When the match was over, Snake pointedly ignored Samus trading husky insults with the increasingly worried Manaphy and slunk off to take a post-match shower that, as it turned out, took another hour and forty-five minutes longer than his showers usually took.

It was difficult. The lower surface area didn't change the fact that he had all sorts of interesting new parts to wash, and no idea what to do with them. The hair alone was a nightmare of shampoo and another layer of shampoo and about half the bottle of conditioner Otacon had given him to make him look less 'old and miserable', and then spinal contortions keeping his head out of the spray and his body in, while he tried to work out if he was supposed to shave his legs or not. Plus, he was constantly holding his breasts in case he got them dirty or something, and he couldn't let them both go in order to do any actions requiring two hands.

They felt nice. Quite firm, but satisfying just to cup in your hands like that. Sensitive. Tender. Lovely pink nipples on the end of both like cherries on cakes. They were also really great to look at. And hold. They felt so good to hold.

After the educational experience, he threw a towel around his waist and set about returning to his room, trying to look as casual as he could. He was known for his attitude of absolute calm in ridiculous situations, after all. It had been why he lived this long.

"You - " came a shy, awkward voice to his left, and Snake jiggled round to face the Trainer, whose name was RED or ASH or JACK or something else capitalised and monosyllabic that Snake had lipread but never actually learned, and certainly hadn't been that absolutely scarlet last time he'd seen him - " - er, S - Samus, shouldn't you put on a t-towel?"

"I'm wearing a towel," Snake responded, his voice silk.

"I mean - " the Trainer stammered - "more of an up-on-top kind of - towel - " He pressed his hands against his chest.

Snake looked down. Damn.

"It's better like this," he started, voice perfectly level. "You need to - air them every now and again, or they get all stiff and hard, like rocks."

It wasn't a terrifically good lie, but the Trainer was young enough to nod, flush darker, and run out as if someone had set him on fire.

Snake returned to his room, dried off, redressed, and headed straight for the supply of stage makeup they'd given him, which he spent a good forty minutes applying, messing up and wiping off, figuring that if he was going to be a woman he might as well look pretty.

Once he'd blinked all the eyeliner out of his eyes and come up with a look he liked, he got up and crawled into Otacon's bed, face down, which he supposed was probably a straight plea for attention. The bed, he noticed, smelt like Otacon. He supposed that this female body should be detecting Otacon-pheromones that his male one shouldn't have been able to pick up, but didn't notice anything consciously, and instead settle down to ponder what the hell Samus was doing to his body while this was going on. She was a smart woman, but if she did anything to it -

The door banged open, and there was a sudden yelp that Snake immediately identified as Otacon's oh-god-there's-suddenly-an-extremely-attractive-woman-in-my-bed-for-no-reason yelp.

"Otacon," Snake greeted. He suddenly had an extremely bad and extremely amoral idea.

"Samus? What are you doing in here?" Otacon stammered, adjusting his glasses with his right hand while gesticulating flailingly with his left. "Did Snake let you in?"

Snake crawled up into a sitting position and attempted to twist his spine in a way that Otacon could see both his buttocks and his breasts. To his surprise, he found Samus's body was more flexible than he'd given it credit for. Otacon attempted to avert his eyes, but failed spectacularly.

"Are you Otacon?" he purred.

"Uh." Otacon suddenly realised he was in a conversation. "Yeah. That's me."

"Snake's told me so much about you," Snake continued, bringing up his perfect long legs. He attempted to flutter his eyelashes, but realised he had no idea how to do it, and merely sat up to regard Otacon through bedroomy eyes, which he thought was probably unisex. "He told me what an amazing man you are."

"Oh," Otacon said, backing away, "that doesn't sound much like Snake. Are you sure you didn't have him mixed up with - er, someone else, or something?"

Snake moved in for the kill.

"I'm so lonely," he whispered, beckoning Otacon closer. "It's so hard being a woman on your own. A woman on your own. In space. Alone. Where no-one can hear you scream in longing for a man's touch." He leaned over, enjoying the sudden jiggling sensation. "I've dreamed so long of a man like you."

Otacon's expression suddenly changed.

"Snake?"

Snake blinked hollowly. "...What?"

"This isn't funny," he complained.

Snake stared at his foot for a while.

"How did you - "

"You broke character," Otacon explained. "Horribly."

Snake sighed. "Couldn't you have - you know, played along?"

Otacon shook his head. "I could have done, but that would have been extremely weird, and - what got into you?"

Snake folded his arms over his ample bosom.

"I thought I'd do you a favour," he snarled. "I thought you'd like being with a gorgeous woman. But you clearly didn't - "

"But why would you..."

"Why do you think?" Snake rolled his eyes. "I thought seeing as I was a woman, I might try and see what if felt like to - " He threw his arms up in the air. "Come on, you'd do exactly the same thing if you were me."

"Well, er," Otacon flushed, "I suppose if I was suddenly a woman I would do the exact, er, same, um, thing, but - but that's not the point! You can't use her body like that! What if you got her a disease, or - "

"If I gave her a disease," Snake said, gravely, "I already did it as soon as I first stood near her in the same room."

Otacon looked away.

"You shouldn't have brought that up, Snake," he said.

Snake sighed. The mood of the room felt stuffy, oppressve, awkward.

"You're right," he admitted. "I shouldn't have done that."

"I - uh, suppose," Otacon said, sweat breaking out on his forehead, "if you wanted to, you - I mean, we could - I mean - my fingers and, er, mouth, and - you could just lie down and see how it, er, feels to - I'm actually kind of good at that - as long as you don't want to actually - " He stopped, abruptly, and shoved his glasses into his nose.

Snake rolled his eyes, picked up Otacon's hands, and placed them on his breasts.

"I like that idea," he said. "Now, hurry up, before the effect wears off."

Otacon went, "er."

After returning to his usual body, life had been fine. Otacon wasn't acting at all awkward, seeing the situation as a natural continuation of circumstance, and, as he'd eventually confessed to Snake, it had 'forced me to re-evaluate certain things about myself, so it all worked out okay in the end'.

There was just a few marks of Samus's body-borrowing that remained. First of all, she'd removed his beard, and she hadn't even had the decency to shave it and had gone and waxed it off, which meant it'd take a good three weeks before it even started to regrow and it would come back all thin and uneven. Rubbing his pitifully smooth chin, he meditated that she probably did this to spite him for running off before Manaphy could fix the situation.

Second of all, after one particularly brutal match against Zelda, she'd come up to him and admitted she'd thrown the match in repayment for that amazing night.

Snake started avoiding Samus in the corridors.