Perfume
Another one written for a Minus Wave challenge. Love 'em.
He'd never admit it to any of them (gets quite enough pervy-ero-kappa remarks as it is, thank you), but Gojyo loves the way they smell. And it's nothing to do with sweat or dust or when they last had a chance to bathe. He's the only one who never gripes when they all have to share a room, because when he wakes in the middle of the night--and he does that more often than he'd want you to know--he can take in the scent of them all sleeping around him, and then he's okay, then he's home.
Sanzo always smells like sandalwood smoke, not just tobacco but honest-to-gods sandalwood, no matter how long it's been since he set foot in a temple. He smells like hot sun and like something that makes your spine tingle, like raw power, like magic. If Gojyo ever decides to risk his life for real and grab a kiss off the guy, it'll be smack on that red chakra spot, because he's positive it would taste totally unbelievable--better even than the Bosatsu did--and this smell is like that taste.
Hakkai smells cool and dark. How he manages this Gojyo's never sure, spending day after day at the wheel of a jeep with no roof (and whose idea was that, he'd love to know), but he never tans or even sunburns, and he always smells like the floor of a forest, like the bank of a lazy river. Good grooming, or youkai magic, ehh, he'd never know. Sometimes this is nice and soothing after a day in the sun, and makes you think of green leaves and summer rain; sometimes it has a rank, bitter edge, like a pond you'd better not drink from. He sometimes ends up in Hakkai's bed on the first kind of night, but never, ever on the second.
And Goku... Gojyo's never smelled anything like him. It's not youkai or human or even animal; he smells like earth and stone, the warm, mineral, slightly metallic scent of a big rock that's stood baking in the sun all day, giving off radiant heat you could bask in. It smells good, it smells wholesome and natural but--not alive, really; not like anything living; and it gives him the same supernatural shiver that Sanzo's does, only a dozen times stronger, because you can't take in that scent and not feel in your gut that the kid is a god.
He wishes there were a way to ask one of them, any one really, so, what do I smell like? 'Cos he hopes it isn't just smokes and beer and road dust, or the last girl's perfume, or blood.
Maybe he'll find a way.
(Hakkai, out of a dream, half-lifts his head; smells sandalwood and warm stone and sweet, fire-orange river lilies; and sinks back to sleep.)