A/N: This is the first of an arc; each chapter could technically stand on its own, but I like reusing this setting, so... fujiface!
Fuji is perfectly self-possessed at the best of times; he survives Inui's juices with nary a grimace, welcomes Kikumaru's exuberance with a smile, soothes Oishi's worrying with a calming pat on the shoulder, counters Echizen's returns to his Triple Counters with new and/ or improved counters, and frightens Momo and Kaidoh into ending their fights by opening his eyes enough to let them see a mere sliver of blue.
(A pretty shade of blue, all have agreed. Pretty in the way a Portuguese man o' war or a tree frog might be pretty.)
Somehow this self-possession has escaped him, now. He's in a university that's god knows how many miles from home because he wants to take Photography and Botany simultaneously and this is the only one that will allow it, and the crowds of people that mill around are a faceless multitude wherein everyone seems to know each other, inexplicably.
He goes up to the registration table and looks at the list in front of him, looking for F; only his name isn't there because he's forgotten that around here they reverse the order of your name, like the individual is more important than the family from which he came.
Which makes very little sense to him, really.
The girl at the table taps her pen impatiently. It isn't her place to tell him to hurry up, even though she wants to (he can tell), because she's supposed to make him feel welcome here. He smiles a little wider than he usually does; it mollifies her enough so that he gets away without any unpleasantness.
It wouldn't have bothered him, only the girl kind of reminds him of Eiji, the tilt of her head and the way she purses her lips. But Eiji is another continent away, and if he were the girl he'd be doing a much better job making kouhai feel welcome, slinging casual arms around their shoulders and talking non-stop in their ears about the canteen food, the teachers they might get, what the best sort of pen to use in lectures is.
The hall they direct him into is, paradoxically, spacious and stuffy. He looks up at the high ceiling, eyes following the silver-wrapped piping, massive and gleaming over their heads. He imagines the chaos that would follow should it collapse, wonders at the best angle to take photos of it, the least number of strokes he can get away with painting if he wanted to capture the panic-stricken mob fleeing the sudden pseudo-apocalypse.
He thinks of the willow trees outside his house, the delicate arch of their trunks, pale and slim and flecked with dark spots. His favourite cacti, left at home because he doesn't want to subject it to the long journey and Yuuta has promised to take care of it ("Yes, Aniki, I promise to take care of it on the condition you stop calling Mizuki whatever it is you're calling him in Swahili and Tagalog. I knew it was a bad idea to let you convince Nee-san into subscribing to National Geographic. Stupid tribal shows."), spines a deceptively delicate covering of white fuzz.
It's hard, but he tries not to think of blue-and-white jackets neatly folded in lockers, the thwap of a ball against a racket and the way the impact jars his arm all the way up to his shoulder, the glint of sun off oval spectacles and a faint whisper of yudan sezu ni iko, the nearly-imperceptible brush of lips at the back of his neck before matches.
The curve of his smile doesn't falter any, but there is a raw feeling at the back of his throat and his hands are suddenly too empty, opening and closing on air.
On the third day he mistakenly calls out Tezuka's name because there is a boy standing in front of the tennis board in a lavender shirt, lean and tall with untidy brown hair. Luckily for his dignity the boy doesn't hear, but Fuji's ribcage feels hollow with the ache of missing, of helplessness and futility.
He remembers once having whimsically remarked to Tezuka that he seemed to have misplaced his heart, somewhere. Tezuka didn't respond, but in hindsight his eyes were especially soft that day, his hands gentle where they soothed the mottled bruise on Fuji's knee.
Fuji reflects that maybe he should have said that he'd lost it instead; because the distance between himself and the person with his heart (too many footsteps' worth to count, but he counts the steps anyway, one foot in front of the other) has rendered him totally disoriented.
It is fun being a tensai if it means that you get to be inscrutable and enigmatic, or so Fuji has decided. It meant that people leave him be, but they like him, because he is unobstrusive and pleasant-looking (being good-looking helps, also, because it means the girls in his class are all too shy to approach him; especially after the first day when he was the only one to give up his seat to a girl, who promptly collapsed in excited adoration and started rumours that he had a 'dangerous, smouldering gaze guaranteed to set anyone's heart afire') and he doesn't mind lying occasionally to keep people out of trouble.
He makes enough friends to get by, to sit at a table and eat with; but none that he will consider as any more than supernumeraries.
Sometimes he sits down at his desk and tries to write to Tezuka, but he realizes after a bit that it is impossible to try and write to someone when they mostly spoke in silence.
In the end he takes a picture of the alley outside his little apartment, bricks of the enclosing walls dark with moss and crumbled at the corners; the sky is an unsure grayish hue and there is a little speck that might be a pigeon (or perhaps a plane) and sends it to Tezuka with the date and his signature on the back.
Tezuka responds with a tadaima; and turns up on his doorstep three days later, carrying a letter from the reputable rehabilitation clinic in Germany excusing his lateness and another of acceptance from the University.