Title: Origami

Author: Something Like Human

Rating: PG

Warning: Shounen ai (is that really a necessary warning if you're already into FAKE?)

A/N: This is my first FAKE ficlet…let me know how it is.

I sat at my desk and started to fold the slip of paper in my hands. Yeah, yeah, I know: Stereotypical: The Japanese guy doing origami. But hey, I learned it back in high school from some girl who claimed to be Native American, had green eyes and freckles, and a German name. I find the whole act of forming a mundane sheet of paper into an ingenious figure very rewarding.

I crease the paper once again and try to ignore the words hastily written upon it. He always uses those little pastel posty-notes. If I fold it just right, only a few words will be seen on the green paper. Maybe I'll be lucky this time and no words will show.

He has been leaving them more and more often. I'm starting to think that he really is serious about what he says. Of course, I should know he backs his words with his acts. Dismissing what he says is a bad idea. I probably shouldn't dismiss what he writes either. I'm not exactly dismissing him, per se, just not commenting back. Yet.

I fold the paper up, crease on the one side, flip the whole thing over, and do it again. Just a few quick shifts of the paper and one last fold and I'm done. All I have to do is tug down on the two sides and I have a crane.

I look over the green paper crane quickly to assess my technique. There are a few places that my folds could have been a little cleaner but other than that, it looked pretty much like its predecessors lining my desk.

I go to place it in the row with the others thinking that at the rate this is going, I will have folded a thousand in no time. Right before I set it down between a pink one and a yellow one, I note that you can make out one word from the note on the left wing.

I almost tear the delicate form up to dispose of it but stop myself. The one word is just the middle word in a three word long sentence. No one looking at it could tell exactly what it says. Only the writer of that note and I would know that the words surrounding that one are "I" and "you."

I place the origami figure down in its place. Maybe it was time I made a crane for him. I wouldn't have to write him a note in response to the ones I had gotten from him. But he might understand that I'm not dismissing him. I peal off a yellow slip of paper and start.