A/N:

Okay, so this is kind of a shameless Uta no Prince-Sama AU. For those who haven't seen UtaPri, the basic storyline is there's this school called Saotome Academy, where aspiring teen idols or songwriters go in order to be funneled directly into the industry. In order to graduate, you need to come up with a final project and perform it. One half of the final project pair must be a songwriter; the other must be a singer.

Also I couldn't help it I referenced Kimi Ni Todoke too STAHP JUDGING ME

Lan Fan had never liked singing in public.

It wasn't that she was bad at it, particularly. Sometimes, she thought she sounded rather good. It was just that she didn't want anyone else to hear what she wrote in the middle of the night, and she always felt odd singing other people's songs. She was getting fairly good—good enough to get into Saotome Academy for Aspiring Musicians, anyway—and she knew that someday she would probably have to perform, even if it was only to demonstrate to a future musical partner what something was supposed to sound like, but she didn't have to like it. So she spent most of her time in the back of the classroom, listening quietly, taking notes, and humming to herself at night.

Sometimes, though, on weekends, when the other students were off on school-sponsored trips to town, she would wander around the grounds where she knew nobody would hear, and she would sing to herself. It was easier to pick out mistakes in lyrics or in tone when she sang, rather than humming, and besides—nobody could hear her out here. Besides, it meant she could sit in trees without teachers getting mad at her. Lan Fan clambered up into her favorite singing tree—a big old pine with gnarled branches and thick foliage—and propped her musical theory textbook on her knees, so she had a place to write. And actually, she was in the tree for more than an hour before she realized she'd started singing. Sometimes she did it without thinking, this singing thing. She'd be halfway through a song before she even realized she'd opened her mouth.

She'd just finished singing through the chorus, and paused to make a note on her paper, when she heard the slow applause from down below. Lan Fan squeaked, and nearly dropped her notebook. At the base of the pine tree was a boy with a scarf wrapped around his face, and heavy sunglasses sliding down the bridge of a sharp nose. He pushed them up, and put his hands on his hips.

"Hi," he said. "You have a nice voice."

"Um," said Lan Fan eloquently. She could feel her face burning. "…thank you. I suppose."

The boy studied her for a moment or two, and then clambered up into the tree, sitting on the branch opposite. He couldn't be all that much older than her, she thought, but he wasn't a Saotome student; he wasn't in uniform, first of all, and secondly, he had an air about him that made him seem very un-high school, even if one went to such a strange school as Saotome Academy. He loosened his scarf and let it settle around his throat instead. He was smiling. Something about him, for some reason, seemed a little familiar, but she couldn't place it. Lan Fan pulled her papers closer to her, instinctively, and tilted her head to the side. "Who are you?"

"Hm?" He glanced at her from behind the sunglasses. "Oh. Ling. Hi," he added, and stuck out one hand. She took it, and blinked when she realized he had calluses. He didn't seem to be the type to work hard enough for it to show in his skin. "I'm just visiting, so you don't have to worry about me, you know, stealing your homework. Or something. Is that homework?"

"Not really," said Lan Fan, and closed her lyrics notebook. "I mean, I might turn it in someday, but it's mostly just…" Private, she wanted to say. When she wrote something to turn in, it was always light, cheerful—the stuff that pop idols needed in order to stay popular. The things she wrote in the middle of the night were nothing of the sort. They were twisting and dark, like minotaurian labyrinths. Sometimes they disturbed her. Maybe, someday, if she found a visual kei or punk rock band, they might be used, but until then, she only turned in her happier things. "It's not done," she added, feeling strangely self-conscious. She didn't like people hearing her minotaur songs. It made her feel awkward and bony, like she'd been in middle school, her hair too long, when her classmates had laughed behind their hands and called her Sadako and Kayako and every other horror movie villain known to man. She smoothed her skirt a little, and frowned at him. The boy—Ling—cocked his head at her.

"Why not turn them in?" he asked. "It's different, you know? Compared to most of the stuff I've been hearing today, it's…fresh."

"It's just not…" She paused. "It's not talent stuff. You know? It's…it's darker." Then she scowled, because she didn't talk about her minotaur songs and who the hell was this random boy to be questioning her like this and why was she even answering him—"What do you care what I turn in or not? It's not like you go here, or you're a teacher, or something. You can't be more than a second year."

"Technically yeah." He took his sunglasses off and perched them on the top of his head. "But I graduated. What's your name?"

She frowned again. If this boy had been at Saotome, he only would have graduated by getting a contract. He'd be working, in the industry—why on earth would he come back? It didn't really make any sense. "I'm Lan Fan," she said. "If you graduated, why…?"

Ling gave her a mirror-smile, and then pulled his messenger bag around into his lap, digging through it. He didn't speak for a moment. Then he pulled out a notebook, kind of like her own, but a lot more bedraggled, and paged through it to somewhere in the middle. It looked, she thought, like lyrics. He offered it to her.

"Can you look at this for me?"

"Why?"

He just offered another smile, and waited. Lan Fan hesitated, and then she took his notebook in both hands. The page was marked Light, with a small hashtag in front, and beneath the lyrics there were a few musical scores. A slow song, she realized, and hesitated again, glancing up at him. Ling, whoever he was, flicked his fingers at her as if to say, go on, and she licked her lips before looking through the lyrics again.

It was, she realized, actually quite good. Some of the lyrics didn't quite fit alongside the musical notes, and after looking up again for permission, she made a few marks in the margins in her neat, tiny handwriting, but other than that, she liked it. She actually liked it a lot, enough that it surprised her. She wanted to page through the rest of the book—her fingers nearly itched for it—but it was his notebook, and she wasn't about to violate trust like that. Instead, she closed the notebook, and offered it to him. "Is this your work?"

"Well, mostly," he said. "Now you've made notes, so it's not entirely mine, but…yeah." He didn't take the book from her. "You can look at the rest, if you like. I don't mind. Most of the others have been released already. That one's just…different."

She rested the notebook on top of her own. Lan Fan did not open it. She didn't need to. "I can tell."

He laughed. "Ouch. Was that meant to be an insult?"

"No, you just seem…" She flapped her hand a little. "It's…quieter. And you erased a lot. You can feel it if you touch the paper."

"Betrayed by my own notebook." He sighed. "What is the world coming to?"

She felt her lips twitch. Lan Fan looked down at her own lyrics book, and licked her lips. On the other branch, Ling swung his legs back and forth, humming under his breath. She recognized some of the notes—it was Light, faster, maybe, then the tempo in the notebook, but Light nonetheless. Then he glanced back at her.

"What's yours called?"

"What?"

"The one you were singing." He cocked his head again. "Does it have a title yet?"

For some reason, she flushed again. Lan Fan couldn't quite meet his eyes. She looked down at her hands instead. "Um. It's—I was…thinking of calling it Labyrinth. Or Labyrinth Butterfly. I haven't…decided."

He hummed, not a judgment, just an acknowledgment. Ling turned to her. "Have you, you know, picked a partner yet? The singer-songwriter duo? It's due in a few weeks, isn't it? It's been a while since I thought about it."

"It's due Friday." And the likelihood of her finding someone was less to none. She didn't say that. "And no, I haven't, really."

He blinked. "But your stuff is good, Lan Fan. I can call you that, right? I mean, I don't know your last name, so I can't really call you anything else, but…"

"It's...fine." Nobody but her grandfather had called her Lan Fan in a long time. It was a little unsettling, but not…bad, necessarily. Only strange. "I just—I don't know." People don't like me. "There's an odd number of people in the class. And—and maybe I'll be put into a trio with someone. I work pretty well with a few people in class. Our styles—our school styles fishtail fairly well." Ed was more of a rock on, bro kind of writer, but he had a flair and a methodical dedication to detail that she really liked, and he seemed to enjoy what little of her stuff he'd actually heard. The only reason she hadn't petitioned to work with him and Winry is that they were so…well. Ed and Winry. "I've been talking to the teachers. I'll be okay."

Ling hummed again. Then he nodded, like he'd made a decision. "You want to work with me?"

She choked, and nearly fell out of the tree. Spots popped in front of her eyes. Lan Fan took a deep, unsteady breath. "Y-You're not serious."

"I'm always serious," he said happily, and swung his legs again. "Seriously, though, you want to?"

"I'm not—" She swallowed hard. "I mean, I haven't even graduated, I've barely learned anything—"

"Happens all the time here, if someone in the industry likes you enough. I'm still learning, and I've been out of Saotome for a year."

"You have no idea how I write—"

"I know you write stuff I like, and stuff that's good." He had a strange expression on his face, half-laughing, half-not, as if he couldn't quite work out what the problem was. "The song you were singing, Labyrinth Butterfly, that was better than anything else I've heard in months. Not only that, but you're not afraid to correct my stuff."

"But I don't—"

"More than that," he added, and the laughter was gone—he was just studying her, focused hard, "You don't treat me like an idiot, and you don't kowtow to me like a king. It's…" He searched for a word. "It's soothing. More than you know."

Suddenly, all the puzzle pieces clicked together in her head, and Lan Fan snapped her mouth shut. Then she licked her lips. "You're Ling Yao," she said, and he made finger guns at her.

"Yup! Even better, you didn't recognize me. You know how awesome it is to walk around after being super famous for ages and then have someone not know who you are?"

"You've—" She felt a little dizzy. Lan Fan seized the branch between her knees. "Your stuff has won awards—why would you want me?"

Ling blinked at her for a moment or two, and then he burst out laughing. Lan Fan turned pink. When he looked at her again, still smiling, her stomach clenched, and she turned red. He reached out and patted her hand before snatching the notebooks—both his and hers—away and scurrying back down the tree.

"Hey!"

"Don't worry, I'm not going through all of it." And he wasn't. He was looking at Labyrinth Butterfly and chewing on his lower lip, as if he was seeing something he actually liked. Lan Fan stuck her pen behind her ear and crawled down the tree after him, jumping the last seven feet. She landed hard, and her knees ached, but she jogged to catch up with him anyway. He closed her notebook, and offered it to her.

"So?" he asked, when Lan Fan had tucked her book beneath her arm again. "You gonna work with me?"

Lan Fan was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Your song."

"What about it?"

"What's it called? Light?"

He studied her for a moment, and then put his sunglasses back on his nose. "For the moment. I've been trying to come up with a new title. Light is too…" Common, she thought he was going to say. "Undescriptive," he said instead, and that decided her. Lan Fan stuck out her hand.

"Where The Light Shines," she told him. He looked at her, and then at her hand, and when they shook, he squeezed her fingers. Then, before she could blink, he'd pulled her forward just enough so he could press his lips to her cheek. His mouth was warm, and he smelled like lemons. Lan Fan turned bright red, and made a sputtering noise. Ling grinned at her, and let go of her fingers.

"You know," he said. "I think we're gonna get along, Butterfly."

Notes:

The song Lan Fan was writing is called 'Meikyuu Butterfly,' or 'Labyrinth Butterfly.' It's sung by Lan Fan's FMA: B seiyuu, Mizuki Nana, and originally is from the anime Shugo Chara! My favorite lyric is this:

You can't seize, you can't catch the labyrinth butterfly
The wings in your concealed chest sing of freedom even for the people who can't see them.

The song that Ling wrote is 'Hikari Sasu Basho He', or 'Where the Light Shines'. It's Ling Yao's character song from FMA: B, and is sung by his seiyuu, Miyano Mamoru. Miyano was also a seiyuu for one of the main characters in UtaPri, Ichinose Tokiya, which is why I was inspired to do this.

Favorite lyric is this:

How much farther do I have to walk to reach it?
Planting my feet firmly on the marvelous earth
On this endless road toward the place where the light shines
Someday