Title: Curiosity
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 1400ish words
Content notes:
Author notes: Modern day/mundane AU. This and the last two fic I've posted flow straight into each other but they could all stand as individual snippets. (Momo is peach, Momotarou ('peach boy') is a well known Japanese folk tale, and Kuromame means black bean (and is also a dish made with black soybeans and eaten at the new year).
Summary: For someone who had fallen off an international flight not long ago full of doubt, he felt astonishingly like a real person.
oOo

Clef woke to a vibration on his chest, and a set of pin-prickles digging in to his arm. "Whu?" he managed, rolling over - and then yelping, as the prickles became decidedly more painful, and a disgruntled 'mwah!' was yelled practically in his ear.

He blinked his eyes into focusing on the enormously fluffy ginger cat that had its claws holding him still, and which stared back at him for about five seconds - before miaowing louder and tilting forward to headbutt Clef in the face.

"Cat!" Clef spluttered, around the mouthful of fluff, and got headbutted again. "Chill, cat!"

He managed to worm his way upright despite the complaints of the fluffy creature, but managed to get his arms out of the blankets, and head skritches were appreciated enough to win him a respite from the headbutting. Snorting with amusement, he looked about the dimly lit room, only to spot another cat - this one just as fluffy, but coal black and somewhat smaller - perched on one of the corner posts at the end of the bed and eyeing him suspiciously.

That or maybe just judging the shameless attention seeking of their fellow, who was now flopped in Clef's lap purring like a rusty motor.

"I guess my nap's over, then," he said, skritching his new friend behind the ears and grinning when the purr got even louder for a minute. For someone who had fallen off an international flight not long ago full of doubt, he felt astonishingly like a real person.

The welcome from the pile of fluff probably helped with that. It had been years since he'd lived with a cat, and he missed them. "You're friendly, aren't you? I remember Umi saying there were a couple of cats in the house, but not what your names are, I'm afraid-"

Outside the door there was a kind of hissing sound, and it opened a crack further so Umi could stick her head about it and hiss "Momo, did you wake him up?"

Clef's lips twitched. "Nice to meet you, Momo," he murmured.

"I'm so sorry - he's worked out how to open doors with handles like this, the brat, and we haven't managed to replace everything with round knobs yet." She sighed, coming in, though she still lurked near the door. "I was going to let you sleep another hour before I poked my head in to see if you needed another drink and something to eat."

"That's fine, I don't feel too bad - uh, what time is it?" He eyed his bag, which he'd dumped at the far end of the bed, in which his phone was buried. He couldn't reach it without dislodging Momo, but at least he hadn't kicked it off the bed while he slept. (He was pretty certain he'd started off on the covers, which meant he'd dragged them over himself while he was sleeping, and still hadn't tipped the bag off.) "I don't think I've slept for a full day…"

"Just a few hours - it's only mid-afternoon. If you want to come have a drink and a snack, I could show you about the house, and we could sit in the conservatory to have tea - get you some sunlight?"

"That sounds lovely," he said, and details were starting to trickle back to him. He hadn't forgotten where he was - the room was unfamiliar, yes, but the two pieces of calligraphy on the walls and the complicated toilet he could just about see in the en-suite hadn't let him forget he was in Japan even before Umi came in to remind him precisely where he was, and why. "If Momo will let me up, anyway…"

"Momotarou's mostly a floppy sweetheart, you can just pick him up and move him. Kuromame over here is more of a nuisance about clinging." She pointed at the end of the bed, shaking her head. "I was going to ask if you were allergic before letting them in - I cleaned up here and kept them out, but Momo learnt his new trick just the last couple of days, and I realised they weren't in the room with me, and-"

"It's fine." He ruffled Momo's fur once more, before gently easing him aside. "I'm not allergic that I know of. One of my best friends had a cat when we were growing up, I almost lived around there. It's been a while since I've had the chance to live with one."

"Well, these two belong to my parents, technically, so if we did move they wouldn't be coming with us."

Ah, yes. Living with her parents versus moving out into their own place. Once they got married.

Which reminded him of something he'd thought of only on the plane coming here. "So, this company you're inheriting… it's coming straight to you, not your parent's generation…" He couldn't think of a good way to ask if she had a step-parent, or quite what was going on, but once he'd started thinking about it he'd been confused as to the actual details of this inheritance issue on so many levels.

As it was the entire reason he was here, he… wanted to be sure he understood why she needed a random unhelpful trophy husband. ('I can't run the company, I can't even speak the language it runs in', was a pretty good reason he couldn't be involved, after all. But if it could just go to her parents instead…)

"Grandfather picked me as his successor. Mama has her own company she runs, and she wasn't… well, when she ran away to marry Papa and left the country with him, her parents didn't speak to her for a while." Umi wrinkled her nose up. "I got sent things for my birthday, but they only exchanged a few letters, as far as I can tell, until Papa was posted back here when I was ten and Grandfather asked to see me. He'd cut Mama out of the succession back when she left, but he'd left in a clause for any children she had. I've got a couple of cousins, but they'd rather run departments and get their hands dirty than make all the terrible decisions and have bad press conferences and all that stuff."

"So if you don't inherit…"

"Then the board will fight over which of my cousins gets to be CEO, and they'll pick one who lets them make all the decisions while they basically keep their current job and turn up for press occasions." She rolled her eyes. "I wouldn't mind the idea if the board wasn't full of idiots. But I'm not leaving them in charge if I can help it."

"So that's where I come in."

"Yep. You mean I can get married and inherit while they can't get rid of me or stick you on the board and make you try to have me play along with all their ideas." She grinned.

"Would they try to-"

"Lets just say two of them came up to me after the meeting about the marriage clause, and pointed out very happily how unmarried their sons were."

"…Wow."

"Yep!" She came over to the end of the bed and wrapped her arms about the other cat - Kuromame? - who made a small chirruping noise but didn't fight being removed from the room. "Come on, Peaches, we're going down- ah, there you go." There was an orange blur at her feet as Momo darted out. "Do you think you can find your way to the kitchen?"

The last was aimed at him, not a cat. "I think so. It was off the foyer at the bottom of the stairs which came up here, right?"

"I'll see you down there in a couple of minutes, then," she said. "I'll make tea. Uh - the large button at the front of the toilet is the only one you need to bother with if you've not met the others before."

With that, she left him, pulling the door firmly closed. Clef could hear her scolding the cats for disturbing his rest as she headed down the stairs.

There was orange fur all over the formerly-pristine white bedcovers. He looked at it a moment, and laughed. He might be on the other side of the world, but cats were always very much cats.