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“So you’re telling me you have 4 stomachs!?”
William’s confused voice rang out through the empty base, the echo-y walls making it bounce back at him. He sat on the couch while Vyncent stood in front of him with a whiteboard, scribbling out vague diagrams of where all aer organs are placed.
“Yes, I’ve gone over this! Three times!” Vyncent let out a cackle-y wheeze, doubling over in laughter. “It’s not that hard to understand!”
“Dude, I love you, but you can’t just drop on a man that you have 4 stomachs, 7 livers, 150 bones, and on top of that you’re colourblind! Pick a struggle,” William was also laughing hysterically, wiping tears away from his eyes. “You have to understand how weird this is, even for a dead guy who can’t hear, I’m perfectly content with the amount of half-functioning organs I currently possess.”
Vyncent had aer hands on aes knees now, recovering from aes laughing fit. “We’re on the same playing field, you’re dead and I can’t have chocolate or I’ll froth at the mouth and die!”
Ae laughed out lightheartedly, wiping away aes stomach diagram on the whiteboard ae was holding and flopped down next to William on the couch. “-yet somehow you’re noseblind,” the elf mumbled under his breath.
One of William’s scrawny legs kicked ae in the knee and ae yelped, “What was that? Share with the class,” Will sprawled his legs out on Vyncent’s lap, looking at him accusingly.
“I said you’re noseblind!” Ae cupped aer hands around aes mouth, mock-yelling. Ae was just teasing William, but ae tended to forget that he was (raised) human and saw a very confused look on his face.
“…..noseblind?”
“It’s an elf thing—“
“Explain it to me! I want to know,” Will’s drive to constantly learn more never failed him, it was a never-changing fact about the specter.
Ae playfully sighed. “Fine, only because I know if I didn’t tell you now you’d somehow bug it out of me later.”
Will grabbed his hand, squeezing it. “You know me so well.”
“Try to save your weird looks and just hear me out on this one; what do I smell like?”
The black-haired boy furrowed his eyebrows in confusion but Vyncent exchanged a look with him that said ‘you questioned it, I’m just explaining it’ and so he decided to humour him. “Uhhh…you smell like Vyncent?”
Ae rolled aer eyes. “Lean in, what do I smell like?”
Will’s cheeks tinted the slightest amount of pink but he leaned forward, sniffing Vyncent’s jacket. “You smell like your bed, the floor, and a little bit like our shampoo.”
Vyncent chuckled at him, his fangs slightly poking out from behind his smile. “Exactly. Outwardly humans and elves don’t look that different but internally you guys are considerably closer to other primates then other elves—one of the things that separates us is our sense of smell-“
“How so?”
“Shush! I was getting there! Our sense of smell is generally just a little bit heightened compared to yours but not by a lot, it’s more of an internal and social thing called scent glands that we pick up on. Almost every form of humanoid creature has them either around their neck or their wrists,” Ae paused and gauged William’s reaction, who simply looked very curious.
“For us, it’s how we identify each other within our clans. Humans can smell things on other people like where they’ve been, what they’ve eaten, and what kind of soaps and stuff they use but what we smell within each other’s scents is the person's health, who they’ve been with, and insight as to what emotion they’re feeling.”
“That’s crazy,” Will whispered, thinking immediately of all the times he pretended to be calm when he was panicked and anxious out of his mind.
“I guess it’s crazy as a concept if you don’t smell these things every day, but it’s kind of just an integral part of elf culture. If a child is lost in a crowd it’s way easier to find them when you can zero in on their scent, blood-born diseases that don’t have any physical symptoms until they started getting really bad can almost immediately be detected due to a type of sourness that enters someone's scent when they’re sick, our scents are such a universal thing that is shared between friends, siblings, family, lovers, it’s comforting.”
Ae didn’t realize it but aer voice had gone wistful, a twinge of homesickness in aes voice that ae couldn’t control as ae spoke. Vyncent loved aer family here but ae would never forget the distinct smell of lavender as aes mother who would hold ae when ae had nightmares pulled ae close or aes father who carried the sharp smell of metal with him wherever he went.
William’s head leaning on aes shoulder and his legs moving off his lap so he could lean his full weight snapped ae out of his reminiscing. “Your voice got sad. Is there someone you miss?” He immediately mentally facepalmed after saying that, knowing there had to be many people that ae’d left behind involuntarily.
“My mom,” there was the smallest of smiles on aes face, and ae was clearly thinking of past memories. “She had the strongest scent of lavender and because of that it was the only thing that could calm me down as a child. I’m an only child, my dad was an adventurer, and my mom was learning to be apothecarian, so I got babysat a lot and boy did I cry like, all the time, and only lavender would make me stop.”
Will smiled back at ae, the lighthearted air to their playful conversation turning a bit more genuine. “What do I smell like?” He tried to say something that would distract Vyncent from the bittersweet look on aer face.
Ae blushed, Will’s lack of knowledge in elf culture may be the death of ae. Ae turned to him and cupped his cheek, signaling to his neck. “May I?”
William nodded and Vyncent couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit guilty. Ae already knew what the boy smelled like, ae had his scent committed to memory in a way that was so strong that ae would smell it even when William wasn’t there; ae wanted to be closer though, ae wanted to breathe in his scent until it mixed with aes.
Ae leaned down and took a deep breath, deeply inhaling his strange scent. When ae first met him it was the scent of pine trees that wafted around him, smelling exactly like it did when you took a long and deep breath in the forest. There was something weird about it, like something underlying in his scent, but Vyncent chose to ignore it in favour of the comfort ae found it. It became less ignorable the second time he died though and from that point on his scent began to transition from the rich pine to the straight-up smell of wet dirt, unmistakable.
He resisted the urge to rub his face on William’s neck, the longing to be covered by his scent so that ae could protect him, let anyone that smelled him know that to hurt him they’d have to hurt ae first. When his nose almost touched the back of Will’s neck and ae was sure that he could feel his breath there he pulled away. “Wet dirt. A considerable amount of wet dirt, and a little bit of pine.”
Will snorted, giggling a little bit. “Is that a good thing? A common thing? Or should I just spend less time letting Dakota convince me to eat dirt?”
“It’s very normal,” Ae left out the part about literal death overtaking his living smell. “Most people smell like organic things.”
“What do the others smell like?”
Ae thought for a second, slightly distressed at the fact that ae actively had to try and recall what the scents of Dakota and Ashe smelled like. “Tide, to no one’s surprise, smells overwhelmingly like a salty sea breeze. Salt is strong to me, I smelled him before I met him. Dakota’s reminds me of maple syrup—I think it matches him, he’s sweet but that sugar is combated by a lot of cinnamon. Ashe’s smell was kind of like old books and what it smells like to walk into a musty attic.”
Ae paused, choosing whether or not to include the fact that upon the Trickster’s possession her smell turned sour and disgusting like rotting lemons. He skipped over that.
“Mark reeks like if you put nuts in an oven for way too long, Summer smells really pleasant though! Very much like basil and Cantrip is…weird. She smells like gasoline and she’s one of the few people I’ve met that didn’t smell like an organic thing.”
Will looked at ae with utter fascination about what ae spoke about. “I-I fuckin’ miss their scents so much man, Dakota’s room is starting to fade from maple and cinnamon and the fact that I can’t fully remember what Ashe smells like makes me feel like I’ve somehow betrayed her.”
Ae spoke very quietly, and a little out of place for someone who didn’t frequently share what ae was feeling. Ae scrunched up aer face in an attempt to stop tears from rolling down aes cheeks and the purple-haired elf felt a hand rub aes knee reassuringly.
“Hey, you didn’t betray them, okay? Even though Dakota’s coming back I miss them both so much and I can’t imagine if on top of that I could constantly smell them without them being here,” Ae suddenly felt arms wrap around aes torso and ae almost yelped, realizing aer friend had enveloped ae into a tight hug.
It took a couple seconds but ae responded by grabbing him back just as fiercely, pulling him close and resting aes chin on the ghost’s head.
“So the smells comfort you?”
“Yes, the people I’m close with make it feel reassuring—“
Before ae could finish ae felt more tugging and shifting below ae as ae somehow ended up almost on top of William on the couch, one arm loosely around his waist and one leaned up against the arm behind him. Wordlessly, William gently tugged him down so that he could lie across his chest, his head automatically positioned right next to his neck.
“I wish I could make it better. Every fucking day I wish I could wake up and make it better for the both of us so we didn’t have to live in this dump and our best friends weren’t gone but I can’t so the closest thing I have for you is wet dirt that is apparently really strong that I can’t smell but it gives you a goofy smile on your face and that’s all I can ask for right now.”
As Will spoke Vyn snuggled against his shoulder, letting aer warmth seep into the others skin and his scent wash over him.
“Can I—Can I sleep here?” Ae asked nervously.
“Of course, I’m a little bony and very cold but if that stupid dirt makes you happy then I’m glad it does.”
If Vyncent ever found aerself sitting outside in the dead of night in the grass basking in a familiar scent on nights where ae was too afraid to wake up William then that was just a secret ae would take to aer grave.