#living in this flat with no support and being essentially tortured by noise has destroyed me

[kryptonian-puppy]

*

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Yeah no pretty much every autistic kid has a jo. My mother was a jo. My father was a jo. It was easier cuz my sister and I are both autistic, so I got to protect her, but it also made me really good at masking and have a lot of internalized ableism. I’m always kind of jealous of Chris, because he was able to go back to being happily autistic once he got to the safe house, because he knew how to before, with Ronnie. So many autistic people don’t get that :(

CW: This got long. Discussion of ableism and trauma for a neurodivergent person in here, also discussed parental death

Honestly, with the trauma and torture that Chris goes through, I really wanted Tristan to have come from a family that gave him a solid foundation of acceptance. Ronnie pretty much writes herself, I wont lie - I have made very few choices for her ahead of time. 

The story in the first piece I did from her POV - about toddler Tristan ‘playing’ with pieces of dust floating in the air and Ronnie realizing that the usual methods of discipline simply wouldn’t apply to him - is sort of a true story about my partner and his mother (my partner has ADHD, for the record, and is not autistic). I wanted to take the bones of that story and show a parent who realizes “everything the books say about children did not prepare me for this” and show that parent make a decision then and there to figure this out, come hell or high water, without hurting their child in the process.

Chris’s eventual fear of medication comes entirely from WRU/Oliver, and not a holdover from childhood - Ronnie was very very careful about his medication and therapies working together, rather than relying on one over the other - but Chris’s fear also pulls from my partner, who was overmedicated as a child and as a result struggled to feel able to start taking meds as an adult (once he did, working with a doctor who acknowledged his fears and was willing to start from the lowest possible effective dose and work up from there to perfect it, SO MUCH changed about how he was able to filter out the ‘noise’ of the world around him). 

I knew that CHris would have been subjected to a unique form of hell for him - what WRU does is hell anyway, but for someone like Tristan, who depends heavily on constant stimulation, routine/schedule, etc, it seems almost specifically designed to destroy him.

The more I wrote Chris, the more I knew I wanted his background to be one of support and care - one of the sort of side facts on Ronnie is that she goes back to work when Tristan is school-aged essentially just to help pay for his gymnastics and get health insurance to cover his therapy appointments, because who Tristan is with a caring, involved therapist who understands that autism is a function of how his brain is built and not a bug that needs removed, and with an outlet to help him get his energy out while also emphasizing structure and schedule without rote memorization or flat routine, is a totally different boy than he would have been otherwise.

Chris functions as well as he does largely because the people around him don’t push at him in ways that set off trauma responses or negative stimuli response. But, like with the little piece where Ronnie has to carry her weeping, screaming child out of Target, she was really worried for a while that he would retreat into himself and not come back out. 

In my research I did before I felt comfortable naming Chris’s neurological makeup for what it was, one thing I came across over and over and over again were autistic adults talking about how they functioned vs. reading up on these historical situations and the burgeoning Autism Speaks group when it first started and how starkly different the goals of the two groups were.

So I wanted to write Ronnie as someone who would both reflect and NOT reflect the voices of those parents - and I wanted to write Jo as someone who would reflect all the worst possible ways to react not only to a teenager who lost his parents, but also a neurodivergent child dealing with an immense amount of stress. She removes his routine, the way he expects things. The loss of his parents removes his ‘safe’ environment and thrusts him instead into a small windowless room where nothing is HIS except for one rubbermaid plastic bin and his bed. Nothing is right, nothing is the same, she doesn’t enroll him into a new school, she cuts off his access to physical outlets, she takes him off his medications and stops him going to therapy.

If Tristan seems more out of control in those drabbles with Jo, it’s because he is already undergoing trauma, with no way out. So his ‘signs’ of being autistic may seem far more obvious, because he is in distress. His head-banging and hitting himself are symptoms of his stress and trauma, even if Jo only sees them as annoying things he does.

Jo ALMOST touches the point when she thinks about how Ronnie never talked about him hitting himself or hitting his head on things. It’s not because Tristan never did that, but because Ronnie had largely figured out how to set up his life in a way that minimized or mitigated the stressors that made him resort to those attempts to self-soothe. When Jo thinks about how Ronnie talked about his gymnastics medals, she is SO CLOSE to the simple point of how to pull Tristan out of himself.

But ignores it.

Nat also has a lot of base understanding of human development and brain development after twenty years helping incredibly traumatized rescues try to rebuild their lives, which is part of why she knows what Chris is doing when he first shows up. She’s not perfect, but she is able to encourage Jake to allow Chris to self-soothe in non-harmful ways, redirecting him from self-injury to something that is soothing to his mind without causing any harm to his body.

Ben, once Chris is in college, has an autistic little brother and recognizes almost immediately what Chris’s meltdown is, and so he just throws everything that works at his brother at Chris, calming him down from hitting his head on the wall and getting him together enough to come back.

Laken, once they know Chris fairly well, is good at recognizing when his words are just... gone, for a while, and they talk to him knowing he is listening but without expecting him to answer. 

Jake just lets Chris lead the way. He has no idea what he’s doing, on any level, when Chris shows up terrified of everyone, but he just lets CHris show him who he is and tries to go with that. Jake and Nat are aware of Chris’s autism, or suspect it, long before it’s confirmed and he starts receiving treatment again.

You’ll see a little of that in an upcoming Whumptober drabble when Chris gets sick.