A/N: I'm so happy that you guys are still chugging along with me on this. Then again, for those of you that read my CoLu week could get through Day 2 of that, then what I wrote yesterday is nothing!

Lucy, Macbeth, and Erik are 41. Bickslow is 43.

So, without further ado, I give you...

Day 6: Makeup
(Nineteen Years After College)


Lucy closed the door that led from the garage into the kitchen, setting her suitcase down on the tile floor gently. She stopped at the refrigerator and got herself a glass of water, then continued on to the dining room to find Macbeth and their fifteen year old daughter, Persephone, sitting at the table. Which was covered from one end to the other in palettes of makeup, sponges, foundations and concealers, powders of varying shades, lipsticks, liner pencils. Everything that Macbeth had in the way of makeup at the house. Luckily, he didn't make a habit of keeping the things he needed for his studio there too; otherwise, they would need a warehouse to hold it all. This was just the 'regular makeup' and not the 'effects makeup', but it was still way more than any normal person should have. "Hey guys, I'm home," she said with a soft smile while leaning against the wall.

Macbeth smiled at his wife of nearly twenty years, handing their daughter a cotton ball that was wet with makeup removing solution. Lucy looked a little tired, but she always did when she came home from a book signing. "Welcome back, beautiful," he said softly. "How was it?"

Lucy pushed off from the wall and made her way over to the table, then leaned down and briefly pressed her lips to his with a gentle sigh of contentment. "The same as always," she whispered, grinning when she brushed her nose over his before he pulled her into his lap. "I love that people love my books, but sometimes I wish I hadn't been successful."

"Any creeps this time, Mom?" Persephone asked.

"Not that I'm aware of. Tempester's great at weeding them out."

"That guy's so gloomy though," Macbeth said with a smirk. "Just looking at him depresses me."

Lucy giggled and rolled her eyes. "Y'know, he says the same thing about you, Midnight." She turned her attention to the teen sitting next to them and cocked her head to the side while looking her over. She was the spitting image of Lucy where her body was concerned - well, what Lucy had looked like back when she was fifteen - but the rest of her was Macbeth. White hair that fell down to her hips, and matching white eyebrows. His pale skin with only the smallest hint of Lucy's less pale complexion. Her nose was slender and straight, her lips the same shape and fullness as her father's. Persephone really was a perfect combination of Lucy and Macbeth, and looked just like she was their own daughter. The only way to tell that she had been adopted was the nearly neon green eyes she had. She even had his long fingers and thin wrists, and his same taste in style. Sort of. Macbeth had never really gone for the whole lolita look, but he also wasn't a cross-dresser.

It had been pretty devastating when they found out why they were never successful when trying to get pregnant. A few cysts in her ovaries that had gone unnoticed for years had left Lucy barren. It wasn't even a question of whether or not they would adopt. Lucy and Macbeth had wanted so badly to have a family when they were younger, and they wanted to give that gift to someone else. The way it had never been done for them. Seilah and Kyouka had become a godsend once again for them when they found out about Persephone. "What's with the pop-up studio on the table, Percy?"

Macbeth watched as Persephone flushed and scrubbed her face harder while looking in the mirror in front of her. "Oh, this?" he chuckled. "I'm just giving our daughter a lesson on how to not look like a whore."

Lucy and Persephone turned to scowl at him. "It wasn't that bad, Dad!"

Midnight raised his brow at that in disbelief. "Really?" he asked, "Because all you were missing is some glitter and a bump of cocaine."

Lucy's eyes bugged right out of her head. Sure, Persephone had grown up with that kind of language around her, especially since Gajeel could never control his language, and Erik couldn't keep either his language or his graphic metaphors to an appropriate PG-13 rating. But her husband didn't normally talk that way around their daughter. "Macbeth! Seriously?!"

He gave Lucy a level stare. "Blue eyeshadow, Lucy," he said slowly, shivering as he remembered looking up to see his teenage daughter looking like a fucking raving lunatic. "Blue. She was fucking orange... With my eyeliner all over the place... And red lipstick... And so much goddamn blush, I thought I was staring at a clown... It was terrifying."

"It couldn't have been that bad," Lucy said while shaking her head.

"Oh, it was..." Macbeth pulled out his phone, and showed her the picture he took when he saw their daughter trying to leave the house. "I don't even have the words for this..."

The pale skin of her face was covered in a thick layer of foundation and powder, making her an unnatural shade of orange that contrasted heavily with her white hair and eyebrows. Her neck and shoulders were still pale. Her lips were lined in crimson, set slightly around them to make them seem bigger, and then painted a vibrant cherry red. Just above her upper lip was a small circle of black eyeliner set toward the right to resemble Marilyn Monroe's iconic beauty mark. Her cheeks were colored with bright pink that cascaded across the whole side of her face. Thick lines of heavy onyx eyeliner were drawn across her lower lids, with thinner lines on the top. Bright blue sparkling eyeshadow faded into stark white as it travelled up to her eyebrows, which had been colored in with black and made much thicker than they naturally grew.

Lucy blanched and looked at Persephone with with eyes. "What the fuck? Where were you going? A drag show at a strip club?"

"Mom, not you too!" she groaned, dropping her head to the table with a loud thud.

"Honey..." Lucy tried and miserably failed to stifle a giggle. "Lemme call your Uncle Erik. He'll drop you off when your shift starts."

"Sure," Macbeth nodded. "We can pull out your mom's old clothes. Strippers still wear tube tops and mini skirts, right?"

"Hey!" Lucy shouted indignantly. "I wasn't a stripper!"

"I know," Macbeth said with a smile. "A pin-up model is more like it." When Lucy blushed and cuddled closer - clearly thinking back to all the times she had posed for him to take pictures of her - and Persephone gagged, he couldn't help but chuckle. Now that he thought about it, he was due for another set of sexy pictures of his wife. It had been about a month since she let him take any pictures, and he really wanted some of her in the skimpy red lingerie she'd bought just before leaving for her trip. "Besides, you always let me do your makeup, so you never looked like... Well... A tramp."

Lucy paused and pictured herself with the makeup their daughter had on, wearing the clothes that she had abandoned long ago for something more appropriate for a best-selling author. She blanched and quickly shook her head to get rid of that horrifying image. "Thank god for that," she whispered. "That's scary…"

The short, awkward silence was broken when Macbeth's phone started ringing. Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" began belting through the air, and Lucy smiled when she saw Erik's contact picture showing up. It was one from nearly ten years prior, with the maroon-haired man smiling at the camera while a little girl with deep purple hair put hot pink barrettes in his hair. What didn't show up was Bickslow laughing his ass off in the background while he got a makeover of his own from another little girl with white hair.

Lucy quickly answered and put her husband's phone to her ear. "Hey, handsome," she said happily. "Wanna take Percy down for her shift at the strip club? It Drag Night, and chicks with dicks are getting in for free."

"What the fuck, Bright Eyes?" he laughed.

Lucy pulled the phone from her ear, then quickly texted Erik the picture of her orange teen. "Check that shit out."

Erik opened the message he'd just gotten from Macbeth's phone, the nearly dropped his own while he started guffawing. "Oh my fucking god! Bix, come look at this shit!" he shouted between large bursts of laughter.

Bickslow came into the living room and looked over his husband's shoulder, a wide grin on his face when he saw their niece. "She looks like a fucking Oompa Loompa!"

Lucy giggled while Bickslow and Erik continued cracking up, then said, "She's getting a makeup lesson from Daddy now." She put the phone on speaker, then leaned into Macbeth's embrace, smiling when he kissed her cheek. Almost twenty years after getting married, and they were still as happy as ever.

Erik chuckled, switching the phone over to speakerphone since he knew Bickslow was going to sit down with him. "Well, I was actually calling to see if he'd do that shit for Niblet."

Macbeth's eyes slid closed while he laid his head on Lucy's. "Yeah, come on over and have her bring the shit she was using. We'll have a ritual sacrifice in the back after we go to the store to get what they'll need."

Bickslow sighed in relief, plopping down on the couch and pulling Erik into his arms. "Thank fucking baby Jesus... I was gonna tell Doodlebug to check YouTube..."

Lucy laughed and shook her head while her fingers threaded through Macbeth's hair. She felt as tired as he looked right then, and she would have loved nothing more than to get her usual post-signing-homecoming nap like every other time she came back from a trip - something that she blamed Macbeth for, since his horrible sleeping habits had rubbed off on her. But, Bickslow and Erik had no fucking clue what they were doing where makeup was concerned, and they had a fifteen year old daughter as well. It was her duty as the only woman in the girls' immediate family to make sure they didn't miss out on things like wearing makeup. Okay, well Lucy wasn't going to be teaching them herself, because Macbeth was definitely much better suited for the job than she was where that shit was concerned. "I'm surprised Angela even knows her real name, you guys. I don't think I've ever heard you two say it since you adopted her."

Erik grinned as Angela walked into the room. "That's because she's my little Niblet. Never fucking changing..." He still couldn't believe that the scared little girl he and Bickslow had met at the orphanage Seilah and Kyouka were still running had grown up to be such a beautiful young woman. Aside from the fact that she had two dads, it was obvious that she had been adopted. Her hair was a deep violet, several shades darker than his eye, and her skin was like Bickslow's porcelain dolls - that he still called his babies - that he had gotten when he was a kid as a gift from his mother before she passed. She had wide eyes like Lucy, but they were blue instead of brown. A little button nose. A petite frame that he knew she was self-conscious about since her best friend (and cousin) had the body other girls would kill for.

Still, no matter what Angela looked like, she was his little Niblet. The nickname had come about when they had first brought her home when she was only five. She hadn't been at the orphanage for very long, and they had found out that she was taken from some bastards that had her locked up in a cellar after buying her and Persephone on the black market. It was easy to get approved for the adoption by going to the two women that had raised him and the others, but they had been concerned that she wasn't ready yet.

Erik had been adamant though. Her past was similar to his own, and he wanted the little girl to have a chance at a life with two parents that loved her. Yeah, Seilah and Kyouka were the best he could have asked for as far as having someone raise him, but they weren't his parents. He never got adopted, and he didn't want that for her. But the reason she'd been dubbed Niblet was that she was a biter. A hard one. He and Bickslow each had a scar from her small teeth, from the first night she had been with them. It had been scary as hell for Bickslow, but Erik remembered what it was like when he was in her shoes, and eventually... She realized they wanted to be her family, a real family. She had even gotten to keep her best friend in her life permanently, since Macbeth and Lucy had been looking to adopt right around the same time they were. It was clear the two girls were inseparable, and both couples were glad that they could ensure the girls would never lose each other. "And no, Niblet," Erik added with a wide grin. "You're gonna be called that until the day you die."

"Don't you mean until you die?" she giggled.

"No, I'm fucking immortal," Erik said, his tone serious as his eye danced with mirth. "So you'll be long gone before me. Now, go wash that shit off of your face. Your uncle's gonna show you how to do it without looking like you just got gangbanged by the goddamn football team."

Angela scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. "Ugh! You're such a fucking perv, Cobra!"

Lucy snorted and rolled her eyes when she heard Erik sighing. She could practically see him shaking his head at the teenager like he always did. "Angie's still calling you Cobra, huh?"

"Yeah..." Erik sighed again. "I miss the days when I was Daddy... Niblet, why'd you stop doing that?"

Angela shrugged and gave him a Cheshire grin, one she had learned from Bickslow. "I dunno... Because you're a weirdo?" She paused and laughed when she was given a middle finger as a response, already having learned that her father's way of expressing himself made him seem like he hated everyone, when in reality he was just a big old teddy bear inside. At least, that's how he was with family. "But I still love you."

Erik blanched and tucked himself between Bickslow and the back of the couch when their daughter went to kiss his cheek with her bright pink lips. "Hell no! You're not kissing me with that skank-mouth you've got going on!"

"Erik," Bickslow laughed, "Be nice." When he was given an exaggerated kiss on the cheek from Angela, he grinned triumphantly, proudly pointing to the pink mark on his cheek. "HA! See? I'm the favorite dad!"

Lucy smiled softly while looking down at the phone. "I'm pretty sure they forgot we're on the phone."

"Like fucking hell you are," Erik growled. He lifted his head, then turned to their daughter and pointed to his cheek. "Pucker up, Niblet."

Macbeth nodded when they heard Angela giggling, followed by a quick kissing sound.

"You're both my favorite!"

"They usually do..." Persephone sighed. She put down the cotton ball she had been using once the last remnants of her failed attempt at putting on makeup were gone, then leaned forward to the phone on the table. "Hey, Twinkie! Get your ass over here. Dad's taking us shopping for makeup!"

Angela squealed, her voice trailing off as she ran to her room to get dressed.

"Fuck, she's loud!" Erik groaned, dropping his head to Bickslow's chest.

"So are you, baby," Bickslow chuckled. "I had to shove a pillow over your face last-"

Persephone pushed her fingers in her ears, jumping from her seat and running from the table as she shouted, "I can't hear this, I can't hear this!"

"Nice one," Lucy laughed. "Bickslow, you're cooking dinner tonight. I'm really not feeling up to doing anything with a knife. That signing took my will to live right out of me."

"You got it, Cosplayer," Bickslow laughed. "I'll fire up that grill you two never use."

"Lucy bought it specifically for you to use, Bickslow," Macbeth said with a yawn. "Just so she could get you to cook when she doesn't want to."

"You could do it," Bickslow countered, watching as Erik openly blanched.

Lucy grimaced with Macbeth, feeling her insides churn at just the memory of his trying to cook. "No. His attempts at cooking belong in a lab with Cobra's experiments... They could race each other to see which one burns through a table faster..."

Erik nodded. "That's harsh, but valid."

"I won't deny it," Macbeth sighed. "Don't forget that makeup."

"Yep. See you in a bit then."

Macbeth held Lucy tightly while the call disconnected. "I missed you, Dawn."

Lucy smiled and pressed her lips to his. "I missed you too, Midnight."

He smiled and tucked her hair behind her ear as she tried to stifle a yawn. "Bed for you while we're shopping, Sleeping Beauty."

Lucy giggled and rolled her eyes. "Will my Prince wake me up with a kiss?"

Macbeth grinned. "Don't I always?"