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Suguru doesn't smoke.
Seriously, he doesn't. For all the bad boy image Satoru says he has, his teenage angst never pushed him past the long hair and the pierced ears. He knows it's not very wise to throw his lungs away because he wants to look cool. There are several more healthy ways to do that. Besides, he doesn't like the smell of tobacco, so putrid and invasive, clinging to him, chasing him even if he holds his breath while walking near a smoker in the street.
So upon meeting Shoko, a girl who inhaled more cigarettes than actual oxygen, he's… conflicted, to say the least.
She's nice. Funny. Smart in her own ways. A good person. He likes her.
But she smells of smoke.
It takes a while to get used to. At first, he scrunches his nose every time he walks into her smoking. She's understanding. She tries to smoke away from him, never indoors, and when he needs to talk to her, she smushes the cigarette into the nearest wall or against the sole of her foot.
It's really nice of her, he thinks. But he also knows cigarette packs are expensive, and she's wasting unfinished ones just to not inconvenience him. So next time he sees her try to put it out, he mentally sighs and tells her not to worry, that it doesn't bother him.
It does bother him, but he says nothing. This is not about him.
She looks peaceful when smoking. Probably the effects of nicotine, but peace is peace no matter where it comes from. (Is it? He wouldn't know.) Her face relaxes as a dark fog seeps through her teeth with each sigh.
Is it wrong that smoke feels warmer when it's her who is making it? He loathes the stench of death it has, but when her lips form a shaky 'o' to make a gray ring, it seems to smell like a tranquil death, like going down slowly after a lifetime of loving and being loved. It's sweet, almost. Intoxicating, in every sense of the word.
He knows the dangers of passive smoking. It's as bad as active smoking, if not worse. But Shoko's presence becomes a need instead of a luxury, so he sits by her side and counts the loops the smoke does before being lost in the sky.
She offers him a drag once. Not pushing it, not pressuring him, just a casual comment. Wanna try?
And it's tempting. Danger always is. Her fingers are long and slender, he notes when he takes her hand and brings the tip to his mouth. There's a smudge of her lip balm on the paper. It means nothing, but it's his last thought before the nicotine climbs through the filter and reaches him.
He coughs and she laughs. Smoking is not his thing. It never becomes his thing. The lighter he starts to carry around is not for him.
It's for her, because she's forgetful, and she is stuck without a light many times. He's the one who has to come to the rescue. She's the one who says he's her hero and that she owes him her life.
When he jokingly suggests she owes him her eventual premature death, she leans in as if she's letting him in on a secret and whispers she renews the tissue of her lungs once a month with her Cursed Technique. Is that really reaching her full potential as a sorcerer? She shrugs and says she doesn't care, smiling.
She smiles a lot, he notices. Someone from the outside might not notice, but he's up close. He learns to distinguish what the slight curve of her mouth means, even when it's clouded by smoke or hidden behind a hand. For someone so hellbent on playing cool, that curve is present a lot.
Sometimes it's big and derisive, a product of finding amusement in Satoru's vain attempts to get Utahime to pay attention to him. Sometimes it's sleepy and lazy, when someone cracks a funny joke too early in the morning. Sometimes it's inadvertent and small, barely there but unwavering. He likes it better when it's soft and spontaneous, and he likes it best when it's directed at him.
In fact, he likes it so much that one day, when she's smiling through one of her smoking sessions, he takes the cigarette from her lips and replaces it with a kiss.
It's strange. He never thought a girl who smelled so much like smoke would taste so much like fresh air.
Shoko doesn't smoke anymore.
Seriously, she doesn't. After years and years of Utahime begging her to drop her nastiest habit (her words), she decided to go cold turkey. She told her friend it was so she'd stop bugging her, but that was only half the truth.
The other half was that cigarettes still tasted like him.
After that day, she smoked two packs daily for a good while. She tried to resist, because no matter how good her Cursed Technique was or how used to it she was, sore throats are no fun for anybody. But she couldn't help it: it was the only thing she had left of him. She felt his touch whenever the filter touched her lips, so she smoked, smoked, smoked until she choked and couldn't even breathe properly. Satoru could barely hold himself together yet he had to take care of her for two months until she could repair her lungs and go back to a somewhat healthier dose.
Heh. Healthier.
And as time went on, the sweet release of smoking became bitter. Every time she lit one up, she would see his hands circling around the flame of the lighter so the passing breeze wouldn't knock it off. If she tried to put it off, his shadow would approach her and greet her cheerily.
So after six years of slowly killing herself, she smoked her last cigarette on the twenty-first of September of the year 2013 and then hurled the butt into the depths of the forest from the top of the central building in the college.
She breathes again for the first time.
Things were good for some time, until the crazy fucker decided that yes, he did want to orchestrate a terrorist attack on Kyoto and Shinjuku, and that yes, that was a good idea.
Alas, it was not.
When Satoru called her about his passing, she instinctively reached for the pack she kept in her desk. But she didn't reach for the lighter. She just ripped it open in front of the makeshift grave they had dug for him and scattered them over his corpse. It wasn't proper procedure, he should have been cremated. But neither of them could bring themselves to do anything to him. To it. Are corpses still people? She'd never asked herself that before.
The white of the sticks almost seemed to glow against the dark dirt. His face had been pale, still stained with blood they couldn't clean.
It has been almost a year since that. Shoko opens a cigarette pack for herself for the first time in half a decade because now Geto Suguru, the only boy she ever loved, at least a little, is back.
The tobacco is surprisingly sweet. Had she forgotten the taste? Impossible. She could never forget what a cigarette feels like because she could never forget what he used to feel like, before, when he would imprint the taste of nicotine on the tip of her tongue.
"I thought you had quit smoking?" Yaga asks.
She presses the red tip against the hand railing until the little structure collapses in itself, a beautiful, twisted mess like the one he made her into.
"I'm just feeling nostalgic about my student days."