because I love them
Beautiful
It comes as a simple and honest realization and slips through his lips and into the air between them without his permission or notice.
It hangs there a moment – a foreign thing neither can quite recognize – Neji as something he has said, Tenten as something she has heard.
But when she says "Pardon?" her eyes meeting his in all sincerity and with incredulity tinged with hope, it is something he feels in his marrow and at the end of every firing synapse in his being. It is something so simple as to certainly be. The sun will rise in the morning, the moon will follow at night, and this, is no more or less true or simple.
(and although it isn't the first time he's thought it, it is the first time he has said it in her hearing, and he needs her to know it is a truth – not a flattery or an opinion- but an unbiased irrefutable fact, for just as he is certain it is the first time she's heard those words from him, he needs her to hear them in the spaces between her dreams and marrow and thoughts and ions and atoms and cells.)
"You're beautiful."