Die Hard fic for Severina: Assumptions
This fic is offered up as a prize to Severina, who joined me in a word war for the month of March and despite a brand new case of 'lightning fingers' (carpal tunnel) and a bunch of other obstacles, KICKED MAH BUTT. She is a warrior - and truly the best, most supportive, fun fandomwife a gal could ask for. These were her prompts:
-Amusement park
-Stockade
-Spaghetti
-Dentist
I hope you enjoy it, sev! <3
Title: Assumptions
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Characters/Pairing: John/Matt
Rating: T
Summary:
“Hey.” A set of familiar long fingers, warm and jittery around his own. “How you feeling?”
“…Did she say ‘husband’?”
Assumptions
by persnickett
He recognizes the groggy, weighted pull of being sedated well before he remembers where he is.
There’s the misty, eye-catching way the square of light from the small, open window glows on the institutional-grey carpet. How far away his feet feel, all the way down at the bottom of the reclining chair he’s laid out in.
Not a hospital bed, that’s new.
John wiggles an ankle, makes little fists with his toes inside his shoes. He turns his head toward the sound that woke him, and a strange dull pain jabs through the corner of his jaw.
Oh, right. The damn dentist.
It was voices, that had woken him up. Matt’s voice.
And his name. “Mr. McClane,” in some woman’s voice. The nurse, must be.
“…nd is here,” he hears her say.
But Matt is already there. A flurry of motion and soft curses as he juggles the usual clusterfuck of shit he’s always carrying, plus a bunch of stuff that appears to be John’s.
Coffee cup down, phone into the laptop bag, laptop bag strap off over the head.
A riot of that soft, silly brown hair all mussed now, the edges and little flyaways lit up in a halo of brown to reddish to sun-blind white, as Matt comes more or less into focus in front of him, blocking out the little square of grey carpet light. John goes to reach out and smooth it down properly, but he doesn’t think his hand even moves.
“Hey.” A set of familiar long fingers, warm and jittery around his own. “How you feeling?”
“…Did she say ‘husband’?”
The warm, mobile fingers go uncharacteristically still.
“I. Maybe? …Did she? I wasn’t really li- okay okay,” Matt blabbers himself to a halt. Apparently even woozy and half-lidded, John’s try-it-on-somebody-who-isn’t-a-cop glare still works just fine. “So she. Made some assumptions and I sort of. Didn’t correct her?”
“…Assumptions.” Okay so the no-bullshit-I’m-a-cop voice doesn’t stand up quite as well when it comes out around a cheek full of cotton packing and pretty impressively slurred. Good to know.
Matt’s never been what you’d call a hold-out when it comes to shooting his mouth off, though. So a lot of words are suddenly tumbling out of there before John could have really said much more, anyhow.
“I thought they wouldn’t let me in if- you know, the whole ‘family only’-”
A whole lot of words. And John is pretty sure he closed his eyes for more than a blink for a second there, but Matt is still rattling away.
“And before you say that’s fraud,” he’s babbling, more or less on autopilot now, “or I dunno, medical larceny, or some form of illegal piracy…”
“Matt.” John says it gingerly as he can around his mouthful of gauze.
“In my defense you-”
“Matt!” It’s a little louder, but it makes the cotton pack in his cheek hit him with a solid jab to the jaw, and the room do a not-so-great swooping thing.
Jesus, why didn’t somebody tell him a root canal was basically just going to be one hell of a hangover without the party? The little groan that slips out and the way he lets his eyes close again - just for a regular blink this time, or thereabouts - seem to grab Matt’s attention a lot faster than the barking does, though.
His fingers tighten a little where they still have not let go of John’s, and he leans forward into the shaft of window-light so he’s all lit up and glowing like the edges of him are on fire again.
“She asked me if I wanted to come in and ‘hold my husband’s hand’,” he admits, quietly. “While they were putting you under? Remember?”
John just nods this time. Carefully.
It’s not a lie, not exactly. He doesn’t remember anybody asking them anything, per se. He remembers the setup of gleaming silver instruments on a sterile-looking tray by the doorway. One of which was easily recognizable as the infamous dentistry drill, and another that he was sure he could find conclusive proof was just your average garden variety set of motherfucking pliers. John could swear he had the same pair in his tool box at home.
He remembers x-rays on the wall, and the strange, constantly hissing machine behind the chair they sat him down in, and he remembers Matt.
Matt, sitting next to him and smiling completely un-reassuringly as they twiddled the dials and fitted the mask over his nose and mouth. Matt, with both his hands wrapped around one of John’s just as warmly as they are now, but tighter. Counting down backwards from ten with him, at the nurse’s instruction.
He remembers getting down to about four.
“If you could see yourself, man. Big burly hunk of copcake. Brooklyn’s five time Cop of The Year, all stoic and puff-chested,” Matt said, throwing his chest out theatrically, but without taking his hands off of John’s yet, to wave them around like he usually did when he got all amped up like this. “All steely eyed, and that bald-eagle head held high. Like you were being led away to the stockades to face the firing squad, instead of the dentist’s chair…”
Matt who, no matter how much his mouth is always moving, also always has those big brown eyes open. Who, right from the moment he sat in the back of an ambulance as goofed up on morphine as John is on the receding effects of the diazepam right now - and pretending he was going to ask out Lucy, for Chrissakes, just to get a reaction - has always been able to see right through him.
“I just. Couldn’t handle watching you be scared like that.”
And always has the balls to call him on it, too.
“You seem… pretty okay with it?”
“With fraud?” John blames it on the drugs, the way it takes him a second to take in how Matt’s voice just turned up at the end, that way it does when the question coming out of his mouth isn’t really the one he’s asking. “Oh, with the…”
John waves his free hand through the air, like he could pluck the word he needs out of it. It actually obeys him by moving this time. So that’s progress.
“Assumption.” Matt finishes.
“Some reason I wouldn’t be?”
Matt’s eyes widen and his grip on John’s hand goes slack and, even through the diazepam haze, John can see it. The exact second the walls go up.
“Yeah, no. I mean I wasn’t-I didn’t mean-"
This has been happening. John’s been meaning to fix it, but so far it’s been easier said than done.
“Question is,” he says gruffly into the gauze pack, before he loses Matt again to the self doubt and the babbling. Before he loses his moment. Again. “Are you?”
“Me?” Matt laughs without smiling, leaning back and out of the sunlight. Back behind those walls.
“Sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean. …I’m honestly just grateful she didn’t go with ‘kid’. Y’know?” Matt runs a hand through that soft, halo-lit mop. The one that John knows has seen enough additions of the odd shot of silver here and there the past couple years, that nobody has made that mistake in quite some time.
But he’s not about to point it out. Not right now.
“Grab my jacket.”
“What?”
“My jacket, behind you,” John says. Gives another hand wave that doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to. “You put it down on the - “
“Hey listen, you’re not- we’re not leaving! You’re not ready t- are you cold?” Matt asks, in between twisting around to look back over his left shoulder, then his right. Anxiety mixing in now with whatever it is in his tone that makes it sound blunt and distanced in that way that always makes John’s bones itch. And still seeming to miss the leather bomber he put down on the table next to himself only minutes ago. …Or it felt like minutes. “I’m pretty sure they’ll bring us a couple more blankets if-”
“MATT would you just grab the damn jacket??” The gauze pack lands a solid left hook right where it counts, and John has to shut his eyes.
“Alright alright I’m grabbing. This is me grabbing, alright? Witness the grabbing action of my grabbing hands as I g-”
“Will you shut up and look in the pocket already?” John says - a little softer, letting the gauze-pack win this time. He can start to taste the blood just a little now. Matt is looking at him with concern when John opens his eyes again, but he starts groping through the pockets of the softly worn in leather dutifully. “Jeeeesus, kid. Trying to have a romantic moment with you is like…”
“Romantic?” Matt repeats, his mouth actually quirking up with a little touch of humour now at the side. Nose wrinkling up in that adorable confusion John likes a hell of a lot better than that dead-sounding distanced thing, and obviously chalking this moment being anything like ‘romantic’ in John’s estimation up to the drugs.
Then he finds it.
“Whoa wait, WHOA.”
“Open it,” John has to say, when Matt is holding the little black box between shaky-looking fingers. Held out a little in front of himself like he’s afraid a second-Gruber-cousin-twice-removed-on-Simon’s-mother’s-side snuck it in there somehow when the nurses were all distracted and it might be about to explode.
Then there it is. The box is open, cat officially out of the bag. John’s tiny little wrecking ball swinging in, in a matching set of plain platinum bands catching the same fire as Matt’s backlit halo as he leans forward again. Eyes wider than John has seen them in years, and lit up with more than the shaft of slanting light from the window.
Mouth, for once, pressed tightly, silently closed. And those walls? Looking pretty damn crumbly.
John’s heart does a slow, anesthetized flip.
“Wow,” Matt says, eventually. Or, whispers, really. “How long have you been carrying these around?”
“Remember the amusement park?”
“You mean the one we went to all the way back in August?? The one where I warned you that rollercoasters and frail, nerdy types with inner ear issues definitely do not mix, and you said - and I quote, ‘the Cyclone isn’t just a rollercoaster, it’s a time honoured tradition, Matthew’. And said frail, nerdy type ended up puking up the night before’s spaghetti onto your shoe? And then I spent the entire ride home with my head out the window, trying not to chuck up whatever else was left of it from the smell filling up the whole damn car?” Matt is staring down at the rings in his hand with an incredulous but very telltale glisten in his eye, now. The corner of his mouth has got that little tilt of humour back again too. “Not at all, why?”
“So you remember the spaghetti too then.”
“Oh God.” John watches the backward tumble of that beloved mop of sunlit hair, the stretch of his neck as Matt throws his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “You mean it wasn’t romantic enough when I spilled an entire glass of red wine on most of the white linen table cloth and all of the crotch of your best pair of pants?” Matt tips his chin back down to finally let John meet his eyes. There is definitely a glitter there. “You were still purple when I got you out of them that night.”
“You said I tasted like the floor of the mosh pit at a Kenny G. concert.”
“And you didn’t ask me then!?!” It might be imagination but the laughter under Matt’s voice is starting to sound maybe a little choked. His head shakes wryly. “What’s a guy gotta do?”
“I’m askin’ now ain’t I?”
John’s voice doesn’t come out much better if he’s honest, but then he is recovering from dental surgery.
Matt’s eyebrows lift. “Are you?”
Fair enough.
“Matt. Will you…”
“No,” Matt says, vehemently. Eyes still wide and gleaming, and hair falling all about in front of them as he firmly shakes his head.
John blinks the fog out of his eyes. He opens his mouth, but his voice fails. Luckily, Matt is blabbering on again before his heart can join it.
“I mean obviously yes, yes I will. And yeah, I mean, Jesus, I’m going to say yes, but no. No you most certainly are not asking. You can’t ask me now, you’re intoxicated! I’m - pretty sure that’s illegal.”
John taps an impatient finger on the chair’s arm that comes out a lot more like a feeble, wiggly twitch. At least his face seems to be working fine because when he lowers an eyebrow Matt catches on to hush up and start looking sheepish just as quick as he ever does.
“…Or maybe that’s only for signing documents and getting tattoos...”
“Uh huh.”
Matt looks back down at the afternoon light blazing off the pair of rings in his hand. It’s a minute before he looks up again.
“So will ya?”
“I-I will,” Matt vows, leaning in to seal it with a kiss.
Then he stops himself, with a quick, apprehensive look at the swollen, cotton-stuffed side of John’s mouth and what is starting to feel like might be a little smudge of dried blood right in the corner of it. He tips up to put a gentle peck on John’s forehead instead.
“But I will also, make you ask again in the morning.”
John does ask him in the morning. And the morning after that. He asks him in the shower; low and growling in his ear the way Matt likes, as his hands slide the lather over those smooth, familiar angles and lithe little curves. And he asks again at night, when he has Matt panting and desperate and begging under him.
And, true to his word, Matthew’s answer is always a yes. All one hundred and thirty-six of them.
It isn’t until the day John asks him in front of the courthouse judge and all entire eight of their closest family and friends, that Matt pretends to need to think about it first.
“Unless, anybody wants to make an objection? Kowalski?” Matt asks, turning to address Connie with a sweeping gesture over his scrawny torso decked out in the only blazer Matt owns and a skinny black tie. “Last chance, Hot-stuff. Two little words and all this gets locked down for a lifetime.”
“And let you cancel that two week honeymoon to Liechtenstein?” Joe asks, nonplussed, from beside her.
“Sorry, Sweet-cheeks,” Connie shakes her head, curls bouncing. “Looks like you’re stuck with him.”
“You know how long we’ve been waiting for a vacation from this goon?” Joe finishes.
“I do,” Matt answers Joe, before turning back to John and squeezing both his hands giddily.
“…And I do,” he says finally, adding a muttered “sorry,” out of the side of his mouth at the judge, whose impatient glower quite clearly says she has thirteen more of these things to get through before five o’clock and she isn’t about to miss Happy Hour at O’Hannigans for the likes of Matt.
“I do too,” John answers.
And every year after that, John asks Matt again.
At the top of the Luna Park Wonder Wheel, which is a lot more inner-ear-friendly than the Cyclone (and provides much more of the illusion of privacy - in case Matt decides to get inappropriately handsy with his answer. Which he always does).
They never have gone back to Fratelli’s, though. And Matt never quite shows the same enthusiasm he used to, for spaghetti.
Which is fine by John, who learned well enough his first time around that having somebody to cook for at home is an honour and a privilege that never needs to get boring. And if the day finally comes when it does, it’s more than a fair price to pay for the video game controllers cluttering up the coffee table and the second razor sitting next to his in the shower, and never having to settle in between cold sheets at night.
Besides, he thinks, as he pulls his latest bubbling, golden-brown masterpiece out of the oven just in time for Matt to walk through the door - coffee cup in hand, phone into the laptop bag, laptop bag strap off over the head and that riot of mussed, soft, silly hair that is a little more salt-and-pepper than brown these days if you look closely, just around the temples - they both really always preferred lasagne anyway.
-Amusement park
-Stockade
-Spaghetti
-Dentist
I hope you enjoy it, sev! <3
Title: Assumptions
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Characters/Pairing: John/Matt
Rating: T
Summary:
“Hey.” A set of familiar long fingers, warm and jittery around his own. “How you feeling?”
“…Did she say ‘husband’?”
Assumptions
by persnickett
He recognizes the groggy, weighted pull of being sedated well before he remembers where he is.
There’s the misty, eye-catching way the square of light from the small, open window glows on the institutional-grey carpet. How far away his feet feel, all the way down at the bottom of the reclining chair he’s laid out in.
Not a hospital bed, that’s new.
John wiggles an ankle, makes little fists with his toes inside his shoes. He turns his head toward the sound that woke him, and a strange dull pain jabs through the corner of his jaw.
Oh, right. The damn dentist.
It was voices, that had woken him up. Matt’s voice.
And his name. “Mr. McClane,” in some woman’s voice. The nurse, must be.
“…nd is here,” he hears her say.
But Matt is already there. A flurry of motion and soft curses as he juggles the usual clusterfuck of shit he’s always carrying, plus a bunch of stuff that appears to be John’s.
Coffee cup down, phone into the laptop bag, laptop bag strap off over the head.
A riot of that soft, silly brown hair all mussed now, the edges and little flyaways lit up in a halo of brown to reddish to sun-blind white, as Matt comes more or less into focus in front of him, blocking out the little square of grey carpet light. John goes to reach out and smooth it down properly, but he doesn’t think his hand even moves.
“Hey.” A set of familiar long fingers, warm and jittery around his own. “How you feeling?”
“…Did she say ‘husband’?”
The warm, mobile fingers go uncharacteristically still.
“I. Maybe? …Did she? I wasn’t really li- okay okay,” Matt blabbers himself to a halt. Apparently even woozy and half-lidded, John’s try-it-on-somebody-who-isn’t-a-cop glare still works just fine. “So she. Made some assumptions and I sort of. Didn’t correct her?”
“…Assumptions.” Okay so the no-bullshit-I’m-a-cop voice doesn’t stand up quite as well when it comes out around a cheek full of cotton packing and pretty impressively slurred. Good to know.
Matt’s never been what you’d call a hold-out when it comes to shooting his mouth off, though. So a lot of words are suddenly tumbling out of there before John could have really said much more, anyhow.
“I thought they wouldn’t let me in if- you know, the whole ‘family only’-”
A whole lot of words. And John is pretty sure he closed his eyes for more than a blink for a second there, but Matt is still rattling away.
“And before you say that’s fraud,” he’s babbling, more or less on autopilot now, “or I dunno, medical larceny, or some form of illegal piracy…”
“Matt.” John says it gingerly as he can around his mouthful of gauze.
“In my defense you-”
“Matt!” It’s a little louder, but it makes the cotton pack in his cheek hit him with a solid jab to the jaw, and the room do a not-so-great swooping thing.
Jesus, why didn’t somebody tell him a root canal was basically just going to be one hell of a hangover without the party? The little groan that slips out and the way he lets his eyes close again - just for a regular blink this time, or thereabouts - seem to grab Matt’s attention a lot faster than the barking does, though.
His fingers tighten a little where they still have not let go of John’s, and he leans forward into the shaft of window-light so he’s all lit up and glowing like the edges of him are on fire again.
“She asked me if I wanted to come in and ‘hold my husband’s hand’,” he admits, quietly. “While they were putting you under? Remember?”
John just nods this time. Carefully.
It’s not a lie, not exactly. He doesn’t remember anybody asking them anything, per se. He remembers the setup of gleaming silver instruments on a sterile-looking tray by the doorway. One of which was easily recognizable as the infamous dentistry drill, and another that he was sure he could find conclusive proof was just your average garden variety set of motherfucking pliers. John could swear he had the same pair in his tool box at home.
He remembers x-rays on the wall, and the strange, constantly hissing machine behind the chair they sat him down in, and he remembers Matt.
Matt, sitting next to him and smiling completely un-reassuringly as they twiddled the dials and fitted the mask over his nose and mouth. Matt, with both his hands wrapped around one of John’s just as warmly as they are now, but tighter. Counting down backwards from ten with him, at the nurse’s instruction.
He remembers getting down to about four.
“If you could see yourself, man. Big burly hunk of copcake. Brooklyn’s five time Cop of The Year, all stoic and puff-chested,” Matt said, throwing his chest out theatrically, but without taking his hands off of John’s yet, to wave them around like he usually did when he got all amped up like this. “All steely eyed, and that bald-eagle head held high. Like you were being led away to the stockades to face the firing squad, instead of the dentist’s chair…”
Matt who, no matter how much his mouth is always moving, also always has those big brown eyes open. Who, right from the moment he sat in the back of an ambulance as goofed up on morphine as John is on the receding effects of the diazepam right now - and pretending he was going to ask out Lucy, for Chrissakes, just to get a reaction - has always been able to see right through him.
“I just. Couldn’t handle watching you be scared like that.”
And always has the balls to call him on it, too.
“You seem… pretty okay with it?”
“With fraud?” John blames it on the drugs, the way it takes him a second to take in how Matt’s voice just turned up at the end, that way it does when the question coming out of his mouth isn’t really the one he’s asking. “Oh, with the…”
John waves his free hand through the air, like he could pluck the word he needs out of it. It actually obeys him by moving this time. So that’s progress.
“Assumption.” Matt finishes.
“Some reason I wouldn’t be?”
Matt’s eyes widen and his grip on John’s hand goes slack and, even through the diazepam haze, John can see it. The exact second the walls go up.
“Yeah, no. I mean I wasn’t-I didn’t mean-"
This has been happening. John’s been meaning to fix it, but so far it’s been easier said than done.
“Question is,” he says gruffly into the gauze pack, before he loses Matt again to the self doubt and the babbling. Before he loses his moment. Again. “Are you?”
“Me?” Matt laughs without smiling, leaning back and out of the sunlight. Back behind those walls.
“Sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean. …I’m honestly just grateful she didn’t go with ‘kid’. Y’know?” Matt runs a hand through that soft, halo-lit mop. The one that John knows has seen enough additions of the odd shot of silver here and there the past couple years, that nobody has made that mistake in quite some time.
But he’s not about to point it out. Not right now.
“Grab my jacket.”
“What?”
“My jacket, behind you,” John says. Gives another hand wave that doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to. “You put it down on the - “
“Hey listen, you’re not- we’re not leaving! You’re not ready t- are you cold?” Matt asks, in between twisting around to look back over his left shoulder, then his right. Anxiety mixing in now with whatever it is in his tone that makes it sound blunt and distanced in that way that always makes John’s bones itch. And still seeming to miss the leather bomber he put down on the table next to himself only minutes ago. …Or it felt like minutes. “I’m pretty sure they’ll bring us a couple more blankets if-”
“MATT would you just grab the damn jacket??” The gauze pack lands a solid left hook right where it counts, and John has to shut his eyes.
“Alright alright I’m grabbing. This is me grabbing, alright? Witness the grabbing action of my grabbing hands as I g-”
“Will you shut up and look in the pocket already?” John says - a little softer, letting the gauze-pack win this time. He can start to taste the blood just a little now. Matt is looking at him with concern when John opens his eyes again, but he starts groping through the pockets of the softly worn in leather dutifully. “Jeeeesus, kid. Trying to have a romantic moment with you is like…”
“Romantic?” Matt repeats, his mouth actually quirking up with a little touch of humour now at the side. Nose wrinkling up in that adorable confusion John likes a hell of a lot better than that dead-sounding distanced thing, and obviously chalking this moment being anything like ‘romantic’ in John’s estimation up to the drugs.
Then he finds it.
“Whoa wait, WHOA.”
“Open it,” John has to say, when Matt is holding the little black box between shaky-looking fingers. Held out a little in front of himself like he’s afraid a second-Gruber-cousin-twice-removed-on-Simon’s-mother’s-side snuck it in there somehow when the nurses were all distracted and it might be about to explode.
Then there it is. The box is open, cat officially out of the bag. John’s tiny little wrecking ball swinging in, in a matching set of plain platinum bands catching the same fire as Matt’s backlit halo as he leans forward again. Eyes wider than John has seen them in years, and lit up with more than the shaft of slanting light from the window.
Mouth, for once, pressed tightly, silently closed. And those walls? Looking pretty damn crumbly.
John’s heart does a slow, anesthetized flip.
“Wow,” Matt says, eventually. Or, whispers, really. “How long have you been carrying these around?”
“Remember the amusement park?”
“You mean the one we went to all the way back in August?? The one where I warned you that rollercoasters and frail, nerdy types with inner ear issues definitely do not mix, and you said - and I quote, ‘the Cyclone isn’t just a rollercoaster, it’s a time honoured tradition, Matthew’. And said frail, nerdy type ended up puking up the night before’s spaghetti onto your shoe? And then I spent the entire ride home with my head out the window, trying not to chuck up whatever else was left of it from the smell filling up the whole damn car?” Matt is staring down at the rings in his hand with an incredulous but very telltale glisten in his eye, now. The corner of his mouth has got that little tilt of humour back again too. “Not at all, why?”
“So you remember the spaghetti too then.”
“Oh God.” John watches the backward tumble of that beloved mop of sunlit hair, the stretch of his neck as Matt throws his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “You mean it wasn’t romantic enough when I spilled an entire glass of red wine on most of the white linen table cloth and all of the crotch of your best pair of pants?” Matt tips his chin back down to finally let John meet his eyes. There is definitely a glitter there. “You were still purple when I got you out of them that night.”
“You said I tasted like the floor of the mosh pit at a Kenny G. concert.”
“And you didn’t ask me then!?!” It might be imagination but the laughter under Matt’s voice is starting to sound maybe a little choked. His head shakes wryly. “What’s a guy gotta do?”
“I’m askin’ now ain’t I?”
John’s voice doesn’t come out much better if he’s honest, but then he is recovering from dental surgery.
Matt’s eyebrows lift. “Are you?”
Fair enough.
“Matt. Will you…”
“No,” Matt says, vehemently. Eyes still wide and gleaming, and hair falling all about in front of them as he firmly shakes his head.
John blinks the fog out of his eyes. He opens his mouth, but his voice fails. Luckily, Matt is blabbering on again before his heart can join it.
“I mean obviously yes, yes I will. And yeah, I mean, Jesus, I’m going to say yes, but no. No you most certainly are not asking. You can’t ask me now, you’re intoxicated! I’m - pretty sure that’s illegal.”
John taps an impatient finger on the chair’s arm that comes out a lot more like a feeble, wiggly twitch. At least his face seems to be working fine because when he lowers an eyebrow Matt catches on to hush up and start looking sheepish just as quick as he ever does.
“…Or maybe that’s only for signing documents and getting tattoos...”
“Uh huh.”
Matt looks back down at the afternoon light blazing off the pair of rings in his hand. It’s a minute before he looks up again.
“So will ya?”
“I-I will,” Matt vows, leaning in to seal it with a kiss.
Then he stops himself, with a quick, apprehensive look at the swollen, cotton-stuffed side of John’s mouth and what is starting to feel like might be a little smudge of dried blood right in the corner of it. He tips up to put a gentle peck on John’s forehead instead.
“But I will also, make you ask again in the morning.”
John does ask him in the morning. And the morning after that. He asks him in the shower; low and growling in his ear the way Matt likes, as his hands slide the lather over those smooth, familiar angles and lithe little curves. And he asks again at night, when he has Matt panting and desperate and begging under him.
And, true to his word, Matthew’s answer is always a yes. All one hundred and thirty-six of them.
It isn’t until the day John asks him in front of the courthouse judge and all entire eight of their closest family and friends, that Matt pretends to need to think about it first.
“Unless, anybody wants to make an objection? Kowalski?” Matt asks, turning to address Connie with a sweeping gesture over his scrawny torso decked out in the only blazer Matt owns and a skinny black tie. “Last chance, Hot-stuff. Two little words and all this gets locked down for a lifetime.”
“And let you cancel that two week honeymoon to Liechtenstein?” Joe asks, nonplussed, from beside her.
“Sorry, Sweet-cheeks,” Connie shakes her head, curls bouncing. “Looks like you’re stuck with him.”
“You know how long we’ve been waiting for a vacation from this goon?” Joe finishes.
“I do,” Matt answers Joe, before turning back to John and squeezing both his hands giddily.
“…And I do,” he says finally, adding a muttered “sorry,” out of the side of his mouth at the judge, whose impatient glower quite clearly says she has thirteen more of these things to get through before five o’clock and she isn’t about to miss Happy Hour at O’Hannigans for the likes of Matt.
“I do too,” John answers.
And every year after that, John asks Matt again.
At the top of the Luna Park Wonder Wheel, which is a lot more inner-ear-friendly than the Cyclone (and provides much more of the illusion of privacy - in case Matt decides to get inappropriately handsy with his answer. Which he always does).
They never have gone back to Fratelli’s, though. And Matt never quite shows the same enthusiasm he used to, for spaghetti.
Which is fine by John, who learned well enough his first time around that having somebody to cook for at home is an honour and a privilege that never needs to get boring. And if the day finally comes when it does, it’s more than a fair price to pay for the video game controllers cluttering up the coffee table and the second razor sitting next to his in the shower, and never having to settle in between cold sheets at night.
Besides, he thinks, as he pulls his latest bubbling, golden-brown masterpiece out of the oven just in time for Matt to walk through the door - coffee cup in hand, phone into the laptop bag, laptop bag strap off over the head and that riot of mussed, soft, silly hair that is a little more salt-and-pepper than brown these days if you look closely, just around the temples - they both really always preferred lasagne anyway.