for hallibel on tumblr — for the ftfemflash exchange. i honestly could not wait to post a fic for you haha because you seem so cool and now i'm just embarrassing myself because i'm blabbing, but anyway, i hope that you enjoy this! (and sorry that it's on the later end!)

Lucy is only taking Drawing 1 for the graduation requirement — and thus she only expects to get three units of work per week.

But by the end of the second week of the semester, she's soon realizing that three units of work in art means about 10 hours of drawing lines, 10 hours of erasing those very lines, 20 hours of just shading in entire chunks of the canvas with her pencil, and the rest of her waking hours worrying about whether or not her work is good enough — so much more than what she signed up for.

The blond huffs as she slams closed her car door. She does this awkwardly, of course, because there is a huge flat piece of paper and a wooden make-shift portable easel board thing under her arms and she can't afford to get either of them damaged on federal student loans.

Just as she's struggling, her pencil case drops to the parking lot gravel with a grainy splat. She curses, electing to just slam her car door shut with her hips, which is already hard enough because she parked in a tight space and the car next to hers leaves her only enough room for a slight sway.

Fortunately this all works out, and she beeps her car locked, making her way toward the Magnolia Museum of Modern Art — about a ten-minute walk to the main entrance from the all-the-way-in-the-back free parking area.

Honestly if it wasn't for the 40-minute traffic Lucy had to switch lanes unforgivably in to just get past, she wouldn't have minded coming out all the way to the museum. For as long as she's lived in the city, she has never been to the MMoMA, and especially this semester she felt the need to get out to places that she has never seen before, rather than just circulating between the nearby coffee shop, her apartment, and the sad silent existence of the 24/7 undergraduate library.

And of course, going to the museum would be an even better experience if she doesn't have a "field experience" assignment to do while there.

After the mess of getting through security and assuring everyone that she is just an undergraduate and doesn't have anything in her purse beyond broken pencil tips and eraser stubs and maybe a nearly empty bottle of strawberry-scented hand sanitizer, Lucy wanders quickly through the museum galleries, aiming to find a statue to sketch as soon as possible.

She needs to get this assignment over and done before she gets home too late to finish the paper that she, of course, left for the last minute.

Just in case, Lucy's bought a single canister of an energy drink and set it on her kitchen counter — ready to blow through many sunless work hours and through the small hours of the night.

Regardless, she's ready to knock this assignment down, and once she stumbles upon the first statue she comes across, she takes a seat on an artsy futuristic-looking marble bench, crossing her legs and propping her canvas on her thigh. She whips out her pencil and wishes herself good luck as she starts making light lines over the page to set up, looking back and forth from her paper to the statue as she outlines her boundaries and her angles.

Everything is just fine. Lucy is focused and Lucy is committed and Lucy has her drawing game on.

And then she walks in.

Pencil poised over the page, Lucy holds her breath, watching this redhead smile as she thanks the security guard for whatever the hell she's asked the guard for and then turn toward the large abstract painting on the wall just shy of Lucy's peripheral vision.

Lucy looks, then tears her eyes away. She attempts to get back into the spirit of her sketch but she can't get the color of the redhead's hair off her mind.

And Lucy hasn't learned a thing about color theory in her lower division art class, but Lucy for sure knows that that color red is something close to godliness — a scarlet flame that looks a little like the rays of a passing sunset over the ocean horizon just before the black of the night eclipses the sky.

Lucy loves how every other minute, the redhead flicks back her hair over her shoulder, letting her sleek thick tresses roll in the movement and letting Lucy have a glimpse of her calm and peaceful smile. She's not sure what kind of emotions the abstract art is evoking for the redhead but she thinks that that kind of a smile could put even the most furious of beasts at ease.

After another full five minutes, Lucy realizes that she's been staring, and she shakes her head, then gently taps her cheeks to force herself back to drawing the statue.

She only lets herself peek back at what the redhead is doing after five complete minutes of drawing the statue, she promises herself. Just every five minutes, she reassures herself. Only every five minutes, she swears to herself.

But it's an entire half hour later when Lucy realizes that her hand has been drawing the wrong subject altogether.

"Shit," she curses to herself, holding her eraser over the page.

She looks over her work — and is only minimally upset that this drawing happens to be one of the best that she's done since the beginning of the semester. It's only too bad that —

"You attend Fairy Tail University, don't you?"

Lucy blinks, looking up. Her heart pounds and her eyes widen when she sees —

"I'm Erza," the redhead introduces herself, holding out a hand for Lucy to shake. "Erza Scarlet."

She reaches forward to complete the greeting, albeit nervously.

"Hey," she replies. "Lucy. Lucy Heartfilia."

"Sorry," Erza apologizes, a shy smile on her face despite her confident voice. "I suppose I should explain. I think I'm in one of your creative writing seminars."

"I see," Lucy says.

She thinks that she would have recognized such a shade of red hair — especially in a small twelve-person seminar, but she supposes that maybe the redhead has confused her for another blond.

"You probably haven't seen me before though," Erza continues, tongue-in-cheek. "I haven't gone to a single class this semester. I've been traveling for some martial arts competitions this past month a lot and they just happen to be when our creative writing seminar meets."

"Martial arts," Lucy repeats.

"Yeah," Erza affirms. "I just know who everyone is because of that random — what is it, a Facebook-like-discussion group that we have set up for our class?"

"Oh, yeah — the Blackboard Forum thing the professor makes us do every week."

"Yeah, that thing," Erza says, and then she shrugs. "Honestly, I'm just taking that creative writing class to fulfill the "creative" graduation requirement."

Lucy laughs. "Yeah," she agrees, blabbing a little, very nervous about saying something off in front of Erza. "I'm a creative writing major so I'm taking that class as part of the credits for my major, but I have to take Drawing 1 for that. And actually that's why I'm doing this sketch —"

She stops herself, eyes wide.

It's too late.

"Oh! Let me see," Erza demands, sitting next to Lucy and looking over her shoulder.

Lucy scrambles to find an excuse but upon not finding anything to say after a full second of awkward silence, she just blurts:

"You're beautiful."

"I — " Erza stutters. There's a light blush that forms over the woman's cheeks. She turns to Lucy. "Th-Thank you! I'm… I'm not really sure what to say." She laughs. "This might be the most complimentary thing anyone has said to me." She gestures towards Lucy's sketch. "Or drawn for me."

"S-Sorry," Lucy apologizes. "I don't mean to come off creepy. You can… you can walk away if you want now. And you can have this paper if you want too — I need to start over again and sketch an actual statue this time." She forces a laugh.

Erza hasn't stopped laughing. "That's totally fine. I'm still really amazed though — because I think you've drawn me prettier than I actually am!"

"Oh — no, no way," Lucy denies. "I just draw what I see.

"What you see, huh?" Erza teases, waggling her eyebrows.

Lucy feels an intense blush over her cheeks. She hides her face in her hands and laughs her embarrassment off.

Fuck, Lucy thinks. She's falling for this woman way too fast. She doesn't even know if this woman is interested in her. Fuck.

When their laughter fades, Erza hesitates for a moment.

"So you have to spend a few more hours here drawing that statue, don't you?" she concludes.

"Yeah," Lucy replies. "Probably more than a few. I'm not the best artist."

Erza smiles, laughing softly. "You don't mind if I hang around and watch you? I have so much time to kill today and I feel like I should get to know at least one of my classmates in my creative writing seminar."

If Lucy was thinking about herself, she would have said no.

But Lucy isn't thinking about herself, and Lucy isn't thinking about finishing her assignment at MMoMA as soon as possible or speeding back to her apartment through the rush hour traffic or microwaving a 30-second dinner before starting an eight-page paper analyzing a book that she hasn't read a single page of — she's thinking about Erza Scarlet, and how really fucking attractive and funny and down-to-earth and easy-to-talk-to Erza Scarlet is.

So Lucy doesn't get started on redrawing that statue until much later that night, only after Erza has realized that she's distracting Lucy herself and decides to leave Lucy be to finish up her dreaded art assignment.

Erza leaves her number behind in Lucy's phone though — and while walking her way back to her car through the now-empty lot, all the way to the free parking area, Lucy musters the courage to spend Erza a text thanking her for spending the afternoon with her.

When Lucy gets home, needs to take the energy drink after all, but by the ten in the morning the next day, she's turned in her art assignment and her paper — and most importantly, has gotten a text back from the Erza Scarlet girl she met the day before.

Score.

And so, before Lucy finally knocks out in bed to recover from last night's lack of sleep, she writes and rewrites a text replying back — well, damn it, she adds an offer for coffee later that week in as well — and then worries about whether or not she wrote it too creepily or too soon or too uninterestingly for the next 20 minutes before unconsciousness captures her.

When she wakes up, there's a text waiting for her to read:

I'd love to get coffee with you.

It doesn't take many more messages for them to set up a date thereafter, and it doesn't take many more dates for them to realize they liked each other, and it doesn't take many more realizations for them to formalize a relationship soon after.

Lucy was only taking Drawing 1 for the graduation requirement — and thus she only expected to get three units toward her credits.

But by the end of the semester, she has the girl of her dreams in her arms as well.

And that is so much more than what she signed up for.

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