And then i guess i wrote more
He could only spend so much time hiding in the sterile cockpit of Blue Lion, and eventually things settled down and Lance learned to distinguish individual scents instead of living in a giant miasma of chaos. Which was good, since Lance was a fan of being able to breathe without gagging on the air around his friends.
He’d never lost his entire sense of smell, so he still remembered had a sense of taste and memories to go with it. He was thankful of that now, because he’d have gone nuts with all these new smells around if he’d had no way to describe them and no past experiences to compare them to.
Having that background, once things settled down instead of terrifying it was actually like, super fascinating and awesome. Lanc basically went off like a bloodhound, investigating every possible scent in the entire castle with obsessive interest.
Altean technology smelled different from anything on Earth, the only scent Lance could liken it to was one he remembered from playgrounds in school: asphalt after a fresh rain. Something subtle and clean and almost electric, but not quite. The entire castle carried hints of this scent, but it was especially strong around any crystals, and when they went to the Balmera to liberate it from Galra control he found the massive symbiote smelled not just like asphalt and rain, but a thunderstorm over the ocean as well.
But that was just the smell of the technology. The castle itself a very clean uniform scent, not one artificially manufactured but a natural smell that Lance assumes it must have carried all the way from the air of Altea herself.
He suspected that because the two Alteans also had that same fresh laundry scent, apart from the natural individual smells Lance soon noticed they also had. Mostly Coran smelled like the crap he used fo moustache wax and Allura smelled like juniberry shampoo, and also the ‘male’ and ‘female’ type scents Lance was picking up from species to species, but after enough time there were even tinier nuances Lance could smell that he couldn’t even explain.
They smelled like cotton compared to the others, whose outrageous human scents blocked out anything even after they’d left the room. And yes, Lance was including himself. His nose was so sensitive he could smell his own B.O. at all times, and had ended up with an even more obsessive hygiene routine than ever in an attempt to escape what was beginning to feel like second puberty. He just smelled so BAD all the TIME!
And then everyone insisted he smelled like a Bed Bath and Beyond outlet store and needed to calm the fuck down and just let himself stop noticing it the normal way by getting used to it, which, FINE, but that meant Lance was gonna obsess over how everyone else smelled instead. Which was easy.
The most powerful scent belonged to Pidge by far, since she really WAS pubescent and her omega hormones were basically exploding all over the castle. A powerful vanilla mint, an explosion of candy that followed her like a cloud and grew more peppermint-strong like candy canes when she was deep in concentration.
By comparison, Hunk’s scent was so faint he might as well have been nonexistent. When Lance singled him out of the pack, easy enough to do just with his old habit of using his friend as furniture, Hunk smelled warm and comfortable and soft like fresh banana bread, and it quickly became the most comforting scent in the castle. Betas man, there was no better friend to have your back.
Alpha’s scents typically repelled one another and riled each other up, but since Shiro was their pack leader Lance wasn’t surprised to find he didn’t find the captain’s scent uncomfortable. It was manly and piney and when he got real serious you could smell the insanity so strong it sent tingles down Lance’s spine. And when he was actually angry or in the heat of battle it sizzled up like crackling firewood, intimidating and commanding and WAY scarier than he just looked. Lance had had no idea what kind of power a real alpha had until he regained his sense of smell, tell you what.
And then there was Keith.
Keith was… complicated. It wasn’t that he smelled BAD, in fact when that bizarre citric scent wasn’t clogging up Lance’s nose and making his eyes water and sting so bad he thought they’d fall right out of his head it was kind of a nice, potpourri kind of thing, but. My GOD, that ginger-spice lemon-orange citrus HOTNESS to his scent was so powerful, Lance couldn’t stand even being around it. He guessed this was what rival alphas had to put up with around each other…
Even though Pidge’s scent was the strongest, Keith’s was always the one easiest for Lance to pick out, so intense it was. He could still smell it in a room after Keith had left, could follow his whole trail through the damned castle and the one time Lance found himself wandering the trail from Keith’s room to Red Lion’s bay he realized this was what scent tacking was, and holy shit he had just done it on ACCIDENT how cool was that?!
So okay, tracking was a thing Lance had always felt he was missing out on. There were a lot of thing he’d always heard about but never been able to truly understand until now, and when he realized he was slowly opening doors that had been closed to him all his life… well. He wanted to play, obviously.
And by play, he meant literally. There may have, somewhere in between dodging Zarkon nipping at their tail, a forcefully arranged game of hide and seek so he could learn to track every one of his friends by scent, badgering Allura into it by arguing it counted as stealth training for all of them and the opposite of stealth training for him so everyone was learning how to navigate the battlefield better now go hide anywhere that isn’t a personal bedroom while I count to a hundred please.
Unsurprisingly, Keith was the easiest to find every time, the citrus scent so easy to follow Lance almost did it on accident. By contrast Allura herself was the hardest to track, only the sweetness of her perfume left after he picked through all the others overpowering human sweat glands.
Lance found it nice. Allura’s scent, that is. Everyone else was still stifling and overwhelming to be around for too long, and as much as Lance was getting used to it, he found that hanging out with Allura was a wonderful reprieve. Ah, beautiful, badass, AND calming to be around, Allura really was the perfect woman, wasn’t she~?
She wasn’t even the only badass alien Lance got to enjoy his new sense around. Every alien species and every planet all smelled different, and everywhere they went was an endless buffet of new experiences. Lance had thought space was fun and interesting BEFORE, this was like finding out he’d been seeing it all in black and white this whole time!
Good smells he wanted to share with Allura and Pidge and rancid awful bad smells he wanted to trick Hunk into getting a whiff of, hungry food smells and dirty mechanical smells and everything was so much FUN! Once everything stopped being dizzying and overwhelming, Lance was having the time of his life playing with all the amazing gofts space and his new sense had to offer.
It was amazing. But… there was one thing still kind of bothering him.
Lance had always been trying to prove himself, show that he could still be just as good as an alpha even when he was disabled. Now that he was no different than anyone else… there was this strange hollow feeling he got sometimes, like he had betrayed every other person who was still scent blind like he had been.
Lance didn’t really know what to do about THAT feeling, but. At least he didn’t feel directionless. He may not have to prove all the same things he needed to before, but every time he saw Keith he still remembered how much he wanted to prove that someone who worked hard could be just as successful and amazing and someone with natural talent leaking out of their ears.
Well. That wasn’t usually ever the FIRST thing he thought when he saw Keith anymore, but it uh, still showed up from time to time. Somewhere in there.
…Space was full of pretty people.
dededos
prguitarman
kianamaiart
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
