Usual disclaimers: not mine, no money.
Why He Smoked
I asked him once when I was little why he smoked. He just shook his head and said I wouldn't understand. He ignored my insistence that I could. Mama told me to leave him alone, so I did but when I glanced back he was pulling out another cigarette.
I asked him again, when I graduated from the Academy, why he smoked. He looked at me for a long time and I hoped he would answer me. He didn't, just shook his head and walked away, smoke trailing behind him, eyes cast to the sky.
In frustration I asked his old teammate. She looked at me oddly and said if my father wasn't telling me why she had no place to do so. But I'm not stupid; if there was something that she didn't want to talk about, that meant it had hurt her, too. So I tried to find out what had happened.
I found out about their sensei who had smoked; he had died fighting Akatsuki. It was a good death for a shinobi. Of course, I was thirteen at the time, and death in battle still held a little bit of glory.
When I became a Chuunin I asked why he smoked. He scowled and said it was too troublesome to think about.
When my teammate died on a mission I didn't ask him why. I just hugged him and breathed in the tobacco scent; I knew all the terrible things it was doing to his body, but it was still a reassuring smell, it was his smell. It was part of my smell, too, because the fumes have permeated the house over the years and all of my clothes smell faintly of cigarettes.
I think I finally understood, at least a little. I had never had much interest in poisons, but after my teammate died I began reading more about herbs and their deadly uses, just in passing.
When I was a Jounin, and I had just come back from a mission with him, he asked why I had stopped asking as we stood shoulder to shoulder at the hero's monument, looking at the names that were important to us.
I shrugged and said it was because I understood that it really didn't matter why.
He nodded and accepted that.
When he died on a mission I didn't want to believe it, but I had too. I wondered who would keep the tobacco smell in the house, the reassuring scent?
And then I understood, I really understood why. I found his secret stash—mother had been trying to cut him back over the years—and I lit a cigarette. I inhaled and I coughed and I cried and the smoke finally sank through my clothes, through my pores and into my being.
Now I always have the reassuring scent with me.