#♔‘ﾟ‣ ❪ matsukawa ⋮ headcanon ❫ — ❝ crooked grin ; sly hands ; dangerous voice ❞

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Matsukawa has two full sleeves of tattoos and a large mural on his back, all of them featuring various different skull motifs and other morbid designs.

Has 18mm gauges in his ears, a nose ring, and a pair of snakebite piercings on his lower lip.

Absolutely obsessed with anything inspired by octopuses. He has a favourite ceramic coffee mug with painted - on octopus tentacles and little tentacle - shaped measuring spoons and octopus throw pillows on his couch, just to name a few.

Has to wear contacts. He hates them, but wearing glasses is infinitely more annoying and troublesome, so he makes due. Sometimes he "forgets" to put them in just to give himself a break, but his eyesight isn't exactly the best without them.

Runs a podcast called "Stay Awake" where he reads horror fiction submitted by his listeners. When he first started the podcast, he wrote his own stories to get it off the ground. Now, he holds a poll at the end of every month for his listeners to vote on their favourite story submission.

Plays guitar, but only casually. It's not something he records to put out anywhere. He just likes to pick up his guitar and strum out a few songs every now and again, especially on long nights when he can't sleep and has nothing else to do.

Owns five (5) different kinds of spiders named Ophelia, Odysseus, Achilles, Icarus, and Perseus, respectively. (He went through a deep Greek Mythology phase in high school and named them for the nostalgia.) He loves them all very dearly and most of them are fairly docile. Perseus, however, is widely considered to be evil.

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Matsukawa has severe insomnia. He can and often does go days at a time without a wink of sleep, fueled only by coffee and self - medication in the form of a bong. It does help him sleep, sometimes, but mostly it’s just an excuse to get high and float through his days without having to think too hard about the goings - on around him.

He has an aversion to prescription medication of any kind, largely due in part to his affliction of schizophrenia. He tries to take his medication for that as regularly as he can, but more often than not, he willfully forgets or lets himself be lulled into a paranoia about the effects of the medication itself, and this extends to any kind of medication from painkillers to sleeping aids.

He experiences a handful of auditory and visual hallucinations, though the visual ones typically only occur when his symptoms are particularly potent after significant periods of time without taking his medication. The voices are nigh constant except immediately after a dose, but he’s normally very good at ignoring them unless his anxiety flares up, which causes his symptoms to flare in turn, and, of course, the lack of sleep never helps.

He can become somewhat hostile and withdrawn after several days without his meds. This can present itself in hair - trigger irritation at trivial things, cutting off communication with anyone and everyone, tuning out of conversations intentionally or unintentionally, and extreme passive - aggression toward even his close friends and family.

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[   # TW   :   below the cut for descriptions of obsessive behaviour , implied s*talking , mentions of r*eligion , &&. juvenile peer a*buse . reader discretion is advised ]

Matsukawa can get a little . . . obsessive. Normally it’s not all that difficult to keep his mildly fanatic tendencies under wraps, but sometimes they slip out, and sometimes they’re not all that pretty.

He started showing signs of this obsessive behaviour when he was a child. He was always rather reserved, shy   ── ─   he found it difficult to talk to other people. Or, more specifically, living people. Rather than fabricating a fantastical imaginary friend to keep him company on his lonesome, after coming across an obituary in the newspaper his father left lying around, he thought it too depressing that someone so beloved by their friends and family was gone forever, so he took the liberty of giving that person new life in the garden of his mind.

At first, his parents didn’t think anything of it, never even recalling the obituary, and left him to his own devices under the impression that he had an imaginary friend like any other kid. However, when his   ❛   imagination   ❜   started getting a little too specific, they grew concerned.

This person   ── ─   a woman known locally as a former clinical therapist at the city’s rehabilitation institute   ── ─   was well - known in life and therefore there was a lot of information about her on the internet readily accessible to anyone who knew where to look. Matsukawa’s descriptions of this so - called   ❛   imaginary friend   ❜   were so tailored and particular that his parents couldn’t help but do their own research, only to find that the name he brought up so often was none other than a dead person.

Naturally, without the recollection of where he might have come across this name in the first place, they flew into a hysteria and took him straight to a church   (   they were a predominantly Christian household, no thanks to foreign Evangelists   )   to beg for help. The priest did his little ritual, a little cleansing ceremony, as it were, and sent them on their way, but of course, nothing changed.

His parents distanced themselves from him in fear of what had come over him and in turn Matsukawa turned to other forms of social stimulation, particlarly through the remains of whatever poor creatures he found on his little nature walks that were no longer supervised for obvious reasons. Sometimes his little brother and sister tried to tag along and he was open to sharing with them the little stories he created for the half - buried deer skull he found off the trail or the mismatched bones he stumbled across and thought into strange creatures for fun   ── ─   but their parents quickly put an end to that when they started bringing things home to play with like they were toys.

The woman from the obituary remained a constant for the better part of a couple years, long enough that, after a while, his family stopped treating him quite so coldly and reluctantly began to accept that he was uniquely odd. She was a source of guidance for him when his parents shrugged him off and good company while he did his homework after school. He started a collection in his bedroom of peculiar dead things, properly preserved now, just so he could admire them whenever he wanted to.

These new developments in his interests did him no favours in junior high. He was frequently the target of bullying not only because he just looked vulnerable, but especially because of the weird things he doodled on his classwork and in his notebook and on his arms and bookbag. Many of the faculty noted to his parents that the subjects of his artwork were far too inappropriate for a child his age, but no official disciplinary action was ever taken. It seemed that the teachers were merely content to turn a blind eye when other kids would yank at his hair as they passed him in the halls and pull open his bag to spill its contents on the floor and steal his glasses so often they broke and all other manner of horrid behaviour.

He got the message loud and clear, at least. This was what he   ❛   deserved   ❜   for being   ❛   weird   ❜   and if he wanted it to stop, all he had to do was just be normal. As if anyone even knew what that word meant.

[   flexible narrative form this point on ; seijo 4 muns, particularly hanamaki muns, are not required to adhere to their involvement in this headcanon if they choose not to   ]

And then he came to high school. Matsukawa never really had any particular interest in sports, but the student recruiter was very insistent about him trying out due to his height. If past trends were anything to go by, social clubs of any kind were kind of a hazard to him, but he was never really one to tell people no, so he showed up at the try - outs anyway.

Right away, he could tell it was a completely different environment than what he was used to in a school. These kids had come from all over   ── ─   he didn’t know them and, more importantly, they didn’t know him. All they did know about him was that he was already taller than all of the other first years trying out for the club and they seemed to find that especially amazing.

Here he met Oikawa Tooru, who was way too quick to try to be his friend while simultaneously sizing him up, and Iwaizumi Hajime, who was even qiucker to reign in Oikawa by the ear and apologize for his forwardness, and last but not least, Hanamaki Takahiro, who was . . . funny. He had a lot of jokes and it seemed that he wasn’t afraid to toe the line on certain boundaries. Matsukawa typically didn’t humour in the things most other people did, but he surprised himself by laughing so much that day that his face hurt by the end of try - outs.

Hanamaki Takahiro was funny. He also didn’t seem to have any problems carrying on his own conversation. He made a point of sitting next to Matsukawa during lunch hour after digging Iwaizumi and Oikawa out of the throng of students. He didn’t hesitate to humiliate the first person from Matsukawa’s junior high school to recognize him and try to have a go at him. Hanamaki Takahiro was magnetic.

And maybe Matsukawa was just blowing all these little things out of proportion, but it didn’t take him long to decide that Hanamaki, while maybe not a fantastic source of advice, wouldn’t make for such bad company while he did his homework after school, and maybe Matsukawa could find out a few secrets about him along the way.

Hanamaki Takahiro was, above all else, interesting, fixating like a jigsaw puzzle.

Matsukawa always did love solving a good puzzle.