Die Hard fic for sexy_right: Times Square Can't Shine as Bright as You
Title: Times Square Can't Shine as Bright as You
Author: persnickett
Rating: PG
Prompt:Times Square can't shine as bright as you
Notes: Written for the 'A Song in their Hearts!' challenge at sexy_right. The challenge was to use a lyric from the top 10 songs on the charts the week Live Free or Die Hard was released as a prompt. Mine is from Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's.
Times Square Can't Shine as Bright as You
by persnickett
Four minutes to midnight. He was late, too late, but he hadn’t missed it yet.
John raised a hand to the door, wincing at the sharp shot of pain that went up his arm when he did. His knuckles were still a little bloody, but he rapped them loudly against the wood a couple of times anyway.
Before he could knock a third time, the door had flown open and he was stumbling back a couple of steps with his arms suddenly, and a little roughly, full of hacker. John moved a bit awkwardly to return the unexpected, slightly violent embrace but then Matt was already pulling back and delivering a surprisingly heavy blow to his bicep.
“You’re late, man! Like four hours LATE!” Matt punctuated this with another punch in the arm and then spun abruptly around, to cradle his fist between his knees. His second attack had landed against the less forgiving target of John’s shoulder.
They both cursed in pain. That shoulder had never been in the best shape, and the treatment it had gotten tonight hadn’t helped matters. John gritted his teeth, put a little pressure on it with his other hand, and waited until Matt got tired enough of the F-word to shoot him a baleful look and stalk wordlessly back into his apartment, still shaking the ache out of his fingers as he went.
He left the door open behind him, though, so John took it as his cue to follow. By the time he had it closed behind him Matt was already in full flow, voice raised over the Seacrest broadcast squawking from the TV in the corner.
“…Today is a major holiday, McClane!”
“I know.”
“And I don’t know if you know this, but your track record with holidays is shit. Double - quadruple - like, five-time shit. Whatever the word for five times is, that is how shitty…when you are late on a holiday…FOUR HOURS late! On a holiday. Do you have any idea--”
“I know,” John said again, trying not to make it into a surly half-growl, and failing. It was still better than what he wanted to say, which was that he thought he knew his own track record a little better than Matt did. Then again, he realized, this was Matt he was talking to. Brainy, mysterious Matt, who had ways of knowing things John always figured it was best just not to ask about. Besides, it wasn’t likely to make the kid any less pissed off than he apparently was.
“You know what I did while I was waiting for you? Paced.” Matt started moving around the room, as if to demonstrate. “Like actual pacing, like you see on soap operas or the worst, cheesiest sit-coms. The whole deal -- the wringing of the hands, the wandering around just picking things up and putting them back down again,” he ranted, grabbing something on his way past the arm of the couch that looked kind of like a softball, but with fur. “The sitting down on the sofa for a whole 30 seconds before I’d just get up and do the whole bullshit circuit all over again. You know, that whole thing that people don’t actually do in real life except for how sometimes they must, given that I just did it for four hours, and God, GOD, I’m doing it again!” Matt snapped, coming to a dead stop and slamming the no doubt extremely collectible and highly valuable fuzz-ball down on the coffee table. "Which just…pisses me off even more,” he grated, “because that’s what I am. I’m pissed, McClane! I’ve been CALLING you.”
Apparently this was the part where John was allowed to get a word in edgewise, because Matt stopped giving him hell, and just turned and glared at him instead. His eyes had a hard, flashing look to them John didn’t remember ever seeing there before, and there were little spots of pink colouring his cheeks.
“I know. Sorry I couldn’t call you back, kid. Undercover thing.”
“What?” Matt replied, sounding genuinely sort of shocked. The pink spots drained dead away. “I’m sorry, I can only process so many clichés in a given conversation. A what kind of thing?”
“No big deal,” John hedged, resisting the urge to step back a little as Matt started to make his way slowly across the room toward him. “Just one of our guys on the inside got me a shift tending bar at this mob place. Ask around, you know, see what I could find out on the Giulietti case. But we got made.” The light in the hallway wasn’t as good as inside the apartment, and it looked like Matt had just gotten his first look at the state of John’s face. His eyes were even bigger than the usual, both his hands moved to cover up his mouth. “It was a dinner shift, I was supposed to be done in plenty of time to get over here,” John explained, but Matt was just shaking his head, looking horrorstruck.
“Why didn’t you have backup?” Matt asked in a whisper. His eyes were still round and staring, his hands came away from his face, and one of them moved toward the cut on John’s lip.
John didn’t flinch, but Matt stopped short all the same. John reached out, caught his wrist before he could pull away.
“We did. They just had more.”
“I thought you were--”
“I know,” John said again, quietly this time.
“You could have been--”
“I’m fine,” John interrupted again. Matt gave a scoffing half-laugh in response. “Nothing a little soap and water and some Aspirin won’t fix,” John promised.
“I wasn’t pissed, I was scared.” Matt admitted, looking down at where John was still holding him by the wrist, as if it was news. “You know it’s funny, I just kept thinking how I seriously hoped you weren’t dead, because I wanted the pleasure of killing you myself…” John started to smile, but then Matt looked back up at him and he wasn’t smiling back. His eyes had long ago lost the hard, angry look. They were all dark now, and soft. “And now all I want--”
Matt’s words trailed off. He looked away, blinking that newfound softness out of his eyes.
If he had been looking though, he might have noticed the colour leaving John’s face. He might have noticed that John had stopped breathing, and maybe he could have guessed at the way his heart skipped several beats, and started pounding like a jackhammer in his ears.
This had been happening more and more often lately. It happened at weird times, like when Matt shook his head to get his hair out of his eyes, or they went out somewhere and Matt drank something using a straw. It happened when Matt said something so smart it made John’s head swim, and then things he thought he’d always known were suddenly shown in a whole new light, and John ended up going home and thinking about whatever damn thing Matt had said all night, whether he wanted to or not.
You could probably say it happened all the time when Matt was around. But this was the first time it had looked like it was happening to Matt, too.
“So that got weird,” Matt apologized, clearing his throat and raising his hand to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck.
John needed to say something. Something about Matt’s hair, or his lips around a straw. Something about how what was really weird was that the whole time the bouncers at Buona Notte were kicking his ass up and down the delivery lane out back, all he could think about was that he was going to be late to meet Matt.
“Ten!” Ryan Seacrest’s voice blared from the corner. “Nine!”
He had to say something. There just didn’t seem to be any words that would say it right.
Seven…six…
“…It’s not that weird,” John said. His thumb moved once over the skin on the inside of Matt’s wrist.
John’s shoulder was still throbbing. He felt like he couldn’t see all that great out of his left eye. His ribs were aching, and the cuts on his knuckles and scalp were stinging like a bitch. And Matt’s eyes looked so deeply soft and dark now that John wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he drowned to death just staring into them.
Four…three…two…
***
They made it to the bed, eventually, but they never seemed to get any further than stripping off their shirts. Maybe Matt was a little hesitant of John’s cuts and bruises. Maybe neither of them wanted to push this thing too far, too fast. Say what you would about superstition, but John didn’t seem to get a lot of luck to push in this life, and tonight felt a bit like hitting the jackpot.
Whatever the reasons, they had already stopped most of the action, just lying there, stripped to the waist and breathing. Voices carried in through the apartment window from the street below now and then, calling out a greeting to other passers by, breaking into snatches of song. Tonight was a major holiday after all.
“I could still take you out,” John suggested, threading his fingers into Matt’s soft hair. They had missed the ball drop, but they could still definitely find an open bar. He’d been serious about the soap and water, and it turned out Matt was better than Aspirin anyway. “Sounds like a pretty good party.”
John could feel Matt smile, where his cheek was pressed against his shoulder. “I’ve seen Times Square,” he said dismissively, running the tips of his fingers reverently up the path of John’s sternum.
“You’ve seen all this before, too,” John pointed out, with half a smile of his own. It was true enough. After the Fourth, Matt had seen much more than this during their seemingly endless months at the physio gym together. Not to mention the damned hospital gowns.
Matt lifted his head enough to give John a look like the one the nuns used to give him in school, the one that made him think if he wasn’t the slowest kid in the whole damn class, he was definitely a contender. Matt shook his head.
“Not like this,” he said, as his fingers resumed their exploration down the centre of John’s chest. “It’s different now. It’s like it’s all …new.” His hand settled warmly over John’s pec, his thumb tantalizingly close to tweaking the nipple. “…Shiny.” Matt lifted his head again, this time to plant a kiss on the side of John’s head. John had to suppress a shiver, even though the sensation was warm.
“Weird, right?” Matt asked, looking quizzically down at him, from where he was propped up on one elbow.
He could be talking about the newness, the feeling that the same old things seemed somehow changed. The way things they both thought they had always known had been shown in a whole new light, tonight. Or he could simply be talking about the not-unpleasant strangeness of the kiss to John’s shorn scalp, but the answer was the same.
John looked at Matt, right there, his hair not hanging in his eyes but all rumpled from John’s fingers, his lips not wrapped around any kind of straw but all plumped and swollen from John’s mouth. Matt, actually lying half clothed next to him in a bed that didn’t have any freaky monitors or an IV pole attached to it.
“It’s not that weird,” John answered, and tugged him back down into a kiss.
.
Author: persnickett
Rating: PG
Prompt:Times Square can't shine as bright as you
Notes: Written for the 'A Song in their Hearts!' challenge at sexy_right. The challenge was to use a lyric from the top 10 songs on the charts the week Live Free or Die Hard was released as a prompt. Mine is from Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's.
Times Square Can't Shine as Bright as You
by persnickett
Four minutes to midnight. He was late, too late, but he hadn’t missed it yet.
John raised a hand to the door, wincing at the sharp shot of pain that went up his arm when he did. His knuckles were still a little bloody, but he rapped them loudly against the wood a couple of times anyway.
Before he could knock a third time, the door had flown open and he was stumbling back a couple of steps with his arms suddenly, and a little roughly, full of hacker. John moved a bit awkwardly to return the unexpected, slightly violent embrace but then Matt was already pulling back and delivering a surprisingly heavy blow to his bicep.
“You’re late, man! Like four hours LATE!” Matt punctuated this with another punch in the arm and then spun abruptly around, to cradle his fist between his knees. His second attack had landed against the less forgiving target of John’s shoulder.
They both cursed in pain. That shoulder had never been in the best shape, and the treatment it had gotten tonight hadn’t helped matters. John gritted his teeth, put a little pressure on it with his other hand, and waited until Matt got tired enough of the F-word to shoot him a baleful look and stalk wordlessly back into his apartment, still shaking the ache out of his fingers as he went.
He left the door open behind him, though, so John took it as his cue to follow. By the time he had it closed behind him Matt was already in full flow, voice raised over the Seacrest broadcast squawking from the TV in the corner.
“…Today is a major holiday, McClane!”
“I know.”
“And I don’t know if you know this, but your track record with holidays is shit. Double - quadruple - like, five-time shit. Whatever the word for five times is, that is how shitty…when you are late on a holiday…FOUR HOURS late! On a holiday. Do you have any idea--”
“I know,” John said again, trying not to make it into a surly half-growl, and failing. It was still better than what he wanted to say, which was that he thought he knew his own track record a little better than Matt did. Then again, he realized, this was Matt he was talking to. Brainy, mysterious Matt, who had ways of knowing things John always figured it was best just not to ask about. Besides, it wasn’t likely to make the kid any less pissed off than he apparently was.
“You know what I did while I was waiting for you? Paced.” Matt started moving around the room, as if to demonstrate. “Like actual pacing, like you see on soap operas or the worst, cheesiest sit-coms. The whole deal -- the wringing of the hands, the wandering around just picking things up and putting them back down again,” he ranted, grabbing something on his way past the arm of the couch that looked kind of like a softball, but with fur. “The sitting down on the sofa for a whole 30 seconds before I’d just get up and do the whole bullshit circuit all over again. You know, that whole thing that people don’t actually do in real life except for how sometimes they must, given that I just did it for four hours, and God, GOD, I’m doing it again!” Matt snapped, coming to a dead stop and slamming the no doubt extremely collectible and highly valuable fuzz-ball down on the coffee table. "Which just…pisses me off even more,” he grated, “because that’s what I am. I’m pissed, McClane! I’ve been CALLING you.”
Apparently this was the part where John was allowed to get a word in edgewise, because Matt stopped giving him hell, and just turned and glared at him instead. His eyes had a hard, flashing look to them John didn’t remember ever seeing there before, and there were little spots of pink colouring his cheeks.
“I know. Sorry I couldn’t call you back, kid. Undercover thing.”
“What?” Matt replied, sounding genuinely sort of shocked. The pink spots drained dead away. “I’m sorry, I can only process so many clichés in a given conversation. A what kind of thing?”
“No big deal,” John hedged, resisting the urge to step back a little as Matt started to make his way slowly across the room toward him. “Just one of our guys on the inside got me a shift tending bar at this mob place. Ask around, you know, see what I could find out on the Giulietti case. But we got made.” The light in the hallway wasn’t as good as inside the apartment, and it looked like Matt had just gotten his first look at the state of John’s face. His eyes were even bigger than the usual, both his hands moved to cover up his mouth. “It was a dinner shift, I was supposed to be done in plenty of time to get over here,” John explained, but Matt was just shaking his head, looking horrorstruck.
“Why didn’t you have backup?” Matt asked in a whisper. His eyes were still round and staring, his hands came away from his face, and one of them moved toward the cut on John’s lip.
John didn’t flinch, but Matt stopped short all the same. John reached out, caught his wrist before he could pull away.
“We did. They just had more.”
“I thought you were--”
“I know,” John said again, quietly this time.
“You could have been--”
“I’m fine,” John interrupted again. Matt gave a scoffing half-laugh in response. “Nothing a little soap and water and some Aspirin won’t fix,” John promised.
“I wasn’t pissed, I was scared.” Matt admitted, looking down at where John was still holding him by the wrist, as if it was news. “You know it’s funny, I just kept thinking how I seriously hoped you weren’t dead, because I wanted the pleasure of killing you myself…” John started to smile, but then Matt looked back up at him and he wasn’t smiling back. His eyes had long ago lost the hard, angry look. They were all dark now, and soft. “And now all I want--”
Matt’s words trailed off. He looked away, blinking that newfound softness out of his eyes.
If he had been looking though, he might have noticed the colour leaving John’s face. He might have noticed that John had stopped breathing, and maybe he could have guessed at the way his heart skipped several beats, and started pounding like a jackhammer in his ears.
This had been happening more and more often lately. It happened at weird times, like when Matt shook his head to get his hair out of his eyes, or they went out somewhere and Matt drank something using a straw. It happened when Matt said something so smart it made John’s head swim, and then things he thought he’d always known were suddenly shown in a whole new light, and John ended up going home and thinking about whatever damn thing Matt had said all night, whether he wanted to or not.
You could probably say it happened all the time when Matt was around. But this was the first time it had looked like it was happening to Matt, too.
“So that got weird,” Matt apologized, clearing his throat and raising his hand to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck.
John needed to say something. Something about Matt’s hair, or his lips around a straw. Something about how what was really weird was that the whole time the bouncers at Buona Notte were kicking his ass up and down the delivery lane out back, all he could think about was that he was going to be late to meet Matt.
“Ten!” Ryan Seacrest’s voice blared from the corner. “Nine!”
He had to say something. There just didn’t seem to be any words that would say it right.
Seven…six…
“…It’s not that weird,” John said. His thumb moved once over the skin on the inside of Matt’s wrist.
John’s shoulder was still throbbing. He felt like he couldn’t see all that great out of his left eye. His ribs were aching, and the cuts on his knuckles and scalp were stinging like a bitch. And Matt’s eyes looked so deeply soft and dark now that John wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he drowned to death just staring into them.
Four…three…two…
***
They made it to the bed, eventually, but they never seemed to get any further than stripping off their shirts. Maybe Matt was a little hesitant of John’s cuts and bruises. Maybe neither of them wanted to push this thing too far, too fast. Say what you would about superstition, but John didn’t seem to get a lot of luck to push in this life, and tonight felt a bit like hitting the jackpot.
Whatever the reasons, they had already stopped most of the action, just lying there, stripped to the waist and breathing. Voices carried in through the apartment window from the street below now and then, calling out a greeting to other passers by, breaking into snatches of song. Tonight was a major holiday after all.
“I could still take you out,” John suggested, threading his fingers into Matt’s soft hair. They had missed the ball drop, but they could still definitely find an open bar. He’d been serious about the soap and water, and it turned out Matt was better than Aspirin anyway. “Sounds like a pretty good party.”
John could feel Matt smile, where his cheek was pressed against his shoulder. “I’ve seen Times Square,” he said dismissively, running the tips of his fingers reverently up the path of John’s sternum.
“You’ve seen all this before, too,” John pointed out, with half a smile of his own. It was true enough. After the Fourth, Matt had seen much more than this during their seemingly endless months at the physio gym together. Not to mention the damned hospital gowns.
Matt lifted his head enough to give John a look like the one the nuns used to give him in school, the one that made him think if he wasn’t the slowest kid in the whole damn class, he was definitely a contender. Matt shook his head.
“Not like this,” he said, as his fingers resumed their exploration down the centre of John’s chest. “It’s different now. It’s like it’s all …new.” His hand settled warmly over John’s pec, his thumb tantalizingly close to tweaking the nipple. “…Shiny.” Matt lifted his head again, this time to plant a kiss on the side of John’s head. John had to suppress a shiver, even though the sensation was warm.
“Weird, right?” Matt asked, looking quizzically down at him, from where he was propped up on one elbow.
He could be talking about the newness, the feeling that the same old things seemed somehow changed. The way things they both thought they had always known had been shown in a whole new light, tonight. Or he could simply be talking about the not-unpleasant strangeness of the kiss to John’s shorn scalp, but the answer was the same.
John looked at Matt, right there, his hair not hanging in his eyes but all rumpled from John’s fingers, his lips not wrapped around any kind of straw but all plumped and swollen from John’s mouth. Matt, actually lying half clothed next to him in a bed that didn’t have any freaky monitors or an IV pole attached to it.
“It’s not that weird,” John answered, and tugged him back down into a kiss.
.