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Chapter Text

Someone with a terrible sense of humor had scrawled Love Chapel over the door. Many other someones, presumably with equal if not worse senses of humor, had never seen fit to remove the title from the Headquarters of Konoha Administration Department’s (also known as the Order of Desk-Shinobi) Shinobi Branch for Civil Partnerships.

Over time, perhaps over nearly one hundred years, the scrawl had even come to be decorated by carved hearts and some more… violent kunai wounds. On the inside, correspondingly, next to several desks, someone had set up a handsome carpet leading to a lovely archway made of several entwined, always flowering trees.

Some said that this added decoration had been set up by Senju Hashirama, the Shodaime himself, and that the tradition of sticking a kunai, shuriken, or senbon into the Love Tree when you got married there had been started by Senju Tobirama, the Nidaime himself (who was also responsible for the founding of the Civil Partnerships Department, along with most departments in general).

Not because Senju Tobirama had been getting married, though. God, no. But more because his brother had grown a goddamned plant inside one of his administration buildings. According to the very romantic legend, Tobirama had proceeded to make a very valiant attempt on his brother’s life and several kunai had been embedded in the Love Tree as Hashirama ran for his life. The kunai had never been removed, the first couple to get married in front of it had made an assumption, and the tradition had gone along from there.

Tobirama had not actually managed to get his brother, though, the legend continued. He failed quite terribly, because Uzumaki Mito, ever the romantic soul, needed her husband to attend an Akimichi dinner party to discuss business and put her dainty slipper down. Under Uzumaki Mito’s ultimate authority, Tobirama added a lovely spring of sparkling water next to the Love Tree in apology and then, in an admirable display of his intelligence and diplomatic abilities, delegated and started pretending that the entire Civil Partnerships Department did not exist.

Shinobi had been getting married in front of the Love Tree ever since.

Oh, not the Clan marriages or any sort of grand affair – not anything that was big and planned and approved – but small ones. People who had to get married in secret or in a hurry, like a Hyuuga woman and an Uchiha woman who were secret lovers, or two shinobi leaving for dangerous missions countries away from each other. Clan prejudices and war made people desperate and afraid like that, making the join together quickly and quietly. Sometimes with a handful of beloved friends and family, and sometimes entirely alone save the specialized desk-shinobi who manned the office – sometimes for love, sometimes not.

Less tragically, it was also a place for people who did not give a shit about weddings to get hitched. Fuck it all to hell, let’s just get this shit over with. Put some fucking pants on, we’re getting married.

The Love Chapel and its Love Tree had seen many marriages over the years. Some were desperate and sad and doomed to misery, others were gleeful and joyful and the beginning of something wonderful, and others were overdue and comfortable and kind. Some were uncertain but hopeful, others were anxious and remorseful, and some were angry or grieving or outright disbelieving. It was a place as varied as the people who entered it, and it held many stories of all sorts of endings.

But in times of peace, Konoha’s Civil Partnerships Department, Shinobi Branch, saw one kind of marriage far above any other kind of marriage.

It was a truth universally acknowledged, after all, that any shinobi in possession of good skill must be correspondingly kind of weird. The life of a shinobi is hard and cruel and weird as fuck, thus one must be of good humor and better coping methods to live it – more often than not, this coping involve some sort of vice, like drinking, and a good amount of silliness with good friends.

And this was the most common kind of marriage that the Love Chapel saw: exceeding ridiculous marriages that were at least twice as drunk as that.

Ueda Kazuko had seen many a drunken chuunin and jounin (and some older genin) swagger like that into the Love Chape- er, Civil Partnerships Department: slurring words and swaying, but still perfectly able to kill a man and determined to get themselves hitched. It didn’t faze her in the slightest nowadays. She’d only be yelling and jumping to her feet in outrage if one of the bastards puked on the floor again, because that shit stank.

It had long since gotten to the point where getting married at the (fuck it) Love Chapel was almost considered just another fun thing to do on a night-off. In some friend circles, if you and a buddy hadn’t gotten drunkenly hitched at least once, even if you were both in separate monogamous relationships, you were doing something wrong.

This never happened at the Civilian Branch of the Civil Partnerships Department. Lucky bastards.

Kazuko had pretty much just gotten used to it, as well as the massive backlog of marriages that had ended up on her manager’s desk and in the administrative system. Anyone who seemed to be drunk or drugged or simply off during a marriage had their papers stamped with a warning, because they were a shinobi village and suspicious like that, and it took a very long time for follow-up investigations to be made before marriages went entirely through. Hence: backlog.

Their department had only three members, with Manager and Kazuko being the first two, along with their investigator, Oshiro Goro, who was over eighty years old and more prone to naps on the staff room couch than chasing down shinobi these days. Shinobi were notoriously difficult to track down for anything, especially paperwork, and especially-especially for paperwork on drunken marriages that may or may not be legitimate and that the shinobi in question may or may not have any actual memory of.

With that last case, Yamanakas sometimes had to be brought in, which was a whole new world of paperwork hell and embarrassment for literally everybody involved in the process of figuring this shit out. If Kazuko had to face one more case of mutual unrequited love (how the fuck does that even work anyway), she was going to flip her shit.

These days, it was generally assumed that if anyone really wanted their marriage to be legitimate, they would make an appointment and turn up perfectly sober (or the allowed maximum of mildly tipsy, which required specific advance warning), or they would follow-up afterwards, demanding to know what the fuck had happened to their mail or why they hadn’t gotten a card of congratulations from the Hokage.* If their marriage wasn’t the take-it-to-the-grave secretive sort, that was, but sometimes even then because married discounts were married discounts and shinobi could be stingy bastards.

*[[The Shodaime had begun a tradition of writing cards of congratulations for marriages, either because he was just that friendly and romantic, had been prompted by his wife or brother to do so, or had just gotten that bored one day. No one was sure which it was, but by the time Tobirama’s reign came around, the tradition had dug into Konoha with metaphorical claws and metaphorically hissed at the idea of letting go. So all future Hokages had diligently followed the tradition, with various amounts of duress, and the results were hilarious.

On slow days, Kazuko liked to pull out their department’s collection of donated or scavenged cards and read them for her own amusement. Comedy (or it might’ve been tragedy, but she was a shinobi so she could barely tell the difference half the time) had never been greater.

Hashirama’s were incredibly flowery, both in language and perfume, and many of devolved into long, very inspirational speeches about peace and community and the power of love.

His brother’s, Tobirama's, on the other hand, were without technical fault and seemed ultimately sincere in wishing happiness, but they were amazingly stilted and so brief that it seemed bullet points ought to be involved somewhere. The urge to check if they’d somehow fallen out was incredible.

Meanwhile the Sandaime’s cards tended to show off his age by including embarrassing childhood stories and recollections about that really dumbass thing you did as a teenager full of chakra and hormones (a dangerous combination). Saturobi Hiruzen never forgot a thing. You thought no one knew about that time you did the thing-that-must-not-be-named? Had hoped everyone had forgotten? Hah, think again, young ones, and despair.

The Yondaime’s cards were much like the Shodaime’s, in that Namikaze Minato was incredibly effusive and sincere and congratulatory. But they were also like the Nidaime’s as well, in that they were much more controlled and diplomatic and secretly purposeful than the average person might expect. They would have been perfect if not for how they tended to be covered in random little doodles and seals.

It was like Minato had gotten either incredible bored or artistically inspired, while in the middle of running a village and writing a card that should have taken five minutes tops. And like all of the Yondaime Hokage’s secretaries had just given up entirely on having him stop, deciding to deliver the congratulatory cards as they were. Covered in adorable rabbits hopping about, or an incredibly detailed portrait of the Toad Sage, or an extremely romantic depiction of one of the Daimyo’s wife’s demon cats being set on fire.

Strangely enough, Minato’s doodling habit had always gone over incredibly, almost unbelievably well. Take three couples as examples.

The first couple, eager to have children together, had taken the rabbits covering their congratulatory card as a sign of wishing them a happy, prosperous, and fertile marriage together. They were delighted by the personalization, as the wife was a rabbit summoner and they both adored the creatures.

The second couple, two retired men from T&I, received the card with the incredibly detailed portrait of the Toad Sage and were ecstatic. They were enormous fans of Jiraiya’s works, from the man’s first mission reports to his new Icha Icha series, and they quickly had the card autographed by the extremely bemused Sannin.

The third couple was a pair of kunoichi jounin who’d both been training genin team after genin team for years. When they received a congratulatory card with a sketch of a cat on fire, the women had immediately had the gruesome picture of one of the much-hated demon cats of Fire on fire, something they had wanted to do for years, framed and put in a place of honor on their apartment wall.

The legends were uncertain whether or not the Yondaime had been doing any of this on purpose. Because he had been a genius and it had worked out positively for him every single time, most people leaned towards yes, but every time anyone had gone to Jiraiya of the Sannin about it, the Yondaime’s mentor had just cackled with laughter. So it was unknown.]]

Ueda Kazuko was alone at the front desk, the Manager was on brunch break (which was immediately followed by lunch break, then afternoon tea break), and Goro was snoozing on the couch when everything changed and the New Order of Desk-Shinobi attacked.

Well, not so much “attacked” as stormed into the room, started putting everything in boxes, and demanded a full accounting of everything along with a bullet-point list of “exactly what the fuck was wrong with this fucking department” – the words of the new Head Desk-Shinobi, apparently. The only real casualties had been Kazuko’s morning Sudoku puzzle and Goro’s mid-morning nap after he fell off the couch when the desk-shinobi actually picked it up and took it away too.

It was the most orderly display of complete chaos that Kazuko had ever seen. Wow, she had never known that Manager’s desk had had a surface like that. Who knew? In the end, the only thing that was left in the entire tiny building was the Love Arch and a small sign on the door that read Closed for Administrative Reconstruction.

Kazuko had no real memory of the next two hours or so. She felt as though she had been blown about by an extremely efficient whirlwind. Her entire department had been analyzed, sorted, analyzed again, and was in the process of being organized in a different way while being analyzed for a third time. Konoha’s T&I Department could not have wretched information out of her with such speed and entirely, and battlefield commanders would have wept with envy over such a well-coordinated army working to conquer the Civil Partnerships Department and rebuild it anew as quickly as possible.

Kazuko may or may not have even had a breakdown and related the entire wretched story of her jerk ex-boyfriend to the new Head Desk-Shinobi slash Academy Headmaster at some point. She wasn’t actually sure. If it did happen, he was very nice if extremely awkward about it and fled from her in a very polite manner. Hm, he was a lot younger than she’d expected, and kind of cute in a possibly undead-from-stress sort of way.

Similarly, she wasn’t sure how she’d suddenly become best friends with a green-haired desk-shinobi named Midori, who could flawlessly wield three stamps at once – one in each hand and one between her teeth. Midori zoomed through file after file while filling Kazuko in as to what the fuck was happening.

Apparently, the New Order of Desk-Shinobi was analyzing and reorganizing her department in an effort to catalogue and rework Konoha’s entire administrative system. It seemed a bit overboard to do a complete accounting overhaul to Kazuko, but apparently it was either this or the new Head Desk-Shinobi would run away to fucking Suna because leaving the Konoha budget and finances as they were would be the death of him.

Apparently, the reconstruction of the Civil Partnerships Department was actually the New Order of Desk-Shinobi’s version of a break of some kind. You could tell, Midori assured Kazuko, because the new Head Desk-Shinobi was only yelling every ten minutes or so and his voice hadn’t reached its shrill pitch yet and nothing was on fire. This was nothing compared to trying to fight Konoha’s various budgets into comprehensible and cost-effective shape.

Apparently, that was why the Head Desk-Shinobi looked like he’d recently lost a fight. His lost fight had been with said budgets. The medic-nin had only just left with a warning to take it easy before the new Head Desk-Shinobi had suddenly decided that he might as well reorganize an entire department in the meanwhile.

The most terrifying part of the entire experience, though, was definitely Umino Iruka himself. He was a man on a mission, armed with a vocal volume that could shake buildings and absolutely no patience for bullshit to speak of, in command of dozens of desk-shinobi who would leap on boxes on paperwork at a snap of his fingers or a particular scowl. He had many different scowls.

He seemed to be sustained purely by yelling and a coffee machine that looked like it would either fall to pieces at a touch or murder the first person who touched it. It groaned ominously if anyone besides Umino went near it, and produced a substance that could only be called liquid death in a cup by flooding the entire department with a noxious smell that would have cleared a room of lesser shinobi.

If Kazuko had to put words to it, she would have called it the most deathly poison in the world, enhanced by the bitterness of a thousand haunted souls and the hatred of their corpses. Or something.

After the black tar had been produced, Kazuko and several other desk-shinobi watched in horror, report summaries forgotten in their grips, as Umino poured the poisoned liquid into a mug that read World’s Number #1 Teacher and crushed a soldier pill into the mix of death. After mixing it, Umino raised it up for inspection, looking like he’d lost both a fight and several nights of sleep, and said with no emotion whatsoever, “I’m going to die.” And drank it.

Then Umino made a pleasant humming sound and went to go yell at a crowd of desk-shinobi arguing over a stack of divorce papers.

Kazuko scrambled back over to Midori and demanded, “What is that.”

Midori looked up from stamping various marriage papers and removed a stamp from her mouth. “What?” she said, before glancing over at Umino. “Oh, the undead curse goop.” She leaned forward in a conspiring manner, beckoning Kazuko closer. “Rumor has it that it’s an Academy teacher brew. They all drink it. Umino-sama brought that cursed machine from the Academy itself, as a present from the previous Headmistress.”

Kazuko had always known that there was something terrible and unnatural about Academy teachers, but she was horrified. “They all drink it?” She glanced again at the inexplicable mess of jars and spices and containers that surrounded the demonic machine, then observed helplessly, “But… it’s… alcoholic.”

“I think the Kumo spirits and Taki moonshine are supposed to cancel each other out,” Midori said, entirely unconcerned as she returned the majority of her attention to a marriage certificate that appeared to have been signed in crayon.

“…That’s not how anything works.”

“Well, my only other theory is that all Academy teachers are actually undead monsters,” Midori said frankly, “and the goop is what keeps them alive and gives them power while they wrangle hordes of those small, feral, bitey things. So I’m out of ideas.”

“…I think you mean children.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

A shriek suddenly cut through the busy department. “IRUUUUUKAAA-SENNNSEI!”

Kazuko turned to look at the doorway, where stood a genin team and their jounin-sensei. The jounin she immediately recognized as the infamous Hatake Kakashi, the incredibly skilled and unfairly hot Bane of Desk-Shinobi Everywhere. The genin consisted of a furious-looking girl with bright pink hair, a blond boy in a very recognizable and hideous orange jumpsuit, and a dark-haired boy whom she was pretty sure had a six foot poster on the Psych Department wall.

Kazuko’s department wasn’t really one often in the middle of the action, but she’d kept up with the Konoha gossip like any other average desk-shinobi. This team could only be one team, one team that all desk-shinobi feared (even those who worked in the Civil Partnerships Department because shit had gotten weird that one time with the Mori family and one disastrous Perilous Journey by that poor Uchiha boy): the infamous, fourth Team Seven.

Like every other desk-shinobi in the room, she automatically hit the floor and took cover behind the nearest available piece of furniture. For her, this happened to be Midori’s desk, where she immediately discovered Midori had three katana for dealing with situations exactly like this.

There were a few seconds of silence, without even the chirping of an Aburame insect, before there was a very heavy sigh.

“It’s been a week, people,” Umino said flatly, voice carrying through the department along with the smell of pure bitterness that he was drinking. “Everybody had better be back at their desks and working before I finished the end of this sentence, or I’m sending anyone who isn’t out to go tell the Council members that they can have their funds when they submit the proper proposals for budget allotments.”

Everybody was back at their desks and working before he finished the end of his sentence. Midori had already explained to Kazuko that the Head Desk-Shinobi was making a lot of important people very unhappy by revising the administration system. No one wanted to be in that line of fire.

Umino took a smug sip of his “coffee”, then turned to the team in the doorway with a smile that only looked slightly strained. It was still the happiest expression Kazuko had seen on his face so far.

“You’re early today,” he commented. “Hello, Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke.”

The demon fox-boy beamed brightly and waved. “Hey, ‘Ruka-sensei! We’re going for ramen today, right? You promised!”

The dark-haired boy didn’t say anything, neither did the pink-haired girl as she crossed her arms.

“What? No hello for me?” Hatake asked with what Kazuko was mostly sure was mock hurt.

“Hand in your paperwork and I’ll acknowledge your existence,” Umino replied flatly. “If it’s not filed in triplicate, it doesn’t exist.” A common desk-shinobi saying. “And yes, Naruto, we’re going for ramen today. I did promise.”

“IRUKA-SENSEI!” the pink-haired girl snapped before the fox-boy or Copy-nin could answer, and Kazuko realized it had been her who’d yelled. “You can't keep drinking that stuff! It's terrible for you! How many cups have you had today?”

The Head Desk-Shinobi looked like he was about to break into a sweat, but still calmly answered, “Sakura, don’t worry. This is my second.”

Supervisor Naoko, his second-in-command, passed behind him with a stack of reports and said, “It’s Umino-sama’s fourth cup since five this morning. We have a medic-nin on standby if he tries for a fifth before noon.”

Kazuko stared in amazement as the entire genin team looked disapproving, even the dark-haired boy, and even the Copy-nin from what could be seen of his face. The fox-boy looked positively heartbroken and was making big, blue puppy-eyes towards the Head Desk-Shinobi that clearly made the man uncomfortable even as Umino tried to hide his expression behind his mug.

“Iruka-sensei!” the fox-boy said reproachfully.

Umino waved a hand. “It’s fine, Naruto.”

“Iruka-sensei,” the Copy-nin said flatly, “ANBU, T&I, and R&D won’t drink that stuff. ANBU. … ANBU.”

Kazuko turned to Midori, who’d gone back to working with only a few repeated glances at Team Seven, and demanded in a hiss, “What’s going on here? Why is the Cursed Team here? Wasn’t the curse broken by Umino-sama?”

“Yeah, it was. But the Hokage assigned them to Umino-sama for a couple hours every day as a D-rank until the Chuunin Exams,” Midori explains quietly, watching the legendary nin and three twelve-year-olds warily. “Because their C-rank turned into an A-rank or whatever.”

“Everybody’s first C-rank goes to shit somehow.”

“Yeah,” Midori says darkly. “But now they’ve been assigned here. Tempting the return of the curse with their presence. My mother says Umino-sama is the only thing keeping the darkness at bay.”

“Why,” Kazuko demands, aghast.

“To protect Umino-sama from himself, I think. Run errands. Whatever.”

Kazuko didn’t ask any more questions, she just watched fearfully as the pink-haired girl took away the Head Desk-Shinobi’s mug of undead curse goop and poured it and the entire pot out the window. Then watched with continued fearfulness as the genin were put to work running various errands for extremely nervous desk-shinobi, such as dropping off packages to the shinobi postal-service (in the end, no one wanted to be the one to break anything to Council members and agreed that mail was not the coward’s way out), sweeping the floor, fetching people and things, and destroying unnecessary documents (the dark-haired boy seemed to get a huge kick out of burning everything, the pink-haired girl seemed to have a lot of repressed anger that came out in kunai stabbing, and the Copy-nin had actually had to take away explosive tags from the fox-boy).

The Copy-nin pretty much kicked his legs up on a desk and flipped out a bright orange book, and no one besides the Head Desk-Shinobi asked him to do anything. Umino mostly just complained in Hatake’s direction and Hatake was very clueless back in Umino’s direction, but the rest of the desk-shinobi either had an undying hatred or ancient fear for the third-generation-cursed, ex-Team-Seven, elite jounin, so talking to the man would have been a kill or be killed situation, probably.

Around lunchtime, Team Seven dragged Umino out to eat something, then returned him awhile later looking a lot less dead than before. Then everyone got back to work (except the Copy-nin, or maybe including the Copy-nin, because no one really knew what he was doing), and things were proceeding well except for the fact that they seemed to be missing one extremely crucial factor into making sense of the mess that had become the Civil Partnerships Department.

There were hundreds of drunken marriages to filter through, many of which overlapped actual marriages or other drunken marriages, and no one could figure out how the whole thing worked. It was hard to explain, really, but to put it in simple terms, it seemed as though… well… that every single one of partially legal. Pretty legal? Kazuko was pretty sure “pretty legal” wasn’t a thing, but… she didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Anything seemed possible here, on the hunt for whatever it was they needed to fix what had become of her department.

“I FOUND IT!” a desk-shinobi called a few hours past lunch, standing on a desk holding up a law book that was thicker than his head. Kenta, the grand-nephew of the past Head Desk-Shinobi, looks like he’s just saved the world as he beams proudly, looking a bit like death warmed over.

Kazuko, whose sight has started to blur after hours of staring at fine print, feels like he actually has.

Umino, who’d been sulking at his desk after the pink-haired girl glared him down when he tried to make his Academy teacher “coffee” again, immediately rushes over, along with Supervisor Naoko and many other desk-shinobi. The genin look up from where they were having fun tearing disposable papers to pieces with minor jutsus, and even the Copy-nin looks boredly up from his book.

Kenta dumps the heavy book into Umino’s arms and points. As Umino quickly reads the page over, his eyes become increasingly and increasingly wide with horror and disbelief. Several of the desk-shinobi reading over his shoulder look about the same. When Umino reaches the end, he stares for a long moment, then drops the massive book onto his own toes and doesn’t even flinch.

“Oh heavens help us,” Supervisor Naoko says, eyes shut like she’s just accepted the end of the world.

Umino doesn’t say a word, he just stumbles over to the demonic coffee machine and grabs one of the bottles of alcohol surrounding it. Well, he tries and gets hot sauce first, then manages to get the Taki moonshine. Once he has it, he pulls the cork and takes a swig before putting it down and pressing his face into the nearest wall.

The fox-boy cautiously gets to his feet and walks over to the Head Desk-Shinobi, then tugs on Umino’s arm. “Iruka-sensei? Iruka-sensei, what’s wrong?”

Umino mumbles something unintelligible even to shinobi hearing.

The Copy-nin stands as well, visible eye hard. “Umino?”

Umino takes a deep breath, then turns around to face those not still in a similar state of shock or crowding around the fallen book to see what the problem is. He looks like he’s just been told the shinobi postal-service threw all his shit into the Forest of Death or the budget’s back for round two.

“It appears,” Umino says slowly, “that it is not actually illegal to have more than one marriage in Konoha.” The room takes in a sharp breath and even the Copy-nin’s eyes widen. “It seems… that… everybody just assumed that was already a thing and… it wasn’t. It isn't.”

Oh shit, Kazuko thinks, reliving every drunken marriage she ever had to process. Oh shit.

“Wait, what does that mean?” Uzumaki Naruto says, brow scrunched up.

The Sandaime Hokage does not actually say oh shit, but the words are plainly there in his expression as Iruka carefully places the book of law onto his desk and delicately explains the situation. Hatake Kakashi and Team Seven stand at his back, with Kakashi looking absolutely stunned, Naruto still looking confused, Sakura seeming a bit disbelieving of this entire situation, and Sasuke looking like he’d rather go back to burning and shredding paperwork.

Iruka has thrown himself into his duties as Head Desk-Shinobi, while delegating a good portion of his duties as Academy Headmaster to a colleague who’s probably been drinking as much Academy swill as he has. He can worry about the Academy when it’s closer to the actual school year, a more urgent concern is making sure the Konoha budget doesn’t develop a consciousness and start eating people.

Iruka would like to think that he’s doing a pretty good job of everything so far. Mostly it’s just getting an accounting of everything and following common fucking sense. What’s this? What does it do? Is it effective? Should we change it? How do we change it? Fund it or stop funding it? Answer me or find someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about.

At least, no one’s told him that he’s ruining all of Konoha yet, despite being holding two positions he shouldn’t, being far too young for either of them, and being hideously underqualified for both. He definitely shouldn’t have the security clearance he has at the moment, and isn’t actually sure what security clearance level he has or what kind at the moment.

“There are kinds?” Kakashi had said blankly when Iruka asked him. Which was followed by, “There’s fifteen levels? Maa, I thought there were seven.” Iruka couldn’t tell whether Kakashi was kidding or not and just stopped asking him about things, which may or may not have been Kakashi’s goal.

Iruka has an ANBU team watching him now. Which is just… wrong.

“Hokage-sama,” Iruka says helplessly, “what… what do we do… with… this information?”

Iruka is fairly certain that this mess could plunge all of Konoha into chaos. And wouldn’t that be the saddest way and reason for a hidden village to fall? One administrative department slowly falling apart because of one massive loophole and dragging the entire village into hell. Oh why, oh why did Senju Tobirama have to delegate this one?

The Hokage leans back in his seat. “Handle it,” he says. “Quickly and discretely.”

“Hokage-sama,” Iruka pleads.

“The Civil Partnerships Department is your responsibility now, Iruka,” the Hokage says. “Kakashi, you and your team will continue to assist Iruka in this matter.”

Kakashi pales under his mask. “Hokage-sama.”

The Sandaime Hokage lights his pipe and sticks it in his mouth. “I’m not touching this one with a ten foot pole,” he says flatly. “The last time marriage met the administration, a decades-long feud broke out.” He pauses for a moment. “Don’t let another feud break out.”

Yeah, that desk-shinobi and Academy teachers thing that Iruka had thought was a joke.

“Yes, Hokage-sama,” Iruka says miserably. He’d honestly thought this couldn’t get worse. He’s such a fool. He still doesn’t even know why he took both jobs.

“Hokage-sama-” Kakashi tries again.

“Hat,” the Hokage threatens and Kakashi immediately shuts up.

Iruka furrows his brow to figure out what that means, and Kakashi’s genin look equally confused. It clicks on Naruto’s face first, as his blue eyes widen and he points aghast at the Sandaime Hokage.

“Old man! This bastard? You wouldn’t!”

“Oh, but I would,” the Hokage says darkly, glaring at Kakashi, who pales further. Then the Hokage looks at Naruto and adds kindly, “You’re a bit young still, Naruto.”

Iruka’s eyes widen next. How does this keep getting worse? He took these jobs on the assumption it would be in service to the Sandaime, someone he trusts to guide him and actually watch children for more than five minutes at a time. "Hokage-sama, you can’t-”

“Not if this is handled quickly and discretely,” the Hokage says benignly. “Good luck.”

Chapter Text

Naruto follows along at Iruka’s side as they make their way to the Nara compound, scurrying a bit to keep up with Iruka’s distracted speed-walk. His Academy sensei’s been pinching the bridge of his scarred nose every minute or so, probably from tiredness, and Naruto’s had to keep Iruka from walking into several buildings and poles so far.

He wonders if Iruka would notice if he just dragged him back to his apartment to get some actual sleep. Probably not. Iruka’s new job seems really important but really stressful, and Naruto hopes it’s temporary until they can find someone better like Iruka says it is. Although he’s pretty sure that there’s no one better than Iruka for this job if it’s managed to become such a giant mess.

When Naruto becomes Hokage, he’s not going to let everything get so messy. If worse comes to worse, he’ll just have Sasuke and Sakura set everything on fire and start over from scratch, because that seems easier than trying to dig through stacks of paper taller than Kakashi-sensei.

When they get to the compound, Naruto bangs on the door at a gesture from Iruka, and a lazy-eyed, older Not-Shikamaru with a weird face opens it to peer out.

“We have a meeting with Nara Shikaku and his guest,” Iruka says.

Not-Shikamaru nods and waves them him. Naruto gapes once they’re inside; he’s seen Shikamaru disappear into this place, but he’s never been here himself. There are lots of deer decorations and more Not-Shikamarus everywhere, he’s seen a few of them around but they’re everywhere now, and he stares at all of them as Iruka tugs him along into the main house.

They encounter the actual Shikamaru at one point, who peers blearily at Naruto and ends up leading them all the way to a comfortable living room. Here, there’s the most Shikamaru-looking Not-Shikamaru guy yet, playing some board game against Ino’s dad while a guy Naruto is gonna guess is Chouji’s dad alternates between watching the game and reading a book.

“Dad,” Shikamaru says. “Guests.”

Shikamaru’s dad looks up from his game. “Umino-san,” he greets.

Iruka’s face pinches a bit. “Please, just Iruka, Nara-sama,” he says, a steadying hand on Naruto’s back as they enter the room. “We’ve come on behalf of a sub-department of the Konoha Administration Department for a matter concerning you and Yamanaka-sama.”

Shikamaru’s dad waves them further into the room. “I have more than enough time for a word with the man who finally straightened out that vacation-time mess for my jounin,” he says, sounding effortlessly lazier than Shikamaru ever has.

Hey, Naruto remembers that “vacation-time mess”. Mostly because of the pair of drunken jounin who’d burst into the room – wearing sparkly feather boas, carrying cups of bright pink booze with tiny umbrellas, and staggering around on really pointy shoes – to loudly thank Iruka whether Iruka had been wanted to be thanked or not. Iruka insisted with a bright-red face that he’d mostly “yelled at the problem until it went away”, but everybody else agreed that was a perfectly valid form of problem-solving, and Iruka hadn’t been able to get out of the very glittery hugs that ensued.

“Indeed,” Ino’s dad says, shifting from frowning at the game board to smiling politely at them. Naruto’s seen him around Ino’s family’s flower shop and around the Academy a few times; Ino dad’s always seemed alright, and a lot less Ino-ish than Ino, at least. “How may we help you, Iruka-san?”

Iruka clears his throat. “It’s a private matter,” he says awkwardly.

“For security reasons?” Ino’s dad inquires.

Iruka and Naruto exchange a look, they’ve been exchanging looks a lot since they set out to do this, and Naruto grimaces back at his old Academy teacher. If this is what being Hokage involves, no wonder the old man is making them do this. And even if Shikamaru leaves now, which Naruto sort of hopes he does because this is really awkward, he’ll get it out of Naruto later somehow.

They just gotta… pretend it’s a prank. That’s what Iruka said when they started this. Pretend it’s all a giant prank! Oh man, if Naruto had come up with this on his own, it’ve been the greatest prank ever. He still can’t believe he’s getting paid for this. 

Iruka looks back to the grown-ups. “No,” he says. “Naruto, get the papers, please.”

Naruto nods and opens the satchel he’s been toting around for Iruka, shuffling a bit before drawing out a handful of papers and handing them to Iruka. There’s still a lot of papers in there, though. Way too many papers.

Grown-ups are so weird.

Naruto tries not to grin when Shikamaru and Ino’s dads decline to send Shikamaru or Chouji’s dad away. He doesn’t try very hard, because he sort of really wants to see Shikamaru’s face here, but he does try.

“I’m going to put this bluntly,” Iruka begins awkwardly, “because I have found that there is actually no good way to put this.” Naruto shudders at the reminder of the kunoichi lady who chased them off with a double-ended bladed broomstick. “We have recently discovered that there is an issue with Konoha civil partnership law, and congratulations, you’re married.”

Iruka holds out the papers and Ino’s dad snatches them out of his hand, with Shikamaru’s dad moving faster than Naruto’s ever seen Shikamaru move to read over Ino’s dad’s shoulder. Behind them, Chouji’s dad is wide-eyed and has his mouth open, and behind Naruto, Shikamaru looks like he did that one time Ino slapped him with a cold, wet fish. Kinda sick, but also like he’s trying to reject reality or something through sheer willpower and disbelief and surprise.

Ino’s dad goes red, Shikamaru’s dad goes white, and Chouji’s dad kind of looks like he’s slowly realizing this is the absolute, hands-down, best day of his entire life and all previous reincarnations’ lives.

Shikamaru’s dad looks up. “This can’t be legal,” he says.

“It’s pretty legal,” Iruka answers haltingly, kinda red-faced again. Naruto can’t blame him, he thinks his own cheeks are burning a little too, even though he’s kinda grinning like mad because this is awkward but so, so funny.

“We were both already married at the time,” Ino’s dad says, expression cold like really-really-scary-Ino.

“All marriages stand,” Iruka says. “Simultaneously.”

Shikamaru and Ino’s dads stare at him, and behind him, Chouji’s dad, who’s leaned forward to have a look at the papers himself, bursts into laughter. And then it gets really awkward, because Naruto just doesn’t know what to do with himself while Shikamaru and Ino’s dads just stare and stare and stare, while Chouji’s dad just laughs and laughs and laughs in the background, until Chouji’s dad is red in the face and actually crying because he’s laughing so hard.

Iruka clears his throat again and pulls out a notepad and pen. “I take it, then,” he says, “that you do not wish for this civil partnership to stand? Because if so, we’re developing a streamlined process for dissolving and annulling accidental marria-”

Ino’s dad turns to look at Shikamaru’s dad, expression cold like really-really-REALLY-scary-Ino, and says flatly, “I want a divorce.”

“Darling, no,” Shikamaru’s dad says, voice completely dead. “We can still fix this.”

Chouji’s dad is now laughing so hard that he’s not making any sound, and Naruto wonders if they should call in a medic-nin because he looks like that one time Chouji nearly died choking on a chip. Naruto looks at Shikamaru again to ask his opinion, but Shikamaru is not looking good.

“Shikamaru,” Naruto whispers, “are you gonna puke?”

Shikamaru looks at him with wide eyes and a greenish face. “Maybe?” he says, then adds like he can’t quite believe this is real life, “Ino is my stepsister. … Ino is my sister.”

Well… that’s a pretty good reason to puke in Naruto’s book. Although, it always seemed to Naruto that Ino was pretty much Shikamaru’s sister anyway. It’s not like Shikamaru wasn’t going to be bossed around by Ino for pretty much forever anyway, which is what Naruto’s heard sisters do, so Naruto’s not sure what’s different if they’re actually related.

“…Troublesome,” Naruto offers in commiseration. He’s only grinning a little bit, he swears.

Chouji’s dad, who has only just stopped laughing, starts again and actually falls onto the floor, and then doesn’t even try and get up. Shikamaru and Ino’s dads stare in mutual horror. And Iruka, who is trying to hide his face into his notepad and failing, is slowly going from a red complexion to a purple one.

Shikamaru just stares at him like he can’t decide whether to kill Naruto or just expire on the spot, and knowing his laziness, Shikamaru is probably leaning towards the latter.

Best not-prank ever.

Iruka still can’t quite believe this is happening to him. Everything so far has been so much work, but this marriage mess is by far the worst. Handle this quickly and discretely? Quickly and discretely? Just one question: how? How the actual, ever-loving f-

Shinobi gossip like nothing else; they thrive on secrets and information-gathering. Even if Iruka’s locked down on the desk-shinobi and forbidden them to speak of what’s happening, he knows it’ll still somehow get out that someone is coming around with a lot of marriage certificates that are a lot more legal than anyone thought they were. His only hope is that this somehow won’t spread to the civilians as well, or Konoha’s reputation will be… well… fucked, there’s no better way to put it.

Their only hope then will be that the other villages will dismiss everything as far too ridiculous to be true. After all, Iruka can’t even really believe it and not only is it happening to him, but he’s in charge of it.

When they reach the New Order of Desk-Shinobi’s main offices, the floor is mostly emptied of workers, who’ve all gone home to stuff food in their faces and crash on a vaguely horizontal surface for the night, probably. Supervisor Naoko leads a skeleton shift through making sure everything is ready for them to do this whole mess over again tomorrow. Desk-shinobi wave from their stations or yawn a farewell as they stumble out the door, and Naruto yawns in response at Iruka’s side.

Iruka sighs. “I think that’s enough for today, huh, Naruto?”

Naruto nods sleepily, tired from fleeing or fighting or trying desperately to dodge while various unexpectedly married couples take their “pretty legal” nuptials with bad grace. Not all of them have been violent, some have just been emotionally exhausting as someone has a breakdown or someone’s forced to choose between two or more ex-lovers, and not all of them have been bad, with some people just laughing for five minutes straight before signing up for an annulment or shrugging and letting the marriage stand because why not. It’s been a very varied, very tiring day.

Iruka helps Naruto remove the satchel of paperwork and dumps it in a desk drawer for tomorrow, then takes a seat at his desk and flips through the list Supervisor Naoko hands him: a summary of things that happened in his absence and list of things that will require some degree of attention from him soon. While he grimaces at dealing with R&D on long-overdue security improvements, Internal Defense on much-needed check-ups, External Defense on intelligence organization and trade routes, and the Council on the proper use of funds in regards to Konoha’s leading issues, Naruto spins in Naoko’s chair for a while before nodding off into a pile of divorce papers.

Naoko doesn’t mind, she’s too busy taking notes as Iruka rants about incompetence and how the Hokage’s word is law, not something that can be procrastinated on and thrown into bureaucratic hell to rot forever. Konoha is really still trying to fix stuff from the Third Shinobi War, much less the more recent Kyuubi attack and decimation of Konoha’s Military Police, and a lot of people have either gotten very tired or very placid and Iruka has a bone to pick with all of them.

He’s a chuunin, yes, but his temper can’t take much more of this bullshit and at this rate, he’s going to go fight the fucking Hokage Monument. Or bring Senju Tobirama back from the dead so the Konoha Administration Department founder can avenge the slow death of competent government.

What’s surprised Iruka most is that absolutely none of this has discouraged Naruto in any way of his goal of becoming Hokage. Naruto takes learning about all of the Hokage’s massive responsibilities in stride, and he’s definitely learning what not to do if he’s learning anything positive. Granted, most of Naruto’s suggestions for solutions involve setting everything on fire and starting over, firing the entire Konoha Council because “they’re windbag geezers who don’t know their asses from their heads, Iruka-sensei”, and yelling at “everyone being stupid until they stop being stupid”, but those solutions are starting to sound pretty damn good to Iruka.

Iruka’s just tidying up his work for the day when the rest of Team Seven finally gets back from their rounds of delivering the happy marital congratulations. Someone kicks the door open hard and Iruka looks up as Naruto falls out of his seat and awake. Sasuke is standing in the doorway, soaking wet, a bit charred, and looking like he got run over by a flock of chickens.

Sasuke storms right up to where Naruto is wobbling to his feet and, to the surprise of everyone in the room, hugs Naruto tightly and buries his face in the front of Naruto’s orange jumpsuit. Naruto is apparently so shocked that he bypasses surprise and just sort of blanks on all thoughts and emotions.

“Ducks,” Sasuke says miserably, “there were so many ducks.”

Iruka internally debates between asking Sasuke what’s wrong and leaping over his desk for the nearest camera, but then he spots Naoko already on the camera thing. He decides that filing papers to give her a raise was definitely the best decision of his life and opens his mouth to ask what happened, except he’s interrupted by a new person slamming into the room.

Hatake Kakashi, the legendary Copy-nin, is standing in the doorway in the same state as Sasuke. Soaked, charred, and apparently having faced a fearsome amount of ducks. Naoko quickly turns and starts taking pictures of that too, while Iruka fights his natural instinct to snigger uncontrollably.

Kakashi’s visible eye narrows on Iruka. “YOU,” he says venomously.

Iruka slowly gets to his feet and tries to think of how exactly he can fight the Copy-nin. If this were the busiest time of day, then Iruka could set dozens of desk-shinobi on Kakashi with a flick of his wrist. Most of them have horrible grudges against the man and would be more than willing despite their poor odds of winning for an approved shot at punching him in the face.

But then the venom disappears and Kakashi blurs, then suddenly Iruka is getting his own hug and can no longer comprehend thoughts or emotions. What.

“You did it,” Kakashi says. “Sweet merciful god of dogs, you did it.”

“I did what.”

Kakashi partially releases Iruka, keeping an arm around him, and spins around, then points at the small figure standing just behind him. “Sakura, say the thing,” he orders.

Sakura, who seems to have spontaneously appeared like a small, pink-haired ghost, looks up at them with an expression that Iruka has never seen before. It’s something between defiant, war-torn, terrified, and really tired of all bullshit ever. She is also soaked, charred, and feathered.

“I’m never getting married,” Sakura says vehemently. “I’m going to stay a single kunoichi forever and tie my hair back so it doesn’t flow in the wind as I run through the forest, firing jutsu into the sunset.” 

Iruka gapes at her, then looks questioningly at Kakashi, with a pointed glance towards Sasuke, who has not removed himself from Naruto and now Naruto is awkwardly patting the boy on the back while staring around wild-eyed for help. Iruka had often prayed that many of his students would stop making doe-eyes at Sasuke, or fighting over Sasuke, or just that Yamanaka Ino and Haruno Sakura would keep their romantic aspirations outside of Academy classes.

Iruka looks back to Sakura, who seems very determined, and then back at Kakashi. “Did she-?”

“Yes,” Kakashi says, leaning on Iruka with overwhelmed relief. “Thank you.”

“What happened?” Iruka demands, horrified.

Kakashi waves his free arm in a dismissive gesture. “Not important,” he says. “The important part is that it’s over, the inheritance has changed hands, the couple’s been dead for years and can’t cause more trouble, and my adorable monsters have developed a healthy opinion of marriage and romantic commitment.”

“I am never getting married,” Sakura hisses with a terrifying amount of ferocity.  

“Sounds like a plan,” Sasuke mumbles, finally coming up for air but still gripping Naruto by the front of his jumpsuit. “Never get married,” he snarls at his teammate. “It’ll kill us all. The institution of marriage is an archaic trap and romance is a poisonous lie.”

Behind him, Sakura crosses her arms and nods firmly.

Naruto stares at his teammates. “Uh, okay?” Then as Sasuke buries his face in the front of Naruto’s jumpsuit again, Naruto looks up at his teachers and asks distantly, “Am I dreaming?”

“I don’t think so?” Iruka offers confusedly. It’s entirely conceivable that Iruka has passed out at his desk again, but he’s pretty sure that he has better dreams than this. This is kind of sad.

“I couldn’t have dreamed up anything like that,” Sakura says, then flings herself towards her teammates to join the hugging. Naruto flails but can’t escape, and she and Sasuke cling to him as though hugging Naruto will somehow erase all the bad things in the world. Naruto soon gives in and just awkwardly pats the both of them on the back.

“People had better not be dreaming,” Kakashi says to Iruka. “Because I don’t want to deal with lovesick genin in my future and now I won’t have to deal with lovesick genin. Asuma, Kurenai, and Gai are going to turn green from envy. Well, Gai is already green, but-”

“This’ll probably change when hormones really kick in,” Iruka points out, recalling his own experiences.

Kakashi puts a hand over Iruka’s mouth and glares. “Shh, give me this. I’m holding them to it. Forever.”

Iruka glares back and removes the hand. “You can’t hold twelve-year-olds to a promise fore-”

“Forever,” Kakashi insists fiercely, with an expression akin to a truly desperate man.

Iruka decides to let the man have this. (And laugh when the hormones kick in. He’s going to laugh so hard. He’s going to suffer too, because he seems to be stuck both with Naruto and some of the highest offices in Konoha for no logical reason, but he’s still going to laugh at Kakashi.)

Tomorrow had better be a better day.

Tomorrow is not a better day.

Iruka is ridiculously thankful for the people who are just plain embarrassed and want the problem to just disappear, which Iruka is more than happy to see happen. He’s also thankful for the people who are happy to stay married, and also for the people who shrug and say, “Haha, do whatever, man.”

Choke them. Choke them, that’s what Iruka wants to do, even though he’s grateful for them. He doesn’t, but he wants to because what part of your terrible decisions have consequences for everybody that cannot be fixed without your explicit consent do these people not understand?

Iruka is not thankful for ridiculous chuunin and jounin who apparently have nothing better to do with themselves on their nights off.

Which is how Iruka ends up storming into Shiranui Genma’s apartment and dumping a stack of people in front of one of the village’s most capable shinobi, demanding, “How?” The stack of marriage certificates and paperwork is over an inch thick. “Why, Genma? Just… why?”

Genma squints at the stack of papers next to his pillow, then groggily shifts to look up at Iruka.

“Oh,” he says, then yawns and curls his blankets tighter around himself. Despite how he’s in bed, it’s still somehow strange that he doesn’t have a senbon in his mouth. “Figured you’d be around sooner or later. Go put the kettle on, would you?”

 Iruka’s eyes narrow.

“Fuck, you’re the worst,” Genma groans, after Iruka flipped the bed over and dragged the tokubetsu jounin to the apartment’s table to review the inch tall stack of marriage certificates. Despite wearing only pants, missing his signature bandana, he has still somehow managed to get a senbon in his mouth between the bedroom and the kitchen.

Iruka puts the kettle on, because he is not a monster, then sits down at the table, points at the stack of papers, and says, “You are going to go through every single one of these and tell me exactly what the hell was going through your brain at the time.”

Genma groans again and puts his forehead on the table. “I’m gonna go with either ‘absolutely nothing’ or ‘booze’,” he says. “Or probably a whole bunch of filth that can’t be shared without booze, and it’s too early in the morning for that.”

“It’s two in the afternoon,” Iruka says disbelievingly.

Genma waves a dismissive hand. “Relative. I got home from a mission just this morning.” He pauses for a moment, then lifts his head and looks hopefully up at Iruka. “I just got home from a mission this morning, can I be excused from this?”

Iruka teaches adorable (deadly) children, so if Genma thinks his puppy-eyes have anything on them, he is very, very wrong. Even practice cannot beat the innate adorableness of an eight-year-old with ninja dreams and a smile missing their two front teeth (damn it, Naruto used to be so cute once; a nightmare, but so cute), so if Iruka can survive that and hold his ground, he’d not budging for anyone.

Iruka points an immovable finger at the stack of papers. “Divorce time, Genma. Go.”

Genma hums and lazily shifts the papers closer to him to squint at them. “Why not annulment?”

“You know why.”

“I feel like this is sexual harassment. I feel judged.”

“Good.”

 They begin and Iruka regrets every decision in his entire life within five minutes.

“Ugh, divorcing him, he was an asshole.”

Iruka makes a note.

“Okay, she was nice, but then she turned out to be an assassin from Suna,” Genma says reminiscently of the next paper, “so probably divorce her too.”

Probably, Iruka thinks, distressed, and immediately translates it into definitely.

“Oh, definitely divorce this guy. He stole my favorite apron when we broke up. Jerk. I liked that apron.”

If this is what happens to you when you become shinobi elite, Iruka will be perfectly happy to stay a chuunin forever. He didn’t actually think he’d be making jounin anytime, much less anytime soon, especially with his two new jobs and the likelihood that he’ll be chained to a desk forever, but at least now he has a really good reason for wanting to stay chuunin.

“Okay, so… Ebisu? I would definitely remember Ebis- Oh, the bachelor party, right.” Genma hums consideringly, stabbing a senbon into the paper. “This one’s an annulment, definitely, and also probably needs to be struck from existence for the sake of everything. Can we do that?”

 “No,” Iruka says, having already tried. He tried so hard.

 Genma sighs in disappointment, then perks up and says, “Hey, if Ebisu’s in here, then is G-?”

“No.”

“What, really? I would have thought I’d hit that at least once.”

Iruka did too, but apparently there are some miracles. “No. And before you ask, also no.”

“Damn.”

Iruka tries not to think about how despondent Genma sounds. “Please continue, Genma. I have a meeting with the Hokage at six.” He taps the next paper in the pile. “What about this one?”

“Hmm? Oh… that fucker,” Genma says, before he smiles a smile that ought to be outlawed for public indecency and malicious intent. “Oh, he’s dead.”  

 “I don’t want to know,” Iruka says immediately.

 Genma blinks lazily up at him, still smiling that smile that ought to have an intervention immediately where its family members can confront it about its behavior. “You sure? It’s a hell of a story.”

 “Yes,” Iruka lies, because he needs to maintain some innocence and sanity. Or at least pretend to or uphold the habit, since he’s not entirely sure he has either of those things left. “I have a limited time frame for you and we’re not halfway through this stack, I do not want to hear it.”

 “Eh, maybe later, then.”

 Iruka leaves Genma’s apartment with a sorted stack of marriage certificates, an unwilling agreement to meet Genma for lunch sometime later this week, and the thought that perhaps he’s lost so much innocence and sanity that he’s reaching a positive status through the other side. Of the inch-high stack of marriage certificates, not a one of them will be left standing, and Iruka doesn’t actually have enough hands or feet to count the number of times Genma’s been made a widower.

 He’s going to kick Kakashi in the shins as proxy the next time he sees him, because Genma is too quick and sneaky and Kakashi is nice or pitying enough to let Iruka do things like that for some reason. Asshole. Damn assassins.

One of the weirder things about this whole business is that Kakashi actually takes an interest. But then again, it’s not actually that weird. All shinobi are nosy gossips and Kakashi reads erotic romance novels in public, so Iruka isn’t really surprised when he catches Kakashi willingly reading through the paperwork to see who’s been getting drunk and bored lately.

He’s a little bit envious of Kakashi’s reading speed, though. Asshole. Wasting a power like that on field duty when the stack on Iruka’s desk threatened to reach the ceiling earlier today.

What is weird, though, is when Kakashi doesn’t really stop peeking at the paperwork, even though he must have gone through it all five times by the time Iruka finally gives in and demands to know what the hell he’s looking for. None of the certificates have Kakashi’s name on them.

(Iruka would know. He checked for those and was bitterly disappointed when he didn’t find anything to hold high over Kakashi’s head. The Copy-nin seems to have actually avoided ever getting drunkenly married to anyone, but Iruka wouldn’t have put it past Kakashi to have hunted down and destroyed any marriage certificates that could incriminate his “very important reputation as a sexy, carefree bachelor, Iruka-sensei”. That asshole.)

“Oh, no, nothing in particular,” Kakashi says, more than a little despondently, as he resettles the stack of paperwork. He sighs heavily, and Iruka has never seen such a perfect expression of heartbreak from someone whose face isn’t half-visible.

  Iruka squints suspiciously at him, but Kakashi’s ho-hum mildness is impenetrable and better desk-shinobi than him have broken themselves on the brick wall of indifference that is the Copy-nin. Thankfully, Iruka’s the sort to learn from their mistakes. He’s got quite a bit going for him, after all: he can be pretty clever, he’s stubborn to the point of self-destructive, and he now has access to way more information and resources than any one person should have, especially unwillingly.

 “Well, you can keep looking for your ‘nothing in particular’,” Iruka says snippily, collecting a number of papers into a folder and getting to his feet. “I actually have a job to do. For some reason, no one else wants to talk to your ‘beloved eternal rival’ about this mess. They’re making me tal-”

 Very suddenly, so suddenly that Iruka isn’t entirely certain that he could have avoided it even though he was fully expecting it, the folder that he was holding is in Kakashi’s hands instead. Kakashi is also now on the other side of the room, sitting on top of an empty desk (the desk-shinobi it belongs to is out begging divorce signatures from shinobi at the moment, along with what seems half of the entire department), quickly flipping through the papers with what his body language suggests to be the purest form of glee and horror.

 “I fucking knew it,” Iruka says, glaring at him. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it!”

 “Language, Iruka-sensei,” Kakashi mumbles, absentmindedly. He has no time for the Head Desk-Shinobi at the moment, his full focus is on the papers that Iruka stuffed into the folder.

 “Fuck you,” Iruka says, because he can do things like that right now. Kakashi sent Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke to fetch them take-out for lunch, and the remaining desk-shinobi around them have heard infinitely worse from him whenever someone brings him the latest budget report. (So… twice daily, like clockwork, almost.)

 “Mmm, no, thank you,” Kakashi says mildly, still not looking up.

 Iruka folds his arms over his chest and waits, glowering.

 After another twenty seconds or so, after all the papers have been flipped through twice, Kakashi pauses and finally looks up at Iruka. Not even half his face is visible, but Iruka has never seen an expression of such horrid betrayal and disapproval.

 “Iruka-sensei,” Kakashi says, sounding genuinely hurt. “You lied to me?”

 “I said one and a half unrelated true things and you did the work,” Iruka says condemningly. “Maito Gai has utmost respect for marriage; no one wants to admit to him why the entire fucking village is slowly slipping into chaos. Did you really think that he would do something as dishonorable as get married and forget about it? Or not shout it from the rooftops? Shame on you.”

  Kakashi looks like he want to say something, but the logic and trueness of Iruka’s statements is undeniable and the Copy-nin is forced to give a relenting and agreeable nod. Because everything said there is undeniably true. Moris and Maitos, by tradition, marry only for Eternal and Infinite Love born on the Shining Star of Truth and Freedom, and they are never quiet about it. Kakashi should know better, and he is clearly admitting his foolish mistake to himself.

 “Shame on me,” he says finally, almost cheerfully.

 Iruka holds a hand out for the assortment of random papers that he shoved into the folder and Kakashi reluctantly crosses the room to hand the stolen goods over. Iruka takes it back and returns to his desk, flipping through the pages and separating them to get back to what he was doing before.

 He’d rather not, but he doesn’t have a choice. Someone has to unravel the mess that Shiranui Genma has pretty much single-handedly made of Konoha’s widow-benefits system. Damn assassins.

 Kakashi, however, follows Iruka back to his desk – he shoves his hands in his pockets and saunters after him, apparently heedless of all the stares and glares of the still-remaining desk-shinobi in the wide office following him. After Iruka collapses in his chair, Kakashi just stands in front of the desk like that in an incredibly mild and casual display that makes Iruka tempted to make loitering with intent to annoy extremely punishable under law.

 (He has so much power now, he could probably do it and no one would stop him. It’s terrifying. The only saving grace he has is that he doubts anyone would actually listen. Nobody stopped to consider that dropping by the Civil Partnerships department to get married might actually make them married for some reason, after all.)

 “So, not married then?” Kakashi asks, casually enough to stab a man straight through.

 “Nope. Not at all,” Iruka says. “For once, not a single member of the Mori family is causing us any trouble or weirdness. One of them apparently had an improv wedding where the bride and groom ending up playing pickpockets trying to return a shark they accidentally stole from a businessman-”

 “I attended that one with Gai,” Kakashi says, looking off into the distance, visibly eye misty with memory. “It doesn’t sound like it, but it was actually quite good, you know. Very romantic and inspirational.”

 Iruka ignores him, stubbornly. “-but even that one was perfectly legitimate and clearly entirely intentional on all parties' parts.” Because, honestly, that sort of thing just cannot be accidental and no, Iruka can’t ignore this for some reason. “You did what?”

 “The invitation said plus-one,” Kakashi says defensively. “I didn’t want to, but Gai won that day’s challenge and he insisted. It was a very moving and unique ceremony.”

 “Right,” Iruka says, leaning back in his seat and squinting at the Copy-nin standing in front of his desk. “Did you know that you’re actually the twenty-third person to ask me if Gai married someone? I have a list. You’re number twenty-three on the list.”

 “Really? Twenty-three?” Kakashi says, looking somewhere between surprised and disappointed in himself. “Who was the first?”

 “Akimichi Chouza,” Iruka answers promptly. “He chased us out of the Nara compound to ask about all his students… He was actually more disappointed about Gai not being married than with Genma’s behavior.”

 Iruka grinds his teeth at this bitter reminder, because so much for using the man’s old jounin-sensei's disapproval for revenge purposes. Chouza hadn’t seemed to care at all about what Genma was up to and was mostly just relieved that Ebisu was letting loose even a little bit. Iruka has to make a strong effort not to crumple the papers in his hands out of anger and frustration. He needs these papers. 

 “Why do all you people care, anyway?” Iruka demands.

 “It would have been funny?” Kakashi says, blatantly ignoring the way Iruka’s eye twitches. “It’s not at all because anyone’s ever entertained the idea that Gai would make a really great spouse, definitely not.”

 Iruka stares up at the Copy-nin, eyes narrowed. “Uh huh.”

 “It would have been very funny,” Kakashi says firmly, defensively, anything to throw Iruka off this incredibly awkward topic of conversation.

 Thankfully for him, it works.

 “Fuck you, nothing about this is funny.”

 “Eh, it’s a little funny,” Kakashi argues, because it is, actually.  

 Iruka stares up at him again, eyes narrowed, and then reaches for an inch-tall stack of papers waiting on one side of his desk without breaking eye-contact. He reaches into a drawer for a folder and tucks them inside, then holds them out to Kakashi and says very flatly,  

 “Thank you, Hatake-san, for volunteering to manage the case of Mitarashi Anko.”

 Kakashi looks at the papers, then at Iruka.

 “Fuck you,” he says.

 Iruka’s stare has no sympathy. “No, thank you,” he says. “I’m busy.” 

Chapter Text

 It really says something – it really, really screams and shrieks and yodels something of an inexplicably indefinable nature – that Iruka is actually throwing himself into the more benign marriage messes to avoid even thinking about the three cases he’s bringing to the Hokage at five o’clock today. It says something very similar that Iruka is actually viewing some of these disasters as benign now.

 He’s not even sure what benign means to him anymore. The definition of benign has slowly shifted towards “something that’s probably going to be the death of me, but only, like, an incremental percentage of the total problem” or “something that isn’t actively physically trying to murder me at this very moment in time like that goddamn fucking budget when I work on it” or “I’m still looking forward to getting smashed later, but if I was smashed now, I’d probably be having some strange definition of fun”. Or maybe even: “Okay, you are trying to kill me right now, but, it’s like… cute. Nice try but I’ve been twisted beyond human recognition by this point, and you don’t even register on my scale where the bottom level starts with high stress and there are still ten more levels. Get on my fucking level, you adorable goddamn noob, or I’m just going to laugh at you.”

 Iruka’s pretty sure this isn’t good, but whatever. He’s pretty sure he’s not okay anymore. He’s pretty sure that if he has to utter the phrase “pretty legal” one more time, he’s going to snap for the third time since seven this morning (the first two were the budget). He’s pretty sure that he understands the Hokage now on a level that human words can’t describe.

 Konoha is a disaster and a ridiculous, hideous mess.

 But, like, it’s Iruka’s disaster and ridiculous, hideous mess. He finds himself being unhealthily fond of it, even as he bangs his head against his desk, pours more Taki moonshine into a pot of pure expresso (because he’s becoming immune to what his desk-shinobi already refer to as liquid death), and ascends to the shittiest available form of temporary godhood.

 Iruka glances at the mug on his desk and wonders if he can sneak past Sakura's influence on his desk-shinobi and get a refill. Probably not. But at least he managed to keep Kakashi from having Sasuke and Naruto sneak his coffee machine out the nearest window, mainly by reminding them that it was a gift from ex-Headmistress Hitomi and she wouldn’t be pleased if they broke it.

 On that tangent, he reaches for today’s TO DO list and adds a check-up with the Academy as something non-urgent to add to his calendar. Because, as he sometimes forgets, he is also the new Academy Headmaster on top of this marriage mess. They should be doing fine, given that Iruka put one of his more trustworthy ex-coworkers in charge and signs off on every decision the Academy teachers make as a committee, but it never hurts not to turn your back on bureaucracy for too long. He grimaces at the length of the TO DO list he’ll be handing to Naoko today, but better safe than sorry.

 He glances up at the two women sitting in front of his desk, who’ve been silent for the past two minutes and thirty-six seconds, the same amount of time it’s been since Iruka announced that they were married. Inuzuka Hana – beautiful; rugged; beat Iruka up multiple times when they were both Academy students and he was embarrassingly fine with that – is wide-eyed, pale, and apparently on the edge of panic. Aburame Shinju – tall; pale; dressed in black like she’s attending a funeral she’s about to make happen – her expression is… impossible to see behind her high-neck coat and sunglasses, but she’s sitting very, very still at the moment. Perfectly still.

 Aburames, typically, are practically never perfectly still. Yes, they can stand still and sit still, limbs not moving and all that, but they typically have at least a little bit of swarming going on under their coats that makes the fabric of them bump and shift in nearly unnoticeable ways. It’s not really something a person notices until they’ve shocked an Aburame into essentially freezing, and it’d probably be really alarming if Iruka still had feelings or mortality.

 Actually, the way a fierce buzzing sound starts in the vicinity of Aburame Shinju’s shoulders is vaguely alarming, but Iruka’s been doing this for a while now and there’s probably very little she can throw at him that’ll miraculously prevent him from making his five o’clock meeting. If her bugs eat his paperwork, it’ll just come back, because after Iruka started making a real annoyance out of himself and things started getting really messy, he instituted back-up policies that’ve saved them a few mild hells. (Probably at least three and a half hells?) Aburame Shinju doesn’t register on Iruka’s skewed scale at all, really.

 “Fuck,” Inuzuka Hana says finally, the three dogs at her feet letting out whimpering agreements. “Mum is gonna kill me for this one. She’s been banned for life from five wedding gift stores in the past month for this; she’s gonna beat my ass for ruining it.”

 “My uncle has made an enemy of one of his Hyuuga acquaintances fighting for the service of our florist, and attained the services of our caterer at great personal cost,” Aburame Shinju says, in a voice that is somehow at once even and tinged with pure fear. “He will be severely displeased at this revelation as well.”

 The Head of the Inuzuka and Aburame Clans do, however, register on Iruka’s scale. Which is part of why he’s handling this personally instead of, say, literally chucking the papers at Kenta’s head and making it his subordinate’s problem.

 The bare bones of the matter are this: Inuzuka Hana and Aburame Shinju, the daughter and niece of Inuzuka Tsume and Aburame Shibi respectively, are married. They married on some drunken bender a couple years ago, apparently on the night of their first date, which was already going badly when Hana challenged Shinju to a drinking contest because she’d never seen a “hive-up-their-ass” Aburame drink.

 Somehow, this terrible first night was afterwards salvaged and the first-date marriage was forgotten. The papers, of course, were lost to bureaucratic limbo.

 Now two years down the line… Hana and Shinju’s families have just spent months negotiating and arranging their marriage after Shinju finally proposed, which involves several neat, delicate, iron-clad betrothal and marriage contracts that were intended set the tone and rules of the Aburame-Inuzuka social and political relationship for decades to come.

 Next month, Hana and Shinju were supposed to finish nearly a year’s hard work between their clans and complete an alliance that’s been nearly a decade in making; Inuzuka Tsume and Aburame Shibi were supposed to finally solidify a perfectly arranged, negotiated, and planned alliance with the marriage of their daughter and niece. It was, by all accounts (including by the involvement and subsequent notes of Iruka’s predecessor ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren), a very complicated, painstaking, and difficult process for many reasons, not the least because Hana is the Inuzuka Clan heir. But it would all be worth it, the clans have been smugly sure, for the perfectly compromised end results.

 Both clans even managed to make all their elders happy with the deal. That never happens.

 It’s really too bad that those marriage/alliance/whatever contracts and such won’t technically be valid because Inuzuka Hana and Aburame Shinju are already married. If Iruka doesn’t find a clean, simple solution to this, the Inuzuka and Aburame clans will without doubt dissolve into a chaotic feud that will probably consume the village. Because that’s just how these things go.

 It really says something that this is Iruka’s “benign” now.

 “Before we all spiral into panicked screaming,” Iruka says finally. “I might be able to offer a solution.”

 Inuzuka Hana and Aburame Shinju’s eyes flick towards him like hungry predators. Okay, maybe Iruka’s not entirely desensitized, because that’s a little bit fucking terrifying.

 Ignoring the shiver of fear down his spine, Iruka slides the papers he had drawn up across his desk towards them. “These papers are our streamlined marriage annulment contract,” he explains, despairing of the fact that such a thing now exists in the first place. “Sign these and we can dissolve your marriage, which you’ll need to admit to being unaware of, making it invalid as though you were never married in the first place. Then this entire problem disappears and I’ll see you at your wedding next month.”

 “You’d better,” Inuzuka Hana says, apparently on reflex, looking stunned. “You’re part of the party. Wait, so we can just… divorce and get remarried?”

 “Yeah,” Iruka says, praying to any available deity that they take this deal.

 “And it’ll be like this whole thing never happened?”

 Except for the part where the desk-shinobi have records in triplicate of Konoha’s latest and greatest shame… “Yes.” Even if the Aburame and Inuzuka clans find out, this contract was specifically designed to make the drunken marriages totally invalid. Dissolved like mist into air. Poof.

 The hard part is usually getting people to sign them.

 (Iruka can, has, and will force pens to paper if necessary. He’ll probably die managing, but whatever.)

 “Where the fuck do I sign?”

 “The yellow sticky notes,” Iruka sighs in relief, passing Hana a pen. “Any questions?”

 “Will you inform our clan leaders?” Shinju asks.

 Iruka snorts, even though it’s unprofessional, because fuck no. “Absolutely not.”

 “Are you gonna bring a date to our wedding?” Hana says, finishing her final signature with a flourish and handing the pen over to Shinju.

 “I’m developing a fatal intolerance to relationships,” Iruka answers.

 Hana squints her eyes at him and cracks her knuckles. Shinju continues neatly signing.

 “No,” Iruka sighs. “I’m too busy to date right now, even if I felt like it.”

 “…Eh, fair enough,” Hana says, as Shinju finishes up and passes the papers back across the desk. “Do my dogs need to sign it too or anything?”

 Iruka, who is in the middle of signing as witness, freezes and looks up. “…Why?”

 Hana shrugs. “Well, honestly, I can sort of remember that night? I think my dogs were witnesses.”

 Iruka, who hadn’t processed the original marriage document, flips open the folder that Desk-Shinobi Midori gave him on his desk and finds the papers in question. And yes, those are inky paw-prints.

 He’s suddenly forced to wonder whether or not Konoha recognizes nin-animals and summons as legal witnesses, given that Konoha laws do recognize them in a number of ways, and finds that he really, really doesn’t want to. The dogs are under optional additional witnesses, with the desk-shinobi officiant as mandatory witness, so whether it’s legal or not doesn’t really matter for this particular document, but… he’s willing to bet it’ll be an issue sooner or later.

 “Why?” Hana says with a salacious grin, leaning on his desk. “What were you thinking, Umino?”

 “Get the fuck out of my office, Inuzuka,” Iruka says defensively.

 Now he has to add figuring out the rights and legalities of nin-animals and summons to his TO DO list, and it’s going to be a shit-show. All of his sanity now hinges on the hope that no intelligent non-human being has ever had the poor standards and ridiculous inclination to (validly or otherwise, but especially not the former) marry a human being. (Or, if that horror has happened, it happened in, like, Kiri and it’s not Iruka’s fucking problem if someone’s… well… “jumped the shark”, so to speak.)

 Hana just cackles at him as she and Shinju leave his office, with Hana’s three massive nin-dogs trailing behind their mistress and her soon-to-officially-be-ex-wife and fiancée. And, dear merciful fuckery, Iruka’s pretty sure one of the dogs just winked at him on the way out.

 Iruka’s body can still be found blankly staring at the door, waiting for his traumatized soul to return, when Supervisor Naoko comes into his office five minutes later. That he doesn’t really react when she stops in front of his desk is either a testament to his sheer shock or the fact that he can’t remember what regular proper night’s rest on a comfortable horizontal surface is like anymore.

 “Umino-san,” she says, after fifteen seconds of this.

 Iruka snaps back to his body and, grudgingly, the daily life inflicted on him as a human being.

 “Please, Naoko, it’s just Iruka,” he sighs, as he has too many times to count. He rubs the bridge of his nose, fingers tracing his scar and unsuccessfully warding off his headache. “What happened now?”

 He doesn’t really like being in his own office instead of out on the department floor, but some of these matters are getting insanely complex and delicate, and thus have to be handled somewhere a little more private. For comfort and preventing more disruptions to the department workflow, if not for the little things like, y’know, national security and political stability. 

 “Ueda Kazuko is in the hospital with a broken leg, but she got a divorce out of the Kanpekina-Matchi case.”

 “Oh good, that only took a week.”

 “Oshiro’s son, Atsushi, went out and bought a card for everybody to sign,” Naoko says, placing the card in question on Iruka’s desk so he can obediently sign it. Interestingly, instead of saying, say, ‘Get Well Soon’, or something of a similar vein…

 “Why does this say ‘Congratulations’?” Iruka asks, as he opens the card.

 The very first message he lays eyes on says: “Nice going, you lucky bitch. Love, Midori.”

 “She’ll be laid up for at least three days with a concussion on top of the broken leg. No work at all.”

 Iruka’s signature after wishing her well finishes a bit more sharply than usual. Three days is a long time in their world. Tomorrow, they’ll probably find out that three foreign kages somehow managed to get married to each other on diplomatic trips to Konoha. (Fuck, he probably just cursed himself. Shit.) 

 Oh, what he wouldn’t give for three days prescribed medical rest without Konoha falling apart without him. One of the medic-nins threatened to do something like that if Iruka persists in fighting the budget. He’d take her up on it if only he could afford it.

 “Did she do it on purpose?”

 “Ironclad witness accounts say definitely not.”

 “Then I guess we have to give her a bonus,” Iruka says, handing the card back to the woman who’s probably saved his life several times over.

 “I have the paperwork here.”

 He knows exactly four things about Naoko. 1) She’s old enough to be his mother, though she refuses to give him a specific age. 2) Naoko is her given name and her last name isn’t heavily classified like the younger desk-shinobi think it is, she’s just estranged from her mother and at some point desk-shinobi just sort of shed names (see: ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren). 3) She’s both scarily competent and scathingly, subtly, near-fatally funny. And 4) she’s his second-in-command by a combination of professional pride, spite, and sheer kindness, and could retire at any moment but chooses not to. So he will always be polite to her and do exactly what she tells him to or else.

 Iruka reads through and signs the papers that’ll give Ueda Kazuko a bonus, then hands them back to Naoko. Then he explains the new additions to the TO DO list since she last came into his office (maybe about an hour ago), and feels very vindicated when she looks nearly as horrified as he felt before. They go through a few progress reports together, Naoko refuses to let him at the budget again for his own safety, and Iruka signs off on such things like the long-awaited implementation of the latest Internal and External Defense measures that R&D’s been building up for years. 

 Between three shinobi wars, the Kyuubi’s attack, the Uchiha massacre, and other disasters, Konoha is more piecemeal than planned at this point. Their city planning is… not great. The state of their government services and systems is… also not great. It started out fine, but times have been tough and Konoha’s… well… coped, at best. They have a lot to still reconstruct, not even getting started on everything that needs to be revamped and flat-out redone for proper optimization of the world’s “strongest shinobi village”. (Iruka is now beginning to realize how much of the world doesn’t have its shit together and he is afraid. He is dead inside, but he is very, very afraid.)

 Iruka really is tempted to ask R&D if they’ve figured out how to generate power from people rolling in their graves, because he’s not entirely sure Naoko’s joking or wrong when she says the Nidaime, the founder and demi-deity of the desk-shinobi, would probably have Konoha covered.

 Like, that sounds legit to him.

 “Is that everything for now?” Iruka asks, going through his hand-stretching routine.

 Desk-Shinobi have a mandatory training session on keeping your hands healthy and fit, and Iruka has never been so glad to have sat through something that boring before. How grateful he was when test marking was his biggest problem is nothing compared to now.

 “For now,” Naoko agrees ominously.

 “Great,” Iruka says, shuffling the folders and papers on his desk about for the next crisis. “Are the Aburame and Inuzuka Clan Heads here yet?”

 “Yes, they’re in the waiting room.”

 Iruka pauses and says hesitantly, “Is the waiting room still intact?”

 “For now.”

 “Please send Inuzuka Tsume in immediately so it can stay that way for a while longer.”  

 He doesn’t want a repeat of what happened earlier with a group of older genin who’d found out they were married and proceeded immediately to dramatic, tearful, semi-violent break-ups despite no one asking them to and none of them wanting to remain married. It turned out that they were all students and understudies of the Mori Clan’s Shining Star Theatre Company. Damn drama kids getting carried away and lighting his administration buildings on fire somehow both accidentally and intentionally.

 He’s not calling Inuzuka Tsume a drama person, here. He’s just saying there may be… similarities. He’s, like, 98% sure Konoha would not still be standing if Inuzukas entered the world of theatre.

 “Yes, Iruka-san,” Naoko says with a bow, and exits his office.

Chapter Text

 Not even thirty seconds later, the door to Iruka’s office cracks open with a bang. Inuzuka Tsume – beautiful; rugged; lipstick bloody and muscles thick – doesn’t pause to pose in the doorway (like a Mori trainee would). No, she half-marches, half-flounces over to one of the seats in front of his desk, dropping heavily into the chair like she owns it, his office, and the building, and is all too happy to have caught him using her stuff. She’s grinning one of those massive, wild grins that Iruka is going to make illegal at this rate, so help him any deity that’s listening.

 Her smile is all teeth and no shame. It goes uncomfortably well with her very sharp canines. Should Iruka ever write a book containing general life advice, there will be an entire chapter dedicated to why you should avoid people with sharp teeth and the ability to make them glint blindingly.

 Her dog, a massive creature that’s bigger than she is, prowls in after her. It first sniffs around the edges of the room for a few seconds, then comes to settle next to its partner. The dog gives Iruka an unimpressed look, gives an enormous yawn that shows off a frightening amount of very large teeth, and plops down to take an impromptu nap behind Tsume’s chair. Iruka feels unquestionably dismissed.

 “It’s about damn time you let me in here,” Inuzuka Tsume declares, kicking the chair beside her closer to Iruka’s desk so she can kick her feet up, throw her arms over the back of her chair, and sprawl. “I’ve been waiting weeks for this.”

 This is… unfortunately true. Only a few days after they first discovered the whole marriage mess, Inuzuka Tsume kicked down their door, grinning like a madwoman, and asked a terrified younger desk-shinobi very politely when she could expect someone to come around for her. She’s “just stopped by” far too many times since, frighteningly patient and friendly, while they desperately sort through papers, beg divorces, force annulments, and form think-tanks to figure out how to even begin to approach the more… delicately involved and egotistically fragile politically, socially, economically, etc. influential citizens and shinobi of Konoha. Inuzuka Tsume may not be delicate, but the mess she’s made practically is a haystack of glass needles, and she knows it.

 “Yes, I’m… sorry about the wait,” Iruka says, shuffling the very, very thick folder in front of him. “If you don’t mind me asking, would you be willing to give up your source on this situation. We’ve been trying to keep it from being leaked-”

 Tsume throws back and laughs. Loudly. It takes her several seconds to stop.

 “Oh,” she says, catching sight of Iruka’s pained face. “You’re being serious. Don’t worry, kiddo, you’ve actually done an amazing job of keeping this tight. It’s just that nobody gossips like Konoha shinobi, y’know? The stuff out there right now is wild. I love it.”   

 “So… is that a no to sharing your source?” Iruka says hesitantly.

 Tsume’s shameless grin manages to grow even wider as she says, “Oh, kiddo. I don’t have a source; I am the source. I put a few things together, did some basic math, and made myself a very educated guess about what you were up to. I know all, see all, hear all – smell all, too, which’s awful – around this village. I saw the signs.”

 “…How?” Iruka says, stunned and aghast, determined to make sure no one else can do the same. If there are signs out there as to what’s happening, he needs to send Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura out so they can set them on fire immediately.

 The leader of the Inuzuka Clan laughs at him again. “I saw your sign on the ol’ Love Chapel’s door, kiddo. ‘Closed for Administrative Reconstruction’? The hasty exit? The desk-nin pulling out the old lawbooks? The panicked meetings with the old man? It adds up, kiddo: someone had finally clued in as to that little loophole and what it meant for that big ol’ stack of boozy, signed papers.”

 Iruka stares, unable to speak, temporarily uncertain how to even breathe.

 What.

 What.

 “You knew?” Iruka demands in a shriek. If he were less surprised and less stressed, he might care more about the undignified high-pitched horror to his voice, or the fact that it clearly annoys the dog. “You knew about this mess before? How? Why did you say something? How?”

 “I know everything,” Tsume says, shrugging. “Nah, but seriously, it’s a bit of a story.”

 Iruka tries to consider whether or not he wants to hear this story, but all he can really do in this moment is stare at Inuzuka Tsume in horror and think a demanding, repetitive litany of how the fuck and why the fuck. She knew all along and she never said a thing. What the fuck.

 “Okay, fun, I love this story,” Tsume says, lifting her hands to begin framing her narrative. “So basically it starts in some bar this one time, years and years ago when me ‘n’ my friends were young bitches looking to get drunk and share our woes ‘n’ shit. Maybe start a barfight. It’s probably important to remember here that gettin’ drunkenly hitched was a pretty normal thing by then – not as popular as it’s been more recently, but still a fun thing to do on your nights out, right?”

 Iruka may or may not make a sound like his soul is leaving his body. It feels like it.

 “This time, I’m out with Mai and Kushina – best bitches a gal could ask for – because it’s been a little while since I kicked my clan’s ass to become leader and they’re driving me barkin’ mad with their bullshit. On my ass to get married and wear a shirt and all that boring stuff. Stirring trouble and wailing about it. I just needed to get drunk and bitch, you know?”

 “I… am intimately familiar with that feeling, yes.”

 “Oh, I bet,” Tsume leers, before she leans back and continues. “Anyway, we’re only on our first half-dozen drinks, shoveling food into our mouths, bemoaning the existence of men, when these dickheads decide to grace us with their breathtaking conversation and oh-so-enlightening presence. I dunno, guess we were existin’ too loud, so they need to cut in. You gotta know the type, too. Little silver-spoon-fed clan snots. Snobby noble shitheads. You know, I could go on…

 “So I will. Ceiling-nosing jackasses. A celebratory circle-jerk of mediocre jerks. An uninspired pack of pillocks. Two-legged, loud-mouthed leeches. Really, there’s just so much to say about those fuckers. They’re not at all worth bothering with, so I could stop there...”

 Iruka just stares at her, wondering whether he should take notes or scream. He’s leaning towards the former, actually. He feels as though he’s being enlightened by something by greater and more divine than anything he’s encountered before, and nothing else he could ever learn would ever be so useful in his entire life.

 “But honestly, why would I? Puffed-up roosters who wouldn’t recognize their own fucking reflections. Invertebrate intolerables. Biggety mouth-breathers. Unfortunately senseless fops – smell and common, by the way. Proudly fashionable, overpriced asshats. Flush’n’plush, lightweight guffawers. I could go on and on and on, really…

 “So I’m going to. Bowls of overcooked, stale, spiceless rice. Pedigreed, incapacitated-by-stubbed-toes nitwits. Tediously uninteresting fuckboys from a long, proud, traditional line of privileged, pompous, priggish fuckmen. Bromidic bros. Characterless caricatures. Routinely high-bred, insignificant, self-thought goddamn hotshots. ‘High-quality’ gilded shit variety heirs. The common conceited cat-caller performing its cowardly and pathetic mating flip-flopping. The mixing bowl of self-satisfied entitlement and predictable disappointment, ready to be salted and roasted and left to dry. Standard imitation-”

 Iruka, much to his own unhappiness, has to hold up a hand in what is both a determined halt to the nonsense and a plea for mercy. If he’s enlightened any further, his head might explode.

 “I… get your point,” he says weakly.

 “Yeah? You sure, because, believe me, I can keep going.”

 “I’m sure you can,” Iruka assures her, only a little bit desperately, beating back morbid curiosity with the mental equivalent of a really big stick. “But, unfortunately, I do have other things to do today-”

 Tsume raises a hand to her chest – my, what long claws with bright red nail-polish she has, holy shit – in a mockery of offense. “You mean you didn’t put aside a whole day just to deal with little ol’ me, kiddo? Shame on you. There’s a reason I showed up first thing, y’know.”

 “What-”

 “Anyhoo, we made a really long, super official list of that, but you got shit to do, so we’ll cut it short: entitled fuckwits riding on inheritance who need a mouthful of dirt.

 “Honestly, I’d’ve thought that we would’ve had enough of a reputation by then,” Tsume says, shrugging, grinning a grin that’s waiting for someone to take a sip of their drink so it can drop an inflammatory statement, “but I guess these fresh-faced smug goons hadn’t heard. Or maybe thought they could take us for some reason. If anyone in that bar had been nicer, they probably would’ve stopped them, but… kiddo, if you wanted t’throw down with me, Mai, and Kushina, then you deserved everythin’ you were getting and everyone in that bar knew it.”

 “Sorry,” Iruka says, interrupting. “But just to clarify: is this Saito Mai that we’re talking about?”

 Tsume visibly returns from her memories and says, “Yeah.” Her grin, which is the sort of grin that just dropped an inflammatory statement in the middle of a delicate family dinner, doesn’t budge a bit. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the one we’re both talking about here.”

 The point that Inuzuka Tsume is making here is that while Saito Mai is not at all an uncommon name, there’s really only one Saito Mai who really matters in this mess and they both know it. Unfortunately, though he hasn’t actually officially met her yet, Iruka is familiar with the woman who features in far, far too many wild anecdotes - not only across Konoha, but across countries.

 Saito Mai is many things according to rumor. Iruka has no idea what she looks like, the stories of her beauty and charm are so conflicting that he’s just sort of given up on trying to prepare himself; the only thing he knows for certain is that there’s no preparing for her. She’s actually one of his few, precious allies in this mess, having been spoken for by Naoko – and Iruka knows even less about Madame Mai than he does his second-in-command. Saito Mai is thirty-something years old, clanless, and the recently appointed, youngest official leader in recorded history of one of Konoha’s oldest, deadliest factions:  

 The one commonly known as ‘the Kunoichi Corps’.

 The massive (still very secret) scandal of Saito Mai's succession of the official position preceded the massive (again still fairly secret) scandal of Iruka’s succession of his own positions by less than a month. Old Grand-Madame Momo dumped her nameplate on Saito Mai much the same way that Ex-Headmistress Hitomi and Ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren dumped theirs on Iruka, though Iruka hears that Saito Mai took her positions far more willingly and with genuine happiness.

 (He doesn’t understand that last concept, of course, but that’s what he heard. He’s wondered a few times whether or not Hitomi and Ren actually believe the prophecy or just wanted to follow Grand-Madame Momo’s out-of-all-fucks-to-give escape towards retirement.)

 The Kunoichi Corps is probably Konoha’s at once loosest and most powerful faction, looping into basically every other department; it’s a group that every kunoichi in Konoha has ties to and isn’t actually limited to just female shinobi, though kunoichi are the main members and focus. It’s easier to list what they don’t do rather than everything they accomplish, but essentially: they coordinate the majority of Konoha’s information network and information-based missions. Honeypots are the infamous ones, the most frequent joke, but that’s not the only sort of infiltration by far and not even getting started on the assassination, extortion, body-guarding, message-passing, and general observation happening. They are the spine and mind, if not the near-entire body, of Konoha’s spy network.

 To suddenly push that position on a fairly young, clanless, orphaned, poor, apparently disrespectful and “unprofessional as all get out” single mother with a slew of stand-up-routine-worthy anecdotes to her name was… not something that pleased the Council. That Saito Mai is an elusive, “uncooperative” leader - staying in contact via messages rather than anything in-person (it took Iruka a couple weeks in his position to even learn the extent of what the "leader of lipstick missions" really does) because she's busy doing whatever she damn well pleases without asking anyone's permission - doesn't help. That she's also even more radically reformist than Iruka doesn’t help soothe their tempers either.

 Saito Mai has been at her modern-minded meddling for a while apparently, even before she became Head Kunoichi, and now that Iruka’s given an unintentional go ahead to fuck shit up in the name of progress, the Kunoichi Corps has been… up to stuff. Iruka’s not sure what and not sure he wants to know, but since Saito Mai’s done a damn good job of keeping most of her mess away from him, he doesn’t much care what the hell one of his few Naoko-approved allies is up to in terms of doing her job. Saito’s been an enormous help, actually, especially with implementing those new Internal and External Defense measures, and more besides.

 He’s been trying to get a real meeting with her for weeks, to no avail, in the hopes that (even though she’s one of the few people who might actually be even busier than Iruka) she might actually come away from fieldwork and hands-on help him try to fix, reform, and efficiently coordinate their village’s outdated mess of bureaucracy. (She sent a note that was just a winking smiley face with a tongue out in response to that. Which, Iruka had to admit, was… fair.)

 The other reason that Iruka’s been trying to get a meeting with her, which is also the other reason that Iuka’s all-too familiar with the woman, is that Saito Mai may actually hold the record for marriages in this mess. Sometimes it seems that every other paper is her again (Genma has nothing on her). And as much as Iruka desperately wants to meet Saito Mai, thank her profusely, and then shout at her for the sky-scraping stack of papers on his desk, he kinda hopes she doesn’t come in quite yet because, honestly, they’re still counting the mess she’s left in her wake.

 A mess, of course, that Iruka is slowly growing to fear, because as he’s now coming to realize, there are a number of kunoichi who may or may not have known about this beforehand. It’d be just his luck if Tsume’s story is going where he thinks it’s going. He should had fled after hearing that the “it’s a joke but not really” joke throughout the Kunoichi Corps is that their new leader’s unofficial motto is “fuck the system”.

That wasn't at all a lawful sign (whatever the fuck the law is these days). 

 “Too much,” Iruka says distantly, in response to Tsume’s ridiculous prompt on whether or not he’s familiar with Saito Mai of all people. “And yet not as much as I’d like to be.”

 “Yeah, Mai’s always had that effect on people,” Tsume says dismissively. “Now, where was I before you spaced the fuck out? Ah, right. Young bitches: me, the future Madame Mai, and Kushina-chan are getting drunk in a bar years ago. Not the first or last time we would, but this night was special.

 “Oh, you knew Uzumaki Kushina, right?”

 “Yes,” Iruka says and doesn’t elaborate.

 He doesn’t even have the energy to begin to go there right now.

 Tsume’s eyes are a little too sharp, just like her smile. “Good,” she says. “Anyhoo…

 “So I’m spillin’ my ‘what’s a girl gotta do to coup her clan without needing to get married, maybe I should just hook some rando to shut up the racket’ woes, when one of these guys who’ve been preppin’ to bother us all night shouts out, ‘How drunk would a guy have to be to marry you, Inuzuka?’”

 “Oh no,” Iruka says, reflexively.

 Tsume tips her chin upwards, her teeth glinting dangerously in the light. “Oh yes,” she says. 

 “So, me ‘n’ Mai are ready to fuck their shit up. Me? I’m thinkin’ that I’m gonna make a necklace out of their teeth. Mai was probably gonna make ‘em drink poison or something, then laugh as they puked. But Kushina? Ohhh nooo. Kushina stops us, grabbing us both by the arms and yanking us back into our seats, smiling like sweets wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

 “Y’gotta understand, kiddo, this thing about Uzumaki Kushina and what a genius she was. She stops us and says, ‘Hey, hey, hey. Before you punch their teeth in, how about we find out?’ And, of course, I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ But Mai’s getting this giant grin on her face, like she can already smell the blackmail, and Kushina says, ‘How drunk would a guy have to be to marry you, Tsume? Let’s find out. For science.’ Because, y’know Uzumaki Kushina was all about repeated experimentation for the betterment of womankind like that.

 “So instead of ripping their teeth out and making them puke, we all puff our cleavage up a bit and saunter over there, armed with some hard rounds and all our feminine wiles. Their faces, by the way, were gold. I thought their eyes were gonna pop out or they’d choke on their spit. They weren’t ready for any of us in the slightest, kiddo. I mean, I couldn’t flirt for shit then, and neither could Kushina, but all we had to do was mimic Mai who knew exactly what to do and coo at their ability to just drink so much booze. Ooh, aren’t they tough?!

 “Let me tell you, Umino, it is pathetically easy to get clan snobs drunk – a lesson I learned as a little girl that has served me so well in politics, you wouldn’t even believe. You’re an Academy teacher, so you’re probably pretty decent, and fuck, it’s just sad. But, to be fair, even if they had your kind’s liver, they still would’ve been fucked. I’m an Inuzuka, Kushina was Kushina, and Mai did this shit professionally. We were drinking ‘n’ flirting them under the table while the night was still young. And, let me tell you, there is something very satisfying about having a desperately single noble shit croon bad poetry and fawn over how beautiful your sharp teeth are. Sad, y’know, but satisfying.

 “I’m sure you can guess how the rest of that night went, kiddo, so let’s skip ahead a bit. This might have been the first time me and my bitches pulled that embarrassment trick on hapless morons, but it wasn’t the last. Honestly, it became a bit of a game to us. To see who we could pull and how. We were careful with the contracts, of course, because between me, Mai, and Kushina, we knew better than to sign any sort of document to give the shits we were pulling any leverage over us instead of the other way around, but… I’m not sure we ever considered how real they might be until I got into a fight with Mai.

 “See, Kushina wasn’t all that into playing the game, honestly, but she loved watching. We weren’t all that close, me ‘n’ her. The real battle was between me ‘n’ Mai, and that bitch just wouldn’t believe that I’d managed to pull this one mark. It was a competition; a rivalry; a matter of goddamn pride. So I was like, ‘Fuck you, nobody calls Inuzuka Tsume a fucking liar,’ and marched right on in to the Love Chapel to get the papers to prove I did the impossible. Except, you know, fucking bureaucracy, I ended up having to go into the Tower and, before I knew it, I had a stack of papers in my hand of apparently dubious legality. I’m like, ‘This is fucked and I’m getting to the bottom of it.’ So I call in Mai, who has to eat her fucking words first because I did too hook Hy-…

 “Uh, yeah. Anyhoo, we go hunting for answers. We found what you found – only, y’know, like nearly twenty years earlier. I look at Mai and Mai looks at me, and then we both sprint like there’s no fucking tomorrow for Kushina because we had a problem.

 “A problem and a great, glorious, terrible fucking idea.

 “I’m sure you’ve noticed, kiddo, that there’s a very… specific type of spouse in that stack of papers of mine,” Tsume drawls – eyes sharp, smile sharper. “In Mai’s too, though she was way less discerning than I was. Carefully chosen snots of all sorts. You’ve gotta tell me her final count in the end. She’s totally refused to tell me as we’ve grown apart over the years. Each doin’ our own thing, though still stickin’ to our plot.”

 “…P…lot?” Iruka repeats weakly.

 Inuzuka Tsume grins the grin of a predator that’s spent a very, very long time fencing in this particular piece of prey and is watching her prey realize what’s happening.

 “To take over Konoha, of fucking course.”

 Now. Now is when Iruka finally feels his soul leave his body. Or at least all the blood leave his face. This is exactly what he’s been afraid of since discovering this situation, and it’s a dark day to think this is the benign situation. Where the coup is coming from inside Konoha instead of led by foreign countries.

 “It’s all fun and games,” Tsume says gleefully, “until someone finally realizes the New Kunoichi Corps has been carefully picking targets and carefully wording contracts for years. And yeah, maybe most of them won’t turn out all that legal in the end, because politics and security, but we’re ready to go to court. The Hokage, the Council, and the clans are gonna want this handled very discreetly. Just imagine what some of these snobs are gonna give to make this problem just go away.”

 It’s not actually possible for Iruka to pale any further, but he would if he could, because he knows exactly how much he’d give to make this problem just go away. That’s… that’s a lot of power. That’s a whole lot of blackmail and extortion material on a lot of influential people. A lot of a lot.

 Saito Mai is a spymaster, so this isn’t really surprising, but… she’s been holding out on him. Iruka is going to have fucking words with… well, if he can get his hands on Saito Mai, he’ll be having words with her.

 If he could bring people back from the dead, after the Nidaime (to save him from this disaster), he’d definitely bring back Uzumaki Kushina to have words with her too.

 As it is, it seems that he’ll have to be having words with Inuzuka Tsume alone for now.

 Unfortunately, that’s a really fast pace to losing teeth.

 Even more unfortunately, Iruka’s not sure he cares at the moment.

 “…Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Iruka says finally, aghast.

 “Oh, kiddo,” Inuzuka Tsume says, still leaning back in her seat, with a dog near the size of a horse at her feet. “We knew exactly what we were doing. At least, y’know, after we caught on. We’re actually the reason this whole incident isn’t a total catastrophe. I mean, Mai’s a meddlesome bitch, so you probably have a few international mishaps headed your way, but as a whole… honestly, Umino, it could have been so much worse.”

 “Don’t say that. If you just cursed us, I will make your every attempt to touch any paperwork again a waking nightmare,” Iruka promises darkly. Then he puts his head in his hands and says very feelingly, “Fuck.”

 “I did try to come t’you first thing,” Tsume says unsympathetically. “Tsk, tsk, Umino.”

 Iruka doesn’t think he can make any sounds besides a high-pitched shriek at the moment, so he doesn’t say anything at all. So much of the past few weeks is slotting into place. Just… so much.

 “Mai told me that when I finally did get to you, I should tell you that the New Kunoichi Corps formally offers an alliance to the New Order of Desk Shinobi,” Tsume drawls, sounding uninterested. “You’ve been doing great so far, but we have a whole lot of plans finally getting underway that we definitely need to fill you in on to keep things on track and get some other shit started.”

 “…I’m part of a conspiracy,” Iruka groans.

 “Well… I guess.”

 Iruka finally pulls his face from his hands as a thought hits him. “Did Hatake know about this?” he snarls.

 Tsume actually looks startled. “What? Kakashi?” Then she laughs very loudly. “Hah, fuck no. His momma, and I think his momma’s momma too, actually laid a lot of our path, but nah. He doesn’t know shit. I barely know shit, being a clan head and kinda compromised. The New Kunoichi Corps was actually first started, from all but scratch, by Mai herself… and Kushina, of course.”

 Tsume brings her fingers to her lips, kisses them, and raises her hand to the ceiling. “Rest in peace, you foxy lunatic,” she says, before bringing her hand back down. “You’ve seen some of the results of Kushina’s masterful meddling firsthand. That prophecy of yours?”

 “…No.”

 “Yeah, I’m ‘fraid. That was her work. Embarrassingly, Mai only found the notes after it happened, of course, so we had no clue that would happen, but we’re not arguing with the results. Headmaster Head Desk-Shinobi Umino Iruka is, fucking astoundingly, one of the best things to happen to our plotting.

 “Oh, hey, is lil’ Kakashi-kun here? I was wanting to see him. I haven’t really gotten to talk to him in ages. His momma was my mentor, you know, a lot fucking time ago, and I haven’t been fucking with him enough to honor her memory. Been so busy, you know? It’s tough bein’ a single mom.”

 “And apparently being part of a coup,” Iruka says bitterly. “We’re all going to die.”

 “Nah, we don’t want to take over the village like that. Just… nudge those old stodges into something a little more modern and… sustainable, you know?”

 Unfortunately, Iruka actually does understand. It makes a lot of sense.

 “So… Kakashi?” Tsume prompts.

 “Out training with his team.”

 “Huh, I guess they can’t babysit you all the time. Not that you need it, eh, Umino? I hear from Mai that you can take care of yourself surprisingly well.”

 “This entire thing,” Iruka says, ignoring that remark about a thing he’s been trying not to think about. Saito Mai has no business spying on his budget problem or his personal life. “This entire thing has been part of a plot to reform Konoha by Saito Mai’s conspiracy group?”

 Tsume laughs. “No way! Nah, of course not. That’d be fucking ridiculous.”

 Iruka stares, disbelieving.

 “That’s only a little bit. Most of it’s really just drunk idiots having fun.”

 “Oh…” Iruka says, wondering if he sounds as dead inside as he feels. “That’s good to know.”

 “Which is why I’ve gotta ask, why was Shibi out there? I love the guy, I really do, but Aburame Shibi is not, you’ve gotta fucking admit, that type of person. At least, I’ve never seen him that drunk.”  

 Finally.

 Finally, finally, finally a speck of something resembling life return to Iruka.

 “That’s funny,” Iruka hears himself saying distantly. “Because you’re married to him.”

 Tsume pauses, her eyes going wide, her mouth dropping open. For a moment, there is no sound but… Tsume’s dog making a sound that is definitely the dog version of a giggle. Hearing a giant beast like that make a doggy giggle is something Iruka can safely say he never expected to experience.

 “I… don’t remember that one,” Tsume says finally.

 “Oh?”

 “MAI, YOU BITCH,” Tsume shouts suddenly, leaping to her feet, as though Saito Mai is listening in on this conversation and Tsume is going to go kick her ass. “THAT’S NOT FUNNY.”

 Her dog, interestingly, doesn’t bother to move. It looks up, but it doesn’t get up.

 Iruka jumps to his feet as well, bellowing in his best teacher-voice, “INUZUKA-SAN, SIT DOWN.”

 Tsume pauses on the way to the door, frozen again, then tosses back her hair and gives Iruka a winning grin that he doesn’t buy for an instant. Mostly because he last saw that grin on Genma trying to talk himself out of his own mess, then on Naruto trying to pretend he hadn’t pranked Naoko having definitely picked that grin from watching Genma during the assassin’s last visit to the department.

 There is a note on Iruka’s TO DO list that says Kill Genma for that. He’s going to have Kakashi do it, as he’s sure the Copy-nin will be all too willing. (Because if there’s anyone who is just not allowed to pick up anymore honeypot tricks, it’s all of Team Seven, but especially Naruto.)

 “Sorry, Umino,” she says. “But Mai’s got a fucked sense of humor. Aburame Shibi’s the one man I can tolerate as a friend, or… y’know… period, so if she’s fucked that up for laughs, she’s gonna die.”

 “No, I need her because you apparently decided to involve me in a goddamn government coup!” Iruka shouts. “You sit back down! I’m going to call him in here and we’re going to resolve at least ONE SET OF PAPERS IN THIS STACK!

 “AND THEN YOU’RE GOING TO GO GET SAITO FUCKING MAI AND TELL HER THAT I HAVE WORDS FOR HER. AND THEN WE UNRAVEL ALL OF YOUR INTENTIONAL MESS TOGETHER, BECAUSE I’M NOT TACKLING YOUR FUCKING PLOTTING BY MYSELF. YOU MADE THE MESS, YOU’RE GOING TO PICK IT UP OR SO FUCKING HELP ME.”

 Iruka is breathing heavily by the end of this short tirade. Inuzuka Tsume is staring at him, eyebrows raised, not looking particularly impressed, and Iruka takes in a deep breath. If this is how he dies, shouting at Inuzuka Tsume, then so be it.

 About goddamn time.

 “…That’s fair,” Tsume says.

 “Oh,” Iruka says, sinking back into his seat. “…Good.”

 And with that, he presses the button on his desk to call Naoko back into his office. She opens the door about ten seconds later, warily peering in, just as Tsume has taken her seat again. Iruka tells her to ask Aburame Shibi to come in and she bows before disappearing back through the doorway. Twenty seconds later, Aburame Shibi glides into the room and, after repositioning it from where it was used as Tsume’s footrest, sinks gracefully into the other free seat in front of Iruka’s desk.

 “Thank you for coming,” Iruka manages, after several awkward seconds of silence.

 Aburame Shibi inclines his nod in acknowledgement.

 After several more seconds of silence, the man speaks up, “Why have I been called here?”

 “Ah,” Iruka says, glancing Tsume, who is looking determinedly towards a wall. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors surrounding the Civil Partnerships Department, and-”

 “I have not.”

 Tsume’s eyes go wide, snapping away from the wall, and Iruka just… stares.

 “I do not concern myself with idle gossip,” Shibi says.

 Iruka stares a little longer, then in the silence that continues, he hears something inside him snap.

 “There’s an issue with both our marriage laws and our culture in regards to the Love Chapel,” Iruka says, as calmly as he can for someone who’s breaking inside. “Congratulations, you and Inuzuka-san are married. What would you like to do to resolve this issue?”

 After several more seconds of silence, Aburame Shibi finally says, “I believe I would like an annulment. I was under the impression that had been a joke, but I realize now I should have known better than to trust the word of Tsume’s friends.” Then, without a pause, continues, “My most pressing concern is whether or not this will affect the upcoming marriage and clan-alliance contracts between my niece and Tsume’s daughter. I have made many enemies acquiring the services of a prestigious florist.”

 Iruka is relieved beyond belief. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and by the look on her face, neither does Inuzuka Tsume. The dog, though… the massive, deadly, nin-dog giggles again.

 “You learn you’re married to me and your biggest concern is for a fucking florist?” Tsume demands.

 “They are in high-demand and there are few florists who can cater both to my clan’s insects and your clan’s sense of smell,” Shibi says evenly, his expression unreadable. “There is also the matter of our clan elders, but I will need to know as soon as possible whether or not the affair will continue, as I have a number of deposits to manage.”

 Tsume here looks like she wants to continue being furious, but… “Oh shit, you’re right.”

 “I am always right.”

 “I’ve already paid the caterer, fuck.”

 “Indeed.”

 “That fucker is expensive as shit,” Tsume says, before she whirls on Iruka. “Is there gonna be a problem?”

 “If you sign the papers for an annulment, then no.”

 “Where the fuck do I sign?”

 Iruka gets the appropriate papers and watches carefully as Inuzuka Tsume and Aburame Shibi pass them back and forth, signing where appropriate. Aburame Shibi, wonderfully, doesn’t have any other disastrous marriages. Inuzuka Tsume, however… one down, a lot to go.

 “Will any members of our clan be informed of us?” Shibi asks.

 “He means ‘are you gonna tell our kids’?” Tsume says. “Because I get enough shit trying to wrangle Hana and Kiba as it is, and if they learn of this, I’m never gonna be able to get them to do anything ever again.”

 “I concur,” Shibi says.

 Iruka takes a moment to squint at Shibi, because… Shino, really? Well, maybe. He’ll believe it.

 “Absolutely not,” Iruka assures them.

 “Excellent,” Shibi says. “Is there anything else? I have a meeting with the venue director.”

 “Shit! Is that today?”

 “Yes.” 

 “Fuck, alright, I’ll go kidnap the décor people. Meet you there… when?”

 “Noon.”

 “Yeah, alright,” Inuzuka Tsume says, popping her shoulders and neck, “I can do noon. Fucking weddings.”

 Aburame Shibi inclines his head, then does so again to Iruka. “Thank you for your assistance and understanding, Umino-san.”

 “No problem,” Iruka says reflexively, then, “Er, you’re welcome.”

  With the immediate issue at hand solved, Aburame Shibi stands and says, “Is there anything else that requires my presence?”

 “Uh, no.”

 “Yo, am I done too?”

 Iruka thinks about whether or not he wants Inuzuka Tsume out of his sight at the moment. Before, he had nothing but fear for her. Now, while he still has plenty of fear of her, along with new fear for entirely new and different reasons, there’s a new feeling surrounding her that reminds him of no one besides her rowdy son. Even though Iruka definitely wouldn’t have thought Inuzuka Kiba the sort to start conspiracies and plot social-political coups.

 Oh god, he hopes Kiba never takes it into his head to try.

 “I… yes,” Iruka decides on finally. “I only have… one more question for you.”

 “Yeah? Go for it, kiddo.”

 Iruka looks Inuzuka Tsume dead in the eye, musters whatever humanity is left in his soul, and says, “Are you and Saito Mai responsible for the… case of Mitarashi Anko?”

 Tsume takes a few seconds to think about it, then grins one of those grins that Iruka is definitely going to outlaw. “I have no fucking clue,” she says happily. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. But you know, I’m a betting woman at heart -”

 “I can unfortunately vouch for this,” Aburame Shibi says.

 “- and I’m gonna go with: hell, yeah, Mai is.” Tsume's voice is undeniably fond. “That meddlin’ bitch.”

 Iruka has never wanted to meet Saito Mai less and never needed to more.

 “…Thank you for your time,” he says.

 “Yeah, yeah. I’ll see you ‘n’ Mai later to get started on that big ol’ stack of boozy papers, whenever that meddlin’ bitch finally decides to roll back into town. I’ll give her a shout for you, if you like?”

 “Please.”

 “Cool. Alright. C’mon, Shibi, let’s go toss some wedding planners into a dumpster again.”

 “Please do not,” Aburame Shibi says, but follows Inuzuka Tsume out of the room nevertheless, giving Iruka a short bow as he goes. Tsume doesn’t bow, of course, and just swaggers out. And the dog, last but not least, gets to its massive paws with a mighty yawn and follows the Inuzuka and Aburame Clan Heads out of the room.

 “Hey, Umino!” Tsume shouts from just outside the door.

 Iruka takes a deep breath. “WHAT?”

 “Welcome to the club!”

 And with that parting remark and an echoing cackle, Inuzuka Tsume is gone. For now. 

Chapter Text

 Iruka is left alone in his office with a near-unsolvable stack of papers with Inuzuka Tsume’s name on them and a powerful need to go missing-nin and flee to Suna. Unfortunately, before he can work up the nerve to open the window and leap out to freedom, Naoko comes back in. So close… and yet so far.

 “Umino-san?” she says, shutting the door carefully behind her. She sounds like his late mother, who essentially existed in a constant state of torn between genuine concern for his health and hoping against past experiences that he didn’t eat dirt on a dare because she just doesn’t want the shame of having a son who’d do that. “Is something wrong?”

 Iruka opens his mouth to reply and no sound comes out.

 “Is something… more wrong than usual?” Naoko amends, coming into the room.

 “Y…es,” Iruka says, voice breaking in the middle. Then he shakes his head, clearing his mind, and then clears his throat. “I’ll… tell you about it later. Uh, make a note. In an hour, maybe? I need… oh my god, I need some air.”

 Iruka puts his head back in his hands where he’s temporarily safe from conspiracies, coups, his responsibilities as Head Desk-Shinobi of the New Order of Desk-Shinobi, and the New Kunoichi Corps.

 “Then… I suppose now might not be a good time to remind you that after your next appointment, which you were certain would take no more than fifteen minutes -”

 Iruka has no idea how he was ever certain of anything anymore.

 “- you’re due to attend Mori Hanako and Taiki’s surprise anniversary party.”

 Regretfully pulling his face from his hands yet again, Iruka looks wide-eyed towards his second.

 “That’s today?”

 “Yes, Umino-san. You promised you’d attend.”  

 “Fuck,” Iruka breathes. “When did I lose my mind enough to do that?”

 “Yesterday, in an effort to get Hatake-san to go away while you dealt with ‘the budget’.”

 “Oh.”

 Now that’s Iruka being forced to remember, he does recall shouting something or rather at Kakashi in an effort to hide the truth behind his battle with Konoha’s budget. A truth which he’s going to need help with soon and should probably consider bringing more people into if he wants to keep his mission hidden for a while longer and not die in the meanwhile. He’s been very risky with it so far.

 Saito Mai and company are… a distressingly appealing prospect for help.

 Is he that desperate?

 No, not quite yet. He’ll probably be after today is over, but not quite yet. It’s only a dozen hours or so, but still not yet. His pride is hanging by a thread as it is and he needs those dozen hours. Not yet. He still has his pride for a while longer.

 “I’m going missing-nin and running away to Suna,” Iruka announces, tucking Tsume’s papers neatly away for the next fool conned into this position. “I’m sorry, Naoko,” he continues, as he stands and starts to make his way over to the window so he can open it and leap out. “It was nice knowing you, but I’m going somewhere infinitely nicer than here and I shan’t ever be back. Goodbye.”

 Naoko takes several brisk steps and slams her clipboard into his chest like a wall before he can get far.

 “No, you’re not,” she says flatly.

 “Yes, I am,” Iruka counters, though he doesn’t push against the iron bar of Naoko’s arm.

 The iron bar of Naoko’s arm, however, pushes back against him. Clutching her clipboard in a white-knuckled fist, she shoves him back towards his desk and back into his seat.

 “That is no way for the leader I chose to follow to behave,” Naoko says, her voice hard. Her expression is nothing less than wintery. “The woes and mistakes of our ancestors have arisen stronger than ever before and you cannot yield. You chose to be our Chosen One, Umino Iruka. You chose to be desk-shinobi against our every attempt to send you away and if this is your forging, then you must bear it, for desk-shinobi were made above all else to endure.”

 Iruka stares up at her with wide eyes. “I…”

 “Did you give up in your first week as Head Desk-Shinobi,” Naoko demands, “when the Research and Development Department resisted, with verbal outrage and some violence, the implementation of the new Health and Safety Regulations and the creation of a Health and Safety Committee?”

 “…No,” Iruka admits grudgingly.

 He stared at them aghast for five minutes, before shouting them down and – in an action that Iruka will maintain was completely necessary in every way – whacking the Head Researcher in the face with his own clipboard, breaking it and the man’s nose in the process. Things were simpler then, back in his earliest days of being Head Desk-Shinobi, before the discovery. It was a happier time.

 “Did Head Desk-Shinobi Kobayashi Ren give up when the origami of Nohara Rin had defeated his entire department and threatened to turn all his desk-shinobi mad from frustration?” Naoko demands.

 A feral sort of glint in her eye reminds him that it wasn’t so long ago that this happened, and she was there at the time to see and experience the trial of Nohara Rin for herself. (Someone explained to him what all that unfolded paper, mounted like hunting trophies, in the secret breakroom was about after he became Head Desk-Shinobi. He didn’t know what to think at first, but then Kakashi made a few comments in passing and now Iruka still doesn’t know what to think but in a different way.)

 “No,” Iruka admits, before what she said makes it all the way through and has to pause. “Wait, Ren’s family name is Kobayashi?”

 He didn’t know that the man even had a family name. Hearing that he does is just strange – it doesn’t sound right. It’s very important that he learn more of this, but Naoko ignores his silly question and forges onward. Her eyes are blazing and her voice is iron.

 “Did the first Head Desk-Shinobi, Senju Tobirama, the future Nidaime Hokage of Konohagakure," she demands, "give up when he discovered that his desk-shinobi had accidentally been spelling ‘Uchiha’ wrong for five whole years into Konoha’s existence, and that all of the offending paperwork had to be completely rewritten lest the village break into feuding between clans?”

 Iruka opens his mouth to answer, but again, no sound comes out. His voice has been momentarily stolen from him by the sheer horror of the situation Naoko is laying out in front of him.

 “…Yes?” Iruka tries.

 Because good fucking gods, that would be so much work.

 Naoko slams her clipboard down on his desk, cracking the wood of the desk but somehow not the clipboard. It’s kind of terrifying, actually. Iruka would give anything to know how she’s doing it.

 “NO,” Naoko snarls. “He didn’t. He did his job and endured it.”

 Yes, alright, but that was because he was Senju Tobirama. The brother of the Shodaime, Senju Hashirama. The founder of the Academy and first Headmaster. The founder and first leader of the desk-shinobi, who to this day have what’s essentially a shrine to him in their secret breakroom. Umino Iruka is not, by any stretch of the imagination, comparable to the goddamn Nidaime.

 He’s not actually sure that even the late Nidaime could handle the New Kunoichi Corps. Iruka definitely doesn’t have a clue how he’s supposed to deal with them.

 “What are you?” Naoko demands.

 Iruka sighs and answers, “Desk-shinobi.”

 His childhood self would be fucking appalled with him for growing up to accidentally fall into being one of those desk-chained shinobi who rarely, if ever, left the village. Iruka trains now partly out of habit, but mostly just to relieve his mountains of stress. He hasn’t had an actual mission for months now. His teaching job is apparently on indefinite hold. It’s pretty much just been one ongoing crisis after another where Iruka must hold the village together essentially – potentially literally at times – with a stapler and tape, and he can probably expect the ongoing crisis to last forever.

 “And what do we do?” Naoko asks.

 “Endure,” Iruka says obediently.

 And… he finds himself somehow… somewhat… buoyed by this exchange? Shouting the problem away has worked in the past, he can always recruit outside help for impossible problems, and vaguely similar, unbelievably ridiculous, clan-rousing shit like this has apparently happened before and the village is still mostly standing. For a given value of standing, anyway. Things might seem hopeless now, but the desk-shinobi have endured a lot of the ongoing crisis that is Konohagakure as it is.

 It could even be imagined that the desk-shinobi have slowly been prepared for this, over a long, long time. It’s a horrible thought, yet a strangely comforting one nevertheless.

 Naoko nods approvingly at him, like she’s his late mother having just gotten a promise out of him that he will never again try to eat dirt or rocks or anything of the like ever again – yes, even if dared. Naoko brings her clipboard off the desk to hold it in the vicinity of her chest again and straightens once more. Her long, brown hair is still held impeccably back in a bun, not a hair out of place, still home to two sharp pencils ready for use at any moment. Her expression gives nothing away.

 “Then I am pleased to inform you that your next appointment is waiting for you,” Naoko reports primly. “And once you are finished with them, should you still not see fit to share whatever horror has occurred in this room, you must leave for your party.”

 Iruka can feel his face crumple. “Oh… right.”

 “Yes,” Naoko agrees. 

 With a heavy sigh and a heavier heart, Iruka raises his hand to pinch at the scar over the bridge of his nose again. “Alright,” he says, determined and firm, because it’s either that or cry. “Let’s start with getting today fucking over with, then.” He can handle one nightmare; all he has to do is handle just one nightmare… several times in a row. “Send ‘em in, please, Naoko.”

 Naoko nods and leaves the room to do just that.

 And, with another sigh, Iruka puts aside the personified disaster of Inuzuka Tsume and gets up to pick up the cardboard box sitting on one of his many Head Desk-Shinobi heirloom filing cabinets. (Desk-shinobi legend says that the Shodaime made these cabinets for his brother himself as some sort of belated apology gift. They're very nice filing cabinets that absolutely don’t deserve the horrors they contain.)

 It’s not a large or heavy box, just large enough to fit a couple encyclopedias worth of papers, and Iruka can’t tell whether or not he’s annoyed that two people are responsible for so many papers or grateful that these papers only apply to two particular people. He settles on being annoyed, just in case, as he sets the box down on his desk and flops back into his chair, broodingly spinning himself about a few times and stretching the kinks out of his neck again.

 He snorts with amusement, on one of his slow chair rotations, as he notices that one of his desk-shinobi subordinates has lovingly inscribed an identifying label on the side of the cardboard box. Iruka recognizes it as Midori’s writing, but decides not to reprimand his desk-shinobi subordinate for the unprofessional title. If that’s how she’s coping with this, fine. It’s better than Kenta’s habit of screaming and throwing himself out windows to go hide inside someone’s chimney for an hour or two.

 Konoha Security's Gate-Keepers’ Insecurity Finders-Keepers Binder. 

 Nice.

 He doesn't really get it, but nice.

 Iruka sighs again, leaning back into his seat and folding his hands over his stomach. He finds himself staring aimlessly at the back wall of his office, because it’s better than endless mental and actual screaming over the New Kunoichi Corps. Marginally, at least. He needs to focus on something else for now, try to process in the background of his mind for now, and then he can go sob onto Naoko later.

 Hmm. Iruka realizes that he still hasn’t done anything about the various genin mission reports his predecessor mounted on the walls as decoration. They're completely mundane genin-level E-rank, D-rank filler, and perhaps low C-rank missions all of them – and while Iruka was originally too busy to bother redecorating, having preferred being out and about on the department floor, he’s considering making the time. Of course, really making this office his own by changing the decoration would be to officially admit to himself (despite months of work, suffering, and obvious dedication) that he’s actually doing this job, so he’s wary, but… he’s still considering at least removing the mounted old reports, even if he doesn't replace them. 

 They look like some sort of strange modern art display. Iruka doesn't actually mind that appearance or style, really, it’s just… there is, in hindsight, a very twisted sort of humor in having old Team Seven reports displayed like trophies in the Head Desk-Shinobi office. Like a marker of victory, survival, or some desk-shinobi prowess combination of the two. Like a horrid reminder of both how much simpler things were and the decades of disastrous paperwork that Iruka has yet to experience for himself should he dare to remain. Iruka doesn't care how it looks, he just doesn't know if he likes having this reminder mounted on his office walls like art. 

 There are nine of them in total. 

 Firstly, there’s a grocery-run report written on a take-out menu. The words are haphazardly scribbled in between the entrées and appetizers like the genin wrote it at a restaurant at the very last minute. The report that's been unfolded and mounted on the wall is… mostly coherent, just difficult to follow from one fold-out page to another, all the way from the drinks to the desserts. The coherency issue is due to the occasional word being smudged under terrible curry stains; it’s probably coherent under the food stains and terrible cursive handwriting.

 Secondly, there’s a long report written on normal paper, again haphazardly scribbled, which is just completely incomprehensible. Utter gibberish… but with purpose. It’s written in several different languages and several different codes, all of which seem intensely complex, and it’s clear that the author is either a genius, indecisive, or spontaneously and repeatedly forgot how they were communicating. The language and code change every single sentence, sometimes several times a sentence, sometimes mid-word, and there are strange characters and symbols that Iruka doesn’t even recognize but that clearly mean something in their various alien systems. 

 It’s a disaster, but it looks like a priceless historical artifact. 

 If there weren’t a few vaguely recognizable patterns here and there, Iruka would swear that someone just tossed a whole bunch of letters, languages, symbols, and numbers into a blender, before spooning the mess onto a report and insisting it meant something. Iruka couldn’t even begin to guess what the mission was, where it was, when it was, who went on it, or what any singular word on it actually means.

 Thirdly, there's a... novella? Unlike the previous two disastrous entries, the mission report is painstakingly neat, appallingly long, and appears to have been written in the style of an actual book manuscript - complete with a title page, dedications, and a table of contents with chapter titles. It's the only report not mounted on the wall, but instead displayed with pride on a stand in the center of one of the bookcases. It's also signed, although Iruka can't make out the name in that signature between all the loopy flourishes. (It's a pretty signature, Iruka will admit, whoever the name and report belongs to.)

 Iruka's actually sort of curious about this one; he's been too busy to do much leisure reading for the past few months, but the reviews from the desk-shinobi (and apparently from the Sandaime Hokage) attached to "The Mystery of the Mist-nin's Mistress" all say it's very good (five stars and an incredible twist ending, according to Saturobi Hiruzen, alongside many other notable figures in Konoha’s administration). It's on Iruka's reading list now for when he feels like reading a proper book again.

 This is sadly not the strangest book recommendation Iruka has ever received. Some of his Academy colleagues used to read some really weird shit, which is partly why Iruka thought they were making the whole feud thing up. 

 Fourthly, there's a mission report about painting the walls of some old shinobi's booby-trapped house (unfortunately this is not an unusual genin mission at all) and it creeps Iruka the heck out (for reasons unrelated to the booby traps). The only thing potentially "wrong" with this report is the fact that it's covered in adorable doodles of toads (seriously: unbearably cute toads; Iruka never knew toads could be so cute), some frighteningly complex seal work designs that Iruka's pretty sure are intended to tear a hole in space-time either to create a functional time loop or to reverse aging (one or the other; but tearing the space-time hole is a definite), and many, many, many hearts with the name Mister Uzumaki Minato written inside them.

 On one hand, it's all little too normal for Iruka's peace of mind. Besides the drawings, of which there are admittedly many, the report doesn’t seem at all worthy of Team Seven’s supposed “curse” that Iruka accidentally ended. On the other hand, it’s probably not at all what it seems and Iruka doesn't want to know what sort of mind belongs to the genin who was doodling world-rending fuinjutsu on the same paper they were drawing cute toads in funny hats. 

 (The truth of the other hand is that Iruka is pretty sure he knows exactly who the paper belonged to and he doesn't want to think about the implications of heritage there. Iruka makes a mental note to find Naruto a sealing teacher, because he’ll almost certainly be incredible at it if legacy and creativity and power are any indication; then he makes a second mental note to point the inevitable destruction far, far away from his administration buildings and Konoha in general. Kakashi seems like a good target.) 

 Fifthly… for the fifth mission report displayed in Iruka’s office… there's a poem. It's terrible. Like, it's by far the worst piece of poetry that Iruka has ever read in his life, although he'll admit that he knows next to nothing about poetry, doesn't really read poetry, and that there's probably a whole bunch of deeper meaning that someone who doesn't appreciate poetry can't understand and enjoy. (He'll admit it; he's not sure he believes it, but he'll admit the possibility exists the poem might be some measure of good by some more… enlightened person’s standards. Different definitions of “good” and “enlightened” may apply.)

 Iruka's tried to understand what the mission contained within the poem was, since it's apparently an actual mission report, but he had to give up after needing the thick dictionary – the one with all the old, obscure words that one person maybe two-hundred years ago used once in a blue moon – seven times in a sentence eight words long. As far as Iruka's half-read, unimaginative interpretation of the poem goes: either they went to Ame or the moon, they fought a rabbit or an undead missing-nin, and there may or may not have been a tree with magic fruit and reincarnation at some point. So... that.

 While Iruka will admit he doesn't know poetry, it's indisputably a terrible mission report. It is also signed for some reason. By someone named Wakahisa. Iruka’s never heard of them and would like it to stay that way; he would like never to meet this poet.

 Sixthly, there's a script. Someone actually wrote an actual stage-play script as a report, all for a mission about picking some rare plant that only grows in the Forest of Death (which is actually, both sadly and hilariously, completely normal business for Konoha-nin, who know the place and all its ins and outs, and gets amazing reactions out of foreign shinobi who haven't grown up next to the Shodaime's deadly garden). The play delves into the personas people wear for others and to cope in their lives, the strain of any and all relationships built without understanding, and the way the fear and wildness of the woods can strip people down to their most vulnerable… at least, according to the production program attached to the script.

 It's actually... surpsingly entertaining? Also a musical? With score sheets and lyrics and everything? It's very dramatic but heartfelt, tragic yet humorous, a true coming of age story and exploration of freedom, understanding, and love of self, and all built of a standard and unremarkable mission. At least, that’s what Iruka got from reading part of the script itself. He probably would have read all of it, since it was quite captivating, but then he had to run off to put out a literal fire Sasuke “accidentally” started while shredding paper and bickering with his teammates.

 Apparently, the Starlight Theatre out by the Akimichi Compound is doing a revival of the original show soon; and everyone assures him it’s much better to see it unspoiled and then read and reflect afterward. Naoko asked him if he wanted tickets, since she knew people who knew people, but Hitomi and Ren have already offered Iruka use of their season pass since they've seen it fourteen times over the past couple decades. They have box seats and it looks like Iruka and Kakashi are going to take the current Team Seven to the show, because per the Copy-nin: "it's an important part of Konoha culture, Iruka-sensei, and someone else is paying".

 Iruka’s sort of looking forward to it.    

 Seventhly, there's another of Nohara Rin's unfolded origami mission reports. The report itself is about a message-run between Konohagakure and a Konoha outpost in a civilian village, which is standard enough and not especially noteworthy. Iruka still doesn't really understand what the whole origami craze thing was about – it was huge back in the day it seems – but apparently this report is the only one that Ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren ever managed to "solve" himself. Thus, what was once a paper turtle, been mounted in a gilded frame accordingly. 

 Eighthly, there's a mission report from Kakashi that's been mounted on the wall... in a sealed case... with an official-looking, R&D-level warning label stamped on it with what looks to have been an alarming and relatable amount of fury and/or fear. Naoko, looking very pale and unhappy about it, told him that he could read it if he so dared, but that she wouldn't recommend it. Nor would she explain the heart of the issue, as she had to run off to prevent a over-worked desk-shinobi from throwing a filing cabinet through the floor and the Copy-nin had been right there to explain himself.

 Unfortunately, Kakashi's only comment and explanation was to look very sheepish and say, "Maah, I used to write very boring reports, you know." Iruka doesn't know, actually, since getting Kakashi to hand his written mission reports in is always like a mission by itself and they are many things but boring isn’t one of them. Iruka's decided not to risk it for now; he'll find out the truth someday, but not yet.  

 Ninthly, there's... well... it's a perfectly ordinary genin report about a perfectly ordinary mission delivering supplies to an outpost during the Third Shinobi War. Nothing went wrong on the mission itself or on the way back. It's just that, for some reason that is not included much less hinted at in the report itself, the paper is covered in dog paw-prints made in what looks like blood, soy sauce, and orange jelly. Iruka has decided, firmly, that he doesn't want to know how this happened ever. 

 He just doesn’t. He has a tingling feeling about it.

Chapter Text

 And on the edges of that foreboding, tingling feeling comes another one – more immediate, less unknown. The door to Iruka’s office is too well-made and too well-maintained to creak or scratch loudly, but there’s still a sound… and a glow of light, from one of the antique bulbs set up to alert the Head Desk-Shinobi that someone’s approaching. Iruka doesn’t bother to turn away from the back wall quite yet, still contemplating what he’d replace the mounted mission reports with.

 Something painted perhaps? Of a painfully inane subject like a bouquet of flowers? Maybe he can commission an artistically inclined member of the New Kunoichi Corps to have the painted bouquet arranged to have a special meaning in one of their codes? He’s feeling personally partial to: “Go fuck yourself.” His predecessors, he’s sure, would approve.

 Or perhaps he should just go with some well-drawn maps of the Elemental Countries. It would be foolish to put up perfectly accurate, extremely detailed maps from Konoha’s intelligence for anyone to see, but even rough maps with artistic flair would serve to aide Iruka’s daydreams of fleeing to various exotic locales.

 “Gentlemen,” Naoko’s voice says coolly. “Good day.”

  The sound of the door closing isn’t loud, but prison cells have clicked with less damnation.

  On that note, Iruka misses teaching. If there’s an end to all this madness, he thinks he’s like to focus more on his Headmaster title instead of his Head Desk-Shinobi one. Shinobi children only need to be told not to chew kunai, whereas their adult counterparts apparently must be told that civil partnerships are actually legally binding and to please not cause international incidents by accidentally (or intentionally) marrying (potentially multiple) foreign shinobi in secret (whether for blackmail or “funsies”).

 Iruka has a small collection of refrigerator art, sketches, and margin doodles from his students over the years. Maybe he should get those framed and put on his office walls. Some tacky finger-painting of hand seals and construction paper masks would really liven up the place; and it’d be nice to finally do something with all those projects made with such care and love. 

 Someone interrupts Iruka’s contemplation with a small cough and Iruka realizes he should probably turn around. He doesn’t really want to, since daydreaming is such a preferable occupation, but the various disasters of Konoha hardly wait at his leisure. Iruka must get this done and move on to… other, much worse disasters.

 With that grim thought in mind, his hands still folded tightly in front of him, Iruka kicks off the floor to slowly spin his chair back around to face the door. He levels the people standing just over the threshold with his best unimpressed look.

 “…Uhhh, hey,” Kotetsu says, looking five seconds away from bolting. “What’s up, Iruka?”

 Iruka leans forward and places his folded hands on his desk. “How about the fact that I wasn’t invited to the wedding?” he says, not sparing a glance for the box he put on his desk. They can see it and it speaks for itself.

 “Oh… ohh fuck.”

 “Sorry?” Izumo offers.

 Iruka can’t believe these two are older than him. “Please, sit.”

 Hagane Kotetsu and Kamizuki Izumo take the seats in front of Iruka’s desk with nervous and neat wariness respectively, unknowingly replacing two clan heads and a frankly absurd amount of other people who shall, for the limits of time and sanity, not be named. Kotetsu fidgets and Izumo doesn’t meet Iruka’s stare – in the exact way of shinobi who know exactly what foolish thing they’ve done and that there’s no way of avoiding the disbelieving embarrassment of an agent of administration who now unfortunately knows too.

 “Okay, I can explain-” Kotetsu begins.

 Iruka holds up a hand, reaching out with the other to open the box on his desk. “Explain how, in two hundred and seventeen marriage certificates, I was never once invited to any kind of wedding? Thank you so much. Please, go ahead.”

 Kotetsu’s mouth stays open, but sound stops coming out of it. Beside him, Izumo’s eyes are wide with the exact same disbelief Iruka felt when he realized two of his friends had managed to marry each other over two hundred times. Izumo’s expression is, however, missing Iruka’s sheer rage at not being told; because their friend group hasn’t been able to get anything out of these two on their absurdly and demonstratively romantic relationship besides a fervent proclamation of true bro-ship. Iruka doesn’t even really care about the couple hundred forms or the form that their apparently official life partnership takes, he’s just pissed they didn’t tell him or invite him.

 Though, to be fair, Iruka doesn’t drink all that much (well... that's a bit of a... ahem... he's a steady drinker, at least, not a black-out shots drinker) and Iruka would, if he’d been there whether or not he himself was drunk, have stopped his friends from abusing government services and making important life decisions while inebriated. In fact, vague and tipsy-tinged memories suggest that he may have unknowingly done exactly that at least once. Possibly twice.

 “…Two hundred and seventeen?” Izumo manages finally.

 “I counted,” Iruka assures him, fingers of one hand tapping at the cardboard box on his desk and the fingers of the other tapping at the desk itself. “I wanted to know how many kitchen appliances and other homeware I owed you in wedding gifts. How does two hundred and seventeen blenders sound?”

 Kotetsu makes a sound not unlike a whimper. “Please don’t buy us two hundred blenders.”

 Izumo has a shrewder pained expression. “Can I make you a list?”

 “No,” Iruka answers, channeling his best impression of Naoko. He’ll get them one blender; maybe a blender, a sturdy laundry rack, and a set of nice crockery. Certainly not more than all that and also a new rice cooker, air conditioner, and blade rack.

 Iruka doesn’t really have anything better to do with his new salaries than buy nice things for his friends. Being Head Desk-Shinobi and Academy Headmaster doesn’t at all grant him an exorbitant salary, but it’s still far more than Iruka was making before and it’s not like Iruka’s at all changed his lifestyle since starting his new job. (Since this disaster dropped, Iruka hasn’t actually had much of a lifestyle to speak of. He wants his lazy reading days and cozy apartment back.) Iruka’s frugal in regards to himself by nature and nurture, and has no intention of changing his ways much, so he’s been making far more money than he knows what to do with.

 If any of his friends stand still long enough now, Iruka can, has, and will forcibly treat them to the nearest meal of the day. He has birthdays and special occasions marked on his calendar and plans for all of them. Most of his friends are wary of being gifted or treated now, but Iruka doesn’t have to glare much to get them to go along with it. He loves and appreciates his friends very much, even if they drive him up the wall with their marriage-related antics and he can only show it sometimes through spiteful yelling and forceful, spontaneous, temporary adoption.

 He’s treating his desk-shinobi to hot springs and mani-pedis next week. Iruka and his subordinates might all have to suffer beating Konoha’s blatant dysfunctionality in something that can at least believably pretend to work, but by any deity that’s listening, they will have fabulous nails as they try to fix everything.

 It’s… it’s been twenty seconds now and neither Izumo nor Kotetsu have said anything else. So Iruka taps his fingers on the cardboard box again, pointedly, and demands the only real question there is:

 “What the fuck is this?”

 “I can explain,” Kotetsu begins again.

 Iruka levels his stare towards the guy he once looked up to in regards to adulting. No longer.

 “Please do,” Iruka says.

 “Uh… I was… hoping I wouldn’t get this far, honestly.” Kotetsu's face, beneath the bandages over his nose, is slowly turning a bright and unforgiving red. “I don’t have a good explanation.”

 “I will settle for any explanation at all.”

 “We were drunk,” Izumo offers.

 “Yes,” Kotetsu agrees, nodding firmly. “That’s it. Can we go?”

 “No.”

 “Why not?”

 “Because there’s regular nights out and then there’s getting plastered enough to get married, and I had to count two hundred and seventeen accounts of what I refuse to believe is the latter,” Iruka answers, voice growing unintentionally louder. “What’s happening here?! Are you dating? Knowingly traditionally married? Planning to spend the rest of your lives together in platonic, monogamous civil partnership?! Are you in love?!”

 “…You said any explanation,” Izumo mutters mutinously, flatly ignoring all of Iruka’s outraged questions. His face is pink and it looks like he may never make eye contact with anyone ever again. “You didn’t say it had to be true.”

 “…Maybe?” Kotetsu tries, in regards to the questions. He’s tomato red now.

 Iruka and Izumo both turn to look at Kotetsu. Izumo is inappropriately wide-eyed for someone who married his best friend two hundred and seventeen times. Iruka doesn’t know whether to glare at the uncertainty, which is one of the many banes of his desk-shinobi existence, or gape at the fact that Kotetsu has finally potentially admitted to actual feelings. 

 “…What?” Izumo says, hoarsely.

 “I’ve… maybe… been in love with you since we were twelve? Just a bit?”  

 For several seconds, there’s silence as the room takes that long-awaited, much-debated, surprisingly unsurprising statement in.

 What proceeds after that is… well… while Iruka’s been wishing that Kotetsu and Izumo would sort whatever it is they have out for years, he wishes that they hadn’t chosen to do their grand confession of mutual pining and years of repressed romantic adoration right in front of him… in his office… taking up several minutes longer than their allotted fifteen-minute appointment.

 From what Iruka can tell of the confession and what he already knows of his friends, what happened over the years was this: Izumo and Kotetsu are both extremely affectionate and extremely insecure drunks who regularly used the Shinobi Branch of Civil Partnerships’ services to reaffirm their relationship. This happened for years without either of them considering the fact they were actually getting married – because everyone knows that getting drunkenly hitched is just “a fun and consequence-free thing to do” – or discussing the fact they were actually deeply in love with each other the entire fucking time. Mutual pining apparently gets troublesome when both parties would have been fairly content to maintain a platonic life partnership as friends, even if they might like something more romantic and officially defined.

 Kazuko, the chuunin desk-shinobi originally assigned to the Civil Partnerships Department who is currently out with a broken limb and concussion, was right. What even is mutual unrequited love? Fucking bullshit. (Oh. Desk-Shinobi Midori and Desk-Shinobi Kazuko are friends, aren't they? Iruka gets the title Midori scrawled on the side of the cardboard box now. Konoha Security's Gate-Keepers’ Insecurity Finders-Keepers Binder. Right.)

 It’s… touching? Iruka supposes that it’s very romantic; all dramatic and heartfelt like those awful books Kakashi reads that are a thinly-veiled excuse for elaborate porn and confessions of undying love in the middle of storms and such. There’s nothing pornographic going on here – thank the desk-shinobi gods – but there was definitely a lot of artful crying and shouting during the whole “I’ve loved you since the minute I set eyes on you!” part and the “Every morning, I wake up and I want to kiss you so badly it tears me apart inside!” part.

 Iruka doesn’t even need to attend any theatre performances ever again at this rate. Why pay for watching drama when all he has to do is sit back and get all the overdramatic nonsense he could ever need from the comfort and ball and chain of his desk?

 After all the confessions, Izumo then grabbed Kotetsu by the armor and they’ve been clutching at each other and kissing ever since – artful tears and shaking shoulders and all. It’d probably be beautiful if this wasn’t happening in Iruka’s workplace and these two weren’t essentially extended family.

 After a full minute of kissing, Iruka’s pretty sure he’s got to stop staring in aghast wonder/horror and do something before the lack of heaving bosoms and passionate moans changes. That’s… that kissing is getting a little graphic there and… yep… there’s the first bit of passionate, strangled moaning. Time to intervene.

 Iruka’s hand finishes its slow reach for his stapler and he throws it.

 “OW, WHAT THE FUCK?” Kotetsu demands.

 “Don’t make out in my office! What the hell did you think you were going to get up to here? I work here! I’m right here!” Iruka counters, feeling like he’s clinging to a last shred of innocence he didn’t even know he had. “Congratulations, but for the love of fuck, not here.” 

 “You just threw a stapler at my head!”

 “You just tried to shove tongues down each other’s throats in my office!”

 “That hurt!”

 “One of you was starting to make whimpering noises!”

 Izumo is bright pink by this point and tries to surreptitiously remove his hand from inside Kotetsu’s shirt. Subtlety isn’t managed, mainly because Kotetsu, while bright red and ticked off at Iruka, reacts to look more than a little devastated by this.

 Iruka sighs and pinches at the bridge of his nose again, rubbing at his scar. “Look,” he says, “Congratulations. Really. I’m happy you’re working yourselves out and I won’t even tell the betting pool about this if you want privacy.”

 “We have a betting pool?” Kotetsu says.

 “Of course we do,” Izumo sighs. “Maybe we can place bets and collect.”

 Iruka considers demanding a cut, but he has plenty of money now and it’s the department heads, management, and elite jounin who run most of the betting. Iruka fully supports his fellow chuunin playing Konoha’s higher ranks out of their gambling money. Kotetsu and Izumo can bleed those fuckers dry for all Iruka cares; he’ll cheer them on, actually. It's just fair and good sense. 

 “But,” Iruka continues, “I still have two hundred and seventeen marriage certificates here and I have to do something about them. Are you staying married as you start dating or what? Or are you just going to skip to married because you kind of were anyway?”

 Kotetsu and Izumo exchange a look and… oh look… more blushing.

 “I’m just going to have you stay married. If you want to throw some sort of official wedding or whatever, let me know,” Iruka decides for them. He’s done with this. “Any objections?”

 Head shakes.

 “Excellent. Congratulations. I love you both and we should get together to celebrate this soon. Now please get the fuck out of my office and go make out or make love or whatever literally anywhere else besides right in front of me at my place of work.”

 Iruka waits a beat, thinks that over, then adds:

 “Don’t get arrested and don’t get married again, though. I don’t need more paperwork.”

 Kotetsu and Izumo exchange another look, then Izumo steps forward and says sincerely, “Thank you, Iruka.”

 “Yeah, uh, thanks, man. For everything.”

 “No problem. Please leave before I start crying,” Iruka says, because now that they’ve had a moment to sink in, the feelings are infecting him.

 He’s going to sob about this later, but he’d rather schedule it alongside the sob he plans to have on Naoko about Saito Mai. He wants to be efficient about the breakdowns he's currently scheduling for later. 

 Kotetsu and Izumo leave his office hand in hand, looking happier than any two people who’ve left such an extensive trail of bothersome paperwork should have the right to look. Iruka is ecstatic for them. He can already feel the annoyance from when one of his subordinates will assuredly unearth marriage certificate number two hundred and eighteen, but he’s genuinely happy his friends have found the form of genuine happiness they both wanted.

 He probably needs to create some sort of marriage renewal ceremony for the Civil Partnerships Department, specifically for Kotetsu and Izumo but also for anyone who wants to show affection and reaffirm a relationship without actually getting married again or for the first time. It would… hang on… that’s…

 That’s a really good idea.

 Iruka is on his feet and shouting before he can really register what’s happening.

 “NAOKO! NAOKO, I NEED YOU!”

 Naoko is slamming through his doorway, her massive odachi in one hand and her clipboard in the other, ready to kill the threat with extreme prejudice before Iruka’s even all the way around his desk. Since this isn’t the first time she’s reacted this way and her paranoia isn’t exactly unwarranted, Iruka doesn’t blink an eye at the blade.

 “Naoko, I just had an excellent idea that we need to implement immediately,” Iruka says. If he’s disbelieving of anything at the moment, it’s that he didn’t think of this before.

 “Oh?” Naoko says. Then in a fluid and quick series of motions: she straightens, whirls her odachi with a flare of chakra until it shrinks down into its pencil form, sticks the disguised blade back into her bun and removes the other pencil, and presses that pencil to her clipboard. “Yes, Umino-san?”

 Iruka quickly explains his idea to his second, as though it’ll disappear if he doesn’t get it down fast enough. “We won’t actually be able to implement it immediately, I know,” Iruka says. “But we can start working out the logistics of having something like that at least. Run some focus groups and look into the potential legal troubles and such to see if it could work.”

 “It… might work,” Naoko agrees, thoughtfully. “We’ll look into it, Umino-san.”

 “Thank you.”

 “While we are looking into it… May I remind you that you are due to leave for the Mori surprise anniversary party now? You are running slightly behind schedule.” Naoko’s reproachful voice could cow nations. “Your gift has already been delivered for you. All you need do is attend.”

 Iruka almost objects on the basis that he has far too much to do to even consider attending a party, but Naoko’s stare is worse than her voice. He’s going whether he likes it or not, apparently. Naoko seems to be determined to see Konoha through the next several hours without him and if anyone can manage it, it’s her. At the end of all this, Iruka is giving this woman who can do anything another much-needed raise and a vacation.

 “Naoko,” Iruka says, as a thought occurs to him. “How are you at kitchen appliance shopping and gift-wrapping presents?”

 “I consider myself an expert in both regards, Umino-san.”

 “Iruka, please,” Iruka says, then: “I need a blender.”

 Naoko scribbles something on her clipboard. “Anything else?”

 “An escape route to Suna?”

 Naoko’s glare doesn’t have that joke falling flat so much as it flat-out murders it.

 “I have a list,” Iruka sighs. Then, a mischievous idea comes to him, speaking delightful words of fucking with his friends. “Would it be possible to deliver and set up all the items in someone’s apartment within the hour? Without them knowing?”

 “Of course, I am a professional desk-shinobi,” Naoko says, witheringly. “I have done this before, Iruka-san. Please.”

 “…What. Wait, never mind. I don’t want to know.”

 “Confidentiality restricts me from informing you anyway,” Naoko replies. “The list, please. After that, I have a letter that just arrived for you that you may want to consider reading, and then you must leave for the party. Hatake-san asked that I inform you he will send his team after you if you do not show by a certain time.”

 “That bastard.”

 “Indeed. Your list, if you will? Then Saito Mai’s letter.”

 “…Saito Mai's what now." 

Chapter Text

Hey, handsome!

 If I’ve timed this right, the Bitch has just dropped the great and terrible truth on you and left you on the verge of panic. Ordinarily, this is where I’d introduce myself in person, swooping in to save the day and stunning you with my intelligence, beauty, and the charm just oozing from the sultry sound of my voice. Save you, gain your trust and gratefulness, whatever, etc. But this whole situation is hardly ordinary, is it? Sadly, I’m a bit busier than I’d like and can’t make it. This handsomely written and infinitely charming letter will have to do for now.

Don’t fret and don’t flee, handsome! It’s an intimidating and genius plot, I know, but this is where it gets delicate and we need to cooperate if we want our fair home to survive. No more springing things on you (well, no more BIG, big things; a little surprise now and then is healthy for a shinobi, you know). Over the next several days, you can expect my people to reveal themselves and some of our game plan to your people so we can put our best foot forward as things finally unravel. Under our combined might, our foes will bow and cower! 

 (I’m taking your answer to my offer of alliance as a yes, btw. I mean, lol, what other choice do you have?)

 Again, don’t fret and don’t flee. My second-in-command has everything under control and this isn’t going to be any sort of merger (we’re different factions for a reason, handsome; I’m not doing your work for you; I just need you to do some of mine, lol), so I’m not going to be dumping a house onto the horse’s back here. The real work won’t start until I roll back into town. The party doesn’t start until after that.

 Just keep up the good work, handsome, and I’ll be there soon to start my plot’s Phase Two. I’m sure you’ll have our fair home ironed out and wriggling itself into shape soon enough; at the rate you’re going, I think you stand more than a chance of defeating these demons once and for all within the year! (I almost want to tell you to calm down, because you’re making even us regular workaholics look bad by comparison.) Really! Just as I expected from the Chosen One who ended the feud between the two great factions! (The Foxy Lady’s handiwork is masterful, isn’t it? We’re lucky this plot is old enough to have her hand in it too!)

 I can’t tell you everything that I’m up to, because I like a bit of mystery and it’s for the best that I keep you out of my riskier business, but I’m actually doing you a bit of a favor at the moment! (I know! I’m so nice!)

 Me and my girls are tracking down your missing troublemakers! We’re on the hunt! The home-ditchers, the absentee travelers, and those exotic lonely lovelies that our cats dragged in, we’re after them all and we’re going to drag as many of them as we can (or bully those burly hunters into being useful valets) to your doorstep so you get finally get started on all those papers you’ve been forced to set aside due to lack of attendance. Your resources are stretched enough as it is and it’s the least I can do to help you out while I’m getting my own business done. (Had to track the assholes down anyway, so might as well gift-wrap them for you as we haul them in, right? <3)

 I’ll be home as soon as I’ve got my girls up and tackling, and I’ve finished personally grabbing some key players. The stepdad might be a bit tricky, but I’m gonna blackmail the stepmom into coming home if it’s the last thing I do. (Might be, lol, but whatever. You know that feel.) 

Anyway, stay classy, handsome!

 XOXOXO Madame M

P.S. This letter is totally gonna burn on you.

P.P.S. Say hi to your second for me! Love that woman!  

Chapter Text

 Iruka only has time to say, “What the fuck,” before the letter totally burns on him. He would have thought that he has enough spontaneous combustion in his life as it is, but apparently life will find a way to add more. Luckily for him, Naoko was reading over his shoulder and immediately moves to contain the dropped, flaming letter with a wind jutsu.

 A small, contained ball of wind engulfs the burning paper. With a small, strangling pop, the flame is immediately and efficiently snuffed out. Naoko performs this with such a flawless grace that Iruka feels sure he just learned two facts of history. Firstly, that Naoko has used this particular jutsu to put out spontaneous fires many, many times before. Secondly, for it to be Fuuton over Suiton, that there was a hard lesson learned at some point about how some flames, depending on the seal or chemical, don’t react well to water.

 “…What the fuck,” Iruka says again, for good measure.

 “I assure you, as I did when I vouched for her, that Madame Saito is extremely competent at her job,” Naoko says primly, eyeing the smoldering ashes on the floor with dubiousness and light disgust. “Though I do not know her well and she is known for being unprofessional, I believe that she has… good intentions and…”

 Naoko trails off, which is alarming because she never does that.

 “Yes?” Iruka says, trying not to squeak in panic.

 “I am given the distinct impression that Madame Saito there was attempting to be friendly,” Naoko finishes. “She appears to have a good opinion of you.”

 Iruka’s fairly certain Saito Mai’s good opinion is of having someone inexperienced be easily conned into doing a job no one else wants. There is a part of him that is certain that’s the truth behind anyone who tells him that he’s doing a good job (ex: Naoko, his desk-shinobi subordinates, his friends, Ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren, Ex-Headmistress Hitomi, the elderly ex-hunter-nin cafeteria guy who gives Iruka free baked goods sometimes, Kakashi, several department heads, the Jounin Commander, the Hokage, and so on). It’s the same stubborn part of Iruka that refused to believe in the feud between the desk-shinobi and the Academy teachers, because that part of him desperately wishes he didn’t live in a reality where yelling is a provably effective, much-approved, and comparably delicate problem-solving technique.

 At least Iruka can comfort himself with the fact that, if he must live in a reality where yelling is a respectable problem-solving technique, he’s very good at yelling. Excellent at it, in fact. If he has any sort of skill passed down in his blood, it’s yelling. The Umino line might be small and without shinobi until recent generations, but Iruka’s parents had a proud heritage nevertheless; they could both trace their family tree back over a dozen generations into the great fishing and trading villages of far southern Fire Country. Uminos have been proudly conquering fish markets throughout history, armed with shrieking outrage, stubborn sensibility, and lungs that can holler through even the mightiest storm.

 Iruka would consider fleeing to the said far reaches of southern Fire Country if A) he thought he could remain in Fire Country at all without Saito Mai or her like dragging him back to Konoha, B) actually knew or liked any of his distant relations, C) wasn’t prone to seasickness, D) actively really enjoyed fishing or fish, and E) didn’t know for a fact that he’d probably come crawling pathetically back out of sheer boredom. Fleeing to a tempestuous ally like Suna sounds so much more interesting.

 Through Iruka’s daydreams of escaping to fish-reeking or hellishly sandy exotic locales, Naoko’s voice comes floating like a lifeline of forced rationale.

 “If the suggestion that Madame Saito is attempting to be your friend has sent you into a state of shock and/or disgust, I would like to remind you that I am not acquainted with Madame Saito outside of a work relationship,” Naoko says. “My brief impression of that letter is to be taken with many grains of salt. If it makes you feel better, I would remind you that Madame Saito is a leader of deception and more likely attempting to use you for your position’s influence and power. She said as much in the letter quite plainly.”

 Iruka stops his tangent of escape plans and returns to Naoko, looking down at her firm, only slightly worried expression and… smiling weakly. That does make him feel much better actually.

 In the weeks since Iruka’s gained his two new positions, he’s had no shortage of people trying to get into his good graces because they think he’s an inexperienced fool conned into a job no one else wants. It is a job, however, that has plenty of potential power attached that they do want access to. (Iruka’s problems with the Council, the Head Researcher of R&D, and the budget are all prime examples of this.) So Iruka has more power than he’s completely sure what to do with and more people than he ever could have wanted willing to give suggestions.

 Unfortunately for those people, Iruka may be inexperienced, he may be willing to be conned into a job no one else wants, but his proud, fish-market-legacy parents didn’t raise a fool. Iruka’s no shortage of people quickly find out that Iruka has a permanent shortage of patience for their bullshit and give up. (Or don’t. Which the budget is another prime example of.)

 “She did, didn’t she?” Iruka says. “That was… different.”

 If a spy outright tells you they’re a spy, does that make them more trustworthy or less?  

 “If I must be frank with you, Iruka-san, I would profess concern if the Madame of the Kunoichi Corps wasn’t attempting to manipulate Konoha’s other factions to her purposes,” Naoko says agreeably. “That Madame Saito is open and friendly about the matter suggests to me that she is either a fool or cleverer than most. She will bear watching, but make a powerful ally.”  

 Yes, that sounds much more manageable than genuine overtures of friendship.

 “Thank you, Naoko,” Iruka says sincerely.

 “You are welcome, Iruka-san,” Naoko says primly. “And soon to be late.”

 “…What? Oh, right.”

 Iruka dictates his list for Kotetsu and Izumo’s wedding presents post-haste. He quickly rattles off a list of kitchen appliances and homewares he wants delivered and set-up in his friends’ apartment as soon as possible just to mess with them. He might as well give them some long-overdue wedding gifts with his two new salaries he doesn’t know how to spend.

 Normally, Iruka would never recommend breaking into a shinobi’s apartment; he would especially not recommend breaking in and rearranging things. But messing with his friends is an undeniably good cause. Plus, the danger of it is easily adverted by Naoko’s supervision (Naoko is a consummate professional and wry-humored busy-body, and wouldn’t let anything happen to Iruka’s friends that they didn’t absolutely deserve) and the fact that, while Iruka doesn’t have a key to their place, Genma does and will help if he knows what’s good for him.

 (If Genma actually knows what’s sensibly good for him is debatable, but he definitely owes Iruka for sorting out that disastrous stack. Iruka still hasn’t and may never forgive Genma for the mess of the widow benefits and several fortunes the man has apparently “accidentally” potentially collected as a black widower. That’s the main difference between Saito Mai’s stack of papers and Genma’s, besides the numbers: Saito Mai’s grooms and brides generally make it out alive at a much higher rate.)

 “I will see this done before the day is over, Umino-san,” Naoko promises.

 “Iruka, please. Now, as for the missing-nin that Madame Saito mentioned she’s-”

 “Later, Iruka-san.”

 “But what do you think she means exactly by-?”

 “Later, Iruka-san.”

 “I can’t just leave this-”

 Naoko meets Iruka’s imploring stare with a tired, uncompromising glare. “Head Desk-Shinobi Umino-sama,” she says flatly. “You need to leave this office. You need to leave before you go mad. I need you to leave so people can stop dropping increasingly awful revelations upon you and making more work for all of us. I need to organize for tomorrow; everything else will hold. Go relax. Have a drink. Eat tiny cakes. Don’t make me find out what the Copy-nin’s ordered his team to do if you don’t show up. Get out.”

 “…Okay,” Iruka says, almost offended but mostly understanding. He still wants to argue, but someone giving him permission to leave is like the sky lifting from his shoulders. He still has to come back here tomorrow, if he doesn’t stop by briefly tonight, but the temporary illusion of freedom is a heady thing.

 “There will be no more distractions, interruptions, interrogations, or revelations in this office for the rest of the day,” Naoko declares, as she somehow manages to both scribble vastly important notes on her clipboard and efficiently herd Iruka from the room. “Let nothing and no one else stop you from attending that party and maintaining our crucial relationship with the Mori Family. There is no one we can afford to make enemies of less.”

 That last statement seems… a bit overboard. Iruka opens his mouth to try and debate that, because surely they have greater enemies or greater allies they don’t want to make enemies of than the potential foe the Mori Clan could be. And yet… technically, any greater enemies are already enemies. So… do they have greater allies they don’t want to make enemies of? Iruka finds himself decidedly unready to examine his feelings and judge if he fears, for example, Saito Mai as an enemy more or Mori Hanako as an enemy more.

 For everyone’s sanity and peace of mind, Iruka decides not to debate the matter. He lets Naoko push him from the office so he can attend a party he’d rather not until it’s socially acceptable to leave and go pass out somewhere for the night.

   Unfortunately, Iruka and Naoko only manage to get down the hall and to the main department floor, where Iruka's best desk-shinobi are supposed to be hard at work doing his bidding to save Konoha from itself, before they must stop. Frankly and sadly, this is still halfway down the hall farther than Iruka expected them to get. Naoko makes an exhausted noise at the interruption and then mortified noise at sight in front of them, but she doesn't really sound surprised in either noise.  

 Even more sadly, there are no non-administration shinobi causing this new disturbance or even involved. None. It is all, disappointingly and embarrassingly and even vaguely unsurprisingly, Iruka's own subordinates behind, in, over, and all around this disturbance instead of working diligently at their various desks and cubicles. 

 The main people involved are as follows: 

 There's Ito Hitomi, who is slightly unexpected because she's better known as Mimi-sensei. The “Mimi” because people didn't want to confuse her with Headmistress Hitomi, which was a real possibility because the “sensei” is because she's an Academy teacher. (She regularly teaches the very youngest Academy kids too, which is close to daycare with knives, and Mimi is easier for five-year-olds to shout when someone eventually gets nicked.) 

 The Academy teachers generally don’t come to Hokage Tower or the Konoha Administration Department, even though that whole feud thing is over. Habits are apparently hard to break.

 Ito Mimi is four feet and ten inches of endless patience and encouragement. She's a chuunin, nearly forty, has a secondary specialization as a medic, and started as a teaching assistant nearly twenty-five years ago, and she helped train Iruka and he's pretty sure she proactively saved his goddamn life at least twenty-five times with her helpful tips and steadfast cheerful optimism and ability to get deadly nin-children to behave. She's tiny, pretty, reddishly brown-haired, pale with big brown eyes, indomitable, and probably the nicest, gentlest, friendliest person that Iruka has ever met in his life. Everyone loves her. Iruka knew he could choose no one better when he left the Academy in his coworkers hands and gave her seniority, so he could run off and save the rest of the village or whatever it is he’s doing now.

 Then there's Desk-Shinobi Oshiro Atsushi, who is the son of Oshiro Goro, who is the eighty-year-old ex-investigator of the Love Chapel (one of its three employees). Atsushi is also nearly forty, a chuunin, a kenjutsu-specialist with a blade that's as tall as he is, seven feet tall, dark-haired and brown-skinned, not particularly talkative, admirably dedicated, kind with a fondness for children (Iruka has seen him slipping Team Seven veritable baskets of sweets and fruit), and unfairly unflappable. 

 Minor characters in this scene include: Desk-Shinobi Midori and her three swords, Desk-shinobi Kobayashi Kenta (Ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren's great-nephew) and a clipboard, a peanut gallery of desk-shinobi, some horrified errand-runner genin, and, for some reason, Jounin Commander Nara Shikaku. 

 What the fuck is he doing here?

 If Mimi and Atsushi had been declaring their undying love or shoving tongues down each other's throats, it wouldn't have been too out of place or surprising. Even though Mimi is married. There's been many inter-administration couples, trios, and poly groups in this mess. Iruka could have walked by an embracing couple without blinking an eye, leaving it to Naoko to reprimand them for the Public Display of Affection in the workplace. 

 But no. Mimi has Atsushi slammed facedown to floor and pinned in a way that is neither romantic nor sexy. She's sitting on his back and snarling at Midori, who's wielding her blades threateningly and snarling back. Kenta is standing as though he's trying to break up the potential fight without stepping in the line of fire, clipboard clutched as though he can become Naoko if he holds on tight enough.

 All the watching desk-shinobi are in some state of armed and ready to thrown down as soon as Mimi releases Atsushi.

 Jounin Commander Nara Shikaku is watching this standoff off to the side with a very bored sort of interest, with a gaggle of terrified errand-runner genin collecting around him as though the man will protect them or direct them to safety if fighting breaks out. 

 (If the man is anything like his elite jounin, and everything suggests that he is, Iruka can safely say that he will not. Jounin do jack shit in these situations, every chuunin knows that. Sit back with dango and laugh, that’s what they do. If they don’t decide to do the exact opposite of help. Elite assholes. Expert bastards. Masterful, bad-humored, more-skill-than-sense shits.)

 (Iruka thinks that Inuzuka Tsume may have infected him. That Bitch.)

 “Release him, you undead keeper of demons,” Desk-Shinobi Midori demands, slightly muffled by the sword held in her teeth, clearly not having noticed her supervisor and boss come onto the floor.

 Ito Mimi bares her teeth in what can only very loosely be called a smile. It draws very close, wary attention to the fact that she’s a four-feet-and-ten-inches-tall almost-daycare teacher and medic-nin who currently has a seven-foot-tall swordsman pinned to the floor, his seven-foot-long sword embedded in the ceiling several meters away, and that she doesn’t seem all that worried about being surrounded by armed, hostile desk-shinobi. At worst, Mimi looks mildly frustrated.

 “If you would please just let me pass, you power-mad desk-monkey,” Mimi says cheerfully.  

 Iruka has only seen Mimi frustrated on one occasion before. Not when the entire school was lit on fire (on any of the multiple and sometimes consecutive times this happened). Not when the P.T.A. meetings ended in riots twice in a month (the second one was supposed to be a redo of the first and, in many ways, it technically was; it just wasn’t a better redo). It was when he once asked her to supervise Naruto for half-an-hour so he could photocopy some tests; Iruka has no idea what happened there and doesn’t want to know.

 Just like he’s fairly certain he doesn’t want to know what’s happening now.

 “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?” Iruka demands.

 He asks anyway, because he’s apparently a glutton for suffering.

 Every head in the room snaps immediately to him, and Iruka wishes he didn’t currently live the sort of life where being the center of attention of a large almost-mob doesn’t even faze him anymore. How the ever-loving hell did someone as practical as Midori and someone as gentle as Atsushi manage to piss off the nicest, most resiliently cheerful teacher Iruka’s ever met? (It was collectively agreed among the staff that, after some of the students they’d had, if Mimi hadn’t lost it yet, she isn’t ever going to snap.)

 Midori’s sword drops from her mouth. “Umino-san, I-!”

 “Iruka!” Mimi accidentally interrupts, wide-eyed and loud. She suddenly seems to notice that she has a grown man pinned to the floor and scrambles off him, and immediately bumps her head against the seven-foot-long sword that someone has embedded in Iruka’s department’s ceiling. “Ow… Oh. This isn’t what it looks like!”

 On the floor, Atsushi makes a low moaning sound and doesn’t get up.

 “It’s exactly what it looks like, you grave monster!” Midori snaps at Mimi, before she whirls on Iruka and points at him with one blade while pointing the other at Atsushi’s prone body. “Umino-san, this deathly Academy beast invaded our place of work and attacked us!”

 “I did not! You drew on me first!” Mimi says indignantly. “All I wanted was to visit Iruka, but noooo! You outdated, conservative, feud-keeping paper-pushers wouldn’t let me through! Iruka, I’ve been trying to reach you for days, but these silly desk-nin won’t let go of their superstition! They’ve been sending me away and in circles and I’m sorry but I’m through with their nonsense! No wonder no one else wanted to come!”

 Midori opens her mouth to reply, but she seems to catch the expression Iruka can feel dawning on his face and shuts up before even starting. Never before has Iruka seen a room of grown-ass shinobi shuffle their feet like this and suddenly he understands everything.

 “YOU PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WHAT?”

 Several weapons drop to the ground, more feet are shuffled, heads are bowed, and sounds best described as mimble-wimble are made. The Jounin Commander looks indescribably amused and Iruka is going to toss a jounin out a window for this, so help him. (Any jounin will do at this point. He’s not picky.)

 “Iruka-san,” Naoko murmurs beside him, her expression reflecting his murderous feelings perfectly. “You have little time. Your party.”

 Iruka takes a deep breath. “Right. Yes. Right.”

 “You must attend.”

 “…Five minutes,” Iruka says, after a brief pause, voice still strangled with fury and frustration and the fact that he doesn’t even get to go home yet. He has to go socialize with theatre people for hours. “Naoko, five minutes, time me.”

 Then Iruka takes a deep breath – his hands are trembling, he can feel that horribly unattractive vein in his forehead throbbing, the world is slightly reddish – and he again does the thing he was born to do: he ends up a made-up curse by yelling, extensively and with great vindictiveness, at the top of a set of lungs bred over generations of proud fishermen and fishwives.

 Someone’s coffee mug may or may not shatter over the course of Iruka’s diatribe and he doesn’t care. He just doesn’t care. He’s so fucking done with these people and their bullshit feud; he knew something was up with the quietness on the Academy front.

 “…AND SO HELP ME, BY THE POWER OF THE NIDAIME IN ME, I WILL SEND ANYONE WHO EVEN DREAMS OF CONTINUING THIS RIDICULOUS FEUD OUT TO TRACK DOWN MARRIED MISSING-NIN AND BRING THEM TO HEEL ARMED WITH ONLY A TOOTHPICK. I’LL ASSIGN TEAM SEVEN AS YOUR PERSONAL GUARDS FOR A FULL DAY. I’LL… I’LL…”

 Iruka takes another deep breath so he doesn’t pass out. His mind searches desperately for a fate worse than death in the eyes of desk-shinobi, who are in no way a normal breed of ninja.

 “I WILL FIND WAKAHISA AND HAVE THEM WRITE YOU A FUCKING SONNET, SO HELP ME, I WILL,” Iruka threatens, not entirely sure what he’s threatening. “WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS NONSENSE. I WILL NOT HESITATE.”

 He’s fairly certain this Wakahisa person, whoever they are, isn’t dead and that their work is a legitimate threat, going entirely off the way his desk-shinobi whisper sometimes when having the normal water-cooler conversation about deepest, darkest fears and such. Honestly, Iruka wouldn’t say their poetry is that bad, but… then again… he’s only read the one poem. It was admittedly pretty terrible, but for all he knows Ex-Head Desk-Shinobi Ren put up the best of the best of Wakahisa’s work in his office. It’s a frightening but legitimate possibility.

 Just as the threat of a sonnet is apparently a frightening and legitimate threat in the eyes of Iruka’s subordinates, because they all gasp in horror. Many go pale or greyish of face. There’s the whumph of someone fainting that Iruka’s learned to just ignore at this point.

 “ARE YOU REALLY DESK-SHINOBI OR ARE YOU QUARRELING CHILDREN? I TAUGHT CHILDREN FOR YEARS AND THEY WERE LESS CHILDISH THAN THIS. WE CAN’T AFFORD TO BE DIVIDED. WE CAN’T AFFORD TO TAKE OUT OUR STRESS ON OUR ALLIES. WE CAN’T AFFORD TO SABOTAGE OURSELVES. WE ARE ONE; WE ARE DESK-SHINOBI; WE ARE GROWN-ASS ADULTS! I WILL HAVE YOU PERFORM WAKAHISA SONNETS ON STAGE IF-”

 Naoko taps him on the shoulder. Even she looks pale and unnerved as she informs him, “Your five minutes are up, Umino-san.”

 “WHAT? Oh, I mean… right.” Iruka squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath. “I have to go. Someone remember where I was in my rant, I want to finish this later.” Then he raises his voice again and yells, “MEETING TEMPORARILY ADJOURNED. BACK TO WORK!”

 Iruka’s desk-shinobi and the various genin errand-runners scramble for their desks or the nearest door. In the end, the only people left near him are Ito Mimi, Desk-Shinobi Kenta, Jounin Commander Nara Shikaku, and Desk-Shinobi Atsushi, who is still unmoving on the floor – and then Naoko by Iruka’s side, of course, as always.

 “Hi, Mimi,” Iruka says, proud of how there’s only a slightly hoarseness to his voice. “You’re going to have to give me a full report on any desk-shinobi interfering with you trying to reach me later. Please don’t do… whatever you’ve done to Atsushi to them. For now… what can I immediately do for you?”

 Mimi looks sheepish. “Ah, well, sorry, Iruka, it’s not actually all that urgent. I just wanted a second opinion on something and to talk to someone using you as an introduction, so I got a little frustrated after the third day. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes, but it can wait?”

 “…Can we talk it over as I walk to the Mori Clan compound?”

 “That would be absolutely perfect!”

 “Great,” Iruka says, and turns to the Jounin Commander who has witnessed this entire embarrassing affair. Iruka doesn’t know whether to feel ashamed of his department or feel a proud sort of confidence for an inexplicable reason. “Nara-san, I’m deeply sorry about all that. What do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

 “Ah, I need some consulting and had time to meander by today,” the Jounin Commander says, nearly yawning. “Shouldn’t take too long, if that helps. Less than five minutes, probably.”

 “It… might. What can I help you with?”

 Nara Shikaku reaches up a long arm and lazily scratches at the back of his head. “Well, we’ve been reading over those papers and everything,” he says. “Had to tell my wife what was happening and that... finally went over enough to have a talk about it. Anyway, Yoshino wants to know if she can divorce me and keep Inoichi.”

 There is a brief silence in which Iruka, Naoko, Mimi, and Kenta all stare at the Jounin Commander. Kenta looks like he’s trying to invent a new form of mathematics, he’s desperately trying to understand something Iruka doesn’t want to. Mimi just looks intrigued.

 “…I don’t think it works like that,” Iruka says finally.

 “No?” the man says. “Hmm. Shame.”

 “I… guess.”

 “Yoshino said I had to ask and that I had to come back with Konoha’s marriage laws so she could figure it out for herself,” the Jounin Commander continues, giving a disinterested yawn. His expression is mild, as though it’s no bother to him that his wife is planning to scour Konoha law for a way to ditch him for his husband. “I don’t think she planned on listening to whatever answer I brought back for her.”

 “That’s… um…” Fuck it. Iruka gives up on trying to comment. “I can certainly have copies of Konoha’s laws made for you, Nara-san. It’s a right of every Konoha citizen to know the laws under which they live.”

 Even if those laws are dubious and stupid.

 “I will have one of our desk-shinobi prepare a copy of the lawbook for you, Nara-sama,” Naoko promises, before Iruka can even turn to ask her. “We will arrange to have it sent to your household as soon as it is finished.”

 Iruka loves her so much.

 Nara Shikaku nods. “Sounds good by me. Thanks.”

 “Not a problem,” Iruka assures the man. Someone is going to have a very fun rest of the day at the photocopier probably. “Please let us know as soon as you come to a decision so we can resolve the issue between you and Yamanaka-san.”

 Or apparently the Jounin Commander and his wife. Which sounds like a different and probably worse problem because A) Yamanaka Inoichi also has a wife, B) Iruka remembers Nara Yoshino vividly and would rather not deal with the woman feared throughout the entire P.T.A., C) Yamanaka Noriko is possibly the only exception to people who fear Nara Yoshino and she is plenty fearsome on her own, and D) while Shikamaru, like father like son, might not be too bothered… Ino’s reaction may be nothing short of gruesome.

 If Iruka were still only a teacher right now, he’d just wish Saturobi Asuma luck and flee.

 “Yeah, we’ll let you know,” the Jounin Commander says.

 “Is there anything else I can help you with? No? Right, then I really need to be going. Naoko-”

 “Uh, Umino-san?”

 Everyone in their small circle of people turns to look at Desk-Shinobi Kenta. Well, everyone except Atsushi, who is still unmoving on the floor. Atsushi is breathing at least, so this seems to be by choice, and Iruka wishes he didn’t so dearly understand the urge to ignore people calling for him and to lie facedown on a floor for a time.

 “Yes, Kenta?”

 “I, um, also need a minute of your time.”

 “Okay, Kenta.”

 “…”

 Iruka sighs. “What is it, Kenta?”

 Kenta is clutching at his clipboard like it’s a lifeline, like tearing at the papers is the only thing keeping him from falling over and even getting close to eye contact. Iruka thinks that Naoko is trying to train him as her second-in-command. He’ll probably be pretty decent – he’s Ren’s great-nephew, so he has the heritage – but only if he can develop the same I-don’t-have-time-for-your-bitch-ass attitude to fear that Iruka and Naoko can usually wear better and more casually than armor could ever hope to dream.

 “Uh, somebody sent us a genin?” Kenta says finally. “What do I do with i- him?”

 Iruka stares his subordinate. “…What?”

 Kenta steps a little to the side to reveal a shorter shinobi that Iruka failed to really register, presumably the genin in question. Everyone in their circle – including Nara Shikaku, who hasn’t yet left, and excluding Atsushi still faking unconsciousness on the floor – takes a moment to examine the extremely skilled lurker that’s apparently been “sent” to them.

 The genin looks to be about twelve or thirteen years old, dark-haired, dark-eyed, very pale, fine-featured and neatly uniformed, and with a… frightening lack of expression. The quickest way Iruka can think to describe the boy is that he almost looks like a paler, slightly taller, blank-faced, poor man’s impersonation of Sasuke. Iruka had never even thought to hope that he would never encounter a child that effortlessly managed to look more dead inside than Uchiha Sasuke on his worst days. That’s… frightening.

  Several beats too late after his reveal, the boy smiles in greeting. Like he’s still unpracticed at implementing the book he read on normal human reactions and interactions. He smiles like he’s unpracticed at it as well. It’s a haunting, unnatural, faker-than-a-jounin-apologizing-for-late-paperwork fake smile.

 This kid is twelve going on dead inside.

 If Iruka’s life were actually a horror movie, this is the part where he’d run away. His teaching senses, from years of dealing with and training a long line of strange and unique shinobi children, are screaming at him to hit a panic button. Iruka is both inwardly validated and alarmed to see that there’s a similar sort of furrow in Mimi’s brow next to him.

 “Hello,” Iruka says normally, showing none of this.

 “Hello,” the genin repeats in exactly the sort of voice once might expect from a vessel for a person that had had all humor and expression removed. “I am Nakamura Sai. I have been semi-permanently assigned to assist you however necessary while recovering from an injury.”

 “Injury?”

 “Tended to. My medical information is contained within my file, currently held by Desk-Shinobi-san,” the genin continues, gesturing towards Kenta. Even the gesture doesn’t look natural. “My services are in no way diminished, Head Desk-Shinobi-sama.”

 “Iruka,” Iruka corrects. “Umino or Iruka-san if you absolutely must.”

 “Yes, Umino-san.”

 As annoying as it is to have his insistences on informality routinely ignored, at least that’s a hint of personality. Naoko’s lips are slightly upturned with amusement at finding a sympathetic soul, which is good. It indicates that this genin – Sai, apparently – has a soul, which is also good.

 “We did not request any permanent genin assistance outside of our errand and message-runners, Umino-san,” Naoko says, and great, they’re back to that title again. “While we have taken young genin before as temporary assistants, it is usually either because they are future desk-shinobi or being punished by their supervisor.”

 Iruka knows this latter fact and it did in no way surprise him when he learned. He continues looking unsurprised as something akin to an expression forcibly twists the genin’s face for a second at the mention of punishment, noticeable enough that every person in their circle clearly catches it. They’re back to expressionlessness soon enough, but the implication of why the genin is here is clear. It’s punishment of some kind, obviously.

 But Iruka’s parents didn’t raise a fool – or, at least, they didn’t raise a fool in that particular regard. Iruka looks at Naoko, who looks back at him, and they have yet another of the quick, silent conversations that they’ve been getting increasingly and unfortunately better at having.

 “Another dedicated assistant may prove useful,” Naoko says aloud, her expression impenetrable. “You may have more time for the budget this way. It consumes much of your time.”

 “True,” Iruka agrees. “An assistant would be useful, but I have to get to the party.”

 Naoko nods. “He can assist me in the meantime. I will have him accompany me, explain our rules, and find him duties. As your second-in-command, supervision of him would have fallen to me regardless.”

 With a nod from Iruka, Naoko turns to the genin. “Sai-kun, I am Supervisor Desk-Shinobi Naoko, second-in-command to Umino-san, and you will report to me and only to me or Umino-san for the duration of your assignment to the Konoha Administration Department. Come with me and we will discuss your file and your duties.”

 “Yes, Naoko-san.”

 “Umino-san, I will see you after your event to discuss the revelations of today in greater detail,” Naoko continues. In her even stare waits yet another entire conversation, one that Iruka’s probably been putting off for too long.

 Has definitely been putting off too long, if someone has sent Sai to him.

 “The budget won’t wait any longer,” Iruka agrees tiredly. “Thanks, Naoko. I leave the New Order of Desk-Shinobi in your capable hands. Nara-san, please excuse me. Mimi, we need to be off before something else happens and I can never leave.”

 The small circle of people gathered waits for that something to happen, but ten seconds pass without so much as a crash of something falling or a shout of pain. That’s something.

 “Okay, I’m really leaving now. Kenta, get Atsushi off the floor and someone get that giant sword out of my ceiling before someone brains themselves on it.”

Chapter Text

 “So, how are you doing, Mimi?” Iruka says politely, when they’re a little ways down the hallway, firmly and finally leaving the Konoha Administration Department’s headquarters and most of its nonsense behind.

 “Oh, quite well, thank you!” Mimi answers happily. “We’re keeping quite busy at the Academy and all this administrative reconstruction business is keeping my husband very busy as well, so I haven’t seen him as much as I’d like recently. We’re both very happy about a lot of the changes you’re making, though, so we’re still delighted.”

 Of all the consequences that Iruka’s gathering, none of them cut quite so sharply as hearing he’s unintentionally separated his coworker and her husband. Mimi and her mysterious husband are a deliriously in-love couple. Iruka doesn’t know the man’s name, what he looks like, or what he does for a living, but he feels like he knows more or less everything else by proxy by this point and he’s not glad to hear he’s interrupted their relentless doting.

 “I’m sorry to hear that,” Iruka says.

 A part of him – a terrible jealous part that hasn’t slept properly in a week – is hissing that if he has to suffer, everyone else can suffer too, but Iruka absolutely refuses to be that petty to people who don’t deserve it. He’s a very busy man with an increasingly obviously limited amount of energy and resources. As much as he feels an infinite source of it, pettiness must be scourged up and dealt out efficiently as vengeance if he’s to have time for anything else.

 “We haven’t had sex in over a month now,” Mimi sighs.

 “Oh, that’s terrible,” Iruka says… genuinely. He tries. Hearing about Mimi and her husband’s very explorative sex lives was always a highlight of lunch break in the staff room.

 Admittedly, most of those stories left Iruka bright red, second-handedly embarrassed to near-death, and the owner of more kink-related information than he ever could have dreamed existed, but they had been very entertaining stories and he knows Mimi and her husband enjoyed their hobby.

 And Iruka will never admit this, but he actually owes a great deal of sexual self-discovery thanks to Mimi and her husband. Not because he was involved or experienced any great awakenings, but because when Iruka asks himself questions about his own sexuality and what he’s into, he can always think back to Mimi’s stories and realize: not fucking that. It was a very “process of elimination” form of self-discovery, but it worked for him.

 Mimi nods in agreement. “It is terrible! I miss him a lot, so I’m thinking of planning something nice and satisfying for us both sometime soon.”

 Iruka makes a noise that tries very hard for “interested” and probably lands very firmly on “strangled.” Mimi, bless her heart, very kindly pretends not to notice that Iruka is slowly turning pink from embarrassment. She also very kindly changes the subject.

 “But enough of my wonderfully patient husband! Iruka, I wanted to talk to you about this year’s Annual Academy Retirement Fund Fair!”

 Completely unbidden, many images of the fun family event come to Iruka’s mind – only on fire, with people fleeing and screaming, with street stalls and carnival decorations collapsing in clouds of ash and smoke. It’s completely irrational, especially since if the upcoming event does go horribly wrong the cause will assuredly be attributed to the much duller issue of administrative failure rather than fire.

 Unfortunately, equally indignant parental complaints are assured either way.

 “I thought that wasn’t until after the Chuunin Exams,” Iruka says, strangled. He’s certain the dates haven’t changed and everyone knows the Chuunin Exams aren’t for months.

 The administration has been preparing doggedly to host the competitors, the rival village ambassadors, and the (at least modest) crowds of tourists (spies and shinobi families and shinobi families that are also spies) that will come to Konoha. It’s seemed to be going well, as far as anything can go well in administration.

 The Chuunin Exams, which aren’t for some time yet, have been proceeding with few hiccups, fully under the supervision of the Hokage and the Council. It’s actually more or less the only thing Iruka hasn’t had to worry about. Iruka threw a few coffee mugs at External and Internal Defense, yelled a bit, and has been able to leave most of the necessary improvements and arrangements to them, to people like Saito Mai, and to the Hokage.

 The Sandaime Hokage had seemed to throw himself headfirst, blades figuratively (possibly literally?) whirling, into personally managing the event. Most likely to avoid getting involved with any of Iruka’s problems. So, the Hokage is dealing with the Chuunin Exams, as is befitting someone of actual authority, while Iruka (who shouldn’t even be authority of this level) deals with the matters that are more immediately on fire (both figuratively and literally).

 Iruka has at least five levels of “this has to be dealt with immediately” and he does not like it.

 “Iruka…” Mimi says slowly. “The opening ceremony of the Chuunin Exams is in two weeks.”

 “Oh.”

 To the fervent urgency that Iruka’s been embroiled in in these past few weeks, that… more or less translates into months. He does know the dates set for the Chuunin Exam events, it’s just that he apparently… forgot that the current date was so close to those dates.

 It is all Iruka can do not to fly into a panic. They are going to have foreign dignitaries and spies and tourists in Konoha soon. They probably have some here already (more than the normal amount, he means, and fuck, Naoko mentioned something along those lines yesterday) and Iruka is nowhere close to having this marriage mess sorted out. At the very least he is going to have to work double-time, cover everything up, and work in deep secret.  

 “Anyway!” Mimi says cheerfully. “Preparations are going just swell! I only wanted to talk to a few of the jounin about one of the events we’re running, and you know them, they’re so hard to track down when you want to find them! I thought I’d ask you to introduce me!”

 That’s… more efficient than asking the Jounin Commander, actually. Iruka has to commend Mimi’s clever thinking. And, if Iruka is going to be used by his friends and acquaintances for his power, he can think of no better way to be used than to set a preschool Academy teacher on fearsome jounin, especially a preschool Academy teacher with the fixed intent of looping them into participating in a charitable children’s event.

 “Why don’t you just attend the party with me?” Iruka says.

 “That would be lovely,” Mimi says enthusiastically, “so long as the right jounin are attending! Even if they’re not, I’m sure they’ll be lots of tokujo there to talk to. Are you sure the Mori Clan won’t mind?”

 “I don’t think the Mori Clan mind the things most people do,” Iruka says honestly.

 Team Seven finds them before they make it halfway to the party.

 “Iruka-sensei, there you are!” Naruto shouts, waving wildly. “We were starting to worry you were gonna work yourself into a hole! Kakashi-sensei sent us out to find you!” He skids to a stop in front of them and eyes Iruka balefully. “You are coming, right?”

 “Yes,” Iruka says, because he should probably make some attempt at having fun and meaningless socialization before everything falls apart.

 Naruto crosses his arms and nods with great certainty. “Good, because I’ve never been to a ninja party before and I woulda dragged you by the ankles if I had to, y’know,” he says. Then he grabs Iruka by the hand and starts pulling him towards his teammates, who chose not to sprint across a busy intersection. “Come on, sensei! We’re gonna be late.”

 “These are… Hatake’s genin?” Mimi says, following.

 Iruka, having his arm slowly torn out of the socket, turns around to keep talking to her as they walk.

 “Do you need introductions?” he asks, as they reach Sasuke and Sakura.

 “No, I taught all of them!” Mimi says, smiling widely. “I’d recognize that hair anywhere. Hello, Sakura, dear! Hello, Sasuke! Hello, Naruto, who didn’t recognize me!”

 Naruto turns around and gapes. “Mimi-sensei?”

 “Hello, dear, it’s been so long! You’ve all grown so much!” Her gaze lands in particular on Sasuke, who appears to be suffering from an invisible stormcloud over his head. Mimi isn’t quelled at all and looks back at him with all the power and knowledge of a woman who had to enforce naptime and eating tomatoes, and won more often than not.

 Sasuke just grunts at her, but it’s an almost polite sort of grunt.

 “Hello, Mimi-sensei!” Sakura says cheerfully, bowing slightly, and as she leans in, whispers, “Sorry about Sasuke, he’s not feeling well.”

 “Oh? What’s the matter?”

 “Kakashi-sensei’s not entering us in the Chuunin Exams!” Naruto exclaims, and kicks up a cloud of dust. “He said he’s going to hold us back a year!”

 And correspondingly, in the background, the figurative stormcloud around Sasuke thunders ominously.

 Perhaps not so figurative though; there’s a slightly buzz in the air and Iruka is now desperately trying to remember what Sasuke’s elemental affinity is. For the life of him, he can’t. He’s taught so many kids. He still occasionally struggles not to call Sasuke by the names of one of his late Uchiha cousins, which is terrible on so many counts.

 Iruka has no idea what to say. He thinks this is the right decision. Team Seven and Konoha are a bit of a mess, and there’s no shame in waiting a year for the kids to get more teamwork and leadership experience under the guidance of their jounin-sensei. Lots of people don’t pass the exams at all, much less their first time, and if on the first time, it’s usually a result of a couple years practice and preparation. The thought of throwing these three to the Chuunin Exams now is nearly enough to give him new stress issues.

 How does he even comfort them? “I’m sure that Kakashi-sensei knows best,” is a weak phrase. “I’m sure Kakashi has his reasons, why don’t you talk to him about them,” is better, except that getting Kakashi to talk about anything is like trying to nail down mist. And “Chin up, kids, there’s probably, like, a 50% chance your sensei is fucking with you,” is… no.

 “I’m sure Hatake has his reasons,” Mimi says soothingly. “You should talk to him about them.”

 Naruto wrinkles his nose at her and Sakura looks skeptical.

 “Kakashi-sensei talks but he doesn’t say anything,” Sakura demurs.

 “He never makes any sense!” Naruto complains. “He won’t answer our questions!”

 “So tie him up and extract the information for yourselves,” Mimi says pragmatically, putting her hands on her hips. “Ideally, no one even knows you’ve exacted information from them in the first place, but desperate times can call for desperate measures. You’re shinobi, dears, no one ever said you had to ask nicely.”

 “Are you encouraging them to kidnap and threaten their sensei?” Iruka says.

 “Yes, of course. Where there is a Will of Fire, there’s a way,” Mimi answers beatifically. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

 “Not… really.”

 Iruka glances at the three children, who are staring up at their old teacher with wide eyes, like she’s just opened a world of possibilities for them. Maybe he’s been a desk-shinobi for too long, but the idea of Hatake Kakashi suffering a well-deserved assault of adolescents brings great joy to his shriveled heart. Kakashi’ll probably be fine.

 “Well, we can ask him politely about it at the party,” Iruka says, because kidnapping and interrogating someone else’s party guests is a work thing and it’s rude to bring work to a party of friends. “Which is for the Clan Head’s anniversary, so we’ll be on our best behavior, right?”

 “Sure, sensei,” Naruto says.

 “Of course, sensei,” Sakura says, and Sasuke nods reluctantly.

 The three children look up at him with serious, sincere expressions and Iruka… can’t tell whether or not they’re lying to him. Are they lying to him? They’re probably lying to him. Oh, god, they grow up so fast. He doesn’t like this.

 Iruka doesn’t know what he was expecting to Mori Clan to have done. He was almost expecting them to have outdone themselves, and to have to suffer through clouds of glitter and impromptu interpretative dance. But while there is a lot of glitter, it mostly comes in the form of arts-and-crafts paper stars hanging from the ceiling and decorating the doorways, and Iruka is handed a programme when he walks in, detailing all the scheduled performances and the actors and their theatre history.

 Besides that, it actually seems like a… very nice house party. The happy couple, Clan Head Mori Hanako and her husband, are in the very first room, accepting congratulations on their years of marriage and greeting all their guests.

 “You must be Umino Iruka!” Mori Hanako declares loudly, excusing herself from the crowd to come meet them. Her presence is glamorous and her handshake is devastating. “I’ve heard wonderful things about you. Welcome! I can’t believe my beloved cousins planned such a wonderful surprise! I love surprises, don’t you?”

 “Um… yes,” Iruka says, even though his reflex is rather to kill surprises with fire now, feeling like he’s being swept away by exuberance and sheer force of everything. She’s still shaking his hand.

 “I wanted to thank you for all your work in bringing Truth to Konoha’s Inhibition of the Creative Spirit, and I sincerely hope you are able to Rebuild Us into the Shining Star of Wonder and Life that has been Inside Us All Along.”

 “It’s a pleasure,” Iruka says, and pulls on his dying hand.

 “Don’t hesitate to let the Mori Clan know if you need anything. We may be small, but we are mighty,” Mori Hanako says, and then laughs as though this was a joke. “I was delighted to learn from Kakashi that you were coming!” She sighs wistfully. “He’s off somewhere with my beloved cousin, surely Exploring the Blossoms of Passionate Youth Joining.”

 What the fuck does that mean, Iruka thinks, but only part of him. The rest of him is mostly, desperately concerned with how he’s losing feeling in his hand. It may already be dead.

 “Tell me, who are these people you’ve brought to join us in the Unified and Pure Artistic Soul of Konoha and its loving soar towards Freedom,” Mori Hanako urges him, and smiles widely towards the woman and three children standing behind him.

 Mimi is smiling politely, as though this is completely normal, but it's a very fixed expression and her eyes keep darting all around the room. The children just look terrified.

 “Mori-san,” Iruka begins, because she still has his hand, “this is Team Seven…”

 “Kakashi’s students!” she cries delightedly and finally releases him. She drops down on her knees in front of them and shakes their hands, all six of them, in a seemingly random pattern and at a speed that Iruka frankly can’t comprehend.

 “Oh, it is a pleasure to meet another generation of Team Seven! There’s so few of us; I’m so jealous when my friends speak of the generations of their teams!” She looks at them very sincerely, glittering and bright. “I am Mori Hanako, the teammate of your sensei’s sensei! Oh, this makes you all family twice over!” She kisses them all on their stunned foreheads, leaving behind not a smudge of her bright red lipstick. “Know that you are welcome in the Mori Clan! How do you Wonderful Children feel about adoption?”

 Sakura is feeling her forehead wonderingly, Naruto is just… staring with wide-eyes, and Sasuke is taking a slight step back while beginning to reach for the door. Iruka can’t tell whether or not this woman is being serious.

 “I have parents,” Sakura says defensively.

 “They can come too,” Mori Hanako assures her. “The more, the merrier!”

 Inspiration strikes Iruka not unlike lightning. “Mori-san, you should talk to Kakashi about that at some later date,” he says, throwing the problem to someone else, and gestures desperately towards Mimi. “May I introduce my colleague from the Academy, Ito Hitomi? She wanted to speak with some of the jounin and tokujo that might be here about volunteering and support for the Annual Academy Retirement Fund Fair.”

 “Of course! The Mori Clan is always happy to help support our fellow shinobi and community projects!” Mori Hanako gets to her feet and shakes Mimi’s hand exuberantly. “Any friend of a friend of Kakashi’s is a friend of ours.”

 Off to the side, now that she’s turned away slightly, the children are trying to sneak off. Iruka glares at them, because he can’t do that and it’s also rude.

 Mori Hanako leans in to look deep into Mimi’s eyes. “I can see in your eyes that you have the Soul of a Great Director, with a Daring, Risk-Taking Imagination,” she said solemnly. “How have we not met until now? You must tell me all about the creative markers I can see about you. You have Work behind you, tell me about the scars it has left on your soul.”

 “Um, well, I do help run Konoha’s Hidden magazine,” Mimi admits.

 Mori Hanako, esteemed Clan Head, squeals.

 “You what,” Iruka says, because that’s probably the village’s most popular monthly shinobi publication and his colleague has never once hinted she was involved in running it.

 Mimi looks at him balefully. “I don’t tell you everything, Iruka.”

 Iruka stares, and watches in disbelief as Mori Hanako and Ito Hitomi wander off together to discuss Retaining One’s Brilliant Light and the Struggle of the Distribution of Creative Works among the Money-Focused Motivations of a shinobi village. That is… a friendship that he’s sure he should warn somebody about, but he’s not sure who. Their husbands? Iruka doesn’t know who Mimi’s husband is and Hanako’s husband across the room appears to be unfurling a scroll of poetry for an impromptu reading.

 “Can we go now?” Sasuke says.

 Naruto looks at him disbelievingly. “We just got here!”

 Sakura looks torn between both opinions.

 Before an argument starts, a thunder of feet comes through the house and Inuzuka Kiba, ducking around various adult shinobi, flies across the room to grab Naruto by the shoulders. “Naruto!” he crows. “I thought I smelled you! What took you so long?”

 Behind Kiba, Nara Shikamaru and Akimichi Chouji are following at a more sedate pace, their arms full of books and… board game boxes? Shikamaru is reading what looks like a game manual as he walks, more intent in studying this than anything Iruka gave them in school, and it’s up to Chouji to keep his friend from walking into other people or a wall.

 “Oh, hey, sensei,” Kiba says. “What’s up?”

 I just helped your sister and her fiancée annul an accidental marriage that happened on their first date, Iruka doesn’t say. And your mother has been married so many times I actually lost count, and apparently it started out as fun but eventually turned into a conspiracy to bend the factions of Konoha to her will. Someone suggested I banish her, but she’s laughed in my face so many times already and I don’t think she’d actually go.

 “Work as usual,” Iruka says politely. “What have you three got there?”

 Kiba lights up and turns back to Naruto, who he still has by the shoulders. “Oh, man, Naruto, you’re not gonna believe this! The Moris have all five editions and sets and all the figurines and collectibles of Super Ninja Adventures!” He shakes Naruto’s shoulders in excitement. “All of them! Even the new special edition with the original ‘The Demon Fox Lord’s Bride’ storyline!”

 Naruto’s jaw drops open. “WHAT? Oh, man, really?” He practically starts jumping up and down on the spot. “I thought they were never going to reveal that part of Princess Katsumi’s backstory! Is it playable?”

 “Shika is reading it right now, we’re gonna play it,” Kiba promises.

 “But I don’t have my character sheets!”

 Shikamaru and Chouji stop in front of them, with Chouji’s hand on Shikamaru’s shoulder to keep him from tripping over a plant. Iruka squints at the books and board games in their hands, the style of which look… extremely familiar.

 “I have all your character sheets memorized,” Shikamaru says, not looking up.

 “Oh, right,” Naruto says. Then he turns around to look at his teammates, who are watching this interaction warily. “Hey, you guys should join in! This game is great, y’know!”

 “I told you a hundred times that I don’t want to play your dumb role-playing game,” Sakura says guardedly. “And Sasuke doesn’t want to play either!”

 This finally has Shikamaru glancing up, but only for a moment, looking over Naruto’s upset expression, Sakura’s determination, and Sasuke’s badly feigned disinterest.

 “Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura haven’t played before, they couldn’t do it. You’d probably have to keep stopping and help Sasuke,” Shikamaru says boredly. “And Sakura’s not like Ino.”

 “…Ino plays?” Sakura says, surprised.

 “Yeah, sometimes,” Naruto answers. “She’s pretty good!” He looks towards Sasuke and sticks out his tongue. “Not surprised that you wouldn’t want to play! It takes a real shinobi to play this game.”

 He seems to be saying this unironically.

 Sasuke glares at him. “How do you play?”

 “We’ll explain along the way,” Chouji says, and hands Sasuke one of the books he’s holding. Then he offers one to Sakura, like he didn’t even hear her refusal. “What? You’re playing too, right? We need more people anyway. Shika’s mean and he needs to be surprised more.”

 Kiba starts muttering something about jerkfaces who trip them into enemy camps for going just a little bit off quest and only trying to kidnap a pet dog. Shikamaru, who is still reading, smirks slightly at this rant. As Chouji reshuffles all the books and boxes in his arms, Iruka catches sight of a bag of dice. Everything immediately becomes clear. He has vivid memories of the quiet, trying-to-be-subtle-but-unsubtle clatter of a dice on a desktop. 

 “Hang on,” Iruka says, glaring at the original four players. “Is this what you four used to skip class for and do instead of paying attention? Is this the game?”

 Naruto and Kiba are the only ones who bother looking guilty about it.

 “Uh, yes?” Naruto says, then grabs Kiba and Sasuke by the arms and runs for it. “Bye, sensei! We’ll see you later!”

 “Naruto, wait!” Sakura cries, and sprints after them.

 They quickly disappear into the throng of the party, and Chouji gives Iruka a nod before following at more sedate pace, pulling Shikamaru, still reading, by the arm.

 “Nice seein’ you again, sensei!” Chouji says politely. “Good luck with your work stuff!”

 Iruka glares after them, especially frustrated by how he can’t actually do anything because they all graduated. “Where should I tell your sensei to find you if they ask?” he calls after them.

 “We’ll be around,” Shikamaru says, as he and Chouji retreat. “Don’t worry, this campaign should only take us about ten hours.”

 “Ten hours-”

 “Probably minimum,” Shikamaru amends, just before he disappears.

 Iruka stares after them, trying to imagine any sort of game that takes ten hours to play. That certainly explains several extremely long absences from his classes without any kind of parental note. He quickly decides that if any of the sensei ask him where to find them or how to get them to stop rolling those dice all the time, he’s not going to answer. Not only because he has no idea. Kakashi, Asuma, and Kurenai can suffer for once and figure out how to deal with children on their own.

 Belatedly, Iruka realizes that he’s now alone near the front of a house party. He has to brave the interior of the house for food and talk to someone if he doesn’t want to look like an antisocial loner. And, unlike some people, he doesn’t want to look like an antisocial loner.

 It was easier to be around the kids. Now he has to find some adults to socialize with, and come up with decent conversation starters, because Naoko will kill him if he goes back to work so soon. There has to be someone at this party he knows more than passingly.

 He should find Kakashi, actually. He has questions that need answering.

 Like what the fuck does “Exploring the Blossoms of Passionate Youth Joining” mean? Does he want to know? Probably not. But he’s going to find out because it’s either that or stand at a punch bowl and make small talk.