Sanguinary
When everything is desperate and terrifying, when we don't know anything or how events will unfold, we turn to ritual. The repetitiveness of pacing, or brushing your hair, soothes us and centers us. It gives us control over something when everything else seems out of our control.
Fred knows pi, the magical and mysterious number that we all learned the first seven digits of in high school math. 3.14159. I've forgotten why pi was important and how it was used, but I'll know those seven numbers on my deathbed - maybe beyond. But for Fred, pi is more than just a string of numbers. It's ritual magic.