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There was a movie on the television, Harry Potter, and the Sorcerer's Stone - it was pretty good, for a movie of its magnitude. John and Eridan could both, separately and quietly, see how it became such a formative thing for literally millions of people. This shit has franchise potential. It's got it all, even if Eridan knew it was not exactly the best wizard fiction in the world - John, on the other hand, just liked the opportunity to watch movies. Young Daniel Radcliffe, before he became cool and auteur-y, graced the screen with his tiny, nerdy presence, glasses and all, and they soaked in the magic.
Eridan's home, built into and from an old lighthouse on a cliff for some god-forsaken reason, had its own little movie theater. This was very useful for entertaining friends, if not for the fact that Eridan had very few friends to entertain, hence his quiet, vibrating excitement when John agreed to come over for a spell during the cold of Winter break, when the stinging ocean waters on the shoreline became even more dangerous - frigid to the point where it burns, leaving scars of salt and stony decay against the cliff's edges and walls.
It wasn't, like, a whole-ass movie theater, to be clear. A big room, with high ceilings, a projector, a big projector screen. Some concession stuff in the back like a hot dog machine and a popcorn machine and an icee machine, neither of which had been stocked in some time, since Eridan's father wasn't much of a movie buff and his brother wasn't around. Fancy leather recliners with in-built cupholders, six in a row, and then in the back, on a vertical extension to the floor so it could see above the other chairs, a similarly branded leather couch which nobody was sitting in. Instead, John and Eridan sat on opposite ends of the row of recliners, slowly peeling fruit in their hands, letting the occasional splatter of juice fall down onto paper towels.
Well, John was peeling fruit - an orange, with all the difficulty of peeling a hard boiled egg, their short cut painted nails finding excessive difficulty getting purchase on the little citrus beastie. Eridan was just fine biting into a whole apple like an animal, quietly crunching away as Hagrid uttered the immortal lines - "Yer a wizard, Harry!", and Eridan felt a part of him cheer inside. Something about hearing those immortal, oft-memed phrases just triggered some dopamine-esque part of their brain to deliver a flood of reward chemicals. Yes! Harry was a wizard, and it was cool and good.
Once freed from its prison, the orange became a delightfully sticky mess of a candylike meal, waxy white parts easily pushed past to access the delicious gems within. It was like uncovering buried treasure in a mound of dirt, truly the golden experience, even as John simply peeled away each wedge one by one and popped them into their mouth instead of biting into it whole. John had oft heard tales of the sort of people who went into showers to eat oranges, and found it really weird, already having internally committed to never being the sort of person who would eat an orange in the shower and brag about it afterwards.
The movie? Well, it was enjoyable. That much was never in question, a fun little nostalgic romp through something amusing with some stakes and some drama and some whimsy. The dark concrete interior of the sparsely furnished in-home movie theater absorbed the light like hungry hippos, leaving the bright imprint of the screen seared into their eyes as they watched, smiling in silence, occasionally whispering to each other about how strange little plot holes were. All in good, clean fun.
After the movie was over, Eridan sighed, yawned quietly, and hopped out of his recliner to get in a good stretch, back sore from sitting around for about an hour and a half while watching kid wizards do cool stuff on screen. They looked at John, grinning with a little hint of friendly mischief. "Wanna watch the second one?" He asked, holding up a DVD from the DVD rack on the wall, as the lights slowly came on.