Trope bingo story: Outsider

[vilakins]

This one was much harder to write.

Title: Outsider
Fandoms: Blake's 7
Trope: character in distress
Characters: Kerr Avon, Tynus, Anna Grant
Length: 1,259 words
Summary: After Anna's death, Avon records his thoughts in the hope that it will help.

Outsider (on AO3)

Or right here:

Outsider

Cally said that recording this might help. It's worth a try.

I have never been good at reading people.

It took me my first ten years to learn that people didn't always tell the truth and to how detect the signs of sarcasm and, if I was attentive, outright lying. (Watch their eye direction provided you also know whether they're right or left-handed.)

Lies I believed as a small child include:

• If you keep your eyes open when sneezing, they will pop out - easily disproved with some experimentation.
• If you swallow whole seeds or pips, plants will grow inside you - extremely unlikely with the level of hydrochloric acid in the stomach.
• It doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game. Demonstrably wrong.
• The tooth fairy will take your discarded milk teeth and leave a credit. This one is particularly galling because I had to work out what was in it for the tooth fairy and decided they built little pearly houses for themselves using teeth as bricks. Yes, I lied to myself.
• Unused brains will turn to mucus and drip out your nose. Thank you, mother, for the most frightening lie, even if it was directly responsible for my coming top of all my classes.
• Your grade does not matter. This one is the most egregious and told only to those who are not Alphas. It may induce some (like me) eventually to test into Alpha but it is still an outrageous lie. Grade matters.

There were many others from classmates, typical examples being:

• We already have enough people for the team.
• This seat is taken.
• I forgot to invite you to my party.
• Too many more to mention, all of which I now put down to my complete lack of social skills and misreading of (or utter failure to detect) social cues.
• All the above with accompanying smirk, a cue I'd learned by ten.

They called me a weirdo, a freak, and a loony. School days are very definitely not the best days of one's life.


Tynus

It was at high school that things improved. Firstly I discovered that people thought it was funny when I said what I thought of those of lesser intelligence, which was, to be exact, all of them. This and learning how to remain expressionless when verbally attacked were extraordinarily effective in reducing the number of said attacks.

It was a classmate, Tynus, who taught me some of the tricks to passing as normal. Our relationship started when I informed him that a thought could not cross his mind as the walkway was down.

"Oh, really? Think you're smart, do you?"

"Of course."

"Woof, woof."

I was puzzled by this complete non-sequitur. "I am puzzled by this complete non-sequitur." In retrospect I'm highly relieved that Tynus didn't know h0ow to say 'sequitur' either.

"Cur Avon! Cur, get it?"

"Ah. The mispronunciation of my name means I'm a dog?"

"Yeah. I suppose you can do better?"

"Certainly. Say my name quickly and I'm craven."

I think it was insulting myself that made Tynus like me. Or at least I assume he did. He started spending time with me, joined the chess club as well, and tried to teach me how to 'act normal'. He never stopped calling me "cur" and when I objected a few months later, said that was what friends did: insult one another. Affectionate banter. I use it now with Vila who is an almost worthy competitor in the art.

"You have to learn to smile now and then," was another of Tynus's bits of advice. "Other kids are a bit scared of you, you know."

"Like this?"

Tynus recoiled. "Perhaps a tad less sharky than that."

I am still not entirely sure that I have mastered the art.

Besides when to smile (e.g. after making a joke, but not at someone else's unless it was after an insulting length of time), Tynus had various other social adeptness advice like empty phrases considered to be polite, not standing too close to people when talking to them, and refraining from being too honest in my opinion of chess opponents if I actually wanted to have some (although most of these, if disregarded, are very useful ways to disconcert others). Now that I think of it, Tynus too was an outsider, but for different reasons: being even worse at sport than I was, liking art (not a pursuit valued in the Federation), and generally being 'a weed'. We were rather like aliens trying to pretend to belong. In fact I once found a note on my desk: "Kerr Avon, we regret to inform you that your application to join the human race has been rejected." Actually I considered that a compliment.

We remained friends at university, and afterwards too, along with Keiller, another outsider due to his size which I regard as a bizarrely illogical reason to dislike anyone, lack of intelligence being a far greater flaw. The three of us did exact considerable monetary revenge on society however.

I think that one of the reasons I consider Vila and Cally to be more congenial than the others is that they too are outsiders. Not quite members of the human race, literally in the case of Cally.

Tynus did not prove to be a friend despite how long we knew each other. I would be lying if I said that hadn't hurt, but not as much as it might have since Vila was there, for what that's worth. Although since I'm being honest here as Cally advises, that happens to be a non-zero amount.


Anna

Navigating the minefields of human facial expressions and social conventions was still difficult as an adult, especially now that I was considered physically attractive (although how my lips are any more sculpted than others' escapes me), and one very helpful tactic was appearing not to care when I failed. Then I met Anna. Anna was different from the usual run of human from the start: cool, logical, crystal-clear, always saying what she thought. We met at a boring function when she joined me on the side lines where I was holding a drink and looking expressionless and therefore aloof.

"The only way to survive one of these stultifying affairs," she said, lifting her own glass to me.

We spent an unexpectedly pleasant evening exchanging our less than flattering (but accurate) opinions of everyone else there, and that's how it started. Anna was self-contained, forthright, her calm and elegant face always easy to read with its lack of overstated or puzzling emotion.

She was a perfect match for me.

When I thought she had been killed, it hurt in the centre of my chest. No, nowhere near the blood pump that fools think is the seat of emotion. I am unsure of the physical cause of this pain but it always returned whenever I thought of her.

But she hadn't died. She'd lied to me all along and I'd never seen that in her face or heard it in her words. I'm not sure which hurt more, losing her or finding out that how she'd played me.


First Tynus, then Anna. Obviously I am still not good at reading humans, and will doubtless be betrayed again. The best strategy is simply not to care, or at least learn not to.

This didn't help in the way Cally thought - not that I expected it to - but I have acquired a strategy for dealing with future betrayals. So thank you, Cally.

Delete this file, Zen.

Comments

[corvuscornix]

This is wonderful.

As I might have hinted before (ahem) autistic Avon is a very important headcanon to me, but I haven't come across it very often in fanfiction. I'm so glad someone wrote it. (and even happier that it was you!)

[vilakins]

I was thinking of you! I tried to work the hands as some sort of slightly skewed coping mechanism but it was getting too late to fit them in.

And I see they're in your icon! Why do you think he looks at them with such seeming puzzlement?

[corvuscornix]

Oh! If I have some part in the existence of this story, it makes me very happy indeed!

Having read it a few times more and feeling capable of slightly more intelligible commentary, I have to say that I love how you have tackled the problem of making someone as reticent as Avon try to narrate his past - you can really feel how he struggles with it all the way through, with his bullet points and terse headings and short paragraphs and all the the things that he leaves out. And the concession about the "non-zero sum" of Vila's worth is excellent - if honesty is required then he will follow that instruction to the letter, but not an inch further. Being honest doesn't mean you have to be revealing. (only, because it is Avon, it still is) Love that so much.

Oh, the hands! You know, I don't think I've quite decided what I think the hands thing is about for Avon. Truthfully I'm not even sure why *I* do it (and I think I'm doing it less now than I used to, as well), but I've noticed I most often seem do it when switching from one activity to another... So (for me) it might be something to do with... mentally changing tracks? Since I tend to get very caught up in what I'm doing, it might be almost be a kind of self-centering exercise, a way of disentangling from one activity to make ready for a new one? Like the body-language equivalent of "Now, where was I..."

That sometimes seems to fit the situations when Avon does it too. But at the same time we get plenty of evidence that Avon is not very well connected to his body in general, and that he seems to have very ambivalent reactions to touching others in specific - i.e. he's fine with it if it's him doing it, but not the other way around. Which could mean that his tactile sense is causing him problems in some way, so that he needs to be mentally prepared and/or in control of it in order not to be confused/overloaded by it. Now, the hand-staring often happens after he's been doing something physical with them (like steering the Liberator in 'Time Squad' or after wrestling Gan in 'Breakdown' as in my icon) so... Perhaps tactile overload can jolt him "out of himself", and looking at his hands really IS a kind of grounding, subconscious "this is here and now and this is my body" exercise.

Maybe. :-)

Anyway, kudos again to you for writing the story this way. It means all the more to me as I seem unlikely to ever manage to write any of my autistic headcanon stories myself.

[vilakins]

That's a very good explanation for the hand-staring given the times he does it (wrestling, controlling the Liberator). Avon may not even realise he does it, so it wouldn't fit into the story anyway.

I don't stare at my hands, but I do play with them (intertwine fingers, push my thumbs into the centre of the other palm etc) when I'm bored or uncomfortable. Hands have a lot to so with so much in our lives.

My schoolboy Avon refusing to learn how to dive story was about his discomfort with his body and realising that he couldn't control it that well, and also how much better using his brain is.

[corvuscornix]

*nods* Unless someone else has commented on it outright, I don't see any reason why he'd pay much attention to it. (I know I didn't.) It's how his body works, that's all.

I would have loved to know what PD thought he was doing in those scenes, though! (Particularly the Time Squad one - that's clearly something very deliberate he's doing there.)

Yes, I fiddle a lot with my hands like that as well. I like how expressive they are. They are among my favourite things to draw.

I love that story too! Might be time for a re-read...

[vilakins]

I wonder if the hands thing is Avon characterisation or a PD habit that crept in. I like Martin Freeman in everything I've seen him in, but he's always much the same character with the same little expressions etc. The only other thing I've seen PD in is one scene on YouTube of a Peter Wimsey ep in which he was the perp, and he's not at all Avon-like in that. So it's hard to say.

You draw! I love drawing, especially people, but I'm hopeless at hands. I like faces best but I make an effort to draw scenes and other stuff during art month.

[corvuscornix]

I've seen PD in Drake's Venture where I thought he played his character very differently (but well!) and I've always thought that he looks almost unrecogniseable as Avon when out of character in behind-the-scenes photos etc, even in costume. But that might have more to do with facial expression than other body language. (And also, if I hadn't known it from sheer continuity, I would never have thought that S1 and S4 Avon were the same character, let alone the same actor. So my face-blindness might make me an unreliable judge in this matter.)

Otoh, he has said in some interviews that he put a lot of himself in Avon... It would be a fun thing to ask him about if the chance to do so should ever crop up - though I suppose it's unlikely that he'd remember much...

Yeah, I dabble a bit in art now and then, but not very regularly and with nowhere near your level of skill. Mostly nature and/or sci-fi and fantasy creatures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find faces a lot more difficult than hands...

[vilakins]

I really dislike S4 Avon and I remembered that from when I was a kid so when I watched reruns here as an adult I was surprised to find I did like early Avon. I thought I'd remembered him wrongly but no, there he was later on.

Re faces: it's weird, I'm very good at recognising people's faces on TV even when the actors are a lot older or younger because I can stare at them, but can't with people I've briefly met. I don't like looking straight at people in real life when I'm talking to them, and possibly nervousness distracts. So I'm definitely not face-blind but people might think I am just because of that. I keep telling myself I should stare at a spot on their foreheads but only do it when I think of it. But I can look at people when they're talking to others so a longer acquaintance means I get to know their faces well.

As for hands, I'm like all the cartoonists who draw hands with 2 or 3 fingers; there seem to many to fit in.

[pebblerocker]

...in the hope that it will help?

I so need to get back to watching B7, but I just got a brand-new fannish interest and it's eating my watching/fanning time.

[vilakins]

What's the new fandom?

[pebblerocker]

Avatar: The Last Airbender - animated series, not live-action film. It's the perfect show to watch when my niece (age 8) is visiting - age-appropriate but very much worthy of adult attention!

[lolmac]

Oh, my, this is heartbreaking . . . wow. The final line is especially brilliant.

I had never thought of Avon as having been a nerd, or considered that he might not have been born an Alpha -- yes, that works, both work beautifully!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I wasn't sure it was going to work, but yay!

I've always thought of him as both - he cares more about grade than any born Alpha would and says he had the same chances as anyone else - but I did take the Asperger's a bit further than I normally do.

[aralias.livejournal.com]

you have provided exactly the fic that someone on tumblr was looking for! for reference -

http://comarum.tumblr.com/post/106357051191 <-- background
and
http://comarum.tumblr.com/post/106625842406/outsider <-- this is obviously the bit where we mention your fic

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

[huge grin] Those convos and comarum's response make it all worthwhile! I've always thought Avon was rather Aspie and not that socially adept. And you know me, I don't dwell on the characters' sexuality. I think that like with most people, it's not the driving force in their lives; other things matter much more.

I really like the analysis of when Avon starts using confrontational kisses.