A/N: When your chapter is way too late because even though you promised not to let your new fic get in the way of your weekly updates you still wrote your new fic instead of the promised chapter.

And also I have two new story ideas bouncing wildly around my head.

And glorious fanart was drawn for Wandering Fairies which now makes me want to write more of THAT instead of this.

Okay I'll be honest.

I pretty much wanted to write ANYTHING ELSE BUT THIS. I don't even know why you guys.

Okay I do, it's actually cause this chapter wanted to start off from Sakura's POV, but I'm saving that for a special event and didn't want to do it just yet. So, if the chapter feels rough at all, know that's because I literally forced my brain to write it from a POV it didn't want.

My roommate and beta-reader was a godsend though. After I finished trudging through the mindscape scene I had no idea what to do, so she read the little bit I'd written and said, "Why is it always Mebuki? She's cool and all but I want Good Dad Kizashi dammit!" and my brain was like ! and so I finally managed to get the rest of the chapter finished.

I feel like Kizashi's segment is really better than Mebuki's though, since Natsu sort of ignored her even though I didn't want him to… ugh. IT SUCKED OKAY.

I'M SORRYYYYYY!

Seriously though, thanks for reading you guys! I promise it should get better from here, just one or two more transitional chapters and then we hit the opening arc of the chunin exams!

(i had strike-through formatting on part of this fic but this site deleted it - anyone know how to fix that, or are strikethroughs just not a thing on fanfiction dot net?)

"Are you coming?"

Natsu shakes himself, turning to look at Mebuki. "Ehehe, sorry! It's just that the scent changed, can't you tell?"

She takes a deliberate sniff, nose scrunched up, but shakes her head. "It just smells like it always does, to me…"

"Huh." Natsu shrugs, then laces his fingers behind his head. "Well, I'm gonna look around a bit, see if anything changed. You and Sakura-chan can totally chat without me! I'll be over in a bit!"

"Alright then." Mebuki offers a small smile, then turns towards the cabin visible through the trees. Natsu turns the opposite direction, poking around the Field, occasionally climbing trees, but nothing looks different.

Only the smells change. Here a bit more fiery, there a bit more like magnolia flowers and the unique scent of the rainbow sakura trees, similar and yet distinctly different from the normal scent of Sakura-chan's mindscape.

Natsu sighs. He'd really hoped the changing scent meant he could just… find a bridge back to his own mindscape, his own body.

Shoulda known it wouldn't be so easy…

He turns around, heading back towards the cabin, pausing a moment as he catches sight of Sakura-chan and her mother.

Ever since that first time, Mebuki-san always put her fingers through the narrow gap of the window, touching her daughter as much as the barrier will let her, and for a moment Natsu wonders why he's surprised by it now. He takes a few steps closer before he realizes that Mebuki-san's entire hand extends through the window, wrapped tight around Sakura's own.

Natsu bolts up the porch steps before it even occurs to him not to, dropping to a crouch just next to Mebuki-san and feeling the window frame.

This close to it, the damage is obvious.

"Sakura-chan? What happened?" He asks, looking up to check her for injuries, because this is her mind, and the window is warped, and that can't be good, right?

Sakura-chan smiles, gripping her mother's hand in her own right, and slipping her left under the glass to touch Natsu's, resting on the windowsill.

"Both doors got really hot, and flames even started licking from under the second one…" she starts, squeezing his hand, a sheepish expression creeping across her face. "It was so intense, I started wondering if I could actually melt inside my own mind, i-it… well I didn't get hurt! Promise kaa-san! But it was a little scary for a bit… I came back to my bedroom because I didn't want to be too close to the doors, and the window was hazy…" she trails off, shifting a bit awkwardly.

"Sakura-chan?" Mebuki asks, pressing closer to the window, and Sakura looks down.
"I… I thought I could see something. Like a reflection in the glass… I saw Naruto? And Kakashi-sensei. And I've never seen anything before, at all, so I ran to the window and tried to touch it… I guess it seems a bit silly huh? But the window was really warm to the touch, and something felt different about it, even though I don't think I could describe it… I tried to pull it open more, and at first it wasn't moving at all! But then everything got warmer, and suddenly I saw in the glass a lot of fire, only I couldn't see Naruto or sensei anymore, only me surrounded by fire. But nothing burned me, and instead the window just opened a bit more! And then I saw the fire normally, not in the reflection I mean, as it slipped over my hands and out of the cabin… it disappeared after that though." Sakura ducks her head down a bit sheepishly. "Everything's been a bit boring since then, I sort of hoped you'd swing by after the fire, but you didn't, so I've just been waiting…"

Natsu winces, scratching idly at his head. "Sorry, Sakura-chan! I really should have, huh? I just spent so much time trying to figure out Naruto's secret that I totally forgot about anything else…" he chuckles a bit, offering her a sheepish grin of his own. "I'll tell you everything later, promise! But has anything else changed other than the window? Cause it smells different out here to me, though your mom couldn't tell…"

Sakura-chan hums consideringly. "Not that I've been able to tell, though now that you mention it it still feels warmer in here than it did before. Not that it was cold!" Sakura-chan waves one hand, laughing a bit, "but now it's actually really, noticeably warm. There hasn't been anything else though."

"I don't really know if that's a good sign or a bad one," Natsu grumbles, feeling at the damaged window frame. "I guess now that we're back I'm gonna have to ask Inoichi-san if he can take a look." He scowls a bit, because the lessons are useful but he just wants this fixed already. "Even if you're alright, I don't know if it's okay that the window is damaged like this." He scowls as he runs his fingers over the cracked frame. "You're sure nothing hurts?"

Sakura-chan shakes her head. "I haven't felt any different at all really, but I wouldn't mind talking to Inoichi-san again. Maybe with everything that's happened, he can do something?"

Natsu shrugs, standing up and stretching. "I dunno if I'd count on that, but at least he should be able to explain it all right? That's like, his job or something?"

Sakura-chan rolls her eyes, scoffing a bit. "You should really be more polite, especially since he's teaching you personal family techniques to help us!" She looks at him then. "Do you want to stay…?"

Natsu fights off the urge to grimace, waving away her offer with a cheerful smile. "It's alright, I'll leave you guys to finish talking! I'll be down by the lake when you're done, Mebuki-san!"

She nods, offering a smile of her own before turning back to her daughter, and Natsu walks away.

After a whole month, it shouldn't be so awkward but…

Natsu sits himself down on the lake shore, propping his chin in his hands, and stares down at the water. If he squints and tilts his head, the ripples look… pink? He leans forward, moving one hand to brace against the ground as he tries to get a closer look, and for a second it nearly looks like a person-

"Natsu-kun?"

He yelps, tumbling forward to splash in the water as he scrambles to turn and face-

"M-Mebuki-san? I just barely left!" He spits out a mouthful of water as he steps up out of the lake, and Sakura's mother gives him an odd look.

"Did you lose track of time? Natsu left us quite a while ago…"

"I-I guess maybe I did," he says, though Natsu's fairly sure that's not it.

Mindscapes are weird, and the longer this thing with Sakura-chan goes on, Natsu feels more and more like their mindscape might be weirder than most.

He shrugs off the thoughts, offering Mebuki a grin. "Ready to go?"

She glances back towards the cabin, then turns back around. "As I ever am," she murmurs, and Natsu takes her hand and concentrates on those threads of power that lead back to their bodies.

He'll have to tell Sakura-chan all about the mission later, he muses, as he blinks to awareness in the physical world.

Might as well do it when I talk to Inoichi-san, since he'll probably want to know too- WAIT!

Didn't I have that stupid report thing I was supposed to write?!

Natsu groans, sprawling over Sakura-chan's desk and letting the pen slip between his fingers to tumble to the floor.

Outside the window, the sun has all but disappeared beyond the horizon, and Sakura-chan's parents came home from their delayed… whatever it was they went on almost an hour ago and now they're getting ready for bed and the stupid report just mocks him!

He sits up, propping his elbow on the desk and his face in his hand, and glares down at the blank report sheets in front of him.

Well.

Not entirely blank.

Team June 3rd XXXX

On this day

There was this old drunk guy

On June 3rd, this Team 7-

…

Really it might as well be blank.

Natsu groans again, fingers itching to just burn the report to ash, and maybe the entire desk with it.

Or the house. Or the village.

Every single flammable thing in range of his magic sounds a bit nice right now.

Natsu's head hits the desk with a solid thunk as he whimpers. He can practically feel the steam come out his ears as he tries to figure out how he's supposed to write the stupid thing.

"Happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…"

The whine slips out before Natsu can stop it, for all that he didn't really bother trying. Happy's probably not any better at report-writing than he is, but at least they could waste time coming up with ridiculous things to say while they tried to decide what to write… Like that one time the Master expected him to explain how he'd managed to get the guild landed with nearly 100k jewels in fees, and when he tried to stutter through an explanation (because Erza was supposed to be in the guild that day, but he didn't see her, which really meant she was just waiting for the right moment to show up, right?!) Makarov just gave up and told him to write it out because he had to go to a meeting with the client's representative, and Natsu and Happy just ended up writing out a shopping list for fish…

The look on the Master's face was hilarious!

Erza's face when she came back from the cake shop and found out about the situation…

Natsu shudders, whimpering again at the memory of her wrath.

It's not like I knew that stupid cart had some ridiculous rare painting or whatever!

"Everything alright in here?"

Natsu yelps at Kizashi's sudden voice and tumbles off the chair, caught mid-motion in reaching for his dropped pen.

Kizashi opens the door, already dressed in a sleeping yukata, and looks around until his eyes drift downwards, where Natsu is sprawled on the floor fingers still clutching the pen. He chuckles a bit, stepping forward and stretching out an arm. "Need a hand?"

Natsu rolls over, buries his face in the carpet, and groans.

"Would you like to sit up and tell me what the problem is then? I'm afraid I'm not quite so fluent in Muffle as I used to be."

Natsu pushes himself up until he's cross-legged on the floor, dropping the pen in front of him. "Writing reports is stupid." He mutters after a moment, glaring at the pen.

"Oh?" Kizashi stands up and leans over the desk. "Hmm… you haven't gotten very far have you?"

"It's stupid!" Natsu snaps back, crossing his arms and looking away, and Sakura's father sighs, before turning and leaving the room.

Natsu leaps to his feet, nearly tripping over himself as he turns around, but before he can decide whether he was just going to close the door again or ask Kizashi to wait, the man comes back with a second chair in his arms. Natsu gapes, causing the older man to chuckle.

"Well, grab the pen Natsu-kun. I'll see how much I can help… Has Kakashi-san not had you write any before?"

Natsu shrugs, bending down to swipe the pen before taking his own seat. He glares at the paper. "He said they aren't really required for D-ranks and we'd only need them for higher-level jobs… so we just didn't work on it, I guess."

"Aah." Kizashi rummages through the drawers, until he finds a clean sheaf of paper. "Some jonin-sensei are like that, more than happy to teach combat skills and less than fond of the other side of shinobi life. They'll usually foist the genin off on Academy teachers again if the genin's report-writing skills are lacking, so I can't say I'm too surprised… can I ask what sort of problem you feel like you're having?"

"You mean besides how stupid it is?" Natsu grumbles, shoulders sagging.

Kizashi snorts. "Oh I wouldn't go that far. It's really just a basic summary, nothing hard about it."

"How am I supposed to know what sort of information a yami guild wants in their reports? I still don't even know why they want me to write it, I already said everything important in-person!" Natsu throws his hands up and slides down in the chair a bit, sulking. "I never had to do any paperwork back home and I went on way higher-ranked jobs…"

"Really?" Kizashi turns towards him, looking politely curious. "No one ever had to do paperwork where you're from?"

"I mean…" Natsu trails off for a second, thinking. "Levy would do lots of paperwork, usually because she did really complicated paper jobs anyway. Like decoding or curse-breaking and stuff, you know? Complicated stuff, so people liked it when she wrote papers explaining her work or at least proving she did it, since you can't always tell at first glance I guess… And Mirajane would do inventories and stuff, I know she complained once cause I lit it on fire and she had to start from scratch and made me help since I ruined all her work… And the Council sends the Master lots of paperwork, but I don't know what most of that is about. He lights it on fire himself sometimes though, so…" Natsu shrugs, grinning. "It's just never been important!"

"Are you sure those Council papers aren't missives asking where your paperwork is…?" Kizashi mutters, more to himself than Natsu. "You guys don't sound too well-managed…"

Natsu laughs. "Eh who needs that! The Council gets annoyed sometimes, but it's not like we ever do anything illegal, so they can't really complain, ahahaha!" He grins widely, and Kizashi sighs in response.

"I pity your Council. Now, aside from the paperwork being stupid as you say, do you think you could explain what sort of issue you're having?"

Natsu bites back another groan, and turns to the desk. He should probably take it a little seriously, he supposes, for all that he'd rather just- go to bed or hunt down Sasuke for a spar or anything else really. "I've never done something like this before." He mutters after a minute, poking around the blank sheet of paper with the back of his pen. "So I don't even know how to start, or how rich-people-ish I should make it sound, or if I've gotta do it like a shopping list where I just put everything down on individual lines…"

"Rich-people-ish?" Kizashi mimics, eyebrow raised, and Natsu chuffs.

"You know. Fancy talk. 'Egregious' and 'Preposterous' and other big fancy words like that. Rich-people-ish."

"I… see. Well, for a standard C-rank, there's a specific header format - the date you started the mission on the top right corner of the parchment, the date you finished the mission on the bottom left. Standard C-rank reports don't tend to take more than a page, unless they're long escorts or have an unusually intense fight, so that's really all that's needed. Your mission was an escort, right?"

"Yeah," Natsu mutters, because if that's what's needed for a standard C-rank, then he's pretty sure he's in for a lot more work. "But it was a mis-ranked mission. The client lied, and Kakashi said it was more like an A-rank really. But we continued anyway, so we have to write a report for a mis-ranked job, and there were a couple big fights…"

Kizashi blanches, then scoots his chair closer.

"Alright, for a mis-ranked mission, there's actually a bit more protocol involved." Natsu sighs as Sakura-chan's father continues. "First, the cover page. Basically, it's designed to summarize the mission you initially signed up for, the original rank, and whether or not the misranking was deliberate or accidental and why - in the shinobi's estimation - that's the case. Both happen, though it's usually not deliberate for genin, the village works hard to avoid that…" Kizashi scowls then, before shaking it off to turn an encouraging look on Natsu. "If you'd like, you can start easy - date of the mission start in the upper corner, and then begin with something like, "The client -name- hired out Team 7 for an escort mission on this date, to protect him on his return to…" and go from there. I can read over it once you're done with that, before we move on to the second page. Alright?"

Natsu nods, a little hesitantly, and pulls the paper closer to start as Kizashi suggested. It only takes four tries before Kizashi pronounces it 'good enough', which Natsu won't admit out loud is probably half of what he expected to need, though as Kizashi sets the approved first page aside and pulls out a blank sheet for the second, he gets the feeling it'll only get worse from here.

"Now that we've covered that part, there's actually a couple acceptable ways to write out the official mission report. You can either do it chronologically, writing out everything that happened in the order it happened, or you can write it narratively. With the latter, you write out the important parts first, then write out everything else that happened at the end of the report. Usually you'd start with how you found out the mission was mis-ranked for a narrative report, and end with how you met the client or how you returned to the village unless either of those happened to be rather important. Usually, jonin and special ops will favor narrative reports, so that all the important information is right at the front, but they're a bit harder to write so unless you take a lot of really sensitive missions, it's easier for most to just use a chronological record." Kizashi pauses for a moment, and Natsu tries not to make a face. Why are there different kinds of paperwork anyway?! Kizashi reaches over and ruffles his hair, ignoring Natsu's retaliatory swipe. "Since I'm sure you'd rather do it chronologically, the standard format for that is to write out the summary across however many pages you need, and put the dates of the mission those pages cover in the upper-right corner. So if you write out the report, and the first page covers a day and a half, you might put June 3rd to June 4th (morn) so that at a glance they know what date range the page covers. For a team like yours, the captain, in this case Kakashi, will likely have a narrative report that they can use to get the most important dates and times from, allowing them to know which pages in yours to flip through to see those if they choose. Aside from that, it's really just a matter of writing out the mission exactly as it happened. Go ahead and write out the first page, I'll tell you if it feels like anything's missing, alright?"

"Why do they need reports from all of us," Natsu grumbles as he hunches over and starts writing, though he doesn't really expect an answer.

Kizashi supplies one anyway. "For mis-ranked missions, and honestly any higher-ranked job, it can actually be quite important. Different people notice different things, and being forced to think over a mission in the act of writing it out makes it more likely to be comprehensive than if you're just thinking of everything off the top of your head while someone asks you questions. Sometimes, the little things you don't even think about noticing can have huge impacts on future missions in the village, or even for your team. I've heard tell that some S-rank missions actually require having a specially-trained Yamanaka assist you in writing out the report just to make sure absolutely nothing is missed. That could just be a rumor, or something Ino-chan made up, though I admit it sounds quite logical to me. It's also true that in jobs like this especially, Konoha likes to have a record of the motives behind your choices as much as the choices themselves, to create a baseline for behavior. It's likely more useful for Naruto and Sasuke, as far as they're concerned, since if you end up going back home your profiles won't apply to Sakura-chan at all, but it's still better to have them than not."

"Huh." Natsu glances at his companion, then back to the report. "That makes sense I guess. They wanna know why we picked stuff, so that they can try and predict what sort of stuff we'll pick in the future… uh, I don't remember, is this character supposed to have the downstroke on the bottom or the top?"

Kizashi leans over, glancing to where his pen is. "Top- why are you even using that word?" The older man raises an eyebrow, and Natsu snorts.

"Because no other word is strong enough to describe how awful it was, I mean really! I know he was only drinking so much to try an' fool the admin guys, but still! The stench was so bad…"

Kizashi laughs, and Natsu grins back before trying to jot down everything he remembers noticing from when they left.

Er.

"They don't need anything from before we walked out the gates, do they…?"

"Well, if anything relevant happened before you left then you really should put it down…"

Natsu groans, dropping his face onto the report.

"Snot like it's important, I just thought his drinking was too much…"

"Best be thorough Natsu-kun! Come on, here's a new sheet!"

Natsu glares, suddenly wondering if this is some unique form of torture. Kizashi just smiles encouragingly, pushing a blank sheet of paper over, and Natsu reluctantly drags it closer, refusing to sit back up as he writes from an awkwardly sprawled position.

I hate yami guilds...