Disclaimer: I own Naruto. Also, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you...
"I was born female."
At this extraordinarily shocking statement, the world stood still. The world stood so still, in fact, that it fell out of alignment with its orbit around the sun. The sun itself had briefly flared in surprise – but it would take the earth a few months to notice, both because light took its own sweet time getting from place to place, but mostly because it was too preoccupied with dealing with the revelation.
In fact, the misalignment of the earth with the sun would result in the earth gradually drifting away from its gravitational pull, launching it on a roaming journey through the galaxy while its inhabitants, surviving without solar energy via a plot hole, had numerous adventures. This was thousands of years in the future, so we will mention it no more.
What was happening at the moment was of more concern, in any case.
"You were WHAT!" The roar came from several throats, even of people not aware of what had just transpired and found themselves fearing for their mental health as they began to shout randomly. The remainder just gaped, stared, goggled, or outright fainted.
Uchiha Sasuke rolled his/her eyes irritably, tapped a foot, and repeated himself/herself. "I said…"
"We heard you the first time!" yelped Naruto, the first one to regain his voice. The two rivals, along with their sensei and only female teammate (though that title was now thrown into confusion) were, as usual, at Training Grounds 7.
Less usual was the fact that the Rookie 9, their senseis, Team Gai who were not technically Rookies though they were often lumped into that category and whose Team number I can't be arsed to remember, Gai, Tsunade, Jiraiya, Shizune, Anko, Genma, Hayate, Iruka, Panda-san, Hibiki Ryoga, Saotome Ranma, George Bush, Gloria Arroyo, Wambananananafanna, Bathala, Santa Claus and his reindeer were there too.
The Naruto-verse characters stared at the non-Naruto-verse characters. "You shouldn't exist," Shikamaru informed them gravely. "You're a logical impossibility."
"Oh," the n-N-v characters said sadly, and stopped existing.
That taken care of, everyone turned their attention back to Sasuke.
"You…you were born a female?" Kiba repeated warily, handling the words like nuclear technicians handle the smoldering remains of a reactor meltdown. "So…so what are you now?"
Sasuke scowled, frowned, glared and looked annoyed. At once. "I'm still a girl," she (finally confirmed!) admitted grumpily. She glared at Naruto. "But I would have been able to change that if someone hadn't dragged me back from Sound!"
"So that's why you went to Orochimaru?" Tsunade inquired blandly, something dancing in her eyes. "For a sex-change?"
"He said he knew a jutsu…"
"Honey," Jiraiya drawled, looking Sasuke up and down with newly-appreciative eyes. "The day Orochimaru finds a working sex-change jutsu is the day he returns to Konoha professing remorse and love for all things fluffy. Literally. He's always had…a gender identity crisis. That's the real reason he left Konoha, because Tsunade wouldn't help him and because my student kept snickering at him."
"You did, too," Tsunade murmured.
"True, true," Jiraiya agreed affably. "The immortality thing was just a smokescreen, because when he went to Akatsuki he kept getting snickered at there too. Oi," he said, suddenly realizing something. "Itachi's really a boy, right?"
Sasuke scowled at the mention of her older brother. "Yes. Though sometimes he worried otousan."
"Hey, Uchiha, here's a question: WHY!" Surprisingly, it was Shino who snarled this.
Sasuke, pausing for flashbacks occasionally, launched into a long explanation that involved the patriarchal rule and sexism of the Uchiha clan, her father's desire for male heirs and utter disregard for female offspring, her willingness to please him – "Father-complex," whispered someone, but subsided when realizing how true that could be for several people in the audience – the underpoweredness of kunoichi in general, Itachi's psychological scarring, and something about lemons and mushrooms.
This took only three episodes to complete.
The end result of this left Hinata and Neji thankful for their supportive, loving and well-adjusted family; Tsunade thankful for the mental health and stability of her closest friends; Jiraiya thankful for how far his perversion didn't go; several females very confused as to their true sexual orientation, and several males happily reassured of theirs.
"But…but…" Naruto stammered. "I saw you in the hot-springs…"
Kakashi's visible eye curved into a happy little 'u.' "I remember that!" he chirped.
"Henge no jutsu," Sasuke muttered.
"You saw me in the hot springs! And Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto then howled.
Sasuke did not turn red. Really.
Kakashi only beamed brighter.
In the meantime, Tsunade was busily and savagely beating Jiraiya as the white-haired sennin pulled out a too-familiar notebook and pen. Asuma was smoking several cigarettes at once, as many as he could cram into his mouth, his hand trembling as he lit them with a chakra flame. Kurenai snatched his packet of cigarettes away, shoving several into her mouth herself. "Share!" she demanded.
Asuma was in no condition to argue.
"Oh Kakashi!" Gai wailed, tears flowing down his face, "How could you not notice the gender confusion your student was going through? How could you not help the delicate little flower?" He gasped in horror, though not because Sasuke's Sharingan had flared to life at being called a "delicate little flower". "How could I not notice! The perversion of this little one's youth! I must roll around the village five thousand times."
So he did.
Except for Ino convulsively making daisy-chains, trying to deal with the paradigm shift of her world, most of the other Rookies were huddled together, discussing something in low fierce tones.
"You ask him."
"No, you ask him."
"You do it."
"Why not Lee? He's his teammate."
"THAT IS TRUE. BUT…BUT…SO IS TENTEN!"
"SHHHH!"
Finally, moving more like a multi-headed and multi-limbed single organism rather than a clump of nervous genin, the Rookies approached one Hyuuga Neji.
"Hey, Neji…about that long hair of yours…well, um…"
Neji's Byakugan, having activated when he saw his nervous fellow genin approaching, allowed him to understand what they were really asking. Additional veins popped in his face. 'Damn you Uchiha! And the Main House too!'
"KAITEN!"
Shrieking in fear, several young ninja were sent flying, pursued by Neji's furious yells.
"I! AM! A! GUY!"
"Well, you have to admit, if any of the guys were going to end up being girls, Neji's actually more likely than Sasuke…" Asuma remarked to Kurenai around his mouthful of cigarettes.
Thankfully, Neji was too busy screaming in rage to overhear the jounin.
Naruto had staggered to Ino's side, where both blondes proceeded to be much traumatized. They began an efficient if absent-minded system of daisy-chain-making, their fingers flying together. The chain of flowers was now roughly eighteen kilometers in length. Kakashi, grinning widely, watched them for some reason.
In the meanwhile, the reason for all this upheaval and chaos, the newly-female Uchiha Sasuke, stood pretty much forgotten in the center of the training grounds. She folded her arms over her chest – bound underneath a layer of gauze – and huffed. Now that her secret was out, at least she could stop forcing her voice to be so deep – hell on the throat.
She suddenly realized that Sakura was staring at her with an odd expression in her green eyes. It wasn't the blank glazed look of shock that had overlaid the blue eyes of Ino and Naruto, nor the "OMFGsofreaky!" that everyone else had. This was a look of dawning comprehension, one that she had used before when figuring out some insanely hard riddle or performing some high-level calculation, coupled with stone-hard determination.
It frightened Sasuke.
"Sasuke…" she fairly purred, the tone dripping with barely-hidden threat and challenge. Involuntarily, Sasuke stepped back, but Sakura managed to get right into her face nevertheless. She grinned, her teeth bared like a lioness.
"I won't lose Naruto-kun to you."
AN
Bwahahaha.
Also – a new twist on the Team 7 love-triangle. :P