A/N: Pyramids are...involved. Kind of.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fairy Tail.
"How do you fuck up a Henderson-Hasselbalch equation so badly?" Erik asks, sliding the midterm he's given up marking across the table. Macbeth picks up his mug of coffee and holds the midterm up, pinched between two fingers as if it's riddled with an infectious disease.
"You're not legally allowed to show this to me," Macbeth says. Despite his outward disapproval, he scans the paper and scoffs. "Amateur."
"I'm also not legally allowed to mark this shit in public, but…" Erik glances around the bustling cafe, shrugging delicately. It's one of those decently priced vegan, gluten-free joints that have started popping up around the university like cystic acne on a 14-year-old. The only reason he continues to frequent this particular hole-in-the-wall is because it's the only one that serves half-decent spicy chicken sandwiches on top of whatever seasoned grass the vegans claim is food (and he's loathe to admit it, but their vegan coffee cake isn't...terrible).
He picks up one of the midterms his best friend is also slogging through (hypocrite) and wrinkles his nose at the first question. "Is that supposed to be a delta?"
"Doodled those stupid Harry Potter triangles instead. For bonus marks," Macbeth confirms. "Thought it would be cute."
"Sometimes, I wonder why we do this," Erik sighs melodramatically. "We're fucking PhD candidates. We should be stuffed into labs like the cryptids we are."
"'cause we can't use research grant money to afford the grass they serve here."
"If I get a couple thousand bucks in grant money, skimming, like, ten dollars off the top for food isn't gonna kill my research."
"How else can you afford your disposable pipettes?" Macbeth gives him a pointed look.
"You know damn well I only pipette with my mouth," Erik shoots back. An gaggle of undergrads nearby - first years, judging by their textbooks - shoot him an alarmed glance, as if the thought of mouth-pipetting is enough to send them screaming for an ambulance. 'It's so dangerous!' he can hear them think, 'so not safe for a lab! OSHA! WHMIS! Wahh, wahh, wahh!' He rolls his eyes. Children. As amusing as their antics can be, watching them run for the chemical showers when a drop of 0.5 M hydrochloric acid hits their pristine lab coats gets tiring after a while. Lab safety, in his opinion, is overrated. At least with what they deal with - iodine clock reactions, anyone?
"Uh-huh," Macbeth says. "So, how many more you got left?"
Erik checks his neat (by his standards, anyway) piles and stifles a groan of despair by stuffing a large piece of coffee cake into his mouth. Macbeth is first aid certified so if he chokes then he's in relatively good hands - provided, of course, the physics major doesn't just tell him to self-Heimlich and go back to sleep. Then he might be a little fucked. Just a little.
"I'm gonna go to the library and pull an all nighter," he grumbles, stuffing the papers into his backpack and wrapping what's left of his cake in a wad of tissue to place in one of the smaller pockets. "You got any Adderall on hand? I'm gonna need it."
"Just go get some Red Bull like the rest of us," Macbeth says, but he reaches into his messenger bag for his pill bottle anyway. Erik takes four pills and pockets them with a grin.
"Do I look like a Master's student?" he mocks. "Remember, the four stages of academia: Monster for undergrads, Red Bull for Master's, Adderall for PhDc's, and Jaegerbombs for PhD's."
"Because mixing stimulants and depressants is a brilliant idea."
"Name one PhD we know with more than three brain cells. I dare you."
The library is disgustingly crowded and full of snotty, contagious students who he vows to sue for battery should he catch whatever they all have. It doesn't take long to find a quartet of corrals, and even less time is spent scaring a student into vacating one of them. He doesn't even need to use words at this point, just raise his eyebrow and sneer enough that his sharp teeth poke out from his lips.
He settles himself into the corral, lays out his papers, and dry swallows two Adderall (horrible habit, will burn your throat one day) before tackling the midterms.
The blissful silence is broken after three minutes by an enraged cry of, "Fuck VSPER!"
Couldn't agree more, he thinks woefully. But it's almost 12 AM, keep it down.
"Unbelievable...this doesn't even look like a pyramid...fucking unreal…"
VSPER technically sort of falls under orgo, orgo is technically his specialty, and he technically has a duty (ethical, moral, whatever) to help out students struggling with this shit - he's fairly certain it's part of the contract he signed when taking on his GA position.
He's also not really in the mood to deal with acid/base reactions anymore, so he leans over the divider and peers at her setup. Her writing is neat, which tells him she wastes too much time making pretty notes for her Instagram or Pinterest or whatever. She also uses an ungodly amount of sticky tabs, and has a collection of highlighters laid out before her. He thinks back to his own undergrad days - he had one pen, a half-dead highlighter he used to dip in water to keep functional, and he used his sticky tabs to slip Macbeth notes during biology.
The organized freak of nature is admittedly rather cute, so he decides fuck it, and clears his throat. "Trigonal bipyramidal. Basically two pyramids stuck together by the base."
Neat freak jerks so quickly her seat starts tilting over. Erik reaches out to stabilize her and winces as the angle presses his shoulder back and up. This is gonna set his rehab back weeks…
"You scared me!" Neat freak whisper-yells once she's found stable footing. "Where did you come from?"
Where did you go, where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe, his shit brain autofills. Luckily his mostly not full of shit mouth has the grace to filter that out, and instead say, "Well, when a sperm and egg meet to form a zygote-"
You hate biology, what the fuck? A voice that sounds suspiciously like Macbeth jeers in his head.
What else was I supposed to say? Thin air?
"Who are you, you weirdo?" Neat freak demands, curling over her notes as if he's going to steal them. "I know judo, so you better watch it."
"...right, you're going to judo me to death because I decided to give you a helping hand in VSPER," he deadpans. "Fine, I'll just go back to marking. Enjoy, brat."
"Wait!" She grabs him by the sleeve of his very fucking expensive, brand fucking new shirt and tugs sharply. "Hi, I'm Lucy, I'm a first year undergrad. Are you a professor by any chance? Is that why you know so much?"
"I'm a PhD candidate in organic chemistry," Erik replies as he pries her fingers out of his shirt. "VSPER is easy shit. Just remember the shapes and electron clouds."
Lucy scowls and holds up her notebook so he can see the meticulously drawn out chart of all the VSPER shapes and names, and what additional lone pairs do to modify them. It's colour coded, drawn with a ruler's precision, and the writing is so small he debates whipping out his glasses just to be able to make it out.
"Charting isn't helping," she hisses rather adorably. "God, this doesn't even look like a pyramid. I've been to see them, I should know."
"Your first problem is that you spend way too much time making your notes look pretty. This isn't high school, scribble all you want and need. I can tell by the way you loop the tail of your 'g's' that you know how to write in cursive, so you should stick to that. Your second issue is that you're making charts. Practice problems help more," Erik says. It's the same advice he gives the sobbing students he GA's for when they come to him with their failing grades. They often leave sobbing even harder, but she appears ready to give him a live demo of her judo skills. Lucy turns in her seat, opens her mouth to give him what he assumes will be the mother of all beatdowns, and it's then that he notices her faculty sweater.
"Psychology?" Erik reads aloud, half disgust, half disbelief colouring his tone. She's a soft science. Which explains a lot (i.e., why her notes are so...that) but so little all at once (i.e., psych majors don't require any of the basic sciences, why the fuck is she taking chemistry willingly).
"Wow, he can read," Lucy snarks. She flips the strands of hair falling from her bun over her shoulder and sniffs delicately. He imagines she was aiming for 'dramatic' or 'mysterious', but the effect is sort of ruined by the flyaways falling right back.
"Why are you taking chem if you're in psych?"
Her body language collapses all around her, elitism giving way to a sudden bout of nervousness. Her leg starts bouncing up and down, and she draws the collar of her sweater up to cover her bright red cheeks. She mumbles something then, a little too quiet for even him to hear.
"What?"
"I said my friend dared me to!" Lucy snaps.
Erik blinks. "You idiot."
"Excuse me? I'm doing just damn fine in chemistry-"
"You'd be willing to tank your GPA and put a blemish on your transcript over a dare? Do you have, like, any plans for the future or?"
"Yes, I do, actually. You, on the other hand...I imagine you don't."
There's a moment where the universe pauses, sort of like a record scratch in an old cartoon. Erik loses all sense of self and dignity in that brief moment where everything and nothing makes sense. Stephen Hawking could have taken him to the astral plane and given him the keys to the universe and that still would rank second to the utter disbelief (and thrill) he's experiencing.
"Excuse me?" He echos.
"Well, you're getting a PhD. As in your future title will be doctor. Except not a medical doctor, but a doctor of philosophy. From what I've gleaned of you, you're the type of guy who would raise his hand when a flight attendant asks if anyone on board is a doctor, only to disappoint her when she asks you to deal with a seizing patient when you go 'whoops! I'm a PhD'. As for why you're not becoming a medical doctor...no idea, but, you do know what they say." Her glossy lips curl up into a wicked, self-satisfied grin. "'Those who can, do. Those who can't, do research'. I'm the type of person who can. You...do research."
Erik knows that he will look back one day and, when asked, declare that on December 5th, 2018, at 12:17 AM, he fell in love with a woman who read him for absolute filth because he called her an idiot.
We will analyze your apparent humiliation kink later. First, ask the firecracker out, the Macbeth sounding voice demands.
It's not a humiliation kink. It's banter. A banter kink. I don't have kinks, why are we discussing this? Fuck off.
"I do research 'cause who else will pay me to set things on fire in exchange for a little acknowledgement at the bottom of a paper I bullshit the night before it's due?" Erik says in what he hopes sounds like a smooth recovery, but he knows deep down is a little too cocky, even for him. Lil' miss psych seems to notice that.
"Uh-huh," Lucy says dryly, leaning back in her chair with all the confidence of a Pharoah on her throne. She's quite the little light switch, flipping back and forth between her part-time job as a bundle of nerves, and her career as a baller with no worries. She smiles prettily and asks, "I'll give you a chance, Mr PhD. Mind helping a girl out?"
"My name's Erik, and I'll help you out on one condition." He raises a finger, stifling a snicker as her eyes follow the slow wag of it. It's like teasing a cat with a laser pointer.
"Fairly simple: I help you with VSPER and the evil pyramids, and you tell me all about those actual pyramids you visited," Erik says. As expected, she freezes in surprise. So hyper-confident is a facade...interesting.
"That's it?"
"Yup," he pops the 'p' and starts tapping the desk with his red pen. The midterms will be marked in a 4 AM, Red Bull induced haze. He's got way more interesting things to focus in right now.
"Why?"
"You ever see the 'Mummy' movies? With Brendan Fraser? I've always wanted to fight an undead army and put my maggot hypothesis to the test," he replies with a delicate shrug. "I mean, the maggot hypothesis is my zombie battle plan, but…"
"Maggot hypothesis?"
Hook, line, and mother-fucking-sinker, thank you Wendy.
"We can make that date number two. Right now? Trigonal bipyramidal, tick tock."
A/N: *confetti* ALL THE SCIENCE.
I love poking fun of soft sciences but I have much respect for psych seeing as I'm trying to minor in it (it's so easy to make fun of...I mean, sociology is definitely easier to joke about but like...psych jokes are funny, shh).
Hit that mf review!
-Eien