Title: Hazard Scores
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 2150ish words
Content notes:AU
Author notes: Stand-alone, post-canon. For 'did what where?' on my bingo card.
Summary: The Knights are terrible students. Clef probably deserves them.

oOo

"That's when the griffin showed up, and it was so upset it could have hurt itself, so-"

"What," Clef said, raising one hand as though he needed to physically pause the flow of words coming from Hikaru so he could process what she'd said. "Umi, did what?"

"Umi." Hikaru flicked a glance at Fuu then looked back at him. "…She made the upstream part o the river run backwards so the water split and Fuu could lift me down to the river bed with one of her spells?"

It was no good. It didn't change hearing it again. "And where was this, precisely?" Clef asked, dropping his head into his hands. He didn't need to look up to see Hikaru and Fuu exchanging a glance.

Umi said nothing, because she was currently unconscious on the sofa, with every monitoring spell he knew cast over her.

"It was a little further up the river from the clearing you took us to for our last lesson you had time for," Fuu said, slowly. "Just before it curves about a large boulder."

Nodding to himself, Clef sighed. "There's a waterfall just the other side of that bend. I don't suppose anyone had checked where the river went before Umi tried reversing it? She just pushed a whole river around the corner and up into the air?" The two knights who were not unconscious glanced at each other again. "Of course she did."

"I just wondered if she could stop it for a moment," Fuu added, and her voice now as worried as it had been when he'd received the message they needed him - another spell they hadn't been taught - and arrived to find Umi unconscious with Fuu trying to heal her and Hikaru making friends with an adolescent griffin and trying to explain to it she needed to carry her friend to the castle.. "Is that why I couldn't heal her? It's Umi's magic which is hurt?"

"Her magic," Clef said, dryly. "Is exhausted, not injured. It can only rebuild naturally, which takes a little while. It cannot be healed. She's lucky that's the worst that happened - if she'd lost control and it had snapped back on her, you'd have been lucky to heal it fast enough to save her."

Umi made a small, grouchy noise on the sofa just then, as though summoned, and twisted slightly. Clef raised his head to glare at her as all the spells he'd set belatedly started pinging at his senses. Her eyes opened slowly, and she winced, and closed them again.

"Why am I inside?" she complained, sounding like she was highly inconvenienced by this fact.

Clef made a noise even he didn't want to describe. "You are inside because you have been unconscious for nearly an hour after reversing a river up a waterfall!"

"Oh. That." Umi pushed herself up, swaying a little, and Hikaru grabbed her to hold her upright while she steadied herself. Looking at her friends, Umi tilted her head. "Did we manage to get it back, after all that?"

"Yep!" Hikaru said, and pulled a rock out of her pocket.

Clef stared at it. It was a perfectly ordinary river stone, worn smooth and polished by the water, cool grey with a couple of sparkling veins of purple running through it. "…Please do not tell me that the reason you pushed against nature was for that."

"Not telling you anything," Umi told him, sticking her tongue out - and she at least seemed none the worse for wear after her adventure. But they would know that with more certainty in a few minutes - one of the spells on her hadn't been his, but the Master Healer's, and she bustled through the door a moment later. She'd checked over Umi when they first came in, but now she threw the rest of them out the room for a short time while she checked her over more thoroughly, now she was conscious to answer questions.

Miura let them all back in once she was done, shaking her head. "She's fine," she told Clef, as Hikaru and Fuu headed straight back to Umi's side. Clef just watched them for a moment, feeling ill at the way they'd nearly lost one of them today for so foolish a reason.

"Thanks for your help, Miura."

"Well, you're my worst patient of all, so it's rather amusing watching you deal with the worst students possible." She patted him on the shoulder and grinned far too widely at him. "So much power, so little knowledge, and far too much courage."

"Plus the experience of actually being Pillar," Clef added, wryly. "And saving Cephiro several times with magic that had nothing to do with reasonable lesson plans."

Miura patted his shoulder again. "Yep. Have fun." And then she left him to it.

He tried, he really did, but seeing the three of them laughing about what had happened as he walked back into the room was just - too much, and he burst into a rant about safe practises and how manipulating rivers just for entertainment was not it and he only managed to shut himself up when Hikaru reached out and touched his hand gently, her expression emanating her sorrow that they had upset him.

Unfortunately, none of them were sorry for what they had done. For all they knew there were risks with their magic, it never seemed to stick when the danger wasn't external - and they had always, so far, got away with it, just a half-hour with a healer before they were back to normal and planning their next experiment.

Too bright, too clever, and too powerful by half.

"This cannot continue," he said, bleakly.

All three of them paused, but it was Fuu who spoke up. "You want us to stop practising magic?"

"No, I want you to stop endangering yourselves unnecessarily! You have all ended up being treated by the healers in the past few months, and given you, Fuu, can heal most of what you could have done to yourselves, I am fairly certain those are not the only accidents which are happening!" All three of them looked slightly shifty, and he rubbed at his face, suddenly feeling every single one of his seven centuries weighing on his shoulders. "I am all for you learning to really use your magic, but you do not have the kind of theoretical background you need to engage in this kind of unsupervised experimentation! You aren't thinking of the hazards which may come from your experiment, you're just thinking of things which seem interesting and then having a go!"

"Well, that's how we learned magic originally," Umi shot at him, and Clef refused to let her see him flinch.

Instead, he folded his arms and stared her down. "My lack of guidance when I did not actually wish for you to learn magic is no reason to perpetuate a dangerous habit."

Fuu, however, had become thoughtful. "You want us to… risk assess what we are trying to do?" she ventured.

"Yes! Yes, that is it exactly - I want you all to learn to assess the risks in what you are about to do, and recognise when they are too high to be reasonable."

"I guess we could learn to do that," Hikaru said, joining Fuu in her thoughtfulness, and patting Umi on the shoulder when she - still worked up - huffed. "It would be nice to be able to work out what's likely to work and what isn't, at least."

"Which you will be best able to do with a tutor who has more hours they can give you than the small amount of time I can hack out of my schedule, who can teach you the basic theory your land's schooling has not equipped you with," Clef said, a point he had made possibly a hundred times so far. All three girls looked at him with the same expression he'd seen before - one which seemed to mean 'lose our few free hours in Cephiro when we could be playing with magic instead? No?' He sighed. "How long is this 'university' going to last before you have more time free?"

"Another year and a half, same as when you asked two weeks ago," Umi told him, rolling her eyes.

He sighed harder. "Until then-"

"We will come up with a - a risk matrix," Fuu said, looking at the other two and nodding firmly. "We can bring it to Cephiro on our next visit for you to see. A framework we can use to evaluate our intended spells - many are, after all, only minor variations on things we have done with you."

Eyeing them, Clef nodded, slowly. "If I agree with what you have come up with," he said, "then that may work. Until I do, however, no magic you have not used in exactly the same manner before unless you are with a competent supervisor."

Hikaru and Umi eyed Fuu, then each other, then nodded.

oOo

A month later, he looked down at the paper he couldn't read while Hikaru explained what they'd put in all the columns, dozens of lines of writing, with a sinking feeling in his chest. "So here we have who might be hurt by the spell, and this is for how likely it is, and this one for how badly. If it's likely we'll hurt someone other than ourselves, of course we won't do it, but if it's only ourselves that might get injured then we look at the next lines-"

"No." He said it without consciously choosing to speak, but meant it utterly.

"…No?" Hikaru looked at him, and Fuu and Umi were flanking her, all watching him like they were trying to work out how to get around him so they could carry on doing what they were doing. "…Perhaps if I read through the rest of it, you'll see how it works, and-"

"No." He bit his lip, then summoned a piece of paper and a pen to his hand. "Let me simplify it for you," he said, drawing a line down the centre of the paper. One side of it he labelled 'who might be hurt', the other 'decision'. "If someone else could be hurt," he said, writing in 'someone else' in the first column, "you don't do it." He put 'NO' in the second. "If you might be hurt," he added that, "you don't do it. If no one is at all able to be harmed in any way by any consequence of your actions, then you can take your plan to a qualified mage, and if they say it is reasonable, you can try it while under their supervision. There. Does that make it simpler?"

"That's just telling us we can't experiment again!" Umi snapped, glaring at him. "No one else works like that! We asked, when we were writing this-"

She cut herself off, and Clef eyed her. "Who did you ask, and what did you ask them?"

"For what their risk analysis was! We - we asked Ascot."

Because asking the one other person who had started with near as little theoretical knowledge and even less supervision than themselves was a great way of getting the answer they wanted, plainly. "Ascot is now most of the way through a full apprenticeship and does his experimenting with his teachers," Clef pointed out, then couldn't help asking "…What did he say?"

The girls looked at each other before Hikaru shrugged. "If his friends might be hurt, he won't do it."

"And what else?"

"No, that was it."

The temptation to bang his head on something was very strong. "Right," he said, giving in. "Burn that paper. You will tell me when you are coming to visit us again, and I will shift my schedule enough to stay with you, and throw as much theory at you as I can."

"…Our next visit?" Fuu asked.

"Every visit you have planned until you have enough knowledge I think you're going to be safe without supervision," he said, firmly.

All three of them looked startled. "But - you're so busy-"

"I know. But I'm not going to let you drop a mountain on yourselves or whatever else you're going to do next. Come on, when are you coming back. I'd already cleared today for you to argue with me, so we may as well start once I've got the dates down."

He probably deserved them - he'd definitely done enough to warrant a punishment. But even though they were arguing, and Umi was pouting, none of them seemed that upset at his declaration - and neither, deep down, was Clef.

Shifting work was going to be a complete nuisance, but the people he cared about were far more important.