Sasha huddled under his blankets and settled in to endure the pain of experiencing emotions. Being a human and having feelings was awful. Just the worst.
He found himself crying because... because he didn't know why. Because he'd embarrassed himself and because Cooper had been so kind and mostly just because all the anxiety that had built up inside him had created chemicals that his body wanted to disperse through tears. Or something like that.
Sometimes it made him feel better to remember that things like crying weren't necessarily logical or justified. Sometimes the human body just needed to do certain things or feel certain feelings for its own arcane reasons and trying to explain them rationally just didn't work.
Sasha wished he had friends. He didn't really wish that very often because, well... he'd had them. Or at least he'd thought he had. In high school he'd had people he sat with at lunch every day and they would talk and stuff, like friends do. Sasha usually didn't say much, but that was just how he was.
The moment high school had ended, though, he had ceased all contact with every one of those people. A couple of them had tried to reach out to him, but he had no interest in maintaining those relationships. They had simply been a means of not sitting alone at lunch.
He'd always assumed the problem was with him, not the people, because... well, because it was. The people were fine. Sasha just didn't connect with others. But Cooper... he felt differently about Cooper.
But maybe that was just lust. Cooper was attractive. None of Sasha's high school friends had been particularly attractive to him. If Cooper were a girl, would Sasha still want to be friends with him? He wanted to tell himself no, that this was just his teenage hormones getting all out of whack, but he wasn't so sure...
How had Cooper known that Sasha hadn't wanted to talk? Even his parents had never really understood the way Sasha would go quiet when he was upset, though it did complicate things that they were usually the reason for him being upset in the first place. They interpreted it as sulking, but every single time he was just incredibly overwhelmed and trying not to cry.
Cooper didn't seem to share Sasha's difficulty with speaking at all, yet somehow he intuitively understood it. He was incredibly grateful towards Cooper for coming into the situation and helping Sasha sort things out, but he was even more grateful to Cooper for seeing and immediately accepting his feelings, no matter how stupid and disproportionate they were.
And Sasha hadn't even said thank you! Even Cooper had thanked him just for carrying the bucket of water back up and Sasha had just stood there awkwardly and then left. Sasha had been so weird and Cooper had been so nice anyway and Sasha needed to thank him.
But there was no way he could do it with words. Even if he waited until he had settled down and found some opportunity to speak to him, he didn't think he'd be able to get the words out properly. Maybe he'd just stumble over them or maybe he'd actually cry, but there was no way he would end up saying what he meant in a way that got his feelings across without just embarrassing himself further.
But he could write it down. Sasha climbed out from under his blankets and went to get his notepad and a pen.
He used this notepad to write down everything he needed to remember, be it passwords or appointment times or grocery lists. It had cartoon kitties down the sides of the pages so it wasn't the most space efficient, but it had been what he'd been able to find when he decided he needed one so it was what he used.
Sasha started trying to write a letter. He did his best to put into words how much it meant to him that Cooper had helped him, that he'd been kind and reassuring, that he had understood Sasha's difficulty with talking. He cringed as he stared down at his messy handwriting. He crumpled the paper up and then tore it into tiny pieces just to make absolutely sure it could never be found.
He turned to a fresh page, selected a sparkly blue gel pen, and wrote 'Thank You' in big letters as neatly as he could across the middle of the page.
He knew if he gave himself any time to think he would start second guessing himself, so he opened his door, slipped the sheet of paper under Cooper's, and went back to hide under his blankets.
#
Cooper was laying on the bed on his phone reading about octopuses while Abra cooked dinner and Ellie took a shower. He liked octopuses. They were such unique, intelligent creatures.
"Did you know octopuses have three hearts?" Cooper asked when he heard the door to the bathroom open.
Ellie bent down to pick something up. "What's this?"
"And blue blood," Cooper added. "And if they lose their arms they can regrow them."
"Gross." Ellie held out the sheet of paper she'd picked up. "What's this?"
"I don't know," Cooper said. "But what I do know is that two thirds of an octopus's neurons are in its arms."
Abra looked up from the stir-fry he was cooking. "Isn't the plural octopi? And I don't know what that is either, El."
"I'm glad you asked," Cooper said. "No, the plural is octopuses because the word has Greek roots."
"Huh."
Ellie waved the piece of paper. "It just says 'thank you' on it. Have any of us done anything that anyone would thank us for?"
"Oh." Cooper sat up and held his hand out for the piece of paper. Ellie handed it to him and he smiled. It had cats on it. "I bet this is from Sasha."
"Who's Sasha?" Ellie asked.
"Oh, the guy next door," Cooper said. "He spilled some rubbish on the stairs today and I helped him clean it up. He was having trouble talking and I guess he wanted to say thank you."
"Aw, that's sweet," Ellie said.
Cooper got up and stuck the note to the refrigerator with a magnet. "It's so fucking cute I'm going to die."
Abra leant over so that he could see the note. "That is pretty cute."
"I felt really bad for him. He seems really shy and anxious. I hope he's got a good support network."
"Do you want to ask him over for dinner?" Abra asked. "I think I made too much stir-fry."
It took all of Cooper's willpower not to agree and run over there right that second to invite Sasha. "He's really anxious. I think that would be too much for him."
"You are the epitome of too much," Ellie commented.
"Yeah." Cooper flopped back down on the bed. "I was really trying not to be, but I talked way too much and... ugh."
"Nooo, honey, I was joking," Ellie said. "I'm sure you were fine. He wrote you that note, didn't he?"
Cooper smiled. "Yeah. He did do that. He's so cute."
Abra crouched down to get plates out of the cabinet. "Just to be clear, are we talking uwu cute or you'd like to get to know him a bit more personally cute?"
Cooper shrugged. "Porque no los dos?"
"Fair enough," Abra said.
"I don't know if he swings that way, though. It's fine if he doesn't. Mostly I just want to make sure he's okay, but it feels like... like trying to save a butterfly with your bare hands. You want to help but all that fuzzy stuff keeps rubbing off its wings and maybe all you're doing is hurting it more."
"Well, I wasn't there so I can't say for sure how helpful you were, but you have dangerously low self esteem and he sent you a note saying thank you, so I'm inclined to believe that on balance he appreciated what you did."
"Is low self esteem really always a bad thing, though?" Cooper mused. "What if it's an accurate measure of your own self worth? If you're a generally useless person, isn't the only alternative arrogance?"
"Ergh," Ellie said as she flopped face down on the bed and wrapped an arm around Cooper's chest. "Sometimes I just want to punch you in the face."
"With love, until you love yourself as much as we love you," Abra clarified for her as he served the stir-fry onto three plates.
"Sure, that." Ellie sat up, glared down at Cooper, and pressed her index finger against his forehead. "Love yourself, dipshit."
#
Sasha had started regretting that note approximately five seconds after he'd slipped it under Cooper's door.
He was a grown man — at least in the eyes of the law — and he'd sent another grown man a note written in sparkly gel pen on kitty cat paper. And it just said thank you! It didn't even say what for. Or who it was to or who it was from, for that matter.
They were probably all just confused right now, wondering which child in the building had sent them that note. But eventually they'd figure it out and they would think... Sasha didn't even know what they would think. That he was weird or childish or dumb.
He always tried to tell himself that he wasn't as weird as he came across, that he was smarter than people thought, but maybe he was just wrong. Maybe others could see him more accurately than he could see himself in the same way that his mannerisms felt perfectly normal to him until he saw himself on film and realised just how awkward he looked.
At the end of year twelve, along with their yearbook, they'd all been given a dvd with footage some of the students had filmed of everyone in their year. It was funny and harmless and Sasha wasn't in it much because he'd tried not to be, but there had been scenes where he appeared, mostly in the background. It had given him the opportunity to see, for the first time, the way he moved, the way he held himself, his expressions and gestures. It had made him realise how clearly abnormal he was.