Do It Yourself

He wasn’t much surprised that Sagara had absolutely no shame, but he would have expected a former hitokiri to be a little less of an exhibitionist. But ever since those two had admitted their long-repressed feelings for each other (or whatever the case was; Saitou didn’t care enough to pursue), they’d been doing things all over the place regardless of the time of day. Saitou could swear that a shift didn’t go by without his coming across them in some absurd location — bushes or recessed doorways or even mostly unconcealed as long as the street was empty — while he was on patrol.

The truly sad thing was that the rurouni didn’t seem to know what he was doing. Sad, but not particularly shocking: Himura was about the last person in the world Saitou would expect to know how to get the optimal reaction out of a fresh young man. This wasn’t something that would normally occupy the officer’s mind for more than half a derisive minute, but due to the aforementioned exhibitionism, the issue intruded on his consciousness with irritating regularity. One of these times he was going to arrest just Himura and claim it was on charges of being bad at sex.

But much as he would have loved to see their responses to that, he didn’t think it would actually solve the problem. Of course it wasn’t his problem to solve, but half-hearted moans from someone normally as loud and passionate as that boy were almost incitingly irksome.

So that was probably why he found himself at the idiot’s door one evening after having overhead a particularly unenthusiastic-sounding sexual encounter earlier that day. Disliking Himura or liking Sagara really didn’t have much to do with it. Rather, he wasn’t fond of waste, and had always held with that tried and true maxim, If you want something done right…

I love this story because, while it’s almost the shortest piece here, it manages to raise so many amusing questions and ideas. Is Saitou obsessive-compulsive or what, to do something like that with disliking waste and wanting things done right as his only motive(s)? Or maybe he’s in denial and he really does like Sano. And is Sano actually with Kenshin because he likes him, or to get Saitou’s attention in just that way? If the latter, is Kenshin in on the plot or is he being used?

Whatever the case, I’d love to see how Sano will act when he realizes it’s Saitou at his door and exactly what he’s there for. And I can totally picture the brusque way Saitou’s likely to handle the situation. All this extraneous story is what makes a vignette a vignette, of course, and therefore I am rather pleased with myself for this one. I’ve rated it .