dippy :)

I spent almost an entire work shift drawing this tooth-rotting fluff

[Vol 1. Part 1/6] mysterious next door neighbors~

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Unstoppable force meets immovable object 2 (wip)

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Simon seeing Blip A: "What the fuck is that thing?"

he doesn’t really understand math beyond the practical basics, doesn’t know big or complex words — he doesn’t like reading because it makes him feel stupid to not understand things, to have to ask what words mean, and he feels annoying asking, used to not be allowed to ask without an explosion of aggression from his mother or father or foster carers, so he learned to stop asking and stay out of the way and be quiet. he was taught that he’s stupid and a lost cause and it’s a waste of time him trying, anyone trying.

he doesn’t have much of an understanding of science at all, even less than grace’s twelve-year-old students do, and often he struggles to grasp things even as they’re explained and taught to him, because he just doesn’t have the base knowledge. nobody ever bothered to give it to him. he’s smart, grace knows he is — grace won’t allow for a second for driver to continue thinking he’s stupid, or worthless, or any other awful thing that’s been drilled into his head — and grace is as patient as anything when he teaches him.

driver only allows it because he knows grace likes teaching, otherwise the level of attention and patience required would make him want to gut himself. sometimes he still wants to gut himself, sitting tense and ashamed while grace uses his middle school worksheets to teach him about things he knows he should know. sometimes grace will still overestimate him, accidentally — on one notable occasion he prompted driver to try and solve an equation, and driver left the apartment before confessing hours later, once he’d been for a drive and the sting had soothed, that he doesn’t know what that means. but grace always corrects.

there’s a sharp contrast between them. what feels like miles of empty space, between grace’s doctorate and dissertation and driver’s single year of high school that he can’t even remember if he passed. but grace bridges the gap. it makes him nauseous to think how many people have failed driver, how many people who were supposed to protect him instead wilfully hurt him and left him behind, and sometimes it feels so ridiculously ineffective — too little too late — to sit beside him now and reassure him, trying to soothe the bone-deep hurts that were carved there twenty years ago.