Collected Comment!Fic about Asexual Characters

[quinara]

Here is a very hodge-podge collection of fics for various fandoms - fun, eh? All written for the asexual_fandom Prompt Fest. (I cannot believe I wrote Janto... I must be gearing up for writerconuk! ;) ) I don't think there's anything that needs an obvious warning.

An Observation amongst Many.
For wrabbit: Harry Potter; any; AU where marriages are magical bondings and sex is a matter for individuals, married or non married or married but not to each other, to negotiate if they like [Luna Lovegood/Rolf Scamander].

They'd been researching Norwegian Ridgewickles for eighteen months when he asked. The ridgewickles (scaly little symbiotes that live on Norwegian Ridgebacks, feeding on the vegetation caught between their scales), made a fascinating study, seeing as they were only visible when they were warmed by the dragon's skin. Together, Luna and Rolf had developed a viewing table, made of ridgehide and warmed from underneath by temperature-controlled flames. It was a wonderful innovation and allowed them, if they were careful, to transfer the beetle-like creatures for study.

Indeed, the research would be groundbreaking, but it was almost over. "Luna?" Rolf asked as they were tabulating the last of the results. "The study's coming to an end now, but I can't imagine my life without you. Would you consider getting married?"

"Oh, certainly," Luna replied - and considered it as her quill scratched loopy pink numbers over the parchment. At length she decided, "That seems like a nice idea; but I can't imagine we'll have sex."

"Oh no," Rolf agreed, and the comfortable silence resumed for a time. His mind, scattered but brilliant, soon twitched in another direction. "So, where do you think we should publish?"

.

The Taste of Purple.
For jackandahat: BtVS; Ethan Rayne; Of course he flirts - but that's as far as it goes. [1980; beware swearing].

There's a girl at the bar he's got his eye on. She can't be, what, more than twenty? But she has the look, fire in her eyes as she drinks something dark from a wine glass. Everyone knows this pub is a place to hook up for a good time, but you do get the odd ingénue riding on the wrong end of the stick, so caution's always the best way forward.

She's seen him looking now, the swishing wall of her brown hair twitching as she watches him in the mirror. From his booth he can just see her face, above a bottle of Gordon's and Cinzano, and she's good entertainment as he nurses his scotch. Slowly she winks, and waves with her fingers, the tiniest bolt of red magic slipping over and under her knuckles. He realises then that she is his sort of girl. The night just got interesting.

Still, it could be she's looking for something tantric, so he'd better make clear what he has on offer. He offers her a smile then taps his thumb ring against the rim of his glass, shuts his eyes and channels some spare magic through his body, letting it go where it will. In an instant one of the lights turns blue, and the telly switches over from the news to a film about zombies. Not that exciting, but his trade's in the unexpected.

He looks back and... Damn, it's not to be. The girl wrinkles her nose, unamused as she turns away. He shrugs and leans back against his seat.

But then, behind his head, there's a voice. "Mind if I join you?" It's a boy, about the same as as the girl, with a pint glass of something purple. Whipcord thin and dressed like Paul Weller. Buzzing with some sort of energy.

"Please," Ethan says, and watches as the boy leaves his glass in the air, sitting at the table then pulling it back to his hands with a click of his fingers. Showboating. He's seen better.

"Didn't know they had zombies in Beirut," Paul offers. (It'll be a time till Ethan knows his name; this'll do for now.)

Ethan smirks, liking the boy's tone, even if he seems eager to please. "You'd be surprised what they have."

"You've been there?" There's wonder in his eyes, like he wants to be jaded but hasn't fallen hard enough yet. Ethan fucking loves youth.

"Mate, I've been everywhere." I can take you somewhere new.

Paul nods, taking a slurp of his drink.

Then Ethan works out what it is. "Is that a bloody Snakebite?" He snorts. "What are you, twelve?"

But Paul is unashamed, secure despite his naïveté. It's attractive. "I like the name," he says with a shrug, locking eyes with Ethan. "I like the colour and I like the taste." He speaks slowly, taking care over the words, and part of Ethan's brain is transported to that place where he always ends up, the synaesthetic playground where magic takes him, where colour and taste and smell and touch are all the same thing and his mind is absolutely free. There's a party on tonight, he remembers, up in Kentish Town...

"You want purple," Ethan tells him, "you can do better than that."

That's when Paul's eyes become a challenge. "Show me," he says, setting his Snakebite to the side of the table.

For a moment Ethan raises an eyebrow, before deciding, "All right." He nods and downs his scotch, stretching his neck and enjoying the slide of the liquid down his throat. When he looks back, Paul's entranced.

Ethan smiles as they leave, feeling like a bent Professor Kirke on the way to the wardrobe.

---

He never finds out if the boy wanted more from him than the magic. Chaos is like heroin: it buggers your libido right to fuck all. More than that it sets in pretty quick.

But that? It suits Ethan just fine.

.

The Girl in the Fishtank.
For amaresu: St. Trinian's; any; not interested in boys or girls [Kelly Jones + girl in the fish tank].

Every Easter, they strung up a girl for RE, tied her to the blackboard with three stripey ties for as long as she could take it.

Kelly Jones lasted longer than any St. Trinian on record.

The reputation followed her right to head girlship, but it was that sort of respect a girl needed. By the time you reached sixth form, well, you were immediately competing with the Totty and their stories of sexual conquest, not to mention Polly's system of booby-trapped alarms to keep you out of the geek den on certain afternoons. It was a struggle for mystique, for cool.

So, maybe it wasn't a mistake that everyone knew Kelly Jones could put up with pain. Liked pain, even. Though you never saw her dancing the dance of the (ooh-er) sexually active, girls still whispered about her in the corridors (and wrote graffiti with red and black spray paint), about her tattoo and the garotte wire they'd thought they'd seen round her thigh, just above the hem of her gym shorts. It was for this reputation that Katie Sewell sought her out.

'Sought her out' of course meant 'waited in the art room until Kelly came by one day', but when she was there Katie stuck her head out her fish tank, spat out some water and asked, "Kelly, can I talk to you?"

Kelly blinked, stopping still in the corridor, but otherwise didn't react. Third form girls spoke to her, Katie knew - she'd seen them do it - so she waited.

At last, the older girl swept into the room and said, "What's the problem?"

"Do you think it's strange," Katie asked, climbing out and onto the floor, "that I spend all day in a fish tank?"

Kelly smiled. "There's a lot of strange girls here."

"All my year are picking gangs," she tried to explain, wringing out her hair. "They've got pictures above our beds, from, like, magazines and stuff. There's a thing - like, everyone wears their headphones and hides under their quilts between ten-thirty and eleven."

With a quirk of her eyebrows, Kelly looked like she was beginning to understand. She sat down on one of the desks, crossing her arms. "What do you do under there?"

Katie shrugged, not really wanting to admit it. It sounded silly, saying it out loud.

"Katie." Kelly's voice cracked a little harder.

"I - I think about being back in the fish tank."

"And?"

Confused, Katie looked up, not sure what else to say. "That's it. Sometimes I read a book or whatever, but mostly I think about the tank." She was beginning to dry off now, which was necessary once a day, so Matron said, but she felt like she was desiccating. "I don't do what everyone else does."

Thankfully, Kelly wasn't laughing at her. She was thinking, one hand pulling at the choker round her neck, threading a finger under it so the leather dug in; Katie held her breath. At last Kelly said, "What you're feeling's normal," she told her, in that clipped bright accent of hers. "As normal as everyone else." Another finger slipped under her necklace, crossing beneath the first, and Katie was sure it was unconscious. "But you can't live in that tank forever. You've got to fit it in with the rest of the world - learn a skill to make some cash. Swimmming, maybe. Passport forging."

Katie opened her mouth to argue, but bit it back at the last moment. "OK," she said, nodding in deference.

"Don't worry." Kelly seemed to take pity on her, offering a last enigmatic smile as she took her hand away from her neck. "Most of your mates are going to feel it a lot worse than you. It's not always easy, being a boarder here."

Again Katie nodded, then watched the head girl walk away, hips swinging in her pencil skirt. No one fitted in at St. Trinian's, she had to remember that. Even if she fit in even less than the others.

.

Let's Get Metaphysical.
For melannen: Dr. Who/Torchwood; Captain Jack Harkness; Jack's never understood the past's obsession with labels and sex and sexuality. Sure, sex is fun - a hell of a lot of fun, and there are much worse ways to pass the time - but it's not all that important, really. [Jack/Ianto; sometime in S2].

"Would you have sex with Gwen?" Ianto asked, a little desperately. The Hub was cold in the mornings, before anyone else arrived, and their breath was close to steaming today. Jack thought maybe he could see the outline of steam, just appearing in the air.

It was kind of more fascinating than this conversation, which he feared was about to go very wrong. But he couldn't lie, could he? "Sure," he replied with a shrug.

Ianto's jaw clenched, as if he'd been wounded. "Tosh?" he continued relentlessly. "Owen?"

How had they got onto this topic anyway? "Why not?" he replied, his hands gesturing of their own accord. "If you were there we could -"

"Rhys?" Ianto cut him off. "If you'd have sex with Rhys then there's definitely something wrong with you."

"Hey," Jack said shortly, angry now. His skin tingled, but not with cold. "Have you ever thought that maybe there's something wrong with you, with this whole world? The way you're all obsessed with genitalia, as if touching there is something different than what you do everyday, when you shake hands - or stand against someone on the bus?"

"No." Ianto shook his head, looking terribly, terribly young. "It's different - it's..."

There was nothing for it; Jack rolled his eyes. "Yeah, we've got more nerves there. Better nerves. That doesn't make it special." Can't you see that?

"Does this..." Teary eyed, Ianto looked at him, and Jack's heart immediately clenched. "What we - do, does it mean nothing to you, then?"

How could he explain that it was what he felt inside that mattered? That his dick did what it liked, but his heart made careful choices? "You mean something to me," Jack swore, staring him down. "You're the thing that's important."

From the look on his face, it wasn't clear that Ianto understood. Jack didn't know what to say.

.

Living on Drury Lane.
For softestbullet: any; any; nonsexual ways of saying 'I love you, you're beautiful'. [Andrew/Xander; S7].

The house was near bursting these days - and the hordes were hungry. Whenever Andrew baked, the food went in minutes if not seconds, with Molly and her followers becoming more and more cunning in their schemes to take cookies straight from the tray.

Andrew didn't mind, because he always there when they came out, but it was the Scoobies who suffered. Xander, mostly: Buffy and Spike had more important things to worry about, plus Willow nearly always made it in time (Kennedy was on the grapevine); Anya, Dawn and Mr. Giles had their respective Cheese of Death, Concoctions of Doom and peculiar British delights no one else would touch. It was Xander whose disappointed face broke Andrew's heart when he saw there was nothing left.

"I'm cutting back anyway," he'd say with a self-deprecating smile, patting his stomach like it mattered how big it was. "Only gonna get the demons, looking like this."

And so, one day, when he was trying a new muffin recipe, Andrew kept a little of the mix back, sneaking it in the oven ten minutes after the other muffins had started. The dinger dinged when the main batch was done and right on cue the potentials came running in from the outside, and from the living room, and even from the basement (though Andrew didn't know what Vi and Chao Ahn had been doing there). There were muffins for all, seconds for the greedy, and they'd all vanished (along with their eaters) by the time the second lot were done.

Right on time, Xander came in from the yard, tired from mending the fence. (Andrew had watched him from the kitchen - he'd been amazing and careful as ever.) "Oh, were there muffins?" he asked, then quirking a smile. "Guess I'm late for the Muffin Man, huh?"

"Actually, no!" As Xander's eyebrows rose Andrew turned to the oven, pulling out the extra tray with a flourish. It was a small thing he'd found down the store, with only four recesses, currently cradling four plump muffins, golden brown with blueberry blue, warm steam rising rich with that sweet, baked smell. Andrew's labour of love. "The ones in the yellow cases," Andrew explained, indicating the ones on the left, "they're regular. The ones in red cases," he indicated those on the right, "I made with low-fat ingredients, so they're totally healthy, though I'm not sure they'll taste as good."

Xander looked startled, and kind of speechless.

"I mean, if you're watching your weight," Andrew continued, putting the muffins on the counter as they grew too hot in his mitts. "I don't think you need to, but I wanted to offer you a choice in case that's what you've decided to do.

"I..." Xander began, then broke eye-contact. "Thank you," he said, as he took one of the low-fat muffins. "It's not really a weight thing," he confessed as he peeled back the case. "I have problems with food - controlling everything when the punches start rolling, you know?. If I keep to three square meals and healthy snacks then I know I'm doing something right."

Andrew nodded, taking one of the regular ones for himself. "I get that," he said. All he wanted was for Xander to be happy, even if that meant not having what Andrew would call the best muffin experience.

Xander smiled, mouth full of muffin, and they shared the silence as they ate. The kitchen, so often the scene of battle plans and imminent doom, was, for those few minutes, full of nothing but warmth and peace.

Comments

[evilawyer]

Okay, stayed away from Harry Potter (which I hate with a passion because of something related, in my brain at least, to the New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Baptist Preachers from Peoria) fic and the St. Trinian's (of which I know nothing) fic, but loved the rest. The Ethan one --- yes, that is Ethan. Very much so. The Torchwood one was nice, although, having just rewatched Season 2, I was struck by how much Ianto was not the weeper I remembered him to be. He must have gotten it out of his system in Season One. (Haven't seen the Season 3 mini-series, so don't know if he got back into it, maybe?) The Xander and Andrew one, though, that one was so sweet and, in the context of what was to come, just heartbreaking.

[quinara]

Ooh, thank you! I don't write Ethan nearly enough, so I'm really glad he was him. As for Ianto, I'm going to stand by with the fact I've only watched about twenty minutes of S1 (though I can remember S3 much more clearly than S2, so I might have been a bit off?). :)

[laeria]

Heee, you wrote foody fluffy Xander/Andrew! Now with weight-watching. To quote Donna Noble, I bloody love you.

[quinara]

How could I resist! ;) And yay, thank you for saying so :D