#christopher summers

His parents were pretty good, when he was a kid, about letting him be himself. He had to learn quickly at the orphanage—how to modulate tone, how to cope with bad textures, that groaning and rocking and any other visible stims were signs of weakness. (There’s only so quickly, of course, that that could go. There are reasons he made a run for it, and for a long time he thinks he can point to that as the biggest.)

It’s one of those things Scott and the Professor don’t talk about—the kind where Scott’s sure he knows, but he’s never made any move to act about it. He tells himself it’s acceptance

(He talks to Corsair about it, once, and his dad apparently had no idea. Scott was Scott and that was all that mattered. He doesn’t know what to call the emotion that lodges in his chest)

He doesn’t do the things he used to do, by the time he can call himself an X-Man. He doesn’t do any of the new things he wants to, either, doesn’t fiddle with the dial on his visor because that’s dangerous or tap his feet or wring his hands. (He adjusts his glasses a little too often, loves the way loud music with heavy bass runs through his chest, learns to flip pens through his fingers, and doesn’t realize that that’s the same thing)

He still sounds flat and harsh sometimes, still gets caught in loops in his brain, still can’t just make fucking eye contact with anybody, but the glasses mean no one asks about that anymore and that’s a strange little victory that he carries almost smugly, getting that one over on the world

(He doesn’t notice, not for a long time, the way that Jean sometimes misses social cues, how she withdraws a little and then ends up snapping when the rest of them really get going, how annoyed she gets when things change. It takes a while before he sees her stop cutting off the motion and just let her hands flap as she chatters at Warren and realizes she’s trusting them with the freak side of her. The side she’s learned to keep locked up, just like he has)

Hank buys him a weighted blanket, first, but it’s only when Bobby gets him noise cancelling headphones (the Christmas before Phoenix happens) (he can’t bring himself to use them, but he passes them on to Jean and she loves them) that he realizes they’ve seen him. That they know this part of him

(Maddy clicks her tongue and curls up in chairs in ways that he now knows to call vestibular stims. When they’re quiet, when they’re alone, her feet squirm and she knocks herself against walls. They’re not the things Jean did, not at all. She never stops masking, though, not ever, not even when it’s just them. He sometimes wonders if she could even do it when it’s just her)

Emma, in their first days working together, comes to him angrily muttering about how the Professor had never met an IEP before in his life, sees the look on his face, and groans that none of them should be running a school

Later—but early, too, when she’s still really trying to do something more than give them plausible deniability for an affair—she does a lot of learning about adults with autism, because so much of her education had focused on running a school. She talks with him about boundaries, about making space for himself. Scott tells her that the last time he had a meltdown he was seventeen

Uncanny X-Men #175 | Cover Date: Nov, 1983