The clan had become a pain in her ass.

Akane had done it to herself, and yet no amount of delegating seemed to help. She tried not to let it overwhelm her. Not on days when she'd barely made it home on muscles so fatigued she could barely stand upright. Not on days when she finally had all the widows she knew about well tended to only to find new ones at her door. Not on days when she couldn't sleep because war took its toll and all her dreams were of fire and death.

Akane tried to focus on the good things.

The slowly appearing baby fat on the young orphans of her newest dorm, carefully not named an orphanage-she couldn't take the risk of it being seen as what it was. Akane carefully skirting around clan policy.

There was also getting the chance and watch Naoya's face melt in the face of her adorable and curios nieces. He would let them walk all over him the minute he got home-no matter how tired he was. Akane had found him asleep with both of the twins sprawled on his lap several times.

As a good little sister, Akane had a civic duty to never let her too serious oldest brother live it down. The rest of her family joined the efforts enthusiastically. Even Akio-the only person Naoya tortured on the training field in protest, kept teasing their older brother valiantly.

Akane and Cho had even managed to get a wood working workshop together-something Cho's father Hero was a little too grateful for-as his career as a ninja had recently ended via loss of limb, and no shinobi took career ending injuries that meant they could no longer contribute to their households and turned them into burdens on their families well.

Technically Cho could feed her entire family on her own with what Akane paid her-but Cho, usually so level headed and calm Akane forgot she wasn't superhuman, had been freaking out over the possibility of her father taking his own life.

It was an open secret that it was what a lot of injured shinobi did-they couldn't take the sudden shift of their lives, going from powerful warriors their families and the clan depended on to helpless men and occasionally women that had to be taken care of. Even if her father had managed to hold on to life out of duty and committed to a black smith apprenticeship, Cho worried the time and the knowledge his daughter would be supporting their family n the meantime might overwhelm him before he could finish it.

Woodworking was something almost all non-lineage Uchiha men picked up almost incidentally. The men at home were responsible for the furniture and upkeep of the home. Those who couldn't afford to hire anyone else to do it, had to figure it out for themselves.

When Akane had proposed her woodworking shop as a solution, Cho-perfectly steady and civilian Cho, had hugged her so hard her ribs had creaked. It had actually created a new hope for some injured non lineage men. As always-Akane was more than happy to help.

Once she felt the combinations of her greenhouses and her workshops were doing enough to feed her clan. Akane began to focus on weapons and armor.

In a perfect world, Akane would be given access to the official clan armory, instead of the mission room wearhouse where the crappy expendable weapons ended up. If you dug around, you could even find some rusty kunai. It was sadly what was available to the majority of warriors under twenty two.

Those who didn't have a lineage to take care of them usually had to pay out of their own pockets. Some families kept it together well enough to pass down armors and swords generation to generation-but the constant state of warring had made that incredibly more difficult. Warriors always did their best to bring back bodies, but sometimes the best they could manage was a sword or some armor.

Most of the time they couldn't get either.

So the clan only let senior warriors into the armory. Senior warriors had the best track records for making it back from missions so the discernment was almost understandable if the aim was to save as much of their good steel and weapons as possible.

But the aim was to properly arm their shinobi so they could make it back home, so Akane felt like the clan should seriously be doing more.

Considering that her workshop rouses had worked well thus far-Akane she decided to keep using them.

She was managing to justify the existence of her funds through them. So she decided to create a Uchiha workshop council. The more official and justifiable her paperwork looked, the more Akane found she could do.

The Clan council still wouldn't let near anything important, and would never dream of assisting Akane in a goddamn thing, but Akane had gotten really good at working around them. She had three workshops under her name, and was seemingly opening them up to further Clan influence, so the Elders didn't fuss about her proposal and let her have it.

It didn't affect the rest of the clan if the workshops had a different power structure-or so they thought. Simple old fossils that they were. Akane had never been great in school. She'd gotten maybe five A's in the entirety of her last life. It was part of why she didn't bother going back to school when her mother died. But she had to admit that she was definitely smarter than the Uchiha Elders.

Or maybe it was like that saying from her last life; they were playing checkers, she was playing chess.

The ink was barely dry on the Uchiha workshop coalition approval before Akane sent off invitations to the inclan black smiths right under the elders noses.

She invited them to create a workshop of their own and offered a very generous loan to outfit the place however they wanted. Akane had their representative at her door within the week. Akane let Cho-who was always within the clan compound and thus significantly more readily available, be her own representative.

Naoya had helped her brainstorm what concessions she should ask for. They'd decided to go with classic discounts for family members of other workshop workers and a yearly apprenticeship quota with five of the masters. Prioritizing the family of the workers of course, since they were claiming her workshops had been putting money aside the whole time for the loan since their inception in order to make it easier to outfit their relatives with weaponry.

Who could argue when she clearly had the money? Her ledgers said whatever she wanted them to, she claimed to pay her workers mostly in food anyway. Besides, who would want to argue? It was clearly a benefit for the clan.

Especially because now warrior orphans actually had a reason to welcome lonely widows as family members. No one who went to the battlefield as regularly as they did would turn up their nose at discounted prices for weapons.

Those shits were stupid expensive. Sadly the pricier-the better the quality. Akane had gifted her brothers the kind of swords usually only Samurai bothered with. A secret they kept mostly because no one would suspect she could ever afford them.

The pottery workshop did better than the glass workshop, but it only claimed to make a modest sum, and Akane subsidized it. She'd even pulled another advertising trick with the 'Nakamura Pottery' her workshop chugged out dutifully-getting the Daimyos cousin to purchase one conspicuously and comment thoughtfully about the appeal of it's simple beauty using good old fashioned blackmail. Not that the guy knew who was blackmailing him, but Naoya assured her that anyone who tried to investigate would only blame the Senju.

Only her family and three of Naoya's closest acquaintances had any idea how rich Akane actually was, and Naoya's friends both believed in her cause and had been more than adequately compensated.

Her oldest brother was the only one trusted with exact details about her bank account-but seeing as he was the only reason it existed, Akane found it hard to complain. Despite her status as a Warrior-Akane was never assigned missions outside of the battlefield.

If she was lucky-she just ran a quiet patrol. When she was unlucky-she spent days burning literal infants out of existence. But as Madaras fiancé, no one was sending her on Client Missions, perhaps as a courtesy, which Akane didn't really get because she was even more likely to die on a proper mission than she was on the Clan Missions that were pretty much premeditated clashes with the Senju.

While the Senju did their best to take her life, they were also a known quantity. Swords, Kunai, water and earth jutsu. It was pretty much the same thing, unless you spotted a Kunochi in which case-probably a genjutsu or two. Akane, who had been sparring with Akio, who had impressed even some Sharingan users with his deft genjutsu use, and Naoya who had an actual Sharingan these days, most of her life, wasn't terribly impressed by any Senju genjutsu.

Some foreign shinobi with some techniques she'd never heard had better odds of taking her life.

Akane kind of suspected they didn't want her pulling off some awesome missions and impressing the Clan Warriors, except that it was kind of late for that. She had a Name on the Battlefield.

She wasn't even fifteen yet-she was already very impressive. Akane gave Senju nightmares.

Madara hadn't even been named on the battlefield yet. Sure he killed plenty of them, but it wasn't too many more than most clan shinobi. Or maybe it was that as an Uchiha clan heir, having a name was meaningless. Naoya had been killing Senju since before Akane was even born and he didn't have a Name.

Naoya insisted it was because he understood subtlety, while Akane was painfully conspicuous once she used her techniques. Which-he wasn't wrong, but Akane was one of the precious few Uchiha women who saw regular battle, subtlety had never been on the table unless they allowed her to cross dress.

Sadly she'd been shut down when she made that suggestion. Apparently the Naruto world was very selective about its Anime bullshit. Akane couldn't dress as a man without somehow insulting her station.

But as much as Akane thought she was hot shit, the universe did not take long in humbling her.

After, laying in the hospital, ribs screaming in pain-Akane tried piecing together the battle that landed her there. All she could remember was white hair.

X

So my math was off somewhere-sorry about that, but Madaras perspective of everything is next chapter. Akane is trying to keep her head above the water-but she's actively isn't perfect so yeah she fucked up bad enough to land herself in the hospital.

Please let me know what you think!