Akane was the third daughter born to her immediate family. There were five sons.

By the time Akane could walk, they were down to three. She had no memories of her dead brothers aside from attending their funeral pyres. Uchiha always burned their dead. Although it wasn't always possible.

Such were the realities of war.

Akane had been born into the Naruto world, long before the existence of Konoha. She thought it was called the warring clan period, but Naruto had finished while she was dropping out of high school because her mother was sick and there was no one to take care of her. Akane remembered watching the episodes late at night, the screen going blurry through her tears as she tried to distract herself from the painful knowledge that her mother wasn't getting any better.

So what did Akane know about the future?

Madara Uchiha's brother Izuna would be killed by the first Hokage's brother and somehow the Uchiha clan still ended up in Konoha.

Somewhere between Madara being born and all his brothers dying-Madara was manipulated by the black alien plant thing that wanted to end the world. He ended up as one of the final villains for the series.

Currently though, the not yet evil Madara was five. A whole year older than Akane's current body. He was the third brother of his own immediate family. Not counting whatever sons the current clan head had with his previous wife. Akane was a little vague on the exact number of children-but there were two boys who had made it past their teenage years above him.

Madara wasn't heir yet. But given the rate the clan warriors died, it would only be a matter of time. There wasn't even an official Heir currently, Tajima Uchiha's sons were close enough in age and skill that there was little difference between them. There were already rumors that Tajima was holding out on declaring his next heir until he'd seen if Madara was a better Shinobi.

The only reason Akane even knew that much was because her mother was in charge of the main house laundry.

Unlike the Mainline, or the other prominent Lineages that regularly produced warriors with viable Sharingan-Akane was from a family where no one had managed to activate the Clans dojutsu for three generations.

Even if her brothers had been warriors, capable of the fire jutsu and weapon use that had helped the Clan earn its keep-her family was not worthy of respect to anyone else in the clan. Akane was only four and she already toddled dutifully after her mother carrying washbins and soap.

Her brothers were never granted armor and her family barely rated enough food rations to keep them upright.

It was awful.

Her mothers best hope for Akane was that she ended up as the caretaker for the children of the Mainline-it was a respectable position that highly increased the chances of getting her matched with a Sharingan warrior.

All Uchiha women wanted a Sharingan warrior for a husband. It was the only way to guarantee enough food to feed a family-and often meant they could even keep their husbands around long enough to train up a couple of sons that could survive long enough to develop a Sharingan of their own.

Akane wasn't really interested in being a nanny though. Akane wanted to learn how to fight. Something that would be a lot easier if her mother ever let her spend time with any of her brothers-but her mother did not approve of them bonding.

It was cold blooded-but the woman often warned her not to get attached. She'd grown up losing every family member that the Clan threw into the field and dealt with it by hovering over her daughters like a dragon over its pile of gold. Intellectually, Akane could understand it. Her mother saw her daughters as the family she got to keep.

Emotionally though? That made no sense to Akane.

So she snuck over to her brother's rooms to see if they were home regularly. It helped that her brothers adored her, answering her childish questions patiently, and leaning into her enthusiastic affection with aplomb.

They never talked about their mother.

When she had to bury Junto-the second oldest of the brothers she'd known, she found she could no longer judge her mother.

Akane had a small family her first time around. She'd never known her father and her mother raised her with her grandmother's help. Her grandmother passed away when she began middle school and the grief hit her hard enough she had to repeat sixth grade. By the time her mother died junior year, it felt like she'd taken the rest of her heart with her.

Feeling it again, the grief strong enough it felt like a physical knife in her heart, Akane wanted to scream-she wanted to tear apart whoever had taken her brother from her with her bare hands. They should be the ones burning-not her brother in the stupid funeral pyre her mother couldn't even look at directly.

If, after a lifetime of such loss, her mother could no longer bring herself to love those she knew she would lose-then her mother had her respect for keeping ahold of her sanity. Akane knew she didn't have it in her to do the same. Juntos' loss hurt-but at least her pain was proof that she'd loved him as best she could.

She hoped he knew how much she loved him.

Akane endeavored to tell the rest of her family she loved them as often as she could. She didn't want them to forget for a moment-not when they could be gone the next.

Naoya, her oldest brother, hugged her tight that night. Akio, the youngest of the boys, had already beaten her to Naoya's futon. He clung to them both-as they shuddered and cried and missed their brother like a limb.

"I'm gonna kill so many Senju," Akio murmured as he fell asleep, "I'm gonna make them lose their brothers too."

Akane almost flinched at the words-her only saving grace was being far too exhausted to react.

"At least they got the bastards that got Junto," Naoya said, rubbing Akios back.

He said it like it was supposed to help.

It didn't.

Nothing short of bringing Junto back would. And even though she knew that was technically possible in her current world-Akane didn't think anyone deserved to be a zombie.

Akane would cry, she would grieve. She would hate the bastard who killed her brother, dead or not-but she would get through it. She still had two brothers and two sisters left.

She came from another world-surely there was something she could do, something she could come up with to help her family, hell her Clan even. How did that saying go?

Where there's a will there's a way? There had to be something to this Will of Fire business. Akane was an Uchiha, fire was in her blood.

Akane fell asleep thinking about flames. Not the red ones that had consumed Juntos corpse-instead she thought of blue fire-from that scarred up guy from the last anime she'd watched in her previous life.

Cremation flames-fire so hot nothing could stop it.

It was what Akane wanted to be.

X

Chakra was weird.

Akane had watched a series full of funky bloodline limits and artifacts and magic scrolls that were made possible by the stuff-but it didn't help her figure out how to access her own.

Akio called her stupid and sent some of his own into her system-like he was attempting to shock Akanes awareness of the stuff awake.

That was literally what it felt like when Akio did that-like she'd stuck her finger in a socket and lucked out that the current was low enough she could shake it off instead of going straight to the hospital.

Akane searched for a buzz inside herself, but she couldn't find anything like it at all. Instead she asked Akio to show her how to throw Kunai in order to take advantage of having slipped away for the afternoon to the training ground her brothers preferred.

She wasn't actually the only girl around-most people from strong Sharingan lineages insisted on training their women as well as they did their men. For self defense if nothing else.

Akane thought that it made sense-but her mother did not subscribe to the practice she deemed a waste of time when Akane could be doing something important like learning to cook or clean to her standards. Fortunately she was a little too busy to keep track of Akane recently.

With Junto's death their family would be receiving significantly less food come the next month and her mother was trying to marry off Akemi in order to keep feeding them.

Akemi, her older sister, was pretty enough, and a great cook-but she had the whole demure thing going on which Akane felt made it hard to talk to her. It wasn't like her sister didn't have opinions-Akane had just never heard her share any. It didn't help that Akemi was obedient enough to marry whoever their mother chose-no questions asked.

Akane understood that she was in a very different time period. But she found it incredibly depressing that her oldest sister didn't want anything for herself. She hadn't made any requests regarding her future husband and while Akane tried not to judge her passivity, the only reason didn't look down on her older sister was because her mother would never stand for a son in law that treated one of her treasured daughters poorly.

Unlike some of the other mothers in the compound that Akane knew cheerfully sold their daughters to the highest bidder-or those with the best prospects they could find, Akane's mother had given all her love to her daughters and considering her husband was dead-he'd died the same year Akane was born because evidently she just wasn't meant to have a father figure in any life, it was completely in her mothers hands.

It was actually a testament of her mother's apathy that Naoya wasn't married when he was already nineteen. People in the Uchiha clan married young. It was another cold hearted decision, their family depended too heavily on her older brother's rations to afford him a wife and the addition of a smaller family of his own.

She'd asked her brother how he felt about it-but Naoya just laughed it off, telling her she thought too much about silly things, and further distracted her with training. Which told Akane all she needed to know.

Her brother was aware of her mothers blatant favoritism, but chose to ignore it for the sake of their family. Akane knew the rest of them would starve without her older brother's kindness, Clan Policy being what it was, but it broke her heart regardless.

Naoya was a warrior and they were all too aware of how short life was for those in the battle fields. He deserved to find some joy for himself-love, or at the very least a hobby.

At least their other sister Aiko was a good enough cook that she'd been hired to work as a cook for one of the more prominent Lineages. Between that and whatever her mother could get as Akemi's bride price, they should last until Akio managed to learn the Katon and made his way into the Uchiha warrior class and their family would qualify for more food. In a year or two-Akane would take up the issue of his marriage with her mother herself if she had to. With her last son in the trenches of the clan wars and bringing in rations as well she would no longer be able to justify leaving her oldest unwed.

Akane tried not to let her youngest brother's age bother her. The world was what it was. She wasn't strong enough to change it-especially considering she'd probably never even get the dojutsu that made their clan so famous.

Her best bet to help along the so-called more peaceful era of the hidden villages was to do her best to save at least one more of Madaras brothers. If Izuna wasn't gonna make it, having someone else he loved might help him hold it together in face of whatever it was the black plant thing did to his sanity.

Maybe someone smarter than her could have done better-would have managed to make an actionable plan out of her half remembered memories. But Samantha had been a high school dropout who put food on the table as a nail tech. Sure she managed her volleyball meetup group and her bar game night squad-but none of that had helped her get far in life before-and she knew better than to have high expectations of herself for her current life.

Akane was currently on step one of whatever plan she ended up going for anyway.

Which was unlocking her chakra.

If only unlocking said chakra wasn't so hard. Naoya's attempts to help her feel her chakra went about as well as Akios did, which was terribly, and she wasn't any closer than when she started.

She tried to feed the frustration into the taijutsu style of her Clan and improving her aim. She wasn't terrible with weaponry-averaging eight out of every ten bullseyes for each target she aimed for-but her taijutsu was what ended up making her feel dangerous. She often beat her brother Akio in it-who was both bigger and using the chakra he could feel.

He still wasn't great at controlling it at least, even if he did have a leg up on her when it came to manipulating it-since he could feel it and all. But clan wisdom posited you should be able to stick five leaves to yourself before you tried doing the Katon.

Akio still struggled with two.

Naoya often teased their brother that he should be grateful Akane wasn't beating him up with chakra yet.

It made her smile, which was why she suspected he did it, but her frustration about chakra was building-and she had no idea what to do about it. She still dreamed of at least being badass enough to figure out the trick of blue flames. In her most audacious dreams she hoped to basically be a fire bender.

Akane was thinking about fire as she scaled some fish Naoya had secretly brought back from his last mission. Akane may have been the worst cook among her sisters, but she was definitely amazing compared to her brothers. They'd snuck out of the clan compound to secretly cook it out of paranoia-but the guard on shift was one of Naoya's best friends who's silence was easily brought by grilling him a fish of his own.

Technically if a clan member came across any resources, be they food, kunai, money, or even paper-they were supposed to bring it to the Clan warehouse for future allocation. It was supposed to give you credit and skewe the odds in your favor of getting more food or access to weapons if there was ever a surplus. But they were at war-there was never a surplus, and Warriors needed to eat twice the amount of food an adult did in Akanes previous world which meant that as full as the warehouses looked, everyone was always hungry because no one had enough to eat.

It was a very depressing thought. One that made illicit adventures like secretly grilling fish in the forest a necessity for the soul.

It was already fall, so Akane sat as close to their bone fire as she dared. Her brothers would call her crazy for acting like she was cold if they noticed. It wasn't that it was cold exactly. Fire country had some of the mildest winters Akane had ever experienced. The fall was mostly marked by an absence of oppressive heat than anything else. But Akane liked the warmth.

The crackling of the fire brought an absentminded smile to her face along with the heat as she enjoyed her contraband. If only chakra felt the way the heat did. Notable against her skin-ever present in her blood whenever she closed her eyes and easily chased to her core-and holy shit Akane was an idiot.

She dropped her half eaten fish as she scrambled for a leaf-her sudden movement startling her brothers. Akane paid their questions no mind and she closed her eyes, placing the lead in her palms as she felt the heat nestled close in her belly, then she tried to will it up her chest and down her arm where she'd placed the leaf on her flat palm. When she felt she had a steady enough stream supplying the leaf to turn her hand she peeked one eye open to see if the leaf she held would fall.

It stayed, stuck to her palm.

Akane let out a happy squeal, launching herself to her brothers in a hug to share her triumph. She also picked up the rest of her dirt covered fish because she felt twice as hungry as she usually did and there was no wasting food in war time.

It was one of the best days she'd had since Junto's death. She went to the Clan shrine to pray and tell him all about it. Akane missed him, but not more than she'd missed her mother, or her grandmother. It felt callous to think of so coldly, but she knew she had the strength to move past his death.

It was only a matter of time. But even when she left her pain and grief behind, Akane would always miss her older brother.

x

So I'm officially joining the wave of self inserts in the Naruto fandom. I already have 26k for this so I figured I'd share and I will tentatively commit to updating this on Sundays. Wish me luck! Also please tell me what you guys think of Akane?