While everyone else had rushed off to deal with the giant insect problem, you and Ribbit had ended up staying behind in the quieter part of the meadow. The night there had felt softer, calmer, almost untouched by the madness unfolding farther away. The grass had been cool beneath you, the sky above impossibly dark and wide, dotted with stars that looked almost close enough to touch. Fireflies drifted lazily through the air around you, their tiny lights blinking in and out like little sparks of living gold.

She had talked with you easily, the way she always did when it was just the two of you. Her voice had carried that familiar playful edge, full of teasing sarcasm and sly little observations that made you roll your eyes even when they made you laugh. She had nudged your arm more than once with gentle, barely-there taps whenever she caught you trying too hard to keep a straight face. Every time one of her jokes slipped past your defenses and made you laugh anyway, her mouth had curved into that smug little grin of hers, the kind that said she knew exactly what she was doing. And when you tried to deny it, she only looked more pleased with herself, leaning a little closer as if to make sure you could not escape the evidence. With her, even the sharpest jokes had a softness in them, a fondness that made them feel like a private language between the two of you.

Eventually the adventure had ended the way all of Caine's adventures did—messily, with everyone eventually stumbling back to the circus in one piece, more or less, to receive whatever reward he had decided counted as compensation. Once the chaos had begun to settle, she had turned to you with a look that was far softer than the smug grin she wore in the meadow, and with a simple tilt of her head she had invited you to come with her to her room. It was not a rare invitation, not at all. In fact, if anyone had been keeping track, they might have guessed you spent more time there than in your own room. And maybe they would have been right. Something about Ribbit's space always seemed to pull you in—something about the way it felt like hers, and somehow also a place that had room for you.

So the two of you had slipped away from the others and moved down the long corridor where each member's room waited behind its own door. When Ribbit opened her door and stepped inside, the room beyond was as warm and strange and cozy as you remembered. The soft green glow of the walls, the giant flower-shaped bed, the little shelves tucked into the corners, the starry black backdrop that made the space feel like a private pocket of night—it all gave her room a dreamlike quality, playful and comforting at once. It felt unmistakably like her: colorful, a little whimsical, and far more personal than the rest of the circus ever allowed anything to be. You closed the door behind you, and the quiet click of it shutting made the whole room feel even more separate from everything else.

Ribbit had already settled onto the edge of her bed, sitting with one leg bent and the other loosely hanging over the side, her posture relaxed in the way only she could manage. There was something effortlessly expressive about her even when she was still, as though every small movement carried a thought with it. She looked up at you with those large, dark-pupiled eyes of hers and gave you a knowing little smile, the kind that always suggested she was about to say something teasing but did not quite want to give away the punchline yet. "You really do come here a lot, you know." she said, her voice light and amused. "At this point I should probably start charging rent." Her grin widened at the joke, but the softness in her face did not disappear. "...I would not, obviously. I like having you here." she says softly, tapping her fingers lightly against the bed.