A/N: Thank you so much for your reviews! Honestly, I never thought that a fic about Orochimaru (and as a transsexual, no less) would get so much love. Enjoy chapter five!

Disclaimer: The quote below is from the book The Man Who Would Be Queen, a controversial book that claims transsexualism is a kind of a fetish for men who get turned on by thinking of themselves as girls, or that it's a disorder. I make no comment, except that Orochimaru will run into some trouble due to this theory in years to come.

Chapter V

Dude Looks Like a Lady

He is near the boundary of male and female, and one day he may cross it. If he does, one primary motive will be lust. – J. Michael Bailey

Orochimaru hid under the covers of his bed, knees pulled so tightly to his chest that his legs and ribs ached, shivering with fear and fury and misery and utter self-loathing. He felt disgusting, disgraceful, a revolting aberration of nature that shouldn't exist.

Zimu-san was curled up outside the covers, wrapped in a loop around Orochimaru's lumpy form, protecting him from outsiders. When he'd tried to join his friend, to wrap himself around Orochimaru in a hug, the child had shoved him away, screaming through his tears that he didn't want to be touched, he didn't want anything to touch him ever again.

Outside, Dakatsu raged and Shinja pacified. He was screaming – no son of his, no son of his, was going to be allowed to keep this foolishness up! How had he ever got such an idea into his head, such a... a demeaning, shameful... He would not let his only son disgrace the family! Not when he was going to be a proud warrior! An elite ninja!

Shinja tried to calm him; he doesn't know what he's saying, he's just a child, he's only four years old... please, don't be so harsh on him, this is just a phase. She was a tomboy at his age and she turned out fine, didn't she? Nothing would come of it... just let him get older... he'd grow out of it...

Orochimaru shuddered, and finally let out a sob, because he didn't understand why. He squeezed his eyes shut and let tears leak down his cheeks because he couldn't get why, why he was so wrong, so evil, just because he wanted to be what half of the people he knew were – female. He didn't understand why it couldn't happen. He didn't understand. All he knew was that it wouldn't happen, would never happen, and that he'd better get used to that right now, damn it.

"But Daddy! I-I'm not lying! I really... I really am a girl! Please—"

"You are not, Orochimaru! We named you because you are not! Take off your clothes and go look in the mirror, that'll show you everything you need to see. You're a boy, and you always will be. That's not changing."

"I don't want to be! Please, just let me change! I want to so bad."

"No one gets what they want, Orochimaru. You can never just get what you want."

"Why?!"

"Because you have to be STRONG! You have to be able to fight to take what you want! And you are not strong, Orochimaru, or we wouldn't be having this conversation!"

"Daddy..."

Orochimaru sniffed thickly and wiped his nose against his kimono sleeve, which was already stained with snot. There it was, out in the open. He wasn't strong. He wasn't tough. And he knew it was true. He didn't have what it took to be tough, either as a boy or a girl. As long as he didn't, he'd never be able to get what he wanted. He would never be allowed to be what he really was.

His father had stopped shouting, and now he was speaking softly with Shinja, his voice tense with checked rage. They were saying something about getting Orochimaru evaluated, looking for developmental blocks, checking to see how long a child would typically have a "phase" like this.

He didn't understand everything they were saying, but he had always been very intelligent, at least he thought he was, based on how many times his parents had been surprised when he'd known something or how often the few children he met were utterly confused by him. He knew what his parents were talking about. They wanted to know what was wrong with him. As always, he was doing something wrong. He sniffed again and rubbed the heels of his hands against his tear-stained eyes. What didn't he understand?

No one got what they wanted unless they were strong. Orochimaru was not strong. To become strong, he had to act like the thing he didn't want to be. So, by doing what he didn't want to do, he could get what he wanted?

"Zimu-san," Orochimaru said softly, his voice a high-pitched whimper. At the invitation, the snake quickly slithered beneath the sheets and blankets to his friend, eager to comfort Orochimaru. The child wrapped his arms around Zimu-san, the closest thing he had to a confidant, the only one who he knew, without a doubt, would listen to him, would value him, would need him to survive. Orochimaru needed someone to need him.

"You're still with me, aren't you?" he asked. "You... y-you don't think I'm... I'm... that there's something wrong with me?" He bit back a sob, and asked desperately, his voice cracking, "Y-you'll always stay with me, right?"

Zimu-san hissed reassuringly, curling more tightly around Orochimaru, trying to speak to him, to say "Yes, I will," but all that came out was a long "Yssssssss."

Orochimaru understood, and whispered, "Thank you." As long as Zimu-san was there, as long as there was someone who still loved Orochimaru unconditionally... she was whatever she wanted to be. As long as she could keep up the illusion, she was safe from the world.

The little girl fell asleep with dry tears still on her face and Zimu-san in her arms, and had nightmares about waking up and discovering she was a boy.

When she finally did wake up and discover her nightmare hadn't gone away, he sighed and went to make his breakfast.

Orochimaru wasn't the only one in the kitchen. His parents were at the kitchen table, having breakfast. "Mama? Daddy? Why aren't you at work?" he asked nervously but trying not to sound nervous, afraid his father would start yelling at him again.

But Dakatsu only put on a tense smile. "We're going to get you looked at, Orochimaru. To... make sure you're okay."

Well, they didn't have to go anywhere to do that, Orochimaru thought. He knew quite well that he wasn't okay, but he didn't say anything. "Where are we going?"

"To visit a psychologist," Shinja said. "Do you know what a psychologist does?"

"Yes," Orochimaru said, frowning, which caused both his parents to raise their eyebrows in surprise.

"Do you really?" Dakatsu said, sounding pleased.

"Of course I do," Orochimaru said, as if every four-year-old should know what a psychologist does. "There's nothing wrong with my brain." It was his body that was wrong. But he couldn't say that much.

Shinja choked on her tea and had to set it down, covering her mouth. She looked suspiciously like she was laughing. At Dakatsu's sharp look, she said, "He's quite certain on this, isn't he?"

"We'll see," Dakatsu said, and turned back to Orochimaru. "We're going to visit the psychologist anyway, Orochimaru. Usually if there's something wrong with someone's mind, he doesn't know it himself."

Orochimaru hadn't heard that before. He figured all "wrong" things were apparent to the person who had them, like how you could tell if you had a cold or had hurt your foot. "Okay," he said softly.

"Have some breakfast," Shinja said. "We're leaving right after we eat. This was the only day your father and I could get off. Tomorrow, we've both got a patrol mission outside the village."

"Yes, Mama," Orochimaru said, and scrambled up into the seat next to her. Cereal. He didn't like cereal. He much preferred it when his parents were gone earlier and he could get his own breakfast.

No one gets what they want, Orochimaru thought, and reluctantly started eating.

The gloomy meal was the last time he ever had breakfast with his parents.

Orochimaru's mother and father took him to the Konoha hospital, another place he'd never been to before. He'd heard from the other kids that it was a scary place, even scarier than school, but it seemed pretty dull to him. He wondered if the other kids were just scaredy-cats.

They went inside until they reached a door that had a guard in front of it, a bored-looking woman with purple hair, probably in her early twenties. She was sitting at a desk and twirling a kunai around one finger. She glanced up, droned, "Name? Business?" and reluctantly let her kunai stop spinning and slide down so it dangled on her finger like a ring.

"Yashagoro Shinja, Dakatsu, and Orochimaru," Shinja said, holding Orochimaru in her arms. He glanced over the woman and decided she didn't look like she was particularly tough in the girl way, but could be plenty tough in the boy way. "We have an appointment with Dr. Yakushi Izanagi."

"Right-o," the woman said, barely glancing at the planner on her desk. "Through there." She proceeded to begin spinning her kunai again, and that was the end of the discussion.

"Thank you," Shinja said, and they proceeded through the doors and into an empty waiting room.

"These Yakushi don't have much security, do they?" Dakatsu said disapprovingly. "Anyone could get into the Yakushi Ward with her out there."

"Why would that be a problem, Dakatsu?" Shinja said. "They're here for us to reach, aren't they?"

"They're the most talented clan of medic-nin in Konoha!" he said. "Anyone could waltz in here and kill the lot of them."

"Dakatsu, this is a hospital," Shinja said, sighing. "And it's not like we're at war, anyway. These are peaceful times."

"Hmph. For now," Dakatsu muttered.

One of the doors leading from the waiting room opened, and a tall man with dark hair came out, smiling. "Hi. You must be the Yashagoro family. I'm Yakushi Izanagi."

"A pleasure," Shinja said, and Dakatsu nodded in greeting.

His eyes fell on Orochimaru, and he smiled. "And this must be little Orochimaru, right? I hear you don't like to be called a boy. Is that true?"

Orochimaru stared at the man, wondering how he'd found out. "Yes, sir," he said softly.

"I see. Well, I can already tell you're a smart little kid," he said.

Orochimaru managed to smile at that. "Thanks."

Izanagi looked at Shinja and Dakatsu and said, "I hate to ask this, but do you think you could leave Orochimaru-kun outside? Little kids distract from meetings like these."

"Oh... you don't want to talk to him, Yakushi-san?" Shinja asked.

"I tend to find that the parents are a bit more eloquent in explaining their problems, Shinja-san," Izanagi said. "If that's all right with you, that is. Will he be all right by himself?"

"Oh, of course. He's very well behaved," Shinja said, and set Orochimaru on the floor. "You can stay in this room and not get in trouble while we talk, can't you?"

"Yes, Mama," Orochimaru said. He never wanted to cause trouble.

"Thank you," she said, and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

"Shall we?" Dakatsu asked as Shinja straightened up.

"Let's," Izanagi said, and ushered them into his office. "You said on the phone that he's almost five, didn't you? Just a year under my own. Orochimaru will be starting school next year, I expect...?"

The door shut, and Orochimaru was left in the waiting room. For a while, he walked in circles, observing the room. When he got bored with that, he sat in a chair and tried to wait without moving.

He found a clock and tried to teach himself how it worked. Adults thought clocks were very important. After a long stretch of study, he discovered that when the skinny, fast hand went around the clock five times, the long hand made it from one number to the next – from the big 11 to the 12, and from the 12 to the 1, and so on. He wondered why they didn't just make the clocks so that it would move a number every time the skinny hand made a circle, but maybe it was important that it had to go around five times.

As far as he could tell, the short hand didn't move at all, unless you ignored it for a very long time. Then, the next time you looked, it would be somewhere new. He couldn't make sense of it at all. Maybe when the long hand moved around five times, it made the short hand move.

The short hand had mysteriously moved from wherever it was originally to between the 11 and the 12 when the door leading to the rest of the hospital opened and someone came in. Orochimaru twisted around to look.

Another kid, a little taller than Orochimaru, came in, checked the door that Izanagi had gone through, turned to Orochimaru, and smiled. "Hi. Who are you?"

Orochimaru stared at the kid. It looked like a boy – a lot like a boy – but it was wearing a butterfly-shaped barrette in its dark brown hair and a pink jumper. Before he could think twice, he asked, "What are you?"

The kid gave Orochimaru a weird look. "Whaddayou mean? I'm a medic-nin."

"Oh. Really?" Orochimaru had thought one had to be older to be any kind of ninja, medic or otherwise.

"Well, I'm gonna be someday."

"Okay. So you're a girl," Orochimaru said.

"No, of course not." The kid glared at Orochimaru, half in confusion and half resentment.

"But I thought only girls are medic-nin."

"Most of the time, I guess. You've gotta be either a Yakushi or a girl. I'm a Yakushi," the kid said, still eyeing Orochimaru warily. A boy, then. "So what are you?"

"What?" Orochimaru said, taken aback. Was he just trying to be mean now?

The boy in girl's clothing eyed Orochimaru carefully, circling his chair as he spoke and making Orochimaru keep turning his head to look at him. "You're either a girly boy or a butch girl," he said, glancing at Orochimaru's now chin-length hair and androgynous kimono. "And I bet most boys don't know about medic-nin. So, are you a girl?"

It would be so easy to say yes, and to have this boy believe him. But as Orochimaru opened his mouth, something else inside him closed, and his father's words came out. "No," he said softly, ashamed of himself. "I'm a boy."

The boy grinned. "So you're just like me!" he said gleefully. "I'm a girly boy too."

Between the barrette and the jumper, Orochimaru hardly needed to be told that. Still, he couldn't help but smile back, attracted to this boy and his excitement and somehow comforted by the idea that they had this something in common, that though they both were physically boys there was something in them that made them part girl. "Do you want to be a girl someday, too?" Orochimaru asked quietly.

"Yeah, that'd be fun for a while," the boy said, shrugging.

That was all he had to say, and Orochimaru knew he didn't understand.

"What's your name?" the boy asked. "I'm Yakushi Susano'o."

"I'm Yashagoro Orochimaru."

"You're not in school, right?" Susano'o said. "This is my first year." He glanced at the clock.

"No, I start next yea—"

"Aw, nuts," Susano'o said. "I've gotta get back! Lunch is almost over."

"Why? How do you know?" Orochimaru asked, glancing at the clock as well. It didn't make any sense to him.

"Lunch ends when the long hand is pointing at the six," Susano'o said. It was at the five then. "I've gotta go back before class starts."

He ran to the door. "Nice to meetcha!" he said, opening the door. "I'll see you later, Orochimaru-chan!" It shut, and Susano'o was gone.

No one had ever called him "chan" before. Orochimaru stared at the door long after Susano'o had left, hoping and half-believing he would come back so Orochimaru could ask him what he'd meant.

Thirty minutes later (not that he could tell the time) he was idly watching the clock, deep in thought, when Yakushi Izanagi came out with Orochimaru's parents and said that for now, the Yashagoro family could go out to lunch, but later Orochimaru needed to do some tests, too.

"I'm surprised my son didn't come by," Izanagi said, glancing at the clock – it certainly was an important device today. "He said he'd come here to eat lunch during school. Did you see him?" he asked Orochimaru. He shook his head.

"Well, maybe he found someone else to eat with," Izanagi said, frowning worriedly.

"Does he usually forget to do things like that?" Shinja asked, picking Orochimaru up.

"No, no. He's just a bit odd," Izanagi said. He managed to smile, and said, "Really, you don't need to worry about him. He's my son, after all. It's just a phase he's going through."

"I see," Dakatsu said. "We know what that's like." He ruffled his son's hair affectionately. Orochimaru thought with horror that his hair must look an utter mess now.

During lunch, Dakatsu had to tell Orochimaru five times to stop smoothing his hair down, until he asked to go to the restroom and fix it – he told his father he wanted to use the toilet all by himself, which pleased him. Orochimaru didn't even mind having to avoid looking at all the urinals now that he could fix his hair, which actually wasn't messed up at all.

As he looked at his reflection, a man came up to wash his hands at the sink beside Orochimaru. "I think you're in the wrong restroom," he said.

For a moment, a warm glow lit up inside Orochimaru, but it was quickly doused: what would Daddy think? He couldn't bring himself to say anything, neither "Thank you," nor "No, I'm a boy." So he just ran out of the restroom without a word.

As Orochimaru walked back to his parents, he messed up his hair with his hands so that it looked as boyish as possible.

Izanagi's tests were very easy after all. All Orochimaru had to do was look at the pictures the psychologist held up, which were weird black ink blobs, and say what they looked like. Orochimaru saw something every time, but sometimes he saw two or three things, so he always said whichever one he liked more. He hoped he'd pass the test anyway.

"What about this one?" Izanagi asked, holding up a picture.

"A snake," Orochimaru said. "One of the ones with the wide necks." He held up his hands next to his neck to pantomime a cobra's hood.

"All right." He put down the picture and held up another one. This one looked like two squiggles crossing each other. "How about this one?"

"A caduceus," Orochimaru said.

Izanagi gave him a blank look. "You know what a caduceus is?"

"Yeah. It's a stick with two snakes wrapped around it," he said.

"Er, yes. Very good," Izanagi said. He held up another picture. It was a rough circle. "What do you see in this one?"

"An Ouroboros," Orochimaru said.

Izanagi gave him an even blanker look. "A what?"

"It's a snake that eats its own tail," Orochimaru said, pointing at two whitish spots in the ink at the top of the circle. "See? Those are its eyes."

"Is that so?" Izanagi set the picture down and started writing on a notepad. "Your son is quite interested in snakes, Dakatsu-san," he said.

"Yes, he has a pet," Dakatsu said.

"Even so... seeing caducei, Ouroboroses... Highly symbolic in psychoanalysis" Izanagi finished his notes and looked up. "I think your son might be masculine than you think," he said with a smile.

"Really?" Shinja said doubtfully. "It sounds to me as if he's just widely read."

"Can he read yet?" Izanagi asked.

"No," Dakatsu said.

Actually, Orochimaru could, but he wasn't going to contradict his father on that. He might be forbidden from reading, too.

"From my research, I've found that snakes are a very common symbol for the male anatomy," Izanagi said. "And the fact that Orochimaru-kun sees so many symbols of them suggests that his more masculine tendencies are being stored up somewhere in his unconscious."

Shinja looked doubtful, but Dakatsu said, "What do we do about him, then? Can we, er, bring it back out?"

"Just give him time. When he's good and ready, he'll become exactly what he's supposed to be," Izanagi said. With a glance at Orochimaru, he said, "Could I speak to you two in private, please?"

"Sure, sure," Dakatsu said cheerily, picking up Orochimaru and carrying him outside. "Be good, all right?"

"Yes, Daddy," Orochimaru said. When the door into Izanagi's office had shut again and Orochimaru was by himself, he found a small table with some magazines, picked up one called Neuroscience Ninjutsu Weekly, and took it back to his chair to attempt to read the big words.

He hoped Izanagi was right. He hoped that someday he would become what he was supposed to be, because he couldn't keep living like this.