Work Text:
Day 6 — Asexual Identity | reflective
"A Hundred Different Things"
The conversation happened by accident, which was the only way Freya had ever had the important ones.
It was past midnight — properly past, not the respectable kind where you can still say I should go without embarrassing yourself. They were in the twenty-four-hour library because Freya had a paper due and Merlin was not so much studying as providing moral support, which mostly meant sitting across the table from her and scrolling through his phone while occasionally reading out sentences that had no context and expecting responses.
"'The inherent drama of the cell cycle,'" he said.
"That's actually true," she said, without looking up.
"Do you think cells are dramatic? Like, individually?"
"Mitosis is incredibly dramatic. It's a whole performance." She turned a page. "Is this helping you study?"
"I'm not studying."
"I know. Is this helping me study?"
"Marginally," he said, and she laughed, which was why she kept him around.
She didn't know how they'd ended up on the topic. Possibly it was the lateness, the library's specific 1 a.m. quality of stripped-back honesty. Possibly it was that Merlin had come out to his mum that week — he'd told Freya about it, quietly, in the way he was starting to tell people, like he was testing out the sound of it in different rooms. Possibly it was that he'd said, almost as a footnote, that he'd been scared for years he was broken somehow, not feeling things the way he thought he was supposed to feel them.
She'd looked up at that.
"Broken how?" she'd asked.
He'd explained, hesitant and honest, the way he was learning to be honest now. The years of performing an interest he wasn't sure he fully felt. The way desire had seemed to arrive in him differently than it did in everyone around him — present, yes, but not urgent, not constant, not the driving thing they seemed to describe.
She'd been quiet through all of it.
"That's not broken," she said.
"I know that now. Or I'm — I'm getting there."
She looked at her paper. She thought about what she was going to say and whether she was going to say it, because she didn't talk about this, she'd never talked about it, it wasn't a secret exactly but she'd also never had the words that quite fit and she wasn't sure she had them now.
"I don't really—" she started, and stopped. Started again. "There's a word. Asexual. For not really experiencing sexual attraction. Or experiencing it very differently, or less than—" She gestured vaguely, which was not linguistics but was the best she could do. "I read about it once. I read about it a lot, actually. I kept reading about it and then putting the tab away and then reopening the tab."
Merlin was watching her. He had put his phone down.
"I never said it to anyone before," she said.
"Okay," he said, carefully, the way he was learning to be careful about the right things.
She looked at her hands on the table. Something was loosening in her chest that she hadn't known was tied. "It's just — I always thought I was waiting. Like something would switch on and I'd be like everyone else and the waiting would end. But I think I've been waiting for ten years and there's nothing to wait for, and I'm not sure whether that's sad or just." She paused. "Just true."
"It doesn't have to be one or the other," he said.
She considered this. "No?"
"I've been figuring that out this week, actually. That it can be a bit sad and also fine. The two things don't cancel each other out."
She looked at him across the table — this boy she'd met in seminar eight months ago who'd sat next to her and said, unprompted, this lecturer writes on the board like she's being charged per letter, and made her laugh on a day she'd badly needed to laugh.
"I've never said that to anyone," she said again. "Asexual. Out loud."
"How does it feel?"
She thought about it honestly. "Small," she said. "Like a small true thing. The kind that sounds like not much but weighs something."
He nodded. He seemed to understand this specific kind of weight.
They sat with it for a while, the word between them on the table, small and true and newly real.
"Can I tell you something?" he said eventually.
"Yes."
"I'm really glad you did. Tell me." He was earnest about it, that specific guileless Merlin earnestness she'd clocked immediately and trusted ever since. "I think it matters, saying it."
"I think so too," she said. She turned back to her paper, which was still waiting patiently for her.
She was asexual. She was twenty-one years old, sitting in a library at one in the morning, and she had said it out loud, and the world had simply continued, and she was not broken, and the word was hers.
"'The inherent drama of the cell cycle,'" she said.
"I know, right?"
She smiled and kept reading.