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Jules doesn’t bother with fragrance on a daily basis because most of the time he has nowhere to go nobody to impress. Books and tea leaves and horses make for easier companions than the stuffy noblemen he avoids as much as possible, and unlike those men they don’t give a single whit about what he smells like.
Nonetheless he glances at the bottle, still half-full, every day. Like all of his nice things it was a gift from Rosemarine, this one received on his fourteenth birthday.
(“We’ll be adults soon!” Rosemarine had said, though he’d been play-acting at adulthood since he first met Auguste Beau. “So we can’t neglect anything about ourselves, not even our scents.”
“Nobody will care how I smell,” Jules answered; any kind gestures from Rosemarine made him feel guilty for hating him. Guilty for loving him, too.
Rosemarine took another step closer, his face close enough to Jules’ that they must have been breathing the same air. “I care!” he said, frowning. “I took great care to pick something that suited you, so you’d better appreciate it.”
Lavender. Refinement, serenity, grace. “Just because you can make lavender into tea...”
“Because it’s relaxing. You need it”)
Today, he decides to indulge himself with a spritz. Something tells him as the soft floral scent wafts into his nose that he may benefit from it.
Jules had been a high-strung child, and perhaps he had indeed needed to relax a bit, though Rosemarine tended to have the opposite effect on him. Personally he prefers when scents stay in their natural places: his room smelling of old books and the breeze that drifts in through the window, flowers smelling like flowers, his skin smelling faintly of soap (which is admittedly lavender at times), and Rosemarine...
Ah, but Rosemarine has smelled like roses every day for years, so that artifice might as well be natural for him at this point. The fragrance used to make Jules a bit dizzy, which he’d always chalked up to the way that Rosemarine sometimes used enough of it to nearly choke anyone who got near him, like some odd, expensive armor. He’s used to it now, and Rosemarine has learned to use a lighter hand when it’s only the two of them—when he’s safe.
Fragrance has its place, though, and maybe there’s one that would suit Jules better. Something that doesn’t remind him of Rosemarine, who was so small and broken that year but still remembered that Jules’ birthday was a week before Christmas. He avoids dwelling on those memories, ones that remind him too much of who Rosemarine used to be, and of who Jules used to be. Now, the scent of lavender brings them back to the forefront of his mind.
The sound of three sharp knocks in quick succession, and Jules is forced out of his head and back into reality.
“Come in,” he says. There’s no need to clarify that the door is unlocked; the person who’s knocking already knows this, and even if it didn’t, he has a key.
Rosemarine does come in, locking the door behind himself, and his stately presence fills the room even though his fragrance doesn’t. It makes Jules tense and relax all at once, somehow: his companion’s presence is so familiar at this point that it’s almost a comfort, but not quite. He always expects Jules to be on his best behavior, which can be a challenge when Jules is in a constant state of wanting to slap him or kiss him or both, in any order. However, Jules continues to resist the urge to do either as Rosemarine sits quite unceremoniously on his couch and sets his staff off to the side.
“It’s been a long day,” he says, the words leaving his mouth like a sigh.
“Mmm,” says Jules. He’s already getting out a bottle of wine from his cabinet, and a single glass to go with it.
“I won’t go into the details. I don’t want to.”
“Mmm,” says Jules, again. He’s no good with words, other than in essays, and isn’t of any help when Rosemarine feels the urge to rant at him.
“Sit with me when you’re ready?”
Jules was already halfway there. He hands Rosemarine a full glass of wine and sets the bottle on the nearest table; he’s just recently had some tea and it’s too early to drink, for him.
They sit with their legs a few centimeters apart, and Jules rests his arms on the back of the couch. It’s silent between them until Rosemarine’s first glass is finished, and he places it to the side, glancing at Jules. Hoping for something, maybe, though it’s impossible to tell quite what.
“You smell nice,” Rosemarine says, finally. It comes off as more a statement of fact than a complement, likely because he’s the whole reason Jules smells like anything at all other than the occasional cup of tea spilled across his shirt. “Did you know that lavender is—”
Jules is the only person who can get away with interrupting Rosemarine and he intends to appreciate the privilege. “Relaxing? Yes, I know. Did you know that roses are said to be an aphrodisiac?”
“I know already. Don’t say that.”
Speaking to Rosemarine without him taking offense at something is like walking across a tightrope: if Jules is too distant, he worries that he no longer cares; too familiar, and Rosemarine’s aversion to intimacy might win over the affection for Jules that he hides poorly. It’s fascinating, sometimes, but mostly frustrating.
“Sorry,” Jules says. “I won’t say it again.”
It would be nice to stop this sham and just tell Rosemarine all that he thinks of him, the good and the bad, the love and the hate, and just let Rosemarine cry and scream and hit him and fall to pieces. Jules would still be in the aftermath, to pick them up and put them back together.
But. Who would Rosemarine be, after all of that? Who would Jules be? More than anything, that unknown is what he fears.
Rosemarine doesn’t accept the apology in so many words, but he closes the distance between them, and for him that’s far more meaningful. I’m not mad today, his touch says, just a hand on a knee but something that anyone but Jules would consider shockingly intimate coming from the peerless White Prince.
He breathes in deep, and Jules does too, without meaning to. The commingling of lavender and roses seems natural, and when Rosemarine breathes out again he relaxes into Jules a bit further, rests his head lightly on his shoulder. He’s doing it for his own benefit, Jules thinks. That Jules also finds a tender pleasure in his vulnerability is pure happenstance.
They sit like this for a while, both afraid to break this delicate silence. Soon they’ll part, and Rosemarine will find someone to be cruel to openly and Jules will be cruel in his own way, in private. For now, though, the scents of roses and lavender blend together, harmonious as they might be in the hands of a master perfumer.