Die Hard fic for smallfandomfest: No Place I'd Rather Be
Title: No Place I’d Rather Be
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard/Die Hard movies
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating/Category: PG-13/Slash
Prompt: Stay in Bed
Spoilers: nope
Summary: Sometimes all you have to do is ask.
Notes/Warnings: Yes. Extreme warning for extreme fluff. And hospital gowns. Ya done bin warned, yo.
Written for smallfandomfest
No Place I’d Rather Be
by Persnickett
So hospitals pretty much sucked, it wasn’t news to Matt.
There were some things he hadn’t been expecting of course. Traction, for instance - like you saw in soap operas and Bugs Bunny cartoons, where they hang your leg up from the ceiling with crazy metal shish-kebab thingies sticking out of it - that turned out to be an actual thing.
Then there was the fact that McClane’s seriously cute daughter Lucy would come by to visit him, and that he would totally score a thanks-for-saving-my-life kiss on the cheek into the deal. He liked that part of this whole hero gig a lot better than the traction part.
But the most unexpected?
Bad-ass Motherfucker John McClane was pretty much just a giant musclebound toddler the minute you got the man anywhere near morphine.
Next to Matt, on the ugly faux-woodgrain bedside table, his phone buzzed.
Hey kid, turn on channel 20.
Who had known McClane could text? One-handed even. Or that every text he sent would start unnecessarily with the word ‘kid’.
Channel 20 had nothing to offer but the weather report, although hosted by a weather girl with some very obvious surgical enhancements.
Matt was in the middle of typing the word ‘Mature’ when the phone buzzed again in his hand.
Kid. Making a break for it, want anything from the vending machines?
Stay in bed, old man. Matt sent back instead.
Just for that you’re getting Hickory Sticks.
It had been like this for days now. But Matt still found himself chuckling, which he knew was pretty much the whole point. He couldn’t blame the guy too much. There was nothing much else to do. It seemed like even strapped to the ceiling in a hospital, life with McClane around could never be altogether boring.
The inebriated texts and surprise visits had started only hours after Matt woke up after his surgery.
McClane had barely managed to wobble his way into the room, arm in a sling and all, before he was swiftly followed by two nurses and a terrorized-looking orderly.
“There you are!” The first, blonde and boney, nurse exclaimed.
“Mr. McClane, aren’t you ashamed,” said the second, chubbier one, as they came rushing forward.
Then, Matt had been so surprised by what had happened next, he almost wanted to chalk it up to the painkillers. McClane’s eyes got comically big (Matt hadn’t really noticed before, how green they were).
“Shit,” he said, “I gotta go!” And then, no lie, McClane ducked around the back of Matt’s bed, like he was going to find some kind of escape there.
Brilliantly, all three of his pursuers followed him around the same side of the bed, instead of splitting up. They actually ran around it, all Benny Hill and shit, for at least three laps before the orderly figured it out.
It was literally so funny, Matt actually forgot to laugh. The memory of it never failed though, and Matt giggled to himself again at the thought.
“You’re supposed to be headed down to surgery!” The blonde nurse had chided McClane, taking his good elbow firmly, “You can’t get off the gurney!”
McClane just gave a childishly rebellious smirk, and shrugged her off.
“I just came to see my friend,” he argued, woozily.
“We told you, sir,” the tall orderly agreed, taking a hold of McClane’s shoulders a little more firmly. “You need to stay in bed.”
“Let go,” McClane growled, “you gotta let-” Even injured and drugged half out of his mind, McClane had no trouble wrenching out of the tall orderly’s grasp.
The man grabbed for him again though, as well as the blonde nurse, while the chubby one started outright just swatting at him - on his good shoulder, and even the top of his bald head.
“Stay. In. Bed.”
Still, McClane fought his way forward to Matt’s side.
“Ow. Would you-I just gotta… See. My. Friend. Jesus Christ!” he let out, as she landed a swat that actually grazed McClane’s ear. “Here kid, OW!” McClane had said, dumping the phone Matt was now holding in his hands onto the bed. “I owed you.”
‘OUCH OKAY, let’s go,” McClane assented, allowing them to finally remove him from the room. But not without muttering “motherfucker” under his breath and thereby earning one last slap from the heavy nurse, and then throwing off the big orderly two more times.
In the end it took all three of them to wrestle and shove him out the door, while McClane grumbled and made a very indecent cabaret out of the back of his hospital gown all the way.
Which Matt didn’t mind all that much. Dude obviously had some serious commitment to the gym.
As much commitment as he had shown to risking life, limb, and what little dignity they had left around this place, getting Matt a new phone. And apparently one for himself. Just so he could send Matt stupid texts about large-breasted tv anchors and bring Matt whatever he wanted from the snack machines.
And when McClane eventually showed up, it was no surprise that he really did bring Matt the damn Hickory Sticks. But he brought him Reese’s too.
It was obviously true love.
***
Matt never thought the day would come he would have this much sympathy for those nurses they had had back in 2007, but John McClane was seriously the worst patient ever.
You would think it would be enough for most people, to get sent home by the Captain of 63 Precinct, with an order to stay indoors and off of the streets for at least 24 hours, but McClane? No, McClane they had to send home with a literal police escort.
Matt had to hand it to Connie, for knowing John that well, but he made a mental note to give her shit for what had very nearly happened to his pants when he had seen the lights in the goddamn driveway. When you were rooming with a cop, and that cop hadn’t made it home for the night, the last thing you ever wanted to see was one of their brethren knocking on your door.
Sure enough though, McClane’s fever was at 104, which, while relatively spaz-worthy, the internet said only meant they should go to the hospital if a) it got any higher, or b) it lasted more than four to seven days.
So Matt sent him to bed and headed to the drug store, figuring they’d start with good old fashioned over-the-counter narcotics and worry about the hospital later. Had he known what he was in for, though, he might have called the ambulance right away instead, and made all 104 degrees and 210 pounds of flu-ridden uber-cop officially Somebody Else’s Problem.
But Matt hadn’t known. He hadn’t known that when he got back from the store, it would be to find John in the hallway, determinedly staggering his way to the garage door with several bulging bags of trash, as if now were the time he absolutely had to empty every bin in the house. Matt dropped his groceries and rushed over.
“I’ll do it,” he said, when McClane showed no sign of relinquishing his stubborn grip on the bags. “Will you just- Let…me.”
And that was how Matt ended up actually fighting a man for a bag full of takeout boxes and banana peels (and if it hadn’t been for the fever, he was extra sure he wouldn’t have won). Matt came back inside and stood in the hallway with his arms folded and foot tapping like a school marm straight out of Little House on the Prairie, until John agreed to be led back to bed and allowed himself to be properly medicated.
He was there for what felt like all of five minutes - which Matt had taken to try and make him some soup - when he heard the shower running. Which, whatever, Matt supposed, the soup might get cold but fine, he guessed. Fine, that was, until Matt heard a yell and a crash-clang-thump that sounded terrifyingly not-good.
When Matt got there, McClane had locked the bathroom door. He tried knocking, with no response. Then he tried pounding, with similar results.
“McClane?”
Still nothing.
Matt backed away from the door. He put a hand up to his face and pressed on his eyelids, a little disbelieving that he was actually about to try this, but that crash and thump had actually sounded dangerous, and McClane still hadn’t answered.
Matt kicked down the door.
…Or rather, Matt kicked the door and nothing much happened. But John still wasn’t making any noise and he didn’t know what else to do.
After two more tries, Matt connected with the door hard enough it shuddered open undramatically, and he rushed inside to find John laid out in the tub, struggling predictably yet weakly with the downed shower-curtain.
Exactly 1 lacerated bald scalp, 6 bloodied cotton balls, 3 butterfly bandages (1 successfully applied, and 2 crumpled into labyrinthine self-adhesive configurations in the trash), 1.75 scrawny nerd freakouts and 29 big burly cop cusses later, McClane was back in bed and Matt was contemplating how to get the shower curtain back in working order - preferably as soon as possible.
Playing doctor obviously not being Matt’s strong suit aside, John had been clad in nothing but a towel for most of their little emergency medical interlude - and nothing at all for the first few seconds of it. Matt hadn’t had an eyeful of quite that much skin since their hospital gown days. He could seriously use a cold shower.
He was headed down the stairs to find a screwdriver that looked like it might do the job, when he heard the distinctively disastrous gurgle and hiss of soup boiling over on the stove.
Fuck.
Soup cleaned up, multiple fingers burned, 2.6 more scrawny, nerdy freakouts freaked, and screwdriver finally retrieved; the shower curtain was no sooner back in place than Matt heard the telltale sounds of out-of-bed rummaging coming from the basement.
Sure enough, there was John, this time mercifully clad in his bath robe, digging through his tools.
“Hey,” Matt piped up, “Houdini. Looking for this?” he asked, brandishing the screwdriver, when McClane turned around. His glazed-looking glance barely took it in, before he turned back and continued shoving items around on the work bench.
“I did it,” Matt interrupted, darting forward and ducking under McClane’s arm, to force himself between the stalwart barrel chest and the edge of the counter. “I did it already. See?” Once again, it was a move Matt was sure he wouldn’t have gotten away with on any other day, but thankfully, McClane’s fever-glazed features started to form a dopey sort of half smile instead of the usual glower. “The shower curtain is back up,” he said quickly. “You don’t need t-”
“Bathroom door’s broke,” McClane grunted.
“I’ll fix that too.” …Apparently.
McClane just smiled that bemused little half smirk again, and reached past him for the workbench.
“Gonna need drywall compound,” he enumerated tipsily, “screws…”
That was it. Matt had had it. He had had it several soup burns, and ornery bandages, and naked dudes that he totally had zero hopeless hero-crushes on ago.
He let out a defeated whimper and dropped the screwdriver behind him onto the bench. He raised his hands in the air in a show of surrender, and dropped his head forward until his forehead landed on John’s chest.
And if he totally aimed for the spot of exposed, unnaturally fever-warm skin where silver chest hairs were peeking out of the opening of John’s dressing gown, and if he took a breath in that was as much to steady his clearly-embarking-on-nerdy-freakout-number-4.35-nerves, as it was to take in the heady, musky, unshowered scent of him… Well, dammit, he had earned it.
“Please John,” Matt moaned. He picked his head up so his whining could be properly heard, and not muffled against the intoxicatingly tempting nest that was McClane’s chest. “Please. I’m begging you.” He curled both his hands pleadingly in the lapels of John’s robe to demonstrate. “To please, please. Just stay in bed.”
A second passed, in which that little woozy smirk hadn’t budged from McClane’s lips. He nodded. “…’Kay.”
“Okay?” Matt repeated, in surprise.
“Yeah. Sure,” McClane agreed, with an amiable shrug that was all it took to dislodge Matt’s astonished double grip on his robe. “All ya hadda do was say.”
Matt was dumbfounded. Had he not been ‘saying’ all day?
“I know you’re mad at me kiddo, but…” McClane took a step back from him and smiled again. “You’re still real cute.”
“I…cute,” Matt started, and then faltered. “ …Wait. Cute?”
“Pssh,” McClane admonished, with an another unsteady step back and an equally unstable wobble of his head. “You know you’re cute. The way your eyes get when you’re reeeeally excited about one of your nerdy toys? Or when you fall asleep on the couch and I gotta wake you up. …In the morning when you don’t brush your hair,” he went on, pointing vaguely at the top of Matt’s head, and making him wonder, briefly, what kind of state all the soup eruptions and door-kickings and clumsy first aid sessions had left it in.
“Then there’s that sweater you got,” McClane concluded, his tone matter-of-fact.
“My hoodie?” Matt asked, a little incredulously.
He was pretty sure he didn’t own anything that technically qualified as an actual ‘sweater’. Not that it should matter, maybe, but if McClane thought it made him cute, suddenly it seemed like an important distinction to make.
“The first week you stayed here, you came outta the shower in that thing and a pair of boxers, and I dropped my coffee cup,” McClane confirmed, helpfully. “You remember.”
Matt did remember. They had had quite the struggle between their respective gun shot injuries trying to clean up a shattered mug and a pool of hot black coffee.
But he figured he couldn’t be blamed for thinking it had had a lot more to do with recovering from what he had since learned had been McClane’s seventh shoulder surgery, than it did with the titillating display of his uncombed hair paired with a view of his legs that probably would have been a lot more risqué if they weren’t outfitted with crutches and an air cast. Or his goddamned hoodie.
Matt was still staring. But now McClane was frowning.
“What’d you do to me?” he asked, finally.
It took a second or so, but soon Matt realized it should have been clear to both of them by now what had been going on.
“Oh,” he said, when he cottoned on. “…You mean how you’re spilling everything you’ve been holding in the last two and a half years like I fed you a D-I-Y truth serum?”
McClane’s scowl deepened a fraction, although it was still tempered by the brightness the fever put in his eyes. “Yeah that.”
“Yeah,” Matt replied. “That’ll be the NyQuil. It’s basically neon green moonshine.”
Matt would apologize but it felt like he’d be lying. He couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry about any of the things he had just heard. Not very sorry at all.
“Goddamn lucky you’re cute…” McClane growled one last time. Then he turned on his heel to disappear up the stairs, and ostensibly, if Matt dared to believe it, back into bed.
Matt stared after him a second, and then turned to the workbench, trying to clear his head and remember what McClane had said before all that stuff about how cute Matt was, pretty much any time he felt like he was a complete mess. They would need drywall screws…no. Drywall. And screws…
Oh, to hell with it, Matt thought, as he dumped everything back onto the work table and resolved to call a contractor instead. He was busy.
He had urgent hoodie laundry to do, and his cutest pair of boxers to pick out, and maybe even a hairbrush to snap in two.
And by the time McClane had recovered, if Matt’s plans came at all close to being a success, then McClane would be much, much too busy for drywall too.
***
In the end, it turned out all Matt really did have to do was ask.
He wore his ridiculous ‘sweater’ and boxers combination anyway though, and for once his hair cooperated, by being its usual un-cooperative self.
“What are you doin’?” McClane asked wearily, when Matt approached the breakfast table and drew the newspaper slowly out of his grasp.
“Being cute?” Matt responded hopefully.
McClane frowned his usual frown, but Matt remembered that fond half smile from when he was under the influence of what he could admit now was essentially drugstore absinthe, and pressed on.
There was no way he could ever hope to move McClane and his chair, so he turned and pushed the breakfast table back instead, ignoring the judder and scrape of the table’s feet over the linoleum.
Now he had room to step in front of McClane, and climb intrepidly into his lap. He just hoped that if his fingers trembled at all where they gripped McClane’s shoulders tenuously, that John would ignore it in favour of the 140 lbs of scrawny, allegedly cute, hacker straddling him.
McClane was still frowning. But he hadn’t tried to stop him.
“Matt…” McClane said, his voice sounding hesitant but gratifyingly just a touch husky.
“You said all I had to do was ask,” Matt said, when it seemed like John wasn’t going to say anything else. "So this is me asking…”
But then instead of words, Matt leaned forward and tucked his head into John’s shoulder instead.
Matt wasn’t sure how long they sat there. It was probably only seconds, but each one felt like an eternity, before John’s hands came up, fingertips resting gently and warmly over his hips.
“You gonna ask me something?” And this time there was a definite touch of sandpaper to his voice.
Matt nodded into John’s neck, still afraid of what he would see on his face if he pulled away.
“Are you better yet?” he asked, finally.
John made a noise that flooded Matt with relief and delight and warm, happy pleasure, and was pretty much the best sound he could ever remember having heard. He chuckled.
“You could say that,” he answered, spreading his palms flat out against Matt’s back so he was holding him not just with his fingertips but with both whole, warm hands.
“Then there’s only one other thing to ask,” Matt said, moving so he could say it, low, right in John’s ear.
“Can I?” he questioned, taking John’s earlobe between his teeth and closing firmly enough to spark a little grunt in John’s chest, that made butterflies explode into life in turn, somewhere in the region of Matt’s stomach.
“And will you?” he persisted, grazing his teeth along the line of John’s jaw in a way that made the butterflies give another subtle little flutter, all the while marveling at the fact that he was doing this and was still alive - having suffered neither a heart attack, nor a McClane attack.
“And…” Matt said, finally drawing back enough to look McClane in the eyes. The fever was gone, but for some reason they looked just as brightly glazed, the pupils just as blown, now.
“Please?” And he leaned forward to punctuate his final request with a single, restrainedly chaste, kiss.
McClane’s eyes were shut when Matt pulled back at first, but by the time they opened, the goofy smirk was back in full force, as if he had been into the NyQuil again.
“That’s three things,” McClane gruffed.
Matt laughed. McClane joined him with that throaty chuckle again.
“Shut up?” Matt asked, for good measure.
“Yeah,” John agreed.
Matt heard the chair tip and fall over backward, as John stood up. But he ignored it and hung on - arms around John’s neck, and legs still wrapped around him. John braced his strong arms under Matt’s ass, and - thank all of the Gods in all of the universes - wasted no more time in carrying him off to his bedroom.
And they hadn’t left yet.
When Matt blinked his eyes open, the golden-orange way the light was starting to fall in through the window told him they had been here long past the breakfast hour, through most of the afternoon, and it would be getting on for evening.
He felt the weight on the mattress shift, and rolled over swiftly. John was sitting up already, had already peeled back the covers, and Matt snaked an arm out and around his waist just in time.
John paused long enough to let him sit up behind him. Matt draped himself shamelessly across the broad back, relishing the grunt of reaction he got at the contact of skin on skin.
“John,” he murmured sleepily, hoping he sounded as fetchingly rumpled and mussed as John apparently liked him.
”I’m begging you,” he mumbled into the back of the thick neck. He nuzzled his nose exploratively up over where McClane’s razor left silver stubble, and nosed imploringly down further, where the impossible contrast of soft peach fuzz still lived where the razor didn’t reach. “To please. Please please, just stay in bed.”
Matt had been too sleepy to see it coming, but he should have expected it anyway. The next thing he knew he was on his back, his arms being pushed slowly across the still-warm fabric of the sheets - up, up over his head.
“All ya had to do was ask,” John told him.
Matt smiled, and settled his wrists together, the better to let them stay pinned one handed.
“Please,” he whispered.
.
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard/Die Hard movies
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating/Category: PG-13/Slash
Prompt: Stay in Bed
Spoilers: nope
Summary: Sometimes all you have to do is ask.
Notes/Warnings: Yes. Extreme warning for extreme fluff. And hospital gowns. Ya done bin warned, yo.
Written for smallfandomfest
No Place I’d Rather Be
by Persnickett
So hospitals pretty much sucked, it wasn’t news to Matt.
There were some things he hadn’t been expecting of course. Traction, for instance - like you saw in soap operas and Bugs Bunny cartoons, where they hang your leg up from the ceiling with crazy metal shish-kebab thingies sticking out of it - that turned out to be an actual thing.
Then there was the fact that McClane’s seriously cute daughter Lucy would come by to visit him, and that he would totally score a thanks-for-saving-my-life kiss on the cheek into the deal. He liked that part of this whole hero gig a lot better than the traction part.
But the most unexpected?
Bad-ass Motherfucker John McClane was pretty much just a giant musclebound toddler the minute you got the man anywhere near morphine.
Next to Matt, on the ugly faux-woodgrain bedside table, his phone buzzed.
Hey kid, turn on channel 20.
Who had known McClane could text? One-handed even. Or that every text he sent would start unnecessarily with the word ‘kid’.
Channel 20 had nothing to offer but the weather report, although hosted by a weather girl with some very obvious surgical enhancements.
Matt was in the middle of typing the word ‘Mature’ when the phone buzzed again in his hand.
Kid. Making a break for it, want anything from the vending machines?
Stay in bed, old man. Matt sent back instead.
Just for that you’re getting Hickory Sticks.
It had been like this for days now. But Matt still found himself chuckling, which he knew was pretty much the whole point. He couldn’t blame the guy too much. There was nothing much else to do. It seemed like even strapped to the ceiling in a hospital, life with McClane around could never be altogether boring.
The inebriated texts and surprise visits had started only hours after Matt woke up after his surgery.
McClane had barely managed to wobble his way into the room, arm in a sling and all, before he was swiftly followed by two nurses and a terrorized-looking orderly.
“There you are!” The first, blonde and boney, nurse exclaimed.
“Mr. McClane, aren’t you ashamed,” said the second, chubbier one, as they came rushing forward.
Then, Matt had been so surprised by what had happened next, he almost wanted to chalk it up to the painkillers. McClane’s eyes got comically big (Matt hadn’t really noticed before, how green they were).
“Shit,” he said, “I gotta go!” And then, no lie, McClane ducked around the back of Matt’s bed, like he was going to find some kind of escape there.
Brilliantly, all three of his pursuers followed him around the same side of the bed, instead of splitting up. They actually ran around it, all Benny Hill and shit, for at least three laps before the orderly figured it out.
It was literally so funny, Matt actually forgot to laugh. The memory of it never failed though, and Matt giggled to himself again at the thought.
“You’re supposed to be headed down to surgery!” The blonde nurse had chided McClane, taking his good elbow firmly, “You can’t get off the gurney!”
McClane just gave a childishly rebellious smirk, and shrugged her off.
“I just came to see my friend,” he argued, woozily.
“We told you, sir,” the tall orderly agreed, taking a hold of McClane’s shoulders a little more firmly. “You need to stay in bed.”
“Let go,” McClane growled, “you gotta let-” Even injured and drugged half out of his mind, McClane had no trouble wrenching out of the tall orderly’s grasp.
The man grabbed for him again though, as well as the blonde nurse, while the chubby one started outright just swatting at him - on his good shoulder, and even the top of his bald head.
“Stay. In. Bed.”
Still, McClane fought his way forward to Matt’s side.
“Ow. Would you-I just gotta… See. My. Friend. Jesus Christ!” he let out, as she landed a swat that actually grazed McClane’s ear. “Here kid, OW!” McClane had said, dumping the phone Matt was now holding in his hands onto the bed. “I owed you.”
‘OUCH OKAY, let’s go,” McClane assented, allowing them to finally remove him from the room. But not without muttering “motherfucker” under his breath and thereby earning one last slap from the heavy nurse, and then throwing off the big orderly two more times.
In the end it took all three of them to wrestle and shove him out the door, while McClane grumbled and made a very indecent cabaret out of the back of his hospital gown all the way.
Which Matt didn’t mind all that much. Dude obviously had some serious commitment to the gym.
As much commitment as he had shown to risking life, limb, and what little dignity they had left around this place, getting Matt a new phone. And apparently one for himself. Just so he could send Matt stupid texts about large-breasted tv anchors and bring Matt whatever he wanted from the snack machines.
And when McClane eventually showed up, it was no surprise that he really did bring Matt the damn Hickory Sticks. But he brought him Reese’s too.
It was obviously true love.
***
Matt never thought the day would come he would have this much sympathy for those nurses they had had back in 2007, but John McClane was seriously the worst patient ever.
You would think it would be enough for most people, to get sent home by the Captain of 63 Precinct, with an order to stay indoors and off of the streets for at least 24 hours, but McClane? No, McClane they had to send home with a literal police escort.
Matt had to hand it to Connie, for knowing John that well, but he made a mental note to give her shit for what had very nearly happened to his pants when he had seen the lights in the goddamn driveway. When you were rooming with a cop, and that cop hadn’t made it home for the night, the last thing you ever wanted to see was one of their brethren knocking on your door.
Sure enough though, McClane’s fever was at 104, which, while relatively spaz-worthy, the internet said only meant they should go to the hospital if a) it got any higher, or b) it lasted more than four to seven days.
So Matt sent him to bed and headed to the drug store, figuring they’d start with good old fashioned over-the-counter narcotics and worry about the hospital later. Had he known what he was in for, though, he might have called the ambulance right away instead, and made all 104 degrees and 210 pounds of flu-ridden uber-cop officially Somebody Else’s Problem.
But Matt hadn’t known. He hadn’t known that when he got back from the store, it would be to find John in the hallway, determinedly staggering his way to the garage door with several bulging bags of trash, as if now were the time he absolutely had to empty every bin in the house. Matt dropped his groceries and rushed over.
“I’ll do it,” he said, when McClane showed no sign of relinquishing his stubborn grip on the bags. “Will you just- Let…me.”
And that was how Matt ended up actually fighting a man for a bag full of takeout boxes and banana peels (and if it hadn’t been for the fever, he was extra sure he wouldn’t have won). Matt came back inside and stood in the hallway with his arms folded and foot tapping like a school marm straight out of Little House on the Prairie, until John agreed to be led back to bed and allowed himself to be properly medicated.
He was there for what felt like all of five minutes - which Matt had taken to try and make him some soup - when he heard the shower running. Which, whatever, Matt supposed, the soup might get cold but fine, he guessed. Fine, that was, until Matt heard a yell and a crash-clang-thump that sounded terrifyingly not-good.
When Matt got there, McClane had locked the bathroom door. He tried knocking, with no response. Then he tried pounding, with similar results.
“McClane?”
Still nothing.
Matt backed away from the door. He put a hand up to his face and pressed on his eyelids, a little disbelieving that he was actually about to try this, but that crash and thump had actually sounded dangerous, and McClane still hadn’t answered.
Matt kicked down the door.
…Or rather, Matt kicked the door and nothing much happened. But John still wasn’t making any noise and he didn’t know what else to do.
After two more tries, Matt connected with the door hard enough it shuddered open undramatically, and he rushed inside to find John laid out in the tub, struggling predictably yet weakly with the downed shower-curtain.
Exactly 1 lacerated bald scalp, 6 bloodied cotton balls, 3 butterfly bandages (1 successfully applied, and 2 crumpled into labyrinthine self-adhesive configurations in the trash), 1.75 scrawny nerd freakouts and 29 big burly cop cusses later, McClane was back in bed and Matt was contemplating how to get the shower curtain back in working order - preferably as soon as possible.
Playing doctor obviously not being Matt’s strong suit aside, John had been clad in nothing but a towel for most of their little emergency medical interlude - and nothing at all for the first few seconds of it. Matt hadn’t had an eyeful of quite that much skin since their hospital gown days. He could seriously use a cold shower.
He was headed down the stairs to find a screwdriver that looked like it might do the job, when he heard the distinctively disastrous gurgle and hiss of soup boiling over on the stove.
Fuck.
Soup cleaned up, multiple fingers burned, 2.6 more scrawny, nerdy freakouts freaked, and screwdriver finally retrieved; the shower curtain was no sooner back in place than Matt heard the telltale sounds of out-of-bed rummaging coming from the basement.
Sure enough, there was John, this time mercifully clad in his bath robe, digging through his tools.
“Hey,” Matt piped up, “Houdini. Looking for this?” he asked, brandishing the screwdriver, when McClane turned around. His glazed-looking glance barely took it in, before he turned back and continued shoving items around on the work bench.
“I did it,” Matt interrupted, darting forward and ducking under McClane’s arm, to force himself between the stalwart barrel chest and the edge of the counter. “I did it already. See?” Once again, it was a move Matt was sure he wouldn’t have gotten away with on any other day, but thankfully, McClane’s fever-glazed features started to form a dopey sort of half smile instead of the usual glower. “The shower curtain is back up,” he said quickly. “You don’t need t-”
“Bathroom door’s broke,” McClane grunted.
“I’ll fix that too.” …Apparently.
McClane just smiled that bemused little half smirk again, and reached past him for the workbench.
“Gonna need drywall compound,” he enumerated tipsily, “screws…”
That was it. Matt had had it. He had had it several soup burns, and ornery bandages, and naked dudes that he totally had zero hopeless hero-crushes on ago.
He let out a defeated whimper and dropped the screwdriver behind him onto the bench. He raised his hands in the air in a show of surrender, and dropped his head forward until his forehead landed on John’s chest.
And if he totally aimed for the spot of exposed, unnaturally fever-warm skin where silver chest hairs were peeking out of the opening of John’s dressing gown, and if he took a breath in that was as much to steady his clearly-embarking-on-nerdy-freakout-number-4.35-nerves, as it was to take in the heady, musky, unshowered scent of him… Well, dammit, he had earned it.
“Please John,” Matt moaned. He picked his head up so his whining could be properly heard, and not muffled against the intoxicatingly tempting nest that was McClane’s chest. “Please. I’m begging you.” He curled both his hands pleadingly in the lapels of John’s robe to demonstrate. “To please, please. Just stay in bed.”
A second passed, in which that little woozy smirk hadn’t budged from McClane’s lips. He nodded. “…’Kay.”
“Okay?” Matt repeated, in surprise.
“Yeah. Sure,” McClane agreed, with an amiable shrug that was all it took to dislodge Matt’s astonished double grip on his robe. “All ya hadda do was say.”
Matt was dumbfounded. Had he not been ‘saying’ all day?
“I know you’re mad at me kiddo, but…” McClane took a step back from him and smiled again. “You’re still real cute.”
“I…cute,” Matt started, and then faltered. “ …Wait. Cute?”
“Pssh,” McClane admonished, with an another unsteady step back and an equally unstable wobble of his head. “You know you’re cute. The way your eyes get when you’re reeeeally excited about one of your nerdy toys? Or when you fall asleep on the couch and I gotta wake you up. …In the morning when you don’t brush your hair,” he went on, pointing vaguely at the top of Matt’s head, and making him wonder, briefly, what kind of state all the soup eruptions and door-kickings and clumsy first aid sessions had left it in.
“Then there’s that sweater you got,” McClane concluded, his tone matter-of-fact.
“My hoodie?” Matt asked, a little incredulously.
He was pretty sure he didn’t own anything that technically qualified as an actual ‘sweater’. Not that it should matter, maybe, but if McClane thought it made him cute, suddenly it seemed like an important distinction to make.
“The first week you stayed here, you came outta the shower in that thing and a pair of boxers, and I dropped my coffee cup,” McClane confirmed, helpfully. “You remember.”
Matt did remember. They had had quite the struggle between their respective gun shot injuries trying to clean up a shattered mug and a pool of hot black coffee.
But he figured he couldn’t be blamed for thinking it had had a lot more to do with recovering from what he had since learned had been McClane’s seventh shoulder surgery, than it did with the titillating display of his uncombed hair paired with a view of his legs that probably would have been a lot more risqué if they weren’t outfitted with crutches and an air cast. Or his goddamned hoodie.
Matt was still staring. But now McClane was frowning.
“What’d you do to me?” he asked, finally.
It took a second or so, but soon Matt realized it should have been clear to both of them by now what had been going on.
“Oh,” he said, when he cottoned on. “…You mean how you’re spilling everything you’ve been holding in the last two and a half years like I fed you a D-I-Y truth serum?”
McClane’s scowl deepened a fraction, although it was still tempered by the brightness the fever put in his eyes. “Yeah that.”
“Yeah,” Matt replied. “That’ll be the NyQuil. It’s basically neon green moonshine.”
Matt would apologize but it felt like he’d be lying. He couldn’t bring himself to feel sorry about any of the things he had just heard. Not very sorry at all.
“Goddamn lucky you’re cute…” McClane growled one last time. Then he turned on his heel to disappear up the stairs, and ostensibly, if Matt dared to believe it, back into bed.
Matt stared after him a second, and then turned to the workbench, trying to clear his head and remember what McClane had said before all that stuff about how cute Matt was, pretty much any time he felt like he was a complete mess. They would need drywall screws…no. Drywall. And screws…
Oh, to hell with it, Matt thought, as he dumped everything back onto the work table and resolved to call a contractor instead. He was busy.
He had urgent hoodie laundry to do, and his cutest pair of boxers to pick out, and maybe even a hairbrush to snap in two.
And by the time McClane had recovered, if Matt’s plans came at all close to being a success, then McClane would be much, much too busy for drywall too.
***
In the end, it turned out all Matt really did have to do was ask.
He wore his ridiculous ‘sweater’ and boxers combination anyway though, and for once his hair cooperated, by being its usual un-cooperative self.
“What are you doin’?” McClane asked wearily, when Matt approached the breakfast table and drew the newspaper slowly out of his grasp.
“Being cute?” Matt responded hopefully.
McClane frowned his usual frown, but Matt remembered that fond half smile from when he was under the influence of what he could admit now was essentially drugstore absinthe, and pressed on.
There was no way he could ever hope to move McClane and his chair, so he turned and pushed the breakfast table back instead, ignoring the judder and scrape of the table’s feet over the linoleum.
Now he had room to step in front of McClane, and climb intrepidly into his lap. He just hoped that if his fingers trembled at all where they gripped McClane’s shoulders tenuously, that John would ignore it in favour of the 140 lbs of scrawny, allegedly cute, hacker straddling him.
McClane was still frowning. But he hadn’t tried to stop him.
“Matt…” McClane said, his voice sounding hesitant but gratifyingly just a touch husky.
“You said all I had to do was ask,” Matt said, when it seemed like John wasn’t going to say anything else. "So this is me asking…”
But then instead of words, Matt leaned forward and tucked his head into John’s shoulder instead.
Matt wasn’t sure how long they sat there. It was probably only seconds, but each one felt like an eternity, before John’s hands came up, fingertips resting gently and warmly over his hips.
“You gonna ask me something?” And this time there was a definite touch of sandpaper to his voice.
Matt nodded into John’s neck, still afraid of what he would see on his face if he pulled away.
“Are you better yet?” he asked, finally.
John made a noise that flooded Matt with relief and delight and warm, happy pleasure, and was pretty much the best sound he could ever remember having heard. He chuckled.
“You could say that,” he answered, spreading his palms flat out against Matt’s back so he was holding him not just with his fingertips but with both whole, warm hands.
“Then there’s only one other thing to ask,” Matt said, moving so he could say it, low, right in John’s ear.
“Can I?” he questioned, taking John’s earlobe between his teeth and closing firmly enough to spark a little grunt in John’s chest, that made butterflies explode into life in turn, somewhere in the region of Matt’s stomach.
“And will you?” he persisted, grazing his teeth along the line of John’s jaw in a way that made the butterflies give another subtle little flutter, all the while marveling at the fact that he was doing this and was still alive - having suffered neither a heart attack, nor a McClane attack.
“And…” Matt said, finally drawing back enough to look McClane in the eyes. The fever was gone, but for some reason they looked just as brightly glazed, the pupils just as blown, now.
“Please?” And he leaned forward to punctuate his final request with a single, restrainedly chaste, kiss.
McClane’s eyes were shut when Matt pulled back at first, but by the time they opened, the goofy smirk was back in full force, as if he had been into the NyQuil again.
“That’s three things,” McClane gruffed.
Matt laughed. McClane joined him with that throaty chuckle again.
“Shut up?” Matt asked, for good measure.
“Yeah,” John agreed.
Matt heard the chair tip and fall over backward, as John stood up. But he ignored it and hung on - arms around John’s neck, and legs still wrapped around him. John braced his strong arms under Matt’s ass, and - thank all of the Gods in all of the universes - wasted no more time in carrying him off to his bedroom.
And they hadn’t left yet.
When Matt blinked his eyes open, the golden-orange way the light was starting to fall in through the window told him they had been here long past the breakfast hour, through most of the afternoon, and it would be getting on for evening.
He felt the weight on the mattress shift, and rolled over swiftly. John was sitting up already, had already peeled back the covers, and Matt snaked an arm out and around his waist just in time.
John paused long enough to let him sit up behind him. Matt draped himself shamelessly across the broad back, relishing the grunt of reaction he got at the contact of skin on skin.
“John,” he murmured sleepily, hoping he sounded as fetchingly rumpled and mussed as John apparently liked him.
”I’m begging you,” he mumbled into the back of the thick neck. He nuzzled his nose exploratively up over where McClane’s razor left silver stubble, and nosed imploringly down further, where the impossible contrast of soft peach fuzz still lived where the razor didn’t reach. “To please. Please please, just stay in bed.”
Matt had been too sleepy to see it coming, but he should have expected it anyway. The next thing he knew he was on his back, his arms being pushed slowly across the still-warm fabric of the sheets - up, up over his head.
“All ya had to do was ask,” John told him.
Matt smiled, and settled his wrists together, the better to let them stay pinned one handed.
“Please,” he whispered.
.