"I'm certain I will," Ignis assured him. "Especially if you've kept up with it. Cooking is a skill that, like most others, is only bound to improve with practice."

Considering where Shane had been when he first started his cooking journey to where he was now? Well, that was pretty good proof right there. But even if his skills had regressed in his absence, Ignis would still enjoy just the fact that he'd tried, and that they were enjoying the fruits (or vegetables, in this case) of his labors....together.

His smile was small, and distant.

"I've...also missed this," he said.

Which wasn't quite what he meant, but that was as close to what he meant as he would allow himself to get right now.

And there was another soft smile, as Ignis felt briefly for a spoon, picked it up, and carefully dipped it into the soup in front of him. Because that just seemed fitting, didn't it? Him, carefully dancing around something while Shane just goes fumbling straight for it without abandon.

But, even with that extra grace period of all that time while Shane was a goose, Ignis still hadn't quite sorted out where he stood on all of it. He was still working out exactly where he was.

"I should think," he noted, "he should be quite grateful that a stain on the ceiling was all he had to contend with.

"This is quite good, by the way," he added, dipping in his spoon for another bite, already seeing himself making very short work of it, and not merely because he'd been so long without good, fresh, seasonal offerings. "Remarkable, really."

And also talking about the food was undeniably easier.

"Gladio and I," Ignis remarked, smiling back, though he rather wished he could see that smile so easily detectable in Shane's voice, and this it hadn't been so damn long since the last time he had, so his memories of it weren't quite so....fuzzy, "rather lucked out, in that regard. Ours came furnished."

There was, then, a thoughtful hesitation, filled with another bit of soup, but he figured it wouldn't hurt to at least start traipsing a little closer to at least one of the elephants he could only assume had joined them in the room.

"Obviously," he said, "I can't speak for it's taste level, but I can at least attest to it being functional."

"It does enhance the experience significantly," Ignis agreed, "to be able to eat at a table rather than, say, the floor."

Not that he hadn't eaten food in even stranger places.

His tone went...mildly more lightly conversational as he tried not to spend too much time locating that glass of wine.

"Do you have people over often?" he asked, fairly certain he knew the answer, but almost more curious about how Shane answered rather than what.

"I'm not even sure Gladio and I even have neighbors yet," Ignis admitted, but, in his defense, he'd only been back for a very short while, and he was more concerned with familiarizing himself with the island itself again; then he'd focus on reacquainting himself with its inhabitants. "But those upper floors are fairly new, aren't they? I don't remember them being there before."

"That sounds incredibly convenient," Ignis noted, "and also very...Fandom. But what a loss for the potential contractors who would have otherwise handled a project like that."