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He’s starting to worry about how often he equates the clouds he loves to watch drift by with the color of a certain Hyuuga’s eyes. Scratch that, he’s more worried about the fact that he’s chosen to watch the way Neji’s eyes reflect the light of the sun over napping in tree branches away from everyone else.
And there’s really nothing special about the jounin, so he’s not sure why he keeps getting distracted whenever he reads a report in Neji’s handwriting, sometimes smooth and steady, written when he’s not in a hurry and more focused on being precise, and others scratchy and sporadic, but it’s always with flawless spelling and no mistakes. He wonders how long it took him to perfect that.
He’s also not sure why he constantly thinks about running his fingers through the Hyuuga’s hair, thick and silky, no matter how often the boy spins through his taijutsu and kicks up the dirt around him. He wants to try all those ridiculously complicated styles Ino forced him to learn, wonders how the other would look with plaits cascading down his back, or the nape of his neck framed by delicate braids pulled into a crown around his head. And he so desperately wants to know how it would feel freshly washed, still dripping water onto his floor, as he puts the comb his mother gave him to use on the only thing worthy of it.
And so what if he thinks how good that scabiosa flower Ino showed him would look tucked behind Neji’s ear, near identical in shade with the boy's eyes, or threaded through a crown of primroses placed neatly on his head. If Shikamaru happens to come across a book on the meaning behind flowers, nobody needs to know except him and the little old lady at the shop who recommended it.
Really, the only special thing about Neji Hyuuga should be that he’s a Hyuuga genius, and that he’s one of the better ones. But he’s realized that the mental list he made was well past that point, and he’s not sure what to do about the little bullet point in his mind dedicated specifically to whether or not Neji’s lips would be soft.