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Ramuda and Gentaro had always thought, somehow, that seeing Dice in nothing but his boxers would’ve been the worst of it. Well, best, if they’re being honest, but honestly honesty hasn’t ever been all it’s cracked up to be, not to any of the three of them. For Ramuda and Gentaro, especially, it’s simply simpler to let themselves be surprised, and celebrate the fact that unsurprisingly, Dice has always been full of surprises.
Maybe then they can concede that it was a tad bit cruel, to have started making bets with each other on their way here the way they usually did, over what Dice’s urgent call for them in the group chat could ever be about. Which one of them Dice would get on his knees in front of first and beg for money, and which other he’d beg to at least hide him from people bound to come after him after they refuse to lend him any.
That Dice is, instead, un/fortunately fully clothed is what they had noticed first. For some reason, the fucking shiny red sports car on the hood of which he's laying, legs crossed on the windshield while he stared and blinked prettily at his upside-down teammates, was secondary.
Dice sits up, tucks his legs in, and spins— spins, around to face them, deciding for his own good to ignore how closely they watch his ass so smoothly slide off of the polished surface of the car when he jumps to his feet, glad to leave it like a throne he's tired of sitting in. “The hell took y’guys so long?? Do SOS’s mean fuck-all to y’all?? What if I was in danger!”
“But you look perfectly fine~” Ramuda retorts, hop-step-jumping into Dice’s arms. He hugs him tightly in greeting, nuzzling into Dice’s chest when Dice automatically though less enthusiastically returns the gesture. Then, Ramuda pulls his hands back to start patting Dice down without warning. “If you have your mic on you then you’re aaaallll good!”
“You could say that without gropin’ me but whatever,” Dice mutters, rolling his eyes as Ramuda continues his unnecessarily indulgent inspection. He only mildly hates that when he realizes he’s smiling, it’s because Gentaro is smiling, slightly, back at him, too. Dice shrugs casually and cocks his chin at him. “You wanna hug too?”
In response, Gentaro’s eyes widen, and he raises a sleeved palm to his mouth, raises his voice a notch: “Dare you in such a shameless manner seduce a maiden chaste as I?” He shakes his head woefully, overdramatically. “If word of this were to ever get out, who would want to take me in matrimony any longer—?”
“—I would!” Ramuda replies easily, hop-step-glomping Gentaro next. He presses his cheek onto his arm and cuddles into the fresh linen of his shirt. “Me and Daisu are gonna marry you!! Don’t worry ‘bout it, ‘kay ‘kay?” He withdraws and reaches up to put his palms to Gentaro’s cheek. “We’ll hug you all you want, so just let us hug you all we want, too! Right, Daisu?”
Ramuda’s touch, and Dice’s chuckles that follow—not an outright rejection of the idea—have something stirring and blooming in Gentaro’s chest, sending heat rushing up his neck. Gentaro is glad that Ramuda is too busy making kissy faces at Dice now to notice, but Ramuda strokes his cheeks with his thumbs, tenderly like he felt the extra warmth anyway and so wanted to soothe it. Then he drops it altogether with his arms to complain that they hurt, it wasn’t fair that they were so much taller, the works.
Gentaro is almost thankful for the chance to recompose himself when Ramuda bounces back towards Dice with an eager “And?” Gentaro stands back and takes it all in, too, as Ramuda prompts Dice by pointing a lollipop he’s produced out of nowhere and drawing a wide circle with it, at and around the elephant in the room—the red sports car in the empty abandoned parking lot, really. “What’s all this?”
Dice’s face falls, like he’s only now realized that this is pretty weird—yes, weirder than them seeing him after he’d gambled away all his clothes. Like he hadn’t prepared any sort of explanation. Like he’d instead spent his entire time waiting for them just looking forward to seeing them and being with them soon.
Gentaro happens to have regathered just enough of his bearings to think Dice’s reaction darling, so he supplies: “Allow me to guess. The other day you bemoaned that you got kicked out of your regular casino for hitting one of the machines when you lost, and I find it difficult to believe that Lady Luck favors you enough to bestow upon you a sports car showcase from the lottery. But desperate for your fix of action for the day, you’d gone to one of the more underground dens where there are less restrictions on what players choose to hazard.”
“Ooohh I see!” Ramuda twirls around, hands Gentaro his freshly unwrapped candy, and makes a show of clapping his hands. “As expected!! Gencharo’s a Daichu expert!” He sidles up to Gentaro and tilts his head. “So he’s tooootally broke and couldn’t behave enough to at least wait to get funds again, so he went to some sketchy place where they put up all sorts of stuff other than money, huh!!!”
“You guys’re shittalkin’ me, you guys’re really just friggin’ shittalkin’ me right now,” Dice groans, bringing his arm up to fake-cry into the crook of it. He possesses neither Ramuda’s cuteness nor Gentaro’s charm, though, so he guesses he just looks lame trying to act as if he’s offended. But hey, it was worth a shot. Besides, “‘m in a good mood so I’ll just let you off, yeah?”
“l’ll take your generous willingness to forgive our folly as a testament to aforementioned good mood,” Gentaro says, impulsively wanting to finish with a flourish, so he holds the candy in his mouth to free his hands, fold them together while he bows exaggeratedly, in mock-gratitude to Dice, and to hide his grimace when he recoils at the overwhelming artificial sweet of the treat Ramuda had given him; he just much prefers the flavor when it’s faint from someone else’s lips.
“So what now?” Ramuda nonchalantly asks, graciously taking the candy back from Gentaro as he straightens up again. He catches Dice gulp at how he pops the lollipop right into his mouth like it wasn’t just in Gentaro’s a moment ago, and pouts. “There’s not enough space in my studio or Gentaro’s office to hold on to that for you with your boombox, FYI!!”
“Huh?” Dice shakes his head, to shake his daze off, eyebrows furrowing guiltily. “Jeez, I know that, I wasn’t gonna trouble you with it or anything…” He scratches the back of his head awkwardly. “I mean, don’t got the paperwork so I can’t keep it anyways, ‘m definitely gonna re-wager it sooner or later. Just thought that before that, y’know, us three oughta take it out for a spin or some shit…?”
Ramuda and Gentaro share a look at how Dice’s voice trailed off, uncharacteristic in its uncertainty. They remember that expectation again, to have found Dice with nothing, not even the clothes on his back, ready to lose something to chance in the same second it landed in his lap. Yet here Dice is— they can get over that he isn’t half-naked, but the fact that Dice had enough restraint to half-patiently wait for them so they could all enjoy his prize together when he could’ve just gone and played some more by himself–without even being fully conscious of it– has them half-choked up.
But again, honesty is hard for even Dice sometimes, especially when Ramuda and Gentaro turn their gazes back in his direction, blinking at him like they’re moved by the kindness he shows them without even trying, as if it isn’t natural for him to want to share these things with them when they’ve been—sans all the damn teasing— kind to him, too. He taps his foot and jerks a thumb behind him. “Look, it’s a nice car, right? But cars don’t go anywhere when there ain’t anyone to drive ‘em, get me?”
“Gotcha, gotcha!” Ramuda chimes in, to save Dice and Gentaro and himself the trouble of trying to deal with the unfailingly overwhelming sentiment of one another’s indirect affection; the small, subtle things always get them more terribly than any of the overt physical closeness, though that gets them plenty terribly on its own. Ramuda brightens. “A night drive date, huh!! Then where are we going!” He takes his lollipop and puts it to Dice’s lips like a reward.
Dice takes it like one, all to bite down on and grin around. “Duh, wherever the fuck we want!” Dice takes the keys from an inner pocket in his coat and swings them cockily in Ramuda’s line of sight, with the same pride he shows off his trusty pair of dice. “It’s our car now, so world’s our oyster or sky’s the limit or ‘t’s a blank check, whatever dumb thing people are sayin’ these days!”
Ramuda’s eyes are sparkling, and even if Dice is probably chalking it up to hype, to Gentaro who’s watching from where he is beside them, it’s plain as day, just how taken Ramuda is with Dice, because of course he is. Gentaro’s well-acquainted with the feeling; Dice has no idea how utterly adored he is. Gentaro puts a knuckle to his lips and clears his throat all sillily. “Pray-tell, Daisu, who’s taking the wheel? Were you even certain that either Ramuda or I could drive?”
“Ah… Haha,” Dice sheepishly clears his throat, too, swallows the bits of candy down and spits the stick out. “I’ll admit, that part was a gamble. I mean, this whole thing was. My whole life is!” The grin takes its place back on his face, fangs in full display with his more characteristic energy. “But I mean, if any of us’d know how to drive I kinda felt like it’d be you, Gentaro.”
Gentaro raises an eyebrow. “Care to grant me the right to hear the reasoning behind that? Before I even consider doing this for you…” Or so he murmurs, but he’s already elegantly-as-always walking on over, taking the keys dangling from Dice’s fingers into his own with all the grace of a thief in the night, like it’s all he knows. He surveys the car as he does, difficult as it is to look past Dice and Ramuda, and something akin to doubt crosses his mind. He does know how to drive—Dice would’ve won that one—but he doesn’t have a driver’s license on his person or anything.
He’s curious as to whether any of them even does. Gentaro makes his way around the car to find the door to the driver’s seat already unlocked, and Dice and Ramuda peek in when Gentaro swings it open, the former whistling at the snazzy car interior, the latter ooh-ing and ahh-ing still at the cherry-red of the exterior. And despite being distracted— their genuine excitement is music to his ears— Gentaro does observe that neither of them appears to be interested in the workings of it.
No, lack of driver’s license and inability to drive aside, does any of them have any form of legitimate identification on them, even? Not that it matters in the least and in fact, Gentaro has never, ever given it serious thought until this very moment, but considering the… kind of lives the three of them lead, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d be in possession of anything but unceremoniously fraudulent IDs. And as Gentaro steps into the car, with Dice opening the back door for Ramuda before scrambling into the passenger seat himself, he simmers in just how supremely amusing that is, how amazingly similar they are in their different degrees and dimensions of deception.
“Well?” Dice starts once they’ve all slammed their doors closed, leaning across the gear shift to peer up at whatever face Gentaro is making. “You good?” Gentaro looks at him suspiciously in turn, and Dice laughs in the back of his throat to himself and confesses out loud, “I mean, the image I had in my head was you drivin’ one of those old models from the like… black and white movies from the olden days or some crap… Always thought that’d be pretty cool, but seein’ you in a fancy car is kinda cooler for some reason, not gonna lie.”
Gentaro sighs, and he’s ashamed of being unable to hold in the fondness that laces the exasperated breath out. He turns his head away for his peace of mind, eyeing the interior intently like it interests him more than it does in truth. “Right you are. Poor ol’ outdated me couldn’t even begin to dream of driving something as modern and stylish as this—”
“—Eh, first things first,” Dice interrupts, clearly not paying attention to a second of his drivel, instead leaning more into the driver’s seat. He stretches his arm over Gentaro’s chest, announcing belatedly, “Seatbelt’s right here in case you can’t find it, I checked it out earlier before you came and…” And, it escapes Dice altogether what he’s in the middle of doing and how to breathe. He just… lingers, for one long moment, because the proximity is reminding him that though he had offered earlier, in the end he hadn’t held Gentaro. “Uh—”
“—It’s the gap, the G-A-P!” Ramuda suddenly raises, emerging from behind the backrest of the driver’s seat and throwing his arms over it and around Gentaro’s shoulders in a tight hug, because Dice is stupidly being a coward for no good reason. “Picture it!” he muses, “Yumeno Gentaro, old-fashioned fashion icon, in a real trendy and classy sports car! It’s super sexy!” Ramuda nods at Dice. “So so true, Daisu!”
“I— Ramuda, you—!” Dice follows Ramuda when he withdraws from Gentaro, twisting in a flustered frenzy and grabbing at Ramuda for saying unnecessary shit— things that can go without saying that straightforwardly—though all Gentaro does is spare the commotion a delighted simper. He zips the seatbelt out and locks it into place on the other side of his seat, finding that the bright red of it sure does stand out against the dark of his clothes, as well as Dice’s when they eventually chill out and he eventually settles into the passenger seat, defeated after getting his cheeks mercilessly pinched by Ramuda.
Then Gentaro is switching the ignition on and feeling out the steering wheel, feet tentatively testing the pedals while the engine is warming up. He glances at the rearview mirror to find Ramuda sprawling himself across the three seats, and beside him where Dice is trying to figure out how to recline his chair so he can kick his feet onto the dashboard. “Getting comfortable, are we?” Gentaro sings, shifting in his spot and shifting the gears. “Where to, my loves?”
“Dice said something about a world with a sky full of oysters, there would be nice!” Ramuda cheers loudly, pumping a loose fist in the air and punching the car ceiling. It earns him a glare from Dice and a rushed ‘Don’t get scratches on the car, it won’t be worth shit after—wait, I was hangin' out on the hood earlier… Anyway, that’s nowhere near what I damn said!’ but Ramuda just sticks his tongue out at him, cutely, comments that by the way Daisu looked super sexy lounging earlier too, and then he knows he’s immediately forgiven.
“Whatever…” Dice huffs, facing forward and crossing his ankles in front of him. “Anyway there’s gotta be somewhere you actually wanna go, Ramuda…” He makes an OK sign with his hand. “If it’s cash, I got some extra for gas, so we can go as far as that can take us.” Dice drops his hand on Gentaro’s knee and smirks at nothing. “Oh, and Gentaro’s ‘super sexy’ driving skills,” he adds, to humor Ramuda, and himself, and Gentaro, who as if on cue has started moving the car.
Their departure goes off with less of a hitch than he thought it would, Dice figures. Taking back his hand and his joking, he supposes that there really is something captivating about watching Gentaro while he’s like this: eyes ever trained ahead, focused on each of the motions he’s going through as they peel out of the parking lot and roll onto the nearest driveway, every action dedicated to his loves. When Dice finally manages to return to his senses after an… embarrassingly indefinite amount of time, he finds that none of the streets around are all that familiar, though the last time he checked they were still in Shibuya.
He forgets sometimes how he gets to these places in the first place. Pinning his location and sending it to the group chat after he decided he was done for the night was uncomplicated enough, like everything else is with them; they can just dump anything they wanna share in there. In the back of Dice’s mind, though, he wonders how Ramuda and Gentaro had even made it here when they hadn’t replied. Did they meet up somewhere and commute together? The idea of the two of them lurking in sketchy alleyways at this hour makes Dice strangely nervous, but the only thing he thinks is worth voicing out at this point is thanks, for going to the trouble to fetch him today, and always.
Dice shrugs it off to tell them another day, since the night is young and so are they. He elects to get back to finding the lever to push his chair back. He manages it in half the time it took him to quit staring at Gentaro, and stops short to look up at the rearview mirror just to make sure Ramuda’s legs won’t be in the way. He imagines getting them trapped would be a pain at worst, an annoyance at best, and he isn’t keen on causing Ramuda either.
“Ramuda,” Gentaro calls, when he meets Dice’s eyes in the mirror, because they happen to be checking up on their leader at the same time after he’s quieted down so soon. The softness of his voice is startling to Dice, though to Ramuda, it doesn’t fully register, because he’s preoccupied staring out the window with glassy eyes and a wistfulness that shouldn’t be like him, but it is. Gentaro chances a discussion regardless: “The expression ‘the world is your oyster’ lays claim not to a literal world with oysters, but to the endless opportunities life has to offer, those which you may take into your hands by your own means. As for ‘the sky’s the limit,’ I, for one, disagree; I do believe we can always go beyond and farther. Further. If that’s what you’re pondering over there.”
“Pondering shmondering~” Ramuda returns cheerfully, rolling his eyes playfully, though his voice is cracking at the end from how high it goes and something else that he immediately sets out to smother by swinging his legs and kicking the back of Dice’s now-reclined seat. “I only think this hard when I’m writing love letters!” He presses dimples into his cheeks with his nails. “Or else I’d get wrinkles and become ugly~~ Was just thinking it’s a bummer that we can’t go to Oyster World, but oh well, can’t be helped…! There's not really anywhere I wanna go, yo!” He hits the back of Gentaro’s seat, too. “Besides, are Gencharo’s hottie driving skills and Daichu’s coolio cash money really enough to take us to places that don’t exist??”
Ramuda regrets the half-challenge as soon as it leaves his lips, because when he looks up at the mirror, too, he finds their eyes gleaming with a never-say-never shine; Gentaro looks like he’s about to make some wisecrack about the uncertainty of it unless they try to explore the unknown for themselves, and Dice looks like he’s about to make some reckless bet that if it’s the three of them they can get somewhere, just like this, because that’s just how they are and Ramuda, oh, Ramuda would kill to live the way they do, live with them the way they do— he just wouldn’t know what to do with that much raw hope and faith when it’s already all they can do to enjoy this fling, as they are, and enjoy the ride, while they can.
Gentaro can tell, and he’s all in for a joyride, too, so he lets it go, but not without acknowledging: “…True.” He even soughs in faux-regret, though what follows is a sincere attempt at reassurance: “However. While I may very well be insufficient, I swear to try to the utmost of my abilities. Dice also hereby swears to give the cause everything he’s got.” And see, Dice is all in, too, so he doesn’t even get the idea to argue. He just goes along with it when Gentaro steers into the freeway while nudging his elbow in his direction, to change the topic. “Now would you be a sweetheart and teach me how to turn the radio on, please?”
Dice clicks his tongue at the nickname but rights his chair again, starts fiddling with the unit between them anyway. They lapse into a hushed back-and-forth about how, surely, the stereo of a car as expensive as this is bound to be of top-tier quality, but that’s only if they can make out how on earth it operates to start with. It’s a convincingly on-brand debate that’s not worth the fuss, nothing but typical banter, up until the moment their eyes all happen to meet in the mirror once more, because Dice and Gentaro want to confirm if their distraction is working, and because Ramuda’s glad that it is.
Now, Dice and Gentaro are doubling down on the radio pretending they didn’t just check on Ramuda again, but Ramuda had caught them and he just feels something in his stomach—car-sickness, probably, because he hasn’t ever really been in a car like this before, or butterflies, definitely, because he’s done absolutely nothing ever to deserve a posse who bothers with him and looks out for him like they do but here they are, in sheer spite of the whole damn universe, and he hasn’t really ever been in love like this before, either. Ramuda slaps his palms onto his cheeks, less gentle with himself when he feels himself blushing. “Ahh, jeez!”
Gentaro and Dice jump at the sound, and before they can ask what Ramuda is doing, he’s already popping in between them, one push of his finger undoing all their not-hard work and shutting the radio back down in an instant. He joins in on the useless chitchat, goes off about how a neat sound system isn’t going to make a difference; radio stations in these divisions are all the same these days, he claims– as if he’s ever had any gripes with listening to mainstream hip hop-pop. (He hasn’t. He’s usually very proud to drop his drops, magical lollipops ✰ and paint the town in pastel-neon marble-textured cantares by radio waves instead of hypnosis.)
“Gentarooo,” Ramuda moans, putting his hands on his shoulders and shaking them. “Tell us a story instead, mmkay?” He leans forward more to hug him again before he can protest; Ramuda can perfectly imagine the excuses Gentaro can make: he couldn’t possibly whip up a story that quickly, at least not one worthy of a lovely, loverly night cruise with who knows how many hours and miles to go.
But ultimately, Gentaro is weak to Ramuda’s whims and whines–both he and Dice are– so when Dice barks at Ramuda to back off and quit pestering Gentaro or he’ll wreck this car and leave Dice with nothing to wager in the end, Gentaro wordlessly lifts a pointer finger to shush them. He touches the tip of it, feather-light, first to Ramuda’s lips, then Dice’s, then his own. Then he slides it down to his chin, the pose contemplative and indicative of his assent. Even if they could mind the act a little more, they don’t, and they don’t have to pretend that they do.
“That’s our cue to give him a prompt!” Ramuda beams, merrily plopping back into his seat. That they both have deadlines they’re putting off for an impromptu road-trip gives Ramuda confidence in Gentaro’s readiness to just throw something together, so he doesn’t give it as much thought as someone else might. Someone else being, Dice, who’s visibly racking his brain for an idea that Gentaro couldn’t twist and turn into something ridiculous just for the hell of making fun of him or something, because he sure does enjoy doing that sometimes. Ramuda looks around, blinks at the view out the window, realizing why it caught his eye and just how much space they have now. Then the words are out of him instantly: “Do one about stars?”
Dice gives him a look at that, comically frightful. “Great plan, the stars’re gorgeous tonight but—” He puts a hand on Gentaro’s shoulder, clutching, while he bites at the fingernails on his other hand in exaggerated anxiety. He starts shaking him, the exact way he just told Ramuda not to, and wails: “—Eyes on the road, eyes on the road! If you crash this car I’ll literally cry, Gentarooo!!”
Gentaro doesn’t resist the upset, and waits it out. Once Gentaro’s made it clear he isn’t going to budge and Dice calms down, he purses his lips thoughtfully. “Say… Did you know?” he begins in all seriousness. “You can tell planets apart from stars in the night sky by if they twinkle. It’s a matter of relative distance: the closer a celestial body is, the more likely it is for their light to be refracted by the atmosphere.” Gentaro pauses at the resurfacing of a recent memory, then carries on: “As for shooting stars, we may call them that but in reality they’re less glamorous meteors or debris from them.”
“Aha~~!” Ramuda’s taken another lollipop from his pocket now, as if for the express purpose of highlighting the pure confusion on Dice’s face. “Dai-chan looks like he’s calling bullshit but I believe you, Gen-chan!” He takes to busying himself unwrapping his candy, mellowly suggesting: “You gonna tell us a story about that instead? Oh oh, that reminds me!”
There’s a conversation that follows, convoluted and cursory, about the same memory that arose in Gentaro’s mind just a beat ago, shared among the three of them unknowingly until now that they’re recalling it for the fun of it: three variations of the question “Did you see it?” stylized and punctuated in unimportant variation, popping up in the Fling Posse Posse!!! group chat at the exact same time, one night they’d all been too caught up in their own thing to meet up like they’d originally planned.
Even what came next, came in the same manner: from their separate spots, they’d all thought it equal parts crazy-cool and creepy that not only did they catch sight of a split-second spectacle that they had undefined chances of witnessing in a city that dazzles the way Shibuya does– their first instinct was to let one another know, too, wish in earnest and earnestness that they’d shared in it. They didn’t bother mentioning what it even was, because they all knew.
While Ramuda smoked his stress away on the rooftop of his studio after an annoying phone call detracted him from his designs, while Gentaro stepped out of his home office to stretch his limbs which were sore from writing fantasies all day, and while Dice wandered around in a park and promised himself he wouldn’t bother Ramuda and Gentaro just to borrow money because they’re more than that for him– they had all spotted it in the sky: a shooting star.
The conversation lowers into a buzz, Dice’s “Heeeh, what kinda luck is that??” and Ramuda’s “Luck, more like destiny, right?!” echoes of the chat conversation after. But that’s not why Gentaro isn’t responsive; it’s because now they’re reminding him of what he’d gone and said after, a half-meant “Oh my, how romantic!” with hearts in orbit and star emoticons. They’ve both taken to shaking him at this point, making him slow the car down: “Hey, you said you’d write a story about that, didn’t cha? Or was that just another lie?”
It wasn’t, Gentaro wants to say, considering, conspiring. He can leave out the humiliatingly lovesick part of having concretely conceptualized for it that very evening, in a private notebook he keeps for the most intimately inspired of his lyrics, but the rest, he may just find the courage within him to declare. He’s long since understood the consequences of the secrets they’re all keeping, the weight of the burdens they’re all carrying, the places they’ve run from unsure if they’ll ever be able to go back. Gentaro respects them enough, treasures them too much to bring these affairs up or confront, and he’s positive that the feeling is perfectly, infinitely mutual, because they keep gravitating towards each other, where they used to be be damned. So he’ll write this story, lay himself bare, and meet them there.
“Heavens, I speak nothing but the truth,” Gentaro decides with finality; here in the middle of nowhere and now in the middle of the night, no matter what’s brought them here or how, is as good a place and time as it’ll ever be to profess what they are to one another: random, ephemeral, chaotic, themselves, together, and each other’s. “Listen close and listen well, my dears. I am both pleased and humbled to present to you tonight, crafted with all the care of three worlds, a tale.” For the nth time, he glances up into the mirror at Ramuda, and to the passenger seat at Dice. Then he looks ahead, steps on the gas, and absolutely floors it. “About three disparate unnamed planets, and a single shooting star.”