Akane 10-11

Sometimes it felt like everytime Akane did something she could truly be proud of, the universe worried she would be getting a big head and decided to humble her.

Like what happened with the chickens.

It had seemed so obvious to her that raising chickens was the next step of her efforts to feed the clan. She'd saved up her stipend to purchase them and everything.

Then she begged Aiko until her sister willingly gave up as much rice as they could reasonably spare and set up a bulletin board with a large rice reward for Warriors in training to put together a chicken coop in her yard. It was a good thing neither of her brothers were currently interested in getting married, because Akane planned to use up all the space they set aside for that for a chicken farm.

It was actually hilarious to watch them try to build it-Akane had tried to be clear with her instructions, but maybe the only person the schematics made sense to was herself because the group of mostly six year olds were struggling.

Then again, they were mostly six years old. Akane was very sad when she had to leave and go on a mission but she could rest assured that Aiko would be getting her rice worth of labor before she coughed the payment up.

In the three months it took for the chickens she procured to start laying eggs she'd gotten three elderly widows into the first home they'd built by the 'widow garden', Tamura among them, of course, and then started reaping the rewards of her vertical garden.

Then there was a storm, and while Akanes chicken coop kept them reasonably dry, the humidity from the storm got one chicken sick and, not knowing the signs for what a sick chicken looked like-Akane could only mourn the way the rest of her chickens died off within the week.

It was depressing.

But at least she'd left four egg laying chickens with the widows housed near the slowly growing community garden, so all they needed was a rooster to try again. Akane tried not to let it bother her too much that she'd almost put all her eggs in one basket. The pun only cheered her up a little, but watching Akio laugh when she shared it cheered her up a lot.

So did finding Aiko and Emiko making gogo eyes at each other. It was adorable, she hadn't been home when they met, but Akio swore blind they'd fallen in love at first sight, her brother insisted anyone with eyes would have been able to tell. Thankfully Naoya hadn't actually brought Emiko back to marry her, or things could have gotten very awkward at home.

Akane had known her brother had no interest in starting a family so she assumed the glassblower had been offered the safety of a clan for her brother and herself. Naoya would thus be free of the pressure from the elders to get married and pop out more kids with the Sharingan.

Considering his ancestry and a civilian wife the odds for any of his kids having the sharingan went despairingly low, so Akane was reminded that as fantastic as an older brother Naoya was, he was actually incredibly spiteful towards those who ran the clan.

He would never forgive the Tajima Uchiha for making Akane a warrior and bethroing her to his heir, in that order.

Emiko, the glassblower, and her brother Kei, were lovely people, though they ended up putting a partition in her brother's room as their current home was notably smaller than their original and Akane couldn't sleep in the same room as her mother and sister because her mother refused to see her. It had been fine for Akane who was used to sleeping in her brother's room anyway, but Akio and Naoya were weird about Kei sharing a futon with her, even though he was like seven.

Then again, in her clan seven year olds were considered adult warriors to be sent to war, so maybe Akane was just thinking about it with her modern brain.

With Emiko around and Naoyas payment for the mission they just needed to get supplies for the green houses Akane had planned.

Her unofficial but incredibly useful coalition of widows, mostly headed by Cho, helped her plan out the best places for the green houses. She would have never thought to put them near the training grounds, but the forested buffer area between the clan housing and the training fields were perfect. It wasn't like the glass walls wouldn't be able to stand up to a rogue fireball.

By the time winter rolled around they were growing strawberries. As much as Akane would have loved to give the berries to her clan, she'd grown the cash crop for a reason. Selling them to the highest bidder in midwinter let her finance a proper glassblowing workroom for Emiko and let her apprentice ten widows. Sand was all but free, considering her willingness to bribe anyone to bring her back sand if they were going on a coastal mission, and Aiko's cooking had become legendary among the Uchiha shinobi. Lime was actually even easier to get her hands on, there was a cave within half a day's running distance of the compound with plenty of it and quite a few Uchiha Shinobi swung by to pick up enough to score a bento from Aiko.

Lime, it turned out, was also a great thing to sprinkle around chicken coops in order to keep them from getting too humid according to Emiko. Akane informed the families she'd endowed with chickens and left the one in her yard empty, taking up space. It was dumb not to house chickens of her own, but Akane had developed a psychological shadow from walking into the silent coop to find her hopes and dreams of eggs and meat still on the ground. It was stupid, but considering the ongoing phychological damage being a soldier at war did, she really couldnt afford anything else threatening her sanity. She never knew what would be the straw that would break the camel's back.

It took a couple of months to find a place to sell the glass goods far enough inland that they were worth a pretty penny and could support the widows in the workshop, but once she did, she made a solid dent in the amount of widows desperate for her assistance.

She'd also apparently just nominated herself successfully as the person to go to if one was a widow having trouble feeding her children or herself.

Her elderly widow coalition tended to the chickens and gardens in exchange for food and a decent burial should they pass. Any elderly Uchiha woman who found herself old and alone was easily folded into the throng that lives in the makeshift dorms they'd conked together with a myriad of pre-clan missions.

Younger widows were a little trickier. So were the orphans. Old Uchiha policy prior to Tajima's reign was to place orphans with lonely widows-that way the child had a caretaker and the widow would have someone to support them come their late age.

Tajima had made it very clear he didn't care about anyone not contributing directly to the warrior class of the clan. He basically fobbed off any male child of a sharingans parent into the orphan home he'd demanded every lineage make and the orphans whose parents had never activated a sharingan fell directly to a servant class, but they still had to find a lineage home to take them in as the majority of the clan simply couldn't afford to feed someone that was only responsible for housekeeping.

Some of the bereaved widows went and found an orphan anyway, usually at the advice of an elder, but any orphan who was already a warrior was leery of letting a strange adult into their home to eat the food they already didn't have enough of. And not many training to be a warrior could keep up the training without the amount of food it took to support it. More than one young life had been lost to heat stroke or training accidents just because the kid in question was already used to training past feeling unwell due to hunger.

For the girls it was both better and worse. A few families who knew they couldn't afford a bride price would take in an orphan girl with the understanding that they would serve as the wife to a warrior in their home.

Of course if the warrior who was their unofficial intended died then they were unceremoniously kicked out of the family. If they had a parent with the sharingan sometimes they could be kept around for a bride price, but that was rare. Uchiha wisdom posited the child followed the father-though it was well documented the best bet for having a child who developed a sharingan was to have both parents with the doujutsu.

Now the orphans and widows in question just came to Akane.

The next cash crops from the green houses paid for an unofficial, clan orphanage beside her even more unofficial widow dorm. She hired a couple of widows who couldn't remarry for various reasons, but were perfectly physically able to cook and clean for the orphans. Akane knew that feeding and clothing them without the clan's support was going to be as big a challenge as staying alive during the war was.

It wasn't like she could get any real assistance when all of her power was pretty much make believe. Everything Akane did these days was technically unofficial but nobody stopped her because then the issues Akane was dealing with couldn't simply be ignored. It was one thing to claim these issues simply couldn't be addressed due to the war. It was another to actively stop someone from literally saving clan member lives just because she hadn't petitioned the council for permission.

Akane was actually working on backdating some documentation with approval for the creation of her green houses and elder dorm. Shiori Uchiha, one of the more graceful elder widows, had been childhood sweethearts with one of the elders, Uchiha Tomoi. The Elder that ran the Clan mission council. He'd broken her heart by marrying into the Ameratsu lineage and taking a main house wife once he activated his sharingan. But his wife had died in childbirth so occasionally the Elder came sniffing around Shiori.

When Shiori's last living son died, she didn't want to be another mouth to feed in the family and burden her grandchildren. The only reason Shiori didn't marry Elder Tomoi was that by then she had Akane's Widow dorm as an option. To show her gratitude Shiori was willing to string the guy along to help Akane make her way into the official Uchiha sphere of influence.

She knew they'd never let her near anything important like ration distribution or mission allocations, and definitely nowhere near a budget. But Akane wanted to make a widow and orphan office and didn't need their help with any of that. She just wanted to document all the work she was doing and all the clan members she was helping.

Akane didn't tell her family, but she hoped to make the changes permanent and easily continued should the universe be cruel and Tajima win the bet he'd taken putting her on the field.

If anything happened to Akane, no one else would have the wiggle room needed to make the positive changes Akane had committed to. She needed to figure out a way to establish them well enough and ensure continuous funding.

Akane hardly wanted to stop at clothing and feeding those abandoned by the clan. She wanted them to thrive, to live well, to create a community that could create feelings of happiness and belonging, and find the will to overcome their loss.

So many people in her clan were sick with hate. Some of the squad members that only smiled when converted in Senju blood gave her nightmares. She had long known war made monsters out of men, but it was another thing to see it happen with her own eyes.

Hell, it could be argued it has successfully made a monster out of her-part of the reason she was so focused on creating a positive change in her clan was to ignore the growing river of blood on her hands. She killed kids almost everyday.

The first time Akane used cremation outside the compound was against an earth user who had almost buried her squad alive. She'd almost had a near miss with Daiki, her new captain, who 'just happened to be' Naoya's best friend, and almost caught him with her jutsu.

She hadn't, but the burns left searing half his face had made her burst into tears. Akane carried burn cream religiously and she tended to him with wet eyes as he tried haltingly to assure her that he'd rather be burned and scarred than dead.

Akane felt even worse because she couldn't stop crying regardless. She couldn't explain to him how he'd been a touch stone for her. How he always reminded her of that day with her brothers where she figured out how to use her chakra because they'd snuck him a fish after. But now she'd look at him and remember how she'd almost killed him instead, and that hurt her heart.

The Senju called her the Blue Death, already it was acknowledged that the slightest brush of her signature flames were a death sentence. Akane wasn't proud of that. She was pretty sure the only thing keeping her sane was her new found power to compartmentalize and the unconditional love of her siblings.

When Akane left the compound to fight, she was the Blue Death. When she came home, covered in ash and blood, she got to be Akane again. The girl that loved her family and did her best to make her Clan a better place.

But she hoped even the Blue Death never reached a point where it could find such empty joy in the death of her enemies. Akane left her hatred in the battlefield where it belonged, and saved the best, softest pieces of herself for the ones she loved.

It was the only thing keeping her whole, or as whole as what was left of her could be. She didn't have to be that sane or emotionally healed to keep along the road she'd started on anyway. She just needed to find a way to make stupid amounts of money.

Enough to let her pick up the slack of the councils that ran the Uchiha clan anyway. So her target was naturally nobles. Her only real issue was that she didn't have a product and she didn't see any demand her clan could meet in the noble market. Of course Akane came from a world with a thriving 'influencer culture.' She was perfectly aware that if there wasn't a demand, she just had to make one.

Their new compound was near the Naka river with plenty of river clay and the Uchiha had nothing if not fire. All she needed to do was track down the right information and it just so happened her fiancé had recently been to court.

It was no problem to track Madara down. He was either with his brothers or training, sometimes both. Her fiance might as well make himself useful.

X

Happy Labor Day! I made it! I almost didn't, but I'm trying desperately to keep the updating schedule with this fic if nothing else. I have so much of this fic written already-it'd be a darn shame not to. So more Akane making some headway in making the clan not suck so hard but also war sucking. I tried to add some humor in there with the chickens, but humor in sad fics like this one are hit or miss, so please tell me if it amused you.

Also for those of you eagerly awaiting Madaras pov, according to my outline you've got 5 chapters to go. Tajimas on here too but I made some plot changes that make me iffy as to where he's on there, but he'll pop up for sure-all I've got for you is sometime after Madara though. Next up is Emiko, one of our few non-Uchiha thus far!