Title: Apprentice
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 1300 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written in an hour and a half right up to deadline, but there's nothing new about that, so it's also on theme XD It came out of nowhere and I'm not sure what it is? Or what universe it fits in?
Summary: Clef, Ascot, and an accidental apprenticeship.

oOo

Ascot was expecting his lessons in magic to be rushed, moments of time here and there snatched between the other tasks that weighed more heavily on the Guru’s shoulders. He wasn’t a high priority - he wasn’t expecting to be one, didn’t want to take time out of things which truly were more important than his desire to become able to fight for himself, and for his friends, more tangibly. The country was literally falling to pieces - he’d thought better of asking the moment he mentioned it, but the Guru had nodded and declared ‘of course!’ so firmly that he hadn’t said anything more.

At first, it seemed that way - that the quick lessons here and there, easy steps building on each other in ten minute increments, were the bits of some normal syllabus chopped into the segments that could be delivered in a moment. When he couldn’t understand something, there was a short delay while Clef bit down on his lip and thought about it, and then some new explanation or demonstration which made it make sense. Things like finding the centre of his power, which made no sense when told to close his eyes and feel for a ‘warmth’. But when Clef asked him if there was a place inside where he heard the voices of his friends, a sound, or a silence - that made sense. He could hold on to that feeling of ‘listening’, and once he could do that, he could hear his power. His own, a slightly different tone to that of his friends. Casting spells was just making a sound of it instead of listening, and why that made sense, he couldn’t say - but it worked.

And there was always something for him to go away and read, at his own pace - and Clef never examined him on his understanding of the texts, never pressed them on him too quickly. (Ascot hadn’t had much practise at reading, really. It took time to parse through the books he was given, the relevant sections always marked by a bit of ribbon or string, something random and bright.) But he asked how Ascot was getting on with them, if they helped at all, and so many of them were about summoning - and the ways it related to other magic - that they really were interesting enough to fumble through.

He never thought to wonder how Clef had so many books on summoning to hand, when the library was mostly empty, books removed for safekeeping as the damage grew worse. Ascot never went near the library. Why should he, when anything he expressed an interest in seemed to land in his hands a few weeks later?

Probably he should have suspected something when he got a sheath of hand-written notes instead of a bound book, one week, but Clef just shrugged and said this translation was probably easier than the original version and moved on. But it wasn’t anything like the scrawl he’d seen Clef make notes in

After the dissolution of the Pillar system, things slowly got less rushed, until he was spending several hours a week working on magic - and more than that applying his new knowledge to the reconstruction efforts, going out with LaFarga and the Guard as they worked to re-establish villages and towns. Details of spells and how the subtle changes in casting them could affect the outcome profoundly worked their way into the lessons, which grew more and more like discussions, and Ascot only realised how much magic theory he’d now picked up when a small group of apprentice-mages started lurking outside the doors while his lessons were happening, and he heard them whispering to each other - apparently thinking they were being quiet - ‘did you understand any of that, Meriva?’

“Nothing! I thought Gallardo had taught us all the transmutation theory last year, we didn’t cover any of this!”

“Well, what do you expect, from the Guru’s own apprentice?”

Ascot froze, and then stared at Clef - who was busily looking at the cup he’d just turned into a ball, but his ears were starting to turn pink.

“I heard Gallardo saying the Guru designed a whole new teaching strategy for him, when he had all that power but only knew how to summon-”

Clef was flushed bright red by now, and waved a hand at the doors, which shut in a rush - and Ascot knew how he had done that. Could do it himself! How was that related to learning to defend himself!? All of it was running backwards through Ascot’s mind - the books, the discussions, the way everything he’d been taught was directly related to what had worked well the previous time…

“…Clef?” And he hadn’t been using Clef’s title for months, he realised, watching as the other man flapped silently and paced back across the room. “You weren’t meant to- why take all that time, for me - were those all your books?” The questions were a jumbled mess, and not the ones he meant.

But Clef knew what he did mean. “You deserved it - a real education, not a hodge-podge of spells learnt by rote. And I was being selfish; I enjoyed it, trying to find the best ways to show you magic, so you could understand it. Taking a bit of time to do something positive, when everything else was just trying to not let Cephiro disintegrate. I… kept meaning to ask if you would want to take the classification test, these past weeks, but…”

Ascot stared at him. “…I’m a Paru, I’ll always be-”

“Pairu, Ascot.” Clef took a breath and came across to him. “If you want to claim the title. You’re more than qualified for it, but I didn’t know if you would want to take it, and… I didn’t want to stop these lessons with you. Do you know how much you’ve taught me about summoning? We’ve developed a whole new theory of communicative spell-work, talking it through- if you write half of it up, you’d pass your mastery already. And I should have told you, but I didn’t stop to think about it until someone asked me when you would be taking the exams, if you were going to have a second specialism.” He winced. “And then I couldn’t work out how to tell you we seem to have taken you through your apprenticeship and far out the other side, without it being too much to process. Spells, I can explain. My failure to declare you apprentice, however…”

“Apprentice,” Ascot managed, though his mind was spinning.

“When things got calmer, at least, I should have realised, offered you the choice - there are rights to an apprenticeship, granted you’ve had access to nearly all of them living here anyway, but the public acknowledgement-”

Ascot shook his head, hard, and Clef shut up mid-sentence. “I’m not your apprentice. I don’t know about - tests and things, I want to think about that, but - I don’t want to be your apprentice.” Clef flinched away, slightly, but when Ascot looked at him he didn’t look away. “I think… I’d like to be your friend, instead? And keep talking about magic and how summoning works, and-”

Clef blinked at him, wide-eyed, and then then he smiled, which was still rare enough that Ascot noticed it happening. “Yes, that’s - I would like that.”

“…Did you really translate old summoning texts for me?”

“Only a few?” Clef waved a hand in the air, dismissing hours spent writing things out in a hand so much more legible than his normal scrawl that Ascot had been able to parse it. “I had a few of them already, from my own studies - that’s why I had so many summoning books, for my own curiosity, and practise… But I would like it if we could make a real scheme out of the lesson-structure we used, I think it could help other people coming to magic from non-traditional routes. You’ve such an intuitive grasp of magic that it will need some significant tweaking for people who have a harder time with things, but-”

Ascot flushed with the praise, and the rest - he would think about it all later, when he could have time to take it in. For now Clef had veered swiftly back onto safer ground - how transmutation of objects related to the ways summoning supported a creature’s presence and whether it created a body or brought one through from another dimension, and by the time they left the practice-hall there was no one outside the door to watch him flee to his own rooms.