Title: Persuasion Tactics
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 750 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Snippet of modern-mundane-marriage-of-convenience!AU; background Eagle/Lantis, pre-relationship Umi/Clef
Summary: Clef gets a letter from home. It’s not anything he was expecting…


oOo

Clef padded barefoot across the wooden floor of the living room, yawning. It was two in the afternoon, but as he’d barely gone to bed by six in the morning he was trying not to feel too shameful about it. He tried to keep to some kind of regular schedule, even without a job to hold him to it – most days, the cooking and the housework kept him roughly to time. But yesterday had been Ferio’s birthday, and he had joined in the birthday party via video call from Kyoto.

Five to eight in the evening back in the UK had been two to five in the morning for him, and then he’d figured he might as well stay awake long enough to make Umi’s breakfast and lunch to leave them ready for her when she got up to head off to work.

She’d emerged from her bedroom just as he was finishing up and about to head to his, and had paused to laugh at his yawning before inhaling her breakfast and sending him to bed. He’d half-planned on just taking a nap on the sofa for a couple of hours, but she’d shooed him all the way to his room, and his bed had just looked so inviting…

After all, he wasn’t a grad student anymore. He didn’t need to pull an all-nighter.

The post had come while he slept; he headed to grab it, swung about the main room to grab the extras from Umi’s lunch he’d shoved in the fridge for himself (haphazardly piled in a bowl rather than carefully arranged in a box), and headed around to sit on the veranda by the pond and watch the fish as he ate his confused breakfast-and-late-lunch.

He could read Umi’s name by now and at least recognise their address, even if he would struggle to claim he was actually ‘reading’ it given he only knew three of the kanji out of this specific context. But he didn’t need either to quickly go through and sort anything for him from what he had best set aside for Umi to look at. There was a letter he recognised the logo of Umi’s bank on, one from the power company, and then a couple of flyers and a letter from one of the supermarkets he used – again, he knew the logo well enough he didn’t need to read anything on that envelope. That one he would open, but first… there was an envelope below it with his name in a familiar scrawl.

Frowning, he picked it up and held it for a few moments. He and Lantis sent each other emails often enough – he’d even spoken to him plenty yesterday, he and Eagle had been at Ferio’s birthday dinner (well, birthday pizza and board-games). At no point had anyone mentioned a letter.

Well, there was only one way to find out what it was. He set aside his bowl and peeled the envelope open – only to yelp when a couple of photos came falling out.

“What-“

He picked them up, only to find they were a set of photos of Lantis, sat and then fast asleep on the sofa in his and Eagle’s little house – with two small kittens curled up on him, one sleek and black and the other fluffy and white.

Grinning, Clef pulled the actual letter out of the envelope, and found it was wrapped around another, larger photo. This one was a close up of the two kittens, curled up together and fast asleep.

‘Clef,

These are the two newest members of the family. Eagle insists I send you these photos rather than those of him having whiskers constantly shoved in his face. Having persuaded me to let these come and stay here, he’s now looking to who else he can talk into welcoming cats into their house. Being in Japan is apparently not far enough to save you.

Best,

Lantis.’

Clef read the note over, laughed, and folded it up. He picked up his phone, took a photo of the koi milling by his feet, and attached it to a quick email. ‘But I have fifty cat-sized fish to look after!’ he typed, and sent it off.

Still, he picked up the photos after he’d finished eating, and when he set the post on the side-table for Umi, he set the photos on the top. She was used to having cats, and he had to admit, he wouldn’t mind some company during the day.

…Even if he did sleep the morning away occasionally, he was sure a cat wouldn’t mind that, so long as breakfast was provided first.