Author's Note: Okay, first thing is that this is crack. This fic and all the fics in this series (the "Team Seven vs. Paperwork" series) fall firmly under Ridiculous Nonsense, even if there turned out to be a whole bunch more world-building and character development than originally intended. I do not actually think Konoha or the Elemental Countries work this way, though it'd be really funny if they did. It is for fun and meant to be funny, so let's leave crit and sensible solutions at the door.

The "Team Seven vs. Paperwork" series originally started as some fun daydreams about how much nonsense poor Saturobi Hiruzen probably had to put up with as a jounin-sensei. Somehow, this evolved into a generation-spanning fic series about a Curse-That-Is-Not-A-Curse and ninja being incapable of anything but nonsense. "Team Minato vs. Paperwork" is Part 3 in this series, though each installment can stand by itself.

The previous story in the "Team Seven vs. Paperwork" series is "Team Jiraiya vs. Paperwork", which I do recommend reading first (along with the prequel to that, because I think I'm hilarious), featuring Jiraiya of the Sannin having to deal with Namikaze Minato as a genin, along with his two very artistically inclined teammates.

This work was originally posted to my AO3 account.

Tags on AO3: Humor, Paperwork, Konoha Village, Fluff and Humor, Fluff and Crack, Explicit Language, Swearing, Wordcount: 1000-5000, Crack

TEAM MINATO VS. PAPERWORK

Minato loves his team. He really does.

It's just that Team Seven's legacy of being unable to hand in normal paperwork on time is strong in the new generation and it's awful. All his prayers that the third time would be the charm were clearly discarded by the higher powers, probably because watching the chaos is very entertaining for them. Either that or it's all just returned bad energy for Minato taking his entire genin career to realize that he needed to keep spare paper on his desk instead of using his mission reports for brainstorming.

He's begged his sensei never to tell Kushina all his embarrassing genin stories, because she'll never let him live any of them down, but Jiraiya only laughed and pointed out that all of Konoha probably remembers Minato running through the village from hordes of desk shinobi, screaming at the top of his lungs. And if anyone is going to tell his girlfriend about that stuff, Jiraiya often says while grinning wickedly, then it's goddamn going to be the jounin-sensei who had to suffer through it.

It's like... like... the universe has just collectively decided that the jounin-sensei of Team Seven must suffer uncontrollable children and abnormal paperwork. Somewhere, where there is a book of the universe's written rules, and that's one of them.

Konoha has obviously collectively decided the same, since there's only been two other Team Sevens since the Legendary Sannin – Jiraiya's and now Minato's. Other jounin-sensei just refuse to take a Team Seven, no matter who's on it, so they just skip that number while forming teams now and it's not out of respect. It's a tradition made purely out of fear. Unless there's a previous Team Seven member as jounin-sensei, Team Seven does not exist.

Minato hadn't been deterred originally. He didn't believe in curses and he was optimistic about his team. After all, he'd had Kakashi with him for ages and, while he didn't read over any of Kakashi's mission reports, Kakashi was pretty zealous about being a proper shinobi. And the other two seemed nice. One of them was an Uchiha and Uchiha were sometimes, terrifyingly, even more zealous about being proper shinobi than Kakashi is.

He hadn't expected any problems.

And for his foolish optimism, Kushina is still laughing at him.

oOo

First, there's Rin.

Dear, sweet, thoughtful Nohara Rin.

Top of her class in the Academy, Rin has a kind and selfless nature, plus excellent penmanship! Who would have expected that there'd be any problems from her? Minato certainly hadn't expected any paperwork problems from Rin.

Somehow he'd foolishly completely forgotten his genin team at their very beginning, when Hanako had still been pretending to be quiet and normal before she very suddenly wasn't. But in Minato's defense, it was hard for the mind to link the latter and current Hanako with any semblance of normal. With that difference, it was no wonder that his kunoichi teammate had made tokubetsu-jounin on her infiltration skills alone, although she claims her promotion was all thanks to her study of a new form of interpretative dance.

At least, unlike Hanako, Rin doesn't mean to cause trouble.

(Or incite Creative Spirit Revolution or whatever in the world Hanako insists she's doing.)

Rin is very easily stressed and being a shinobi is a very high-stress occupation. And while Rin's performance doesn't suffer at all under stress – in fact, Minato's pretty sure that stress actually multiplies Rin's capabilities exponentially, though he hasn't got the data to prove it – she still needs an outlet for all the stress that her occupation collects.

So she does origami, just as a fun little hobby. Rin learned the art at a young age from her mother, who had learned it from her mother and so on, and Rin is very, very good at it. Give her a few pieces of paper and Rin can make almost anything out of them, from little animals to a detailed Hokage Monument. She's wowed Obito, who compliments her profusely and keeps a collection of her pieces on his windowsill, and Kakashi, who doesn't say anything but does the same thing, several times with her vast skill.

Minato thought it was cute at first.

The problem is that folding paper is so ingrained in Rin that if she's not writing on the paper, she does it automatically. She can't be allowed to carry scrolls in her hands because they become little sculptures and she doesn't even notice until someone else points it out, even if they were running for their lives at the time.

Once, he went off to make dinner for his team and when he came back to the living room, Rin had turned half of his junk mail fliers on the coffee table into paper cranes. She hadn't even noticed and just kept telling some story about spending time trailing medic-nins, while Obito and Kakashi stared incredulously at her fast-moving fingers and the growing pile of cranes.

He once told Rin to fetch a take-out menu and was handed a paper toad.

They can't use napkins at restaurants because Rin just somehow takes them over the course of the meal and suddenly there's paper popsicles by the condiments.

It doesn't seem compulsive or anything; Rin doesn't need to fold paper and won't start twitching there's paperwork on the table that he won't let her have. She doesn't go after his fuinjutsu notes, probably because she can sense the river of tears that'll happen according to Kushina, or his books. It's just that it's an automatic habit to burn off stress for her, and so it just... happens. A lot.

According to the Psychology Department when Minato asked them, having caught them headed out of their offices armed with hunter-nin nets and knock-out tags, there are far worse stress-relieving habits for shinobi to have and they have far worse shinobi to worry about. Seriously, did he have any idea how hard it was to just get ANBU to make an appearance at their scheduled therapy sessions? Just unfold the freakin' paper.

But the real problem with Rin handing in little paper trees and complex paper flowers, having unconsciously and automatically folded her mission reports as soon as she's done writing them, is that no one has the slightest clue how to undo them. No one has a problem with the idea of undoing her work, even if it's cute and very well-made, it's just that the average shinobi actually can't.

The origami that Rin and her mother practice is apparently an old family technique, one that no one else knows and therefore one that no one else can undo. Minato tried once and ended up holding a complex mess that couldn't be pulled any farther without ripping the whole thing to pieces.

He's sure that Rin writes very nice reports, though, under all that folding.

Rin makes the impossible puzzle boxes of origami.

The Head Desk-Shinobi, the same man who held the position while Jiraiya was dealing with Minato's Team Seven (Minato distinctly remembers that one time the man came to hand back one of Taiki's unacceptable mission reports to Jiraiya and broke down crying on Minato's sensei) and whose name Minato doesn't actually know (he's known the man for too long to just come out and ask but nobody ever says it so now Minato's not actually sure the man has one), is not happy with this.

He kidnapped Minato in the middle with a date with Kushina, which Kushina was at first not happy about but ended up just laughing at him for, and brought Minato to Hokage Tower. After a series of tunnels and unfamiliar rooms and passageways, Minato ended up being in a room he'd never seen before and shown a long table with four piles of paper.

The first and largest pile was of Rin's mission reports in their full origami form.

The next pile was of mission reports that someone had tried to unfold, which had ended up as misshapen, half-folded messes that couldn't be unfolded anymore without ruining the report, like some kind of origami dead end. Minato had been relieved that his attempt looked just like these.

The third pile actually just consisted of three reports: one that had been ripped to shreds, one that had been carefully cut to pieces with the pair of scissors sitting right next to it, and a pile of ash that Minato has resolved to never ever ask about.

The fourth pile of reports was second-smallest, with four or five mission reports at most. None of them had been unfolded, and instead likely been cut to pieces by the scissors and then carefully reassembled with a truly fearsome amount of tape. There was a pile of empty tape-dispensers taller than the table itself sitting right next to it.

And right next to that pile, there was a desk-shinobi sobbing loudly while her coworker desk-shinobi, all oddly maudlin, comforted her. "I tried. I tried so hard but I just couldn't do it," she wailed, being held by a man who seemed to be missing patches of his hair and another man who seemed to be wearing tape like full-body bandages.

"There, there, Naoko," said the man who had clearly gotten into a fight with the tape-dispensers and lost. He also patted the back of the other man involved in the hug, whose eyes were also glittering with unshed tears, awkwardly.

"Do you see what you've done?" the Head Desk-Shinobi demanded, wild-eyed.

"Uh," said Minato.

The man grabbed him by the front of his clothes. "We can't undo them. We've tried everything!"

"Um," said Minato.

"So you and I are going to your damn paper-folding genin -" Paper-folding was said here as though it was the most despicable of curse words. "- and telling them to stop it right now."

"...Okay?" said Minato, then he realized, "Wait, why are you coming?"

"Because," the Head Desk-Shinobi spat, "your sensei ignored our warnings and permanently put off telling his genin to stop putting their unacceptable hobby into their mission reports and I am not having another You-Know-Who on my hands!"

Minato, still reeling from being kidnapped in the middle of date-night, was confused. "Who?"

"Wakahisa Taiki!" the Head Desk-Shinobi whispered furiously, as though speaking of the world's most dangerous, deadly, and immorally repulsive missing-nin.

All the desk-shinobi stopped their crying and gasped in unison, then made the sign against evil.

"Desk-Shinobi-sama! Don't say his name!" one hissed fearfully.

Minato, who had never read any of his old teammate's poetry save for that first one that Jiraiya had made him read in a desperate and indirect attempt to stop it, didn't really blame them for it. In the face of his old teammate's enthusiasm, everyone had only hedged around the issue, and Taiki's creativeness and inspiration had only gotten worse since he'd started dating Hanako.

So the Head Desk-Shinobi dragged Minato down to find Rin, who was eating ramen with her teammates. Well, she and Obito were eating, Kakashi, masked as always, had already finished and was poking at the napkin wolf pack in the middle of the table with his chopsticks.

The Head Desk-Shinobi glared hatefully at the napkins.

"Sensei?" Rin asked, confused and concerned. "I thought you were on a date with Kushina?"

"I am, well... I was. It's complicated," Minato answered, trying not to let the minor killing-intent the Head Desk-Shinobi was releasing towards the napkins bother him. "Rin... I'm here with... um... Desk-Shinobi-sama... to talk to you about your... mission reports."

"Oh no, is something wrong with the way I'm writing them?"

"No! No!" Minato insisted, wishing he could do what his sensei had done and just run for it. Rin's big eyes here could give Taiki's sheer enthusiasm a run for its money and Jiraiya's inability to say something made a lot more sense now. "It's... it's not that."

Minato took a deep breath. "Rin, you need to stop folding your mission reports."

"Oh," Rin said. "Okay, sensei. It's kinda unintentional, but I'll try to stop. I guess it's pretty inconvenient for the desk-shinobi, huh?"

In this moment, when the Head Desk-Shinobi and Minato let out sighs of relief, Obito chose to speak up.

"I don't see why she has to stop," he said thoughtfully. "I think it's cool. And can't you just unfold the paper? Rin's origami always brightens my day!"

Rin beamed. "Thanks, Obito!"

Minato had no answer for that, because he had to use the Hiraishin to get the Head Desk-Shinobi out of there before one of his genin got the full wrath of an incensed desk-shinobi.

The Head Desk-Shinobi, after all, is the strongest and most powerful of them, and Minato has only managed to face him before while running with his mission reports with Jiraiya's help. The Head Desk-Shinobi is a career-chuunin, but good god, not for lack of skill.

"Maybe her parents can help?" Minato suggested.

Rin's parents didn't help. Minato and the Head Desk-Shinobi met with Rin's father because her mother had been out at the market. They stared at the extremely realistic paper vases full of equally realistic paper flowers, and each been halfway through a cup of tea before they realized that their teacups were also paper, just that special hydrophobic sort that the calligraphy store sold - the same high-end place where Minato got most of his nicer fuinjustsu supplies.

Minato's certain that at least the curtains and the bookshelves were also origami, and the table and the lamps weren't, but he's still not sure about the chair he was sitting on and the coffee table he saw.

"There's no way to stop them," Rin's father, a retired medic-nin, told them blankly, without even hearing what Minato and the Head Desk-Shinobi were there for. "They can't control it. Oh, they'll try their best, but they can't really. It's like their hands aren't attached to their brains. You can't make her stop."

"How do you unfold them then?" the Head Desk-Shinobi demanded. "I'll pay you."

Rin's father just stared at them for a long moment.

"Sir," Rin's father said finally, "I love my wife and I love my daughter, but I am still a sane man... and I am drinking out of a paper teacup right now. Do you really think that I have any idea how to undo any of the mess that I am currently in?"

So they haven't been able to get Rin to stop and there's apparently no way to make her stop. The Head Desk-Shinobi went back to give his subordinates the bad news, and Minato was left to deal with an angry Kushina who, upon being told the story, laughed at him for five minutes straight.

The only solution, obviously, was to find someone who could unfold Rin's work.

Only Rin's mother is completely oblivious and insists that she's perfectly happy with her current occupation, and isn't her darling girl's work beautiful? And the origami that Rin and her mother know can apparently only be taught from mother to daughter - "It's a family secret, you know!" - and no amount of begging from the desk-shinobi is changing Rin's mother's mind. She thinks this is all some sort of joke and said, "Aren't the ninja so funny, darling?"

"Hilarious," Rin's father replied flatly.

Minato had thought they were doomed until he realized something: Rin had attended the Academy. So he immediately flashed off to the Academy to beg for help from the Academy teachers. Rin had been top of her class, so either they knew how to stop her from making origami or knew how to undo it. (Or had just given up and given her top marks, but Minato was pretty sure someone would have said something by now if that were true and he's mostly sure Rin's not that sneaky.)

It turned out that Rin's stress had slowly developed over the course of her Academy education, so the Academy teachers had had the time to slowly adjust as Rin started to hand in origami, then increasingly complex pieces of origami. By Rin's graduation, two Academy teachers had mastered the art of unfolding her paperwork. The proud man and woman both beamed as they related this accomplishment to Minato.

But they won't help.

Minato learned that day that there is a bitter rivalry between the Academy teachers and the desk-shinobi. The Academy teachers would give up their secrets in the ancient art of nin-children-wrangling over their dead bodies, and the Head Desk-Shinobi would ask the Academy teachers for assistance sometime shortly after absolutely never. It boggled Minato's mind, but neither party let up or explained why there was a feud between them in the first place.

Surely Academy teachers and desk-shinobi worked together frequently?

Minato went to the Sandaime Hokage to ask what the hell was going on, only for his sensei's sensei to sigh heavily and start telling a very long story about a forbidden romance between a young Academy student-teacher and a promising junior desk-shinobi. It was a sad tale, full of lost chances and bad luck, and it ended in unspeakable tragedy and a deep feud between two of Konoha's factions.

It made annual team assignment, the Hokage said with another heavy sigh, something akin to hell. It had taken him many long years of negotiation and parley for there to be an uneasy cease-fire between the Academy teachers and the desk-shinobi. Should Minato insist that the teachers undo Rin's origami for the desk-shinobi, it could lead to a return to open feuding once more, and plunge Konoha back into that hellish time they had only so recently recovered from.

"...What," Minato said finally.

The Sandaime sighed again and summarized things into a few points. Firstly, the Head Desk-Shinobi and Head of the Academy used to date and it's like the entire Academy and all the desk-shinobi had a massive, really bad breakup. Secondly, if Minato started that shit again, the Sandaime was leaving it entirely to him to fix – Saturobi Hiruzen was not going through that crap again.

So... no help from the Academy teachers.

For awhile, Minato kept on being kidnapped at random intervals by the Head Desk-Shinobi to help the Secret Room of Desk-Shinobi unfold Rin's mission reports, as was apparently his responsibility as jounin-sensei. No time or place, save being on actual missions, was safe for Minato. They took him from the market, in the middle of training, in the middle of sparring with other jounin, in the middle of meetings with the Hokage, and, worst of all, in the middle of date-night.

Kushina stopped thinking things were hilarious really fast. She got annoyed.

Minato feared for all of Konoha then.

And then, suddenly, he stopped getting kidnapped and Kushina looked really smug.

Minato was terrified.

Kushina told him not to worry about it and he was even more terrified and getting increasingly high-pitched, so she finally sighed and brought him to the Secret Room of Desk-Shinobi. Instead of it being burnt to the ground like he'd feared, it was now set up with a long table with people seated in chairs at each end, surrounded by cheering shinobi.

At one end sat Nara Shikaku, a man one promotion short of Jounin Commander who basically did the job already, and the old cafeteria man who made the really fantastic baked goods they served on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the shinobi mess hall – and who was also ex-hunter-nin, but that wasn't important next to his baked goods. Half of Minato's motivation for the Hiraishin, he could swear, was so he could always be first in line for those.

Both men were trying to undo Rin's mission reports and almost seemed to be succeeding until they both reached one of those dead ends and their papers immediately ripped into pieces.

"DAMN IT!" Shikaku yelled, and Minato had never seen the generally lazy man so into... well... anything. "Get me another one!"

"I, unfortunately, have to be back for my cafeteria shift," the old man said, standing up and giving Shikaku a bow. Shikaku immediately got to his feet and bowed back, as though acknowledging a truly worthy opponent, before dropping back into his seat.

The old man's seat, on the other hand, was filled by none other than Yamanaka Inoichi, the newly-appointed Head of T&I.

"You're going down, Shikaku," Inoichi announced grandly, accepting a piece of paper from a shinobi that was definitely part of the Research Department, while one of the Hokage's secretaries and a random desk-shinobi swept up the ripped mission reports.

"In your dreams, Inoichi," Shikaku drawled, accepting his own origami mission report.

A random ANBU stepped out of the crowd and said blandly, "Ready?"

"Yes," Shikaku said.

"Absolutely," Inoichi agreed.

"On your mark. Get set. Go," the ANBU said.

Both men started slowly unfolding and the crowd went wild.

"...I don't get it," Minato said.

Kushina sniffed and crossed her arms. "Well I got tired of having date-night interrupted," she said frankly. "All your free time is mine and you weren't fixing anything, so I had to do something about it, y'know? I talked to Desk-Shinobi-sama -"

Minato started to think then that no one actually knows the man's name.

"- and he agreed that you're completely useless and he'd let you off the hook if I could get someone else to help with the reports. No Nara can resist a brain puzzle and Shikaku's actually solved one -"

"What?"

"- but the cafeteria guy uncle got three of them, so Shikaku's determined to beat that. And Inoichi loves puzzles and absolutely refuses to be unable to match Shikaku, y'know? And then the rest of them just started showing up. Except Academy teachers, who are banned for some stupid reason," Kushina explained, then she made a harrumphing sound. "The desk-shinobi had to move their Secret Room of Desk-Shinobi, but I'll find it again; if they think just moving is going to stop them from getting pranked then they need to think again!"

Minato just stared at her, then back to the crowd of cheering shinobi, then back to Kushina.

"I love you so much," he said.

She patted his arm fondly and replied, "Damn straight."

And Minato had thought it was over then. Rin was still turning in origami mission reports, yes, but that didn't matter! He didn't have to deal with them, since he can't read them until they've been unfolded, and the desk-shinobi weren't bothering him to do something about it since, thanks to Kushina, Shikaku was leading the Command Department and Inoichi was leading the T&I Department to do the job for him.

Even putting the ruined reports back together is apparently an interesting brain puzzle.

But then came the downside that Minato hadn't expected: the only thing that anyone will talk to him about now is Rin's origami mission reports. Paperwork; all his conversations are now about paperwork, and there's nothing he can do about it besides going missing-nin or becoming a hermit like sensei.

It's like nobody's accomplishments against Rin's origami counts until they've told Minato.

Minato goes to the market and gets told by a shinobi that they think they got two-thirds of a way through a paper fish. They really almost had it, you know.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Minato goes to the shinobi mess hall to get the old hunter-nin's baked goods, and he always gets smugly informed that the future Jounin Commander still hasn't matched the record and that it's apparently driving Shikaku nuts.

Minato goes to the Jounin Standby Station and suddenly someone's recounting, fold by fold, how they finally managed to unfold half of a paper cow. They're still working on the other half, of course, but they think they'll have it if they unfold the rest in this particularly pattern. Does Minato want to hear their theory?

No, no, Minato does not want that.

But that doesn't apparently stop anyone.

ANBU keep breaking into his apartment to either leave unfolded reports on his counter or to verbally report, as though to the Hokage of a dangerous S-rank mission, their progress.

Uchiha Fugaku found Minato training once to consult him about a particularly tricky paper crow.

Minato was once called to the Hokage's Office, was told it was an emergency, and then, when he appeared in a flash of light, fearing for the Sandaime's life, got casually asked by his sensei's sensei if he might have any idea how to refold some of this paper monkey. The Sandaime was deeply concerned that he'd taken the wrong path somewhere along the line, and that if he proceeded further, he might unfold himself into a dead end again.

Minato nearly screamed.

After a particularly long-winded account from a hospital medic-nin, from which Minato only escaped because of an imminent meeting with his team, he knows he looks a bit worn. Kushina's taken to calling it 'frazzled' and says he needs to learn how to be ruder to people.

This time, it seems he looks particularly frazzled, because his team is looking at him with open concern. Well, Kakashi and Rin are; Obito is late again.

"Sensei, are you alright?" Kakashi asks.

Minato shakes his head at the same time that he replies, "Yes, yes, I'm fine."

Kakashi and Rin exchange a look.

"Here, sensei," Rin says, stepping forward with a smile and pressing something into his hand. "To brighten up your day!"

Minato looks down in his hand at the little paper sun.

He very carefully does not scream.

oOo

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