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.
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.
#AsexualAwarenessWeekFandomChallenge
Day 2: aspec characters in shows and movies
Matthew Cuthbert (drawn here in movie form) has always been on the asexual spectrum for me. He lived with his sister, and never married because he was too afraid of women (Marilla, on the other hand, never married because men were too afraid of her).
I was a little disappointed when the new Netflix version gave Matthew a romantic subplot, but he was still the same endearing Matthew, so I got over it. His love for Anne always makes my heart ache because it’s so pure.
It’s Asexual Awareness Week and I want to try an experiment.
Ever since June, this blog has been posting pictures of aces spotted at Pride events, in order to show that we exist and we belong. Now I want to show where we exist, namely, that we’re everywhere.
Here’s what I want to do: I’m going to start with some blank maps and I want to fill them in. But I don’t just want to color in the states or countries when someone says “I’m in Nebraska!” or “I’m in Lichtenstein!” or wherever. I want pictures of visible aceness in all of these places. Ace flags at famous monuments, demi t-shirts on the street, gray-ace chalk markings at Pride, that sort of thing.
I’m going to need your help for this.
Here’s what I need you to do.
Grab an ace, gray-ace, or demi flag or acey clothing of some kind. (It’s okay if the flag is printed or hand drawn!)
Go outside. If you can go to a famous landmark or nice view of some sort, that would be great, but you don’t have to. A local park would be fine, even the sidewalk in front of your house would be okay in a pinch. (If you already have a good picture, you can just send that in. If you don’t have or can’t take a picture, an artist’s rendition of what it would be like to take an ace flag to someplace awesome in your local area will be suitable.)
Take a picture of the aceness wherever you are. You don’t have to be in the picture if you don’t want to, but some visible ace symbol has to be.
Submit the picture to acespotting, putting your state/province/country in the caption. You can do that here: https://acespotting.tumblr.com/submit And make sure you give me your location, since that’s the point of this experiment! Province/Territory in Canada, State/District/Commonwealth/Territory in US, and Country anywhere else. (If you’re logged in, your username will be associated with the picture, so if you don’t want that, you can either log out or use an “Incognito” or “Private” browser window to submit anonymously.)
I’m also going to need your help to track down aces in obscure places and convince them to participate. California will be easy. Nunavut will be hard.
I’m hoping that we can completely fill the Canada/USA/Mexico map by the end of Ace Week. I’d also like to get at least half of Europe filled in. And as amazing as it would be to get every single country on the world map represented, I think I’d be happy to get something on every continent. (Who knows someone in Antarctica?) And if your place isn’t really on the map (Like, say, Puerto Rico…), send something in anyway and I’ll get it added.
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