Die Hard Fic for sexy_right Fic Tac Toe: Touch
Title: Touch
Author: persnickett
Rating: NC-17 to be safe
Prompt: PTSD
Notes/Warnings: Yes. Big time. Memories of child abuse - of a sexual nature. Major H/C. Also sexual in nature. Probable slight weirdness of the authorial nature. Completes my Fic Tac Toe board at sexy_right.
Additional notes: I don’t know what it is that gives my mind a tendency to go here with Matt. But judging by how long this has been sitting on my hard drive, clearly I feel kind of guilty about it. …Then this prompt came up and…I literally had to.
Maybe it’s just a side effect of casting. Maybe Matt should have been more Good Will Hunting - a poorer, grittier species of Boy Genius living in a shitty apartment in Jersey. After all, there is just something about Justin Long that screams ‘spoiled private school kid from Connecticut’ SO loudly, that back when I first joined fandom and was exploring my headcanon and writing Bad Habits, I unwittingly gave Matt Justin’s background long before I became enamoured with the actor and learned anything at all about him. Maybe it was partially his accent. …But I digress.
Once you factor that in, something about the Matt we meet in canon, sitting in his dump of an apartment and admittedly an ex-criminal (if not also a current one), is oddly incongruous. Where are the doting parents who should be happily continuing to fund their beloved son’s life of privilege?
I know I’m not alone in this. Matt is often cast as an orphan in fanon, sometimes by dint of an accident, sometimes by choice. Either his family’s or his own. No matter whether Matt’s criminal activities are a cause or effect of this; no matter how as writers we get him there, such a situation inevitably calls to mind places like foster homes and boarding or even correctional schools and institutions. Yes, I know many foster homes are wonderful places many people owe their lives to. But I also know some aren’t.
And I know something had to turn Matt into the jumpy, distrustful, anti-establishmentarian conspiracy theorist he is by the time we (and John) get to meet him.
It seems like no matter what background story I try to give Matt, he’s just some kind of abuse-magnet. And I’m sorry. I love him anyway.
(and that’s what this story is really about)
__________
Touch
__________
The first time it happens, can’t really be the first time. It must have been happening a while now, and John is only now working the connection out.
Matt has a hundred places he likes to be touched. The spot just above his collar bone that makes him gasp and shudder with just a simple brush of fingertips or gust of warm breath over his skin. There’s the place where the rise of his hip dips down into the little ditch just below it, where a graze of teeth or a flick of John’s tongue makes him arch and moan and push up desperately into the touch.
And when they’re out in public, and Matt wanders to a standstill in the middle of Best Buy with has his head down - chewing his lip and muttering over the pros and cons of seven different computer components that all look exactly the same to John - a guiding hand strategically placed on his lower back always gets them out of the store and home to bed in twenty minutes or less. Fifteen, if John can sneak his thumb far enough up under the layers of soft, washed-out shirts to find skin, and rub it over the little furrow at the base of Matt’s spine a couple of times.
But there’s one place Matt doesn’t seem to want to be touched at all.
John didn’t make all that much of it the first time he kissed him and Matthew reached up to catch John’s fingers and interlace them with his own, before they could tangle in his hair. He didn’t think much of the sharp little breath like a gasp; had chalked it up as reaction to his masterful technique, he supposed, rather than surprise or - what it looked like now - thinly veiled panic.
Once he’s seen it, though, he can’t stop seeing it. All it takes is the once, and then scattered, jigsaw moments start snapping into place one after the other: the way Matt will often catch John’s wrist whenever it starts to slide up his nape; pull their arms up over his head, and ask to be pinned down; place John’s hand on his dick - and keep it there - covering it with his own to encourage the quick, rhythmic tugging; or turn his head and trap John’s fingers in his teeth, only to suck and slick and swirl his tongue, and then beg John to press those slick, wet fingers into him one at a time, beg to be fucked.
Maybe it’s because they’re not having sex, that John’s head is clear enough to notice this time, the way Matt flinches.
The Giants are up by 12 points. John is working on his second beer, and Matt, as usual, is working on his laptop. They’re both flaked out in front of the game - relaxed and lazy, John’s arm stretched along the back of the sofa. At some point during the break, his hand curls itself idly around the back of Matt’s neck, and Matt settles backward into the touch absently.
That is until John’s fingers move high enough to card up into the soft ends of his hair and Matt tenses like he heard a gunshot.
He rubs a hand over his face and leans forward into his screen, away from the sofa-back. Then he stays that way, until the Giants have been stomped 29-18 and John clicks off the TV, tosses the remote aside, and breaks the silence that never seemed heavy and awkward before now by announcing he’s going to go to see about dinner.
**
When John is getting ready to climb into bed that night, Matt is already there - stretched out under the covers with a magazine.
Matt never brings his comics to bed. He sits at the table whenever he gets a new one, turning the pages carefully by their edges. Then he puts them away in little plastic envelopes, where they sit on bookshelves that seem to keep turning up out of nowhere. They have already multiplied too prolifically to be contained in Matt’s office and are beginning to migrate out into the hall. John has yet to see Matt read the same comic book twice.
His magazines, though, Matt carts around like disposable security blankets. He’ll wander around with one compulsively rolled up in his hand; bring them to the grocery store and physio appointments. He leaves them all over the damn place, too, all worn and rumpled and puffed up fat from repeated readings until John gathers up a bunch of them and tosses them in the trash. Matt never seems to notice, and a fresh crop always appear to take their place within days.
The one he’s got now has the cover curled around backward so Matt can hold it up with one hand. The ad on the back is a picture of some kind of psychotic looking cheerleader posing with a lollipop and a chainsaw.
The text says ‘Lollipop Chainsaw’. How appropriate.
John peels the blankets back and doesn’t mention how, for a genius, sometimes Matt reads some remarkably stupid shit. It’s probably supposed to be ironic or something.
At first, when he sees his chance, John almost doesn’t want to test it. There’s a reluctance, a sort of guilt around deliberately pushing at the walls Matt has clearly been struggling pretty damn hard to uphold. It’s still the early days for them, John supposes, and up ‘til now it’s been all pleasure and more or less zero pain.
He’d love nothing more than to say he believed he could keep it that way, for Matt. But he can remember enough nights of lying awake, wanting to reach for Holly. Wondering if she was thinking the same thing, as he shut his eyes and waited for sleep instead.
He remembers the nights that came later too, when the sheets were cold when John crawled under them, and there was nobody there to hear him say he was sorry he hadn’t tried harder, hadn’t reached out.
So as soon as he’s settled in, he steels himself and makes his move - tries to keep the action as casual as possible.
Sure enough, Matt outright shies away like a spooked colt. The startled look Matt shoots him only lasts for a second before he’s burying his nose in his article again, but his free hand has balled itself up tight, and suddenly John gets the feeling he should be counting himself lucky Matt didn’t lash out and clock him one on pure reflex.
There’s nothing to test anymore, now. He’s seen this before.
Thirty years on the force has shown him enough cases- enough kids all slouched in on themselves, sullen and skittish, with their bangs grown out long enough to curtain down over their eyes. Girls as young as thirteen, wearing long sleeved sweaters in the middle of July; the cuffs pulled down and stretched out of shape from being clutched obsessively in their palms so as to hide the marks on their wrists.
He kicks himself a little for not seeing it before in his own home, his own Matt. Then he kicks a little harder for maybe not wanting to. The thing about keeping pain out of a relationship is, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there already. It just means you’re refusing to share the load.
In hindsight it felt like the signs were written all over Matthew - the insular hunch of his shoulders, the cagey, through-the-bangs gaze. The independent, isolating career choice, and his troubled sleeping patterns and habit for evasive, distracting chatter. The trust issues with cops, shrinks, the government…pretty much everyone in a position of any sort of authority.
Now that he sees it, though, the only way forward is through.
“You have a thing…” John explains, keeping his tone neutral.
Matt looks up at him, again only for a second. His expression looks carefully bland.
“Yeah. I guess I do.” Matt flips a page John is pretty sure he isn’t even reading anymore. “It’s not personal.”
“No. I mean, you have a…thing.” John reaches forward and Matt sits still for it this time, submitting to a delicate combing of fingers through the hair at his temple. He keeps his eyes on his reading but his lack of expression is more frozen mask than nonchalance. “…Fluffy white thing.”
John holds it up as fluffy white evidence.
“Oh.” Matt doesn’t look at it. “Thanks.”
“But since you brought it up. You wanna talk about this other thing you got? About not wanting people touching you?”
“Not really.” Matt flips another page over that he couldn’t possibly have read in the last six seconds.
“Huh. That’s too bad.”
“Is it?” Matt says, bristling a little, despite how tight a rein John can see him plainly trying to keep on his temper.
The way forward is through, John reminds himself.
“Yeah,” he says. “Because see, I’ve been married. That means I know that when you don’t want to talk about something, that’s when it’s the most important. Hell, anyone who’s met you knows you can talk all day about stuff you only give half a shit about. When Matt Farrell gets quiet…that’s when the gears are turning.”
Matt flashes him a glance of acknowledgement, but there’s no smile in it.
“And your gears can turn a lot faster than mine,” John goes on, “and in my experience that just leads to a lot of me doing the same thing a lot, and then doing it a lot harder, and finding out way too late the problem was I shoulda been doing something else all along, instead.”
“Don’t think I haven’t figured out that when you say ‘I’ve been married’ you’re really saying ‘I’ve been divorced’,” Matt says drily, cutting his eyes over at him sideways and pretending he’s still getting anything out of the magazine article held up in front of his nose. “Jury’s still out on whether it’s a sympathy bid or some new species of threat you’re working on, but feel free to just keep on playing that card until the verdict comes in.”
“Hey,” he says, quietly. “Gotta play the hand you’re dealt.”
Maybe Matt catches a certain significance in the words, or maybe it’s just clear from the tone that John isn’t going to rise to the bait and be put off the scent by an argument. His shoulders drop a little where they’ve been pulled tightly up toward his ears against the pillow.
“When I was doing my time at Brightwood, there was this teacher there.”
Matt has always talked about his old boarding school this way - sarcastic jokes about prisons or Nazi work camps. The heaviness in John’s gut like lead tells him he’s about to find out why.
“Or a doctor, really, from the clinic. He had this weird thing for my hair. …Got fired for molesting kids. So. Just bad associations, I guess.”
“Kids like you?” John asks, through the thickness starting to tighten his throat.
“Obviously.”
John bites the inside of his cheek. This is hard enough as it is, Matt isn't going to help anything by hiding behind semantics.
“Matt. I’m asking if one of the kids this guy hurt, was you.”
“And I answered you.”
Knowing it was coming doesn’t make it burn any less, somehow. The words hit him so hard he feels gut-punched, winded.
Matt puts down his magazine and when he brings his eyes up to John’s face, there’s something strange and piercing in them, moving searchingly all over his features - it feels like a test. He has no idea whether he’s passing.
“Still want to talk about it?” Matt folds his arms tightly over his chest. The words are an unequivocal challenge.
John rolls up onto his shoulder under the blankets, makes a point of getting comfortable, of getting close. Then he lies through his teeth.
“Yeah,” he says simply. “…If you can.”
Matt snorts. “I can.”
Challenge accepted. John counts it a win, if a bittersweet one, and tries to prepare himself.
“The guy was a creep,” Matt says, sounding almost bored. He rolls away from John briefly, under the pretence of setting his mag down on the bedside table. “We used to hear the older kids talking about it all the time. Trying to laugh it off I guess. Some of them even acted like they liked it - calling him a fag, bragging about getting him to give them blow jobs and stuff. I thought it was all just…mean kids being… Well, you know how it is. Gay jokes! The most hilarious thing to hit the schoolyard since humankind invented the toilet.”
Matt widens his eyes and twirls a sardonic finger in the air.
“ …Then I got sick.”
The hot lead in John’s insides goes molten and starts to crawl slowly through his veins like lava. Matt keeps his eyes pointed straight ahead and soldiers on.
“I was too young to know about pedophilia or what was going on - that I could have screamed for help, or told someone. It wasn’t even…I mean it wasn’t rape or anything, not in the technical sense, just a lot of…unwanted touching. A LOT of unwanted touching. Then he’d touch himself too. That I knew wasn’t right.”
Not rape in the technical sense. John wants to punch something. Maybe a couple of things. He really wants to ask what happened to this dirt-bag, if he’s been put away where he belongs or if he’s still out there, still doing things to kids.
If years of cold sheets and TV dinners have taught him anything, though, it’s that Matt doesn’t need John McClane, Super-cop rushing off to be his hero right now. He needs John, his partner and his friend, to be there. He just needs his boyfriend to listen.
Not that that makes it easy.
“He asked me if I’d ever seen what a grownup man looked like naked before, and then- Well, I hadn’t. You know, with hair and…it looked, just, huge and weird to me. The whole thing was just…it was so fucked up and confusing, you know? I started to cry, and I think…God, I think it just made it worse. I think the asshole got off on it. He just…he’d just keep petting and petting my hair, like it was some kind of tender moment instead of...”
Matt breaks off and picks another bit of fluffy white lint off the sheets. John stops wanting to punch things and starts wanting to crawl right out of his skin.
Instead he just sits there, watching Matt and feeling his blood boil, and wondering if a shrink would say he’s supposed to make Matt say it out loud, what it is. Tell him he knows the ins and outs of the law, and that there’s nothing ‘technical’ about it.
“Then that’s where it always started. Every time I got sent to his office he’d start with the hair-stroking. It didn’t matter where I was hurt, it could be my big toe for chrissakes, but the inappropriate part always started with the hair. He thought he could pass it off as concerned and paternal and go from there, I guess.”
Matt’s voice has taken on this sort of lifeless, robotic timbre that’s somehow even harder to hear than the false stoicism from before.
“So whenever that happened I’d get this really cold chill all over. Just knowing what was coming next.”
John feels a chill of his own move slowly up his spine. Matt had gone to that school for years…
“…I was so scared to get sick, once I broke my thumb playing Jail Break - it’s like tag,” Matt explains unnecessarily, looking quickly over at him. As if he thinks John was born a cop, or is maybe just too old to have ever been a kid. “I hid it from the teachers for four days before I got caught trying to learn to write cursive with my left hand.”
Matt gives a short little laugh with more bitterness than mirth and John waits for him to go on, but he’s just looking at his hands, flexing his thumb up and down.
John flexes his own fingers too - he’s been making fists so tight it hurts a little.
He recognizes this silence as the moment he’s supposed to save the day. Reach into some secret stash of happy endings and silver linings and say something that makes it all okay.
But he doesn’t have it. There’s no magic spell that fixes this; no making lemonade when life gets bored with lemons and hands you a pile of shit instead.
So he does what he’s been wanting to this whole time, and reaches out. His hand hovers just shy of the hair trailing over the shell of Matt’s ear. Matt looks at him warily, something sparking in his eyes like a warning - but the feral, panicked look from earlier seems to be gone, now that the secret’s out.
“There’s a reason he fixated on your hair, Matthew.”
Matt shuts his eyes when the touch lands. He grits his teeth like he’s fighting off some physical sensation - a surge of rage or pain, roil of nausea maybe.
“It’s beautiful,” John continues resolutely, ignoring it when Matt gives a self-conscious little scoff and looks up at the ceiling. “It’s soft, but strong, like silk. …Like you. It even smells good.”
John moves close enough that he can nuzzle his nose over the top of Matt’s head in a sort of unrequited Eskimo kiss. He can hear Matt take a breath that sounds slow, deliberate.
“Some people can’t see something beautiful without wanting to touch it. …Take it,” he says, into the crown of Matt’s hair, before he pulls away a little to look him in the eyes.
“You were just a kid, Matt. And none of what he did was your fault. But you’re a man now. A man has to guard all the stuff that’s soft and beautiful in the world, you know? From the sickos like him.”
Matt doesn’t say anything, but John can feel the short, tiny nod under his hand.
Matt turns his face away then, at the feel of John’s palm ghosting over the tips of his hair again. But he doesn’t tell him to cut it out, doesn’t pull or squirm. John isn’t pinning him. He’s propped up on one elbow, sort of leaning over him. Matt could turn over and shift away, or - at this angle - probably even shove John off of him if he wanted. But he stays where he is, quietly right there under him.
John pushes his fingers deeper, scratches a little, like petting a cat. It seems strange now, to never have done this before.
“The hardest thing a man can do sometimes is be soft,” he admits, and from the wry, minute little upward curl in the corner of Matt’s mouth, neither of them is missing the fact that if Matt had been looking at him right now, he probably couldn’t even get the words out. “It takes strength. But you’ve got it. You do it better than me, even. So…” John’s shrug interrupts what his fingers are doing for a moment. “Let me. Let me be soft with you. …I’m not gonna do anything you don’t want.”
It’s not much of a therapy plan, but it’s all he’s got. John drags his fingers slowly through the dark, satiny strands again. He can do this all night if Matt will let him. And he just might. Matt’s hair is beautiful; shiny, warm. John can’t help but think he’s been missing out, here.
He loses track of how long they lie there. John is watching the glossy-smooth locks move through his fingers - flicking at the ends, and tugging gently now and again - and Matt puts a hand up over his eyes as if he’s suddenly embarrassed. Then he shifts his hips a little and John feels why.
And this- this is the worst part of what that psycho had done to Matt. Tenderness was supposed to feel good, it was supposed to be a turn on. And now, Matt thinks there is something wrong with him because his body is working exactly the way it’s supposed to.
“That’s right,” John says, low. He moves closer still, adjusting his position so his thigh is pressing down, giving Matt better friction. “Take it back.”
The hand covering Matt’s face falls away, but his eyes are still shut.
“He can’t take shit from you unless you let him,” John encourages. “All the things that are strong and beautiful about you, Matt…take it back.”
Matt finally looks up at him, and his eyes are blazing with something that - if still hard - is anything but cold or detached like before. He gives an experimental thrust of his hips.
“That’s right,” John urges again, “come on.”
Normally, he would lean down, take Matt’s mouth in a series of hot, urgent kisses. Rove down over the pale arch of his throat, and fit his mouth to the notch of his collar bone; keep on working until Matt comes apart and starts to beg- and for a moment he nearly does. But that isn’t what this is about.
So John continues to stroke and tug at his hair softly, and now that Matt is looking him in the face while he does it, he doesn’t want that to stop. It’s enough, watching Matt’s pupils bloom wide, and the flush rise in his cheeks while he grinds rhythmically against him, staring intently right into John’s eyes until his lips part and his breath catches, and he gives a whimpering moan and comes, hard and bucking, into the layers of sheets and cotton shorts between them.
Matt hasn’t moved, doesn’t even wait to catch his breath, before he reaches down a hand to press against John’s now-rock-hard dick.
“Leave it alone,” John says, gripping Matt’s wrist and waiting for his second or two of insistence to subside. “Leave it alone, it’ll keep.”
It’s not what this is about.
John settles down and tucks him close against his chest, and Matt throws his arm over his eyes. If the corners of those eyes are a little wet, John can pretend to ignore it.
He’s sure Matt buys the act just about as much as they each buy the other is asleep a while later, when Matt whispers his syllable of thanks.
**
In the morning when Matt slides into the shower behind him, he just smiles when John offers to do the honours if Matt would like to pass him the shampoo. But before the week is out, John gets back from the gym to find Matt giving up on his computer for once, and when he slides in behind him this time, he does.
And when Lucy comes by for dinner on Sunday and insists Matt play her at her favourite old Sega game, Matt jumps a little when her victory celebrations include a rather vigorous ruffling of his hair. But then he smiles, and retaliates by popping the clip holding up her ponytail on his way to the kitchen to grab them fresh drinks.
Nobody needs to tell John McClane that there are some scars that never quite heal, but the heart is a muscle like anything else. If there’s one thing he’s no stranger to, it’s therapy, and the secret to getting your full range of motion back is no secret at all.
Use it or lose it. Plain and simple.
Sure, there’s no silver lining here, and in real life there are no happy endings. There are bad days and there are days that are better.
Today is definitely a whole lot better than yesterday was, and from where John’s standing - in his kitchen, where a slinky young thing with a cute haircut grins happily at him and reaches up to rub a hand playfully over his scalp on his way to the fridge - tomorrow is looking even brighter.
There’s not a hell of a lot more they could ask for.
.
Author: persnickett
Rating: NC-17 to be safe
Prompt: PTSD
Notes/Warnings: Yes. Big time. Memories of child abuse - of a sexual nature. Major H/C. Also sexual in nature. Probable slight weirdness of the authorial nature. Completes my Fic Tac Toe board at sexy_right.
Additional notes: I don’t know what it is that gives my mind a tendency to go here with Matt. But judging by how long this has been sitting on my hard drive, clearly I feel kind of guilty about it. …Then this prompt came up and…I literally had to.
Maybe it’s just a side effect of casting. Maybe Matt should have been more Good Will Hunting - a poorer, grittier species of Boy Genius living in a shitty apartment in Jersey. After all, there is just something about Justin Long that screams ‘spoiled private school kid from Connecticut’ SO loudly, that back when I first joined fandom and was exploring my headcanon and writing Bad Habits, I unwittingly gave Matt Justin’s background long before I became enamoured with the actor and learned anything at all about him. Maybe it was partially his accent. …But I digress.
Once you factor that in, something about the Matt we meet in canon, sitting in his dump of an apartment and admittedly an ex-criminal (if not also a current one), is oddly incongruous. Where are the doting parents who should be happily continuing to fund their beloved son’s life of privilege?
I know I’m not alone in this. Matt is often cast as an orphan in fanon, sometimes by dint of an accident, sometimes by choice. Either his family’s or his own. No matter whether Matt’s criminal activities are a cause or effect of this; no matter how as writers we get him there, such a situation inevitably calls to mind places like foster homes and boarding or even correctional schools and institutions. Yes, I know many foster homes are wonderful places many people owe their lives to. But I also know some aren’t.
And I know something had to turn Matt into the jumpy, distrustful, anti-establishmentarian conspiracy theorist he is by the time we (and John) get to meet him.
It seems like no matter what background story I try to give Matt, he’s just some kind of abuse-magnet. And I’m sorry. I love him anyway.
(and that’s what this story is really about)
__________
Touch
__________
The first time it happens, can’t really be the first time. It must have been happening a while now, and John is only now working the connection out.
Matt has a hundred places he likes to be touched. The spot just above his collar bone that makes him gasp and shudder with just a simple brush of fingertips or gust of warm breath over his skin. There’s the place where the rise of his hip dips down into the little ditch just below it, where a graze of teeth or a flick of John’s tongue makes him arch and moan and push up desperately into the touch.
And when they’re out in public, and Matt wanders to a standstill in the middle of Best Buy with has his head down - chewing his lip and muttering over the pros and cons of seven different computer components that all look exactly the same to John - a guiding hand strategically placed on his lower back always gets them out of the store and home to bed in twenty minutes or less. Fifteen, if John can sneak his thumb far enough up under the layers of soft, washed-out shirts to find skin, and rub it over the little furrow at the base of Matt’s spine a couple of times.
But there’s one place Matt doesn’t seem to want to be touched at all.
John didn’t make all that much of it the first time he kissed him and Matthew reached up to catch John’s fingers and interlace them with his own, before they could tangle in his hair. He didn’t think much of the sharp little breath like a gasp; had chalked it up as reaction to his masterful technique, he supposed, rather than surprise or - what it looked like now - thinly veiled panic.
Once he’s seen it, though, he can’t stop seeing it. All it takes is the once, and then scattered, jigsaw moments start snapping into place one after the other: the way Matt will often catch John’s wrist whenever it starts to slide up his nape; pull their arms up over his head, and ask to be pinned down; place John’s hand on his dick - and keep it there - covering it with his own to encourage the quick, rhythmic tugging; or turn his head and trap John’s fingers in his teeth, only to suck and slick and swirl his tongue, and then beg John to press those slick, wet fingers into him one at a time, beg to be fucked.
Maybe it’s because they’re not having sex, that John’s head is clear enough to notice this time, the way Matt flinches.
The Giants are up by 12 points. John is working on his second beer, and Matt, as usual, is working on his laptop. They’re both flaked out in front of the game - relaxed and lazy, John’s arm stretched along the back of the sofa. At some point during the break, his hand curls itself idly around the back of Matt’s neck, and Matt settles backward into the touch absently.
That is until John’s fingers move high enough to card up into the soft ends of his hair and Matt tenses like he heard a gunshot.
He rubs a hand over his face and leans forward into his screen, away from the sofa-back. Then he stays that way, until the Giants have been stomped 29-18 and John clicks off the TV, tosses the remote aside, and breaks the silence that never seemed heavy and awkward before now by announcing he’s going to go to see about dinner.
**
When John is getting ready to climb into bed that night, Matt is already there - stretched out under the covers with a magazine.
Matt never brings his comics to bed. He sits at the table whenever he gets a new one, turning the pages carefully by their edges. Then he puts them away in little plastic envelopes, where they sit on bookshelves that seem to keep turning up out of nowhere. They have already multiplied too prolifically to be contained in Matt’s office and are beginning to migrate out into the hall. John has yet to see Matt read the same comic book twice.
His magazines, though, Matt carts around like disposable security blankets. He’ll wander around with one compulsively rolled up in his hand; bring them to the grocery store and physio appointments. He leaves them all over the damn place, too, all worn and rumpled and puffed up fat from repeated readings until John gathers up a bunch of them and tosses them in the trash. Matt never seems to notice, and a fresh crop always appear to take their place within days.
The one he’s got now has the cover curled around backward so Matt can hold it up with one hand. The ad on the back is a picture of some kind of psychotic looking cheerleader posing with a lollipop and a chainsaw.
The text says ‘Lollipop Chainsaw’. How appropriate.
John peels the blankets back and doesn’t mention how, for a genius, sometimes Matt reads some remarkably stupid shit. It’s probably supposed to be ironic or something.
At first, when he sees his chance, John almost doesn’t want to test it. There’s a reluctance, a sort of guilt around deliberately pushing at the walls Matt has clearly been struggling pretty damn hard to uphold. It’s still the early days for them, John supposes, and up ‘til now it’s been all pleasure and more or less zero pain.
He’d love nothing more than to say he believed he could keep it that way, for Matt. But he can remember enough nights of lying awake, wanting to reach for Holly. Wondering if she was thinking the same thing, as he shut his eyes and waited for sleep instead.
He remembers the nights that came later too, when the sheets were cold when John crawled under them, and there was nobody there to hear him say he was sorry he hadn’t tried harder, hadn’t reached out.
So as soon as he’s settled in, he steels himself and makes his move - tries to keep the action as casual as possible.
Sure enough, Matt outright shies away like a spooked colt. The startled look Matt shoots him only lasts for a second before he’s burying his nose in his article again, but his free hand has balled itself up tight, and suddenly John gets the feeling he should be counting himself lucky Matt didn’t lash out and clock him one on pure reflex.
There’s nothing to test anymore, now. He’s seen this before.
Thirty years on the force has shown him enough cases- enough kids all slouched in on themselves, sullen and skittish, with their bangs grown out long enough to curtain down over their eyes. Girls as young as thirteen, wearing long sleeved sweaters in the middle of July; the cuffs pulled down and stretched out of shape from being clutched obsessively in their palms so as to hide the marks on their wrists.
He kicks himself a little for not seeing it before in his own home, his own Matt. Then he kicks a little harder for maybe not wanting to. The thing about keeping pain out of a relationship is, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there already. It just means you’re refusing to share the load.
In hindsight it felt like the signs were written all over Matthew - the insular hunch of his shoulders, the cagey, through-the-bangs gaze. The independent, isolating career choice, and his troubled sleeping patterns and habit for evasive, distracting chatter. The trust issues with cops, shrinks, the government…pretty much everyone in a position of any sort of authority.
Now that he sees it, though, the only way forward is through.
“You have a thing…” John explains, keeping his tone neutral.
Matt looks up at him, again only for a second. His expression looks carefully bland.
“Yeah. I guess I do.” Matt flips a page John is pretty sure he isn’t even reading anymore. “It’s not personal.”
“No. I mean, you have a…thing.” John reaches forward and Matt sits still for it this time, submitting to a delicate combing of fingers through the hair at his temple. He keeps his eyes on his reading but his lack of expression is more frozen mask than nonchalance. “…Fluffy white thing.”
John holds it up as fluffy white evidence.
“Oh.” Matt doesn’t look at it. “Thanks.”
“But since you brought it up. You wanna talk about this other thing you got? About not wanting people touching you?”
“Not really.” Matt flips another page over that he couldn’t possibly have read in the last six seconds.
“Huh. That’s too bad.”
“Is it?” Matt says, bristling a little, despite how tight a rein John can see him plainly trying to keep on his temper.
The way forward is through, John reminds himself.
“Yeah,” he says. “Because see, I’ve been married. That means I know that when you don’t want to talk about something, that’s when it’s the most important. Hell, anyone who’s met you knows you can talk all day about stuff you only give half a shit about. When Matt Farrell gets quiet…that’s when the gears are turning.”
Matt flashes him a glance of acknowledgement, but there’s no smile in it.
“And your gears can turn a lot faster than mine,” John goes on, “and in my experience that just leads to a lot of me doing the same thing a lot, and then doing it a lot harder, and finding out way too late the problem was I shoulda been doing something else all along, instead.”
“Don’t think I haven’t figured out that when you say ‘I’ve been married’ you’re really saying ‘I’ve been divorced’,” Matt says drily, cutting his eyes over at him sideways and pretending he’s still getting anything out of the magazine article held up in front of his nose. “Jury’s still out on whether it’s a sympathy bid or some new species of threat you’re working on, but feel free to just keep on playing that card until the verdict comes in.”
“Hey,” he says, quietly. “Gotta play the hand you’re dealt.”
Maybe Matt catches a certain significance in the words, or maybe it’s just clear from the tone that John isn’t going to rise to the bait and be put off the scent by an argument. His shoulders drop a little where they’ve been pulled tightly up toward his ears against the pillow.
“When I was doing my time at Brightwood, there was this teacher there.”
Matt has always talked about his old boarding school this way - sarcastic jokes about prisons or Nazi work camps. The heaviness in John’s gut like lead tells him he’s about to find out why.
“Or a doctor, really, from the clinic. He had this weird thing for my hair. …Got fired for molesting kids. So. Just bad associations, I guess.”
“Kids like you?” John asks, through the thickness starting to tighten his throat.
“Obviously.”
John bites the inside of his cheek. This is hard enough as it is, Matt isn't going to help anything by hiding behind semantics.
“Matt. I’m asking if one of the kids this guy hurt, was you.”
“And I answered you.”
Knowing it was coming doesn’t make it burn any less, somehow. The words hit him so hard he feels gut-punched, winded.
Matt puts down his magazine and when he brings his eyes up to John’s face, there’s something strange and piercing in them, moving searchingly all over his features - it feels like a test. He has no idea whether he’s passing.
“Still want to talk about it?” Matt folds his arms tightly over his chest. The words are an unequivocal challenge.
John rolls up onto his shoulder under the blankets, makes a point of getting comfortable, of getting close. Then he lies through his teeth.
“Yeah,” he says simply. “…If you can.”
Matt snorts. “I can.”
Challenge accepted. John counts it a win, if a bittersweet one, and tries to prepare himself.
“The guy was a creep,” Matt says, sounding almost bored. He rolls away from John briefly, under the pretence of setting his mag down on the bedside table. “We used to hear the older kids talking about it all the time. Trying to laugh it off I guess. Some of them even acted like they liked it - calling him a fag, bragging about getting him to give them blow jobs and stuff. I thought it was all just…mean kids being… Well, you know how it is. Gay jokes! The most hilarious thing to hit the schoolyard since humankind invented the toilet.”
Matt widens his eyes and twirls a sardonic finger in the air.
“ …Then I got sick.”
The hot lead in John’s insides goes molten and starts to crawl slowly through his veins like lava. Matt keeps his eyes pointed straight ahead and soldiers on.
“I was too young to know about pedophilia or what was going on - that I could have screamed for help, or told someone. It wasn’t even…I mean it wasn’t rape or anything, not in the technical sense, just a lot of…unwanted touching. A LOT of unwanted touching. Then he’d touch himself too. That I knew wasn’t right.”
Not rape in the technical sense. John wants to punch something. Maybe a couple of things. He really wants to ask what happened to this dirt-bag, if he’s been put away where he belongs or if he’s still out there, still doing things to kids.
If years of cold sheets and TV dinners have taught him anything, though, it’s that Matt doesn’t need John McClane, Super-cop rushing off to be his hero right now. He needs John, his partner and his friend, to be there. He just needs his boyfriend to listen.
Not that that makes it easy.
“He asked me if I’d ever seen what a grownup man looked like naked before, and then- Well, I hadn’t. You know, with hair and…it looked, just, huge and weird to me. The whole thing was just…it was so fucked up and confusing, you know? I started to cry, and I think…God, I think it just made it worse. I think the asshole got off on it. He just…he’d just keep petting and petting my hair, like it was some kind of tender moment instead of...”
Matt breaks off and picks another bit of fluffy white lint off the sheets. John stops wanting to punch things and starts wanting to crawl right out of his skin.
Instead he just sits there, watching Matt and feeling his blood boil, and wondering if a shrink would say he’s supposed to make Matt say it out loud, what it is. Tell him he knows the ins and outs of the law, and that there’s nothing ‘technical’ about it.
“Then that’s where it always started. Every time I got sent to his office he’d start with the hair-stroking. It didn’t matter where I was hurt, it could be my big toe for chrissakes, but the inappropriate part always started with the hair. He thought he could pass it off as concerned and paternal and go from there, I guess.”
Matt’s voice has taken on this sort of lifeless, robotic timbre that’s somehow even harder to hear than the false stoicism from before.
“So whenever that happened I’d get this really cold chill all over. Just knowing what was coming next.”
John feels a chill of his own move slowly up his spine. Matt had gone to that school for years…
“…I was so scared to get sick, once I broke my thumb playing Jail Break - it’s like tag,” Matt explains unnecessarily, looking quickly over at him. As if he thinks John was born a cop, or is maybe just too old to have ever been a kid. “I hid it from the teachers for four days before I got caught trying to learn to write cursive with my left hand.”
Matt gives a short little laugh with more bitterness than mirth and John waits for him to go on, but he’s just looking at his hands, flexing his thumb up and down.
John flexes his own fingers too - he’s been making fists so tight it hurts a little.
He recognizes this silence as the moment he’s supposed to save the day. Reach into some secret stash of happy endings and silver linings and say something that makes it all okay.
But he doesn’t have it. There’s no magic spell that fixes this; no making lemonade when life gets bored with lemons and hands you a pile of shit instead.
So he does what he’s been wanting to this whole time, and reaches out. His hand hovers just shy of the hair trailing over the shell of Matt’s ear. Matt looks at him warily, something sparking in his eyes like a warning - but the feral, panicked look from earlier seems to be gone, now that the secret’s out.
“There’s a reason he fixated on your hair, Matthew.”
Matt shuts his eyes when the touch lands. He grits his teeth like he’s fighting off some physical sensation - a surge of rage or pain, roil of nausea maybe.
“It’s beautiful,” John continues resolutely, ignoring it when Matt gives a self-conscious little scoff and looks up at the ceiling. “It’s soft, but strong, like silk. …Like you. It even smells good.”
John moves close enough that he can nuzzle his nose over the top of Matt’s head in a sort of unrequited Eskimo kiss. He can hear Matt take a breath that sounds slow, deliberate.
“Some people can’t see something beautiful without wanting to touch it. …Take it,” he says, into the crown of Matt’s hair, before he pulls away a little to look him in the eyes.
“You were just a kid, Matt. And none of what he did was your fault. But you’re a man now. A man has to guard all the stuff that’s soft and beautiful in the world, you know? From the sickos like him.”
Matt doesn’t say anything, but John can feel the short, tiny nod under his hand.
Matt turns his face away then, at the feel of John’s palm ghosting over the tips of his hair again. But he doesn’t tell him to cut it out, doesn’t pull or squirm. John isn’t pinning him. He’s propped up on one elbow, sort of leaning over him. Matt could turn over and shift away, or - at this angle - probably even shove John off of him if he wanted. But he stays where he is, quietly right there under him.
John pushes his fingers deeper, scratches a little, like petting a cat. It seems strange now, to never have done this before.
“The hardest thing a man can do sometimes is be soft,” he admits, and from the wry, minute little upward curl in the corner of Matt’s mouth, neither of them is missing the fact that if Matt had been looking at him right now, he probably couldn’t even get the words out. “It takes strength. But you’ve got it. You do it better than me, even. So…” John’s shrug interrupts what his fingers are doing for a moment. “Let me. Let me be soft with you. …I’m not gonna do anything you don’t want.”
It’s not much of a therapy plan, but it’s all he’s got. John drags his fingers slowly through the dark, satiny strands again. He can do this all night if Matt will let him. And he just might. Matt’s hair is beautiful; shiny, warm. John can’t help but think he’s been missing out, here.
He loses track of how long they lie there. John is watching the glossy-smooth locks move through his fingers - flicking at the ends, and tugging gently now and again - and Matt puts a hand up over his eyes as if he’s suddenly embarrassed. Then he shifts his hips a little and John feels why.
And this- this is the worst part of what that psycho had done to Matt. Tenderness was supposed to feel good, it was supposed to be a turn on. And now, Matt thinks there is something wrong with him because his body is working exactly the way it’s supposed to.
“That’s right,” John says, low. He moves closer still, adjusting his position so his thigh is pressing down, giving Matt better friction. “Take it back.”
The hand covering Matt’s face falls away, but his eyes are still shut.
“He can’t take shit from you unless you let him,” John encourages. “All the things that are strong and beautiful about you, Matt…take it back.”
Matt finally looks up at him, and his eyes are blazing with something that - if still hard - is anything but cold or detached like before. He gives an experimental thrust of his hips.
“That’s right,” John urges again, “come on.”
Normally, he would lean down, take Matt’s mouth in a series of hot, urgent kisses. Rove down over the pale arch of his throat, and fit his mouth to the notch of his collar bone; keep on working until Matt comes apart and starts to beg- and for a moment he nearly does. But that isn’t what this is about.
So John continues to stroke and tug at his hair softly, and now that Matt is looking him in the face while he does it, he doesn’t want that to stop. It’s enough, watching Matt’s pupils bloom wide, and the flush rise in his cheeks while he grinds rhythmically against him, staring intently right into John’s eyes until his lips part and his breath catches, and he gives a whimpering moan and comes, hard and bucking, into the layers of sheets and cotton shorts between them.
Matt hasn’t moved, doesn’t even wait to catch his breath, before he reaches down a hand to press against John’s now-rock-hard dick.
“Leave it alone,” John says, gripping Matt’s wrist and waiting for his second or two of insistence to subside. “Leave it alone, it’ll keep.”
It’s not what this is about.
John settles down and tucks him close against his chest, and Matt throws his arm over his eyes. If the corners of those eyes are a little wet, John can pretend to ignore it.
He’s sure Matt buys the act just about as much as they each buy the other is asleep a while later, when Matt whispers his syllable of thanks.
**
In the morning when Matt slides into the shower behind him, he just smiles when John offers to do the honours if Matt would like to pass him the shampoo. But before the week is out, John gets back from the gym to find Matt giving up on his computer for once, and when he slides in behind him this time, he does.
And when Lucy comes by for dinner on Sunday and insists Matt play her at her favourite old Sega game, Matt jumps a little when her victory celebrations include a rather vigorous ruffling of his hair. But then he smiles, and retaliates by popping the clip holding up her ponytail on his way to the kitchen to grab them fresh drinks.
Nobody needs to tell John McClane that there are some scars that never quite heal, but the heart is a muscle like anything else. If there’s one thing he’s no stranger to, it’s therapy, and the secret to getting your full range of motion back is no secret at all.
Use it or lose it. Plain and simple.
Sure, there’s no silver lining here, and in real life there are no happy endings. There are bad days and there are days that are better.
Today is definitely a whole lot better than yesterday was, and from where John’s standing - in his kitchen, where a slinky young thing with a cute haircut grins happily at him and reaches up to rub a hand playfully over his scalp on his way to the fridge - tomorrow is looking even brighter.
There’s not a hell of a lot more they could ask for.
.