Duran-kun and Kiyo-chan's Omake Theater
(featuring the Kuga-Fujino family pets)
Natsuki Kuga was very good at a lot of things: sports, schoolwork (when she bothered to show up for class), riding her motorcycle, hand-to-hand fighting, shooting firearms, making Shizuru Fujino's mouth go dry and heart go flippety-flop. Cooking, however, was not on that list. Odds were, her love of mayonnaise had come about because she wanted something to add some flavor to her endless parade of sandwiches and instant meals.
Shizuru, for her part, was actually quite good in the kitchen so long as it didn't involve pastry, and since they'd moved in together on account of the aforesaid flippety-floppiness (and a similar reaction of Natsuki's own) she was more than willing, generally, to handle the cooking chores. Still, there were times when she was too tired from a hard day or too pressed for time due to her university classes to cook a meal.
Tonight was such a night, and like any good sweetheart Natsuki had risen to the challenge.
She'd ordered Chinese take-out.
They'd had a fun dinner with a half-dozen or so samples loosely approximating a dim sum assortment. Duran and Kiyohime had helped make sure there were no leftovers to go bad in the fridge.
"You have dumpling sauce on your nose," Natsuki told Duran. His tongue flicked out, but missed a spot. "Here, let me." She grabbed a napkin and mopped the steel muzzle clean. "There, good boy!" He thumped his tail happily on the floor, and she tossed him a fortune cookie.
"Ara, if you swallow your fortune does that mean you have better luck?" Shizuru asked when Duran wolfed the cookie down whole.
"I'm pretty sure it won't hurt him," Natsuki decided. She doubted that eating a slip of paper would even hurt a dog that wasn't made of metal. Kiyohime, however, seemed to have learned from the example; her first head picked up one half of the cookie, the fourth head took the other half, and they snapped it in two. The sixth head extracted the fortune and handed it to Shizuru.
"Hm, 'You have a good head for business.'"
"Yeah, but which one?" Natsuki joked. Several pairs of eyes glared at her. The fifth head's weren't among them; it took advantage of the distraction to munch on the cookie bits.
"What does yours say, Natsuki?"
"I don't know." She broke the cookie open, then read, "'When you learn to be flexible, amazing opportunities reveal themselves.'"
"Oh, indeed?"
"Typical fortune-cookie logic. Um, Shizuru, why are you looking at me like that?"
"You read the cookie, Natsuki—'amazing opportunities.'"
"That doesn't expl—mmph!"
~X X X ~
"Natsuki, you're sitting out swimming in P.E.?" Mai asked in surprise. "I thought that was your favorite. Are you coming down with something?"
"No; I think I might have pulled something in my shoulder. It's kind of sore, so I didn't want to take a chance."
"Oh? Too bad. How'd that happen?"
"I was learning to be flexible," Natsuki murmured, blushing.
"Huh?"
"Um...let's just say that Shizuru believes in fortunes," she said, and stubbornly refused to give Mai any further details.
~X X X~
A/N: This omake was actually inspired by real-life events. My wife and I had gotten Chinese take-out, and her fortune cookie had, word-for-word, Natsuki's fortune on it. Since I'm pretty much the Shizuru in our relationship, I immediately went where Shizuru did. ^_-