Title: Terabithia
Characters/Pairings:TezuFuji, bordering on friendshippy gen.
Rating: K.
Warnings: run-on sentences and a lilac hue with a smattering of I-don't-know-what-I'm-writing
Length: 1,745
Summary: there is a bridge between Florence and Tokyo - it's the same bridge that links playgrounds to textbooks and eventually office cubicles.

terabithia.

There is a bridge, guarded by a gate of molten glass, that lets curious feet traipse across babbling brooks or singing streams to a curious place where stars sing lullabies to petals swirling with the breeze. It's a place that exists at the very back of every person's mind, only beneath and behind and buried under sheets and files of politics and economics and serious-sounding taxonomy, and time over time the bridge's gate solidifies and the place becomes a snow globe.

Fuji collects keepsakes, hoarding them zealously in a shoebox of three-millimetres-thick corrugated cardboard and a dented corner, each and every memory meticulously organized according to some off-kilter melody only he can hear. This box is a single tiny universe beneath his bed, behind the subtle folds of loose bedcovers and quilts too large for a child, and it is a universe he never opens but remembers all its inhabitants by heart. He takes it out, now, in this world where stars are hydrogen and helium and the wind is described in kilometres per hour, and as he carefully blows across the surface dust floats into free air and he thinks if he traces his fingertip from one particle to another he can see a little planet. He remembers an old game of numbered dots and order that Yuuta loves and Fuji does not simply because he prefers curved spirals and junctions and intersections with exits and dead ends.

In his cardboard universe Fuji gathers different stories, each with a world of their own.

A scholarship in Italy – it's a brilliant opportunity contains eight words and takes less than five seconds to verbalize. It means the Renaissance and cathedrals and fleur-de-lis on a coat of arms. It also means the end of blue-striped jerseys and sitting on wooden benches waiting for the rain to cease.

"It's an amazing portfolio, I'll admit," the interviewer nodded, "But there's no theme," she said, waving her painted nails to grasp a piece of the atmosphere, "No single unifying idea."

"When I point my lens," Fuji answered, "I point it at the world."

There is a network underneath the asphalt of Tokyo, deeper and deeper below the underground. It's a rigidity that links business districts and secures the completion of nine to five, where five is just a guideline and overtime is routine. Tokyo is people exchanging immaculately printed cards with both hands - where society dictates that the receiver takes a quick look before slipping the card into a black leather wallet.

Tokyo is a city defined by growing skyscrapers eagerly piercing the sky, by the electricity that crackles across the city telephone lines, by the neon of the metropolitan after dark. Tokyo is two syllables and a planet of baobabs.

The difference between here and Florence is the fluidity, the movement of arms and the accent across syllables. It takes Fuji a while to learn Italian because his tongue is rhythmic intonations and close variations of forty-eight set phonemes, and Italian is a language where a vowel changes the pronunciation of a consonant and the names of months do not all rhyme. He's mastered the basic curl of tongue, the gentle tap against his teeth, but he watches Italian movies and it's like a sonata in uncommon time - his Italian is the flatline on a heart monitor, and no matter how he tries or doesn't try his hands remain firmly glued to his sides.

He compares the Canzoniere to the Shinyō Wakashū and he traces pictures of two skies. One of them is an array of man-made stars and blinking letters as a pretext of steel towers and concrete highways. The other is a canvas of clouds on a water mirror and sunlight captured as a golden glare in the corner.

Firenze, Fuji tests, Florentia. He traces the outlines of the pond in the picture - the syllables taste slippery on his tongue. From what he hears Florence is a city of arches and marble hallways, of street musicians and olive oil with every single dish served. He uses a search engine to search for images of this city and he sees water and bridges and a domed basilica.

Florence is a garden of roses and forty-three orange sunsets when he's sad. Fuji does not know what Florence is.

Fuji lifts from his cardboard box seven items - a teddy bear, a wristband, a kaleidoscope - and places them each in different universes of their own, sleek laminated boxes with blue ribbons and no dents. He remembers a rhyme about bunnies as he angles his fingers to form loops and tightens each knot, and when he's finished he lines all seven perfectly parallel to the edge of his desk.

I'm sorry, he whispers to each and every one, but it's about time I move on.

There are three more empty boxes on top of the drawer to his right. In the first one he places a tarot deck, both major and minor arcana facing down and thrice-shuffled. He knows without looking what kind of story the tarot signs will convey - it'll be set on a world where the moon smiles and shines with its own light, where there is foresight and understanding and bright red cars that takes him where he wants to go.

Fuji rummages for a sheet of paper for the second. On it he writes his own story of a place where there is no sunset, only rising sun, and he conveys with every stroke of ink everything he wanted to say - I'm sorry, I miss you, I hope you're well - because this world houses a child too eager too fast to burn his bridges. These two boxes he seals with a soft red ribbon, and when he's done he takes them to the two empty rooms next to his and sets them down on the bedstand without sound.

Fuji returns to his room and mulls over the last box.

"It's a prestigious arts school," Fuji shrugged, letting the wind take over his words, "They said it's an honor." Tezuka kept walking among leaves that rustle and never looked back, and there was a smile no one saw on Fuji's face. "Are you disappointed, Tezuka?" he asked and Tezuka stopped.

"You are, aren't you?" Fuji declared, because in Tokyo they have the same single jigsaw dream, and a puzzle is not complete with a missing piece, "Maybe you're thinking I should have refused, or that I should have concentrated solely on tennis-"

Tezuka turned to him. "No," he said, shaking his head, "No. It's a good opportunity. You should go."

If Tezuka had told him to stay, Fuji thinks, maybe he would. Maybe he wouldn't, as well, but there is certain poetry in the satisfaction of being wanted and being home and he tips the last empty box over – he strains his ears to hear the box hit the wooden desk.

The doorbell rings when no one is at home and Fuji lifts himself off his desk chair with a little exhale. Before he leaves his room he unlocks the latches off the window and looks down to see the narrow street behind his house, the one with the stray golden puppy and the deflated rainbow-coloured beachball that used to belong to Yuuta and now belongs to the puppy they named Ryu. Not for the first time he feels conflicted whether to wish his window faces the front door.

Tezuka stands in Fuji's front garden with one arm across his chest and a thick notebook in the other. The moment he opens the door Tezuka strides forward and thrusts the book in his direction. "Take this with you," Tezuka says, and he does not look away from Fuji's face.

Curious fingers peel open the cover and Fuji finds a timetable with sets of numbers and running distances. "A training menu," he says in the tone of a child, and he feels his lips start to curl.

"You haven't won against Echizen yet," and Tezuka does not need to say anything else.

Fuji smiles and asks him to wait while he retrieves his photo of sunlit clouds and a box he ties with a ribbon. The box he keeps safely in the pocket of his jeans and he hands Tezuka a printed piece of Florence sky. Thank you, Tezuka says as he touches only the edge of the photo because Fuji told him two summers ago that fingertips leave stains on a photograph's surface. Tezuka keeps the sky facing upwards in a clear folder he borrowed and will return.

"Hey," Fuji murmurs, and his fingertips secretly touch the edge of a frayed lavender ribbon, "Let's walk."

They arrive side-by-side at a playground of creaking swings and a slide with chipped red paint. Fuji startles the pigeons on the jungle gyms and watches them fly, because he's wanted to do that at least once, and in that moment they are surrounded by the beating of wings and a shower of feathers. Fuji sits on a swing and Tezuka leans on the swing's pole and they remain still, listening to the receding protests of pigeons and Fuji still remembers how out of the sandbox appeared a dragon that attacked the jungle gym that was a castle.

"Actually," Fuji begins, "I have something else for you." He takes the box with the lavender ribbon from his pocket and presses it onto Tezuka's palm, fingers lingering for a while before slowly retracting, and Tezuka's thumb is a little cold from the wind. In this box Fuji put nothing, in this world he kept a rose behind a glass dome.

"It's a rose," Fuji says, "Don't open it until I tell you to."

The difference between a child and an adult is that a child can speak to the snowflakes in the air and hear them reply. The difference is that an adult sees a hat where a child sees a magnificent jungle snake digesting an elephant. Fuji likes to think that right now he is neither, because he keeps in his pocket the snowflakes that alight on his palm and a hat or a snake or a dead elephant can be whatever they want to be.

He thinks, as his plane soars into stars and Tokyo diminishes into a lattice of steel and nightlights, it's probably about time he returns from the bridge - if he can no longer hear singing stars the sky remains.

end.

Comments and concrit are loved.