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a gendice scrap.
Fold, crease, pinch. Fold, crease, pinch. Shift, shift. Fold, crease, pinch.
Make sure all the corners and edges align, press firmly in order to leave an imprint on the delicate paper, flip it over and make sure you do the same things to the other side.
The art of making paper cranes was a craft to be honored. To create something so complicated and beautiful from a simple beginning was nothing short of magical, though it took diligence and patience in order to truly see the majesty come forth and --
“Ahh, this is so boring…!”
Dice hated every single second of it.
It’s a fuzzy memory now - from a time that he doesn’t look back on often, and so he can’t even remember the owner of the gentle voice that laughs at his complaints when his big mouth affixes into a small frown.
“Now, now, the sooner you learn the better… you know how the custom goes - if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, then they will lead you to your soulmate,” the person says, and Dice can’t remember much about them, aside from the warmth he felt when they were near. A hand pressed over his small one, encouraging him to press just a little more carefully against the brightly colored paper in his hand.
“I’ve definitely made 1,000 by now!” he declared, pouting as he wondered why his time after school was dedicated to this rather than more time to play.
Looking back on it - he had to have been in kindergarten at the time, so he was probably closer to 14 than 1,000 paper cranes but 5-year-old Dice never claimed to know how to count.
“You’ll know when you’ve done it.” He’s assured by his companion, sincerity and wisdom blending in a simple sentence.
“Ughh, it’s so boooring,” Dice declares again, but his hands don’t stop working. It’s hard to say what drove him back then - maybe just some childish, innocent hope that he’d earn some praise if he kept going.
All he wanted to do was chase after that gentle voice, those encouraging hands, that warm feeling.
He didn’t care about who his soulmate was.
Tiny brows furrowed as he looked at the bumpy, slanted paper bird that rested in the palm of his hand.
He just really hoped that his soulmate wasn’t as dull as the task it took to summon them.
--
Over a decade later, and to say that things have changed would be an understatement.
If you asked Dice what he’s lost over the years - he’d laugh and say with perhaps too much enthusiasm, ‘Way too much to count!’
But at some point he knew he’d abandoned everything familiar, ran away from that gentleness without thinking to look back. There was no warmth here, only the slight chill of the Shibuya streets as the evening unfurled overhead. His jacket had been lost in his most recent set of wagers, but even as he lacked the shelter over his head or knowledge of where he’d be spending his night, he’d say that the fire in his chest that’d been ignited from a thrilling round of gambling was more than enough to keep him warm.
It was just a small matter to get his chilly fingers to cooperate with the same sentiment.
Fold, crease, pinch.
The flyer he’d taken down from a nearby wall - of an event that’d long passed, that required money to attend that Dice didn’t have - was slowly taking shape in his calloused fingers, the familiar shadow of a wing being formed with only the streetlamp overhead for a guiding light.
But he’d done this so many times that even without the light, he’d know which step he was on.
Shibuya was busy at all times of day, which is why he didn’t even look up at the sound of footsteps headed in his direction. Probably someone with something to do, people to meet -
“Mm, what’s this? You have a hobby that isn’t losing track of all your earthly possessions in grand sweeps?”
Or someone who came to meet him.
Dice’s eyes flicked up to meet Gentaro’s, the other man looking over him as if he was some kind of study, a mystery to be unpacked - rather than just a gambler who lost both a match and his jacket, folding a paper crane under Shibuya’s nighttime glow. Still, Gentaro’s lips curled up a the very end, his amusement in his subject painfully evident.
Though as Dice looked over Gentaro’s person, what he found more interesting was - “Oi, is that my jacket?!”
The amused glow in the novelist’s eyes only increased as he brought his hands up to the green item that draped his shoulders - already big on Dice, even bigger on his more narrow shoulders - and he quipped, “No, I don’t believe so. Certainly I found this in a discount bin on my way over….”
“Two sentences in and a lie already?! That’s a 50/50 chance of lie!” Dice whined.
Well, those odds were his favorite, technically.
“It was four since I found you, if you’d like to get technical,” Gentaro hummed. “Though I suppose I’ve been caught. Yes, that was a lie. Imagine my curiosity when on my walk over to our intended destination for the night and I find a gambler, not the one I know, sporting this warm garment on a rather cold night…”
“Tch, right? He was wearing it already when he took the last of my cash,” Dice grumbled, “But ended the game since he said he didn’t have any use for my shirt or pants. He backed out real early!”
“Is that how you interpret a strategic retreat…” Gentaro mused aloud, before offering a smile. “Well, I naturally assumed that you would be out here somewhere, sans jacket, so I felt like taking it back.”
“Ahn? How?” Dice’s brow furrowed as he looked back at the paper in his hands, flipping the tail of the crane from where it was resting. “He won it fair and square, you know? Sucks ass, but that’s what the dice decided.”
“Well… it’s not that hard to pretend to be psychic,” Gentaro’s expression only continued to glow as he recounted his adventure of the past half hour. “Something like ‘that garment will surely only bring you calamity, those who wear it only meet misfortune’. With a well-placed, completely out of the blue guess that he won it off the back of a street mutt with a fire in his eyes, and that he might not know that the owner before was fished out of a nearby river… he readily parted with it to a completely unrelated stranger on the street.”
Switching to the tone normally belonging to the type of housewife you’d find musing over the price of celery in the grocery: “It’s amazing what kids will believe these days if you just give them a little bit of a scare.”
Dice tried to suppress the shudder that ran down his spine: “Th… that was a lie too, wasn’t it?”
Gentaro’s lips parted in a full, dazzling and haunting smile, eyes sparkling with devilish delight.
“Was it?”
Truly a phantom.
And Dice lost the battle of that electric tingle taking an express trip down his back.
“Ah… ahah, thanks... I think,” he managed, just barely. Then he shook his head even as his fingers shaped the head of the crane, “Just give me a second? I’m almost done here….”
Dice didn’t haven’t to look up to take a guess that the expression on Gentaro’s face was back to calculating, contemplative like when he was watching people on the street, making characters out of strangers he’d never met.
“To fold a thousand paper cranes and they’ll lead you to your soulmate…” he reflected quietly, shifting with a passing wind, fingers curling into Dice’s jacket and pulling it more against him reflexively. Or maybe he was rubbing it in that he hadn’t given it back yet. “I didn’t think you the type to believe in such a thing.”
“Hah! Yeah, I guess it’s not really my style, huh?” Dice laughed even as he pulled the wings of the crane apart. “I’m not really into the whole ‘finding my soulmate’ business either, but a while back I started folding one for every loss - why not, you know? Letting fate decide who my soul’s tied to, I’m kinda curious to see what I end up with. Even if I lose a match, maybe I’ll win big in the soulmate game.”
“You would see it as a game…” Gentaro sighed, summing up the whole of a person in a sentence without so much as blinking. “How many have you folded then?”
Dice looked over the crane in his hand. His lines had gotten crisper with practice and age, the birds he made no longer a lumpy figment of a crane. This one was all bright colors, bold fonts, and dazzling effects - a very Shibuya bird, if he had to say so himself.
He rose from his squat, moving to place the Shibuya Crane on a nearby bench, wedged between slots so it wouldn’t fly away, as he answered Gentaro’s question with unwavering confidence:
“Fuck if I know.”
“.... Pardon?”
Once he was sure his new paper friend wasn’t falling over, he turned back over to Gentaro and raised his arms in a careless shrug.
“I fold when I lose - so I’ve probably folded a couple… uhh, hundred?”
Apparently even a decade made no difference in Dice’s ability to count cranes.
Gentaro’s brow furrowed as even he seemed to need to take a moment to process this information. “So you… don’t know how close you are to 1,000 - or if you’ve even passed it?”
“How many times do you think I lose…”
“Often - perhaps two to four times daily, on average.”
Dice did not care to mention that Shibuya flyer bird was his 3rd of the day.
“Well - what’s the point of keeping track?” he argued, just for the sake of arguing. “There’s no rule that says that I’m not gonna meet ‘em before I make the 1,000 anyway, right? I don’t really know or get how it works… but if it’s my soulmate, I’ll probably know!”
Gentaro looks at him for a long moment - and this is an expression that Dice can’t quite place. Evaluating, with a strand of interest, before folding into the usual look of mild exhaustion. “You say that with such confidence…”
“It’s just another roll of the dice anyway,” he replied with confidence, with a grin tugging at his lips even as he hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans.
Another breeze passed, carrying a chill with it and Gentaro - in a refreshingly human moment - seemed to shudder faintly with the temperature drop, face ducking into the fur trim of Dice’s jacket.
It was a moment that Dice caught - distracting him briefly from his own response to the cold, and -
Shit, it was kinda endearing.
But knowing the plans that waited ahead of them, he still reached his hands out to the lapels of his jacket even as they were wrapped around Gentaro’s shoulders and grinned. “You know, even though this looks good on you…”
He trailed off, gambling on any kindness that Gentaro might have in his heart -
Yet ever contrary, Gentaro’s expression flattened into something wry, his lips turning into a slightly meaner smile, “It does, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll keep my winnings against two hopeless, superstitious gamblers.”
“Aw come on, we’ll be out for a few more hours at least…!” he whined. “And no way Ramuda’s gonna lend me money for any clothes that ain’t super pink and decorated with cupcakes.”
“Oh, but don’t you know, Dice?” Gentaro’s voice took on another feminine tilt, this time sounding like one of Ramuda’s fans, “That’s the height of fashion these days!”
“Eh? Is it?” he startled, suddenly very worried for the current state of Shibuya’s dress code.
“Ah, that was a lie,” Gentaro sighed even as he brushed off Dice’s hands from his jacket, lifting the item off with his own hands - and carelessly revealing that he wore another coat underneath. “Now take this, I was getting rather warm.”
“You already had one?!” Dice complained as he took his coat back all too readily, reveling in the warmth that it brought as he slipped his arms back into it.
“Of course, if our plans stretch into the evening, it only makes sense to check the temperature,” Gentaro lectured easily even as he reached up to idly adjust the ends of his hair. He glanced back to Dice with an easy smile, “But you’re welcome, for my kindness in thinking ahead for you.”
The collar of Dice’s jacket still smelled faintly floral - was it from the guy who took it from him? Gentaro? The drifting scent of a nearby garden? - and he wrestled with his frustration for being lied to about ten times in just as many minutes.
But Gentaro canted his head to the side and - shit, objectively speaking, the guy was gorgeous and Dice wasn’t thirsty or anything, he just had eyes - raised a brow in his direction like he was expecting a response.
And Dice felt all the embers of his irritation drift away with another breeze, and he sighed. “Thaaaaank you, Gentaro.” First, a long, drawn out reply. A second passed. Then, a brief snort and a smile: “... I appreciate it.”
“Think nothing of it… well, aside from that you’re buying my dinner tonight.”
“Ha?!”
“A lie, of course,” Gentaro hummed pleasantly even as he began to walk ahead, looking over his shoulder and encouraging Dice to follow along. “Now come, Ramuda is probably getting impatient by now.”
Dice glanced back to the crane that sat in the wedges of the bench and wondered if maybe it was better company for the rest of the night… but he knew he’d pick an adventure ahead of serenity every time, and his feet urged him forward to follow Gentaro not a second later.
“Alright, alright, I’m comin’!”
Make sure all the corners and edges align, press firmly in order to leave an imprint on the delicate paper, flip it over and make sure you do the same things to the other side.
The art of making paper cranes was a craft to be honored. To create something so complicated and beautiful from a simple beginning was nothing short of magical, though it took diligence and patience in order to truly see the majesty come forth and --
“Ahh, this is so boring…!”
Dice hated every single second of it.
It’s a fuzzy memory now - from a time that he doesn’t look back on often, and so he can’t even remember the owner of the gentle voice that laughs at his complaints when his big mouth affixes into a small frown.
“Now, now, the sooner you learn the better… you know how the custom goes - if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, then they will lead you to your soulmate,” the person says, and Dice can’t remember much about them, aside from the warmth he felt when they were near. A hand pressed over his small one, encouraging him to press just a little more carefully against the brightly colored paper in his hand.
“I’ve definitely made 1,000 by now!” he declared, pouting as he wondered why his time after school was dedicated to this rather than more time to play.
Looking back on it - he had to have been in kindergarten at the time, so he was probably closer to 14 than 1,000 paper cranes but 5-year-old Dice never claimed to know how to count.
“You’ll know when you’ve done it.” He’s assured by his companion, sincerity and wisdom blending in a simple sentence.
“Ughh, it’s so boooring,” Dice declares again, but his hands don’t stop working. It’s hard to say what drove him back then - maybe just some childish, innocent hope that he’d earn some praise if he kept going.
All he wanted to do was chase after that gentle voice, those encouraging hands, that warm feeling.
He didn’t care about who his soulmate was.
Tiny brows furrowed as he looked at the bumpy, slanted paper bird that rested in the palm of his hand.
He just really hoped that his soulmate wasn’t as dull as the task it took to summon them.
--
Over a decade later, and to say that things have changed would be an understatement.
If you asked Dice what he’s lost over the years - he’d laugh and say with perhaps too much enthusiasm, ‘Way too much to count!’
But at some point he knew he’d abandoned everything familiar, ran away from that gentleness without thinking to look back. There was no warmth here, only the slight chill of the Shibuya streets as the evening unfurled overhead. His jacket had been lost in his most recent set of wagers, but even as he lacked the shelter over his head or knowledge of where he’d be spending his night, he’d say that the fire in his chest that’d been ignited from a thrilling round of gambling was more than enough to keep him warm.
It was just a small matter to get his chilly fingers to cooperate with the same sentiment.
Fold, crease, pinch.
The flyer he’d taken down from a nearby wall - of an event that’d long passed, that required money to attend that Dice didn’t have - was slowly taking shape in his calloused fingers, the familiar shadow of a wing being formed with only the streetlamp overhead for a guiding light.
But he’d done this so many times that even without the light, he’d know which step he was on.
Shibuya was busy at all times of day, which is why he didn’t even look up at the sound of footsteps headed in his direction. Probably someone with something to do, people to meet -
“Mm, what’s this? You have a hobby that isn’t losing track of all your earthly possessions in grand sweeps?”
Or someone who came to meet him.
Dice’s eyes flicked up to meet Gentaro’s, the other man looking over him as if he was some kind of study, a mystery to be unpacked - rather than just a gambler who lost both a match and his jacket, folding a paper crane under Shibuya’s nighttime glow. Still, Gentaro’s lips curled up a the very end, his amusement in his subject painfully evident.
Though as Dice looked over Gentaro’s person, what he found more interesting was - “Oi, is that my jacket?!”
The amused glow in the novelist’s eyes only increased as he brought his hands up to the green item that draped his shoulders - already big on Dice, even bigger on his more narrow shoulders - and he quipped, “No, I don’t believe so. Certainly I found this in a discount bin on my way over….”
“Two sentences in and a lie already?! That’s a 50/50 chance of lie!” Dice whined.
Well, those odds were his favorite, technically.
“It was four since I found you, if you’d like to get technical,” Gentaro hummed. “Though I suppose I’ve been caught. Yes, that was a lie. Imagine my curiosity when on my walk over to our intended destination for the night and I find a gambler, not the one I know, sporting this warm garment on a rather cold night…”
“Tch, right? He was wearing it already when he took the last of my cash,” Dice grumbled, “But ended the game since he said he didn’t have any use for my shirt or pants. He backed out real early!”
“Is that how you interpret a strategic retreat…” Gentaro mused aloud, before offering a smile. “Well, I naturally assumed that you would be out here somewhere, sans jacket, so I felt like taking it back.”
“Ahn? How?” Dice’s brow furrowed as he looked back at the paper in his hands, flipping the tail of the crane from where it was resting. “He won it fair and square, you know? Sucks ass, but that’s what the dice decided.”
“Well… it’s not that hard to pretend to be psychic,” Gentaro’s expression only continued to glow as he recounted his adventure of the past half hour. “Something like ‘that garment will surely only bring you calamity, those who wear it only meet misfortune’. With a well-placed, completely out of the blue guess that he won it off the back of a street mutt with a fire in his eyes, and that he might not know that the owner before was fished out of a nearby river… he readily parted with it to a completely unrelated stranger on the street.”
Switching to the tone normally belonging to the type of housewife you’d find musing over the price of celery in the grocery: “It’s amazing what kids will believe these days if you just give them a little bit of a scare.”
Dice tried to suppress the shudder that ran down his spine: “Th… that was a lie too, wasn’t it?”
Gentaro’s lips parted in a full, dazzling and haunting smile, eyes sparkling with devilish delight.
“Was it?”
Truly a phantom.
And Dice lost the battle of that electric tingle taking an express trip down his back.
“Ah… ahah, thanks... I think,” he managed, just barely. Then he shook his head even as his fingers shaped the head of the crane, “Just give me a second? I’m almost done here….”
Dice didn’t haven’t to look up to take a guess that the expression on Gentaro’s face was back to calculating, contemplative like when he was watching people on the street, making characters out of strangers he’d never met.
“To fold a thousand paper cranes and they’ll lead you to your soulmate…” he reflected quietly, shifting with a passing wind, fingers curling into Dice’s jacket and pulling it more against him reflexively. Or maybe he was rubbing it in that he hadn’t given it back yet. “I didn’t think you the type to believe in such a thing.”
“Hah! Yeah, I guess it’s not really my style, huh?” Dice laughed even as he pulled the wings of the crane apart. “I’m not really into the whole ‘finding my soulmate’ business either, but a while back I started folding one for every loss - why not, you know? Letting fate decide who my soul’s tied to, I’m kinda curious to see what I end up with. Even if I lose a match, maybe I’ll win big in the soulmate game.”
“You would see it as a game…” Gentaro sighed, summing up the whole of a person in a sentence without so much as blinking. “How many have you folded then?”
Dice looked over the crane in his hand. His lines had gotten crisper with practice and age, the birds he made no longer a lumpy figment of a crane. This one was all bright colors, bold fonts, and dazzling effects - a very Shibuya bird, if he had to say so himself.
He rose from his squat, moving to place the Shibuya Crane on a nearby bench, wedged between slots so it wouldn’t fly away, as he answered Gentaro’s question with unwavering confidence:
“Fuck if I know.”
“.... Pardon?”
Once he was sure his new paper friend wasn’t falling over, he turned back over to Gentaro and raised his arms in a careless shrug.
“I fold when I lose - so I’ve probably folded a couple… uhh, hundred?”
Apparently even a decade made no difference in Dice’s ability to count cranes.
Gentaro’s brow furrowed as even he seemed to need to take a moment to process this information. “So you… don’t know how close you are to 1,000 - or if you’ve even passed it?”
“How many times do you think I lose…”
“Often - perhaps two to four times daily, on average.”
Dice did not care to mention that Shibuya flyer bird was his 3rd of the day.
“Well - what’s the point of keeping track?” he argued, just for the sake of arguing. “There’s no rule that says that I’m not gonna meet ‘em before I make the 1,000 anyway, right? I don’t really know or get how it works… but if it’s my soulmate, I’ll probably know!”
Gentaro looks at him for a long moment - and this is an expression that Dice can’t quite place. Evaluating, with a strand of interest, before folding into the usual look of mild exhaustion. “You say that with such confidence…”
“It’s just another roll of the dice anyway,” he replied with confidence, with a grin tugging at his lips even as he hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans.
Another breeze passed, carrying a chill with it and Gentaro - in a refreshingly human moment - seemed to shudder faintly with the temperature drop, face ducking into the fur trim of Dice’s jacket.
It was a moment that Dice caught - distracting him briefly from his own response to the cold, and -
Shit, it was kinda endearing.
But knowing the plans that waited ahead of them, he still reached his hands out to the lapels of his jacket even as they were wrapped around Gentaro’s shoulders and grinned. “You know, even though this looks good on you…”
He trailed off, gambling on any kindness that Gentaro might have in his heart -
Yet ever contrary, Gentaro’s expression flattened into something wry, his lips turning into a slightly meaner smile, “It does, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll keep my winnings against two hopeless, superstitious gamblers.”
“Aw come on, we’ll be out for a few more hours at least…!” he whined. “And no way Ramuda’s gonna lend me money for any clothes that ain’t super pink and decorated with cupcakes.”
“Oh, but don’t you know, Dice?” Gentaro’s voice took on another feminine tilt, this time sounding like one of Ramuda’s fans, “That’s the height of fashion these days!”
“Eh? Is it?” he startled, suddenly very worried for the current state of Shibuya’s dress code.
“Ah, that was a lie,” Gentaro sighed even as he brushed off Dice’s hands from his jacket, lifting the item off with his own hands - and carelessly revealing that he wore another coat underneath. “Now take this, I was getting rather warm.”
“You already had one?!” Dice complained as he took his coat back all too readily, reveling in the warmth that it brought as he slipped his arms back into it.
“Of course, if our plans stretch into the evening, it only makes sense to check the temperature,” Gentaro lectured easily even as he reached up to idly adjust the ends of his hair. He glanced back to Dice with an easy smile, “But you’re welcome, for my kindness in thinking ahead for you.”
The collar of Dice’s jacket still smelled faintly floral - was it from the guy who took it from him? Gentaro? The drifting scent of a nearby garden? - and he wrestled with his frustration for being lied to about ten times in just as many minutes.
But Gentaro canted his head to the side and - shit, objectively speaking, the guy was gorgeous and Dice wasn’t thirsty or anything, he just had eyes - raised a brow in his direction like he was expecting a response.
And Dice felt all the embers of his irritation drift away with another breeze, and he sighed. “Thaaaaank you, Gentaro.” First, a long, drawn out reply. A second passed. Then, a brief snort and a smile: “... I appreciate it.”
“Think nothing of it… well, aside from that you’re buying my dinner tonight.”
“Ha?!”
“A lie, of course,” Gentaro hummed pleasantly even as he began to walk ahead, looking over his shoulder and encouraging Dice to follow along. “Now come, Ramuda is probably getting impatient by now.”
Dice glanced back to the crane that sat in the wedges of the bench and wondered if maybe it was better company for the rest of the night… but he knew he’d pick an adventure ahead of serenity every time, and his feet urged him forward to follow Gentaro not a second later.
“Alright, alright, I’m comin’!”