Okay this has been,,,,, a concept I’ve been sitting on for a while now. I’m so sorry this has taken so long, anon. I love you and my girl Cheryl a lot.
- Cheryl has been abused her whole life by her parents, that’s pretty obvious. So she’s suppressed everything that makes her seem anything but allistic. - But after burning her house down (and before moving in with her foster family the Spellmans) Archie is the one to take her in. It gives him something to focus on that isn’t the concept of his dad possibly dying. - She gets the chance to observe him closer than she ever has before, and she knows that he’s autistic, but that’s about as far as her knowledge of the subject goes. - “Why do you do that?” She asks him one day, making the boy pause mid hand-flap and blush, looking away from her. “Sorry, I didn’t realise it was bothering you.” “It isn’t.” She’s quick to reassure, her hands squeezing in and out of fists (a behaviour that would have gotten her disapproval and possibly a slap with her parents) “I just… Want to understand.” - Archie lights up, and is more than happy to infodump all the information he has on her. It’s the most alive he’s been in weeks. - The more she listens, the more she feels sick. It’s… Her, or at least, a version of her she’d be more happy as. - “Are there… Different types of this…?” “Oh yeah! It’s a spectrum, you know? So there’s a whole bunch of different stuff and different ways it expresses in different people.” “Hmm…” - It takes a god damn long time to unlearn some of the things she’s had to teach herself to survive where she was. Stimming is the easiest to relearn. She “borrows” some of Archie’s fidget toys (he keyed in early on what she was trying to do and left some lying out for her to find, knowing she wouldn’t accept a gift) and practises by herself. - The next thing she manages to re-learn is infodumping. She’s with the Spellman’s at this point and just talks and talks and talks to Sabrina about her Favourite Person (Jason), and then her next favourite people (Archie and Veronica, two of the only people she can actually consider friends) and Sabrina, the autistic teenage witch, just smiles and listens. - After that, Cheryl learns to let herself go non-verbal. She’s had a long day, and she just wants to be quiet. Someone asks her a question over the dinner table, and they can all see her visibly building herself up to speak, but Zelda just rests a hand over hers and smiles. “It’s alright, Cheryl, you don’t have to speak if you don’t want to.” - Eventually, Cheryl becomes so much more productive than she ever was before, because she’s not using all her spoons into hiding herself. She uses her productiveness to find her special interests which include, hair and make up, cheerleading, and fashion. The same things she liked before but now she gets to explore them in her own way, and it’s not weird for her to know a billion facts about these things now.
