Word Count: 2,174
"Did you know that in Japanese culture, if you make a thousand paper cranes, the gods will grant you one wish? It's a myth that was made popular by the true story of Sadako Sasaki, this girl who got leukemia because she survived the Hiroshima bombing and tried to fold one thousand paper cranes in order to get better."
Eren was listening very intently to his roommate Mikasa chatting on and on about her Japanese heritage. She was making a pile of colorful origami cranes as she did so.
She briefly looked up at Eren and offered him a colorful square of paper. "Do you want to help?" she offered.
"Sure," he replied, taking the square from her.
"Are you sure about this, Eren? I mean, it's a thousand paper cranes. That's a lot of time, money, and origami paper."
Eren sighed for the hundredth time that conversation. "Yes, Armin. I do want to make her a thousand paper cranes. Her birthday's coming up; how hard could it be?"
His blond friend glared at him and pointed at the very crinkly and sloppy cranes on the coffee table. "Those took an hour to make. Mikasa's birthday is in two weeks. It took Sadako like what, three months to make six hundred of them? You're not going to make a thousand of them in two weeks."
Eren scowled. "Then what do you suggest, Armin?"
Armin grinned at him and pulled a miniature pair of scissors out of his pocket. "Paper stars," he replied.
Eren raised an eyebrow at his friend. "I'm not even going to ask where you got that pair of scissors, but why stars and what do scissors have to do with them?"
"There's another legend based off of making paper stars. If you make a hundred or a thousand and gift them to someone, it's a symbol of how much you care about them, depending on how many you give them. Or, alternatively, if you give them the stars so that they could make a wish on them. It's a Chinese tradition, but Mikasa is a mixed Asian, right?"
Eren nodded.
"Well, first off, paper stars are way smaller than paper cranes, so they'd be easier to hide from her. She is our roommate, after all. Second of all, they're a lot easier and take less time to make than cranes," Armin continued, twirling the scissors around on his finger all the while before tossing it up and catching it again. Then he pointed it blade-first at a pile of scratch paper on the table. "And while we could just go to the Chinese supermarket and get a pile of origami paper or something from thereㅡ well they do sell star paper, too, but that's beside the pointㅡ it would be a lot cheaper to just cut out strips of colored or scratch paper, and as needy college students, we need every penny we've got."
Eren chewed on his lip as he thought about Armin's points. "Fine," he finally said, falling backwards onto the trio's shoddy sofa. "But I don't think we should be using old notes, we might be able to sell them to underclassmen in the future, and as 'needy college students who need every penny we've got,' it would probably be best if we saved those."
Armin smiled. "Of course."
"How are you doing this, Armin?"
Armin stared blankly at his friend as he deftly twisted a strip of paper into a pentagon and folded the rest of the paper into a pentagon before tucking the final little bit under the pocket. "I mean, I kind of told you alreadyㅡ tie it into a knot, then fold the remaining paper along the sides and then pinch the corners to make it puff up."
Eren glared at him, a loose and crumpled paper pentagon on his lap. "How is it that you're so smart, yet you're such an awful teacher?"
Armin shrugged as he puffed up his star and added it to a neat little pile he had among the scraps of paper he and Eren had collected on the coffee table. "Not all skilled people can teach what they're good at. Or maybe you're just not a verbal learner. Maybe you're a visual or tactile learner. I just don't know," he said.
"Auuugh," Eren groaned, flopping backward onto the couch and pretending to die. When Armin didn't respond, he cracked open one eye and saw Armin calmly ignoring him and making yet another paper star.
Eren sighed and sat up again. "Can you teach me one more time?" he begged, but the front door clicked open.
"I'm back," Mikasa sang, and Armin and Eren exchanged terrified glances for a split second.
Eren swore and hastily stuffed his awful attempts at making paper stars into his pants pockets as Armin swept his stars into his hand and shoved them between the couch cushions. Then they both tried to look as normal as possible.
Mikasa looked over at them with a funny expression on her face. "What are you guys doing?"
"Studying," Eren lied, eyeing his textbooks lying on the floor nearby.
"Do you need help?" Mikasa concernedly asked.
"No!" the boys quickly yelled, then stopped themselves.
"We're fine on our own. Don't you have a class to be going to?" Armin quickly clarified.
Mikasa checked her watch. "Not for two hours," she began, but Armin was already pushing her out the door.
"You can never be too early, don'tcha know? Have fun in class, take your time coming back!"
He locked the door behind her.
Eren snorted from the couch. "Nice going, Armin, that wasn't suspicious at all. Did she at least have her keys with her? And don't we have a class later?"
"It's trig, I can pass that in my sleep, and I don't see her keys anywhere."
"Well," Eren dryly replied, pulling somewhat crushed stars out from between the couch cushions. "You're going to have to tutor me in trig later, then, because these stars aren't going to fold themselves."
It took a little while, but Eren learned how to make proper paper stars soon enough. He carried a little jar of them in his backpack at all times, so he could absentmindedly make them whenever he had the time. Whenever he got back to his little apartment, he'd dump the stars into an even bigger jar in his underwear drawer. He hoped Mikasa never found out where he kept her present while he was making it, but at the same time, he figured she wouldn't care.
He never really kept count of how many stars he made, he figured that if he put that kind of pressure on himself, it would stress him out more than he needed to be, so the day he first counted the stars was the night before Mikasa's birthday.
"Eight ninety-three, eight ninety-four, eight ninety-five," he muttered as Armin watched from his desk, his homework for the night long forgotten.
"I don't think you have enough," Armin dubiously told him from his seat on Eren's swivel chair.
Eren scowled up at the blond. "I can make more."
"Yeah, but you also need to study and do your homework," Armin reminded him, knocking on the cover of a textbook on Eren's desk.
Eren paused his counting and thought for a moment. "Am I behind at all?" he wondered aloud.
"It's been about a week; I'd assume so," Armin warned. "You're going to need tutoring for weeks after this, that I can guarantee you."
Eren groaned and counted out the last few stars. "Nine hundred twenty-seven," he declared and fell onto his back on the floor. "Not bad, if I do say so myself."
"I concur," Armin admitted, turning away from the boy on the floor so that he faced the desk. "But it's half past eleven at night. Seventy-three stars is quite a bit to make, and you need to both study and sleep."
"Pah. Sleep is for the weak," Eren said, reaching for more colored paper and a pair of scissors. "What I'm going to need is some coffee."
Armin's eyes suddenly glinted madly. "I just had a brilliant idea," he said as he stood up from the office chair and started walking out the door.
"What're you doing?" Eren asked as he added a star to his already absurdly large pile.
"You've still got some ADHD meds left, right?" Armin replied, not answering.
"Yeah, butㅡ Armin what are you planning?"
"You'll see."
Eren dropped his strip of paper and poked his head out of his bedroom door. "I'm more than a little concerned, Armin!" he called after his roommate. "All I need is coffee!"
"Is something going on?" his third roommate Mikasa asked through her door.
"No!" the boys chorused. Eren squinted at Armin as the latter started pulling things out of the cupboard in their tiny kitchen, but retreated back to his room to continue making stars.
"Coffee was a mistake."
Nearby, Armin slowly sipped a cup of tea and rolled his eyes. "'All I neeeeed is cooooffeeeee,'" he mocked, putting his tea down. "To be fair, you did drink it all in one go. At midnight. You're not going to get any sleep until six in the morning."
"Why didn't you stop me? Hell, why didn't I stop you from adding Adderall to my coffee?" Eren lamented.
"'Sleep is for the weak,'" Armin quoted.
"Yeah, well now I need to sleep for a week. But I can't. Because I had a big ol' cup of coffee. With Adderall in it."
"You finished the stars, at least. And now you can study."
"But at what cost? Oh, the horrors of human pride! To have flown too close to the sun, driven by pride, only to come crashing down on melted waxen wings!"
Armin looked at his tea like it was a camera on The Office. He picked it up and took a sip with a sigh. "Your literate sarcasm is just making you sound like a drama queen. Actually, scratch that; you've always been a bit of a drama queen. It's just showing now more than ever."
"Coffee was a mistake."
"Yes, well, it was your mistake."
Eren groaned.
"Happy birthday to you~"
A still somewhat bewildered Mikasa blew the candles off a messy, homemade cake as her friends cheered and applauded. Everyone was squeezed into her, Eren, and Armin's tiny living room in their little apartment to celebrate her birthday.
"You should open your presents now," a ponytailed brunette girl said, nudging Mikasa's shoulder. The brunette pushed a small, wrapped box into the latter's hands.
"Thank you, Sasha," Mikasa politely replied.
Eren and Armin leaned against the wall in the back, watching the homely scene take place before them. Eren felt butterflies flutter in his stomach when he thought about the simple little jar of stars he made for the birthday girl.
Eren felt Armin elbow him in the ribs. He winced and turned to his friend.
"Aren't you going to give her the stars?" the blond whispered.
Eren shook his head. "Not until everyone's gone. I'm a little embarrassed at how simple it is. It's just a jar of stars for aesthetics and decoration."
"Yeah, but you made them all by hand!" Armin furiously whispered back. "With love and care and with Mikasa in mind! And you know how much of a sap Mikasa is for things like those."
Eren mulled it over for a moment or two. "But what have you gotten for her."
Armin did jazz hands. "It's a myyysteryyy."
"You didn't get her anything, did you."
"Hush, you. I gave you the idea of stars instead of cranes. Now go get your present."
With a sigh of defeat, Eren slunk away to his room, opening up his dresser and pulling out the jar of stars from among his clean underwear. He paused for a second, wondering if it would be gross to give it to Mikasa without wiping it down first. It had, after all, been sitting among socially taboo clothes, but at the same time, how would she know?
Well, he'd know, and it would make him feel bad, he decided as he rubbed away the imaginary germs with his shirt.
He walked back into their tiny living room, clutching the jar close to his chest as he approached Mikasa in the center of everyone. He thrust the jar towards her.
"Happy birthday," he mumbled. Mikasa's eyes widened ever so slightly, but she took the jar anyway. "There's a thousand of them, so, uh.
"Make a wish."
Author's Note: This was actually intended to be a shipfic, but I ended up just leaving it up to interpretation. Which is cool, too! Yeah. Slipped a couple headcanons into here, too, like how I like to think that Mikasa is a mixed Asian and that Eren has ADHD. Good stuff amirite? Anyway, if you enjoyed, feel free to leave a favorite! Or something! Leave your thoughts in the reviews (if that's what you're into), and as always, have a greaaat daaaay~