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“The shrink, I mean the other one, not Sophie, the one who did the one-on-one session, she said that I could appear normal, if I worked hard enough at it,” Parker says, almost dreamily.
“She did?” Eliot asks non-concomitantly, but his stomach drops.
“Yes. She said there are ways to learn how to be like everybody else.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Is it a bad thing if I don't?”
“No, Parker, it's not,” Eliot answers, straightening up in the couch. He doesn't realize how loud he said it until he feels Parker flinch away. “Sorry,” he adds in a whisper. “But it ain't wrong. You're fine and beautiful just like you are.”
Parker makes a doubtful noise, but she leans back against him.
“Nate would like me more if I was normal,” she says after a while.
“What makes you say that?” Eliot asks, but he already knows she's right. Parker is far more attuned to other people than she seems sometimes.
“He wants me to change,” she says quietly.
“He doesn't think about this like we do, Parker,” Eliot says. “He believes you'd be happier if you could fit in better.”
“Would I be?”
“I don't know. But Nate doesn't understand that learning how to pretend isn't the same as becoming normal. That there's a cost to it.”
“But you basically look normal,” Parker says.
“I'm blind, Parker, I don't look normal,” Eliot answers with a hint of annoyance.
“You know what I mean,” she chastises him gently.
“I know. But it's the same, if you want to look at it that way. Remember when I pretended to be sighted for over a day and you never noticed?”
Parker hums softly, letting Eliot hear her nod. “You were really good at it.”
“But I couldn't have held on any longer. I can do it for a while, but it's hard. It means I can't use my cane, or have a guide, so I have to pay attention to every single echo all the time, and I know it can all fall apart in a moment. I might miss a step, or someone wanting to shake my hand, or someone might look a little closer and figure it out.”
“Oh, I think I see what you mean,” Parker says, clapping her hands excitedly. “I can concentrate really hard on people's body language, and keep myself from stimming, and all the other stuff, but it's really tiring and then I'll start making mistakes, right? And it might only take one mistake and people will know I'm different.”
“Exactly,” Eliot says.
“That's why being Alice was so exhausting! Because she's normal!”
“Yes. Alice is fine, but she isn't you. So you have to pretend all the time to be someone you aren't.”
Nate keeps trying to remind Parker that Alice isn't a separate person from her, but Eliot understands why she insists on it. If Alice is Parker's masking persona, Eliot's fine with her keeping the avatar separate. It means she won't loose herself behind the mask, the way he did.
The way he still does.
“How does Sophie do it?” Parker asks after a pause. Her voice is vaguely muffled, and Eliot realizes it's because she's absently sucking her thumb.
“It's easier for her,” Eliot says, “because she doesn't have to change a lot about herself when she plays a character, it's mostly enough to change her accent and her clothes. The rest is a part of her already, she just has to put it forward. And she only plays most IDs for a few minutes at a time. If you want to look neurotypical, you have to do it all the time.”
“Is that what you do?”
In an outdated reflex, Eliot turns his head away, feeling his face heat. He doesn't actually need to break eye contact, which he is pretty sure they wouldn't be making even if he could see, but the sudden emotion is beyond his control.
It's ironic, almost, that he feels ashamed of masking almost as much as he feels ashamed of being autistic. Both feelings are in complete contradiction with what he is trying to tell Parker, and that just makes it worse.
“Eliot?”
Parker's tone is worried, and Eliot realizes he's let too long pass without answering. He tries to form the words in his head, but nothing comes. In the end he just shrugs.
“I do understand, you know,” Parker says, standing to come to sit beside him.
Eliot raises his arm toward her and she comes to snuggle closer. He squeezes her gently, resting his arm on her neck.
“My brother is autistic too,” he says after a while. He didn't intend to share this, but in this moment it feels right. “He was diagnosed as a child like you, and he always had a harder time than me fitting in. That's why I was never assessed, because compared to him I looked more normal.”
“So you didn't know growing up?” Parker asks.
“No. I suspected for a long time, but I didn't really figure it out until a few years ago.”
“Must have been weird.”
“I guess,” Eliot says. “I mean, looking back, it seems kind of obvious, but back then… Anyway, in high school, Jake wanted nothing more than to be like everyone else, and he mostly managed it. By the time we graduated, almost everyone at school had forgotten that he used to be a really weird kid. Then he went to college, and I guess there must have been too much change, too much pressure. He crashed. Burned-out. He started self-harming, and he dropped out. Could barely leave the house for six months. That's the price of masking all the time.”
“Is he okay now?” Parker asks slowly, digesting his words.
“I think so. I haven't seen him in a long time.”
“But he's your brother,” Parker says, and Eliot hears something in her voice that tells him there's a story there. Or maybe he's just projecting.
He can't quite keep the image of Jake, his arms covered in cuts, curled up in his dorm room, rocking, out of his mind's eye.
“Family ain't ever easy,” he says, and it feels like running away.
“Do you want to keep taking the pills?” Eliot asks hours later. Parker is still sitting on the couch beside him, half leaning into his side. She's been fiddling with the beads on his bracelet, still on his wrist, and she's becoming more and more restless.
“No,” she says. “It was nice to relax for a bit, but I need to be on point.”
“You're allowed to keep taking them, Parker. If they make you happier.”
She shakes her head, letting him feel it by leaning into his shoulder. “I feel happier, but I don't feel like me. That's not right.”
“I can understand that. But remember it's your choice. It's not about what you can or cannot do for the crew or what the others want you to do, okay?”
“I know. I want to be happy, but I just can't think right. I can't afford it. I can't afford to be slower.”
“Okay,” Eliot says. “You understand going off the pills cold turkey will be hard?”
“I'll be fine,” Parker says. “I've done this before. They made me take all kinds of treatments when I was a kid, but I always stopped after a few weeks when my head got really fuzzy. Usually that was when I ran away.”
Eliot groans to himself, a vivid memory of his brother staring at the wall, almost unresponsive because of the drugs, coming to his mind. “You shouldn't have had to go through that,” he almost says, but it won't mean anything to Parker. It's what he would have said to anyone else, because he's heard it so much growing up. I'm sorry your mom passed. You shouldn't have have to go through that. I heard about your son's...issues. I'm sorry you have to go through that. That last one barely got Jake to react through the fog his meds put in his head, but Eliot wanted to murder someone. How could anyone be sorry his brother exists?
He doesn't doubt Parker has heard the same thing, over and over.
“You'll stay with me?” Parker asks.
“Yeah, I will,” Eliot says. Of course he will.
She lets him put his arm around her and squeeze tight. And she’s right. It’s hard, but she’s fine. She’s safe in Eliot’s arms, and she doesn’t have to pretend. They’re okay.
They’re okay.