Title: Pacing
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: G
Length: 300ish words
Content notes: None?
Author notes: Spies!AU, Umi & Clef
Summary: Hikaru's taken a chance. Neither Umi nor Clef are good at waiting.

oOo

"Could you at least stop pacing?" Clef bit out, rubbing a hand across his face. "You're wearing me out just watching you."

From the other side of the hotel room, Umi hissed. "This wasn't the plan! And it's not like you aren't just as worried."

Clef frowned down at the mug in his other hand, the teaspoon which he couldn't keep from rattling against the side of it as his hand trembled, just a touch. "Hikaru saw an opportunity, and she took it, and you can't say you wouldn't have done the same-"

"If I was the one doing it, I wouldn't have to sit here fretting!"

"You aren't sitting at all! If you wear the carpet out and we have to pay this shit hotel to redo their furnishings-"

A double-click over the earpieces they both wore had both of them freezing, staring out of the window, at the vast corporate building over the road with all its mirrored windows... only it was Fuu's voice in their ears. "We have found a good view of the other building exit," she murmured, and Umi reached up to tap her own earpiece in acknowledgement, before stopping with her hands on the windowsill, staring fixedly at the entrance they could see from this room.

Clef, in turn, hadn't turned away from the three laptops wedged on the little table in front of him, each showing a different view of those doorways. He wasn't meant to be here - not because he was retired from fieldwork, much though he'd reminded Umi of that three times already today.

He was meant to be the one inside the building opposite, finding a way to get to their server room. Only he'd recognised the head of security while he and Ferio were doing reconnaisance - and that meant the risk was too high for him to be the one going in.

Ferio had been the one who pointed out Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu weren't far away, weren't on assignment, and hadn't ever come across the man now securing the building opposite instead of various dubious military laboratories. But none of them had expected Hikaru to spot the group of work-experience students being ushered inside the building and instantly tack herself onto the end of it, easily passing for seventeen instead of twenty three.

It made Clef itch - it was the kind of thing that Emeraude would have pulled, and he couldn't help but feel it was his fault.

Still, for now, there was nothing to do but wait, watch, and hope.

And try not to start too many fights with Umi.