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At some point between being revived and actually living again, Tommy took up knitting.
Not by choice, mind you, but by complex manipulation, the likes of which even Tommy, strong and resilient as he was, had been unable to resist.
Puffy had been the one to suggest it during one of their therapy sessions. They’d been slowly working on getting old and new hobbies reintroduced, and in the past week he’d tried – with mixed success – fishing, running, and, most recently, gardening. It was while discussing the gardening that Tommy accidentally inspired the topic.
“The plants and whatnot are all well and good, but I can’t keep it up for long before I end up just ruining it all,” Tommy recounted from where he was slouched in the plush armchair. It had been a month and a half of biweekly therapy sessions and still he felt out of place in Puffy’s office. His hands gripped tight at his knees to resist the urge to cross them over his chest.
“What do you mean by ‘ruining it all’?”
Tommy bristled, fingers digging into the rough canvas of his pants. “I mean I ruined it, don’t I?” he snapped, eyes darting up to glare at Puffy across from him. Having to clarify his words, words that never came easily, instead jumbling up inside his brain until they spilled from his mouth in some facsimile of his actual intentions, was his least favorite part of therapy.
Puffy didn’t say anything in response, instead raising a single eyebrow expectantly.
Right. Tommy slipped his eyes closed and breathed in deep, holding the air in tight for a count of five. The burn in his lungs distracted him from the root of his anger, and as he exhaled, he imagined the fiery annoyance that had flared up in his abdomen dissipating out into the air like steam. When he opened his eyes again, his head was swimming with excess oxygen and Puffy was wearing a small, proud smile.
Like everything else in his life, it was something he was working on.
“So,” Puffy continued, fingers folded delicately on the notebook in her lap, “What happened with the gardening?”
This time, Tommy took a second to find his words.
“I want to keep up with the gardening,” he started, because that was something he knew to be true. “I like it.” Also true, and easy to admit. The earth had always been a familiar thing and he found it gave easily under his hand, like it could recognize him in kind. The plants were just as friendly, brushing against him like a handshake, their leaves rustling in the wind like laughter around him. He liked the way it brought color to his home, too, blooming in a sunset of pinks and yellows and reds outside his simple wooden house.
“But gripping the hoe bothers my hands after a while,” Tommy continued. “So, I, erm …” He shrugged his shoulders inwards, glancing away from Puffy’s intent gaze. “I got mad. No, wait.” Tommy paused, thinking for a moment. Labeling emotions. Another thing they were working on. “Frustrated,“ he finally decided, eyes looking up briefly to Puffy for approval before darting away again just as quickly.
“I got frustrated ‘cus my hand stopped working and I threw the hoe and fucking … destroyed a bunch of the flowers.” The last bunch of Tommy’s words came out rushed, mushing together as his earlier frustration seeped into his voice.
Puffy did react then, leaning forward, brow furrowed. “Sorry, did you say your hands stopped working?”
Oh. Tommy forgot, sometimes, that there were still people who didn’t know about his chronic stiffness – a symptom of being made of literal rock and earth – which had been a part of him for as long as he could remember. It wasn’t often painful anymore, but with enough inactivity it was like his muscles would just forget how to move, reverting back to their stiff, lapidarian origins.
Tubbo had always helped him through it when they were younger, when Tommy was still growing and his petrified muscles couldn’t keep up and would seize with the stress and tension of puberty. He’d draw Tommy a warm bath or knead his muscles with strong fingers until they were forced to loosen. But now, Tubbo had moved in with Ranboo and was raising a son, and now Tommy was left to deal with it by himself.
So, deal with it he did.
“I’m made of, er, stone … earth … stuff,” Tommy said, holding up his hands in demonstration. “So sometimes my hands don’t … work like normal hands.”
Puffy was clearly surprised, her already wide eyes the size of the moon with the emotion, but she composed herself in the next moment, settling back down into the role of therapist. “That … sounds difficult,” she said when she’d calmed, and Tommy felt his shoulders fall as the tension there dissipated.
He shrugged. “I dunno. S’fine, I guess. Just … How I am.”
“Have you ever tried anything to ease the stiffness?”
“Not really,” Tommy replied. “Moving more helps, maybe.”
Puffy leaned back in her chair, contemplative eyes scanning the room. Her pen tapped a disjointed rhythm on her notebook, which she never actually used to take notes – Tommy knew because he’d stolen it once, out of curiosity, only to find it completely blank – and Tommy watched as her eyes fell on something behind him, a smile spreading across her face in the next second. He turned in his chair to see what it was, but the only thing in that corner was a nondescript leather shoulder bag, the top overflowing with yarn.
Puffy’s gaze returned to Tommy, their eyes meeting. “I have an idea.”
That idea had been knitting, to Tommy’s initial horror, something he associated only with scratchy turtle necks and mothball-smelling nans – which Tommy was not, despite what the white hair might make you think.
He’d fought Puffy’s proposal, and he fought it hard, stomping his feet and bringing out his best, most annoying whiny voice to try and wear her down. It was working, too, he could tell, because her ear was starting to twitch from within her bushy head of hair, but right when he’d been about to declare himself triumphant, she’d stomped her own cloven foot and declared knitting lessons a designated therapy assignment.
From there, they’d started dedicating a portion of each therapy session to teaching him the basics. It started slow and awkward at first, two needles clacking together awkwardly in earthen hands as the yarn tangled itself into something resembling a knitted pattern. There had been more than one incident involving scissors and a boiling over of frustrations, unevenly developing patterns hacked apart when they didn’t lay exactly as he’d planned. But, eventually, he’d gotten the hang of it, hours of work finally paying off in the form of haphazardly constructed objects that could almost pass for clothing.
The most surprising part of it all – even more surprising than the realization that he wasn’t actually half-bad at knitting, or that his hands nearly stopped seizing altogether a month into taking it up – was that Tommy actually … enjoyed it.
That didn’t mean he wanted to spend every hour of every day doing it, but there was something calming about it, his hands moving in the simple rhythm, the pattern working itself out from his hands in an ever-growing product made by his own hand.
Knitting was constructive, he found, just as constructive as the cobblestone towers he used to build, only without the urge to jump off them at the end.
Which, you know. Was probably an improvement. According to some people, at least.
Soon, he and Puffy no longer needed to set aside time during therapy to focus on his knitting. Instead, he’d started doing it through the entire thing, pulling out whatever project he was in the middle of right at the start and knitting away as they blathered on about emotions and healing, blah, blah, blah – all that ooey-gooey, nice-sounding stuff that Puffy liked to mention with a serious face. There was something about having his hands occupied that freed his mind up to talking. Puffy said that it maybe took his brain out of hyper-vigilance mode, whatever that meant. All Tommy knew was that he’d started looking forward to therapy, just because he got to knit.
That was, until he realized he could knit outside of therapy, too. Then he went back to hating it just as much as before.
It was at that point, probably, that Tommy started to take this whole knitting thing seriously.
Suddenly, he had projects.
Now, Tommy’s first idea for a project had not been his first actual project. No, his first project had been a pair of socks that had turned out barely usable – mismatched and full of holes from dropped stitches. They’d been near unwearable, one sized for a child while the other hung loose even on Tommy’s sizeable feet, but they’d been warm and made by Tommy himself, so he held onto them, folded carefully in the corner of his clothing chest and distinct from the rest.
No, it wasn’t until after the third item Tommy had successfully crafted – the matter of success itself judged on the utility of the object, whether the sweater could be a sweater or a hat a hat without strangling the life out of its wearer – that he finally found himself drawing out the pattern for his original idea.
It took days to finish the design, simple as it was. It had to be perfect, was the thing, no stitch out of place, no chance of misaligning a row – his material was limited, this time; no room for second tries.
So, three months after he took up knitting and nearly as long since he’d started to enjoy it, Tommy stared into one of his chests at his chosen material and nearly threw his knitting needles out for good.
Instead, he picked up the blue wool from where it had sat in his chest for months now, collecting dust in its thick tufts, enough that it made his eyes sting and nose water – definitely for no other reason – and returned to Puffy.
“How do I make this into yarn?” Tommy blurted as soon as Puffy opened the door. He was shivering on the front step, not expecting to have to make the trip all the way to Snowchester out of nowhere.
Puffy stared at Tommy, then down at the blue wool he was holding out in front of him, her eyes widening. “Is this–”
“How do I make yarn?” Tommy interrupted, maintaining eye contact, his face molded into a frown. This wasn’t one of his therapy sessions. She couldn’t force him to talk about anything he didn’t want to, here.
Puffy seemed to come to that same conclusion, because she sighed, her expression softening. “Come in.”
They spent a couple hours in front of her fireplace, the crackling embers lighting their way as they spun the wool into yarn. Puffy showed him first, sat in front of the contraption and peddled as her hands held the wool steady, making sure it fed onto the spool in even strands.
Then, it had been Tommy’s turn, his hands taking the curly end of the strand and copying her motions, feeding and replacing the wool with shaking hands, his foot jolting the spool in haphazard motions. It became a steady motion eventually, the blocks of matted wool slowly spreading out into beautiful lengths of yarn that they then spun into perfect balls.
With the wool pulled taut through the strands of yarn, you could see how the blue wasn’t one solid color, but an array of shades – sapphire and cobalt and midnight blues all woven together with the errant bit of silver finding its way among them, like stars streaking across the night sky.
It was that view that greeted him when he finally left Puffy’s Snowchester cabin, the night lit only by the towering mansion in the distance with all its windows shining yellow.
Oh. That was another idea for a project.
Once Tommy had the yarn, the hard work began. The blue scarf took shape over the course of three weeks. It shouldn’t have taken that long, of course – the design was exceedingly simple, the knitwork as easy as completing row after row with simple and repetitive motions – but Tommy refused to allow even a single mistake, a single dropped stitch, to tarnish this most sacred project.
No, perfection was what it deserved, and so perfection was what he worked for.
Tommy was so used to things coming to ruin by his hand. He could never hold onto anything for long – not people, not pets, not his own belongings – all of it gone up in smoke before he could clutch tight enough to cause damage.
Knitting was somehow the exception to this. Instead of destruction, his hands were creation, items given newfound usefulness and beauty through his own skill.
He wasn’t convinced it would last, but he would use it to make this one thing. Just this one thing, and then things could go back to how they always were.
One month it took him, one month of painstaking work, his sweat soaked into the wool enough he worried it would smell like mud by the time it was done. It didn’t, to his relief, and as he wrapped the finished product around his neck, nose buried deep in the folds of it, he was assured he would never be without a bit of blue again.
xxx
Tommy’s next big project was a sweater for Tubbo’s brat, Michael.
While wandering near spawn, he’d come across a yellow sheep, the color of honey, rich and golden and perfect for that bee-loving fuck.
What he hadn’t planned on, however, was how much more difficult sweaters were than scarves. It took him just as long as the scarf, the blue material forever snug around his neck, this time rightfully so.
Turned out, sweaters had sleeves and a whole front and back section, not to mention the cowl, all of which needed to be completed separately, but with perfect symmetry, lest it be lopsided.
And no child of Tubbo’s was getting a lopsided sweater. Not if Tommy had anything to do with it.
So, the sweater had been a new challenge and another reason Tommy had almost given up this knitting thing altogether. But, eventually, it was finished, the tiny golden thing whole and shining in the sun as he carried it the long way to Snowchester, not wanting to risk soaking it in the water tunnel Tubbo had crafted.
Actually handing the sweater over to its intended giftees, however, was almost more frustrating than the making of it.
“What’s this, then?” Tubbo asked when he was handed the little bundle of yellow yarn.
“It’s a sweater, innit?”
“Yeah, I got that. But what for?”
Tommy glanced away, picking at the skin on the side of his nose absently. “That little shit kid of yours needs clothes, doesn’t he? You two dragged him out of the Nether and now he has to live in all this fucking snow and freezing cold. It’s practically fucking child abuse if you ask me.”
Tubbo held the sweater up appraisingly, the lighter bits of gold in the yarn glinting in the mid-afternoon light and the little bee patch Tommy had sewn into it at the last minute on full display. “It’ll probably be a bit big for him now, but he’ll grow into it soon enough,” Tubbo said. “Can you believe he’s already shot up two inches since we brought him home?”
“Guess he’ll take after Ranboob in the height department, then.”
Tubbo glared up at him – Ha! Irony – in a resigned sort of way, before folding the sweater and placing it next to him on the couch. Sweater tucked into a neat pile of gold, Tubbo grabbed his now lukewarm coffee and leaned back into the comfort of the plush pillows. “Where’d you get it from, then? It’s not one of our old ones from way back when, is it?”
Tommy scoffed, crossing his arms across his chest. “You really think this masterpiece is one of your dirty hand-me-downs? As if you could keep any of your shit in this kind of condition, with your little dirt-eating fingers, you wrongin.”
“Oy! If anything you were the one eating dirt, Mr. Rock Man.” Tubbo paused in taking a sip of his coffee and scrunched up his face. “Actually, d’you reckon it would be considered cannibalism if you ate dirt?”
“You’re wrong for that.”
“No, no, hear me out–”
“No, I simply won’t. I won’t hear. My ears will stop working and I’ll live forever without my hearing because you decided to bring up this horrible topic of conversation–”
“Oh, you’re so dramatic, honestly.” Tubbo rolled his eyes. “‘Cus if you think about it, right, you’re made of rocks. So if you eat rocks, it’s like eating your flesh.”
“No, no, that is not true. It’s just not–”
“It is, though!”
“No. No! Because by that logic, you eating animals would be cannibalism since you’re both made of flesh.”
Tubbo paused at that, thoughtful. “Okay. So, then, it would need to be another person made of rock for it to be cannibalism?”
“Yes!” A second passed, then Tommy’s brain caught back up to the conversation. “Wait, no! I’m not discussing with you the intricacies of how it would be feasible for me to be a cannibal!”
“Did I, uh, did I come at a bad time?”
Both boys on the couch glanced up to see Ranboo standing in the doorway to the living room, body leaning halfway in and halfway out. Leave it to Ranboo to be indecisive even in committing to entering a room.
Tommy scowled as Tubbo perked up, his grin softening at the sight of his husband. “Hi, Boo,” he greeted, saccharine tone a stark contrast to the frustrated shouting from only moments earlier. It made Tommy sick to his stomach, the aftertaste of the affection like eating too many sweets on an empty stomach.
“Come look what Tommy brought for Michael,” Tubbo continued, placing down his mug and reaching for the sweater.
Ranboo shuffled forward into the room, stopping and hovering awkwardly next to the large chair across from the couch when he met eyes with Tommy’s glare. His gaze quickly darted back over to where Tubbo was now holding up the sweater in question, eyes immediately going wide.
“Ooh, it’s so cute!” Ranboo cooed, rounding the arm of the chair and sitting down on its edge. “Can I see?” he asked, reaching for the sweater eagerly, nearly bouncing with his excitement.
“Sure.”
Tubbo handed it over and immediately Ranboo ran his long fingers over it. He seemed to melt at the feeling of the soft fabric. “It’s so soft! Michael’s gonna love it.”
If Tommy was steadfast in anything, it was his annoyance for the person that had stolen his best friend, but the way Ranboo so emotively showed appreciation for his creation was a near thing in dissipating it for just a split second, until Tommy got ahold of himself, deepening his scowl and crossing his arms for good measure.
He couldn’t be caught doing something as uncouth as liking Ranboo, now could he?
“Hey, you never did say where you got it,” Tubbo voiced as he took another sip of his coffee.
“Oh,” Tommy replied. He had forgotten that bit, hadn’t he? Somewhat of an important piece of information, when giving a handmade gift. “I made it.”
“What?!” Twin shouts echoed through the wide living space of the mansion, followed by Tubbo’s much quieter, “Ah, shit,” as his jostled mug spilled coffee across his lap.
“Boo, can you–”
“On it.”
Ranboo teleported to the kitchen and back again in a split second, shaking off the purple particles that hovered around him with the tea towel he now had in hand.
“Thank you,” Tubbo said as he took the towel from his husband, patting at his lap. “Now,” he continued once most of the mess was gone, “what’s this about you making this?”
“I made it,” Tommy answered. “I don’t know what’s so complicated about this.”
“But how? ”
“Knitting. Obviously.” Was Tubbo dense, all of sudden? It wasn’t that hard of a concept to understand.
Tubbo raised his eyebrows incredulously as he tossed the tea towel on the coffee table and faced Tommy again. “You? Knitting?”
“Yeah? And?”
He laughed then. “What, you got the grey hair and felt the need to complete the grandma look or something?”
“Rude! I’ll have you know knitting is a serious and difficult skill, Tubbo. ”
Tubbo just kept laughing, wiping at his eye as a tear threatened to leak. “Yeah, right, I’ll let my nan know she’ll have a new friend in you.”
Tommy glared. “Fine! See if I make a sweater for you, then.”
That shut him up immediately. “No,” he whined. “I want a sweater. Come on, I didn’t mean it.”
“No, no way, not after this utter disrespect. Honestly, I expect better from you, practically my brother. How could you insult me in such a way–”
“Uh,” Ranboo broke in, hand raised partway like he was in some school classroom. “I’d like a sweater.”
“Shut the fuck up , Ranboob.”
Against his better judgement, Tommy did end up making sweaters for the both of them. Not that they deserved it. The fuckers.