Work Text:
Navy likes her clothes warm.
She loves the cold, too. She loves when it snows. She loves when the ice begins to coat the ground, and those years when the big rinks open up, and they come onto the ice. 2 minutes, 40 seconds. 2 minutes, 35 seconds. Free skating. 4 minutes. 3 and a half minutes. They were all so experienced. She’d counted it so many times. She’d drawn so much. A full sketchbook of figure skaters that she’d patched up on the edges to keep it from overflowing.
lutz, lutz, l-u-t-z
She loved the way it was spelled.
l-u-t-z
a-x-e-l
15
She came out of her home with warm clothes. She went to the Opening Festival with warm clothes.
She loved when her clothes were fresh out of the dryer. She’d run them through just to feel them warm, sit near the dryer and draw and sit quiet and practice her calligraphy with her good pen. A doodle—not quite. A drawing. It’d improved. And then the dryer went off, and she opened it and pulled her clothes out, and she rubbed the fabric against her face over and over and over again, and she slipped the clothes she wanted to wear on, and it was warm. It felt right. It just felt right. Sometimes she’d leave with them. Go somewhere she wanted without prompt. Sometimes she’d just sit in the middle of her floor, rolling, rocking, quietly drowning in her clothes.
When she went outside, some people told her she dressed boring. That was fine. She wasn’t one for style, though she loved the outfits of figure skaters. The way they sparkled over the ice. Rhinestones and sequins and everything that glittered, shimmered, shined while they flipped and jumped and spun on the ice. She couldn’t wear something so complex herself. She tried. It made her skin itch. She couldn’t stand it. Her clothes were warm when she left, fabric soft against her skin, gentle and unburdening. She couldn’t wear anything else. She wouldn’t.
Her clothes would dry, eventually. Dry and cool. That was fine.
When she came home, sometimes she’d lie on the floor. Sometimes she’d look on top of her drawer, close to her bed, and grab her blow dryer, and she’d turn it on high and run it against her clothes. Hot for some, hot, hot, hot—but warm against clothes. Going through a tumble dryer without being burned. It felt right. It felt just as right. She couldn’t describe it well to anyone else—but the warmth in her clothes just felt right.
⋆꙳•̩̩͙❅*̩̩͙‧͙ ‧͙*̩̩͙❆ ͙͛ ˚₊⋆
She liked to run her hands along the dotted lines.
In her packed up sketchbook, among the drawings of figure skaters that lined every page, save for some spots with their names or the moves they did the day she saw them, and how many times they did them, along their outfits, meticulously placed jewels. Craft stores. Tiny beads. The same colors and shades and nearly the same shimmer. Sequins picked off pillows for a while, then picked out of a bag, glued along the lines, dried and admired. The small jewels were her favorite.
Dots.
Every jewel, every cut and edge and ridge, ran beneath her fingertips, over and over and over again. Sometimes there were a mass of them. Tiny ones. Lined up like the sketchbooks on top of her shelf, in perfect rows. She ran her entire hand around them, and she felt like flowers and sparkles were popping out of her body.
snowflake designs traced with white rhinestone jewels, slight darker blue to lighter blue to near-white blue gradient, rhinestones in the same designs on the sleeve, sequins over top, spaced out by a pinkie, second row of seats, but not if you looked up close, maybe a bead,
winter princess design
They shimmered so wonderfully. It was such a good thing to her. She ran her fingers over it, over and over again. Jewels under her fingers. Warm clothes over her skin. Snowflake over snowflake, falling on the ground outside, piling up, fluffy like the insides of a plush toy. She hoped she’d see something like it at the ISU series this year.
Her clothes were still warm.