On the hundred and third day, Fen made food.
This was not unusual — Fen had been making food since the second week, initially because he ate more than his budget allocated for and had calculated that cooking was more efficient than purchasing. The cooking had evolved, over the following months, into something that was distinct from efficiency.
He made food that was good. This was the simple version of the observation. The more precise version: he made food the way Tessaly made maps — with attention that was its own justification, producing an outcome that people experienced not as a delivery of a nutritional requirement but as a thing that had been considered.
On the hundred and third day he made a meal that had no operational occasion — no arrival, no celebration, no practical need that cooking would address more efficiently than purchased food. He made it on a Sunday evening when all six of them were in the hostel, and he put it on the common room table, and he said nothing about it.
Ren sat at the table and ate and thought about what was happening.
What was happening was: Fen had made a thing for them because they were there. Not to serve a function. Not because the occasion required it. Because this was where they were and this was what he had.
★ ★ ★
He was thinking about the meal two hours later when Fen appeared in the doorway of his room.
"You've been thinking about the food," Fen said.
Ren looked at him. The Gaze at low expression: mild amusement, nothing more significant. "Is it visible?"
"You have an expression," Fen said. "It's the one where you're processing something you don't have a category for. You use it a lot."
He filed this: my processing states have recognizable external indicators.
"What do you do with things you don't have a category for," he asked.
Fen leaned against the doorframe. He considered the question with the genuine thoughtfulness he applied to questions that surprised him. "I eat them," he said finally. "Metaphorically. You try to think your way through everything. Sometimes you need to just — take the thing in. Without categorizing it first."
"That's imprecise."
"Yes," Fen said. "Most of the important things are." He pushed off the doorframe. "The food was good."
"Yes," Ren said.
"That's enough," Fen said. "You don't have to do anything else with it."
He went back to his room. Ren sat for a while and tried to let the food be good without categorizing why.
It took a while. He wasn't sure he fully succeeded.
He tried again the next day, with the memory of it.
That worked a little better.