Chapter Text

Sasuke told himself he didn’t mind the mandatory contract breaks. Really. He didn’t. They gave him the chance to go home to the GTA, remember how much he hated the GTA, visit his family, remember how much he hated visiting his family, and come back to Ottawa in a timely manner.

No. The problem wasn’t the mandatory contract breaks, even if they were just a sly way of keeping him off the employee benefit plan and withholding paid vacation and sick days.

The problem was his manager.

“Why did you schedule the co-op interviews for last week?” Sasuke demanded. “You knew I was gone!”

Only one of Kakashi’s eyes was visible above the cover of his latest book, which depicted a beefy, shirtless man carrying a swooning woman with truly horrible 80s hair, bridal-style. That one eye gazed at Sasuke sleepily. Kakashi’s free hand typed away at his keyboard. “Honestly, I had no idea. You should give me some warning, Sasuke. It’s rough, losing my very favourite junior policy analyst for two weeks without notice. I had to draft my briefing notes all by myself.”

Sasuke resisted the urge to point out that Kakashi was meant to be doing that anyway. There were larger issues at hand. “You’re the one who told me I had to take the time off! You gave me the dates! It was in my Outlook calendar! ”

Kakashi’s one-handed typing ceased as his fingers moved to the mouse. Click. Click. Click. His eyebrows lifted a centimetre or so, then drifted back down, as if maintaining an expression of surprise required too much effort. “Oh, so it was. Would you look at that. Eh, so I did the co-op interviews without you. They’re my direct reports, so once you’ve shown them the ropes, you won’t really need to worry about them.”

“But—!” Sasuke began, and quickly stopped himself. He knew that was complete bullshit. The instant those new students stepped through that door, Kakashi would offload all the work of managing them to Sasuke, just like he did with everything else. He knew Kakashi knew that too, and he knew Kakashi knew that he knew it. But he didn’t quite have the guts to accuse his manager outright of being a lazy son-of-a-bitch who couldn’t even be bothered to proofread his two-sentence emails before sending them. Especially not when Kakashi had been hinting of late, in his own vague, infuriating way, of landing Sasuke a longer-term contract, the kind that included benefits and covered costs for French training.

“I’ll send you their resumes. They don’t start till September anyway,” Kakashi said, in what he probably thought was a soothing tone. “Why worry?”

***

Another mandatory contract break, three weeks of sleepless nights over the prospect of looming unemployment, and one miraculous and excruciating last-minute negotiation with HR later, September 3rd rolled around, and with it, the influx of co-op students. Despite having over three months of warning, IT and accommodations were, as usual, unprepared. No matter how many pointed emails Sasuke sent them, cc’ing Kakashi—even cc’ing their director Jiraiya, the ultimate power move—both teams irritably pleaded a backlog and insisted they couldn’t have computers or email accounts set up for Kakashi’s students (his kiddos, as Kakashi had taken to calling them) until the day after tomorrow at the very earliest.

“Oh well,” Kakashi said mildly when Sasuke arrived in his office to deliver the news, a mere fifteen minutes before the new students were supposed to arrive. “They have to do their orientation anyway.”

“That’s only an hour! What am I supposed to do with them for the next two days?”

“Show them around the office?” Great. Another fifteen minutes. He could push it to twenty if he went into great detail explaining the trick to working the finicky microwave in the kitchenette. “I know, you can teach them how to use GCDocs. Oh, and the shared drive. Maybe show them some of your cute PowerPoint tricks too.”

Sasuke resisted, barely, the urge to stare heavenward at the ceilings banks of bland fluorescent lighting and pray for patience to any god who cared to listen. Every single day of his life he regretted his foolish decision to show Kakashi how to make bullet points slide onto the screen one at a time. “Kakashi. They’re students. I guarantee you they know how to use PowerPoint.” Outside Kakashi’s office, someone’s phone started to ring.

“Well, you’ll figure something out.” Kakashi glanced at the time on his computer and sighed. “I guess I’d better go. I have a meeting with risk management that started ten minutes ago. You don’t mind handling this for today, do you?”

“I—”

“Great. I knew I could count on my very favourite junior policy analyst. We can all go for lunch together on Friday. My treat.” Still nose-deep in his garish romance novel, Kakashi rose to his feet and ruffled Sasuke’s hair—actually ruffled his hair—on the way past.

Someone’s phone was still ringing. Neji poked his head from his cubicle and said irritably, “Hey, would you get that already?”

Sasuke swore under his breath and sprinted over to his desk, just in time to grab the phone off its cradle before voicemail kicked in. “Hello, Sasuke Uchiha speaking—”

“Some kids here for you,” said a gruff Quebecois voice on the other end of the line. “Give us some warning next time, eh?”

“Excuse me? I sent you three emails—”

Click.

Sasuke muttered another curse and made for the stairs. Three of the four elevators were out of service again. Tenten had once expressed to Sasuke the opinion that Public Works kept them on the fritz deliberately to promote employee health and, by correlation, lessen usage of the employee health benefits. Not that Sasuke would know anything about that . Damn short-term contracts.

Down at the security desk, Kotetsu and Izumo were conversing in rapid, drawling French—Sasuke was irritated to find that, as usual, he could only pick out a few words—and were completely ignoring the two people standing in front of them. These were definitely the co-ops. No mistake. The girl—Sakura Haruno, Sasuke recalled—was impeccably dressed, in nondescript heels and a pencil skirt tailored so appropriately it would have given the vice president a run for her money—but her hair was a bright, bubble-gum pink. Yep, student for sure. Liberal arts, probably. He couldn’t remember the degree listed on her resume. The boy—

Sasuke swallowed, and tried not to stare. Compartmentalize, just like Itachi always told him. Yes. He could do that.

Blond hair—messy, like it hadn’t seen a brush in a few days too many. Sasuke could forgive that; his hair had a will of its own too, so maybe that wasn’t just sloppiness. The lurid tropical-print blazer over a t-shirt, paired with wrinkled khakis and running shoes—that was another story. Sasuke’s lip curled. This was the government of Canada, not some hip tech start-up. Sasuke was willing to bet all the money Phoenix still owed him that this was the guy’s first office job.

There was also the fact, which Sasuke was doing his best to ignore, that this guy had the figure and features of the kind of A-list actor who landed leading roles in big-budget superhero movies and appeared shirtless and glistening in advertisements for men’s cologne. To put it frankly, even his highly questionable fashion sense couldn’t disguise the fact that he was hot. Three-chilli-peppers-on-a-Thai-food-menu hot. Downtown-Toronto-in-July hot. Molten-cheese-scalding-the-skin-off-the-roof-of-your-mouth hot—

But that was incidental.

Sasuke forced himself to focus on the girl again. She looked familiar; according to her resume, she’d done a previous work term here with a different team. “You must be Sakura,” he said. “I’m Sasuke. Pleased to meet you.”

He extended his hand. She shook it. She had an excellent handshake. Firm, but not too firm.

“Pleasure,” said Sakura. “You’re in operations too?”

“That’s right.” Well, no putting it off any longer. He turned to the boy and pasted a smile on his face. “And you must be Naruto—”

“Yeah, believe it!” Naruto grabbed Sasuke’s proffered hand and used it as leverage to pull Sasuke in for a manly hug, complete with a hearty thump on the back. “Man, this place is swanky! Security guards and everything! Do we get badges? That’d be sweet. Hey, where’s that old guy who did the interviews?” His voice was husky, vaguely pubescent, as if it had started breaking at thirteen and never quite stopped.

Sasuke just stared at him. He had a horrible suspicion his face was going tomato-red. It had been a tight hug.

Kakashi… Kakashi had interviewed this guy. Kakashi had sat in the boardroom with this guy across the table from him and looked at him and listened to him speak and he had actually decided to hire him . Sasuke had read Naruto’s resume: half an MA in poli sci, work experience as a landscaper and a camp counsellor. Nothing special. So what the hell had Kakashi been thinking ?

This was why Sasuke so loathed those mandatory contract breaks. He needed to be there at all times to manage his manager. Otherwise, Kakashi went and hired unprofessional hyperactive weirdos who dressed like they’d walked right out of the pages of Toronto Life profiles, the kind that discussed their million-dollar downtown Toronto condos and their promising careers as innovation gurus at up-and-coming companies that would be bankrupt within the next two years.

Luckily, Sakura stepped in for him. “You mean our manager? He’s not that old. It’s just the hair.”

“He’s thirty-six,” Sasuke said stiffly. “And he’s in a meeting right now. I’ll be showing you around.”

“Oh, no shit?”

Sasuke elected to ignore that. He signed the forms on the security desk and slid them across; without breaking off from his conversation with Izumo, Kotetsu spared them the briefest of glances and handed Sasuke a pair of visitor passes. Naruto and Sakura fell into step beside him as he headed for the stairs, Sakura’s heels clicking on linoleum, Naruto’s runners squeaking.

“So are you a co-op student too or what?” Naruto asked, somewhere between the third and fourth floors. Sakura was out of breath, although she was managing the stairs better than Sasuke had expected in her heels; Naruto, to his annoyance, didn’t sound winded at all, as if he made a habit of racing up and down five flights of stairs every day.

“I was.” Sasuke tried to control his own breathing. He was in decent shape, but the last two flights always killed him. Damn Public Works and their terrible elevator maintenance. “I graduated last spring. I’m contract now, being bridged in.” Bridged in, yes. That was what he told himself. Bridged in, just… slowly. Excruciatingly slowly. At the approximate speed of a retreating glacier, or a hungover sloth running a marathon. At this rate, he’d be lucky to land a permanent position before Kakashi retired.

Fifth floor. Sasuke tapped his badge against the sensor by the door and pushed it open. “So, your workstations aren’t set up yet—”

“Typical,” muttered Sakura.

“—but I’ll show you around before your orientation. This is the p—” He managed to catch himself right before he said “the pit,” which was the name everyone on the floor used to refer to the student seating area, where accomodations and IT had somehow managed to cram eight computers into a space that could comfortably seat, at most, four people. To Sasuke’s irritation, he also had the misfortune of sitting here, even though he wasn’t technically a student anymore. Accomodations kept saying they were working on it. “Ah. I mean, this is where you’ll be sitting.”

“Do we have our own extensions, or are we sharing?” Sakura asked, eyeing the phones.

“You’re sharing, two to a line.”

“Secure filing cabinets?”

“Down there. I’ll get you the combinations for them.”

“Those are for anything classified Protected B or higher?” Okay, she was… pretty good. Prepared. Or at least good at giving the impression of being prepared, which was mostly what counted here anyway.

“Right. Now—” Sasuke sighed. “You don’t have to raise your hand, Naruto. This isn’t a classroom.”

Naruto laughed, and rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “Right, sorry. Is there a bathroom around here or what?”

“No,” said Sasuke.

Naruto stared at him, mouth open in bewilderment. Sasuke rolled his eyes. Idiot. Of all the people Kakashi could have hired…

“Yes, obviously . Men’s is down the hall and to the left—”

“Right on. Back in a sec.” Naruto dumped his backpack unceremoniously on the nearest desk and took off, and Sasuke wrangled his face back into a smile so he could pretend not to be annoyed. The problem with students—and he was fully aware of his own hypocrisy in thinking this, having been a student himself until a few months ago—the problem with students was that most of them came in here with no sense of professionalism. He glanced sideways at Sakura. The other problem with students was that they were either spectacular all-stars, single-handedly more capable and efficient than half the senior staff combined—or they were duds. He had a feeling Kakashi had managed to land him one of each.

Sakura had already found the desk labelled with her name and set her purse down. She smiled. Sasuke smiled back. He liked her instinctively, but seeing her standing there in her heels and pencil skirt and modestly cut blouse, asking about shared phone lines and Protected B files, exuding an air of competence so heady you could bottle it and make a small fortune selling it as an elixir at corporate wellness retreats, he also felt his metaphorical hackles rise. Yes, he liked her, but he also couldn’t help regarding her as capital-C Competition. Sure, he had seniority—but Kakashi had said one of the students was bilingual, and Sasuke was willing to bet it was Sakura. Everything he’d seen of Naruto in the ten minutes they’d known each other suggested that Naruto was the kind of person who didn’t know a preposition from a pronoun in one official language, let alone two.

“Good Morning, Hatake Junior!” Rock Lee’s voice cut through the ambient office chatter like a foghorn. Sasuke cringed a little. Kankuro from audit had called him that once in a meeting—a sarcastic little joke about how Sasuke was always shadowing Kakashi, ha ha, so funny. Lee seemed to think it was meant as a compliment, and took every opportunity to shout it down the hall at Sasuke or yell it out whenever they passed each other in the streets outside their building.

Lee came bounding along the aisle between cubicles to join them. He was clutching the mug Gai had given him at the operations branch Secret Santa last year, the one that said #1 JUNIOR POLICY ANALYST!!! on it in aggressive orange type. Sasuke’s smile winched a few degrees tighter.

“Ah, Hello!” said Lee, skidding to a halt in the middle of the pit and spotting Sakura. She looked startled, but she offered a polite smile and held out her hand. Lee wrung it enthusiastically.

Obligatory introductions. Great. How long was this meeting of Kakashi’s supposed to last anyway? “Sakura, this is Lee. His team does urban social housing. Lee, Sakura. Our new co-op.”

Sakura opened her mouth, probably to go through meaningless pleasantries, but Lee beat her to it. He beamed. He was still shaking her hand. At this rate, she’d have a dislocated shoulder well before she’d even made it to her first lunch break. “Oh! A Bright Young Mind! The Bountiful Blossoming of the Next Generation is Indeed a Great Thing to Witness!”

“Oh!” said Sakura. “Um. Thank... you?”

Lee beamed at her before turning back to Sasuke. Sounding—for Lee—slightly calmer, he asked, “Did you see the email from Jiraiya? EXCOM needs Board Room B all afternoon, so the student orientation has been postponed. But! Never Fear!” He raised his mug, as if in a salute. “For the Orientation Shall Be Rescheduled for Tomorrow!”

“Great. Thanks,” Sasuke said weakly. To his relief, Gai shouted for Lee from across the office, and Lee flashed them one last winsome smile before taking off through the cubicles at a sprint.

“Was… was he flirting?” Sakura asked hesitantly. “Or is he just… like that?”

“He’s just like that.” Either that, or he was always flirting, with everyone. Sasuke hadn’t considered that possibility before. It was disconcerting. “Anyway, I guess your orientation is cancelled.”

“That’s fine, I did one with the innovation branch last year.” Her phone buzzed in her hand, and she glanced down. “Actually, if you don’t have any work for me to do, is it alright if I head down to the third floor now?” Seeing his blank expression, she added, “Oh, sorry, I thought Kakashi explained—he hired me because Jiraiya owed Tsunade a favour, and she didn’t have the funding for a student this term. I’ll mostly be working with her. Obviously I’ll do whatever Kakashi needs too, but since my computer’s not ready yet…”

No, Kakashi had not explained, which was just typical. Hmm. Tsunade… she was the director of research and innovation. Sakura made it sound like she’d be working right under her. No, more than that, Sakura made it sound like Tsunade had pulled some strings to make sure she’d have Sakura working right under her, funding be damned. That was. That was. Sasuke had spent ten entire months here before Jiraiya had even managed to learn his name . And Sakura—Sakura was—

“Sure,” said Sasuke. He sincerely hoped his seething jealousy wasn’t painted all over his face.

It wasn’t until she’d left already that the true repercussions of Sakura’s position sunk in. If she was going to be gone all day doing laudable, noteworthy things with Tsunade—in both official languages, too—then that left Sasuke stuck with Naruto.

***

“So the shared drive is where everyone stores their documents across all the branches. You can encrypt confidential documents. Obviously secret and top secret documents shouldn’t be saved here—not,” Sasuke couldn’t help adding smugly, “that you have the clearance to be working on anything classified that high.”

“Uh huh,” Naruto said vaguely. He was fidgeting with a spot on the seat of his chair where the pleather had started to wear through, digging his finger in to make the hole bigger.

“Most people just make a file with their name so that everything they’re working on stays in the same place. It needs to be organized so other people can find documents related to their projects. See, this is Kakashi’s.” Sasuke clicked through Kakashi’s folder to display orderly subfolders and documents, all clearly named and versioned. He was very proud of that folder. It had been a nightmarish dumpster fire of a disaster when Sasuke started working for Kakashi, but two days of extensive overtime and way too many espressos had fixed that. Kakashi still just stuck every new document he created in the subfolder labelled “stuff,” but Sasuke made sure to go in at least once a week to file everything properly.

“Uh huh,” said Naruto. Now he was staring at the door to Kakashi’s office, currently closed, where a cluster of dog photos were taped up under the label bearing Kakashi’s name.

Slightly irked that his exceptionally organized folders hadn’t elicited the admiration they were due, Sasuke clicked out of the shared drive and opened another icon on his desktop. “And this is GCDocs. It’s our new electronic records and documents management system. Jiraiya—that’s our director—wants us to migrate everything below Protected B here by the end of the month.” If memory served, Jiraiya’s exact words at their last branch meeting had been I honestly couldn’t care less, but IT’s going to keep hounding me until you jokers start using this bullshit, so get a move on. In truth, Sasuke was much further behind on the document migration than he’d wanted to be—between migrating all of Kakashi’s documents, arguing with HR over his contract, and occasionally doing his actual job, he just hadn’t had the time. But Naruto didn’t need to know any of that. Instead Sasuke explained, “It’s useful for audit trails but its error messages are totally incomprehensible, it crashes a lot, and sometimes the edit lockouts really screw you over.”

“Uh huh,” said Naruto. He was craning his neck to watch Tenten toasting a bagel in the kitchenette, not even pretending to look at Sasuke’s screen anymore.

“Are you listening?” Sasuke demanded. “This is important.”

“What? Oh—yeah, totally. Edit lockouts. Protected E. Got it.”

“Protected B.”

“‘S what I said. Hey, so, what time’s lunch?”

Sasuke forced himself to take a deep breath. In. Out. Once more. Just like the meditation exercises Gai was always making his team do. He told himself that it was fine. It was all fine. For unknown reasons, probably in a fit of temporary insanity induced by Sasuke’s absence, Kakashi had decided to hire this moron, and now Sasuke was stuck babysitting him, but that was fine. His only responsibility here was to cover the basics. If Naruto couldn’t be bothered to listen, well, that was also fine. Let him fuck himself over. It wasn’t Sasuke’s problem.

***

“ Sweatpants. He’s wearing sweatpants today! Varsity sweatpants!”

“Well, it is casual Friday,” Kakashi pointed out. He turned a page. The well-worn creases in the spine of today’s bodice-ripper suggested that it was an old favourite. Maybe Kakashi was feeling sentimental.

“That doesn’t mean you can show up to work dressed like a—dressed like a—” Some primal self-preservation instinct flared deep in his brain, telling him to stop and observe his surroundings carefully.

It was indeed casual Friday. Kakashi, sitting slouched at his desk with his romance novel drooping in one lazy hand, was wearing jeans covered in dog hair, a purple Toronto Raptors hoodie also covered in dog hair, and—just visible under his desk—what appeared to be… crocs. With athletic socks.

Sasuke peeked again at his manager’s feet. The crocs didn’t even match. One was pink, one was green. The pink one had a gaudy rhinestone jammed through one of the holes.

“Dressed like a…?” Kakashi prompted.

“Never mind,” Sasuke said quickly.

“Did you actually need something, or did you just come in to complain about our precious little kiddo’s sense of style? Because I have a meeting starting in”—Kakashi glanced at his computer screen—“oh. Fifteen minutes ago. Guess I’d better get going.” With a sigh, he unfolded his lanky frame out of his office chair—watching him stand always made Sasuke think of someone trying to set up an unnecessarily complicated and slightly broken beach umbrella—and stretched his long arms over his head. Novel still in hand, Kakashi picked up his mug and ambled out of his office.

“I just think it’s unprofessional,” Sasuke said later to Tenten, during a chance meeting at the coffeemaker in the kitchenette. Tenten was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans for casual Friday. Sasuke was also wearing a plaid shirt and jeans for casual Friday. Just about every single public servant in the National Capital Region was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans for casual Friday. It was practically enshrined in the dress code. From where he stood in the kitchenette, Sasuke had an excellent view of the offending sweatpants as he watched Naruto shoot a rubber band at one of Gai’s co-op students.

“What,” said Tenten, “you mean the fact that he’s dressed like a—”

“Gym rat? Yes. Exactly.”

“I was going to say like a frat boy who dug through a Value Village donation bin blindfolded. But now I feel bad.”

Sasuke snorted. “Yeah, that’s about right. What a moron.”

“Hey now. He’s not that bad. Really friendly.”

“Tch.”

“Look, if you really think he dresses so inappropriately, you should talk to him about it. You’re his supervisor, aren’t you?”

“Technically, Kakashi’s his supervisor.”

“Oh, right . Kakashi’s about as likely to do any supervising as he is to learn how to use the photocopier himself.”

This was, unfortunately, true. Sasuke had been doing all of Kakashi’s photocopying for him since the day he started his first work term as a co-op student himself. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure Kakashi even knew where to find the photocopier on his own.

“Still…” Sasuke said vaguely. To hide his sudden discomfort, he grabbed the coffee carafe and topped up his mug. Telling Naruto he dressed inappropriately would be an admission that he noticed what Naruto wore, which would be tantamount to saying he looked at Naruto, which—

Well, it was like Anko from credit assessment, who never wore a bra. Everyone knew she never wore a bra. You could see her nipples. More accurately, you couldn’t not see her nipples. But you couldn’t just say Anko, please wear a bra, Public Works is blasting the AC in here and the only way your nipples could be more obvious is if you took your shirt off and circled your areolas in Sharpie . You couldn’t say that, because that would mean admitting you’d been looking at her nipples instead of watching her PowerPoint presentation. You especially couldn’t say that if you were a man, sexual orientation notwithstanding, which was why Sasuke, Kakashi, Gai, Neji, and Lee spent every meeting with her staring at the charts and figures in her slides with the intensity of staked-out RCMP officers preparing for a major drug bust.

“I’m just saying, he’s probably not going to clue in on his own. You need to take him under your wing, like a baby bird.” Tenten glanced at the pit. “A six-foot-six baby bird who eats instant noodles for lunch every day and can bench, like, three hundred pounds.”

Oh, so she had noticed that too. Well, at least he wasn’t the only one.

“It’s fine,” he muttered. “I don’t even care.”

“Uh huh,” said Tenten. The look she gave him as he hurried back to his desk was far too perceptive for his comfort.

***

On Monday morning, Sasuke arrived half an hour early, as was his custom. Gai and Lee were the only other ones in this early, but from the melodious sounds of gongs and sitar music emanating from the other end of the floor, they were busy doing their sun salutations together. Sasuke made his first cup of coffee and set it down on his desk, where it would languish forgotten until it had transformed into cold sludge, which he would then choke down before his nine o’clock meeting with comms. He put on his headphones to block out the sounds of Gai bellowing yoga poses, and settled in to work.

For the next two hours, he updated spreadsheets, replied to emails, drafted memos for Kakashi, drafted fact sheets for Jiraiya, worked on his deck for the executive committee, worked on Kakashi’s deck for the executive committee, reviewed Neji’s latest draft of their new environmental building materials policy, and, in an effort to develop his vocabulary, struggled through two CBC articles in French.

Vaguely, he registered the office filling around him. Sakura arrived fifteen minutes early, checked her email, and then took off, probably to see Tsunade on the third floor. Kakashi showed up, eating a vanilla dip donut and looking (as usual) as if he’d just wandered back into civilization after living in the wilds of Gatineau Park for three months. Gai’s students (Shikamaru, Choji, and Ino—Sasuke suspected Gai had hired three for the sole purpose of one-upping Kakashi’s two) came in one after the other. Naruto—wearing an absolutely garish green polo shirt patterned with pink flamingos, and clutching some sort of fancy coffee that gave Sasuke heartburn just looking at it—arrived late, as usual, and greeted everyone boisterously, also as usual.

Sasuke gritted his teeth and turned up the volume on his music.

Just before nine, someone leaned over and tapped his shoulder. Sasuke jumped, his concentration snapping like a snipped rubber band, and looked up from his spreadsheet. Naruto had scooted his chair over to Sasuke’s desk, beside Sasuke’s. Right beside Sasuke’s. Sasuke scooted backward a few inches and slipped one of his headphones off his ear.

“Hey!” said Naruto. He was grinning and rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “Yeah, so. Uh. I think I accidentally deleted the shared drive?” He laughed. “Is that bad?”

“You what,” Sasuke said flatly.

“You know that drive where everyone stores all their files—?”

“I know what the shared drive is,” Sasuke snapped. “What do you mean, you deleted it? Let me see.”

The brief, abyssal moment of existential terror Naruto’s words had provoked was quickly assuaged by reason. Naruto couldn’t have deleted the shared drive. He was a co-op student. He didn’t even have the permissions to view all of the shared drive. He must have deleted the drive icon from his desktop, or unmapped it from his file explorer, or something equally mundane, harmless, and reversible. Sasuke slid his chair over to Naruto’s computer. He clicked. Clicked again. Clicked a third time, panic now starting to buzz around his brain like static. Click click click.

“Hey!” Ino said suddenly. “I can’t access any of my files!”

“Me neither!” said Choji.

“Same here,” said Shikamaru, sounding supremely bored by the whole affair. “What a drag.”

“You guys too?” said Tenten, poking her head up over the wall of her cubicle. Someone—it sounded like Neji—started cursing, and across the floor, Lee let out a howl that suggested he had just watched someone disembowel three generations of his family right in front of him.

Sasuke stared at Naruto. Naruto laughed again, nervously, and said, “Oops?”

***

“He deleted the shared drive! The fucking shared drive, Kakashi!”

“Eh, everyone makes mistakes, Sasuke. Why, I remember a certain little kiddo hitting reply-all on an all-staff email…”

Even now, two years later, Sasuke flushed hot with shame at that memory. “That was different! I’ve lost months of work!”

“Well, IT’s working on restoring the backup, so not to worry. You know, Sasuke, I’m surprised at you. If you’d been more proactive about migrating your files to GCDocs…”

Sasuke’s blush flared a few degrees hotter. Humiliation at being called out for falling behind mingled with an emotion perhaps best described as seething fury. He was behind on migrating his files to GCDocs because he’d been busy migrating all of Kakashi’s files to GCDocs. And fixing all of Kakashi’s Excel formulas. And showing Kakashi how to set up a Facebook account, because apparently Kakashi still lived in the 90s. Sasuke still wasn’t sure how he’d let himself get roped into that one.

“Timbit?” offered Kakashi, gesturing to a box on his desk.

“No! I don’t want a fucking Timbit!” Seething fury abated temporarily in favour of sudden suspicion. “Hey—aren’t these the Timbits Gai brought in for his students this morning?”

“These Timbits? You must be mistaken.” Kakashi contrived to look so innocent that Sasuke knew for sure he had to be guilty.

***

In the end, IT did manage to restore the backup, and Sasuke only lost a few days’ worth of work. But the damage was done. It had settled in Sasuke’s cold, dead heart a virulent, simmering vendetta, the likes of which Sasuke hadn’t known since grade three, when Itachi had broken Sasuke’s new scooter. It was a vendetta even greater than the intense resentment he harboured against the internal audit team, who always seemed to have it in for operations and made a habit of unjustly criticizing them for reckless spending.

He hated Naruto. He detested—no, he loathed Naruto. He loathed Naruto’s stupid, tacky outfits. He loathed how Naruto was always fidgeting with pens and paperclips and other miscellaneous office supplies at his desk. He loathed how Naruto was always jiggling his leg in meetings. He loathed Naruto’s loud, obnoxious laugh. He loathed the crunching sound of Naruto breaking up the noodles in his instant ramen every single day for lunch. He loathed watching Naruto trying to flirt with Sakura on the rare occasions she was actually at her desk, although he did take a certain vindictive satisfaction in watching Sakura roll her eyes and immediately shut him down. He loathed how Naruto tapped on the arrow keys over and over and over again to adjust the position of graphics in PowerPoint instead of just dragging them with his cursor like a normal human being. He loathed how Naruto grinned and waved and said, “Heya, Sasuke!” every time he saw him, like they were friends or something.

What he loathed most, though, was that everyone else—everyone else—seemed to… like Naruto. The other students liked him—even Sakura, when Naruto wasn’t trying to hit on her. Tenten gave him hiking recommendations. Lee had started going to the gym with him. Gai liked him, but then Gai liked everyone. Kakashi showed him his dog pictures, but then Kakashi showed everyone his dog pictures. Jiraiya said once—jealousy and bitterness had burned the words into Sasuke’s mind like a brand—that Naruto’s slide decks were “flashy” and “packed a damn good punch up at EXCOM.” Sasuke had even caught Neji, who was usually reserved and short-tempered, sitting with Naruto at lunch one day, the two of them deep in a conversation about the Canadian Olympic women’s curling team.

“Well, the execs are always saying they want disruptors,” said Tenten, when she and Sasuke were cabbing back downtown from a meeting at INFC. “And Naruto’s definitely… disruptive.”

“Please,” said Sasuke. “When the execs say they want disruptors, they mean they want people who’ll suggest a centralized system for ordering office supplies instead of doing it team-by-team.”

Tenten acknowledged that this was true. “Still,” she added. “He’s fun, don’t you think? I even saw him sitting at Bridgehead with Gaara from audit yesterday.”

“You did not,” Sasuke said in disbelief. The whole internal audit team was a blight upon their Crown corporation, the meanest and most spiteful dregs of accounting and finance programs across the country, a coven of veritable hellspawn intent on bringing about institutional Armageddon via a thousand petty roadblocks and accusations of minor financial misconduct—and Gaara was the very worst of the lot. Sasuke and Kakashi had spent a harrowing four hours with Gaara five months ago, staring into those dead, expressionless eyes as Gaara made them pick apart every single tiny misstep they’d made in their northern rural housing development initiative.

“I did!” Tenten insisted. “Gaara was even smiling! Or I think he was. He wasn’t frowning, anyway…”

But the real kicker came on a Thursday, at approximately 3:00 p.m., when Sasuke was hurrying back into the office for a 3:15 teleconference with the Atlantic regional office, trying to inhale spicy Italian sub while also jotting down speaking points on the back of his Subway napkin. He strode past the security desk, where someone had stopped to chat with the commissionaires in French, and hip-checked the badge clipped to his belt against the sensor for the door. As the sensor beeped and lit up green, some tiny, subconscious flare of recognition prompted him to glance back towards the security desk.

The door clicked open.

The door clicked closed.

“ Naruto? ” Sasuke said in disbelief.

The guy hanging out by the security desk broke off his rapid French and turned. Just in case the disorderly blond hair and the blinding orange-and-turquoise t-shirt weren’t identification enough on their own, he grinned, waved, and said, “Heya, Sasuke!”

To Sasuke’s dismay, Naruto said a few more words in French to Izumo and Kotetsu, then jogged over to join Sasuke. “You mind tapping your pass?” asked Naruto. He pointed to the sticker bearing a large red V plastered across his chest. “I forgot mine again. Third time this week. The guys were gonna buzz me in, but if you’re going up anyway—”

Wordlessly, Sasuke bumped his hip against the sensor again. They went down the hall to the elevators, all four of which were actually functional for once. Naruto tapped on the up button about fifteen times in rapid succession.

“So. You, uh. Speak French,” said Sasuke. He stared unseeingly up at the screen above the elevator in front of them, flashing through numbers as the elevator moved between floors.

“Yep. I did French immersion,” Naruto said cheerfully, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Oh, and then I did a semester in Lyons in my undergrad. I sound Parisian as fuck, though.”

“How terrible,” said Sasuke. He was definitely not thinking about how he had to run every email he got from Deidara in risk management through Google translate. He was also not thinking about how he had to run every email he wrote back to Deidara in risk management through Google translate, after which he had to get Tenten to proofread. He was especially not thinking about how he’d only scored ABA on his last French test, not the BBB his position required.

So Naruto was bilingual. Well, that explained why Kakashi had hired him. Bilingual co-ops were hot commodities, hotter even than spots on the jury for the annual GCWCC corporate chili cook-off. It also explained why Kakashi had stopped asking Sasuke to send meeting minutes, slide decks, regional emails, and other miscellania to the translation bureau. Naruto could do it probably faster and definitely cheaper.

Well. That was… good. Yes. It was good that Naruto, otherwise a complete disaster, served some function—added some benefit—to the team. That was good.

God, Sasuke hated him.

***

Sasuke was not having a good day.

It had started at six-thirty a.m., when some lady on the jam-packed 44 bus had elbowed Sasuke in the face and blacked his eye. As his eye slowly began to swell shut, he’d walked from the bus stop to the office in the rain, only to discover he’d forgotten his ID badge at home. He wasted valuable minutes arguing with Izumo and Kotetsu, who seemed grumpier than normal, until they finally gave him a visitor’s pass and buzzed him in. He headed straight for the kitchenette for a much-needed caffeine hit and immediately dumped half a carafe of scalding hot coffee all over his pants.

He spent fifteen minutes writing and proofreading a clear, detailed, and logically organized multi-paragraph email to Kakashi summarizing the current status of the team’s major files. Then his Outlook crashed, devouring his carefully crafted draft. He wrote it again, proofread it again, and hit send before Outlook could try to sabotage him a second time. An hour later, a notification popped up in his inbox, and he opened Kakashi’s response:

To: Sasuke Uchiha

Subject: Re: Monthly Progress Report

k sounds good

kh

---

Kakashi Hatake

Manager

Rural Housing Development Team

Operations Branch

No good job. No thanks for all your hard work. No you’re the backbone of this team, Sasuke, and without you we would all founder on the sharp, unforgiving rocks of policy management . Nothing. That was just typical. Normally it wouldn’t bother him, except that he’d personally watched Kakashi walk out of his office and into the pit yesterday to compliment Sakura on the succintity of her latest briefing note. Sasuke swallowed a surge of irritation, and tried to distract himself by biting into his apple, only to accidentally sink his teeth right into the skin on the inside of his cheek, hard.

Around eleven, Karin, their admin assistant, stopped by his desk to try to flirt with him. That was bad enough, but she also delivered a funding proposal of his that had been rejected by EXCOM, as well as a docket marked URGENT, the due date for which was two days ago. Just as he was scrambling to get started on it, an email popped up in his inbox from Jiraiya:

To: Sasuke Uchiha

Subject: thx, see attached

pls return by thurs

---

Jiraiya Saito

Director

Operations Branch

Why, Sasuke wondered for the millionth time, did no one at the managerial level or higher know how to write a proper email? He opened the attachment. It was a four-page document Sasuke had drafted, which now contained seventy-six pointless and conflicting revisions from five different people.

In the afternoon, he sat through three back-to-back hour-long meetings. All of them ran over, and all of them covered issues that could have been easily resolved via email in under five minutes. The last one involved three people calling in from regional offices, all of whom kept forgetting to mute and unmute themselves appropriately.

By the time four o’clock rolled around, in short, Sasuke’s mood was borderline nuclear. Headphones on, volume cranked, he hunched over his keyboard. Eyestrain in the one eye that hadn’t swollen shut made his screen blur before him; a tension headache was starting somewhere in the back of his skull. All he wanted to do was put his fist through his computer screen (or at least power it down), leave the damn office on time for once in his godforsaken life, jam himself onto on overcrowded bus for forty minutes, and lie down on the floor in his apartment, where he could watch reruns of House Hunters International until his brain melted right out his ears—

Something connected, not very hard, with the back of his head, then fell to the floor. He looked down. A pen. He looked up.

“Ahhh!” said Naruto, his voice muffled slightly by the hand clapped over his mouth. “Sorry!”

“Wait to go, Naruto,” said Shikamaru, rolling his eyes.

“Geez, you’re clumsy,” said Choji. Ino giggled, as did Sakura, the traitor.

“Oh, I’m clumsy?” said Naruto. He pointed an accusing finger at Choji, his face splitting into a grin. “You’re the one who—”

“ Cut it out ,” Sasuke snarled. All five of them fell silent, staring at him in shock. “This is an office, not a fucking preschool, and some of us actually have work to do. If you’re just going to mess around, go home.” His eyes lingered over Naruto, whose wide, blue eyes were fixed on him. There was a word on the tip of his tongue, pressing against the back of his teeth. He knew it was a bad idea. He knew it was unprofessional. He muttered it anyway: “Moron.”

As if Sasuke’s professional misconduct had triggered some managerial sixth sense, Kakashi chose that moment to poke his head out of his office and call, “Sasuke? You got a sec?”

Still fuming, and already regretting losing his temper, Sasuke got up and skulked over to Kakashi’s office. He resisted, just barely, the urge to slam the door behind him like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Kakashi was slouched over his desk, the end of a pen clenched idly between his teeth. Sasuke entertained a brief and extremely satisfying fantasy in which the pen’s ink capsule explode all over Kakashi’s face. Kakashi gestured for Sasuke to sit, and set his latest romance novel face-down on his desk, the spine splayed to hold his place. Oh boy. This was serious.

“Sasuke,” said Kakashi. “You seem stressed.”

Sasuke bit back a sarcastic retort. Sassing a subordinate was unkind and irresponsible, but sassing a superior—even one as laid-back as Kakashi—was probably a good way to guarantee he never landed another contract again. So was admitting to the fact that he was severely overworked, lest Kakashi start thinking he wasn’t up to his job. Instead he said, “I’m fine. Not stressed. Everything’s fine.”

“Sure? There’s nothing troubling you? Work matters? Financial troubles? Personal...”—Kakashi hesitated for a fraction of a second—“... affairs?”

What the hell was this? Was Kakashi… concerned… for his… wellbeing? Or something? Whatever it was, it was fucking weird. “I’m sure,” he insisted. “Everything’s fine.”

“Well, alright. Oh, I have something for you.”

Sasuke sighed, expecting another overdue docket or a Treasury Board sub that needed rewriting—but Kakashi dug something small out of his drawer and tossed to Sasuke, who caught it. It was a tube of lotion, something labelled arnica cream.

“Uh… thanks,” said Sasuke, wondering if the effects of the office’s overactive HVAC on his naturally dry skin were that obvious.

“For your eye,” said Kakashi. “It’ll help the bruising. Trust me.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Anything for my very favourite junior policy analyst.” Kakashi’s eyes crinkled like he was about to smile, but then he just yawned. “Gai’s also offered to perform some crystal healing on you to speed your recovery. He tells me your aura suggests your chakras need serious realignment.”

Sasuke stared at Kakashi, trying to figure out whether or not he was joking, but Kakashi just gazed serenely back. “I—I think I’ll be okay. But I’ll, uh. Keep that in mind.”

Something tapped at Kakashi’s window, and Sasuke, in his high-strung state, nearly fell out of his chair—but it was only a pigeon perched on the window-ledge, pecking idly at the glass. Actually, there were a lot of pigeons perched on the window-ledge. They seemed to be eating…

“Did you put birdseed out there?” Sasuke asked.

“Hmm? Oh… more or less. Gai gave me some of his homemade granola.” Kakashi’s chair spun in a lazy circle as he turned to look at the pigeons. “Cute, aren’t they?”

The pigeons’ beady little eyes bored into Sasuke as if they could see right through his body and into his soul. Sasuke tried not to shudder. The pigeons around the government buildings in Gatineau had evolved to become bigger, stronger, and more ruthless those across the river in downtown Ottawa. One had stolen a French fry right out of Sasuke’s hand once when he was having lunch on the lawn by the Museum of History. Cute was not the first word that came to mind.

“Is that all?” Sasuke asked.

He was still half-expecting some form of discipline for snapping at the co-ops, but Kakashi just said, “Mm hmm,” and picked up his romance novel again.

Sasuke had almost made it to the door when Kakashi said, “Oh, hold on…”

He froze, anxiety quickening his pulse—was this it—?

“I have to present the low-income credit file to risk management tomorrow,” said Kakashi. “Could my very favourite junior policy analyst spare a few minutes to jazz up my slide deck a little for me?”

Sasuke’s shoulder sagged with relief. He knew from experience that when Kakashi asked him to “jazz up” a slide deck, what he actually wanted him to do was create the slide deck from scratch based on a handful of vague bullet points in an email he’d sent two weeks ago and a three-hundred-page policy binder that neither of them had read. But that was better than a reprimand, as far as he was concerned. “Sure,” said Sasuke. “Just send it over.”

“Stellar. Have a good night. Oh, and Sasuke?”

“Yes?” said Sasuke, already halfway out the door.

“Play nice with the kiddos, will you?”

Sasuke muttered something vague and surly and slunk out the door before Kakashi had a chance to say anything else. Somehow a mild yet targeted comment from Kakashi stung more than an outright telling-off.

***

After that, Sasuke deemed it prudent to avoid Naruto, inasmuch as he could avoid someone who dressed primarily in neons and spent eight hours a day sitting at a desk less than five feet away from his. All things considered, it was surprisingly easy. Sasuke had suddenly found himself caught in a flurry of meetings and presentations and training sessions, in addition to which Kakashi had had the bright idea to sign him up as a branch representative for the annual Government of Canada Workplace Charitable Campaign. Between doing all of Kakashi’s work for him, attending meetings to discuss the logistics of inter-branch bake sales, and occasionally fulfilling some of the actual responsibilities of his job, what little time Sasuke did spend at his desk was spent hyperfocusing until his eyes throbbed and drinking so much coffee he sometimes felt like the room was thrumming around him.

He still talked with Sakura on the rare occasions their paths crossed, and he got along alright with Gai’s students, but he figured Naruto probably wanted to interact with him just about as much as he wanted to interact with Naruto. And he had bigger problems. The majority of employees were opting out of making GCWCC donations via payroll deductions, wisely wary of having Phoenix further mangle their pay, which meant fundraising was down. And, even though the next year’s federal budget wouldn’t be unveiled until March, EXCOM was already getting antsy about the corporation’s federal funding, which meant the pressure was on from Jiraiya for Gai and Kakashi to start demonstrating the importance of their projects.

“Hiruzen says the word is science and tech are going to be big this year,” Jiraiya told Gai, Lee, Kakashi, and Sasuke during one of their strategy meetings. They all nodded; it wasn’t the best news, but it also wasn’t unexpected. The previous government had been progressively clawing back science funding every year; the newly elected prime minister would want to invest more heavily to make a public show of reversing that. It was all politics; Sasuke doubted the new PM cared any more than the old one about funding caribou mating surveys and antibiotic resistance research, but it could still mean trouble for their work.

“We Must Triumph on Behalf of Residential Infrastructure!” said Lee, his face ablaze with righteous passion. Gai, who appeared to be on the verge of bursting into manly tears of pride over Lee’s fervour, clapped him heartily on the shoulder.

“Uh, yeah, that,” said Kakashi. He was slouched over the boardroom table, more scarecrow-like than ever, warily eyeing the greenish-brown smoothie Gai had brought with him to the meeting as he nursed his own double-double. “I was thinking we can push the environmental angle on some of the work we’ve been doing with NRCan and the Ontario MECP. Kind of science it up.”

“Uh huh. Then pick some small fry to throw in too,” said Jiraiya, nodding. “Project budgets under six hundred grand, deliverables in a few months. You guys got stuff like that?”

“Of course.” Gai flashed the group a winsome smile. “I’ll get my team working on fleshing out proposals right away. We won’t rest until those slide decks are in your hands.”

“Great. Kakashi?” said Jiraiya.

“Sasuke?” said Kakashi.

“We’ve got stuff,” said Sasuke. He took the wave of panic rising in his chest and punched it right back down, hard. He did have files that would fit the bill, but they were all early stages, continually put on the backburner as he dealt with emergencies of varying scales across their current projects. For each of them, he’d still have to develop the briefing notes, and flesh out the policy drafts, and meet with risk management and finance and legal, and—

He punched the panic down again. Compartmentalize. Compartmentalize. Compartmentalize. He could do this. He just had to focus on one thing at a time. And also maybe start bringing a sleeping bag to the office so he could more easily work twenty-hour days. He could set up camp in that corner by the photocopier. Shower at the Goodlife down the street. Live off day-old bran muffins from Marcellos. No big deal.

“Okay. Let’s see some drafts by the end of the week,” said Jiraiya.

Sasuke, still drifting in a haze of anxiety and mild hysteria, wondering if anyone else had ever suffered a heart attack at twenty-three or if he would be the first, walked out of the boardroom and right into Naruto.

“Oh, sorry,” said Naruto, stepping quickly out of his way.

Sasuke made the mistake of looking at him. He didn’t mean to glare. Really. It was just habit at this point, combined with the natural instinct to protect his eyes from the pylon-orange of Naruto’s shirt.

Naruto looked away. “Uh. Kakashi, Tsunade’s looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, she says you’re squandering Sakura’s talents on menial gruntwork again, or something? She looked pissed.”

“Ah. Well, in that case, I’ll be working from home for the rest of the day. Email if you need anything,” said Kakashi. He started meandering purposefully off towards the elevators.

Aside from that small incident, though, Sasuke thought he'd done an admirable job of minimizing contact with The Enemy. On the unavoidable occasions when they did need to communicate for business purposes, they did so exclusively through email and track changes. Sasuke thought they could very easily maintain this for another few months until Naruto's term was up, at which point they never had to see each other again, and Sasuke could return to quietly self-destructing in peace.

That was what Sasuke thought. Until Naruto hit him with his bike.

It was approximately 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, and Sasuke was jaywalking across O'Connor Street, hunching his shoulder to keep his phone pressed to his ear while he fumbled in his bag for his water bottle, balls-deep in an argument with Neji over the draft Ts&Cs for the proposed low income mortgage default assistance program. "Look," he was saying as he stepped out into the street, "If that's your opinion, fine, but you can't just put that in an email. If the project gets ATIP’d—"

"AHH LOOK OUT—"

The words registered a split second too late. Sasuke looked up just in time to see the cyclist who, an instant later, ran him down.

Because the universe apparently harboured a personal grudge against Sasuke and delighted in making him suffer, the cyclist was, of course, a blond boy in his early twenties, wearing an aqua shirt patterned with yellow pineapples under a truly awful orange bomber. Naruto.

To Naruto’s credit, he'd tried to swerve to avoid hitting Sasuke full-on, and the unholy squeal that had threatened to pierce Sasuke's eardrums as he was knocked to the ground suggested Naruto had also slammed on the brakes. Neither had done Sasuke any good. But Naruto had tried.

He was also already off his bike—it fell over onto the sidewalk with a crash—and crouching beside Sasuke, saying, "Holy shit, I am so—Sasuke? "

Inexplicably, Sasuke found himself fighting the urge to laugh. That was worrying. Did he have a concussion? Shit. He couldn't have a concussion. He didn't get paid sick days, and even if he did, he had way too much work to do. Kakashi had broken two of his spreadsheets again, and he was supposed to have briefing notes on those project outlines to Jiraiya in two days, and he had that preliminary meeting with risk management tomorrow, not to mention that call with the Prairies regional office about their upcoming rollout, and—

“Hey, are you okay?” Naruto asked. “You’re breathing kinda funny.”

Sasuke groaned, and touched the back of his head. His fingers came away dry—no blood. Good, good. He didn’t actually think he’d hit his head, but he’d gone down so fast it was hard to tell. He’d skinned the hell out of both elbows—torn right through his shirt—and his tailbone was throbbing, but otherwise everything seemed to be in order.

“I’m fine,” Sasuke snapped. “Watch where you’re going.”

For the briefest instant, the concern vanished from Naruto’s face, replaced by a scowl. Huh. Sasuke had never actually seen him get angry before. “Hey, you’re the one who was—” But Naruto stopped himself. “I mean, look, geez, I’m really sorry. You sure you’re okay? I can get you an Uber to the Civic or something—”

“I’m fine,” Sasuke insisted. Ignoring Naruto’s proffered hand, he pushed himself upright. “I just need my phone—”

Naruto ran a hand through his hair. No helmet. What kind of moron biked downtown without a helmet? “Oh, uh, right, your phone. Like, that phone?”

He pointed to a pile of plastic and metal that could plausibly, at some point, have been a phone. Sasuke’s stomach did something akin to stepping down an empty elevator shaft from the fifteenth floor. Shit. Shit, shit shit. Neji was going to think Sasuke had hung up on him in a blind rage. More to the point, that was his phone . His phone. His personal phone. IT still hadn’t assigned him one of the corporate Blackberries. They kept saying they were working on it. And what if someone called? What if someone emailed?

“Uh, maybe if you put it in rice…?” said Naruto.

What happened next Sasuke could only attribute to temporary insanity, brought on either by the trauma of being run down by a bike or the accumulated stress of doing a job meant to be split between three people. In retrospect, even he could acknowledge that it might have come off as slightly unhinged.

He grabbed the front of Naruto's shirt, pulled him in close, and hissed into Naruto's startled face, "You're dead to me, Uzumaki."

"Whoa, whoa," said Naruto, who looked a little alarmed. He grabbed Sasuke's hand and tried, gently, to pry Sasuke's fingers away from his shirt. "Dude, it's just a phone. You want me to get you a new one? I mean, you were the one jaywalking, but if it's that important to you—"

Naruto’s hand was warm against his wrist. All at once, the righteous fury evaporated, and Sasuke’s whole body sagged. He let go of Naruto’s shirt and rubbed his face. God, he was tired. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay, good, ‘cause I’m gonna be real, I couldn’t afford it right now anyway. Know what I got on my last paycheque? Six fifty. Like, I don’t even know why they bothered. Everyone warned me before I started that I’d get screwed by Phoenix, but seriously—huh? What’d you say?”

“I said we’re blocking the bike lane,” Sasuke lied. He was pretty what he’d actually mumbled, in a final bout of temporary psychosis, had been something along the lines of shut the hell up you fucking idiot . But that was, perhaps, unduly harsh.

“Oh yeah, right.” Naruto stood and hauled his bike up onto the sidewalk. Sasuke stood too, doing his best to brush the worst of the street grime off himself. He scooped up the remains of his phone and stuffed them in his bag. Maybe the SIM card would be salvageable, at least.

“Well—” he began, preparing to bid Naruto a cool yet cordial goodnight.

“Aw, shit, your shirt.” Naruto pointed to the holes torn in Sasuke’s elbows, beneath which the skin was raw and oozing. “Geez, that looks nasty. You want a Band-Aid? I think I got a couple in my bag—”

“I’m fine. I should go—”

“You headed south? Hey, me too, I’ll walk with you.”

And so, to Sasuke’s great dismay, Naruto fell into step beside him, using one hand to wheel his bike.

“Hey, can I ask you something kinda personal?” Naruto said after a minute.

“Uh,” said Sasuke, caught off guard. “I guess.”

“How come you hate me so much?”

Sasuke fiddled with the strap of his bag and looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. They’d made it all the way to the Nature Museum now. He watched the giant inflatable jellyfish in its glass tower change colours, blue then green then yellowish-orange. “Tch. I don’t hate you.”

“Really? ‘Cause at work you sorta act like you do. And also, you just said I was dead to you, like, ten minutes ago. So, y’know.”

“Well,” said Sasuke, feeling not unlike the human equivalent of the greenish scum that formed along the surface of the Rideau Canal, “I don’t.”

“Okay. Good.” Naruto’s face suddenly split into a grin. He prodded Sasuke in the arm, and Sasuke resisted the urge to slap his hand away. “‘Cause I’m gonna be your boss one day.”

“What,” Sasuke said flatly.

“Yeah, believe it! Give me five years and I’ll be the deputy minister!” said Naruto, and he punched the air as if already celebrating the victory.

Sasuke just rolled his eyes. “We don’t have a DM, moro—uh—Naruto. We’re a Crown corp.”

“A what now?”

“A Crown corporation. The government has departments—Justice, Ag Can, the big ones—and it has agencies—like Parks—and it has Crown corps. Like us. Only departments have DMs. We have a CEO.” Which Naruto would already know, if he had bothered to look at the organizational hierarchy chart Sasuke had given him in his welcome binder on the first day. Honestly.

“Oh. Geez.” Naruto brightened again almost instantly. “Well then, I’m gonna be the next CEO!”

“Tch.”

“Just wait. You’ll see.”

“Why do you want to be the CEO anyway? You’ll just spend all your time going to meetings and getting roasted by CBC reporters.”

Naruto laughed, and shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. I just feel like I could really do something, y’know? Make sure people like you and Sakura and everyone can actually focus on doing your jobs without dealing with too much bullshit. Just seems like there’re all these great ideas and cool projects and awesome people all over the place that could really do a lot of good and they just sorta get squashed by corporate stuff. I guess it’s, like, idealistic, or whatever, but, eh. Hey—what’re you looking at me like that for?”

“Like what?” Sasuke jerked his head away so fast he felt something in his neck crunch. He had definitely been staring. For one transient moment, he’d almost felt that he was seeing Naruto for the first time—seeing something beyond the annoying laugh and the loud voice and the equally loud shirts, like there was an actual person with actual complex emotions somewhere underneath all of that. It made him uncomfortable.

“Like that weird look you were giving me just now.”

“I wasn’t giving you a weird look,” Sasuke snapped. He glanced up, and realized they were right in front of his building. He’d never been so glad to see it in his life. “This is my apartment. I’m going home now. Goodnight.”