Chapter Text
He's rewritten this monologue in his head so many times the words are basically worn down at this point. Like those river rocks. Like his panda eraser that doesn't even look like a panda anymore cause he's held it so much.
Hirose, he thinks, and the name still shows up wearing all its old stuff. Gold light, third grade, that art room smell. Eight years he's spent basically keeping a whole running tally in his head over that name, like some embarrassing notes app he refuses to delete. Eight years of texts left on read with his heart still jumping every single time anyway, like a dog that keeps running at a door that's never gonna open for it, no matter how many times it's been taught otherwise.
That's the part he's never actually said out loud. Not to Hirose. Not even really to himself, not until recently, lying there in the dark with the ceiling doing absolutely nothing to soak up the thought: he has never once reached for me the way I've spent like a THIRD of my life reaching for him.
Every gift handed back with some easy "thanks, Matsumura," the exact same tone he'd use on literally anyone. Every fact Matsumura memorized about his day met with mild surprise that Matsumura even remembered, never the kind of wonder Matsumura felt remembering it in the first place. He's catalogued like a hundred small offerings to Hirose Aiki and watched every single one just get soaked up into that same general warmth Hirose gives everyone. Oomori. Takeuchi. The kid by the window. Probably the cockroach from episode seven too honestly. Matsumura isn't special. He's never been special. He's just been there, longer, with more receipts, and he mistook how long he loved someone for that love actually being seen.
It's a specific kind of starving, he thinks, loving someone who's nice to you in exactly the same amount he's nice to a total stranger.
And then there's Nakamura.
Matsumura did NOT mean for this to happen, he wants that on record somewhere, in whatever folder of his brain keeps track of humiliating realizations. He meant to hate Nakamura clean and simple, like you hate bad weather. An obstacle. A rival. Some monolid nuisance circling the same impossible sun as him.
But weeks ago, and he hates that he can pinpoint the exact moment, Nakamura noticed something. Not about Hirose. About him. Matsumura made some offhand bitter comment about the panda eraser, half joking, the kind of thing he says so nobody clocks how much it actually means to him, and he expected nothing, like always, cause expecting nothing is literally how he survives Hirose's gentle, total indifference.
And Nakamura had asked.
Asked what kind of panda. Asked if he still had it. Asked with that awful earnest stammer, like the question cost him something just to get out, like he'd actually sat there turning this dumb useless fact over in his head and decided yeah, it's worth caring about.
Matsumura went home that night and just sat there. Really still. For a long time.
It turned into a pattern after that, kind of like frost on a window. Not all at once, just building up, line by line, til one day the whole thing's different and you can't even remember when it started. Nakamura remembering the stupid small stuff Matsumura accidentally let slip. Nakamura's awkward, clumsy attention, nothing like Hirose's effortless thing, somehow turning out to be the first attention in YEARS that actually landed. That stuck. That asked follow up questions. That looked, impossibly, like it was building toward something instead of just taking it and putting it down somewhere.
It's deeply unfair, Matsumura thinks, genuinely despairing about it. He spent eight years keeping score for someone who was never even checking the scoreboard, and somewhere along the way, the rival, the annoying stammering octopus obsessed rival, just looked back. No effort. No big buildup. Just looked.
And he resents it so bad. Resents it like you resent finally getting fed after spending all that time convincing yourself you weren't even hungry. There's no folder for this one. No eight year archive, no panda eraser, no gold afternoon light he can point at and go "see, THIS is when it started, this is the proof." There's just this awful, dizzy fact that the wrong person noticed him first, and turns out noticing is basically the whole entire point of love, the thing he's been starving for this whole time.
Hirose, he thinks again, one more time, out of habit, out of some leftover loyalty to whatever he's been carrying around for eight years.
But it's quiet. It's always been quiet. The kind of thing you keep around to look at, not something you actually live inside of.
And somewhere across the room, badly, clumsily, completely by accident, Nakamura's looking at him like he's already decided Matsumura's worth the trouble of being figured out.
Matsumura puts his head down on the desk and groans, loud enough that Kawamura looks over again.
"This," he mutters into his arms, "is so much worse than just being ignored."