Author Note: Welcome to Parallel Lines, an É/E Modern AU for the lovely anon who sent this prompt: "and we lay, we lay together just not too close, too close (how close is close enough?)" Features ace!Enjolras.
Originally, this was going to be a Pushing Daisies AU, but after some interesting ideas-bouncing, I decided to instead explore how E/E would work if Enjolras were asexual.
According to the website, Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, "an asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction." To me (and most logical humans, I hope), this does not in any way suggest they are incapable of forming romantic relationships with people. The resulting story is how I imagined such a relationship would form between Éponine and Enjolras, had the latter been asexual. I fully recognize that there is a spectrum to asexuality, and that their experiences do not speak for the whole community.
Please note that I myself am not an asexual person, so if I have represented asexuality here in an inaccurate manner, please tell me and I will do my best to correct it.
Disclaimer: I am not Victor Hugo. I do not own the book, the musical, or the film, and I certainly do not own the characters.
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Parallel Lines
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She isn't sure when she first noticed him that way—she thinks it may have been after one of his speeches, when he'd talked so passionately about the need for change. Then after the end of the rally and the clean-up, she'd noticed him helping an older, black, homeless woman into his car, plastic bags full of her belongings, clothes threadbare if cleaner than others' she'd seen on the streets.
She had asked Combeferre who she was.
"Oh, Stella? She's one of the homeless people Enjolras is friends with—she used to be a professor at the local university before the lay-offs, then her husband got cancer and the medical bills were too high to pay. She's a quiet, resilient sort—if you treat her like a charity case, she'll just laugh at you, but she'll take help if you let her help you back. Enjolras usually drives her to the shelter in exchange for her opinion on his speeches."
It isn't a side she'd thought the marble man could exhibit, an understanding of the people he's trying to help and a recognition that they've got as much to offer him as he does them.
And after that, it's a dozen little moments piled together: the jittery way he squints at everyone after three cups of coffee, how he runs his hands through his hair when he's stressed, his endearing love for all the Lion King movies (he tears up whenever he watches them, not that he'll ever admit it).
Soon, Éponine realizes the that her heart—which used to flutter madly at the sight of Marius, then ached horribly after he started dating her best friend, then eventually became numb to the world when she figured out nobody was going to love her like that—her heart warms at the sight of him.
It's not excitement, it's not infatuation, it's a quiet, steady thing that creeps up on her and nevertheless changes everything.
So one day, in the middle of a debate on healthcare reform, she takes one of his gesticulating hands in hers, leans forward, and presses her lips to his.
And, oh, how the warmth in her heart blooms into heated passion.
There's a problem, though.
He doesn't kiss her back.
The moment she realizes this, the warmth disappears as if it had never been. She pulls back, cursing herself for being all kinds of a stupid idiot, and opens her mouth to apologize, to say forget it, to ask him to pretend her momentary lapse of judgment never occurred—
"You like me," he says, his words halfway between a statement and a question.
She swallows heavily. "Yes."
Unexpectedly, he blushes and looks down, looking terribly young and unsure of himself. "I—you—I'm not sure this is a good thing," he says.
Her heart cracks a little. Is she so unlovable? He's the man who gives everyone a chance, and she'd thought that maybe—no. It doesn't matter what she thought. "It's okay," she replies woodenly. "I'm not going to go after you if you don't like me back—"
"But I do!" he blurts out.
She blinks. "Wait, what?"
He traces nervous patterns on the table surface, and this hesitation isn't like him at all. "I like you romantically," he states.
The warmth is back in her chest. She smiles at him, bright and happy.
He smiles back hesitantly before continuing, "It's just—are you aware that I'm asexual?"
Her brows lift in surprise and she's slightly too shocked to say anything in reply.
He gives out a little huff. "I'm guessing that's a no, then. I've never really kept it a secret, so I thought Courfeyrac or Bahorel or one of the others may have told you…" He peers at her underneath golden eyelashes.
"Well," she says slowly, "they told me you weren't interested in relationships right now, and Marius mentioned that you used to date Grantaire, but that you'd also gone out with one or two girls in high school, so I figured I at least had a chance."
She's not sure how much of a chance now. She's perfectly aware that her sex appeal is one of the strongest things she's got going for her—Montparnasse and all her ex-boyfriends and her father's groping cronies had made that clear. She's not sure how that would work with a person who isn't really interested in sex.
He smiles wryly. "Trust me, it's more than a chance. But..." He looks her firmly in the eye and declares, "I'm never going to be what society classifies as normal. I'm never going to want sex with you, and I'm fine with holding hands or kissing, but frankly I find sexual intercourse itself to be mildly uncomfortable. So I would understand if you would rather not pursue a relationship with me."
She tilts her head and looks at him closely. "All…right. Let me get this straight—you like me, but you don't want to have sex with me."
"In a nutshell," he replies.
"But you would be okay with dating me?" she presses.
He nods, but holds himself stiffly, as if bracing himself for rejection. "Yes. But I'm not certain you would be content with—"
"You let me worry about that," she says firmly. "Let's date and just…see where this goes, okay?" She takes his hand in hers and raises a brow in question.
"Okay," he says, looking surprised. "Okay."
They take things slow, and Éponine is surprised at how much she likes it.
They hold hands, fingers linked under the tables during meetings at La Musain, when they're walking down the street, after he cooks her dinner at his apartment.
They cuddle, her body fitting snugly against his on her ratty old couch as they watch Doctor Who, on his leather love seat as they argue about politics, about books, about whether or not Joly really is suffering from pneumonia.
They kiss, close-mouthed, chaste kisses where he brushes his lips against hers, gentle as butterfly wings. He peppers her face with them, lingering on her eyelids, her cheekbones, the line of her jaw. He murmurs how smart she is, how beautiful, how strong, how lucky he is to be with her.
With Enjolras, she's never pressured to go further than she likes, never made to feel as if she has to repay dinner or gifts with sex, never has to worry that he wants her for her looks alone, never has to feel not as pretty, not as sexy, not enough, because he never compares her to anybody else.
Instead, it's easy. Being with him. Liking him. L…loving him.
After all, he's the one who says "I love you" first, and she has to bury her face against his neck to hide the unexpected sting of tears when he does so, because nobody's ever been the one to say it to her first. She feels like she's spent her whole life chasing after love, after happiness, and he offers it to her so, so easily.
So when he asks, hesitantly, haltingly, if maybe she would like to go further…? She shakes her head firmly, presses another close-mouthed kiss to his beloved lips, and tells him no, thank you, she'd rather not if that was okay with him.
And the look of pleased surprise on his face is more than enough to keep her satisfied.
It's true—if it means she can get to keep him, if it means he will stay and love her, then she'll give up sex. She'll touch herself furtively in the bathroom where he can't see or hear her, she'll fight back the urge to press him against the wall and kiss him breathless, she'll ignore the ache in her belly that accompanies the warmth in her heart whenever she catches sight of him.
She's an expert at being what people want, and if what he wants is her to not want him, she can do that. She can be that.
She won't ever, ever, ever risk losing him.
…
…
…
To be honest, he's always noticed her—it's impossible not to, though initially she'd creep in after Marius like a shadow, head ducked down and clinging to the walls.
But still, he remembers the first glimpse he had of her: olive-toned skin, hair as black as soot, eyes as explosive as gunpowder.
He'd seen her and he'd wanted to know more about her, know why exactly it was that her gaze seemed so lost when her feet moved with such purpose.
It takes a few months and more than a few moments spent gazing after her and finally an intervention staged by Les Amis to realize he's fallen in love with her.
It's a horrible realization for a lot of reasons, including the fact that he doesn't have time for a relationship and the gut-deep knowledge that he'd have absolutely no chances with her.
"I don't see why you can't just ask her out," Combeferre says reasonably.
"Can't you?" Enjolras spits out, taking his frustration out on his best friend. "She's got men lined up for blocks chasing after her, and she's the only person I've seen besides Bahorel who exudes sexuality simply by standing there. She's not going to look twice at somebody like me."
Combeferre merely gives him a patiently exasperated look and shakes his head, not saying anything in reply.
What else is there to say, after all?
Two weeks later, he's sitting in La Musain and she's kissing him just the way he prefers, close-mouthed but firm, no tongues, just heated lips and sure movements, and it's better than he ever imagined.
The next fifteen minutes are even better than that.
The next six months are even better than that.
Almost before he knows it, they're moving in together, her photos framed on his bookshelves, her clothes in the drawers next to his, her bubblegum-flavored toothpaste sitting by his contact solution.
It's the pieces of a life together, and sometimes he has to stop and take a breath because he always figured he was going to be alone—but now he's not.
Now he's with Éponine, and he doesn't think there are words for this kind of happiness.
Surprisingly, she's the most accommodating partner he's ever had.
In the first few months of their dating, he'll admit to being afraid that their relationship would end at any second—either because she made him too uncomfortable or because he couldn't give her what she needed.
He made his peace with that, expected it with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Instead, their relationship is everything he always wanted—intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying without being physically demanding. They talk and argue and debate, and they hold hands and they dance and they walk around arm in arm—
—and she never pushes him further than he likes, never makes him feel inadequate about being her partner, never even indicates that she was the slightest bit unhappy to be with him.
They've got their problems, of course, like the way she never wants to ask for help even when she needs it, and his tendency to resist admitting he's wrong even when he obviously is, and how they're both too stubborn for their own good, but in general their life is wonderful.
He does get slightly worried, though, when she never takes him up on his offer for sex.
It's not that he wants to have sex, but he does want to make her feel good, and it's one of those things about relationships that he's learned to negotiate, carefully setting the boundaries of how far, how much, how often.
He's most comfortable with kissing and heavy petting, and he likes touching but not being touched, and he's relatively alright with intercourse, though he'll never seek it out and would be quite happy if he never had it again.
This…doesn't ever appear to come up in conversations with Éponine, who seems almost telepathic about what he wants and what he doesn't want. He's lost count of the times he's been one second away from asking her to pull back a little and she does it before he even gets a chance to.
Éponine seems remarkably blasé and undemanding about the whole thing; she casually mentions early on that she has a vibrator, so there's no need for him to have sex with her, and that seems adequate enough for the both of them.
He wonders if she might not even be that attracted to him, if what she wants from him is exactly what he wants from her—love, companionship, knowing a person so well you didn't even need words to communicate.
After all, if she wanted more, she would have told him, yes? Éponine is startlingly blunt about what she wants and she's never hesitated to tell him anything else.
He mentions it to Grantaire, however, and his friend and ex-lover nearly spits out his drink.
"Shit, Enjolras, you're in trouble," he says.
Enjolras frowns. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, Éponine's definitely got a sex drive, and you definitely don't, but I assumed you two arranged a weekly sort of thing, like with us," he answers. "Compromise and all that."
"Well, I offered, but she didn't seem interested," Enjolras says.
"Oh, shit, that's even worse. You mean she's gone cold turkey even after you offered? Because let me tell you, our girl was definitely interested six months ago, and if she's saying she's not interested now, she's definitely lying. And that can't be good for either of you, man. Are you sure you explained things to her? Maybe she thinks you're disgusted by her or something."
"I am not disgusted by Éponine," Enjolras retorts coldly.
"Well, yeah, I know that, but does she?"
"Of course she does. I told her I love her. How could I love somebody I'm disgusted by?"
Grantaire gives him an exasperated glance. "Look—it's hard for a sexual person to be in a relationship with an asexual person. Vice versa, too, obviously, but one of the reasons being with you was so hard was because for the longest time I thought you not wanting me sexually meant you didn't want me, period.
"I just want you to make sure you're communicating with her properly and not letting her be a self-sacrificing martyr. You saw how she was with Marius, and that was just infatuation. She loves you—how much more do you think she would do for you if you're not careful?"
The thought sits uncomfortably with Enjolras, so he tries talking with Éponine about it.
"Are you certain you don't want me to have sex with you?" he blurts out anxiously.
She stops in the middle of slathering Nutella on bread to give him an odd look. "Well, duh. I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do. I told you I'm fine with it. Why? Do you want to have sex with me?"
She's looking at him suspiciously instead of hopefully, like he had expected, so he answers honestly: "No."
"Okay," she says, shrugging, and she goes back to making her Nutella and banana sandwich.
That night, when he's holding her in his arms, he casually tests the waters, and trails his fingers over the waistband of her panties.
She takes his hand and firmly laces his fingers with hers, bringing their joined hands to rest by her head, and that seems to be the end of it. He pushes Grantaire's words to the back of his mind.
The two of them are just fine.
They aren't, as it turns out.
A week later, he gets home (their home now, and God, that never fails to make him grin) from work a few hours early, and he's about to go and find her when he hears a low, almost pained-sounding moan coming from the direction of the bedroom.
He gets there, but it's empty, and he's beginning to think he imagined it when he hears it again.
It's Éponine's voice, and he quickens his steps, running towards the bathroom. What's wrong? Is she hurt? Is she—
He opens the door to the bathroom, more than a little panicked, and stops dead in his tracks.
Éponine's lying in the bathtub, knees raised and spread, head thrown back as her hands shift below the surface of the water in confident, easy movements, and he can appreciate the beauty of her desire without being moved to desire himself.
She doesn't notice him—her eyes are closed and she's too lost in her own gratification to hear his entrance. She trails a soapy hand up and down her body, and she moans again, low and heated, and he recognizes the sound as one of pleasure and not pain.
"Enjolras," she says, and oh. Oh, she's imagining—oh.
He closes the door quietly behind him and goes to kneel next to her.
"Éponine," he says, and her eyes open and her head whips toward him. He begins to reach out to touch her cheek when she splashes water right into his face.
"Get out!" she shrieks, crossing her arms over her breasts and looking scandalized beyond belief.
"Éponine, what—"
"Get out! Get out, get out, get out!"
He does what she says and retreats to the bedroom, sitting on their bed and waiting anxiously for her to come out.
He doesn't understand why she doesn't want him to see her. Did he read things wrong? He's not disgusted by her, but he never took into consideration the fact that she might be disgusted with him, that she finds the thought of having an asexual person touch her repulsive.
But then she was imagining him touching her, wasn't she?
He's so confused.
She comes out dressed in his bathrobe, the sash tied tightly around her waist, every inch of her covered. She looks as anxious and uncomfortable as he feels, and he pats the bed next to him in invitation, hoping she'll take it.
She sits down a few feet away from him and hugs her knees to her chest.
"I didn't want you to see that," she whispers.
"Why not?" he asks, honestly confused. He's quite aware that she's a sexual being, with all the urges and desires that entails.
"You don't want that from me—you don't even like it when I touch you too much. How could I expect you to—" She cuts herself off and looks at him beseechingly. "I don't want you to think that I want more from you than you can give. Enjolras, I would never force you to do something you didn't want. Never."
He can't help himself; he gives a self-exasperated sigh and scoots over to her, leaning his head against the crook of her neck. "Goddammit, I hate it when Grantaire is right."
Her hand automatically comes up to pet his hair. "What do you mean?" she asks, a little warily.
"He told me you'd gotten…the wrong idea about me." He plays with the tie of her—his—bathrobe. "That you think that sex isn't something you can ask me to give you."
She tugs angrily at his hair and forces him to look at her. "Well, Grantaire doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, then, because I sure as hell wouldn't ever ask you to give me something you aren't comfortable with." Her hands come up to cup his face. "I know you don't want me," she says softly. "I'm fine with that. You're here anyway, aren't you? That's good enough for me."
Fuck. Enjolras closes his eyes and resists the urge to swear out loud. He'd really, really messed this up.
He pushes her back onto the bed so that she's lying down, then stretches out next to her and pulls her to him so that their bodies touch, the lines of him merging with hers, close enough that he can feel her frantic heartbeat.
"Éponine," he says seriously, looking her in the eye so she knows he's telling the truth. "Just because I don't want to have sex with you doesn't mean I don't want you.
"I want you desperately. I want to see you smile and hear you laugh and go dancing with you. I want to listen to you talk about art, about politics, about everything you care about. I want to hold hands with you, and kiss you, and spend mornings cuddled up together on our couch. I want you in my house and in my bed and in my life. I want to grow old with you; I want to have a family with you; I want to spend forever with you.
"I want you," he says simply, wiping away the tears at the corner of her eyes. "And I want you to know that that's never going to change, that you shouldn't be afraid to ask me for the things you want, because I want to give them to you."
She clutches him tightly, and says brokenly, "I don't want you to leave me."
He holds her closer, throwing his leg over hers. "Never," he promises, pressing kisses to her eyes, her cheeks, her trembling mouth. "Never, never, never."
When he starts to kiss her lower, moving to her neck and the slope of her chest, she stops him. "Wait, you don't—"
"Éponine," he says. "Do you remember when you dragged me out to that awful techno dance bar?"
She looks nonplussed. "Ye-es…" she says cautiously, obviously not sure where he's going with this.
"And do you remember how I told you that I really would have preferred not to go, but I went anyway? And got drunk, and danced with you, and let Jehan draw designs on my face in glow-in-the-dark paint?"
"Yes," she says again, grinning a little.
"Well, for me, sex is kind of like that. It's not something I want—in fact, it's something I would be perfectly fine never doing again for as long as I lived. I never would have gone if I'd been by myself. But you know what? I'm with you now, and if going to dimly lit bars with bad music makes you happy, then I'll go. Because I love you, and even if I don't love those sorts of places, I do love making you happy and you're happier when I'm there with you."
She giggles and snuggles closer to him. "Did you honestly just compare sex to a techno bar? I'm telling Courfeyrac."
He groans and buries his face against her hair. "Don't. Please don't, my reputation has suffered enough thanks to that experience as it is."
She laughs some more, and he laughs with her, and soon she's letting him open the robe and press kisses to her skin, letting him murmur words of love and affection to her, letting him learn the lines of her body the way he's learned the lines of her heart. He touches her softly, reverently, and a little awkwardly, but she doesn't seem to mind if the way she's moaning out his name is any indication.
He brings her to orgasm with his clever fingers, making quick, tight circles around her clit until she's shuddering helplessly against him.
And even though he isn't stirred to arousal himself, the sleepy, content look in her eyes afterwards is satisfaction enough for him.
Éponine rubs her hand against the muscles of his stomach. "You sure you don't want me to…?"
"I'm sure," he says, smiling a little at their role reversal. Honestly, this is the way things should have been from the start, and he feels a twinge of regret that he hadn't paid attention to her the way she paid attention to him.
No matter. He's paying attention now.
They fall asleep, pressed together close as close can be, and for them, what they have is more than enough.
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