A Word with Friends
Avarice - excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain : greediness, cupidity
Hosted by @hedwigoprah
Thank you @woundedsoul12 and @chaosherald for the tag ins 💕 and if I find the original post that got me thinking about how Rook can’t identify the scent in the Crossroads, I will tag them in, too.
Inspired by the Scent of Home banter in game, this is a Rook who grew up with Lucanis in Treviso and has been pining since day one. She’s certain that her feelings are unrequited - these two have spent the last 15 years estranged - and so what she smells at Elvhenan’s Haven in the Crossroads doesn’t give her the same warm and fuzzies as the rest of the squad.
The scene (and the sentiment) fits within my Purple Haze (Rookanis) slow burn, immediately after You tell yourself it’s raining … 😉
Cupidity
The rest are in full agreement: the bewitching aroma of Elvhenan’s Haven evokes for each of them the feeling of home — but Rook (privately) disagrees.
To Rook, the effusive, heady scent that bulldozes her is instead the scent of her own avarice.
Because Emmrich and Davrin and Lucanis all smell the incense of their youths — the camphor and the campfire and the coffee (respectively) of their best-loved places. And Harding smells her mother’s love, and Neve the city she mothers, washed clean.
But Rook?
Rook smells the dust of the long-forgotten attic; she smells old books and polished marble and crisp, moon-heavy Trevisan midnights. She smells cioccolata and coffee, vetiver and cedar, leather and steel and the ozone tang of the lightning strike.
And these are not the smells of Villa de Riva.
No. These are all Lucanis.
And so, she pretends to the others that she can’t-quite-place the scent that has her yearning, that wields her shame; she worries her flush deepens every time she smells it.
Because what is greed? — what is cupidity? — if not the selfish act of making a home where one is unwanted, where one doesn’t belong.