If Ilya does ever figure out that Shane's autistic it'll be through something so stupid. Like he's scrolling through TikTok one night because he can't sleep and he comes across this video that's like 'Dear autism community: rate this spoon'. And there's this whole reveal where they unwrap it from a cloth so he's expecting the fanciest spoon he's ever seen and then they reveal it and he's so disappointed to find it's just... a normal fucking spoon.
He thinks this must be a joke so he goes to the comments, and sure enough it's absolutely full of people who not only seem to think this spoon is worthy of rating in the first place, but who seem to have very strong opinions on what makes it a good or bad spoon. To Ilya a spoon is a spoon is a spoon. It's absolutely baffling to him that people seem to think the handle looks like it's not weighty enough, or that the shape of the bowl is wrong, or that it's too flat or too square. He opens the playlist of cutlery rating videos because surely this can't be the norm, and sure enough every single one has a comment section full of very strong opinions about how good or bad this normal fucking fork or knife is.
And then a memory returns to him, as he looks over at his peacefully sleeping husband, of Shane moving in and having to get rid of all his cutlery to replace it with his.
"Sorry, I know it's stupid, but yours are really bad to hold, baby. It's literally all I can think about every time I eat here."
And Ilya didn't mind at the time. So Shane likes his own cutlery better? That's a small compromise when Ilya doesn't have strong feelings about silverware in the first place. But now things are beginning to click, and he's beginning to draw a line between the opinionated spoon people and the day he had to drive his cutlery to the nearest goodwill.
Ilya spends the rest of the night reading about autism and suddenly there's so much more that's beginning to make sense. He doesn't know how he'll bring it up with Shane – if he'll ever bring it up with Shane – but for how it's good to know.
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