The primary sense a born wolf utilizes is their sense of smell, and trying to describe the difference to someone is easiest when one compares it to a different language.
It's different for those who receive the bite - their sense of sight is what reigns. It's understandable, as they've lived the majority of their lives relying on their eyes. But for a born wolf, it's all about scent: instead of a first memory of what they see, it's instead a first memory of what they smell. It's a frustrating issue - how do you describe color to a blind man? How do you describe scent to a human, for whom a nose is more or less ornamentation, good to assist in breathing and facial symmetry and little else?
It is a different language. Just as there are sentences, broken into words, broken into letters ... there are scents within scents within scents.
Just as there are words in foreign languages that are untranslatable into English, there exist scents which cannot accurately be described by the simplicity of the human tongue.
(this one is love. there is music, yes, but love is the smell of maple. the slight tang of animal gut - processed, pinched, stretched into a thing capable of heart-rending sound. hide glue. brazilwood. horsehair - worn, utilized daily, handled with great precision and care.
this one is loss. there is wood again, but not processed by heat and human hands; there is no music, the trees are silent. there is wood, and the iron-copper reek of blood, and the high serrated black kick of fear, and painpainPAIN-
)
There are words that cannot be translated. (litost. komorebi. duende. schadenfreude - and Derek does enjoy that particular word.) There are scents that cannot be translated. The concept is so foreign and abstract to most that Derek doesn't bother explaining it - he's not one for philosophical conversation, anyway.
This one is love.
This one is loss.
And the closest he can get to describing this one-
(youth. the offensive sting-stink of silver. the heavy muffling cloy of coal seconds before it fully ignites - the potential of fire. the sweet suffocating haze that is the promise of a thousand summer nights. history, and lots of it, carved into her blood, sutured into the marrow of her bones. shadows and danger and the prickling defiance-excitement at the roof of the back of the throat.)
is to simply label it as divergence.
(Though, What Might Have Been crosses his mind from time to time. He turns it away with the ease of practice. There is a box labelled Argent in the abyssal depths of his heart, those pits as deep as the glacierblue of his wolf-eyes, and that box does not open.
It never opens.)
di·verge (v)
2. to differ in opinion, character, form, etc.; deviate.
3. Mathematics (of a sequence, series, etc.) to have no unique limit; to have infinity as a limit.