Naruto trudged down the streets of Konoha. It was too lively, in his opinion. Sasuke was silent beside him.

"It just feels wrong, you know?" Naruto said, continuing a rant he had ended a minute earlier, "Like, it's only been a week and everyone's talking more about his successor than about the old man himself." He scowled, but his heart wasn't even in it. He had taken the Hokage's death terribly hard.

Naruto had always dreamed of becoming the Hokage himself one day, and whenever he had imagined it, he had thought it would be the old man himself who handed the hat down to him personally. The Third would retire peacefully, and Naruto would become the Fifth Hokage. That was that. Well, not any more.

Sasuke spoke up, seeming distracted. "Yeah, I know. We need to get out of the village for a while. This place is stifling."

Naruto nodded, eyes glum. He had spent the last year stuck outside the village on the slopes of Mount Myoboku with a bunch of toads, and this wasn't in any way the return he had hoped for. Actually, the village had been pretty good to him recently. A couple of years back, Sakura had finally got fed up with hearing him make up stories about the past Hokage whose ranks he wished someday to join and had made him spend a day in the library actually learning something about them. Really, it shouldn't have taken so long, but due to his upbringing Naruto was barely literate. He had the whole 'child of a hero' thing to thank for the sudden shift in treatment, he supposed.

Seeing the name 'Uzumaki Kushina' as the wife of the Fourth Hokage had sparked a couple questions, which had soon spread like sparks catching fire when answers were suspiciously lacking. Soon, coincidences had mounted and, when certain people had refused to talk, Naruto had resorted to spreading made-up stories about himself in an effort to provoke a response. Around the time when the village was abuzz with worry that Naruto was literally the child of the Nine Tails Demon Fox, the Hokage had stepped in to set the record straight.

Since then, his life had gotten a lot smoother. He just wished he could say the same for Sasuke.

They continued walking down the street, and Naruto kept catching people scowling when they saw the young Uchiha Chuunin. Naruto cursed under his breath and felt like spitting.

"Yeah, I can see why you'd wanna get out of here, too," he said.

"What? You can?" asked Sasuke, bewildered. Naruto wasn't sure why his friend was acting like such a spaz all of a sudden.

"Yeah, dude. Everyone's giving you the cold shoulder. I've already had to threaten some jerks with beatdowns for talking shit about your family, you know."

"Oh… right. Yeah, all these armchair intelligence experts are convinced they know who's behind this all... If you ask me, they're just jumping at shadows. It's not a big deal. But thanks."

"Whatever, man. Let's get out of here if we can."

'Although,' he thought to himself, as he caught sight of a girl coming down the street, 'there's something to be said for not being around a bunch of wrinkly old toads any more.' The person in question was the cute Hyuuga girl whom he had seen from time to time over the years. Hinata. And, boy, time had really been good to her. Wow. Gotta play this cool.

Naruto gave her a wave and a greeting as they approached, and her white eyes widened in shock. With a high-pitched squeak, she sort of stumbled in place then stammered out a response.

"N-Naruto! You're back! I- oh- Sorry!"

Then she covered her face and rushed past in a hurry, disappearing down a nearby alley.

Naruto sighed. Some things hadn't changed.

"Man, how's a guy supposed to get a girl's attention when she won't even give me the time of day, huh?" Naruto grumbled.

"What? Wait, what are you talking about?" Sasuke asked, confused.

"Girls, man! I'm talking about girls. Come on, didn't you see that back there?"

Sasuke frowned, staring at Naruto. "I saw something, yeah, but what do you think just happened?"

"It's the same thing that always happens when I try to talk to her. She finds some excuse to run off, or says she's feeling bad. It's enough to get a guy down, ya know?"

"You're serious." Sasuke's voice was flat, without inflection. "You're actually serious and not just kidding me here."

"Yeah, what's your problem?"

"Oh, no, nothing. I mean... You really don't-" Sasuke paused, before adding, "Huh. I can't believe you hung out with that foul old man for a year and still..."

"What? Still what? What the hell are you talking about?"

Sasuke shook his head. "No, you know what? I'll explain it when you're older."

Naruto glared at his friend, but it didn't illuminate the matter. Eventually, he gave up. Together, they moved onward until they reached the Academy.

In an organization like Konoha's Shinobi administration there are really only two methods of management: Order through fiat, and order through paperwork. A good leader could either keep things working smoothly through attentive focus and delegation to deservedly trusted underlings, or through administration of a good system that could function on its own through well-understood and well-documented rules.

The Hokage's unexpected death had revealed an unusual problem, which was that all of the employed ninjas, bureaucrats, and ninja-bureacrats had different opinions on how the village had actually been run when you got right down to it. Some people had come into work every day and listened to the first competent person who had a job for them all the way up the line to the Hokage. Others had relied on systems and procedures that had been in place for decades, sending reports and requests to the appropriate individuals and receiving orders and mandates by the book.

Apparently, the Third Hokage had never gotten around to making the rogues play by the rules. Either that, or he had never gotten around to fully dismantling the bureaucracy. Or, and this opinion was growing in popularity, he just liked being a dick to certain people.

So it was that Naruto and Sasuke proceeded through the hallways of the Academy's Administration buildings, dodging a stream of bureaucrat-nin herding a stampede of filing cabinets on wheels down the corridors like their lives depended on it.

The building was a madhouse.

As they passed a very loud room on their left, both of the young men were forced to dodge suddenly as a storm of shuriken whirled out of the open doorway and embedded themselves into the opposite wall. The inside of the room was filled with people arguing vigorously about qualifications skills, ages, and management style, and the discussion had evidently grown heated enough to descend into random outbursts of violence.

Interestingly enough, Sasuke was certain that none of the people he saw inside that room were important enough to make any decisions on the matter whatsoever.

"Choosing a new Hokage isn't going to be easy, that's for sure. There's no one who can hope to do everything he did." Sasuke paused, then added, "At least not without a couple decades of practice."

Naruto was uncharacteristically silent, but nodded his agreement.

"Kakashi told me that they're already hounding him about the position."

Naruto snorted. "Yeah, sure. He's an amazing shinobi and all, but they don't know him like we do. He'd hate it."

"True enough."

Together, they moved on until they reached the office they were looking for. Despite the general recall, the village couldn't just stop taking on missions, or maintaining control over its territory entirely, and maybe, just maybe, there'd be something that could get them out of the village for a while.

They knocked on the door, then stepped inside before Sasuke introduced them.

"Uchiha Sasuke and Uzumaki Naruto reporting for assignment!"

His cry went unanswered, as the thirty or so chuunin and jounin in the room completely failed to pay attention to him. That's not to say that the room was quiet, oh no. The shouting began, or rather continued, immediately.

"The team that just came back from Mist, where's the data on their mission?!" bellowed one jounin.

"If it's a recent one then it's probably in Cabinet 1, Row A!" responded another.

"I just checked '1-A' and it wasn't in there!"

"There are two '1-A's now. Did you check both of them?"

"Yeah! Checked both!"

"Well if it's not in there then it was probably on the Hokage's desk when we did the recall!" shouted another.

"Fantastic! Where is that, then?" asked the first.

"Everything on the Hokage's desk got dumped into the 'Immediate Attention' box and shoved over there in the corner," a fourth pointed. "It's the one with 'IA' on the front."

"Wait, the 'I-A' box? Didn't Sakumo from Internal Affairs just wheel that one out of here an hour ago?" asked another.

"No, you're thinking of Hakusho from Interrogation! He grabbed the 'Intelligence Assets' box and brought it down for examination!"

"W-Wait, so does Interrogation have the 'Immediate Attention' box or the "Intelligence Assets' box?"

"It's the one that said 'I-A' on the front. Go down and ask them about it, will you?"

Sasuke looked like he was being physically wounded by this continuing conversation. Naruto, meanwhile, was twitching with barely restrained fury. He started to shout and grab attention, but was interrupted as the door behind them slammed open and a hugely muscled man walked into the room bellowing twice as loudly as they had.

"Got an incoming one! Weird ships seen on the eastern coast! Possibly some unaffiliated fighters or ninja causing trouble in the port towns! There's a request to go check it out!"

One of the jounin waved a hand dismissively, "Got it. Probably won't take priority for a while. Toss it in the 'Incoming Assignments' bin right there, okay?"

"Got it!" responded the huge man. Then he paused, "That's the one labeled 'I-A,' right?"

That was it. Naruto screamed. "Holy Shit! What is wrong with all of you?!"

There was a brief moment of silence, and Sasuke snapped out of his stupor in time to call out to the jounin that had accepted the receipt of the mission.

"No, wait, let us take care of that!"

The bureaucrat-nin gave them a confused look, before finally settling on exuding aggravated superiority. "Oh, it's you two. What do you want? "

Sasuke noted the man's face seemed vaguely familiar. The man was so generic he hardly warranted a second glance, but Sasuke had the feeling that he and Naruto may have once stink-bombed him or something. He smirked, feeling back on familiar ground. "We're here to help with the work-load. Let us take that mission."

The bureaucrat-nin frowned. "We're not just sending people out willy-nilly at a time like this. We're certainly not going to let you two go without supervision."

Sasuke sighed, rubbing at his neck. "That's a shame. I mean, a real shame. We've been stuck here for a while and we're starting to get… restless. We were interrupted in training, and it's hard to keep ourselves occupied without driving everyone else crazy."

Behind Sasuke, Naruto took the cue from his teammate and picked up a piece of paper off a messy pile that looked somewhat more important than the other nearby messy piles and began to industriously fold it into a paper airplane.

"Is- is that supposed to be a threat?" the man asked, uncertainly, "Hey, quit it!"

Naruto sent the airplane shooting through a nearby window, then began working on another one. Sasuke immediately went for the kill. "No, no, certainly not! It just seems a waste to leave us here without a job, but if you want us to stick around then I can figure something out. Maybe Naruto and I could help out with the paperwork or something?"

Naruto flicked another glider out of the open window before the bureaucrat-nin stomped over and slammed it shut. "No, no there will be none of that. I won't have you getting in the way. If you two want to make yourselves useful for a change and beat up a few drunk fishermen then be my guest."

Suppressing smirks, the two young shinobi of Team Seven were swiftly sent off to Dispatch for their mission details. They were ready to leave in record time.