Work Text:
A noose to start.
Slip knot, she corrects, but the only difference between the two is size, really. Comfort, as well, she would hope, but maybe her series of loops and knots weren’t as welcome as she had thought, all things considered. She takes a deep breath and slips it over the needle, tightening it, but not too much. She had trouble with that when she was learning, too much tension in everything she did which made it too difficult to work with. She tries not to see it as a metaphor, adds more slack, and continues to cast on.
Figure eights, next, a series of twisted wrists to get a line of neat stitches, tension perfect after all these years of practice, on her longer set of needles. She needs a break from making scarf after scarf for Lavinia in the hopes that maybe she’d be able to see it, feel it, wear it this time. Her wrist twinges with the repetitive movement and her heart aches at the reminder of her loss. So. A jumper.
She knits and purls her way into a seed stitch, uneven like she’s felt for months now, and hesitates on the last few stitches, struggling for optimism. Regina knows that she’s skilled enough to make a scarf in almost no time at all, but a jumper requires time. She adds a few more centimeters. They will find him, she tells herself, and soon. But it’s already spring, snow a loud threat in the air but an empty one, and by the time he’s ready to wear a jumper it’ll be autumn and he’ll have grown.
He’ll have grown because he’ll be okay, he’ll be eating, and he’ll be safe. She’s adding size for his health not because she thinks it’ll be long to find him again. She adds a few more stitches anyway.
Knit, purl, repeat.
The feeling of new wool is scratchy and unpleasant but will soften up the more it’s handled, the more it’s washed and cared for, and she takes a break to wipe at her face. No crying while knitting because the only thing worse than the feeling of scratchy wool is the smell of it wet.
Her mother had sighed, a little, over the phone when she’d asked if more yarn could be mailed over. “There just isn’t a place to buy more, here,” she’d explained as calmly as she could. She’d packed what she thought was a reasonable amount for the school year, an extra bag filled to near bursting, but it hadn’t been enough. Not for this year. “It can be any kind,” she’d promised, haggled. “The woman who owns the store knows me,” dotes on me, treats me like a favorite niece, “she’ll know what I need.” Her mother had agreed in the end, but hadn’t said when she would, which Regina had let go. Regardless of the wealth she’d grown up with, she was well aware that her mother’s time was something she’d never been able to comfortably afford.
She wondered, at the time, if her mother would’ve been more likely to help if she’d told her the whole story. How the grief at Lavinia’s absence had consumed every spare thought she had and left her unable to notice that something had gone very wrong with her friend until it was too late. He’d been right there, miles away, and she’d offered him tea and let him walk away into December without a jumper.
She didn’t know if it would have helped convince her mom to send her the yarn any sooner, but she did know that what she actually wanted was comfort, and that there were better places to look.
Knit, purl, repeat. A twinge in her wrist as she yarns over.
She was so emotional the first time she’d given a completed project to someone, an odd rush of pride and affection. She’d made something misshapen and likely to unravel, but she’d made it; loved someone enough to will a tangible object into existence so they could feel it. Did Easy not feel it? How much they loved him? Even with the uncomfortable tightness from too much tension or the bumps from too much, the gaps in the fabric from missing a stitch, all of it leading to uneven edges as they forced themselves into the space anyway.
Jerusalem storms into the room, mid argument with Kipp who carries himself as someone incapable of storming and instead follows like a drizzle. The two of them have been doing that more often, fighting even though they both agree with each other. Regina assumes it’s because while Kipp can keep up with Jerusalem even at her most, he’s animated enough to not make her feel like she’s being unreasonable even if he can’t match her as easily as others. There’s a reason Jerry never argues like this with her, and certainly not with Aubrey.
Regina doesn’t think she has a best friend, loves all of hers dearly but knows what they are to her and what she needs from them, understands the delicate ecosystem that they make up around her. Watching the argument continuing to play out, though, she knows that not everyone in their group feels exactly the same; Kipp is possibly Jerusalem’s best friend, but Easy was something else entirely.
She frowns as she looks back at her work and realizes that she’s purled twice in a row instead of alternating. She rips out the twin stitches and tries again.
Jerusalem notices her and sighs heavily before throwing herself onto the couch next to her, all dramatic and careless movements, yet managing to not actually displace any of the yarn skeins. Regina smiles.
“Odd shape for a scarf,” she comments, apparently giving up on her not an actual disagreement with Kipp, who leans against the couch on her other side. This might be their version of hugging her, she thinks absently. Not touching but bracketing her, checking up on her project to ask around how she’s feeling.
“It’s a jumper this time.”
“It’s too big for him,” Kipp responds and Regina stops knitting to stare at him, confused in a way that must show because Kipp rolls his eyes. “It’s not that great of a deduction, of course it’s for… him.”
“It doesn’t have a real shape yet,” she explains. “How could you tell the size was wrong?”
Kipp shrugs, looking past her at Jerusalem and making a series of expressions that she decides she doesn’t need the context for. “You start at the bottom and make it loop, right? There’s enough there that to make it even it’ll have to be too long.”
“That’s a surprising amount of technical knowledge for you to have,” Jerusalem says, brightly yet mockingly as only she ever manages. “Did someone else in your family knit?”
“Just Regina.”
She inhales sharply, unsure of what to do with this information. She loves her friends, knows that they love her back. She also knows that her parents love her, but that they know absolutely nothing about her hobby, her craft. That she could be adding an arm on and her father still wouldn’t know what it was she was making.
“Nicely done, Kipp, you made her cry,” Jerusalem is saying as she sits upright in order to grab Regina and pull her into a hug. She goes willingly, unaware that she was crying until it was pointed out and now not sure how to proceed.
Kipp hands her a handkerchief as he defends his honor to Jerusalem, the two of them back to bickering. Offering comfort while giving her time to pull herself together, she does hate to make a fuss.
“It’s too late in the season,” she says when she’s collected herself and they both instantly fall quiet. “He won’t need a jumper until autumn.”
“And by then he’s bound to have hit a growth spurt,” Jerry answers, and her heart clenches. She’d forgotten, wrapped up in her grief, how comforting it was to be quietly understood. Well, understood anyway. Kipp begins musing on who will be the tallest when they’re fully grown and Jerry has thoughts to contradict him. If she wanted to be quietly understood, Quickly is in the library and Aubrey is. Well, Aubrey is.
She sits back upright, Jerusalem letting her go but not moving to put distance between them again, and resumes her work. She can tell that both of her friends are glancing at her as they continue to chatter, but they don’t make any efforts to get her to join in whatever it is they’re discussing now, simply staying in her space as an open invitation.
Knit, purl. Her wrist twinges.