Hey, guess what? I'm watching 'Perfume'. For anyone who doesn't know, it's about a man who can smell everything, and finds the smell of women particularly overwhelming and beautiful...so he kills them and makes perfume from them to keep their scent forever. This is nowhere near that dark, but it is sappy and probably tenuous.
Dean walks the near empty streets, inhaling the scents of exhaust and night air. Threads of bad diner food, beer and tobacco work through the air. Base lines of new asphalt a few streets away, creosote on a fence, full dumpsters to his left.
Everyone on the street can smell these things.
Dean catches their scents, the occasional people, smelling of bread, cheese, mayo, soap, paper, ink, starch, shoe leather, smoke, hair, cancer, arousal, death, blood, paper again...
Must be tampons.
He can smell the red glass in the stop light, the water in the air, the gold jewellery in a pawn shop window, a tree three blocks away, two teeth in the gutter and someone's peace lily, baked solid and unwatered on a sill two floors above his head.
It's exhausting and brilliant.
And he's smelt it all before.
Smelt it since his birth in a small house near a landfill in Kansas. Since his mother died in labour and his father abandoned his strange, scentless son to the tender care of Missouri the mother of an orphanage.
Dean, despite his talent, is scentless and people are wary of him for that reason, though they do not know it. He left the orphanage for a bullshit job at a local mechanic, got fired and moved to the city. Here perhaps, it would not matter that he was scentless as glass.
Though of course, glass has a scent, to him.
It is frustrating to try and explain to people that everything has a smell, and so he doesn't. Doesn't speak much at all. At eighteen he first smelt a woman, really breathed in the scent of a girl he met in a bar while he was trying to get help towing a car from its lot. She was one of the best things he'd ever smelt, he could have revelled in it always.
She had found him strange, frightening.
No one understood how he could find this beauty in things, much less in them, in women and men, the chosen few who smelt divine. They found his attention, once captured, to be overwhelming, sociopathic in its directness and totality.
Dean as a result, has never had a relationship that lasted longer than a hot shower, in the case of his partner.
Dean had carried each of their scents for weeks, unable to mute them to his sensitive nose.
He's walking now in the pursuit of food, idly sorting through the scents around him to distinguish pastry, apple, cream, frying meat, cheese, herbs, grease...
He begins to head in their direction, but stops when he catches something else.
Something new.
It trails across the street like the flare behind a sparkler. Thin and white and bright and star-like. But it's warm, burning hot and smelling...smelling like...
He can't find a word.
It's good.
Like the kind of rain that comes after six weeks of drought. Like funeral tears. Like birthday candles and salt and smooth river stones and nickel plating and gold teeth and fireworks and sex and snake scales and white sheets.
Like the fleeting gasp of his mother, which he carries deep inside as most carry hair in lockets.
Like the snatches of Dad and Brother that he holds from when he tracked them down at fifteen, to find that they were happy forgetting about him.
Like ice from the wrong side, when you've fallen through and you're trapped under the glazed surface.
Like the women, the men, the chosen. But more, God so much more.
He is without hunger, without tiredness, without physicality as he follows that white light trail.
He has to find it, to hold it, to...
He's never letting it go, not so good, not so blinding as it is. It packs the empty place inside of him tight with emotion, with feeling and memory and closeness. This thing is scent enough for both of them to share.
It's perfect, it's everything...it's
There.
Dean stops, three blocks over from where he started, ignoring the curious stares of late passersby.
The scent, lancing like lightning through the streets, stops at a man standing under a tree. He's standing with his arms awkwardly at his sides, large trench coat dwarfing his frame, rumpled suit and tie underneath. He's paying no attention to the street around him, just standing, like he's waiting for something a long way off, something so far away that there's no point in looking out for its arrival.
He's the most beautiful thing Dean's ever smelt.
He doesn't even really see the man as he approaches him, because the smell, the smell is driving him mad and he needs it closer, to drink it in and savour it before it's gone.
The man barely reacts as Dean stands a handbreadth away, inhaling him deeply.
Dean's too drunk on the scent to comprehend the weirdness of that.
He presses closer, inhaling at his throat, behind his ear, the soft dark hair at the nape of his neck. When he reaches the man's face he finds it frowning curiously, but the man doesn't ask him to stop, so he doesn't.
Castiel stands as the human smells him, strangely curious as to the behaviour. He has little experience of humans, but this seems odd, even to him. He knows that, to the humans who can see or hear angels, that they appear beautiful.
He's never had someone be enamoured with his odour before.
Dean shunts the man into the alley behind them, gently pressing him to the wall and smelling his collar bone, pulling the buttons of his shirt open and inhaling the skin, drinking in the scent as it spirals up. The man's breath stutters and his fingers gently fold themselves into Dean's hair, he lets them rest there, he tugs at the man's clothes and breathes.
Castiel wonders if this is how the other angels, how God feels when he is worshipped. A blend of need and gratification. Love for the act itself and confusion as to why, why this man wants him so much.
Dean scuffles more determinedly with the man's clothing, inhaling deeply, stroking the skin to release the scent.
Castiel feels the man's touch and realises only then how much control he has lost, how much he has opened up to this man. His wings ripple at the feeling of hands on his vessel, pleasure warring with confusion in him.
Pleasure wins out.
There's a rustle, a violent flap, and the scent engulfs Dean like the tide.
Incense and stone and water and teeth and bones and gold and blood and smoke and pain and...and...
Light. He can smell light. Not sunlight or candle light or neon lights. He has smelt those before.
This is just...light. Light and something familiar, but only in the basic sense.
Feathers.
And as Dean can combine leaf, stick, apple into apple tree. He senses the connection between the two new and overwhelming scents.
Light Feathers.
It physically hurts him to smell it, and yet he drinks it down like acid, like poison and raises his head to look into the eyes of the stranger, too far gone to notice their colour, to notice anything but the scent rolling off of him.
"What are you?" he chokes out, breath taken up with coming in, breathing him in.
And just as he knows his mother's scent but not her name, he knows before he speaks...
"An Angel of the Lord."
He feels wetness course down his face as the glorious scent burns his mouth and nose. As the infernal, amazing, talent that has blighted his life since birth is blared away by this man, this angel, and his impossible scent.
Dean slumps against the angel's half bared body, free at last.
Castiel closes his arms around the man, and finds that his impulse is to find him sanctuary, to keep him safe.
When Dean opens his eyes a while later, he finds himself lying in the lap of a beautiful man in a rumbled suit, shirt half undone.
He can't smell anything.
But he looks into his blue eyes with a kind of awe, and feels connected for the first time in years. In all his life.
Castiel looks at the human in his arms, and realises that, quite against his will, he has fallen in love.