The title, in case anyone is curious (and as I am PROCRASTINATING on fixing the pieces of this chapter together, heh,) is from a Bad Company track of the same name. I'm not the biggest Bad Co. fan in the world (my father is one of the biggest Paul Rodgers fans, so I've grown up listening to them) and this isn't one of my favourite tracks, but the chorus - 'untie the knot/ the hold over me you got' - and the frustration seemed to fit Clef's situation. (Sorry, Clef. XD)

I made Eagle and the others from Autozam British because, well, that way I know faintly what I'm talking about. ^^;;; Though I went to a Japanese University for a year, I was an exchange student on a language course, not in normal classes, so the details of University life are not exactly a precise model of Japanese University life - they're closer to British, in several ways. I did then find in-world reasons for it, but, yes. Take everything with a pinch of salt!

I hope people like this chapter (which is later than I thought, because there was one paragraph in the middle which refused to make sense. For the sake of 100 words, many hours were lost. XD;) and, well, yes. It's all rather silly, but fun to write in a very different way to Protecting You.

(Yes, I am using the car names to give the characters their family names. I have no explaination for how things like 'Clef' and 'Ferio' are supposed to be Japanese names in this, so please don't ask! The magic system grew out of several things, including the use of 'magic' circles in Cardcaptor Sakura and Fullmetal Alchemist, and the University I've co-opted here is roughly quarter of an hour by bicycle from the Kitano Tenmangu shrine which is the very first place in CLAMP's new manga, Gate7, a coincidence which made me cackle rather with glee. ^^; Jumbos, for the record, is real, and is indeed the best okonomiyaki ever.)

Now I've rambled for far too long, so~ thank you for reading.

~down

oOo

Untie the Knot

oOo

Chapter Two

oOo

"Excuse me? Hello - may I come in?"

Tentative knocks on Clef's door were hardly a rare occurrence; the office seemed to feel that if he was hanging around doing nothing that important, as they didn't feel his scrambled-together selection of courses from the rest of the University really mattered when they couldn't count towards his (suspended, but still-enrolled-upon) Applied Magic Masters, then they should do their best to make use of him; he was tutoring a good dozen students fairly regularly, and the term wasn't that old yet. But he got an office out of it, he wasn't complaining. (Where they could hear him.)

"Hmm? Sure, door's open-" he replied, automatically. Then stopped, frowning down at the book he was annotating. (A benefit to buying his own.) That voice…

"Ah… thank you. The office said I should talk to you, about the dissertation I'm - oh my god it's you!"

Blue eyes met blue eyes met blue eyes, and his head decided to have a flashback, stabbing wildly. Umi stared, pale - then she bowed and fled the room, babbling. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry about that - were you okay? I'm so sorry! I still can't believe I ran you over… I'll leave, don't worry about wasting time on me- oof!"

There was a thud in the corridor, and a bitten off yelp from another voice.

Clef stood, eyeing his doorway a little wildly, and was debating how bad an idea it would be to go and look when a bemused Eagle Vision wandered into view, one hand gripping Umi's arm firmly. She was clutching at her nose, and staring fixedly at the floor.

"Do you have a seat this girl could borrow? She ran into me quite hard…" Eagle asked, in gently accented Japanese. Then he broke off to yawn widely, raising his free hand to cover his mouth. "Eh, sorry - I'm still a bit, you know."

"I wasn't expecting to see you until tomorrow, Eagle. Shouldn't you be in bed?"

Eagle steered Umi over to the seat before Clef's desk, and set her in it firmly. "I was bored, and everyone has classes - jetlag's no fun. Besides, I have a first draft of that essay that I was wondering if you'd mind looking at, if you've got the time…" Rolling his eyes, Clef held out a hand, and Eagle dug the sheaf of papers out of his rucksack. Clef set it on the desk, and peered at it suspiciously.

"I thought we'd agreed you'd type your essays up, to save my sanity when I'm trying to work out which kanji you actually meant?"

"It IS typed!" Eagle protested, grinning a little. Fluent enough in Japanese he might be - but kanji were the bane of his existence.

"Then what's all this?" Clef poked at the edges of the paper with his pencil, as if the bi-lingual scrawl there would sit up and bite him at any moment. "This is not typed."

"…That would be when I couldn't sleep on the flight, and started trying to edit it on my own. Just ignore it - none of it makes much sense even if you know what I meant to write. I just haven't had time to print another copy off yet, and Lantis needs a new ink cartridge for his printer, so…"

"…Fine."

"Are you alright, though? Lantis told me you'd knocked your head about quite hard - he wasn't sure you'd be in today."

"I'm fine. Emeraude let me come in as long as I don't dash about too much."

Eagle smiled at that. "I'm sure you're alright then. After all, if Emeraude let you out of her sight…"

Clef rolled his eyes. "Are you coming round for dinner tonight? She said something about cooking for all of us when I left this morning, so-"

"I suppose so. Emeraude's food is great - though I was thinking about dragging people to Jumbo's..."

"…You and Ferio are addicted to okonomiyaki, I swear. How do you ever cope in England?"

"Badly!" Eagle grinned, then yawned and leant back against the wall, settling down to wait. He was right next to the door - if the girl bolted again, he'd be able to stop her. (Which said quite a lot about Eagle and loyalty; he'd no idea why she'd run, yet here he was ready to back Clef up, without even being asked. Probably without thinking about it, even - he looked more asleep than awake, slumped back like that.)

Clef set his pencil down, and turned to the girl. "…is your nose all right?" he asked, figuring first things first.

"…I'm fine." She said, quietly, almost trying to sound as though she wasn't there. Umi was staring at the floor, not letting her eyes wander about the room - she had caught the hem of her skirt between her fingers, and was twisting it tightly, rumpling the fabric badly. Her cheeks were flushed a bright red, but her nose was a shade brighter still, where she had run into Eagle. Clef eyed her dubiously, and wondered if he could find an ice pack for her.

Then she looked up, and Clef hadn't remembered just how bright her eyes were before.

"…I should be asking you that." She said, with a small, nervous smile. "I'm the one who ran you over."

Clef didn't have to look to see Eagle straighten, and become much too interested. "You… did what?" he grinned at Clef. "Now, this is a story I haven't heard before. Or is that how you hit your head? Lantis was holding out on me if it was..."

"Oh, shut up." Clef flapped a hand at him dismissively, but didn't hide his smile. "Go bother your boyfriend or something. Or, better yet - there's an article by a J. Kessler, in one of the newest journals. I can't remember which, but there aren't that many English journals in the library - It's a paper on…oh, what do you call it? The British water demon; the one that looks like a horse, drags you into the water and drowns you… well, it's on that and the connections it has with the history of London. If you've nothing better to do, could you copy it for me and stick a few translation notes on? "

"Yes, sir." Eagle laughed, and wandered back out into the corridor, yawning again.

oOo

"At the office, they said you were going to be my tutor for my dissertation, but you're not a lecturer, are you?" She asked, and the confusion was warranted; his (manic, cardboard, made-by-Ferio-and-remade-even-brighter-if-he-dared-remove-it,) namecard listed the MSc. he should have by now, not a doctorate.

"No, but I tutor undergrads quite a lot." He stopped there, searching for a way to kick the conversation on. She was holding a set of papers in her hand, crumpled by now with the grip she had on it, but he could see it was a print of the Department's usual dissertation proposal form, and she'd begun to fill it in. "Is that your proposal - may I see it?"

As he reached across the desk, his sleeve caught on the top of the computer screen and it rucked up before he even noticed, exposing a long stretch of his arm; Umi caught her breath audibly, and he froze.

"...I can see why they told me to talk to you." Umi whispered, staring at the dark bands of ink wrapped about his wrist. He didn't understand the comment, but then she leant forwards, one hand reaching out, and Clef couldn't help leaning back into his chair and dropping his incriminating hands into his lap. She froze, then stepped backwards again, head dropping until she was staring at the floor. He could see the high colour returning to her face anyway, through the fall of her long fringe.

"Sorry." he said, quietly. "It's just, it..."

(It wasn't voluntary? he thought, and didn't know which he meant; flinching away even with the desk between them, or the existence of marking itself.)

Umi's shoulders were hunched up, her face still looked painfully bright, and surely he could do better than that. "The thing is.. damn it, hasn't anyone said anything about me? Last I heard, it was common gossip about the department!"

That lifted her head, at least. so she could stare at him in confusion. "Said what? I mean, I've heard of you, sure - I didn't realise, but that's you, right? You're staying here until you can finish your practical masters, because at the moment you can't cast after an accident, but I've not heard about a mark-" Her eyes went wide and her voice trailed off as she stared at his hands - or at where they were, behind the desk, the pieces fitting together.

"Aha." he said, dryly.

"The reason you can't - it's a binding? A full one? But who - why did you ever agree to that?"

The expression she wore was one he knew intimately, the look of someone who couldn't imagine life without that extra sense, that ability, because it was so intrinsically a part of them. Waving her back to the chair opposite his desk with one hand, he rubbed at his eyes with the other, trying not to flinch again when his cuff fell back down his arm again, and Umi hissed at the further swirls revealed. "It's a regulation government one, put in place when I was hurt to protect the mahou-arteries as they heal, and stop any uncontrolled magic while I get the muscle control back in my arms." He looked at her, and wasn't sure what prompted him to add: "by the time I came around, it was in place, and only a government approved specialist can take it off."

"...Ah." Another uncomfortable silence descended, and he almost thought she was going to make her excuses and run, and he didn't want that.

"So, what's it about?" he asked. Umi blinked up at him, confused, cheeks still mildly flushed. "Your dissertation." he prompted her, "what topic have you picked?"

"Oh! Yes. The ways magic is channelled through symbols - whether it draws power or has power pushed through it, what difference that makes for the ways it works, and if it's possible to store magic in the circle so a non-mage could activate it without needing another power source, that kind of thing." A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth. "The technicalities of circles."

"That's... a rather broad topic. You only have 15,000 characters, you understand?"

The girl grinned at him then, briefly, and it was his turn to blink as her hesitancy faded entirely, leaving behind the girl who'd yelled at him even while she worried. "That is exactly what my advisor said - then 'I don't know enough on that to help you narrow it down; we'll find you a tutor to help out. Someone with a closer specialty.' And the Office sent me here. Like I said, I can see why they sent me to you - bindings take power, don't they, without being activated. There aren't that many symbols which do, and there's hardly anything about them in the library, at least in the catalogue - government restrictions all over the place! Even when they talk about them there aren't any images, and how do you analyse a symbol without knowing what it looks like?"

"I have, also, studied the topic myself since I got landed with one, you'll be pleased to hear." Clef said, dryly. "I can be more than just a study subject."

Umi blushed again, but didn't tense up. Instead, she pulled a face at him. "I should hope so, or they'd have given me someone else as my tutor."

It should have been awkward. It always had, talking about the binding. Instead... Clef felt like sticking his tongue out at her, and quashed the impulse fiercely. He rolled his eyes instead. "You've no clue where you want to start narrowing it down?"

"Nope - I've so much reading this term I can't really fuss about with general reading, either." She pulled a face. "University's meant to be easy after you get in, but I keep taking too many courses which want me to work."

It was a common complaint among the mage students. Some kind of training was required in magic by the time one came of age at twenty, so people had to either be on a university course or take one of the government evening classes, which didn't teach much at all beyond how to not use magic. Most students in the country worked like hell to get into their chosen University then got to relax, memorising their way through their classes, hanging out with clubs and societies. But the mages were on a different model - smaller classes to deal with the variety of magic, more individual essays and presentations to ensure they understood what they were learning, and then a dissertation if they wanted to pass with honours. They usually had a term or two abroad, as well, and the mages generally had more international students and teachers than the rest of the University as a whole.

That, though, was a universal trend. If enough links were fostered between the various mages, then, the thought went, it would be harder to persuade them into any wars like the ones of the last century when half the world seemed torn apart.

Umi, though... he didn't think she really meant it; not only was she smiling still, but if she wanted an easy time of it she could either have opted out of the dissertation or at least picked some small contained, simple topic.

Grabbing a piece of paper off his scrap pile Clef nudged at the mouse to wake his PC back up. "If I give you three or four good overview books to start from, you should be able to narrow it down, and we can argue it out from there if you don't hit on something reasonable immediately... these should all be in the library, I can check that from here for you. Unless they've thrown them out in the last few years, and the librarians never get rid of books, they just shift them into the basement vaults." he opened up one of his undergrad essays and mined the bibliography, scribbling down a couple of the titles and editors, then stopped and tapped the end of his pen on the desk. "There was another one, I found it last year. Newish, blue cover - what the hell was it called?"

"I have no idea, but I'm sure I can get somewhere with these in the meantime?" She reached out to take the list. His sleeve fell back a little, again, as he handed it over - not far, just enough for the very edge of the ink to show, too dark for a shadow, at the end of his sleeve. "Could I see it?" She asked, abruptly, and he just stared at her a moment before bursting out laughing, taking both of them by surprise.

Umi went a painfully bright shade of red and dropped her head into her hands. "I didn't mean - well, not like that-"

"I'm not sitting around topless in my office. Somewhere else, perhaps - there's really no good way of saying it, is there?" She was giggling into her hands now.

"There really, really isn't!"

It took a few moments for them both to sober up again - every time he caught her eye Clef's mouth twitched up, so he focused on his computer screen, finally checking those books were in the library. "I'll hunt for the other book when I next go in, I think I know where I found it, and I need to change my books before the weekend anyway." He promised, then "...look, I'm really not comfortable with taking my shirt off in here - anyone could walk past, that's not going to do either of us any good."

Sitting back, Umi nodded. "I know, sorry. You're right, I wasn't really thinking - it just seemed so convenient, I got carried away. You shouldn't have to be some kind of research subject just because it would be easier for me."

"No - no, I want to help, I don't mind, it's just, not here. And I have no idea how to make this sound less disturbing, but my room is just down the road and I've a copy of the Tayama book which you might as well borrow?"

There was a pause while she stared at him and he largely tried not to blush - then they both dissolved back into laughter. (His throat was beginning to ache, he'd not laughed this much in - well, a while.)

"We seem destined for eternally awkward moments." Umi said, putting the list and her papers in her bag. "If you're sure, then, yes, I'll come, please."

"Let me get my bag together, then. I wasn't planning on much more today anyway, I can do this at home." He shoved his book into his battered bag, next to his laptop, frowning at the split beginning in the side seam. "Time I got a new one, I think. I don't want my laptop falling out halfway down the road."

"That wasn't..." Umi trailed off. Clef blinked at her, not following. "When I knocked you over, I mean." she explained. "Was that what tore it?"

"Oh, no, this is just overuse, honest."

oOo

"So you've done your own work on circle theory?" Umi stood by his bookshelves, flicking through the Tayama book. She tapped a finger on one of his scribbles post-its left in the pages. "What did you focus on?"

Clef was dragging the cover of paper from the floor, stacking them roughly on the desk. At least the paper was the only mess - he'd done laundry yesterday, banned from thinking too hard. "A simplified circle for general manipulation spells. It was my dissertation, actually, same as yours." Umi hummed a question mark at him encouragingly. "Most of the work in Circle Theory goes on making more elegant, more effective diagrams - making them more and more specific. I wanted to do the opposite. Simple circles are always seen as children's playthings, or sloppy, inefficient. The kind of thing only thieves or street performers bother with. People carry around their favourite circle for general use because even those are too complicated to draw quickly. I wanted to have something more flexible - lightning strikes in an instant, so I wanted something I could draw in that instant, and do whatever I needed - you're staring at me."

"It's just - that seems a bit much, for an undergrad?"

"Less than your topic." He pointed out, shooting a grin back at her. "Which is why I know of what I speak asking you to focus on something smaller. I went through hell trying to cram it all into the limits."

The book closed as Umi turned right about to face him. "But you came up with a working design?"

"Yes - well, mostly. It works with physical elements, not the more evanescent types, and the use is limited to physical manipulation - you'd be able to use it. That is, it's water, right? Your element?"

"Yes."

"Here, I've a copy of it somewhere. The bibliography might be helpful, I guess. I've not got a printout of the one I got those off..." He had to kneel on the floor to get into the long low cupboard under the window, and his right arm twinged when he leant his weight on it - he hid the wince, switched arms, and kept on digging until his fingers hit the plastic curves of the binding, buried under copies of the last year's essays. Flicking through, he found the diagram page and handed it up. "It's mostly based on the work Kurama and Briggs did - which you won't have read about yet, sorry. The outer circle is the activator."

Umi touched the outermost line as he stood up, and the design began to glow a little; she looked about, and spotted the glass of water on the desk. There was hardly a moment's hesitation before the liquid coiled up and out into the air, shivering into a ball half a metre above the desk. Then she blinked at the laptop beside the glass, and the water moved further into the room. It was an impressive display with an unfamiliar circle, and he could feel the faint shiver of power against his skin again, though less dramatically now she wasn't dragging moisture from the air.

As he watched, she raised her other hand, palm up, and the water leapt in a perfect silvery arc to sit on her hand, then it split into three distinct strands which she plaited together, wrapped about her fingers and each other, before sending it back to splash into the glass one section at a time. Then she beamed at him, and his breath caught in his throat.

"So, the office were right three times over about you being my tutor."

oOo

Clef's room was at the top of the first set of stairs in the building, and with the bug screen and the depth of the window, the bulk of the aircon on the sill outside, there wasn't much chance of people seeing in even though it faced the road. Both roads - he was near enough to the corner of the building that he could see right across the junction and down to the level-crossing. The bell for approaching trains was the constant marker of his days, sounding regularly four times an hour, right into the night.

He still moved back into the room when Umi looked at his wrists, his shirt's buttons, then away again. "Do you still-" He started, then gave up and shrugged. Umi looked away, down the corridor-kitchenette towards the door, but nodded firmly.

"If you wouldn't mind?"

He wavered, then rolled the desk chair into the middle of the wooden floor and sat on that, facing the back; the end of his bed felt too... something. This way he could swing away from her as he fumbled the buttons undone, and pulled the thin cotton off in a rush. His hair twisted and fell in a tangle about his face, and his arm twinged again at the stretch as he raised it - damn it, he hadn't been overdoing it that much - but awareness of both fled the instant Umi lay one cool fingertip on the nape of his neck.

Clef tried his hardest not to shiver. Staring at the papers on his desk, he folded his arms across the back of the chair and leant forwards. He knew, roughly, what she was seeing - he had been shown diagrams of the lines swirling across his back, the exact pattern which extended from neck to his waist, and reached down his arms, heavy black lines he couldn't disguise. He caught glimpses of it in the bathroom mirror when he was taking a shower. But... he wondered what she could be seeing which made her catch her breath so, reach out so gently. He hated it - even if people didn't understand it as a binding, they glimpsed it and thought it some delinquent tattoo, and it was there to snarl himself up inside his skin.

"I didn't expect it to look beautiful." Umi whispered.

At that he had to look at her, startled, craning his neck to see her expression, and what he would have said then he had no idea, but he was going to say something - probably an unwise something - when there was a perfunctory knock at the door and he looked there instead just in time to see it open, and Ferio walk in.

"Hey, Clef, I was wondering - um." Ferio managed to kick his slippers off in the genkan and step up into the corridor before he actually looked up and stopped. The three of them remained still as a tableaux until the heavy door swung shut of its own accord, and then a wickedly amused grin spread across Ferio's face. Clef moaned and dropped his head onto his arms. "Sorry to interrupt, it wasn't anything important - and you really should remember to lock your door if you're bringing people home with you, Clef!"

"I'm not-" Umi spluttered, the same time as Clef glared and said "you aren't interrupting, she's studying the damned marking - and you should learn to wait for an invitation."

"But you never hear me when you've got headphones in." Ferio pointed out, coming into the main room and offering Umi a nod. "Hi, I'm Ferio. Honda Ferio, that is. Are you one of Clef's tutoring victims?"

"Ryuuzaki Umi, pleased to meet you. Yes, he's going to help me with my dissertation."

"Not just as a subject of it, either." Clef felt the need to mutter, pulling his shirt back on.

"Ah." Ferio looked taken aback, for a moment, but recovered himself easily. "I was sent on a quest by Lantis. Are you going to be a while yet? Should I come back?"

"No, that's okay." Umi grabbed her bag, and picked the book up again. "I've got to get home anyway, my friends are expecting me. When do you want this back?"

"Whenever you're done with it, I'm not using it at the moment. Do you want to set a time for a tutorial, or wait until you're into the reading?"

"I, hmm. Are you free Friday afternoons? I should have got through some of it by then, and I don't have anything after three?" She had to half unpack her bag to get the heavy book in, but grinned so fiercely when she had managed it that Clef grinned back involuntarily.

"Half three on Friday, then. My email's on system if you need to get in touch beforehand..." Clef stood as she made for the door, meaning to walk her down, only to be waved back firmly.

"I can find my own way out, you stay and help your friend on his quest. I'll see you Friday." She bowed and was out of the door before he could reply, and it swung shut with a thud behind her.

Ferio smirked down at him. "Interesting day?"

"You could say that." Clef shook his head, smile still tugging at his lips. "Given that she's the girl who ran into me last week."

The doors downstairs shut with their unique glassy rattle; Ferio stared at Clef a moment, then walked over to the window to watch Umi go. "Really? ...Well, that's one way to get someone's attention, I guess. Not sure I'd recommend it, but-"

Clef grabbed the closest pencil and threw it at Ferio, who twisted away like always, laughing and catching it mid-air. "I'm going to be tutoring her, not dating her. What did you come to see me for, anyway?"

He tried not to look too relieved when Ferio followed the distraction, snickering even harder. "Zagato bought a plant for Emeraude last week, he wants to give it to her tomorrow, but he gave it to Lantis to look after because she'd see it in his room..."

"...And it's dead already?" Clef guessed.

"Dying, Lantis thinks. He wants you to come see if you can work out what it is and where we might buy another one."

"Why on Earth Zagato gave it to him to look after..." Clef muttered, but obediently got up and followed Ferio out and down the corridor. It would distract him from going over the afternoon and being too embarrassed at himself.

(It would also give his arm a chance to rest. But that was another one of those things he didn't think about.)

oOo

end chapter two.

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