Written while stuck at home, recuperating from major abdominal surgery. This is for Harle, who takes such good care of me.

Too Crafty By Far

"What are you doing?"

The Rokkaku regular with the spiky black hair - Bane? Kurobane? - didn't even look up from the tangled mess in his lap before replying solemnly, "Homework."

"Huh." Momo didn't quite know what to say to that, but it sure didn't look like homework to him. Homework, whenever he got around to it; involved books and sheets of paper, and you didn't pull it out of your duffle and do it in between matches, no matter how bored you were. It had nothing to do with yarn or wooden needles, which is what all the Rokkaku regulars had in their hands at the moment.

"For our grandmothers, it was housework, but today we call it home - " the orange-haired one began, breaking off with a yelp as Black Hair poked irritably at him with the flat end of a needle.

"Davide, we've heard that one already- and it sucked the first time! Dammit, where was I…" He squinted at the shape of his project for a moment before sighing and turning back to Momoshiro. "Don't mind him- he was dropped on his head as a first-year. I know this looks bad, but none of us have had any time to get any schoolwork done since the Nationals started, and this is easiest to carry around."

"Huh." Momoshiro said again, feeling like twice the idiot.

"Ah, Rokkaku Chu's famous handwork classes." He turned to see Fuji come up behind him, exchanging a casual wave of greeting with the silver-headed guy Fuji and Kikumaru had played during the Regionals.

"Handwork? You mean crafts? Hehh- don't you have clubs for that kind of stuff?" He'd known Rokkaku was a weird place, what with that playground and the wooden rackets and all, but this made his head hurt.

"Yeah," Silver Hair volunteered, flicking his hair back out his eyes with a smile. "But our school has a very holistic charter, so we have classes for it as well." The 'handwork' in his lap looked impressively complicated, involving three needles and two different colors feeding in to make some sort of patterned sock. It looked like the kind of thing he had seen people in foreign movies hang up above fireplaces for Christmas eve, which made no sense at all.

"It's not as odd as it sounds," Fuji prompted with good-natured amusement, no doubt enjoying the look of bewilderment on Momoshiro's face. "We play tennis in gym class, but we still have a tennis club. Their school just takes that a little further."

"Uh-huh," Rokkaku's first-year captain enthused, nodding his head vigorously as his needles clicked together. "Oh, yeah! This is what makes our school so great- we have all these kinds of classes no one else does because its all about trying everything, and learning everything, and being able to apply everything to everything else, so whether you're learning knitting or math, you can still apply them to each other in all these weird ways, and you'd never believe what kind of stuff you can apply to tennis! Oji doesn't say much, but I figured it out- that's why he has us go out digging clams or buying him drinks, because its all experience, and any experience you can learn from, and - " A few drops of spit flew out of his mouth as he warmed to his subject, waxing an entire candle factory's worth of eloquent on educational theory, the mind-body connection, and the need for more physical activity in schools. Momo felt his eyes begin to glaze over at the two-minute mark, and by the seven-minute mark was ready to get down on both knees and beg someone, anyone to shut him up. But the other Rokkaku regulars were all paying attention to the string messes in their hands, apparently immune to this sort of thing, and Fuji was smiling at their motor-mouthed captain with gently sadistic indulgence, so there was no help from that quarter. Momoshiro was going to die there, listening to that guy going on, bored quite literally to death, and there wasn't anything he could do about it, and Fuji would have to drag his corpse back to the team, and dammit, that stupid Viper would probably cry. Echizen would have to walk to school, and Eiji-sempai would have no-one to buy burgers for, and it was all the fault of Rokkaku, them and their stupid homework-

" - which is how we applied our eurythmy class to our match against Hyotei's Mukahi and Oshitari. Say, maybe we can get Oji to include that in the training camp next year - "

"Ken-kun, you dropped a stitch." Silver Hair cut in gently, pointing to a long run that striped the middle of their captain's sock-thing, cutting across the neat pattern for a good four inches.

"Ah? Aghh! Damn! When did that happen? Whoops!" Momo felt the blood flow back to his head as the exposition cut off while the Rokkaku captain frantically counted down the rows.

"Oh, almost ten minutes ago," Long Hair/Red Ballcap put in from the other end of the bench, rolling his eyes to the heavens.

"You can use my crochet hook," Brown Hair/Bull Nose offered shyly from his place beside Silver Hair, a noisy huff of breath steaming from his nostrils. Peace reigned for a moment, broken only by the captain muttering under his breath as he worked the borrowed tool in and out, trying to recover what he had lost. Momo figured it would be a good time to make his escape, whether Fuji was coming or not, but there was one thing that still bugged him. Okay, so maybe you could learn things about tennis from dancing or cooking or whatever, he could buy that, and maybe a school where you did club-type things for class would actually be kind of fun, but -

But -

"Uh, I know you guys have these handwork classes, but- hehh- wouldn't it make more sense to do woodworking or something? I mean, isn't all this kinda… girly?"

You could have heard a pin drop. (Or a needle drop.) All the heads along the bench rose slowly in challenge, and Momo mentally booted the seat of his own shorts as he realized he had just delivered serious insult to an entire rival team's worth of guys, most of whom were bigger than he was. Shit. Shit.

"Uh- um- I didn't mean it like that, y'know…" he floundered. Fuji was going to kill him. "Its not… it just looks…"

"Maybe it once was," Orange Hair interjected formally, as all eyes turned to him, "But times have changed." He gestured to their captain's lapful of ruined stocking and quipped,

"Nowadays, it isn't just women who go diving for purls."

Notes: Obviously, these guys are knitting. Handwork classes are a staple of the Waldorf school system, and Waldorf schools tend to be happy hippie schools that remind me of Rokkaku. Waldorf schools also do eurythmy, which I can't explain besides saying that its this thing you do, in slippers and sheets. Look it up, and I doubt you'll be any more enlightened. Oh, and Japanese pearl divers were traditionally women, because they believed that women had greater lung capacity. Purls are a knitting stitch. Davide is stupid. We love him anyway.