Ellyn was on the lookout all day, and when classes were over, she spent more time around the Academy's courtyard than was at all necessary. Her usual hangout was the library, but he hadn't been there, so now she loitered around all day waiting to catch Ophion in a moment of free time.
Between lunch and dinner, Ellyn sat around the cafeteria. He had to eat sometime. She was starting to feel like a creep, waiting around for a man she didn't know that well. She had to see him and make sure everything was all right with him now. He'd been better when they walked up the mountain, but anything could have happened. She just had to see him.
She could have reached out to him in some other way, found his dorm room (probably), but Ellyn didn't want to come off crazier than she already was. The way it worked in her mind, she'd see him and casually bump into him. Casual. Hah. There was nothing casual about what she was doing, but she'd pretend for the sake of it.
She pulled out a small book and flipped it open to a random page, pretending to read. She read the first sentence a few times before she'd scan the room. Ellyn shook her knee under the table, trying to contain her growing anxiety. Why was she so fidgety? She wasn't regularly like this.
Ellyn was just about to get up and leave; she hadn't seen him anywhere, and she wasn't sure where else she'd look that they could both typically be in. She couldn't bug him while he was giving any tours, that wouldn't work. She couldn't talk to him then; it would be rude.
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The fact of the matter was that it wouldn't have mattered where she looked in the school. For the first few days after the tsunami had hit, Ophion hadn't been there. He'd gone home, returning to check in on his parents. His father had inevitably been off island, and he was happy to discover that his mother was fine. She'd evacuated well before the wave hit, although their home was badly damaged. He'd salvaged what he could, helped her move into temporary housing, and it was only then that he'd returned to face the music.The damage was bad. Even with magic it would be weeks before everything was restored, and the sight of the library had been like a knife through the heart. Too many books that had been ruined beyond repair. Nothing short but time travel would save some of them.
He slunk into the cafeteria late, looking exhausted. He'd been tucked away in the back room of the library, carefully picking through some of the more valuable history texts, trying to see what could be salvaged. Some could, some couldn't. Some he really wanted to be salvaged, and the only thing he could do was wait and see if magical moisture removal would be enough.
He was starved, and he went straight for the food, queuing up and loading his plate before grabbing a seat. He made no effort to sit with anyone, digging in immediately. He felt downright ravenous.
Ellyn spotted Ophion while he was getting his food and her stomach flipped. She needed patience right then, but she had none. By some force of luck (or magic) she didn't stand and go over to him until he had sat down, luckily at an empty table. She was nervous enough without having to get through any friends he might have.
She was glad to have a book and a tray to hold to hide the shaking of her hands. Her stomach knotted the closer she got, but somehow Ellyn managed to come off as confident as a sixteen-year-old girl could when she sat across from Ion and smiled at him.
"Hey, Ophion," she began softly. "How have you been?"
What a lame thing to start off with, but what else did she have? She wanted to ask him why he looked so tired, or if there was anything she could do for him. What's more, Ellyn wanted to give him her food, or sit beside him, do something, anything to ensure he was feeling well. It was unsettling the intensity of her affection for a man she knew nothing about.
Ellyn was so close to asking him where he had been, what he had been up to. The words were on the tip of her tongue, the only thing holding them back was how crazy he might think she was for asking.
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The moment someone stopped at his table, Ophion glanced up, expecting to find another grad student. Instead, he found a familiar face, and proceeded to immediately make an ass of himself by choking on his food.He had not expected to see her again. Or at the very least, not so soon. His cheeks went pink, an unusual reaction for him, and he took a moment to recover before looking back up at her.
She was young. Afterwards he'd had a hard time guessing her age, but in the full light of day? Young. A minor. The whole thing would have been embarrassing enough with someone his own age, but a thousand times worse without it.
He had to take a deep breath, reminding himself that she had quite literally saved his life, and only then could he compose himself enough to gesture to the seat across from him.
"I've been fine. Busy with the library. How have you been?" He said, as if nothing had happened at all. Just old friends catching up, not people who had met literally in a life or death situation.
Ellyn took the seat across from him the second it was offered to her. Maybe she took it a little too fast. She wondered if he was choking because he had hoped not to see her? Ellyn was watching Ophion warily, determining what to say, how to act.
The girl looked down at her food, picking at it with her fork. She wasn't hungry, but even if she had been, she didn't like eating in front of people. "Oh. That's nice. I've been around the library a bit, too, so I guess we must have been there at different times." Now she was worried he had been avoiding her. Before it just seemed immature to think that, but he was acting so casual.
"I've been fine, too; just helping with the cleanup from the tsunami. Keeping up with studies, making sure friends are all right.
"I've been worried about you. I don't know you well, or anything, but we didn't exactly part at the best of times, so I was hoping to see you've been doing good." Ellyn went quiet, having not known exactly where she was going with that. She just wanted to run off, lower her head, and lick her wounds. Wounds she wasn't even positive how she'd gotten.
Despite the insecurity that unsettled her stomach, Ellyn tried to meet Ophion's eyes and smile brightly.
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She seemed nervous and awkward, but not in the way he'd expected. He'd expected... well, he'd kind of expected blushing, and he didn't get that at all. Instead she seemed nervous in a very different way, as if she was afraid he was going to say something bad. His brows furrowed together in obvious focus as he chomped on a carrot stick, watching her poke at her food."We must have, yeah. That said - honestly, I'm fine. Snakes are meant to hibernate, and since no one part of my body was worse than everything else, once I was woken up, that was basically it. They made sure I was totally warm, gave me a heating pack for emergency use, and discharged me." Lots of people were hurt, so anyone like him who wasn't showing signs of bleeding out had essentially been kicked out to free up space.
"Sorry if you were worried about me." He looked genuinely embarrassed as he said it. "Mostly I was just worried about my mother - the house's gone, but she managed to save some stuff before she got out with my sister." He honestly wasn't that concerned about the loss of his home. His apartment in the dorm had survived mostly intact with some water damage, so he hadn't lost all that much. The island would inevitably bounce back. "How have you been?"
Ellyn felt herself relax at this new information. He hadn't been avoided her at all. He had been visiting his mother. All at once she was feeling both very relieved and very silly for jumping to conclusions. Briefly, Ellyn blushed.
"Oh!" she couldn't help how delighted she sounded, Ellyn had to contain her joy before she went on talking, lest he thought she was happy his mother's home was gone. "I'm glad your mom and sister are okay. Sorry about the house. Is your dorm okay?" She was assuming he lived in a dorm, but she figured if he didn't he would correct her. "I remember you being upset about your books."
She leaned forward, holding her head up by her chin with the palm of her hand in the universe sign of interest. "I've been better. Who hasn't recently? My dorm is in ruins, but I didn't have anything close to my heart there. I'm sure my roommate is more broken up by it than I am.
"You know, since ... everything, I've been wondering about you. What you're like. I think we should spend time together. Get to know one and other."
Ellyn knew that came out open to interpretation. If she were less bold, she'd have been blushing much brighter than she was at that moment. She figured she might as well go for it, rather than dancing around this one moment between them. It just made things less awkward.
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She certainly seemed... chipper. A bit too excited about minor details that didn't even excite Ophion himself. He winced at the mention of his dorm, quickly cutting in."The dorm's mostly okay, but a lot of the books in the library are totally ruined. We've been trying to fix the surviving ones." He explained, which was also a clear sign of just what he'd been doing in his time. He didn't particularly feel the need to explain himself to her, but he didn't want any hurt feelings.
Of course, hurt feelings seemed all but inevitable after her announcement that they should get to know each other. He was, at his estimate, probably ten years older than her. She was young. Really young. Really young and had seen him more or less naked.
If he could have vanished right there, he absolutely would have. Unfortunately he was not gifted with such powers, and was instead forced to sit there, turning redder by the second.
"Ah - yeah, I think - I think we could become good friends." Emphasis on the word friends, because there was no way in hell he was becoming more than friends with someone so young.
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Good friends was a start to Ellyn. Okay, yes, she found him physically attractive, but she didn't know him. Not at all. She was just curious to know who this man was, and wait for this survivor -- whatever this feeling was, to wear off. There was a name for it; she just couldn't remember it right then.
"Well, yeah," Ellyn said with a bright smile and the confused tilt of her head. "That's what I meant, silly." And she wasn't sure whether it was, honest to God, what she had meant. She supposed she'd have snatched up whatever scrap he gave her. Be it friends or 'let's see.'
That wasn't to say she hadn't realized the emphasis he put on friends. So, he had no interest in her. That was what it seemed like. Or maybe it was something she was missing. He didn't know her well enough to have an interest or no interest in her, did he?
He probably didn't want her in his dorm. Was that why he had cut in so quickly? The library was a neutral place. "I'd be happy to help you with the books in the library. You seem kind of tense, so maybe it would be better if we just worked together and got more acquainted that way."
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Oh, good. So he'd been imagining it - either that or he hadn't been imagining it, and she'd simply accepted his casual pass. He supposed that either way was acceptable, just as long as it didn't make him feel like some kind of creepy pervert.He relaxed slightly, eager to move the conversation onto a new subject, and deciding that the library would be good enough.
"I worry you might be bored there, but we do need lots of help. Right now it's basically picking through books and trying to sort out which ones are destroyed and which ones are just wet." Wet ones could be dried, even if they'd be a bit weird afterwards. Some were absolutely beyond repair, no matter what was done with them. "Well, that and writing down the titles so we can keep track of which is which."