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Everyone on John's list got the same phone call. Most of got them the same message, but the words weren't really the important part. "Just calling to say hi, hope everything's good with you." He tried to call every couple weeks. It used to be that a month or more could pass, but he's never that busy, anymore.
Al usually picks up and they'll talk about nothing. Zeus usually doesn't anymore, or if he does, he has to yell over the sound of music or video games in the background, but he'll call back on his own time and let John know if there's anything worth knowing. John calls everyone who he feels he owes – who he knows he owes - his life to. That's not a thing you let go. He calls both his kids, tacks on an "I love you," that he's always meant but he's still not sure they believe. He calls Holly, now that they're speaking again.
Matt usually doesn't pick up, or call back, but he talks to Lucy, and sometime Lucy picks up the phone for John, now.
November
"Daddy, please?"
A year earlier, John would have given a lot to hear his daughter asking for his help. Hell, he would have given a lot to just hear his daughter's voice on anything other than a recorded message. He tried to keep that in mind and hold back the snide comments at being asked to babysit Matthew Farrell once again.
"Honey, I just don't think it's a good idea for me to go snooping around in his life. Just a few weeks ago, you said he was fine."
He heard Lucy’s sigh clearly through the phone, and could imagine her rolling her eyes to go along with it. "Exactly, Dad. Matt's okay. He's fine. Did he strike you as the type of guy who is ever just fine?"
John had to admit her point. Even if you subtracted the terrorists and the gunfire, the explosions and the widespread public panic, Matt hadn't seemed like the even-keeled type. John could easily believe that he and Freddie had a lot more in common than the computer stuff.
John had known it wouldn’t matter that he’d tried to warn Lucy off getting involved with Matt. He knew all about the adrenaline rush that went along with a crisis, and he also knew that being a hero wasn’t enough to make a relationship work. As proud as he was of how Lucy and Matt had handled themselves, two heroes probably just made it worse. The best he could do was try to keep them just far enough apart that they could figure out their shit on their own time, instead of getting stuck in John’s cycle of hook-up and break-up.
"Lucy, sweetheart, just tell me. Did you two have a fight? Is that why you need me to check on him?"
Lucy made a sound close enough to ew that John almost felt bad for Matt. "Dad! No, it’s not like that. I’m just worried - he hasn’t picked up the phone in, like, a week, and he’s been so weird any time I've tried to talk to him about going out to dinner with us. Please?"
Most of what John wanted to do was tell her to leave the guy alone, that if she really wasn't interested, that maybe Matt was off licking his wounds. Of course, John also wasn’t an idiot. He’d long since learned that telling a kid not to do something was a sure-fire way to get them to try it. Telling a McClane not to do something was like an iron-clad guarantee that they'd accomplish it. There'd never been any denying that Lucy had that McClane streak in her, and Holly hadn't done it any favors when she'd raised Lucy to be a confident, independent young woman.
"It’s like he’s a robot, Dad. Matthew Farrell, corporate tool." Lucy sighed, and John could picture her huffing out a breath in frustration, ruffling her bangs like she used to do when she got stuck on homework as a kid. "I just, I thought he was different. I still think he is. I’m worried, Daddy."
"You’re gonna need more than just a hunch to get me on the road to Camden, honey," he said, but as the words left his mouth, he reconsidered. He and Matt had been almost close through the Fire Sale clean-up, but he hadn’t seen the kid in person in, shit, four months? Not since his parents had swooped in and had him transferred to some other hospital after his trauma surgery. It wouldn’t be the worst idea to touch base, and then he could reassure Lucy and they could all go back to living their lives. If she asked him again, he'd go, but she probably wouldn't. Matt was probably just being Matt, lost in his computers, and they'd be back to normal by the end of the week.
December
Matt’s new place wasn’t much better than the old one had been, in another block of student apartments too run down for most of the actual students to want to live there anymore. It didn't exactly give the impression that Matt had sold out to The Man, but it maybe explained why Lucy complained that Matt never invited her over to hang out. The slip of paper next to the buzzer for #304 said Farrell, and the lock on the exterior door was broken. John didn’t bother pressing the call button, and just walked up the stairs like he had the last time he’d shown up uninvited.
Coming out of the stairwell into the third floor hallway, John could already hear talking from inside one of the apartments, a voice in half a conversation, barely muffled by the thin walls. When he paused outside the door and raised his hand to knock, the voice rose and fell in a familiar pattern that John easily identified as Matt’s. As expected, the door rattled in its frame when he pounded on it. The sound of two deadbolts and a chain sliding back was more amusing than reassuring, since John was pretty sure he could put his fist through the door, or through the dingy plaster and lath that surrounded it, and barely bruise his knuckles. It definitely wasn't the fortress he’d expected Matt would find for himself.
When Matt opened the door, he swung it wide without first checking who was there. The look on his face was classic exasperation, but his voice was subdued when he spoke again.
"Jesus, Lucy. It’s bad enough that you leave me a zillion messages, you have to send your father to check up on me too?" Matt backed away into his apartment, and if he didn’t quite gesture to invite John in, he didn’t shut the door in his face either. "Yeah," he said, turning away. "Great. That’s not going to happen, and now I’m going to hang up on you."
"You might as well come in," Matt said over his shoulder. "As long as you’re here, you can do your cop thing or your dad thing or whatever." He gestured expansively, if a bit mockingly. "Welcome."
John stepped in far enough to swing the door shut behind him, and scanned the room at Matt's invitation. It didn’t take long: not much space, and even less stuff. There was a duffel bag and a laundry basket on the floor by the window. The closet door was ajar, revealing two empty shelves and mostly-empty hangers below that. The walls were bare and there was a towel draped over the bathroom door.
"I’ve been reliably informed that this is what the Brits would call a grotty bedsit," Matt said, gesturing behind him to the futon that was in fact the only obvious place to sit in the apartment. There was a tray next to it with a laptop, and a bunch of things plugged in to the laptop, but no sign of a desk, a real computer, even a stereo or a television. "I’d offer you something to drink, except that I don’t want to. Actually, I’d like it if you’d just leave, but I bet Lucy’d show up tomorrow if I kicked you out, so you can stay."
"She’s worried," John said, "and she’s not usually that much of a worrier. But you’re probably safe as long as there’s a few thousand miles between you." She hadn't mentioned how worn-down Matt looked, so maybe it was a recent change, or he really had been avoiding her. It wasn't like Lucy to hold back a card like that when she could play it.
"So I’m safe until her break’s over. And you’re trying to stay on her good side."
John nodded. "And I’m trying to stay on her good side. So you talk, and I can report back, and we can all get back to doing things we enjoy."
Matt looked even more deflated at that, but the words were out and John had never seen much use in trying to take things back. "I don’t know why she won’t leave me alone," Matt said. “I’m fine, work’s fine, everything’s fine."
When John held himself still, hands in the pockets of his coat, Matt turned towards what passed for a kitchen. He thumped two glasses to the counter before turning on the tap and pulling a tray of ice cubes from the freezer. "And don’t think I’m not wise to your interrogation routine,” he said. “I’m not going to crack, doesn't matter how long you wait. And there’s nothing to spill out if I did crack."
John smiled at him, as guilelessly as he knew how, and didn’t protest the accusation or Matt's claim.
"Lucy worries too much,” Matt said, more to himself than to John. “If she wants to worry about someone, she should be worrying about her fucking boyfriend." He paused in cracking ice cubes out of the tray to hold up a finger in warning. "And if you say anything to her about how you know she’s still seeing that douchebag, I will disavow all knowledge and tell her you bugged her phone."
Matt put John’s glass of water on top of the high counter dividing the kitchen from the rest of the space and stepped back out into the center of the room. It was hard to imagine him sharing the space with anyone, or doing anything other than working or sleeping. The counter could have been a nice place to sit and talk, if there’d been any chairs to pull up to it, so John settled for leaning back against it, resting some of his weight on his elbows. He took a cautious sip, but the water looked clear enough and it didn’t taste like anything had died in the pipes. Recently.
"It’s not that it’s not nice that she cares, man. I’m just. I’m just a little McClane’d out at the moment. I’m trying to detox, if you will. It’s hard to get back to normal when you’re here, and I’m grateful, I am, but it's just. It's exhausting, being an outlier."
John kept consciously opening up his body language, spread his hands, non-threatening, beseeching. "One new thing, Farrell, that's all I need. Tell me one thing Lucy doesn't already know so that I can convince her that we actually had a conversation and you're okay, and then I'll be out of your space."
Matt sank down to sit on the edge of the futon. It made him look small and definitely put him at a disadvantage, neither of which were things John would've expected from the guy he'd met that summer. "There is no new thing, man. Believe me when I tell you, if I could make it so there's never a new thing, I'd totally do that."
Everything about Matt had screamed "new" before – new ideas, new toys, new jobs – not that that last one had worked out well for anyone.
"How about your family,” John asked. “Going to see your folks for Christmas?"
Matt shrugged. "I'm gonna drive up for the day, yeah. They're flying out to LA for some thing on the 26th, so I'm coming back, but they wanted to see me, so I'm going."
"They giving you trouble?"
Matt shook his head, but the motion was tight, contained like the rest of his gestures, and John missed the flare of Matt's hair. "Nah, I mean they were worried, and angry, and then worried some more, but they're basically cool. Just we don't have a lot in common, so we don't talk much, and then they start thinking I'm accidentally cooperating with terrorists again." Matt chuckled, soft. "So, you know, the usual. I think I want them to stop worrying more than they want me to be okay. I want everyone to stop looking at me and wondering." He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and then looked up to make eye contact again.
"I just don't want to be on any more fucking lists, y'know? I'm not anybody special, and I don’t need attention, like I don't need, no offense, the national hero and his hot daughter checking up on me all the time. I can hold down a 9-to-5 job, and I can be as much of an idiot yuppie hetero WASP as the next guy if I put my mind to it. Nobody special."
John thought about pointing out that "idiot yuppie hetero WASPS" were at least as likely to get shot in Camden as smart, radical, atheist computer geeks. But he had to allow that daily life might still be tougher on the computer geeks unless you were Bill Gates, so the kid probably had a point. Still, he did look tired, and a little jumpy, less caffeine and adrenaline, more just plain nervous in a way he hadn’t been before. His hair was short, not quite military-short, but definitely, well, yuppie-short.
Matt looked down to where he had both hands wrapped around his glass. "I just need a little time to put my life back together, and a little peace and quiet to accomplish it."
The hell of it was, John should have been happy that Matt was committed to the straight-and-narrow, but just like Lucy had said, there was something wrong about it. It was like the wrong when you can tell that a business is a front, but as hard as John looked at Matt, there was no sign that he was telling anything other than the truth, or was anything other than committed to his new life. Even if he was more polite and sedate than John would have believed. Matt set his glass down and stood, wiping his palms on his jeans. "John, thank you for stopping by. It’s nice of Lucy to worry, and I’m grateful that you made the trip, but I’d really just like it if you’d go home now. Please."
"Just don't disappear on us, Farrell." John said, and moved to let himself out of the apartment. Don't fade away, was more like it, but John wasn't in any position to judge who Matt was supposed to be. There were millions of perfectly average people living perfectly average lives, and if that's what Matt really wanted, who was John to say otherwise?
January
John’s appointment to the Joint Terror Task Force had been anything but a sure thing. He certainly hadn’t lobbied for it, and he still questioned whether he wanted it at least once a week. For better or worse, he had been the guy on the force with the most experience with actual flesh-and-blood terrorists. That didn’t make him either qualified or inclined to cooperate with Feds when he didn't literally have a gun to his head, but the JTTF meant that he stayed at the top of that list.
The good news was that the investigations were a hundred dead ends and hoaxes for every credible threat, and even most of the credible threats got shut down before they went anywhere. The bad news was it was a lot of coordinating with tech guys and forensic accountants and other people whose titles John couldn't be bothered to remember. It was a lot of watching people caught in a wide net, people who never seemed to do anything just in case someday they did.
Their current assignment was solidly domestic, at the fringes of a group of malcontents who no one would have given a second thought to thirty years earlier. Tailing this guy was the most depressing thing in the world, and as he sat in the passenger seat, watching the snow and drumming his fingers against his thigh, John couldn’t help but hope for a little excitement. Just a little excitement, the kind where no one gets hurt, like a purse-snatching or maybe a loud drunk pissing on something he shouldn't.
John slouched in his seat, watching Danielson trudge across the street back to his cargo van. The brown paper bag in his hand was neatly folded over at the top, and the only hint to its contents was the fact that Danielson had just left a liquor store. John was struck by the stoop to his shoulders as he curled in on himself against the wind, and an unwelcome feeling that a few years ago, their spots could have been reversed.
Danielson’s features were worn, indeterminately middle-aged for all that his file said he was fifty-three, under a mop of sandy brown hair that looked like he'd been running his hands through it all day. He didn’t seem twitchy so much as resigned and maybe frustrated. John could at least empathize with the feeling, if not the cause.
John watched as he added this bag to the collection in the passenger-side footwell, and nodded as Ramirez prepared to pull out to tail the van to its next stop. None of the businesses had been known fronts, nor had they been on the list of places of employment for Danielson’s suspected associates. Any other time, given the shitty weather and the locations he’d entered, John would bet that the bags contained a take-out dinner and maybe a six-pack, a couple bottles of wine or some whiskey to hold him through the long, lonely weekend. As it was, everything Danielson did and everyone he talked to fell under suspicion. John had to allow that some of the bitter, solitary men on their watch lists were also potential terrorists. But he also had to think, after three unproductive days and no chatter, that maybe Danielson really was just a lonely general contractor with really crappy taste in friends.
Danielson’s next stop was an apartment building, not his own, and he took all the bags inside with him as Ramirez eased their car past and into an alley across the street. When he didn’t return after a few minutes, John told Ramirez to call in their location and recent activity and ask whether they should settle in to wait, while he got out of the car to scan the residents listing by the buzzers. As he rounded the hood of the car, John had a split-second to register a ball of flame behind the glass doors before the blast wave hit, and all thought of empathy with Danielson flew out of his head.
John woke up in the hospital with a head that felt like the Pipe and Drums had set up shop whining and thumping between his ears. Everything hurt. The burning in his throat was the main thing that kept him from yelling at the nurse who was straightening something about his bed. That and the thought that he might puke if he opened his mouth or moved his head too quickly.
He still felt like a building had collapsed on him, and if Sclavino's earlier attempt to debrief him was any indication, that had more or less happened. He still didn’t remember any of what had landed him in the hospital, and if Ramirez was in the same shape, then the brass might not even know what they had been investigating when it all went to shit. On the other hand, they must have figured something out, or he would have had a lot more visitors trying to pull details out of the spaghetti of his memories.
The last thing he remembered before the hospital was getting up to go to work - whatever morning that had been. It was hard to piece anything together, but it had to have been at least a couple days ago, because he'd already woken up once to the sight of Jack and Holly watching him anxiously. Even if they'd gotten on the first flight, which was unlikely, it would have taken time for anyone to notify Holly. Unless he'd dreamed that, but he didn't think he had.
This time, the nurse was his only company, but he thought he could hear Holly out in the hall arguing with someone.
The clock on the wall said 6, and it was dim outside. There was no telling whether it was morning or evening, so there was nothing for it but to ask. John made half an attempt to speak, then thought about trying to clear his throat, before laying a hand on the nurse’s arm and gesturing towards the water pitcher on the cart by his bed with what he hoped was a helpless enough expression. He managed a few sips of water and blinked, and then he was asleep again.
By the time Lucy showed up, with Matt hanging back awkwardly in the doorway, John had been moved to a private room and only had one machine and an IV hooked up to him. He generally took that to be a good sign, even if he still couldn't manage to stay awake for more then 20 minutes at a time.
He'd asked for a mirror, mostly so he could judge how other people were going to react to him. He looked like Frankenstein’s less successful experiments, lots of cuts and scrapes, fine stitches holding together a mass of bruises, but it looked worse than it felt, at least through the painkillers. He'd made a few cautious faces into the mirror and didn't feel like his skin was being peeled off.
He half smiled at the sight of Lucy in the doorway, and nodded to Matt. He gestured to his throat and shook his head a little, mouthed "hello" when she waved and then held out his less-injured arm for a hug when she looked a little like she was going to cry. He whispered "sorry" when she accused him of not being careful.
Matt was still hanging back in the doorway when Lucy had talked herself out and gone to find Holly, so John beckoned him in. He entered the room cautiously, looking as confused by the welcome as John had ever seen him, and staked out a piece of floor on the far side of the bed, well clear of the monitors.
"I was going to tell you that you look like shit," Matt said with a hesitant smile, "but I don’t know what the rules are when only one of us got blown up." John rolled his eyes, and gestured to his face, his chest, the bandage on left bicep, and the cast around his leg lower leg.
"Well, if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger," Matt said, "you’ve got to be one of the strongest people on the planet by now. That’s something." That deserved another eyeroll and a rude gesture to boot, but after, Matt settled into the chair next to the bed, visibly relieved. "You said you were too old for this last time, man, so what’s your excuse now?"
On day four, which John was pretty sure was Sunday, Matt showed up to visit before Holly, Jack and Lucy arrived. He apologized for not bringing breakfast, which mostly meant that John didn't have to pretend that he wanted to eat. "Holly offered to get me a room, or maybe to let me bunk in with Jack, as a thank-you for driving Lucy up, but that was just too... anyway, she's paying to park the car at their hotel, so that's good. I've got a friend from college in Brooklyn Heights, so I crashed with her last night. I've know some folks in Manhattan, too, but they're all assholes, so." John didn't have anything to say to that other than the obvious, so he didn't, and after a long moment Matt picked up the remote and asked, “TV?”
John's least favorite thing abut being in the hospital, other than the fact that it usually meant something had exploded near him, was the tendency people developed to talk over him like he wasn't there, and like he wasn't capable of making decisions. In this case, though, it was nice to close his eyes against the glare from the window and just let the voices float around him. "Obviously we wouldn't have moved him from ICU if he was still in crisis," the doctor said, "and we're hopeful that he'll be stable enough for discharge in a few days, but he'll need extensive support while he heals."
John took that to mean that was going to be laid up for at least a few weeks while various bones knit back together, and then in for a couple of months of practicing how to make a fist and stand on two legs. That was assuming that by the time his legs would support his weight that he could balance through the nausea and the headaches that seemed to have shown up with his concussion. He really was too old for this shit.
Pretty soon it was obvious that the talking over his head, had spread to talking behind his back, in the hall, and at any other opportunity where Holly thought she could organize his life. Every time John woke up, it seemed to be halfway through another conversation, and more of them were between Holly and Matt than he knew what to do with. Neither of them seemed to care how easily sound carried from the hallway into his room.
"It's never easy between us, and I'm. I'm glad he's going to be okay, but this isn't my life anymore. I thought maybe Jack could..." Holly sounded tired, but not as frustrated as John might have expected. "Matt," she said, "you know John, as an adult. It'd mean a lot to us if you'd agree to stay with him for a while. It's not so much that I think he's hiding symptoms, but you know and I both know he's definitely not admitting how bad they are. We'd all feel better if he wasn't staying alone, and it'll be hard to keep him settled if he's got cops stopping by to check on him. They've always been the worst at getting him to take it easy."
There was silence for a bit, before Matt's response. "Don't think I can't see what you're doing here, but okay."
Matt came back in after Holly left and John didn't try to pretend that he hadn't heard every word Holly had said. Matt looked more embarrassed than upset. "Not gonna lie to you, man," he said. "They're totally setting me up to keep an eye on you. I can see where Lucy gets it from."
February
John resisted the urge to check himself out AMA the moment Holly and Jack left for the airport, but it was a close thing. Before he'd leave John unattended, Matt made John promise that he wouldn't try to bolt before Matt returned from dropping Lucy off and picking up the rest of his stuff from home.
John got his care instructions while Matt was away, which got him neatly past mentioning that he lived on the second floor of a building with no elevator, with eight steps outside that were probably slippery, best case scenario, if not outright covered in ice. He nodded at the warnings about recurring dizziness, about being careful with his leg, about being conscientious with his pain medication and about watching for any increase in inflammation or new pain.
Getting into the car outside the hospital became an exercise in Matt trying not to touch him anywhere that hurt. It was pretty much doomed to failure, and John was sweating and fighting not to breathe hard enough to make his ribs hurt by the time he was settled, but it was worth it to be free.
By the time they finally made it to the door to his apartment, even John was willing to admit that it had been a bad idea. He thought more than once about sitting down in the stairwell and scooting up the steps one at a time.
John gritted his teeth and hobbled the few steps from the entryway to the couch, and didn't even try to protest Matt helping him to sit down. Once John was settled, Matt collapsed to the floor and groaned.
“Fuck. If we never do that again, that'd be okay with me.” John thought about his checkup in three days, and thought it'd do more harm than good, getting him back out of the building and into the hospital. “Don't take this the wrong way man, but you are freaking heavy.” John was still dealing with the aftermath of hauling his own weight around, so he didn't feel like cutting Matt much slack on the subject.
“'S good for you,” John said, trying to breathe as evenly as he could.
“Wasn't exactly what I pictured from the John McClane Workout,” Matt said. “I think maybe I'm doing it wrong.”
The apartment didn't look like anyone had been there since John left for work six days earlier, but at least it had been clean enough when he left.
He couldn't possibly be out of milk, or coffee, or eggs, or bread, and he knew for a fact that there were at least thirty cans of soup in the pantry, but there was no chance that John was going to get up to check the fridge and challenge Matt about it. At least for a few days, if Matt said he needed something, John was going to be gracious enough to agree.
Before Matt would leave to walk down to the store, he made John swear that he wouldn't try to stand up, or move, or reach for anything on the far side of the coffee table and fall and kill himself. It was probably the easiest promise John had ever made, until Matt had been gone for 45 minutes and John needed to piss.
It was awkward as all hell having Matt in his apartment, like his everyday life had finally collided with all the catastrophe he'd attracted over the years, and it only got worse. Matt was accommodating, helpful, reasonably understanding when John yelled or got frustrated. The one thing that Matt remained stubborn about was the work, his normalcy. He kept his nose buried in his laptop, plugged in until it was time for the next thing John needed.
John had been pretty effectively cut out of the bombing investigation once he'd become a victim, and it wasn’t so much that he was trying to draw Matt into working with the cops, but when the guy was his only companion for fourteen hours a day, it was only natural that John, in his civilian capacity, would want someone to talk about the case with, and it grated, but John was in no position to push when Matt simply stepped away.
March
Matt sank down to the floor, out of John's sight behind the back of the couch. It wasn't much of a hiding place, but in order to face him John would have had to stand up, or twist around on the couch to face him, and Matt deserved the credit if he'd worked that out as a measure of privacy. It was still cheating, starting this conversation and then literally refusing to face John, but John was willing to give him a pass if it meant they got some things out in the air.
"I've done some stupid shit to impress girls," Matt said, “but this was by far the stupidest. I mean yeah, I thought it was a legit job, and I certainly was promised reasonable payment, but mostly I thought she was hot, and I hoped maybe I'd get to see her, and. Well, you know how that went. So now I'm just not. Fucking anyone. Planning to fuck anyone. Until I'm pretty sure they're not a criminal mastermind, and I'm pretty sure I'm not contributing to the downfall of western civilization."
"So it's been a while," Matt said. "It's pretty hard to prove a negative."
"But I'm really glad I'm here." Matt said. "It was hard, after, you know. Hard getting back to normal. I'm not sure I got back to normal, actually. I'm not. I'm not glad you got hurt, but it was nice, to be needed. I think that's why Lucy left, actually. She knew I was pretty useless on my own. And we made a good team, before, right? So she thought that we might be able to work together, only that work was me not sucking at life and you not permanently fucking up your body by checking out AMA again."
Matt took a deep breath, and then another before he spoke. “Mostly I just wanted to thank you for not being weird about it. I know it didn't seem like I was listening, but I really did hear everything you were trying to say about letting my life get back to normal, on not reading too much into relationships formed in the heat of the moment."
And that was the moment, even though John could rarely be forced to admit it, that he realized he'd been looking at everything from the wrong direction.
April
When John got home, there was a crate - most of a crate - of red wine bottles on the kitchen counter, and his floppy-haired boyfriend was asleep on the couch with the missing bottle wedged in the corner of the cushions next to his head.
John leaned against the table by the door while he pulled his shoes off and tossed them in the general direction of the rack in the closet. It rattled against the wall when he stood, but Matt didn't so much as twitch.
There were two wine glasses on the counter next to the crate, empty, and still slightly dusty like most of the rest of the glasses were. God only knew how it was that they even owned wine glasses, because he certainly didn't remember buying them, but they'd been part of the landscape above the sink for maybe as long as he'd lived there. There was a good chance that Coretti had deposited them there when she and the guys had helped him move.
John walked over to the couch, and resisted the urge to flick Matt on the ear in favor of touching his arm and waiting for him to respond. "Finish a job?"
"Mmm," Matt hummed and rolled over by way of stretching. The amount of space that he could take up on the couch was staggering for such a skinny guy, but John didn't mind sitting on the coffee table to watch him. He'd spent more than enough time on that couch. "More 101-level web development shit, but it's done."
"Any referrals?"
"Yeah, but I'm not sure if I'm going to take them. I think it might be time for me to work on something I'm actually interested in. A challenge."
John laughed. "You mean just living here isn't enough of a challenge for you?"
"A rewarding challenge," Matt said, and ducked his head as John went to flick him on the ear after all. "Besides, I think it's definitely time for the barter economy to go, and I don't think any of those dudes want to pay in cash. I mean it's not like this guy is a vintner or some shit, he's probably just emptying out a wine cellar that he can't afford to keep climate-controlled, so now he's just, like, a wine hoarder. And I'm a little too conditioned to being able to spend as I earn. It works when I make a couple thousand dollars and buy some new sweet new speakers. Not so much when I drink away my sorrows with the profits. The literal... shit, is that even legal, paying someone in booze? I'm not going to have ATF breaking down the door, am I?
"I'll protect you," John said. "And we've got a pretty solid door."