Eventually she gives up on moving the last copy and has dinner out with him in tow - it's fish and it's got a sprinkling of actual herbs on top and it's wrapped in a big mushroom cap - and brings him home after they've eaten.

The fish makes him weirdly homesick even though he did not in fact ever move in with Charlie, and the whole thing before that was - a lot.  He wants.... something.  If he were home, his mom would take one look at him and give him a hug, which he'd accept and then feel a bit better afterward.  And then he'd get to making dinner, or cleaning, or paying the bills, and he'd be useful for something.  He wouldn't have to take credit for writing any great works of classic literature, except for how he's not doing that because instead he's mostly pretending -

There's no way for him to get a hug, here.  If he asks for one, or tries to sneak in another one with a massage, she'll learn how pathetic he is, and then what?  She's too good a person to turn him out, so she'll just quietly wish she'd let that octopus thing kill him, until one day when they aren't careful enough and something else gets him, or she takes him up to the surface where he'll have to start an entire new life, again, alone.

The thing is that he did like it, in some twisted way, and the fact that he feels low at the moment doesn't change that.  If it did, he would at least feel less... sick.  Pathetic, still.  Like a freak.

He's really grateful for the fish, which is also sad, because it goes hand in hand with granola bars being fancy down here, but at least that's a normal kind of acclimation.  A kind it's good and sane to have.

He doesn't trip on the way home, but in spite of the light and the there-are-his-feet spell he does bump-brush his shoulders into cave walls a few times.

"Are you okay? I didn't bother to detect poison on the food, I've eaten there before and she's chill..."

"I'm fine.  Or, I don't think I'm poisoned."

"Good, I'd rather not have a feud with the fish place."

"...Right."

"- most easily available poison wouldn't have actually killed either of us," she clarifies. "And definitely nobody wants me or you hard-to-come-by-poison amounts of dead."

"....Yes, Niss."

Eventually they are home. She puts the money away; she has never made it particularly hard for him to see where in her room she stashes her coins.

Huh.  Yeah.

"Back at home, if somebody tried to poison us, or even if they just weren't careful enough and the food made us sick, we could go to the police or the government and they'd take care of it.  So... I'm just not used to the idea of having to do feuds about anything."

"There's... stuff in that vein I could try but it would not... work, unless I was very lucky."

"Yeah.  I didn't think it would."

"Do you want to plan to go out like that more times, how was it?"

"I think I'm going a little bit crazy, but... I at least might be going more crazy in general from staying in here all the time than from going out like that."

"Okay. I can bring you along any time you want to come, for that. Anything else to be done about the crazy? I know it's a pretty crazymaking situation."

"I don't really know.  ...I liked the fish.  But I don't want to be - too expensive -"

"Fish isn't that expensive - do you like it more than bacon -?"

"Not really.  Maybe it was just the eating out of the house.  ...Cave.  Part of a cave."

"I can do that more often too though it trades off against, you know, every other thing that costs money."

"Yeah.  Exactly.  ...I used to do a lot of the cooking, back home.  And liked it.  But I don't know if it would help, because everything's just so different.  I don't know how to use a fire for it, for starters."

"What did you do, boil everything in a hot spring?"

"There's - I guess it's still fire, sometimes, but it's controlled."  ...Probably Niss would enjoy hearing more about this?  Maybe?  "There are pipes that run through pretty much every house in the country where I live, and there's a gas in those, a flammable gas, and anytime you want, you can turn a dial and let out a little of that, and something makes a spark to light it on fire.  You can control exactly how much you want, and it makes it bigger or smaller depending on how much heat you want.  You can turn it off and the fire's just gone, with no extra work.  There are a lot of things like that."

"Whoaaaa. Like that in what way - I can't think of a lot of other things you could have analogous to fuel to run through pipes - I guess water, you could do water -"

"We have water, and - lightning, which you can use to power lights, and temperature control, and that's what makes the music player work, even though that doesn't run by being plugged into the wall...  Some stoves just use lightning to make some metal really hot instead of having fire at all."