"It's kind of a running theme in American politics that we arm people and then it comes back to bite us in the butt."
"It could be worse. We could be giving people nuclear weapons."
"You're right, it could be worse. We could be giving people planes and having them crash into major buildings in the US."

- The usual guy, my history teacher, and then the other guy that does a lot but not as much.

o.o.o.o.o

Deidara slowly opened the door to Konan's room and peeked in. "Konan-nee?"

"You can come in, Dei-chan."

It was decidedly odd, Deidara thought, to hear a man's voice coming from Konan. Not because of the sex change itself, but because of how much it grated on Deidara's nerves compared to the changed voices of the others. While hearing female voices from his formerly male comrades wasn't all that disturbing, hearing a male voice from Konan was. The problem was that Deidara couldn't pinpoint why, other than that the idea of men becoming women and returning was more ingrained than that of women becoming men and going back. Even that thought, however, was discarded, because Deidara could tell that that's not what it was. He was so used to the thought of both that the small difference in time for which he'd thought of both situations naturally was irrelevant.

Maybe it was that Konan was so soft and feminine even as a man, and his voice reflected it? Culturally, hearing a woman speak in a rough, masculine manner was treated with neutrality, overall, while a man speaking in a soft, feminine manner was treated negatively… but no, it wasn't that either.

Maybe… Deidara shook his head and just walked into the room before Konan grew curious about what he was doing, just standing outside his door.

"Hello, Deidara." The voice that Konan now spoke with still feminine, and not even all that deep. However, it was still undoubtedly male.

"Hey, Konan, un." Deidara came in and sat down on the bed. At the moment, he had decided to try reversing his original gender-changing trick, and was female while appearing male.

"Is something wrong?" the blue-haired man turned away from the desk, orange eyes lidded but bright.

"Actually, I wanted to ask how you're dealing with all this, un." Deidara waved a hand at Konan's body. "I know that it's a huge shock, and most people don't adapt to a change in sex, or even gender, as well as I do, un."

Konan sighed and stood, walking over to a full-body mirror and standing in front of it, back turned to Deidara. Deidara was at just the right angle to see him in the mirror.

"I am… dealing with it."

Deidara asked for the unspoken continuation, "But?"

"But… it's so wrong. I am a woman. I have always been one, and my body and mind were in harmony. I was who I was, and I was proud of it."

Deidara got the feeling that Konan was only partially talking about the differences between his/her male and female selves. "I know it's disorienting, un. I can't fully understand, because I've been switching for so long, but… it's only temporary, remember, un? Three months, and it ends."

Konan still hadn't moved from in front of the mirror, and still didn't speak. The doubt hung in the air like a thick cloud, and Deidara knew how little the others believed in Hidan when he spoke about Jashin.

He sighed and stood up, and came up behind Konan. He was even shorter than Konan than before—Deidara height didn't change between sexes, but most of the others did suffer from such a situation—but he could still come and peek around Konan's arm.

And give him a hug.

"It'll get easier, I promise, un." Deidara wasn't used to being the one comforting Konan. The situation was usually the other way around, but in this case, Deidara was as close to being an expert on this as any of them had. The psychological ramifications of this sudden change had hit them all hard, after the shock had worn off. Almost a month in, and they still found themselves feeling like everything was just wrong. Their arms were too long or too short. Their minds were more likely to linger on some things, and their emotions had gone to h*** in a hand basket, carried there by their changed hormones. They put on brave faces, but they were all struggling with it. Some more or less than others, but there was just that lingering feeling of wrongness to their minds and bodies, and it made them all uncomfortable.

"How—" Konan's voice actually broke. "How do you put up with it?"

Deidara frowned. "I don't. I don't just put up with it, I thrive, un. I mean, I grew up as one sex, getting teased as being the other. It never felt wrong to be what I was originally, but neither did it feel wrong when I first switched, un. I don't… gender and sex are hard things to ascribe labels to once you get out of binary gender, un. I mean, I might be bigender, or androgynous, or genderqueer, or all three if they're even mixable… it's a complicated thing, un. All I really know is that I'm comfortable as both, or neither, or changing between them when I feel like it. But… most people aren't like that, un. Most people don't even have switching as an option. And most people are pretty comfortable the way they're born and never see any reason to change who and what they are, un. Most people are cisgender, and for someone like that to suddenly be thrust into a situation where they're not… I almost can't wrap my head around it, un." (1)

"I guess you're lucky, then." Konan let out a miserable sounding chuckle, his shoulders hunching in on themselves. He gestured towards the mirror. "I look in the glass, and I can't see that as myself. I look and I see someone else standing between me and the mirror."

"That's probably what most of the organization is feeling right now, un." Deidara muttered, and then moved away, holding on to Konan's arm. "Come on, sit down. You're probably more stressed than you realize, un."

Konan let Deidara move him, and Deidara huffed as he sat down on Konan's bed again, pulling the blue-haired man down to sit next to him.

"Does this have anything to do with you and Nagato? Does… does it have anything to do with the baby you're trying to have, un?"

Konan didn't flinch, but the small twitch that occurred by his ear—it was one that Deidara had learned to look for by now—indicated that the answer was very much a yes.

"Let me guess, it's even harder and more out of reach this way, un?"

Konan snorted mirthlessly, derisively. "Isn't that obvious?"

"Yeah, kinda." Deidara knew he wasn't as expected to make certain actions as a man, but that had grown less and less applicable over the years as his two sides mixed further. He was just so outside the norm overall that the members of Akatsuki had stopped expecting things a long time ago.

So it didn't surprise Konan much when the blond gave him a hug. Not anymore.

"Only three months, remember? We know what happened, and it'll be fine, un."

Konan shook her… his head. "No, I'm not sure it will. Nagato had been getting better, but this sudden change… It may have set his, her, whatever, Nagato's progress back by months. I don't know if it's the body's physiology, or the sudden shock, but most of the weight gain that we've been managing recently has just… stopped. Nagato hasn't gained more than a pound over the past few weeks, and we were doing so well on that specialized diet too…"

Deidara bit his lip, not knowing what to say.

Was there anything to say?

o.o.o.o.o

Zetsu stared down at her body, and then over at a mirror.

It… it was a little odd, to be sure. It had taken this long for Zetsu to get comfortable with the idea of actually examining this body in a mirror, but get comfortable with it she did.

Sex and gender were nearly foreign concepts. Sure, plants and people both had a technical gender most of the time, but Zetsu was a… a science baby, maybe? Zetsu wasn't human, or plant, or animal, or anything, really. Zetsu's gender had almost been purely aesthetic, and then Madara had decided at the last moment to do something so that there was a working set of genitals. Zetsu wasn't quite sure why, but it probably had something to do with urinating.

Having breasts was odder, especially since they were a lot more sensitive than a regular, no, a male chest (Kami knew how Deidara would react if Zetsu referred to a male chest as a normal one). They weren't particularly large, or particularly small, but just the fact that they were there made fighting so much more difficult. They had to have support, and even be bound down if Zetsu wanted to win a taijutsu battle (not that the plant-person ever did much hand-to-hand), and being struck there hurt. That was why Zetsu thought of the… appendages as sensitive. It hurt just as much to be hit there as it did to be hit in the groin. And, as Tobi had earlier found out, it hurt just as much to be hit in the groin as a woman as it did to be hit in the groin as a man.

The change had had greater psychological effects, though. White Zetsu, the one that had technically chosen to get the degree, was fascinated by how his comrades were acting, but even more fascinated by the changes wrought upon her black half and upon Tobi.

She knew that Tobi had started looking at Deidara with fondness. It wasn't much of a secret, considering how Tobi had actually come out and said it a few times. But this sudden change hadn't just made them all uncomfortable; it had given them (all but Zetsu) a challenge and a pinnacle to strive towards: Deidara. Then had come the conversation between Deidara and Tobi that had shoved everything into perspective once it had spread: Deidara, the one that was so at ease, didn't think it was a good idea to emulate him, to emulate her. It wasn't healthy for them to do so.

Zetsu, privately, agreed, and made sure to tell Tobi this when they next talked. It was a bit of a surprise that there wasn't anyone that had actually experienced gender euphoria upon the change as opposed to dysphoria, but they already had Deidara, so it maybe it wasn't all that surprising that there weren't any other statistical outliers in the organization. (2)

Tobi had started to act strangely after that talk, and had come to Zetsu for help, ostensibly to talk to the black half about how the Moon's Eye Plan should proceed with these complications.

The conversation had invariably shifted to Tobi's mask. Not the orange one, no, but the mask that was Tobi. It was not Madara, the senile old bat that wanted to take over the world. It was not Obito, who had been broken as a child and never quite fixed up right, whether mentally or physically. No, Tobi was the third mask, emulating a friend that neither had seen in years.

(Zetsu never did mention that Obito's break with sanity was what had led him to get a psychological degree in the first place.)

The mask of Tobi, she said, was easy to hold. It was almost natural at this point, and… fun, she admitted. It was a part of her by now, and Zetsu could tell that even without the years of knowing the former Konoha-nin. But acting the part of a girl was, for whatever reason, so much harder. It almost made her doubt herself, in more ways than one.

The conversation had gone on from there and covered far too many topics, so many that Tobi's head had started to spin and she had excused herself.

Zetsu had thought that the mask may have started to break. The question, however, was which mask was breaking, or even how many.

The other thing was Black Zetsu.

Black Zetsu was supposedly Madara's living will. It wasn't Madara, but all the base thoughts, goals, instincts, etcetera… they were all there. White Zetsu was closer to being a moral center, however, supposed cannibalism aside.

(She was a misshapen clone of the Shodai Hokage grown from a tree. Was it even cannibalism when she probably wasn't human?)

The sudden change had thrown that side off-balance. It… she? Wasn't used to being questioned, and it rankled. But most of all, Black Zetsu wasn't used to questioning herself.

There was the crux of the problem. White Zetsu, for all her airiness, did a large amount of self-evaluation after getting the psychological degree. Luminosity was her goal, and she liked to think that she had achieved it. Black Zetsu, however, rarely did so much critical thinking, especially in regards to herself.

The sex-switch had changed that. White Zetsu had spent so much time trying to figure out what to say in case of counseling (as with Tobi, and even a few others that had come to talk for similar reasons), that such ideas had lodged themselves in Black Zetsu's brain and taken root. And from the ideas of gender identity, of romantic and sexual orientation, of finding one's alignment, of self-analysis, had come the ideas of other kinds of mental dissection of one's own mind. (3)

It was a novel idea to Black Zetsu. She had never had much reason to think on her own actions and reasoning, but the winds of change had come, and she began to develop, and was no longer the simple little puppet that she had been since Madara created him.

Dance to your own beat, Zetsu. Your time will come.

o.o.o.o.o

Deidara breathed in a familiar scent as he woke up, and opened his eyes to stare into equally familiar purple eyes.

"Hey, un."

"Hey." Hidan replied, smirk playing on her lips. "I liked last night."

"Me too." Deidara pressed himself closer to his lover, but still kept their heads far enough away from each other that they could look each other in the eye.

"Can't f***in' wait for it to go back to normal, though." She looked down unhappily, and Deidara chuckled softly.

"It'll happen, Hida-kun. We've got, what, two months left? It'll be over before you know it."

"Mm… I guess you're right." Hidan mused, one hand playing with Deidara's hair.

"C'mon, let's get ready for breakfast. I think I smell pancakes."

"Alright, blondie."

Too bad neither realized what today would bring.

There would be something especially… serpentine invading their twisted little lives today.

o.o.o.o.o

(1) Bigender, androgynous, genderqueer, cisgender. I urge you to look all these terms up, as well as related terms which I did not have Deidara say, such as ambigender, transgender, and two-spirit. These terms each have different connotations, and there are often only very slight nuances to the meanings. I don't have the room to explain, so take a look through Wikipedia to see exactly what it is that I'm talking about.

(2) I think I've mentioned this before, but:
Gender dysphoria – you feel like you're in the wrong body, sex-wise.
Gender euphoria – you feel like you're in the right body, sex-wise.

(3) Gender orientation/identity, romantic orientation, and sexual orientation are three different labels that a person has to decide on for themselves. They are related, but one does not automatically decide the other two.

o.o.o.o.o

A/N – So… I did a lot of research for this chapter. I still can't say what Deidara's gender identity is, though I think it's something around bigender or two-spirit, or maybe I can just say s/he's genderqueer.

This chapter probably seemed rather angst-filled, but I did say I liked Cerebus rollercoasters, so doing sudden emotional changes from one chapter to the next (or even within a chapter) are to be expected. I also wanted to show just how much emotional turmoil would come from a change like this. The emotional aspects of a forced gender change in most fics always seem so shallow to me, and I wanted to explain that something like this could be a lot more complicated than it seems at first glance.

You may have also noticed that I don't use gender pronouns as often for the other characters in these chapters as I do for Deidara. Think of that what you will. It may give you some interesting things to think about.

Further questions about gender and sexuality things should be directed to Wikipedia. If you want to talk to an actual person about it, talk to your psychology teacher or school counselor. You can ask me to talk about it… but I only know as much as I've learnt from TvTropes and Wikipedia. Autumn-is-beautiful knows more than I do, but still isn't an expert and may not have the time or motivation to talk to you about it.

Ja ne,

Phoenix