let's talk about scent memory! I have cycled back around from wanting to smell like plain vanilla back into wanting to smell like my favorite ice cream shop. fortunately I do have a perfume for that and it was my favorite scent around this time last year, I think.
the past few days I've remembered to switch perfumes but I haven't been wearing any at all until afternoon. I remembered to put some on this morning and was hit by the strongest wave of nostalgia I've felt in ages. this was my daily perfume for a very short while, applied every morning, before my life went to shit. I don't even have any memories attached to this scent, but the last time I wore it consistently, I was a lot happier and that's enough.
I'm careful about when I wear my favorite scents because I don't want bad memories attached to them. scent memory can be so strong and it is so important to me. I didn't think this one would be so bittersweet. time to wear it every day again until it loses any associations!
[text ID: all the mornings in Lancashire still smell like you. / Last week I was caught in a storm overseas. / When the rain smell drove me silly / all I could feel were your hands.]
Nostalgia's such a wild thing. You could have just mediocre memories of some place, but it'll still stick with you later, like, you could catch a whiff of that gas station smell and your scent memory will be like, hey, don't you miss when you were somewhere else?
I don’t know if this has been burned into my memory as a good thing, but I’m in love with that sickly-sweet smell of running water, rivers, streams, etc. It’s probably due to a lot of animals using it as a bathroom, but I don’t care!
Y’know how you can smell a specific scent and suddenly be violently transported back to the circumstances in which you last smelled it in more than passing? Well, I just made the mistake of using the same chapstick I used for the bulk of the 2017 season, and I am S U F F E R I N G.
Chemical smells or scents that have a chemical undertone will usually leave Furia with a deep nose wrinkle and likely sniffing/sniffling a bit. It’s a smell that can turn her stomach when it’s really strong and make her incredibly uncomfortable.
Things like de-greasers and shop soaps make her skin crawl. Mainly because they remind her of her uncle’s shop, where she was regularly reminded of the expectations of her gender. She wasn’t allowed to go near the cars or the tools or anything else that might get their little princess greasy. (Her father and uncle called her Princesita, which she didn’t mind most of her childhood, but by 10 it wasn’t a term of endearment to her anymore it was a weighted chain that anchored her to someone else’s expectation of her. While mamacita will earn a glare, calling her princesita can garner a hastier and more violent response.)
It can also bring back rather shocking memories for of the warehouse where her grandfather worked, and where he took her when she was fifteen. Her nostrils burned with the acrid chemical stench as her whole image of the man who served as her father figure shattered to the screams coaxed out of a dock worker, who stole a flat of something or other that she can’t remember anymore. What she does remember is the cold calculation in her grandfather’s dark eyes as he removed flesh and a finger from the man who wailed and begged for mercy with promises of repayment and renewed loyalty, which her grandfather accepted only after taking his pound of flesh as payment (figuratively).
After that event, Furia saw that man in the neighborhood a few times. He never looked her in the eye. If her grandfather was with her, he’d give her Yayo a deep nod and scurry away, out of his sight, as quickly as possible. She started to look more closely at the looks people in the old neighborhood gave her grandfather. There were truly glances of respect and appreciation, but there were those that she now more correctly could classify as fear.
What was more, she was now fully aware of who her grandfather was, and why he garnered their respect. Most of the families there had someone who worked the docks, and her grandfather (and his father before him) were smugglers. Everyone in the neighborhood felt the influence of his business. He helped families and local business owners who struggled with disasters or other financial situations. Poppy’s only came to the neighborhood because her grandfather loaned the owner the money to buy the building outright after the bank refused him a loan--everyone knew it was because of his race since Poppy’s was the busiest restaurant in Mission Beach at the time.
The dichotomy of who her grandfather was scared her away from his attempts to make her his successor. It’s one of those things she finally had to come to terms with. That, like her grandfather, she could be a monster in the eyes of some people and a good person deep down. And she still struggles with this to some extents.
But I got away from myself. Chemical smells bring back ugly memories and bathe her in disquietude.
The door of the hotel room closes softly behind you, and Zemo leads you into the plain hotel room.
You feel awkward, unsure—he’s not a target or a handler, and it leaves you without a basis on how to really interact with him. He turns back to you, tilting his head as he observes you, standing in the entryway to the hotel room.
“Well, come on then,” he urges you softly. You step towards him, and he rests a hand on your shoulder.
He guides you to the bathroom, sitting you down on the toilet seat. He kneels, turning on the bathtub. Hot steam rises from the gushing water, and he stands, turning back to you.
“Well?” he asks.
“What?” you ask, scrunching up further on the toilet seat. The jacket he’d flung around your shoulders to cover your hospital gown-clad body earlier swamped you, and you pulled it tighter around your body. Surely he wasn’t asking you to…?
He sighs.
“You cannot stay filthy forever.” He bends down, pulling away the jacket and dumping it on the floor next to you.
He watches as you try to tug the hem of your gown further down your legs, and you watch his face as his eyes drift lower.
His jaw tightens and his lips twitch, and you realise that he can see the edges of your pussy peeking from between your thighs, just below where you’re able to pull the hem of the gown.
The scent of whiskey and cigars, laid over top of some kind of sugar, fills the room, thick and briefly overwhelming before Zemo seems to snap himself back. Your face feels hot, and you cross your legs at the ankle.
“Okay,” you say, scooting forward and hopping off the toilet seat. “Are you going to stay…?”
“Naturally.” His voice isn’t quite as steady as it’s been the other times he’s spoken. “You have been locked alone in a cell for many months now, драга. I will care for you this time.”
You try to shrug off your nerves, focusing on how nice it’ll be to finally get clean instead. The hospital gown drops to the floor, and you don’t notice the way Zemo’s eyes stay trained on your face like he’s being held at gunpoint.
You step into the steaming tub, gasping at the heat of the water. You stand there for a moment, letting the water burn away the frozen edges of your toes.
The prickling sensation is uncomfortable, and you slowly lower yourself until you’re fully seated.
Zemo crouches next to you, and you realise that as you got adjusted, he removed his outer layers and rolled up the sleeves of his burgundy sweater.
Your eyes focus on the vein leading down his forearm as he reaches across you to grab the bottle of shampoo sitting on the edge of the tub.
“Hair.”
You lean back, dipping your head in the water until all of your hair is soaked through, then sit up, scooting closer to him. The water sloshes against the edge of the tub.
The feeling of his fingers as he scrubs your head is heavenly, and you melt into the tub, pressing your head further into his hands as he washes your hair.
It feels like an hour of just dozing while he washes the blood, grit and grease out of your hair before you feel his hands drift lower, ghosting down the back of your neck and then sliding around to rub soap across your collar bones.
You snap to attention, flushing. You try to turn and look at him, but his hands are firm as they slide down your chest, and you lose the will as tingling heat shoots down your stomach and pools in your pussy as his hands chastely pass your breasts and down to clean the dirt off of your stomach.
It’s not sexual.
He’s being methodical, washing you like he is intent on washing the captivity off of every inch of your body, but it’s been so long since you’ve been touched in any capacity that even his proper cleaning of your body leaves you a puddle, melting into the water of the tub.
You sigh softly, and his hands still for just a moment before drawing quickly away.
The absence of his touch seems to wake you up, and you sit up a little straighter, suddenly embarrassed by the way you behaved, letting this man you just met – no matter how nice he seems – bathe you.
Enjoying bathing like you did is just a cherry on top of the embarrassment of being inappropriate with a guy who is probably just trying to be nice. Maybe.
He is hiring you for terrorism, after all. So maybe this sort of behaviour was normal for him.
The heated feeling settled deep in your belly sours when you stand up from the tub and look down at the greyish-pink water.
Zemo pulls the plug in the tub, and you watch the water begin to drain away, unsure how you feel seeing the evidence of your captivity wash down the drain so simply.
“Clothes, then?” Zemo asks, hand wrapped around your forearm. You nod, gratefully accepting the towel he hands you, and you bend over to dry your hair.
When you look up from the task, Zemo is gone, and there is a small pile of clothes on the sink counter.
You reach for them, and when you bring the large black shirt to your nose, it smells like whiskey and that same sugary treat you still can’t place. Zemo’s shirt, then.
You slip it over your head and pad out of the bathroom, feeling both reassured and cautious.
Zemo is sitting on the bed, reading from a red book.
You approach him, but he doesn’t look up from the book even when you sit on the end of the bed.
“Do you know what this is?” He asks, flipping a page. He looks up at you then.
“No,” you admit. “Should I?”
“Not necessarily. This book is one of HYDRA’s most valuable weapons.” Zemo says, closing the book. “This book is everything that made the Winter Soldier.”
You recognise that name, and you huff in a shaky breath.
“The Winter Soldier?”
“Yes, драга,” Zemo rumbles, and he redirects his gaze to the book in front of him, glaring. “The Winter Soldier is the dearest friend of Captain America, you see. Getting to him means getting to the Captain.”
“And getting to the Captain means getting to the rest of the Avengers?” You make a guess at what he’s getting at, and he nods.
“Yes.”
You scoot across the bed, already missing the feel of another person's skin against your own. He catches your movement and reaches over, grabbing onto your upper arm and helping to drag you closer until you’re sitting next to his leg with his calf pressed against your back.
“So, how do we get to the Winter Soldier?”
“I am going to set off a bomb,” Zemo says. “And you are going to Bucharest, in Romania, and hunting down the Soldier.”
You shut your eyes against the image of that ruthless metal hand squeezing around your throat until your eyes pop. Did the Soldier even have anything in him for you to control?
“What do I do when I find him?”
“Follow him. Make sure the day of June twenty-second is gone from his memory. Do not let the police kill him when they find him.”
You pause. You’ve never been assigned a mission like this before. The things HYDRA made you do were much different, honey pot missions and assassinations in broom closets, not… outright fighting the police.
But Zemo freed you from the cell and washed your body, and you wanted to give him a reason to continue giving you affection. So…
“Should I keep him from getting arrested?”
Zemo shakes his head.
“No,” he says, and swings his legs off of the edge of the bed, standing and walking to where a duffle bag sits in the armchair facing the hotel bed. “Just make sure that they do not kill him. They will bring him to Berlin, where I will be waiting.”
He turns, tossing you an object, and you lean up to catch it. You recognise the smooth dark metal cylinder held in your palm — a gas grenade. You rear back in surprise.
There’s no text written on the outside of the canister, save a plain white string of numbers along the bottom.
“A gas grenade?” You ask, confused. You’re not sure how a gas grenade is supposed to help you keep the Winter Soldier from getting killed but also arrested.
“A pheromone grenade," Zemo clarifies as he approaches the bed, standing at the end. “You did not know?” You shake your head, not sure what you were supposed to know. You hold out the grenade; he takes it from you, turning it in his hands.
“HYDRA made this out of your pheromones,” he says. “In the base where I found you, they kept files on attempts at long-distance mind control based on your pheromones.”
…So that they wouldn’t have to let you out of the cage. You feel sick, bile rising in your throat; the thought of losing the one thing that HYDRA allowed you… The thought of it being taken away so all you could do is rot makes a sense of dread build in your chest.
You can almost hear the plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk…
“It failed," Zemo says, drawing your attention back to him. “You still have to be close to the target. However, the grenades did act as knockout gas… and in theory, will allow you to force your pheromones on those who may not otherwise be in reach.”
You understand.
“So I can control the police and keep them from killing the Soldier.”
Zemo smiles at you, and you feel a flutter in your chest, the emotion clashing with the lingering sickness of HYDRA and making you nauseous.
