Chapter Text
By the fountain, the Angel above and whoever else you could think of praying to — this was so weird.
It wasn't actually — that weird — but it was just weird enough for you to feel exceedingly self-conscious by standing perfectly normally at the scented candle isle.
Actually — no, you weren't standing perfectly normally — in your infinite paranoia you just kept circling the section, adding and removing random items from your cart in autopilot as the candles and diffusers pulled at you like the Earth the Moon – orbiting around them but never crossing paths.
Okay, now you'd gone back around into really weird territory — you could only pretend to change your mind about generic store-brand floor cleaner a certain amount of times before the well-meaning employees had stopped asking you if you needed help, and had instead started looking at you with thinly-veiled worry — oh, that one you actually did need some of. You grabbed a bottle of the mildest cotton-scented detergent and nonchalantly glided into the next isle —who are you even trying to fool anymore? Not any of the employees, nor the other shoppers, and most of all not yourself.
You were the most chalant living creature you'd ever seen. You looked like a scented candle had killed your grandma.
-
Your current situation was so unlike you it made your head swim when you entertained the thought a second too long – you, looking for something scented??? You, who got blinding migraines from walking around malls because of the mix of scents of the perfume aisle, whose eyes would itch and water from being in the same room as a scented candle or stick of incense, and who had to wear a mask when walking around the city else you felt like you were going to puke from the ad-ridden and pixel-laced air.
You loved some smells, but it was so easy to cross that fine balance and get overwhelmed you avoided most scented things like the plague. All the soaps in your house were as basic as they came, the only non-scented deodorant you liked kept getting increasingly harder to find and your shampoo only had the softest notes of vanilla you could handle. You wished you could wear perfumes - it made you feel so childish, having to get the blank no-name soap and smell like nothing - you wish you could be cool and suave and smell like a dream coated in rich, deep scents, like smoke, and flowers and-
The whole reason you were here.
You'd uncovered an... exception, you could call it. A fixation, if you were feeling like being slightly mean to yourself, but it was the truth.
Tenna's perfume.
Your boss smelled like ... something you couldn't quite identify, that clung to him and lingered in the air when he left. Smokey, sweet, soft and warm, persistent but not intense — and you had started to find yourself enjoying the soft scent whenever he was around. It instantly soothed you like a full-body balm, pleasantly overtaking the rest of the stimuli accosting your senses and making you feel at home.
You'd embarrassed yourself a handful of times by hounding the other employees about the “new air fresheners” before you'd managed to identify the source - you'd watched the scented candle rotation in the green room, the bathrooms and the dressing rooms like a hawk for a week, even keeping a spreadsheet and trying to find where the scent you were enjoying so much came from. It was random – sometimes it was stronger, sometimes it was softer – it wasn’t always the same, but a certain core note remained, even if it was accompanied by something else. It was driving you absolutely mad.
It didn't hit you (quite literally) until one day, when you were working late, and you almost slammed head-first into your fifteen-feet tall CRT boss. As you stumbled forward, you were suddenly plunged into a sea of smoke and florals, of warmth and familiarity, full of deep, rich notes you couldn’t identify – and contrary to what you’d think, it didn’t overwhelm you. The tension you were carrying from a particularly hard week melted away, and you closed your eyes for a second, trying to commit every note to memory-
“Goodness gracious! You should really watch your step, superstar! ”
You stumbled back, gripping at the nearest surface with a deep gasp like you’d just come up to breathe after being thrown into a (metaphorical) pool.
The bright screen of your CRT-headed boss looked down at you, ridge slightly raised in surprise and worry – he was holding a script under his arm, and had taken off his signature red tailcoat jacket, his sleeves rolled up as he held his arms out towards you. Your fingers twitched against the warm metal plating of his forearm – the buzz of electricity running under the surface.
Mr. Tenna.
The source of the smell was – your boss. Mr. “Ant” Tenna. The only. The king of TV, yadda yadda - the same Tenna who was currently standing in front of you, as if helping out a clumsy PA was currently the biggest of his worries, who was staring at you as if he’d just said something and was waiting for you to respond-
Oh Angel above, please smite me down and take me now.
“Oh! Yes, sorry, Mr. Tenna!”
You took your hand off his arm like it’d suddenly become red-hot, and stepped back, dusting off your clothes to buy yourself time as the gears started turning in your head.
You could not be crushing on your boss because of his perfume. You could not have been obsessing over and chasing the lingering scent of Mr. Tenna, lord of TV World and head of TV Time. You could not have been fantasizing about his smell, feeling so calm and so familiar and so warm-
Oh, by the Fountain.
You absolutely were.
“Check, check! Everything working correctly? You didn’t get hit in the head, right? (That’d be an awful lot of extra paperwork!)”
Huge gloved fingers snapped in front of you as Tenna crouched down, the scent getting stronger – you blinked, and in your dazed confusion, your mouth fired off before your brain managed to connect two neurons together.
"I've been meaning to ask... What perfume do you wear, sir?"
-
Ah. This was. So perfectly NORMAL. Shopping for shampoo. Something he definitely always did and needed to do regularly to keep his non-existent luscious locs shiny and in check.
Haha.
Ha.
God he was a freak.
Tenna slammed his head against the shopping cart and instantly perked up at the loud metallic sound, quickly ducking into an empty isle. He quickly adjusted what he dubbed his “civilian attire” - a trenchcoat and sunglasses – hey, nobody said that shopping while being a Dark World-renown celebrity was easy! Though he mostly wore the outfit for the aesthetics– as much as he’d like to fool himself, there were not that many fifteen-feet tall, snazzy, ingenious, relevant and magnificent CRT-headed Dark-World-lord-slash-show-host-slash-TV-stars around, no sir!
He was one of a kind, for better or for worse.
Back to the matter at hand – he peeked over the isle: the coast was clear, and he slowly pushed his squeaky shopping cart, turning over his goal in his mind.
He’d made sure he left no loose ends – at the start of the week, Mike had been notified not to bother him for the whole evening as he’d be “working late”: Tenna had locked his door, poured himself a glass of scotch, and rolled up his sleeves- and he’d read, signed and filed every single piece of paperwork he could find, organized the schedule for the whole TV program for at least four days, and then, after finishing his scheduled work for the upcoming week in just one single 27-hour workday…. he’d been making good use of his hard-earned free time… doing his research.
He'd been hovering. An innocent question here and there, a quick peek at your toiletry bag when you were on your lunch break, lingering just a smidge too close when asking you a question – all the while trying to disguise how his antennas twitched, trying to commit your smell to memory. A certain PA gained a fifteen-foot tall shadow for a week – he seemed to have an endless supply of requests for you to do, of questions to ask, of coffees to fetch - and as the end of the week approached, he'd made up his mind.
It was a generic enough scent, nobody would know! There was no way they would!! If you'd mentioned buying your specific hard-to-find shampoo at this specific chain store it was just a bizarre coincidence!!!
(He could convince himself it wasn't that weird if he kept repeating his mantra - they have lower prices here they have good sales and good offers and they have those big microfiber cloths that I've been meaning to get for a while this is ALL. SO. NORMAL.!!!!!)