The world K lives in now is so full of new, wonderful, living things that he doubts he'll ever have time to study each of them as he wants to - as they deserve to be known, paid attention to, cherished even. He believes this with the fullness specific to a man that spent the entirety of his life on a corpse of what was once a vibrantly living planet, that knew he was going to die without ever knowing anything else - and, technically, did.

But every now and then he gets the chance to do this, to simply memorize the pattern along its rough back, the slit of a pupil in its gold patinaed iris, the nearly translucent webbing between its bell-tipped toes. To watch the way its throat expands and deflates with its breathing, the impossible width of its mouth even though it doesn't so much as move in front of him. He is aware of Hakkyuu, too, but he doesn't rush - not until the other man speaks.

"Why do you scorn it so much?" he asks once Hakkyuu has spoken again, prompt, a question he has been thinking about but hadn't wanted to ask aloud until he was forced to tear a greater fraction of his attention off the frog.