btitle: /b Sidereal
bfandom: /b Prince of Tennis
bcharacters: /b Tezuka, Fuji, Echizen (pairings as you see them)
bgenre: /b introspective
brating: /b PG
b( a href=".#cutid1"summary: Fuji peels back every layer until all secrets are laid bare, while carefully keeping his own hidden behind thin, quirked lips./a )/b
Sidereal
Tezuka has long given up the arduous task of actively trying to figure out Fuji.
The process, while it lasts, is tedious and illogical and impossibly Fuji. Finally, Tezuka determines that Fuji is his singles two, a natural at doubles, and an asset to Seigaku. This, he decides, is enough.
Fuji doesn't lead and he doesn't follow. He is never the future, and barely the present. The exquisitely cut crystal of an empty, empty bowl.
Tezuka eyes lock on Echizen now, molding him from across courts, across oceans, for Seigaku. For himself.
But while Tezuka and Echizen may map out a hundred tomorrows with their stares and expectation, iFuji/i is the one who always stands at Tezuka's side, still and undemanding. Watchfully, Fuji peels back every layer until all secrets lay bare, while carefully keeping his own hidden behind thin, quirked lips.
Monthly Tennis once called Tezuka the sun of the Japanese junior high school universe, and if this is true, Tezuka thinks Fuji must be a large planet with a close, elliptical orbit, drawn in enough by the gravity of the Tezuka Zone to stay close, but never enough to collide. Echizen is a meteor shower, screaming towards him with impossibly speed and no fear of disintegration. Tezuka holds his ground and lets him come.
Arriving on the grounds of the Senbatsu training camp, Tezuka looks down on the courts from a small incline, observing the best of Japan pitted against each other. His shoulder gives a dull throb of sympathy, which he chooses to ignore. Squished together on a bench, Tezuka spots the Fuji brothers with the Rokkaku vice captain snug between them, an arm around each of their shoulders, and Tezuka can feel another of Fuji's secrets unfold like a precisely constructed origami swan.
With a sudden blinding certainty, Tezuka knows that Fuji learned how to stand next to him from years of standing next to Saeki.
Tezuka turns around and proceeds to the other side of the hill where Echizen and the rest of Ryuuzaki-sensei's group is waiting.