title: Hair of the Lion
summary: Lucy tries to FaceTime when she's drunk, Loke is best boyfriend material for good reason and Wendy pretty much goes "ummm" in the midst of all the inebriated people. Oh, and telling this story to friends amuses them very much.
pairings/characters: Lucy/Loke (established), Lucy, Wendy, Cana, Erza, Levy, Loke, and cameos of celestial spirits sprinkled in. See if you can name the constellations. Mentions of familiar faces as well, but no actual appearances.
note1: I don't own anything. BOATS, man.
note2: if I'm dipping into the FT fandom the first story's got to be for my OTP even if there's only a microscopic bit of actual romance. I tried okay? Okay.
note 3: AU because it fits better.
"So," Levy said in between spoonfuls of chocolate pudding. "Tell me about your incredible boyfriend."
Lucy choked on her mouthful of cheesecake. To be fair, after changing her social media status as 'in a relationship' before coming home for the holidays she should have expected for someone to ask, but when no one had brought it up during the group dinner of girls' night out, Lucy had forgotten all about it.
Really, though, she should have known better. They'd just been waiting for her guard to be lowered.
"Oh yeah," Cana said, pausing in the middle of imbibing her fourth beer of the night. "I heard you caught a pretty impressive one. So? How is he? What's he like? Details!"
While Lucy tried to regain proper air flow into her lungs and stop choking to death via sweet cheese, Wendy piped up. "I met him!" the petit girl said, the only one in the group of girls to have gone to the same school as Lucy.
"Think he's good enough for Lucy?" Erza asked, already cracking her knuckles in anticipation. It was almost like her friend wanted for Lucy's yet-unknown boyfriend to have a fault she could mercilessly punish him for.
"Sure," Wendy said with a shrug. "Actually, I met him officially when a bunch of people came over to our apartment to get drunk after midterms were over."
"Ack!" Lucy shrieked.
"Oh, really?" Cana drawled, leaning forwards. "People? Drunk? At Lucy's? She's never mentioned this. What happened?"
"Wendy no!" Lucy wailed.
Her roommate and good friend looked at her with a pitying expression, and then at the rest of the girls, who were all leaning in, clearly curious and interested in hearing the details, and ready to go to extreme measures to get them. And no one did extreme better than their group, save for maybe their male and more reckless friends.
Following the rules of democracy, the clear majority won.
"Well, so I woke up from a late afternoon nap that went a little too long and found a party going on at home . . . ."
"What's going on here?" Wendy asked aloud, all remnants of sleep having fled her senses at the sight of what lay beyond her bedroom door.
Despite the living room of the apartment she shared with Lucy being filled with people, she received no answer. Most of them were too busy laughing or drinking to even look in her direction.
And then she remembered. Oh, right. The midterm for the astronomy class had been today. Lucy must have been in a good mood if she had let herself be suckered into holding the party.
Well, she'd been stressed recently, so Wendy supposed it was a good thing she was finally getting a chance to loosen up, but . . . .
"I gotta FaceTime everyone!" said blonde, in a seriously dishevelled state of dress, shrieked as she ran from the kitchen towards her bedroom.
. . . Lucy couldn't hold her liquor.
"Wait, Lucy got drunk?" Cana asked, looking far too amused for her own good. "Miss Lightweight here?"
Lucy tried to bury her head into her arms. "Guys," she whined, face red. That was a night she didn't want to think about.
"You got drunk with Wendy there?" Erza said, slightly disapproving. The girl had skipped two years in school, so technically, she was still a minor, and Erza was fiercely protective of her.
"She must have been sitting in the middle of all her drunk friends going like 'ummm'," Levy guessed (accurately).
"No, no, I made sure she was asleep," Lucy defended.
"That's even worse!"
Wendy continued to tell the story before they got off-track.
Wendy shut her room door behind her and trotted after her roommate. "Lucy," she called, avoiding the tanned man and blue-haired woman making out against the wall. "Lucy, wait!"
The blonde had already slipped into her own room and yanked out her laptop lacrima. "FaceTime," she sang. Her face was flushed a deep red, her blonde hair was mussed up, the state of her clothes were on the borderline of being indecent, and now that Wendy was up close, she could see that Lucy's eyes were unfocused.
Oh, and she smelt like alcohol. At least two different types.
Wendy winced in sympathy. She was probably going to get a really bad hangover the day after.
"Lucy? Why are there people drinking here?" She felt like she had woken up in an alternate world of some kind.
"Midterms are done!" she cheered. "So – so Plue and the gang came over because Professor Mustachy wasn't such a hard-ass on his tests and it was good and we did good and now we don't have to worry till finals!"
Her words were getting slurred.
"So now I've got to FaceTime everyone!" Lucy finished, nearly knocking her lacrima off her lap. She would have, and probably broken it in the process if Wendy hadn't managed to catch it.
"Remind me to make sure you guys know how to drink properly before school starts again," Cana mused aloud. "I think I should have done a better job of prepping you all to be more like me."
"I think you just won the genetic lottery with your liver, and no amount of preparation could ever do the same for us," Levy muttered, eyeing the evidence of Cana's bountiful drinking for the night.
"Where does the boyfriend come into the story?" Erza was more focused on the point.
"Wait for it," Lucy groaned, resigned to having the story of her shame be told.
While Lucy tried to figure out what her account's ID and passwords were and scowled fiercely whenever the page informed her that the caps lock was on, Wendy left the room to get her a glass of water. It probably wouldn't get rid of the hangover waiting the next morning, but the young nursing student was hoping that it could ease some of the inevitable pain.
Or, she tried to reach the kitchen for a glass, till a pair of twins snatched her up. "Cute girl!" they crooned. "Drink with us!"
"No thank you!" Wendy squeaked, and ducked out of the dual embrace, only to bump into a very loud, very tall man in a cow-spotted shirt.
"Watch where you mooove," the man shouted, drawing the last word out as he stumbled onto his bespectacled friend.
"Sorry!" Wendy made sure to not run into anyone, and thankfully got to the kitchen, where there was only one person.
And a sort-of familiar one, too. She'd seen this auburn-haired man around a few times on campus, and recently he had asked Lucy out.
"Hi," she said. "You're Loke, right?"
He glanced up, and smiled. "Yes. And you're Wendy? Lucy's friend and roommate?"
"Lu-chan, got some pictures of him?" Levy raised her drinking straw and pointed it accusingly. "You didn't post any on your blog."
"I did, too!"
"Yeah, a really blurry one where he's all wrapped up in a scarf and we don't see anything."
"We need to fix that," Levy said imperiously, and held out her hand. "Give me your phone lacrima."
"Hey, no, wait – Erza!"
After a brief scuffle for the mobile device where Lucy was unintentionally groped and poked by several pairs of hands, Levy held up the blonde's lacrima almost too triumphantly. "Still the same password?"
Her only reply was a grumble.
"Same it is."
"Ooh," Cana said when Levy found the first picture of him, Loke in a tailored suit, the attire for business school students. He had one arm around Lucy's waist, and the two of them were in front of their university's famous rose garden. "Nice one. Good job, Lucy."
"Why didn't you show us him before?"
"Wendy!" Lucy wailed.
Feeling slightly bad for the blonde, Wendy hurried to go on with the story.
"Sorry for the ruckus," he said, smile turning sheepish. "Did we wake you?"
Yes, a part of Wendy wanted to say, because they could just have fun and then stumble home with their senses all buzzed, but she was going to have to clean all of this up. And Lucy would probably be too hungover to help the next morning.
But he was being nice, and they didn't mean harm.
"It's alright," she said instead. "I slept a little past what I was aiming for. I needed to get up and study anyways."
"Oh good," he said in relief as he put away the dish in his hand. It was then that Wendy finally noticed the dishes and cups he was putting into the washer.
"What are you doing?" she asked, alarmed.
"Hm? Just cleaning up. They ate all the nachos, and then left a big mess, so . . ." he trailed off and gestured with sudsy hands towards the sink.
Back that up a little. He had come to a party held at his girlfriend's house – a girlfriend, Wendy might add, that he had apparently given up his famously playboy ways to pursue after actually, seriously falling in love with her because of some long-winded adventure Wendy still wasn't clear on the details about because she didn't pay as much attention to the school gossip as she should have – and while everyone else, said girlfriend included, was apparently getting tipsy and inebriated, he was cleaning up.
What kind of a university student was he? Actually, better question – was he human? "Why aren't you, you know, partying out there with Lucy and the others?"
Loke washed his hands of leftover suds after putting the last of the dishes on the rack to dry. "Already did. I just happen to hold my liquor better than some people." That last word was finished with a proud smirk.
Right on time, someone began singing about how the lands and the heavens all depended on each other.
"Right," Wendy said awkwardly. She reached past him to snatch up a glass and filled it with water.
"For Lucy?" Loke guessed, drying his hands on a dishtowel.
"Mm-hm."
He followed her out of the kitchen, and kept the drunk cow-shirt man from falling on top of her. "Where is she?"
"In her room, trying to FaceTime people while drunk."
"She's on the internet while she's drunk?" Loke said in alarm, and it was only then that Wendy realized how bad of an idea it was to leave a Lucy with impaired judgement alone with her laptop lacrima.
Loke ran ahead, and full glass of water in hand Wendy hurried after. She avoided being knocked over by the making-out couple that was getting way too handsy for her comfort, and made it to Lucy's room, where Loke was gently prying Lucy away from the lacrima.
"Wendy," Lucy slurred, gesturing wildly at Loke and nearly whacking him in his face. She did manage to knock his glasses askew. "Look! I called him, and he just appeared! It's like magic!"
She sighed in relief. Good, Lucy hadn't made random calls to strangers or uploaded embarrassing pictures of herself. The blonde would have been mortified when she was sober.
"I'm here," Loke said indulgently, fixing his glasses. "Did you call anyone else?"
Lucy shook her head. "But I should!" she declared. "I haven't talked to Gray, or Natsu, or Erza, or Levy, or – or Happy in forever!"
Wendy picked up the laptop lacrima and placed it on the desk away from the bed Lucy was sitting on. "Happy doesn't have FaceTime," she reminded the blonde, passing the cup of water into Loke's outstretched hand. "He's a cat."
"But he talks!" Lucy insisted. "He does! I swear!"
Levy began giggling loudly, and Cana followed suit.
"In my defense, he really did make some word-like sounds," Lucy mumbled. "And he's smart. He understands me, I swear."
"Is she drunk right now?" Erza asked, seriously appraising Lucy.
"Can't be," Wendy replied. "She's not trying to FaceTime everyone she knows."
Levy dissolved in a howl of laughter.
With some incredibly saint-like patience, Loke managed not only to get Lucy to drink all the water, but also tucked her in. "She's tired," he said as Lucy mumbled into her pillow, digging out two aspirin tablets and leaving them at her bedside with another glass of water.
Despite the long nap she had taken, Wendy felt the same.
Loke noticed. "I'll get everyone to leave," he said, standing up. "Go to bed, Wendy."
"But the mess-" Wendy protested.
He grinned. "I'll take care of it."
"I'll help," she said, but right then, Lucy flailed her limbs around until her blankets off her body.
"It's too hot!" she groaned. "And I have to FaceTime!"
"Why is she so obsessed about FaceTiming everyone when she's drunk?" Wendy mumbled, pushing Lucy back down into the bed and away from the laptop. "Lucy, stay. Good girl."
And then the blonde popped right back up like a Bobo doll. Resisting the urge to replicate the violent part of the Bobo doll experiment, Wendy gently but firmly pushed her back down. "No – stay!"
"How about you watch over her?" he suggested, lips twitching in a suppressed smile. Apparently, love was enough to make the drunk girl's crazy antics look cute in his eyes. "Make sure she's okay? At least until she falls asleep."
That wouldn't be too far off. Already, cut off from her strange urge to FaceTime people, Lucy was nodding off. "Sure." Wendy decided to chalk it up as practice for her nursing career.
Loke kissed Lucy on her forehead and then left the room quietly, shutting the door behind him and leaving the two girls to themselves in relative quietness. Despite her apparently drowsy state, it still took a while for Lucy to doze off, and that was only after Wendy had begun to recite the different components of the human bone to her. When she was absolutely sure the older girl was asleep, Wendy got up quietly and came out of her room –
To be met with a near-spotless, near-empty apartment. "Whoa," she said. She and Lucy were pretty neat, for college students living on their own, but she knew for certain that the apartment hadn't been this clean before the party.
Loke came out of the kitchen with a full garbage bag. "I cleaned as much as I could," he said. "Wasn't sure where some things went, so I'm sorry if they're in the wrong place."
"That's – that's fine," Wendy managed to say. Honestly, when he had said that he'd take care of it, she had figured that he would just kick out everyone, maybe take the remaining booze with him. She hadn't expected him to clean everything up.
His eyes went to Lucy's shut door. "She's asleep?" he asked quietly.
Wendy nodded, still a little dazed.
His lips turned up in a fond smile, before it turned slightly mischievous. "Could you tell her to FaceTime me when she's sober and not hungover?"
Giggling, Wendy promised that she would, and Loke left. The next morning, while Lucy was suffering from headaches and wincing at sudden noises, Wendy made sure to tell her everything her boyfriend had done.
"I approve of him," the younger girl finished with.
Lucy cracked a pained smile as she reached for her laptop. "Me too. But gah, I never want to drink again. Even if Loke is nice enough to do all that."
And then, three weeks later, pretty much the same thing happened, except Wendy only managed to stop Lucy after she had called no less than three people on FaceTime.
"He got everyone to leave and then cleaned up? That's a lot of dedication. Maybe you're a really pretty drunk?" Levy said, once she had finally calmed down from her fit of laughter.
"According to the people I contacted through FaceTime, I'm not," Lucy said drily.
"It's true," said Wendy, remembering the red-faced, giggly Lucy. "She's not."
Levy laughed. "So," she said, and then burst out into more laughter. "Sorry. I can't believe you go and FaceTime people when you're drunk!"
"I can't believe you don't FaceTime us when you're drunk," Erza said, looking a little put out.
"I just choose random people in my contact list," Lucy defended. "It's not by choice. Really."
The redhead raised an accusing eyebrow. "But you called Loke the first time around."
Lucy had no defense for that.
"So he's hot, he goes to business school, he can hold his liquor, and he cleans up?" Cana sighed, and took a gulp from her own drink. "Damn, wish I met him first."
"Mm," Levy hummed. "Lu-chan, don't let this one go. He's pretty awesome."
Lucy blushed, but she had a small smile on her face. "Yeah," she admitted. "He is."