Inheritance

Leaves in the Wind, Part Two

"Your orders."

Sasuke glanced down at the sealed scroll being held towards him in gloved hands. The cover of his mask was especially useful in these situations, where it allowed him to surreptitiously scan things for threats with his Sharingan. Seeing nothing, he took the orders and stored them on a small seal on his palm.

"Hokage-sama requests that I remind you that your orders are for your eyes only, not those of your team unless they specify otherwise."

Sasuke narrowed his eyes at the masked shinobi, allowing the words to hang in the air and the tension to climb. But it was a pointless endeavour. The other shinobi simply stared back, impassive and unreactive, like every other one of Danzou's Root lapdogs.

It made Sasuke's blood boil.

Being careful not to let that fact slip, he nodded, turned on his heel and set off across the village's rooftops. The pale glow of star and moonlight smothered everything below in a veil of silver, and cool breeze whipped past his skin as chakra supplemented leaps carried him across the village at a pace he would have found exhausting two years ago.

He thought about the past often. No longer just days when the Uchiha clan still stood strong and proud, but now of the time before Danzou. A time where the streets below, even at this time, would have been bustling with activity instead of graveyard silent. A time where people went about their daily lives with smiles on their face, talking to their neighbours and helping each other.

A time where Sasuke could move from one side of the village to another without feeling the eyes of masked men tracking him every step of the way, ready to kill at a moment's notice.

Of course, two years ago, he'd never noticed exactly what Konohagakure was to those that lived there. He'd never appreciated what they'd had, even before his clan had been brutally murdered by his own brother. As with many of the good things in Sasuke's life, he'd never appreciated it until it had been stolen from him.

It had not taken many instances of people being dragged off of the streets in the middle of their days for people to spend as much time as possible in their homes or places of work. Nor had it taken many cases of doors being kicked in and folks dragged out of beds for the villagers to work out the consequences of an overheard comment about their venerable Hokage.

Danzou would say that crime rates had plummeted, and productivity had increased tenfold. That their shinobi had increased their mission completion ratio to levels unheard of before his coup. He would also say they were safer than ever, with their dangerous neighbours Sunagakure scoured from the map, and their mission-load added to our own.

Technically, none of those things were untrue. But neither was the fact that people were fleeing at a steady rate, regardless of how many arrests Dazou made, or how many traitors were executed for being caught. Nor was the increased fatality rate on missions as exhausted shinobi were pushed well past their limits, or that with Suna destroyed, the other villages had accelerated their militarization and begun seeking alliances to stand against Konoha.

For every step Danzou took to grow his and Konoha's power, another crack appeared on its surface, held from breaking by fear of the man who stood at the helm.

Sasuke only hoped it shattered before Danzou plunged them all headlong into a war unlike any seen before.

He arrived at his deserted clan compound even more tense than when he'd last left it, and his pace didn't relent until he arrived at his family home, slid the front door aside and stepped inside. He only felt the eyes of his observer leave his back when he closed the door behind him, and was finally able to let out a deep sigh, allowing the tension to bleed out of him.