warning that there is a tiny mention of weed ahead

He finds the first one slipped under his door on a Tuesday morning, just before his first class. It’s a spot of yellow on his carpet that catches his eye as he’s leaving the room, worn backpack heavy on one shoulder. Yongguk had left before Daehyun had woken up, so Daehyun figures that it’s finders, keepers. He picks up the sliver of paper and turns it over in his hand a few times before he realizes that it’s a paper crane. He has seen girls in his class during high school fold them before, chattering excitedly. This one, though, isn’t sloppy like the ones the girls had made. The paper is crisp and clean of unintended folds and the creases are sharp. Daehyun guesses that either he or Yongguk had accidentally brought it into the room, perhaps stuck to their shoes. He tucks a strand of brown hair behind his ear, sets it on the top of his dresser, and thinks nothing more of it.

That same evening, when Daehyun stumbles in through the door at half past ten, Yongguk presents him with another.

“I found this on the floor when I came back from the studio. Nearly stepped on it,” Yongguk says, and deposits folded paper into his hand. “I saw one on top of your clothes drawers and figured it was yours.”

Daehyun twists his lips. “It’s not. That one,” he points to the bird on his dresser, “I found on the floor this morning.”

Yongguk looks at the tie-dye patterned crane in Daehyun’s hand and shrugs, noncommittal. “Weird,” he says wisely, and lumbers to his bed, where he’s transcribing scribbled words from a pocket-sized notebook onto a Word document.

.

“Hey.” Daehyun scratches behind his ear with his pencil. He looks over at Yongguk, who is squinting at the screen of his laptop intensely, and waits for a response. Yongguk grunts like a grizzly bear awakened from hibernation. “Do you think someone could be putting those cranes there? You know, like some kind of message?”

Yongguk rumbles for a second, dissatisfied at being distracted from his work, then finally turns to Daehyun. “What for?”

Daehyun thinks about this. “I don’t know. But maybe these cranes are for one of us? They might be for you.”

“Somehow I doubt it.” Yongguk brushes it off, and turns back to the program on his screen.

Daehyun sighs quietly and tries to concentrate on his own homework. He can’t really say he was expecting to get much more out of Yongguk. Their relationship isn’t unpleasant by any means, but neither is it extremely friendly. There is a kind of detachment on both their parts, a mutual agreement to leave each other alone that they had somehow forged. Yongguk is a year ahead, flying through his studies and beyond, feverishly working on his future. He hadn’t seemed like the type when he and Daehyun had first met at the end of the previous year.

Daehyun remembers that Yongguk had been walking down the hallway fresh out of the shower, decked in an army-green bathrobe loosely secured around his waist and a white towel draped over his head. He’d been scrubbing furiously at his hair and nearly walked right into Daehyun. Of course, Yongguk had apologized sincerely, but Daehyun, catching a glimpse of his heavily tattooed chest, had simply nodded and scurried off as quickly as possible.

Daehyun knows better now that Yongguk is not the delinquent he had first assumed. Yongguk has another tattoo on his arm and a spattering of words on his back, but he typically covers up all three with crewneck t-shirts. He has piercings in his ears that he keeps filled with simple studs, and perhaps his haircut—shaved mostly at the bottom and the sides with the thickest tuft of hair at the top center—isn’t the most convincing, but Yongguk is no more a threatening figure than a stuffed lion. Daehyun also suspects that Yongguk takes the occasional whiff of weed on the weekends, social setting permitting, but Daehyun doesn’t find it all that concerning. The most he can say is that Yongguk’s style needs a little remodeling, especially with the ill-fitting, faded jeans of which he keeps at least three pairs.

.

The origami doesn’t stop coming from that day onward. It’s two different colors or different patterns every day, one in the morning before Daehyun wakes, and the other sometime in the evening before Daehyun comes back. He should maybe be concerned with the fact that someone knows his schedule so well, but he doesn’t really care. There’s no question that the cranes are being delivered for Daehyun, since Yongguk claims one evening that he’d been in the room the entire time, and the bird had miraculously appeared inside. Daehyun thinks that perhaps Yongguk had met the messenger and neglected to tell him so, but he doesn’t pry.

By three weeks’ time, forty-two cranes grace the top of his dresser, and it’s become a bit of an inconvenience. Daehyun looks up ways to appropriate them and finds that he can hang them up. He snags a thick spool of sparkling blue thread from a friend in fashion design (he’s called in on one of the debts from the many times he’s had to make fabric-store runs in the middle of the night) and lays out all the birds on his bed.

He discovers the note through a complete accident. It happens while he inspects the first crane for a place to thread the string through, and peels back the folded paper of the right wing. Behind it, he finds ink.

Daehyun can only read a few words. Curious, he unwraps the bird carefully. On the inside, the yellow has given way to white and the dark blue of pen.

#1: I don’t really know where to start, but I suppose I’ll introduce myself with a little history lesson of sorts.

In Japan, the paper crane is a symbol of peace. 

Even more so, it is a symbol of hope. They say that a girl named Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia at an early age because of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, where she lived. When she was hospitalized, she began to fold paper cranes.

If you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true. Her wish was to live.

Mine, I guess, is a little bit more selfish than that. And so, with that, you should know that this is just the first of a thousand.

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Daehyun has heard the story. The books proclaim that Sadako dies before completing all one thousand cranes, and that her friends complete the rest. She’s buried with the birds beside her. Her relatives, on the other hand, say that she finishes more than a thousand paper cranes before her death.

Daehyun wonders where in that story someone can find hope. He wants to know, wants to know so bad that the disappointment he feels when all he finds on the rest of the cranes are numbers steadily counting to a goal far away consumes him for the rest of the evening. He hangs the numbered cranes on the thread, seven to one string except the very first, with only six. The note he tucks safely into his sock drawer.

a/n: It has been brought to my attention that there is a daejae fic that goes by the name of A Thousand Cranes floating somewhere around here. I would like to clarify that I am in no way, shape, or form attempting to copy this author. Our plots are very different, and even the ideas differ.

I will ask that those of you who have read or will read the other fic, please do not compare our fics. c:

Hope y’all enjoyed!
-Jess