Gravitation/General/CUSTOM + Pretty
Title: Just Fine
Author: cuethe_pulse
Fandom: Gravitation
Prompt: Table 6:07-Pretty
Character/Pairing:Hiro x Ayaka
Rating: PG
Word Count: 543
Summary: Ayaka finds a picture of an old girlfriend of Hiro’s.
Authors Notes/Disclaimer: Future fic. Gravitation and its characters do not belong to me.
Hiro’s half-asleep when Ayaka decides it’s time to start unpacking the little boxes. They’ve hardly been in the new house for two months and Hiro thinks there’s plenty of time for that, preferably when he isn’t drowsy and in a blissful post-coital haze, but he’s never opposed her before and he doesn’t plan on starting now. So he forces himself out of bed and dons a robe and picks out a box. He joins her, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and her excited smile makes getting up worthwhile. Hiro goes through the box and the belongings are hers: a couple of CDs, a ticket stub from a Bad Luck concert, a really beautiful journal that he knows she’s never written in, some scented candles and an unopened bottle of massage oil.
“Honey, who’s this?”
She’s holding a photo album of his, opened to a picture he hasn’t looked at in years. It’s him with his arm around a girl with jet black hair and piercing blue eyes-contacts-and deep red lips just inches away from his ear. He remembers when it was taken, waiting in a line outside a music store to buy the latest Nittle Grasper CD with Shuichi and the camera he got for his birthday.
“That’s an old girlfriend of mine.”
“Oh.” She doesn’t sound surprised and Hiro can tell that she already knew. “She’s pretty.”
Hiro knows this is dangerous territory. They never talk much about his past relationships and they haven’t once since getting married. They tend to stay away from that subject because Ayaka is a surprisingly jealous woman. He still remembers the first time he saw the spark of the green-eyed monster in her eyes, when Shuichi’s sister hugged him a little too tight after a concert.
“She’s all right,” he says carefully. “I guess.”
“Hmm.” He watches the way she scrutinizes the picture, struggling to find something wrong with it, some fault that she can comfort herself with. “I don’t know. She looks more than all right to me.”
“Maybe a little more.” And now she has him.
“Only a little?”
“All right, she’s pretty,” he consents. “She was pretty, anyway. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
She nods and asks her next question in a near-perfectly executed voice of nonchalance: “So, what happened?”
The way he answers this is crucial. “She wasn’t pretty enough” makes him seem shallow and flippant. “Pretty isn’t everything” implies that Ayaka might be lacking in that department, which simply isn’t true and Hiro doesn’t want to lose his head over a misunderstanding like that.
“We just weren’t meant to be,” he says, then worries that’s too generic and cheesy. Hastily he adds, “She wanted me to trade in my acoustic for a banjo.”
A smile tugs at her lips and Hiro knows that she’s inwardly making herself silly with glee and the knowledge that she would never make such a foolish suggestion. Satisfied, she closes the album and sets it at her side.
“I can take that picture out, if you want,” Hiro offers, unnecessarily, but unafraid.
“Oh, no,” she says with a shake of her head. “No, it’s fine. It’s just fine.”
And Hiro grins and kisses her cheek, because he knows it really is.