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The pack, unfortunately, ran into a bit of a pickle on their latest assignment. They were stranded at Lakeside Stable in Faron Jungle until further notice. 'Notice' being either Impa getting around to returning Time's increasingly frustrated calls or else whenever the pack healed enough from their injuries to make their own way to hospitable territory on horseback. Wars and Four already futilely scoured the surrounding jungle for an abandoned wagon to fix up after the stable master regretfully informed them all his carts and wagons were rented out to fruit harvesters.
All five of them collected an assortment of bumps, bruises, and stitches, but Sky and Legend were the worst off. While everyone else was able to start pacing around the stable grounds after a few days, filled with nerves and worries though they may be, Sky and Legend were still confined to their beds. Sky's left ankle was nastily sprained escaping an electric lizalfos, and then not an hour later he'd broken his right tibia tumbling down a crumbling temple when the stone block disintegrated under him. Legend had a dark bruise across his back from being thrown into a wall, though what really kept him in bed was magic exhaustion thanks to burning through most of his reserves protecting everyone from said electric lizalfos upon which they stumbled. The stable master had, quite kindly, given them use of a little private room for the duration of their stay.
The little room was previously used to store excess tack and the odds and ends that tend to accumulate at a stable. It still smelled like old leather and horses. It was also quite small. So small, in fact, that two beds nearly filled it entirely, with just enough room between them for someone to walk.
Legend was glad to not be stuck in the main room anymore. After about a day of random travelers coming over to chat about this and that and getting real nosy about what happened, he'd been ready to scream and beg Time to just toss him over the back of a horse already and let him make his own way home. At least in this little room, he didn't have to deal with unwanted visitors. He did, however, have to deal with a roommate.
He was loath to speak ill of anyone—that was definitely a lie—well, then, he was loath to speak ill of a packmate—better—but he was about at his wit’s end with Sky.
Really, he was at his wits end with being stuck in a room with only a tiny window for light, confined to a bed because he couldn't stay on his feet for longer than a minute without breaking out in a sweat. This frustration, understandably, made it harder to handle every other little irritation.
And Sky could be so irritating.
For example, right now, Sky was sitting up in bed, propped up with a few spare pillows. In his lap sat what was possibly the ugliest ball of yarn in existence in the history of Hyrule, and he was using two long needles to turn the yarn into a hideous lump of something vaguely poncho-shaped. The needles clacked and scraped against each other at regular intervals, steadily grating on Legend's last nerve.
Goddess, he wished the pack had a healer. That wouldn't do him much good right now, but it would free him of Sky.
"Din's left little toe," Legend finally exclaimed, glaring up at the ceiling. "Can you give it a break already?"
Sky's knitting needles kept clicking steadily along. "I'm in the middle of a row," he said, by which he meant 'please don't talk to me or I'm going to miscount.'
Legend really didn't care if he dropped a loop or slipped a knot or whatever he called it at the moment. "You've been doing that all morning," he groaned, gaze tracing a dusty spiderweb in the corner of the room he could see for the umpteenth time. "Aren't you bored yet? Isn't your carpal tunnel acting up by now?"
Sky paused for long enough to stretch his wrists and shake out his hands. "Nope," he reported happily. “I do wish I’d thought to bring my compression gloves, though.”
Of course, it was not as though they’d planned to have this kind of down time when packing.
The clicking resumed.
The thought crossed Legend's mind with all the certainty of a doomed man that he was going to go mad if he laid here listening to that all day. Which was exactly what was going to happen if Sky had his way.
Sky leaned forward, adjusting the slowly deflating ball of yarn. He winced and sat back again, rubbing gingerly at his thigh above the splint. Sighing and relaxing back into the pillows after a minute, he carried on as if Legend had asked, "Dear Idoo very nicely lent me their knitting needles and Heshu has been so kind and considerate to everyone that I simply couldn't say no to helping her finish this project in time for her grandmother's seventy-sixth birthday. I mean, seventy-six is such an accomplishment! She deserves to have something warm and spun by her granddaughter's own hands!"
Legend blinked at the dried out husk of a fly trapped in the long-abandoned web. "Who, the actual fuck, is Hishu?"
"Heshu," Sky corrected easily. "She looks after the horses stabled here permanently, but she's from Lurelin Village. Shorter than average, thick brown hair, eyelashes to make Wars envious. Surely you remember her; she spent the first day looking after you because no one in the pack was up to it."
Legend considered that. "No, doesn't ring a bell."
"How can you just not remember someone who spent hours wiping your brow and made sure you had enough to eat and drink out of the goodness of her heart?"
A rather self-explanatory question, for all those reasons. Also because she'd had to help him get to the rudimentary bathroom outside, an event he was forcefully blotting from his memory.
"What, are you in love with her?" He asked crankily.
"You don't have to be in love to be nice," was Sky’s trite answer.
Legend let it lie for a bit. Eventually the annoyance and boredom—though mostly the boredom if he could be honest, which he couldn't—got the better of him and he said, "Sky, if I have to lay here and hear you count to twenty one more time I am going to take those sticks and break them over your head."
Sky spared a moment to give him a dubious look, then cheerily suggested, "Well, why don't I teach you how to do it, then?"
Legend blinked, scrunched his face up, and finally looked over at Sky. "What?"
"You’re sick of being stuck in bed, and I can't blame you. Honestly, I don't know how you've gone this long without something to do. I'd have dragged myself out of here days ago if I had to just lay in bed." He hefted the knitting needles, showing off the current eye-sore. He'd finished two other projects already, but Legend had no idea what they'd been because he was both too drained and not stir-crazy enough to care. "This is just the thing you need."
Legend scoffed. "I've been counting to twenty since I was three, I don't need anymore practice."
Sky acknowledged the very humorous joke with an eye roll. "Knitting is a lot more than just counting, you know. Depending on the pattern, there's math and thinking in three dimensions. It's really quite stimulating."
"Absolutely rivetting, I'm sure," Legend said, dripping sarcasm. "You're the picture of intellectual prowess right now."
The jab did not find its mark, but it might have gotten close because it took Sky a moment more than usual to say anything. "Sounds like you think you won’t be good at it."
Legend pushed himself up on his elbows so he could roll onto his side enough to face his roommate. His back protested. "No, I think it would be boring."
"Counting to twenty too hard for you?"
"No," Legend said, growing indignant. "I could do it if I wanted to. But I'm not ten years old, so I don't."
"Prove it," Sky challenged.
For a moment, just a moment, Legend almost started counting. He saved himself by changing the 'one' into, "W-well I would, but you only have the one set of needles."
Sky's grin was concerningly victorious. "I'll fix that."
He set the poncho and yarn aside, pivoted to the edge of the bed, and stood. It was… not very graceful. The splint immobilized his right leg below the hip, making it functionally useless for getting upright. He grabbed desperately for his crutch as his left leg took his weight, wedging the stick between the beds to lever himself up with his arms. Pain flickered across his face with the first shuffling steps and Legend almost demanded that he get back in bed before he could make anything worse. But the room was so small that by the time he'd opened his mouth, Sky was already opening the door and asking someone sweetly for another pair of knitting needles, one arm locked around the crutch and the other in a death grip on the edge of the door.
"Thank you," he beamed at whoever handed him two shining, slender needles. He closed the door and turned around, prize clutched in one hand, expression saying it might not have been worth the price.
"Get back in bed, you idiot," Legend hissed, "before you set off Time's worry sensor and he comes in here and smothers us."
Time would definitely make them both lay absolutely still and do absolutely nothing, insisting they have complete and utter rest for however long it took him to get them out of here and to proper care. If he could make them sleep through will alone, he would, and Legend had no doubt that he wouldn't be allowed to spend more than a few minutes awake for the next week.
(Under better circumstances, Time also should have been on bed rest with limited activity for at least a few more days. A lucky strike on his blind side left him with a gash across his abdomen that needed approximately thirty stitches to close. Unfortunately, by his second unanswered call to Impa he couldn’t bear staying in one spot.)
Sky collapsed onto the soft mattress, groaning as he heaved his splinted leg up and got settled.
"Here," he panted, offering the needles in the small empty space between the beds.
Legend took them, practically snatching the tools away in his determination to prove Sky wrong. All he had to do was put loops on a stick, how hard could it be?
He held out his other hand. "Yarn."
Sky selected a ball from his collection of lumpy options. "This'll be good," he said, pressing the gray yarn into Legend's demanding hand. "It's going to cling a bit, but I think it's one of Heshu's later skeins so it's more consistent. She's getting really good at spinning!"
Legend rolled his eyes at the habitual praise of someone who wasn't even around to hear. He poked at the yarn, searching for a free end to pull.
"Oh no, not that end," Sky corrected when he saw Legend unwinding the ball. "It's so much easier to work from the inside."
He leaned over, reaching for the yarn, fingers just short of brushing it. Legend took grudging pity on his wan expression and passed it back to him. Picking through the layers, Sky delicately worked two fingers into the ball's core and pulled out the other end.
"There," he said, giving it back to Legend. "It won't roll away from you so easily if you use this end."
Legend took the yarn and needles, holding them in clenched fists as he tried to imagine how to start. There had to be at least one slip knot somewhere, he was sure of that. He was not about to ask for help.
Whether or not he needed it, Sky launched into an explanation.
"It'll be easier if you hold the needles a little looser, like this." He demonstrated by picking up his set, fingers wrapped gently around the needles, holding them mostly with his thumb and first two fingers of each hand, free end of the yarn laying over his left hand and twisted once around his pinky finger. "Gives a little more flexibility and reduces hand fatigue."
Legend imitated the hold. The long needles feeling strangely unwieldy in his hands for their slight weight. The needles really were unreasonably long. Did people get so bored after a while that they needed the risk of accidentally whacking themselves in the face to keep their attention?
"Oh," Sky realized. "It will be easier to get started if I demonstrate how to cast on, it can be a bit tricky."
Legend waited for him to fly through the last of the round and move the lump of a poncho onto a single needle.
"Okay, how to cast on," Sky said once he had a free needle. He grabbed a second ball of yarn and pulled out the end. "The width of your project depends on the number of stitches—well, and the yarn and needle size, but you only have one size of yarn and needle. So, really, the only thing that matters is the number of stitches. We have to cast on the right number of stitches from the beginning." He looked at Legend's needles. "Those are a good size. How big of a square do you want to make?"
"A square?" Legend said with disdain. "How about something with actual, practical use?"
"Squares are fundamental building blocks and great for practice," Sky insisted. "They're versatile and easy to scale up and down once you have the hang of it. You can make all kinds of things with squares: blankets, hotpads, dish towels—"
"Dish towels?" Legend made a face. What did Sky take him for? A grandmother?
"There is little more useful than a good, knitted dish towel. Tell me if you disagree next time you do dishes."
The point of this entire thing was to prove that he could knit, not get dragged into tedious conversations about everything Sky loved to make. "Fine, a square."
Sky took a moment to recall where he'd been before the tangent. "I think five inches would be a good starting size. That's enough to see how consistent you are on each row and would be very manageable on those needles."
"Great. So, casting on." Legend impatiently nudged him onward.
Sky measured out a length of yarn about as long as his forearm. "There's a lot of ways to do this, but the longtail method is good for beginners, and everyone, honestly. I use it on a lot of projects still. The tail needs to be just over three times the length of the square, so fifteen inches for this."
Not only could Legend count to twenty without a problem, he could do basic math on his own, too. Sky did not need to tell him what three times five equaled. He was suffering from magic exhaustion, not idiocy.
"Then we make a slip knot and slide it onto a needle," Sky carried on blithely, unaware the Legend already did that part and was chewing at the bit to stop himself from telling him to hurry up and get on with it.
Legend was, secretly, in his heart of hearts, glad he held his tongue. In the next moment, Sky grabbed the free end of the yarn in his left hand and did something complex with both hands that involved the needle swapping between hands and at the end a new loop sat on the needle next to the first one, simple and tidy and inexplicably there.
"Oh, sorry," Sky smiled into Legend's disgruntled glare. "Should I do that slower for you?"
Alright, maybe his impatience hadn't gone unnoticed. Whatever. He was on forced bed rest, he could act as crabby as he wanted.
The movement was only slightly comprehensible the second time. Something with making multiple loops of yarn around the needle, but Legend couldn't follow how it ended up creating only one loop at the end. Which was ridiculous. 'Casting on' was clearly just about looping and pulling yarn in a particular order, it should not give him any problem.
He fumbled his hands into the starting position, yarn grasped in the left hand, looping over his thumb, needle in his right hand. Next, he needed to… slide the needle into the loop around his thumb and… tighten it?
"Great, now—wait, don't pull it tight yet," Sky interrupted himself, reaching a hand toward Legend like he wanted to physically stop him from making a mistake. "Swap the needle to your left hand and use your right hand to wrap the working yarn around the needle, back to front, in front of the loop and snug it down."
Legend's lips pressed into a thin line as he followed Sky's lead.
"Yes, yes! Just like that," Sky praised. "And now, needle back to right hand, slide the loop around your thumb over the tip of the needle, push the stitches back down, and pull the long end to secure the new stitch."
Every movement felt awkward and he fumbled far more than he'd ever admit, but in the end, two loops sat securely on the needle.
"Fantastic! Keep doing that until you just have a few inches left on the long end."
Legend contemplated the free end of the yarn. Twelve inches of anything never felt so horribly long. But he couldn't sit here and groan about it because it was literally only putting loops on a stick, and it was dull and childish and absolutely a waste of his time but definitely not technically challenging. He went haltingly onward, fumbling the needle between his hands and pulling on the ends of the yarn as Sky restarted the poncho.
When he accidentally pulled two stitches off the end of the needle while flipping the loop around his thumb over the tip, something hot and embarrassed flashed in his chest and neck, but Sky just said, "Oh, I hate when that happens. Got startled one time and managed to undo four inches."
Somehow, Legend managed to not kick the ball of yarn onto the floor out of frustration. He considered it, but doing so felt like a bit of an overreaction to undoing two measly little loops. So he settled for glaring the needle into submission and continuing.
The end of the yarn steadily shrunk until only three inches dangled from the needle. Legend had a less than tidy collection of stitches, but at least he'd finished and could move on to what would likely be an equally mind-numbing step.
"Very good," Sky said, setting down his needles to look.
Legend bit his tongue and managed to grumble instead of snapping, "I'm not a kit."
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
Sky offered him one of his vague smiles. "Okay, now that you've cast on, you're ready to start knitting. There are two basic stitches in knitting and we'll start with the knit stitch, which you were actually kind of doing to cast on. You'll need both needles now. And switch which hand the working needle is in, so you can use your dominant hand."
Legend picked up the other needle, a question starting to nag at the back of his mind.
"Instead of making a loop around your thumb with the yarn, you're going to insert the working needle—that’s the needle without any stitches yet—into the last stitch, front to back, like this." Sky held his work so that Legend could see how he slid the needle into the loop from the bottom, guiding it with his fingertip. "Then, wrap the yarn around the working needle, back to front, bring the needle back to the front and slide the old stitch up and over the other needle and snug it down just like you did for casting on."
While still awkward, Legend found that using the second needle instead of his thumb didn't trip him up too much as he made the first handful of knit stitches to work the line of loops from one needle to the other. Yeah, this knitting thing was definitely easy.
"You're doing great, just be careful to not tighten the stitches too much, or you'll have a hard time getting the needle in on the next round." Sky turned his attention back to the needles in his lap.
The question bouncing around in Legend's head finally jumped out in impatient tones. "Why do you keep calling them that?"
Sky looked up. "Sorry. Calling what what?"
Legend pointed at the loops on his needles. "These aren't 'stitches'. They're loops. Stitches are a sewing thing."
"A lot of different crafts call their basic building blocks a stitch, actually," he said. "Knitting, crochet, embroidery, tatting—they all use stitches."
"Why?" Legend asked, nonplussed. "That's like calling everything used in construction a brick. It doesn't make any sense."
Sky thought about that. "I guess it is a little odd? But that's the word everyone uses. Stitch."
Legend grumbled something about a lack of creativity and went back to knitting—making knit stitches—whatever—until all the stitches were on one needle again.
"That's the knit stitch," Sky said, pausing his work. "The other stitch is the purl stitch. It's basically a reversed knit stitch, which can be a little confusing at first so don't worry if it takes you a while to get the pattern down."
Legend doubted that. He could definitely remember the difference between two things.
Sky demonstrated the purl stitch twice, like it was magically somehow harder than all the knit stitches Legend just did. At the end, he repeated, "Just remember that with purling the needle goes back to front and the yarn goes front to back over the top of the needle, not the bottom. It took me so long to get that right when I first learned."
With a conscious effort, Legend managed to not say anything rude about that, though several options sprung to mind. The days of confinement were making him irritable and Sky didn't deserve to take the brunt of that just because they were in the same room. Even if he had annoyed him into learning how to knit in the first place.
Legend reversed the work. Swapping the needles so he once again had the working needle in his right hand, he began the first row of purls. The first two purl stitches went fine, but on the third stitch he wrapped the yarn the wrong way around the needle. He caught the mistake before moving the stitch to the other needle and fixed it, scolding himself silently. That was definitely just a one-off thing. He could remember the difference between two stitches. Easy. He paid a little more attention to each stitch after that, careful to do them right.
Finally, after more time than he cared to admit, he reached the end of the row.
"Excellent," Sky enthused. "Now you know the two basic stitches of knitting: knit and purl. Everything else just builds on that."
"Knit and pearl," Legend repeated under his breath.
"Purl," Sky said.
"What?"
"It's called purl, not pearl."
Legend blinked at him. "You just said pearl twice."
"No." Sky shook his head. "They're slightly different."
"I don't think so."
Sky sighed like he wasn't the unreasonable one here.
Legend bristled a little at that. "Well then why the fuck is it called pearl?"
"It just is. You knit, and you purl."
"First stitch, now pearl. You knitting people need to pick words that actually make sense so you sound less kittish."
Sky straightened his habitually lax posture a little at that, smiling dimming by several degrees. "The fiber arts make up some of the oldest traditions in the world. Kitting is several thousand years old, so you're just going to have to accept that we use some unusual words. Runes aren't exactly free of strange terms, either."
"I know the etymology," Legend shot back, suddenly feeling like he had to defend runology as an academic field of study. Which was ridiculous. He was talking to a guy who literally spent his downtime making towels and sweaters like someone’s granny.
"Fine, yes, the terms are odd." Sky said and went back to his project.
Legend waited for a minute but Sky didn't say anything, studiously focused on his own work, counting stitches under his breath. He waited for a bit longer.
"So," he said at length. "What's next?"
Sky let a deep breath out through his nose. "Just keep going, alternating rows of knit and purl to get used to it."
"Okay," Legend said slowly. He swapped the needles between hands again and began to knit.
He did six or seven rows, the square-to-be slowly getting longer before he paused to inspect his work. It was kind of chunky and uneven, but he could blame the yarn for that because it had lengths that were a little thicker or thinner than average. It also looked like it had gotten a little narrower as he worked, but he could write that off as a result of the irregular yarn. What he couldn't blame on the yarn was the blip in the middle of the side that looked like a bunch of v's. He flipped it over and found that the blip was also present on the other side that looked like rows of dashes.
"Sky," he hazarded and there definitely wasn't any trepidation in him when he said it. "What's this?"
"One moment," Sky said, finishing a count of twenty before turning to him with his usual level of interest regained. "Oh, yes, looks like you knit when you should have purled, or purled when you should have knit, depending on what row you were on. Really easy mistake to make. You could frog back and fix it if you want, but this is just practice so honestly I wouldn't bother." He touched a stitch currently on the needle. "But it looks like you did it here, too. It's just three stitches so if you want to know how to fix it, we can tink it."
Yes, of course, Legend wanted to go back and correct the mistake. Much as he hated to leave the other one where it was for anyone to see, he had to agree that he'd rather not lose all the progress.
Sky showed him how to undo stitches and work them back onto the other needle, throwing in a cryptic warning about not dropping a stitch. Legend made a mental note not to do whatever that was as, apparently, a crochet hook was needed to fix that mistake and he really was not prepared to learn a second ridiculous craft today.
"There you go," Sky said once Legend was knitting again. "Easy peasy. There's really nothing to fixing something if it's just a few stitches back. That's why it's important to pay attention and catch the little mess-ups before they get buried. Overall, you really are doing quite well! Some people have a hard time keeping their hands on both needles at first, but your form has hardly even slipped. Good job!”
Legend ignored the excessive praise and resolved to keep a closer watch on the stitches, even if it was silly to have to pay so much attention to something so simple. He was not going to ever admit to repeating the mantra of 'needle back to front, yarn front to back' steps in his head as he went. Now that he was paying more attention, he couldn’t entirely ignore the ache building in his hands.
"So," Sky said as they worked. "You're doing a pattern called stockinette. All the knits are on one side and the purls are on the other. The side with the knits, the little v's, is the right side, the side that would be on the outside if you were making something wearable. The purl side is called the wrong side, because—well—because it's the side you don't want people to see, I suppose. Stockinette stitch is fairly quick to do because you just have to keep track of what row you're on to know if you knit or purl, you don't have to count stitches so much. And it looks nice. Simple and nice. But, you'll notice," he pointed at where Legend's work was starting to curl up on itself, "that it tends to roll. Doing a border of, say, only knits helps to stop that. So, if you're feeling ready for a little more complexity, you can add a border and see how it looks as you go. I recommend doing the first and last set of three stitches as knits."
Legend looked down and furrowed his brow. "It's not going to be consistent if I add a border now."
"That's alright," Sky reassured. Legend thought it was most definitely not 'alright' to change the pattern partway through. It'd look weird. "You're just doing this for practice anyway. We'll frog it at the end so Heshu can have her yarn back."
Legend didn't like how that sounded. "That's the second time you've said that." He realized he sounded accusatory. "What, in the twilight realm, is 'frogging'?"
Sky had the audacity to laugh. "When you undo a seam or unravel something, it's usually called 'ripping'. When you have to undo a lot of rows, it's called 'frogging' because you 'rip it'. Which sounds like, like a frog. Ribbit."
Legend could not believe Sky was making a joke right now. He stared, mouth slightly agape. "You mean, I have to undo this at the end?"
He'd already put so much time into making this curling, imperfect stockinette rectangle, and he knew that at this rate it was going to take at least an hour to turn it into a square. How could Sky so casually expect him to get rid of it after all of that? Sure, he knew it had to be just as hideous and lumpy as everything Sky was making, but that didn't mean he wanted to destroy it. Just, maybe, put it in the bottom of a chest in his room where nobody else would accidentally stumble upon it.
Sky carried on, blithely unaware of Legend spiraling into despair over his stupid, boring, waste of time knitting. "Frogging is actually rather satisfying. Because the stitches are built on top of each other, once you pull the needle out and give the end a tug, it comes apart super easily. The yarn's usually a little wavy from being under tension. It's pretty. Of course, that's also why you have to worry about dropping a stitch and getting a run, because all of the stitches under the one you drop were relying on it to keep them together. So, when you lose that, well, there go all the others."
Legend didn't pick up on most of what Sky said. He stared down at his needles and said, feeling a little disconnected from what was happening in front of him, "Right. So, I guess I'll do a border."
"Give it a go!" Sky said far too brightly.
Legend did, and while the border stopped the piece from rolling further, he hated it just a little bit in his heart. His grip on the needles and yarn grew tenser with each row.
The light coming through the window shifted, moving across the room.
Legend only had about an inch of length to go when he realized that it was becoming steadily harder and harder to get his needle into each stitch. He pressed on and in almost no time at all couldn't get the needle in at all, no matter how hard he pushed or wiggled or tried guiding the pointy tip with the pad of his finger. Eventually, he had to admit defeat, index finger throbbing from the number of times he jabbed the needle into the soft flesh.
"I'm stuck," he forced himself to admit.
"What do you mean?" Sky asked, looking over.
"I," he sighed. "I can't get my needle into the stitch."
"Oh, sounds like a tension problem." Sky reached across the gap between the beds. "Can I have a look?"
Legend handed it over, watching Sky fiddle with and gently tug at stitches here and there.
At last, Sky gave his verdict. "Yeah, your stitches got too tight. That usually happens from putting too much tension on the yarn as you wrap it or slip the stitch over, or you might have been making the next stitches on the tapered part of the needle instead of the shaft. There's not a lot you can do about it now without frogging. It looks like it's been going on for a while and just barely became too tight to work, so the shape is going to be a little skiwampus unless we go back to about here." He pointed to about an inch and a half down the length. "But, the needles I'm using are a smaller gauge, so if you want I can probably finish off this row and get you restarted with looser stitches."
"Sure, that. I guess." Legend agreed and there really was no reason for him to be getting so emotional over this. It was literally a worthless piece of knitting that he was going to have to destroy in the end anyway. He didn't even care about it. This was definitely just the magic exhaustion getting to him. He'd spent too much time sitting up, is all. Wore himself out. Maybe Time had the right idea and he should just lay back down and go back to doing nothing because apparently he was in no fit state if he had to hold back tears over something so childish.
Sky freed a needle and set about fixing Legend's mistake while he sat there, silent and feeling miserable for himself.
"There you go," Sky said at last, handing the needles back to him. "You're good to go. Just try to keep the tension a little bit lighter, okay?"
"Okay," Legend agreed, consciously reminding himself not to hunch over as he worked.
At last, after both too much and not enough time, Legend reached the end. From one needle hung an approximation of a square. It was lumpy in some places, too narrow in the middle, curling at the bottom, and had more blips from mixing up knit and purl than he cared to admit. But… but he'd made it. Silly as that sounded even in his own head. He'd made this with his own two hands, a couple sticks and string. This was something he could hold and see and feel itching between his fingers. He made this.
And he had to destroy it. Which was fine. He didn't even like it. Knitting was boring and dull and should not take as much focus as he'd given it. He was glad nobody but Sky would ever know that he did this, that he knitted something. He'd proved that he could do it and now he could get rid of the evidence and never do it again.
Even if he really wanted to tuck the square away in his rucksack and keep it in his room.
"You did it!" Sky said, and, really, he didn't need to sound so thrilled and surprised by the fact. Of course Legend did it. It was just knitting.
"Not bad for a first go," Sky continued. "You didn't drop or slip any stitches. The muscle memory of knit and purl will come with time and practice, and you caught most of the mistakes anyway. Well done! Want to show it off before we frog it?"
Legend's mouth fell open, mortified. "No!"
No, he was not letting anyone else see it. Sky was more than enough. The rest of the pack had no reason to know that he, a grown man, even touched a pair of knitting needles, let alone learned to use them. Hylia, he could imagine the look on Wars’ face if he saw this, the well-deserved teasing. No, no, best to be rid of it before that could happen.
Legend yanked the needle out of the stitches.
Sky's eyes went wide. "Careful!" Then his mind appeared to catch up to his eyes. "Oh," he said with relief. "Do you really want to frog it already?"
"What else am I supposed to do?" Legend demanded.
"Take a minute to enjoy it?" He offered. "You put a lot of time into it."
"Doesn't Heshu need her yarn back?" Legend gritted out.
"Not immediately," Sky soothed, eyes looking at his face and then darting away. "Unless Time gets through to Impa we're stuck here for at least a few more days at best. There really is no rush."
Legend took a deep breath, hating how it trembled. That better not be the prick of tears in his eyes. "I don't see a reason to wait around, not like it's going to be any different tomorrow."
Sky cast about for something else. "Oh! Let me teach you how to finish the end, at least. It will be nice to go through the whole process, start to finish, on one thing."
Legend glowered down at the square resting in his hands, one end now a series of loose loops threatening to fall apart. It would be better to just get rid of the whole thing at once, like ripping off an adhesive bandage, but he really didn't want to do it.
"Okay," he finally said. "How do you finish the end?"
With a reassuring smile, Sky pointed to the needles. "Start by putting the needle back through the stitches."
He walked Legend through the process of getting the loops back on without twisting them, voice still happy and light like Legend hadn't just about broken down into tears in front of him. Over knitting.
"Now we can cast off," Sky hummed when the square was once again resting on the needle.
Legend worked his way through, knitting two stitches before slipping the first one over the second and off the needles entirely until at last there was only one stitch left on the needle. He felt… remarkably steadier when he looked over at Sky and asked, "Now?"
"Break the tail from the skein, slip it through the last loop and pull it snug."
Legend gave the yarn a hard tug between his hands. It snapped at a weak point. A moment later, he had his square sitting in his lap, completely disconnected from the needles, little tails of yarn trailing from two corners.
Sky didn't say much after that, he just made a happy sound in his throat and turned his attention back to the poncho growing in his lap.
Legend's eyes felt gritty and he wiped at them discretely. His body was wrung out and achy. His wrists and fingers complained at every movement. His elbows twinged. His back told him he'd been upright for far too long. He felt tired, more worn out than he'd been since the first couple days at the stable.
He set the yarn and needles aside, adjusted the pillow and laid down. A groan escaped his lips as his back relaxed into the mattress. In no time at all, between one slow blink and the next, he fell asleep, the square tucked safely in one sore hand.
Sky watched him sleep for a few minutes, letting him truly sink into restful oblivion before reaching over and retrieving the needles and yarn so they wouldn't get inadvertently kicked to the floor. Then he continued on his project, pausing every so often to relax and stretch out his joints.
He wished he never said anything about frogging the square. It hadn't seemed like a big deal at the time seeing as how Legend was only doing it because he egged him into it and would probably go back to his typical scorn of the fiber arts as soon as he was up and around, and Sky hadn't wanted to take Heshu's best yarn. He'd thought the increasing tension in Legends movements and voice were because he was trying to not snap so much at Sky for being irritating. When he looked over and realized Legend was on the verge of tears, he hadn't known what to do. He felt awful about overlooking his distress and probably making it worse with unthinking words.
Eventually, the door creaked open and Time put his head into the room.
Sky raised a finger to his lips, hushing him and pointing at the slumbering Legend.
The lines around Time's eyes and mouth loosened at the sight. He nodded and then looked back at Sky and pointedly mouthed 'get some rest.'
Sky innocently held up the half-finished poncho, mouthing back 'what?'
Time shook his head with a fond smile and left, closing the door gently behind him.
Sometime later, the door opened again, this time to admit Heshu carrying two bowls of hearty stew.
"Hello," she whispered cheerily.
"Hi, Heshu," he whispered back, setting the poncho aside and accepting a bowl. "Mmh, this smells good."
"That's because Runi isn't letting any of your packmates near the pot this time. He learned his lesson."
Sky smiled fondly. They really were all abysmal cooks. Sometimes he wondered how they managed to survive this long.
"Oh, wow." She looked at the nearly finished poncho. "You're so fast at knitting. I can't imagine I'll ever get so good at it."
"It just takes practice," Sky said. He looked over at his soundly asleep packmate. "He's learning to knit, too. I had him use your gray skein. I hope you don't mind."
"Oh, no." She waved off his concerns. "I'd never hope to commission anyone to make all this for me, not if I saved up for a year. A skein is the least you can ask for, and I have so many."
He thanked her again for her generosity with helping the pack while they were stuck at the stable. She thanked him for helping her give her grandmother the best birthday gift. Then she left, leaving the second bowl with Sky so he could make Legend eat eventually.
Sky hoped that when Legend finally woke, he would have forgotten that frogging the square was ever an option.