Die Hard Super Bowl Fic for smallfandomfest - Next Stop: Disneyland
Title: Next Stop: Disneyland
Author:persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating/Category: (PG-13/Slash)
Prompt: “Let’s get cold so we can warm up again” -found on the back of a pound of Starbucks Christmas Blend
Summary: John and Matt watch the Super Bowl
(Oh, and Matt gets hypothermia)
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Next Stop: Disneyland
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“Take a good look,” Matt says, as soon as the door cracks open. “This is why they don’t make t-shirts that say ‘I heart Brooklyn’.”
He’d spread his arms to gesture at himself but that would mean spreading his arms. And they are busy, fruitlessly hugging his chest for imaginary vestiges of body heat.
“Jesus,” McClane swears, which doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t look like he’s trying not to laugh at him though, which kind of does.
Matt knows what he looks like. He can feel that his hair is beaten down over the top of his skull and down the back of his neck, and from the way some of it feels stiff where it’s plastered to his forehead he wouldn’t be surprised if there were little icicles in it. He heard the water squishing out of his sneakers as he squeaked and squelched his way up the four flights of stairs in McClane’s walk-up - aw yeah, penthouse, baby - and he can see in the merciless fluorescent hallway lighting that his hands have turned a funny mottled purple, which means his lips are probably just as blue.
“They don’t have winter here, it just keeps on fucking raining until the rain freezes into sleet,” Matt notes, as the door swings wide and he moves hopefully into the apartment. The light in here is at least more welcoming. It doesn’t feel appreciably warmer but then it’s entirely possible it’s a veritable sauna in here, and Matt is just completely and utterly numb.
“And nobody can drive, but everybody does! Right through gigantic Brooklyn potholes, full of shitty Brooklyn sleet.” McClane gives him a wide berth, and Matt makes a beeline for the sink. McClane is used to him being kind of a germophobe, but this time hand-washing in water that is above ninety-eight point six degrees seems all the more urgent. “Do you know how many times I got splashed on my way over here? Neither do I, because I stopped counting after six. Hey, by the way.”
“Hi.”
“I brought beer.” Matt thrusts the single bottle clutched tightly in a perilously sensationless grip at McClane.
“Pre-chilled,” McClane says, and now he does kind of look like he’s trying not to laugh. Bastard.
“You’re welcome.”
His fingers stay curled stiffly in place after McClane takes it. Matt sniffs, and then wipes at his nose with the cuff of his sodden jacket anyway. Gross. Now he really needs to wash his hands.
He elbows the faucet on and waits until McClane turns to the fridge to stow Matt’s extremely thoughtful hostess gift and tries not to grimace at the weird, dislocated popping feeling in his joints as he uses his other hand to bend his fingers straight. Acting like a giant pants-wetting pusscake in front of McClane is something he tries not to do these days. It usually works pretty well, it’s been a while since anybody tried pointing guns at them.
“It’s a Brooklyn six pack. Fuck.” That water is hot. Or it feels hot. The position of the tap handle is actually almost all the way to ‘cold’. “They call it that because that’s what six glass bottles in a cardboard carrier looks like when you add freezing rain and pavement. I did not see a single green, growing thing on my way here, and did you know you live thirteen blocks from the nearest bus stop? I mean it, urban sprawl is a serious problem. In a proper civilization everything is in walking distance.” Matt nudges the water a little further toward ‘warm’ and only lets out about half of a hissing noise before he bites down on it. Right. See above re: Pusscake, Not Being A.“And people wonder why obesity is so rampant. Brooklyn is What’s Wrong with America, man.”
When he turns around, shaking his hands and looking around for a dish towel, McClane is staring at his feet. Which are oozing shitty Brooklyn sludge onto McClane’s kitchen floor with a speed and determination that is frankly sort of impressive in its industriousness.
McClane isn’t really a germophobe, but he is kind of a neat freak. It’s one of those sort of unexpected things you learn about someone who spent most of the day you met them smeared in ashes and blood that was only mostly their own. Kind of …cute, if you will- which on second thought, Matt will not, thank you very much.
It’s another thing he tries not to do around McClane these days; think unrequited, starry-eyed warm fuzzy bullshit like that. Sure, McClane doesn’t seem like the most emotionally-attuned dude on the planet, but then neither is Matt, and even he is starting to think it’s getting weird.
“Sorry,” Matt says, looking down at the offending soakers and back up at McClane. He tries to wrinkle up his nose, and make some credible facsimile of puppy eyes, but the numbness that used to be his face feels like it’s not moving right. He probably looks pathetic enough right now anyway. He’s shaking. He can feel that, now.
McClane stares at his face for almost as many seconds as he stared at Matt’s feet.
“Don’t move,” he says, and Matt doesn’t. He just sniffs again a couple of times, wraps his arms uselessly back around himself and shivers pitifully, while McClane goes off down the hallway to thump around the back of his apartment a lot, and comes back with a pile of what looks like it might be all of the household linen the man owns.
A towel that is pink and fluffy - and bizarre, Matt thinks feverishly, bizarre and not at all ‘cute’ - goes down at his feet to soak up the Brooklyn cesspool sliming around them.
“Hey, HEY!” McClane barks, when Matt moves to step onto it. “Shoes off.”
Matt is supposed to say something smartassed and witty now, he’s pretty sure, but the numbness feels like it is starting to seep into his brain, and he’s shaking so hard now, he’s afraid his teeth might chatter if he talks. So he clamps them shut and follows orders instead.
“Hair,” McClane says tersely, throwing another equally pink and equally bizarre-not-endearing towel over his head. While all of McClane’s linen is ugly, none of it seems to match. This one has white floral patterns woven into it.
“OW, easy!” Matt says, when two completely un-endearingly large hands start rubbing the towel over his head with what some might describe as ‘violence’, but as Matt is not a pusscake or anything of the sort, he decides he’ll go with ‘vigour’.
“Friction,” McClane says. “Don’t have a hair dryer.”
“Friction - jealousy,” Matt responds. “Tomato - to-mah-to.” Well it’s good to know his mouth is still working, if not his sense of self-preservation.
McClane is sort of smiling when Matt emerges from the towel, though.
“Gimme the wet jacket,” he says next, holding out a hand and making a quick, beckoning kind of gesture. “I’ll throw it in the dryer.”
This is some sort of logic that would likely make sense if his brain were operating at a normal rate of thermoregulation and blood circulation, Matt knows. But in his current state, the highest possible number of layers of things covering his skin seems like the most preferable option.
Matt wraps his arms around himself tighter than before, jams his fists into his armpits, and tries to arrange his mouth in an approximation of a smile. His teeth are chattering, dammit. So much for his plans to be macho and debonair.
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “I’ll hang onto it.”
McClane sighs.
“You ever take any kind of survival studies, kid? Science even? At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I literally don’t know what they teach you in school these days. That coat - is a useless piece of crap, for a start - but it’s wet, and it’s frozen,” McClane says, illustrating by grabbing fistful of it and squeezing another ugly trickle of Brooklyn weather onto the floor, then wiping his hand off on the back of his jeans. “And when the fabric starts to dry, the evaporation is going to draw the heat out of your body.”
“Don’t…science me. I know science, McClane.” Wow, his brain sucks right now. “And this jacket, I will have you know, is the only one I have.” Seriously, what is he, drunk? Did he cut himself on one of the beer bottles that he broke on his way here after taxi-splash number four, and accidentally absorb five bottles worth of organic local micro-brew into his blood stream? “And it’s a lot less useless-crap-y when it’s not soaking wet. It’s…puffier.”
Luckily, neither of them seem to feel the need to highlight the fact that if Matt had a tendency to get out more, or maybe wasn’t pretty much broke, or both, he might have a better one. Probably because McClane already knows.
“But it is soaking wet,” McClane points out, sounding disturbingly reminiscent of Matt’s old Kindergarten teacher, Mrs Brownlee.
“So is everything I’m wearing! Your science only works when you have something to put on that isn’t sopping wet instead. Slower evaporation, slower loss of body heat. So. Layers.” Take that, Science.
McClane isn’t listening though, he’s too busy taking those in-no-way-appealing oversized hands and - for lack of a better term - groping him. McClane grabs his thigh above the knee and squeezes against the sodden denim, then he pushes his hand up and under Matt’s jacket and prods at his ribs. Whoa.
“Hands,” he says, which McClane ignores. Maybe because to him it just sounded like a random squeak.
“You’re right, you’re wet to the skin, kid, Jesus. Alright, gimme everything.”
What kind of survival training do they give cops in the Academy? It’s a good thing McClane’s skin is made of some kind of bullet proof Kevlar if he thinks the way to survive hypothermia is to sign up for an all-nude Polar Bear Dip.
Matt wishes he could have said all of that out loud, or even part of that, but all that comes out is “I’ll be naked.” It’s embarrassing purely on the basis of how scandalized and Victorian he sounds. “Cold,” he manages to add as explanation, but barely.
He shoves his fists in even harder under his arms, just to see if he can feel them. He can’t really, which is something of a concern. His mouth isn’t doing what his brain wants any more either, which is okay because his brain clearly still sucks.
“Whaddya think this is for?” McClane holds up a huge blue comforter that looks suspiciously like it might have come off of his bed.
“You’re k-kidding me.” And now the literal stuttering. Awesome.
“Modesty, thy name is Matthew.” McClane rolls his eyes. “Keep your shorts on, Daisy Duke. I’ve seen you in less. Remember the hospital gowns?”
“N- Try n-not to.”
Well that much is true. It happens though, more often than he’d like. At times when it really probably shouldn’t. Like in the middle of long showers, or a C++ command, or trying to maintain a usually very one-sided conversation over cinnamon soy lattes with Lucy.
It would have helped out with the whole not-thinking-inappropriate-unattainable-shit-about-McClane plan, if he hadn’t known little details like that his body hair was dark once, but starting to go grey, and that he had an ass that spoke volumes about just how much the dude truly loved the gym.
Now McClane is looking at him, with this strange, penetrating gaze and Matt gets the uncomfortable feeling he can see inside his brain with Superman x-ray vision or whatever the McClane mind-reading version would be.
“Not arguing,” he says gruffly. “Strip.”
This can not be happening.
At least it’s dry, if not warm exactly, once the blue blanket is wrapped around his shoulders. It smells like it did come off of McClane’s bed, like fabric softener and McClane’s aftershave and something subtler and deeper that is probably too personal for Matt to be thinking about.
McClane disappears from the apartment, saying something about the laundry room, and Matt pulls his McClane-scented wrapper up around his cheeks, and breathes. He read somewhere yoga breathing raises body temperature, he’s pretty sure.
McClane already has the game on. He doesn’t remember wandering into the living room, but apparently he did. His joints feel sluggish and creaky, and he has to concentrate when he wants to move them. It’s vaguely disturbingly like controlling a marionette.
When McClane comes back, Matt is standing in front of the TV, but not watching it - he’s too busy staring down at his toes and trying to make them curl and uncurl. They do it, but not with the timing he expects from them. Trippy.
Matt shivers some more.
“Alright, there?”
Whoa, McClane is close. He’s holding Matt by the shoulders, and rubbing his arms. How does he move his hands so fast?
“More friction?” Matt comments, leaning into it, and McClane’s arms go around him, rubbing over his shoulders and back.
It should probably be weird, but it doesn’t feel weird. Feels good. It feels like the movement forces the blood that seems to have gone thick and slow in his veins to move its ass. It feels like a hug. Almost.
The side of his face touches McClane’s neck and the flash of heat stays there after he steps away, glowing incandescently across his cheek.
“Here,” Apparently they’ve moved across the room. McClane is sitting him down on the couch, tucking the blue blanket in all around him like a big, bald mother hen. “Sure you’re alright? Didn’t think you’d show up in this weather. I was expecting a phone call instead, then you showed up at the door looking like a drowned puppy.”
“Had to,” Matt responds. His teeth aren’t clacking together anymore, but his tongue feels weird now, fat and slow. Delayed, like his toes moving on the rug. “Super Bowl Sunday is practically a national h-” His brain might have freezer burn, but even he can’t misinterpret the superstitious side-glance nearly saying the H-word draws out of McClane. “…You like football,” he concludes.
It makes sense. If you pretend.
McClane gives his foot a squeeze - how he even knows where it is under all the bunched up masses of comforter is nothing short of fascinating - and turns toward the TV. Matt gets back to the business of shivering his ass off.
There are snacks laid out on the coffee table and a bucket of ice with cans of beer and soda in it on the floor. This is the McClane rendition of a Super Bowl party, and Matt can’t help but feel he’s ruined it. Looking at the bowls of cheese doodles and pork rinds seems to make him feel slightly nauseous though, and the ice bucket just makes him feel a violent, primal hatred for all things cold.
He tries to let his unintentional party-foul go, and focus on the game, but he thinks he might be missing things. The score keeps changing but all he ever sees are referees holding their earpieces and a bunch of guys sitting on benches and looking intense.
He’s not sure whether this is better or worse, but he’s not numb anymore - just cold. Really, deeply, from-the-inside-out cold. He gets it now, what old people mean when they say they feel cold ‘in their bones’. It feels like cold is literally radiating out from the marrow in the longer ones - the femur and the tibia, or whatever is in his legs and forearms. It’s like his body has inverted all its processes and now generates cold the way it used to make heat. He’s like a walking air conditioner. If he were a comic book character that would be his superpower. The Human Frigidaire.
It’s his hands and feet that are the worst, though. Now that they’re not numb, they ache dully, and Matt flexes them under the cover of the ratty old comforter that is doubling as his only item of clothing. He thinks about his jacket, tumbling around somewhere in a clothes dryer, and feels a little resentful about McClane accusing it of worthlessness. It shouldn’t be possible for a blanket not to be warm, but then again it’s probably not McClane’s blanket’s fault. Its only job is to hold in body heat, and Matt doesn’t have any of that.
McClane looks over at him, and catches him throwing baleful glances at the ice bucket.
“Still shivering,” he mutters, seemingly to nobody in particular, and checks his watch. Then he leans over, and starts burrowing a hand in under the tucked-in mass of covers until he can find Matt’s foot, and feel it solicitously all over.
Matt’s breath wooshes out of him at the contact, and he discovers a sore ribcage to go with the throbbing in his extremities and his head. Does shivering use muscles? If so, he must be getting a hell of a core workout today.
“You’re so hot,” he gasps.
At any other time those words might be embarrassingly ironic, but right now the literal implications are too distracting. McClane is hot. The touch burns without hurting, like passing his fingers through candle flame as a kid, or swiping his hand through the bonfire at camp. Even after he lets him go, Matt can still locate McClane’s hand under the blanket by the heat signature it gives off.
“No,” McClane argues, “you’re just cold. You’re alright, c’mere.” And Matt loses track of all the flame fingers licking under his heels and up over his ankles and calves as his legs are pulled out straight and both his feet are wrestled into McClane’s lap.
Of course he’s alright, he knows he’s alright. It hadn’t occurred to him until right this second he might not be. He wonders what the symptoms are of hypothermia, if there are any dangerous or permanent consequences - besides the obvious death. He’s not as worried about it as maybe he should be, but then again maybe he’s just too distracted by McClane tucking the blanket in again, all around both of their legs - creating a little oven all the better to roast Matt’s ankles in.
Now that is really hot. He can feel McClane’s skin blazing through the dense cotton of his jeans. It’s warm enough to be uncomfortable, and still, Matt doesn’t think even The Donald could come up with enough cash to make him move his feet right now. This is what he needs, this painful imperative like staring into the sun. This must be how a moth feels, right before it stops being a moth and becomes just a puff of smoke.
He doesn’t care how weird it is, he lets instinct take over, pushing his heels in between those columns of broiling heat, burrowing his toes stiffly in under McClane’s thigh.
The guys on the bench are looking intense again, and the coaches are wandering around with uptight body language and self-consciously ignoring the cameras by the time he realizes the temperature from his ankles down is no longer strictly uncomfortable. In fact it’s pretty awesome.
He tries wiggling his toes and McClane shifts position, and Matt’s skin is flooded with renewed warmth again. That has to be some kind of weird illusion caused by the frostbite on his brain. It actually feels like the places where his feet have been are cooler than the rest of the space in the McClane-o-Matic lap oven. Is it actually possible he could have seriously drawn all the heat out of McClane’s flesh, like some kind of vampire draining him slowly of life force…but with toes, instead of fangs? Oops. It doesn’t stop him from wiggling them though, shifting them into a new position under McClane’s leg in search of a spot that hasn’t been used up yet. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.
“Feeling better?” McClane asks.
Maybe he is. He’s been so wrapped up in the joy of getting what warmth he can, where he can, he’s stopped paying attention to the rest of himself.
Systems check: No chattering teeth. No fucking shivering, how about that. He’s still cold. Really goddamn cold, but just in a normal damp, miserable sort of way, and not that bullshit mystical always-winter-but-never-Christmas kind of cold, like he’d never be warm again. His hands have stopped aching, but when he moves them now they’re prickling in an unpleasant re-awakening of nerves that feels worse but probably isn’t.
“My feet are,” he nods. He can do that now without that bobble-headed feeling, like his neck doesn’t have enough tendons or whatever it needs to control the tension. “You’re like a furnace.”
McClane looks at him for a second that feels just a little too long.
“Like hell I am, you’re suckin’ all the heat out of the place. Scoot over.”
Matt isn’t sure what McClane wants but he’s pulling out all the tucked in edges of the blanket. The blanket Matt can’t help but be suddenly reminded is also currently serving him as anything resembling clothes. His fingers snatch reflexively at the corners.
“You got a problem with sharing?” McClane asks, raising an eyebrow. He probably would have gotten along downright famously with Mrs Brownlee.
He isn’t tugging at the blanket for the moment, but what’s happening now is arguably more distressing. McClane is unbuttoning his flannel shirt, and stripping down to an ancient, flimsy wifebeater. And now he’s all arms and chest hair, and Matt wishes there was a place to put his eyes that didn’t have so many bulges happening on it.
“What are you doing, more ‘science’?” A dull sense of alarm is starting to grow in the frozen tundra that is currently Matt’s brainpan. His feet slide out of McClane’s lap.
“You got me,” McClane says, sounding suddenly serious. “The fewer layers between us, the better you’ll warm up. You’re showing all the classic signs, and it’ll be a real big inconvenience for me if you die of acute hypothermia in my apartment. I hate paperwork.”
McClane is shoving at his hip, and now it’s abundantly clear what he’s getting at.
“You’re going to save my life again by making me the baby spoon,” Matt says incredulously - because his braintundra is still obviously in a state of permafrost.
“If you’re lucky,” McClane quips. “Besides. You just froze me from the waist down, and now you’re hogging the only blanket I own. Scoot over.”
Feeling for the second or third time today that what is happening cannot actually be in fact happening, Matt leans forward enough that McClane can fit in along the couch behind him and arrange himself - and then the blanket, and then Matt - to his satisfaction.
“Don’t fall off the damn sofa,” McClane growls in his ear. “Here,” he says, settling a broad hand over his stomach and drawing him backward so he is leaning into a wide wall of semi-naked chest.
“Hhhhhhhhokay! Holy shit.”
“Alright?” McClane’s voice rumbles against his spine.
No. He is not alright. Nope, not a bit, at all, nuh-uh.
“When I said you were a furnace I didn’t think your skin could actually inflict third degree burns!”
He’s being dramatic, he’s aware. But the very weird, very intense prickling sensation now rampaging up and down his back and the lengths of his limbs sucks.
“Settle down,” McClane says drily, pulling him backward again.
When he finally does, he discovers it’s actually not that bad. Just like the McClane-o-Matic foot oven, this is warm - okay hot, but it’s also right, and his body just knows that somehow, despite the fact that every single one of its nerves seems to be complaining about it - pretty fucking loudly, in fact. Unlike the Easy-Bake Farrell-foot oven though, this is all-over. It could take a minute or so to get used to.
“H’oh boy,” Matt huffs. “Sorry, that was just…something else, man. It’s better now.”
Or it was.
“…Why am I shaking again, then?”
“It’s okay,” McClane answers languidly from behind him, “it’s just shock. Try and relax, it’ll wear off.”
Matt tries to oblige, and not to feel that it is patently unfair that after hypothermia, one is then required to go into shock. It seems oddly redundant.
He feels slightly nauseous and dizzy again, but he figures if he mentions it to McClane he’ll just get shushed and lectured on how shock affects the body, and rack up more bad Super Bowl-interrupting karma points.
Matt shuts his eyes and just breathes, drinking in the warmth and the reassuring scent surrounding him, cocooning himself in it. There were hints of McClane on the blanket he’s been wrapped in all evening, but this is stronger, muskier. It’s McClane in real time; breath, and heat, and beer and harsh old fashioned bar-soap, and skin.
…He may have fallen asleep. The guys on the screen are drinking Gatorade, and looking like they’re about to actually start doing something, any second now.
His brain also seems to be thawing out. There’s pros and cons there, not the least of which is that he’s now inescapably conscious of the weirdness, the patheticness, and the simple embarrassing awkwardness of his situation.
He can feel what must be McClane’s chin tucked into the crown of his hair.
He should move. He doesn’t want to. This is all very stupid and bad, and yet so, so very amazing and awesomely good.
His left arm may have gone to sleep. God, he hates that.
“S’almost half time,” McClane murmurs into his ear, saving him the trouble of deciding whether or not he should speak. “Your clothes are probably ready. There’s a burger place about six blocks up. Whaddya say we walk over and pick up some takeout?”
“Uh,” Matt says, and the way it scratches its way out of his throat means he has definitely been asleep. He wonders how long, and if McClane knows.
“I got a real jacket you can borrow. I could probably bundle you up in some of my clothes real good. You should be okay. ‘Specially now that we know how to warm you up when we get home, huh?” McClane rubs a friendly, distinctly cuddly hand over his tummy.
If this is the way the truth comes out, so be it. Matt’s mouth is open, all ready with a completely honest confession like ‘I’m not sure I could handle that’, but McClane is still talking.
“…And when we get back, I can make you some hot chocolate, you know, in case your blood sugar drops.”
Oh, thank god. “You’re messing with me!”
McClane fucking chuckles, and Matt ignores the way it ruffles his hair, and hums comfortably against his shoulder blade.
Matt shifts onto his back so he can look at him, letting his shoulder dig into McClane’s chest as he does. “I am semi-nude and recovering from fucking near-fatal thermo-shock and you are messing with me, right now.”
McClane just smiles and rubs at the spot where Matt’s shoulder jabbed him. He’s still watching the TV, so he doesn’t notice when the first grin Matt has managed all evening freezes and melts right off his face, as a wash of chill that has nothing to do with the weather outside rushes over him.
Wait.
“So…” Matt’s voice is still all stupid and sleep-husky. He clears his throat and tries to sound more like a grownup and less like a lovesick tween. “Does this mean you know?” McClane looks away from the TV and at his face, and Matt bites his lip a little, but manages to push on. “You know that I’ve been battling a gigantic, hopeless secret crush on you?”
“You took three buses and walked thirteen blocks in a freezing rain storm to watch a game with me that you could have watched on your gigantic TV, your cell phone, and probably four of your two dozen computer screens at your place. It’s not much of a secret, kid.”
“Oh.”
McClane is already looking back at the TV, so Matt tries to do the same.
McClane seems completely unperturbed by what feels like a huge revelation for Matt. It stands to reason, maybe, when something turns out to be the world’s worst kept secret, that talking about it doesn’t bowl anyone over with surprise, but still.
Matt chews at a little piece of chapped skin on his lower lip. McClane’s hand is resting supremely unconcernedly on his hip.
“So, does this mean you’re okay with it?” Matt rolls backward a little and looks over his shoulder at him, again. “This seems to be pretty okay with you…this…what would you call this? Some people would call it ‘cuddling’ probably - not to say that I’m saying that you’re- I mean, being on a couch, lying down, spooning a half-clothed guy with admitted- ”
“Matt.” McClane is still watching the game, but his tone of voice is effectively quelling even without eye contact. “The game that you took three buses and walked thirteen blocks and gave yourself acute ‘near-fatal thermo-shock’ to watch, is still on.”
“Right,” Matt says, and he turns back to it. Just in time too. It really is on. An actual play is in progress, what do you know. But then the QB gets hardcore sacked and they both make air-fists of frustration and shout “come ON!!” in stereo.
Then it’s a bunch of dudes on a bench again and Matt takes the moment to twist back over his shoulder.
“I just want to know we’re okay,” he says, quietly. “I don’t need you to be anything you’re not… But if you and I are going to stay friends, we’re both going to have to be okay w-”
“Matt…” McClane says again, but this time there’s a big, warm finger under his chin, tilting his face upward, and then McClane is tipping forward, and oh, wow, he was not expecting this.
This kiss, if he had imagined it - which he hadn’t, but he’s sure as hell going to be remembering it - is nothing like he would have expected. McClane’s lips are softer than they look, and the motion of them over Matt’s own is gentle, and slow and sweet.
His heart speeds up, and when his fingers curl themselves around McClane’s wrist, he can feel McClane’s pulse doing the same. He’s not cold anymore. He can’t remember what cold even feels like.
“Shut up,” McClane says, when they finally pull apart. He sounds just as husky as Matt did waking up after his post-shock nap.
“Not staying friends, then. Got it.” Matt turns back to the TV.
McClane chuckles again, and Matt takes a minute not to ignore the cute, endearing way it ruffles his hair, and hums comfortably against his shoulder blade. Then an oversized hand finds his under the comforter and their fingers fit together in a way that most people would definitely call cuddling.
Yeah. They’re okay.
.
Author:persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating/Category: (PG-13/Slash)
Prompt: “Let’s get cold so we can warm up again” -found on the back of a pound of Starbucks Christmas Blend
Summary: John and Matt watch the Super Bowl
(Oh, and Matt gets hypothermia)
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Next Stop: Disneyland
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“Take a good look,” Matt says, as soon as the door cracks open. “This is why they don’t make t-shirts that say ‘I heart Brooklyn’.”
He’d spread his arms to gesture at himself but that would mean spreading his arms. And they are busy, fruitlessly hugging his chest for imaginary vestiges of body heat.
“Jesus,” McClane swears, which doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t look like he’s trying not to laugh at him though, which kind of does.
Matt knows what he looks like. He can feel that his hair is beaten down over the top of his skull and down the back of his neck, and from the way some of it feels stiff where it’s plastered to his forehead he wouldn’t be surprised if there were little icicles in it. He heard the water squishing out of his sneakers as he squeaked and squelched his way up the four flights of stairs in McClane’s walk-up - aw yeah, penthouse, baby - and he can see in the merciless fluorescent hallway lighting that his hands have turned a funny mottled purple, which means his lips are probably just as blue.
“They don’t have winter here, it just keeps on fucking raining until the rain freezes into sleet,” Matt notes, as the door swings wide and he moves hopefully into the apartment. The light in here is at least more welcoming. It doesn’t feel appreciably warmer but then it’s entirely possible it’s a veritable sauna in here, and Matt is just completely and utterly numb.
“And nobody can drive, but everybody does! Right through gigantic Brooklyn potholes, full of shitty Brooklyn sleet.” McClane gives him a wide berth, and Matt makes a beeline for the sink. McClane is used to him being kind of a germophobe, but this time hand-washing in water that is above ninety-eight point six degrees seems all the more urgent. “Do you know how many times I got splashed on my way over here? Neither do I, because I stopped counting after six. Hey, by the way.”
“Hi.”
“I brought beer.” Matt thrusts the single bottle clutched tightly in a perilously sensationless grip at McClane.
“Pre-chilled,” McClane says, and now he does kind of look like he’s trying not to laugh. Bastard.
“You’re welcome.”
His fingers stay curled stiffly in place after McClane takes it. Matt sniffs, and then wipes at his nose with the cuff of his sodden jacket anyway. Gross. Now he really needs to wash his hands.
He elbows the faucet on and waits until McClane turns to the fridge to stow Matt’s extremely thoughtful hostess gift and tries not to grimace at the weird, dislocated popping feeling in his joints as he uses his other hand to bend his fingers straight. Acting like a giant pants-wetting pusscake in front of McClane is something he tries not to do these days. It usually works pretty well, it’s been a while since anybody tried pointing guns at them.
“It’s a Brooklyn six pack. Fuck.” That water is hot. Or it feels hot. The position of the tap handle is actually almost all the way to ‘cold’. “They call it that because that’s what six glass bottles in a cardboard carrier looks like when you add freezing rain and pavement. I did not see a single green, growing thing on my way here, and did you know you live thirteen blocks from the nearest bus stop? I mean it, urban sprawl is a serious problem. In a proper civilization everything is in walking distance.” Matt nudges the water a little further toward ‘warm’ and only lets out about half of a hissing noise before he bites down on it. Right. See above re: Pusscake, Not Being A.“And people wonder why obesity is so rampant. Brooklyn is What’s Wrong with America, man.”
When he turns around, shaking his hands and looking around for a dish towel, McClane is staring at his feet. Which are oozing shitty Brooklyn sludge onto McClane’s kitchen floor with a speed and determination that is frankly sort of impressive in its industriousness.
McClane isn’t really a germophobe, but he is kind of a neat freak. It’s one of those sort of unexpected things you learn about someone who spent most of the day you met them smeared in ashes and blood that was only mostly their own. Kind of …cute, if you will- which on second thought, Matt will not, thank you very much.
It’s another thing he tries not to do around McClane these days; think unrequited, starry-eyed warm fuzzy bullshit like that. Sure, McClane doesn’t seem like the most emotionally-attuned dude on the planet, but then neither is Matt, and even he is starting to think it’s getting weird.
“Sorry,” Matt says, looking down at the offending soakers and back up at McClane. He tries to wrinkle up his nose, and make some credible facsimile of puppy eyes, but the numbness that used to be his face feels like it’s not moving right. He probably looks pathetic enough right now anyway. He’s shaking. He can feel that, now.
McClane stares at his face for almost as many seconds as he stared at Matt’s feet.
“Don’t move,” he says, and Matt doesn’t. He just sniffs again a couple of times, wraps his arms uselessly back around himself and shivers pitifully, while McClane goes off down the hallway to thump around the back of his apartment a lot, and comes back with a pile of what looks like it might be all of the household linen the man owns.
A towel that is pink and fluffy - and bizarre, Matt thinks feverishly, bizarre and not at all ‘cute’ - goes down at his feet to soak up the Brooklyn cesspool sliming around them.
“Hey, HEY!” McClane barks, when Matt moves to step onto it. “Shoes off.”
Matt is supposed to say something smartassed and witty now, he’s pretty sure, but the numbness feels like it is starting to seep into his brain, and he’s shaking so hard now, he’s afraid his teeth might chatter if he talks. So he clamps them shut and follows orders instead.
“Hair,” McClane says tersely, throwing another equally pink and equally bizarre-not-endearing towel over his head. While all of McClane’s linen is ugly, none of it seems to match. This one has white floral patterns woven into it.
“OW, easy!” Matt says, when two completely un-endearingly large hands start rubbing the towel over his head with what some might describe as ‘violence’, but as Matt is not a pusscake or anything of the sort, he decides he’ll go with ‘vigour’.
“Friction,” McClane says. “Don’t have a hair dryer.”
“Friction - jealousy,” Matt responds. “Tomato - to-mah-to.” Well it’s good to know his mouth is still working, if not his sense of self-preservation.
McClane is sort of smiling when Matt emerges from the towel, though.
“Gimme the wet jacket,” he says next, holding out a hand and making a quick, beckoning kind of gesture. “I’ll throw it in the dryer.”
This is some sort of logic that would likely make sense if his brain were operating at a normal rate of thermoregulation and blood circulation, Matt knows. But in his current state, the highest possible number of layers of things covering his skin seems like the most preferable option.
Matt wraps his arms around himself tighter than before, jams his fists into his armpits, and tries to arrange his mouth in an approximation of a smile. His teeth are chattering, dammit. So much for his plans to be macho and debonair.
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “I’ll hang onto it.”
McClane sighs.
“You ever take any kind of survival studies, kid? Science even? At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I literally don’t know what they teach you in school these days. That coat - is a useless piece of crap, for a start - but it’s wet, and it’s frozen,” McClane says, illustrating by grabbing fistful of it and squeezing another ugly trickle of Brooklyn weather onto the floor, then wiping his hand off on the back of his jeans. “And when the fabric starts to dry, the evaporation is going to draw the heat out of your body.”
“Don’t…science me. I know science, McClane.” Wow, his brain sucks right now. “And this jacket, I will have you know, is the only one I have.” Seriously, what is he, drunk? Did he cut himself on one of the beer bottles that he broke on his way here after taxi-splash number four, and accidentally absorb five bottles worth of organic local micro-brew into his blood stream? “And it’s a lot less useless-crap-y when it’s not soaking wet. It’s…puffier.”
Luckily, neither of them seem to feel the need to highlight the fact that if Matt had a tendency to get out more, or maybe wasn’t pretty much broke, or both, he might have a better one. Probably because McClane already knows.
“But it is soaking wet,” McClane points out, sounding disturbingly reminiscent of Matt’s old Kindergarten teacher, Mrs Brownlee.
“So is everything I’m wearing! Your science only works when you have something to put on that isn’t sopping wet instead. Slower evaporation, slower loss of body heat. So. Layers.” Take that, Science.
McClane isn’t listening though, he’s too busy taking those in-no-way-appealing oversized hands and - for lack of a better term - groping him. McClane grabs his thigh above the knee and squeezes against the sodden denim, then he pushes his hand up and under Matt’s jacket and prods at his ribs. Whoa.
“Hands,” he says, which McClane ignores. Maybe because to him it just sounded like a random squeak.
“You’re right, you’re wet to the skin, kid, Jesus. Alright, gimme everything.”
What kind of survival training do they give cops in the Academy? It’s a good thing McClane’s skin is made of some kind of bullet proof Kevlar if he thinks the way to survive hypothermia is to sign up for an all-nude Polar Bear Dip.
Matt wishes he could have said all of that out loud, or even part of that, but all that comes out is “I’ll be naked.” It’s embarrassing purely on the basis of how scandalized and Victorian he sounds. “Cold,” he manages to add as explanation, but barely.
He shoves his fists in even harder under his arms, just to see if he can feel them. He can’t really, which is something of a concern. His mouth isn’t doing what his brain wants any more either, which is okay because his brain clearly still sucks.
“Whaddya think this is for?” McClane holds up a huge blue comforter that looks suspiciously like it might have come off of his bed.
“You’re k-kidding me.” And now the literal stuttering. Awesome.
“Modesty, thy name is Matthew.” McClane rolls his eyes. “Keep your shorts on, Daisy Duke. I’ve seen you in less. Remember the hospital gowns?”
“N- Try n-not to.”
Well that much is true. It happens though, more often than he’d like. At times when it really probably shouldn’t. Like in the middle of long showers, or a C++ command, or trying to maintain a usually very one-sided conversation over cinnamon soy lattes with Lucy.
It would have helped out with the whole not-thinking-inappropriate-unattainable-shit-about-McClane plan, if he hadn’t known little details like that his body hair was dark once, but starting to go grey, and that he had an ass that spoke volumes about just how much the dude truly loved the gym.
Now McClane is looking at him, with this strange, penetrating gaze and Matt gets the uncomfortable feeling he can see inside his brain with Superman x-ray vision or whatever the McClane mind-reading version would be.
“Not arguing,” he says gruffly. “Strip.”
This can not be happening.
At least it’s dry, if not warm exactly, once the blue blanket is wrapped around his shoulders. It smells like it did come off of McClane’s bed, like fabric softener and McClane’s aftershave and something subtler and deeper that is probably too personal for Matt to be thinking about.
McClane disappears from the apartment, saying something about the laundry room, and Matt pulls his McClane-scented wrapper up around his cheeks, and breathes. He read somewhere yoga breathing raises body temperature, he’s pretty sure.
McClane already has the game on. He doesn’t remember wandering into the living room, but apparently he did. His joints feel sluggish and creaky, and he has to concentrate when he wants to move them. It’s vaguely disturbingly like controlling a marionette.
When McClane comes back, Matt is standing in front of the TV, but not watching it - he’s too busy staring down at his toes and trying to make them curl and uncurl. They do it, but not with the timing he expects from them. Trippy.
Matt shivers some more.
“Alright, there?”
Whoa, McClane is close. He’s holding Matt by the shoulders, and rubbing his arms. How does he move his hands so fast?
“More friction?” Matt comments, leaning into it, and McClane’s arms go around him, rubbing over his shoulders and back.
It should probably be weird, but it doesn’t feel weird. Feels good. It feels like the movement forces the blood that seems to have gone thick and slow in his veins to move its ass. It feels like a hug. Almost.
The side of his face touches McClane’s neck and the flash of heat stays there after he steps away, glowing incandescently across his cheek.
“Here,” Apparently they’ve moved across the room. McClane is sitting him down on the couch, tucking the blue blanket in all around him like a big, bald mother hen. “Sure you’re alright? Didn’t think you’d show up in this weather. I was expecting a phone call instead, then you showed up at the door looking like a drowned puppy.”
“Had to,” Matt responds. His teeth aren’t clacking together anymore, but his tongue feels weird now, fat and slow. Delayed, like his toes moving on the rug. “Super Bowl Sunday is practically a national h-” His brain might have freezer burn, but even he can’t misinterpret the superstitious side-glance nearly saying the H-word draws out of McClane. “…You like football,” he concludes.
It makes sense. If you pretend.
McClane gives his foot a squeeze - how he even knows where it is under all the bunched up masses of comforter is nothing short of fascinating - and turns toward the TV. Matt gets back to the business of shivering his ass off.
There are snacks laid out on the coffee table and a bucket of ice with cans of beer and soda in it on the floor. This is the McClane rendition of a Super Bowl party, and Matt can’t help but feel he’s ruined it. Looking at the bowls of cheese doodles and pork rinds seems to make him feel slightly nauseous though, and the ice bucket just makes him feel a violent, primal hatred for all things cold.
He tries to let his unintentional party-foul go, and focus on the game, but he thinks he might be missing things. The score keeps changing but all he ever sees are referees holding their earpieces and a bunch of guys sitting on benches and looking intense.
He’s not sure whether this is better or worse, but he’s not numb anymore - just cold. Really, deeply, from-the-inside-out cold. He gets it now, what old people mean when they say they feel cold ‘in their bones’. It feels like cold is literally radiating out from the marrow in the longer ones - the femur and the tibia, or whatever is in his legs and forearms. It’s like his body has inverted all its processes and now generates cold the way it used to make heat. He’s like a walking air conditioner. If he were a comic book character that would be his superpower. The Human Frigidaire.
It’s his hands and feet that are the worst, though. Now that they’re not numb, they ache dully, and Matt flexes them under the cover of the ratty old comforter that is doubling as his only item of clothing. He thinks about his jacket, tumbling around somewhere in a clothes dryer, and feels a little resentful about McClane accusing it of worthlessness. It shouldn’t be possible for a blanket not to be warm, but then again it’s probably not McClane’s blanket’s fault. Its only job is to hold in body heat, and Matt doesn’t have any of that.
McClane looks over at him, and catches him throwing baleful glances at the ice bucket.
“Still shivering,” he mutters, seemingly to nobody in particular, and checks his watch. Then he leans over, and starts burrowing a hand in under the tucked-in mass of covers until he can find Matt’s foot, and feel it solicitously all over.
Matt’s breath wooshes out of him at the contact, and he discovers a sore ribcage to go with the throbbing in his extremities and his head. Does shivering use muscles? If so, he must be getting a hell of a core workout today.
“You’re so hot,” he gasps.
At any other time those words might be embarrassingly ironic, but right now the literal implications are too distracting. McClane is hot. The touch burns without hurting, like passing his fingers through candle flame as a kid, or swiping his hand through the bonfire at camp. Even after he lets him go, Matt can still locate McClane’s hand under the blanket by the heat signature it gives off.
“No,” McClane argues, “you’re just cold. You’re alright, c’mere.” And Matt loses track of all the flame fingers licking under his heels and up over his ankles and calves as his legs are pulled out straight and both his feet are wrestled into McClane’s lap.
Of course he’s alright, he knows he’s alright. It hadn’t occurred to him until right this second he might not be. He wonders what the symptoms are of hypothermia, if there are any dangerous or permanent consequences - besides the obvious death. He’s not as worried about it as maybe he should be, but then again maybe he’s just too distracted by McClane tucking the blanket in again, all around both of their legs - creating a little oven all the better to roast Matt’s ankles in.
Now that is really hot. He can feel McClane’s skin blazing through the dense cotton of his jeans. It’s warm enough to be uncomfortable, and still, Matt doesn’t think even The Donald could come up with enough cash to make him move his feet right now. This is what he needs, this painful imperative like staring into the sun. This must be how a moth feels, right before it stops being a moth and becomes just a puff of smoke.
He doesn’t care how weird it is, he lets instinct take over, pushing his heels in between those columns of broiling heat, burrowing his toes stiffly in under McClane’s thigh.
The guys on the bench are looking intense again, and the coaches are wandering around with uptight body language and self-consciously ignoring the cameras by the time he realizes the temperature from his ankles down is no longer strictly uncomfortable. In fact it’s pretty awesome.
He tries wiggling his toes and McClane shifts position, and Matt’s skin is flooded with renewed warmth again. That has to be some kind of weird illusion caused by the frostbite on his brain. It actually feels like the places where his feet have been are cooler than the rest of the space in the McClane-o-Matic lap oven. Is it actually possible he could have seriously drawn all the heat out of McClane’s flesh, like some kind of vampire draining him slowly of life force…but with toes, instead of fangs? Oops. It doesn’t stop him from wiggling them though, shifting them into a new position under McClane’s leg in search of a spot that hasn’t been used up yet. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.
“Feeling better?” McClane asks.
Maybe he is. He’s been so wrapped up in the joy of getting what warmth he can, where he can, he’s stopped paying attention to the rest of himself.
Systems check: No chattering teeth. No fucking shivering, how about that. He’s still cold. Really goddamn cold, but just in a normal damp, miserable sort of way, and not that bullshit mystical always-winter-but-never-Christmas kind of cold, like he’d never be warm again. His hands have stopped aching, but when he moves them now they’re prickling in an unpleasant re-awakening of nerves that feels worse but probably isn’t.
“My feet are,” he nods. He can do that now without that bobble-headed feeling, like his neck doesn’t have enough tendons or whatever it needs to control the tension. “You’re like a furnace.”
McClane looks at him for a second that feels just a little too long.
“Like hell I am, you’re suckin’ all the heat out of the place. Scoot over.”
Matt isn’t sure what McClane wants but he’s pulling out all the tucked in edges of the blanket. The blanket Matt can’t help but be suddenly reminded is also currently serving him as anything resembling clothes. His fingers snatch reflexively at the corners.
“You got a problem with sharing?” McClane asks, raising an eyebrow. He probably would have gotten along downright famously with Mrs Brownlee.
He isn’t tugging at the blanket for the moment, but what’s happening now is arguably more distressing. McClane is unbuttoning his flannel shirt, and stripping down to an ancient, flimsy wifebeater. And now he’s all arms and chest hair, and Matt wishes there was a place to put his eyes that didn’t have so many bulges happening on it.
“What are you doing, more ‘science’?” A dull sense of alarm is starting to grow in the frozen tundra that is currently Matt’s brainpan. His feet slide out of McClane’s lap.
“You got me,” McClane says, sounding suddenly serious. “The fewer layers between us, the better you’ll warm up. You’re showing all the classic signs, and it’ll be a real big inconvenience for me if you die of acute hypothermia in my apartment. I hate paperwork.”
McClane is shoving at his hip, and now it’s abundantly clear what he’s getting at.
“You’re going to save my life again by making me the baby spoon,” Matt says incredulously - because his braintundra is still obviously in a state of permafrost.
“If you’re lucky,” McClane quips. “Besides. You just froze me from the waist down, and now you’re hogging the only blanket I own. Scoot over.”
Feeling for the second or third time today that what is happening cannot actually be in fact happening, Matt leans forward enough that McClane can fit in along the couch behind him and arrange himself - and then the blanket, and then Matt - to his satisfaction.
“Don’t fall off the damn sofa,” McClane growls in his ear. “Here,” he says, settling a broad hand over his stomach and drawing him backward so he is leaning into a wide wall of semi-naked chest.
“Hhhhhhhhokay! Holy shit.”
“Alright?” McClane’s voice rumbles against his spine.
No. He is not alright. Nope, not a bit, at all, nuh-uh.
“When I said you were a furnace I didn’t think your skin could actually inflict third degree burns!”
He’s being dramatic, he’s aware. But the very weird, very intense prickling sensation now rampaging up and down his back and the lengths of his limbs sucks.
“Settle down,” McClane says drily, pulling him backward again.
When he finally does, he discovers it’s actually not that bad. Just like the McClane-o-Matic foot oven, this is warm - okay hot, but it’s also right, and his body just knows that somehow, despite the fact that every single one of its nerves seems to be complaining about it - pretty fucking loudly, in fact. Unlike the Easy-Bake Farrell-foot oven though, this is all-over. It could take a minute or so to get used to.
“H’oh boy,” Matt huffs. “Sorry, that was just…something else, man. It’s better now.”
Or it was.
“…Why am I shaking again, then?”
“It’s okay,” McClane answers languidly from behind him, “it’s just shock. Try and relax, it’ll wear off.”
Matt tries to oblige, and not to feel that it is patently unfair that after hypothermia, one is then required to go into shock. It seems oddly redundant.
He feels slightly nauseous and dizzy again, but he figures if he mentions it to McClane he’ll just get shushed and lectured on how shock affects the body, and rack up more bad Super Bowl-interrupting karma points.
Matt shuts his eyes and just breathes, drinking in the warmth and the reassuring scent surrounding him, cocooning himself in it. There were hints of McClane on the blanket he’s been wrapped in all evening, but this is stronger, muskier. It’s McClane in real time; breath, and heat, and beer and harsh old fashioned bar-soap, and skin.
…He may have fallen asleep. The guys on the screen are drinking Gatorade, and looking like they’re about to actually start doing something, any second now.
His brain also seems to be thawing out. There’s pros and cons there, not the least of which is that he’s now inescapably conscious of the weirdness, the patheticness, and the simple embarrassing awkwardness of his situation.
He can feel what must be McClane’s chin tucked into the crown of his hair.
He should move. He doesn’t want to. This is all very stupid and bad, and yet so, so very amazing and awesomely good.
His left arm may have gone to sleep. God, he hates that.
“S’almost half time,” McClane murmurs into his ear, saving him the trouble of deciding whether or not he should speak. “Your clothes are probably ready. There’s a burger place about six blocks up. Whaddya say we walk over and pick up some takeout?”
“Uh,” Matt says, and the way it scratches its way out of his throat means he has definitely been asleep. He wonders how long, and if McClane knows.
“I got a real jacket you can borrow. I could probably bundle you up in some of my clothes real good. You should be okay. ‘Specially now that we know how to warm you up when we get home, huh?” McClane rubs a friendly, distinctly cuddly hand over his tummy.
If this is the way the truth comes out, so be it. Matt’s mouth is open, all ready with a completely honest confession like ‘I’m not sure I could handle that’, but McClane is still talking.
“…And when we get back, I can make you some hot chocolate, you know, in case your blood sugar drops.”
Oh, thank god. “You’re messing with me!”
McClane fucking chuckles, and Matt ignores the way it ruffles his hair, and hums comfortably against his shoulder blade.
Matt shifts onto his back so he can look at him, letting his shoulder dig into McClane’s chest as he does. “I am semi-nude and recovering from fucking near-fatal thermo-shock and you are messing with me, right now.”
McClane just smiles and rubs at the spot where Matt’s shoulder jabbed him. He’s still watching the TV, so he doesn’t notice when the first grin Matt has managed all evening freezes and melts right off his face, as a wash of chill that has nothing to do with the weather outside rushes over him.
Wait.
“So…” Matt’s voice is still all stupid and sleep-husky. He clears his throat and tries to sound more like a grownup and less like a lovesick tween. “Does this mean you know?” McClane looks away from the TV and at his face, and Matt bites his lip a little, but manages to push on. “You know that I’ve been battling a gigantic, hopeless secret crush on you?”
“You took three buses and walked thirteen blocks in a freezing rain storm to watch a game with me that you could have watched on your gigantic TV, your cell phone, and probably four of your two dozen computer screens at your place. It’s not much of a secret, kid.”
“Oh.”
McClane is already looking back at the TV, so Matt tries to do the same.
McClane seems completely unperturbed by what feels like a huge revelation for Matt. It stands to reason, maybe, when something turns out to be the world’s worst kept secret, that talking about it doesn’t bowl anyone over with surprise, but still.
Matt chews at a little piece of chapped skin on his lower lip. McClane’s hand is resting supremely unconcernedly on his hip.
“So, does this mean you’re okay with it?” Matt rolls backward a little and looks over his shoulder at him, again. “This seems to be pretty okay with you…this…what would you call this? Some people would call it ‘cuddling’ probably - not to say that I’m saying that you’re- I mean, being on a couch, lying down, spooning a half-clothed guy with admitted- ”
“Matt.” McClane is still watching the game, but his tone of voice is effectively quelling even without eye contact. “The game that you took three buses and walked thirteen blocks and gave yourself acute ‘near-fatal thermo-shock’ to watch, is still on.”
“Right,” Matt says, and he turns back to it. Just in time too. It really is on. An actual play is in progress, what do you know. But then the QB gets hardcore sacked and they both make air-fists of frustration and shout “come ON!!” in stereo.
Then it’s a bunch of dudes on a bench again and Matt takes the moment to twist back over his shoulder.
“I just want to know we’re okay,” he says, quietly. “I don’t need you to be anything you’re not… But if you and I are going to stay friends, we’re both going to have to be okay w-”
“Matt…” McClane says again, but this time there’s a big, warm finger under his chin, tilting his face upward, and then McClane is tipping forward, and oh, wow, he was not expecting this.
This kiss, if he had imagined it - which he hadn’t, but he’s sure as hell going to be remembering it - is nothing like he would have expected. McClane’s lips are softer than they look, and the motion of them over Matt’s own is gentle, and slow and sweet.
His heart speeds up, and when his fingers curl themselves around McClane’s wrist, he can feel McClane’s pulse doing the same. He’s not cold anymore. He can’t remember what cold even feels like.
“Shut up,” McClane says, when they finally pull apart. He sounds just as husky as Matt did waking up after his post-shock nap.
“Not staying friends, then. Got it.” Matt turns back to the TV.
McClane chuckles again, and Matt takes a minute not to ignore the cute, endearing way it ruffles his hair, and hums comfortably against his shoulder blade. Then an oversized hand finds his under the comforter and their fingers fit together in a way that most people would definitely call cuddling.
Yeah. They’re okay.
.