Die Hard Fic for Smallfandomfest: I Can be Your Hero (Baby)
Title: I Can Be Your Hero (Baby)
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Flight risk
Spoilers: nope.
Summary: Any way you sliced it, the fact was John McClane had developed some pretty keen instincts for knowing when somebody was only pretending to be asleep.
Notes/Warnings: Technically the third installment my apparent ‘ We Could Be Heroes’ series, but in theory each story should stand alone, so probably no need to read those first.
Written for smallfandomfest
I Can Be Your Hero (Baby)
by persnickett
Some people might say spending 30 years up close and personal with the dregs of humanity on one of the toughest police forces in the country had given him sort of a sixth sense when it came to people. Or maybe it just made him kind of skeptical.
Not to mention a long and storied education in exactly how not to save a doomed marriage, but any way you sliced it, the fact was John McClane had developed some pretty keen instincts for knowing when somebody was only pretending to be asleep.
John held back the sigh that suddenly seemed to want to escape his chest, and played along. He made a show of it - gentling back the sheets, easing himself off the mattress. He pretended not to feel the eyes on his skin as he picked his own clothes out of the tangled havoc their nights always made of Matt’s apartment floor and padded his barefoot way to the bathroom. He ignored the telltale rustle of somebody hastily covering up, as if the kid still being naked when he came out would be somehow more indecent than the things they had just done.
John filled up the sink, splashed the water up into his face, and over his scalp. Let the kid have his time to be appropriately ashamed or whatever it was. He grabbed the soap and scrubbed the last traces of sex from his hands.
But when he dressed and stepped back out to the ridiculous pallet the kid called a bed, Matt wasn’t in it.
Matt was at the door. Barely wearing a pair of threadbare boxer shorts that looked like John could tear them off him with little more than a sideways glance and leaning himself languidly back against the wood with both hands clasped lazily behind him. The exhausted elastic in the waistband clung to one lean hip and dipped dangerously low on the other, exposing the smooth, pale outcrop of bone he could still practically feel against his palm.
Something in the too-casual posture, and the way Matt watched him from under fuck-tousled bangs, made John’s gut clench. This wasn’t their usual goodbye. Their usual was more like a grunt, or a snore. In fact - the more he thought about it the more he was sure - their usual goodbye was no goodbye at all.
Matt wasn’t supposed to make him feel like this. Matt was supposed to irritate him, to intrigue him, to make him want to throttle him and fuck him in equal, baffling, infuriating measure. He was supposed to make him laugh, and to come so hard it felt like his spine would melt and his brain would leak out his damned ears. But this - this felt dangerous, and the only way John had ever known to deal with danger was to run right at it.
John pushed his hands into his pockets. He crossed the room slowly, giving Matt time to move if he wanted.
Matt didn’t. He let John get close enough he needed to tuck his chin to look down at him, and he still didn’t move, just tipped his head back against the woodgrain so that his hair got impossibly more rumpled than it already was. John reached out to smooth it down - a well-worn reflex already - but Matt caught his wrist.
Then came an alarmingly familiar jingle and the slick, snide embrace of cold steel, and the reason Matt had his hands behind his back became clear. John’s jacket was still hanging on the peg by the door, and apparently Matt had taken the opportunity to go fishing.
He jerked back, but it was too late. The handcuffs were already clasped shut, dangling from his left wrist as smugly as the smirk on Matt’s face.
Thankfully the kid hadn’t done anything as stupid as putting his own wrist into the other cuff, but from the looks of it, he was considering it. Matt’s hand came up, fingers coming to rest in the crescent of stainless steel like he was looking for permission.
“Sorry Officer,” he drawled slowly. “The Captain thinks you’re a significant flight risk.”
It was still wrong, still like there was something in the air in the apartment. Something tight that made it hard to breathe. The back of John’s neck prickled, as the ghosts of hair that hadn’t been there for years now made to stand on end.
He took a step back. Matt took a step forward. John put a palm up between them, and Matt took the hint, and went still.
But something happened to his face, too. A light went out of his gaze somehow, like a shadow slipping over the stars at midnight. And without completely understanding why, John hated himself just a little for it.
“What?”
Basically, it was all he could think of to say.
“Huh?” Matt blinked. “Oh. A flight - y’know, a ‘fight risk’?” he prattled. “I thought you would know, cops say it all the time on TV…”
“What?”
“…It means if, like, if a suspect is likely to skip town unannounced or whatev-”
“I know what it means!” John interrupted.
Matt’s hands came together and he started to pick at his fingernails, a nervous habit John couldn’t stand. It made him want to smack the kid’s hands apart when he did it. People did that when you asked them questions they didn’t want to answer. The last thing either of them should want when he was here was to feel like he was at work.
John brought his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. The stupid cuffs swung and bumped against his chest.
He took a breath and squared his shoulders, started over. “I meant what are you tryin’ t- why would you say somethin’ like that?”
Matt just shrugged, and shot him a furtive-looking glance through the disturbed curtain of his bangs. “…Thought it was kind of sexy?”
“Sexy?” John repeated, hearing the incredulity colour his tone. He stopped himself before he could say some genius thing like ‘Again??’ that would remind the both of them he was too damn old to be doing this.
Matt would figure that out soon enough anyway. It had been a few months now, that they had been doing this. Months, and still every time Matt slid the chain loose and let John through his door there was some tiny, nasty-voiced part of him that whispered that it might be the last.
Matt stopped picking at the hangnail he apparently found suddenly fascinating and lifted it to his mouth so he could go to work on it with his teeth instead. John shoved his hands into his pockets again before they got him into trouble.
“Kid, look…”
“Don’t, it’s fine!” Matt said quickly, dropping his hands to his sides to gesture feebly while he went on. “It’s not your thing, that’s cool. I just thought-but you wanna get out of here, so. Cool. I’ll see ya. I guess.”
Matt was still standing in front of the door.
“What’s the name of the little game we’re playing here?”
Matt looked surprised but recovered quickly, cocking his head appraisingly. “We can call it whatever you want.” His voice took on that that forced-sultry drawl again.
John put his palm up between them again, even though Matt hadn’t moved. He watched for that midnight-light to snuff out in Matt’s eyes, but this time it wasn’t even there.
“Good,” he replied evenly. “Because I wanna play ‘Matt cuts out the bullshit and tells me what the hell he really wants’.”
Matt just smiled blandly. The ghostly prickle at the top of John’s spine took on heat and started to burn subtly. Coldly, like frostbite.
“I don’t want to do anything you don’t want.” Matt shrugged. “If you need to go, maybe get some rest, it really is cool.”
Matt stepped away from the door - and right in front of the place where John’s jacket hung.
John smiled falsely back. He ignored the jibe about needing his rest, like the tired old geezer he obviously was, and leaned in close. He didn’t speak, just reached over Matt’s shoulder to retrieve his coat. Matt stood his ground.
John waited for whatever was giving him that dangerous, icy-hot chill to step out of the shadows and reveal itself, but Matt wasn’t giving anything away. He just started tearing at that hangnail with his teeth again, like he was prepared to stand here all night and might as well have something to do.
John put a hand out for Matt’s shoulder that never landed. They both watched the way it hovered just shy of the angle of his collar bone, sheared away without touching down.
“’Night, kid.”
“Yep.”
John turned for the door. His hand was on the knob before Matt’s voice stopped him.
“Fine--”
John turned back. Matt looked suddenly unfamiliar to his eye; standing there in nothing but his shorts, the smooth, unbroken canvas of his skin lit with an unusual cast. They were both used to navigating the tiny apartment in the grey, silver-screen dusk that fed in through the big picture window facing the street, but here, the light was different. It came in a yellow strip of hallway glow from under the door and from the light over the stove, painting the planes of Matt’s face, his body, in shades of gold.
John realized belatedly that they had never stood here together before now.
“It’s just…you don’t think it’s weird?
“It’s a little weird,” John admitted. Who gave a shit if it made him sound old? Every single thing about this conversation was weird.
“No,” Matt said, shaking his ruffled head. “I meant - you know, how Friday nights used to be, like movie nights at your place…sometimes I even crashed there. I mean, is it weird? You’ve never spent the night here, you’ve never even stayed long enough to order takeout!”
Something at the back of John’s brain slid into place and clicked. Something cold and reptilian and potently spiked with dread.
“So if I don’t spend the night I’m ‘skipping out’ on you?” He held up the arm with the cuffs dangling ridiculously from the wrist. “I’m a flight risk, is that it?”
“I didn’t say that!” Matt argued quickly, but they were finally getting somewhere that made sense, and John knew from experience the time to stop asking questions wasn’t now.
“You want us to go back to watching movies?”
“No--”
“Order takeout?”
“No! Yes. I don’t know, maybe!” Matt threw his hands in the air. He whirled around and paced a few frantic-looking steps back into the apartment, jammed both his hands into his hair, and whirled around to face him again. “Jesus,” he sighed, and it was unclear whether it was John’s questions making him swear, or the state in which he had just discovered his hair.
“McClane,” Matt said seriously. “…Do you think we fucked up?”
The prickle at the back of John’s neck welled up and washed down his spine like a boiling bucket of ice water. The tiny, nasty voice in his head triumphantly whispered I told you so.
“…Maybe,” John said.
A shell-shocked sort of look took over Matt’s features. His hands stilled and he gave up prodding ineffectually at the disaster zone his hair had become. John resisted an urge to reach out and help set it to rights so strong that it felt like it came from the pit of his stomach. He folded his jacket over his arm instead, smoothed it over the damned set of cuffs that had started this whole thing.
“If you think we fucked up doing this,” he finished, “maybe we did.”
He turned back toward the door, but he didn’t reach it this time. This time, Matt dodged around him and slipped his slight frame between John and the handle.
“What if I don’t?” Matt asked urgently. His eyes held a desperate look and the narrow ribcage seemed to be heaving slightly. John felt like if the light were better and he looked close enough he could see where the kid’s heart would be pounding erratically in his chest. “What if I don’t think we fucked up?”
And this was what Matt was supposed to feel like; all trace of pretense gone, intriguingly, infuriatingly baffling, and so intoxicatingly close John could feel the heat of all that strangely gold-gilt skin.
“What if the only thing I think is fucked up is how…fucking…compartmentalized this whole fucking thing seems to be for you,” he was stammering profanely. “We never talk afterward. I don’t even know what you tell people about where you go Friday nights.” The proverbial cat was out of the bag now and Matt’s words came out in a rush. He came forward and John didn’t stop him this time, letting Matt move them a little further back into the apartment as if the momentum of his thoughts could carry them off their feet like a swiftly flowing stream. “What if I want to know if I can tell people about us or if I’m some dirty little secret? …What if I want to know what I’m supposed to tell Lucy?” Matt asked, finally. “Because let me tell you, she’s never been shy about asking!”
“Jeeezus…” John wheeled around, putting a stop to Matt’s herding approach and striding the last few steps back toward the bedroom on his own.
Matt waited for John to turn around and look him in the eye before he spoke again.
“What if when I ask you if you think we fucked up, all I want is to actually hear what you think, for once?”
Matt’s eyes were dark, back here in the familiar film-noir gloom of the bedroom, his gaze hard, waiting for whatever punches John might have been about to throw.
His fingers were moving though, picking nervously away, and on the inside John was swearing. Swearing if he got one more goddamned mixed signal out of the kid he was going to…
He was probably going to say something a lot like what came out next.
“I think people who want to try and kink things up a little in the sack don’t chew their fingers off like they wish they were anywhere else but here,” he said roughly.
The fingers in question disappeared guiltily behind Matt’s back, but his chin went up. John kept talking, if maybe a little too loud.
“I think people who want you to stick around and talk it out don’t pretend to fucking be asleep!”
“…For the record,” Matt argued, “I wasn’t really thinking anything all that kinky, just maybe more of a role play….”
Matt’s voice was too soft. His gaze was dropped, and whatever tangent he was about to launch them into next, he was right about one thing. John did need to get some damn rest. He sighed, turned and sat himself down on the mattress.
The comparatively quiet action seemed to bring Matt up short.
“You want to know what I think?” John asked him, once Matt had gone silent. “I think you don’t know what you want, Matt.” John rubbed a weary hand over the back of his neck. “I think the day you wake up and figure it out, it sure as hell isn’t going to be this.” He made a gesture with the hand that wasn’t in cuffs vaguely intended to indicate himself, and whatever it was Matt was doing with him.
For a moment, Matt didn’t say anything. He just stood there, nearly naked, with his brows drawing together until a little line appeared between them. And then…
“I know what I want,” he said simply. “I’ve known what I wanted since the moment I ran out to the driveway at Warlock’s and got into that car with you.”
And just like that, no more mixed signals. There was a tightness that went out of Matt’s posture, and a familiar sincerity in the slouching, slightly gawky way he sort of crumpled forward and crawled onto the low-mounted mattress next to John.
“And so have you,” he asserted, bumping their shoulders together coyly. And for the first time since he walked in that night, John smiled a real smile.
Which Matt apparently took as some kind of encouragement to start being a smartass.
“Have you ever considered that maybe the one who doesn’t know what he wants is…oh I don’t know, bigger than a bread box, balder than a Magic Eight-Ball, and sitting approximately exactly right where you’re sitting right now? …McClane?” he prompted, when John didn’t laugh. “What do you want?”
“What I want doesn’t matter,” John said. He was sort of impressed in spite of himself at how matter-of-fact he was able to keep his tone. Hardly any emotional baggage or divorce-related bitterness crept in at all.
Matt didn’t seem nearly as impressed. “Not an answer,” he said.
“What I want never works out,” he clarified.
Matt was quiet again, for a little longer this time, weighing the words for the admission they were, of just how much it was to ask. For a minute John thought about getting up, making his way to the door.
“Can I ask you one last thing?” Matt said, finally. “Have you actually ever let it work out? Or do you pretty much always…” Matt trailed off, and made a gesture that consisted mostly of what looked like somebody with much bigger biceps than Matt had clumsily flailing a couple of irritable hamfists haphazardly through the air.
As far as impressions went, it probably wasn’t that far off.
“I pretty much always,” John admitted. He put a hand down on Matt’s knee, made a move to heave himself up off that lousy excuse for a mattress, and say something about how it was probably a good time for him to go get that rest Matt had been busting his balls about earlier. But Matt stopped him, reached out a long-fingered hand and put it warmly to his thigh.
“Make you a deal,” he said. “How about this time, you just go ahead and take what you want.” The hand on his leg moved a fraction higher. “And next time self-sabotaging season rolls around, we just let somebody else take a turn.”
The thumb on the inside of John’s thigh made a little circle. Matt smelled the same way his sheets always did, of something warm and faintly spicy-sweet, and John was reminded he had been inches away from all that milky-smooth young skin for what felt like hours without touching. He put his hand up for Matt’s shoulder and let it land, ran it along the silken edge of his clavicle.
“Take what I want huh?”
Matt’s eyelids dropped shut and John leaned closer. The kiss was strange - for them, anyway. Soft, and without their usual fervor and struggle. But not without passion. No, John wouldn’t say that at all. Not with Matt pressing warmly closer, his spine supple and pliant as John’s hand traveled up his nape to push into his hair. He let John take the lead on deepening the kiss, opening gently when he did.
The punch that landed on his bicep when the kiss broke was a definite surprise.
“Why do you have to make it so hard?” Matt’s voice had a cracked-sounding edge on it that came off like wry laughter, but might have been something else. “I almost let you walk out of here, man!”
He drew back again, but John caught him before the second blow could land. Matt gave a playful tug of resistance, but then he relaxed.
“Is this part of that role-play?” John groused, letting him go and rubbing ruefully at his arm. He had to hand it to the kid, there was definitely a throb there.
Matt looked down at his hands and gave that same raw little laugh again. “You are still wearing those…”
“Yeah,” John allowed cautiously, leaning himself backward a little, and out of reach just in case. “Don’t get me wrong, I might be up for it some time when I actually have the key.”
The crack of Matt’s laughter was real this time, but when he brought his eyes up to meet John’s own, sure enough there was a certain telltale sparkle. John reached up, put his palm to Matt’s cheek. He rubbed once with his thumb. It was dry, but Matt sniffed a little just the same.
“Only you, McClane,” he scoffed wetly, shaking his head.
“Promise?”
Matt blinked those shining eyes, and swallowed so hard John could hear it click.
“Duh,” he said, after a beat.
“Alright,” John agreed. “Now I guess I better go get these things off, before I hit the sack.”
“I thought you didn’t have the key?”
“Oh I have it,” John replied, grunting a little as he hauled himself up off that damned mattress. “Just not here. It’s in my desk.”
He could hear Matt scoff amusedly again.
“You comin’?” He put the words back over his shoulder, before he turned around to look at him.
Matt’s eyes were suddenly a little bigger than before. “What, with you? To get the-in front of all your-” he faltered. “Won’t they, sort of, figure out that we’re…”
“Jesus, I hope so,” John said, gruffly. “It would be a pretty sad thing for the City of New York if all of us were as big a pack of idiots as you think we are.”
“I didn’t-” Matt started to argue, like it was always his first instinct. “No. I mean…” There was a pause while got to his feet, somewhat more smoothly than John had done. “…You’re okay with that?” John watched as his hands came awkwardly together again.
“Yeah,” he said. “Are you?”
Matt smiled. His hands relaxed, fell to his sides.
“Duh,” he said again, and bent to retrieve his t-shirt and jeans from the floor.
Duh.
John smiled too. But he wiped it off his face before Matt had straightened up.
“Now get your stuff,” John chivvied him. “We can drive back to my place after, spend the night there.”
“Why your place?” Matt contended, without missing a beat on his way toward the bathroom.
“There’s no way I’m spending a whole night on this couch,” John called after him. “My back’ll give me shit for it for a week.”
“It’s a futon,” Matt corrected loudly, over the sound of briefly running water.
“Yeah. Japanese for couch,” John muttered. Maybe Matt wouldn’t hear.
But when Matt’s freshly combed head popped out of the bathroom door he said “What? Who even told you that,” he went on, as he crossed the room to grab a backpack off of the floor in the corner. For all of his arguing, John couldn’t help but notice Matt seemed to be packing his toothbrush. “That is such a blatantly ignorant assumption to… Wait,” he said, pausing in his packing to run a thoughtful hand through his hair and mussing it all over again. “Is it really? That would actually make sense.”
“Would you get moving already?” John pressed. “I don’t have all night.” He jingled the clinking cuffs hanging from his arm as a reminder.
“Who leaves the keys to a set of handcuffs in their desk?” Matt commented, even as he moved to the dresser and shoved a couple things into the bag. “What if you need to, I don’t know, use them?”
“You never put cuffs on anybody you’re not planning to take downtown,” John said seriously.
Matt stopped talking. He shook the hair of out his eyes, and looked over at him. “…Okay.”
“Remember that, for when I get you home,” John finished.
He quirked an eyebrow for good measure.
Matt rolled his eyes as he zippered up his bag. “Again with the assumptions. You know, you’ve never had any complaints about my bed before, all those times we-”
“My bed has a headboard,” John mused, picking up the dangling cuff with his free hand and examining it like he was gauging the size. “It’s got these little slats in it…”
“Your place it is!” Matt agreed hurriedly. He shouldered the bag and moved swiftly for the door. “What are you waiting for, we don’t have all night!”
Oh, but they did.
And as John made his way to the door, he noticed that nasty little whisper that used to tell him tonight might be one of the last, was suddenly pretty damn quiet.
FIN
.
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Flight risk
Spoilers: nope.
Summary: Any way you sliced it, the fact was John McClane had developed some pretty keen instincts for knowing when somebody was only pretending to be asleep.
Notes/Warnings: Technically the third installment my apparent ‘ We Could Be Heroes’ series, but in theory each story should stand alone, so probably no need to read those first.
Written for smallfandomfest
I Can Be Your Hero (Baby)
by persnickett
Some people might say spending 30 years up close and personal with the dregs of humanity on one of the toughest police forces in the country had given him sort of a sixth sense when it came to people. Or maybe it just made him kind of skeptical.
Not to mention a long and storied education in exactly how not to save a doomed marriage, but any way you sliced it, the fact was John McClane had developed some pretty keen instincts for knowing when somebody was only pretending to be asleep.
John held back the sigh that suddenly seemed to want to escape his chest, and played along. He made a show of it - gentling back the sheets, easing himself off the mattress. He pretended not to feel the eyes on his skin as he picked his own clothes out of the tangled havoc their nights always made of Matt’s apartment floor and padded his barefoot way to the bathroom. He ignored the telltale rustle of somebody hastily covering up, as if the kid still being naked when he came out would be somehow more indecent than the things they had just done.
John filled up the sink, splashed the water up into his face, and over his scalp. Let the kid have his time to be appropriately ashamed or whatever it was. He grabbed the soap and scrubbed the last traces of sex from his hands.
But when he dressed and stepped back out to the ridiculous pallet the kid called a bed, Matt wasn’t in it.
Matt was at the door. Barely wearing a pair of threadbare boxer shorts that looked like John could tear them off him with little more than a sideways glance and leaning himself languidly back against the wood with both hands clasped lazily behind him. The exhausted elastic in the waistband clung to one lean hip and dipped dangerously low on the other, exposing the smooth, pale outcrop of bone he could still practically feel against his palm.
Something in the too-casual posture, and the way Matt watched him from under fuck-tousled bangs, made John’s gut clench. This wasn’t their usual goodbye. Their usual was more like a grunt, or a snore. In fact - the more he thought about it the more he was sure - their usual goodbye was no goodbye at all.
Matt wasn’t supposed to make him feel like this. Matt was supposed to irritate him, to intrigue him, to make him want to throttle him and fuck him in equal, baffling, infuriating measure. He was supposed to make him laugh, and to come so hard it felt like his spine would melt and his brain would leak out his damned ears. But this - this felt dangerous, and the only way John had ever known to deal with danger was to run right at it.
John pushed his hands into his pockets. He crossed the room slowly, giving Matt time to move if he wanted.
Matt didn’t. He let John get close enough he needed to tuck his chin to look down at him, and he still didn’t move, just tipped his head back against the woodgrain so that his hair got impossibly more rumpled than it already was. John reached out to smooth it down - a well-worn reflex already - but Matt caught his wrist.
Then came an alarmingly familiar jingle and the slick, snide embrace of cold steel, and the reason Matt had his hands behind his back became clear. John’s jacket was still hanging on the peg by the door, and apparently Matt had taken the opportunity to go fishing.
He jerked back, but it was too late. The handcuffs were already clasped shut, dangling from his left wrist as smugly as the smirk on Matt’s face.
Thankfully the kid hadn’t done anything as stupid as putting his own wrist into the other cuff, but from the looks of it, he was considering it. Matt’s hand came up, fingers coming to rest in the crescent of stainless steel like he was looking for permission.
“Sorry Officer,” he drawled slowly. “The Captain thinks you’re a significant flight risk.”
It was still wrong, still like there was something in the air in the apartment. Something tight that made it hard to breathe. The back of John’s neck prickled, as the ghosts of hair that hadn’t been there for years now made to stand on end.
He took a step back. Matt took a step forward. John put a palm up between them, and Matt took the hint, and went still.
But something happened to his face, too. A light went out of his gaze somehow, like a shadow slipping over the stars at midnight. And without completely understanding why, John hated himself just a little for it.
“What?”
Basically, it was all he could think of to say.
“Huh?” Matt blinked. “Oh. A flight - y’know, a ‘fight risk’?” he prattled. “I thought you would know, cops say it all the time on TV…”
“What?”
“…It means if, like, if a suspect is likely to skip town unannounced or whatev-”
“I know what it means!” John interrupted.
Matt’s hands came together and he started to pick at his fingernails, a nervous habit John couldn’t stand. It made him want to smack the kid’s hands apart when he did it. People did that when you asked them questions they didn’t want to answer. The last thing either of them should want when he was here was to feel like he was at work.
John brought his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. The stupid cuffs swung and bumped against his chest.
He took a breath and squared his shoulders, started over. “I meant what are you tryin’ t- why would you say somethin’ like that?”
Matt just shrugged, and shot him a furtive-looking glance through the disturbed curtain of his bangs. “…Thought it was kind of sexy?”
“Sexy?” John repeated, hearing the incredulity colour his tone. He stopped himself before he could say some genius thing like ‘Again??’ that would remind the both of them he was too damn old to be doing this.
Matt would figure that out soon enough anyway. It had been a few months now, that they had been doing this. Months, and still every time Matt slid the chain loose and let John through his door there was some tiny, nasty-voiced part of him that whispered that it might be the last.
Matt stopped picking at the hangnail he apparently found suddenly fascinating and lifted it to his mouth so he could go to work on it with his teeth instead. John shoved his hands into his pockets again before they got him into trouble.
“Kid, look…”
“Don’t, it’s fine!” Matt said quickly, dropping his hands to his sides to gesture feebly while he went on. “It’s not your thing, that’s cool. I just thought-but you wanna get out of here, so. Cool. I’ll see ya. I guess.”
Matt was still standing in front of the door.
“What’s the name of the little game we’re playing here?”
Matt looked surprised but recovered quickly, cocking his head appraisingly. “We can call it whatever you want.” His voice took on that that forced-sultry drawl again.
John put his palm up between them again, even though Matt hadn’t moved. He watched for that midnight-light to snuff out in Matt’s eyes, but this time it wasn’t even there.
“Good,” he replied evenly. “Because I wanna play ‘Matt cuts out the bullshit and tells me what the hell he really wants’.”
Matt just smiled blandly. The ghostly prickle at the top of John’s spine took on heat and started to burn subtly. Coldly, like frostbite.
“I don’t want to do anything you don’t want.” Matt shrugged. “If you need to go, maybe get some rest, it really is cool.”
Matt stepped away from the door - and right in front of the place where John’s jacket hung.
John smiled falsely back. He ignored the jibe about needing his rest, like the tired old geezer he obviously was, and leaned in close. He didn’t speak, just reached over Matt’s shoulder to retrieve his coat. Matt stood his ground.
John waited for whatever was giving him that dangerous, icy-hot chill to step out of the shadows and reveal itself, but Matt wasn’t giving anything away. He just started tearing at that hangnail with his teeth again, like he was prepared to stand here all night and might as well have something to do.
John put a hand out for Matt’s shoulder that never landed. They both watched the way it hovered just shy of the angle of his collar bone, sheared away without touching down.
“’Night, kid.”
“Yep.”
John turned for the door. His hand was on the knob before Matt’s voice stopped him.
“Fine--”
John turned back. Matt looked suddenly unfamiliar to his eye; standing there in nothing but his shorts, the smooth, unbroken canvas of his skin lit with an unusual cast. They were both used to navigating the tiny apartment in the grey, silver-screen dusk that fed in through the big picture window facing the street, but here, the light was different. It came in a yellow strip of hallway glow from under the door and from the light over the stove, painting the planes of Matt’s face, his body, in shades of gold.
John realized belatedly that they had never stood here together before now.
“It’s just…you don’t think it’s weird?
“It’s a little weird,” John admitted. Who gave a shit if it made him sound old? Every single thing about this conversation was weird.
“No,” Matt said, shaking his ruffled head. “I meant - you know, how Friday nights used to be, like movie nights at your place…sometimes I even crashed there. I mean, is it weird? You’ve never spent the night here, you’ve never even stayed long enough to order takeout!”
Something at the back of John’s brain slid into place and clicked. Something cold and reptilian and potently spiked with dread.
“So if I don’t spend the night I’m ‘skipping out’ on you?” He held up the arm with the cuffs dangling ridiculously from the wrist. “I’m a flight risk, is that it?”
“I didn’t say that!” Matt argued quickly, but they were finally getting somewhere that made sense, and John knew from experience the time to stop asking questions wasn’t now.
“You want us to go back to watching movies?”
“No--”
“Order takeout?”
“No! Yes. I don’t know, maybe!” Matt threw his hands in the air. He whirled around and paced a few frantic-looking steps back into the apartment, jammed both his hands into his hair, and whirled around to face him again. “Jesus,” he sighed, and it was unclear whether it was John’s questions making him swear, or the state in which he had just discovered his hair.
“McClane,” Matt said seriously. “…Do you think we fucked up?”
The prickle at the back of John’s neck welled up and washed down his spine like a boiling bucket of ice water. The tiny, nasty voice in his head triumphantly whispered I told you so.
“…Maybe,” John said.
A shell-shocked sort of look took over Matt’s features. His hands stilled and he gave up prodding ineffectually at the disaster zone his hair had become. John resisted an urge to reach out and help set it to rights so strong that it felt like it came from the pit of his stomach. He folded his jacket over his arm instead, smoothed it over the damned set of cuffs that had started this whole thing.
“If you think we fucked up doing this,” he finished, “maybe we did.”
He turned back toward the door, but he didn’t reach it this time. This time, Matt dodged around him and slipped his slight frame between John and the handle.
“What if I don’t?” Matt asked urgently. His eyes held a desperate look and the narrow ribcage seemed to be heaving slightly. John felt like if the light were better and he looked close enough he could see where the kid’s heart would be pounding erratically in his chest. “What if I don’t think we fucked up?”
And this was what Matt was supposed to feel like; all trace of pretense gone, intriguingly, infuriatingly baffling, and so intoxicatingly close John could feel the heat of all that strangely gold-gilt skin.
“What if the only thing I think is fucked up is how…fucking…compartmentalized this whole fucking thing seems to be for you,” he was stammering profanely. “We never talk afterward. I don’t even know what you tell people about where you go Friday nights.” The proverbial cat was out of the bag now and Matt’s words came out in a rush. He came forward and John didn’t stop him this time, letting Matt move them a little further back into the apartment as if the momentum of his thoughts could carry them off their feet like a swiftly flowing stream. “What if I want to know if I can tell people about us or if I’m some dirty little secret? …What if I want to know what I’m supposed to tell Lucy?” Matt asked, finally. “Because let me tell you, she’s never been shy about asking!”
“Jeeezus…” John wheeled around, putting a stop to Matt’s herding approach and striding the last few steps back toward the bedroom on his own.
Matt waited for John to turn around and look him in the eye before he spoke again.
“What if when I ask you if you think we fucked up, all I want is to actually hear what you think, for once?”
Matt’s eyes were dark, back here in the familiar film-noir gloom of the bedroom, his gaze hard, waiting for whatever punches John might have been about to throw.
His fingers were moving though, picking nervously away, and on the inside John was swearing. Swearing if he got one more goddamned mixed signal out of the kid he was going to…
He was probably going to say something a lot like what came out next.
“I think people who want to try and kink things up a little in the sack don’t chew their fingers off like they wish they were anywhere else but here,” he said roughly.
The fingers in question disappeared guiltily behind Matt’s back, but his chin went up. John kept talking, if maybe a little too loud.
“I think people who want you to stick around and talk it out don’t pretend to fucking be asleep!”
“…For the record,” Matt argued, “I wasn’t really thinking anything all that kinky, just maybe more of a role play….”
Matt’s voice was too soft. His gaze was dropped, and whatever tangent he was about to launch them into next, he was right about one thing. John did need to get some damn rest. He sighed, turned and sat himself down on the mattress.
The comparatively quiet action seemed to bring Matt up short.
“You want to know what I think?” John asked him, once Matt had gone silent. “I think you don’t know what you want, Matt.” John rubbed a weary hand over the back of his neck. “I think the day you wake up and figure it out, it sure as hell isn’t going to be this.” He made a gesture with the hand that wasn’t in cuffs vaguely intended to indicate himself, and whatever it was Matt was doing with him.
For a moment, Matt didn’t say anything. He just stood there, nearly naked, with his brows drawing together until a little line appeared between them. And then…
“I know what I want,” he said simply. “I’ve known what I wanted since the moment I ran out to the driveway at Warlock’s and got into that car with you.”
And just like that, no more mixed signals. There was a tightness that went out of Matt’s posture, and a familiar sincerity in the slouching, slightly gawky way he sort of crumpled forward and crawled onto the low-mounted mattress next to John.
“And so have you,” he asserted, bumping their shoulders together coyly. And for the first time since he walked in that night, John smiled a real smile.
Which Matt apparently took as some kind of encouragement to start being a smartass.
“Have you ever considered that maybe the one who doesn’t know what he wants is…oh I don’t know, bigger than a bread box, balder than a Magic Eight-Ball, and sitting approximately exactly right where you’re sitting right now? …McClane?” he prompted, when John didn’t laugh. “What do you want?”
“What I want doesn’t matter,” John said. He was sort of impressed in spite of himself at how matter-of-fact he was able to keep his tone. Hardly any emotional baggage or divorce-related bitterness crept in at all.
Matt didn’t seem nearly as impressed. “Not an answer,” he said.
“What I want never works out,” he clarified.
Matt was quiet again, for a little longer this time, weighing the words for the admission they were, of just how much it was to ask. For a minute John thought about getting up, making his way to the door.
“Can I ask you one last thing?” Matt said, finally. “Have you actually ever let it work out? Or do you pretty much always…” Matt trailed off, and made a gesture that consisted mostly of what looked like somebody with much bigger biceps than Matt had clumsily flailing a couple of irritable hamfists haphazardly through the air.
As far as impressions went, it probably wasn’t that far off.
“I pretty much always,” John admitted. He put a hand down on Matt’s knee, made a move to heave himself up off that lousy excuse for a mattress, and say something about how it was probably a good time for him to go get that rest Matt had been busting his balls about earlier. But Matt stopped him, reached out a long-fingered hand and put it warmly to his thigh.
“Make you a deal,” he said. “How about this time, you just go ahead and take what you want.” The hand on his leg moved a fraction higher. “And next time self-sabotaging season rolls around, we just let somebody else take a turn.”
The thumb on the inside of John’s thigh made a little circle. Matt smelled the same way his sheets always did, of something warm and faintly spicy-sweet, and John was reminded he had been inches away from all that milky-smooth young skin for what felt like hours without touching. He put his hand up for Matt’s shoulder and let it land, ran it along the silken edge of his clavicle.
“Take what I want huh?”
Matt’s eyelids dropped shut and John leaned closer. The kiss was strange - for them, anyway. Soft, and without their usual fervor and struggle. But not without passion. No, John wouldn’t say that at all. Not with Matt pressing warmly closer, his spine supple and pliant as John’s hand traveled up his nape to push into his hair. He let John take the lead on deepening the kiss, opening gently when he did.
The punch that landed on his bicep when the kiss broke was a definite surprise.
“Why do you have to make it so hard?” Matt’s voice had a cracked-sounding edge on it that came off like wry laughter, but might have been something else. “I almost let you walk out of here, man!”
He drew back again, but John caught him before the second blow could land. Matt gave a playful tug of resistance, but then he relaxed.
“Is this part of that role-play?” John groused, letting him go and rubbing ruefully at his arm. He had to hand it to the kid, there was definitely a throb there.
Matt looked down at his hands and gave that same raw little laugh again. “You are still wearing those…”
“Yeah,” John allowed cautiously, leaning himself backward a little, and out of reach just in case. “Don’t get me wrong, I might be up for it some time when I actually have the key.”
The crack of Matt’s laughter was real this time, but when he brought his eyes up to meet John’s own, sure enough there was a certain telltale sparkle. John reached up, put his palm to Matt’s cheek. He rubbed once with his thumb. It was dry, but Matt sniffed a little just the same.
“Only you, McClane,” he scoffed wetly, shaking his head.
“Promise?”
Matt blinked those shining eyes, and swallowed so hard John could hear it click.
“Duh,” he said, after a beat.
“Alright,” John agreed. “Now I guess I better go get these things off, before I hit the sack.”
“I thought you didn’t have the key?”
“Oh I have it,” John replied, grunting a little as he hauled himself up off that damned mattress. “Just not here. It’s in my desk.”
He could hear Matt scoff amusedly again.
“You comin’?” He put the words back over his shoulder, before he turned around to look at him.
Matt’s eyes were suddenly a little bigger than before. “What, with you? To get the-in front of all your-” he faltered. “Won’t they, sort of, figure out that we’re…”
“Jesus, I hope so,” John said, gruffly. “It would be a pretty sad thing for the City of New York if all of us were as big a pack of idiots as you think we are.”
“I didn’t-” Matt started to argue, like it was always his first instinct. “No. I mean…” There was a pause while got to his feet, somewhat more smoothly than John had done. “…You’re okay with that?” John watched as his hands came awkwardly together again.
“Yeah,” he said. “Are you?”
Matt smiled. His hands relaxed, fell to his sides.
“Duh,” he said again, and bent to retrieve his t-shirt and jeans from the floor.
Duh.
John smiled too. But he wiped it off his face before Matt had straightened up.
“Now get your stuff,” John chivvied him. “We can drive back to my place after, spend the night there.”
“Why your place?” Matt contended, without missing a beat on his way toward the bathroom.
“There’s no way I’m spending a whole night on this couch,” John called after him. “My back’ll give me shit for it for a week.”
“It’s a futon,” Matt corrected loudly, over the sound of briefly running water.
“Yeah. Japanese for couch,” John muttered. Maybe Matt wouldn’t hear.
But when Matt’s freshly combed head popped out of the bathroom door he said “What? Who even told you that,” he went on, as he crossed the room to grab a backpack off of the floor in the corner. For all of his arguing, John couldn’t help but notice Matt seemed to be packing his toothbrush. “That is such a blatantly ignorant assumption to… Wait,” he said, pausing in his packing to run a thoughtful hand through his hair and mussing it all over again. “Is it really? That would actually make sense.”
“Would you get moving already?” John pressed. “I don’t have all night.” He jingled the clinking cuffs hanging from his arm as a reminder.
“Who leaves the keys to a set of handcuffs in their desk?” Matt commented, even as he moved to the dresser and shoved a couple things into the bag. “What if you need to, I don’t know, use them?”
“You never put cuffs on anybody you’re not planning to take downtown,” John said seriously.
Matt stopped talking. He shook the hair of out his eyes, and looked over at him. “…Okay.”
“Remember that, for when I get you home,” John finished.
He quirked an eyebrow for good measure.
Matt rolled his eyes as he zippered up his bag. “Again with the assumptions. You know, you’ve never had any complaints about my bed before, all those times we-”
“My bed has a headboard,” John mused, picking up the dangling cuff with his free hand and examining it like he was gauging the size. “It’s got these little slats in it…”
“Your place it is!” Matt agreed hurriedly. He shouldered the bag and moved swiftly for the door. “What are you waiting for, we don’t have all night!”
Oh, but they did.
And as John made his way to the door, he noticed that nasty little whisper that used to tell him tonight might be one of the last, was suddenly pretty damn quiet.
FIN
.