Okay this is some personal shit but I need y'all to understand something:
Asexuality wasn't even formally recognized as a sexual orientation until 2012 (and the variations along the spectrum even later.)
I was 29 in 2012. I spent the first 3 decades of my life thinking I just "didn't have a knack for flirting" or that something was fundamentally broken about me, and it must just be an amalgamation of all my own insecurities and self-loathing that every time someone expressed attraction to me my entire being recoiled from it like touching a hot stove, like "haha you know what actually fuck this." Even if I liked them. Even if I, during several ill-fated attempts in my mid-20s, initiated it.
I clocked Lucanis as demi long before Mary confirmed it. Several of his banters make it painfully obvious. He loves romance in fiction but can't seem to make it happen for himself irl. He has made exactly one (1) other attempt, because it takes So Much respect and trust and time and mental energy to get him interested in the first place, and when it went unacknowledged/unreciprocated he just shrugged and went 'well thats how that goes I guess" and never bothered again. And now he's in his mid-thirties with a busy career (and trauma upon trauma) and assumes its just never happening. He expresses affection through acts of service bc it's all he can do despite believing its not enough (bc he knows other people need something he can't seem to give).
He understands some people have unusual kinks and thats fine, it's all the same shade of weird to him so y'all might as well have fun. He's obsessed with wyverns (this seems to be a very specific joke in the ace community lol).
He is absolutely desperate to hold onto his few remaining familial connections (however toxic), because that's all the love he ever expects to know.
And the almost-kiss? That wasn't Spite. The contrived attempt at swagger, not exactly fake but more like trying to ride a fleeting wave of mutual attraction long enough to communicate it with body language. The utter bliss of Rook's single finger on his chest because he is so terribly touch-starved.
And then this expression of frustration and guilt and bone-deep sadness on his face and in his voice that I felt in my soul because that was me. That was me at 25-28 trying desperately to touch a hot stove on purpose because I was so abyssmally lonely. And I too blamed it on trauma. On self-loathing. On feeling othered and wrong.
I wanted to fucking cry for him.
Though not as much as when, at long last, we arrive at a relationship where while sex isn't necessarily off the table if both are feeling it, what matters to him above all else is that he ends the day asleep in your arms.
Just absolute perfection.
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
dededos
origamiaround
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
snowghoul
