[ A strange creature, this Yu. His breath stirring a small patch of heat on clothed skin, the man laid out across his bed looks nothing like the unruly tempest he's come to know in three years time. No, instead he seems to Lavi like something imperceptibly soft and yet strong, and he suspects if he were to reach out and touch the gentle slope of cheek, he might find his fingertips grazing the curve of some petal, delicate and smooth.

The thoughtless fingers nested in satin hair twitch with a mind of their own, releasing dark threads with the intent to do something surely foolish, surely ill-advised--

"...So if it was a gift, who'd they give it to?"

His drifting hand closes in on itself, retreating back from its meandering path before it can transverse past Kanda's crown, drawing up instead to pinch the bridge of his nose.

There aren't hard and fast rules against speaking of other logs necessarily, but there are sanctions on finality. That person who received the gift--that person is someone long buried now, a phantom of history that never truly existed.

So too will Lavi become like that. A ghost of a life never lived, a remnant of memory.

That thought steals away the gentle warmth and replaces it with something hard and suffocating in his chest. He swallows it back, that strange lump of confused pain, taming his emotions with the force of cooler logic.

Softness does not serve a Bookman.

Thus, rather than answer that question, he laughs a little sharply, squirming to draw Yu's attention to a logistical problem of their current position. ]

Hey, I'm not a pillow, y'know. I still need something to read unless you want me to have nothing better to do than stare at you for the next few hours.