Title: Seaside Rendezvous
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: Teenish
Length: 1000ish words
Content notes: Mention of childhood drowning
Author notes: In which there isn't actually a seaside rendezvous.
Summary: "What, you've never?"

"No?" Clef tilted his head slightly at Umi. "Why would I?"

oOo

"What, you've never?"

"No?" Clef tilted his head slightly at Umi. "Why would I?"

"Not ever?" Umi asked again, feeling thoroughly confused. "But- you're seven hundred and fifty-whatever years old. And you've seriously never, not once-"

From the doorway, Ferio cleared his throat, and they both turned to look at him. "I don't want to know what you're arguing about," he told them, cheerfully enough, "but I've been dispatched to tell you that we're all heading out now. If you're still both coming? I mean, if you have other plans-"

"What?" Umi shook her head at Ferio. "Why would we be- nevermind, whatever. Ferio, have you ever gone swimming in the sea?"

From the way Ferio opened his mouth, then closed it again, that really wasn't what he'd been expecting. "Is that what you're arguing about?" he said, after a pause. "Clef's never gone paddling?"

"Cephiro is surrounded by ocean, how could you not go swimming at least once?" Umi asked, still determined to get to the bottom of this travesty. "Didn't you go on holiday to the beach at all?"

"Once or twice." Clef shrugged. "But my parents were slightly worried that I was going to walk straight into the water, I think. My power came in early, so the few times we went, I wasn't allowed near the sea."

"What's your power got to do with it?" Umi asked, even as Ferio made a small startled noise at the door. She looked at him, while Clef just stood there shaking his head and trying to sort the last of the paperwork he'd been going through. "What? What is it?"

"Clef's a natural lightning mage," Ferio said, voice slightly thin. "Water can - call them, they're attracted into it, and have to learn to not just walk into any large bodies of water. It's one of the reasons we don't have many lightning mages with much power. But Clef, how young were you if- I mean-"

"When I first went to the sea? No idea."

"When you got magic!"

Umi glanced back and forth between the two of them, Ferio's obvious agitation and the mild confusion on Clef's face.

"I don't really know," Clef said, slowly. "It's pretty much my earliest memory, but I'm not sure things from that long ago wouldn't be blending together by now. Five, six, something like that, I would guess? Possibly seven"

"And no one set a binding until you'd come of teachable age?" Ferio demanded, apparently worked up enough that he walked into the room and let the door slam itself shut. "Even my sister was eleven before she came into power, and you put a limiter on her-"

Clef just snorted, opening a drawer to put the pens away. "Oh, they tried. It didn't take. That's why I always explain to any child what I'm proposing to do, and why, and work with them - I just kept snapping mine. No one explained it was meant to protect me, and the people about me."

Ferio rubbed at his face with his hands. "I'm really not asking how you ended up with power that young. I do not want to know."

Staring between them now, Umi slowly got to her feet. The thought of Clef that young, with magic sparking at his fingertips, was - frightening. Even more when apparently it led to attempted drowning, and-

But Clef was just shaking his head, smiling slightly. "If you really must know, I wanted to talk to a star - I'd seen a meteor shower once, I wanted to catch one. A lightning bolt looked pretty similar to me - it's not like we usually get storms, so the first time I saw one, I went out to catch one. And I did." He shrugged. "It wasn't very talkative, but it was friendly enough - only then my parents caught up with me and started panicking and did all they could to wrap me up protectively away from the world for the next five years or whoever long it was until I started my training. And once I got lessons… well, there wasn't anything else I really wanted to do. But my parents remained justifiably worried how I'd react to the ocean, so, no, Umi. I've never gone swimming in it."

"Can you swim?" she asked, suddenly, and he laughed, even as she and Ferio were still slightly horrified.

"They made the smallest possible swimming pool in the back garden and made me learn about three months after I caught the lightning. I've not done it in years, but, yes. I can swim." He looked up at the two of them, and grinned. "So you can both stop making my childhood a tragedy over there. If it's such a shame I've never been in the ocean, I'll have plenty of chance to fix it this afternoon, now you're dragging me on a beach picnic. Unless I'm somehow now excused from coming?"

"What? I - no, you are not excused!" Umi snapped, shaking herself out of her stillness to grab his hand and drag him towards the door. "Come on, Ferio. What did you think we were even talking about, anyway?"

Ferio snorted, pushing the door open and holding it for the two of them. "Oh, nothing much. Clef being inside other kinds of oceans, I guess-"

Umi thumped him on the shoulder, even as Clef started laughing, flushing bright red. "But I've done that," he managed, and Umi thumped him, too, feeling her own face flush. "Seriously, no one noticed Umi dragging me away at Festival? I didn't think she was very subtle-"

"You won't be doing it again anytime soon if you help Ferio make terrible puns," Umi told him, and shoved him out the door before turning to pull it shut and pull the shield-spell over it - Clef had taught her how to do so nearly five months ago, when she'd decided enough was enough and propositioned him explicitly enough he actually had to give her an answer. …She hadn't thought they were being subtle, either, but that was no excuse for terrible jokes about her name. Even if she was the one who'd set up the context.

All the same, if Clef apologised nicely enough, she just might let him make it up to her later on; they weren't due back from the seaside until the day after tomorrow, and if no one else had noticed they were sleeping together, they were probably going to be thrown by the joint room they'd booked at the inn. And he was very good at apologising, when he wanted to be.