Hallo, Aro is a series of flash fiction stories about allosexual aromantic characters navigating friendship, sexual attraction, aromanticism and the weight of amatonormative expectation.
When Paide ein Iteme says the words “I don’t love”, he doesn’t just refer to romantic relationships.
Little does this world hate more than a loveless man, save perhaps a loveless woman.
Contains: A disabled, pansexual, aromantic cis man discussing the reasons why the phrase “I don’t love” encompasses his platonic and familial relationships.
Content Advisory: Non-detailed mentions of death, war, violence, abuse, cissexism and suicidal ideation. More detailed references to off-page ableism and abuse, including a parent’s breaking of an autistic child’s stim toy. Depictions of heterosexism and heterosexist slurs/sex negative language.
Links: PDF, EPUB and MOBI files are also available for download from Patreon.
Length: 1, 000 words / 4 PDF pages.
Note: This story takes place between The Eagle Court stories A Prince of the Dead and The King of Gears and Bone. I always planned to elaborate on Paide’s statement of love later in the series (and have done so in the drafts of the sequel novel, Birds of a Feather). The need for empowering, sympathetic fictional representation of loveless aros and aros with complicated relationships to love, however, provoked me to tell this story now.
It may help new readers to know that the narrator is a revenant, ensorcelled by the necromancer he fought.
“He connects, attaches, to things.” Paide lets the words roll over his thoughts before speaking, unsure how to convey his meaning to someone unknowing of his brother’s nature. “Trinkets, odds and ends, textured bits he can hold in his hands. One year he went everywhere stroking a wooden spoon! I don’t mean a bribe. A token, showing him that we accept him in this way, so we may be trusted in others.” He glances across the table. “Do you still make your bits of beads and jewellery?”
Thereva called his sketches on maps and missives “bits of drawings”, but even she spent the quiet nights of the war working with wood and thread.
“I have something.” She almost smiles, her fingers still atop her last jade counter. “I also think you lied before, sir. Paide.”
Is this another declaration he’ll dislike hearing? “How so?”
“You said you didn’t love. How isn’t that love? It just isn’t romantic.” She shifts the piece two squares. “Your move.”
The board shows Paide another loss.
At least this one lacks consequence.
“I didn’t lie.” He didn’t correct her earlier assumption, but she did listen to him when all others denied his truth. Why not also in this? “You’re looking, I think, for something you’d rather see in my words. Something preferable. I meant how I said it.” He pauses for the space presaging impact, even here unable to cast aside his orator’s tricks. “Little does this world hate more than a loveless man, save perhaps a loveless woman.”
Thereva leans over the table, fine brows raised, her eyes searching his. Looking, maybe, for the shadows of the man that spoke of suicide? “I … I don’t know what that is! Princely pity shrouded in princely verbiage? Depression? Your debility?” She shakes her head. “What do you need of me? What are you asking by saying that?”
It means something that she asks.
It also means something that she thinks him hale enough for teasing.
“I don’t think love is something I want or need. I don’t think I should keep what I thought was love, having seen what it wrought.”
She blinks, frowning. “I understood that as you don’t wish a husband or a wife. How do you mean it, then?”
For the first time in months, the world feels steady underneath his chair. Perhaps it’s that today Paide reached the nadir of desperation, his sanity too rent to be further tarnished. Perhaps it’s the conclusion of a journey that shaped every use of his queerness as a weapon to discourage his father from pressing marriage, now unnecessary. Perhaps it’s the strange freedom come after casting the rest of his life to the pyre.
Their expectations denied his humanity. Why respect those few still within his ability?
“I don’t. I like … liked…? Like sex.” He laughs, as though Thereva didn’t see people emerge from his tent at odd hours, as though sex hasn’t become memory and history over hope. “I want a friend. I don’t love elsewise. I never have. But…” He exhales in the old habit of delay, speaking’s breath hissing over his lips. “My father loved me, but that didn’t stop me enduring his judgement, angels forbid he have a cocksucker for a son! Mamman loved my father, but that didn’t stop him from dying at her hands. Mamman loves my brother enough to war for him, but that didn’t stop his wooden spoon from shattering under her hands … or me applauding her anger. I thought…”
Thereva shifts her weight, preternaturally patient.
Is there any magical order of words, Paide wonders, that convey depth of feeling without implying self-pity?
“I thought I loved my people, my country. I thought to save Ihrne from the tyranny of a necromancer with power to void law. I thought I loved them, and they me, and I thought that love justified my war.” He halts, thinking of armies of bones, the bearing of corpses from the battlefield while the enemy claimed his living allies, a conflict that brought blood, loss and deprivation. “It gained Ihrne nothing.”
He lost his title, his crown, his heartbeat, his future.
For what? Death?
Thereva, commander of soldiers and forced co-conspirator in Paide’s useless idealism, nods at him … but her lips press, colourless, into a thin line.
“Lovelessness is a byword for hatred, horror and cruelty. But my family’s love is nothing but horror and cruelty. Our love justifies anything that follows, no matter how questionable, how wrong. Why isn’t it better to be loveless?”
Thereva’s brow furrows. She speaks with care, but it may mean anything; Paide has never found her easy to read. “My understanding … my understanding is that isn’t real love. False love, hate masquerading as love.”
Paide remembers too late her family: kin accepting of her womanhood if she denies herself expression, affection and connection.
If that’s what the world names love, why value it?
“Too many people too often call abuse ‘love’ for me to think it a false reckoning,” he says slowly. “What if it’s meant to justify what should be incomprehensible? Not a flaw, but a feature? Love didn’t shelter my brother from us. Is love, then, what’s required to craft kindness or governance? To rule? To protect?”
Her lips part, soundless, before she shakes her head. “I can’t say, truly, that it is.”
“I need acceptance more than love, Thereva Asigne. So does my brother.”
She sits, statuesque if not for the rise and fall of her chest, before reaching across the table, glancing at his hand. He nods; she closes her fingers about his. “Accept, then.”
Her faith, he thinks, empowers him more than a kingdom of love.
Paide ein Iteme, loveless prince-regent of Ihrne. It doesn’t sound like a tragedy this side of war, not when love failed to provide safety and sanity in his current shape of life. It sounds like a beginning, a renewal.
It sounds like hope.
He nods at the board. “New game?”
K. A. Cook is an abrosexual, aromantic, agender autistic who experiences chronic pain and mental illness. Ze writes creative non-fiction, personal essays and fiction about the above on the philosophy that if the universe is going to make life interesting, ze may as well make interesting art. You can find hir blogging at Aro Worlds and running the Tumblr accounts @aroworlds and @alloaroworlds.
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