"I'm psychic," Kakashi bit out, his voice turned sharp in response to her half-faked nonchalance and his own rising irritation. He strangled the impulse to grab that slim, sweat-beaded neck and shake it until answers fell out. No hurting teammates. Peace. "You smell like him," he explained, short and abrupt.

Looked something like Ryouma, even, in a broken-mirror kind of way. Black hair cut short and ragged in a lack-of-style that fell somewhere between male and female, though longer than Ryouma's mullet had been even before the nurses had sheared it off. Dark eyes, lazy and brown instead of alert and brown-black, but intelligent all the same. Pale skin, a threadwork of scars, a chakra presence that blazed entirely too strong -- unnaturally strong, and not in a way that felt like a bloodline limit. One of Orochimaru's experiments?

Her body was androgynous, to the point that Kakashi thought she probably cultivated that image. Some kunoichi did.

All of this he noticed in an eye-flicker, information caught and kept by a part of his brain devoted to doing just that, while the rest of him pointed out more important facts. Like the weariness clinging to her ginger-candy scent, beneath Ryouma's more familiar smell, and the mission-battered look written into the shadows beneath her eyes. A fresh cut scabbed its way down over her left cheekbone; something deeper and nastier had been bandaged on her throat.

Recently returned from a mission. Smelling of Ryouma. Wearing his shirt.

It was so entirely not what Kakashi had expected, that he struggled for a moment to wrap his brain around the obvious. And then logic clicked back together. After all, if you were going to swing back from gay to straight, androgyny made a nice side-stop along the way.

Kakashi thought of the red hoodie Ryouma had loaned him in the hospital, and the hotel room before that, and felt his stomach ache. Felt something internal gather up and sneer at the weakness.

"Ryouma survived your mission, then?" he said, trying for neutral. It came out arctic-cold and angry. "Did you have fun?"