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daisychainsandbowties · 2 years

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thoughts on autistic beatrice

i got a couple asks about this, so here we go.

speaking. despite her talent for linguistics, and her fascination with language, Beatrice does sometimes have periods where she is non-verbal. alternates with days where she needs to talk a lot. Lilith usually gets subjected to her talkativeness on these occasions - or rather, she subjects herself to it, willingly. knows how to respond and manage and help when things are a lot. she is quite content to sit and listen and poke fun while Beatrice lets all of the thoughts out of her head.

Bea has areas of specific focus, and likes to tell convoluted stories to reach her point bc it’s how her brain likes to do things, and Lilith is one of the rare people who will simply listen, who is not impatient. Bea has been trained to think in straight lines, but there is a natural obliqueness to her thought processes. & especially when she is tired and/or hurt it unravels out of her.

it takes a long time for her to trust anyone enough to actually relax and do that kind of stimming, but once things are easier it’s at least once a week, and Lilith pretty much drops everything to go sit with her in the library or down by the cliff or in the sun by one of the outer walls. this is astonishing to Bea, because nobody in her life has been willing to listen to her talk before, for hours.

for Lilith it’s like watching the sun rise, & Bea transforms when she’s able to let all of the many myriad & often beautiful thoughts she has find their way out. to have them held and appreciated.

special interests. i think for sure Bea is really interested in math & physics & linguistics & probably a bit of architecture (my girl knew how to convert dirra to feet = math nerd AND architecture nerd, for sure).

re: physics - Bea is just really interested in the mechanics of the universe, & it’s kind of an adjacent interest when you throw knives, because there is math involved & a bit of physics knowledge, especially for her throws which are from unpredictable distances (usually knife-throwing is done at standard distances with more or less consistent trajectories. whereas Bea throws in consistently unpredictable circumstances, often at moving targets).

she likes spiders and pretty much all fields of biology - anatomy, entomology, biophysics (she was a bit obsessed with gravitational tropism & how they grew plants in space), biochem, physiology of all kinds. definitely used to do architectural sketches for fun. knows all about how buildings have been constructed over the centuries. likes spiders because misunderstood, solitary, & just rlly rlly interesting as creatures. linguistics for obvious reasons. aka ‘if i learn ten languages i will be able to talk to people’ = cue not knowing what to say to people in ten languages. i’m gonna say she likes prime numbers. the mystery of them, the way they are so strange and self-contained.

routine! Bea is big into routine. it helps her to deal with the parts of her life that will always be chaotic - OCS activities are pretty much chaotic by default, because possession and demons don’t keep people-hours.

she NEEDS to go running every day & Lilith is usually the only one who can keep pace with her, so they get up in the predawn dark most mornings and run until the sun rises. they don’t talk while they run, but they have a sort of silent conversation going on. gentle competition and mutual egging-on. performing stupid little parkour tricks where no one can see them. once or twice they go down by the beach and end up trying to toss each other into the ocean.

when they get back Beatrice has muesli (she always has muesli, when she can) & she has this specific blue bowl and this specific spoon. everyone knows not to touch it (and Lilith knows too but still does dickhead things like hide it, but she gives it back almost immediately. just likes to see Bea’s face scrunch up like an emoji. she calls it ‘your haughty little stare’.

Lilith peels an orange while Beatrice makes up her breakfast (picking the banana chips out. ‘why don’t you just get the brand without banana chips.’ ‘you wouldn’t understand.’) Lilith scatters orange peel everywhere on purpose and Beatrice goes around after sweeping them into her palm, which makes her hands smell like citrus (and, incidentally, exactly like Lilith’s, all day long).

time-blindness/interoception. Beatrice loses time. has a habit of going into a trance or just hyper-focussing on things. in those instances Mary or Lilith or Cam will find her just Staring and they always go to fetch Shannon, because she has a knack; she’s a gentle stirring presence, and she goes and puts her palms on Bea’s face and gets her eyes to focus on her. narrows the world down to simple touch. leads with a couple of innocent questions about math or sometimes jellyfish, or any of the topics Bea likes.

this is what she needs. Mary is the steady voice that pulls everyone together in a fight, but Shannon has the measure of Beatrice. she knows to ask questions, to lure her out of her stupor with positive things. gentle, stirring. usually there’s nothing bad about losing the time, except that she can end up with throbbing headaches from dehydration.

but it’s time her brain needs, to be away from other people, because Beatrice has observed and catalogued and she is pretty good at the social side of things. yet it is exhausting. & sometimes she needs a hour or two to just exist in her own orbit.

eye-contact. when she’s comfy she tends to stray away from eye-contact, just because other body language is better and not so overwhelming as eyes, but martial arts taught her how important the eyes are for betraying intent, so she looks. but if she trust ppl there’s less eye contact. what there is, then, means more.

she and Lilith are almost entirely absent of eye-contact when alone with each other. they are parallel play pros, and they save eye-contact for fighting, though Lilith is extraordinarily good at NOT giving away anything with her eyes. she can be beating the crap out of two people at once and look like she’s grocery shopping, but when she’s in the swing of things there’s often a manic glee to her eyes. & Bea likes that because it’s uncomplicated and wild and honest. but yeah, Mary occasionally goes to Shannon - ‘hey, do you think Beatrice would know the answer if i asked her what colour Lilith’s eyes are?’

speaking (contd.) Bea does have a tendency to forget about inflection in speech. has a monotone a lot of the time, which other people mistake for condescension. she can be very persuasive, but when she’s comfortable her voice keeps this unerringly constant pitch.

doesn’t tend to have the wild wavers you expect when ppl are with their friends; actually gets flatter & more even the more enthused she is. so she’ll be telling Lilith about how spiders can walk upside down on glass & the pitch, if you measured it, would be a straight line, but this speaks to Lilith’s brain too, because it isn’t jumping on distinctions in sound & getting anxious over it.

if you pay attention to the rest of Bea’s body language it’s easy to see how excited she is, but that doesn’t manifest in her voice so much. oh she can emote vocally with the best of them (cut to the museum heist scene where Vincent kidnaps Ava) but calm relaxed Bea is going to be rocking that monotone.

food. for the first while in cat’s cradle Beatrice has trouble with mealtimes. it was never her forte - always the first down to breakfast in boarding school, so eventually the ppl setting up just left a bowl out for her & the tureen of muesli, and a milk bottle still slick with dew from sitting on the stoop with all the others.

it’s the social aspect, mostly, and the change of routine, that get to her. plus Beatrice just isn’t motivated by food at all - for her it’s like, due to interoception, and some sensory preferences, though Bea’s a good soldier and can just ignore texture and taste if she has to.

she doesn’t like the tables in the vaulted hall or the weird dim lighting, and all the other nuns talking in hushed voices so they become this susurration of sound. so she just skips lunch, or dinner.

Lilith insists that she could care less, & she only tells Mary because otherwise she’ll get a lecture about responsibility and the new recruits, and also Bea is the best fighter besides her, and she doesn’t want to win just because the little twit forgets to eat.

initially Mary just insists that Bea goes to meals with her. that doesn’t really help too much; Bea goes where she’s told, but yk you can lead a horse to water, can’t make them drink.

one day Mary goes and sits down next to Bea while she’s reading one day out in the courtyard, & hands her a cup of pudding from a bunch of surplus (and almost expired) MREs that the OCS bulk-bought ages ago. & Bea, skeptical but obedient, open it up & tries it & Mary, privately, thinks it’s chalky and overly sweet, but Bea adores it. she reads the nutritional info and is weirdly psyched by how ‘full of food groups’ it is. (Mary shrugs, but Lilith gets it; she also grew up craving salt and protein and portions larger than a palm).

Mary bulk buys even more of them, & soon the Trio™ start carrying them around. Shannon has a bunch in her backpack, and Mary keeps them in the glove box of the van. Lilith sometimes just has one in the pocket of her hoodie, so that when it’s a Hard Day they can all reliably take Bea out into the sun with a bit of breeze coming up over the cliffside, & pass her a horrible calorie-dense protein pudding monstrosity.

it works, though. once Bea has Lilith to cling to she doesn’t mind going to the official means, & also Mother Superion takes her in her office & tells her she can go to the kitchen or eat in MS’s office if she’s not feeling it any evening. it works, and Beatrice manages to win against Lilith two out of five times in training, and she looks better and more than she has in her whole life, because the ppl around her FINALLY care about what she needs.

touch. Bea actually really likes it. flinches, at first, when Mary throws an arm around her, or when Shannon goes to her after a hard fight and presses their foreheads together, and leaves her sooty thumb-prints on Bea’s cheeks from holding her face.

Lilith is another touch-starved bitch so they are like two polarised magnets initially, but after a while it changes. Beatrice falling asleep against Lilith in the back of the OCS fan. Bea having a panic attack and Mary climbing clear over the handbrake from the front seat (shotgun) to go and hold her very tightly, and rock her, and just say meaningless nice things.

Lilith like a deer in the headlights watching it, but eventually letting Beatrice braid her hair when her hands won’t stop shaking from the adrenaline. at once point they are hiding from possessed ppl & Lilith wraps her whole body around Bea, pressing them together into the shadows, and Beatrice is just… stunned by the closeness of it all. the lemon and sweat smell of Lilith (Bea starts stealing her shampoo after that).

eventually she knows how to seek touch, how to ask for it & Bea and Lilith become kind of ridiculous about it (just watch the infirmary scene). they sit propping each other up, side-by-side or back-to-back. Bea with her legs flung over Lilith’s lap, reading out of a book in the library. in church playing ‘one-two-three-four, i declare a thumb war’ while Mary loses her shit in the row behind them.

Beatrice likes braiding hair, and when she’s upset she just clings to ppl (Lilith starts calling her barnacle and also limpet) but both of them need that from each other, & most of the other sisters are just not Bea’s people; she has her three people (four, almost, when Cam arrives).

with Mary it’s a lot of rough shoving and headlocks and kicking each other’s calves and ‘hey, think fast!’ followed by Mary chucking something at Bea.

with Shannon it’s the face-touching, and her arms folding Bea into a hug to end all hugs. & obviously with Ava we have Beatrice the little spoon, & her quiet amazement at how much Ava likes touching her arms or pecking her on the cheek - i don’t think she was raised to believe that people might long to touch her, and where Lilith hid her longing pretty deftly, Ava is much more open about it; it’s part of what shocks her when Ava hugs her very suddenly that first time in Cat’s Cradle after the wall incident - not the touch, but the recognition of Ava’s hunger for it. i think it occurred to Beatrice that maybe Ava could not even remember the last time someone hugged her like that. i think she understands& once they’re together it’s stupid how often they are in contact with each other, but it’s Bea’s love language, i think.

sensory issues. texture is obviously a thing for Beatrice. specifically with food, but also with clothes. you’ll see (in the show) that she tends to favour clothes that are loose around the arms (part of her reasoning being that it’s easier and better to fight in loose-fitting clothes) but yeah she’s not a fan of tight clothing. likes pressure on her own terms. she likes sweaters and tank tops, men’s-section t-shirts because the weird v-shape of women’s sleeves is foul and heinous. she does like to button shirts all the way up to the top because for unknown reasons it feels safe and precise.

sound is not too bad for Bea. she’s used to a lot of shouting in martial arts training (the use of a kiai in kendo is well-established & often super loud. she kind of likes that, shrieking at the top of her lungs with permission) and also gunshots with the OCS. none of it bothers her more than gunshots are just super unpleasant to hear for anyone.

she does enjoy asmr though. ocean sounds especially (thunder is bad unless there’s a really predictable interval between bouts of thunder) hates those deep-space ones because the bass makes her feel dizzy.

she just also really likes the sound of the people she loves talking. sometimes she can get Lilith to say more than four sentences together & it’s heaven. Ava obviously has her doe-eyed with her ability to talk about anything, to fill silences with good sound.

Bea HATES to be shouted at, berated etc. but mostly for trauma reasons, b/c of the whole endless night her parents yelled at her before they sent her away. this is part of the reason that silence makes her a bit uneasy, unless she knows what it means.

silence with Lilith has a few flavours; she has a happy silence, which is like a cat coming to sit in a room with you. she also has a broody silence, which Bea likes too, actually, because Lilith isn’t angry, she’s just filling the room with the noisiness of her thoughts. her angry silence makes Beatrice want to say around too, but only in the hope of mending things. Mary’s silences are usually good, or else they’re about Shannon. & Shannon has her gentle silences and her hidden silences. the fact is that silence for Bea is rarely actual silence, because she is too attentive to the meanings of silence.

she likes Ava’s version of silence, which is talking.

is also very very perceptive of sound - Lilith insists you can’t hear electricity OR spiders moving around, but Bea is adamant that you can, actually. she always knows when there’s a big house spider in her room bc they are NOT stealthy. it’s why she likes asmr - esp. in cat’s cradle - because it drowns out the small noises of the convent which don’t get tuned out by her brain.

light can be annoying for Bea. headcanon is that the museum heist sunglasses were not a brand new acquisition - Ava got them for Bea in Switzerland (‘you shouldn’t read in the sun if you’re gonna squint, bea’) because Beatrice got headaches from too much light, & they looked dorky so two birds with one stone. she does appreciate light, though, and loves sitting in the sun. anything that is not like England. she gets weird and sad when it rains too much. also HATES being rained on. fully sulks about it.

finally, stimming! i think when she’s upset Bea would, ideally, self-soothe by rocking. it’s why Mary does it, because Bea’s parents berated her for it so many times that her body freezes up at the thought.

she likes to braid hair, as i said. likes tapping things, fiddling with things in her hands - reason why she’s so ‘puts hands behind back’ ‘puts hands in pockets’ ‘makes hands hold each other so they can’t do their own thing’. but yeah, in Switzerland it happens a lot more. playing with pens, tapping thumb & forefinger, tapping surfaces (very lightly), AHEM skipping stones. just keeping those guys busy.

asmr is also stimming, btw. & so is eating the right food for the purpose of enjoying the textures. all of the touching.

she also has mental stims! that r like… doing equations, or running through facts. counting primes. reciting as much of pi as she can in one minute, imagining a clock face and watching it move. i think so much of her stimming is probably mental, actually. rlly fun stims are finding linguistic patterns in things, or translating things back and forth - so like, from english to french to german to latin & then going back without cheating to see if any changes get imposed by counter-translating directly - also spatial reasoning in general is good stimming. thinking, how exactly would that fall? or imagining things swinging or shattering or anything like that, where you have to extrapolate a bit based on instinct and also knowledge. having to be so internal her whole life would have furnished her with a bunch of them, but i think her OCS family bring so many good visible stims to the surface too!

anyway, those are some of my thoughts on autistic bea. i love her very.

#warrior nun #sister beatrice #autistic beatrice #(in case anyone is wondering yes i am autistic so not speaking out of my armpit here)#if anyone has any others feel free to msg me or tell me in the tags #part of what made me start writing fic for wn was how much i connected to bea's autistic swag #so yea #casper writes #ty anons (and not anons) who were asking abt this

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