Title: Rest and relaxation
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 1000ish words
Content notes: None, beyond Clef having been injured before this starts
Author notes: Stand-alone but set in the random spies!au I have. Umi/Clef. For light (I was staring at the light on the bottom of our TV when this idea hit) but also 'fast-forward' for the fan-flashworks bingo card.
Summary: Clef is no good at being patient.

oOo

Clef hissed and thumped his head back on the pillow in frustration, then hissed again as pain stabbed down through his head. Daylight filtered in through the thin curtains hanging over the windows, and an advert kept blaring away on the television. No matter how hard he hit the buttons on the remote control, nothing happened - the light on the bottom of the television never flickered, and it certainly didn't start fast-forwarding through the damnable adverts he'd already seen a hundred times. It wouldn't even turn off.

Throwing the remote across the room didn't solve anything. It didn't break anything, either - he flung it into the curtains and it caught in the fabric well before it reached the glass beyond, sliding down to the floor. But it didn't make him feel better, it didn't turn the television off, and now it was out of reach.

His phone wasn't. He picked it up and dialled with his eyes shut, waiting with fizzing impatience until Emeraude's voice came on the line.

"Clef?"

"If you sent someone to pick me up, I could at least be in the office and get some work done. It would make me feel better-"

"No. You're resting, doctor's orders," she said, and promptly hung up on him.

Clef pulled the phone away from his ear far enough to glare at it, and then dialled again.

"If someone could just bring me my laptop here-"

"No!" She hung up again.

Hissing obscenities in several languages, Clef swallowed down the impulse to throw his phone after the remote control. And then he rang Emeraude's office line, instead of her mobile.

"We have caller ID, you remember? Go away," Emeraude greeted him this time.

"I can't go anywhere!" Clef snapped. "I can't even turn the tv off and I am going to start breaking things if I don't get something to do soon-"

"Then go to sleep! Clef, you have three broken bones and very nearly fractured your skull to add to the total, I'm not letting you work!"

"But-"

"No!"

The problem with your oldest friend also being your boss was, he reflected darkly, that she wasn't afraid to use her powers for 'his own good'. "I've slept as much as I can."

"Then read a book."

"There's not a single book here I want to read," Clef snapped back, ignoring the inconvenient fact that he didn't want to read any of his small library because focusing on the words kept giving him a headache. Head injuries were the worst. So were broken feet.

"Catch up on your tv, then. Do some internet shopping, surf the internet for cat pictures, I'm sure you can find something to do."

"I was trying to catch up on this bloody series I made the fool mistake of recording, but there are adverts every ten seconds, and I can't even fast-forward them, and now the remote is the other side of the room and I can't get to it and I haven't had a home computer for three months I can't get on the internet." He'd meant to get around to replacing the last one, he really had, only things had been hectic and - well. He was at work almost all his waking hours. The only smartphone he had was a work one. The only computers he had were work ones. Emeraude had confiscated both before having him driven home from the hospital.

It had been years since he'd been injured, and he was, if possible, even worse at it now than he had been.

Emeraude sighed heavily down the line. "Did you try changing the batteries?" she asked.

"…Batteries?"

"In the remote control."

He blinked, stared across the room, then glared at the bedside table - which had several spare batteries in it, but also the fairly strong painkillers he'd been prescribed on top of it. Clef decided that he was absolutely blaming them for all of this.

"…I'll take that as a no," Emeraude said, and he could just see her trying not to laugh at him. "I'll send Ferio or someone around with batteries and some colouring books, okay? Just rest until they get there."

"Fine," he muttered, feeling like a sulky kid. Probably because he was acting like one, but he hurt and everything was irritating and he didn't want to buy a cordless vacuum cleaner no matter how many times the advert played. "By colouring books you mean a laptop, right?"

Emeraude hung up on him again with a laugh, and he subsided back into his pillows.

He must have drifted off again, despite the feeling he'd slept enough for three years, because the next thing he knew there was a rattle of keys in the lock and a knock on the door, followed by a cheerful greeting. Not Ferio's, though, and he pushed himself up in bed in time to see Umi walk into the room, several bags hanging from her arms. "Hey," she said, wandering over to kiss him on the forehead. "I hear you're about to set the television on fire."

"You're in Russia," Clef said, staring up at her. "I mean- what? You're-"

"The director called me back yesterday," Umi said, her voice soft and one hand running gently over the bandage about his head, then down to turn his chin so she could inspect the small cuts down the side of his face. "Didn't know when I'd manage to get back, so we didn't think it was worth telling you until I was here - I landed an hour ago and got a message that you were about to set the television on fire and also you needed batteries? I also grabbed my laptop and some books, snacks, a couple of dvds- I leave you for one week and you get yourself all dinged up-"

Clef wrapped his arms about her waist and buried his face against her shoulder, shaking slightly. Umi went silent, and then wrapped her arms about him, wriggling her way onto the bed.

"Hey," she said, softly.

"Thank you," he murmured, the tension shuddering out of him. He still felt like hell warmed up, but the world didn't see quite so terrible as it had an hour ago.