Word Count: 500.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Nii Yugito's long legs dangle over the bridge as she sits and stares up at the stars.

The air is frigid, her breath coming in little puffs of steam, and the stars glitter like a light on winter frost. The seasons are turning from autumn to winter, and tawny leaves litter the streets far below.

Yugito wonders why she is so empty. She is thirteen years old, and she isn't at all like the other girls her age—not that she knows any girls her age. They avoid her and treat her like a walking plague.

Yugito, little black-clad, white-scarved Yugito, is a plain little alley cat in a world of bright-clad songbirds. She is pale and quiet, silent and somber. No-nonsense Yugito does not understand the frivolities and the petty vicissitudes of teenage girls, nor does she think she ever will.

But why does she not understand? That is what Yugito wonders day and night, why, even if she does not experience it herself, she can not see it from an outsider's perspective.

Humanity is to her an enigma. Yugito has never pretended to understand human nature. But she knows that she is human too, even if there is a nekomata nestled in her collarbone. She shares most of her genetic structure with the people of the village, and human blood flows through her veins the same as everyone else in Kumogakure, yet no one seems to remember. There is so much more of her demanded in every mission, yet she is treated like a child or a person who can not make a single decision on their own.

And normal human behavior is as alien to Yugito as the dark side of the moon. She supposes she has her cloistered upbringing to thank for it, and absently hopes that time will change that.

But why is she empty? Why is there a strange hollow feeling deep within her that no amount of anything can fill?

On a whim, Yugito stops looking at the stars and starts looking down at the people below. Couples laugh and clasp hands, brothers and sisters commune and argue, parents hold up their children. And in one glance, she knows.

She never had arms to hold her up as a child. She was alone, always, even in the thickest crowd.

She has never had true human companionship. Ē and Kirabi are too far apart in age from her to make true companions, and Yugito barely knows her paternal cousins, couldn't pick them out in a crowd.

No one has ever bothered to teach her companionship, the values of human bonds. Kirabi is probably the one person who could teach her, but he isn't reliable and Yugito doubts her ability to learn it on her own. It has always been Yugito, her and herself alone, against the village, against the world.

Yugito's pale eyes flick back to the stars. A cool frost sinks over her chest as she thinks of what she will never have.