A/N: And we're finally back for Day 7 of CoLu Week! Sorry for the delay. Heavy Price refused to be ignored until it was complete.

You guys can thank indraaas for helping me plot this chapter out, like, a year ago… When I first started working on this story. And MadSoullessQueen for giving me the spark of inspiration for part of this chapter.

Also, I happened to finish writing this just a few hours after posting the epilogue for Heavy Price. I waited to post it to avoid spamming inboxes with updates, though. Gotta make sure you guys have time to read everything, right?

CoLu Week 2019
Day 7
Resonant

"You're a fucking toolbag," Cobra hissed, glaring at Jellal with everything he was worth. "You realize, this could kill my patient!"

"I realize that if you weren't one of the best doctors in my hospital, I would've thrown you to the curb for talking to your boss that way," Jellal sighed. He didn't look up from his paperwork, continuing to sign off on bullshit that Cobra just didn't care about. It wasn't about his patient, so it didn't matter.

"This is absolutely ridiculous," Cobra snarled. "You can't just-"

"I can," Jellal said. He set down his pen, lacing his fingers together in the power move of all power moves while he finally looked at his fuming Head of Diagnostics. "You don't run this hospital. I do. And when I say that you can't just rearrange the MRI schedule to suit your needs, I mean just that."

"So you're banning me from-"

"I am," Jellal said. "Put your request in, through the proper channels, and it'll be dealt with accordingly. On my schedule. That includes not bullying the technicians, just so you're aware. End of story."

"My patient-"

"You don't really care about the patient," Jellal said, smirking at him. "Don't pretend you do."

Cobra had a great number of choice phrases he'd been saving for a day like this. Sure, it might actually get him fired, but he was damn well going to give Jellal the ass-widening he'd been begging for with his snippy little fucking attitude.

The door to Jellal's office slammed open, much as it had when Cobra had stormed in twenty minutes prior after finding out that he wasn't allowed to use the fucking MRI to diagnose his patient, and Lucy stood in the doorway with a scowl on her face and silver glitter covering her head and shoulders.

Cobra turned, his eye widening when he saw the Look of Death she was giving him. Fuck. Did that mean she'd finally gone back to her office? And she happened to find the bucket of glitter he'd propped up on top of the door, rigging it to spill all over her…

"Erik-" she began.

"Lucy, I can explain-" he sputtered.

"-Monroe-"

Oh, fuck. She pulled out the middle name.

"-Vivas!"

His whole name. Just came tumbling right out of her fucking face. Just like that. He was ten seconds from shitting himself as she stomped closer, glitter trailing behind her with every heavy step from her sensible two-inch royal blue heels.

"You will clean up this god-forsaken mess this instant, or so help me, I will rain hell down on you and your children, and your children's children!" she shrieked.

He knew for a fact, based on his long-standing friendship with Lucy that spanned more than a decade, that it was a bad idea to say anything other than Yes, ma'am. He knew that. Still, his mouth decided to try and get him killed. "Go for it," Cobra said, "But we both know that my potential offspring will be the assholes running Hell. I doubt you'd be able to terrorize them."

She'd joked before that if he ever ended up impregnating some poor, unfortunate soul with his demonic DNA, the four fucking horsemen of the Apocalypse would show up to pat him on the back. Lucifer himself would more than likely start serenading his hellspawn at their birth.

"You wanna repeat that?" she hissed. His eye went wide when Lucy's hands became talons that attached themselves to the front of his grey blazer. Not really, but her grip was so strong that he questioned whether she was actually one of the denizens of Hell. "There's a trail of glitter leading here from my office, and I have no problems covering it with your blood trail!"

"Jesus fucking Christ!" he yelped as she shook him.

"He can't help you now!"

Jellal's jaw dropped when Cobra wriggled out of his blazer, leaving it in Lucy's hands, then ducked under her arm and ran out into the main hospital. Lucy turned on her heels with more dexterity than she should have had in shoes like that, and rushed after Cobra. "What… even…"

Cobra ignored the nurses and patients and technicians he darted around through the halls of the hospital. He could hear her coming closer. "How are you running so fast?" he bellowed.

"You're dead when I catch you!"

He probably should have given her an apology of some sort. Cobra rounded a corner, gasping when he slipped on the recently waxed floor. He slid across the floor and bumped into the wall, scrambling to his feet once again as soon as he got his bearings. The elevator was just there at the end of the corridor. He could make it to safety! The sound of her heels clacking on the tile disappeared. He shouldn't have been relieved. He should have looked behind him to see if she'd fallen as well.

He should have known that she'd cheat.

Something sharp and heavy hit the back of his head, sending Cobra tumbling to the floor right in front of the nurses' station. It took a moment to right himself, and when he was up on his hands and knees, his gaze settled on an innocuous little shoe. Royal blue suede. Two-inch heel.

What the fuck…

Her steps thundered down the hall, heavy and steady, moving her closer to his prone, immobile ass far too quickly.

"Did you throw a fucking shoe at me?" he mumbled, rolling onto his back. It took a moment for his vision to clear, but when it did, Lucy was standing over him, her breaths heaving and her carefully styled hair, a complete, glittery mess.

"Hold my fucking shoes," she spat, throwing the other at his face. Cobra barely had time to lift his hands and catch it.

He squawked when she grabbed his legs, digging beneath his pants to get a solid grip on his ankles, and started dragging him down the hall. Through the trail of glitter she'd left on her mad journey to Jellal's office. "What the hell?" he yelled. "Lucy, let go of me!"

She hefted his legs higher on her hips. "Dr. Loke, hold the elevator!"

The nearby nurses tittered when one of Cobra's backstabbing lackeys listened to her, holding his arm over the elevator door until she was able to drag Cobra into it. Odd, why was he wearing scrubs? Was there a surgery Cobra didn't know about?

"Heartfilia, it's ready." Cobra's eye widened when Virgo came speed-walking toward them from down the hall. Why was she also in scrubs? Virgo rarely participated in surgeries, unless she really had to.

He didn't trust them one bit. It was evident in the way he started struggling against Lucy's hold on his legs. But she was already pulling him into the elevator.

"What the fuck are you doing?!" he roared.

Lucy dropped his legs and, within seconds, Loke and Virgo had him pinned. Lucy snatched her shoes from him, then stepped backwards out of the elevator.

Her smile was chilling as the door slid shut. Outside of the elevator, the nurses waited with bated breath. There was a muffled, but no less audible, scream followed by pounding of some sort. And when the door slid open again, the light in the elevator was hanging down, and Loke, Virgo, and Cobra were covered in a mound of gold and silver glitter.

"Payback," Lucy said, crossing her arms over her chest. "You have such a wonderful team."

"Wh-What the hell?!" Cobra shouted, kicking Loke off of his legs. He could feel the glitter everywhere. The betrayal stung almost as much as the crafting horror somehow scraping against his scrotum.

Oh, he was going to get her back for this. Tenfold.

Wendy came rushing down the hall with a file in her hand, then stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the anarchy that had consumed the corridor. Cobra crawled out of the elevator, shaking glitter from his hair. Lucy laughed and put her shoes back on. "Um, Doctor Cobra?"

"What?!"

"I-I got the patient a contrast MRI," she squeaked. "I-I thought you'd wanna know…"

He stormed over to her and snatched the file from her hands, then read the latest test results. His stomach sank right into the very depths of hell. He read it twice, just to be sure, then turned to Lucy.

"Any other snarky comments?" she asked with a smirk.

Cobra's lips thinned, then he shoved the file into her chest and stormed off, leaving little specks of shining glitter in his wake.

Lucy frowned at his back, then read the file. "Oh…"

"It's cancer, right?" Wendy whispered. When Lucy nodded, she turned to watch Cobra disappear around a corner. "If he doesn't care about the patients, why does he seem upset about this?"

Loke came up beside her and placed a glittery hand on her shoulder. He smiled softly when her wide, innocent eyes turned to him. "Cobra's complicated," he said. "Cancer means his job's done. He got the diagnosis, and there's no cure."

"It's more than that," Lucy sighed, shaking her head. "Damn, tumors in the spinal cord…" She turned to Virgo, the one she could trust the most out of all of Cobra's team. "Take this over to my office, and have the nurses transfer him to the Oncology ward as soon as possible. We'll need to be aggressive, and I have to meet with him soon."

Virgo nodded and rushed off, glitter be damned, to do as Lucy asked.

"Loke…"

"Yeah," he sighed, catching the odd look in her eyes. He turned to Wendy with a gentle smile. "Let's head down to the surgical suites, okay? You could do with an observation or two."

Once they were gone, Lucy made her way down the hall, following the trail Cobra had left behind. She found him in his office, sitting in his chair and bouncing a ball off the far wall. She sighed and closed the door, then pulled the blinds shut so no one in the hall would be able to see inside. Just for good measure, she locked the door, too. His team wouldn't be around for a while, she already knew, but still. It would help him relax.

Next, she turned off the lights. It was still early enough in the day that sunlight streamed through the windows. But anyone walking by his office would think he was gone.

Lucy slid her shoes off by the door and walked over to his desk. "Cobra?"

"You should be dealing with the patient," he muttered. Cobra spun his chair so he was facing away from her.

She hated it when he did that. He'd been doing it ever since college, when he didn't want to be bothered. It took months of them being roommates for her to decide that she was the exception to his Leave me the fuck alone, or I'll blackmail you into ruin rule. He hadn't been happy about it, but he'd eventually agreed.

"Aren't you curious how Wendy got the MRI done?" she asked, standing beside him. The ball bounced against the wall again, and he caught it without looking.

"What matters is that it got done."

"You're not even gonna go back to Jellal and gloat about how you subverted his overlord ruling?" Lucy sighed when he simply sunk lower into his chair. She glanced down and smiled when she saw how much glitter was still on his face, and in his hair. "Talk to me."

He stared off into space, still tossing the ball against the wall, as Lucy rummaged in his desk. The soft crinkle of plastic preceded her stepping in front of him. The ball bounced off her head, unnoticed, when she leaned down and started wiping his face off with a wet wipe. His vision was filled with her gently smiling lips and tired eyes.

Cobra frowned. "You're not sleeping enough."

"Don't turn this back on me," she said.

"Your makeup is doing fuck all to hide those bags," he said softly. His fingers brushed across hers before she could wipe across his scarred cheek, and he met her gaze squarely. "What's wrong?"

Lucy just shook her head at him. "You first," she countered.

Cobra sighed out a deep and heavy breath, and his head tipped back onto his chair. Lucy leaned over him a little more. He rolled his eye at her. "Come here, moron," he muttered. His hands wrapped around her hips, and he pulled her right into his lap. She laughed quietly and pulled her legs up, then wriggled her butt just to dig her bony ass into his leg. Just like she always did.

If anyone saw them like this, he'd never hear the end of it. People would talk about how he must have corrupted her in some way, convinced her to cheat on her husband with him. But that just wasn't the case. Lucy was just his friend. And she just so happened to be the only person he was comfortable with letting into her personal space at any given time. As her legs draped over his and she leaned a little more heavily against his chest, his arms wrapped around her hips.

Touching her waist would've made this weird.

"You were telling me what's wrong," she prodded.

Cobra scowled at her, then closed his eye as she continued wiping as much glitter as she could from his skin. "Cancer's too easy," he finally said. "Everything gets tied up in a neat little bow when it's cancer. Back pain? Cancer. Fatigue? Cancer. Bowel or urinary issues? Cancer. Hell, a fucking cough could be because of his spinal cancer metastasizing out into his fucking lungs."

"That's not that common, you know," she said.

"He's a smoker," he said. "40 years. If he doesn't have lung cancer, too, I'll be surprised."

"So you're upset because it's not something else?" she asked.

"Every time it ends with cancer, the puzzle's gone," he said. "All the work that's gone into it before that diag-fucking-nosis is wasted, because… It was just cancer."

"It's usually a death sentence," she said sadly.

"I don't even mean that," he sighed. "There's no final twist. It doesn't go from acting like Sarcoidosis to blastomycosis. We don't have that scramble to solve it. It's stupid fucking cancer. And now he's either gonna live or die based on how his body reacts to any number of fucking chemo treatments. It's done."

"But it's not done the way you'd hoped," she said, nodding when he was silent. "Well, I don't know what to tell you, hun. When it's cancer, it's cancer."

"Gee, thanks…" His eye narrowed after a moment. She set down the wet wipe on his desk and smiled at him. "Now, about this no sleeping thing."

It was Lucy's turn to look anywhere but at the person talking to her. Cobra spun in his chair again, then grabbed a wet wipe and started rubbing it across her face. Lucy gasped and tried to pull back, but he held her still.

"Fuck your makeup," he said. "Talk."

Her cheeks puffed out in a large sigh. "I'm not talking about it during the work day," she said. "Drinks after work?"

"What kind of drinks?" He chuckled quietly when she glared at him. "I just mean, are these bar drinks, or is my good whisky coming out?"

"Bar," she said. "It's not that serious."

"You'd tell me if it was," he said. He didn't need to ask. All he had to do was remind her that she was sworn, as his one and only friend, to tell him everything that was wrong in her fucking life. His soap operas could only do so much. Sometimes, he wanted that little smattering of human interaction and drama.

"I'd tell you," she said, nodding.

"Damn straight."

"Now, how did you get your MRI privileges revoked for two weeks, and why did Wendy come begging me to switch my patient's MRI slot with her?" Lucy asked.

Cobra laughed and tossed the crumpled, drying wipe into the wastebasket. That explained how they'd gotten the test done while he'd been trying to get a rise out of Jellal. And why she'd been heading to her office when she was supposed to be overseeing some little teenage boy's first MRI. "Well, you see, I might have flipped the schedule around a little bit on the CT scanner. And the pharmacy. And the clinic. And-"

"Cobra, you didn't," she groaned. Still she smiled at him when he gave her a cheeky grin. "You're hopeless!"

"Yeah, well, Jellal got his panties in a twist over it."

Her smile turned decidedly evil a moment later. "You should find him some… untwistable panties, then. To help avoid chafing, of course."

"Oh, I love that brain of yours," he cackled. Yes, this was going to be fabulous. He just needed to do a little internet search, and hope he wouldn't have to pay too much for shipping. He'd dropped a pretty penny on the glitter bombs in her office. Cobra froze after a moment, staring at her in horror. "You only stopped at the door in your office, right?"

"Yeah, why?"

Through the wall, there was a masculine shriek, followed by a thoroughly agitated, "Cobra!"

"Was that Jellal?" she asked, then squeaked when Cobra threw a hand over her mouth.

"I'm guessing he was looking for you in your office," he breathed. Cobra held her tightly and slid down to the floor, then dragged her under his desk. "You only got the first wave. There was a pulley system. Think tarred and feathered… with Elmer's."

"Cobra, you're dead!" Jellal roared as he stormed down the hall. Sadly, Cobra didn't get to the see the rainbow plumage covering his face and chest. Not in person, at least. He had to wait for one of the nurses on the floor to send it to him.

The picture was set as his computer background for six months, and made a debut on the hospital newsletter. Cobra got thirty extra clinic hours for the newsletter stunt.

Thanks so much for being patient with me on this, guys!

Day 8 of CoLu Week 2019 will be posted in You're Still the One, but it's a doozy of a chapter. You'll probably have to wait a few days for it to get written.