Title: Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
Summary: "Voilà," he said beside her ear, breath warm. "A crane."
Word Count: 545
A/N: Reading a Sess/Kag fic over at Dokuga inspired this one, if you can believe that. It was mostly the title of the section I was reading, "Voilà A Crane," that got my synapse firing (for better or worse). Which made me think of someone (like our favorite odd couple?) saying it, while at the same time present a perfect origami crane.
Also: Happy Thanksgiving!
Tokio didn't think of herself as an especially competitive person. Sure, some times Enishi goaded it out of her, but he had to really work at it and by the time he got her interested, he'd lost interest.
But something about Saitou brought it out of her. She didn't know what the hell it was about the man, but all he had to do was say something obnoxious in just the right tone, and she was suddenly damned if she didn't make him eat his words.
Maybe it was the smirk.
One of her more ignoble challenges involved origami. She could never figure out exactly how the conversation had started, but she did know how Saitou had activated her otherwise dormant competitive streak. It was when he said,
"You don't really look like the origami type, Chiisai."
Which her mind had decided to interpret as:
"Yeah right, like you can do origami."
She had glared at him, then snapped the paper placemat from in front of him and carefully folded and ripped off the excess until she had the size she wanted. She then began making her folds, crisp and precise, and within a minute she produced a crane bearing the name of the luncheonette on various places of his little paper body so as to make attempting to read the characters a real challenge.
"Voilà, a crane," she said with a feral smile in his direction.
He eyed her, then the crane, then her again.
"Very nice," he said, tone bland. Then he plucked a discarded gum wrapper from the counter and began folding it, and Tokio watched him, baffled, for several moments, until she began to recognize the series of folds he was executing, and then stared at him in frank disbelief.
He didn't honestly think he could fold a crane out of a gum wrapper, did he? While wearing gloves, no less? The man was clearly crazy—
A perfect, tiny crane suddenly appeared in front of her, sitting innocently on a bed of white—his glove, she realized after a moment.
I'll be damned, she thought, staring at the little crane in shock. That bastard actually did it—
"Voilà," he said beside her ear, breath warm. "A crane."
She stared at the crane, then looked at him; he was watching her, expression smug.
"I hope you choke on your soba," she said calmly.
He laughed and straightened, and Tokio ignored him the rest of the time he was in the luncheonette.
He'd left the gum wrapper crane with her, having the gall to tip his hat to her as he presented it to her. She'd thrown him a black look, but in the end, she'd taken the tiny crane with her to the museum and later, home, where it found a permanent home on her night table.
She was impressed, not that she'd ever say so. No living with the man, then.
She also let him think she had thrown out the little crane in a fit of pettiness. But that was only because he was obnoxious enough to ask her if she was in the mood to fold anymore cranes when he saw her the next day.
…Well, no one ever said she had to be a good sport about it.