Title: Raiment
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 2500ish words
Content notes: None
Author notes: post-canon Umi and Clef
Summary: Umi just wants something different to wear

oOo
Umi sighed, and flopped back on the bed. "Why does no one warn us these high days are coming? Every time, we get here for the weekend and boom! It's a festival or something and we have nothing appropriate to wear and end up scrambling through our wardrobes trying to piece an outfit together-"

Tilting her head, Fuu looked down at her. "They can't help that time passes differently here to in Tokyo. We haven't found a way to accurately predict how long will go by for either of us, so it's not like we can plan a calendar out."

Huffing loudly, Umi waved that sensible thought away. "Still! It's irritating!"

Hikaru laughed, pulling things out of the trunk that held their selection of shoes and accessories. "There's nothing we can do about that. But I don't think anyone would mind us turning up in something from Tokyo. If you want something you know will be here, why not bring a kimono or a nice dress or something over? Then you'll always have an option."

"But I like the things they wear here!" Umi wailed, which was the route of it all. "I just want to feel like I belong here sometimes! And not have to answer questions about what I'm wearing! And-"

"Well, unless you learn how to make yourself clothes each time we turn up half-way through a festival, you'll have to bring something from home or settle for scrambling," Fuu told her, turning away to the wardrobe to see what they had between them.

Umi shot upright in the bed. "That's it!"

The others stared at her. "...What is?" Fuu asked, a note of caution in her voice.

"Making things! We should get Clef to to teach us how to make clothes with magic! Or at least spruce them up a bit- do you reckon he's still hiding in his study, or will he have gone out to help with whatever they're setting up this time? It's the mage's guild's anniversary festival today, isn't it? Or am I on the wrong festival again."

Hikaru shook her head. "I think that's the one. So Clef would be busy, wouldn't he? You could ask him to teach you before the next festival?"

"He can't be doing that much when the festival's already starting out there." Umi pushed off the bed. "I might as well go try - I don't think anything we have is going to fit me, I've got taller again."

"You keep saying that like it's a bad thing," Hikaru grumped. "If I ever get taller-"

"One day you'll move to Cephiro, then you can be as tall as you want," Umi told her. "Anyway, I'm going to go bother Clef." She ignored Fuu's knowing smile as she headed out the room, and down around the winding ramp at the centre of the Castle.

To be honest, if she couldn't find him, she knew what she was wearing was fine - she was in a pretty summer dress, deep pink over a blue blouse, mostly because she'd been on holiday with her family and hadn't bothered looking through her wardrobe when she got back to find any of her more usual clothes for coming to Cephiro (which had been a lot of jeans, recently, though only because Hikaru kept dragging her out climbing trees and scrambling through the woods and they were better protection for her legs than the skirts she would generally wear in Tokyo.

Still, it was a while since she'd worn something other than jeans or the three-year-old mismatch of festival clothes here. The freedom to do something a bit different would be welcome.

Clef's study door was shut, but there was no flash of shield spell when she knocked, and she pushed it open. "Hey, Clef, are you in?"

"Umi?"

She could hear Clef's voice, but she couldn't actually see him. She blinked, looking at the empty chair, and then around the room. "Uh, Clef?"

"I'm in the supplies cupboard," he called out.

"...There's a cupboard in here and you're in it?"

"That is what I just said, yes?"

Umi came further into the room, still looking for this cupboard, or at least the door to it - and blinked. One of the bookcases was tilted slightly, standing out from the wall, and she headed around it with a slowly-growing smile to see the room behind it, full of shelves and little labelled drawers, Clef in the middle measuring out some dried leaves.

"Clef- Clef, why do you have a hidden potions ingredient cupboard in your study? How long has this been here?"

He looked around at her, and blinked, then shook his head and sighed. "It has been here as long as my study has. It's not hidden!"

"...It has a secret door hidden behind a bookcase, you don't think that's hidden?"

"It has a perfectly normal door which happens to have a bookcase attached to it because I needed more space for bookcases." Clef flushed slightly as he said that, turning back to whatever he was doing. "You were in here several times before the door was covered over, don't you remember it?"

"That must have been years ago," Umi pointed out. "Did you really need to hide it behind something? Couldn't you have just expanded the room or something?"

"I'm not allowed to do that without permission anymore," Clef muttered.
Umi shook her head. "And you didn't want to bother asking for permission?"

"I didn't think anyone was going to give me permission to rearrange three rooms being used by the healers just so I could have space for more books and my tea collection. There are a lot of shields in the walls on the training rooms next door, and they would be a nuisance to take down, and then put back up, and also I would have to talk to Miura about it and she's still not happy with me."

"She's not happy with you because you keep drinking a lot of tea and nothing else, not sleeping, and then refusing to have a check up."

"So she's definitely not going to help me have a larger space for tea," Clef told her, coming back out of the store room - with a tea pot in his hand, and Umi blinked at him, then at the hundreds of little drawers. "Wait. That's all tea?"

Clef smirked at the teapot, but didn't actually look up or answer the question, instead heading to the kettle where it was steaming softly on the other side of the room. "Do you want a cup?"

"Aren't you meant to be heading out to the festival sometime soon?" Umi waved at the window, outside which she could only see the sky, and absolutely nothing of the festival at all. "Isn't it a mage's guild one?"

"It's the anniversary festival," Clef said, shrugging. And that meant Umi had been right earlier. "The apprentice classes get to organise and run it - part of their learning Guild history, so I have nothing to do except turn up in a few hours so it's clear I haven't interfered but I approve of it. The apprentice-class masters have to sort out anything that goes wrong in the meantime, not me."

"Oh." Umi shrugged. "Tea would be good, then."

He steeped whatever he had in the pot, and poured the delicately scented, pale liquid into two delicate cups, bringing them over. "Is that what you wanted me for? To ask about the festival?"

"Not precisely- I wanted to ask about clothes for the festival." Umi cradled the cup and breathed in, sighing happily at the smell wafting off it - she liked this blend a lot, whatever it was, Clef tended to have a pot in the early afternoons, and she'd come in enough to drink a fair amount of it through the years. She sipped, smiled, then noticed Clef was frowning at her.

"Your clothing looks fine for the festival."

"But I want to wear something Cephiran, and all three of us have worn every possible combination of our Cephiran things by now."

"...You want me to buy something new for you to wear? It's a little late for that, but I have some old robes lying about, I could fashion something for you, I suppose?" Clef said, eying her dubiously. "Is that what you mean?"

"No, I want you to teach me how to do it myself. The making clothes with magic thing. At least enough to do a bit of decoration and jazz something up."

"Oh!" His expression cleared. "That makes more sense. But you still need cloth to make something with, and it will take a little time to learn to make things which don't come out looking more like fashion from your own world, I suspect - I can't help much there, if you want anything which looks like modern Cephiran clothing I am not the best source of information. And you do need to understand how things are constructed, in order to create them - seams and the drape of fabric and the shape of the pieces of cloth and all those kinds of details."

"...Oh." She deflated. "So making something myself for this afternoon is..."

"Unlikely to work well, unless you are familiar at least with clothing construction in your own world?"

She had to laugh at that. "I got banned from any of the classes which involved sewing back when we were in school because I was always doing something unexpected wrong. I attached my project to the skirt I was wearing once, that was the last straw."

Clef's lips twitched, but he managed not to laugh at her. "So it is unlikely that you will be able to successfully visualize a piece of clothing coming together?"

"Probably." She had finished her tea, and fetched the pot, pouring another for herself, and then for Clef. "You made evolving armor for us - are you telling me you know how to make that, too? Without magic?"

"I haven't the skill in my hands, but yes." He tilted his head at her. "I had a three-month placement with the armorers in the smith's guild to learn how to make protective wear. Enspelling the potential future forms into the simple armor was another six-month placement. And I'm still not very skilled at it. I was six months with the tailors learning about cloth and how it can be transformed into clothing. More time with the smiths watching the traditional creation of crockery and tables and chairs - I think it was three years, overall, picking up all the extra pieces of knowledge so I could go back and complete the upper mastery. And I still stick to simple clothing where I can."

Umi stared at him, then at her hand, where her gauntlet would be sitting if she'd actually been wearing it. "Those last-level clothes-"

"Oh, those were the Mashin, nothing to do with me," he disclaimed.

"Huh." She wrinkled her nose up. "I don't want to spend months watching people making clothes before I try!"

"It sounds as though you've been taught some of the basics already, and if you only want to make a few items you could just spend a couple of days learning about those specifically," Clef told her. "But really, the dress you have on is lovely. Why do you want something else?"

With a huff, Umi dropped her chin onto her hand. "Because I don't want people going 'look, there's one of the magic knights!' everywhere I go. There are plenty of people here not from Cephiro, but a lot of them are wearing Cephiran clothing, and ours must just look so weird to people here that we're instantly recognisable."

Clef tilted his head, looking at her a moment, and then nodded. "I could help find you something today, if you wanted, and you didn't mind it being somewhat old-fashioned," he offered, and Umi looked at him in confusion. "I do have a number of sets of robes from before I was Guru. I don't need them, and I could alter a set for you, if you want?"

"...I would like that," Umi agreed, her voice catching a little, and she couldn't even work out why. Clef offered to do things for people all the time - it wasn't like he was even inviting her back to his bedroom, he waved his hand, concentrating, and a small pile of fabric appeared in the middle of the room, on top of one of the smaller stacks of books.

"Would it be okay for me to wear a mage's robes?" Umi blurted, suddenly, and Clef nodded.

"You can do magic, you're a mage, whatever your level of qualification - and a magic knight is hardly an apprentice. They should be fine, any of those, they're all from when I was newly qualified. If you wanted to pick, I could alter them a little to make them... somewhat more up to date? And to fit you," he said, and Umi spent the next few minutes looking through the options before settling on a deep blue with silver and gold embroidery about the hems, a white shirt tucked in with them with matching embroidery about the collar.

Clef did groan when he saw that, something about the effort of having to make the pattern match up, but it barely took him a minute to reshape the items to something which, when Umi used his tea-storage cupboard as a changing room to pull it on, fit perfectly and looked good too. He'd lowered the neckline of the shirt, slimmed down the billowing robes to something reasonably fitted, and seemed to have used the extra fabric to widen the trousers.

When she came out, he looked at her a moment, then summoned up a box of jewellery - some of which she remembered him wearing - and wordlessly handed her a pair of the magical no-piercing-needed Cephiran hoop earrings, a ring with a stone that matched the robes for colour, and a bracelet which matched both.

"There," he said, looking away, when she had them on. "Now you look like a mage. Shall we go out and see how things are going?"

She touched the ring with one finger, unsure. Was he loaning her these? Were they a present? "Clef..."

"Come on!" He grabbed her hand, and pulled her impatiently from the room, heading swiftly away from the conversation.

Umi followed, and they headed out together to join their friends, while she tried to put aside the strange feeling of wearing Clef's clothes.

oOo

It wasn't until she got home and finally got to unpacking, three days later, that she realised she'd left her dress in Clef's study.

Hopefully no one but Clef had noticed it, or the whispering next time wasn't going to be 'that's one of the magic knights!'