a female character you see as asexual // fantine
She is founded on softer things, pink and cream and sugar and silk, pastel fragility steeped in a tender, sun-striped melancholy. She is founded on love – every type of love, all of its variations spun together like lace, woven in the manner of the complex flute melodies that she so adores. She wishes that she could play the flute, and she has tried to learn a few times, though the nuances of it always slip from her mind, in the end. Her delicate fingers are better suited to tracing pipes and braiding hair, in any case, than to any rougher task; she is crafted as carefully as the breath of a rainbow, and it is there, in her shivering opalescent colors, that her strength resides.
Tholomyes, of course, draws more from her – and she does not hate him for it, though it hurts a little and the fleeting trembles of pleasure don’t quite redeem the unpleasant twists in her stomach. He asks her again and again with his smooth rich word, and she grows to accept the faintly sick chill that enclasps her whenever she detects that certain glint in his eye.
“You do not love him!” Zephine exclaims one day with a hand across her parted lips. The four of them sit with their legs long across the grassy slope of a hill in a park, flowers scattered around them, eager light dancing behind all of their eyes.
“Oh, but I do – it is only the action that I rather… well, it’s no better with him than it would be with any other man, that is all. The pleasure is fine enough, but – oh, this talk is not proper. Must we dwell upon it?”
And the topic is washed away with laughter and sunlight and sweet spring scent. Fantine is content. And later, when she begins to feel a deeper twist and stir in her belly, she is touched with relief. It is worth it, she thinks as soon as she knows. It is worth it, when she can’t breathe through the hurricane of tears that comes with his departure. It is worth it when she holds the child, kisses the cloud-and-cream softness of her daughter’s forehead for the first time.
It is worth it, in an alley populated by two dirty girls and their flame-haired mother.
It is worth it, with locks of shorn golden hair painting the dirty ground.
It is worth it, a dull ache spreading through her iron-stained mouth until she can feel naught else.
It is worth it – on the sailors’ beds, against alley walls, drowning in snow heaps. It is worth it, even in the end, cradled in sheets and doused with the calm of the hospital that she will never depart. Because Cosette is alive, and Fantine has made it that way, and surely there is no purer act of love in the whole of the world.
aaw fandom challenge // day two
Published
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