~"Chains": Brady Fic-bit~
"The door is standing open
But I'm too tired to be afraid.
My whole life's in this moment
But I've been fighting all the way.."
Jeriah was the baby of the Uzuki family and had been for years treated as such. There was perhaps no one as smart as him and in fact during a childhood IQ test, he had scored well above that of which was normal. Gifted, that was what Jeriah was and yet he did not do much with it, but there was also a reason for that, for to utilize it he'd have to go out among people and Jeriah's greatest fear was of people. Not of family, of course not, Mathias, Mathias' wife, his children.. they were all people he could deal with and even though he did not speak much to them, he could sit comfortably in a room alone with them. The rest of the human race was a different story and quite honestly he thought that they were best avoided. There was many different things and situations that led to this conclusion and having been born with shyness, it fastly grew acute.
The first was the expectations. It had always been difficult to grow up in the shadow of someone like his brother. A being of infiniate confidence and potential, surely Jeriah realized that Mathias could walk outside, speak to people, interact with them without freezing up and letting the worries infiltrate him. Logically Jeriah saw Mathias as someone who could do anything with effortless grace, while it took Jeriah all of his courage and then some to do what Mathias did so easily. Go up to the counter to talk with a customer sales representative, that was easier said then done and he never could get the results he wanted, his words making him sound like an utter dork and he realized that he'd be better served to shut up.
It was his secret shame that he couldn't even get through a normal high school before he had to switch to home schooling, too many people for him to have to deal with, girls giggling him about his much older brother, guys that looked down on him because he wasn't athletic like him.. he had really no friends except for perhaps the stray cat on campus, befriending by coaxing it out from it's hiding space with pieces of his lunch.
As much as he disliked people, he made up by befriending animals. And in fact in his apartment in New York, he had two cats, a dog, a parakeet and some goldfish, the only companionship he needed, and they were lavished with all of his love and adoration, and likewise was given the same adoration. The cats and dog had been rescued by him, all of them having either been neglected or abandoned, he had taken them in and treated them with his own brand of love and devotion, tending their wounds and coaxing them out of their shells until they would of done anything for the master that took them in. And he did share an affinity with them, certainly he was the only human that they considered decent in any way, their wounds from society too deep for them to be completely erased.
What Jeriah did was write. It was an occupation that kept him at home for the most part. There weren't very many options for him when he couldn't bear to deal too much with society, he had tried something along the lines as a night maintenance worker at the Museum of Natural History, however the supervisor always seemed to be hovering around him, there was another stream of odd jobs before finally he decided to write. He had no problem with that, his imagination and mind was kind to him with writing for there was a whole world in his mind, peopled of his own creations, there was safety there where he could predict reactions and dialouge. Not to mention that he had a flair for the written word so it was easy for him to write, it came almost effortlessly, and in a matter of a month he had his first book which he sent to a publisher and found that it was accepted. Arrangements were made and he found himself with a best seller on his hands for his books seemed to sell like wildfire. Because of that first book, he found that it was easy to write more, it also gave him another barrier of safety which he wrapped around him like a cloak. He wrote under a nom de plume for the most part because he didn't want to hassle his brother with people who would recognize the last name of Uzuki and then pester for autographs, so instead he wrote under the name Jeriah Leontes.
Because of the modern world, it was easy to pay most of his bills online, to avoid going out as much as possible, and for the things he had to do, well he did it quickly and with managing to talk to as few people as was utterly necessary. For human interaction, his brother always sent him dinner invitations at least a few times a month, and Mat and his kids were what Jeriah could deal with, and while the kid's fighting could make him wince a little bit, at least he was somewhere that he was comfortable.
"But the life cannot let go,
It's a chain cuts across my soul
Anchoring in this world."