Title: Fieldwork
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: PG
Length: 2300 words
Content notes:
Author notes: SPY AU because. Milieva sent me burn notice. And I could. And this isn't at all a man from U.N.C.L.E. modern-day fusion nope~ Clef/Umi.
Summary: Clef's phone wakes him up. That's never good - especially not when it's Umi calling. (Not that he won't go help her out of whatever hot water she's landed in this time...)

oOo

The shrill ring of his phone shattered Clef’s sleep all in a second. He didn’t switch the light on as he reached for it – he had no need to, as the thin curtains on his windows only diluted the eternal blazing of the pachinko parlour opposite – and the electric-blue light of the sign on the love-hotel just down the road. Tokyo was impossible to shut out or repress, so he let it work for him – especially when something was up.

And something had to be, for that phone to ring in the middle of the night. Something had to be very wrong indeed. That being so, it was best if whoever was watching his apartment tonight didn’t realise he was up. Or so said too many years of fieldwork.

“Hello?”

Clef had two phones – neither a landline. Wires were painfully easy to hack. Mobile signals weren’t particularly secure, in the end, but at least you needed more than a pair of pliers and some wire to break into them. One was his work phone, which would still have been on, a month ago. Then he made the sleepy mistake of letting an email or two send read-receipts back to his boss without thinking about the timestamps on them, and now she was monitoring his phone and his computer to make sure he actually slept.

The other phone would have been his personal phone, if he had any life outside the agency. As he didn’t, it was his emergency contact number, and there were perhaps ten people who knew the number for it. The few times it had rung in the past, it was Emeraude, calling him in because something had kicked off and they needed him at HQ.

This time, it wasn’t.

“Clef, hi, hope I didn’t wake you! I’ve got a favour I need to ask.”

“…Umi.” He flopped back onto his pillow, and was very glad he’d lit no tell-tale lights; there was no way this call wasn’t going to end in trouble. And inconvenience. And quite possibly his being persuaded to hack another agency when he really really knew better. “Blast it, Umi, what are you-“

The sounds in the background of the phonecall started to filter in: laughter, music, glasses clinking – or possibly bottles. None of which would sound out of place, had he not known that Umi was currently taking painkillers which did not mix well with alcohol, and her two best friends, the only people who could have persuaded her to a pub at this time of night while she couldn’t drink anything, were something over a thousand miles north on assignment.

“What are you doing?” He asked, and was rolling out of bed already, looking for the clothes he’d abandoned on a chair the night before. “You aren’t clear for fieldwork, Umi, what are you up to?!”

Normally there would have been some form of protest at this point. Instead, Umi just spoke, voice flat. “There’s a problem at work. Needs a plumber. Or our friends aren’t going to be able to come back home on schedule.”

Clef paused with his trousers half-way on, part of him wanting to protest that leaky plumbing was barely code – most of him screeching to a halt at the thought of a leak at work.

“I need you to come meet me. …Will you?”

“I don’t do fieldwork!”

The protest was reflexive, and won a startled laugh from Umi, one which almost cancelled out that hesitation when she asked if he would trust her – on the basis of a single phonecall and absolutely no information – to be her backup. Because of course he would. He yelled at her even more frequently than he lost his temper with most of the field agents, but he’d been in far too many scrapes with her to not trust her. She was the bluntest, most honest agent he knew… which was probably why she got into more trouble than most of the others put together.

She hung up as soon as she’d given him a location, and he was out of his door and headed for the fire escape, with only one phone – and a gun under his oversized jacket. He had the feeling it might be needed.

oOo

There was only so much Clef could do in a rush to blend into the crowds. Tonight he’d defaulted to an oversized hooded jacket, the hood pulled up over the paleness of his hair; the erratic cloud-bursts of the rainy season gave it justification. It rained the whole time he was getting far enough from his place to risk catching a taxi – it was too late for the trains to be running, and the address Umi had given him was too far to walk in less than an hour and a half. If he left her alone that long, she’d have given in to boredom mixed with impatience and started without him.

Whatever it was they were actually doing.

He walked the last few blocks, after leaving the taxi driver sure that he was a tourist with unreliable Japanese who had gone into a club to meet up with some friends. He slipped into an empty alleyway behind the pub Umi had called him from, and announced it again – he felt it needed emphasis. “I don’t do fieldwork. I am retired from the field!”

“That’s a subtle way of announcing yourself to strangers.” Umi smirked at him as she detached herself from the shadows.

“If there was anyone else back here, you wouldn’t have let me get this far.” He glared at her. “I want to make it clear, I am here under protest, and whatever chaos now occurs, it is not my fault.”

“Oh, come on. You’d be bored to tears if you never got out of the office, I’m doing you a favour! You should be thanking me for adding some variety into your life.”

“You shouldn’t even be out here.” He glared at her a moment more, but couldn’t hold the expression, not when Umi’s smirk had faded into something serious. “You’re certain, though? There’s a leak at HQ?”

Umi nodded. “Oh, I’m sure. We’ve got a mole. I think there’s only one, probably, but given who it is I’m not certain, and he’s trying to find out where Hikaru and Fuu have gone – he’s sending reports up to Sapporo. They know they’ve got people trying to infiltrate them, but they don’t know where yet – if we can’t stop him, and get a message up to them-“

“Who, Umi?”

She hesitated, again. “Are you… Clef, are you certain you want to know? You could just help me with this, and then stay out of it – if there’s an investigation at work and you get dragged into it you know they’ll have to revoke access to HQ while it’s going on. I can find stuff to do, but you-“

“I am apparently incapable enough of entertaining myself that you called me out here tonight so I can enjoy myself?” He asked her, voice dry. “I’m certain, Umi. If it’s someone higher in the organisation, you may need me to help put your case forward. And if it wasn’t someone like that – you would have rung Emeraude first. But if you aren’t sure you can reach her… I’m certain.”

Nodding, Umi bit her lip, then sighed. “It’s Innouva.”

Clef’s mind stopped again for a long moment, and then started working overtime. Innouva wasn’t quite upper-management, but he was very, very close to it for a field agent who had only transferred across to the Tokyo branch a year ago. A high-flyer, he’d thought – a very high-flyer, he realised now.

“He’s been passing on information through a computer setup in one of the offices two roads along. I can’t work out how to get at the system from outside, and the security system is too good for me to break without it being noticeable the next time someone comes in. If you could do that – if you could get us in, and into the computers, we could send our friends in Sapporo some nice misinformation about Hikaru and Fuu. Say they’re looking at the Russian shipping links in Otaru, or something, turn their attention away. And then – we could set him up. Catch him looking for Hikaru and Fuu’s mission; maybe even find out if he has any other contacts in the organisation or if he’s a lone wolf.”

“…All we need to do is get into an office, and then into a computer?”

“Yes!”

“…That’s far too easy.” Clef pulled a face. “You always land in hot water, not lukewarm. Where’s the catch?”

“There isn’t one!” She pouted at him. “It’s simple! It’s just – a really good security system?”

oOo

Half an hour later, Clef was knelt on a narrow ledge seven stories up, soaked through with the rain which kept pausing just long enough for him to hope it had stopped before drenching him again. Umi was sheltering under a decorative plinth at the end of the ledge, and he was concentrating hard on not looking down. “How did you even find out about this!?” He demanded, fingers tangled in a mass of wires, all precisely the same. “How, and why, did you have to find out about this tonight? You’re not even cleared for fieldwork! Let alone balcony work!”

“I’m fine, I’m not going to melt! I’m not even planning on getting into any fights, and I can hardly do anything about the rain – it’s going to be raining for months. At least it’s not too hot yet.”

The last half of that was too true to protest, so Clef circled back to the first part, which was a blatant lie. “You have three fractured ribs, Umi! That is not fine! If you’ve been running about the place doing surveillance on the rest of us just for practise again-“

“I was training!” Umi protested, pulling a face at him. “You’re the only person who objected.”

“I’m the only person who caught you.”

“I wasn’t prying into your private life, or anything.” She slumped back against the stone – just as the heavens opened once more, and Clef started swearing under his breath again, cycling through languages. “Anyway, I just – people keep sending me out of the office. Apparently I’m getting in the way, or something. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the coffee shop downstairs, and, well. Innouva was just there too often for someone who wasn’t on assignment – and for someone supposedly organised enough not to forget his stuff and have to come back to HQ three times on the same day. I got suspicious. But I didn’t try following him until I was certain. Not Innouva – he knows what he’s doing, it would have been too easy to get caught.”

The main entrances to HQ were through the dressing rooms of a whole row of clothing shops in central Tokyo – there was one coffee shop at the centre of the row, which did very well out of its surprisingly large regular clientele. From there, you could see most of the road… but you would have to be there a long time before you spotted something so slight as a co-worker coming back to the office more than usual.

Clef turned his attention to the wires again. “Well, as you’ve so kindly decided to entertain me this evening, and have so much extra time, I guess I’ll have to find you some work to do once we get back and get this sorted out. You don’t need your ribs to do data-entry for me, after all. There’s even a spare desk in my office – if you get in my way, you’ll have to bring a cup of tea back for me, too.”

“You-“ Umi blinked at his muttered offer, and he wasn’t certain, for a moment, whether she was going to take it as a threat instead. Then she smiled. The small, sweet smile he had glimpsed once or twice before, and didn’t know what to do with. “Thank you, Clef. I’ll find some way to repay you. …For tonight, too.”

“You- could always take me out someplace which is actually fun, sometime.”

Umi’s head shot up, and he had to stop his work with the wires for a moment, his hands shaking a small, embarrassing amount. “I… like things other than work. You realise. It might be something- not work?”

Clef nodded, and swallowed, and the two of them stared at each other as the rain faded back to the occasional drip.

A moment, and then a scooter whined along the road below them, and they both drew back against the building. “After we’re done here.” Clef told her, voice a little stronger. “We save Hikaru and Fuu’s mission, we catch Innouva, and then – we can talk?”

“Yes.” Umi grinned at him then, sharply. “Well, better hurry up then. If you don’t impress me now, I might decide we should go clubbing.”

“…You would, too.” He laughed, quietly, and turned back to his work.

oOo

Two hours later, they were three miles away, dripping wet, both out of ammunition, Umi clutching at her ribs and Clef with a new bandage about one leg – their disinformation plan had worked, and then things had gone rather… chaotic. But Innouva wasn’t going to be passing any more information, and there were a few less criminals in the city.

“That went well!” Umi said, brightly, as they waited for their lift back to HQ, and Emeraude, who was waiting for their explaination.

Clef looked at her, then stared at the sky. “I hate fieldwork.” He told the stars, invisible beyond the lights of Tokyo.

Umi laughed – and then she stood up, stepped closer, and kissed him softly on the cheek. “Thank you. For jumping into the hot water with me.”

“…You’re welcome.”

oOo