![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
down posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
magicknightrayearthTitle: Sugar kisses
Rating: General
Pairing: Clef/Umi/Ascot
Content notes: No warnings, beyond the fact I seem to have written a ridiculously saccharine valentine's day fic? Set after Adopted chaos but stands alone.
Summary; Cephiro has some of its own traditions.
oOo
Clef wasn’t quite asleep at his desk, but he wasn’t far from it. Half-grown dragonlings, it turned out, got highly crotchety when they started shedding their skin for their adult scales. He’d spent half the night sitting against the wall of what had once been a closed pen, and was now an open den area where they could come and go as they pleased. Three uncomfortably large heads had compressed his legs as all three of them demanded his attention, and any time he tried to leave for his own bed they wailed fit to wake the whole castle.
He would probably have been there all night, but Ascot came down to check on things a few hours past midnight and chased him off to bed, leaving several of his friends down to comfort the dragonlings in their itchy grouching. He’d seen Clef to his door, ‘just so you can’t fall asleep partway there’, and Clef had kicked his boots off and curled up on top of the covers, still fully clothed.
It hadn’t been the best night’s sleep. It was better than none, but not enough to keep him alert; the thump of his study door bursting open had him jumping half out of his skin, dropping his pen as he did so. “Umi!” he snapped, because even in a crisis, no one else threw the door open so impolitely. “Why do you always do that?”
Looking up to glare at her, he found his vision obstructed by a - crinkling, see-through bag tied up with ribbon? Containing what looked like a dozen of the strange and addictive confections which they Knights brought from home sometimes, though these looked… different.
Clef peered over it at Umi, bewildered. “What?”
“For you,” Umi told him, gruffly.
“…A present?” He reached out, and the bag was dropped unceremoniously into his hands. He stared at it again. The sweets - chocolates, that was the word - were all shaped like different things. Several were flowers, but there was at least one which looked like a dragon, and several… fish? “Thank you?”
“It’s just obligation-chocolate, don’t worry about it, if you don’t want to eat it you can give it away-” Umi said, all in a rush, and when Clef looked up she was already leaving the room. The door thumped shut behind her, leaving him staring at it, more confused than before.
“…What in the world is obligation-chocolate?” He said, as if the bag of treats could answer him. Shockingly, it didn’t say anything, remaining a silent mystery.
oOo
Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and Hikaru stuck her head around - asking politely if she could come in. “Of course,” Clef said, waving her in and moving the papers in front of him, trying to at least look like he hadn’t been poking at his surprise gift since Umi left.
Hikaru saw it, and grinned. “This isn’t as nice, but I remember you liked them, so here,” she said, and held out a small packet with the black and red paper about it he remembered as his favourite of the kinds of ‘chocolate’ the Knights had previously brought. “Fuu brought dessert for everyone instead of chocolate. Apart from Ferio, of course.”
“Of course?” Clef asked, taking the chocolate, but Hikaru seemed to think it was an agreement. She bounced about the desk to kiss him on the cheek and then darted out again, a half-empty bag slung over her arm.
“Sorry, I have to get to everyone else before we leave! I’ll see you next week!”
Once more, he was left staring at the chocolate. But this time his memory was stirring. Last year, and maybe the year before that, there had been a day when the girls brought a couple of bags of sweets and distributed them among their friends, claiming some custom from home. But there had been nothing like the package Umi had handed him. And no mention of ‘obligation-chocolate’. Nor had Umi been blushing when she handed it over.
Ferio came in while he was still sat there looking through the different shapes - managing not to slam the door, but forgetting to knock - bringing yet another stack of paperwork. “Here,” he said, “I need you to sign off the accounts for your Guild. Caldina’s audited them - and LaFarga watched her do it, so I don’t think she’s added any ‘helpful commentary’ about the expenditure this year, but- oh!” He saw the bag of chocolates, and grinned. “So you and Ascot both got the good stuff from Umi this year, huh?”
Rubbing at his eyes, Clef wondered if he was just so sleep-deprived that nothing made sense today. “What do you mean, ‘the good stuff’?”
“That’s certainly not, what do they call it? ‘Obligation-whatever’.” Ferio waved at hand at the bag, which Clef stared at in even more confusion.
“It’s not? But-”
“Well, if you don’t want it…” Ferio sidled about the desk, and Clef snatched the bag away from him protectively.
“It’s mine! Leave it alone!”
Ferio smirked at him. “If you give me one, I’ll explain it?”
Narrowing his eyes, Clef pointed at the door. “Get out, and stop coveting my stuff. I’ll get the accounts done tomorrow, you can come back then - you can’t have that, either!” He lunged over to save the bar Hikaru had given him from Ferio’s pocket.
Laughing, Ferio headed out the door, with an irritatingly knowing expression on his face.
So. ‘Obligation-chocolate’ meant something, and this probably wasn’t it, and from the shape of the conversation and Umi’s strangeness Clef was beginning to guess what it might be. But… he wasn’t certain.
She’d given the same to Ascot, Ferio had said. Well. Maybe… she’d told him a little more about it.
He hesitated, but put the bag in his pocket (safe from marauding Ferios) and headed out of the room.
oOo
Ascot was outside, which was normal for this time of day. He was also sat in the back of the dragonlings’ empty den, which was not. He looked up when Clef came over, and smiled, but there was something nervous about it - until he saw the crinkling wrapper sticking out of Clef’s pocket, and the smile relaxed into something deeper.
“…Please tell me Umi explained this to you.” Clef dropped down beside him, pulling the bag from his pocket as he sat down. “She dropped this on me, told me to give it away, then ran off.”
Ascot laughed, quietly, and pulled a matching bag from his sleeve - or, not quite matching. Instead of the fish, he had little birds which looked rather like Yaris. “No, she did the same to me,” he said, and Clef’s heart fell. “…But Hikaru told Caldina, so Caldina explained.”
“Then what is obligation-chocolate, and what does it mean if this isn’t it?”
Slowly, a blush on his cheeks, Ascot explained. “There’s a day in Tokyo - apparently yesterday, really - when women give chocolate to the people they like. It’s meant to be the men they like but-” Ascot shrugged, which about summed up the Cephiran view on earth’s rather binary understanding of things. “Obligation-chocolate is cheap, from a shop, given to people like colleagues that you’re expected to give something. ‘Real-feelings’ chocolate is meant to be for the person you really like. This… I’m pretty sure this is hand-made.” He looked at the package again, and Clef noticed for the first time that there was a little charm on the ribbon of each. He had a little fish, again, and Ascot a bird’s head.
“People you… like.” Clef took a breath. “…Romantically?”
“…Yes.”
They sat there in silence, neither of them daring to say what that might mean for them, neither of them looking at the other, until Clef grabbed at the ribbon on his and pulled it open, catching the little fish as it slid free. There were a number of fish chocolates - he took one, and held it out, hand shaking slightly. “…Here. You don’t have one of these.”
Ascot’s head shot up and he stared at Clef a moment, before flushing furiously. He fumbled with his own bag, and traded Clef a bird for the fish, without a word.
“Are we meant to reply to Umi somehow?” Clef managed, a moment later, as he tied a much less elegant knot about the mouth of the bag to hold it shut again. “They’ll have left by now, won’t they? It was meant to be a quick visit today. I wondered why they were coming at all, but…”
“Not today.” Ascot bit his lip, looking down. “There’s - apparently, you’re meant to respond, a month later, with another present. Only it’s meant to be white? I don’t really know why it’s white, but… I thought, if you wanted, maybe…” He swallowed hard, and looked him straight in the eyes, completely earnest. “I thought maybe we could do something together?”
“…Is that traditional?” Clef asked, his throat tight. “For people to work together to return a gift?”
Ascot shook his head. “No, but… I’d like to.”
It was Clef’s turn to take a breath, hands trembling a little. “I-” he started, and had to clear his throat. “…I would like that, too. In fact, if it’s white…” He looked at the chocolates, at the care which must have gone into shaping them. “I think I have an idea what we could do. If you wanted to.”
oOo
A month later, Ascot came and found Clef just the Knights were due to arrive, pulled him out to the den while he tried to protest. “We’re doing this together,” Ascot told him, nerves apparently making him assertive.
Clef mostly wanted to hide. Somehow this was more nerve-wracking than anything he’d done since the rebirth of Cephiro. “If you wanted to, you could give them by yourself-”
Ascot held onto Clef’s hand almost tight enough to hurt. “Together,” he insisted, and Clef took a breath and tried to stop panicking.
It didn’t work very well, but he must have looked slightly less like he was going to bolt; Ascot let go of his hand. LaFarga - who Ascot wisely trusted more than Caldina with this - must have delivered his message as promised, as Umi came wandering over to them not long afterwards.
“LaFarga said I should come see you here?” she said, looking between them curiously. She’d spent an hour being strange about both of them when she first returned, after the chocolates, but the subsequent three hours cursing as Clef argued her into helping them give all three dragons a thorough scrub to help shift their old skin had them all right back to normal… with the small exception of the hours Ascot and Clef had spent together working on their return project, busily not talking about what it meant.
She was certainly startled enough when Ascot thrust a small folded box at her, failing to meet her eyes; she looked at Clef, bewildered, who blushed hard and took a reflexive half-step back.
Ascot shoved the box into Umi’s hands so he could grab at Clef’s sleeve and stop him. “In return for the chocolates,” he said, and it was Umi’s turn to flush. She opened the box to stare at the tiny round(ish, neither of them were that good at it,) white comfits inside.
“Ascot, you made these?” she said, and her voice squeaked a little.
“We both did,” Ascot told her, seeming to grow more assured when they weren’t immediately returned. “Clef and I, together. We made them.”
Umi glanced up at Clef, and all he managed to do was nod confirmation.
Ascot looked to Clef, and then back at Umi. “Caldina told us about ‘white day’, so we thought of these, but also… Cephiro has some traditions, too. With these.” He reached out, and took one of the comfits from the box… and then he turned to Clef. “Like this,” he said, softly, and held it to Clef’s mouth with a shaking hand.
Clef took a breath, and then carefully took the small ball of sugar from Ascot’s fingertips with just his lips. The sweetness of the outside melted across his tongue, and then at the very end there was the sharp bite of the small spiced seed at the centre of it, and he didn’t look away from Ascot the entire time he was swallowing it. His heartbeat had shot up so fast he felt light-headed, and there was the faint powdery trace of sugar on his lips. He fought the impulse to lick it off. If this was a demonstration… “Thank you, Ascot.”
“You have something, here,” Ascot whispered, stepping in, brushing his fingers over Clef’s lips… and then dipping his head to kiss the sugar away.
Clef closed his eyes, and leaned into the contact, hands coming up to hold onto Ascot for balance as much as anything. The ‘sugar kisses’ when he was young had been a laughing game, sweet and quick. This lingered, deepening when neither one of them pulled back, and he was entirely breathless when Ascot finally stepped away.
Umi was staring, eyes round, hands still clutching the open box. Ascot stepped back to her, and took another comfit, offering it to her. She looked between the two of them- Clef couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, frozen to the spot - and then she leant to accept the sweet from Ascot’s fingers, and moved in to kiss him without waiting for him to say anything, and maybe not even to finish the comfit. Her free hand held the back of his neck as she kissed him as freely as he’d kissed Clef, and when she let go of him, she darted over and kissed Clef with no excuse and just as much enthusiasm, her tongue sweeping over his lips.
When she pulled back, it was to take Ascot’s hand, pull him over, flushing hard. “…There was still some sugar there,” she told Clef, eyes dancing.
“There’s plenty more in the box, too,” he told her, and she nodded.
“You’ve made so many, I think I’ll have to share them with both of you. …If that’s okay?”
“Yes,” Ascot said, as Clef nodded.
Clef took Ascot’s other hand, lacing their fingers together, looking between the two of them. “And we could always make more, if we run out.”
Umi’s smile at them was radiant. “You can teach me to make them, too. Then we’ll never run out.”
oOo
end
oOo
Rating: General
Pairing: Clef/Umi/Ascot
Content notes: No warnings, beyond the fact I seem to have written a ridiculously saccharine valentine's day fic? Set after Adopted chaos but stands alone.
Summary; Cephiro has some of its own traditions.
oOo
Clef wasn’t quite asleep at his desk, but he wasn’t far from it. Half-grown dragonlings, it turned out, got highly crotchety when they started shedding their skin for their adult scales. He’d spent half the night sitting against the wall of what had once been a closed pen, and was now an open den area where they could come and go as they pleased. Three uncomfortably large heads had compressed his legs as all three of them demanded his attention, and any time he tried to leave for his own bed they wailed fit to wake the whole castle.
He would probably have been there all night, but Ascot came down to check on things a few hours past midnight and chased him off to bed, leaving several of his friends down to comfort the dragonlings in their itchy grouching. He’d seen Clef to his door, ‘just so you can’t fall asleep partway there’, and Clef had kicked his boots off and curled up on top of the covers, still fully clothed.
It hadn’t been the best night’s sleep. It was better than none, but not enough to keep him alert; the thump of his study door bursting open had him jumping half out of his skin, dropping his pen as he did so. “Umi!” he snapped, because even in a crisis, no one else threw the door open so impolitely. “Why do you always do that?”
Looking up to glare at her, he found his vision obstructed by a - crinkling, see-through bag tied up with ribbon? Containing what looked like a dozen of the strange and addictive confections which they Knights brought from home sometimes, though these looked… different.
Clef peered over it at Umi, bewildered. “What?”
“For you,” Umi told him, gruffly.
“…A present?” He reached out, and the bag was dropped unceremoniously into his hands. He stared at it again. The sweets - chocolates, that was the word - were all shaped like different things. Several were flowers, but there was at least one which looked like a dragon, and several… fish? “Thank you?”
“It’s just obligation-chocolate, don’t worry about it, if you don’t want to eat it you can give it away-” Umi said, all in a rush, and when Clef looked up she was already leaving the room. The door thumped shut behind her, leaving him staring at it, more confused than before.
“…What in the world is obligation-chocolate?” He said, as if the bag of treats could answer him. Shockingly, it didn’t say anything, remaining a silent mystery.
oOo
Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door, and Hikaru stuck her head around - asking politely if she could come in. “Of course,” Clef said, waving her in and moving the papers in front of him, trying to at least look like he hadn’t been poking at his surprise gift since Umi left.
Hikaru saw it, and grinned. “This isn’t as nice, but I remember you liked them, so here,” she said, and held out a small packet with the black and red paper about it he remembered as his favourite of the kinds of ‘chocolate’ the Knights had previously brought. “Fuu brought dessert for everyone instead of chocolate. Apart from Ferio, of course.”
“Of course?” Clef asked, taking the chocolate, but Hikaru seemed to think it was an agreement. She bounced about the desk to kiss him on the cheek and then darted out again, a half-empty bag slung over her arm.
“Sorry, I have to get to everyone else before we leave! I’ll see you next week!”
Once more, he was left staring at the chocolate. But this time his memory was stirring. Last year, and maybe the year before that, there had been a day when the girls brought a couple of bags of sweets and distributed them among their friends, claiming some custom from home. But there had been nothing like the package Umi had handed him. And no mention of ‘obligation-chocolate’. Nor had Umi been blushing when she handed it over.
Ferio came in while he was still sat there looking through the different shapes - managing not to slam the door, but forgetting to knock - bringing yet another stack of paperwork. “Here,” he said, “I need you to sign off the accounts for your Guild. Caldina’s audited them - and LaFarga watched her do it, so I don’t think she’s added any ‘helpful commentary’ about the expenditure this year, but- oh!” He saw the bag of chocolates, and grinned. “So you and Ascot both got the good stuff from Umi this year, huh?”
Rubbing at his eyes, Clef wondered if he was just so sleep-deprived that nothing made sense today. “What do you mean, ‘the good stuff’?”
“That’s certainly not, what do they call it? ‘Obligation-whatever’.” Ferio waved at hand at the bag, which Clef stared at in even more confusion.
“It’s not? But-”
“Well, if you don’t want it…” Ferio sidled about the desk, and Clef snatched the bag away from him protectively.
“It’s mine! Leave it alone!”
Ferio smirked at him. “If you give me one, I’ll explain it?”
Narrowing his eyes, Clef pointed at the door. “Get out, and stop coveting my stuff. I’ll get the accounts done tomorrow, you can come back then - you can’t have that, either!” He lunged over to save the bar Hikaru had given him from Ferio’s pocket.
Laughing, Ferio headed out the door, with an irritatingly knowing expression on his face.
So. ‘Obligation-chocolate’ meant something, and this probably wasn’t it, and from the shape of the conversation and Umi’s strangeness Clef was beginning to guess what it might be. But… he wasn’t certain.
She’d given the same to Ascot, Ferio had said. Well. Maybe… she’d told him a little more about it.
He hesitated, but put the bag in his pocket (safe from marauding Ferios) and headed out of the room.
oOo
Ascot was outside, which was normal for this time of day. He was also sat in the back of the dragonlings’ empty den, which was not. He looked up when Clef came over, and smiled, but there was something nervous about it - until he saw the crinkling wrapper sticking out of Clef’s pocket, and the smile relaxed into something deeper.
“…Please tell me Umi explained this to you.” Clef dropped down beside him, pulling the bag from his pocket as he sat down. “She dropped this on me, told me to give it away, then ran off.”
Ascot laughed, quietly, and pulled a matching bag from his sleeve - or, not quite matching. Instead of the fish, he had little birds which looked rather like Yaris. “No, she did the same to me,” he said, and Clef’s heart fell. “…But Hikaru told Caldina, so Caldina explained.”
“Then what is obligation-chocolate, and what does it mean if this isn’t it?”
Slowly, a blush on his cheeks, Ascot explained. “There’s a day in Tokyo - apparently yesterday, really - when women give chocolate to the people they like. It’s meant to be the men they like but-” Ascot shrugged, which about summed up the Cephiran view on earth’s rather binary understanding of things. “Obligation-chocolate is cheap, from a shop, given to people like colleagues that you’re expected to give something. ‘Real-feelings’ chocolate is meant to be for the person you really like. This… I’m pretty sure this is hand-made.” He looked at the package again, and Clef noticed for the first time that there was a little charm on the ribbon of each. He had a little fish, again, and Ascot a bird’s head.
“People you… like.” Clef took a breath. “…Romantically?”
“…Yes.”
They sat there in silence, neither of them daring to say what that might mean for them, neither of them looking at the other, until Clef grabbed at the ribbon on his and pulled it open, catching the little fish as it slid free. There were a number of fish chocolates - he took one, and held it out, hand shaking slightly. “…Here. You don’t have one of these.”
Ascot’s head shot up and he stared at Clef a moment, before flushing furiously. He fumbled with his own bag, and traded Clef a bird for the fish, without a word.
“Are we meant to reply to Umi somehow?” Clef managed, a moment later, as he tied a much less elegant knot about the mouth of the bag to hold it shut again. “They’ll have left by now, won’t they? It was meant to be a quick visit today. I wondered why they were coming at all, but…”
“Not today.” Ascot bit his lip, looking down. “There’s - apparently, you’re meant to respond, a month later, with another present. Only it’s meant to be white? I don’t really know why it’s white, but… I thought, if you wanted, maybe…” He swallowed hard, and looked him straight in the eyes, completely earnest. “I thought maybe we could do something together?”
“…Is that traditional?” Clef asked, his throat tight. “For people to work together to return a gift?”
Ascot shook his head. “No, but… I’d like to.”
It was Clef’s turn to take a breath, hands trembling a little. “I-” he started, and had to clear his throat. “…I would like that, too. In fact, if it’s white…” He looked at the chocolates, at the care which must have gone into shaping them. “I think I have an idea what we could do. If you wanted to.”
oOo
A month later, Ascot came and found Clef just the Knights were due to arrive, pulled him out to the den while he tried to protest. “We’re doing this together,” Ascot told him, nerves apparently making him assertive.
Clef mostly wanted to hide. Somehow this was more nerve-wracking than anything he’d done since the rebirth of Cephiro. “If you wanted to, you could give them by yourself-”
Ascot held onto Clef’s hand almost tight enough to hurt. “Together,” he insisted, and Clef took a breath and tried to stop panicking.
It didn’t work very well, but he must have looked slightly less like he was going to bolt; Ascot let go of his hand. LaFarga - who Ascot wisely trusted more than Caldina with this - must have delivered his message as promised, as Umi came wandering over to them not long afterwards.
“LaFarga said I should come see you here?” she said, looking between them curiously. She’d spent an hour being strange about both of them when she first returned, after the chocolates, but the subsequent three hours cursing as Clef argued her into helping them give all three dragons a thorough scrub to help shift their old skin had them all right back to normal… with the small exception of the hours Ascot and Clef had spent together working on their return project, busily not talking about what it meant.
She was certainly startled enough when Ascot thrust a small folded box at her, failing to meet her eyes; she looked at Clef, bewildered, who blushed hard and took a reflexive half-step back.
Ascot shoved the box into Umi’s hands so he could grab at Clef’s sleeve and stop him. “In return for the chocolates,” he said, and it was Umi’s turn to flush. She opened the box to stare at the tiny round(ish, neither of them were that good at it,) white comfits inside.
“Ascot, you made these?” she said, and her voice squeaked a little.
“We both did,” Ascot told her, seeming to grow more assured when they weren’t immediately returned. “Clef and I, together. We made them.”
Umi glanced up at Clef, and all he managed to do was nod confirmation.
Ascot looked to Clef, and then back at Umi. “Caldina told us about ‘white day’, so we thought of these, but also… Cephiro has some traditions, too. With these.” He reached out, and took one of the comfits from the box… and then he turned to Clef. “Like this,” he said, softly, and held it to Clef’s mouth with a shaking hand.
Clef took a breath, and then carefully took the small ball of sugar from Ascot’s fingertips with just his lips. The sweetness of the outside melted across his tongue, and then at the very end there was the sharp bite of the small spiced seed at the centre of it, and he didn’t look away from Ascot the entire time he was swallowing it. His heartbeat had shot up so fast he felt light-headed, and there was the faint powdery trace of sugar on his lips. He fought the impulse to lick it off. If this was a demonstration… “Thank you, Ascot.”
“You have something, here,” Ascot whispered, stepping in, brushing his fingers over Clef’s lips… and then dipping his head to kiss the sugar away.
Clef closed his eyes, and leaned into the contact, hands coming up to hold onto Ascot for balance as much as anything. The ‘sugar kisses’ when he was young had been a laughing game, sweet and quick. This lingered, deepening when neither one of them pulled back, and he was entirely breathless when Ascot finally stepped away.
Umi was staring, eyes round, hands still clutching the open box. Ascot stepped back to her, and took another comfit, offering it to her. She looked between the two of them- Clef couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, frozen to the spot - and then she leant to accept the sweet from Ascot’s fingers, and moved in to kiss him without waiting for him to say anything, and maybe not even to finish the comfit. Her free hand held the back of his neck as she kissed him as freely as he’d kissed Clef, and when she let go of him, she darted over and kissed Clef with no excuse and just as much enthusiasm, her tongue sweeping over his lips.
When she pulled back, it was to take Ascot’s hand, pull him over, flushing hard. “…There was still some sugar there,” she told Clef, eyes dancing.
“There’s plenty more in the box, too,” he told her, and she nodded.
“You’ve made so many, I think I’ll have to share them with both of you. …If that’s okay?”
“Yes,” Ascot said, as Clef nodded.
Clef took Ascot’s other hand, lacing their fingers together, looking between the two of them. “And we could always make more, if we run out.”
Umi’s smile at them was radiant. “You can teach me to make them, too. Then we’ll never run out.”
oOo
end
oOo
