Die Hard fic for smallfandomfest - They Say Lightning Doesn't Strike Twice
Title: They Say Lightning Doesn’t Strike Twice (If you’re John McClane it’s Five Times)
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating/Category: R
Prompt: Five Times
Spoilers: none
Summary: Five times John and Matt say goodbye (until they finally get it right)
Notes/Warnings: Written for smallfandomfest Nicknames. Tumours. Thorough abuse of the ‘lightning’ theme.
They Say Lighting Doesn’t Strike Twice
(If you’re John McClane it’s Five Times)
by persnickett
1. So Long
Hugging John McClane turns out to be a lot like hugging a side of beef. Or maybe a Mack truck. If a Mack truck was warm, and smelled like Old Spice. Everywhere you could conceivably touch the man is just hard, and solid. And warm. Very, very warm.
Or maybe it just feels that way because Matt is kind of cold, standing here under the awning of the rainy hospital kiss-n-ride, trying to balance on his new crutches and saying a goodbye to McClane that had been kind of stumbling and awkward until McClane, in typical McClane fashion, had just taken things the physical route and reached out and grabbed him. So here he is, wrapped tightly in a sudden Mack-truck-made-out-of-sides-of-beef hug that makes Matt lose one of his crutches in a puddle, stumble forward in a way that would have probably made his knee hurt like a bitch if the nurses hadn’t dosed him up on what now kind of seemed like it might actually have been too much Vicodin, and maybe feel a little bit dizzy. Or maybe that’s the Vicodin too.
The rain is pattering all around them, and McClane grips him a little tighter before he finally lets him go, holding him still by the shoulder so he can sweep a calculating look over him like he’s gaging the odds of Matt’s survival in the wilds of New Jersey once he’s gone. Matt blames the sudden wave of gooseflesh erupting all over his arms and down his spine on the cool, storm-charged air that rushes between them as McClane steps away.
“Hugging me must be like hugging a stack of toothpicks to you,” Matt says, when McClane finally lets him go. Out loud. Which is definitely the Vicodin. “Or something equally cuddly,” he finishes lamely, running an absent hand self-consciously over his chest and down the front of his rib cage.
“Nah,” McClane says. For a moment Matt is sure his eye follows the movement of Matt’s hand over his body, but then McClane is bending down to retrieve the fallen crutch and Matt reminds himself he’s in a state of mind right now that’s probably really good at imagining things. Thunder rolls menacingly overhead, and the rain starts to come down in what looks like buckets. “More like hugging lightning,” McClane says, with a vague gesture at the weather, when he straightens up. “Or a wall socket.”
“Ha,” Matt says, even though he is sort of tempted to laugh. He had thought the morphine was good, but this stuff isn’t half bad either.
It isn’t the first time in the past few weeks of their recovery together that McClane teased him about being hyperactive. He had called him ‘motor mouth’ so many times, Matt was likely to turn around like it was his name the next time he heard somebody say it in the street. And he was pretty sure even the nurses with the biggest crushes on McClane were getting tired of his joke of asking them if they had any spare Ritalin lying around.
“Guess that makes you the Thunder then. Y’know, since it’s loud and scary, but basically nothing more than a lot of hot air.”
McClane smiles, but there’s something wrong about it. It doesn’t reach his eyes the way it usually does when they banter. Granted, it isn’t Matt’s best material, but he’s working with a serious psychotropic handicap, here.
“Well,” he says, brushing some of the water droplets from Matt’s crutch before handing it back.
“Yeah,” Matt says, settling it under his arm and realizing this is it. He won’t be hearing McClane grumbling about green hospital jell-o, or making that stupid played-out Ritalin joke again. Maybe ever.
Matt opens his mouth to say something to that effect, maybe even including the word ‘goodbye’. The rain seems suddenly louder than before. And then McClane is saying “take care of that leg”, and ducking out from under the shelter of the big glass awning and making for the parking lot.
And Matt stands there, wobbling on his new crutches under the deafening rain, and watches him go - jogging off into the storm and out of his life, as suddenly and surreally as he came into it.
2. Farewell
“Hey there, Lightning.”
“Haaa, there we go,” Matt says, disentangling himself hastily from John’s greeting embrace. “He calls me Lightning because of all the jagged edges compared to all this,” Matt explains, patting satirically at John’s ribs and chest. “Or because I’m so full of nervous energy,” he chatters at the vanguard of Feds standing impassively around them in the lobby. “Or because it sounds better than ‘toothpick’ or something logical like that. It’s not because I make him all tingly, and piss his pants. HEY,” Matt interrupts himself loudly, turning to Christine with a smartassed mock simper. “Look what you brought me. Lawyers! That’s so thoughtful, thanks McClane.”
“Christine Blakewell,” she says, ignoring Matt’s tone of sarcastic disdain and holding her hand out for a shake.
John had warned her about the kid’s attitude, but maybe it would have helped if he’d given Matt a call to say she was coming. He hadn’t wanted to worry the kid any more than he had to, but he knew what a ‘meeting’ with the Feds really meant. And now from the looks of it, the kid does too.
“Just call me Lightning.” Matt smiles at Christine without showing teeth, and then turns around and limps off down the hall, leading the way to the interview room.
John isn’t fooled. He caught the look in Matt’s eye when he laid eyes on Christine and figured out why she was here. John has seen that same closed off, evasive look of thinly veiled panic once before, in the back of an ambulance, months ago. It was that same look that changed the words from “you take care, kid” to “see you at the hospital” even as they left his lips. The same guarded, wary look that hung around in the back corners of his mind as he gave all the nurses in the place hell until they put him in a room on the same floor as Matt’s.
And that same look is the reason John is still sitting in the hotel lobby eight hours later when Matt’s interrogation lets out.
***
John collapses to the mattress, careful enough not to crush the air out of Matt’s lungs when he comes down, but still reckless enough with exhaustion to land sprawled mostly on top of him.
Matt is sweating almost as much as he is, their skins warm and slick against each other in the greying nearly-dark of the hotel room. His hair is damp too, tickling at John’s nose, the scent still too fresh to have turned harsh and musky.
John’s arms feel like lead but he raises one off the mattress anyway, tries to keep the over-exerted tremble out of it as he lays it over Matt’s hair and draws it down over the crown to the nape, not quite a caress. He could make it one but he doesn’t; doesn’t allow the pad of his thumb to move in a soothing stroke over the skin.
“You know, Lightning Bug,” he whispers into the ear in front of his lips instead as he draws himself out of Matt’s body, pulling away before things can get soft and awkward. “Sometimes you do make me feel kinda tingly. …And maybe a little like I might piss my pants.”
He can see the curve of Matt’s cheek when he smiles into the pillow. Matt chuckles quietly too, but the sound chokes off into a soft grunt of discomfort at the abrupt withdrawal. John heaves himself away from Matt and up onto all fours again, ignoring the protest from his abused limbs. He leaves his hand at the nape of the kid’s neck, the pressure just enough to stop Matt from turning over to face him. In case he wanted to.
John takes a last look in the fast-fading light at the body stretched out prone under him. He lets his fingers trail down a few notches of the prominent spine a last time as he wrenches himself from the sultry warmth of the tangle they have made of the bed; their debauched nest of the last few months.
John turns his back as he dresses himself, still mostly hard, still sticky with sweat. The Feds have taken longer with Matt’s case than either of them had expected, and long nights of experience tell him Matt will have curled up onto his side behind him, hugging the pillow to his chest.
He moves to the door, stands with his shoes in his hand, toes making fists in the cheap acrylic pile. Neither of them speaks. There are things to be said, no doubt. About it being Matt’s last night here in the Hyatt, about that job offer from Bowman, all the way out in DC. John can’t trust his voice.
He reaches for the handle. There’s a sigh from the bed, but of sleepy satisfaction or something less than pleased he can’t be sure. And still he can’t look back, can’t risk that this time Matt won’t be burrowed happily down into the pillows but sitting bolt upright, watching him with that cold, shuttered look in his eyes and hair all a riot, the sheets clutched to his chest in a telltale fist of anxiety. He can’t see that and still make it out of here.
He turns the knob and steps out. The air conditioning in the hallway is cold, the air smelling strangely dead, like dry dust. John knows he smells of Matt, of all the things they have just done. He holds his breath, tries to commit the traces still lingering on his skin and in his lungs to memory. He hopes that knowing it’s the last time will somehow make it stick better than all the times before.
John puts his shoes on in the elevator, and swallows against something sitting in his throat like a lump.
3. Auf Wiedersehen
Matt rubs his eyes, checks his bag for his passport for the one-millionth time. God only knows what he was thinking taking the red-eye, when Bowman was footing the bill anyway. Old habits, Matt supposes, scrubbing a hand over his face and checking for his boarding pass. For the ten-millionth.
He takes out his cellphone. McClane’s number is still showing across his screen.
The call clicks over to voicemail right away. McClane shuts his phone off when he sleeps - he’s still got a landline for chrissakes - but it wouldn’t matter if Matt were calling in broad daylight, at the most convenient time in the history of the universe, at McClane’s most idle hour. John hasn’t been picking up Matt’s calls all week.
“McClane,” barks the recording of John’s voice. Matt presses the phone closer to his ear. “Leave a message.” He takes a breath.
“Final boarding call for flight three-seventeen to Washington,” the PA chimes, loud and far too chipper for this hour. “Flight three-seventeen, this is your final boarding call.”
Matt sighs and hits the Call End button, thinking he probably couldn’t have said it better himself. He could hack in and delete the message from McClane’s system again. But he doesn’t this time.
Matt grabs up his bags and heads for the jetway. There’s probably nothing left to be said, anyway.
4. Goodnight
“McClane?”
They must have the kid on some pretty strong stuff. Matt’s pupils stay dilated as he blinks himself groggily awake and he looks down at the IV in his arm like he forgot it was there while he slept. His voice has a ruined sound, like they’ve had him on a respirator.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m your emergency contact,” John says. His voice sounds just as fucked over as Matt’s.
Matt’s dilated gaze goes cold and closed. He turns it away, toward the ceiling. “This isn’t an emergency,” he says.
“You collapsed, Matt.”
“Forty-eight hours ago,” Matt agrees, nodding at the ceiling. They’ve already got him shaved and prepped for surgery, and the movement looks strange without the hair bobbing around his temples and in his eyes. “That was an emergency. That was actually pretty urgent. But not this, this is just a routine scheduled procedure. Then seven weeks of chemotherapy. Case closed, bada-bing, abra-cadaver.”
John knows how this works, jokes from a hospital bed. Holly had heard them a million times, even Lucy. Maybe Jack. Quips that he might not make it; the casual lies that that would be okay by him.
Now he knows why they always tell him it isn’t funny.
“Listen, Lightning Bug,” John says instead, “the doctors say-”
“Don’t call me that,” Matt interrupts, surprisingly sharply. “It’s kid,” he corrects, “you know it’s kid, or motor mouth or hack boy or…” The strength of his voice wavers and gives out. “You only call me that when you’re trying to say goodbye,” he rasps. “Just… Don’t.”
Matt shuts his eyes. For a minute John thinks he might be drifting off to sleep again. When he opens them, there’s a split second where it looks like Matt is surprised to see him.
“You know, I still don’t get it,” he murmurs dreamily, and John isn’t entirely sure Matt is talking to him, and not himself. “Why? Why did you come?”
“I’m your emergency contact,” John says anyway, fighting not to show any outward sign of the way the repeated question freezes his guts and makes his blood run cold.
The doctors warned him. They said that Matt might not be ‘himself’. That he was on a lot of painkillers, and that there was a lot of pressure on the brain. That after surgery he was likely to make a full recovery, and a bunch of stuff John hadn’t even really heard after that because of the sea of shimmering red swimming in front of his eyes, and the sudden and deafening pounding of blood in his ears.
They might know better than John about things like the operability of a tumour, sure, but they don’t know Matt. They don’t understand how anything less than full recovery just isn’t an option. How Matt’s braininess is in every part of what makes him who he is. How every movement, every word of Matt’s just screams swiftness, and wit, and smart. Smart, smart.
John’s throat aches.
Matt is watching him with his big-pupiled eyes impassive. “So Bowman shipped you down here on the red-eye to - what - ‘contact’ me? …Still a cheap bastard,” Matt says, shaking his shorn head. John can’t manage a smile, doesn’t even try.
“I wanted to be here,” he says, even though he would give a large proportion of his paycheque, and maybe a small proportion of one of his right limbs, for both of them to be anywhere else.
Matt is shaking his head again. “I mean why, why show up? With all the cavalry and lawyers, and sit in my hotel,” he asks, and there is nothing dreamy or pondering about his tone, now. “Why…come up to my room?”
John’s head is throbbing. He blinks and it feels like the inside of his eyelids are made out of sandpaper. And Matt’s dulled gaze is pointing straight at him, looking like he’s expecting some kind of response.
“Your face does this thing,” John says. “When you’re scared, but you don’t want anybody to know about it.” His voice sounds weird. Flat, and toneless. There’s more, but John doesn’t know how to say it; the wrongness of it. The way Matt, not open and expressive - and downright annoying sometimes - about letting the whole damn world know how he feels, just isn’t Matt. The ache in his throat is a full-out burn now. “Makes me feel like I’m bleeding.”
Matt stares at him. The monitor next to his bed beeps.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Sure it is,” John manages, just.
Matt blinks, and it’s like a chink in the armour. A crack in the walls, where John can see the emotions march across his features in quick succession: surprise, confusion.
Annoyance.
“Please.” Matt looks back up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t the one who was scared the day you walked out. You couldn’t even look at me.”
“You’re doing it right now,” John says. It’s less an argument than a fact.
Matt blinks again. His shoulders slump against the starchy white hospital pillows, and he lets out a sigh, and there he is. There, under the missing hair, and the IV, and the stupid, terrifying-looking machine beeping next to him, is Matt - eyes soft, brows together, and his mobile features forming a familiar, resigned pout.
“I forgot I wrote your name down,” Matt admits softly, still staring upward. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way. I just… There was no one else, you know?”
Oh yeah, John knows. There wasn’t anybody else, hadn’t been anybody else, since Matt. He wouldn’t be surprised if Matt’s name was still written on his contact sheet either.
And the truth is - despite all the danger, all the threat and panic boiling in his chest the whole flight over - John would be lying if he said the thought hadn’t occurred from time to time, throwing cool thrills like shocks of icewater on the fiery turmoil in his head, that there hadn’t been anybody worth changing the paperwork for, for Matt either.
“I mean it though,” Matt is saying now. “This isn’t really what an emergency contact is for. I don’t need anyone to pick me up of the floor, or call 911. It’s handled,” he says, waving the hand with the tube in it dismissively. “Good thing I actually go outside now, huh?”
This time, John manages a smile. Matt manages a soft half-a-smile back.
“So feel free to go, before I say something I’ll regret,” he quips. “Like that all that Pay Per View I said the FBI was paying for wasn’t, technically speaking, ‘legal’ or that there may potentially be more than one CCR jam hidden somewhere in the depths of my iPod mix, or that after you left I never stopped-”
Matt breaks off, looking mildly surprised at the words coming out of his mouth as if somebody else is putting them there. He picks at the IV tape on the back of his hand.
“Well, I guess you might as well stay now,” he gripes, throwing up his hands and letting them land weakly again in his lap. “Fucking morphine.”
Matt shuts his eyes again. “…We can’t keep doing this,” he says.
John opens his mouth to say he spent two weeks in this crap-hole for mot much more than a blown-out shoulder, and he footed the bill for legal fees that probably would have been unspeakable if Christine hadn’t been cutting him a serious buddy-price, and he is sure as hell not going anywhere now, but suddenly the room is full of people.
There are people lowering Matt’s bed, people checking on the scary-ass beeping machine, and a woman in a white coat with a clipboard smiling at him and telling him they are ready to take Matt in to ‘the theatre' now. It takes John a couple seconds of passive-aggressive smiling to realize that means it’s time for Matt’s surgery. It takes a couple more for him to realize it also means he’s supposed to leave.
“Hey Lightning,” John says, as they start to wheel the gurney into the hallway. Matt doesn’t tell him off this time, just looks up at him. “I never stopped, either.”
His face holds a raw look of fear, but it’s right out in the open where John can see it, and Matt nods once, bravely, before they wheel him away.
5. I Hate to Go and Leave this Pretty Sight
Matt watches as John dresses himself, stands by the door with his shoes in his hand. He hears Matt’s sigh from the bed, and turns.
“You might want to take an umbrella,” Matt murmurs sleepily without lifting his head, and John starts to make his way back to the bedside. He shuts his eyes in anticipation, and sure enough, he feels John brush the hair off his face. It’s been grown back nearly two years now, and John hasn’t been able to keep his fingers out of it since. “There’s a sixty percent chance of rain tonight.”
“And if I get home early?” John leans down and purrs in his ear. “What are my chances of a little Lightning?”
There’s a rough scratch of stubbly nuzzling at the nape of his neck. Matt figures he can pick his head up enough for a little kiss. Which kind of turns into a big kiss. With tongue. And maybe a bit of teeth.
“They say it never strikes twice,” he grins, when he can breathe again. “But I like your odds.”
“Gotta strike twice around here. Somehow Lightning always seems to come before Thunder.”
“You are an unfailing romantic.” Matt rolls his eyes, snuggles back down into the sheets. “I swoon.”
“You know,” John says, suggestively, with another scratchy nuzzle. “I could skip the gym, go in late. Maybe put in a different kind of ‘workout’?”
“And have Bowman tear me a new one when the Captain of his star strike team drops dead of an old man heart attack from too much sex and neglecting his cardio? Beat it, Flatfoot.”
“See you at the office,” John chuckles indulgently, giving his hair a final little tug before he moves away.
Matt can hear John humming Bad Moon Rising to himself in the hallway, and then his key in the door. He curls up onto his side, and hugs John’s vacated pillow to his chest.
~END~
.
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating/Category: R
Prompt: Five Times
Spoilers: none
Summary: Five times John and Matt say goodbye (until they finally get it right)
Notes/Warnings: Written for smallfandomfest Nicknames. Tumours. Thorough abuse of the ‘lightning’ theme.
They Say Lighting Doesn’t Strike Twice
(If you’re John McClane it’s Five Times)
by persnickett
1. So Long
Hugging John McClane turns out to be a lot like hugging a side of beef. Or maybe a Mack truck. If a Mack truck was warm, and smelled like Old Spice. Everywhere you could conceivably touch the man is just hard, and solid. And warm. Very, very warm.
Or maybe it just feels that way because Matt is kind of cold, standing here under the awning of the rainy hospital kiss-n-ride, trying to balance on his new crutches and saying a goodbye to McClane that had been kind of stumbling and awkward until McClane, in typical McClane fashion, had just taken things the physical route and reached out and grabbed him. So here he is, wrapped tightly in a sudden Mack-truck-made-out-of-sides-of-beef hug that makes Matt lose one of his crutches in a puddle, stumble forward in a way that would have probably made his knee hurt like a bitch if the nurses hadn’t dosed him up on what now kind of seemed like it might actually have been too much Vicodin, and maybe feel a little bit dizzy. Or maybe that’s the Vicodin too.
The rain is pattering all around them, and McClane grips him a little tighter before he finally lets him go, holding him still by the shoulder so he can sweep a calculating look over him like he’s gaging the odds of Matt’s survival in the wilds of New Jersey once he’s gone. Matt blames the sudden wave of gooseflesh erupting all over his arms and down his spine on the cool, storm-charged air that rushes between them as McClane steps away.
“Hugging me must be like hugging a stack of toothpicks to you,” Matt says, when McClane finally lets him go. Out loud. Which is definitely the Vicodin. “Or something equally cuddly,” he finishes lamely, running an absent hand self-consciously over his chest and down the front of his rib cage.
“Nah,” McClane says. For a moment Matt is sure his eye follows the movement of Matt’s hand over his body, but then McClane is bending down to retrieve the fallen crutch and Matt reminds himself he’s in a state of mind right now that’s probably really good at imagining things. Thunder rolls menacingly overhead, and the rain starts to come down in what looks like buckets. “More like hugging lightning,” McClane says, with a vague gesture at the weather, when he straightens up. “Or a wall socket.”
“Ha,” Matt says, even though he is sort of tempted to laugh. He had thought the morphine was good, but this stuff isn’t half bad either.
It isn’t the first time in the past few weeks of their recovery together that McClane teased him about being hyperactive. He had called him ‘motor mouth’ so many times, Matt was likely to turn around like it was his name the next time he heard somebody say it in the street. And he was pretty sure even the nurses with the biggest crushes on McClane were getting tired of his joke of asking them if they had any spare Ritalin lying around.
“Guess that makes you the Thunder then. Y’know, since it’s loud and scary, but basically nothing more than a lot of hot air.”
McClane smiles, but there’s something wrong about it. It doesn’t reach his eyes the way it usually does when they banter. Granted, it isn’t Matt’s best material, but he’s working with a serious psychotropic handicap, here.
“Well,” he says, brushing some of the water droplets from Matt’s crutch before handing it back.
“Yeah,” Matt says, settling it under his arm and realizing this is it. He won’t be hearing McClane grumbling about green hospital jell-o, or making that stupid played-out Ritalin joke again. Maybe ever.
Matt opens his mouth to say something to that effect, maybe even including the word ‘goodbye’. The rain seems suddenly louder than before. And then McClane is saying “take care of that leg”, and ducking out from under the shelter of the big glass awning and making for the parking lot.
And Matt stands there, wobbling on his new crutches under the deafening rain, and watches him go - jogging off into the storm and out of his life, as suddenly and surreally as he came into it.
2. Farewell
“Hey there, Lightning.”
“Haaa, there we go,” Matt says, disentangling himself hastily from John’s greeting embrace. “He calls me Lightning because of all the jagged edges compared to all this,” Matt explains, patting satirically at John’s ribs and chest. “Or because I’m so full of nervous energy,” he chatters at the vanguard of Feds standing impassively around them in the lobby. “Or because it sounds better than ‘toothpick’ or something logical like that. It’s not because I make him all tingly, and piss his pants. HEY,” Matt interrupts himself loudly, turning to Christine with a smartassed mock simper. “Look what you brought me. Lawyers! That’s so thoughtful, thanks McClane.”
“Christine Blakewell,” she says, ignoring Matt’s tone of sarcastic disdain and holding her hand out for a shake.
John had warned her about the kid’s attitude, but maybe it would have helped if he’d given Matt a call to say she was coming. He hadn’t wanted to worry the kid any more than he had to, but he knew what a ‘meeting’ with the Feds really meant. And now from the looks of it, the kid does too.
“Just call me Lightning.” Matt smiles at Christine without showing teeth, and then turns around and limps off down the hall, leading the way to the interview room.
John isn’t fooled. He caught the look in Matt’s eye when he laid eyes on Christine and figured out why she was here. John has seen that same closed off, evasive look of thinly veiled panic once before, in the back of an ambulance, months ago. It was that same look that changed the words from “you take care, kid” to “see you at the hospital” even as they left his lips. The same guarded, wary look that hung around in the back corners of his mind as he gave all the nurses in the place hell until they put him in a room on the same floor as Matt’s.
And that same look is the reason John is still sitting in the hotel lobby eight hours later when Matt’s interrogation lets out.
***
John collapses to the mattress, careful enough not to crush the air out of Matt’s lungs when he comes down, but still reckless enough with exhaustion to land sprawled mostly on top of him.
Matt is sweating almost as much as he is, their skins warm and slick against each other in the greying nearly-dark of the hotel room. His hair is damp too, tickling at John’s nose, the scent still too fresh to have turned harsh and musky.
John’s arms feel like lead but he raises one off the mattress anyway, tries to keep the over-exerted tremble out of it as he lays it over Matt’s hair and draws it down over the crown to the nape, not quite a caress. He could make it one but he doesn’t; doesn’t allow the pad of his thumb to move in a soothing stroke over the skin.
“You know, Lightning Bug,” he whispers into the ear in front of his lips instead as he draws himself out of Matt’s body, pulling away before things can get soft and awkward. “Sometimes you do make me feel kinda tingly. …And maybe a little like I might piss my pants.”
He can see the curve of Matt’s cheek when he smiles into the pillow. Matt chuckles quietly too, but the sound chokes off into a soft grunt of discomfort at the abrupt withdrawal. John heaves himself away from Matt and up onto all fours again, ignoring the protest from his abused limbs. He leaves his hand at the nape of the kid’s neck, the pressure just enough to stop Matt from turning over to face him. In case he wanted to.
John takes a last look in the fast-fading light at the body stretched out prone under him. He lets his fingers trail down a few notches of the prominent spine a last time as he wrenches himself from the sultry warmth of the tangle they have made of the bed; their debauched nest of the last few months.
John turns his back as he dresses himself, still mostly hard, still sticky with sweat. The Feds have taken longer with Matt’s case than either of them had expected, and long nights of experience tell him Matt will have curled up onto his side behind him, hugging the pillow to his chest.
He moves to the door, stands with his shoes in his hand, toes making fists in the cheap acrylic pile. Neither of them speaks. There are things to be said, no doubt. About it being Matt’s last night here in the Hyatt, about that job offer from Bowman, all the way out in DC. John can’t trust his voice.
He reaches for the handle. There’s a sigh from the bed, but of sleepy satisfaction or something less than pleased he can’t be sure. And still he can’t look back, can’t risk that this time Matt won’t be burrowed happily down into the pillows but sitting bolt upright, watching him with that cold, shuttered look in his eyes and hair all a riot, the sheets clutched to his chest in a telltale fist of anxiety. He can’t see that and still make it out of here.
He turns the knob and steps out. The air conditioning in the hallway is cold, the air smelling strangely dead, like dry dust. John knows he smells of Matt, of all the things they have just done. He holds his breath, tries to commit the traces still lingering on his skin and in his lungs to memory. He hopes that knowing it’s the last time will somehow make it stick better than all the times before.
John puts his shoes on in the elevator, and swallows against something sitting in his throat like a lump.
3. Auf Wiedersehen
Matt rubs his eyes, checks his bag for his passport for the one-millionth time. God only knows what he was thinking taking the red-eye, when Bowman was footing the bill anyway. Old habits, Matt supposes, scrubbing a hand over his face and checking for his boarding pass. For the ten-millionth.
He takes out his cellphone. McClane’s number is still showing across his screen.
The call clicks over to voicemail right away. McClane shuts his phone off when he sleeps - he’s still got a landline for chrissakes - but it wouldn’t matter if Matt were calling in broad daylight, at the most convenient time in the history of the universe, at McClane’s most idle hour. John hasn’t been picking up Matt’s calls all week.
“McClane,” barks the recording of John’s voice. Matt presses the phone closer to his ear. “Leave a message.” He takes a breath.
“Final boarding call for flight three-seventeen to Washington,” the PA chimes, loud and far too chipper for this hour. “Flight three-seventeen, this is your final boarding call.”
Matt sighs and hits the Call End button, thinking he probably couldn’t have said it better himself. He could hack in and delete the message from McClane’s system again. But he doesn’t this time.
Matt grabs up his bags and heads for the jetway. There’s probably nothing left to be said, anyway.
4. Goodnight
“McClane?”
They must have the kid on some pretty strong stuff. Matt’s pupils stay dilated as he blinks himself groggily awake and he looks down at the IV in his arm like he forgot it was there while he slept. His voice has a ruined sound, like they’ve had him on a respirator.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m your emergency contact,” John says. His voice sounds just as fucked over as Matt’s.
Matt’s dilated gaze goes cold and closed. He turns it away, toward the ceiling. “This isn’t an emergency,” he says.
“You collapsed, Matt.”
“Forty-eight hours ago,” Matt agrees, nodding at the ceiling. They’ve already got him shaved and prepped for surgery, and the movement looks strange without the hair bobbing around his temples and in his eyes. “That was an emergency. That was actually pretty urgent. But not this, this is just a routine scheduled procedure. Then seven weeks of chemotherapy. Case closed, bada-bing, abra-cadaver.”
John knows how this works, jokes from a hospital bed. Holly had heard them a million times, even Lucy. Maybe Jack. Quips that he might not make it; the casual lies that that would be okay by him.
Now he knows why they always tell him it isn’t funny.
“Listen, Lightning Bug,” John says instead, “the doctors say-”
“Don’t call me that,” Matt interrupts, surprisingly sharply. “It’s kid,” he corrects, “you know it’s kid, or motor mouth or hack boy or…” The strength of his voice wavers and gives out. “You only call me that when you’re trying to say goodbye,” he rasps. “Just… Don’t.”
Matt shuts his eyes. For a minute John thinks he might be drifting off to sleep again. When he opens them, there’s a split second where it looks like Matt is surprised to see him.
“You know, I still don’t get it,” he murmurs dreamily, and John isn’t entirely sure Matt is talking to him, and not himself. “Why? Why did you come?”
“I’m your emergency contact,” John says anyway, fighting not to show any outward sign of the way the repeated question freezes his guts and makes his blood run cold.
The doctors warned him. They said that Matt might not be ‘himself’. That he was on a lot of painkillers, and that there was a lot of pressure on the brain. That after surgery he was likely to make a full recovery, and a bunch of stuff John hadn’t even really heard after that because of the sea of shimmering red swimming in front of his eyes, and the sudden and deafening pounding of blood in his ears.
They might know better than John about things like the operability of a tumour, sure, but they don’t know Matt. They don’t understand how anything less than full recovery just isn’t an option. How Matt’s braininess is in every part of what makes him who he is. How every movement, every word of Matt’s just screams swiftness, and wit, and smart. Smart, smart.
John’s throat aches.
Matt is watching him with his big-pupiled eyes impassive. “So Bowman shipped you down here on the red-eye to - what - ‘contact’ me? …Still a cheap bastard,” Matt says, shaking his shorn head. John can’t manage a smile, doesn’t even try.
“I wanted to be here,” he says, even though he would give a large proportion of his paycheque, and maybe a small proportion of one of his right limbs, for both of them to be anywhere else.
Matt is shaking his head again. “I mean why, why show up? With all the cavalry and lawyers, and sit in my hotel,” he asks, and there is nothing dreamy or pondering about his tone, now. “Why…come up to my room?”
John’s head is throbbing. He blinks and it feels like the inside of his eyelids are made out of sandpaper. And Matt’s dulled gaze is pointing straight at him, looking like he’s expecting some kind of response.
“Your face does this thing,” John says. “When you’re scared, but you don’t want anybody to know about it.” His voice sounds weird. Flat, and toneless. There’s more, but John doesn’t know how to say it; the wrongness of it. The way Matt, not open and expressive - and downright annoying sometimes - about letting the whole damn world know how he feels, just isn’t Matt. The ache in his throat is a full-out burn now. “Makes me feel like I’m bleeding.”
Matt stares at him. The monitor next to his bed beeps.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Sure it is,” John manages, just.
Matt blinks, and it’s like a chink in the armour. A crack in the walls, where John can see the emotions march across his features in quick succession: surprise, confusion.
Annoyance.
“Please.” Matt looks back up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t the one who was scared the day you walked out. You couldn’t even look at me.”
“You’re doing it right now,” John says. It’s less an argument than a fact.
Matt blinks again. His shoulders slump against the starchy white hospital pillows, and he lets out a sigh, and there he is. There, under the missing hair, and the IV, and the stupid, terrifying-looking machine beeping next to him, is Matt - eyes soft, brows together, and his mobile features forming a familiar, resigned pout.
“I forgot I wrote your name down,” Matt admits softly, still staring upward. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way. I just… There was no one else, you know?”
Oh yeah, John knows. There wasn’t anybody else, hadn’t been anybody else, since Matt. He wouldn’t be surprised if Matt’s name was still written on his contact sheet either.
And the truth is - despite all the danger, all the threat and panic boiling in his chest the whole flight over - John would be lying if he said the thought hadn’t occurred from time to time, throwing cool thrills like shocks of icewater on the fiery turmoil in his head, that there hadn’t been anybody worth changing the paperwork for, for Matt either.
“I mean it though,” Matt is saying now. “This isn’t really what an emergency contact is for. I don’t need anyone to pick me up of the floor, or call 911. It’s handled,” he says, waving the hand with the tube in it dismissively. “Good thing I actually go outside now, huh?”
This time, John manages a smile. Matt manages a soft half-a-smile back.
“So feel free to go, before I say something I’ll regret,” he quips. “Like that all that Pay Per View I said the FBI was paying for wasn’t, technically speaking, ‘legal’ or that there may potentially be more than one CCR jam hidden somewhere in the depths of my iPod mix, or that after you left I never stopped-”
Matt breaks off, looking mildly surprised at the words coming out of his mouth as if somebody else is putting them there. He picks at the IV tape on the back of his hand.
“Well, I guess you might as well stay now,” he gripes, throwing up his hands and letting them land weakly again in his lap. “Fucking morphine.”
Matt shuts his eyes again. “…We can’t keep doing this,” he says.
John opens his mouth to say he spent two weeks in this crap-hole for mot much more than a blown-out shoulder, and he footed the bill for legal fees that probably would have been unspeakable if Christine hadn’t been cutting him a serious buddy-price, and he is sure as hell not going anywhere now, but suddenly the room is full of people.
There are people lowering Matt’s bed, people checking on the scary-ass beeping machine, and a woman in a white coat with a clipboard smiling at him and telling him they are ready to take Matt in to ‘the theatre' now. It takes John a couple seconds of passive-aggressive smiling to realize that means it’s time for Matt’s surgery. It takes a couple more for him to realize it also means he’s supposed to leave.
“Hey Lightning,” John says, as they start to wheel the gurney into the hallway. Matt doesn’t tell him off this time, just looks up at him. “I never stopped, either.”
His face holds a raw look of fear, but it’s right out in the open where John can see it, and Matt nods once, bravely, before they wheel him away.
5. I Hate to Go and Leave this Pretty Sight
Matt watches as John dresses himself, stands by the door with his shoes in his hand. He hears Matt’s sigh from the bed, and turns.
“You might want to take an umbrella,” Matt murmurs sleepily without lifting his head, and John starts to make his way back to the bedside. He shuts his eyes in anticipation, and sure enough, he feels John brush the hair off his face. It’s been grown back nearly two years now, and John hasn’t been able to keep his fingers out of it since. “There’s a sixty percent chance of rain tonight.”
“And if I get home early?” John leans down and purrs in his ear. “What are my chances of a little Lightning?”
There’s a rough scratch of stubbly nuzzling at the nape of his neck. Matt figures he can pick his head up enough for a little kiss. Which kind of turns into a big kiss. With tongue. And maybe a bit of teeth.
“They say it never strikes twice,” he grins, when he can breathe again. “But I like your odds.”
“Gotta strike twice around here. Somehow Lightning always seems to come before Thunder.”
“You are an unfailing romantic.” Matt rolls his eyes, snuggles back down into the sheets. “I swoon.”
“You know,” John says, suggestively, with another scratchy nuzzle. “I could skip the gym, go in late. Maybe put in a different kind of ‘workout’?”
“And have Bowman tear me a new one when the Captain of his star strike team drops dead of an old man heart attack from too much sex and neglecting his cardio? Beat it, Flatfoot.”
“See you at the office,” John chuckles indulgently, giving his hair a final little tug before he moves away.
Matt can hear John humming Bad Moon Rising to himself in the hallway, and then his key in the door. He curls up onto his side, and hugs John’s vacated pillow to his chest.
~END~
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