This is a bit of a flashfic; I got a bunny and just poured it out into the computer until it was done. No pairings here.
Disclaimer: I owe everything to Terry Pratchett, who gave me one half of this, and Disney and Squenix, who gave me the other, but the story belongs to me, who let the two halves roll around in my head until they clicked.
Feedback, favorable and otherwise, appreciated.
Ienzo had an excellent sense of smell. In fact, his sense of smell was so good that it went beyond merely 'excellent' into 'inhuman'. This was only appropriate, since, strictly speaking, Ienzo was not exactly human himself.
His family was nothing to be ashamed of. They had their quirks, of course, but every old family did, and at least theirs hadn't gotten anyone arrested for fifty years (Great-Aunt Ludmilla, poor soul, she always did have terrible self-control, they said when they spoke of her).
It was almost amusing how easy it was to fit the age-old euphemisms of the upper class around his family's 'condition'. There were things of which one simply did not speak in polite company if one was the kind of person who used 'one' and was careful about the placement of one's prepositions, and the precise species of Ienzo's family was one of them, rather like a slightly embarrassing but not contagious medical condition.
They were perfect aristocrats (rather a contradiction in terms, considering) almost all of the time. No one held it against them that they had to avoid evening engagements one week in the month. It was rather like having a pirate for an ancestor, really: after a few generations the strangeness got worn away and the only thing left was a tendency to pilfer small amounts of money under stress. There was no reason that Ienzo shouldn't leave home to study. He had always had perfect self-control, not like Great-Aunt Ludmilla, and even at thirteen he could be relied upon not to do anything foolish.
The fact was that Ienzo could smell who was walking in the door from across the room (except when they switched shampoos, colognes, and clothing, just for the joy of being unexpected) even at the new moon. At the full, he could smell everyone in the castle.
They had to make some special arrangements. After the Sulfur Incident, Ienzo wore nose plugs whenever they were working with anything that smelled even a little. They actually did stop working at a decent hour on full moon nights, or else Ienzo sulked for days over missing things. And everyone started showering more.
Boys being boys, and young scientists being more so, they experimented widely on Ienzo (with his complete consent, since, he said, no one at home had the slightest idea of scientific method).
Silver burned his hands, and he was thenceforth banned from Ansem's rare formal dinners. This was more of an annoyance to Ansem than to anybody else, as it was expected that at least one of his apprentices would join him at such meals, and he had hoped that Ienzo would be more willing to participate in conversation than Dilan, who only watched everyone closely, and Elaeus, who only listened. Braig and Even had banned themselves, threatening to make the soup explode if they had to sit through "another three-hour gathering of inbred nitwits stupid enough to care about cutlery" (Even's words). Ansem hadn't believed them until they'd done it.
Wolfbane had no effect on him in any form, whether inhaled, touched, eaten, or injected. This was a great disappointment to Elaeus, who had taken up an interest in vegetable poisons for no reason that anyone else could fathom. At least he never cooked.
Changing was optional indoors, even at full moon, as long as Ienzo kept away from windows. If he was in the light of the full moon, he had to change, unless the sun was up. However, he claimed that staying in windowless rooms all week made him feel itchy underneath his skin. The rest of the time, he could change at will, even during the day.
The longer he stayed in one shape, the less of the other shape he retained. After a few days in human form, his sense of smell dropped from supernatural to merely extraordinary. Similarly, he refused to spend more than one night at a time as a wolf, for fear of losing so much of himself that he would forget to change back. It was, he admitted, unlikely, but he preferred not to take the risk.
Ienzo's body mass never changed. He was either a rather small boy with slate-grey hair or a medium-sized, slate-grey wolf. Conservation of mass, Braig explained, to which Dilan replied that they knew that, not being ten years old.
He could smell blood from a very long way away. It usually ended up with him grabbing the strongest-smelling thing he could find and inhaling until he sneezed.
The change only took an instant. He claimed that it didn't hurt. None of the others entirely believed him. Ienzo was easy enough on the eyes in either shape, but in the moment between shapes…each of them only looked once and never wanted to again.
Whatever else was inside the wolf shape, Ienzo definitely was. He could still follow conversation, and they had many full-moon talks in their shared living room, Ienzo curled neatly as ever on the floor. He always complained about not being able to talk. Braig laughed and said that was the best part. The condition couldn't be transmitted by biting, Braig discovered with some disappointment.
The only thing they didn't test was Ienzo's alleged immortality. According to legend, he could only be permanently killed by fire or silver (or otherwise making sure that there wasn't enough of him to heal), but Ienzo put his foot down and said it was just legend, the usual proportion of his ancestors were dead, and this went beyond the bounds of reasonable risk. Since it was his life, they acquiesced. Eventually Even stopped asking.
It was typical of Ienzo's mind that his last coherent thought, as the darkness overwhelmed him, was, "Someone should modify the legend to add 'or darkness'."
As it turned out, it wasn't the last thought of Ienzo's mind, though Ienzo was gone forever. Zexion awoke within the mind that had once belonged to Ienzo, with a new power of illusion, his old sense of smell, no heart, and a gaping hole in his mind where the change should be.
He wanted that back. He only ever admitted once how much he missed it, that second skin, that last chance, the physical strength he had never had while human, and Lexaeus never told. Zexion wanted his heart back, he wanted Ienzo back, but most of all he wanted that comfort that Ienzo had had and taken for granted. He would do anything it took, anything, to get that back. He laughed when the neophytes called Seven "Werewolf", because Saïx might draw his berserk power from the moon, but he was nothing like a werewolf, nothing at all—and yet Zexion was jealous of him, ferociously jealous, because the pale imitation Saïx had Zexion would give anything to have.
At the last, when pale hands closed around his throat, all Zexion could see was silver, all he could smell was fire, and all he could think was, "Maybe the legends were right, after all."