Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Smoke ❯ Smoke ( Chapter 1 )

Title: Smoke

Author: Sintari

Rating: T

Spoilers: None really if you know who Asuma is

 

Asuma actually never liked cigarettes. He remembers his father lighting one off the end of another, coughing. Slapping his mother and later warning him, “Wear a condom, kid. Five minutes of bliss isn't worth a lifetime pushing a broom.”

 

The old man's lungs finally did him in. The doctors at the hospital would have been able to cure him if he hadn't popped a cigarette in his mouth as fast as they could burn the cancer out. Asuma's older brother, Haru, is the janitor at the Academy now. Three kids in five years, his salary barely supports his family. He doesn't look at Asuma when Asuma slips the extra money to cover the mortgage into his coat pocket. Later, when he spots Haru at a bar bragging “my little brother the shinobi isn't such a badass” Asuma just lights another cigarette and walks back out. He allows his brother that small point of pride.

 

Eri is not a shinobi, and that's why Asuma married her. Before her, he had never met a woman who could make a room peaceful just by walking into it. She cooks for him, and keeps the house neat, and all those other things that modern women are not supposed to do anymore. Her skin is warm, even in winter. She is beautiful, too. She loves him. When he is home, she keeps his ashtrays emptied.

 

Every night before bed she kisses the ancient round burns on his forearms. She dulls the sharp-edges of his memory.

 

He loves Kurenai because she is a shinobi. She has felt the slime of entrails on her hands, seen her ally's last rictus grin as blood welled to outline each individual tooth. She is more at home with a shuriken in her hand than a dishtowel. She turned over in bed and her hair fanned out behind her and he repeated to her his father's maxim. Kurenai answered that shinobi never know if they even have five seconds left, much less five minutes. Then she took his cigarette, giving it a shallow puff before returning it to him.

 

He could taste her lipstick on the filter.

 

Asuma stands outside the Academy with a cigarette in his mouth. The non-smoking policy inside the building is strictly enforced. One of the new instructors comes and stands beside him, chaffing his hands together in the cold. The first-year takes out his own cigarette; Asuma offers him a light. The end catches and flares and the blooming smoke carries the scent of his father's brand. Asuma stands very still for a long second before flipping his own half-finished cigarette into the gutter.

 

Asuma's fingers are starting to stain yellow like the old man's. He has never lit one cigarette off the end of another though, and he swears he never will.

 

But he lights another before he gets home. Because the choice between a disgusting habit and allowing his wife to taste another woman on his mouth when he kisses her hello is really no choice at all.

 

END