A/N: Another prompt!night drabble, written after a couple of humorous ones, just to prove myself I could make myself cry at 1am, I apologize.
AIR FRESHENER
Smell is said to be the sense that can evoke the most powerful memories. And like everything else, anything that can bring back memories is both a blessing and a curse, to a grieving soul.
For the first time since he has come home, Peter enters the bedroom, beyond drunk, and the smell that instantly hits him almost causes him to fall to the ground. Like many other trivial, domestic things, Olivia had been the one deciding one day that they should have some air freshener plugged to their bedroom wall. At first, he had found the flowery smell a bit nauseating, but through the years, he had come to associate it with lazy Sunday mornings spent in bed, barely noticing it anymore, especially when his nose was pressed against her skin and she was the only thing he smelled.
Today, the scent is strong and overpowering, the way it always is during the first few days after refilling the device. His blurry eyes find it, plugged to the wall next to the dresser, and he remembers now, how she had changed it only two days ago.
When she was still alive.
He feels the brief urge to pull it off the wall and throw it to the ground, destroy it into as many broken pieces as his shattered heart. But he doesn't, his foggy brain pointing out the fact that it would only make the smell worse, anyway.
The ache is too unbearable, though, his longing for her too intense; and so he simply lets himself fall upon their bed, crawling like a wounded animal until his face is buried into her pillow.
And he finds himself hoping that his tears are not bitter enough to erase her scent from the linen.