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The idea had been sitting in the back of Collei's mind for three days.
She hadn't meant to keep thinking about it. She had watched Ranger Rana for maybe two minutes—three at the most—before she'd turned around and gone back to the hut. That was all. It wasn't like she'd wanted to learn. She had just been curious. Curiosity wasn't the same thing as wanting.
Except she kept thinking about the plush. It looked a bit like Amber's.
It had been small, the one Rana was making. Lopsided, honestly, one ear slightly larger than the other, the yarn a cheerful shade of orange that had no business being that bright in the middle of the forest. But Rana had held it like it was something precious, her fingers moving through the loops with the easy confidence of someone who had done this a hundred times, and there had been something about the smallness of it — a small, soft thing you made with your own hands — that had lodged itself somewhere in Collei's chest and refused to leave.
She could make something like that.
No you can't, said the other part of her brain, the louder part, the practical part that had kept her alive for years. Your hands shake. You'd ruin it.
This was true. Her hands shook. They had always shaken, long before she understood why—the Eleazar moving through her nerves like a slow tide, tightening her grip on some days and loosening it on others without any warning. Tighnari had explained it to her carefully, weeks ago now, with the same precise patience he applied to everything, and she had listened and understood and still, every time her fingers betrayed her mid-task, felt a hot spike of something that wasn't quite shame but lived next door to it.
She set down the small stone she'd been turning over in her hands—a habit she'd developed, something to do with her fingers when she couldn't sleep—and stared at the ceiling of her hut.
Ask him.
The thought arrived simple and direct, the way Tighnari himself spoke.
Collei's jaw tightened.
She didn't ask for help. Asking for help meant admitting you couldn't do something, and admitting you couldn't do something meant giving someone information about your weaknesses, and giving someone information about your weaknesses meant handing them something they could use later. That was how it worked.
That was always how it worked.
Except.
Except Tighnari had wrapped her arms with the careful attention of someone defusing something fragile. He had sat on the floor outside her door in the dark without asking for anything in return. He had offered her his ears—his ears—when she was falling apart, the most ridiculous and unexpectedly perfect thing anyone had ever done for her, and she had felt her breathing slow for the first time in what felt like years.
He wasn't going to use it against her.
She knew that. She knew it the way she knew the smell of rain coming before the clouds arrived—not because anyone told her, but because she had been paying attention, and the evidence was overwhelming, and she was, underneath everything, a person who trusted what she observed.
She just hated asking.
Tighnari was at his desk when she appeared in the doorway, which was normal. He was always at his desk. She had privately begun to wonder if he slept there.
He was writing something, his pen moving in those neat, deliberate lines she'd been watching for weeks now—the same lines she was slowly, painstakingly, beginning to replicate in her own crooked handwriting in the diary he'd given her. His ears were relaxed, tilted slightly outward in the easy angle she'd come to recognize as focused but not alarmed, and he didn't look up immediately, which she'd also come to understand wasn't rudeness. It was just Tighnari. He finished his thought first. He always finished his thought first.
"Collei," he said, still writing.
"Master Tighnari."
A pause. The pen stopped. He looked up, and his expression did the thing it sometimes did—a small, almost imperceptible adjustment, the professional composure making room for something a little warmer. His ears shifted slightly toward her.
"You're hovering."
"I'm standing in the doorway." she defended weakly.
"You've been standing in the doorway for approximately forty seconds without saying anything. That's hovering." He set down his pen. "What is it?" he asked softly.
Collei's fingers found each other behind her back. She pressed them together, feeling the faint tremor in her left hand, and made herself stop.
"That ranger," she said. "Rana. I saw her making something. A plush." She paused. Just say it. "I want to learn how."
Tighnari looked at her for a moment. She watched his face carefully, the way she watched every adult's face—for the flicker of dismissal, the barely-concealed amusement, the shift in posture that meant you're wasting my time—and found none of it. He just looked at her, steady and considering.
"Crocheting," he clarified.
"Is that what it's called?" she murmured, looking at her hands.
"Yes." He leaned back slightly in his chair. And noticed her gaze. "Your hands."
It wasn't a question. Collei's jaw tightened again, the old reflex, the door slamming shut—but she made herself leave it open this time, just barely.
"They shake," she said flatly. "I know. I'm telling you that because it'll probably make it harder. Not because I want—" She stopped. Reorganized. "I'm not saying I can't do it."
"I didn't say you couldn't." His tone was perfectly even. "I was going to say that I could help steady your hands if you needed it. With your permission, of course."
Something in Collei's chest, the tight-wound thing that lived there permanently, loosened a single notch.
"Okay," she said.
He produced yarn from somewhere—of course he had yarn somewhere, she was beginning to suspect Tighnari had everything somewhere—and a crochet hook, and cleared a small section of the low table near the window where the afternoon light came through in long, warm strips.
"Sit," he said, pulling up a cushion across from her. Not the chair behind his desk. The floor. He settled onto it with the ease of someone who spent considerable time at floor-level, which given how much of his research involved crouching in undergrowth, she supposed was accurate.
Collei sat cross-legged across from him and eyed the materials with the focused attention she gave most new things—cataloguing, assessing, filing. The yarn was soft. Softer than she expected. A warm brown color, nothing flashy.
"Why brown?" she asked.
"It was what I had." He glanced at her. "Did you have a color preference?"
She opened her mouth to say no and then thought about it for a half-second too long, and he watched her do it with the patience of someone who had all the time in the world and knew better than to rush her.
"Green," she said finally. "Maybe."
"I'll get green yarn next time." He held up the hook. "For today, brown. Pay attention."
He started with the basics — the slip knot, the chain stitch — demonstrating first with his own hands, quick and practiced, the hook moving through the loops with the same efficient precision he brought to everything. Collei watched intensely. She had learned early that watching carefully enough could substitute for a lot of things, and she applied that skill now, tracking the angle of his wrist, the way he kept the tension in the yarn consistent, the small adjustments of his fingers.
"Try," he said, handing her the hook.
She tried.
The yarn immediately did something wrong. She wasn't sure what, exactly — the loop was too tight, or not tight enough, or she'd gone through the wrong part of it entirely — and the knot she produced looked nothing like the clean chain he'd made.
She stared at it.
"That's a start," Tighnari said, and his tone was so perfectly, blandly neutral that she looked up sharply to check if he was being sarcastic. He wasn't. He was looking at her work with the same expression he gave everything — assessment without judgment.
"It looks nothing like yours."
"All first attempts look nothing like the teacher's. That's what first attempts are for." He tilted his head slightly. "Try again. Same motion."
She tried again. The yarn did a different wrong thing.
She tried a third time, and her left hand trembled on the hook mid-motion, and the stitch slipped entirely, and she felt the familiar hot flash behind her sternum — useless, clumsy, you already knew you couldn't — and pressed her lips together hard.
"May I?" Tighnari asked quietly.
She looked up. He had one hand extended, open, palm-up — not reaching, just offering. Waiting.
The old instinct said no. The part of her that had been paying attention for weeks said something different.
"...Yes," she said.
He shifted to sit beside her rather than across from her — not close enough to crowd, she noted, exactly the right distance — and reached over to guide her hands. His touch was light. Impersonal in the way that felt, paradoxically, more respectful than warmth would have — he was treating her hands like a student's hands, not a child's hands, not something fragile. Just hands that needed correction.
"Here," he said, adjusting her grip on the hook. "And here — keep this finger here, it controls the tension. You don't need to grip so hard. The hook does the work."
She didn't say anything. She was paying attention to his hands over hers — the steadiness of them, the way they moved her fingers into position and then released, not holding on, not lingering.
"Now try."
She tried. And the stitch, this time, went through the right loop.
It wasn't pretty. The tension was uneven and the chain was slightly twisted. But it was a chain, and it was hers, and she stared at it for a moment with an expression she quickly neutralized.
"Better," Tighnari nodded.
"It's still crooked."
"Yes. You'll make it less crooked with practice."
She looked at him sideways. "That's not very encouraging."
"I thought you preferred honest assessments to empty encouragement."
She had never said that out loud to him. She turned back to the yarn so he wouldn't see her face do the thing it was doing.
"...Yes," she said. "I do."
"Then: that is genuinely better than your third attempt, and your fourth attempt will be better than this one." A pause. "Keep going."
They worked through the afternoon.
Tighnari returned to his desk at some point — he had a report to finish, he said, in a tone that implied the report was overdue and he held it personally responsible — but he glanced over regularly, and twice came back to correct her grip or demonstrate a new stitch, and each time he moved beside her there was the same careful, measured distance, the same impersonal precision.
Collei barely noticed the hours passing.
This was unusual. She normally tracked time the way she tracked everything else in a space — constantly, automatically, knowing the exits and the angles and the rhythms of whoever she was with in case she needed to leave quickly. But the yarn was demanding enough of her attention that the vigilance dropped, not all the way but enough, and the afternoon light moved across the table in long slow bars, and the forest outside made its patient sounds, and she kept working.
Her left hand shook twice. She paused when it did, breathed, waited for it to steady, and kept going. She didn't comment on it. Neither did Tighnari.
By the time the light shifted to gold, she had something.
It was — well. It was something. Round in a general sense, with a head that attached to a body in a way that suggested they were related, and two ears that she had attempted three times and then accepted as they were. One was slightly longer than the other. The yarn was uneven in places, tighter where she'd gripped too hard and looser where she'd been distracted.
It was, objectively, a little lopsided.
It was also, undeniably, a plush. A small, soft thing she had made with her own hands.
Collei stared at it sitting in her palm.
She didn't mean to make the sound she made. It was very small — barely a sound at all, really, more of a sharp exhale through her nose — but it came with the expression she hadn't quite managed to suppress in time, the one that pulled at the corners of her mouth before she could get control of it, and her eyes went wide and then wider, and for approximately three seconds, twelve-year-old Collei looked exactly like a twelve-year-old.
"It has ears," she put it over her head, so Tighnari could see.
"It does," Tighnari agreed. He had turned from his desk. His own expression was doing something she couldn't quite categorize — something quieter than a smile but in the same family as one, something that lived in the slight ease around his eyes and the angle of his ears, which had tilted forward in a way she had learned meant pleased.
"They're uneven."
"They are."
"One is longer."
"By approximately four millimeters, yes."
She turned it over in her hands. The yarn was warm from being worked, soft under her fingers. One of the ears flopped slightly to the side. She pressed it back up and it stayed for a moment before flopping again.
The sound she made this time was not controlled at all. It was a laugh — short and surprised, more air than sound, the kind that escapes before you've decided to let it — and she clapped her other hand over her mouth immediately, her eyes going wide at her own treason. Now you're going to get punished, you idiot. The voice in her head said.
Tighnari said nothing. When she looked at him, his expression had not changed, but she had learned to read him in the way you learned to read weather — in the small things, the barely-perceptible shifts — and there was something in the set of his face right now that she could only describe as quietly, genuinely glad.
Not smug. Not look what I did for you. Just glad, in the simple and uncomplicated way of someone watching something good happen.
It made her feel strange. A warm kind of strange. The kind she still didn't entirely know what to do with.
She looked back down at the plush. The floppy ear. The slightly round body and the lopsided head and the yarn that was too tight in some places and too loose in others.
I made this, she thought. With my hands. My hands that shake.
"I'm going to make another one," she said. Her voice came out more certain than she expected. "A better one. The ears will be even."
"They will," Tighnari said, with the same calm certainty he used for botanical facts, like this was simply a known thing. "You'll practice the tension in the chain stitch first. Tomorrow, if you want."
She nodded. Her hands curled around the small plush, careful, the way you held something you didn't want to drop.
"Master Tighnari."
"Yes?"
She wasn't looking at him. She was still looking at the plush, at the floppy ear and the uneven stitches and the small soft shape of the thing her hands had made.
"...Thank you."
The silence that followed was comfortable in the way that silences between them had slowly, incrementally, over weeks of careful distance and unhurried patience, become comfortable.
"You're welcome, Collei," he said, and went back to his report.
She sat for a while longer in the gold afternoon light, turning the small lopsided plush over in her hands, and did not try very hard to get rid of the smile.