It's a good moment, Seoraj decides; he doesn't laugh, either, but he grins back and it's fleetingly a bit like being in cahoots, a bit like sitting around with the lads, and a bit like none of those things at all. Different isn't bad, though, and that's the whole basis of the philosophy by which he lives his life. Life is good - not his life, remarkably, but the fact of it and the constant changing and evolving nature of it is just good and fascinating and ever in motion. Life is good, and it's there to be appreciated.

People who don't see beauty just aren't looking, he thinks; sometimes it's because they can't any more, and it's a sadder thing to him than just death. To live without being able to connect with how astonishing and curious that is in itself...

"It's what we owe," he shrugs, still smiling. "The way I see it, every day you're not dead, that's a day you don't take for granted. That's a world you don't take for granted."

But he makes it sound beautiful, somehow, and not desperate. It's easy to see, then, how he embraced Baedal.