Fandom: Gatchaman Crowds
Title: Through the Motions
Author: SweetFirefly
Rating: G - K
Genre: Romance
Pairing: Sugane Tachibana X Hajime Ichinose.
Spoilers: Up to season one finale (the director's cut).
Summary: Sugane likes rituals. Hajime goes along.
Disclaimer: I don't own Gatchaman Crowds. Still, I like it. Gatcha!
A/N: So our soccer team was crushed yesterday... but I spent the game's duration writing a fic, so I got that going for me, which is nice. XD This is just a little piece to celebrate my finishing Gatchaman Crowds - an awesome series that should be watched by EVERYONE. And I mean, everyone. Honestly, it makes you better as a person.
Why Sugane and Hajime? Because I'm a sucker for characters like Hajime, that inspire others, and I love the dynamic between those two. It's awesome how well Sugane grows in those twelve episodes and how you can see the development of his relationship with Hajime. \o/
Through the Motions
Sugane-senpai likes rituals.
It's something Hajime's known from the beginning, from the way he stood all stiff when holding his Note, like he had a stick up his ass or something. Like Pai-Pai, he takes comfort in rules and regulations and traditions, but he's got different reasons for it.
It's how his mind is organized; he just sees things better when they have structure. She sees it in him all the time: in the way he carefully polishes his sword from hilt to tip with a ball of cotton, or in the way he always chooses all the colored papers he plans to use and places them nearby before starting his collage; or in the way he jumps into his feet and faces the Hinomaru (1) when the Kimigayo (2) is playing, and how, when Rui-kun was formally accepted into the Gatchaman, he bowed before him and, red as a tomato, asked how he preferred to be addressed and vowed to remember it.
Hajime has made it her personal mission to show him the world beyond the rules and figures and planned things, but she knows it's also a part of him; in those motions, there's respect and meaningfulness, from senpai and all the people that inspired him and made him what he is.
So when he drops to one knee and retrieves a small box from his pocket, a lot of things that cross Hajime's mind – that they've been living together for seven years now, that all their friends already know about it, that he already knows her better than anyone else (except maybe Berg Katse), that she loves him so much and, really, they've been married in anything but name for a long time and she never really cared about names – go unsaid; instead, she just smiles and goes along with the show.
"Will you marry me?" Sugane asks solemn.
"…Of course," she says, a deep warmth going all the way to her bones.
And as he places the ring in her finger, she ignores the grumpy sighs inside her chest and thinks she'll go along with every one of his plans, if it makes him grin wide like that.
(1) The flag of Japan.
(2) The national anthem of Japan.
Thanks to: poisontea, who made a fanmix on LJ about Rui and got me into watching this series, Tatsunoko for making the series in the first place, the upstanding work of all the seiyuus and of director Kenji Nakamura. Gatcha!
If you liked it, please tell me what you think!