Title: setting down roots
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: Teen
Length: 3000ish words
Content notes: Post canon, Umi/Clef, first time,
Author notes: Follows on from two of the other little stand-alone things that are somewhere on the comm, but you don't need to know them? Just that Clef's built himself a cottage.
Summary: He was perfectly aware that this was the most obscure way anyone had ever invited someone over for dinner, but not letting himself panic about anything related to feelings was very high on his agenda.

oOo

"I'm thinking of adding a cellar," Clef said, without thinking about it very much, one afternoon. Umi had come over for her reading lesson, but they'd been going on for months now, and she mostly picked up a book and read it herself, poking him when it didn't make sense.

He picked out a selection of books and gave her a list of words to look up first, but the lessons at this point were more the discussion they had after she'd done some reading. There were a lot of cultural references which no one thought about until someone who didn't understand them ran headlong into them; he'd tried to pick books that helped explain some, so when she started reading novels that through about references here there and everywhere, she wouldn't have to keep stopping and looking things up. The knights had been coming back and forth to Cephiro for years now - were on the verge of doing it the other way around, and going back and forth to Tokyo while living here - but there was only so much of another culture you could easily pick up on short visits, no matter how many of them you made.

So right now, Umi's 'reading lessons' involved her showing up at his cottage early afternoon, reading for a few hours while they chatted and drank tea on and off, then Clef cooked them something so they could eat together and discuss the books.

He was perfectly aware that this was the most obscure way anyone had ever invited someone over for dinner, but not letting himself panic about anything related to feelings was very high on his agenda. If he panicked, he was going to somehow mess up their friendship, let alone anything else.

Today he was going over the plans Ferio had come up with for the next festival day, while Umi lounged on the sofa and read a book about a young girl who had found a just-hatched dragon at the end of the garden and decided the best thing to do with it was to keep it, and raise it, secretly, without her parents - both of whom were allergic to pretty much anything that moved - knowing about it at all. Hijinks, naturally, ensued; from the occasional snickering as Umi made her way through the slim volume, she was enjoying them.

The snickers had fallen silent now, and when he looked up she was staring at him with the greatest confusion. "You want to - add a cellar? What, under the house?"

"Yes?"

"Why?" she asked, and he hadn't thought it was a particularly startling statement, but she was actually sitting up and turning around to look at him, abandoning her comfortable sprawl on the sofa which she'd claimed so thoroughly in these afternoons that he thought of it as hers.

Clef blinked at her. "…So I can store things in it?" He shook his head, trying to gather himself into more coherency than that. "I'm getting a fair amount of produce from the garden, it would be nice to have a stasis-charmed cellar to hold it. The charms work better below ground, if the earth spirits are willing to have them there, and I get on pretty well with the local spirits here, I don't think they'd mind and I can pay the usual tithe easily enough."

"…The usual tithe?"

"A basket for each of the local spirits once a month through winter and a couple of months either side, and an extra helping of the festival food each high day, unless there's some local tradition here that asks for something different - I'll go through the usual negotiation rituals with them before I start, of course, then it's just a matter of finding a day that's good for everyone, and they'll think kindly on it when I ask the earth to move aside, and - I get the impression this isn't how things work in Tokyo. You don't have Spirits, do you?"

"I mean, we do, but - not the same way?" She shook her head, draping her arms over the back of the sofa and relaxing into the cushions. "We have to dig out things like cellars by hand, except when I say by hand I mean with a big machine, these days, and you generally have to do that before you drop a building on top of it."

"It's a good thing we don't have to do that here, I'd not thought to have one as part of the original plans. The upper floor was a late addition, too, but I suppose that would be easier to add on."

"Building up is generally easier than removing the foundations you've put your building on," Umi agreed, and still she was leaning over the sofa, watching him closely. "You've got a pantry already, though, and there's room to the side of the cottage. Wouldn't expanding sideways be easier?"

"Well, the stasis spells…" Clef glanced away, aware his face was starting to warm. "And that space might be useful someday. I'd rather go sideways than add another story up, if there was a need for more space sometime."

"More space than this?" Umi looked about, and he knew what she saw - the one room he spent over half his time in when he was here, a large chunk of the rest of his time being spent outside, and he'd told her there were a couple of rooms upstairs he was using mostly as box rooms right now, slowly going through things he'd amassed over the years to work out if he wanted to keep it, use it, or move it on to someone new. Compared to the space he'd had in the castle, this was a huge place, and he didn't see it getting too much bigger whatever happened, but.

"This is fine for just me, but it might get a bit crowded if I wasn't alone," he said, hearing his own voice distantly as he tried not to look at Umi, not to think about what he was saying, and - most of all - not to panic.

Shifting sounds from the sofa let him know Umi had reacted to that, but he didn't dare look up to see her expression, so he had no idea how until she spoke, her own voice a little hoarse.

"You mean, you might - have an apprentice living here, something like that?"

He nodded, accepting that reason - which was perfectly true, it wasn't uncommon for an apprentice or even a qualified mage working towards their mastery to go live with a mentor for a couple of years, shadowing them in their work and getting guidance in their studies. He'd thought about asking the Guild administrators about going on the rolls as free for a placement, if anyone wanted one - he'd done a bit of class teaching now and then, but aside from Ascot and, arguably, the Knights, he hadn't had any student who really qualified as an 'apprentice' in the last few centuries.

The only reason he hadn't done so yet was Livina was still convinced his moving out of the Castle meant he was looking to step down as Guru sometime soon, and he had no doubt she would take the acquisition of an apprentice the same way, and he didn't know how to tell her that actually having people about, having other things to do, made being Guru easier. So he was avoiding the argument, with about as much determination as he'd been avoiding having any of the conversations with Umi which were lurking on the horizon.

They were lurking closer than that now, he realised, glancing up to find Umi staring at him. He looked away again. "Anyway! The garden's bound to have some good years and some bad ones, so it only makes sense to hold over something from the good years. Plus, I can start rotating the things I'm growing then, but still have them to hand."

"…You can't just stick them in a storage gem?"

"The storage spell doesn't hold things as well as a stasis spell," he said, and leapt upon the topic with vigour. "They achieve similar ends, but they do it in separate ways - have you ever seen Presea or anyone charm a gem? I've some stones somewhere upstairs, that I've never got around to using - do you want to learn how to do it? It's a bit different to the kinds of magic you've used before, but it's very useful, and not that difficult - I'll go find one."

Standing, he made it to the corridor and almost to the base of the stairs without looking at her, but was halted by her calling out to him.

"Hey, Clef… can I come with you?"

He halted, frozen to the spot, and stared back at her wide-eyed. Umi was looking a little panicked, too, or as close as he'd seen her get to it in years - her hands were white-knuckled on the back of the sofa, book entirely forgotten.

Taking a deep breath, he tried to find his voice, and failed. He'd failed his main goal, too; Umi knew something was up, and the idea of letting her see upstairs had him feeling more exposed than if she'd just asked him to take his clothes off.

…Which wasn't a good track to let his mind go down at all.

He nodded, instead of saying anything, and headed upstairs just as silently, listening for her footsteps as she followed.

The stairs came up on a small landing, the railings somewhat whimsically curved and carved wood with a couple of small griffins and dragons hidden here and there - he'd given up the pretence that this whole house wasn't one big indulgence, by the time he'd been putting them in, and all the woodwork up here was the same - when he was a child, he'd been taken to a master wood-worker's workshop once, with his mother. They'd been invited around the back for a cup of tea, into the woman's home, and there had been whimsical carvings tucked into every possible nook and cranny of the place.

All his life, he'd remembered how welcoming that place had felt, how happy the owner and her family had been, and he'd purchased bits and pieces of furniture that reminded him of that place on and off. But he'd never quite let him make something like it himself, before this.

Which was one thing. The other - others - were what caught Umi's attention first, inevitably. His bedroom stood at the front of the cottage, door still open and the bedsheets blatantly flung about where he'd clambered out that morning in search of tea - and when she managed to pull her eyes from that, she looked abotu the rest of the place, and he saw her trying to tally it with 'just a couple of box rooms?'

There was a bathroom up here, a pretty good size, and those box rooms were both a respectable size for anyone to have as a bedroom, or a study. In fact, as it stood, there was absolutely no reason he would ever have to expand the place just to take on an apprentice.

"The gems are in this one, I think," he got out, and pushed into the room at the back of the house, trying not to look at the creatures tucked into the knots and the corners of the wood here and there, secrets to be found by any future occupant. There was a wide dormer window at the back, and smaller windows either side of the room, flooding it with light - there was plenty of space to tuck a chair by that big window, a couple of small beds by the walls…

It was perfectly good as a storage room, and the items piled up hopefully disguised everything else it might be. It would make an excellent library, as well, when he inevitably ran out of space to put new bookshelves in the living room. Or it would make a good room for any adult to take as their own.

The gems he knew about because he'd only found them a week ago, and he went straight to the back of the room and the table he'd dropped them on, ignoring the sound of Umi moving about behind him, looking into a couple of the boxes and chests of drawers, peeking into the other box room - which was also a good size.

"I mean," she said as though she was continuing a thought she hadn't voiced, the sound wobbling slightly, "you do have so much stuff up here it's going to take you years to sort through it all, so I'm not surprised you're thinking of adding more space."

"Yes," he agreed, quickly, turning about with the bag in his hand. "I've more things still in storage somewhere in the castle, too, I don't even remember all the things I've collected over the years. Which is another reason a cellar beats a storage gem! I can have things where I can see them, so I remember they exist-"

He turned with the velvety bag of polished gemstones in his hand, to find Umi only a few steps away, biting her lip.

"Umi?"

"Please tell me there's a reason you've decorated your whole house with dragons as well as griffins," she said, all in a rush, and he felt his face go bright red. "And a couple of Fyula, I spotted them too, but-"

His voice caught in his throat, and he couldn't move, and fortunately Umi wasn't one to wait for him to get over the blinding, ridiculous panic that rushed over him. She closed the gap between them, her hands coming up to cradle his face, and falling into her kiss was like falling into the ocean and keeping on going, sinking right under the waves.

The bag of gems clattered as it fell to the floor. Clef shuddered, and the cottage shuddered, magic flickering about him as he gave up control, and wrapped his arms about Umi, and tried to keep up.

And for a moment, all he could think was 'she isn't going to make me try talking!' with the purest relief he'd ever felt.

She pulled away slightly, dragging in a shaking breath, and they were pressed close enough he could feel her chest move against his. "You could have asked me what I wanted in a house, before you made one for us, you- twit," she said, but the way her lips were twitching up into a smile took any sting from the words. "Seriously! I might not want to live in a witch's cottage in the woods!"

"I was making the cottage for me," he protested, hoarsely. "It's just… apparently I want you here, too, and - I can change it, change all of it, move back, whatever you want - I just needed to get out, the castle was so- I couldn't imagine what I wanted, there, because all I wanted to be was out-"

Umi kissed him again, and he gladly gave up the attempt to explain anything. She obviously understood the most important part, anyway, if not the huge tangle of fear that had scared him off even dreaming of this, Umi in his arms in the afternoon sunlight, holding him close. He didn't understand it himself.

Her lips moved from his to his cheek, and then the curve of his jaw, and down to his neck, and when she pressed a kiss there he shivered again, the sensation jolting right through him. Flickering sparks of magic were dancing about them like motes of dust in the air. "Umi," he said again, a breathless warning this time; it had been far too long for any semblance of control over his reactions, especially not when panic and hope had his heart thundering before she'd even touched him.

Pausing, Umi pulled back far enough to look at him, and then she gave him the most satisfied grin he'd ever seen on someone's face. "Oh, really?" she murmured, and instead of backing off, she pressed closer against him.

He couldn't quite stop the noise he made at that, his hands gripping her clothes as tightly as he could. "It's not… a good idea?" he managed, though he didn't sound convinced even to himself.

"What isn't?" Umi said, and pressed her mouth back against his neck. "This?" she murmured, breath hot on his skin, and this time she bit him - not even gently.

Clef jolted, crying out, and the next half an hour or so blurred in a headlong rush of pleasure that left them both dishevelled and breathless, laying on the floorboards between a stack of boxes, a spare sideboard, and a set of eight dining-table chairs.

"This wasn't what I had planned for the afternoon," Umi said, thoughtfully, tucked against his side as they slowly caught their breath.

Huffing a laugh, Clef pressed a kiss to her forehead. "I was trying not to plan anything at all. Too frightening."

"Apart from a cellar?"

"Cellars I can deal with. You…"

Umi beamed at him. "I'm scary, am I?"

"Terrifying," he told her, absolutely honestly, and another five minutes melted away as she kissed him again.

"But I agree, if you're having an apprentice here sometime, they're definitely not having this room," she said, looking abotu with no little satisfaction.

Clef started to laugh, and had to lay his head back on the floor, closing his eyes against the sight of his bedroom - not ten paces away - and yet here they were, lying on the bare floor.

"Next time," Umi told him, when he shared the thought. "…In fact, why don't we go have a look, I didn't go in there so you'll have to show me around…"

Laughing still, Clef kissed her, and agreed.