
They sat for a while without speaking. The bulb hummed softly, a sound like a held breath. Klaus sharpened another pencil he didn't necessarily need to sharpen as Ringo leaned back against the bed, his hands in his pockets, watching him with open, unguarded curiosity.
"You ever draw people while they're here?" Ringo asked.
Klaus paused.
"Sometimes."
"Anyone I know?"
Klaus met his eyes.
"You."
The word landed between them, heavier than it should've.
Ringo laughed, but the sound was quieter than usual.
"Go on, then," he said. "Do I get to see?"
"If you stay still."
Ringo considered this with exaggerated seriousness, then shrugged.
"I can try."
Klaus gathered fresh paper, and smoothed it flat against his thigh. He didn't ask Ringo to pose yet, for he wanted the moment to arrive on its own.
Ringo lingered by the bed, his weight on one hip, coatless now, the room's light tracing his familiar lines. Klaus felt the shift before he could name it - the sense that something ordinary had tipped imperceptibly into something else.
"You're looking at me like I'm about to disappear," Ringo said.
Klaus swallowed.
"I'm just making sure you don't."
Ringo's expression softened, just slightly.
"Well," he said, after a beat. "Better do it properly, then."
He reached for the buttons of his coat.
The buttons made a small, traitorous sound.
Metal against thread, thread against fabric – each soft click landed too loudly in the narrow room, as if the walls themselves were listening. Klaus's pencil stopped mid-line. He told himself it was only to observe properly, that a good drawing required attention, but the truth pressed closer than that.
He had not expected Ringo to begin so quickly.
The coat slipped from Ringo's shoulders and pooled at his feet like a shed skin. He didn't look down at it, nor look away from Klaus, either. His expression was open and almost solemn, as though this were less an invitation than an agreement being honored.
Klaus felt his chest tighten.
The fog outside the window thickened, smearing the streetlight into a pale, saintly blur. The room seemed to grow quieter still, as if the city had leaned back to give them space.
Ringo's hands moved to the buttons of his shirt.
He undid them slowly, fingers fumbling once before finding their rhythm. Klaus noticed everything. He noticed the way Ringo's brow creased in concentration, the slight hitch in his breath when the fabric parted, and the glimpse of skin revealing incrementally rather than all at once. The act felt less like undressing and more careful and ceremonial.
Klaus swallowed. He did not realize he had stopped breathing until the first involuntary hitch escaped him, sharp and quiet.
Ringo heard it, of course.
His eyes flicked up, catching Klaus in the act of being undone by nothing more than breath and light. Something unreadable crossed his face. It wasn't amusement nor embarrassment, but recognition, perhaps.
"You alright there?" Ringo asked, gently.
"Ja," Klaus said, too quickly. Then softer, "I am.. aware."
Ringo's mouth curved, not into a grin per se, but into something softer.
"Good."
The shirt slid from his shoulders and down his arms. For a moment, it caught at his elbows, holding his suspended between dressed and bare, and Klaus felt an almost absurd urge to beg him to stop there and let the moment remain uncompleted, perfectly balanced. However, despite Klaus's prayers, Ringo shrugged free, folded the shirt with unconscious neatness, and placed it on the chair.
The light traced his collarbones, and the hollow at the base of his throat. Klaus had drawn that hollow before – he was certain of it now – again and again, without ever realizing it belonged to this particular body. Seeing it here, present and breathing, made the drawings on the walls feel suddenly insufficient.
Ringo shifted his weight, hands dropping to his belt.
There was a pause then, a real one. It wasn't theatrical nor coy, just the small stillness of someone checking themselves before crossing a threshold. Klaus felt it like a held chord.
"You want me to–" Ringo began, then stopped.
Klaus stood, crossing the small room on legs that felt strangely distant. He didn't touch Ringo, but he stopped just short, close enough to feel the heat of him, and close enough that the scent of soap and smoke pressed in around him.
"Ja," Klaus said. "But only if you want to."
Ringo searched his face, and whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him.
"Alright," he said quietly.
The belt loosened, and leather sighed. Klaus's breath hitched again, sharper this time, and he did not apologize for it. He watched as Ringo stepped out of his pants and folded them with the same unconscious care he used for his shirt, and placed them beside the chair.
He stood bare to the light now, just existing.
Klaus felt something within him give way, slow and full. This was not the kind of nakedness that demanded consumption. It asked for reverence.
"Lie down," Klaus said, his voice barely a whisper.
Ringo did.
He stretched out across the narrow bed, one arm flung above his head, one knee bent, the posture careless in a way that spoke of trust rather than indifference. He adjusted slightly, turning just enough that the light fell across him in a way that made Klaus's throat tighten.
Just then, Klaus saw it.
The scar lay low on Ringo's abdomen, pale and curved, modest in its persistence. It didn't announce itself, for it only existed as a quiet interruption in the map of his body, softened by time.
Klaus stopped moving altogether.
Ringo followed his gaze, then looked back up at him. His voice, when he spoke, was casual but careful.
"That's where they cut me open," he said. "Years back."
Klaus's breath left him in a slow exhale. He knelt beside the bed without realizing he had decided to. The floor was cold through his pants, grounding him just enough to keep from unraveling.
"May I?" he asked.
Ringo nodded.
Klaus reached out with impossible gentleness, his fingers hovering for a fraction of a second before making contact. The skin was warm. The touch sent a quiet shock through him, immediate and dizzying.
He traced the line once, reverently, as if it might vanish beneath pressure.
"It's beautiful," Klaus said, the words escaping before he could reconsider them.
Ringo laughed softly, incredulous. "You're mad."
"Maybe," Klaus said. "But who cares?"
The words settled between them, heavy and luminous. Outside, a siren wailed and faded, like a reminder of a world that no longer quite applied.
Klaus withdrew his hand, returning to his paper as if to an anchor. He drew with renewed intensity, letting the shadows deepen, the lines growing surer onto the page. He didn't draw the body as flesh so much as presence, but as something caught between survival and devotion.
Ringo watched him draw.
No one ever did, usually. They often posed, preened, or drifted into boredom. Ringo, however, watched with intent focus, as if witnessing something being translated rather than created.
"You make it look like a relic," Ringo murmured.
Klaus didn't look up.
"Maybe it is."
The night stretched and the fog thinned. Somewhere below, children and adults alike had already begun to awaken with the sun. Klaus drew until his fingers ached, until the room felt suspended outside of time.
When he finally stopped, dawn was beginning to worry at the edges of the window.
Ringo sat up slowly, padding over to look at the drawing upside down. He stared for a long moment.
"That me?" he asked.
Klaus nodded.
Ringo chuckled. "You've made me look like a fuckin' greek god or somethin', man."
Klaus met his eyes. "Could've fooled me."
The light shifted and morning crept in, pale and uncertain.
Neither of them bothered to move.
Morning did not arrive so much as intrude.
It pressed at the edges of the window like a hesitant visitor, pale and unsure of its welcome, thinning the fog without banishing it entirely. Hamburg in daylight was a different creature. It was less forgiving and more literal, however the room held onto the night stubbornly, the shadows clinging to the corners of the room as if they had earned the right to remain.
RIngo stood by the window, his bare feet on the cold floorboards, his arms folded loosely across his chest. He didn't care to dress yet. Klaus watched him from the bed, the drawing resitng between his knees and the charcoal dust smudged into his fingertips like inked prayers.
Neither of them spoke for a long while.
The quiet felt earned.
"You always look like that." Ringo said at last, not turning around.
"Like what?"
"Like a kicked puppy, maybe.. or like you've been somewhere you're not supposed t' talk about."
Klaus smiled faintly. "Artists are.. very good at not talking."
Ringo huffed a quiet laugh. "That's not what I've noticed."
He turned then, leaning back against the sill, the new light revealing angles Klaus had not drawn – sharper now, and less soft. The scar remained pale and almost luminous, refusing to be diminished by the day.
"You goin' to keep it?" Ringo asked, nodding towards the drawing.
"Yes," Klaus said immediately, then after a beat: "Unless you want it destroyed."
Ringo considered it for a while, "No," he said. "Keep it."
Klaus smiled and nodded demurely, keeping the drawing in his hands.
RIngo reached for his pants, hesitated, then let them lie. Instead, he crossed the room and sat beside Klaus on the bed, close but not touching. The proximity made the air thicken again. It was unbearable to Klaus.
"You didn't flinch," Ringo said quietly.
"At what?"
"The scar. Most people do."
Klaus looked down at his hands. "I'm not like many people."
"True," Ringo said, gently. "It's your best trait."
Klaus laughed softly. "Ja."
They sat like that as the city woke below them – shutters rattling open, voices drifting upward, the small shops around beginning their day with dull, inevitable sounds, as if life was reasserting itself.
Ringo finally stood, putting his clothes on. Klaus watched with a curious ache, knowing that the moment was already receding into memory even as it lingered.
At the door, Ringo paused.
"You'll draw me again," he said. It wasn't a question, but a demand.
Klaus nodded.
"If you come back."
Ringo smiled, with something quiet and certain behind it.
"I always do."
The door closed softly behind him.
Klaus remained where he was long after the footsteps faded, the drawing warm on his lap, the room still humming with the echo of breath and trust. Klaus had expected the air in the room to thin and for the shadows to retreat as the night finally conceded defeat to the morning, but none of that happened.
Instead, the space seemed to hold its shape stubbornly, as if unwilling to admit that the body which had given it weight had gone.
He remained seated on the bed, the drawing resting against his thighs, afraid that standing would've scattered whatever fragile equilibrium had been achieved. The paper felt absurdly warm, as though it had absorbed something alive. Charcoal dust marked his fingers and the heel of his palm and he rubbed at it distractedly, smearing it further and making a mess he didn't care to immediately clean.
Hamburg had resumed itself with mechanical persistence outside. There were deliveries, shouted greetings, and the scrape of shutters and the clatter of bottles. Klaus let the noise wash over him without engaging, as if listening through water.
He looked at the drawing.
It was not precise. He had not intended it to be. The proportions were slightly off, some lines were too heavy in places, and the shadows were exaggerated to a point of devotion. It was almost like an icon, a reliquary, and even a body translated into witness. The scar was pale at the center, a quiet fulcrum on which everything else turned.
Klaus pressed two fingers to it on the page.
"He stayed," he murmured, to seemingly no one.
He didn't sleep that morning. Instead, he cleaned the room. He gathered the loose papers and stacked them neatly, wiped tables down, and rinsed the cups crusted with last night's wine. Each small act felt less like a disruption and more of a continuation, as though order itself were another way of honoring what had occurred.
When he finally laid down, the light was already harsh and declarative. He closed his eyes and saw again the way Ringo had stood, as if daring the world to look properly this time. For some reason, the memory didn't ache.
Days passed.
Hamburg was relentless in its sameness: night after night of music that rattled the bones, laughter that curdled into arguments, boys arriving and departing like the weather. Klaus went to the clubs. He stood in the corners. He drew on napkins and the backs of receipts and any surface that would take a line.
Ringo came and went with the others, loud, bright, and infuriatingly alive. He joked. He flirted. He pounded at the drums with a kind of joyous violence that left sweat flying and audiences shouting for more. If anyone noticed the way Klaus watched him now – they didn't say a word.
They didn't dare to speak of that night.
Not at first.
Sometimes, Ringo would glance at Klaus mid-song, just for a second too long. Sometimes, Klaus would catch Ringo touching his own abdomen absently, his fingers brushing the place where the scar lay hidden beneath fabric.
The drawing had remained in his room, wrapped carefully and tucked away, like something that might bruise if handled too often.
Weeks later, on another night heavy with fog, Ringo followed Klaus upstairs again without being asked.
"You going to draw me?" Ringo asked, slumping into the chair, his boots kicked off with careless ease.
Klaus hesitated.
"Not like before."
Ringo studied him, then nodded.
"Good."
They sat in silence, the bulb humming above them as the room reacquainted itself with their shared presence. Klaus sketched Ringo's hands this time – battered, expressive, and always in motion. He drew the way they curled and uncurled, as if searching for rhythm even in stillness.
"You remember everything," Ringo said suddenly.
Klaus looked up.
"I only care to remember what matters."
Ringo snorted.
"That's worse."
They laughed, and the laughter loosened something within the room. Klaus had realized just then that the night they both shared didn't mark the end or a beginning of something, but it was more of a reference point. A place the rest of their time would orbit.
Sometimes, late and quiet, Klaus wondered what it had meant to be seen like that – to be translated into charcoal and reverence. He wondered if the drawing had changed Ringo, or if it had merely revealed something already present.
On a morning when the fog lifted completely, revealing a blue sky Klaus had almost forgotten existed, he took the drawing out again. He studied it in the clear light, noting its flaws and excesses. He did not correct them.
Perhaps, some things were not meant to be refined.
He rolled it carefully and placed it back where it belonged.
Outside, Hamburg went on watching.
Inside, Klaus sharpened a pencil and waited for the next night to arrive.
By autumn, Hamburg had learned their names.
Not in any official sense - no one was writing them down yet, there was no archivist hovering with a pen – but in the way cities remembered certain faces and sounds. Ringo's laugh bounced off club walls and stuck there, and Klaus's quiet presence became part of the furniture as he made a name for himself as the boy in the corner with the bright eyes.
His room changed with the season. The air grew sharper and the fog came earlier, and lingered longer. Klaus tacked heavier paper to the walls and weighted it against drafts that crept in like thieves. He drew coats now, and collars turned up against the cold. He drew hands shoved into pockets, shoulders hunched not with fear but endurance.
Ringo came up more often.
He came up sometime alone and sometimes trialing noise behind him with laughter, half-sung melodies, and the clatter of boots on the stairs. Klaus learned to hear the difference before the door opened. He learned to know whether the night would be loud or quiet by the rhythm of Ringo's steps.
On quiet nights, they drank slowly. On loud ones, they argued about nothing – maybe about music, tempo, and people.
"You think drawing freezes things," Ringo declared once, sprawled across the bed, his hair still damp with sweat. "Like pinning a butterfly."
Klaus shook his head, sketching without looking up. "No. I think it proves they moved."
Ringo turned his head to watch him. "Fancy way of saying you're afraid of forgetting."
"Ja," Klaus said simply.
That honesty startled Ringo into silence.
They never repeated the exact ritual of that first night. Not in full, at least. There were no instructions, no deliberate undressings under the light. Instead, intimacy arrived sideways, disguised as habit.
A shirt shrugged off because it was warm. A belt loosened because it cut into skin after hours of playing. Ringo stretched out on the bed without comment, trusting Klaus to look – or not – according to the shape the moment took.
Klaus learned restraint the way one learned a second language. He learned how to draw without reaching. How to let admiration exist without demanding response. It did not diminish the intensity he had but refined it and sharpened it into something almost painful in its precision.
The scar appeared and disappeared according to chance and light.
Sometimes Klaus caught sight of it briefly, a pale curve revealed between movement and fabric, however sometimes Ringo covered it unconsciously, his palm brushing his abdomen as if the body remembered before the mind did. Klaus never pointed it out again. The first acknowledgement had been enough.
Winter came down hard that year.
The cold intensified everything until it felt carved rather than merely sensed. Klaus wore gloves with the fingers cut away so he could still draw. Ringo complained constantly, dramatic and loud, but he always came back red-cheeked and grinning, full of restless heat.
One night, after a particularly brutal set, Ringo stumbled up the stairs laughing and breathless, and collapsed onto the bed without bothering to remove anything but his boots.
"Draw me like this" he said, flinging an arm over his eyes. "Ugly and knackered."
Klaus did.
He drew the slackness of exhaustion, and the way effort hollowed and softened at once. He drew the faint bruise blooming along Ringo's forearm, and the way the scar was hidden tonight.
"You make me look kinder than I am," Ringo said, peeking between his fingers.
Klaus paused.
"No. I make you look truer."
Ringo was quiet for a long time after that.
The city watched them, patient as ever. Hamburg had seen thousands of boys like this pass through – bright, hungry, and convinced of their own immortality. It knew how stories usually ended, but it also knew when to linger.
Klaus began to understand that drawing Ringo was not about possession, but attention. It was about the rare and dangerous act of looking at someone for long enough to notice how they survived themselves.
Some nights, when Ringo had gone and the room was empty again, Klaus would unwrap the first drawing – the one from that night – and lay it beside the newer ones. He saw the differences immediately, but he decided not to comment on it.
Time, eventually, demanded acknowledgement.
It did so without drama at first – small, almost polite, intrusions. A new club with better lights. A manager hovering a little too close to the stage. Men in pressed coats asking "casual" questions. Hamburg, which had once felt infinite, began to show its edges.
Klaus noticed the change in Ringo before Ringo spoke of it.
The laughter came later in the evenings. The drinking sharpened rather than softened him. He sat differently now. He was less sprawled and more coiled, as if some part of him was already packing itself for departure.
"You're drawing faster," Ringo observed one night, watching Klaus's pencil move with uncharacteristic urgency.
"I am adjusting," Klaus said.
"To what?"
Klaus did not answer right away. He pressed the pencil harder, letting the line darken until it nearly tore the paper.
"To the possibility of interruption."
Ringo snorted.
"You make it sound like a crisis."
Klaus glanced up.
"Isn't it?"
That quieted him.
The fog outside had grown thinner lately, the river showing itself more often in the mornings. Ships came and went with greater regularity. Klaus found himself counting them unconsciously, a habit he did not remember forming.
One evening, Ringo arrived without his usual noise. No laughter on the stairs or the slam of boots on wood. He closed the door carefully, as if afraid of waking something.
"They're talking about London," he said, standing near the bed, not sitting. "Properly this time."
Klaus felt the words land in his body before his mind caught up. London. The word was heavy with implication.
"I see," Klaus said.
Ringo studied his face. "You always do."
The room felt smaller that night. Or, perhaps, Klaus was simply more aware of its boundaries with the slanted ceiling, the single bulb and the walls that had learned their shadows too well.
"Come here," Klaus said, quietly.
Ringo did.
He didn't undress ceremonially. He didn't need to. He shrugged off his coat and jumper, until he stood as he had that first night, unadorned and offered not for spectacle but for the truth. Klaus's breath caught despite himself, the familiar betrayal of his body's honesty.
"You don't have to –" Ringo began.
"I know," Klaus interrupted. "But I want to draw you like this."
Ringo nodded and laid down. His posture echoed the first night almost exactly, uncanny in its symmetry. He had one arm above his head and one knee bent. His scar was visible again.
Klaus knelt beside the bed again, the floor clold and grounding. He did not touch the scar this time. He did not need to. The reverence was already there and established.
He drew quickly and fiercely, as if trying to outrun something. The lines were darker and more insistent.
Ringo watched him, silent.
"You won't lose it," Ringo said suddenly. "Whatever it is you think you're losing."
Klaus did not look up. "I am not afraid of losing it," he said. "But I am afraid of not remembering it correctly."
Ringo swallowed. "You drew it. That's your trick, isn't it?"
Klaus paused then, finally meeting Ringo's pale blue eyes. "Drawing is not a trick," he said gently. "It is a responsibility."
The pencil slowed and the room breathed with them. Outside, a ship's horn sounded. It was long, mournful, and almost impossible to ignore.
When Klaus finished, he did not show the drawing immediately. He sat back on his heels, exhausted in a way that felt earned.
Ringo sat up slowly, crossing the room to look. He studied the page longer than he ever had before.
"That's… different," he said.
"Ja," Klaus replied. "It has to be."
Ringo traced the air just above the paper, careful not to touch.
"You've made me look like I'm already gone."
Klaus's voice was steady, although it cost him something.
"I have made you look like you are leaving."
The distinction mattered.
They didn't speak much after that. Ringo dressed, then lingered at the door.
"You'll keep drawing," he said.
Klaus nodded. "I will keep seeing."
Ringo smiled, small and genuine. "That's worse, you know."
"I know."
The door closed softly.
That night, Klaus laid the drawings out in order across the floor. He sat among them like a supplicant in a chapel of his own making.
None of them contradicted each other.
Klaus sharpened his pencil one last time and waited for the next knock or for the absence of one.
