Work Text:
Kuroda Michiko regretted daily that she had left her role with the largest shoe wholesaler in the elemental nations. She had been the undisputed top of the Human Relations Department there, and it had been a real department.
“I used to be respected,” she said, staring at the most recent communique from on high. “This is ridiculous. I onboarded that man two weeks ago.”
And yet here was an appalling request to find his replacement, as Kisou-san had apparently lost the will to continue working for the Akatsuki and left with no notice at all. Horrified with shock, Michiko stamped it read and took a deep breath before rolling over to her filing cabinet.
Now that it had been read, her office memo re-grew wings and fluttered away, back to the head of the organization. She didn’t pay it any attention. She was too busy fomenting outrage. It burst out of her audibly.
“This is all so unbelievably unprofessional!”
Michiko sifted through her talent folder once more and tried not to cry from anger. These people couldn’t retain talent. No matter what benefits package she put together, the company culture forced out hire after hire. She didn’t know what was the matter with Kakuzu-san, but she knew that apparently, 16 weeks of paid vacation and a top tier health plan was not sufficient to motivate someone to work with him for an extended period of time. This was so typical that she had not yet shredded the files of potential candidates who had not made the cut for the last round of recruitment. It was to these human resource dregs that she turned now. Here was some grungly woman who lived in a swamp and supposedly used genjutsu to turn away hunter nin. There was the file of a mass murderer with a sword. Here was the file of a mass murderer with a rake. That green file? A mass murderer with a very short temper and a very long list of complaints from private clients. She put that one aside as a bottom tier option.
The memo itself was long gone, but the old-fashioned handwriting next to “reason for departure” was burnt into her memory.
“He lost heart,” Michiko repeated to herself, profoundly disgusted. “That’s the reason this man always gives. And why–” She stamped Kisou’s folder resolved– “does no one ever come in for off boarding?” She tossed the file into the former employee paperwork pit.
She was talking to a wall in this organization. But it was important! If only she knew why they were quitting, then she could surely find a way to retain talent. It was not the truest wish of Michiko’s career to hire an S-class shinobi once every other month. They were an organization of approximately 10 shinobi for crackers’ sake, it shouldn’t be this difficult. She had only had time to do a single gap analysis in her year with the company. She had more than a suspicion that a learning and employee development plan was what they needed, more than a constant recruitment drive to feed new employees to Kakuzu-san.
“If I ever meet that man,” she mumbled darkly, “I am going to give him such a performance improvement plan.”
Oh. Michiko sat up so abruptly that her hair clip wobbled. That was what she would do. She was going to put her foot down and–
“I think not,” said the company President the next day. Her facial expression didn’t move in the least, but the white paper bows around her heels fluttered in agitation. “Kakuzu-san is one of our top operatives.”
“His partners–”
“He needs a new one,” Konan interrupted. She held up a scarred palm, indicating that the topic was closed. “Thank you. You may go.”
“Very well,” Michiko said, instead of screaming. Her face felt heavy, skin weighed down by unhappiness. She didn’t have it in her to give a corporate-approved smile. She went back to her office and brooded about her circumstances. They were, she felt, intolerable. As a professional, it was demeaning. Her efforts were wasted.
‘I need to stop trying,’ she decided. It was a hard decision. Michiko inhaled deeply and had a cup of oversteeped office tea to sit with the thought. It still seemed right by the time she was done drinking.
Alright, then. She was going to find and hire the worst candidates imaginable. What was the point of vetting personalities and histories if Kakuzu-san was going to drive them off? If her job was to hire people who would leave immediately, then all she had to do was get them in the door.
Fine, then. She pulled the green file and sent someone off with a ridiculous inflated offer of employment to recruit Suna no Hirada, since it had been an awfully long time since they employed someone with a wind nature and the idea of balance appealed to her. When Hirada-san lost heart later that week, Michiko already had a contract offer letter for Knife-Hands-Hinata from Kumogakure. It was unclear to her why Hinata-san had knives for hands, but it seemed to be congenital and undesired. She promised him a private surgeon to get the knives out of his wrists and a donor for new hands. That was apparently tempting enough to get him in the door, and the surgery was an interesting enough challenge that dear Orochimaru-san, the only civilized person in this building, sent her a card thanking her for the chance. She put it in a frame and wondered why the hell she had cared about this organization in general. It was all about people, really, and not the massive conglomeration of approximately ten insufferable shinobi that they came out to be as a group.
The day after his scheduled surgery, he disappeared from the active duty roster.
It was unclear to her why No-Knife-Hands-Hinata left the Akatsuki, but Michiko didn’t care any longer. She picked a stream of candidates that were on the job for 3 days, for a week, and then? Then, they simply stopped replying to her mail and never even expressed interest in the job.
“How unexpected,” Michiko said snidely. Her empty office agreed, echoing the words back to her. “I can’t understand why no one wants to work with us with a 71% turnover rate.”
She phrased her concerns along these lines to Konan much more politely. It was like talking to a rock.
“There will be no examination of office culture,” Konan intoned. “I only require you to source talent. In fact, we need two new hires. Akasuna Sasori-san requires a partner, as Orochimaru-san has left us. Please take care of it. Thank you, Kuroda-san.” The President then exploded into thousands of pieces of paper and flew out the window.
This was total bullshit. Orochimaru had gone, really? This place was intolerable. She sullenly recalculated the turnover rate to include Orochimaru and tried not to spend too many minutes daily looking at his nice note and wondering where he had gone and if they needed an HR Head. She thought about quitting herself, but she was so close to qualifying for a high yield joint savings account that she just couldn’t bear to do it.
Michiko scraped the bottom of the human resources barrel and started offering more to entice worse people in the door. When you were only recruiting out of missing nin who had an S rank or higher– well, your options were limited and any new options had to be swooped upon. She found a news report about a teenager who had committed an awful lot of arson in Iwagakure and had someone bring him a job offer that included pay matched to Konan’s salary, why the hell not, it didn’t matter because he wasn’t going to stick it out. He was 14, for hell’s sake. Michiko drank an entire pot of tea and jittered about miserably. She was sending recruitment letters to actual children now.
Indeed, he didn’t even accept the job offer. Michiko heard that and thought, ‘fair enough, he read the contract and knew it was too good to be true,’ and edited her next job offer down to something more realistic. Hidan of Yugakure would probably like a pony, she decided, and why the hell not promise him one after 6 months on the job? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. No one wanted to work for them anymore. She would offer him two ponies a year. She put her personal stamp on the letter with a hysterical giggle and sent it off to his last known address.
That was, of course, when she got a note asking her to come to the lobby. Apparently, their youngest employee had showed up and dumped Iwagakure no Deidara in the lobby. She was required to go and do employee onboarding.
Michiko looked at the note for a long time. She looked at it until it got irritated and ripped itself out of her grip, smacked itself against her stamp, and then flew off down the hallway. She waited until it was gone to let out an unsteady breath.
‘I promised him Konan’s salary,’ Michiko remembered. She swallowed hard. ‘What if he stays?’
Well. He wouldn’t. He was off to work with Kakuzu and no one could tolerate that man. Michiko got her nerves and her supplies together. Then she went to do a talk about company culture and responsibilities to a surprisingly silent young man with dead eyes and a persistent drool issue. His coworker remained silently at his side the whole time. There were no questions, comments, or visible reactions. To all the world, Deidara-san might have been asleep with his eyes open.
Eventually, she had to ask. “Is he… quite alright?”
She asked it in an undertone. Uchiha Itachi, who was no longer their youngest member, looked at her with a sort of polite disdain. “He is as expected.”
“...Right.” She took a fortifying sip of her tea and got out the chart explaining their career advancement schedule. Michiko was halfway through an explanation about the mechanisms for sharing constructive criticisms about work (they had a form letter for anonymous complaints) when Deidara sort of groaned, clutched at his head, and developed a sudden personality that included a lot of enmity for Itachi-san.
Michiko ended up running back to her office with papers scattering the hallway behind her. She barricaded the door shut and took another stab at writing her resignation letter. Dear Orochimaru would take her in, she just knew it.
Knock.
She looked up.
“Excuse me, Kuroda-san.”
Oh, it was just Itachi-san. She hurried to open the door. “I’m terribly sorry about how that meeting ended-oh, you’ve brought my presentation!” Genuinely touched, Michiko hit a few bows of gratitude. “You’re so helpful.” He was perhaps the best hire of her career. “Oh, I hope that Deidara-san has calmed down. Are you alright?”
Itachi-san set down all of her paperwork on her desk. He barely glanced at her. “I am well. Kuroda-san, I noticed a discrepancy with Deidara-kun’s offer of employment.”
The blood went cold in her veins.
‘I’m going to be fired.’
“I took the liberty of removing the two extraneous zeroes from the pay offer. Have a good afternoon.”
“Yes,” she said faintly to his back, “quite.”
Close call averted, she fell back to her desk and promised that she would take her role more seriously. Even though their employee turnover rate was 77% per year, she was going to earnestly try her best–
Oh, no.
She leapt over her desk to see if her outgoing mail had been collected. It had. The offer letter promising bi-yearly ponies to Hidan of Yugakure had been sent out while she was onboarding Deidara-san.
‘The company President is going to fold me into a hundred pieces if I have to get a pony budget.’
There was nothing to do about it but wait and hope that Hidan did not have his mail forwarded to a new address after he killed everyone in Yugakure. Michiko chewed her nails down to stubs over the next week. Come on. Surely that man did not have his administrative life in order. He would never see the job offer. And if he had– well, it wouldn’t matter, would it? If he got hired on, he would lose heart and leave the organization in weeks, never to be heard from again.
Oh, that was uncomfortably close to one of the thoughts she wasn’t supposed to have. She stopped that line of thinking immediately.
Michiko had reformed, she really had. So she virtuously put her nose to the grindstone and really sought out acceptable hires. This included a bit of extrapolation and creative interpretation of what made one a nukenin, and once, she requested that someone make a little noise over in Takigakure to chase out a person of interest who might listen to a recruitment speech. All of that went out the window when she flicked on the light in her office and saw a handsome young man dead on her desk.
Michiko shrieked and hit the wall. The scene was horrific. Gore dropped all the way down the wooden legs of her desk to the flooring. “My carpet!” She cried. “That was a special expense!”
The corpse sat up and winked at her. “Don’t be too concerned about the physical world,” he chided her. He swung his legs off the edge of her desk. “That’s fuckin blasphemous.”
She recognized him— and oh, this made sense. She had read all about him.
“Oh, you must be Hidan. So glad you could make it in!” He wasn’t dead at all, he was just some sort of goth. Her nephew was goth as well. Michiko knew all about them. He had painted a skull on his face. It was rather good, actually. What an artsy young man!
Immensely relieved that it wasn’t a B&E situation and that the carpet would be write-off-able as a meeting incident, Michiko wiped her hand on her skirt and crossed the room to offer him a handshake. “I’m so sorry, I missed your request for an appointment. If you’re sitting there, I’ll just stand here and start the onboarding.” It was a perfect waste of time, of course, he was going to leave in tears in a fortnight.
‘Konan might approve the ponies at this rate anyway, if he stayed. But what are the odds?’
“…water boarding?” Hidan asked. He cocked his head to the side like a puppy paying close attention.
Michiko laughed politely. “No, I think Hoshigaki-san is responsible for that,” she joked. Hidan nodded, brows furrowed, as if he was taking a mental note. “No, I wanted to talk about your contract and the working—“
“I don’t care about any of that, lady.” He cut her off with a rude hand gesture. Hidan finally stood up and looked at her. “What’s the deal with the six month delay to get a pony? Do you think I can’t wait six months to get a pony and you won’t have to pay me what you owe me?” By the end of that diatribe his eyes had narrowed to slits and he was leaning aggressively into her personal space.
‘He’s contrary,’ Michiko realized. ‘He came here to prove himself.’ How useful of him. Her worldview shifted: this goth teenager might actually stay on staff long enough for her to collect her benefits and get out. The warm climes of wherever the hell Orochimaru-san had gone were beckoning to her, she could feel it.
“It’s because Kakuzu-san is so scary that everyone leaves within a few months,” she said out loud. She put a troubled look on her face. “I felt hope, when I read your file about how you—“ there was a brief pause as she scanned her mental filing cabinet to remember which mass murderer he was— “destroyed an entire village.”
“Kakuwho?” Hidan looked ready to boil over with outrage. “You think I’ll, what, cut and run?” He sneered. “Let me at him.” Hidan rolled his shoulders ominously. She was close enough to hear them crack. “I have Jashin-sama on my side.”
‘Is that a god? I don't know that one. I’d pray to anyone who responds at this point.’
She rolled with it. “If Jashin-sama will get you through a year with Kakuzu-san, it will demonstrate to all in the organization that you have a higher power on your side.”
“Right!” The air of menace slid off of Hidan like a dropped cloak. “You’re right.” He seemed pleased by this. “I’ll show all you infidels the truth, and be the elite—“ he cut her a look. “What does this group do?”
Michiko shrugged, because that was outside of her area of expertise. “I think we’re a state sponsored terrorist cell.” At his blank look she added, “we kill people for money.”
“Money’s for assholes,” Hidan said, “I’ll only do it for free.” He sneered down at her toothfully, as if he was preparing to fight about it.
“Done! I’ll put that in your contract.” Michiko was all but beaming at him. Hidan seemed a little confused by the positivity but he grinned back at her.
‘That’ll make it a lot easier to spin the horses as alternate compensation just in case he does stay long-term. It’ll all work out! I’ll embezzle his paychecks myself and save for a pony if I have to.’
“Welcome to the team,” Michiko said, “and don’t lose heart. Whatever you do, make sure to fill out an exit survey if you decide to leave. Our turnover rate is 77% at the moment and since no one complains, I can’t do anything about it.”
Hidan jolted away from her. “77 percent?” He repeated, voice high. “That’s absolutely bad. This Kakuzu dude must be rank with sin.” His gaze went distant as he rubbed at his jawline.
Oh, she liked him. Michiko slapped a stack of blank complaint forms onto the top of his onboarding paperwork. “Feel free to write angry anonymous letters about that and any other issue,” she told him. “Please. Feel very free!”
“Oh, I will.” Hidan smirked unpleasantly as he took the pile of paperwork. “I have a lot of things to say.”
She really did quite like him. Michiko gave him another handshake on his way out of her office and reminded him where to leave the letters for most effect.
In the silence that followed, she crossed her fingers. “I hope this one stays,” she said to herself. “I’m running out of candidates and I need to run out the clock here.” She paused, and decided to scrape the bottom of a different barrel. “Jashin-sama, help me.”