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The date itself has long since been forgotten from his mind, but Hizashi remembers it being a cold afternoon. Cold because he had to send Hitoshi back because the boy had forgotten his scarf, and afternoon because they’d been waiting on Shouta to wake up, just to have his husband be called in for an emergency.
But Hizashi digresses.
It is cold, and it is just past noon, and Hizashi and Hitoshi are alone when they make a trip to the quaint little shopping area that Nemuri had been gushing about.
Hitoshi glances up at him, hands in his pockets. “We can always wait for another day when Aizawa is free,” he suggests.
“That’s all right! This way, we can case out the best spots for the next trip,” Hizashi refutes. “Besides, you know if it took too long, Shouta will start grumbling.”
Hitoshi snorts into his scarf.
They’ve just entered the street when Hizashi notices that Hitoshi is no longer behind him. The boy is staring at a window display of knitting needles, something unreadable in his eyes. “Do you know how to knit?” Hizashi asks. The hobby didn’t seem like something Hitoshi would have picked up.
“No,” Hitoshi answers.
“Okay, would you like to learn then?”
At this, Hitoshi finally looks up at him, eyes wide and round. “We don’t have knitting supplies,” he says.
“No,” Hizashi acknowledges. He pushes open the door to the shop. “But we can always get some.”
Hitoshi follows him in. His hand reaches out to weigh one of the knitting needles. “They’re too big and not weighted right for throwing though,” he informs. “And I’m not sure how they’d fare as melee weapons.”
“Well,” Hizashi answers after a pause, trying to hide how alarmed he is. “It’s a good thing we’re not buying them for weapons. We’re buying them to knit.”
He picks up a few knitting needles and some yarn, and even gets Hitoshi to pick out some colors, so he’ll take that success. At the counter as they’re paying, there’s a question on Hitoshi’s face – his brows pressed together in confusion.
Hizashi waits patiently for him to ask.
Hitoshi never does.
When they get home, Yamada hands him the bag of knitting supplies. At his bewildered face, the pro-hero grins at him. “Try it out!” he suggests. “Maybe you’ll find a new hobby.”
Hitoshi does not know how to inform him that it is highly unlikely that anything productive will come out of this venture, so he just takes the bag with him in silence.
The bag lays in the corner of his room, untouched for a week. Hizashi does not ask about it, so Hitoshi assumes it’s been forgotten. He heads back to his room after breakfast one day to discover that one of the cats had managed to knock the bag over and tangled in the yarn and was meowing pitifully.
Hitoshi fixes Tempura with an unamused look but gamely untangles the cat and sets him free. His hands are careful as he unknots the yarn and tries to spin it back into its little ball again the best he could. Hitoshi does not think about the slight panic in his chest at the sight of yarn on the floor, nor how warm the sight of the knitting needles and the yarn made him feel.
Hitoshi comes back from school on a Wednesday, and, in a fit of boredom, sets up a target area on one side of the room and tries to get the knitting needles to fly right. The shape and weight of them are all wrong, and he does not get them to work before he accidentally sends one flying into the plaster and breaking a hole in the wall.
“Shit,” Hitoshi whispers to himself, even as there is a knock on the door.
“Hitoshi?” Aizawa calls. “You all right in there?”
“Yeah!” he calls back, trying to convince himself that his voice is not higher in panic. “All good! Just … doing some reorganizing!”
“Ok,” Aizawa says. His footsteps echo down the hall.
Hitoshi breathes a sigh of relief, then stares at the sizable hole in the wall with trepidation.
In the end, he spends half an hour too long finding the perfect picture from the internet to print out. The printer in the office starts running, and Aizawa’s voice is absolutely confused when he calls out, “Is anyone printing a picture of a … pug?”
“Yes,” Hitoshi says, entering the room in time to snatch the picture from the printer tray. “It reminds me of my old dog.”
Like he’d predicted and had been depending on, the unexpected tidbit about his past stop Aizawa from asking anymore questions.
Hitoshi awkwardly tapes the picture of the pug over the hole in the wall and tries not to despair at how out of place it looks on the walls. “It’s ok,” he tells himself. “I’m like eleven, this is the sort of stupid things eleven year olds do right? Obito would do this. I think.”
Over in the next room, Hizashi tries to convince Shouta to let him buy more dog memorabilia. “He’s printing out his own merch, Shou!” he whispers fiercely. “This is the first time he’s taken explicit interest in something!”
Shouta thinks about how it seems like Hitoshi is finally putting down roots and making his room his, and sighs in defeat. “All right, but no going over budget.”
He grumbles about how it’d have been better if it were cat memorabilia, but it’s all half-hearted. Shouta also definitely does not place a pug plush into his online shopping cart.
Two weeks later, Hitoshi wakes up to a box sitting outside his room with his name on the top. He side steps it warily and enters the kitchen to find his guardians at the kitchen counter.
“Good morning!” Yamada greets. Aizawa grunts into his coffee.
“Good morning,” Hitoshi repeats. “There’s a box in front of my room.”
“Yeah!” Yamada enthuses. It is entirely too early in the morning for his energy. “I’m glad you found it!”
Hitoshi carefully does not wonder how anyone could miss it.
“Did you like it?” Yamada continues.
“I haven’t opened it yet,” Hitoshi admits. “I wasn’t sure who it came from.” And what was in there, and whether or not it’d appeared without anyone noticing, and—
“Ah,” Yamada says. “That’s all right! It came from us, so it’s safe, don’t worry. We hope you like it!”
Hitoshi wants to ask what the special occasion was. He thinks about Gai and his random little gifts and decides that maybe this is what emotionally stable people do. Just. Random little gifts for people they like. How bizzare. Hitoshi does not ask. Instead, his eyes drift back to the hallway.
“After breakfast,” Aizawa declares.
Hizashi droops.
Hitoshi takes a seat at the kitchen counter and serves himself some breakfast.
It is decidedly after breakfast when Hitoshi carries the box back into his room. It is lighter than its size would suggest, and Hitoshi places it on the floor. His only pair of scissors have gone missing, so Hitoshi cuts open the tape with a kunai and pries the flaps of the box open. The first thing that greets him is the face of a pug, and Hitoshi freezes at the sudden rush of homesickness that courses through his body.
It is, of course, not a real pug. Hitoshi lifts the plush out of the box and strokes a hand down artificial fur and yearns for the scent of dog and grass and a low, gravelly voice. His next breath is shaky, and it takes a lot more effort to keep it even. “I miss you, Pakkun,” he tells the plush.
It takes him several minutes before he’s ready to place the plush on his bed and dig through the rest of the box’s contents. There’s a light in the shape of a dog that he places on his bedside table and plugs in, filling the room with a soft yellow glow. A blanket with Dalmatian puppies gets spread over his bed. The poster with a bunch of different dogs curled around each other in deep sleep, the words “Home is where the pack is” above them, hurts something in Hitoshi’s heart. He hangs it up anyways, replacing the printed picture.
It looks a lot more natural now. No one would expect it to hide a hole.
Hitoshi places the novelty pen with the head of a golden retriever on his desk and cannot help the smile that stretches across his face or the warmth in his chest.
Hitoshi wakes up in the middle of the night during a storm, the nightmare still playing in his brain. There are dried tears he doesn’t remember shedding on his cheeks, and his face feels sticky and disgusting and hot. Bullets of rain splash harmlessly against his window. He tries to drown out his thoughts in the thunder to no avail. He doesn’t quite remember the exact details about his nightmare – just feels the lingering emotions of fear and desperation and guilt that haunt his waking moments. It would take a miracle for him to go back to sleep.
Lightning flashes and illuminates the room, and Hitoshi’s eyes catch on the knitting needles and yarn he had practically forgotten about. Before he knows it, he’s throwing his legs to the side and reaching out to grab them from the shelf. When thunder roars again, he’s already nestled back in the bed, laptop in front of him. He places Plushkun on his side, giving it a quick squeeze. “All right, Plushkun,” Hitoshi says, his whisper nearly unheard over the pouring of the rain. “Let’s see how this works.”
The screen is set to a video titled “Knitting for Beginners”. Hitoshi clicks play.
“Knitting,” the figure on the screen begins, after the introductory opening, “is not, as some would have you think, just a hobby for old ladies.”
When Hitoshi wakes up in the morning, it is to a half slumped sleeping position and to his laptop battery at 13%, the screen playing an inexplicable video about horse bones. There is a crick in his neck that aches, and a half-formed knitted piece of …. something … that might be generously called a scarf on his lap. There are areas where he has dropped a stitch and areas where it is too tight and holes and the whole thing looks like an uneven mess.
Hitoshi grins at it anyways.
When Sashimi demands to be let in, as is her due, Hitoshi wraps the scarf thing around her neck and grins at the sight she makes. “Now you can be Erasercat,” he whispers to her conspiringly, “the fiercest cat in all the land.”
Sashimi graces him with an unamused look.
When she stalks off to the living room, Aizawa takes one look at her and deadpans, “What.”
Yamada beams, immediately delighted. “She looks just like you, Shou!” he laughs. “Did you make that, Hitoshi?”
Hitoshi nods, feeling suddenly nervous.
“You made that?” Aizawa repeats. “I didn’t know you knitted.”
“It’s a new development,” Hitoshi says and tries not to feel guilty at the knowledge of how the knitting needles and yarn had been sitting on his shelf for nearly half a year.
Aizawa hums. “Good job.”
Hizashi gives another delighted little giggle, and without even glancing up, Aizawa swats him with a hand. For a good solid fortnight, Hizashi grins like a maniac every time he sees Sashimi with her little scarf. Despite how annoyed he looks, Aizawa never removes the scarf.
It’s like that first scarf unleashed the dam. Hitoshi finds something calming about the repetitive motions and the click clack of the knitting needles. The apartment is too small for katas or sparring, and his porn books had all been confiscated, so Hitoshi finds himself heading for the knitting needles again and again.
It’s—
Every single source on the internet states how easy knitting is, but all Hitoshi can think of sometimes is how bad he is at it. It takes entirely much too long to even knit a decently sized piece, and by all rights, all that time and effort could be spent pursuing more productive hobbies. By all rights, Hitoshi should have been great at it. His sharingan was the perfect tool for the task, and yet. And yet.
Dropped stitches, uneven edges, yarn attached to the wrong stitch, stitches that cross over into other stitches.
Hitoshi has made all and every single possible mistake he could possibly have. It is something of a novelty. He has never failed so hard at something before, but this. This is something he can fail and yet still have something to show for it, and he’s improving, he can tell, and—
“There’s something about having put your effort into something, and seeing the finished product,” Gai says, for once not shouting it to the entirety of Konoha. “It is the most Youthful of things – the product of your hard work.”
Hitoshi has knitting needles of different sizes and spools of yarn and random pieces of knitted objects lying around his room.
It’s nice.
Aizawa catches him sitting cross-legged on top of the dining table at 1am one night, having come in after a late patrol. “Okay,” the pro-hero says, after their stare down had exceeded ten seconds. “I'll ask. What are you doing?”
Hitoshi glances down at the knitting needles in his hands and fixes Aizawa with a concerned look. “Knitting,” he says slowly. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Aizawa says, looking like he’d rather much go straight to bed.
In fact, it is exactly what Hitoshi is expecting. Instead, Aizawa heads to the kitchen to pour himself a cup of water then plops himself down on one of the seats at the table. “Why are you awake?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Hitoshi replies easily.
They sit in silence for a while. Aizawa watches his hands stitch over and over again. “Are you enjoying knitting?” he asks at some point. “Hizashi told me he’d gotten them for you. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep doing it to spare his feelings.”
“I like it,” Hitoshi tells him honestly. “It’s nice.”
He doesn’t quite know how to articulate the calmness knitting fills him with. The pride he gets at a finished work in his hands. How the repetitive motions eases him into something less paranoid. The joy he gets when Yamada wears the hat he’d knitted for him. There’s just so many things that knitting does for him. The lack of words frustrate him, but Aizawa just nods.
“Okay,” he says.
And it is.
Hitoshi runs out of yarn one day and spends the entire week jumping at shadows and loud noises, his thoughts racing with no way to calm them down. Aizawa takes him to the nearby gym to work out his energy, but with the torrent of storms that are hitting Japan at this time of the year, it is not always such an easy fix.
It is Yamada who sits him down one day. “All right, kiddo,” he says easily. “What’s going on? You’ve been more keyed up lately.”
“It’s nothing,” Hitoshi says.
“It’s clearly not,” Yamada replies. He pauses. “I haven’t seen you knitting lately,” he says. “Did something happen?”
Hitoshi stills.
Yamada nods. “Would you like to talk about it?”
“I—I ran out of yarn,” Hitoshi admits. “Will we be going to the shopping district again anytime soon?”
“No,” Yamada says, sounding apologetic, “it’s in an entirely different province so probably not until the storms clear up. Shouta and I have been busy with hero work from the floods.”
“I know,” Hitoshi says quickly, “that’s okay—”
“—that said,” Yamada interrupts, “we can still buy more yarn online, you know?”
“Oh,” Hitoshi says.
Hitoshi knits and knits and knits. He knits a little sweater for Tempura and a little hat for the dog nightlight on his table and socks for Plushkun. He knits Aizawa a blanket and Yamada an ugly Christmas sweater, and his little store of knitting supplies grow and grow and grow.
It is not until one day that he realizes all of a sudden his knitting hobby was taking over the apartment. The cats get tangled in the yarn, but even then, there’s yarn kept in closed baskets all throughout the apartment, and Hitoshi recognizes that this cannot possibly be cheap.
“I’m sorry,” he tells his guardians over dinner. “I didn’t notice it’d gotten so bad. I’ll try to stop.”
“Stop what?” Yamada asks in bewilderment.
“The knitting,” Hitoshi explains.
“Why would you stop knitting?” Aizawa asks.
“Because,” Hitoshi begins in confusion. It was very obvious to him, so it should have been clear, right? “It’s not exactly a cheap hobby, nor is it every productive. And I may be making progress, but improvements have been slow—”
“Kid,” Aizawa interrupts, “that’s perfectly fine.”
Hitoshi closes his mouth on unformed words and stares at him in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Yamada says, “being good at knitting isn’t the point. You could be the worst knitter in the world, and it’d still be okay, as long as you enjoy it.”
“It’s about your experience and growth, problem child,” Aizawa finishes. “You don’t have to be able to achieve something in it for it to be worthwhile.”
Hitoshi has once been Hatake Kakashi. And Hatake Kakashi was a shinobi raised in a world of shinobi. The Elemental Nations were not a soft, peaceful land. Things were measured in terms of achievements and productivity and benefits and disadvantages. Only civilians had the advantage of unproductive hobbies, and even then you had to have power and wealth. Kakashi has never been anything but a shinobi.
“All you need to do is do it for you,” Yamada says, “and that will be enough for us.”
It has been several years since they started fostering Shinsou Hitoshi. In many ways, things have changed, and in others, things have remained. It had been a new thing –a child in the house. At first, Hizashi finds himself too aware of his own actions. Despite everything, at the end of the day, Hitoshi is a stranger. And it is very strange to have his space invaded by a stranger.
But Hitoshi is just a child, and he reminds Hizashi of Shouta, and it takes time, but they make it work. It is good.
It is good.
Hitoshi has nightmares and wakes up with unfamiliar names on his lips and watches them with wary eyes and sometimes, walking back to his room after a late night glass of water, Hizashi can hear stifled sobs coming from behind closed doors, and his heart aches. Their house has never had so many weapons scattered around, but it – it is good. They’re making it work, and with every day that passes, Hitoshi is coming out of his shell – more willing to push against boundaries and test his environment, and despite how frustrated Shouta is by Hitoshi’s tardiness, it means Hitoshi is feeling safer. At the end of the day, isn’t that what Shouta and he had hoped for?
It has been several years since Shinsou Hitoshi came into their lives. In some ways, things remain the same. Shouta still wakes up at noon unless he has other obligations. Tempura is as much of a food critic as he has ever been. There is still much too many bags of juice bags in the fridge.
In other ways, things have changed. Sashimi now has a scarf, looking like Eraserhead in the miniature. Hizashi’s feet are no longer cold, warmed by knitted socks. There is a third permanent seat at the table. And the boy that he calls his own no longer watches them with wary eyes, face guarded.
Instead, Hitoshi smiles at them frequently. Deliberately sits on top of the remote so no one can change the channel. Fills their house with all sorts of dog memorabilia and knitted items. Their boy is safe and secure and happy.
And Hizashi wouldn’t trade any of this for the world.