"No reason in particular. Nice girl. I wonder why the troupe leader picked her in the first place."

"She's got a very earnest style, I like it. I think it would've turned out well if Fakir hadn't been such a huge idiot about it."

"Maybe so," says Rue, smiling. "She doesn't particularly know what she's doing, but she's... determined."

"She's nice to dance with."

"I suppose."

"...oh hey," he says, as certain facts about the world belatedly occur to him. "You're Mytho's girlfriend, aren't you?"

"You could say that. What of it?"

"Do you know about the thing where he lost all his emotions and they keep turning up in unexpected places and causing trouble?"

"Of course."

"Well... good, I guess. I figured if you were dating him then somebody should probably tell you if you didn't know already. How does dating somebody with no emotions even work, anyway?"

"What do you imagine it interferes with?"

He opens his mouth. He closes his mouth.

Our tale is set about a century too early for the phrase 'you do you, I guess', but that's the approximate sentiment he's looking for, if only he had a way to articulate it.

After a few seconds, he finally settles on, "...never mind."

"All right, then. Have fun practicing."

"Thanks, I will."

She turns and leaves. Serafin is dangerous, but perhaps not imminently so.

He goes back to practicing.

A while later, just as the sun's light is beginning to fade from the sky, he finally collects his book and his lamp and leaves to return to his dorm.

He will run into a pair of suspiciously familiar girls who glare at him suspiciously.

"And where do you think you're going," asks one of them.

"...home?"

"So you're not following Duck?" asks Pique.

"You've been following Duck a lot!" says Lilie.

"Yeah, we're beginning to wonder if your intentions are entirely pure," says Pique.

"I bet they're not! No way!" says Lilie.

He snorts.

"What the hell d'you think you know about my intentions?"

"Nobody knows anything about your intentions," says Pique, crossing her arms. "That's the problem."

"Yeah! Poor Duck doesn't know anything about the snares of men!" says Lilie.

"It was one thing for her to be obsessed with Mytho, everyone knows he'd never do anything inappropriate with anyone," says Pique.

"We haven't found anything wrong with him at all," says Lilie, as if this fact causes her tremendous pain.

"But nobody knows what you're about, so if you want to protect her reputation then you have to be more careful."

"Yeah! Otherwise everyone will think she's fallen!"

"Like not running off places by yourselves in the middle of the night, because if you do that then people're gonna talk."

...Serafin laughs.

"I'm not ensnaring her. I just like her, that's all. I wasn't even with her tonight, I was practicing ballet by myself."

"Oh wow! So she went out into town all by herself in the middle of the night!" says Lilie, delighted.

"Then she's probably just buying more birdseed or something," shrugs Pique. 

"What if she had someone to meet! How many people can Duck possibly be pursuing at once?"

"Let's just go home. Just don't do anything dumb, Serafin," says Pique, before turning to go.

"Yeah! Or we'll feed you to cats!"

"We'll - wait, what?"

"Vicious, starving cats, with sharpened, bloody claws!"

"No, if you're going to threaten people you have to say something credible, like that you have a shotgun."

"Huh, I bet I could get a shotgun..."

They're already most of the way back to the girls' dorm. It's surprisingly hard to interrupt their conversations.

He gazes after them, shaking his head slowly, then continues on to his room.

Duck comes back to the dorms late and leaves them early. It's the weekend, and the natural habitat of ducks is - probably the pond, actually, but this one is going to the library to read.