May 14th, 1891 — Padmore Park

Bellamy had been here for three hours already. There was a lot to do before he was ready to capture one moment. He had to get his canvas and paints set up, sketch in the background, mix colors, and get the first layer down. He would have come even earlier, just to ensure everything was perfectly ready when the moment arrived, but he worried that any earlier in the day the light would have been too different and it would have meant all the colors he put down on the background were all wrong. Adjusting shades and shadows he could manage on the fly, but if he had the entirely wrong pigment down for the grass underfoot or the beginnings of the sky, he might as well just start over.

He'd gotten about as far as he wanted to get before the subject of the painting arrived, and he was now waiting near his easel, arms crossed over his chest in mild impatience. Bell kept glancing at the sun in the sky, wondering if it was in the right spot or whether this entire outing was going to be pointless.

The latter, apparently; by the time Alistair Darrow had appeared, a cloud had moved into the way and shrouded this whole section of the park in shade. "Oh, honestly," he complained bitterly, as though the weather had done this particularly to spite him. Then he turned his attention to Alistair, who was still a ways in the distance. Cupping his hands on either side of his mouth, he called, "Don't muss your hair this time!"

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Alistair Darrow

  

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Alistair had been sorely tempted to just floo home rather than take his usual walk. Or stay at work a little longer. But then he would find himself wondering if the man would be there, waiting. He had seemed to imply that he would be. Alistair had no idea what he wanted but knew it had something to do with his hair and the way it had looked in some particular moment in time. It had made him very conscious of his movements ever since.

And so he ended up showing up. He could see the man in the distance with what looked to be an easel. Oh. It made some sense now. He still thought the man was weird but figured now it was just one of those eccentricities artists seemed to have. Some of his more artistic friends also tended towards oddity though he didn't think any went accosting strangers in the park like this man had.

Alistairs fingers twitched to do what he had just been bid not to do. His skin flushed when people turned to look at him as he stopped in what he thought was roughly the same spot he had been in a couple of days ago.

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Well, that was alright, Bellamy supposed. It was hard to tell if the fellow was actually in the right spot or not when the cloud was still covering up the sun, but they'd know soon enough, he supposed. In the meantime, at least he hadn't run his hand through his hair again and pushed it all back. Though it did look different than it had the last time he'd been here, didn't it? Maybe it was Bellamy's imagination, or a faulty memory (sometimes he did wonder, particularly after his father had started going a little odd, whether he would notice if he started slipping, mentally, or whether it would just happen and he'd still think everything was going just as it should). Maybe it was just that curls didn't fall the same way twice; this fellow's hair might be as unique as a snowflake at any given moment.

Well, time would tell. Bellamy wouldn't really know for certain until the sunlight hit it again.

"Alright, just wait there," he instructed, with an impatient glance towards the clouds above.

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Why was he doing this? Why was he even here? He should have just avoided this path instead of having a rare show of stubborn pride. It would not have been too bad to just take an alternate route home. He didn't enjoy attention so he definitely was not enjoying the idea of being painted. "Will this take very long?" It wasn't so much that he had places to go, people to see but more that he did not want to be here.

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Bellamy rolled his eyes at the question. He presumed that Mr. Darrow knew what it was he was waiting on, so he had to know that Bellamy had no way of answering it. He wasn't a weather diviner (and in his brief interactions with the few he'd met in his travels, he didn't put much stock in their craft, anyway; the weather was always so changeable). How should he know how long it would take for the clouds to meander along on their way?

"If you're in a hurry I'll offer a sacrifice to Freyr to speed things along," he said dryly, obviously without any intention to follow through on that remark. He didn't really imagine that Darrow would be in a hurry, though. He said he took this route when he walked home from work, so he had nowhere pressing to be — and whatever plans he might have made for his evening had to be secondary to this. The pursuit of beauty outranked any of the menial tasks this fellow might get up to on his own while sitting at home, Bellamy had decided even without knowing anything at all of the man's life. Not that knowing more would have swayed his opinion — to Bellamy nothing was more important than art.

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A sacrifice to who? Alistair had nothing to say to that but presumed it was some sort of deity that he had yet to read about. This was getting increasingly awkward. His skin flushed when he realized people were noticing that he had just been standing one spot for a few minutes now. It took every ounce of self-control to not start tugging at the ends of his curls.

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Bellamy was too preoccupied with his own growing impatience to pay much attention to the other man's mood, so he scarcely noticed how restless Darrow was becoming. He was mostly looking at the sky, watching the cloud make slow progress across where the sun had been. There were dozens of flat, stringy clouds today, so it was unlikely that they'd have much of a stretch of sunlight even when this particular cloud did move on. He'd have to paint quickly to get the right effect... or maybe he could prioritize mixing the perfect shade while the sun was shining, and then do some broad strokes when it clouded over again once he'd already gotten the colors right.

The cloud finally moved out of the way, and Bell turned his attention to Alistair Darrow. "Move forward a bit," he instructed. "One or two steps — right — and then just a little to the left," he said as he started blending the right shade of gold on his palette. "Why are your cheeks so red?" he asked, mildly irritated, as he continued to blend colors. The flushed skin wasn't the right look for this portrait at all.

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Alistair did as instructed though he did not get why he needed to be in such a specific spot. He wanted badly to rub his cheeks to try and maybe chase his blush away but he was afraid he might get yelled at. "People are staring," he said because wouldn't anyone be alarmed by that? Then again, Alistair had already concluded that this man was a little weird. He probably wouldn't care and likely wouldn't even understand why Alistair cared.

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Of course people were staring. People ought to be staring, with the sun in his hair looking like that. Bellamy had learned, however, that most people reacted poorly when he gushed over their appearance right to their face, so he didn't say that. He didn't know why people were so self-conscious about being called out for their beautiful moments, but they were, and he didn't want to scare off the subject of his painting before he'd even put brush to canvas.

"Well, let them," he said instead, with a shrug. He had the color right on his palette now, and he gave one worried glance up to the cloudy sky as he moved to start painting the base layer of the man's hair on the canvas. "I'll try to be quick," he said, though really this had nothing to do with Alistair Darrow's comfort level or the people around them who were staring and everything to do with the fickle weather. Bell would never have rushed his art for another person, but he had to work with what he'd been given, and he wasn't sure how long the sunshine would last.

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Ugh, he didn't want to let them. He liked his anonymity and definitely did not like people noticing that he existed. Hopefully after this, the man would be satisfied and leave him alone. "All right," he said when the man said he would try to be quick. He knew art couldn't be rushed but he very much wanted to disappear.

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Bellamy focused on the painting, and for the next ten minutes or so he didn't say anything else. If Alistair Darrow was growing increasingly uncomfortable, Bellamy didn't really notice — he was annoyed every time the man moved even the slightest amount, but he wasn't paying enough attention to his expression to see whether he was shifting on purpose or if it was just the natural way people tended to move when they stood still for too long. After some amount of time passed, the sun moved behind a cloud again and the glint from Darrow's hair disappeared.

"It's going pretty well," Bell informed the man as though he would be encouraged by this news. "I'll try to get your face sketched in until the cloud moves. Look at me," he instructed, setting one paintbrush down and picking up a small nub of a pencil from the edge of his canvas. "Right in my eyes, alright?"

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Alistair was growing restless and increasingly uncomfortable. He tried his best to stay still but he was not born to be a mannequin. He kept shifting slightly to only stiffen when he realized he had done so. The other man kind of terrified him a little. He was so intense about this whole thing.

"Okay" he hoped that meant that they would be done soon. He looked towards the man but could not bring himself to meet his eyes. "Do I have to look right into your eyes?" The very idea made him want to hurl.

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Bellamy could be a very intense person when it came to his art, so making eye contact with a stranger didn't faze him. Darrow's question was almost a little confusing. Hadn't he just said that? Had Darrow not heard him, or was he being purposefully obtuse?

"Yes," he said with a nod, already starting to sketch in some of the features on the canvas. "How am I supposed to get the color of your eyes right if I can't see your eyes, hm?"

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Alistair hated every bit of this. From now on, he was going to take a different path home. Would it be too rude to just turn around and run away if he saw the man walking about in the same places as himself? Probably. He didn't think he could bring himself to do that.

He forced himself to look into the mans eyes and immediately wished he hadn't. It felt so weird. And he was finding himself noticing a little too much the color and sparkle of the other mans eyes. A beautiful dark brown that made him think of chocolate. Alistairs moment of gay panic at least meant that he was now very still.

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   Bellamy Echelon

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Bellamy fixed his eyes intently on the other man's for a moment, trying to memorize the color. The shade of brown in his own eyes might have fluctuated just a bit as he did; that happened not-infrequently when he was focusing hard on trying to match a color with his palette, without his even realizing it. He blended a bit of the color and held his brush up between them, gaze sliding from his paint to Alistair Darrow's eyes until he was satisfied that they matched, at which point he gave a curt nod.

There was something weird about the atmosphere, Bell noticed, though it had taken a second for him to become aware of it. He didn't know what it was. The expression on Darrow's face hadn't changed, at least not in any significant way, so he wasn't sure what had tipped him off that something was different, but it definitely was.

"Are you alright?" he asked with a slight frown. Had Alistair Darrow stopped breathing for a second? Of course not — that would have been silly, and there wasn't any outward indication that it had happened. Why was that the impression that Bellamy had, then?

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Alistair found it so unsettling to have someone looking at his eyes so intently. Eye contact for him was a very intimate thing so he felt like he would be rather glad if the end of the world came about. Any moment now, please. Was it just his imagination or had the color of the mans eyes changed just the slightest bit? He stared a bit harder, trying to puzzle it out.

He blinked in surprise when the man asked if he was all right. "Erm.. I'm fine. Are you done?" He hoped so because he wanted to get out of here.

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