A/N: CHRISTMAS COLU NEEDED TO HAPPEN! AND GUESS WHAT. IT AIN'T A ONESHOT BRO. NO. LET ME EXPLAIN THIS. Based loosely off the carol "12 Days of Christmas", each chapter will focus (in some way) around the gift given in the song. Ergo. 12 chapters, and maybe an epilogue. This one I'll try to update vaguely consistently. Vaguely. It'll be done before Christmas, this much I know for sure.

Anyway...without further ado..."41 Days of Lucy"!

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...

A partridge in a pear tree.

"I'm a failure," Lucy Heartfilia moaned, belly-flopping onto the sofa. "Plue. What kind of life am I living."

Her dog merely huffed before burying himself between two throw pillows, intent on ignoring his owner. Lucy pouted, poking his back lightly. "Even you don't wanna talk to me in my time of need...I hate my group members so much, honestly, you don't understand."

And the third year psychology major had every right to. Her group was not only composed of the most unreliable people on the planet, but they had done absolutely nothing to help with the work, even though Lucy had painstakingly outlined exactly what the other three were supposed to do. Add to the fact that they had called her a half hour earlier asking her to finish up the project, citing some emergency or the other, she was royally pissed off.

Given the loud beat of what sounded like EDM in the background, Lucy hoped somebody got alcohol poisoning.

"Should I be Shakespeare dramatic, Plue?" Lucy asked, sitting up. Her sofa was pushed right up against the balcony door, with a gap large enough to let the sliding door open and shut. If she angled herself just right, she could see the snow flutter to the ground softly. Lucy nodded. Yes, that sounded like a lovely idea. Then, she could plot her revenge.

Lucy curled into a small ball, staring out the window pensively. The world was eerily still, and the snow fall was almost too slow to be real. The large pear tree right beside her complex was weighed down by the heavy snow, to the point of which she was certain one or two branches were going to snap off.

God, she hated the Christmas season.

The dreaded holiday was several weeks away, and already houses were decorated top to bottom in twinkle lights, tinsel, wreaths, and all sorts of bells. Stores had switched out the plastic fangs and goblin masks for Santa hats and oversized sweaters with snowflake patterns the second October had become November. Now, three weeks into month, Lucy was getting sick and tired of it all.

She hated the fakeness of it all. How everybody seemed to just come together for one day to exchange meaningless gifts and pretended they liked each other before going back to shit talking everybody until the next major commercialized holiday rolled around. Mest had told her once before that she sounded like a bitter old spinster, but Lucy had valid reasons for disliking Christmas.

She had never had a real, family and friends style Christmas growing up. Every year was spent in stuffy dress, mingling with the uptight children of other business tycoons as the adults made more business deals and mergers. Gifts to the kids were cheques worth hundreds of dollars, and even though her piggy bank exceeded several thousand by the end of the night, Lucy always left empty and dissatisfied. She never kept the money, anyway. She would donate it in increments to the local orphanage via Mrs Spetto, and tell her father she had spent the money on new jewelry when he asked.

Even though she had spent every Christmas after the age of fifteen in Natsu's basement with the rest of their friends, now that they were in university, the time they had to spend with each other was growing shorter and shorter, and she knew that there would be no get-together this year because of their schedules. For the first time in six years, she would be alone again, and she hated it.

Lucy was drawn out of her thoughts by a muffled curse, and she looked out the window just in time to see a body fall into the pear tree and then off that to the ground below. A string of twinkle lights swung like a pendulum in front of her balcony ominously.

"Oh my God!" Lucy shrieked, scrambling for her front door. She didn't bother with a coat or boots, and voice in the back of her head told her she would regret going out into the frozen tundra that was Crocus in nothing but booty shorts and a tank top, but she had more pressing matters to attend to.

She lived on the second floor, so falling from her level wouldn't be overly serious, but she had no idea what floor the person had fallen from. The blonde hoped that the sheer volume of the yell in combination of the twinkle lights meant that they lived only a floor or two above her. Twinkle lights were only so long, she reasoned with herself. They had to live close by.

The thing Lucy hated about the metal doors that led to the back courtyard was the metal bar she had to press in to open it. It took her entire body weight to get it to budge, and even then it needed to be pressed harder. Once she opened it, her exposed skin was hit with a blast of arctic air, and she squealed.

"Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold...!" Lucy chattered her teeth as she sprinted to the stirring body. She could hear him (the voice was way too deep to be female) swearing violently, stringing together the curse words in ways Lucy hadn't thought possible to create an effective medium for his frustration.

"-stocking fuck!" he snarled as Lucy finally dropped to her knees beside him. Her legs immediately started burning due to the cold, and she was half numb at this point, but she could care less. There was no blood staining the white snow, and he seemed lucid enough.

He was alive.

"Are you fucking insane?" he yelled, sweeping his one eye over her barely clothed body. "It's in the negatives and snowing, you stupid-ass blonde!"

"S-s-saw you f-f-f-fall," she stammered, trying her damnest to speak in a level tone. "C-c-c-came to help. How b-b-bad?"

"Third floor," he said. "Think I bruised a rib hitting the tree, might have a concussion."

"I'll c-c-call the amb-b-bulance," Lucy would have smacked her head if she was capable of that much movement. Her phone was halfway across the room in her apartment, hidden away so she could ignore her group members as they kept checking back to confirm she was doing their work. Catching this, the man sighed. "Jacket pocket closest to you."

Lucy's trembling fingers slid into the pocket with great effort. She almost moaned in relief as the fluffy interior provided some heat to her frostbitten fingers. The digits hit something solid, and she pulled it out, being careful to not drop it in the snow. "P-p-password?"

"Meth," he said. "Don't ask. My friend set it and I don't know how to change it."

"S-s-settings," Lucy suggested as she tried to hit the emergency call button. Her fingers were so numb at this point she couldn't even feel them touch the screen. It was a disconcerting feeling, being able to see the movement but not feel the sense associated with it.

"911, what's your emergency?"

"M-m-m-my neighb-b-b-bour f-f-f-fell off-f-f-f his b-b-balcony," Lucy shivered violently. God, she should have at least put a sweater on. That way, she could've draped it over legs for a bit of coverage. She was sure she was going blue in some areas.

"We'll send an ambulance right away, ma'am," the operator paused for a second. "You'll be needing some...help for yourself, correct?"

"Yeah," Lucy said. "B-b-b-blankets. Please."

"She's got frostbite!" the man shouted loud enough that he would be heard on the other end. "Tell the stupid fucks to hurry it up or she'll start losing toes!"

If she had the energy to, she would have cried.

In the end, it had taken over an hour to warm her up to healthy levels.

She was lucky, according to the doctors. She had managed to avoid the blisters that were common to severe cases. They called it a Christmas miracle.

She called it pure dumb-luck.

Dressed in the thickest, fluffiest pyjamas she could find in the gift shop, Lucy padded her way to her neighbour's hospital room. She resisted the urge to glide on the pristine floors in her fuzzy socks. She had to look somewhat mature to make up for her terrible first impression to the man.

Though the bright red pyjama set decorated with little Christmas trees and snowmen would certainly make her look stupider than before. If not that, then the Santa hat one of the nurses had shoved on her head with a smile certainly would.

"Excuse me?" Lucy knocked on the open glass door as she poked her head in. "I hope I'm not interrupting..."

"Oh," the man looked up from the papers on his lap. "It's you. Yeah, come in."

He was pretty attractive, Lucy thought as she edged forward. His maroon hair was slightly damp and stuck to his rich, mocha skin on some places. His left eye was sealed shut by a thick scar that bisected it, running down to just in the middle of his cheekbone, and just above his eyebrow. His functioning eye was a startling shade of violet. From what Lucy could tell from his arms, exposed by the pasty hospital gown, he was fairly muscled.

"I'm Lucy, by the way. Lucy Heartfilia," she introduced herself as she sat down in the chair next to the bed. Out of the corner of her eye, she examined the papers. One of them looked like the discharge forms she'd filled out, and the other had headache inducing words and numbers.

"Dr Erik Vivas," he replied absent-mindedly, signing the form in a flourish. Lucy snickered slightly, and that was when he looked up. "Something funny about that?"

"No, it's just...am I the only one who finds it ironic that a doctor is in a hospital bed?" Lucy laughed aloud. The corner of his lip curled up in vague amusement. "Not that kind of doctor."

"Oh," she glanced away sheepishly. "My bad."

"Happens all the time," he shrugged it off, righting the papers into a neat stack and sticking them in an envelope by his bedside. He turned back to her and crossed his arms over his chest, wincing slightly. "I'm the Ph.D kind of doctor."

"Oh!" Lucy perked up. "What in? I was thinking about getting one myself, but I'm dying in third year already, so I'm clearly not cut out for it..."

"I'm a toxicologist with the CDC," he said. Lucy's jaw dropped in awe. Her apartment complex was home to a variety of characters, and she knew for a fact that almost all of them paid their rent with money gained in very illegal ways. Had it not been for the dirt cheap rent, Lucy would've moved out to avoid being murdered long ago, but alas, she was a broke university student and this was all she could afford.

The point was, Lucy had been certain from day one that her upstairs neighbour was one of many drug dealers in the building. It was the only way to explain the positively vile smells coming from upstairs. Lucy wasn't sure if illegal drugs smelled gross, but she operated on the assumption that some did.

How wrong she was.

"I thought you were a drug dealer!" she blurted out. His eyebrow shot up in surprise, and she clapped her hands over her mouth in horror. "No, wait!" she hastily began to correct herself. "It's because your apartment reeked-oh, God, don't take that in offense, either! Ah, I can't talk today-!"

"Calm down," he chuckled. It was a pleasant sound, Lucy decided as she lowered her hands to her lap. Deep, rumbling, and with a bit of a gravelly tone to it. "I only got my Ph.D this year. I used to do practice labs in my kitchen before the actual lab in class. Don't ask where I got the equipment or materials from."

"Oh," Lucy said in relief. "Wow, that's a relief. Sorry, I just...we really started off on the wrong foot. And I feel like I'm making it worse, so I should probably leave before-"

"Dr Vivas," a stout doctor entered the room, and Lucy slowly slid back into her seat, hoping to blend in with the ugly plastic chair as much as possible. The doctor smiled kindly at Lucy before picking up the charts at the end of the bed and reading over them. "You seem to be in good shape. You fractured two ribs, and you've a concussion, but you're cleared for discharge."

"Papers are here," Dr Vivas pointed to the envelope. "I can leave now?"

"Yes," Dr Kaur, as her ID card read, nodded. She pursed her lips in thought, glancing at Lucy for a moment. "Although...do you have anyone to look after you for a few days? You know concussions."

"Nobody," Dr Vivas scowled. "And it's not the first time I've had one of these, I can handle myself-"

"All the more reason to have someone with you," Dr Kaur said firmly, turning to Lucy fully. "Would you feel comfortable looking after him for a few days? Just monitor his symptoms to make sure he's recovering well."

Lucy opened and shut her mouth, flicking her gaze between Dr Kaur and Dr Vivas. The former had a kind, open look on her face, while the latter seemed to dare her to say yes.

Lucy weighed the pros and cons. On one hand, he would likely dislike her for forcing herself into his life out of the blue, but at least he would be alive. At the same time, a selfish part of Lucy whispered that maybe she could use this as an excuse to have some company, if not just for a few days. Who knew what would come of it?

It wasn't like she had anything to lose.

"Sure," Lucy agreed. Dr Kaur clapped her hands together once, smiling broadly. "Excellent! I'll be right back after filing these discharge papers to explain how this all works."

As the brunette took the papers from Dr Vivas's bedside and exited the room, Lucy couldn't help but feel a flash of trepidation run through her. What had she just signed herself up for? She had zero medical experience, and had quite literally just met the man in what was potentially the most unconventional way possible, and now she was his official caretaker.

Mest had always told her Natsu's penchant for getting into borderline insane situations would eventually make its way to her.

"Well," Dr Vivas sighed irritably. "Your place or mine?"

Lucy fought the blush that sought to flood her cheeks at the unintentional double entendre. Although, judging by the barely there smirk on his lips in combination with the twinkle of mischief in his eye, he knew full well how his question could have been interpreted. The little shit liked seeing her squirm!

These were clearly going to be the longest few days of her life.

A/N: high-key this was so much fun to write. Tell me what you guys think so far! I'm excited hear your thoughts!

Why "41 Days of Lucy" and not "12 Days of Lucy", you ask? Because

A) 12 Days of Lucy sounds weird in my head

B) it's 41 days from the date her universe till Christmas.

C) because 500 Days of Summer is a cult classic and I needed to pay homage to it

-Touko