A/Ns: Sigh. I have homework due at 8am tomorrow morning, but what did I do today? I finished season 4 of House of Cards and wrote CoLu. It's another prompt, and it's one I found a million years ago and had planned on writing a while ago. I'll put the prompt at the end this time, along with some more information about this story and which one it's actually connected to.
I hope you like it!
The computer screen in front of her blurred for just a moment when Lucy felt her exhaustion kicking in once again. The hundreds of numbers and names in front of her, all waiting to be called or ticked off, and the sounds of the dozens of other people in the room around her, all reading the same script that she had in front of her filled the room. All of it just made Lucy wish she could be anywhere else but there.
She hated her job with a passion, but it was one of the only ones she could hold down for very long with her university work taking up most of her time. Lucy knew she shouldn't hate her job as much as she did, because it was really quite easy. All she had to do was sit in an office chair in a large room filled with cubicles, phones, and computers, press a button on her screen next to a random number, and read the script that was in front of her. It was casual work, but as easy as it was, it was also incredibly hard to go home each night or day with a smile on her face.
Everyone was always just so rude. It wasn't like she was trying to sell them anything. She was just wanting to ask a few questions. She was on the phone to a stranger for all of three minutes if she was lucky.
But no one seemed to be willing to put up with just a few polite questions, and when she spent her entire shift getting abused, Lucy really questioned why she put up with such a horrible job. She always remembered that it was because she needed the money, and so that was why she stayed.
Even when it meant working from four til nine on a Friday night, she stayed.
Sighing, she looked up from her phone she had sitting on her small little workspaace and closed the mobile Scrabble game she'd been playing for the last few minutes. When she heard her phone vibrate on the table from an in-game message from the person she'd been playing for the last three months straight, she held back a quiet laugh.
'Did you really just play zucchini? Who the fuck are you?'
Oh yes. She'd just played zucchini for twenty-seven points, putting her well into the lead for what was game number fifty-eight between them. Lucy couldn't exactly respond to MrCobra007 right then like she wanted to, but if she could, it would probably only be something along the lines of, 'Yes, I did, Mister Quixotry.' She still hated him for playing that word in their first game. Hell, she hadn't even known it was a word until he'd played it. But now, on game fifty-eight with Lucy having a pretty good chance of winning it (unless he managed to pull out something like jukebox), their wins and losses would finally be tied again.
But still. MrCobra007 was just going to have to wait until she went back to work for a little while to get the reply she wanted to give him. She wasn't getting paid to play games on her phone.
She adjusted her headset and made sure the microphone was close enough yet far away from her mouth at the same time, then made sure her script she was to read from was open in front of her. With the list of numbers and the first name of the people they belonged to in front of her, Lucy skimmed the list, scrolling down a little, and then pressed the green call button next to a random one of them with a click of her mouse.
The person on the other end picked up, and Lucy sat up in her chair while looking down to the script in front of her. "Hello?" the man on the other said, his voice gruff and from what Lucy could tell, bored.
She glanced back up to the screen to see what was listed for her caller. Nothing but a first name and a number for this one. "Good evening, Erik, is it?" Lucy asked.
"Yeah, that's me," he mumbled. "What do you want?"
Lucy was just a little taken aback by the man. She already knew not to expect much from him because he was already being a little rude, but granted, there was a good chance it was a little past seven p.m. for him, too, like it was for her, and most people didn't particular enjoy getting calls in the evening, let alone on a Friday evening. There was a chance he also lived in a different part of Fiore, too, and not all of the country fell into the same time zone. Still though, time zone aside, Lucy couldn't help but picture just what this Mister Erik looked like (she did that occasionally because she liked putting names to faces), and in her head, he was only a middle aged, balding, overweight asshole, who was probably going to die alone because no one loved him.
Putting that little image aside though, Lucy told herself that she only had a couple more hours to go and then she'd have the weekend off. She could survive. "My name is Lucy. I'm calling on behalf of Eisenwald," she recited from the opening script in front of her. "We would like to talk to you about the recent outages and shortages to our internet services over the la—"
Erik groaned into the receiver, and Lucy was sure she had heard him roll his eyes. "Look, this is the third time you fuckers have called me this week," he interrupted her, and Lucy was having to turn down the volume of her headset just so she wasn't going to go deaf in that ear any time soon. "How many times do I need to tell you morons that I do not give one single flying fuck about your stupid calls and your dumbass surveys. So you can shove my contribution up yo—"
"Hey, hey!" Lucy could honestly put up with a lot of a crap with her job, and most times, she could deal with the torrents of verbal abuse. But this guy? Hell no. This guy was taking it to the next level, and Lucy was having none of that. She wasn't in the mood to. "Please do not speak to me that way," she said politely, and all Lucy heard was silence on the other end of the line while Erik just blinked and listened, too stunned to say anything. Trying her best to stay calm and keep herself from raising her voice too much, lest her supervisors actually hear her straying from the script or even yelling at the stranger, she continued, "Please do not blame me for something I have no control over. If you've already received calls from us this week, then I apologise, but I was not aware and it's not supposed to happen."
Lucy knew full well just how frustrating those kinds of calls were, but once she had taken the job, she had come to have a newfound respect for the people who were doing the calling. It wasn't like they worked for the actual companies they did the surveys for, or even shared their beliefs. Lucy certainly didn't, yet she got treated like she did sometimes, and it was unfair. It was people like Erik that really made Lucy want to just throw in the towel sometimes. She didn't deserve that kind of treatment. Even if the money was reasonable, Lucy would sometimes prefer to have a job that she actually liked going to, even if the pay was horrible.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I don't believe that I deserve that kind of treatment from a stranger, and over the phone, no less!"
Erik wasn't even thinking about hanging up now, which he'd been so close to doing before Lucy had cut him off. He wasn't even really thinking about anything at all now, but that small bit of humanity within him was only taking note of how her voice had changed. She'd gone from reading the script he knew she had, to calmly telling him off for his little outburst, and to letting that he'd obviously offended her a little bit begin to show.
Erik was actually wanting to apologise to her now, and he really wasn't quite sure why. He hated those kinds of calls, and each time he got one, he only told them to fuck off and he hung up. No one had ever actually talked back to him and made him feel like he had been put in his place (which was a feeling he really did like, contrary to popular belief), but she had. "Uh… I'm—"
"No. No," Lucy cut him off once again, and all Erik did was stare blankly at the ceiling from where he was lounging on his sofa. "I don't want to hear it. I'm tired of being abused by people who don't even know me. This is just a job, you know. And it's a really fucking horrible one, too. How would you like it if you were essentially getting paid to have hundreds of people hang up on you and insult you on a daily basis?"
"Well, I'd honestly just tell them to fuck the hell off and hang up on them if they did that to me," Erik muttered.
Lucy rolled her eyes, and the odd glances she was getting from her co-workers closest to her from her own outburst went ignored. "Yes, but we're not all assholes to people on the phone like you are, are we?"
"You sure? I'm pretty sure you're not getting paid to call me an asshole, so that kinda makes you a bit of an asshole too."
"You… Shut up," Lucy mumbled. For some strange reason though, she found herself smiling, and that, she didn't quite understand. She should be almost foaming at the mouth because of this guy, as well as every other person she'd had to put up with on that evening alone. Almost everyone she'd called had hung up on her, and she could count on one hand the amount of polite people she'd talked to. This guy was obviously not one of those. "But don't get me off topic!" she snapped.
Erik snickered as he pulled his fridge open, his phone held between his ear and his shoulder. "You did that yourself, doll. I simply answered your question."
"Don't call me doll, either."
"Then what do you want me to call you?"
"U-Um, well… Lucy works, since that's my name," she mumbled again. She wasn't quite sure why she was still even talking to the guy anymore, but she didn't exactly want to hang up and call someone else and do her actual job.
"Lucy? What a girly name. Bet you're a fancy little girly girl who loves the colour pink and drinks frappuccinos while crying over a broken nail, aren't you, Lucy?"
"Hey! Lucy is a nice name, thank you very much." She glanced back up to her screen to check his name once again, then leant back in her chair to idly turn in it slightly. "And what about your name, huh? Erik with a 'K'! Oh, look at me, I'm Erik with a 'K'. I'm a jerk who likes to judge people on their names."
Erik grinned as he fell back to his lounge. "Sounds about right."
She rolled her eyes. The man was somewhere between infuriating and far too entertaining, and again, she'd gotten herself distracted. All she wanted to do was rant to the guy, not talk about names! With a huff of annoyance, she sat up again and quietly said, "But you got me distracted again. My point before was that you had no right to have a go at me like that, okay? All I do is press a button and read a script, and what do I get? I get told to, as you so elegantly put it, shove your contribution up my ass."
"I never said that," he laughed. "You cut me off before I could say that."
"The point still stands," Lucy mumbled. Movement in the corner of vision had her turning slightly just to see one of her supervisors giving her a suspicious glare, and she sighed quietly. "I'm pretty sure my boss is going to come over here in a minute just to make sure I'm working, so unless you're going to let me do my job and not insult me, I'll have to go."
Erik didn't exactly want her to go though. He much preferred hanging up on people than answering the phone, but he was glad he hadn't hung up on Lucy. "Sorry, doll. No surveys for me," he smirked, and he heard her sigh from the other end of the line. "But you know what you should do?"
"What's that?"
"Tell your boss to fuck right the hell off."
Lucy smiled and whispered, "As tempting as that is, I can't do that. She's still my boss. I'd lose my job."
"But you don't like your job, do you?" Erik pressed. It was obvious to him that she at the very least didn't love her job, and even Erik knew that Lucy's job was bound to be one no one enjoyed. He would've been fired within his first five minutes if he'd had that kind of job.
"Well, not particularly…"
"Then quit."
"What? I can't do that!" Lucy hissed, and she nervously glanced around herself again. She would love to quit, but she couldn't really do that, could she?
Erik shrugged. "Why not? You don't like your job, you said so yourself that you're getting abused on a daily basis by strangers over the phone, so why would you stay? Quit. Tell your boss to fuck off and go find yourself a better job."
She had to admit that Erik had a point, though. She didn't like her job, and getting hundreds of people hanging up on her and calling her rude and hurtful names on a daily basis really did suck. Telling her boss to fuck off was really far too tempting, and she was going to do it. So she wouldn't have a job for a little while, but that would be fine. She'd get one eventually. "You know what? I'm gonna do it."
"That's the spirit."
She smiled, and already she could feel her palms begin to shake with what was probably a bit of nervousness and excitement as she closed the binder in front of her. She was quitting her job, but she was excited about doing so. And to think that it was because of the stranger named Erik that she was. Hell, it was the stranger named Erik that had made her horrible evening turn around, and he had honestly kind of made her day, too.
He was an asshole, obviously, but whoever he was, Lucy was glad she'd talked to him and not hung up when she'd realised he wasn't going to let her ask him the questions she needed to. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have an evil bitch that needs to be told to fuck off," she said quietly, and when she laughed, Erik only found himself smiling.
"Have fun with that." And he'd been about to hang up then, but then he didn't, because he wanted to say just one more thing. "But, hey… Call me after? I mean, just to… To tell me how it went with your boss. I wanna know if there was a cat fight." He liked talking to Lucy, strangely. She seemed to remind him of someone, but he wasn't quite sure of who, but he still liked her. She was sassy and she'd kind of made his night.
Plus… He did kind of want to know what happened with her boss. It would surely prove to be entertaining if she really did tell her to fuck off.
Her face flushed, and her mouse only hovered over the close button for the program with all of the numbers of people to call. Erik's details were still on the screen, and after a moment of hesitation, she found herself quickly typing down his name and number into her own phone in a note. "I'll think about it," she whispered. She might call him, or she might not. It was bad enough she was keeping his number, but it wasn't going to matter if she was quitting, was it? "But thanks for being the asshole who cheered me up, Erik."
"Oh, fuck off, Lucy," he laughed again, and really, it was probably just to make himself feel better about the fact that he was sure he'd be blushing slightly if he were to look in a mirror.
Pulling the headset off with a sigh, she shut her computer down and she closed everything on her desk, trying her best to make it as neat as it had been when she'd started working there. Lucy knew her supervisor was probably still keeping an eye on her, but Lucy didn't care. In a moment, she'd be telling her where she could stick it (it felt right to use Erik's words), so she could wait for just a moment. Lucy had much more pressing things to attend to first.
Reaching for her own phone once again, she opened up her Scrabble app again just to quickly type out the response she had wanted to before she'd ended up talking to Erik. Her actual turn would have to wait, just because it would require some thinking when it came to a word to play. Now that it was sent though, Lucy could go and quit her job, and she was already sure she'd be more than likely walking out of the building with her middle fingers up, and then calling Erik as soon as she was out of hell.
When Erik felt his phone vibrate on his stomach a few minutes later, he picked it up again, almost hoping that it was Lucy calling or maybe sending him a message, but when he saw it was a message from his favourite Scrabble player, CelestialW1nter, he only grinned and rolled his eyes.
'Yes, I did, Mister Quixotry.'
A/Ns: No romance! Though, I did originally plan on having this end up with them being together, but I decided to keep it short (for me) and end it here.
This story is actually connected to Late Night Shopping, the MidKino one-shot I did for MidKino week. If any of you have read that, this is how Lucy and Cobra ended up meeting. What I had planned on having at the end of this in a second part was them meeting at a bar somewhere after she quit when they realise they're in the same town, and they realise that they've been playing scrabble/words with friends for each other for the last three months too. Then... At some point they start dating, move in together, get a cat called Sasserella (Cinderella) because they're constantly out-sassing each other, and insult each other on a daily basis with the scrabble fridge magnet set.
All irrelevant little details, but that's just how it is in my head and how it was supposed to go.
Anyway. I love these two so much, and I really needed to write some CoLu. I'm trying to get out of my comfort zone, if you haven't guessed, even though I still have so many BixLu stories planned... I lost count of how many there actually are.
And also, the prompt if anyone was interested: AU where character A is a telemarketer who has had a pretty shitty day because of all the terrible people on the other line and is sarcastic and rude to character B. Character B finds character A hilarious and after an interesting conversation says, "call me when you are off work."
I do hope you enjoyed this one-shot though! Still working on my chapter stories... Slowly. But I should probably go and do that homework that's due in the morning.
Until next time!
- April