Title: A ringing clear and sweet
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 900ish
Content notes: None
Author notes: Post-canon, Presea/Hikaru this time?
Summary: Waiting wasn't really in Presea's skill set. So it was probably a good thing it took so many years to notice the way she'd come to feel about Hikaru.



Waiting was not something Presea had much skill with. She’d waited for the end of the world in the middle of the Forest of Silence because she’d been given almost no choice, but she didn't know that she'd have managed it without Mokona messing up the whole place often enough to keep her focused on that rather than her inability to do anything but stay there as the Forest grew wilder and fewer people made it through.

(Sometimes, in decade since she’d learned quite what Mokona was… sometimes she looked back at that time and winced. But then, Mokona had been deliberately trying to provoke her. Perhaps the traps had just been entertaining…)

Either way, it was likely a good thing she didn’t actually notice the affection growing after Cephiro’s restoration, through the years of infrequent visits. Not until the festival for the tenth year anniversary, which was the first celebration that Hikaru had made it to in years – she had been so busy with her schooling in learning to treat animals.

It wasn’t the dress, the way Hikaru was very clearly grown – if still not very tall. (Though the dress, and the way it gave glimpses of bare leg as Hikaru moved, did remain a very distinct memory.) No. It was the way that when Presea entered the hall, a little later than she’d intended – some Guild business had refused to be easily finished – Hikaru turned, saw her, and her whole face lit up with a smile that made Presea’s heart thump hard in her chest.

“Presea! I’ve missed you! Come, will you sit with us?” Hikaru came over, reached out for her hand, and Presea could only nod and let herself be pulled across to the table where Ferio sat talking to Fuu and Caldina, Umi apparently already somewhere among the dancers, or maybe in the gardens. Presea didn’t quite catch it – she was trying very hard to pay any attention to anything but the realisation ringing through her.

She made it through the evening without losing her composure too completely, though she had very little idea what they’d talked about. What she did remember was Hikaru taking her hand, promising to catch up properly soon, she would be back in a couple of weeks-

The next morning, Presea lay in bed a long time, staring at the canopy and not managing to think about much at all. There was a meeting of the heads of all the Guilds, and she made it there before anyone but Clef was in the room, and blinked at him, with the sudden wry thought that she certainly had a ‘type’, as Caldina would have put it. Ridiculously cute, and ridiculously powerful.

But where she’d never really imagined her feelings for Clef to be more than a lingering crush, a small light to hold when things were dark, thinking of Hikaru lit a blaze that warmed her through.

Getting to actually know Clef had let the one small spark flicker into a good friendship, and she made her way across the room to sit beside him now.

Clef looked up as she slumped into a chair. “You look like you need this?” he said, pushing over the teapot he’d apparently brought with him and summoning another cup to offer her.

“Thanks,” she murmured, pouring a cup and wrapping her hands about it. “I… found it hard to sleep after the celebrations last night.”

He eyed her, staying quiet just long enough that her cheeks started to heat, then said, “It was good to see our Magic Knights again,” with an air of enquiry.

Presea flushed harder, and closed her eyes. “So obvious?”

“…There’s still a lot of your power in the walls of the castle.” Fixing Clef’s complete inability to make a building that was structurally sound, as she refrained from pointing out this time. “It… shivered a little, last night, and when I turned around Hikaru was leading you across the room and you looked like a bell someone had just rung.”

Her face couldn’t actually get any hotter.

“I’m glad,” Clef said, quieter, turning back to his own drink with a smile. Then he flinched, and pulled a face.

“What?”

“It’s nothing important.”

Presea looked at him, until he was the one who flushed.

“…I’m also glad that we aren’t ever going to be in a position where the one required to make the weapons for the Knights is the one determined to get rid of them,” he admitted, voice dry. “Plus, you are far more… inventive than Zagato ever was.”

Presea opened her mouth, then shut it again, blinking. Because, of course, Hikaru was the last Pillar of Cephiro.

Instead of it being a terrible thought, Presea found herself smiling. “But that’s why it’s impossible to not love her,” she said, staring into her cup. “Hikaru would never have made that choice. She would have found another way – she did find another way. She brought us hope.”

“She did,” Clef agreed, softly, and he raised his cup in a silent toast; Presea raised hers to tap gently against it. They both sat and sipped their tea as the doors opened, Dart and Atenza walking in, Zafira a few paces behind them.

Presea had two weeks to work out what she wanted to do, before Hikaru’s next visit; just two weeks to wait.

She could do that.