A/N: we're getting closer and closer to the fun bits, y'all! So close to the good shit.
Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail by Hiro Mashima. Nor do I own Twelfth Night by Shakespeare.
On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Eight maids a milking.
"Lucy, why the fuck is the tupperware of brownies labeled radioactive?"
"'Cause Erik's a moron," the blonde deadpanned, entering the kitchen and depositing their dirty dishes in the sink. "He came down in an absolute tizzy at six this morning because he stuck a bunch of chemicals in his fridge and forgot, so when he made the brownies in the morning he had no place to chill them. The radioactive sticker is supposed to scare me, but…" she stuck her hand in her sweater pocket and extracted a ream of bright yellow stickers with 'radioactive' stamped across in chunky black letters. "I found them in his briefcase. He finds joy in trying to terrify me."
Cana Alberona cocked an eyebrow and raised her bottle of wine in a mock salute. "You're dating a keeper, Lucy."
"We aren't dating." She scowled, snatching the bottle from Cana and taking a swing. The bitter tannins of the wine swept over her tongue, and her nose wrinkled in response. Erik had spent a whole evening explaining the chemistry behind wine ("I did a stint in a brewery during my undergrad. I also spent that stint so piss drunk I couldn't see straight for time.") and she was disgusted to find she still half remembered his drunken rambles. Wasn't that a thing couples did? Remembered the stupid shit the other person liked even if they'd had no prior experience in the subject area? She tipped the bottle back once again and swallowed both the wine and the stupid questions bubbling in her throat. If she had thought Inner Cana was a nightmare and a half, real-life Cana was two damn nightmares that she did not need psychoanalyzing her.
"Uh-huh." Cana snagged the bottle back and dropped the matter. "Are you still down to help out with that 'ye olde age' reenactment thing? 'Cause we're missing our eighth milkmaid."
"Yeah, don't see why not. Costumes are provided, right?"
"Yup. And if Erik comes along, he gets to see you tug on some teets. Teets look like dicks. This whole Freudian shit will take place and then he'll finally take you to bed!"
"You come into my house, sit under my roof, and you speak Freud's name? This? This is sacrilege."
"You know, the last time we were this close to a cow was in Fitz's twelfth grade bio class dissecting cow eyeballs," Lucy mused aloud as she struggled to find the arm holes of her dress. That the 'change-room' she was currently inhabiting was roughly the size of a porta-potty stall - and it damn right smelled like one, too - was only the tip of the glorious, shit-covered iceberg she was crashing into.
When Cana had offered her the position, Lucy had initially figured that a few hours spent tugging on cow boobs for milk was well worth the money she would be making in return - it was just enough to help cover next month's rent, and she was never one to turn down rent money. What Cana had conveniently forgotten to mention was that the person running the reenactment was a stickler for details, which meant that the dress she was given had the texture of a flour sack and the collective insulation of three whole layers of tulle. The apron she had been given would likely add one more layer, but the frostbite was inevitable.
"Let's hope that the whole karma cycle thing doesn't come to completion and the cow you gotta milk doesn't break your ribs to honour her fifth cousin or whatever," Cana called from her own stall. "You done yet?"
"I found the head-hole, so we're making progress here. Wait!" Lucy yelled triumphantly as she stuck her left arm through its sleeve. "Found a sleeve! I might actually get my shit together in the next three hours!"
"Sure, Jan."
With the dress now on and properly adjusted, Lucy took a minute to glance down and take it in. It was fitted a little too tightly around her bust and hung somewhat loosely around her waist, but she supposed that couldn't be avoided. The dress was a rather ugly shade of pale blue, but the white apron did a decent job of hiding most of it. With a final pat down, she grabbed the weird little hat she'd been given and exited the porta-potty.
"I don't know how to put this thing on, wanna give me a hand?" She held it out to Cana, who made quick work of tying onto Lucy's head. The brunette wheeled her around and tilted her head in a scrutinizing manner. "Eh, you don't look hideous. Where's your shawl?"
"We get shawls?"
"Yeah, dude, it's like, negative a billion degrees out. I mean, nobody would be complaining if they saw your nips through the dress but I figured you wouldn't be too pleased if the twin peaks looked ready to fight the next world war with a bayonet. Unless you wanna show 'em off to certain doctor whose name makes me think of hot sex up against a wall…" a crude grin split Cana's lips as she slung an arm over Lucy's shoulders. "Oh, man, you should ride him in one of the stables!"
Lucy sputtered, lost for words. A thousand rebuttals came to her tongue - public indecency, that's so unhygenic, we could get arrested, I'm not fucking Erik in a cow stable, I'm not fucking Erik period - but all that she managed to squeak out over the sound of blood rushing in her ears was, "Ew!"
"You say that now, but when he's got you pinned to the-"
"Oh, hey, look at the time, gotta go milk a cow, see ya!"
The first thing Lucy registered as she stepped into the barn was the overwhelming scent of bullshit. Literal, honest to god bullshit. Bile rose up her throat and she desperately swallowed it back. The last thing she needed was the stench of her own upchuck culminating with the bullshit for a sensory overload.
Rationally, she knew that olfactory fatigue would probably go by easier the more readily she kept breathing, but her lungs kept forcefully expelling what little she managed to inhale to keep them clean. She slapped a hand over her nose and mouth and breathed in deeply through a tiny slit between her fingers. The smell was still acrid and she was half-ready to bolt out the door, but it was more manageable than before.
"It'll get easier once somebody comes around to clean up the poop," a woman by one of the stalls said sympathetically. She wore an outfit similar to Lucy's and kept her thick brown hair pinned up in an elaborate French twist. "Are you the eighth milkmaid?"
"Yeah," Lucy managed to choke out. "I'm Lucy."
"Nice to meet you! Name's Millianna, I'll get you set up over here." She crooked her finger and made her way over to a stall at the very back of the barn. "You got a pretty good spot, Lucy! Once the sun starts setting it hits your stall and you get the pretty orange glow! I hope your shawl is heavy, though, it gets super chilly back here. Oh, and your cow is an absolute sweetie, her name is Helena. Your stall is next to Minerva's, by the way. She's a bit catty, but she grows on you. Kinda like fungus!"
"I resent the catty remark," Minerva deadpanned from where she was seated on a stool next to her cow. "Stop bothering the newbie, Millianna, you need to go and find someone to clear up the shit before we all catch ."
"You can't catch like that, can you?" Millianna turned to Lucy, who shrugged delicately. This was most definitely not her area of expertise. She made a mental note to ask Erik when they got home that night.
Oh? Whose place counts as home? Inner Cana cooed. Lucy scowled and stomped over to her stall, making sure to inhale deeply as she did so. The stench quickly overtook her senses, drowning out whatever Inner Cana was about to say next.
"Have you ever milked a cow?" Millianna asked.
"No, but I watched some YouTube videos on it," Lucy replied. The other woman nodded and knelt down next to the cow's udders, grasping a hold of one in each hand. "So the trick is to not squeeze one all the time before moving on to the next. Alternate. Also, hold them at a bit of an angle and tug firmly. You'll figure out the pressure needed with some practice. You only need to milk her when people come in, and I do most of the talking anyway so you don't need to worry if they start asking about history and all that."
"So what do I do when there's no people here?"
"Groom her! We have some nice brushes here. They love getting groomed, so it'll help build up some more trust between you two." Millianna held up both her thumbs. "We good then?"
"Sounds good to me." Lucy smiled. Millianna waved cheerfully and strutted out of the barn purposefully, leaving Lucy to turn around and gingerly touch Helena's smooth coat of hair. "We're gonna have a blast, aren't we?"
Helena moo'd.
Statistically speaking, cows killed roughly twenty-two people per year.
It was easy enough to image how difficult it would be for a police officer to go to someone's home and tell them that their loved one was dead. Knock on the door, look morose, 'I regret to inform you of Billy-Bob's passing', and then awkwardly comfort the grieving spouse until they ask how it happened between sobs. If there was ever a time that Lucy wanted to be a fly on the wall, it would be for each of those twenty-two cases where the officer had to steel themselves, look those watery eyes dead on, and say 'Billy-Bob was killed by a cow'.
The thing is, when statistics like these were reported they often forgot to report the background - that is, how in the eternal hell did Billy-Bob manage to get himself six feet under by old Betsy the Milk Cow? If someone were to go up to a stranger on the street and say 'did you know that cows kill about twenty-two people per year?' the chances of that stranger immediately thinking of Betsy doing the macarena on top of Billy-Bob were ridiculously high. The reality is, there were a million confounding variables to consider, first and foremost being 'what the fuck did Billy-Bob do to piss off poor Betsy so much that she had to cave in his chest cavity?'
Lucy had to wonder how many of those twenty-two people had a) been killed because their milking skills were non-existent and b) because of sheer exhaustion.
Milking was fucking hard. Really, really hard, and Minerva had the audacity to look bored as she went about her job.
Lucy, on the other hand, was dying.
At first it wasn't so bad. The burn that had started in her biceps and wrists was manageable up until hour two of her captivity, at which point she felt as though she had just bench pressed the equivalent of two Laxus's stacked on top of one another. By hour three, her shoulders and upper back were so tight that coal would likely spontaneously become to diamonds if they were placed between her shoulder blades. Hour four had her upper abdomen clenching and her arms almost fully numb, and by the time the sun had started to set, Lucy was certain that if somebody dismembered her she wouldn't be able to feel it. There were probably enough endorphins coursing through her veins to cultivate and then derive morphine from to supply a surgical ward for the next ten years.
"You look like death warmed over," Sorano said cheerfully.
"I think I broke all my bones," Lucy mumbled, only just managing to turn her head over to acknowledge her presence. "I'm gonna die of acute stress in the middle of the night."
"You're just being dramatic," Sorano waved her off. "Speaking of drama, have you seen Erik around? I know that slimy little snake is hiding somewhere."
"No. Why is he hiding? Did you try and confiscate his hip flask or something?"
"No, his royal acid reflux is trying to avoid his job. There's a production of Twelfth Night going on at nine tonight and he was cast as Orsino."
"And by cast you mean…"
"...voluntold."
Lucy rolled her eyes and flexed her fingers, her mind elsewhere. Erik in a play. Erik, her caustic, 'liberal arts are the devil's creation, STEM or bust', 'I have one emotion and it's cocky' neighbour (boyfriend, Inner Cana stressed) in a play. Just the thought of him in leggings and a poofy shirt was too much for her pain addled brain to handle.
"Why don't you go check out the pharmacy or whatever the equivalent is here?" Lucy suggested. "He's probably mixing together ancient plants to get some modern day drug that gets you high so he can avoid play duties."
"Twenty bucks says it's meth," Sorano called over her shoulder.
"Thirty says he's found a way to synthesize THC," Lucy yelled back, watching as she exited the barn into the quickly dimming light outside.
"You both lose. I'll take the fifty."
Lucy screeched and Helena let out an affronted moo.
Erik rose from under a pile of hay stacked in the corner like he was Dracula, ready to take on the night and exsanguinate a couple dozen people for fun. While Lucy fought to keep her erratically beating heart from boxing its way out of her ribcage, he picked bits of hay out of his hair and off his face without ever breaking eye contact. She swore that once she could remember how to move her appendages, she would use her newly developed biceps muscles to cold clock the smirk off his face. Maybe give him another concussion, just so Dr Kaur could chew him out again.
"You're an ass," she gasped, pressing a hand to her chest shakily.
"And you have no faith in me," Erik replied. "I mean, seriously? THC? Meth? I'm much more creative and not nearly as self-destructive as you make me look."
"Hiding in what amounts to an oversized porta potty for cows is your idea of genius? Does the CDC accept PhD's printed in crayon?"
He raised an eyebrow. "I don't remember you being this sarcastic, blondie. I'm rubbing off on you."
"Unfortunately, I don't seem to have rubbed off on you at all." Immediately, she pressed a hand to her mouth. Regret in T-minus three, two, one…
"I seem to remember a lot of rubbing during the Olympics," Erik said. "But if you wanted to rub off on me then I'm not complaining."
Lucy dipped her hand into the bucket of milk under Helena and scooped up a handful, throwing it at Erik. Only about half managed to reach him and sully his shoes. The toxicologist picked up a handful of hay and gently dabbed at the wet spot, shaking his head mockingly. "Your aim is shit."
"The state of my toilet after you used it the other day says the same about you," Lucy grumbled. "I'm putting a bullseye sticker in it next time."
"Just for that, I'm gonna waffle stomp in your shower."
"I will kill you. I will kill you so dead."
"Whatever you say, Liam Neeson."
Lucy wiped her hands dry with the bottom of her skirt and set about rubbing the tension out of her upper shoulders and neck. Her friend Juvia, a third year kinesiology major, had taught her a few self-massaging techniques back when they had endured their first round of university exams together and while she had forgotten the more "deep-tissue" ones, she had a vague enough recollection of just what knots to press to tackle the problem until she could find a hot shower to fix the rest.
Slowly, she pressed her thumbs into the curve of her neck and drew them upwards, digging into the base of her skull. She swept her thumbs around under her ears and back down to her neck, pressing hard and repeating the upwards motion. In the back of her mind, she could hear Juvia reminding her to maintain a relaxed posture - a lot of the tension could be released simply by dropping the shoulders and unclenching the jaw. Doing so, Lucy felt her chest grow a little lighter and her shoulders start to unwind. It was easy to lose herself as she forcibly relaxed her body, muscle by muscle. The conscious effort it took pulled her in and drowned out all other thought, until there was only her and the odd static of nothingness.
Lucy's lungs spasmed as Erik's fingers took over, pushing hers away.
"You really need to hit the gym," he murmured in her ear, moving his thumbs down to the area between her spine and shoulder blades. "You'll get used-" he pressed down hard and dragged down, eliciting a moan from her. "To the burn."
"Maybe," she gasped, squeezing her eyes shut as he ran over a spot that had her seeing stars, "I like the burn."
She could almost feel him rolling his eye at her, but every hard press of his thumbs against her back, moving against the curve of her shoulder blades and tracing the dips beneath, made it harder and harder for her to string together a coherent thought. His hands drifted to the side, more centered to her shoulder blades, and he began rubbing small circles, inching upwards every few seconds.
"How are you this good with your hands?" Lucy managed to ask. She couldn't help how she started sagging back towards him. It was almost as if she was a marionette and he was snipping every string that kept her tied to Earth. Every stroke had her feeling lighter and looser than before, and it wouldn't be long before she would find herself draped over his chest in a pile of goo.
"Practice. You pick things up when working late nights hunched over a desk." His voice was the final layer of heat needed to throw her over the edge. Her neck fell back just as he rubbed a circle into the base of her skull, and she forced her heavy lids to slide open.
She couldn't pinpoint his expression. It was blank. Too carefully blank. Her honey eyes bore into his dark violet, taking in the sudden tightness around it. When she opened her mouth ever so slightly to breathe, she saw it.
Every person had a tell. It didn't matter if they were as stoic as Macbeth or as exuberant as Natsu, there was always something - a twitch, a tic, a fidget - that gave them away. What the tell was for depended entirely on the situation and in that moment, when she saw the muscle in his jaw jump, Lucy knew.
Lust.
Time seemed to suspend itself in their little pocket of existence. The world could have gone through a whole Ice Age outside and they wouldn't have noticed. The only things she could focus on were the unconscious strokes of Erik's thumbs against her neck and the million shades of purple in his eye.
You can do it, you know, Inner Cana whispered. Kiss him. Do something.
But what if I break the moment? Lucy thought back. I'm so scared to move. What if I do and then he runs away?
But that's the thing, isn't it? There's no in between here. You either do it or you don't. If you do, then he either reciprocates or runs. A concrete one or the other. If you don't? If you don't, then you'll be haunted by the millions of 'what if's' and I promise you not one of those will involve him leaving you.
Lucy closed her eyes and tilted her head up. Erik's hands drifted to cup her jaw and she could feel his breath fanning over her forehead as he leaned down. Just a little closer and-
"Erik! You illiterate fucknugget, I knew you were hiding somewhere!" Sorano screeched from the entrance.
Erik ripped himself away from her as if he had been burned, moving to stand several feet away. Lucy only caught the split second of absolute confusion on his face before it was replaced with a sneer. "Who told?"
Sorano planted herself outside Helena's stall firmly, tossing her silver hair back with a humph. "I just happened to pass by Dr Geer, who kindly informed me that he saw you sneak in here earlier today. You're unbelievable, you know that? Ugh, come on, the show starts in a half hour and you need to get dressed. You look so ugly I think my retinas just detached themselves."
"Now you know how I feel when I have to look at you every day," Erik snarked back, following her out of the stall. He paused and turned back to Lucy, decidedly more collected than he had been a minute ago. "You're coming to the show, right?"
She nodded. She couldn't trust herself to speak.
"Good. You can faint and then I'll have an excuse to leave early," he grinned. Anyone else would have missed the fact that it was only half as genuine as before, but not Lucy.
"I'll launch you both into the sun if you do," Sorano threatened, grabbing Erik by the wrist and tugging him out of the barn. "Leave early to get a good seat!"
Lucy placed her head between her legs and stayed curled up in a ball until Cana came to collect her fifteen minutes later.
They managed to grab seats in the fifth row right beside Mira and Mard, who looked more like royalty than the two people who had been hired by the fair to play the king and queen.
"He refused to put on the outfit I had planned," Mira sighed, waving at Mard. The university professor straightened his emerald cufflinks (a perfect match to the shade of Mira's dress, Lucy noted) and scoffed. "I have spent years cultivating my reputation, Mirajane. I refuse to allow it to be tarnished by...cosplaying," he said the word as if it were a curse.
"Shit, even Erik got roped into dressing up," Cana said, digging through her breasts for a small flask. "You need to call one of those doctors that specialize in assholes, Mard."
"Dr Geer."
"Wait, Erik's dressed up?" Mira squealed. "Did you convince him to match you?"
"N-no, uh, Sorano voluntold him to play Orsino in the play, so…" Lucy stuttered. She hoped the shade of red her face was clearly sporting could be explained away by milking Helena.
"Dr Vivas is involved in this?" Mard looked somewhat more interested, although that could have just as easily been him clapping his hands together in glee at the thought of Erik suffering. "I must say, my interest has been piqued. He never struck me as an actor."
"And if you all don't shut up, then we're never gonna see him act," Sorano growled from behind them. "So zip it. I need new blackmail material."
Macbeth either snored or said 'psycho swan bitch' before lolling his head back down to sleep.
The crowd went silent as the spotlight focused center stage and the curtains drew back. Erik stepped forward, dressed a little more suitably for the role, and took a deep breath. He caught Lucy's gaze and then started to speak.
Looking back on it, she had the man seated at her side to thank for her ability to keep up with the purple prose that was Shakespeare. Her knowledge was rusty at best and Erik's monologue didn't flow as smoothly as it would have if somebody with an actual background in theatre had recited it, but it was more than enough for her.
"Enough, no more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical."
Beside her, Mard shifted.
"His tone is mediocre and his control over the language is atrocious, however…" his dark eyes flicked over to Lucy. "I believe that one cannot deny that there is a genuine conviction to what he is saying."
When Lucy was ten, Juvia had dragged her to one of those stupid stalls at the fall fair where you could win a teddy bear if you could guess which cup a small ball was under. The vendor would put the ball under one of four cups and switch them up so quickly that his hands were a blur. Juvia had lost all her three tries, but Lucy won hers on her first go. In retrospect, she knew it was because her brain had subconsciously detected a pattern and had seen where the cup with the ball was, even if there was a disconnect between what she saw and perceived. But on that day, with her hand drifting over the third cup, there had been such an overwhelming flood of rightness through her body that it left her feeling hollow and whole all at once and she knew if she so much as twitched she would lose. Try as she might, her brain refused to let her hand move, so she selected cup number three and walked away with a stuffed bear as big as her torso.
Looking at Erik over a decade later, Lucy knew she had found her cup number three again.
"Yeah," she said so softly she may as well have not said it all, "You're right."
"Do you happen to own a weather app at all?" Erik asked as he looped his scarf around her neck. "Or do you look at -15 C and go 'tankini season'?"
"It was not this cold this morning," Lucy said defensively, though she couldn't deny the sense of deja vu that travelled down her spine. All they needed steady snowfall and the eerie silence of a winter's night and they could have been leaving Asuka's house and she couldn't have spotted the difference.
"That would be because of the sun," Erik said. "Do you need me to explain how that works, too?"
"I'm good. Are you sure you don't wanna catch a cab back? We can split the cost."
"Nah. It's a waste of money for a twenty minute walk," he said, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets. It didn't escape her attention how the arm closest to her was kept at an angle from him, creating a little circle for her to loop her own arm with. She shuffled closer and did so, falling into step with him as they walked away from the fairgrounds.
"You did pretty good today, even Dr Geer was impressed. Well, as impressed as he can get."
"Good. Stupid fuck failed me during the Shakespeare thing we had to do back in uni."
They fell into a comfortable silence, punctuated only by the soft crunch of snow beneath their feet and the occasional howling breeze.
It wasn't long before Erik spoke again. "Listen, about earlier today-"
"Let's talk about it later," Lucy interrupted, drawing to a stop. Her gaze remained focused on the way her boots dug into the ice. "...not now."
He nudged her with his elbow until she looked up at him. Though his face screamed 'casual boredom', relief was etched into every inch of his being, right down to the way his exhales turned to fog the second they passed his lips.
"Okay," Erik promised. "Later."
A/N: ? Idk, this happened.
That cow statistic is real by the way.
Hit that mf review button.
-Eien