Fine, that was very Uchiha of you.

Moonlight flooded into the room as the door opened, illuminating every furnishing inside.

Pink wallpaper, floral curtains.

A lace-trimmed canopy draped over the bed. A small round mirror sat on the dressing table, with a brand-new wooden comb beside it and two glittering hair clips next to that.

Uzumaki Hayashi held on to the doorframe, looking over everything one item at a time. The more he looked, the quieter he became.

He walked over to the large wardrobe against the wall and yanked its doors open.

Well, damn.

It was full of dresses in every imaginable style.

And not just one or two, either. They filled almost half the hanging rail, and some still had their tags attached.

Uzumaki Hayashi closed the wardrobe, turned around, and leaned his back against its doors. Tilting his head up, he let out a long breath.

Now he understood everything.

All that "You look like her, you really do," that kindly smile, that Grandpa Third business.

From the moment he walked through the door, the old man had never checked his gender. Redhead, pale skin, an androgynous face, and a name like "Hayashi," which apparently struck him as a little ambiguous.

The man had assumed, from start to finish, that the child brought back was a little girl from Uzushio Village who had been left wandering far from home.

Uzumaki Hayashi considered the time.

At this hour, the old man would have long since gone to bed. Iwai Tanabe was coming early tomorrow to take him to register at the Ninja Academy, too. He could hardly run to the Hokage Building in the dead of night to discuss his gender with a man in his seventies.

He would have to wait until after registration tomorrow, then go find the Third Hokage and clear this up.

He sighed in resignation and walked to the bed. After staring at the lace canopy and spending ages trying to steel himself, he still couldn't bring himself to lie down in it.

Forget it. Even sleeping on the floor would be better than this.

As it turned out, sleeping on the floor couldn't save him, either.

Uzumaki Hayashi lay on the floor, tossing and turning, growing more awake by the minute. Every time he closed his eyes, his head filled with those dresses with the tags still on.

Unable to sleep, he simply got up, went into the bathroom, and took a hot shower.

Once he finished, a new problem arose.

He had spent the whole day walking in the old clothes he had worn while wandering, and he really didn't want to put them back on tonight.

Uzumaki Hayashi searched the entire wardrobe. Wearing dresses was like getting a job: not happening. Not in this lifetime.

In the end, he could only dig out a thin set of white nightclothes. They were just about wearable, though the neckline was a little too wide and the sleeves a little too short.

They're only for sleeping. They'll do. It's the middle of the night, anyway. Nobody will be outside.

Uzumaki Hayashi tucked the Wind Release: Vacuum Sphere scroll inside his clothes, grabbed two rice crackers to hold between his teeth, and pushed open the door of the little house.

Konoha was quiet late at night.

The streetlights were spaced far apart. Moonlight spread across the rooftops, and the four faces on Hokage Rock loomed faintly in the distance.

He stuck to secluded paths, and after wandering for nearly an hour, he actually found a training ground.

Several wooden posts were sunk deep into the earth, and a row of targets had shuriken embedded in them. The grass had been trampled flat, making it obvious that people trained here regularly.

"This'll do."

Uzumaki Hayashi found a clean patch of grass and sat down, spreading the scroll across his knees and reading it line by line in the moonlight.

Wind Release: Vacuum Sphere, a B-rank ninjutsu.

There were only three hand seals. The hard part was transforming and distributing the chakra. The chakra held in the mouth had to be compressed into bullets, continuously, one shot after another, without any breaks...

He became so absorbed that he even forgot to chew the rice crackers in his mouth.

Meanwhile, from the shadows of a tree not far behind him, someone had already been staring fixedly at his back for a long time.

Whoosh-

The sound of something cutting through the air suddenly came from behind him.

Uzumaki Hayashi's body moved before his brain did.

He lunged forward, rolling with the momentum the instant his shoulder hit the ground. The movement was as crisp as if he had practiced it thousands of times, and he came to a steady stop two paces away, down on one knee.

With a dull thunk, a kunai embedded itself where he had just been sitting, the iron ring at its end still humming with vibration.

Uzumaki Hayashi glanced down. Besides the kunai, he discovered that a shoe had somehow flown off his foot and now lay forlornly on the ground he had just rolled across, sole facing up.

Only then did he slowly turn to look at the person who had thrown the kunai.

Under the moonlight, a black-haired boy stood at the edge of the training ground, dressed in dark blue with a fan emblem on his back. His expression was so cold that he looked as though someone owed him eight million ryo.

Sasuke Uchiha.

Uzumaki Hayashi's eyelid twitched. He had already worked out most of what the kid was doing here.

This idiot was practicing shuriken in his own haunt in the middle of the night when he suddenly saw an unfamiliar face sitting in the training ground. Redhead, someone he'd never seen before—he probably took me for some outsider ninja who had sneaked into the village from who knows where.

No questions, just a kunai to test the waters.

Fine. That looks very Uchiha of him.

Uzumaki Hayashi stood and brushed the grass off his knees, casually releasing the chakra he had been holding back and pressing it toward the black-haired boy.

Sasuke felt his chest suddenly grow heavy, as though a mountain had descended on him out of nowhere. His legs buckled, one knee slammed straight into the ground, and cold sweat sprang out all over him.

He had only ever experienced this suffocating feeling from one person.

How was this possible-

"Take a good look."

Uzumaki Hayashi walked up to him and raised the scroll in his hand.

"This is a ninjutsu scroll. The Third gave it to me himself this afternoon. I came here to train. I'm not who you think I am."

Sasuke raised his head with difficulty.

He wanted to see exactly what this person who could pin him down so hard he couldn't even lift his head looked like.

Then he saw.

In the moonlight, the person wore thin white nightclothes and stood barefoot, Redhead spilling over his shoulders. His neckline hung loose as he tilted his head to look at Sasuke.

Sasuke's mind went blank for a moment.

A girl?

That chakra that had crushed him until he couldn't breathe had come from this girl in front of him?

In his twelve years, he had never met a girl who could fight. The ones who flocked around him at school were noisier than the next, and he had never given any of them a second glance.

But this one-

The person who had just forced him to his knees now stood in the moonlight, so pale it almost hurt to look.

Wait.

Nightclothes.

Bare feet.

An open neckline, too.

And he was still kneeling on one knee, his head tilted up to look. A rush of heat surged from the base of his neck straight to the tips of his ears.

The next second, he whipped his head aside as though he had been burned, practically twisting his neck ninety degrees. Even his voice changed pitch:

"Y-you... put your clothes on properly first!"

"Then get away from me!"

Uzumaki Hayashi: "?"

He looked down at his thin clothes, then back up at Sasuke Uchiha, who stubbornly refused to turn his head back, and fell into thought.

Seriously.

How many times had this happened today?

What the hell was wrong with the eyes of everyone in Konoha?