I was hailed as both a prodigy the likes of which had never before been seen and a complete idiot.

After a week in the hospital, my chakra exhaustion was remedied along with my blindness, but I would forever retain a lazy eye where I permanently damaged one of the neighboring nerves that controlled some eye muscles.

That didn't really matter much when I had x-ray vision, but my normal vision was perhaps a bit impaired. I'd live.

When I went home, the atmosphere was changed entirely. Even though my mother was entirely against it, my life was subtly shifted to include training in all kinds of elements.

I had to play more with my older relatives - "Ninja" was like "Hide-and-go-seek", various clapping games far more complicated than I remembered were almost a substitute for toddlers sparring, and shinobi children played games like cat's cradle in seconds, competing for fastest times. Even just playing with my six year old cousins, for a not-even two year old was absurd, but I flushed my body with chakra and fatigue was banished. Soon they had trouble keeping up with me.

I learned to throw. Balls. Discs. Sticks. Wooden kunai. Throwing techniques were discussed on a weekly basis and even though it was technically playing, I was expected to get better.

Our clan had a very strict set of warm up routines that everyone did. It got more complicated as you got older, but even the youngest participated in some way. It was a bit like yoga at first, though the addition of chakra of course made a lot of it impossible without. Like everything else, my innate sense of chakra and enhancement - moving it around my body since I'd done from the moment my chakra system started developing - allowed me to excel at it beyond expectations.

Finally, there were simple chakra control exercises. The infamous leaf sticking was taught in the Academy, sure - but we were the Hyuuga clan. We needed control of each of our tenketsu - most immediately our hands and fingers. Before I turned two, working with my eight and nine year old cousins I was folding origami without touching it. I could use a Chakra String from any finger or toe or any other tenketsu on my body to attach to any object and fling it around, or bring it to my hand, or whatever else - I imagine that could be a neat little trick in the middle of combat.

Then there was the rejoicing all around the clan when Hinata was born. Lady Himara, the wife of Lord Hiashi, had been pregnant almost since I could remember, or at least since I could see.

Never again would I see Hiashi smile so broadly as when he introduced the little girl around. He had always before been so reserved, but I remembered clearly how unabashedly delighted he was to hold her in his arms.

She was an adorable baby, curious and happy with ridiculously chubby cheeks. Our parents were together so often - and my father Hizashi on missions so often - that we were raised more like siblings than cousins. Even if I was a prodigy with more in common with adults.

On the Hyuuga clan compound, there is a tree next to a pond that grows very particularly sideways.

Here I balanced, one foot on the pond, the other stuck to the tree, bend forward as instructed to make the damn exercise more difficult. Five leaves hovered between my outstretched fingers, and another was on the tip of my nose.

My father retired from ANBU when I was three, and decided to take a personal hand in my training.

"If you can last the full thirty minutes then you may have adequate control for us to begin our instruction for the day, Neji." He said lightly.

Hizashi Hyuuga was a bit of a dick, and had ridiculous expectations. Probably because I constantly met them.

Upon his retirement he immediately realized that I had far too much chakra - I'd played with it from birth, something shinobi just don't do. The developing chakra system of a baby is flexible like that, and it accommodated.

No one could diagnose how much chakra someone had like a Hyuuga - all it took was a glance. I had more chakra than my cousins who were graduating the academy. At age three. And Hizashi mentioned numerous times that Hyuuga typically have a greater than average amount of chakra - though obviously it varied wildly.

Hizashi told me that I'd never master Juuken without ridiculous, heretofore unheard of chakra control. Thus, he combined exercises. And modified a few to be more difficult. Standing on water at a steep angle was ridiculously hard on a lot of muscles, and I had to constantly reinforce them with chakra, and flush them to avoid fatigue - it took a month until I no longer fell in with every flush.

"Very good, Neji, that's your half hour." Hizashi said finally. I used all of the composure I had to bring my legs together and elegantly step forward off of the pond. Then I flushed my muscles with chakra a few times to take away the ridiculous ache they felt and immediately felt better.

I don't know how I functioned in a world without chakra. It really is the greatest thing.

"Now, your instruction has already included the basic elements, the kihon of Juuken. So let us begin instruction in the first twenty-six of the most basic Juuken kata. Once mastered, we will move on to the more intermediate eighty-three kata, and then it is my hope that you can even master all fifty-two of the advanced kata before beginning the Academy. Keep in mind this is a very ambitious goal, and I will of course not be disappointed if it takes you a good deal longer. Most do not even begin this instruction until age seven or eight." Hizashi said with a smile.

Hiashi tried to push Lady Hinata the same way I was pushed. It didn't work out so well.

When she started training at age three, I was four and a half, and had already mastered all of the Advanced kata of the Juuken that my father Hizashi thought would take me until the Academy to master.

Children don't have the kind of discipline that an adult does, and I had already lived to adulthood. I was incorporating hardened chakra into my strikes, to truly craft it into the feared and deadly Gentle Fist style of the clan.

Hinata...was a three year old.

For a three year old she was probably pretty good - great, even. No one in our clan could have compared, since the Branch Family members didn't start their training nearly so early. But with me as one of the more recent examples from the Branch family - and Hizashi born only seconds after his big brother Hiashi - it wouldn't do to have the Main Family look bad.

None of that really mattered, of course. For a time, nothing mattered.

I had a fully developed mind - an adult mind that had lived a lifetime - and I didn't understand why my father had to die.

The timing was cruel. I'd just mastered the kata of the Juuken, and Hiashi had branded me like cattle in return.

For my own safety. For the safety of the Byakugan. I could see the loathing in my father's face. I knew the hypocrisy of the Main Family, especially when there were so many ways to keep our eyes safe - and that everyone in the Clan knew how Hiashi and Hizashi's own mother, from the Main Family, had her eyes stolen on a mission to Water Country. A routine C-rank.

As though it were about safety. My father provoked Hiashi into showing me the true meaning of the brand - control - soon after it was applied to me. He was tortured with the cursed seal for no reason other than as a demonstration, as far as I could tell.

We were subservient because we had to be.

Then Lightning Country, in the midst of peace talks with the Village Hidden in Cloud to finally end the Third Shinobi World War, kidnapped Lady Hinata.

I pieced the rest together from rumors. It happened in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping, and my dad was dead and shipped off to appease the Raikage before I woke up.

Hiashi interrupted the capture and killed a Lightning diplomat. The other representatives from Lightning demanded his head. He gave them father - his twin brother - instead. To protect the Byakugan.

The Cursed Seal renders the Byakugan useless after our death. It's created exactly for this purpose. In addition to controlling us.

I knew that - knew it was a good and noble sacrifice of my father. And yet a part of me hated Hiashi for doing it. Hated how cold he was, how cold he must have always been even if I hadn't always seen it. To offer up his own brother on a kami-damned platter.

I remembered my father's lesson, on the day he was tortured, about our place to serve and protect the Main Family. Perhaps he would have wanted - did want it. He was Hiashi's brother like I'd been raised as a sibling to Lady Hinata, and I knew that I'd raise the Shinigami himself to protect that innocent, doe-eyed little girl.

But damned if I'll ever forgive Hiashi for it.