/jp/ - Otaku Culture

And here, Marisa turned toward Reimu. "Reimu, I want to apologize. I've barely made any time to see you recently, and I should have. I...Wish I could've been rooting for these two with you and Tenshi, instead of blundering around blind." If anything, I think we all felt just a little bit worse after that. Reimu especially, since she seemed quite broken up about it. After a few moments of silence, she stumbled up and over to Marisa, then silently wrapped her arms around her tightly. "Whoa, I wasn't expecting - Nah...I'm okay with this." She hugged her back. "Felt a little bit like we were falling out. I missed seeing you so often, and I just felt like there was a bigger and bigger gap growing." Marisa sounded quite...Mature about this, which surprised me since I'd thought that she was somewhat less mature about most things.

Tenshi sidled up next to me. "That's...My fault." She mumbled to me quietly. "I spent so much time with Marisa that she and Reimu weren't speaking as much. Maybe I should - I don't know, stay away for a bit." I shook my head and said that doing that wouldn't solve anything. Perhaps she'd want to reduce the amount of Marisa's time that she was taking up, but ditching Marisa after they'd gotten so close would only make things worse. Drifting apart was even worse. I'd almost done it to Keine and Miss Narumi, and I still felt awful about both. It just seemed to get harder to make the first move the longer it went on. I suspected that was what Marisa had been feeling.

"You think so?" Tenshi asked me quietly. I nodded, saying that I didn't want to see anyone falling out. It was an awful feeling. Marisa starting to come to the Shrine more often would probably solve most of the problem easily. And we all had to apologize for letting the joke about keeping Yamame a secret go on for so long. "Yeah...That was probably the worst thing, huh?" I patted Tenshi on the shoulder. As long as we didn't do it again.

Once everyone seemed to have sorted themselves out and we'd all apologised - Apologies which Marisa accepted almost immediately - Reimu made it very clear that I was not leaving this room without telling her about the proposal. By this, I meant that she said, "You are not leaving this room until you tell me about the proposal." This was accompanied by a deadly stare, so I sat down and explained most of the night, along with all the interruptions to my time with Yamame which kept preventing me from actually proposing. Once I'd reached the end, Reimu had more or less fallen apart, especially once she'd gotten my speech out of me. Tears trailing down her face, she'd practically jumped on top of me to wrap me in a hug and blubber some nonsense that no one could decipher at me. Then, she'd turned and done the same to Yamame before gushing about the ring some more. I'd forgotten that for all her grumpiness and Shrine Maiden duties, Reimu was, at heart, just as much of a hopeless romantic as both Yamame and I. In fact, Marisa looked pretty enchanted by the whole thing too, so I wouldn't have been surprised if she was one as well. In the end, it seemed like Tenshi was the only one of us who hadn't completely fallen apart. "It's just - It's so - So...Romantic! As the sun rose! And the speech! I - I..." And off Reimu went back into tears.

By this point, I decided that I'd best go and sit with Yamame so that Reimu wouldn't get dizzy rushing back and forth between us, and once I had, Reimu had turned it into more of a group hug. "U-Um, it's okay, Reimu." Yamame tried to say as we both fell backward from Reimu falling forward on top of us. "It was very romantic." She tried to look over at me but didn't get very far thanks to Reimu being in the way. Now I remembered why I had been pleased that Yamame hadn't gotten too drunk before I'd proposed. I'd been worried about this exact thing. She'd gotten overly emotional, so I decided to sit her back up and politely ask her to calm down. Yamame followed my lead. "Yes, well, very romantic. And unexpected!" She looked at me with a warm smile. "...But I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been hoping for it." I smiled back without thinking. Reimu did sniffle, but she managed to restrain herself this time.

Marisa cleared her throat and set about getting up. "Should probably, uh, get going. Or something. Give these two some privacy." I heard her mutter under her breath. "Staring any longer would be a little..." I cast a glance at Tenshi, hoping that she'd get the message I was trying to send. She stared back for a moment, then uncrossed her arms and nodded.

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