Private Little Older Brother

One evening, when he was in his dorm, Elijah would hear knocking on the door to his dorm. When he opened the door, he would be greeted by a fellow catboy. A teenager, from the look of things, only a few inches shorter.

Ganymede had decided to dress more casually than he typically did for these encounters. Rather than a suit, he wore a denim jacket and a striped shirt - a style he'd read was fashionable in the modern day. Twice he nearly turned around and headed home to change clothes before approaching Elijah; but no, that would be a pain, and he was surely being ridiculous. His outfit was fine. He looked like an ordinary teenage boy, for the most part - perhaps even one with some amount of style.

Now Ganymede was standing outside of Elijah's dorm room, and the door was opening for him. "Good evening! I'm Ganymede. And you must be Elijah. I'd heard that you came to the island not too long ago, and I wanted to introduce myself."

"I'd be happy to," Ganymede said with a smile. He was going to save the answer to that first question until the door was closed behind them - matters related to their species were probably best discussed in private.

It was remarkably relaxing in here. Between the warmth and the dim lighting, that pile of pillows was looking pretty enticing.

"The scouts told me you came here," Ganymede said. Then he switched to speaking an archaic dialect of Japanese: "I asked them to tell me when other NEK0 arrive. I was actually in the first group that they rescued, and... though you might not believe it from looking at me, I'm actually one of the oldest... So, it's nice to finally meet you, younger brother."

Ganymede liked to see the other NEK0 as his brothers and sisters - even the ones who objected to that label.

Ganymede chuckled. "No, I'm not [the keeper of the NEK0]," he said, repeating that comment in the same archaic dialect, "But I do see them - and you - as being like family to me. Nobody asked me to do this - I simply decided, one day, that I wanted to help people that might be struggling the way I was, when I came here."

Since he was being invited to sit on the pillow pile, he supposed he would do so. He took a moment to slip his shoes off first, however. it was only the polite thing to do.

"I've been on the island since January, 2019. So, I'm approaching two years," he said. "Right now I'm in tenth grade. After remedial, they put me in 8th grade so that I could try to socialize with people who looked as old as I did, at the time. Which... didn't work out quite as well as we all would have liked." he shrugged. "My natural form makes me look like an eleven-year-old."

Currently, he looked only a couple years younger than Elijah. They both knew appearances could be deceiving.

A job?

It bothered Ganymede sometimes - how he was stuck taking classes at a student, grasping for the childhood his life had denied him. Sometimes he felt like he was still learning how to be a person. All the while many of his younger cousins were already starting careers.

"Are you sure it's a good idea to go rushing into the work world as soon as you can? I'm not saying it's not, it's just that... there's a lot of social skills that most others starting their jobs will have and that our lives before coming here don't often afford us. You don't have to find a job if you don't want to."

Ganymede sounded worried. Especially since Elijah was just casually invading his personal space like this. He didn't mind the contact, and he'd met other cuddly NEK0, but it didn't give him confidence that Elijah had adjusted to this society.

Ganymede saw a lot of himself in what Elijah was saying. Perhaps he was reading too much into it.

"Impressive work, navigating around technology like that. It took me a lot longer, though I'll admit much of that came from my initial reluctance to invest time into gadgets like that."

He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. He had resolved not to just focus on less unpleasant topics and move on as he would usually do. After all, the whole point in him doing this was to share his meager wisdom with younger NEK0, and Elijah here seemed in need of that.

"I also... outlived my original owner, actually. And despite all the ways that man had mistreated and abused me, the life he gave me was all that I knew. I loved him."

"I never had the opportunity to properly mourn his passing at the trading post. There was always some task or indignity for me to endure that monopolized my emotional energy, and so my despair was left to fester unchecked. The distractions never really... helped me to heal. They just temporarily numbed the pain.

"It was only by confronting my memories of him that I was really able to start healing. Not only from the wounds his death had left on me, but also the ones he'd inflicted in life."

He watched Elijah for his reaction. It would be too easy - and unethical - for him to simply tell Elijah not to flee from his grief by working.