Title: Alone
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: PG
Length: 1200 words
Content notes: Discussion of past casual sexual relationships?
Author notes: Clef, written in under an hour, set sometime after canon and before the ridiculousness which is Protecting You. Dubious everything because written in under an hour and also present tense, and pointless, but MEH it bit me and so I thought I might as well get it out of my head?
Summary: He wakes up, and he's alone.



He wakes up, and he’s alone.

It takes him one moment, two, to remember that this is normal; that there shouldn’t be anyone beside him in the bed. That if he had them there, this form he wears now wouldn’t know what to do with them, anyway. After more than a century, one would think his memory would be in better shape; some nights, it is.

This is not one of them.

Clef sits up, and sighs, breath shuddering as he empties his lungs as far as he can, as if that can take the anxious press of his dreams with it. It has been several months now since the rebirth of the land; the view out of his windows is dark with the small hours of the night, but when he looks across he can make out the jagged line of mountains in the distance, the silhouette of the closest islands as they hang in the sky. Things which crumbled, before the end. The beginning. But all he can see is bare rock, and it is not enough to settle the acidic ache in his chest, creeping up his throat.

Slipping from his bed, he pads across the room to the long panes of glass, resting his hand against them. He made certain, when making this place for himself, that he would have a view which could show him as much as possible of what was happening to Cephiro. The glass runs ceiling to floor; if the castle had been designed less for defence, all the bedrooms higher in the towers, he would have given himself a place on the ground floor where he could walk out and touch the ground as quickly as possible. As it is, with the castle forming the heart of the new Cephiro, the ground floor is full of workrooms and meeting places, spaces for the guilds – the dining room. The arrival hall. It is no place for one lone bedroom to be snuck in, and far too open to the public besides that.

The heavy glass is more of a barrier than he wants between him and his land, but he never has the time or the energy to spare to alter it. One day, he thinks, resting his head on the chill of the smooth barrier separating him from the night. He will give himself a balcony, a way to get beyond the harshly defensible structure of the walls and out into the air, at least. For now, the view will have to be enough.

Stood close to the window like this, his room in darkness, he can make out more of what lies outside; the slow-developing spill of the gardens and orchards between the base of the castle and the outer wall, the glimmer of water in the river running through the plain beyond. And Cephiro is still and warm in his chest, wrapped through his magic, through the connection he has to her as Guru. There is none of the shaking, the jittery edges to his sense of the land; nothing is crumbling.

It is the middle of the night, and he is awake for no reason but his mind’s inability to rest.

Clef sighs again, but wearily, this time. His dreams tonight were amorphous, stubbornly unspecific, but wrapped in a choking anxiety he knew all too well. He never had slept well, mind too set in its habits of sparking in every direction as soon as he lay down, turning things over and over until he was half mad in need of distraction from them. As a child, he had curled up by his parents, and let their presence give the moment he was in weight over the events of the day which wanted to swallow his thoughts. As he grew, he had learned other ways to let himself rest – or to go without. His early apprenticeship years had been filled with nights reading instead of sleeping, his days scrambling through classes ricocheting between too awake and half asleep.

His later years, he had relearnt that another person beside him helped settle himself in ways he didn’t feel the need (or the will) to analyse. And he liked helping people enjoy themselves, liked making them feel good. Sex had been easy, and the relationships cheerful, uncomplicated. Nothing serious. After his apprenticeship was over and he was no longer about so many other people caught in the same stressful situations, it had become a less regular thing, but not exactly rare. Only his ongoing studying began to take more of his attention, once he came back to Cephiro from his rambling tour of the worlds beyond. More and more, he preferred to spend his nights reading.

When he became Guru, it had been a conscious choice, to take on this form and set that aside – to study, to focus on his work. It was far more important. To stand beside the Pillar, as well, who usually abstained from such things. It marked a new point in his life, and it demonstrated his control of his power to all those who had been surprised when he was the one who was chosen as Guru, with his temper and his anti-social habits. And he had learnt so many ways of coping without sleep, over the years, that it hardly mattered he was discarding one of them.

Only then Emeraude became Pillar – his student, his friend, and slowly the stress grew and ate away at all of his coping mechanisms. By the time Cephiro was crumbling, an ever-present itch in his chest and his heart and his hands, his only sleep came from exhaustion or potions which overpowered the need to be fixing this. And now…

Now his body seems to have forgotten all the ways he had gathered for calming it, enough it is reaching back for ones he has not tried in years. His form… is a question which itches at his mind, a choice he cannot yet let go of, but which seems increasingly ill-suited. It pinches at him. Not because he wants the distraction of hormones, of inviting people into his bed. That he is not prepared for; the kind of friendly relationship he had built before are be beyond him now. Everything in his life is weighed with so much importance that something casual will not stand up against it. But he is not willing to look for the kind of intimacy which would go beyond that, either. It is more…

Cephiro is growing. Is dreaming safely about him, a soft pressure against his heart. There is no Pillar trapped into their role, and no one is questioning his abilities these days. Perhaps…

Perhaps it is becoming time for another change.

But standing alone in the night, in the dark, the thought of letting go is more frightening than the niggling itch at staying the same, so Clef sets it aside, pushes it away. He reaches for another dose of the sleeping potion which has become his constant aid, and draws back to the bed.

After all, he is not entirely alone. Cephiro dreams with him, when she wishes. And she burns steadily in his heart.

It is enough.

oOo

end

oOo