Author's note: Let me start off by saying that this story is for xfilesfanatic and her birthday. I don't know how I could ever thank her enough for her generosity, support, and friendship! She is an awesome writer and all in all a wonderful person. Happy birthday, and I hope you enjoy this story!
Also, this story isn't exactly a story, so I marked it as a poem, but it isn't exactly a poem, either! I'm not quite sure what it is, but please enjoy it!
Daphne's hair…it smelled like pleasure. At least, that was what Niles had always thought. It smelled like long, dark nights when all he could do was lie awake and dream of it.
It smelled like running away to a place where he had the one he loved. It smelled like touches, sights, sounds that were so perfect that to think of them would be shameful, yet he couldn't help but dissolve himself into them. It smelled like every blink, every breath, every movement that ever came out of her.
The smell was faint, smooth, interchangeable, yet it always stayed the same. Niles knew what it smelled like to the rest of the world, what shampoo she used, yet no one else would ever know what its fragrance truly whispered into his ear.
That first night he had dared to lean into and catch a breath of her long, bright locks he hadn't slept a wink. The very essence of her entire being rested inside his head as he kept smelling her over and over again in his mind, not stopping until dawn.
Each time he smelled Daphne's hair, life found him again. Sorrow was away, depression took a sudden vacation, and loneliness fled. This was the part of her that nobody else knew about. There was no other person, no other man who would be able to take her inside him the way he did. If he could not have all of her, this was the part that he could have…the part that no one could steal away from him, because as time passed the scent never left him. It seeped under his skin, it became part of him, and even after they were married he still had the habit of leaning close to her every night right before he fell asleep and experiencing it all over again. He then would go back to his own pillow and let the sweet scent glide into his dreams without a thought.
The smell never got old, it never became stripped of its power, and Niles never lost interest.