Above Konoha, the sun gave a half-hearted attempt at providing a sunny day; dark clouds stumbled across the sky, turning the warm air cold when they obscured the sun. Underfoot, gusts of wind blew around building corners, causing shop doors to bang and blowing away towels hung out over balconies to dry. Just as it kicked up dust in the busy town of Konoha, so did it blow around the green leaves in a secluded training ground just outside the village borders.

Kaishi made a clucking sound with her tongue as she shooed away the leaves that attached themselves to her forehead. She swore and blinked furiously as an off-balance insect flew straight into her eye. Eyes watering, the young girl continued slogging up the slope, past the gentle-flowing river, to where a clearing would soon open up in the trees. Her destination was an old training ground that was once used by the ninja of Konoha, as evidenced by the occasional kunai or shuriken she'd found, lost in the undergrowth. Nobody came there anymore, since the village council levelled new grounds for practicing that were bigger and better cared for; the leaves and grass and twigs that accumulated in this part of the woods created an irritating obstacle to quick manoeuvres.

Technically as a civilian, Kaishi wasn't supposed to be outside the village without having a written consent form from her parents, who had specifically forbidden her from hanging around where ninja worked, for her own safety. Not that she was particularly interested in ninja – they were more of a peripheral subject in her life, with no impact on her personal life – but the very fact that her family didn't expect her to come out her made the location so appealing. No matter where her mum sent her brothers to look for her, she could skip school here in peace.

Besides, today was a special day.

Kaishi patted the pocket of her puffy coat, feeling the cylindrical shape against her chest. Her heart beat fast, thrumming with the adrenaline that comes with, well, committing a crime. Technically. Technically…come on, nobody's even looked at the scroll for like, decades.

She'd first come across the scroll in the ninja library that morning. Not that civilians were supposed to be able to go into the ninja library – apparently it was filled with dangerous shit that civilians just wouldn't understand. Tch. No, she'd come across her ticket to knowledge quite accidentally, an access card she'd found on the street, probably dropped by a ninja cadet – what did they call them, genin? – without much experience as they raced across the rooftops. She'd thought that definitely it wouldn't work – she'd expected them to just know that she wasn't supposed to have it, but Kaishi had given it a shot because let's face it; how many times would she get this chance? She'd gone for it, and despite thinking the subterfuge was written plain as day across her forehead, the sleepy chuunin at the front desk had simply taken a quick glance at the card before waving her through, his head quickly thumping back on his folded arms, followed swiftly by quiet snoring.

Is he even a ninja? Kaishi had asked herself, baffled by his lax attitude. But then, she didn't know anything about his lifestyle. Maybe he'd just completed a daring, life-threatening mission…and gone straight to the library desk. Yeah, right. Whatever.

She wasn't about to look a gift-horse in the mouth though, and quickly slipped into the library; as soon as she was in, nobody seemed to pay her any attention. There were quite a few other patrons, sitting or standing, studying various tomes, scrolls and loose-leaf documents.

Kaishi had a deep appreciation for libraries. Well, for documents in particular. She was a dab hand at art if she did say so herself, and her appreciation for calligraphy and the written word led to her taking on a few odd jobs here and there writing up store-signs and so forth with her even hand. Her family assumed she'd go on to be an artist or something, and while she wasn't entirely opposed to the idea, it sounded like an awful lot of hard work for very little reward (especially since nobody could seem to quite agree on what 'art' really was – why drown yourself in such an unstable pool?).

Regardless of her personal prowess or lack thereof, she'd spent most of the day that she was supposed to be in school, browsing through manuals on ninjutsu, thick books on the history of clans, and meter-long scrolls on the politics of civilian-ninja relationships. Most of it went over her head, and as soon as words like 'bunshin' or 'kawarimi' started taking up half the text she just shook her head in confusion and returned them to their proper place. It was only when she started wandering towards the back of the library that things started getting interesting. The scrolls here seemed to emanate a restless energy – probably that ninjutsu chakra or whatever. Still, it drew her from one to another. She didn't dare touch them; she wasn't sure what would happen if she did, but she'd seen a lot of ninja nearly blow themselves sky-high when performing drunk jutsus in the middle of the street, so she wasn't about to risk it herself.

At least, that's what she'd been intending, until she'd been startled by a gruff order barked from behind her.

"Oi! You're not supposed to be here!"

Kaishi had startled.

Without realising how close she'd been standing to a shelf of cubby-holes, each containing their own yellowing scroll, she'd spun around, arms flailing in the panic of having been caught trespassing. Taking a step back, she'd tripped over her other foot and crashed backwards – although she'd managed to catch herself, it was too late for the bookshelf; with a timber-deep groan, the bookshelf toppled and started falling.

The shinobi who had startled her moved in a split-second, pushing her to the ground and standing over her as a cascade of paper and bamboo dowels rained down on them. Kaishi had shut her eyes tightly, waiting for the thundering to stop – the space was tight and cramped with the shinobi crouched over her and she felt her breaths start coming shorter and faster as the tumbling went on and on and on and-

"Are you okay?"

Kaishi hesitantly opened her eyes, only to realise the falling of the scrolls had stopped. A heavy grunt echoed from her protector, who straightened up. The low thud that followed indicated him straightening up and putting to rights the shelf that must have fallen on him. She scrambled up, registering the danger had passed, and her eyes widened as she took in the chaos she'd caused.

They'd been right at the back of the library so the noise might not have drawn that much attention, but Kaishi swallowed convulsively as she took in the sight of tens and tens of no doubt precious scrolls crumpled and unrolled on the library floor. She almost fainted as she caught sight of one that was ripped almost all the way through.

"Oh shit, I-" I'm sorry. She wanted to say it, she was sorry, but she knew it wouldn't cut it. She'd done who knows how many yens worth of damage. Her parents would know about this. They'd have to pay.

"Fuck!" Before she could think it really through, panic caught a hold of her and she turned and bolted. Kaishi ignored the indignant 'HEY!' that chased after her, instead dashing through the jumble of shelves, past the library-goers and past the sleeping chuunin, now drooling on his paperwork. She ran out of the building and didn't stop until she turned the corner at least ten streets away from the ninja library, crouching down low into a ball in front of what looked like a dingy laundromat.

Well, she tried to curl into a ball. The curling itself was hindered by something round jabbing into her chest. It felt like…

Oh no. Kaishi felt her heart fall, already knowing what had happened even as she pulled open her jacket to see what had stabbed her. Reluctantly, she pulled out a scroll.

A scroll.

That she'd stolen.

From the ninja library.

She was so going to jail.

It must have slipped into her half-zipped jacket in the chaos of the falling shelf. And the section she was in looked important too. She almost didn't want to think about how much the scroll was worth. How important it was.

How dangerous.

She dropped the scroll as though burned, watching it warily as it rolled harmlessly across the street. It then sat there, metaphorically blinking at her with large, innocent eyes.

Well, it hadn't blown her up yet. It still might. It should be safe though if she just…didn't open it.

…it'd be a bit of a waste though.

Kaishi worried at her lip. Maybe it wasn't the most legal of circumstances but…she had the scroll now, right? She'd give it back! Eventually. Once the uproar she'd no doubt caused had quietened down a bit. In the meantime though, maybe she could just have a peek. Surely they wouldn't leave anything explosive so open in the library, right? Like, if it exploded upon being opened, it wouldn't be much use to anyone. So it should be safe. She'd just take a quick look. Just to know how big a problem she'd caused. Besides, she wouldn't understand most of what was written in there anyway, so it wasn't like she'd be compounding the problem, after all.

Cool. Coolcoolcoolcoolcool. No doubt no doubt no doubt.

Right. Still, she wasn't about to open a scroll she'd stolen in the middle of town. She'd need to find somewhere pretty quiet, private, to look her spoils- err, accidental acquisition, over.

She knew just the place.

X-X-X

And that was how Kaishi ended up sneaking out of the village (what, like it's hard?) and to the old training ground. Perhaps the rest of her day might have been mildly interesting yet remarkably uneventful, if it weren't for one terribly, awkwardly, impractically inconvenient fact; Kaishi was not in fact, alone.

Which is what made it such an incredibly bad idea for her to decide to open the scroll while walking. Kaishi figured that she was far enough away from the village –and more specifically, the library – that random nin weren't about to catch her in her criminal act. She'd come up here, away from her brothers, enough times to know where she was going, and honestly, the suspense was killing her.

So, keeping only half an eye on the path ahead of her, Kaishi slipped the scroll from her jacket. She held it up to the natural light and, if she hadn't been so absorbed in the way the occasional glimpses of sun turned the moss-green binding an almost-shimmering emerald, she might have noticed the soft grunts and dull thuds. Nevertheless, she was distracted, and slipped her finger under the rope holding the scroll closed, tucking the thin length into her pocket absently.

Thus it came to pass that Kaishi unrolled the scroll an arm's width just as she walked into the tree's clearing. Simultaneously, she heard a surprised shout. Her head whipped up just in time to see a boy, crackling with chakra, try to divert a kick aimed at the training log propped up behind her.

No matter how talented he was, it was too late.

With a shout, the two collided. Kaishi experienced a lot of pain, a blinding flash of light and then-

Nothing.

X-X-X

Kaishi's awakening was less 'gradual and gentle' and more 'sledgehammer right to the noggin'.

"WHAT OUT!" She yelled, holding her hands in front of her face. It took her a second to register that, yeah, nobody's coming at her. Tentatively she lowered her arms, shaking her head at her blurry eyesight. Bad idea.

"Owwww." She whimpered, hands clutching at her long and spiky ha-

"What the fuck?" She whispered, patting her head. This was not her hair. Her hair was short and stubbly (to the disappointment of her mother who wanted her to have the long and luscious hair of Kaishi-aged-seven rather than the buzzcut she sported now). She tugged at one of the mysterious spikes.

As she ducked her head, that's when she realised.

"What the…fu…ck?" It was really all she could say. She spotted the cream shorts, the ninja sandals, the bandage-wrapped forearms all at the same time, together with…another feeling.

I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be jiggling down there. Oh she was definitely no supposed to be jiggling down there. What did that guy do?

Kaishi whipped her head around, trying to spot whatever idiot had been running at her with a fucking charged up fucking magic chakra doo-dah. She spotted another body lying down near her, and as soon as she focussed on it, everything slotted into place.

That body was…her. There she was, sporting a very unflattering black eye and split lip. That meant-

"I'm him?" That didn't sound quite right. Well, it sounded right, as in 'the solution to the puzzling conundrum that I appear to have stepped into' but apart from that, literally nothing about this situation was right. Still, if she was in that crazy ninja kid's body, they must have, like, switched, right?

She crawled over to her (wow that was going to get confusing) still body, trying to ignore the weird bouncing sensation in her underwear, and shook her own shoulder. First gently, then roughly.

"Oi. Oi, idiot! Hello? Anyone in there? You're not leaving me in this fucked up situation…c'mon, my guy. Wake up. I don't know fuck about chakra, I need to you undo this clusterfuck you did. You listening to me, punk?!" She yelled in her own ear, but the body before her stayed comatose.

Kaishi tried to force the slowly rising swell of panic down again, sitting back on her heels, and then eventually sprawling in the long grass, glaring at her still body. She breathed heavily through her nose.

"Alright, buddy. Ooookay. Okay, I can wait this out. He can't stay knocked out that long. I'll just…wait. Right here. Okay."

So there she sat. And she waited.

X-X-X

When the sun started to set, Kaishi had worked herself well and truly into a frantic panic. She was stomping around the clearing, grasping her unnaturally thick, spiky black hair, casting furious glares at the body, which hadn't moved a cm in the last five hours.

"Oh gods, what am I going to do? I'm going to have to tell someone. I-" She still, an awful thought suddenly occurring to her. What if…what if this guy…wasn't in her body? What if she had somehow, like, knocked him out of his body. Oh my god, what if she'd killed him.

Kaishi started hyperventilating, falling to her knees and pressing her forehead to the grass, trying to stay calm in the face of her rapidly escalating rap sheet. Impersonation, trespassing, theft, murder. And the guy had been a ninja. Could you get the death sentence for killing a ninja? If it was an accident? Oh she was going to die, holy shit.

…

Orrr, a new thought sidled across her mind, tentatively raising its hand, we could…not tell anyone. At least for now. There must be like, a reversing jutsu or something, right? It'll be fine, just get the scroll, look it up.

Kaishi wanted to hit herself. There she'd been, working herself into hysterics for hours, without thinking to look for the scroll.

Okay, so where was the scroll?

Kaishi patted herself down, immediately missing the heavy feel of it weighing down her jacket. Of course, she'd had it open when she'd run into that guy, probably the reason they were in this mess in the first place. Alright, so I must have just…dropped it here…somewhere.

She found herself once again on her hands and knees, trying to find the dropped scroll, just to come up empty. She growled in frustrating, bashing her hand into her – the guy's – head in an effort to knock some sense into herself. Right, so she'd been standing there, so if she'd dropped it, she would have either dropped it in the clearing, or…

Her heard sank and she scrambled to her feet to dash to the edge of the clearing. As she looked at the downward slope of the hill the training ground was on, she felt her hope sink. Oh no. I know where it is.

And she did. It barely took five minutes to make it down to the river at the base of the hill, and almost immediately she spotted the scroll, having rolled down the hill after being flung from her hands in the collision. It was floating in the river, old parchment soaked through. The only thing having stopped it floating down the river was that it had been caught on a rock, sticking out just on the edge of the bank. Not that it helped much.

Kaishi tried to be as delicate as she could, but the sodden paper just…fell apart in her hands as she lifted up. The whole thing was drenched, and the parts that weren't falling in sodden clumps through her fingers, was blue-black from the ink that had bled and smeared in the water. Any characters that might have once graced the scroll, were indistinguishable. It was useless.

Kaishi felt the frustration and despair bubble up in fat tears that collected in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. An ugly sniffle developed until she was full-out snotty-crying, gasping through the clogged up feeling in her throat. She couldn't really see anything through her blurry vision, her weirdly-thick eyelashes damp and sticking together.

She didn't know how long she cried, but with one last wet hiccup, she eventually wiped her nose in her navy sleeve. She honestly didn't know what she was supposed to do now, now that her biggest clue had washed away with the watery silt.

Reluctantly, Kaishi dragged herself from the collapsed heap she'd fallen into during her crying fit. Gently cradling the remnants of the scroll, she made her way back to the clearing; maybe she was due some good luck – maybe the other guy had woken up. Maybe everything would be okay.

X-X-X

Everything was not okay. Everything was even less okay than she'd imagined when she returned to the clearing to face two ninja, at least chuunin from their tak vests, crouching over her body. Her other body. Her- ah, whatever.

They must have been on high alert, because both drew their weapons and turned at her approach, looking ready to leap at her and slit her throat. One of them blinked, confusedly lowering his weapon.

"Uchiha Sasuke?" He addressed her.

Oh- oh holiest of all fucks. She knew Uchiha Sasuke. Well, not personally, but even she, a civilian with not much to do with ninja, knew him. Knew what happened to his family, it had been all over the news, front page of the Konoha Leaf for a solid month. She also knew that the last Uchiha was the pride of the shinobi community. He was a prodigy, a child star in the ninja arts.

Kaishi had probably killed Uchiha Sasuke. They were going to kill her.

She gasped as the realisations all hit her at once. She fell to her knees and threw up, before abruptly, blissfully, fainting.

X-X-X

This time, waking up was kinder than before. The non-smell of a hospital room hit her nose first, followed by the hushed beeping of some kind of medical machine she was hooked up to. There was movement beside her, and she turned her head a little to catch sight of a strangely-dressed nurse. She was moving some kind of pipe fed into the back of her hand, and occasionally tugging on the sheets gently to straighten them; the movement must have woken her.

The nurse must have noticed her waking up, because she smiled gently at Kaishi.

"Oh good, you're awake. I'll be right back."

The kind smile she gave her put Kaishi at ease and she fell back into a sort of fuzzy daze as she left the room. It seemed like just an eye-blink when the door of the hospital room opened, the nurse coming back in, this time followed by some more people.

Kaishi tensed, the fog disappearing quickly from her head. The events of the previous day (was it the previous day? Night? What time was it) came rushing back to her as the newcomer approached.

"Well, Sasuke-kun, how do you feel?" The Hokage asked, not unkindly, liver-spotted hands folded neatly before him.

"U-uh-" She stuttered, her tongue feeling thick and numb. One of the tall, lithe ninjas wearing a mask approached her bedside table, pouring some water from a glass pitcher into a cup, silently proffering it to her.

"Th-thanks," Kaishi murmured, sipping her water. The Hokage's eyes narrowed a fraction, an almost calculating look in his eyes, as though he was evaluating her. Well, she was acting strange.

"Sasuke-kun, do you think you can tell us what happened in the forest? The border guards found you on the evening patrol, in quite a state, I must say. In even more of a state though, is the civilian girl whom you seemed to have been in the presence of. She seems to have only light injuries, but…"

Kaishi swallowed. "But?"

"But she hasn't woken up. Whatever happened, there are no signs of her regaining consciousness. Sasuke?" The Hokage, grandfatherly as he initially seemed, levelled his heavy stare at her. Kaishi felt caught under the pressure and, in the vein of the last seemingly hundred decisions she'd made, said something very stupid.

"She, she surprised me, Hokage-sama. I was- practicing, and she just walked in on me. I was in the middle of a move, I couldn't stop, so I ran into her! I don't know what happened, really. She just, well, we both were knocked unconscious. I woke up, but she didn't. She had this, uh, scroll with her that I think tangled with my attack somehow." She felt the lies fly off her tongue. Well, they were more like white-lies, right? Most of it was true, just not from her perspective. At worst it was dissembling – ninjas loved that shit anyway, right?

Kaishi grew more confident the more she spoke.

"So I went to find the scroll, but it had rolled into the river. I couldn't read it, so I came back to the clearing, and the two other ninja were there. I guess I got dizzy from the collision and blacked out." She finished. She felt a light sweat bead her brow as a heavy silence settled in the hospital room.

The longer nobody said anything, the more Kaishi was sure she was busted. She clenched her hands in the sheets.

"Very well."

Kaishi blinked at the Hokage's words. It sounded like-

"You should be thankful, Sasuke-kun, that you weren't injured any worse than you were. I've been told you'll make an excellent recovery in time to attend your graduation ceremony tomorrow. The girl on the other hand…what a shame." The Hokage shook his white-haired head, pursing his head in regret.

What about me? She wanted to yell, desperate to know what happened to her body. She wanted to go back to it as soon as possible, no way was she spending the rest of her life as a guy, much less this guy.

The Hokage tugged thoughtfully at his goatee.

"She's in a coma. Her family have been in to see her. The chuunin figured the scroll was important to the whole situation you found yourself in, but it truly was too damaged to make out any of the jutsu responsible for her state. For now, until any more information can be uncovered, she will have to stay at the hospital in the long-term care ward."

Kaishi must have looked poleaxed, because something in the Hokage's face seemed to soften.

"You mustn't blame yourself, Sasuke-kun. It was an accident. The family aren't looking to press charges either. If you'd like to visit, here's the number of the room she's been placed in." He handed over a small piece of white cardstock, the neat characters for 210 written with the precision of a life-time's practice.

"I must take my leave, now. There is much to do before the day is over. Despite what happened today, I do hope you will try to enjoy your graduation ceremony. Congratulations, Uchiha Sasuke." He said, placing his hand for a moment on Kaishi's shoulder, before leaving, his masked ninja shadows disappearing with him.

As the door clicked shut behind them, it truly hit Kaishi.

She's in a coma.

Too badly damaged.

Long-term care ward.

Her family-

Abruptly she shoved her fist into her mouth as a sob ripped itself from her throat, tears again forcing themselves from her. She wasn't Kaishi anymore. Her body, Kaishi, was in a coma, and her family didn't even know. All they knew was that she skipped school and ended up in hospital probably never to wake up. She'd managed to ruin the scroll, the last chance to fix this mess. She might have killed Uchiha Sasuke.

She wailed as the heavy feeling in her heart increased, burying her face in her bedsheets as she bawled her eyes out, tears pouring out along with the stress and despair that collapsed on her like a building on fire. She didn't even notice falling asleep.

X-X-X

The evening passed by in a numb blur. She woke up and was fussed over by a nurse, who told him he officially had a clean bill of health. She stood on shaky feet, looking at the too-big feet as she shoved them into her- into Sasuke's sandals. Kaishi wasn't sure she was healthy. She certainly wasn't okay. She was too deep in. Technically yes, she could go to the Hokage now and explain everything, but what would happen then?

Sasuke would probably still remain dead, and she'd be charged with murder, or manslaughter at best. They'd lock her up – or kill her? She didn't know how ninja law worked, but surely they couldn't let her stay in the Uchiha's body, even if they believed it wasn't a deliberate attack; this Uchiha guy seemed pretty important, it probably wouldn't be the first time someone's tried something on him. Then of course she's also stolen and destroyed a scroll. A scroll that without, they couldn't undo whatever fucked-up jutsu had landed them in this mess. The two outcomes seemed to be either she end up in jail or in an asylum, and with what happened to the rest of the Uchiha family, she wouldn't blame anyone for thinking Sasuke had finally snapped and gone mad, guilty for having almost killed a girl.

Still, if she didn't say anything, where did that leave her? She wouldn't be able to see her mum, her dad, her older brothers ever again, at least not as a member of the family. She's be a boy, a ninja without ninja skills for the rest of her life.

Gods, I'm so screwed. It's only been a day. Yet, she'd managed to turn her own world upside down.

…But what if…

It was a long shot, but it occurred to her that, maybe, with a bit of subterfuge – which was, after all, the ninja way – she could just…pretend to be this Uchiha Sasuke guy. Do research on the side. Maybe she could find a jutsu or, or research this kind of thing. She'd study hard and maybe she could undo all this. Then if, if Sasuke was still alive, just trapped in her comatose body, he'd support that it was an accident. And if he was, y'know, gone, she'd at least still get her own body back.

She stared at Sasuke's toes as they wriggle in the open ends of the sandals. Thoughts circled her head until she nodded her head, mind made up.

Maybe this made her a bad person. Maybe she should sacrifice her personal freedom for the chance that maybe someone somewhere knew how to fix this old, obscure jutsu she'd destroyed. Maybe she was killing any chance this boy had at living a normal life. Well, so be it.

Maybe Mujina Kaishi was just an asshole.