A/N: Hi everybody. So this is my new story - it's an AU based mostly on Naruto, but there are characters from other series in here, too, like Prince of Tennis, Gakuen Heaven and a couple others. Sorry if that's confusing.

The setting is a high-class private boarding school, Bell Liberty Junior and Senior High School. Everybody in the school lives in one of three dorms, which are called Bluebell, Snapdragon and Daisy. The story sort of moves through a lot of different characters' perspectives to show all the different sides of a big mess that took place one day at Bell Liberty. The first chapter is Neji's - and he's head of Bluebell dorm, which is for people who are nice and try hard.

Warnings: AU. Possibly OOC. Some pairings will come up, including Sasuke x Naruto, Achilles x Neji, Shikamaru x Temari and others.

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Chapter 1 - Neji

Neji had a lot of duties as the head of Bluebell dorm. Some of them were more glamorous than others. Not that that made any difference, of course, in the care he took with his responsibilities—duty was duty and Neji, at least, understood that, though he sometimes wondered if the same could be said of anyone else.

Choosing horses for the members of his dorm before riding lessons commenced tomorrow was one of his less glamorous jobs. Especially because it was raining and the stables smelled like something Neji didn't want to think about, and the mud from his walk over had gotten onto his shoes. But not everyone in Bluebell had had the foresight to bring their own Icelandic pony to school, as Neji had—although of course there was plenty of room in the Bell Liberty stables, if any of his classmates had wanted to board their horses here—and since he knew for a fact that no one else was going to take it upon themselves to advise horses for the students who were without, Neji would do it himself.

The stable was empty, except for the horses, of course; his footsteps echoed down the long lane in front of him, hushed by the rain falling on the roof over his head. Neji stopped before an unremarkable thoroughbred, rolling his eyes and pushing his damp hair way from his neck. Oh, he had offered that anyone who wanted help picking out their horse could come along with him to the stables. He'd even gone so far as to suggest that the leaders of the other two dorms might want to come along as well, for the sake of the students in their houses.

He'd gotten no response worth mentioning. Shikamaru had given him a shrug that as likely meant he had already worked something out as he didn't care one iota how the whole thing went down, or a mix of the two, perhaps—it was hard to tell with Shikamaru sometimes. And Achilles—oh, that Achilles, who might have been willing to accompany Neji if it hadn't been for the fact that he was waiting, just then, for a certain relative of his scheduled to visit that afternoon—Achilles had suggested that Neji just let it alone and wait for tomorrow, with a characteristic smirk that Neji just knew meant the Snapdragons would be running around unsupervised tomorrow, as usual—why had he expected anything else? Achilles would probably let them choose whatever horses they wanted, without paying the least attention to whether they suited each other or not.

Choosing a horse was an art, after all. How long had it taken Neji to find the perfect pony?

Neji shivered a little as he walked down the line of stalls, wishing he had brought his shawl with him instead of his flimsy though well-designed jacket. He wouldn't have called the stable lonely, exactly, but all the same he wouldn't have minded a little company; it was a shame he hadn't been able to catch Naruto before making his way outside. Neji really did his best to keep tabs on the most troublesome member of his dorm, but it was hard when he was always sneaking off with one bad influence or another…

Neji paused to peer in at one of the horses, fingering the name cards he had brought with him. Each of the stalls he passed featured a plaque with the horse's name, and the owner's name, if it had one—he was surprised to see how few of them actually belonged to anyone besides the school. There were a few Urakawa horses, and a few Keigos, and a couple others—but all in all, most of the animals belonged to Bell Liberty. Neji shook his head. No Hyuuga would ever stand in such bad taste as to ride a school horse, he knew—and a few of the better families, families like the Winthrops and the Itos, really should have had one or two on the premises.

Well, forget the Itos. When had that family ever played by the rules?

Neji sighed to himself, annoyed in a background way with the Itos and annoyed more immediately with how many cards he still had left in his hand. A few of the choices had been easier—Atalantia and Psyche had grace, at least, even if Neji couldn't speak to their experience, and Kiba he had simply assigned to a fairly normal creature, insofar as 'normal' described any of the horses in the Bell Liberty stable. But there was one name card in his hand that he could not throw so casually.

It was Naruto's, of course. Neji was almost positive Naruto hadn't been well off enough to even see a horse before coming to Bell Liberty—or if he had done any riding, it was undoubtedly of that awful Western variety, where cowboy hats took the place of helmets and the riders slouched in their saddles like half-dead fish. Neji could just picture that. He swallowed a sigh of disgust as he neared the end of the row. He wanted Naruto's first experience with real riding to be a success—and for that to happen, he couldn't just find a horse of the right size, or one with which the orange nightmare that was Naruto's wardrobe would not combine to murder the eyes of unsuspecting passersby. He needed to find a better horse than that—a horse that matched Naruto's soul.

Neji reached the end of the row and turned to head back, his shoulders slumping a little as he seemed to have run out of options. Then he glanced into the last stall and stopped. The horse inside was fourteen or fifteen hands high and a sort of chestnut color—but what had caught Neji's attention was that the horse appeared to have gotten its head stuck in its water bucket.

The horse was shaking its neck uselessly back and forth, stumbling blind around its stall with an indignity Neji wasn't sure he'd ever seen on a horse before. One of the animal's hind legs hit the wall and its knees buckled in response. It fell back onto its haunches in surprise—surprise that became more evident when the jolt knocked the bucket loose from its head and sent it skittering across the stall.

Neji blinked at the horse. It seemed to blink back at him. Then it rose and twitched its tail, glancing for a moment from side to side as though searching for an explanation as to what had just happened. Then it shook itself—and with the shake, all its preoccupation seemed to disappear, and it whickered agreeably, ambling toward the gate to see if Neji had anything worth eating.

Neji stuck Naruto's name card on the gate's crossbar and walked away, a little smile on his face.