cinderellaverse?? In my 2024??
it’s more likely than you think!
(for context: the rotten ot4 are wildly codependent, Ben is possibly seducing them all via unreciprocated acts of kindness, and this takes place directly after the iconic Good Boy scene, only with some AU changes that aren’t ready to post yet).
(why am i posting this if no other context is finished yet??? Because I’m needy and crave validation. Next question, please).
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“Ugh,” Mal agrees. She looks mostly asleep still, which is understandable. “Weird. Did you eat yet?”
Carlos lifts the napkin-wrapped bundle in his hands. “I brought food. To share. If you want.”
This, predictably, gets Mal up. They’re far enough away from the isle that Carlos can almost believe that their parents aren’t lurking behind every dark corner of the castle, but not so far that they’ll turn down fresh food, even at stupid early hours.
“Berries?”
“Yeah. Brought berries for you. And muffins.”
“Evie wants chocolate,” Mal says immediately, stretching out both hands for the napkin-wrapped bundle. “And weird that Ben made you meet someone new. I thought we’d already been subjected to every princess-type in the school by now.”
“Not a person. He made me meet a— a dog.”
Mal stops with the muffins in her hands still outstretched. “Oh,” she says carefully, which is nice of her. Their Auradon education must be kicking in, or some shit. “And you’re not halfway home?”
“I was. But Ben sort of—put the dog away and tracked me down? He was cool about it. We went over afterwards to check out the stables, cause he thought maybe it was like, just animals I don’t like, and they’ve got cats and stuff there. And the dog was on a leash, and he’s actually super tiny and not murderous.” Carlos shrugs, telegraphing the motion as much as he can. Which isn’t much. He’s supposed to be working on the whole expressing emotions thing. Even though it’s so much easier to shut down entirely whenever he feels an emotion. “So yeah. Still alive, still here! And Ben’s being weird.”
“Weird how?”
“Just weird. He was being all nice and stuff. D’you think he’s been bribed by Fairy Godmother to get info on us?”
“Might be,” Mal agrees, tearing into her muffin. She’s unwrapped the whole bundle, and laid them out in an order that’s got to make sense in her head. (it shouldn’t make sense. They can’t afford to be predictable. Predictable is how you get your lunch stolen, or poisoned, or eaten by pirates who think it’s funny to take a perfectly rotten sandwich and swap it out for seaweed slime). “You should eat though. You didn’t tell him anything, right?”
Carlos pulls a scrap off the cinnamon sugar muffin. It’s the one Mal’s put in his assigned spot, which is directly across from her own, with Evie’s double chocolate on the left and Jay’s lemon poppyseed on the right. He’s not really hungry, but it’s still too much to turn down food, so he rolls it between his fingers until half of the sugar falls off into the napkin, and the rest of it is compressed into the smallest possible ball of muffin flesh. He can eat a little piece of it, and then Mal will stop asking, and he can eat for real later. Once he’s alone.
He pops the ball of muffin into his mouth. “No. Not really.”
Mal shoves another mouthful of muffin into her mouth. She picked the blueberry one, and it turns the whole mess of it vividly purple as she chews. “Cool. He’s probably just being a royal brat then, trying to get some new intel for the gossip mill. But hey, it’s cool that he showed you the stables. Maybe next time we need to get to town you can steal us a horse, yeah?”
Carlos snorts. He’s seen a horse now, and there’s no way they can get away with stealing something that big and ornery. Cars might be bigger, but they don’t bite and they don’t poop and they don’t have teeth the size of his fingers and a desire to bite through anything that looks even remotely like a carrot. “Yeah, no. Horses are fucking giant.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Mal says casually. She throws one of her loose berries up so she can catch it in her teeth. Sometimes, when it’s just the four of them, Mal forgets to act human and does things like this. Things where she snatches treats out of the air with her teeth, when her neck bends in ways that a human’s shouldn’t, like she’s forgotten that she only has seven bones in her neck and not seventeen like a standard dragon. “Nobody ever wakes me up at the crack of dawn to show me cool shit.”
Carlos wants to laugh and make this whole thing normal, but he’s fucking exhausted and the cinnamon sugar from the muffin is sticky on his fingers. He’s been trying to pull it apart carefully so that his whole hands don’t get covered in the crumbly topping, but that’s been working about as well as their escape plan so far, which is to say not at fucking all. “Yeah, yeah. He also made us run laps first, don’t be jealous.”
Mal snaps her teeth. “I’ll be whatever I want. He didn’t do anything else?“
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, mom. He just wanted to talk a bunch about how we’re settling in. And how we’re doing emotionally.”
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Something I’ve noticed, is people connect autism to a stereotype that autistic people struggle with feelings.
It seems to be true for many autistic people, I wonder occasionally if I struggle less because of the way the trauma panned out in my life.
But what I realized I struggle with, is not people misunderstanding my feelings. Or my facial expressions. It’s people listening to mh tone of voice and not my words. And my tone is what I fuck up all the time-fuck up in comparison to the standard set by people who don’t even know what they want because you can never get it right with them.
For example. I say “wow that sucks” with an incredible amount of empath/sympathy(I forgot which one it was). But apparently my tone was off, so no matter how I felt on the inside, I was insulting this person I was being incredibly attentive to.
They listen to my tone and not my words.
There’s more evidence but I don’t want this to be some big vent. It’s just an observation. But an incredibly important one.
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idk wether this is an autism thing, or maybe its just me
but whenever i talk for extended periods of time, or im hyperverbal on a certain day, i feel quite guilty about talking, the guilt makes me want to never talk again, idek whyy i feel guilt after talking lots, i just do.
but every time, wwithout fail, it makes me want to never talk again, the compel of being silent for the rest of my life is so strong.
like im supposed to be the quiet, reserved, socially awkward one, so when i chatter and talk with different people i feel bad about not fitting those adjectives all of the time :(
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ok im kinda butting in without even reading what you guys were talking about sjfntk sorry but you mentioned something about not understanding tone and tone is hard so I wanted to talk a bit ! I try to use indicators (like elaborating my intentions in brackets) so it's easier to people to clearly understand me :) but I also don't have words for some tones becausee idk maybe my vocabulary isn't good enough, currently I'm trying to think of an alternative to how I used to use /lh (aka. light hearted), it's kinda like when you're not completely serious but you're saying true things and also in a bit of a joking manner? Hard concept for me to explain lol
i feel like the word "friendly" would partially describe that tone. if not, "light-hearted" is still a good tone indicator for the message. i don't think tone needs to be described perfectly, as the indicators are often partially used as reassurance rather than a full description. sometimes i put /lh just for the person to know i'm not being agressive or attacking them: it's not me exactly conveying my tone, but eliminating some unpleasant possibilities.
anyways, on the topic of tone indicators: i do appreciate people using them for me. it's not exactly required, but ... yeah, if you want to avoid a misunderstanding and the possibility of me embarrassing myself, then put one of them bad boys at the end of an ask
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