MEET PHOENIX AYALA
Phoenix Ayala had been through a lot. They never liked to actually admit it, especially since, in their mind, it wasn’t half as much as a lot of other people had, but it was an objective truth. After being diagnosed with both social and general anxiety at a young age, having a terrible fallout with their mother after they’d come out as non-binary in their early twenties, and going through relationships with what they called their Unholy Trifecta of Exes - The Serial Cheater, the Emotional Abuser, and the Non-Binary Denier - they’d wound up where they were now, with a million little nervous ticks, not a friend to speak of (not that they’d ever really had those anyway), and self-esteem that could have touched the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Their only comfort was in clothing design and their work as a tailor; spending hours at their sewing machine, quietly singing along to whatever music they had on in the background and making scraps of fabric into beautiful designs, was one of the only things that ever truly made their constantly-worrying mind go quiet. So they very much enjoy their job at a small tailor shop, spending most of their time in the back room working on designs and trying to avoid actually interacting with the customers - until they do a fitting for an energetic, bespectacled man named Eli, who offers them a side gig designing costumes for the music videos his acapella group makes.
After taking the job and meeting Eli’s other friends, a singing group who calls themselves VoicePlay, Pheonix suddenly finds themselves with a whole group of friends, people who actually want to be around them and spend time with them, people who seem to like them just as anxious and awkward as they are. But after everything that’s happened to them, they’ve been left incredibly wary of fully letting people in and bothering them with who they really are, no matter how nice the guys are being to them.
Phoenix genuinely doesn’t believe they deserve friends, or to be cared about - and with all the ways they’ve been hurt before, that isn’t exactly a surprise. But there’s no one better for bringing harmony into their life than a group of singers, and if these guys have anything to say about it, Phoenix is going to realize just how loved they are… and possibly even find some non-platonic love with a certain bass singer as well.
(Not that Geoff would ever make a move on Phoenix himself - he doesn’t want to make them uncomfortable at all. But as it turns out, Eli Jacobsen and Layne Stein are a matchmaking duo not to be messed with, especially when it comes to what Eli calls “a pair of pining idiots”.)
Tagging @auxiliarydetective, @lovings4turn, @hiya-itsamber, and @acaplaya-musings!