Hashirama groaned as he pulled the pillow off of his head around the time he had started wishing to smother himself with it. As the sun was rising, something miraculous happened. Izuna had stopped snoring. Smiling at the blessed silence, he rolled over in order to go to sleep.

That was not to be however. Less than two minutes after he'd closed his eyes, a darkly grumbling Sarutobi Konohamaru entered the room and shook him awake.

"What?!" he snapped.

"Thanks to Naruto's disappearance, I have to go to the Kage summit in Kumo." the Sarutobi muttered.

"What's that got to do with me?" he asked.

"Well, there needs to be a Hokage here to deal with any problems that might crop up as well as the day to day stuff, and with Me and Naruto gone, you're the only Hokage in the village since you're Hokage for life and all that." Konohamaru replied.

"So, despite how I was treated by your people, you want me to get up out of my nice warm bed and do your work for you?" he grumbled as that damnable sense of duty that had propelled him to he head of his clan following the death of his father and step-mother in spite of his own desires reared its ugly head.

"They're your people too!" the Sarutobi exclaimed. "Well, the descendants of your people, but you get the idea."

"Fine, I'll do it!" he snapped as he crawled out of the hospital bed he'd been placed in, and in which he had gotten absolutely no sleep thanks to his roommates.

Muttering darkly about the people in the place he'd found himself in and about the Uchiha whom he'd yet to see wandering around the village out of principle, he made his way to the Hokage's office as soon as he was dressed for the day, having taken his clothing from the laundry and checked out of the hospital in the usual manner for ninja. When he reached the office, he stopped, backed out, double checked that it was indeed the Hokage's office and not the Tax Department, went back in, and stared at the desk for a full minute.

"When I get home, I am so killing that brat's grandfather." he said after the fifth "Kai" had failed to dispel what was before him.

Apparently, someone had decided to chop down a forest, convert it into paperwork, and set it all on the Hokage's desk for the Hokage to fill out at his leisure.

No wonder that Konohamaru brat had been so eager to skive off to that "Summit"...

&!&!&!&

Madara, who was used to Izuna's snoring, had managed to sleep rather peacefully after he'd found a relatively comfortable position, and had managed to get a rather nice lie-in as well since there were no members of his clan coming to him and demanding advice. Sure, less and less people had been coming to him for such since he'd taken Izuna's eyes, but that hadn't stopped every Fugaku, Obito and Tekka from dropping by and demanding a chunk of his time whenever the heck they felt like it morning, noon, or night.

Had he known that heading the Uchina clan would have left him seriously sleep deprived...Heck, who was he kidding? He would've taken the position anyways. It had been his dream ever since he had been a small child after-all. People had gotten sick of hearing how he'd be Clan Head years before he'd finally attained that goal.

Yawning and stretching, Madara decided that sleeping in until eight - while rather decadent - was more than enough and decided to get out and explore the village he'd helped found. He'd had the distinct impression that there had been something that everyone he'd encountered so far had been hiding from him, and he had every intention of finding out what that was.

After wandering through a number of streets that were oddly free of Uchiha and being stared at and whispered about by more people than he could count and being propositioned five times in the marketplace, he left the downtown area of the bowl-shaped crater the town had apparently been rebuilt into after some cataclysmic disaster and headed to quieter climes. After wandering through one or two parks that had obviously been designed by the Senju, he rounded a corner and saw his clan's symbol for the first time that day emblazoned on the side of a building.

As he looked up at what was apparently the headquarters of the "Konoha Military Police Force", a rather harried looking man hurried out to him.

"You're late!" the man said. "It's bad enough I get it from the guy who's supposed to be playing Obito, I don't need it from you as well. Hiro breaking his leg was the last thing we needed, especially with our Mikoto out on maternity leave."

"What is it you think I'm supposed to be doing?" he asked the man who was critically eyeing him.

"Your job!" the man exclaimed as he handed him a sheaf of papers.

"The costume's fine for now. Just follow the script and don't try to answer questions you don't know the answer to. Hiro's last substitute was an absolute disaster, what with his frequent ad-libbing and the bizarre ideas he'd put into those poor children's heads. We're lucky the Academy decided to give us a second chance. If they hadn't, the village would have pulled our funding, and then where would we be? Out of a job, that's where!" the harried looking man said as he hustled him inside the building.

As he stood in what was apparently the bullpen of the police station, he read the script he'd been handed. Apparently, he was to tell the story of his exploits, even stuff he hadn't done yet. According to this, Izuna was going to die soon and he was going to...

"I WHAT?!"

&!&!&!&!&

While Madara was trying to convince himself that his trip to the future was a hallucination that had been fueled by the mushrooms that he'd foraged for in the forest the day before, gossip was spreading through the Uchiha Clan like wildfire. Like all gossip that is only half understood and been passed through several parties as if in a game of Telephone, this gossip became more and more distorted the further it spread.

"Did you hear?" one of the Uchiha housewives who had been a ninja who'd lived out of a tent up until a couple years before and was only just getting the hang of that whole "homemaker" thing said to another in the marketplace.

"What?" the other "housewife" asked, hoping that the gossip would be juicier than the pathetic thing that was masquerading as steak that was on sale.

"Apparently, the Rokudaime Hokage came back in time to rescue our clan." the first said as she examined the vegetables in a nearby stall with a mind to buy some lettuce.

"Rescue us, why?" the second asked as she examined the tomatoes.

"Madara's going to go insane and eat Izuna before he slaughters the entire clan because we wouldn't build him a rocket so he can start a moon colony." the first said as she poked at the wilted thing that the stallkeeper had been trying to pass off as lettuce.