Welcome to Gaia! ::

Ellis had been startled by the sudden appearance of.. the boy? What even was he? Had a carnival come into town that he hadn’t heard of? Spooked by the unidentifiable stranger and already a bit unnerved by sitting alone in the park after sundown, Ellis had hopped (nearly fallen) over the side of the bench he was sitting on. When Alya looked around, he shrunk even farther behind it and into the shadows, suddenly unsure.

Hello?

Chewing on the inside of his cheek and trying to ignore the way his shin throbbed from the way he’d just banged it on the corner of the bench, Ellis watch the man with his long blonde hair as he, in turn, looked for him. He didn’t seem.. Threatening.

“Uhh,” he began as he unwound the tension in his legs and stood back at his full height, “hi. Sorry.”

There was a journal clutched in his left hand and held tightly against his chest, though the pen he had been scrawling with had been tossed in his panic and rolled to a stop at the edge of the trail, still tucked in the fresh-cut grass. Ellis seemed hesitant to actually walk out from behind the bench completely but now, openly facing the other man, he let his eyes travel his clothes curiously.

“This just seems.. Very odd.”

A model.

Ellis raised an eyebrow and looked Alya over again, picking out the strange little bits of his outfit and the curious, lengthy braid he was stroking. He wasn't sure that he believed him but he didn't really have any other explanation to offer, either. Plus, Ellis' bright blues were immediately drawn to the way he was stroking the braided locks. He always did have a soft spot for other anxious spirits.

"What?"

The surprised eyebrows immediately furrowed as he tried to remember what the strange blonde man had said, suddenly aware that he had been spacing out.

"Oh, my leg?" The redhead glanced down and then, immediately, frowned when he noticed the leg of his pants had a small rip over the knee. It was throbbing dully, sure, but he was almost positive he'd mostly just dinged it. He bent down quickly to inspect the hole, spreading the tattered denim to find the scratch that aligned with the rip. It was barely worse than a cat scratch and not even very big, nothing worse than he'd caused himself climbing trees.


"I think it's just a little scratch, it's my fault for being jumpy." He stood with a shrug and offered the other man a weak, if pleasant, smile.

In a few slow steps, he crossed the patch of lawn and stooped low to pick up his pen where it had rolled to a stop at the side of the park path. As he grabbed it and rose back up to his full height, he tried his best to force some of the tension out of his posture. There were other people in the park sometimes, this was totally normal. The weak and pleasant smile remained.

"I'm Ellis. I was just.. writing out here in the quiet."

Ellis laughed awkwardly as his eyes rose to the sky above them, glancing across the little pinpricks of light that only showed themselves so clearly in the park, away from the saturation of city lights.

"Honestly, I hadn't even realized that it had gotten so dark.."

The redhead's eyes dropped back to the model and the odd concern he seemed to suddenly have for him. Sure, it was after curfew and he was sitting around in the dark, but surely all the rumors were just silly?

"I came out sometime before sundown. The twilight hours are just.." Ellis paused as he realized he was using his wistful, dreamy voice - not intentionally, but the focus he had while writing was a slow release, not a sudden cut off. Even now, while talking to the sudden stranger, his brain was trying to pull him back down to his words instead. The hand around his journal curled tighter as the other raised to ruffle his hair across the back of his skull, stroking through it near the scalp in a nervous gesture. "They're just good for writing. I got caught up in it, I haven't really noticed anything at all outside of my journal."

Certain that Alya couldn't really mean him any harm, Ellis moved closer so that they were both standing on the pathway and looked in the direction the other man had been running not minutes before. That was also the direction of home, so -

"I should probably head home, though."

Ellis’ bright blues swung in the direction that Alya told him to avoid, staring into the dark of the park night as if he could see the rabid beast lurking somewhere in the distance. Waiting. In all honesty, Ellis had seen his father put down a rabid dog once when he was very small. It wasn’t his own, thankfully, but Ellis could never quite shake the sound of the handgun as he emptied it on the beast - it was one of his earliest, most vibrant memories of the man that had always been his hero.

It was also why Poe was a kind, fluffy rabbit and not a dog at all.

For a moment he was in danger of slipping into the dismal, dark abyss of his personal tragedies - it was great for writing but not so much for socializing - when Alya distracted him with a playful tease.

“Wh-what?”

Ellis’ bright eyes darted back toward him and crinkled about a nervous smile. Hopefully the street lamp illuminating them both wasn’t quite bright enough to show the other man his suddenly scarlet cheeks. He laughed it off and dropped his gaze to the ground shyly, tensing and relaxing his fingers around the binding of his journal in a nervous twitch. What a very bold, playful thing for a stranger to say - a strange, pretty stranger, too.

“Something like that,” he said, finally, as he forced his bright eyes back up to Alya’s. The fluttering beneath his breastbone was not unfamiliar, though he tried his best not to hint at his own awkward brand of anxiety. “I don’t know if any ladies would miss my face but I think I have a couple of..” he paused and chewed at the inside of his lip while he searched for the best, most neutral word he could think of, “friends that might not enjoy seeing it become puppy chow.”

Certain suddenly that there was no way he was going to be able to head back in the direction he had been expecting, he moved a bit closer to the friendly stranger that called himself Alya. Ellis was a trusting, kind soul and if a man didn’t want him to get eaten by a dog then he couldn’t be altogether awful, right?

“I don’t know anyone that could come pick me up but, um, maybe you wouldn’t mind walking with me to the exit? If you think I’m too handsome to get eaten, then surely the world would miss you if it came back for round two.”

Ellis was already smiling when he heard the tone of Alya’s voice. It always sounded that way when someone very much wanted to pry into his brain but didn’t want to offend by doing so. It was the mark of the considerate, he thought, and it made a world of difference between the ginger shutting down the question and unfurling to let the other man peak inside.

His pale, slender fingers pulled his journal from where he had tucked it under his arm and began to unwind the leather braids that wrapped around its covers. The binding fell apart, showing how well loved this particular journal must be, and the pages cracked open to the center.

“Everything,” his pace slowed a bit as he let his attention drop, using his peripherals to help guide him along the line of the path - partly by aligning his feet with parallel to the edge of the pavers and partly by Alya’s body. At least the long, blonde braid was easy to keep track of. “Sometimes it’s a dream or a simple thought that swells into a story, sometimes, if I’m sad, it’s just a drabble of nonsensical emotions. There’s poetry and then sometimes there’s nonsense..”

Ink stained fingertips turned the leaves slowly, displaying a scrawl of lilting cursive among doodles and simplified figure drawings. Ellis’ journal was a smatter of his brain, spread across the blank pages like a biography told in snippets.

“We’re secretive because it’s us on the pages. It takes a lot to let someone read that.”

His journal shut without a sound and his bright, baby blues slid back up to meet Alya’s eyes. There was still a smile on his face but he seemed clouded, as if a part of his mind had been left behind between the leather covers.

“It’s totally the opposite of what you do though, isn’t it? A version of you gets trapped forever in a frame for anyone in the world to see.”