'Be brave.' That's the first thing Sugane hears within the Gatchaman base. It's directed at him from over the back of someone so wide and so tall that he seems as far away as the sky. Smoke drifts from the side of a face that turns, half-lost in the trail of grey and the next words Joe speaks lights a fire in Sugane, one that won't be put out for years.

Perhaps that's why, soon after, JJ is able to reach inside him and pluck out his heart to give him a NOTE so white on the inside that it screams to be filled with words. Sugane remembers flicking through the pages eagerly, so ready for the new start he thought Joe had promised him without saying.

That was his first mistake.

No one in the team knows how to talk to each other. Not really. Utsutsu dips and hides behind OD's back, behind pillars, behind other girls who look just like her. It takes years for Sugane to start to decipher the flicker in their expressions, little shudders that mark them out as not quite human, just relatively static copies of something that is.

OD at least, makes the effort to chip away at him with jovial little chats and big, expansive hand gestures, pirouetting on his heels as he announces a dinner invite with a flourish. Perhaps he means to be nice but Sugane can't quite muster up the effort to believe him. So he never goes.

He feels empty, blank, unfilled. White.

At least Leader has the black in his fur alongside his white, filled in like some yin-yang symbol. He roars a lot and Sugane finds himself taking down everything he says with utter sincerity. At least he's trying to fill the silence, within a base that feels too big for all of them here.

And Joe...well, Joe slouches and that seems to make everything that comes out of his mouth sound twisted and broken. Sugane wonders if everything in Joe's soul has become as coiled as his spine, whether Joe's limping from some injury he can't see. It's not his fault he sounds so weary. It can't be. Joe was the one who told him he had to grow up after all. And doesn't that mean standing up straight?

So none of them talk, or if they do it feels as though it lacks something. Truth, maybe. Perhaps that's why they turn to the Notes, communicating with stunted sentences and careful rejoinders that refuse to imitate txt speech. That would be too casual, denote familiarity. And also, Leader would have a fit.

So they write down things like: 'MESS. On the bridge. Anyone coming?' or 'Meeting. Ten o'clock. Don't be late.' Only Leader dares to add exclamation marks, adding rather barbed things, like 'Lateness won't be tolerated!' And of course, JJ, out of all of them, is the only one allowed to use metaphors, let alone poetry. But then he's god. More or less.

Sometimes Sugane finds himself staring down at the cover of his note, grey, the colour of gears, or machinery and industrialisation. But even so he doesn't feel as though the parts of him mesh together like a well-oiled machine. He finds himself asking questions like, why don't they ask someone for help? And why not get the police involved? Aren't they trained to handle the fallout of something like this, far better than a few lonely individuals like us?

It's too bad he never writes them down let alone direct them at anyone else. But then would they even listen? Besides, Leader knows what he's doing. Probably.

And then Hajime joins the team.

The base is filled with something now. A buzz, an undercurrent of energy that murmurs unhappily, even in the corners anyone rarely stands in. Sugane can see it, feel it, it licks at him beneath his skin like an electric current. It's even enough to make Utsutsu fidget.

Sugane feels himself moving, reaching out to seize Hajime, to shout at her. He tries to rescue her from a glass floor that nobody knew was there, because they were too afraid to reach out, to make JJ's godhood muddy somehow. So then he tries to stress the importance of their mission to her and is both frustrated and blown away by her questions. She isn't afraid to ask them, not like he was.

And she doesn't even have the courtesy to use her NOTE to do it. He and everyone else, receive sketches from her, little things, like a doddle of an alarm clock, the lines firmly engraved into the page with a razor-sharp grey. There's a 3-D softness to its pencil markings that Sugane knows he can never hope to imitate. It's surrounded by love-hearts, softly sketched things that look as though they belong to the imagination of someone unsullied, like an eleven year old girl. Later on, he finds himself smiling at them fondly, in the short moments when he doesn't find them annoying. Hajime writes messages beside them, things like 'time to wake up, silly!' and 'Senpai, don't be late again, okay!'

He shouts at her for the last one. But it's her fault. She shouldn't be trying to show up an upperclassman!

And it's so strange because her Note is white, the colour of something that lacks some vital component. She should be even emptier than he feels. But she's not. For one thing, she talks. And keeps going, even when everyone tries to brush her off. Sugane doesn't understand it. He would have given up by now.

It takes a stupid amount of courage to ask her for anything.

'Pass me the salt please.'

'Sure!'

A smile accompanies her words, as always, unbearably cheery and enough to make his teeth itch. But he presses on, reaching out his hand to receive the small shaker, watching the arch of her palm as it slides against the glass. Her fingernail taps against his own, the two of them jostling against each other for the briefest flare of a second. It's electric-thin, this sensation and it unnerves him.

Worse of all, his eyes can't quite pull away from her fingers. The shape of her hands strikes him, like a spell, as they always do. He notices that they never close over objects, never crush them, not completely, her hands instead coming up to form borders round them in delicate egg-like curves. Recently he's found himself wanting to stroke her slim fingers, to try and imitate the softness he's seen in them when they press down material onto the pages of her sketchbooks, smoothing out the creases and fixing them down firmly with glue. He doesn't understand this impulse in himself so he reins it in.

'Thank you.'

He feels like he's cleared some huddle just saying it, even more so as he tears his eyes away from her hands. And when she beams at him in response, he feels something jump up and flip over in his stomach.
He wonders if he's coming down with something.

Because for all he yells at her about responsibility, Hajime has never once ducked her household duties. She washes dishes with a tune to accompany the swish of liquid in the bowl, the scrubbing of her hands keeping time with her jaunty humming. She never forgets anything on the shopping list and if anyone asks her to hover or dust or plump out the cushions, all she will ever say is 'okay!' And then out comes the smile.

It reminds Sugane of sunshine, ready to pop out from behind a cloud.

Unfortunately he still doesn't get how to talk to her. All he can do is ask for the simple things. And yell.

I'm not irresponsible. She says this with no real temper, even though it nags at Sugane, as though she's tried to tell him this before. Or perhaps just show him. He realises now that Hajime isn't good at talking. She just does it too differently from everyone he's ever met. Or perhaps he's just no good at listening. The thought makes his heart sink into his boots.

He watches the buildings drift past, up and away, their height stretching and releasing like balloons. The hum of the elevator echoes beside them, Utsutsu tucked away against a wall as she refuses to look at anything apart from her shoes. Sugane wants to say something to her; like that blue ribbon looks cute. It's twisted into knots that resemble roses, crinkled up like paper, in a way that looks cheap but lovely all the same.

'What are you shopping for anyway?' he asks instead, half-hating himself for being such a coward.

Hajime's eyes glaze over.

'Ooooooh! I'm going to pick up a cute little darling, that's just come in! It's colour is going to feel me up with a lot of razz and maybe a hint...'

She brings her hand up, almost as though she's about to form a shadow puppet with it. Her fingers and thumb twist into the mottled bumps that might, on another day, help portray a yapping dog on a badly-lit wall.

'..well, a hint of a punch!' she mimes one badly, her hand ending up pointing at the ceiling somehow. 'And perhaps with a real pow! That kind of powerful feeling, I want to bring it with me!

She must not pick up on his blank look, because Utsutsu's voice chips in from his left, her voice a faint, frail whisper that somehow manages to sound sullen.

'Scissors. We've collecting a new pair.'

'Ah.'

Well, it would explain the imaginary love hearts he can see forming behind her eyes.

Sugane can't get it out of his head, that crushed look on Joe's face as he had been lifted from the pavement, blood still drying round his mouth. Utsutsu had worked a miracle but she could not reach inside Joe's soul and stroke it with her power. He went home alone, his back dwindling into the distance until Sugane had gathered enough courage to raise his hand, perhaps to wave him off.

But Joe had looked blurry and indistinct, melting into the paving stones as the dark crept in and stole him away. Never had he looked so small.

Sugane doesn't think that it's happened just because he's grown taller. And he wants to spill some of this out to Hajime, sitting across from him in her garish room, sweets and tea propped up inside plates and saucers. Never has such an assortment looked so pastel to him, before, hitting into the white of the table with the same brash impudence as a child's crayon set.

Hajime sips her tea and listens as he tells her of Rue and his battered frame.

'I was wrong about him,' Sugane concludes. But he doesn't apologise for resembling a stalker, for not taking Hajime at her word. And that's okay too. She's not Leader, after all.

Because this is an equal exchange, this conversation. She tells him about Berg-Katse and his strange muddle of a riddle, the answer something she couldn't guess at, not even after she tried. There's a hint of frustration tugging at her frown as she says this, as though she feels that there was a clue right before her eyes and it slipped away from her, just as easily as Katse's invisibility hid him away from Joe's attacks.

Still, something stops Sugane's tongue. And he finds himself looking for a smile, relief blossoming inside as it wipes her frown away. It's strange, how the night fades away from them both as they talk, how the hours chip away and something takes hold, changes, feels softer as the morning approaches.

Watching the sun with her later, seeing everything change to gold like it's been touched by Midas, Sugane feels nothing close to a yell approaching his throat. For the first time he finds a feeling he wants to chase. If only, he believes, he could give it to Joe.

He doesn't want to kiss her. At least not as much as he doesn't want her to ever look sad. That's more important. And if certain parts of her stick out in his mind, if the touch of her hand against his head feels soft and yet hard, even more so as a bolt of electricity strikes the rim of his ear...well, he'll live. He's a hero, after all.

Her look can shred him to pieces though, her soft eyes and an upturned mouth making everything switch to a stop inside his mind. He knows that now, had experienced it for a stupidly short amount of time until the hair-ruffling ruined it. It doesn't worry him.

She sees a lot, but she won't see this. And even if she does, she won't use it to wound him. Sugane is learning to keep his heart both close and open, letting the questions he's always kept locked up, spill out, angry but free.

He denounces JJ as a God, tears him from a pedestal he's never quite understood. And sets Hajime up on one of her own, even if only within his heart.

It's dangerous, of course. But perhaps that's the point. In battle later, as he stops to breathe, wild on adrenalin, he'll press his heart into his NOTE. He'll barely be aware of what words rush out to swamp Joe's pages but he hopes some of them will touch the one person he's always wanted to save.

He's got to learn to do more than yell or listen. Now he has to learn how to talk.

Sugane can't save Hajime. It's something he has to wrestle with. Most of the times, the ones where he tries, it turns out that she doesn't need it. But now she's played the tragic hero, given up a part of herself that Sugane is not sure he could have thrown away had their position been reserved.

He sees it, he feels it coming. Her quietness, her drifting away from them all, even if her smile never stops.

And she doesn't change. Not outwardly, not where it matters to most of the world. But inside, where she houses her thoughts, tiny glittery things that give birth to big changes, things that make her the person Sugane privately adores...well, now she has a house-guest. The kind that is probably rude, invasive and basically almost everything Sugane once believed of Hajime, when she first came barrelling into his life.

He looks at her. Perhaps it's time someone tried to talk to her. He's tried before, of course, but then, that wasn't really talking, was it?

'Hajime, can I talk to you?'

She looks at him. But the smile doesn't quite reach her eyes, even though it's only the second time her name has dropped from his mouth. At least this time the world won't be watching, watching and commenting with words free from the facial expressions that could help give them context.

'Of course, Sempai.'

He flicks the NOTE close.