Title: The wrong order
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: Teen
Length: 700ish words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Marriage of convenience/mundane!AU, Clef/Umi
Summary: He's gone through this whole relationship backwards.


oOo


This entire relationship was happening in the wrong order, Clef knew that. Ferio had said as much, the night before Clef’s flight to Japan – that you were meant to get to know someone before you flew around the world to marry them, and yes, that would have been the normal, likely sensible thing to do.

Well, sensible was boring, right?

Sat in the privacy of his own bedroom, in their house, Clef lay an arm over his face and tried to breath calmly, and not panic.

You were meant to get to know someone, fall in love, get married.

Not get married, get to know them, fall in love.

Worse – marriage, knowing, loving, and finally realising you were ridiculously attracted to them and hadn’t a clue what to do about it.

Of course, when attraction mostly only came after affection for you, that was the standard order for the last section, but the first few bits made it even more of a confusing mess than he’d have felt otherwise. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought Umi was beautiful; it was just he hadn’t expected to start feeling the impulse to get close, to touch, to-

He took another deep breath. The worst part of this whole thing – in which being attracted to his wife was a problem, and didn’t that sound like a terrible sitcom – was that somewhere along the way, she’d become a firm friend, and the person he wanted to talk things through with. But he couldn’t talk through this with her, of all people! He didn’t have anyone else he wanted to talk to about it, either. Not even Emeraude, who’d been there and seen the mess of the few times he’d felt something like this before, the couple of relationships he’d attempted. He had a horrible feeling she would say he needed to tell Umi, and he was absolutely terrified of doing so.

Not least because – well, she was running her Grandfather’s company right now, but she hadn’t actually managed to get that ridiculous rule about unmarried women changed yet. Their marriage was still tactically important to her.

He was not going to mess that up.

“It’s just attraction,” he muttered, flopping onto his side. “It’ll go away. It always does.”

The most embarrassing thing of all was what it had taken to actually hit him – for him to actually realise what he wanted, here. Any of the last few months living together - seeing her sleepy and mussed up in her nightclothes, or dressed in the most impressive evening dress to take him to meet the board of her company, or even looking sharp as possible in all her suits – all of those would have been a more appropriate moment to stop and think ‘I want to kiss Umi’ than in a ratty old sweatsuit, dirt-smudged and pissed off, swearing revenge on the rosebush in the corner of their garden for making her life difficult when they tried to put a few more flowers in.

It was just – the sincerity with which she’d been threatening the rose, the realisation that this was something he got to see which no one else did, the sheer victory in her voice when she managed to get around it and do the planting she wanted. He stood on the veranda and laughed, and wanted to kiss her so badly he took three steps out onto the lawn before freezing as he realised what he was doing.

That was three days ago, and it had only got worse. Now he knew, the sleeping wandering about the house in the mornings in those pyjamas with the tiny shorts and the oversized t-shirt had him wanting to wrap her in his arms; the sharp smiles in the sharper suits made him want to drop to his knees and ask what he could do for her while he was there. And he was desperately glad that there wasn’t another formal event this month, because he had no idea how he would feel about those elegant dresses now.

“If I’d known it was going to turn into this, I wouldn’t have-“ he started, but he couldn’t even make himself mutter the words to the empty air of his room.

Even if he’d known, he didn’t think he could have turned this down. In spite of the mess he was feeling, he was utterly, thoroughly thankful to have had the chance to get to know her.

If right now he and his own hand were going to have to get to know each other very well again, and he was going to have to watch what he said, try and check every impulse – it would be worth it if he could get through this, and get back to just… loving her, as best he could, without imposing anything more on her.