aroace kevin??
Aro!ace!Kevin who doesn’t even realize that he’s different until high school, when the other boys at church start getting a lot less subtle about their attentions to the girls and the jokes they bandy around when the youth group leader isn’t paying attention. Aro!ace!Kevin who laughs along awkwardly and says, when they ask him who he’s got his eye on, that he’s saving himself for after his mission. Aro!ace!Kevin who hears about the homosexuals the church disapproves of and wonders, for a moment, what it would feel like to want something so badly you’d go after it, even if you damned yourself in the process. It reminds him a bit too much of his own desires (even though they’re nothing alike, obviously), and instead he wonders how anyone could like men (or women) enough to give up the church. They must be crazy; there’s nothing better than the church and its promises. Aro!ace!Kevin who meets Elder McKinley and realizes that, yes, there are people who can’t help it at all, and they’re not just choosing it, the way he sort of assumed they were. He meets Arnold, who falls for an African girl who, by all standards, is one of the most beautiful people Kevin has ever seen. And Kevin doesn’t feel anything. Aro!ace!Kevin who loves his friends, he’s sure of that, but he never feels the desire to push beyond that, to find out what it feels like to press his lips against someone else’s, what’s it’s like to go from 1st base to 2nd to 3rd to home, to bring someone home to meet his parents and have them ask “So when’s the wedding?”, to daydream with them about the life they’ll have together, fragile and tentative and dream-like, but powered by love. Aro!ace!Kevin who starts to think that he’s spent so much time and energy focusing on what he wants in the afterlife that he can’t focus on anyone else now, and half throws himself into ‘loving’ (doing favors for, hanging around, constantly talking to) his friends in hopes it’ll make up for what he’s done and half falls into a sullen sort of hopelessness, because he’s ruined himself and any chance at happiness because he was such a goddamn selfish child. Aro!ace!Kevin who finally gets confronted by someone, who demands he tell them what’s wrong because he’s acting like a crazy person, and he realizes they think he’s going to commit suicide. Aro!ace!Kevin who tells them everything, who yells it in their face so then they’ll just leave him alone, the way he deserves. Aro!ace!Kevin who’s friends don’t understand, but they know they love him and that he… well, he acts like he loves them and he’s clearly not a psychopath, so he must be okay, right? And they love him anyway. Aro!ace!Kevin who attends weddings like everyone else but squirms and averts his eyes through the whole ceremony and acts like he only came for the party afterwards (even though he wants it, he wants to know what that feels like, to want to live your whole life with someone, to kiss them and have sex with them and be in love with them, because he has never, never felt that before. Aro!ace!Kevin who comes to terms with the fact that he’s different while he’s on his mission, and becomes almost okay with it by the time he and Arnold (and the new Mrs. Cunningham) step off the plane in Salt Lake City. Aro!ace!Kevin who is almost always at Arnold and Naba’s apartment after that, because he loves them more than anyone else in the world (except for Connor McKinley, who is currently a thousand miles away), and puts his all into the friendships he made in Uganda i stead of worrying about the women his family throws his way. Aro!ace!Kevin who, finally giving into his desire to know, once and for all, if there’s anyone else in the whole world who understands what this feels like, does some Google searching, and finds out that he’s not broken, and he’s not sick, and there are other people like him who are so proud of what they are that they go to parades for it, and have festivals and events and flags, and even though Kevin has never been a huge fan of green or purple he buys some t-shirts and flags and those black rings (which he replaces his purity ring with) and finally starts to feel good about himself, for the first time in a very, very long time.
