Title: Listen in
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 1200ish words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Nonsense Spies!AU, Umi/Clef, Fuu
Summary: Work was still a mess, dealing with the fallout from finding they'd had a mole leaking information out of the organisation, and the fact that Clef was trying to run this mission from a laptop on a horribly sticky roof was just one more result of that.

oOo


"So, where are we going for dinner?"

Clef blinked at the laptop he was setting up, and then tuned to glare across the rooftops towards Umi's current location. He couldn't see her - she was tucked down on the other side of the building next-but-one, in a niche half full of aircon units which should give her a good chance of watching the building and alley opposite her without being spotted too easily.

"I doubt we're going anywhere, this is going to take a while. Did you forget to grab food?" he said, tapping his earpiece's mic on with one hand while poking the laptop with the other. It was being pretty slow to wake up - probably because it was pretty hot out already, though it was only just past breakfast. He was under cover but still out in the heat of the day, tucked under a shelter for drying washing that didn't look like it had been used for years; the building below him had been apartments, once, but issues with the structure had come up and it was empty while various lawyers argued over who should pay to fix it. There was a plant room sticking out of the roof behind him, and he was seriously debating a bit of breaking and entering - it should be a little cooler in there. "If you did-"

"I remembered food! But it's boring. And it's our anniversary, so we should go out and eat something when we're done."

"…We're probably going to be here until one in the morning. And what anniversary?"

"Six weeks and six days since we got together." Umi sounded like she was trying not to laugh even as she said it. "I'm sure that's an important anniversary somewhere in the world, everything is, right?"

Clef sighed, and then pressed the earpiece button so he could repeat the sound at her. "I don't think so."

"Well, nearly-seven-weeks, then."

Hitting a month of actually dating Umi without anything going horribly wrong had been terrifying and brilliant together. (Well, nothing going wrong except their first date getting interrupted by the yakuza, their second failing to start because Umi got hit in her just-healed ribs and they spent it in medical with the doctors checking that she hadn't any new fractures, and the fourth and fifth both involving them being exhausted and falling asleep while trying to watch a movie.)

Work was still a mess, dealing with the fallout from finding they'd had a mole leaking information out of the organisation, and the fact that Clef was trying to run this mission from a laptop on a horribly sticky roof was just one more result of that.

"If we get out of here at one, nothing's going to be open, and we're going to be too tired to care anyway. And I've not been to this city before, I don't know what would be around."

"Cranky. Did you forget to have your cup of tea this morning?"

"I didn't forget anything," he muttered. "You're not getting blasted by heat from those aircon units, are you? If you get too hot-"

"They're blowing away from me, and I'm fine. Anyway, I don't think we're going to be here all that long. Are you set up to get into their computers yet?"

"…Why?"

"Because I can see Fuu walking in downstairs." The levity was gone from Umi's voice, replaced by utter focus.

Clef hissed, and dropped everything else to get the laptop up and ready. Fuu was pretending to interview for a job - she was actually aiming to get a usb stick with one of his programs onto one of the networked computers in the building they were watching - which should connect to this laptop once it had power, and send him as much of the contents of the network it was on as it could do before it was discovered. Which meant he needed to be waiting to receive that broadcast and - there.

"Okay," he said, going back. "Ready whenever she gets to a connection."

"Now we just wait. Sorry you're not inside this time."

"Well, this only really works short-range."

"And you're the only person we could grab to watch the computer for us on short notice?"

"You needed a third, and with Hikaru out of the country-"

"I know, we're still low on people right now. Blast Innouva, anyway."

Things wouldn't have been quite so busy if they weren't checking every single member of the organisation for involvement with Innouva's betrayal, but things were also just - busy. So much so that he hadn't been able to spend much time with Umi at all in the past couple of weeks.

Which might be why he'd not-quite-volunteered for this but certainly hadn't ducked out of the way.

"Well. However long it takes, I think we'll be out of here before one in the morning."

"You don't know how long the transfer's likely to take," Clef said, with a sigh he couldn't quite help. Going out to eat would have been nice. "If they don't find it-"

"Why is the best-case scenario always the most annoying?"

He snorted. "Life."

"Bah. Well. Fuu's in, I'm watching."

oOo

It wasn't one in the morning, in the end, when the broadcast cut off - it was only just past midnight. But by the time all three of them were safely away from the organisation they'd been pulling information from, it was closer to two, and they'd managed to grab one hotel room between the three of them - but Umi vanished while Clef took his turn in the bathroom, and a quick shower had him feeling a lot less sticky and a lot more at peace with the world - so he was somehow unsurprised to come back out and find her setting several boxes of pizza and some paper plates out on the little coffee table.

"There!" she declared, looking proud. "That's actually better than some of our dates so far."

"I'm not sure Fuu wants to be on one of our dates," he said, lips twitching as he came over to sit down on the floor with the two women, solemnly accepting a paper plate.

Umi waved a hand at Fuu, grinning. "She and Hikaru were on our first date with us," she pointed out.

"Not when you got to a bedroom," Fuu pointed out, cheerfully, making Clef half-choke on the bite of pizza he'd just taken.

Laughing, Umi stuck her tongue out at Fuu. "This is a pizza restaurant now, not a bedroom, so that's fine."

"That makes no sense," Clef muttered, but the room was a comfortable temperature, the pizza was surprisingly good, and having three of them there made it easier to take turns on watch and still get a fair amount of sleep. He leaned back against the end of the closest bed, leg resting against Umi's, and let himself relax. Normally he would have started looking at the data they'd pulled by now - but he didn't need to, and tonight he wasn't going to, either.