Die Hard Fic for smallfandomfest: It's About Time
Title: It’s About Time
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John McClane/Matt Farrell
Rating/Category: (PG-13/Slash)
Prompt: a matter of time
Spoilers: n/a
Summary: They say time waits for no man. And John McClane never figured on ending up spending half his life doing it, either.
Notes/Warnings: Written for smallfandomfest for the prompt "a matter of time". And for severina2001. Who prompted it. And likes established.
It’s About Time
by persnickett
They say time waits for no man. And John McClane never figured on ending up spending half his life doing it, either.
“Hey,” Matt said, to acknowledge he was aware of John’s presence - which was sort of impressive considering he hadn’t even glanced away from his computer screen.
“Quitting time." John leaned himself languidly against the door jamb, letting his open bathrobe hang away from his torso.
“Already, really?” When Matt finally turned away from his several computer monitors to look at him, his eyes were shot with red, and it looked like dark, circular smudges were just starting to develop under them.
John folded his arms. Matt’s hands were still hovering over the keyboard, but they flew promptly up in the air in response.
“I know! We said no more all-nighters. And this isn’t one, John. I’ll be up in a minute. It’s just these last two columns to go, and then, you know what I can do? I can just set up a macro and then I’ll let it run through the night, so I’m not…rotating every goddamn matrix by hand.” One of said hands traveled up into his hair and made a desperate-looking little fist, while the other gestured at the blocks of numbers on the screen as if it was supposed to mean something to John. “I mean seriously, who codes in Fortran these days!?”
“Babbling, Matty.” John pointed out. “We’ve talked about this-“
“About the babbling. I know,” Matt interjected, putting his hands up again and then letting them move in waving gestures around his head. “When I’m talking in circles it means my focus is off the rails and if I’m not clear-headed enough to even talk in a straight line how the hell can I be thinking in rows and columns, much less at the same time, and I’m- well aware that I’m doing it again.”
Matt pushed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. When he brought them away he slapped them down on his thighs, and rubbed them briskly back and forth like he was trying to wake up his body’s flagging blood vessels. He blinked hard a couple of times.
John frowned.
“I’ll be up soon, I swear,” Matt promised. “Sometimes these things are just a matter of-- ”
“Time,” John conceded, before another babble-train could pull out of the station. “I know, I know. You’re not exactly checking your email, blah blah.”
“I was going to say perseverance or something.” Matt had turned back to his wall of digits, clicking at his mouse and tapping distractedly at his lower lip. And John knew he had already lost him again, to the miles of code scrolling past on the screen.
Matt reached for his Red Bull and then gave it an empty-looking shake.
“Hey, John?” Matt addressed him without looking away, “can you grab me another one of these before you head up? I don’t want to get up - I get distracted and end up doing something else, and then I lose track…”
Something else like coming to bed with the man you claimed to love, and getting some actual rest? John sighed.
“Yeah,” he said, instead. He wrapped his robe around himself as he went, covering up his shorts and shaking his head at himself as he tied up the belt. He’d even made sure he was wearing the good ones, without any little holes near the waistband.
When had it happened? When did he become the neglected wife in this little scenario they were living?
They didn’t wear rings, and he and Matt weren’t really the type to put it on paper, but John wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to kid himself about things. He knew what this was, what they were. And nobody knew better that a marriage wasn’t about dressing up in white, or who carries who across the threshold.
It was about remembering to pick up the dry cleaning the first time without having to be asked again. It was about late night trips to the 24-hour pharmacy for baby aspirin and Pepto Bismol, and showing up at the bus stop with an umbrella when it was raining out. It was about migraines and foot-rubs - and fetching goddamn Red Bulls - and all the stupid, niggly little details John had never been smart enough to make time for the first go-round.
Time. It was always about time with Holly. Too many late nights at the precinct. Too much time spent worrying about catching scumbags who liked to sell crack cocaine on playgrounds, and not enough with his own damn kids. Vacation time, alone time, ‘quality’ time. When it came to Time, there was never enough.
**
John sighed again as he slipped off the robe, hung it on the hook on the back of the bedroom door. He lay down and tried not to think about how cold the sheets felt against his skin. Maybe what was getting to him was this whole thing felt a little too familiar.
It wasn’t as if it were lost on him, the irony in finding himself here - in John of all people ending up the one trying to lure a workaholic husband into bed with his aging, beat-up physique. He snapped off the light, and settled down to stare at the ceiling, and tried to remember if this was how it had felt when things started to go sideways with Holly, or if it was different.
It wasn’t so much that the sex stopped happening, though of course that was what John noticed first. But what he didn’t cotton on to for what had obviously turned out to be much too long, was that that was when they stopped taking time. When they stopped talking to each other, wrapped up in the sheets and each other’s arms. How was your day? Jack bit the lunch lady again. This guy at the office is a real piece of work…
Eventually Holly gave up pestering him about taking time out, and stopped having any herself. That was when it went bad. It wasn’t like John still hadn’t figured out where to put the blame or anything like that. When you can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em. And the two of them had made a pair that was pretty tough to beat.
Sure, they’d agreed on it at first, thought it was a good thing, when she’d gone looking for the Nakatomi job. Her days would be full, and the kids could only benefit from having a mother who was happy and fulfilled - challenged.
Yeah, things got real challenging. Then came the housekeepers, and the nannies. Then the transfer to California, and the nights like this one. When John used to lie in bed alone, staring up at the ceiling and knowing it was just a matter of time - not a question of if, just a matter of when one of them would get too tired of it, the endless struggle just to keep their heads above water, and pull the plug.
He would be lying if he said he’d seen nights like this coming, the two plus years ago, now, when Matt first moved in. In all that time Matt had never been what John would call hard to get into bed - if you could pardon the pun. Hell, they made it all of two weeks before getting around to it the first time, after they moved home from the hospital.
Twelve days and eleven and a half nights, to be exact, and Matt got all the credit there. As if he’d ever let John forget it, that he had been the one to ‘man up and get their gay on’, as Matt liked to put it at parties. Or family dinners, or charity events, or basically any time he got a glass of wine in his hand.
And they’d been getting it on pretty damn regular ever since. Maybe that was why nights like this one threw him for such a loop.
And there was the difference, John realized, as his thoughts finally started to drift off into the darkness. It was still a matter of time. The difference was Matt knew what he and Holly had been trying to figure out all along.
When it comes to time, nobody should have to ask for it. You can’t beg, borrow or steal it. You have to make it.
The difference was that these days he fell asleep on nights like this one knowing it was just a matter of time before deft, questing fingers woke him up again, demanding and urgent in the dark.
**
“Whutime izzit?” he mumbled through the heavy blanket of too-little sleep, when the inevitable happened and Matt’s hands were moving rousingly over his ribs, roving across his chest.
“Quitting time,” Matt said, into the space between his shoulder blades. He lifted his nose and nuzzled it into the shivery spot under John’s ear.
John turned his head to give him a stern over-the-shoulder glare. Only one eye made it open, but it seemed to do the trick.
“Uhmmmm…Three? Thirty. …ish.”
John squinted blearily over the top of Matt’s tousled head at the digital clock on the bedside table opposite.
“’S quarter to five,” he concluded, thickly.
“That’s what I said.” Matt hooked his chin over John’s bicep, pulled insistently at him with the arm still insinuated in under the covers and around his chest.
“Oh, Matty,” John reproached, as he let himself be rolled toward Matt’s warmth; not tired enough to fall for that, but apparently too tired to keep the soft, nagging sound out of his voice. He let his arms go around Matt’s shoulders. “You need rest, Jesus. I keep tellin’ ya, even a brain like yours needs rest to function.” He put up a hand so he could comb through the mop of Matt’s hair. It was all ruffled and tatted from what was probably a lot of frustrated rumpling and tugging. Matt hummed appreciatively at the attention. “You make too many mistakes when you’re tired, and then you just have to spend more time-”
Matt cut off the flow of John’s scolding lecture with a firm kiss on the mouth. He had used the same move to stem Matt’s rambling too often to complain about it. Besides, kisses made Matt shift and squirm closer in a way that sure as hell wasn’t anything to complain about.
“Rest, yes!” Matt enthused, nodding and nudging his way in under John’s chin to put a couple promising kisses against his neck. “That’s where you come in. I’m coming down off of eighteen hours coding and no less than five Red Bulls.” He took one of John’s hands and set it against his hip. Which was bare. “You know I can’t get to sleep at this hour without a goodnight-slash-goodmorning blowjob.”
John let his hand move over the smooth angle of Matt’s pelvis, and around to cup the compact little globe of his ass. He never could resist a little squeeze.
“Funny,” he grunted, getting a good handful and hoisting Matt on top of him, so that their hips slotted together. “At this hour, I can’t wake up without one.”
“See?” Matt grinned triumphantly against his collar bone. “That’s what so great, your design is totally forward compatible to mine.” His hand smoothed approvingly down John’s abdomen, and snagged in the elastic waistband of his shorts. “It’s my second favourite thing about you.”
“Second huh?”
“Uh huh. Oh look,” Matt’s fingers curved in under his waistband, pushed eagerly inside. “And there’s the first.”
“You’re a real romantic, kid. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Matt pressed another shut-up-and-maul-me-now kiss against his mouth.
“All this talk, John,” he admonished impatiently, before nipping him sharply on the chin and ducking his head under the sheets, so that his last words of the night-slash-morning came out a muffled murmur.
“…Such a waste of very valuable time.”
.
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John McClane/Matt Farrell
Rating/Category: (PG-13/Slash)
Prompt: a matter of time
Spoilers: n/a
Summary: They say time waits for no man. And John McClane never figured on ending up spending half his life doing it, either.
Notes/Warnings: Written for smallfandomfest for the prompt "a matter of time". And for severina2001. Who prompted it. And likes established.
It’s About Time
by persnickett
They say time waits for no man. And John McClane never figured on ending up spending half his life doing it, either.
“Hey,” Matt said, to acknowledge he was aware of John’s presence - which was sort of impressive considering he hadn’t even glanced away from his computer screen.
“Quitting time." John leaned himself languidly against the door jamb, letting his open bathrobe hang away from his torso.
“Already, really?” When Matt finally turned away from his several computer monitors to look at him, his eyes were shot with red, and it looked like dark, circular smudges were just starting to develop under them.
John folded his arms. Matt’s hands were still hovering over the keyboard, but they flew promptly up in the air in response.
“I know! We said no more all-nighters. And this isn’t one, John. I’ll be up in a minute. It’s just these last two columns to go, and then, you know what I can do? I can just set up a macro and then I’ll let it run through the night, so I’m not…rotating every goddamn matrix by hand.” One of said hands traveled up into his hair and made a desperate-looking little fist, while the other gestured at the blocks of numbers on the screen as if it was supposed to mean something to John. “I mean seriously, who codes in Fortran these days!?”
“Babbling, Matty.” John pointed out. “We’ve talked about this-“
“About the babbling. I know,” Matt interjected, putting his hands up again and then letting them move in waving gestures around his head. “When I’m talking in circles it means my focus is off the rails and if I’m not clear-headed enough to even talk in a straight line how the hell can I be thinking in rows and columns, much less at the same time, and I’m- well aware that I’m doing it again.”
Matt pushed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. When he brought them away he slapped them down on his thighs, and rubbed them briskly back and forth like he was trying to wake up his body’s flagging blood vessels. He blinked hard a couple of times.
John frowned.
“I’ll be up soon, I swear,” Matt promised. “Sometimes these things are just a matter of-- ”
“Time,” John conceded, before another babble-train could pull out of the station. “I know, I know. You’re not exactly checking your email, blah blah.”
“I was going to say perseverance or something.” Matt had turned back to his wall of digits, clicking at his mouse and tapping distractedly at his lower lip. And John knew he had already lost him again, to the miles of code scrolling past on the screen.
Matt reached for his Red Bull and then gave it an empty-looking shake.
“Hey, John?” Matt addressed him without looking away, “can you grab me another one of these before you head up? I don’t want to get up - I get distracted and end up doing something else, and then I lose track…”
Something else like coming to bed with the man you claimed to love, and getting some actual rest? John sighed.
“Yeah,” he said, instead. He wrapped his robe around himself as he went, covering up his shorts and shaking his head at himself as he tied up the belt. He’d even made sure he was wearing the good ones, without any little holes near the waistband.
When had it happened? When did he become the neglected wife in this little scenario they were living?
They didn’t wear rings, and he and Matt weren’t really the type to put it on paper, but John wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to kid himself about things. He knew what this was, what they were. And nobody knew better that a marriage wasn’t about dressing up in white, or who carries who across the threshold.
It was about remembering to pick up the dry cleaning the first time without having to be asked again. It was about late night trips to the 24-hour pharmacy for baby aspirin and Pepto Bismol, and showing up at the bus stop with an umbrella when it was raining out. It was about migraines and foot-rubs - and fetching goddamn Red Bulls - and all the stupid, niggly little details John had never been smart enough to make time for the first go-round.
Time. It was always about time with Holly. Too many late nights at the precinct. Too much time spent worrying about catching scumbags who liked to sell crack cocaine on playgrounds, and not enough with his own damn kids. Vacation time, alone time, ‘quality’ time. When it came to Time, there was never enough.
**
John sighed again as he slipped off the robe, hung it on the hook on the back of the bedroom door. He lay down and tried not to think about how cold the sheets felt against his skin. Maybe what was getting to him was this whole thing felt a little too familiar.
It wasn’t as if it were lost on him, the irony in finding himself here - in John of all people ending up the one trying to lure a workaholic husband into bed with his aging, beat-up physique. He snapped off the light, and settled down to stare at the ceiling, and tried to remember if this was how it had felt when things started to go sideways with Holly, or if it was different.
It wasn’t so much that the sex stopped happening, though of course that was what John noticed first. But what he didn’t cotton on to for what had obviously turned out to be much too long, was that that was when they stopped taking time. When they stopped talking to each other, wrapped up in the sheets and each other’s arms. How was your day? Jack bit the lunch lady again. This guy at the office is a real piece of work…
Eventually Holly gave up pestering him about taking time out, and stopped having any herself. That was when it went bad. It wasn’t like John still hadn’t figured out where to put the blame or anything like that. When you can’t beat ‘em, you join ‘em. And the two of them had made a pair that was pretty tough to beat.
Sure, they’d agreed on it at first, thought it was a good thing, when she’d gone looking for the Nakatomi job. Her days would be full, and the kids could only benefit from having a mother who was happy and fulfilled - challenged.
Yeah, things got real challenging. Then came the housekeepers, and the nannies. Then the transfer to California, and the nights like this one. When John used to lie in bed alone, staring up at the ceiling and knowing it was just a matter of time - not a question of if, just a matter of when one of them would get too tired of it, the endless struggle just to keep their heads above water, and pull the plug.
He would be lying if he said he’d seen nights like this coming, the two plus years ago, now, when Matt first moved in. In all that time Matt had never been what John would call hard to get into bed - if you could pardon the pun. Hell, they made it all of two weeks before getting around to it the first time, after they moved home from the hospital.
Twelve days and eleven and a half nights, to be exact, and Matt got all the credit there. As if he’d ever let John forget it, that he had been the one to ‘man up and get their gay on’, as Matt liked to put it at parties. Or family dinners, or charity events, or basically any time he got a glass of wine in his hand.
And they’d been getting it on pretty damn regular ever since. Maybe that was why nights like this one threw him for such a loop.
And there was the difference, John realized, as his thoughts finally started to drift off into the darkness. It was still a matter of time. The difference was Matt knew what he and Holly had been trying to figure out all along.
When it comes to time, nobody should have to ask for it. You can’t beg, borrow or steal it. You have to make it.
The difference was that these days he fell asleep on nights like this one knowing it was just a matter of time before deft, questing fingers woke him up again, demanding and urgent in the dark.
**
“Whutime izzit?” he mumbled through the heavy blanket of too-little sleep, when the inevitable happened and Matt’s hands were moving rousingly over his ribs, roving across his chest.
“Quitting time,” Matt said, into the space between his shoulder blades. He lifted his nose and nuzzled it into the shivery spot under John’s ear.
John turned his head to give him a stern over-the-shoulder glare. Only one eye made it open, but it seemed to do the trick.
“Uhmmmm…Three? Thirty. …ish.”
John squinted blearily over the top of Matt’s tousled head at the digital clock on the bedside table opposite.
“’S quarter to five,” he concluded, thickly.
“That’s what I said.” Matt hooked his chin over John’s bicep, pulled insistently at him with the arm still insinuated in under the covers and around his chest.
“Oh, Matty,” John reproached, as he let himself be rolled toward Matt’s warmth; not tired enough to fall for that, but apparently too tired to keep the soft, nagging sound out of his voice. He let his arms go around Matt’s shoulders. “You need rest, Jesus. I keep tellin’ ya, even a brain like yours needs rest to function.” He put up a hand so he could comb through the mop of Matt’s hair. It was all ruffled and tatted from what was probably a lot of frustrated rumpling and tugging. Matt hummed appreciatively at the attention. “You make too many mistakes when you’re tired, and then you just have to spend more time-”
Matt cut off the flow of John’s scolding lecture with a firm kiss on the mouth. He had used the same move to stem Matt’s rambling too often to complain about it. Besides, kisses made Matt shift and squirm closer in a way that sure as hell wasn’t anything to complain about.
“Rest, yes!” Matt enthused, nodding and nudging his way in under John’s chin to put a couple promising kisses against his neck. “That’s where you come in. I’m coming down off of eighteen hours coding and no less than five Red Bulls.” He took one of John’s hands and set it against his hip. Which was bare. “You know I can’t get to sleep at this hour without a goodnight-slash-goodmorning blowjob.”
John let his hand move over the smooth angle of Matt’s pelvis, and around to cup the compact little globe of his ass. He never could resist a little squeeze.
“Funny,” he grunted, getting a good handful and hoisting Matt on top of him, so that their hips slotted together. “At this hour, I can’t wake up without one.”
“See?” Matt grinned triumphantly against his collar bone. “That’s what so great, your design is totally forward compatible to mine.” His hand smoothed approvingly down John’s abdomen, and snagged in the elastic waistband of his shorts. “It’s my second favourite thing about you.”
“Second huh?”
“Uh huh. Oh look,” Matt’s fingers curved in under his waistband, pushed eagerly inside. “And there’s the first.”
“You’re a real romantic, kid. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Matt pressed another shut-up-and-maul-me-now kiss against his mouth.
“All this talk, John,” he admonished impatiently, before nipping him sharply on the chin and ducking his head under the sheets, so that his last words of the night-slash-morning came out a muffled murmur.
“…Such a waste of very valuable time.”
.