Chapter Text
"Mat. Mat." There was a soft insistence to Brian's voice, like he was going against his own instinct to wake Mat up, but he had a good reason. Mat hadn't been asleep, truly, but he'd been dozing on and off for the better part of an hour, and pulling himself out of the hazy depths of half-sleep was especially difficult considering how warm he was, and how lulling the quiet warble of the TV had been.
He stretched, cat-like, under the heavy weight of the blankets they'd piled on themselves, emptying closets and leaving their beds bare to make an enormous nest on the couch, and struggled to extricate himself enough to sit up. At some point, he had tipped over into an awkward position against the arm of the couch and stayed there, trapped by blankets, and his muscles were protesting now.
"Yeah?" he replied hoarsely, the word more yawn than anything. Brian hadn't moved at all in the hours since they'd settled in to intermittently watch late night television and the winter storm outside, visible through the large living room windows and nearly as novel as any show. They hadn't had snow like this in years, like Jersey had purposefully given them several mild winters in a row to save up for a big blowout.
He turned to check the progress since he'd dozed off, and made a shocked noise when he saw that the snow was piled almost halfway up the living room windows now. It created the illusion that their house was sinking below the earth, and they were already a good two feet under the ground level, by the looks of it.
"Ciaran is Sophia," Brian said gleefully, drawing his attention again. He looked past Mat at the scene outside like he'd forgotten the storm was happening, and raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. "Shit, I don't think we'll be going anywhere for a while. Good thing Tom left that twelve pack here," he added, grinning wolfishly, and Mat couldn't help but smile back as they both remembered the deluge of desperate texts from Tom earlier in the night about his lost beer. He and Ciaran had stopped by after cleaning out the Conoco with what they considered emergency storm supplies - beer, Red Bull, hot Cheetos, Slim Jims, a huge box of donuts, a keyring flashlight, a packet of aspirin, a lighter, and a single tea light candle - and had offered Mat and Brian some of their bounty, beer excluded.
Apparently best friend code stipulated that sharing beer was not required in emergency situations. Mat thought Tom was probably making that up, but he left Brian to fight that battle, more interested in the Cheetos anyway. They had gotten distracted by one, then three, then seven consecutive games of Madden 16. Tom and Ciaran had hurried out when they realized the storm had already started, and the beer was later discovered under the kitchen table, where Mat suspected Brian had put it, hoping Tom's short attention span would indirectly win it for them.
"That was a crazy stroke of luck." Mat laid on the sarcasm as heavily as he could, but the effect was ruined when the tail end of his sentence caught on a yawn. Brian just grinned more widely, shifting toward him on the couch, and Mat realized he'd pressed his cold feet against the warm curve of Brian's thigh at some point in his sleep.
He drew them back self-consciously as he finally pulled the last bit of twisted blanket off of himself and sat up all the way, swinging his legs the other direction so he could tuck his feet under himself, shivering as he was exposed for the first time in hours. Their heater seemed to only work when it felt like it, and the living room was chilly. "What'd you say, before?"
"Ciaran is Sophia." At Mat's undoubtedly blank expression, Brian nodded his head toward the tv, and Mat noticed that while he was asleep, Friends had been replaced by Golden Girls. When the meaning finally hit his sluggish brain, he let out an involuntary, ugly laugh that was mostly a snort, hiding his slowly colouring face when that made Brian laugh in turn.
"How do you figure?" he asked when he'd reemerged, studying the episode as he rearranged blankets around himself to accommodate his new position, shivering faintly in his thin shirt. Next to him, Brian shifted imperceptibly closer, their shoulders almost brushing underneath the blankets he had pulled to his chin, and Mat observed goosebumps raising along his arms. They definitely needed a new heater.
"Well, he's sneakier than the rest of us combined, he complains about everything, and when he gets mad he scrunches his face up just like her," Brian explained, gesticulating at the screen. From what Mat had gathered, Sophia and Dorothy were on some kind of vacation together, bickering in a pastel-coloured hotel room, Rose and Blanche nowhere to be seen.
"And when you least expect it," Brian continued, "he hits you with the sagest shit you'll ever hear in your life." Mat smiled to himself, nodding softly as he recounted the way Ciaran always delivered his advice, giving the impression that you should've known what to do already, but he was begrudgingly giving you the answers anyway.
"Who's Tom?" he asked, wrestling with a fleece that he was trying to extricate from the crease between the couch cushion and the frame. It pulled free after a few determined tugs, and the sudden release jostled him back against Brian, closing the inch of tentative distance between them. Mat tensed, the fleece twisting in his hands, and then every muscle in his body relaxed against his will, and he let himself lean into the warm, comforting bulk of Brian's sweatshirt-clad side.
"Tom is Rose," Brian said matter-of-factly, sliding down into the couch an inch or two so that Mat's head slotted perfectly onto his shoulder. Mat almost didn't hear him, preoccupied with wondering if they were almost-cuddling on purpose or if it had just happened coincidentally as they settled into the couch. It was old, well-worn, and anyone toward the middle of the cushions naturally tipped against each other.
Brian settled an arm around his shoulders. Intentional, then.
"He's definitely forgetful enough," he said thickly, trying to choke down the feeling of his heart fluttering wildly. He'd never been this comfortable in his life. It was only the panic ripping all his seams apart that was keeping him from immediately falling asleep again, enveloped in the intoxicating warmth that the other seemed to radiate naturally.
"Fortunately for us." Brian shot him another grin, which was dizzying considering how close their faces were, and continued. "Plus he's sweet, and surprisingly helpful when he puts his mind to it. Fuck if I can understand any of his stories, though." Tom had a habit of telling excruciatingly long and winding stories, filled with inane detail, and they rarely had a point to them that anyone but Tom could decipher. If there was enough beer involved, even Tom was left clueless by his own convoluted tales.
On the screen, Rose and Blanche were bickering over a drawing of a tiger wearing a top hat and brandishing a magic wand. Mat had no idea why; he'd been barely paying attention to the plot, eyes fixed on the screen only so he wouldn't stare at Brian the entire time he spoke. Blanche was waving a drawing of a sea otter around in a threatening manner now. Brian was so warm.
"Who're you?" Mat heard his own voice like an afterthought, thick with exhaustion, and he burrowed farther into the blankets, the movement shifting his head on Brian's shoulder so that if he were to crane his neck, he could press his face to the juncture of Brian's throat where it met his collarbone. It took every ounce of willpower in Mat's body not to do so.
"Blanche, obviously," Brian said airily, trying to adopt Blanche's accent and only succeeding in exaggerating his own odd Jersey drawl. "I am footloose and fancy free, after all."
"And stubborn, and ridiculous, and dramatic," Mat added sleepily, grinning when Brian made an offended scoffing noise and ruffled his hair viciously with his free hand.
"Well I never," he said, again in the worst approximation of a Southern accent Mat had ever heard. "I prefer strongly opinionated, passionate, and theatrically inclined, thank you very much."
"You forgot delusional," Mat muttered under his breath, giggling and trying to duck out of the way when Brian attacked his hair with a new fervor. He didn't get very far, partly due to the strong grip of Brian's arm around his shoulders, and partly because he was reluctant to shift their current position too much. When Brian was satisfied with his retaliation, he settled back into the couch, and Mat melded easily into his side again with relief.
"So that means I'm Dorothy, huh?" he realized with a slight sinking feeling in his stomach, wondering what exactly that meant. Dorothy was the frumpiest and most abrasive one of the group. Brian seemed to sense the ripple of self-consciousness in Mat's tone and shifted the arm he had around Mat's shoulders so he could rub warm fingertips reassuringly against the skin of his upper arm, right where the sleeve of his t-shirt stopped. For some reason, Mat shivered.
"You're a huge grump in the morning. Actually, you're grumpy a lot of the time," Brian started, not making Mat feel any better. "But once you lighten up a bit, you can also be softer and kinder than any of us. You're always taking care of everyone, even when it comes off like you're bossing us around. We'd all lose track of our heads if you weren't there to remind us to keep them on our shoulders."
Brian's voice had taken on a serious quality and had quieted considerably, the tip of his nose brushing against the top of Mat's head as he leaned close. "You're the voice of reason. I- we couldn't function without you."
Mat realized two very concerning things simultaneously. The first was that his heart, whose beat had been increasingly frantic over the course of their conversation, had seemingly clanged to a dead stop. The second was that he was overwhelmingly, ridiculously in love with Brian. And it was ridiculous, because it occurred to him (in the way that very obvious things do) that he should've seen it coming a long way off.
Fuck.
"And I rock a mean muumuu," he said weakly, his voice sounding very small as he broke the heavy silence with the first dumb joke that came to mind. The familiar peals of Brian's laughter as he lost his shit over it settled the anxious twisting feeling in Mat's stomach slightly, even if Brian seemed to be overcompensating for the weird moment between them. It wasn't that funny. Mat giggled a little anyway, a natural and helpless reaction to the sunny sound of Brian's laugh.
On the screen, Rose and Blanche were having an emotional reconciliation over their earlier fight. With another flutter in his chest, Mat realized that Brian's fingers were still moving against his arm, although instead of a reassuring gesture it seemed he was just absently tracing patterns against Mat's skin now, like he wasn't aware that he was doing it. Mat was too aware, warmth spreading out from that spot and pooling in the cold corners of his body that hadn't recovered yet from their brief foray out of the blankets earlier.
"I don't doubt it," Brian murmured, his voice sounding far away. Dorothy was back to arguing with her mother, but he couldn't make out what they were saying, and then they were going out of focus. Mat was vaguely aware that he was falling asleep again, nuzzling his face against Brian's shoulder to get comfortable as he fought a losing battle with his leaden eyelids.
The last thing he registered before sliding headlong into sleep was the brief but tangible brush of lips against his forehead.