Prucan OneShots (Requests are open)

Aspergers

Female Canada has Aspergers and is scared to tell Gilbert.

Matilda has known for a long time that she has had Aspergers. It's something that she hates about herself but she understands that she can't change it (she's tried trust me on that). She can hide it and copy other social skills but it's so hard for her. Everyday not being herself even if it's a little weird. She has so many masks that sometimes she would forget who her true personality was.

Until she met Gilbert.

Let's pause for a moment. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about. Aspergers is part of the Autism spectrum, it's a development disorder that effects the way someone can socially act around others.

It's different for girls and guys. Girls aren't as noticed as guys. Matilda can remember her darker skinned mother glarring at people when they said:
"Your daughter doesn't look autistic."
Or
"She looks normal to me. Are you sure she's Autistic?"

Oh and her personal favorite:
"Does that mean your other daughter (Matoldas twin) has Aspergers too?"

That would almost get people a slap on the face.

Anyway, the young woman had been able to trip and stumble through life. Somehow getting through college to become a zoo veternarian and meet her current partner Gilbert.

Matilda and him were slow friends thanks to her supervisor (Francis) and he would often hang out with them but soon it was just the two of them.
Soon she noticed that for some interesting reason, she was able to remove the mask slightly showing a bit more of herself to hom and to him it seemed he didn't mind. He thought it was cute.

He didn't know about what she had. She didn't know when or how to tell him. How does one do that? Tell someone that their lover is different, more different than they already knew.

Matilda had thought about every horrible way Gilbert could react and every good way. She had gone over what to say and how to say it over and over.
Even practiced with her favorite patient, the Artic polar bear Kuma.

Matildas' special interest was polar bears. A special interest is something someone in the spectrum is in a way obsessed with. She knew more than polar bears obviously but they had always sparked her in a way the other Artic animals couldn't.

Well anyway, Matilda had never anticipated that this would happen when she told Gilbert what Aspergers was and that she had it.

It was late maybe 11:30.
Matilda sat on the couch clutching her fake bears paw as he sat on the floor. Her lover across from her.
His elbows rested on his jeans and his hands were laced together as he processed the information.

To him it made since (after Matilda explained the majority of it to him).
It explained why she had to sit way to high to even see the band in concerts, or why she didn't wear perfume, why she didn't like to go out much (even for an antisocial person).

"Why did you hide this from me?" Gilbert asked.

"I-I thought you wouldn't want me." Matilda said not looking up from her lap.

"You lied to me."

"I'm sorry." Matilda whispered "You can go home. I'll understand."

"Have people left before?"

She nods tears burning in her violet, tired, eyes.

Gilbert moves forward and clutches Matildas cheeks in his hands.
"I love you." He says
"Can you look at me?"

She does struggiling to keep her eyes on his, but they pull her in carefully and slowly like trying to call a cat over so it can be loved on.

"I love you." He says again "I love you. No matter what. I want to love every inch of you. Every nook and crany, every cell, and every tear." Gilbert said wiping away a tear Matilda places her hand on his.
She's okay with touch just not for too long, but with Gilbert it's different he can somehow touch her longer.

"Show me all of you and I won't leave."

She nods.
"I love you." She says for the first time in their two year relationship (as friends and lovers)
Gilbert takes the hand that is on the right side of the girls cheek and kisses it like it is the sweetest thing he has ever tasted.

Slowly the mask came off when she was around Gilbert. She was more shy, more quiet, but when she talked the volume was mostly quiet but could randomly shoot up at times without her knowing it, she showed him how much she loved polar bears, she showed him that she could wear perfume but it was hard to detect its scent, she showed him how she couldn't do hugs that didn't have pressure, (so he made sure there was lots of pressure). She showed all of it to him.

Yet Gilbert accepted this to her surpise. He still worshiped the young blond and loved her for who she was.

That same night maybe around two in the morning, he was up later as she slept on his bed, online researching everything he could about Aspergers in women. He looked at the girl from time to time as she slept and saw a great deal of similarites with some of the things with her and the disease but he still whorshiped her as she did him (perhaps he was a  bit more territorial) but in the end it changed hardly a thing.

Just as it should hardly ever change anything when one is a little different.