No Smoking
Ino exhaled, blowing a dense stream of smoke out from between her pursed lips. Eight cigarettes and three asthmatic fits later, she had more or less mastered the art of smoking. The trick was to take shallow breaths and to remove the cigarette from your mouth before inhaling the smoke. Failure to do so resulted in a painful amount of coughing and some very undignified wheezing.
"So that's where my Marlboros went." The voice came from above, but before she could look up he had already leaped down from the roof.
"Uh, hi, Asuma-sensei," Ino said, trying not to look like someone who had just smoked her way through half a pack of cigarettes. She needn't have bothered; her rough voice was a dead giveaway, as were the butts littering the ground.
Her team leader nodded briefly in greeting. "What do you think you are doing?" His face was carefully bland, but his eyebrows were furrowed and his hands, stuffed deep in his pockets, were clenched into fists.
Adjusting her posture, Ino abandoned the innocent act (she hadn't thought it would work anyway) and decided instead to brazen it out. She took one last drag on her cigarette and sighed, exhaling copious amounts of smoke. Fanning the air with her left hand, she shooed the shifting shapes away.
"Why do people smoke this crap?" she asked rhetorically. "My mouth tastes like I licked the pavement, my throat feels like sandpaper, and my hair smells like I fell in a campfire!"
Momentarily abandoning his disapproval, he answered her question. "That's because the stuff I smoke is rather strong. You should have started off with something smoother, like Misty or Virginia Slims."
Asuma took a seat on a wooden crate, indicating with a nod of his head that Ino should sit next to him. She perched on the very edge, angling her head and regarding her teacher warily. Although she couldn't tell if he was in fact irritated with her or just jonesing from lack of nicotine, she had the feeling that she was about to be chastised.
He looked away from her and began tapping his foot against the asphalt, an impatient staccato rhythm. Not even thirty seconds had passed before Ino was gritting her teeth in irritation; in another thirty she had broken the silence by blurting out the first thing that came to mind, just to get him to stop. "You knew I took your cigarettes."
To Ino's surprise, her sensei laughed. "You're going to be a very good kuinoichi someday," he said, smiling. "But it will be a few more years before you can pick my pocket without me noticing."
Abruptly, his features arranged themselves into a stern expression. "You know, smoking also turns your teeth yellow, gives you smoker's lines, and eats up a good part of your paycheck . . . Not to mention all that cancer shit."
It was a half-hearted lecture, given out of a sense of duty. Ino felt her uneasiness evaporating now that she knew he wasn't truly angry with her. "You don't let that stop you," she couldn't resist pointing out.
Asuma shrugged carelessly, but a hint of seriousness lingered at the crease between his eyebrows and the frown lines around his mouth. "Ninjas lives are short and spartan; indulgences of any kind are severely discouraged," he said. He shrugged again, acknowledging the heavy weight of this fact while simultaneously disregarding it. "But I find cigarettes relaxing. That alone makes them a welcome luxury."
Ino tilted her head and studied him through narrowed eyes. "Yet you don't think I should take up smoking."
"You technically can't until you're 15."
"That's a stupid law and you know it!" Ino exclaimed. "At thirteen I'm apparently old enough to be sent on dangerous, life-threatening missions, but I can't use the money I've earned risking life and limb to buy cigarettes! Besides, if I was really that desperate for a smoke I could just use a disguise jutsu and buy them from the vending machines that they have in every motel lobby."
"You could try."
Ino bristled. "Is that a threat?"
The look he gave her was indecipherable. "It's sound legal advice. Don't break the law; that's the only thing separating us from those deserters." Shaking his head, he stood up and stretched, a gesture that reminded her of Shikamaru. His right hand slipped into his pocket, fingers automatically feeling for a pack that wasn't there. A grimace flickered briefly across his face. He plucked the still smoldering cigarette from Ino's fingers and took a greedy drag. If anyone else had done that she would have screeched in protest, or giggled nervously and called their attention to the indirect kiss. But Asuma-sensei was trying so hard to be parental; it would be a shame to spoil his efforts.
Ino watched as his stiff stance steadily relaxed, the tension expelled out of his muscles along with the smoke he blew into the night air. She resettled herself on the crate, pulling her legs up onto the wood and hugging them to her chest like a child. She rested her chin on her knees and waited for him to speak. A companionable silence grew between them as he finished the cigarette. "So we agree you're not going to smoke anymore?"
"When did we agree that?" Ino yelled. Her mercurial mood slid from calm serenity to righteous anger in a matter of seconds. She felt a temper tantrum building and surged to her feet to glare at her teacher, only to catch him smirking at her. He was . . . he was messing with her head! The long pause followed by an abrupt statement designed to throw the subject off balance . . . Ino almost laughed; leave it to Asuma-sensei to act like a professional interrogator even when acting like a father.
And then she realized something else. Using the sharp, unrelenting tone she adopted when pursuing a piece of particularly juicy gossip, Ino snapped, "You didn't answer my question. Why don't you want me to smoke?"
But he wasn't looking for an argument, and his reply came easily. "You always smell like flowers. It would be a shame to change that." Ino dropped her gaze to the ground and tried not to blush.
His hand hovered above her shoulder, but he thought better of it and tugged on her ponytail instead.
"Hey!" she shrieked.
Asuma smirked. "As soon as you're old enough, you're buying me a pack of Marlboros."
Notes: Written more than a year ago for bleach_flashfic on LJ. I just wanted to archive it here as well.
Thank you for reading ;]