A/N: I am so sorry for this chapter in advance. I cried writing it, editing it, and now posting it. It's not the last one, but I think it's the second-to-last one unless my creative process veers off in an unexpected direction. I would say enjoy, but given the circumstances...

Paul's POV

"What d'you mean, is that all?" asked John, wilting under my stare. "I don't even get a hello?"

I continued to glare. "Care to explain why you thought it was a good idea not to call me last night?"

He shrugged, tension building in his shoulders. "Didn't cross my mind, sorry." There was little, if any, regret in his tone.

I shifted back on my heels and crossed my arms tightly across my chest. "Oh, it 'didn't cross your mind'? It didn't cross your mind that we've been scheduling this for weeks and I've been looking forward to it ever since then? So apparently were you, at least that's what you said. Not sure if it made much of a bloody blip on your adar if you could just up and forget it at the drop of a hat! You could've been hurt or something and I had no idea! No idea, John. Where were you?" I struggled desperately to keep my voice down.

A dark scowl began to paint its way across his face, a sure sign the conversation wouldn't remain civil much longer. "What, are you suddenly me mum and I've missed the memo for some reason?" he sneered. "'Cause I don't remember when the duties of knowing my whereabouts at all bloody times of the day fell to you!"

"When you fucking married me, John! That's when!" I threw my hands in the air. Did he honestly not care? If the roles had been reversed, I knew for a fact John would've been reacting like I was. Maybe with even more of an outburst.

"Oh yeah?" he snapped, the sarcastic, angry tone he generally reserved for the nosy press infiltrating his words. It was an ugly sound in my ears; I wanted to clap my hands over them as if it would stop them from being said in the first place. "Before what priest? Before which witnesses? Because as far as I can goddamn well see, it wasn't a real marriage."

I froze, my hands dropping to my sides like they'd been paralyzed. His words hit me like a series of painful blows to my abdomen. They almost made me double over from the pain they caused. "What?" I asked quietly, some small, desperate part of me praying I'd misheard him. There was hardly any chance that I had, but I wasn't ready to accept hearing those words come from his mouth.

John had no such reservations about restating the venomous statement that had just spewed from his mouth. With a sneer like I hadn't seen in years—it was the sort that had been prevalent in his teenage years—he repeated himself. "There is no part of our 'marriage' that's recognized by anyone but us. It's not legally binding and you bloody well know it. In fact, it could be considered illegal."

Meeting his eyes was a Herculean feat, but I managed to give him a long, searching look. "I thought the whole point of it was that neither of us cared about any of that," I said, a crease forming between my eyebrows.

"Well maybe I've changed my mind."

"Get out." I made the demand quietly, composing my face against the tidal wave of emotion that was begging to come through with alarming force.

A scoffing, disbelieving noise issued from John's throat. "Sorry?"

"I said," I raised my voice. "That you can get your arse off my property. You didn't seem to have a problem staying away last night. Go back to wherever was clearly so much better than being here. I'm sure you want to!" My hand clenched around the handle of the door tightly. The metal dug into my palm as a cold, painful reminder of reality.

His face became stony and mask-like, save the fire snapping in his eyes. "Maybe I will." His voice was low and devoid of emotion. I watched him turn on his heel and stride back down the walk in the direction of the driveway. Right before I slammed the door shut with enough force to make the window panes rattle, I heard him shout, "And her name is Yoko!" The resounding boom of the door immediately following seemed to add to the finality of his tone.

Slowly, I slid down the door and sat with my back pressed against it. A moment ago, every emotion I possessed along the lines of pain and anger were blazing full strength in my chest. Now, there was nothing. Numbness spread through my senses until I barely registered I was sitting in my kitchen and the door was icy on my back. I couldn't even think; my thoughts were floating around, out of my reach.

I don't know how long I sat there. At some point or another, Martha lumbered over to me and plopped down at my side. With a mournful huff, she nudged her head beneath my palm. I wondered if her sensitive ears could pick up on the sound of my heart shattering.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

I had forgotten about the studio day we had planned the following Monday. The thought of having to be in the same room as John, especially with other people in the same room, did not appeal to me. Just act relatively normal, I told myself. Keep away from him and he'll keep away from you. And then there'll be no problems, for the moment anyway. We would have to talk; I couldn't kid myself about that. It didn't make the idea any easier to think about, though.

I got to the studio early enough that no one else was there, not even George Martin, and slunk to one of the back corners. Gently, I picked up my oldest, most beat-up acoustic guitar. Running my fingers along the strings, I plucked out a quiet melody. It took me a few measures to realize it was Yesterday floating from the instrument. The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me how much it ran parallel to the situation I was facing now.

"Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay, oh I believe in yesterday..."

"Haven't heard that one in awhile," Ringo's voice commented from the doorway after awhile. I stopped playing and laid a hand on the strings to stop the echo. Looking up, I watched him come into the room and toss his jacket over a chair.

"Yeah, I dunno why I started playing it," I replied, rubbing the back of my neck with my palm. His blue eyes gave me a scrutinizing once-over and I felt myself wanting to squirm. Ringo had a funny way of seeing through just about any lie set before him.

He simply shrugged, taking a seat next to me. "That happens sometimes, I suppose. At times, our minds decide they've got something they want us to think about whether we like it or not. I reckon music's the gentlest way of going about it." He didn't press the issue or demand to know what might or might not be eating at me. I was grateful for it.

Within the space of the next fifteen minutes, George, Mr. Martin, and John arrived in that order. It was teenager-ish, but I couldn't help dropping my gaze to my lap when John entered the studio. After a few minutes, I was vaguely aware of George Martin's voice floating over the speakers. My eyes focused on the source of the sound, obstinately ignoring a certain pair of brown eyes that were boring quiet holes in my stream of consciousness.

"Shall we start work on I'm So Tired?" he inquired. It was a song John had written during our time in India. I remembered suddenly that he had received an awful lot of mail when we were there; he got at least a letter a day. They weren't really letters though, were they, I mused. They were postcards with relatively simple art and hardly any words on them... Wait.

I flashed back to when John had left my house the day before, promising he would be back even if he was a bit late. He'd pulled a small rectangle of paper from his pocket and looked at it for a long time before he drove off. It was the same as the ones he'd been getting in India. Who had they been from? And why? That Yoko person he'd yelled about earlier, had they been from her? I massaged my temples with the tips of my fingers. There was a headache beginning to pound on the interior of my skull.

I successfully managed to avoid John without seeming obvious about doing so all day. We were able to get takes of a couple songs that would be on the record. We didn't have a name for it yet, but it was going to be a double album. Our producers reckoned it was risky, but they also conceded that we had far too much good material to throw anything out. I just wanted to get it over and done with.

Whether by coincidence or because the others actually did notice all was not right in the land of Lennon/McCartney, John and I were the last ones left in the studio before we could do anything about it. Reluctantly, I lifted my head to meet his gaze. Taking a deep breath, I said, "'Spose we ought to talk, yeah?"

He gave me a long look full of emotions too closely jumbled together to make sense of. "Yeah," he said at last, his tone carefully neutral, "guess we should."

I sat down in a chair with a heavy sigh. "I just don't know where to start, John," I confessed. "Earlier today really hurt me. I'm not sure what else to say about it."

John pulled a chair over so he sat across from me. He stared over the tops of the glasses he had begun to wear again. It only began to occur to me then that we wouldn't be young and carefree forever, and to think so was only foolish wishing. He'd always needed glasses, but the laugh lines around his eyes had only recently started appearing. They were soft and only noticeable from a close distance, but given enough time, they would deepen. I knew if I looked in the mirror it would yield similar results. It had always been my wish that we would grow old and grey together, but I had the distinct feeling it might not be happening after all when we finally had the talk we'd been needing to have.

"I had it all planned out in my head," he sighed, taking his glasses off and polishing them on the hem of his shirt with slow, deliberate motions. "But now I can't seem to find the words for any of it."

"I'll start the ball rolling, shall I?" I said, feeling a blunt edge creep into my tone. If we tried to beat around the bush any longer I'd go mad. "Who's Yoko?"

He started guiltily, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. "She's an avant garde artist I met right before we went to India. I was in the downtown area when her exhibit caught my eye. Actually," he gave a short bark of a laugh, "I might've been on a trip. But her art is amazing, Paul. It gives you a new view about the world around you, you know? I'd never seen anything like it before."

I felt a knot of resentment settle firmly in the pit of my stomach. "She sounds great," I said hollowly.

He caught the change in my tone and closed his eyes briefly, a sigh rushing past his lips. "Paul, I know what you're thinking—"

"Then tell me," I said, sharpness replacing the hollow sound that had been there moments before. "Tell me what I'm thinking, because Christ knows if I know."

He rubbed his palms against his knees, clearly nervous about the information he was about to impart to me. Nerves began to surface in me as well. If he was nervous, whatever he was going to say couldn't be good. "You know the song we started with today, I'm So Tired?" he asked.

I nodded my head in the affirmative. "You wrote it when we were in India, I helped with some of the lyrics."

"Yeah. Well, it's sort of a summary of my thoughts at the time, and right now for that matter. I've been with you for four years, Paul—"

I had a sudden revelation about where all of this was going and stopped him, panic beginning to leach into my mind. "John," I said, interrupting him. A sick feeling was rising up in me.

"Let me finish, please," he begged, a look that begged me desperately to understand entering his eyes. "I married you four years ago, Paul. And I haven't regretted a single second of it. Except for the hiding. There hasn't been a day of those four years that I haven't wanted to say 'sod this!' to all of the rules and grabbed your hand or kiss you in public. But I couldn't. All these years, I've been scared. I didn't want to hurt you, me, or the reputation of the band. I'm tired of hiding. I'm bloody sick of hiding. I don't want to do it anymore."

Tears stung at the corners of my eyes. I swallowed down a lump that had formed in my throat with great difficulty. "So just like that, you're done?" I croaked, my ability to speak falling away more and more by the second.

I wasn't the only one with eyes that weren't completely dry. John scrubbed at his face impatiently, almost like he was annoyed with the tears for appearing in the first place. Typical of him. The thought made me want to just sit in his arms for the next forever or two. That wasn't happening, though.

"I just... I don't know how to explain it any better," he said, dropping his face into his hands.

"I think I've got the gist of it," I said, firmly telling the tears in my eyes to piss off. "You've finished with me and you'd like to move on to the next one, if I wouldn't mind. I should've seen it coming, it's what happened with Cyn, after all. Why would I be an exception to the rule?" A slightly hysterical giggle escaped me.

"No, Paul, that's not what I meant at all," he disagreed, reaching out to grasp my hand and changing his mind at the last minute. His hand fluttered back down to his side uselessly. "I love you, that hasn't changed. I can't stand having to hide away anymore, though. It's driving me insane. We can only be together if we plan it weeks in advance. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't up and decide to surprise you with a night out at some posh restaurant or take you to all those damn film previews we get invited to. And Yoko, well, she is amazing. She's shown me so much about thinking about how the world works and our parts in it. I've never been so in tune with any of that before, and it's fascinating."

I stood up. If I didn't go now, we'd be here until the world ended. John and I tended to talk in circles and it was never helpful, even less so now. "Well, I'll just step out of your way, shall I?" I asked quietly, allowing one solitary tear to slide down my face.

John leapt up after me, catching my hand in his. "Christ, I've ballsed this up in a bad way. I never meant... I didn't want—"

I pulled my hand free, looking him straight in the eyes. The tears were streaming unabashedly down both of our faces and we did nothing to stop them. "I know, John. I get it. And I'm getting out of your way."

A sob hitched in his throat. "Paul, I'm sorry," he whispered.

I shook my head, wiping at my eyes. "Don't be. You're right. Our relationship is bloody difficult to maintain at best. Like I said, I'm getting out of your way. I don't like it," I swallowed hard, "in fact, I hate it. But this isn't going to work anymore. It hasn't really been working since we stopped touring." I pulled the ring I'd been intermittently wearing since one day in 1964 that would be forever burned into my memory from my finger. It instantly felt bare and strange without it. Looking at it one last time and reading the inscription that had been so true back then, I put it in John's hand and folded his resisting fingers around it. "Goodbye, John," I said, releasing his hand and turning toward the door. It wasn't goodbye, not really, considering we were still in the same band. But it was goodbye to a love I thought would last until we both took our last breaths on this earth.

But life is what happens to you when you're making other plans, right?

John's eyes followed me out the door. Our lives had just been changed forever. Just not in a way either of us would have wanted.

A/N: I hate writing sad endings. I really do. But this isn't the end! There's one more chapter to go. Will it be happy or sad? Take a guess! I'm not telling you anything about it, just that it hasn't been written yet but I've got it all planned out in my mind.

Review, even though I've just broken your hearts and mine?

PS: This breaks my heart still further, but I have no more ideas for my story Life Goes on Within You and Without You and I just don't know how to continue it. Therefore, it has been discontinued. I'll leave it up, but don't expect any more chapters to come from it. I might continue it again someday, but right now I can't think of anywhere to take it.