"We are all like fireworks. We climb, shine, and always go our separate ways and become further apart..."

~Hitsugaya Toushiro

He leaps over the turnstile, his legs kicking out beneath him and landing on the cement flooring of the train station. The train doors are in his sight, perhaps a good 30 child-sized strides away.

But by looking over his shoulder to check on the security guard pursuing him, he crashes into someone in front of him.

Then it is all over. Never mind that his fall probably crushed all thirty boxes of Pocky in his backpack—another security guard roughly grabs hold of his school uniform shirt.

"Young man, where are you parents?" The guard asked, not amused by the fact that the boy has disrupted everyday routine at the station.

He doesn't answer. Instead, the boy's eyes lay blame on the man before him—the one that impeded his dash towards the train. With all his might, he glares at this man's blue-green eyes.

Hitsugaya Toushiro returns the boy's blazed expression with the regard of faint interest.

"Sorry about that, sir." The man in the uniform apologizes to the silvery white-haired traveler as the boy continues to squirm under his grasp.

"No, it's fine. I should be the one apologizing for my son's misbehavior. I guess he couldn't bear seeing his father off today."

Surprise extinguishes the fire in the schoolboy's brown eyes.

"Here. I'll pay for his ticket now." He takes out his wallet.

With the fare in his hands, the guard lets go of the child, feeling somewhat sheepish about his gruff treatment when facing the aloof smile of the blue-eyed man.

"Here." Toushiro hands the ticket to the boy after the guard returns to his post. He starts casually towards the train doors.

Snapping out of awe, the boy called out, "Hey! What'd you do that for?" He roughly pushes past the back-and-forth flow of the crowd to follow the stranger, despite that his mother has always told him to do the exact opposite. The train doors slide shut behind him.

The train for Okayama is now departing. The train for Okayama is now departing. Please remain behind the yellow lines...

"Oi! Aren't you going to answer me?" He finds the mysterious man sitting in an empty row of seats. "Why did you buy the ticket for me?"

Toushiro replies with a shrug, "You just looked like you really needed to get on the train. And I happened to have some extra money, so I helped. It's what people do sometimes in this world."

Only strangers do that with adults, you're not supposed to do that with kids! Is what he wants to yell at this man. But at the same time, this is the first time anyone has treated him like an adult. He decides to settle himself on the seat facing across the stranger.

"You know, helping people run away is the same as kidnapping." He says distrustfully, as if testing the man.

"But you aren't running away, are you?" Blue eyes stare at the changing scenery that increasingly blurs as the train gains speed.

The boy jumps out of his seat almost too soon. "No! I'm not!" He insists, "I'm not doing anything wrong! I'm just going home."

He expects a typical, chastising look adults give children but receives informal silence instead. Somehow, he feels frustrated that this guy doesn't show any interest. He sits, bangs his heels against the bottom of the seat, watches his sneakers dangle above the floor.

Finally, bored, he blurts, "Fine. I am running away. Wait! No. It's not really running away, but my mom doesn't know I'm here."

Given the guilty scowl on his face when the guard caught him, the school uniform he is wearing right now, and the backpack most likely filled with non-nutritious snacks, Toushiro has already guessed that his new traveling companion was a runaway. Not a very good one either. But nonetheless, he lets the child continue.

"She doesn't get it. I hate the countryside. The crickets never shut up and there's no air conditioning and the floors in my house are all creaky. And none of those country kids are even fun to race with in Mario Kart. That's why I have to go back my real home in Okinawa." The boy mutters.

"I grew up in the city. It was pretty fun."

Brown eyes brighten at this agreement. "I'm right, right? The countryside stinks."

"Well, I grew up in the countryside too." Toushiro keeps his eyes on the clear blue sky, "I moved a lot when I was younger. Narita, Kyoto, Tsukigata, Toyono, and you probably won't even know where the rest are. But yes, it was pretty hard to make new friends. And those crickets were really loud."

"My mom says that we only have to live there for a year. But then after that we're moving to Tokyo. She says it's important to her because she's writing for a bigger book company. And my dad is teaching at another school there too." He sulks, staring at his light-up shoes, "But nobody asked me what I think is important."

The soft rumbling of the ground underneath them fills the silence as Toushiro muses at how similar the boy is to the child he used.

"I hate being ten. Everybody still treats me like I'm a nobody. Being ten stinks." He kicks at the back of the seat with his heel, steeped in sour frustration.

"Really? I think being ten was the best year of my life."

The boy looks up at this stranger—this man with blue eyes that seem to search for something farther than the horizon—in incredulity, "What? Why?"

Toushiro considers his past, as he has been for nearly half of his life, and then considers the image of the boy sitting across from him, half-reflected in his window. Finally, he turns to this child with earthy eyes and messy hair that is slightly too light to be considered black, replying with a trace of a nostalgic smile on his expression:

"I was ten when I met my first love."

"Sensei! Short—I mean, Toushiro knocked me over! He took the ball right from me!"

"Is that true, Toushiro-kun?"

"He wasn't going to score anyway."

And that was how he was dragged away from the field and the tattletales by the teacher, who scolded him before confining him in the library again. The door shut with a click that echoed throughout the room of dusty books and empty tables. Well fine, they were much better company than those crybabies outside who couldn't play soccer for their lives. He was doing that pudgy kid a favor. Heck, he would've made a goal and won had the kid not fallen over like some overstuffed, flimsy doll and started bawling.

It was just the same with that other boy last week who told on him for kicking his shin. And that girl who sniffed and called him a ball-hog on his first day.

It wasn't his fault that they all stunk.

They were all annoying too. While introducing himself in front the kanji: "Hitsugaya Toushiro" written in chalk, he had seen how they all whispered amongst each other and stared at him like some foreign object. And then after class, they all crowded him and asked him stuff like: "Oh, say _ in _ dialect?" "Ne, have you been to _ city before?" He hated it, being treated like some sort of interesting monkey. They were never going to be like the friends he had in his old home anyway, so why bother?

And then they started calling him a cold shorty.

If only they would just see how good of a soccer player he was.

He kicked the side of a wooden shelf, causing a book to fall off with a dull thump. Something—or perhaps someone—made sound on the other side of the shelf. Peering through the empty slot the thick novel once was, he found himself looking straight into a pair of brown eyes.

"Who's there?" Surprised, he jumped back and ran over to the other side of the tall shelf.

A girl in a blue-white sailor uniform stared curiously back at him, holding in her lap a large book perhaps just as heavy as she was. He recognized her tall frame and her black pigtails. His face—sparked with excitement for the possibility of adventure—fell flat in disappointment.

"Oh, it's just you."

She was always in the library, crisscross-applesauce on the floor with her nose in some giant book. They didn't even have any pictures. He didn't get her. On the first day, he stormed about the library in his dirtied uniform, with knees bruised and scratched from a fight (that idiot pushed him first. And he made him miss the ball too. Of course he was going to push him back). As he tried to track mud on every inch of carpet, he noticed the girl who staredwide-eyed in the corner. But the moment he turned his head in her direction, she held up the book as if it were some sort of shield. That only made him more frustrated and he continued his goal of ruining the flooring by stomping with heavier anger.

Sometimes he made giant walls out of the boring books and knocked them over. Other times he simply breathed hard on the windows and then drew pictures of monsters on the fog, imagining that their pointy teeth were real and could swallow his classmates who were playing outside without him.

But no matter what he did, all she did was read. She never even asked him for his name.

"Oi, you." He finally said that day, "What's your name?"

She lifted her head in shock. Looked around, and then pointed at herself in innocent confusion, "Me?"

As he suspected, this girl was weird. "Of course you. You're the only other person in here, right?"

"Oh...right. Sorry." She nervously looked down at the ground sheepishly.

"So, what is it? Your name?" He felt uncomfortable, unused to initiating introductions. When he moved here, people always came to him. Now he felt all stiff and awkward. He tried to compensate it by sounding more assertive and demanding, but this only made him feel worse.

"Hinamori Momo." She answered.

The clock seemed to tick louder and louder. He looked up at the ceiling, not sure how to continue. By the time he looked down, she was already looking at the tiny words again.

"Oi! Why don't you ask me the same thing?" He demanded.

Her head snapped up again. Was it him, or did her face seem a bit flushed? She stammered, "W-what do you mean?"

"You're supposed to ask me what my name is."

"I am?"

"Yeah." He felt annoyed. He was the new kid. He wasn't supposed to have to ask the questions. Why was this girl so weird?

"B-but why? I already know your name. Aren't you Hitsugaya Toushiro-kun?"

This took him aback. "How did you know that?" He started kicking the ground beneath his feet. This conversation was not going how he planned—that is, if he had a plan at all to begin with.

"I-I'm in your class. In the back." Her eyes darted to her black shoes.

"Oh." Was all he could say. Then, he blurted, "Why do you read alone in here all the time? Don't you have any friends?"

"Because I like books, and…" She abashedly smiled with her hands fidgeting behind her back, "the characters are like my friends."

"Hah?" He looked at her incredulously before realizing the meaning of her words. "No, I mean real people friends! Don't you have any?"

"I-I…I'm not good…" She mumbled with averting eyes, "at games…and nobody likes that…"

She was hard to hear, with her mumbling and soft voice. She read books without pictures and read them for fun. She was taller than he was by nearly a head. The girl in the pigtails seemed hardly like a fun person to play with, but the fact that she didn't have any friends either gave him the slightest bit of happiness—a kind that he couldn't really notice at that moment, but led him nonetheless to stiffly say:

"Not me. I don't really mind…"

He kicked the ground in pendulum swings. Summer-turning-autumn rain began a soft but steady drum roll outside, in concert with the trampling of classmates' mud-soaked feet running through the halls. Yet for him, the school building still felt vacant and silent with the exception of just the two of them, as he felt the gaze of her wide eyes.

Okay, so the bad news is that I lied when I finished Twelve and said that I would be trying new manga/anime/characters to write about. In my defense, I am working on new projects…

So the good news is (or maybe not good, it's up for you guys to judge I guess…) that I'm writing HistuHina again.

This fic will mostly be slice-of-life-ish. It came to me as a combination of inspirations from my personal life, an OVA (which I will give credit to towards the end since doing so might give away the ending I have in store), a book, and most of all, Toushiro's quote from a manga chapter. From the way it's looking right now, I don't think it'll be a very long (around 10-12 chapters).

Anyways, I'm glad to be back!