Len has found his mate, but there's an unexpected obstacle.
He's recessive.
Len thought that he would always love Ahote, and all he had to do was grow up and claim him.
Before he could come of age and confess his feelings to the man he loved, a Sibe...
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ADYEN
I had never thought about what having a proper older sibling would be like. Sure, when I had been passed around from family to family, a lot of my foster parents had older children of their own, or other foster kids a few years older than me, but I had been on my own mostly. A lot of them also didn't seem to have any want for a family-like dynamic with someone they weren't related to.
Now I knew my brother and all those things I had told myself I didn't need—all those sibling friendship scenes on T.V. I had rolled my eyes at—I realized that I had a deep-seated want for them that had only showed itself when Naylan and I started talking a lot.
He was only a year and some change older than me, but I felt like I was talking to someone much older when he gave me advice and listened to my rambling about school and my relationship with Len.
He had been the one to encourage me not to think about what my track mates would think if I was a little more open about being gay. I had told Naylan that a lot of their jokes made me uncomfortable, and he suggested that nothing would change until I stood up to that, so I did. I took a stance, told them blankly that I was seeing Len, and since then I've been conscious about being more open about that fact in public. If people asked, I stammered but managed to admit that yes, I was with him and I was gay.
I was gay.
There was something freeing about taking agency and openly stating a fact that I kept to myself. Being a foster kid had made me hide things instinctively. I wasn't sure which adults would be supportive and which ones wouldn't be, and there's a memory of one of my foster siblings from years back simply saying "ew" when I mentioned that a boy on television was sort of cute.
My thoughts drifted back to Len. There was so much I wanted to tell him, but I had to be a bit careful about that. It was a good thing that Naylan and his pack had settled in an abandoned building complex close to a factory site. They were bordering territories that weren't there own but remained distant enough to not be a problem.
My stomach knotted a bit. I knew a part of me was just making excuses not to tell him yet because I was a bit worried that he would panic or get sad about me keeping this from him for so long. He was supposed to be teaching me stuff, but I've carried those burdens to Naylan since there was less of an emotional factor to it.
