yitzhaks:

a male character you see as asexual // jean valjean

He used to think that it would happen eventually. He gave it time—nothing but time. He didn’t seek anyone out. He didn’t ever wish for more; only expected, in an odd distant way, that it would sometime reach him. After all, he was far too familiar with the words from his sister; she promised him that, as soon as he discovered true pleasure, he would never breathe carelessly again. She promised him that love was his purpose, and she, even after everything that had happened to her, did not know how to differentiate between love and the actions that she presumed to go along with it.

Yet he was far too often panting and sweating under the strain of his aching life to crave any exertion more. Love, surely, would best be the opposite. Something cool and gentle, something without passion, without flame.

The chains that ate away at him for nineteen years solidified his surety. They were not made solely of metal. There were men there, men with wild eyes, who saw him as prey. And he endured it, because he had no other choice. Only after years, when he let himself grow truly strong, was he able to fight back; until that time, he allowed his jaw to clench and his eyes to leak, and cast his thoughts out to the raging sea as it battered against the exterior of their fragile, salt-encrusted wooden bunk.

And when he saw Fantine—oh, Fantine, the purest and sweetest woman who would ever grace his presence, with a shining copper core that even starvation and disease could never dull—when he saw what it had done to her, he learned to hate it. It had ripped her apart. For him, for her, there was no pleasure, and it was then, with her cold and trembling in his arms, that he accepted it. He would not fear the action that had poisoned her, not forever, but he had no desire for it. His wants, his needs were broader, more ambitious, silver and less flowery.

Soon enough, he was old. No one expected more of him. He was content to be precisely what he was, and so he spent his life with the love he desired, awash in soft colors, covered in the kisses of old book pages and pressed flowers and the soothing glow of the stars.