Absolution

Chapter Five: Kyrie Eleison

Jon lay in bed but he didn't think he would ever sleep again.

Richie hadn't seen a point in getting his lip looked at ("I washed it, it'll be fine!"), but after hearing about the injury, Doc had had a shit-fit and badgered him over the phone into getting medical attention. The doctor and nurses didn't ask any questions, as was customary, and Richie was given four tiny closely-spaced stitches as a precaution against his lip healing in some unattractive manner.

Since then, he'd been holed up in his room with his music turned up so loud it filtered through the wall to Jon's room. Richie pretty much thought in music and he had song mix cassettes made for just about every possible mood, from "happy" to "down" to "in love" to "out of love" and everything in between. Tonight, he was listening to the Beatles again, and Jon imagined that the name of this mix tape could only be Beatles Songs to Get Drunk By, or, more specifically, Beatles Songs to Get Drunk and Bawl Your Fucking Eyes Out By.

Or maybe that was just his own mood talking. Jon wasn't drinking, but he had already finished the bawling his eyes out part. He had managed to stubbornly avoid crying through "Yesterday" and "No Reply" (no small feat), but when the tape moved into "For No One", which, to Jon, was one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written, he had cracked up magnificently.

The next few songs were a blur as he heaved great sobs into his pillow until his ab muscles felt like he'd taken fifty body shots in a prize fight. By the time the song "In My Life" rolled around, the sobs had tapered off into sniffles and hiccups and Jon lay on his face listening to the lyrics as if for the first time.

But of all these friends and lovers, there is no one compares with you.
And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new,
though I know I'll never lose affection for people and things that went before;
I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more.

Popular theory pegged the song as a general contemplation of the past, and the people and experiences that shaped it. But it was written before John Lennon had met Yoko Ono, so Jon had never understood who the "you" was in the song that Lennon was speaking to-- this "you" who turned out to be such a bewilderingly important part of his life that everything that came before paled in comparison, and everything to come after would have to be evaluated differently forever.

Now Jon had a very good guess who "you" was.

He rolled onto his back and rubbed his gritty and swollen eyes. Another Lennon-written song, "Don't Let Me Down", followed, and Jon wondered how drunk Richie was by now. If he'd been drinking since the music began, which Jon figured he probably had, he was most likely unconscious by now.

Richie had been drinking a lot more in the past few weeks than Jon had ever seen him do in the years they'd known each other. Jon had just figured it was the stress of the tour getting to him, but he realized now it was more than that.

Unlike Jon, Richie was terrible at hiding his feelings. If he was mad, sad, embarrassed, whatever, he wore it like an article of clothing. Unless he was drinking, when everything just kind of melted away into a haze of ambiguous joviality, hiding whatever inconvenient thing was bothering him at the moment.

The voices of Lennon and McCartney met in perfect harmony.

I'm in love for the first time...

Jon's legs were flimsy underneath him when his feet hit the floor, and he stood there for a minute, making sure he was going to stay upright. He looked down at himself, at the boxer shorts and over-sized t-shirt he wore, and considered getting dressed, but he didn't think it really mattered. The chance that some stranger was going to be roaming the halls this late at night was slim, and Richie had seen him dressed this way many times. Actually, that probably didn't matter either, as Jon figured Richie would barely know who he was anyway, if at all.