Chapter 2
Naruto Uzumaki found himself standing in front of what many Shinobi considered to be hell on earth. The front of the building looked unassuming and plain, much like the other small government offices scattered through the village almost haphazardly. It was said that the Shodaime himself chose the positions for many of the most important strategic buildings in the village, carefully spacing them and disguising them in areas that, at the time, were industrial or military-based.
Naruto came to the conclusion that the Shodaime had been either very drunk while 'carefully planning' the random spacing of the buildings, or he'd used a dartboard, a map, and a liberal amount of alcohol, which circled back to the first option anyway.
The two refugee women, Makoto and Haruka, had held up well during the relatively long journey. Naruto was actually thankful that he had gotten up early this morning to prank, otherwise, he know that he would've missed the few, random hours that the office was open today. Glancing at the sign - "Konoha Branch: Bureau for Information, Research, and Community Health" - and the hours listed on a small piece of paper stuck to the very edge of the window in tiny print - "Tuesday and Thursday open to public, 11:30 until 3" - he noted the small shinobi symbols written in a fine layer of dust and grime on the window. They translated roughly to "Pain!" and "Help me! (non combat)", with a small symbol he couldn't read that looked vaguely like a one-eyed dog with a slash mark through it.
"Well, I think this is the place." He turned to the two women, who smiled and sagged visibly in relief. "Tell you what," he started, glancing at the way Makoto was favoring one leg and the sweat pouring glistening on Haruka's brow, "I'll go in and see what I can do about getting information on your Kazama Arashi, alright?" He stretched out his neck, try to leverage an extra inch to see through the moderately busy traffic. This street - "Sarutobi Lane", named after not the Sandaime but a successful merchant of leather goods who had a shop down the way - had a surplus of merchants set in small stone alcoves along the pass. Despite the shade, the street still seemed blisteringly hot. The temperature today had to be insufferable for civilians, but Naruto had long ago developed resistance to that sort of thing. He really needed to when his best clothes were a sweatpants and jacket set, loaded with hidden weapons and goods and padded with inches of worked leather.
"I'll probably be in there for a while, you know." He stated, more to himself than anything, "So, could you ladies get me something to drink while I'm in there? I hate to ask it and all, but..." he twisted his head, watching their silent exchange when their eyes met. He tried to decipher it, and settled on the explanation that, by the state of their clothes, they weren't well off. To be fair, he wasn't that rich either, but somehow, his "moderately wealthy" and their destitution didn't even compare. "Just until lunch, I mean. Then again, I'm a growing boy! We could just get something to eat now, and the office migh-" he fumbled his words, "er, should be open then." He tried to smile at them, his normal "foxy" grin awkward on his face suddenly.
"We'll be fine, Naruto-kun", Makoto stated sternly, sitting slowly on a nearby bench. Haruka took off her pack and sat beside her mother, sparing a shake of the head in Naruto's direction. "I'm not so old yet that a bit of walking will ruin me, or that a bit of waiting will fray my nerves." Naruto saw that her hands in front of her were nearly trembling, and Naruto didn't know if or how much she was lying about her health. "The fact that you're willing to go there in my stead, willing to hasten any information we could get ... that is more precious to me than water or rest."
Naruto spun quickly on his heel to face the building, the strange feeling in his chest twisting his heart and his stomach until he felt that they were draining all the air from him. Her smile made him feel like he couldn't breathe, and he didn't know why that felt so good all of the sudden.
"Well," he said, hoping that no one else heard the crack in his voice that he completely blamed on puberty stopping in for a visit, "we still have that dinner date, y'know!"
Haruka actually giggled, and sounded like she was ten. "A date with such a handsome young man? Naruto-kun, you'll spoil us!"
Naruto hoped desperately that they didn't see the way his skin betrayed him, turning a bright red somehow didn't match bright yellow and orange, and quickly ducked his head and darted into the building like Nukenin were on his tail. He thought he heard laughter and wasn't sure if he should be worried or overjoyed that for once, it might've been coming from the voice in his head.
"BIRCH" was called "The Bureau of Bureaucracy" in muted whispers by jonin around their campfires and drinks. Naruto appreciated this name to the fullest at the moment he entered the building. The public part of the office was rather tiny, no bigger than a public restroom. There were a total of two chairs to sit in, both occupied by two elderly men who might've been shinobi, might've been civilian, and might've been around since before both terms were coined. It was as if that section of the room was carved around them, because the overwhelming towers of unfinished, unorganized paperwork that cluttered the other section were noticeably empty. As he entered, the two men gave him a weighty glare. For an instant, he felt their eyes sink straight through his stomach until they glared directly at the fox-bastard sealed there, and than that instant was gone, replaced instead by a feeling of utter confusion as the two old men turned to each other with identical snarls on their lips.
"Look at those clothes!". The two men looked identical to each other save for a few more tufts on the head of the one on the right, and a few more tufts in the ears on the one on the left. They wore traditional robes and sandals, and Naruto wondered if they realized what era they were in. He was answered moments later when their banter continued.
"Simply despicable!" one old man coughed, slamming his cane against the floor.
"I agree!" the other crowed, also slamming his cane into the floor.
"The nerve!" The one on the left creaked, squinting at Naruto again. "Can't believe youngsters wear orange now! And on a Saturday, no less!" Naruto had to force himself not to face vault. He wondered what that had to do with anything, but quickly came to the conclusion that the whole scenario playing out before him made no sense. It seemed so surreal somehow that he resisted dispelling the genjutsu.
"You old coot!", the one on the right barked, whipping the cane around to the slightly balder old man with a startling shinobi-like speed. "It's Monday! Any fool can tell that!"
"'Old Coot"?" Naruto swore he saw a cloud of dust when the living, breathing fossil hunched forwards in his chair, his shoulders shaking until the trembling passed to his whole body. Naruto thought fleetingly about where the nearest hospitals were when the frail man let out a high pitched whine. "How DARE you talk to your father like that! Your mother would roll in her grave!"
The other old man shook his identical cane at his father, before surrendering the effort and resorting to thumping it on the floor for effect and as punctuation. "Mother's not dead yet, you senile geezer!"
"Lazy upstart! Your grandchildren would be ashamed of you!" With this, Naruto backed very cautiously away until their voices faded slightly. In his deliberate effort not to draw attention back to himself, he completely missed all the warning signs he'd been trained for years to gain, and ran back first into another person for the second time that day.
His ninja senses had never been this humiliated, even when he'd been caught so completely flatfooted by Haku. If Kakashi-sensei were here, he'd never let Naruto live this down.
Then again, the genin rationalized, the odds of the masked man being in a government establishment of any sort, let alone one that took conscious effort to find and enter, were very low. Factored in was the complete and utter lack of anything either discernibly female or visibly engaged in a desperate battle for survival, and it seemed like Naruto would need to be the single most unlucky bastard in the history of Konoha if he weren't able to gracefully back away from whoever he had rammed into, complete his original mission, and then stealthily retreat and deny that this whole thing had ever happened.
"Why, it's certainly a surprise to see you here, Naruto-kun!".
'I hate my life'. He was too frozen to do anything but stiffen even further as the familiar figure untangled himself with all the grace and dignity that fled from Naruto the moment he woke up today.
The blond could hear the smug smile on Kakashi's face. He wasn't a Hyuuga, but that didn't stop him from knowing that his sensei's visible eye had crinkled into that haunting, damnable crescent, even before he turned around. "Surely, it's a sign from the heavens that this meeting was meant to be! Here," he continued, his tone completely shifting from sugary sweet to ice cold in an instant, "take this stack of papers to the front desk." The Jonin placed an ungodly thick pile on one of his frozen hands, and Naruto had to snap out of his shock to balance himself out, nearly toppling over as he strained to get the wobbling tower into control.
Naruto stared blankly up at the Jonin, who then had the grace to look sheepish. The silver-haired man rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, as it turns out, the other instructors enjoy doing paperwork just as much as I do..."
Naruto picked up the weighted pause at the end of that statement. "Which," Naruto took up, "means that you all are too lazy to fill out your mission reports and stuff." He glared at the ridiculously tall man. "So, which one of you lost the bet to the Old Man?" Naruto navigated his way over to what could've been the front desk, getting his pride back with every moment that his teacher wasn't cackling at his misfortune.
"Gai." The kyuubi-vessel thought for a moment, remembered Gai from a few chance meetings around Konoha and found himself nodding at Kakashi's answer. He paused, a question striking him, and he raised an eyebrow at his sensei.
"Wait, if Gai lost, then how did you get stuck with" and he gestured widely, "all of this crap?" He pulled out a report with his teeth, skillfully setting the stack down. He glanced at it, wincing at the awful handwriting that made his look manageable by comparison. "Wait, this is from Team Eight!" He flipped a few pages, glancing through blocked words. "And this is from Team Ten..." he glanced up warily at Kakashi. "This is from Team Nine. Wait, I didn't even know we HAD a Team Five, but that's in there too."
The Jonin sniffed and glanced away. "Sure, I had to collect and organize all of that, but frankly, I got off lucky."
The silence in the air grew thick with dust, the muffled-sounding curses from the old men, and the rustling of paperwork. Naruto finally spoke, his words strategically chosen.
"Lucky compared to...?" Kakashi grinned, opened his mouth, and Naruto instantly felt a sense of complete and utter dread wash over him in icy waves. "Waitwaitwait! I don't want to know. REALLY don't want to know."
"Aw!" Kakashi cooed, ruffling the blonde's hair with disregard as he pulled a certain book from his vest pocket with the other arm. "You DO have some survival instincts after all!" One eye poked out from over the orange cover. "You didn't seem to have any instincts left when it came to avoiding civilians, so a teacher has to wonder about their student."
"HEY!" Naruto shouted, "You're a Jonin! It's your job to sneak around and all. It's not my fault that you're such a lousy instructor that you can't teach about detection and stuff worth a damn."
"You wound me." Kakashi deadpanned. He motioned with one hand, and Naruto turned around to see a very serious looking man behind the front counter, looking at him with an expression that stated the fact that he was not amused by Naruto's antics.
Naruto gulped.
"Er, hey. Yeah, you." He said, fidgeting in place while he tried to smile. "Listen, I'm here because I need to get some information and-"
"And I need to submit paperwork for genin teams designations GM-11, HK-7, KY-8, SF-5, and SA-10." Kakashi continued, his voice rising a few octaves and sounding sickly sweet - a cruel commentary on Naruto's voice. "Or at least," he concluded in a whisper that only Naruto could hear, "you will if you don't want your teammates to" and he practically giggled, "assist you in retraining those "not running into people" reflexes." Naruto growled, and Kakashi continued smoothly from behind his book, and still crouched behind Naruto. The genin marveled at how much effort Kakashi continually put into making other people do his work for him. For a six foot man to hide behind a four-foot something genin probably took more skill in concealment and silence than most ninja used in an entire day. It went without mentioning that if Hatake Kakashi had put even half that energy into doing his paperwork, he'd have done it six months ago and saved himself the hassle.
The silver-haired man continued on, much to Naruto's dismay. "As your loyal teammates, I'm positive that they'll want to help you get better as a shinobi. Even if it does take all-night training sessions. Isn't there supposed to be a thunderstorm tonight? Oh well, no matter. I'm sure they'll make any sacrifice necessary for the good of th-".
"Alright!" he muttered, writing the symbols for "jerk" with his fingers against his thigh.
Kakashi poked him in the back. He traced the symbols for "I heard that". Naruto hung his head.
"Yes, I'm here to do allllll of this paperwork, and then I wanna get some information about a guy who could've lived here a while ago." The clerk gave him an incredulous stare. "What?"
"'A guy who could have lived in Konoha a while ago'?" the clerk wondered aloud. He shook his head. "Do you have any idea how vague that is for an office like this? You're insane." He adjusted the bulky pair of black glasses in an almost dismissive motion. "Also, unless you have permission from your jonin instructor stating that this is related to shinobi training, genin cannot fill out official paper-" He was interrupted when a hastily signed note skidded across the desk in front of him, wrapped around a blunted shuriken. Naruto turned to find that Kakashi had already bolted. It was likely that he'd been halfway through the front door when Naruto agreed to do the paperwork. Naruto's eyebrow twitched, and half his thoughts circled around the question of what he could do to his sensei to get him back for this.
There was a moment when the only thing that could be heard was the clerk's unfurling of the crinkled paper, and then he cleared his throat. The clerk looked young, about early twenties. He seemed like the sort who put full dedication into his job, and left zero room in his life for anything that actually resembled a life, like family, romance, or fun. He had his dark hair combed back neatly, slicked back with the reflective oil shinobi learned very early not to get near. His outfit was the official uniform for the lower level of the shinobi administration, but the loose black robes with thin red embroidery seemed to clash with the small green pin on his lapel. There wasn't, of course, a name tag or any truly identifying marks - the lapel was a concession to how dangerous this job wasn't, otherwise government workers dressed more like civilians than the civilians themselves. All in all, he did not seem like the sort to tremble. The man's voice squeaked once, and he paused, breathing in and out steadily. "Y-your instructor is H-hatake K-k-kakashi?", he asked as his glasses fogged up.
Naruto nodded, and his feet guiding him back a few steps. The man actually whimpered, and Naruto watched in incredulous awe as the man's eyes rolled back in his head and he fell backwards out of sight with a soft thump. Naruto quickly leaped onto the counter and then behind it, searching the clerk for a pulse. He was alive, but out cold, the paper still clutched in his hands.
"...Okay, whatever." Naruto said with a shrug. He looked around, and couldn't see the two old fossils behind all the paperwork and potted fake plants. "If it works, go with it." He murmured to himself as he softly jumped over the body. "Well, I wanna get out of here quick so I can eat dinner with Makoto-san and Haruka-san, and Sakura-chan and Sasuke-bastard will just kill me if they have to go through with another midnight session." He scratched his head. "Hey! I know." He grinned, and fell into the ready stance, hands frozen mid-seal. He sent a mild pulse of Chakra through the still hands, concentrating on the separate threads that seemed to flow from them. There weren't nearly as many as he started with, with just five of his original bunshin from this morning still remaining. All the Makoto and Haruka clones had dispelled long ago, and he 'remembered' being hit by Iruka in three different clones.
Naruto wished he could convince the Hokage to let him have another look at the "Forbidden Scroll". He'd been told early on that the Kage Bunshin technique was listed on there not because it was incredibly difficult, but because of the incredible amount of Chakra needed not just to initiate it, but to maintain it. Doing anything fancy with it required precise mastery of it, as well as superb Chakra control. Naruto had the "mastery" part of it down pat, but found that "magnificent Chakra control" didn't matter much when you had an endless power supply. It seemed like the Kage Bunshin had always been a part of his life, but in fact he'd only had it for a matter of months. Most shinobi wouldn't dare experimenting with their techniques without proper instruction and years of training with it. Naruto had neither time nor instructors - no one in the village could even try to copy the sheer number of his clones. Naruto was the only one who could understand what it was like to be part of a hundred minds at once, and still be the same person through it all. He couldn't put into words how deceptively hard (and yet, relatively easy) it was to coordinate the moves of dozens of clones so they didn't all end up in a pile.
Naruto had managed it an hour after he learned it.
But, there was another reason that the technique was listed as forbidden. He called it "Info Overflow", but it probably had a technical name like "Sensory Saturation" or something. What happened was that, as soon as a clone was dispelled - whether by an enemy, by lack of energy, or by simply severing his connection with it - all the information it took in during it's "life" was instantly transmitted to the original Naruto.
When Naruto sent his clones ahead as scouts, or as distractions, he had to cope with a brief moment of complete and utter disorientation as completely conflicting memories fought inside of his head. Conversations 'he' hadn't had, skirmishes he never played in, and places he hadn't been suddenly became his own conversations and his own battles. The disorientation mainly came from being in twelve different places at once. When one connection was severed, it was like it rippled through the rest of them, forcing them all to "report in" through their own connections. The feedback sucked, and Naruto was damn sure that if it weren't for the Kyuubi and the healing abilities they shared, his head would've exploded by now.
Literally.
The fact that it was a dangerous technique didn't stop him from using every advantage he could, though, and he activated his connections to his clones again, dispelling them all in a shot and recoiling from the overload for a brief minute. After a pause, Naruto exhaled heavily, straightening up and shaking off imaginary battle wounds.
Iruka had been led to the far opposite end of Konoha through the forests. To make his luck even better, the clone had been in the trees when it'd been dispelled, meaning that Iruka had no clue where he was now. His old sensei hadn't encountered any Makoto or Haruka clones, which meant that they were safe where they were.
Naruto checked his watch. He'd been in here for about a half hour, and wanted to speed things up. He grinned, fox fangs peeking over his lip. He could do fast.
He stepped through the curtain-shaded doorway that led into the back of the office, momentarily losing his focus. Rows and rows of shelves were crammed in haphazardly, some stacked to the ceiling without an inch to spare while others were only waist height and nearly abandoned. Books, boxes, oddly shaped statues and scrolls filled some shelves entirely, while twine-tied parcels were the only objects on others. Loose leaf papers were strewn everywhere with the same glee of a preschooler with a can of silly string.
"Well, damn," he whistled, eyebrows inching high on his forehead, "this isn't gonna be easy." He crouched down, balancing on the balls of his feet while he forced a single kage bunshin, who was formed in complete mimicry of his position. His clones weren't able to use any techniques themselves, but a handy secret he'd found on the fly was that somehow, they helped his chakra control when he really needed to focus.
Using the first clone as a "template", he willed a little over a dozen into existence. All of him straightened and massed together in a jumbled group. "Alright!" he - the original - called while he - the clone and the mass entity - listened. It was confusing as hell, and Naruto had thought about assigning names or personalities to some of them, just to make it easier in his head. "Listen up! We want to make this quick so we can get out of here for some ramen-" he was interupted by an enthusiastic chorus of "Ramen!" and "Let's eat!" and one or two polite inquiries of "Hey, can I have some too?".
"Mmm, Ramen." His stomach rumbled, and he licked his lips. "Anyway, let's search for any information about "Kazama Arashi" or the Yondaime in here." As one, they all glanced at the room, then back to him. "...Yeah, I know. But, do it for Makoto!" There was a round of cheers. "And Haruka!" There were more cheers. "And RAMEN!" That gained an almost deafening round of hoots, applause, and cheers, and Naruto was very glad that the clerk was out cold and that the old men were already deaf. "Let's go!"
There were three large aisles, and all of the Narutos quickly found that all of the paperwork was in no particular order at all. Some boxes of paperwork had a collection dating back fifteen years and over thirty different failed genin and chuunin teams. That brought back the original paperwork, and he created two more clones to double-check the paperwork and, since the clerk was out cold, stamp it with the official seal laying nearby.
Naruto winced when he realized that being in the back room of a government office was probably treason of some sort. Then again, he rationalized, there still was that note Kakashi wrote, and when he'd glanced at it, it said that he had permission to do paperwork for the genin teams. It didn't, of course, specify what era the genin teams had to be in. With that in mind, he made of few of himself start organizing the disarray, grouping together senseis, teams, and students. It had to be the first time in the history of Bureaucracy that having papers in triplicate actually came in handy.
As some of the bunshin read paperwork, others ran courier around the room and passed boxes and figures to still others who climbed on the shelves in makeshift, human ladders. The first Naruto started feeling a throbbing in temple that was usually disguised by successive bouts of adrenaline in battle, but was now out undisguised. He felt into the pouches on his leg and pulled out a small packet of aspirin, swallowing five dry. It wouldn't help very much or for very long, but unless the Kyuubi worked on numbing the pain and not destroying the pain relievers, it would have to do.
The room was awash with noise. There were papers rustling, boxes being folded together, taped, taken apart, or scraped against metal shelving as some Narutos muttered curses under their breath. One Naruto he'd almost put a name to hummed a cheerful song as he balanced precariously on the shoulders of another one, who was glaring spitefully at the world. He patrolled the aisles, reinforcing chakra here and there, dispelling any particularly uncooperative clones and replacing them with fresh clones who had 'seen' the example he set. Naruto found that it really helped when making clones that they knew exactly what he knew when they were born, and could seamlessly fit into battle, or whatever task he needed them to do, again.
"Found something!" one clone shouted, waving a fistful of papers. Naruto hurried to that one, watching as the clones on either side of him slowed down and peered over his shoulder. He squinted at the paperwork, trying to make out handwriting that had to be worse than his.
"I think..." he said, bringing the paperwork back and away from his eyes a few times, "that this definitely proves he was here." The forms were yellowed already with age. The date at the top was very nearly twenty years old, and the name "Kazama Arashi" was printed in box letters near the top, with the writing getting progressively worse from there. "Team Arashi", he strained, "Genins Suzuko Rin, Uch-" He swore to himself. He couldn't make out anymore than that. He might've see a "ake" in there, but that could've been a "wre" just as easily with handwriting like that. He pondered for a moment. The "Uch" probably was a Uchiha of some sort - he knew that twenty years ago, they'd been all over the place.
The clones around him paused expectantly. "Right! Good work!" He rewarded the clone who'd found it with a fresh burst of Chakra that guaranteed life for a bit longer (or until a really good hit). "But, back to work!".
The clones mumbled, but their pace sped up a small bit from what it was before. They had a lead, and even if it was just a tiny start, Naruto could and always had taken whatever he could get.
Thanks for all the review so far! My thanks to Norry for reading this over a few times and resisting the urge to burn it at first sight. Criticism is welcome!