Author's Note: The previous story in the "Team Seven vs. Paperwork" series is "Team Minato vs. Paperwork", which I do recommend reading first (along with the prequel to that, because I think I'm hilarious), featuring poor Namikaze Minato having to deal with Kakashi, Obito, and Rin as genin.

As many of you likely guessed, Kakashi's bad luck took a much different turn.

TEAM KAKASHI VS. PAPERWORK

A little while later, still making their incredibly slow progress to Hokage Tower and encountering nothing but staring shinobi or civilians going about their business, Kakashi is so on edge that it's not even slightly funny anymore. He feels like he's going to jump out of his skin if something doesn't happen, and by the growing numbers of anxious desk-shinobi scouts, he's probably not alone in wanting a threat to appear already so he can fry it with an unnecessary amount of lightning.

"Sensei, this is taking forever," Naruto groans dramatically. "If we were going any slower we'd be walking backwards, y'know! Can't we hurry up! I'm dying here!"

"Some things take time to be done right, Naruto," Kakashi replies chidingly, as he casually turns a page of his book and only barely manages not to throw kunai at a duck that walked around a corner a little too quickly for his stretched-to-snapping-point senses. "Besides, that's good for improving your perspective on life."

Naruto groans again, even louder than before. "Sensei, please," he begs shamelessly, rifling in one of his hideously orange pockets and pulling out the dreaded paperwork that was causing all of this. "Here, can't you just take this to the tower fo-"

At this offering, Kakashi automatically puts a half-skip in between his steps to put distance between him and the potential massive explosive tag. "No, no, Naruto," he replies tightly, casually turning another page without reading a word. "This is something you have to do yourself."

Naruto looks vaguely confused at the space between them that wasn't there before, with an alarming, considering furrow to his brow that makes him look like Minato, but then he obviously and thankfully dismisses it as nothing important.

"Ugh," he complains, before taking back the massive explosive tag.

Kakashi flawlessly steps back to his center position between his sensei's son and the brooding one, ignoring the annoyed glare Sasuke had been giving him for daring to even look like he might break a personal space bubble. Ah, disaster temporarily avoided, Kakashi thinks with relief, still on high-alert for other possible threats and trying not to flip off the shinobi snickering behind a fruit cart.

Then Naruto suddenly extends the papers again. "Oh, come on, sensei-"

Kakashi, busy on the lookout for rogue water pipes and runaway nin-puppies, isn't able to make his... well, it's essentially a flinch, so... full-body flinch away seem natural or not suspicious. He automatically shied away from Naruto's paperwork on instinct, and only notices what he's done when Naruto takes the papers back again, wearing a Kushina-suspicious and Minato-considering look on his whiskered face.

Oh no.

Kakashi does his best to poke his nose further into the book he's not reading, tries to shift his panicked limbs into as casual a pose as possible, all in a desperate attempt to seem like he's not deeply terrified of even touching those sheets of paper. But it's clearly not working, and then he notices that, on his other side, Sasuke has witnessed this entire exchange and looks equally suspicious.

Extra oh no.

Then the worst thing yet happened: Naruto and Sasuke's eyes met, and they exchanged a look.

Oh fuck.

With a Kushina-smug and Minato-oh-I-get-it expression, Naruto withdraws the offered papers, but he doesn't put them away. And on Kakashi's other side, Sasuke pulls out his own mission report, with an expression that was too bland to be called mischief but...

"Sensei," Sasuke says, lips twitching with something that looks like it very much wants to be a smile as he holds out the papers, "Could you please read over my report for any mistakes?" And that's how Kakashi knows this is bullshit, because the regular Sasuke would never ask that and might fight anyone who even offered on sheer insult.

Kakashi steps away from Sasuke's papers as subtly as he can. "No, no, Sasuke," he answers tightly, trying to keep his eye out on their surroundings, also trying to lean as far away from the curse's manifestation as possible without looking like he's trying to avoid suffering from a three-generation-long-and-counting curse. "I'm sure you've done fine."

"Please, sensei, I insist."

Never has Kakashi heard bland innocence sound so gleefully vicious. Never.

"No," he replies flatly. He's trying to sound as disinterested as possible, but it's really, really hard when Sasuke keeps pushing those papers closer and Kakashi has to move closer to Naruto for safety. No one should ever have to move closer to Kushina's spawn for safety from an Uchiha prank.

This is wrong.

"Oh, are you checking our reports, sensei?" Naruto asks then – oh no oh no ohnonono – just as wickedly innocent as his teammate. "Sensei, read mine over too!" Argh, papers, papers from the other side; they're surrounding him. "It's not fair if you just read over that bastard's report!"

"That's right," Sasuke agrees – Kakashi knew it, he fucking knew it would be the end times when these two agreed on anything – while pushing his demonic report closer still. "Dead-lasts need all the help that they can get, sensei."

"Shut up, bastard," Naruto replies, and never has he done that while sounding so cheerful before. "I just don't want you getting any special treatment from sensei, ya know! Sensei should take and read all of our reports, right, sensei?"

"Ugh," Kakashi replies intelligently, caught in the middle of everything he feared about this day.

"He'll take forever on yours," Sasuke says without any real bite. "He should read mine first."

Papers. They're getting closer. His ANBU-trained instincts are basically shrieking and rolling around on the floor wildly. 'Explosive tags! IncOMING EXPLOSIVE TAGS! POISON! FIRE! RUN, RUN, RUN! INCOMING IMMEDIATE AND PAINFUL DEATH!'

"No, he should read mine first! You don't need any help, you bastard! Sensei, read mine!"

Oh god, they're nearly touching him.

"I asked first, dead-last!"

'DeaDLY NINJUTSU! FUINJUTSU! KENJUTSU SOMEHOW! FLEE! FLEE! FLEE!'

"I asked him second, bastard! What's the difference?! Come on, sensei!"

Naruto pushes his paper forward again and the edge of a page finally crosses the line by threatening to brush against Kakashi's elbows. That's it. Kakashi can't take being caught between these two forces of evil any longer and (casually, casually, casually) jumps back, letting Naruto and Sasuke's cursed paperwork bump into each other instead of their jounin-sensei.

Kakashi is actually surprised that the two curse manifestations don't create a vortex of pure evil and suffering when they touch – a soul-sucking void that will slowly consume the world. Instead, the two mission reports only brush before Naruto and Sasuke turn to look at him.

Naruto's expression is Kushina-hah-I-gotcha and Minato-oho-I-know-something-you-don't-want-me-to.

Sasuke's expression is Fugaku-I-was-right and Mikoto-secretly-pleased-and-smug.

Oh god, Kakashi thinks, feeling desperate and terrified. Wasn't Uchiha Mikoto on Kushina's genin team? He forgot about it in the middle of worrying about the Team Seven curse, since Kushina mostly grew out of it, but the desk-shinobi hated that team with a passion that rivaled their dealings with Team Seven. Mikoto and Kushina were very good friends, weren't they?

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck.

He's so fucked.

"I'm not reading your reports," Kakashi tells them both, clamping down on the terror rising in his soul by shoving his face into his book – safe space, he wants his safe space. "Learning by doing is the best way to improve your perspective on life."

Sakura looks up at him, thoroughly unimpressed with the jounin-sensei that she is unknowingly shielding in Kakashi's tactical retreat. "Sensei, you're so lazy," she says, crossing her arms and thankfully – sweet gods, thank you – not pulling out her own mission report. "It's like you're allergic to the idea of extra work."

Kakashi eyes her thoughtfully. "Been peeking at my medical records, Sakura? That's not nice."

Sakura sputters, then scowls, and ahead of them, Naruto and Sasuke exchange another look before putting away their mission reports. Oh god, Kakashi wants to get down on his knees and kiss somebody's feet in gratitude, which is a platonic kink he never knew he had.

But this is only the beginning, he reminds himself. He's diverted the curse for now, but only just for now. He'll be seeing those mission reports again, and not only in his nightmares, because this is the just the beginning of the end.

oOo

Iruka pinches the bridge of his nose. He didn't even drink that much last night, and he went home early compared to the drunken benders that his fellow Academy teachers had been well on their way towards, but he still has a headache. Seriously, ugh, why.

If he were smart like his coworkers, he'd be sleeping it off right now, but since he just can't stand staying unproductive for more than a week, he tumbled out of bed for his shift at the Mission Assignment Desk this morning instead of staying for school-break body-shots last night.

Working the desk is an... interesting experience. Many of the desk-shinobi have been retiring recently and the rest have a lot of saved vacation time, so they need people to help them keep Konoha running smoothly but... they try to reject him every year. Iruka's been working with them for years now, he's good friends with a handful of desk-shinobi and friendly acquaintances with most of the rest, and yet they still dither about trying to find reasons to fire him or turn him away.

"It's nothing personal," they insist, before they're eventually unable to find anything and are grudgingly forced to let Iruka into Hokage Tower to help with their precious paperwork.

He's not sure why they do it, but from what he's gathered, the repeated attempts to dismiss him seem to center around his position at the Academy. It's really nothing personal, one friendlier desk-shinobi attempted to explain at the beginning, it's just there's the whole Academy teachers and desk-shinobi feud thing, so he was probably sent to destroy them from the inside.

Iruka, benevolent and gracious as he is, has elected to take the whole thing as a running joke. He won't believe that the warm and wise Academy teachers and the sharp and smart desk-shinobi are really so unreasonable and ridiculous. Feuds, honestly, what absolute nonsense. It's probably just an excuse to foist the team assignment off on him every year.

Well, there is that secret staff room for the desk-shinobi that Iruka's not allowed to even be informed of. (It's on the third floor; you go through the janitor's closet that's second on the right just off the stairs on the second floor, then up through the trapdoor opened by pulling the blue book in the center of the top shelf; the password is 'Wakahisa'. Honestly, Iruka's a chuunin, but he's not blind or useless.) But Iruka assumes that it's just for full-time desk-shinobi and not temps, given how the final door is labeled 'Secret Room of Desk-Shinobi, second oldest order of Konohakagure' and its insides are decorated with carefully unfolded or taped together mission reports by a Nohara Rin and the desk-shinobi that 'solved' her work, and a large framed portrait of the Nidaime Hokage (which honestly resembles a shrine).

It is a little weird how his stapler skills once had the desk-shinobi telling him that he should have been one of them, and to leave the Academy for his true calling, but Iruka shut down that poor joke by telling them that his true calling is teaching young shinobi. Just like how it's weird that some of his fellow teachers told him that he must return fully to the Academy before he was tainted by the desk-shinobi, and they wouldn't stop joking about it until Iruka finally snapped and told them to cut it out.

Who knew shinobi had such poor senses of humor?

It seriously isn't helping his headache that the desk-shinobi are in such a... god, he doesn't know the word... tizzy? Can that even apply to shinobi? Whatever, they're all heavily-armed and highly on-edge, which is never good for shinobi ever. They keep whispering about the 'return of the curse' and, with reports from desk-shinobi doing some kind of reconnaissance constantly passing by the window, how 'the curse approaches'.

Whatever has them so worked up, it's so bad that they tried to keep him from working today, even more than they already did. Usually it petered out to bad jokes after the first couple of weeks, but today they were in full force and fine form, even trying to threaten and bribe him to take the day off.

Iruka could be heavily susceptible to nice bribes, especially trips to hot springs, oh god was he weak against those, but... those usually came with someone needing a favor like him taking an extra shift or helping them with a problem student. But this? This was like somebody walking up to him and offering to do all his grading for nothing or telling him to take a paid vacation day for no reason.

It was something too good to be true that no shinobi worth anything would fall for, so Iruka badgered his suspicious way past them and stubbornly plopped himself down in his usual desk anyway. He smells something off here, although not necessarily a trap, and he wants to know what. Iruka has always been too curious for his own good.

They even tried to cite his recently healed injury as though he would die in the next five seconds if he didn't immediately fuck off to a hospital. Iruka knows they processed a lot of his medical files and release papers, so that's bullshit.

A desk-shinobi that's been keeping watch by the window suddenly falls off their perch. Since the entire room has been on-edge all morning, Iruka's not too surprised when every single desk-shinobi stops what they're doing and pulls unreasonably large weapons out of seemingly nowhere.

He's a little curious as to why Midori has three katana since she's a genjutsu-user, and where the hell she was keeping them, but he's more concerned as to why she's holding one of them in her teeth. That doesn't seem... sensible.

"What is it, Kenta?" Supervisor Desk-Shinobi Naoko demands, wielding an odachi that she seems to have pulled from under her desk somehow. She looks like she's facing war, with a grim determination to her face that suggests she's mentally prepared to fight all of ANBU and kick their asses.

Kenta pulls himself off the floor, face gone unnaturally pale. "They're here," he whispers fearfully, staring at his hands like he's never seen them before. "They're on our doorstep."

Izumo and Kotetsu, just returned from a mission, look over from where they were reporting to Midori with the three katana. "Who's here?" Kotetsu asks curiously, kunai suddenly in his and Izumo's hands – because if you raise the tension in the room, any shinobi will react.

Iruka may or may not have a shuriken in the hand under his desk, and he can throw the pen he's holding in the other hand as accurately and deadly as he can a kunai.

"The new Team Seven," Kenta whispers, rocking back and forth like he just witnessed hell itself.

Izumo and Kotetsu, instead of looking confused like Iruka feels, immediately stiffen.

"What?" Izumo says.

"The new Team Seven is handing in their first mission reports today," Midori explains, eyes wide with fear and talking surprisingly coherently around the katana hilt between her teeth. "They'll be here within the next two minutes."

Izumo and Kotetsu both blanch.

"You know what, Izu?" Kotetsu says suddenly. "I just remembered that I don't need my mission pay right this second. We should go home and take a nap and come back tomorrow."

"Excellent idea, 'Tetsu," Izumo replies, grabbing his partner's sleeve (even afraid for his life, Izumo is still a germaphobe) and pulling him towards the nearest window. As they pass Iruka, Izumo gives his friend a scared and pitying look. "I'm so sorry, Iruka."

"Wh-?" Iruka tries to ask.

"Just remember that we love you, man!" Kotetsu calls, just before they both jump out the window.

Iruka is more stunned that none of the desk-shinobi move to reprimand his friends more than that his friends suddenly jumped out the window for no explicable reason. The desk-shinobi are usually incredibly strict about using the door, to the point where Naoko, who's a chuunin, will literally drop-kick even disobedient jounin back out the window. He's pretty sure that the desk-shinobi wouldn't let the Sandaime Hokage use the window.

"Well, fuck this!" Inuzuka Hana suddenly declares from where she was in the middle of accepting a new mission. "I'm not sticking around to get caught in that mess! Come on, Shinju! Let's go hide under a dumpster until this is all over."

"Please, no. I can think of many more pleasant places to hide," the female Aburame next to her replies, but she follows the other woman out of the room nevertheless.

And the two women are immediately followed by every shinobi that doesn't work here, all of them out the window without anything besides a few goodbyes and some, "I'll come back later for that important A-rank, yeah?"

Kenta tries to leave in the crowd as well, but Naoko stops him. "No, young desk-shinobi," she says wearily. "You must do your duty and meet your fate."

"But, Supervisor Naoko," Kenta pleads, tearing up. "I'm scared."

Naoko puts a hand on the shaking young man's shoulder. "I know, young desk-shinobi," she says softly. "I'm scared too. But you must be brave and remember that your sacrifice will not be in vain. They will remember this day and they will remember that you stood strong against a fearsome foe."

Kenta sniffs. "I'll... I'll try, Supervisor Naoko."

"No, young desk-shinobi," Naoko says, voice hard again. "That is no way to face our enemy. Against Team Seven, there is do or do not. There is no try, here. We don't have room for trying, now."

"I'll... I'll do it, Supervisor Naoko," Kenta says firmly, expression determined.

Naoko nods, then turns to face the rest of the room, odachi in a white-knuckled fist. "Today there is no room for weakness! No room for doubt!" she declares. "Today we face the curse that has plagued our ancestors for generations. Now it has arisen stronger than ever before, but we shall not yield – we shall not fall! For we are desk-shinobi and we were made to ENDURE! Now... WHO ARE WE?"

"DESK-SHINOBI!" the room returns.

Naoko jumps onto a desk and screams, "AND SHALL WE YIELD?"

"NO!" the desk-shinobi shout back, even Midori with a katana between her teeth.

"SHALL WE FALL?"

"NO!" the desk-shinobi shout back again, with Kenta the loudest of them all.

"WHAT WILL WE DO?"

"ENDURE!"

Iruka, who has taken part of none of this craziness and is sitting at his desk like he's the only sane man in the room, wonders why they don't seem to have any hope of victory in whatever battle they're fighting. He also wonders if he tripped and hit his head getting up this morning and if all of this is some sort of hallucination from a near-death experience and the good drugs at the hospital.

"ENDURE!" the desk-shinobi shout again.

Iruka pinches his arm to make sure that he's not dreaming all of this up, but no.

"ENDURE!"

It's possible, of course, that this is a genjutsu of some kind, but no friend or foe that Iruka knows of would ever come up with something like this. Besides, even as hard as he looks, there's absolutely no sign that this is a genjutsu and he's pretty good at spotting those – he has training in supervising large amounts of nin-children with sharp objects and skills they don't really know how to use.

"Now return to your posts!" Naoko shouts. "And prepare!"

"YES, SUPERVISOR NAOKO!"

Iruka's not entirely certain, but he thinks he might be missing something.

oOo

Author's Note: This fic is finished and chapters will be posted daily until it's complete. There will be 3 chapters.