Die Hard fic for Spook Me: Bugs
Title: Bugs
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard/Die Hard movies
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating M
Prompt: Insect
Spoilers: nope
Summary: It started with the bees.
Notes/Warnings:
TRICK OR TREAT!! <33
Written for the spook_me ficathon on for the prompt ‘Insect’. TW for insects, obviously, and…maybe some Halloween ‘gore’? The image linked in the text was my picture prompt provided by the lovely ozsaur as part of the challenge.
-Happy Halloween!! <3 ‘Snick.
Bugs
by persnickett
It started with the bees.
As Matt had known it would. The research on bees had been disturbing and fucked up for years, Matt had always said it. Besides, you never trusted anything with a hive-mind. It was basically the first thing his parents - and when he said parents, he definitely meant comic books - had ever taught him.
Not to say that Matt had exactly been prepared. The whole thing had given him the heebie-jeebies right from the start; the newscaster’s tone suspiciously too light for the set of censored, blurred-out hospital photographs flashing across the screen behind her. Warning of the new breed of ‘mutants’ causing some trouble for the healthcare system in Australia, and reminding travellers who might be thinking of visiting the ‘Land Down-Under’ not to forget to pack their bug spray.
It didn’t take long to spread. More and more cases were reported all over the globe. The bees’ attacks seemed to become both more frequent and aggressive.
And their sting? Was insane.
Wracking, full-body pain that didn’t stay localized at the site but spread throughout the entire nervous system, and then into the brain. Spinal and brain fluids were both affected. The cranial swelling and brutal, distended hunch to the spine left victims not only monstrously disfigured but prone to fever, delirium and finally hallucination. Sometimes resulting in bizarre accounts of aggression and even - in one or two particularly grisly cases - cannibalism.
Matt would never forget the footage of the hunched, inhuman form, crouched horrifically over the body of a man lying unconscious in the street. Blood pooling from where his face and scalp looked like they had been mostly clawed viciously away.
But of course, the bees had gone all Donner Party on each other too. With their population wiped out in a single season and pollination a thing of the past, the earth’s ecosystem crashed shockingly fast. It took less than a year for lively, fish-filled, duck-and-muskrat-inhabited marshes and flowering, grassy wetlands to become stagnant, foetid, decaying swamps.
And so, the flies came next.
The clouds of them apparently visible from space, and the newscaster’s tone while showing the NASA photographs no longer light, but grave. Her reassuring, generically attractive features barely masking a personal internal panic that had started some time ago already in Matt’s own mind.
It wasn’t even the flies that were so bad of course, although the swarms were fucked up and nightmarish to behold.
They filled the skies. They blocked out the sun. People stopped going out in the streets when they could avoid it, their faces covered with scarves - and later, even gas masks - just to keep from breathing them in, the air got so thick with them by the end.
But it was the spread of disease that was the real problem of course. Matt didn’t care much for the hospital on a good day but the ER turned into a scene so gruesome it was practically medieval - he was talking gory, flesh-eating shit, with swollen limbs and bursting, pus-filled boils.
Matt had never expected to find himself wishing he could un-see what it looked like - the horror and agony on a human face - when a limb started to swell… and just never stopped. Splitting the skin, the flesh, and muscle underneath right down to the bone from the pressure alone.
The mortality rate was unprecedented.
And now? The little group of what, for all they knew, were the last survivors had barricaded themselves in a looming old stone house upstate. It was actually sort of nice, if all the more chilling for its austere old-fashioned beauty now that it was still and dusty, cavernous and echoingly empty as a tomb - which was looking like the more and more likely outcome as the hours ticked by for them.
The place would have been a real palace back when they had still had things like electricity and running water, but all the twelve of them were interested in now was the shelter, such as it was, against the next wave of Mother Nature’s boiling, belching, crawling buzzing seething fury.
Locusts.
Fucking. Locusts.
Matt had never actually seen a locust before, but now that he had - it was no wonder the bible had used them in history’s first ever recorded horror story. He had always thought of them as just kind of a grasshopper on steroids, but these things were bigger. Crunchier. They were armoured for fuck’s sake. Matt remembered a time he used to be creeped out to the point of being kept up at night as a kid, by a nature program he had seen going into much-too-closeup detail about the life of the praying mantis. The mantis had nothing on these things.
It was almost like it was personal. They demolished whole crops in minutes. Blanketed signal towers and chewed through power lines and cut off communication between their human rivals for the proprietorship of the earth like breathing. If the foul things actually breathed.
People starved. Children cried in the homes their parents were too terrified to leave, and would find nothing to give them, nothing to reassure them or soothe the hunger pains in their little bellies, even if they did.
Locusts. They were death on wings. Inevitable.
And they had finally reached the little group’s old stone safe haven.
Matt could see their hairy little feet on the ends of their stick-like legs against the glass of the windows in the minutes before they covered them thickly enough to block out the light. Their long, repugnant carapaces piling relentlessly up in layer upon layer of living, twitching, crawling Hell, until the ones closest to the glass were crushed; their ruptured thoraxes oozing the clear and milky fluids of their innards down the fancy, intricately patterned leaded glass.
And still they came. You could hear it, the dull, muffled thump… thump-thump of the soft, winged bodies piling themselves on the roof in shovelfuls much heavier and a zillion times more macabre than the thickest snowfall New York had ever seen.
Until the rafters began to groan, and the glass in the windows began to crack. And the group retreated to the cellar, finally. As if it were going to help them.
And now. They waited.
All huddled in the dark, side by side. Karen and Josh clung to each other like always in the corner, and a guy whose name Matt had never actually caught locked the door and pressed his back in useless, undying hope up against it, sliding warily down its surface to sit pointlessly on guard at the top of the stairs.
The flashlight Gale had brought down stuttered and went out, because of course it did. Matt was absolutely not holding his breath.
He could feel John beside him in the dark, tense and ready for what came next, the sheer solidness of his presence doing the things it always did for Matt in times of stress. It was calming, the steely, unconcerned air in his gaze, and unflinching set of his jaw as he stared straight ahead.
Watching.
Matt slid down a little further into the sofa, pushing his toes in under John’s thigh, sandwiching them in between the reassuring heat of thick, heavy muscle and the familiar ugly brown velour of the cushion.
John didn’t turn away from the screen, but he shifted his position, pulling both Matt’s feet out from under him and putting them properly right in his lap instead. A big, warm, sturdy hand settled on top of his knee, the thumb moving a couple, three, four times in knowing, soothing strokes.
“Is this the part after you put on the scary movie, where your date gets all coquettish and damsel-in-distressy, and you get to be all flexing, and heroically protective?” Matt asked, his voice a little husky already from the touch.
Hey, adrenaline amplified all biochemical responses, he was absolutely not so far gone for McClane that a little thumb-over-denim action would make him that easy. …Well not on a normal day. But bugs were seriously creepy okay?
“You picked the movie, kiddo,” McClane drawled lazily, with another one of those soothing-but-also-oddly-inflaming thumb-strokes.
And his voice. Ugh, did adrenaline make your ears react more sensitively to smoky, gravelly, sexy-ass murmurs too? Matt was a hundred percent sure it was a known cause for goosebumps, at least.
“I did, didn’t I?” Matt said, letting a tone of mock surprise, as if he had actually forgotten, slip into his voice. “It was a legitimate question, not a complaint,” he clarified, bringing his fingers up off the couch back to grab hold of the bunched-up sleeve of John’s worn cotton Henley.
He pulled, just a little.
John didn’t move. He just sat there, that rugged, immovable object that he was, and smirked, damn him.
And apparently adrenaline had an effect on that too because a pack of thrills somewhere in the vicinity of the back of Matt’s neck got way-the-hell too excited and went rushing all willy-nilly down his spine, and the goosebumps turned to outright, totally-visible shudders.
The smirk got smirkier and John reached out to take his own hold on Matt’s t-shirt and pulled right back.
Matt went. Willingly. Crawling into his lap, twining his arms around the thick, strong neck, the whole snuggly, needy, damsel-in-distress deal.
John’s hands were on his back then, rubbing warmly up and down and doing nothing for the shuddery, shivery situation going on there. Matt still had no complaints.
“Not gonna get nightmares now, are ya?”
“Ha ha.” Jokes about their age difference. Yeah, that never got old. “Is that your way of asking me to spend the night?” Matt asked, settling his hips over John’s where he was currently straddling him, so that the angle could potentially get a lot more interesting. “Because then, don’t expect you’ll be getting any sleep anyway.”
John smiled. Not just a smirk but an actual - albeit slightly wolfish, and definitely even sexier - smile. He pulled at Matt’s shirt again and Matt didn’t need telling twice.
The adrenaline was definitely doing its job. The kiss felt as amazing as it always did, but…intense. Hotter.
Everywhere John’s hands went, Matt could feel it like trails of heat and sparking fire. Up his back, cupping his nape, even along his arm, where he could feel the start of the strangest tickle… not like the rest of the touches but… prickling… and strangely-
Matt gasped as he pulled abruptly backward out of the kiss.
“AAAAH-HA-HACK!!!”
A roach. A roach roughly the size of something too-damn-friggin’-huge, with shiny gross wing-covers and revolting spiky black legs, and long, curiously questing antennae was sitting. On. His arm.
“Ack, Omigod!” he exclaimed, letting go of McClane to shake his arms around in a manner that he was sure wasn’t a very cool or dignified look for him, but was totally warranted anyway.
The roach fell backward onto the ugly brown couch cushion. And didn’t move.
It would have had a hard time. It was plastic.
Matt gave another all-over shudder anyway. “Jesus Christ, McClane!! Where the fuck did you get that thing!?”
It took a while for John to answer him. He was too busy shaking with silent laughter. Matt could feel it, the mirthful quake and quiver of strong thighs under his own. He wasn’t sure he could blame the warmth it made start spreading out, from the places their legs were touching to some very intriguing regions, on adrenaline though.
His cheeks were kind of warm too. Matt couldn’t help joining in with a sheepish laugh of his own as he felt the relief flood through him, letting his shoulders unbunch and the tight coil in his stomach slowly unwind. But he gave John a good swat on the bicep to rein him in none the less.
McClane gave one last chuckle. “Picked it up on the way home after you texted,” he finally replied.
Matt shook his head, let his hair fall about and cover up his blushing face a little.
The text had been a picture of the admittedly ridiculous movie cover, and the caption ‘let’s totally not watch this. say 8pm?’ and then a link to the Urban Dictionary definition of ‘Netflix and chill’, just in case. Because subtlety had ever been something McClane - or anybody for that matter - had ever accused him of.
Truth be told, T be spilled, or whatever it was the human children were into saying these days, Matt had honestly been pretty pleased with the increasing creativity of his booty-call messaging - though if anybody would have told him it was going to bite him in the ass like this… Well, he thought, as John reached up to smooth his hair back away from his face the way Matt knew he liked to do - he would have much preferred that said biting ended up being much more literal.
Still, there was always the added bonus of the way the fright had his heart pounding and his blood rushing. And if the way McClane was looking at him was any indication, the wideness in his eyes and the flush he could still feel fading in his cheeks weren’t doing any harm either.
“Jesus,” Matt complained, nuzzling needily down into the hand still lingering at the side of his face. “That’s gonna keep me up all fucking night.”
McClane was still looking at him, all amused, and Matt just spent a minute looking back - at the glare of the TV set illuminating the sweeping curve of his bald head, and the teasing way those steely green eyes gleamed even in the flickering glow. Matt’s mouth was oddly dry. He swallowed.
“Nah,” Mclane argued, “that’s my job.”
He shuddered. And then again. Damn, but adrenaline was something.
Matt licked dry lips. “You’re hired. How soon can you start?”
And then there was that smirk, then that wolfish grin. And Karen’s scream from the television behind him made him jump, but it was nothing to the thrill that shot up his spine, right from his tailbone all the way to the crown of his head, as John slipped an arm swiftly up his back and turned, and Matt found himself flipped brusquely but not unhappily onto his back just as quickly and unceremoniously as John’s stupid plastic roach friend.
“How’s right now work for you?”
Stubble scratched at his skin, and his back arched, and a warm barrel-chest pinned him down to the godawful ugly couch cushions. And Karen screamed, high pitched and blood-curdling, again.
Let her.
Right now was working out juuuust fine.
.
Author: persnickett
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard/Die Hard movies
Pairing/Characters: John/Matt
Rating M
Prompt: Insect
Spoilers: nope
Summary: It started with the bees.
Notes/Warnings:
TRICK OR TREAT!! <33
Written for the spook_me ficathon on for the prompt ‘Insect’. TW for insects, obviously, and…maybe some Halloween ‘gore’? The image linked in the text was my picture prompt provided by the lovely ozsaur as part of the challenge.
-Happy Halloween!! <3 ‘Snick.
Bugs
by persnickett
It started with the bees.
As Matt had known it would. The research on bees had been disturbing and fucked up for years, Matt had always said it. Besides, you never trusted anything with a hive-mind. It was basically the first thing his parents - and when he said parents, he definitely meant comic books - had ever taught him.
Not to say that Matt had exactly been prepared. The whole thing had given him the heebie-jeebies right from the start; the newscaster’s tone suspiciously too light for the set of censored, blurred-out hospital photographs flashing across the screen behind her. Warning of the new breed of ‘mutants’ causing some trouble for the healthcare system in Australia, and reminding travellers who might be thinking of visiting the ‘Land Down-Under’ not to forget to pack their bug spray.
It didn’t take long to spread. More and more cases were reported all over the globe. The bees’ attacks seemed to become both more frequent and aggressive.
And their sting? Was insane.
Wracking, full-body pain that didn’t stay localized at the site but spread throughout the entire nervous system, and then into the brain. Spinal and brain fluids were both affected. The cranial swelling and brutal, distended hunch to the spine left victims not only monstrously disfigured but prone to fever, delirium and finally hallucination. Sometimes resulting in bizarre accounts of aggression and even - in one or two particularly grisly cases - cannibalism.
Matt would never forget the footage of the hunched, inhuman form, crouched horrifically over the body of a man lying unconscious in the street. Blood pooling from where his face and scalp looked like they had been mostly clawed viciously away.
But of course, the bees had gone all Donner Party on each other too. With their population wiped out in a single season and pollination a thing of the past, the earth’s ecosystem crashed shockingly fast. It took less than a year for lively, fish-filled, duck-and-muskrat-inhabited marshes and flowering, grassy wetlands to become stagnant, foetid, decaying swamps.
And so, the flies came next.
The clouds of them apparently visible from space, and the newscaster’s tone while showing the NASA photographs no longer light, but grave. Her reassuring, generically attractive features barely masking a personal internal panic that had started some time ago already in Matt’s own mind.
It wasn’t even the flies that were so bad of course, although the swarms were fucked up and nightmarish to behold.
They filled the skies. They blocked out the sun. People stopped going out in the streets when they could avoid it, their faces covered with scarves - and later, even gas masks - just to keep from breathing them in, the air got so thick with them by the end.
But it was the spread of disease that was the real problem of course. Matt didn’t care much for the hospital on a good day but the ER turned into a scene so gruesome it was practically medieval - he was talking gory, flesh-eating shit, with swollen limbs and bursting, pus-filled boils.
Matt had never expected to find himself wishing he could un-see what it looked like - the horror and agony on a human face - when a limb started to swell… and just never stopped. Splitting the skin, the flesh, and muscle underneath right down to the bone from the pressure alone.
The mortality rate was unprecedented.
And now? The little group of what, for all they knew, were the last survivors had barricaded themselves in a looming old stone house upstate. It was actually sort of nice, if all the more chilling for its austere old-fashioned beauty now that it was still and dusty, cavernous and echoingly empty as a tomb - which was looking like the more and more likely outcome as the hours ticked by for them.
The place would have been a real palace back when they had still had things like electricity and running water, but all the twelve of them were interested in now was the shelter, such as it was, against the next wave of Mother Nature’s boiling, belching, crawling buzzing seething fury.
Locusts.
Fucking. Locusts.
Matt had never actually seen a locust before, but now that he had - it was no wonder the bible had used them in history’s first ever recorded horror story. He had always thought of them as just kind of a grasshopper on steroids, but these things were bigger. Crunchier. They were armoured for fuck’s sake. Matt remembered a time he used to be creeped out to the point of being kept up at night as a kid, by a nature program he had seen going into much-too-closeup detail about the life of the praying mantis. The mantis had nothing on these things.
It was almost like it was personal. They demolished whole crops in minutes. Blanketed signal towers and chewed through power lines and cut off communication between their human rivals for the proprietorship of the earth like breathing. If the foul things actually breathed.
People starved. Children cried in the homes their parents were too terrified to leave, and would find nothing to give them, nothing to reassure them or soothe the hunger pains in their little bellies, even if they did.
Locusts. They were death on wings. Inevitable.
And they had finally reached the little group’s old stone safe haven.
Matt could see their hairy little feet on the ends of their stick-like legs against the glass of the windows in the minutes before they covered them thickly enough to block out the light. Their long, repugnant carapaces piling relentlessly up in layer upon layer of living, twitching, crawling Hell, until the ones closest to the glass were crushed; their ruptured thoraxes oozing the clear and milky fluids of their innards down the fancy, intricately patterned leaded glass.
And still they came. You could hear it, the dull, muffled thump… thump-thump of the soft, winged bodies piling themselves on the roof in shovelfuls much heavier and a zillion times more macabre than the thickest snowfall New York had ever seen.
Until the rafters began to groan, and the glass in the windows began to crack. And the group retreated to the cellar, finally. As if it were going to help them.
And now. They waited.
All huddled in the dark, side by side. Karen and Josh clung to each other like always in the corner, and a guy whose name Matt had never actually caught locked the door and pressed his back in useless, undying hope up against it, sliding warily down its surface to sit pointlessly on guard at the top of the stairs.
The flashlight Gale had brought down stuttered and went out, because of course it did. Matt was absolutely not holding his breath.
He could feel John beside him in the dark, tense and ready for what came next, the sheer solidness of his presence doing the things it always did for Matt in times of stress. It was calming, the steely, unconcerned air in his gaze, and unflinching set of his jaw as he stared straight ahead.
Watching.
Matt slid down a little further into the sofa, pushing his toes in under John’s thigh, sandwiching them in between the reassuring heat of thick, heavy muscle and the familiar ugly brown velour of the cushion.
John didn’t turn away from the screen, but he shifted his position, pulling both Matt’s feet out from under him and putting them properly right in his lap instead. A big, warm, sturdy hand settled on top of his knee, the thumb moving a couple, three, four times in knowing, soothing strokes.
“Is this the part after you put on the scary movie, where your date gets all coquettish and damsel-in-distressy, and you get to be all flexing, and heroically protective?” Matt asked, his voice a little husky already from the touch.
Hey, adrenaline amplified all biochemical responses, he was absolutely not so far gone for McClane that a little thumb-over-denim action would make him that easy. …Well not on a normal day. But bugs were seriously creepy okay?
“You picked the movie, kiddo,” McClane drawled lazily, with another one of those soothing-but-also-oddly-inflaming thumb-strokes.
And his voice. Ugh, did adrenaline make your ears react more sensitively to smoky, gravelly, sexy-ass murmurs too? Matt was a hundred percent sure it was a known cause for goosebumps, at least.
“I did, didn’t I?” Matt said, letting a tone of mock surprise, as if he had actually forgotten, slip into his voice. “It was a legitimate question, not a complaint,” he clarified, bringing his fingers up off the couch back to grab hold of the bunched-up sleeve of John’s worn cotton Henley.
He pulled, just a little.
John didn’t move. He just sat there, that rugged, immovable object that he was, and smirked, damn him.
And apparently adrenaline had an effect on that too because a pack of thrills somewhere in the vicinity of the back of Matt’s neck got way-the-hell too excited and went rushing all willy-nilly down his spine, and the goosebumps turned to outright, totally-visible shudders.
The smirk got smirkier and John reached out to take his own hold on Matt’s t-shirt and pulled right back.
Matt went. Willingly. Crawling into his lap, twining his arms around the thick, strong neck, the whole snuggly, needy, damsel-in-distress deal.
John’s hands were on his back then, rubbing warmly up and down and doing nothing for the shuddery, shivery situation going on there. Matt still had no complaints.
“Not gonna get nightmares now, are ya?”
“Ha ha.” Jokes about their age difference. Yeah, that never got old. “Is that your way of asking me to spend the night?” Matt asked, settling his hips over John’s where he was currently straddling him, so that the angle could potentially get a lot more interesting. “Because then, don’t expect you’ll be getting any sleep anyway.”
John smiled. Not just a smirk but an actual - albeit slightly wolfish, and definitely even sexier - smile. He pulled at Matt’s shirt again and Matt didn’t need telling twice.
The adrenaline was definitely doing its job. The kiss felt as amazing as it always did, but…intense. Hotter.
Everywhere John’s hands went, Matt could feel it like trails of heat and sparking fire. Up his back, cupping his nape, even along his arm, where he could feel the start of the strangest tickle… not like the rest of the touches but… prickling… and strangely-
Matt gasped as he pulled abruptly backward out of the kiss.
“AAAAH-HA-HACK!!!”
A roach. A roach roughly the size of something too-damn-friggin’-huge, with shiny gross wing-covers and revolting spiky black legs, and long, curiously questing antennae was sitting. On. His arm.
“Ack, Omigod!” he exclaimed, letting go of McClane to shake his arms around in a manner that he was sure wasn’t a very cool or dignified look for him, but was totally warranted anyway.
The roach fell backward onto the ugly brown couch cushion. And didn’t move.
It would have had a hard time. It was plastic.
Matt gave another all-over shudder anyway. “Jesus Christ, McClane!! Where the fuck did you get that thing!?”
It took a while for John to answer him. He was too busy shaking with silent laughter. Matt could feel it, the mirthful quake and quiver of strong thighs under his own. He wasn’t sure he could blame the warmth it made start spreading out, from the places their legs were touching to some very intriguing regions, on adrenaline though.
His cheeks were kind of warm too. Matt couldn’t help joining in with a sheepish laugh of his own as he felt the relief flood through him, letting his shoulders unbunch and the tight coil in his stomach slowly unwind. But he gave John a good swat on the bicep to rein him in none the less.
McClane gave one last chuckle. “Picked it up on the way home after you texted,” he finally replied.
Matt shook his head, let his hair fall about and cover up his blushing face a little.
The text had been a picture of the admittedly ridiculous movie cover, and the caption ‘let’s totally not watch this. say 8pm?’ and then a link to the Urban Dictionary definition of ‘Netflix and chill’, just in case. Because subtlety had ever been something McClane - or anybody for that matter - had ever accused him of.
Truth be told, T be spilled, or whatever it was the human children were into saying these days, Matt had honestly been pretty pleased with the increasing creativity of his booty-call messaging - though if anybody would have told him it was going to bite him in the ass like this… Well, he thought, as John reached up to smooth his hair back away from his face the way Matt knew he liked to do - he would have much preferred that said biting ended up being much more literal.
Still, there was always the added bonus of the way the fright had his heart pounding and his blood rushing. And if the way McClane was looking at him was any indication, the wideness in his eyes and the flush he could still feel fading in his cheeks weren’t doing any harm either.
“Jesus,” Matt complained, nuzzling needily down into the hand still lingering at the side of his face. “That’s gonna keep me up all fucking night.”
McClane was still looking at him, all amused, and Matt just spent a minute looking back - at the glare of the TV set illuminating the sweeping curve of his bald head, and the teasing way those steely green eyes gleamed even in the flickering glow. Matt’s mouth was oddly dry. He swallowed.
“Nah,” Mclane argued, “that’s my job.”
He shuddered. And then again. Damn, but adrenaline was something.
Matt licked dry lips. “You’re hired. How soon can you start?”
And then there was that smirk, then that wolfish grin. And Karen’s scream from the television behind him made him jump, but it was nothing to the thrill that shot up his spine, right from his tailbone all the way to the crown of his head, as John slipped an arm swiftly up his back and turned, and Matt found himself flipped brusquely but not unhappily onto his back just as quickly and unceremoniously as John’s stupid plastic roach friend.
“How’s right now work for you?”
Stubble scratched at his skin, and his back arched, and a warm barrel-chest pinned him down to the godawful ugly couch cushions. And Karen screamed, high pitched and blood-curdling, again.
Let her.
Right now was working out juuuust fine.
.