Coriander

Everyone in this world has a particular scent that clings to them and helps define who they are. Each individual has two scents; a regular scent that anyone can smell, and a soulbond scent. Only your soulbond can detect the secondary scent, and only the secondary scent. When someone finds their soulbond (the person who shares the same mark as they do, and who they have the highest chance of making happiness together with) their scents intermingle and become complementary to each other.

Watching his two best friends, clad in the deepest of reds with eyes only for each other, walk by him, Lan Jingyi inhaled deeply their scents of fresh cedar and juniper. They were a perfect match, and Jingyi? Lan Jingyi smelled of coriander; bitter and acrid.

A tight pain gripped his chest tightly as he watched them leave the celebration hall together. It was fine, he had known this day was coming for a long time. It had already been two years since Lan Sizhui and Jin Ling discovered they were soulbonds, during Lan Jingyi's sixteenth birthday no less (Jin Ling and Lan Sizhui nineteen and twenty at the time). Lan Jingyi hadn't been able to enjoy the rest of his birthday feast.

Two years… Lan Jingyi was eighteen now and it still felt like it had that day. He inhaled deeply and plastered a smile on his face, grinned through the slight pain in his chest. It was fine, they were a perfect soulbond pair and Lan Jingyi knew that they would find happiness together. It didn't matter that most bonds were between an alpha and omega pairing or that people whispered about two strong headed alphas being bonded, he knew his two best friends would find happiness together. As long as they were happy, that was all that mattered.

Lan Jingyi slipped quietly from the hall and flew back to the Cloud Recesses alone.

Jin Ling made an indignant noise when Lan Sizhui picked him up bridal style and spun him around happily before depositing him on their bed. Lan Sizhui grinned down at his blushing husband's face. "Hey! Who said you could treat me like the wife!" Jin Ling squawked loudly, "You're the one who walked down the aisle!"

"Oh?" Lan Sizhui said playfully. "I don't recall agreeing to being your wife." He had agreed to be "the bride" during the ceremony though, as Jin Ling practically threw a fit and Lan Sizhui figured it was only right since he was intending to marry into Lanling Jin and not the other way around. Lan Sizhui chuckled and leaned in to whisper hotly, "But I can be your husband."

When Lan Jingyi touched down at Cloud Recesses it was well into the middle of the night. The few people not at the celebration in Lanling had been asleep for hours. The night air was cold and still as he made his way back to his shared room with Lan Sizhui, just his room now. Lan Sizhui would never share it with him again. Alone in the dark, Jingyi's chest ached.

Jin Ling laid panting on silken red sheets, knees splayed wide and his robes strewn open around him, hair fanned out like an inky halo. Lan Sizhui's long red wedding band wound around his eyes and down to his wrists behind his back. Everytime his hands twitched his head jerked in response. Lan Sizhui's white ribbon formed a perfect bow around the base of his cock, it's ends trailing down between his creamy thighs.

Lan Sizhui swallowed dryly at the sight between those ribbon ends; two of his fingers pushed and pulled at Jin Ling's entrance. He was transfixed by the obscene sounds coming from his husband's oil soaked virgin hole. He watched, entranced, as the tips of his fingers pressed in the edges of Jin Ling's pink hole only to be sucked in completely before dragging them back out again, the entrance puckering around them. He twisted and scissored them repeatedly until even his own breath grew ragged from it.

Jin Ling's thighs shook from the continued assault and his face burned from the squelching sounds coming from his body. His hips jerked up as the first deep thrust of fingers brushed against his prostate, causing his hands to pull on the bonds over his eyes. "Ah!" he cried out in surprise before sucking his bottom lip into his mouth.

Lan Sizhui pulled his fingers free and, from behind him, produced another cloth ribbon that he used to cover Jin Ling's mouth, before going back to studiously fingering his love. Every time his fingers thrust inside of Jin Ling he pushed them deeper and deeper until he was just stirring them inside of his trembling husband, watching the oil drip out between his fingers.

Oh yes, Lan Sizhui wanted to ruin his beautiful husband.

Lan Jingyi tossed and turned in his small bed. The room was too quiet and his chest ached weirdly, his lungs felt cold. Rubbing the soulbond mark on his chest in an attempt to rid himself of the feeling, Jingyi wondered if he would ever find his bonded pair. If anyone could love an omega who smelled bitter like coriander.

Shortly after Lan Sizhui and Jin Ling married, Lan Jingyi started getting sick a lot. He frequently came down with fevers and had chest pains, his body felt weak. After the first six months he would wake up in the middle of the night from coughing fits, drenched in a cold sweat and feeling like his lungs were seizing. It constantly felt like something was sitting in the back of his throat that he couldn't get out.

Over time he starts to notice these little brown… dots mixed in with the bits of mucus he is coughing up and his breath starts smelling… odd. It leaves an earthy almost bitter-tasting coating, like something sweet that has gone sour, that lingers heavy on his tongue.

Lan Jingyi doesn't know if he is dying or not but he figures he must be. He's caught some weird disease and this is it, this is how he dies. Alone and bitter tasting like the coriander scent he carries that everyone turns their nose up at.

It isn't until the end of that first year, when Jingyi's throat starts itching terribly and he retches up a small, mangled, white bell flower about the size of the tip of this finger, that Jingyi really knows.

It's probably fitting that he will die alone without a soulbond because someone unfaithful like him does not deserve a precious bond to cherish, not like what his two best friends have. Not him, not when he covets something that can never be his. Jingyi doesn't deserve his souldbond, wherever they may be, not when his heart is filled with such longing for someone else.