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It’s meant to be a joke.
“You need a hobby!” Stiles says. “One that doesn’t involve manhandling me, sheesh. Have you tried knitting?”
Derek rolls his eyes so hard it’s a wonder they don’t fall right out of his head.
But the thing is, Stiles is right. Now that Derek isn’t fighting for his life on a near constant basis, the fact of the matter is that he’s bored. He works out, he runs, he pummels a punching bag and pretends it’s Chris Argent’s face. But without anything to plan for, without a reason to strategize and investigate and slink around in the dead of night... he suddenly has more hours in the day than he knows what to do with.
So the idea sticks with him. And – he will never be sure how – he eventually finds himself in the arts and crafts department at Wal-Mart, staring at yarn.
“This is stupid,” he grumbles.
He picks out a ball of deep green yarn anyway. It’s soft and warm to the touch and there’s a simple scarf pattern on the label.
How hard could it be?
--
Pretty freakin’ hard, actually.
It turns out there’s a reason he’s never tried knitting before – it’s fucking stupid. It has its own secret language, comprised of nonsensical phrases like ‘knit one, purl two’, ‘cast on’, ‘cast off’, and Derek hadn’t exactly thought to pick up a Knitting-to-English dictionary. What is this, fiber arts or sailing? He can’t keep the loops on the knitting needles, and even when he does the yarn still gets tangled up on his fingers, the needles, and anything else it can wrap and knot around.
He looks at tutorials and watches instructional videos on YouTube, but all they do is leave him more confused. He drops stitches like hot potatoes. By the end of one very, very frustrating week he has a tiny square of lumpy, misshapen fabric.
He unravels it with a growl and throws it in the back of his closet, swearing to give up this ridiculous endeavor forever.
--
But the thing about Derek is that he’s physically incapable of quitting something once he’s started it, just because it’s hard. It might be the werewolf thing, the alpha thing, or maybe just a natural quirk of his charming personality (hah). All he knows is that he can’t back down from a challenge. And that pile of misshapen yarn? It’s a challenge.
So it only takes three days for him to dig it out of the back of his closet and try again.
--
It goes better this time. Not much, but a little. Enough that when he finally decides it’s either start over or rip it to shreds he chooses the ‘start over’ option, despite how tempting the idea of getting out his claws is.
He has to buy new yarn the third time. He picks red this time, bright like blood or the hood of a certain sweatshirt, and he’s not going to read into that, no thank you. It’s just the color that sticks out at him the most.
He’s improving all the time now, really getting the hang of the basics, at the very least. He’ll never admit it, not to anyone, but you know what? Stiles might be right. It’s kind of relaxing, when he doesn’t want to set it on fire.
Huh. Who knew?
--
It takes Derek two months, but at the end of it he has successfully completed a scarf, all in that bright red yarn. It’s a little lumpy and the fringe is uneven, but he still feels a sense of accomplishment and pride when he looks at it.
He leaves it curled on the end of Stiles’ bed. Doesn’t leave a note and sure as hell doesn’t say anything, but he knows it’s glaringly, embarrassingly obvious anyway.
He still leaves it.
--
“Oh my God, what is that… thing around your neck?” Lydia’s nose is wrinkled in disgust. She brushes her fingers against the scarf around Stiles’ neck as though afraid it might rub off its lack of charm on her.
Stiles’ cheeks are red, but Derek, from his vantage point behind a tree (and he is not lurking, or creeping, or whatever – he’s keeping an eye on his pack, which is a perfectly respectable endeavor, so Scott and Stiles and the rest of them can stop mocking him for it), can’t tell if it’s a blush or due to the crisp chill in the air. Stiles picks up the uneven ends and waves them in Lydia’s face. “What does it look like, genius? A scarf.”
“It’s hideous.”
“Yeah, well, it was a gift.” Stiles strokes his hands down the soft red yarn, and he’s smiling now. “Homemade, you know? I don’t care what it looks like. It’s… special.”
Derek bites the inside of his cheek to hold back a grin as he walks away. Time to buy more yarn.