Work Text:
The phone rings barely for a second before Lucien answers it without looking away from the paper he’s grading. There are only two people who would call him in the middle of the night like that, after all.
“Yes?”
“Lucien...”
MC is one of them. Her voice sounds thin and shaky through the static of the call. That and the late hour must mean she’s having trouble sleeping again; her work must have been consuming all her time recently, leaving her a nervous wreck.
“It’s pretty late,” he says, a soft smile reserved just for her pulling at the corners of his lips as he continues marking the essay. Part of his brain is already planning which herbal tea to bring her as soon as he’s finished. Just one short paragraph left. “Shouldn’t you be asleep, Miss?”
“Can you help me bury a dead body?”
“Mm-hm.” He underlines yet another typo in the word periaqueductal. Did the student even run their paper through spellcheck before submitting? It’s the third time already. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
After MC’s tiny “...okay”, Lucien hangs up. He notes down his final remarks on the essay, then takes his glasses off and rubs at his eyes. No more grading for the next hour at least; he could really use a break and MC called at just the right time.
Right, he thinks as he gets up and turns off the floor lamp next to the couch. Finding a shovel takes no time at all, automatically as it comes, and he’s ready to leave his apartment, hand on the door handle, when MC’s request finally clicks.
—wait.
It’s 3:25AM when they step back from the freshly turned soil in the local park. MC dabs a paper tissue against her eyes; it’s already soaked through so it doesn’t help much. Even so, she still blows her nose into it and stuffs it into her pocket.
For a moment, there’s only silence. MC’s still shaking, be it from the experience itself or from the cold—she should have grabbed a warmer jacket and a hat before they left for the park—but she clearly tries to hide it from him by tightly clasping her hands together. Silly girl; as if she could ever fool him.
“Have you ever... done this before?” she asks eventually, playing with her fingers and never, ever looking away from the spot on the ground.
He hesitates for just a moment. It’s not exactly what she’s asking about, but—“Yes,” he says. “A couple of times.” A handful, really—if your hand has at least twenty fingers and continues growing more.
She doesn’t need to know about that, though.
“Thank you,” she mumbles. She looks so pitiful standing there, sniffling, arms crossed tightly across her chest now, that Lucien can’t help pulling her close to lean against him. It only earns him another hiccupped half-sob. “I didn’t want to do it alone.”
He hums quietly. When she leans her head against his shoulder, he rests his chin on the crown of her hair and rubs warmth into her arm. The shovel in his other hand feels comical now; they didn’t need anything nearly as big to bury a single goldfish.
“Anytime.”