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Things were breaking up, as things tended to do, and Maus had drifted from his impromptu dance lessons with Grieve - having conveyed to her something like the essentials of a shuffle and received in return the essentials of some long-dead jig, heavy with the strange awareness that he might have been the first person besides herself to make those motions in a thousand years of silence where the music should have been - and been standing next to a less-than-usually-icy Joy when his eardrum ruptured.

Or at least, that's what he'd thought, initially. Not that there was any pain - only a sort of pop, very near his ear, and a little inrush of air, and his own startled and undignified yelp. Joy, however, had seemed unmoved - maybe even a little smug in her superior knowledge.

"Ah," she had said. "That's how Hellawes got to me, too."

He'd never actually thought to ask her about what he was still mentally classifying as a magical flea infestation, at least not outright. He had instead taken it on faith that if she had something to tell him, she would, and having received no advice or elucidation had decided she knew nothing.

This was something approaching the shape of a prank, which he was honor-bound to appreciate. It was good to have something to appreciate in that moment: some concrete impulse towards benevolence towards his fellow creature unhindered by the dreary pain of everything that the Tempestine rituals had summoned up and that the alcohol had made waterlogged and heavy.

He appreciated this, too: to break gently away from the clumps of people and their chatter and their drinks, and to sit down near one of the canals and look for the distant light of long-sailed lanterns, and to cup his hands around a tiny creature who was, even now, fastidiously grooming her whiskers with tidy, swift little paws. To be for a moment not alone but adjacent to some throng of humanity forming a comforting background noise to the strangely-familiar sensation of running his thumb over a sleek little forehead.

The mouse - or whatever she was - paused in her meticulous self-care and lifted her little black eyes in the gloom to something over his shoulder. He turned, then, to see what had caught her attention, and while he had been expecting a person, found himself confronted instead by a little floating figure, which arrested him so completely that he didn't keep looking to see who or what else might have accompanied it. He instead transferred the mouse gently to one hand, reaching the other out towards the - thing? was it a tiny octopus? - in the dark, in much the same way that he reached out to Petitcru, and once to Lulu.

He didn't dislike her. It took a lot to make Maus actively dislike anyone. But all the same, there was a enough sore feeling in his heart that he considered the possibility that she might be about to lose her lunch with something vaguely like smug satisfaction.

Still, she could do that over there. He remained seated on the ground, giving her at first only the silent glance before turning his attention back to Boo. After a moment's hesitation he held up the mouse-thing, again cupped in both his palms, and watched her whiskers twitch as she lifted her tiny nose in what seemed like a friendly, somewhat fearless overture.

"She's got room for the heart because there's no bones in there," he observed - stay silly, soldier - watching the way Boo moved before his eyes wandered past her and back to the water.

The mouse, meanwhile, had a heartbeat that buzzed against his thumb in a way that was familiar but unremembered, and he found himself struggling to recall some passage from some book - some discussion about how many times a heart could beat before it gave out, and how swiftly a mouse used up its ration. Nothing came back to him, but it was a relief to forget something the way one might forget the words to a song, rather than the other way.

"Is she like Hellawes too, then?" He asked, using the only frame of reference he had. "Only cuter."

Hellawes had once brought him a dead mouse, on a visit to the Garde. He hadn't appreciated it. It had felt very much like a dark joke as his expense.

"I used to keep mice. Before," he said, somewhat abstractedly. "They're not really - they don't do sweet and affectionate. It was more like - more like -"

He hesitated. The not-mouse was cupped in his palms, having abandoned her sniffing at Boo to again clean her whiskers, and he again ran his thumb over her tiny back. His hands, in this moment, seemed remarkably gentle - careful hands, to hold something fragile; not hands that could have harmed anyone, even in the ten or so years that they had been designated for reaching into chests to crush the lives inside them - and gentle, also, was the way he lifted her to touch his lips momentarily to her forehead. As he had suggested, she received this little irrepressible gesture of affection without much reaction, barely pausing in her assiduous grooming.

"They're like - quintessential prey animal. Ought to be terrified of you. It's like - it sounds stupid," he said, with an apologetic little laugh, "but it's like an honor, or something, when something that small doesn't feel bothered about you being around. And they don't live long. I did the math once - if you can make a mouse happy for a half an hour it's the same as making a human being happy for like, an entire day. More, really. It's so easy to be good to them."

If he had said something about himself, he did not know it. He paused, and then he half-turned towards her, transferring the mouse gently to one hand again - moving again with careful habit - and letting her lean off the edge of his palm as he held it out towards Ekstrom. "Do you wanna hold her?" he asked.