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There were three stages to their weekly movie nights.
Stage one involved gorging themselves on food. They were growing teenage boys, after all. They needed as much food in their bodies as they could get, blatantly ignoring the fact that pizza and popcorn and soft drinks and candy really weren’t the best kind of food for a pair of skilled volleyballers. They could make up for it at their Saturday training.
Every Friday night found Hanamaki staying at Matsukawa’s house and them both settled in the middle blocker’s room sat at the low table he kept in there. The room was a traditional style, so there was no bed frame to lean against, but it meant there was plenty of room to sprawl out. As always, they’d laid multiple futons side by side and blankets on top of them all, creating a spacious , comfortable mattress to accommodate them.
But the blanket nest is ignored, for now, in favour of Hanamaki attempting to fit an entire large pizza in his mouth without chewing while Matsukawa shoves his cheese-in-hamburg into his, both attempting to do so without laughing at the comedy movie they had chosen least they choke on their good food.
Stage two was the longest, commencing once all the food had disappeared.
It was hours of skipping back and forth in muted scenes and adding their own dubs, or retelling the stories themselves. It was sending stupid snapchats to Oikawa and Iwaizumi, harassing the second years with vague text messages, and prank calling Kindaichi and Kunimi. It was the time where all of their great jokes and pranks were discovered and planned. It was their most open time, lost to the way fatigue and comfort stole away their inhibitions and left them even more comfortable with each other than they already were.
Stage three was deep into the morning hours in the glow of a muted horror movie.
(In reality, it was Matsukawa’s time.)
Stretched out on their nest of futons and blankets and pillows, the movie was long forgotten, now simply repeating itself, only left on to provide a low enough amount of light that the sleeping body wouldn’t be disturbed. In times like this, Matsukawa would hate for it to be disturbed. Years ago, now, he had noticed something in the gentle shape of Hanamaki’s face and the curve of his cheek to his mouth, and the way the muscles relaxed whenever the wing spiker was lost in a peaceful sleep. A closet romantic, Matsukawa could wax poetic until the dawn about the attractiveness of, well, Hanamaki’s everything, but sometimes there isn’t enough words in his vocabulary that will do him justice.
In fact, in times like this, the only woken soul in the house, and perhaps even the neighbourhood, there’s only three short words that dance on the middle blocker’s tongue, begging to be let out. And, every time, he swallows them again.
Tonight was no different. Swallowing was always difficult, like trying to dry-swallow a pill (and an analogy like that carried far too many connotations, because medicine was good for you (you can’t tell him) but he hated to take it (just spit it out)). Eventually, though, it listened. The lump went away and he could breathe again and he moved so he wouldn’t end up trapped.
Matuskawa turned the movie off and made some semblance of an attempt at cleaning up their trash (but it’s always a farce, an attempt to buy time before he has to go to bed) and a trip to the bathroom to relieve himself and brush his teeth was his final chance. A splash of cold water on his face cleared his head entirely, kept the words and feelings locked tight in his chest, and then he finally returned to his room. He was guided through that darkness by the notification light on his phone blinking. He didn’t bother to check it. It was Oikawa, with some stupid snap, or Iwaizumi asking him if he did it.
Either way, the middle blocker wanted nothing to do with it.
Instead, he simply checked his alarm was on and laid his phone screen-down on the floor at the head of the blanket nest. He settled down into the plushness of the futons and the comforting warmth of the blankets, and he only had a few seconds to get comfortable before there was a weight and an extra body of warmth.
The way his chest clenched around his heart dragged a sad smile onto Matsukawa’s lips. It had never been strange for them both to be like this. Theirs had always been a very physical friendship, with hugs and leaning against each other or draping over one another (and even gentle, platonic kisses in the darker moments of their lives when they needed someone there for them), but that’s all it had ever been.
Platonic.
Their entire friendship from top to bottom was platonic and Matsukawa would take what he could get.
So he ignored the feelings bubbling in his chest again. Ignored the memories of Hanamaki’s laughter from a particularly stupid joke he had given earlier that even, and the smile he’d worn through one of the middle blocker’s. Ignored the image on the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes of catching Hanamaki talking with a girl from class four, and the phone call that had followed that night, the wing spiker desperate for advice on how to act for a first date. Ignored the lingering touch on his back he could feel, burning hot from Iwaizumi’s pity, and the apologetic looks Oikawa had been shooting him ever since.
He ignored everything that wasn’t himself and Hanamaki and this dark room, and slid his arms around his friend to draw him closer to his chest. He allowed himself one kiss, a pass of lips to Hanamaki’s temple, before burying his face into the nearest pillow to catch the tears prickling at half-lidded eyes.