Okay people--first fanfic up. This is a Naruto fanfic set in the future of Konohagakure. It's about Neji, his daughter Raechylle, and his wife Raevynn; I made up both the latter two. Please do not tell me who Neji ends up with in the real story because I am totally in love with him and I really don't want to know until I have to!! And no, I do not have to know now, if you're a cruel sadist and were about to tell me just because I told you not to tell me...Well, I wrote this over the summer of 2007, at age 12, so that's my excuse if it's really bad. I put up the prologue and chapter 1 at the same time because it was getting too complicated trying to make a document for the prologue and then the first chapter...those of you who are authors probably know what I mean. Well, enough of me going on and on. Please read and review!! thxxx...

--Moira Calhoun

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PROLOGUE

Raevynn is not coming back.

Neji Hyuga sat on the luxurious king bed in his bedroom, staring out of the floor-to-ceiling windows at a blood-red sunset in the west. The radio was playing softly, a woman's lilting voice sang a slow, melancholy tune that barely reflected the amount pain he was feeling inside. He sighed and lay back on the cool cotton sheets, closing his eyes and letting memories of the bed, and all the things that had happened in it, wash over him. Not bothering to close the curtains and letting the fading light dance over his body, he felt a strange sense of exhaustion fill him, and let himself succumb to the dark comfort of sleep.

He had never loved anyone as much as he had loved Raevynn Martin. The two of them had been married for two years when Raevynn had blessed Neji with a son.

As any new father would have been, Neji was superfluously proud of his little boy. He was exceptionally happy when he tested his three-year-old son for the Byakugan, the Hyuga Clan's kekkei genkai, or bloodline trait. To Neji's excitement, the little boy successfully activated the Byakugan.

You see, the Hyuga Clan had been nearly wiped out when Neji was fifteen years old by a disease unique to people with the Byakugan. Neji and his cousin Hinata were the only ones who had escaped the epidemic because they had been away on a mission.

Neji had taken it upon himself, as a fifteen-year-old chunin, to rebuild the entire Hyuga Clan. Since he hadn't been pleased with the set-up of the clan before, Neji rearranged the entire thing. It took him almost a year to write a "constitution" that thoroughly explained the procedures of ruling in the clan, even outlining what to do in the most improbable hypothetical situations.

Having graduated as Rookie of the Year at the Ninja Academy at age eleven, and mastering ninja techniques that he taught himself, Neji had always been considered a genius. Setting up the government, though time-consuming, hardly posed a challenge for him. The real problem was replenishing the clan of members.

When he married Raevynn, Neji gladly admitted her and her younger sister Deadra as the newest members of the clan. And when Hinata married Kiba Inuzuka, he was accepted as well, thus partially combining the Hyuga Clan with the Inuzuka Clan.

But there was another problem, this one relating to the passing down of the kekkei genkai. Neji and Hinata were the only ones who possessed the Byakugan, and Neji worried that it wouldn't be passed down the next generation. After doing a little research on genetics and heretics, all Neji could do was hope that at least his and Hinata's children would have the Byakugan. He declared, though, that those born into the clan without the kekkei genkai would take their mother's maiden name as a last name.

So, when Neji's three-year-old son proved that he had the Byakugan, Neji was absolutely elated. His theory was that there was a fifty-fifty chance that a child, born to one kekkei genkai-possessing parent and one non-kekkei genkai-possessing parent, would have the bloodline trait.

In his and Raevynn's mind, a fifty percent chance was a pretty good one. Neji was confident that, with a little luck, the rest of their children would have the Byakugan, as well. And Raevynn had always been an exceptionally lucky person.

But what goes up must come down, and Raevynn's luckiness definitely came down with the birth of her second child. Neji's daughter was born to a mother who had just gone through nine and a half hours of labor. The complications were uncountable, and Raevynn had to stay in the hospital for a month. The entire time, the doctors were unsure whether or not she would make it through each night.

Finally, though, Raevynn came home. But her luck was going to come crashing down again. Raevynn claimed to be a sorceress. Neji didn't believe her.

Thirteen nights after her return home, Raevynn and Neji got in a horrible argument that ended in a terrible happening, which Raevynn believed she had caused. Afraid of what she might do, decided to leave Konohagakure altogether.

Neji was left with the task of raising a three-year-old son and an infant daughter, all the while grieving for the loss of the only person whom he had ever truly loved. A loss he thought he had caused.

But all three of them made it through. Neji was again proud of his son when he went to the Ninja Academy and excelled in all of his classes. And he had high hopes for his little girl, who had turned out to be an incredible likeness of the woman Neji had loved and lost.

Just like he had with his son, Neji tested his daughter for the Byakugan when she was three years old. He thought that she would easily activate the kekkei genkai, just like her brother had. But no matter how much strain he put her under, how many times he pretended to put her in a life-threatening situation, the little girl couldn't awaken her Hyuga blood.

Finally, Neji was forced to admit it. His daughter, a mirror image of Raevynn, near perfect in every other way, didn't have the Byukugan. As he watched his daughter trudge out of the training room, knowing she had failed her father's test, the thoughts were jumbled in Neji's head.

This girl is going to break my heart. She looks so much like her mother. But somehow I know she's not going to grow up to be the same. Or is she? Raevynn never had the Byakugan. Raevynn never changed her last name to "Hyuga." She tagged it on at the end of her name only when people kept getting confused about it. This girl's last name is going to be Martin too, and I was the one who decreed that. Fate has done it again. And what have I learned?

Lying on his bed, Neji awakened, but without opening his eyes, he knew that it was morning. Where had the night gone? Sleep wasn't such a comfort, after all. He was still left with his jumbled, heartbroken thoughts, and a painful burst of intuition.

Wherever she is, Raevynn is not coming back.

ONE

The Conference

"Raechylle, every time I look at you, I can't believe how much you look like your mother."

My aunt, just like everyone else, had to say the same thing.

I never knew my mother.

And I never knew how to respond when someone told me I was "Raevynn's spitting image." Was I supposed to say thank you? It wasn't exactly a compliment. I never said, "Do I?" because I had heard the comment so many times from so many people I couldn't doubt that it was true. Usually I just ended up shrugging and saying, "Hmm." Today was no different.

I shrugged perfunctorily at my aunt Deadra. "Hmm."

I never so much as saw a picture of my mother, Raevynn Martin Hyuga. Father locked away everything she had owned in his closet.

Aunt Deadra fanned her hand in front of her face. "It's quite warm today."

Like I didn't know that already. I was sitting by the door to the, perspiring in the July heat but too lazy to go turn down the thermostat.

"Wait, Raechylle, look at me again," my aunt said. I had cast my glance to my fingernails.

I looked up. "Why, look at that," Deadra declared. "Your eyelashes are somehow getting longer, just like Raevynn's did when she was a teenager."

"Okay…" I mumbled. Deadra tended to get a little…weird sometimes. And she especially liked talking about her sister. My mother.

I, on the other hand, generally tried to avoid conversation about the woman who had given birth to me. It wasn't in me to pretend that I knew anything about her, because I didn't. All the other girls I knew had grown up with their mothers fawning at their every talent and teaching them integrity and caring. The only thing I could do was ruminate about who my mother might have been (I would never admit it to anyone, but making up fantasies about my mother was something I did quite often).

It was like I lived in a world completely detached from the other girls'. So I was always aloof about the topic of mothers.

I had grown up with my taciturn, condescending father, Neji Hyuga, lord of the Hyuga Clan. All Father had ever told me about my mother was that she had been the most wonderful woman he'd ever met, and that she had "gone" when I was less than a month old. "Gone" where, I didn't know, nor did Father provide any reason why. When I was younger, I'd press him for more information, but he'd always find a way to elude my questions. Being a silly little girl, I'd asked my brother, Hatori.

Right now, Hatori was sixteen, my elder by three years, and a special jonin. He was almost always away on missions, but when I was younger, we were as close as two peas in a pod, though we could never have been more different. Hatori had said Father told him not to tell me anything about my mother, but he didn't listen—he never did. That was one of the ways he and I differed. I was a perfectionist, always doing everything to the exact detail, while Hatori jumped into something, made quick work of it, and jumped back out.

Hatori had always been confident and exuberant, while I was pensive and aloof. Being a boy, he hadn't been hurt nearly as much as I had by the fact that we were motherless. But there was always the fact that Hatori had the Byakugan, the bloodline trait of the Hyuga Clan, and I had been born without it.

My father, for some reason, seemed to scorn me for not having the Byakugan, and made me feel like I didn't belong in my own family. I didn't see what was so amazing about it. It was just a sight-enhancing ninja technique. And since Hyuga blood could never be pure, some of my younger cousins didn't have it, either…and the clan didn't abhor them, nor did they make them feel unaccepted in their own family.

Anyways, according to my brother, I had been a tough birth and had left my mother in bad condition. She had stayed in the hospital for a month, and when she finally recovered, she "wasn't the same." That was what Hatori had said Father had said, and even as a child I had found the words quite elusive and that they connoted many things.

Thirteen nights after she came home, she and Father had gotten into a massive argument, and she had disappeared by the next morning. She left behind almost everything she owned, plus a note that, according to Hatori, simply said, I'm sorry.

I was pulled out of my reverie and back into the present when Deadra, gesturing to the thick wooden door, continued, "They're still not done in there?"

I shook my head. "I don't think so." I had been sitting outside the meeting room for a while now, and my legs were cramped from being in the same position for so long. It was unbelievable that a conflict as insignificant as how our gardens should be regulated could take so long to resolve (that was what the family heads were debating about in the Cavern). And where were my other aunts, anyway?

I was supposed to be babysitting the kids. I hated little kids—they were so messy and loud. But no matter how much I tried to reason with him, my father still assigned me this detestable job every time the family heads had a meeting. In this huge house, though, it was an impossible task to monitor five children, their ages ranging from two to six. I had been running around for an hour, trying to keep an eye on all of them. Finally I got the younger three asleep in the Marsh, and the other two were playing with building blocks (I have no idea why we have wooden squares in a box, but that's what I found) in the Prairie downstairs.

You're probably wondering what I'm talking about. How can there be a Cavern, Marsh, and Prairie in my house? Well, that's just what the rooms are called; they're painted accordingly inside. The furniture even reflects the habitat of the room. Father says Mother named the rooms like that when they first bought this house, and she had them painted to resemble scenes in nature. Now, I'm not a psychology expert, but, hungry for any bit of information about the woman, I had assumed that this meant that my mother was a nature-lover.

"How can they take so long?" Deadra glared at the door as if it might provide her with an answer.

Shrugging, I said, "I'm wondering the same thing."

"What a waste of a good Saturday," my aunt said huffily. She pushed a lock of sweaty blond hair from her forehead. "Tell your father that we can't always come here every time they want to hold a conference."

Yeah, right, I thought. Like I could tell my father what to do.

She stood there and I sat for about another minute.

"Gosh!" Deadra suddenly exclaimed. "I am not waiting another second for those stupid men to argue their little mouths off any more than they already have!" She pounded on the door with her right hand, putting her left on her hip.

My second uncle, Kiba, opened the door. His huge white dog was close at his heels, as usual. Why was that vicious thing in this house when Father wouldn't allow me to keep a hamster?

Then I thought of my mother again. I was always thinking about her in the back of my mind. How could I know who I was if I didn't know my mother?

Well, right now, something occurred to me that Hatori had said. When we were younger, Hatori had told me that, for the first three years of his life and while my mother was still living, the house had been filled with animals. According to my brother, there had been three cats, two dogs, a tank of fish, two pet rats, a lizard, a snake, and what Hatori described as a "fat rabbit." We'd also had a sheep, a donkey and two horses out in the barn that now only contained my horse, Stormheart, and his companion, the donkey. Father had given away all the pets soon after my mother left. But he had kept Stormheart, my mother's horse's foal.

Now, I wasn't a complete animal lover, but I would have liked a furry friend to accompany me through my lonely, mother-deprived childhood.

Once again, I was zapped out of my thoughts.

"What?" Kiba asked, standing in the doorway.

"What!?" Deadra shouted. "What do you mean, 'what?'! I'll tell you what! You people have been talking in there for three hours about how our gardens should be regulated!!!"

"Calm down," Kiba said noncommittally. "We'll be done in a bit."

"That's what you said last time!" Deadra called after him as he retreated back into the shadows of the Cavern. After the door was shut, she released a growl of frustration. Then she stormed away without any regard to me; I was still sitting by the door.

All was quiet once Deadra left, and the house was still in the July heat. About five minutes later, though, the volume of voices inside the Cavern began to rise, though the words were still unintelligible.

Suddenly I could hear my father's voice over all the rest. "I shall not agree to let you put others in the position that provided me so much misery for thirteen years! There won't be enough Hokages to provide them all with the salvation he provided me. In creating Branch families again, you're only condemning many of us and our posterity to lives of despair and acquiescence!"

I withheld a gasp of shock—what were they talking about? What position had put my father in "misery for thirteen years"? Thirteen years was a significant time in the Hyuga Clan. My mother had been thirteen when she first met Father; it had been thirteen years since my mother left us.

Trying to dissect the information, not to mention my father's vocabulary—"posterity" and "acquiescence"? —was not the simplest thing. I had been taught the history of the Hyuga Clan, but the history of a clan you were born into but unaccepted by is not what you most want to remember when you're thirteen years old.

I tried to go over what I knew. Before I was born, when my parents were around my age, the Hyuga Clan had been wiped out by a disease unique to people with the kekkei genkai of the Byakugan. The only survivors were my father and his cousin, my second aunt, Hinata. Father hadn't liked the way the clan had been set up before—something with a Main Branch and other flanking branches that had to serve the Main—so he rebuilt the clan. His new government had a Head Family that was a notch above the rest of the families, but the other families were in no way obliged to bend to the Head Family's demands. The secret of the Byakugan was passed down from Lord to his heir, and all the families had to protect each other.

Since he and Hinata were the only two people with Hyuga blood, when they had gotten married, their spouses were accepted into the clan, as well. My mother's sister, Deadra, and her family were also accepted. Therefore, Hyuga blood could no longer be pure, and some people born into the clan, such as myself, were birthed without the Byakugan. These people would take their mother's maiden name, like I had. Though we were supposed to be accepted as full members of the Hyuga Clan, it seemed as if that wasn't happening, at least, not for me.

There was nothing in what I knew that could tell me what Father's words meant. The only thing I was sure of was that he and the others definitely weren't conferring about how to regulate our gardens.

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So how was that?? I really really really appreciate reviews--take 2 minutes and write one plzz!! The whole story's done so you can expect Chapter 2 to be up in a jiffy...but don't expect there to be as much next time. Thanks for reading!!

--MC