At least offering to drive would be a normal thing to do. Normal in a situation where you have a car and the person with whom you share a destination does not. Normal when it looks like, feels like, it could start raining midway through the fifteen minute walk. Normal at least if you're not going to conceal the fact that you have the car and instead lead the other person straight to it.
But there's the issue: Near is habituated to normalcy. A kind of it, anyway. His personal version of it, wherein the world at large may be going sideways, but the individual people around him still generally behave according to a basic mutual agreement regarding what to do in certain situations. Like this situation. Hey, brilliant idea, how about I drive?
He has to glare at Jude for a second after that "do you want me to drive," to remember that he already knows not to expect normal human interactions out of him. Whatever the reason -- because he is a toddler, because he is an alien, because he is autistic, because he doesn't give a fuck -- he hasn't signed the standard social agreements. Remembering doesn't make any of this better, exactly, but it does divert some of his exasperation away from Jude and right back to himself.
"Do you want to spend more time with me than you have to?" he asks back, guessing that Jude hasn't suddenly developed a taste for his company.
But there's the issue: Near is habituated to normalcy. A kind of it, anyway. His personal version of it, wherein the world at large may be going sideways, but the individual people around him still generally behave according to a basic mutual agreement regarding what to do in certain situations. Like this situation. Hey, brilliant idea, how about I drive?
He has to glare at Jude for a second after that "do you want me to drive," to remember that he already knows not to expect normal human interactions out of him. Whatever the reason -- because he is a toddler, because he is an alien, because he is autistic, because he doesn't give a fuck -- he hasn't signed the standard social agreements. Remembering doesn't make any of this better, exactly, but it does divert some of his exasperation away from Jude and right back to himself.
"Do you want to spend more time with me than you have to?" he asks back, guessing that Jude hasn't suddenly developed a taste for his company.