Title: Blue screen
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: T
Length: 4000 words
Content notes: off-screen sex
Author notes: Umi/Clef. It’s a youtuber AU. Follow up to a bit I did on here a while back that grew vastly longer than I could manage for one challenge~
Summary: It's hard to make a video when your computer won't turn on... fortunately sometimes your friends can help...


oOo

A week after the flurry of the convention, Umi posted her next video, went to sleep, and woke up on Saturday morning to a flurry of comments. She tried to read the first day’s worth, mostly, but after that she didn’t go near them.

Half-way through the third comment asking her if she would make souffle pancakes (no, she didn’t like making them and there were dozens of videos already by bakers who actually liked to eat what they baked, go watch them-) she picked up her phone and flicked to her usual messaging app, wanting to get rid of the irritation by complaining in private before she started grouching at people in public comments.

Only it was early on a Saturday morning. Most of her friends should be asleep, and she didn’t want to be the one who woke any of them with a notification bell if someone had left their phone on and she pinged even the group chat. (Someone inevitably would have.) Of all the people she had contact details for, in fact, there was only one person she knew should be awake – the one who had a video deadline either late today or early tomorrow, who took his weekend at the beginning of the week instead.

She flicked the message app open, and brought up his number – he’d given her his contact details, that meant she could use them as far as she was concerned, and… yes, he was showing as online.

“So how long do you read the comments for on your videos?” she tapped in, and sent before she could think twice about it.

For the next minute of silence, she wondered whether he would ignore the random message – whether he even had her phone number saved anymore, or whether that had just shown up in his notifications without any clue who it was coming from.

The minute after that, however, was largely taken up with staring at the ‘incoming video call’ notification as it dinged away on her phone, and almost failing to accept before it timed out.

“Uh, hi?” she said, as her screen turned into a strangely-angled shot of a room she was far too familiar with by now, though she had no idea where it was.

“Good morning,” Clef said, and she had no idea what he was thinking. “Sorry, if you actually want a response, it’ll have to be like this – I’m on a deadline.” And he held up to the phone a piece of cloth with an absolutely beautiful bit of embroidery on it, all scrolling metallic lines. “I need both hands. If you wanted to distract me from the fact I’ve been doing this for nearly fifteen hours, however, please do.”

“Oh, that’s neat,” she said, peering at the embroidery as closely as she could. “Wait, are you making a piece of clothing out of that? Your deadline’s got to be today, right?”

“No sponsor this go, so I’ve got until tomorrow afternoon to finish it off.” He shrugged. “It’s not going to be hard to finish putting together, but the editing… I’m a little behind schedule. I was helping some friends move, I didn’t have that in my calendar, so... If I can get all the sewing done by about one today, then I can edit all afternoon…”

“You’re going to edit the entire video in one afternoon?”

“Oh, no, I’ve been throwing things into a rough cut in the evenings, I just need to – smooth it out, do transitions and audio and all of that.” Which sounded like most of the editing, to her, but he didn’t sound like he was panicking. Just… focused, that same magnetic intensity on display that had dragged her into watching so many of his videos.

Umi sat back, amused. “Your videos always look so calm and well-planned. Are you telling me that’s all a lie?”

“Not always,” he said, glancing up with a grin. “Just sometimes. The magic of editing. Anyway, what did you ask me again?”

She took a moment to remember. “How many of your comments do you generally read?”

“None,” he said, promptly.

“What, none at all?”

“Nope. I have someone I pay to do some moderation and keep an eye on things – they edit my subtitles as well – and they send me an idea of what kinds of themes and questions are coming up, but I haven’t read any comments directly in almost two years. It works better for me this way.”

“I never thought of paying someone to take care of the comments,” Umi said, thinking over that. “Huh. I might have to. I usually read the first ones. I like chatting with them – there’s some really cool people who drop in. But after the first day…”

“That’s when I have my moderator start just looking over the comments for things that need to be removed,” Clef said, wryly. “Anyway, have you found someone to take that strawberry cake off your hands yet? It looked lovely.”

He’d watched her latest video. The one she’d only put up last night. Umi didn’t know what to do with that. “My apartment block has a maintenance lady who spends all her time fixing it or else we’d have no heat and no water – it’s her birthday this week, and strawberries are her favourite fruit, so…”

“I’m sure she’ll enjoy it.” He sat up and looked at the cloth he was working on from a slightly greater distance, sighed, and then unthreaded the needle and started using it to coax some of his stitches back out. “Do you often have reasons for the cakes you make on the channel?”

“A lot of them, not all.”

“I guess I’ll see my cake on there sometime, then.”

“Probably! But I’ll get the cake to you before the video goes up, so you can avoid spoilers.”

He laughed at that, and they chatted for the next couple of hours while both doing something else. It was just nice to have company – and company in the same timezone, too.

#

The next couple of months they talked pretty regularly, usually during the boring bits of their work – research and editing for Umi, vast amounts of hand sewing for Clef. She did make that cake, and it turned out he was only an hour on the train from her place – she rode it up and they met in a park, had a picnic, argued about filters on inPic photos.

That was one long, beautiful afternoon in a park. The sun was shining, there was a nice flat space below one impressively large tree where they spread out the picnic blanket she’d brought – it was waterproof, which was good given it was still early in the year and the grass under the tree wasn’t entirely dry.

“This is very prepared,” he said, smiling at her from the other side of the blanket as he helped spread it. He was in a shirt with flowing sleeves which looked like one of those pirate-y ones from the movies, only it was distinctly purple, and it had little black-and-white birds embroidered on the collar and the cuffs. Somehow it wasn’t out of place with the perfectly ordinary black jeans he had on – possibly just because he didn’t care what anyone thought of his clothing.

Umi made herself not stare at his clothes and grinned back at him. “Pictures of cake on picnic blankets somewhere green go down well on inPic. I’ve never had a proper picnic on it before.”

Laughing, he settled down beside the cake box as Umi started unpacking the bag she’d hauled everything in, looking at it speculatively. “We’re breaking your prop in, then?”

She tried so hard not to think of the various ways a blanket like this could be ‘broken in’, failed, and felt her face heating. But she wasn’t the only one – she saw Clef pause, a moment after he’d said it, and his ears went bright pink.

It was probably a good thing they were in a public park with a good number of people walking by on the path. She didn’t make any of the comments that first came to mind, and he didn’t say anything either, just helped set out the sandwiches and salad she’d brought.

“Do I get to see the cake yet?”

“No dessert before lunch!” she said, and tried not to laugh when he pulled a face at her.

“But if you wanted to set up a nice shot or two for inPic… the picnic would look better with everything out, wouldn’t it?”

“…Are you trying to bribe me into letting you see the cake already?”

“Yes.” He shrugged, lips twitching. “You made it for me, right? Shouldn’t I be allowed to appreciate it?”

“You don’t even know what I made!”

At that, the smile got warmer. “I’ve watched enough of your videos to know that whatever you’ve made, it’ll be amazing.”

Yet again, Umi found herself blushing. “…How many of my videos have you watched?”

“Well.” He looked down. “…Probably all of them, now. …They’re very good to have on while I’m sewing.”

She had no idea how to respond to that, despite the fact she was the one who had blurted out the question.

Fortunately, she had a handy distraction – she gave in and opened up the box she had the cake in, pulling it carefully out, to a small and appreciative noise from his side of the picnic blanket. It was a good-looking cake, if she said so herself – chocolate fudge cake, with additional home-made strawberry jam between the layers, decorated with pieces of strawberry and curls of three kinds of chocolate.

Fortunately for her composure, after a few moments of admiring the cake – and trying to steal a bit of chocolate from the top, which she shooed him away for – he started paying attention to how she was setting out the food they’d both brought and started ‘helping’, leading to a very cheerful argument about photo composition that lasted until they actually started eating, and morphed into an argument about lighting and filters, and kept the tension away for the rest of the afternoon.

How they managed to spend an entire afternoon just talking without any kind of effort, she had no idea. It was like spending time with Hikaru and Fuu, but with more arguing, and the occasional moment when Clef smiled or turned at an angle where the sun danced on his hair, and that urge to reach out and touch hit again.

Even with that, it was one of the most cheerful afternoons she’d had in ages. Even heading home on an overcrowded train, she couldn’t stop smiling.

The face that Clef made when he tried the cake, going absolutely, happily silent – that was something she was more than happy to have caused.

#

It was the middle of a Monday afternoon when most everyone else was on holiday but both of them had ended up with work to do – a video deadline for a company that wanted a good few days to review it, for Clef, and Umi was trying to come up with something to make for an inPic sponsored post.

She was suggesting things pretty randomly, mostly to make Clef laugh, when he went silent for long enough she looked up at her phone. “Hey, are you still there?”

“Shit,” he said, sounding lost. “That- shit.”

“…Clef? Are you okay?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong?” Umi peered at the screen, just in time to see the video turn on and turn, shaking slightly, to focus on the screen of his computer – the very, very blue screen. “Oh, shit. Your deadline-Do you have the footage backed up?“

“I was working from the external drive, but I can’t – where can I get a new computer?” he said. “It’s a bank holiday, where-“

“Do you have a contact you can get hold of, tell them you need a little extra time? It’s not your fault your computer just died on you-“

“They’re American,” he said.

“Right. Not going to understand our bank holidays mean closed shops or sales that have wiped out all possible stock, not going to be open yet anyway to negotiate with. Have you got a PC-whatsit shop near you?”

“Not one I can get to easily – the one near me shut down last year, so it’d take two buses each way, and they’re on bank holiday schedule, that’d mean hours- If I had a car- But I hate cars. The supermarkets sell some laptops, right? They’re doing bank holiday hours, I’ve got one of them closer but that gives me until, what, four- I need to get back to this in the next couple of hours, so if I bought something… I guess I’d need to set it up, and – oh, fuck, I need to install Eterna on anything I want to use-“

“Don’t you go buying any rubbish from a supermarket because you’re in a rush, you’ll be saddled with it for years, and they aren’t going to have anything with a decent processor. You need something better than that,” Umi warned him, even as she carried her phone over to the desk where she did her editing. “Look, give me –“ she checked her phone, pulling a face at the timetables. Bank holiday schedules were running on the trains, too. “An hour and a half. Make a cup of tea, see if you can reboot it – try booting into the BIOS, there might be some diagnostics or repairs or something it can run – but we’ll get you back up and running within two hours, I promise.”

He finally looked at the phone, at her, rather than the dead computer. “Umi, what-“

“Trust me?”

Clef paused, then nodded.

“Then just hold on. I’ll call you in a bit.”

She hung up, and then started to unplug everything from her tower pc, gathering the cables up and eying it as she went. She was pretty sure it would fit in one of the zipping freezer bags from the supermarket, she had a couple, and the insulation meant those were pretty well padded… he already had a screen there with his current desktop, but she didn’t know what connectors it had, so she grabbed a displayport cable as well as the HDMI one she used, then dug in a cupboard to find a VGA adaptor, just in case.

She had a backpack-style laptop case from back in Uni, and in went her laptop, an external harddrive, her handbag – the whole thing with all its contents – and a handful of spare clothes and toiletries in case she couldn’t get back tonight and had to crash in a hotel room. Then she was out the door, headed to the station.

#

On the way, she asked his address, realising she didn’t have it – he sent it back without hesitating, then managed to tail someone into the building.

When she knocked on the door to his flat, he opened it looking ruffled and confused, and stared at her a moment.

“Umi?”

She lifted the bag with her PC in as high as she could – her arms were starting to ache a little, she wasn’t used to carrying this much – she probably could have got a taxi from the station, but it was close enough she’d decided walking would be as quick. “I brought a PC,” she said, as he stared at the printed blueberries on the side of the freezer bag she’d brought it in. “You can use this to get your video done.”

He stared a moment longer, then seemed to almost shake with relief, eyes closing a moment before he managed to step to the side and wave her in. “Thank you, Umi – thank you, you didn’t have to-“

“Don’t thank me yet, wait until we’ve got your video finished!” she said, heading into the flat that was oddly familiar from his videos – but with several corners she’d never seen on camera, like the bookcase with a hectic pile of books on it, double-stacked and packed in tight, a lot of the spines worn and very scruffy. “Where’s your desk?”

“Just here.” He led her across the room, and they set about unplugging his PC, and getting hers set up. It booted, and then she paused for a moment – and told him the password to her account. She trusted him not to go poking about on there without permission, and anyway, she mostly just had video footage on that one.

When they managed to get his project to load, he turned around, stood up, and wrapped his arms about her.

“Thank you,” he murmured, with a relieved sigh. “I don’t know what I’d be doing if you hadn’t-“

“You’d be swearing at a laptop you’d grabbed from the supermarket and would keep on hating for the next few years,” she told him, with a laugh. “Now you can get to work and then make a plan for a decent PC.”

“Can I get you anything? Are you – did you plan on staying?” he asked, pulling out of the hug far enough to look at her, and it was only a little awkward. “You’re welcome to, if you want to-“

“If you’re okay with it…”

“Please do,” he told her, firmly. “Once I’ve finished this, I’ll definitely owe you dinner, at the very least. But I’ll be boring company while I’m working.”

“We’ve chatted through the process of editing your last dozen videos, I know what you’re like while you’re doing this,” she pointed out, with a smile. “Anyway, I brought my laptop too, so I can set up over here and do some of my own work. Just… if we’re planning on eating, then I might have to stay over, if that’s okay? …Bank holiday train schedule. They’re stopping early.”

He looked at her and she met his eyes, for once managing not to blush.

“If you are happy to stay, then you’d be very welcome,” he managed, his voice a fraction rougher than it had been even at the moment when his computer died on him.

“Then I’ll stay,” she said, and went to set herself up on the other side of the room.

#

“I can’t believe it’s done,” Clef said a couple of hours later, breaking Umi out of her focus on reviewing what footage she’d got so far for her latest kitchen equipment review video. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the computer – and then he smiled across the room at her. “Do you want to be mentioned by name?”

“Hm?”

“I’m adding thanks at the end of this,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Would you like to be an anonymous friend, or may I name you?”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, blinking. “You needed a hand – well, a computer – I had one you could borrow. It’s not that big a deal.”

“Umi, you brought yourself and your desktop an hour by train to stay at my flat while I edit this,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m grateful.”

“You could always thank me in private instead of in the credits,” she said, and she meant with that meal he’d promised her – she really did. But she realised a moment later what she’d said, and her head shot up to find Clef staring at her – and this time, neither of them deflected, neither of them pushed the innuendo aside.

“I would thank you any way you want me to,” he said, voice very soft. “So long as it doesn’t make you uncomfortable with staying here, if you still want to-“

“Then come here,” Umi told him, and her breath caught as he crossed the room to her, kneeling down in front of the low sofa she was sat on, reaching out slowly to brush his hand across her cheek.

“Umi…”

“Come here,” she said, again, and leaned in to kiss him.

#

She stayed the night.

The video got sent off on time - if only thanks to a timer Clef had set when he started it rendering.

They even got around to having dinner, eventually.

#

Next morning she was woken by the buzz of her phone, and it took her a moment to realise it was on the wrong side of her to normal.

“Hmm? Who is it?” she asked, sleepily.

“Umi – Umi, aren’t you awake? You have a video you need to get finished today,” Fuu said, voice sharp. “You haven't been online all morning - do you have something ready?"

"It's fine," she said, aware that the rustle of bedsheets was probably audible over the phone. She'd only slept through a deadline once, anyway.

Fuu - who had apparently taken Umi's message of 'someone remind me I've a deadline this week, it's on the wrong day!' to heart, didn't sound as certain. "Seriously, don’t you have a brand deal deadline today?”

“Ugh. Maybe.” Umi yawned, slipping out of bed and padding across the room bare-footed. “I’ll come up with something, it’s fine. I think my phone’s got a pretty good camera, these days.”

“Your phone has – Umi, where are you?”

“I guess you’ll see when I upload,” she said, looking back at the bed and grinning – Clef’s hair was even more of a mess now, curling over the pillow as he kept on sleeping. “Don’t worry about it, everything’s fine – everything’s pretty good, actually, right now.”

“Umi-“

She hung up, and put ‘do not disturb’ on her phone. If she was going to film with it – and she wasn’t on planning on leaving here all day – she didn’t want it to be interrupted by messages going off.

Her clothes from the day before were still presentable, and she had her entire calendar and task list on an app – Fuu was right she had a deadline, but it was for a set of stories on InPic, not a video.

Even easier.

Clef was starting to stir – she slipped back across the bedroom to collect a smile and a good-morning kiss, and then permission to go ahead and use his kitchen and any ingredients she could find. He even had a little tripod she could borrow to hold her phone, which was very useful. She pointed it down at the countertop, so the rest of the kitchen stayed off-screen, and got to work.

Hot cakes were straight-forward, appropriate for breakfast, and always popular whatever you wanted to call them (American-style pancakes, flapjacks… there seemed to be dozens of varieties on the theme.)

“This recipe will make breakfast for two – or three, if you have enough toppings,” she said. “It also works with savoury side dishes, which are my favourite, as well as with sweet things; and it’s quick and easy to make without any special ingredients. You can usually find anything you need in the kitchen of anyone who bakes even occasionally – just make sure you check the use-by dates if you’re not in your own place!”

She was pretty proud of the picture the two plates made; she took a proper shot with the camera for her main feed as well as getting the stories set up, and they got approved pretty fast. She was able to upload them in the afternoon, halfway through walking through the park that stood between Clef’s place and the nearest supermarket, so he could buy groceries and cook her dinner in return for breakfast. (Lunch had been pizza, ordered from his bed when they ran out of energy.) And once she’d hit ‘upload’ and checked everything was there as it should be, she’d turned her phone off, put it away in her bag, and turned to Clef with a grin so wide her face actually hurt.

#

The comments and the gossip sites, of course, instantly latched on to the fact that wasn’t her countertop, that wasn’t her kitchen, and she was making breakfast.

Caldina was the only person she properly knew who brought it up in the comments, of course she was – she was pretty certain Caldina recognised Clef’s place, anyway, given the ‘Oooh, looking good~<3<3<3’ and a bunch of fireworks. (Which fuelled the gossip, but was ambiguous enough to not be that clear, as Caldina – who laughed so hard in their slowly growing group chat but made no other comment to their mutual friends either – well knew.)

Hikaru and Fuu waited for their weekly call, the next day, when Umi had – reluctantly – gone back to her own flat. “Where were you?” Fuu asked, staring at her.

Grinning through the screen, Hikaru rested her head on one hand. “You know, that Clef’s kitchen was in one of his videos a little while ago – he was talking about dying cloth, I think. Did you know his countertops look just like the ones from your InPic stories?”

“I mean, I don’t think he’s renovated in the past six months, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t,” Umi retorted, completely failing not to blush as her friends cackled at her. “Turns out I like the real person too, so I guess we’re dating now?”

“I guess we should congratulate you, then,” Fuu echoed her, teasing.

Umi flushed so hard her face was nearly painfully hot, and stuck her tongue out at them, unable to stop thinking of the last couple of nights. “Definitely,” she murmured, lips twitching as her friends laughed, but unrepentant.

#