Piece by Piece, by Friendshipper (Continuing Education Challenge)
Title: Piece by Piece
Author: friendshipper
Word Count: 4900
Rating: G; gen (with a bit of Teyla/Kanaan at the end); mention of various canon deaths
Summary: Teyla makes an afghan, and Atlantis learns to crochet. Seasons one through early five.
As it happened, Teyla hooked the first square of a new zhadani the day before the Lanteans appeared -- the day before Athos was lost.
She had always enjoyed the feeling of the dyed wool and cotton running through her fingers, the pleasant repetition of the hook moving in and out. Taking advantage of a rare quiet evening, she sat on Charin's rug and sorted through her friend's many balls of beautiful yarn. Charin had obtained many of them when she was a young woman, at markets on dozens of worlds; since she no longer went on trading parties, her friends and relatives brought them back for her now, remembering the old woman's love of beautiful dyed fibers.
Charin used them to weave richly shimmering fabrics, but Teyla herself had never enjoyed spending time at the loom. Small light projects that could be carried about were more her style.
She finally selected a nice wool dyed in many shades of green. Charin had enough of it to make a decent-sized blanket. "Are you certain you do not mind?" Teyla asked her friend. "This must have been expensive."
Charin laughed and clasped her hand over Teyla's. "Look around you, dear girl. I have enough yarn to last much more than my remaining years. I would love nothing more than to see it put to good use."
So Teyla sat cross-legged on the rug and began the pleasantly familiar motions of casting a new square for a fresh project. She murmured, under her breath, the old prayer to the Ancestors for good luck that should always be said when starting a new undertaking, and then chatted with her friend and munched on nuts from a bowl on Charin's floor until it was late and time to take her leave. She left the completed square rolled up in Charin's tent; there was time enough to move the project over to her own residence, but for now, she liked having an excuse to stop into her friend's home more often.
Time enough ...
She didn't think of it again until days later, in the wake of tragedy and disaster, when they were gathered in the City of the Ancestors, taking stock of the meager possessions that they had managed to bring with them. In that last desperate flight, everyone had grabbed those things most precious to them, sometimes nothing more than their children and themselves. Charin had been unable to bring much at all; she'd been clinging to a young nephew and trying to speed along her own slow steps. But she placed into Teyla's hand a green square with a familiar pattern of stitches.
"I brought this for you," Charin said. "I am sorry that I could not save the rest of the yarn."
For some reason that was what did it -- Teyla bent her head, buried her face in the green wool, and wept quietly. She had not cried in many years, and she had been too busy, these last days, for the reality of what they'd all lost to sink in. Now it hit her with the force of a hammer blow: there was no more green yarn, no more colorful rugs and hanging tapestries -- no more village. The forests had burned. The wooden toys her mother had carved for her; the soft yellow zhadani blanket her father had hooked for her before she was born; the blue dress that a long-ago sweetheart, now married with children, had sewn for her; the big roughbark tree that she'd climbed with Kanaan and his cousins; gone, all gone.
The green woolen square smelled of herbs and incense and woodsmoke, the fragrance of her childhood -- all she had left of it now.
Charin held her until she was done weeping. "I don't know what I was thinking, really, dear. Of course you can't finish it now. I suppose I had to take something, and there was so much, and no time to decide --"
Teyla stood back, gently disentangling herself. She wiped her eyes. "I cannot see why I should not finish it," she said. The hook, her favorite small one of polished dark wood, was stuck through the hooked square, which was fortunate since the others were now all lost; she folded up the square neatly and tucked it into her coat pocket. "There is more yarn in the world."
For a long time, urgency consumed her trips offworld -- she was serving two sets of interests now, two groups of people equally desperate for food and allies and, in the Lanteans' case, the energy devices that they were so dependent upon. But all things come in time, and the day came that she quietly asked their current trading partners if she might add some rolls of gold-dyed woolen yarn to a shipment of tava beans bound for the Athosian settlement. The negotiations had gone well and, she thought, perhaps it wasn't too indulgent to throw in a little something for herself.
That evening she found a quiet balcony and began to hook for the first time in months. Her fingers still knew the patterns, though. Her father had taught her when she was very small, carefully shaping her pudgy little hands on the hook and yarn.
"Are you crocheting?"
Teyla had been aware of Dr. Weir's approach, but politely did not look up until the other woman spoke. "I am not sure. My people call it hooking."
Dr. Weir winced. "I wouldn't suggest that you call it that around the Marines. I'm not sure if it's just the translation, but on Earth, that is a slang term for ... something else." Blushing a bit, she joined Teyla on the floor, squatting down awkwardly; she did not look like a woman who frequently sat on floors. "It's not quite the same, anyway. In crochet, you hold the yarn like this -- May I?"
Teyla handed over the square, and Dr. Weir hesitated for a moment before getting the yarn arranged in her hands and demonstrating. It produced a different stitch than the usual hook stitch used on Athos, but every world had slightly different ways of drawing loops of yarn through other loops of yarn; Teyla had seen many, including some like this.
"I haven't done it in years -- my grandmother taught me when I was a kid, but I'm afraid it was never really my thing." Dr. Weir gave a small laugh. "It's hard enough to be taken seriously as a female negotiator when you aren't hauling around a shoulder bag of yarn."
Teyla tried to guess at her meaning. "Because it is a man's craft on your world, you mean?" Athos was the same -- such light portable crafts were easily suited to travel and hunting, which historically had tended to skew male. No one had thought Teyla odd for taking up a craft that was usually done by men, but then, in Teyla's experience, the Athosians were more relaxed about such things than many worlds.
"What? No, no." Dr. Weir laughed again. "Crochet is women's work. In my part of Earth, at least."
Teyla filed away another bit of information about Earth -- at least Dr. Weir's part of Earth; she reminded herself that Earth was a place of many nations. Dr. Weir obviously came from a nation with firm gender segregation. Such people, she knew, frequently had many gender-related taboos that were not always obvious to outsiders. She would have to continue observing them closely so as not to accidentally offend.
"Would you like to learn Athosian hooking?" Teyla asked, as Dr. Weir handed it back.
"I'd love to. But, really, you have to remember not to call it that where the men can hear you, at least if you don't want to deal with a lot of crude jokes."
From then on, Dr. Weir -- Elizabeth -- started joining her regularly on the balcony. Teyla taught her the Athosian hook stitches, and learned the ones that Elizabeth knew. The zhadani grew square by square.
None of the squares matched at all. Charin had taught Teyla that in order to have a proper, trade-quality zhadani, it was necessary to buy all the yarn at one time from a single merchant, since each individual spinner and dyer would produce yarn of a different thickness and color. With the original batch of yarn lost, Teyla had initially tried to find colors and thicknesses that would work well with the midweight green that she'd used to begin the project -- it was irrational, she knew, but she felt as if it was important to keep the original square as part of the design; it was a last link to the village and world they'd left behind forever. But the new squares kept coming out misshapen, reflecting Teyla's efforts at learning Earth's crochet stitches and Elizabeth's practice at Athosian hooking, and when Elizabeth wanted to come along on Teyla's next trip to obtain more yarn in the markets of Ku Daigon, she decided that trying to maintain any sort of consistency was probably a lost cause. On the other hand, Teyla thought, the zhadani would still be functional even if it wasn't beautiful. It would keep someone warm, and that was the function of such a thing, after all.
While she enjoyed the challenge of representing Atlantis and Athos in serious bargaining, it was also a tremendous pleasure to trade for fun -- to run her hands through hanks of richly dyed yarns, and choose the ones that were most pleasing to her. On Charin's behalf, Teyla began to seek out yarns and fibers to help her friend start rebuilding the collection that had been lost on Athos. It added a pleasant aspect to her trading missions.
Somewhat to her surprise, as more people saw her hooking squares in her rare moments of downtime, a growing interest was spreading throughout the city. Different people -- mostly women, but not all -- began to ask her where she was getting the yarn, and, when she explained, offered to give her various items to trade on her next trading trip if she would bring them back some yarn and hooks, too. Various yarn-hooked handicrafts began to appear around the city; most of them were misshapen and lumpy, made on unfamiliar tools by people who hadn't done anything of the sort in years, but they were popular items to trade as gifts for the various Earth holidays. A few of the born-again yarncrafters, including Kate Heightmeyer and Wendy Hewston, asked Teyla to show them how to do Athosian-style hooking. Since a zhadani square was the easiest possible project for a beginner to learn, Teyla began to accumulate weird-shaped, inexpertly hooked squares that her friends made under her tutelage. Rather than waste them or hurt the feelings of her students, she incorporated them into the zhadani; it wasn't as if it could get much stranger-looking than it already was.
She began occasionally taking a small bag of yarn and her hooks with her on missions where she anticipated having some downtime. The first time that she took out her hooking kit, to pass the time on a long jumper flight, Dr. McKay looked over at her and said loudly, "Wait, Teyla's knitting?"
"Is that a problem?" she asked, calmly hooking the rows for a new square. Dr. McKay, she knew, liked to mock what he did not understand.
"No, it's just --" He faltered, and stammered for a moment. "It's not really, um, you."
She smiled a bit, as she began to work the second row into the first. Perhaps this was the sort of thing that had led Dr. Weir to avoid bringing her own hooking to meetings, back on her world. "You know me so well, then?"
McKay's face flamed a bright, shiny pink. "No -- no, it's just that with the sticks and badassery and all, it's not something I would have -- What?" he demanded, glaring at John, who was grinning.
"Hey, I'm not getting involved here, Rodney. You're digging your hole deep enough as it is."
John and Ronon had both seen her working with yarn before, as she occasionally ate breakfast with one or the other of them, and often had her bag of yarn along with her. However, the next time that John joined her for breakfast, he kept glancing at the half-finished square in a way that was almost shy. At last he said, "So ... you mind if I ask what you're making?"
"It is a zhadani -- I think you would say an afghan." She hoped sincerely that he would not ask to see it. With contributions from nearly a dozen different people, the finished piece had grown ever more misshapen and many-colored. Teyla thought that it had a certain oddball charm, but it was definitely not how she would like her people's folk arts to be presented to the world.
"Ah," John said, and nodded.
There was a long silence, during which Teyla sipped her tea and hooked on her zhadani square, and John spread preserves on his toasted bread with a very focused intensity, as if rendering the preserves at just the right thickness had become the most important thing in his world.
As the silence passed from companionable to awkward, Teyla asked cautiously, "Would you like to learn?"
John jumped. "Um ..."
"It is all right," Teyla said quickly, because she'd learned how odd John could get when he felt as if he was being pressured. "You may let me know if you'd like to learn; otherwise, we need not speak of this again." She turned her work and began a new row. "How are your new Marines coming along with their training?"
They moved on to speak of other things, and time passed, and seasons turned. And then, Charin died, and Teyla found herself standing in the tent of her oldest and dearest friend, looking around her with numb surprise at the quantity of yarns and fabrics that Charin had managed to collect in the year and a half since they had lost everything.
"She wanted you to have her things," Marta said gently. "She said that she thought of you as her own daughter."
"I know." Teyla had cried herself dry, in the privacy of her quarters; now she was exhausted and empty, weighed down beneath a crushing burden of grief. The warm, familiar smells of incense and dyes, which had comforted her since she was a little girl, suddenly overwhelmed her -- murmuring an apology to Marta, she pushed back the door covering and stumbled out into the afternoon sunshine.
John, who had flown her to the mainland, was loitering nearby -- apparently engaged in idle chat with some of the men, but he swiveled immediately when she stepped out of the tent, and took a few steps towards her. "Hey," he said.
Teyla smiled at him, not quite trusting her voice yet, and tucked her hands in the pocket of her traveling coat -- it was really too warm for it, but she'd put it on automatically in her quarters that morning, as she usually did when she left the city on a personal trip. "John ..." she said when her voice was steady, "may I use the radio in the jumper to call back to Atlantis?"
"Of course." He didn't ask why, just shadowed her back to the clearing where he'd parked the jumper, activated it for her, and then left her alone.
Teyla perched on the edge of John's pilot chair, feeling small and very, very alone, and asked Chuck if she might speak to Elizabeth. "I can wait," she said, but Elizabeth came back immediately, as if she had nothing to do all day but answer calls from the mainland. These people, Teyla thought, did not seem to express sympathy directly, beyond a few awkward condolences; it was not their way. But their feelings were very plain from their actions -- John's anxious hovering (she could see him through the jumper's window, glancing in her direction and then looking away); Elizabeth's solicitous attentiveness.
"Elizabeth, I have been wondering if it might be nice to have some boxes of yarn in the rec lounges, so that people might choose what they need and leave what they do not want. Do you think there would be any problem with that?"
Elizabeth thought it was a marvelous idea. So Marta and some of the others helped Teyla sort through the yarns -- some would stay with the village (Teyla made sure that everyone in the village who enjoyed hooking was able to pick out a ball or two, starting with Halling) and then the rest went to Atlantis in a couple of boxes labeled in Earth script: FREE YARN - TAKE SOME!
Teyla had expected the yarn to quickly vanish from the boxes. But instead, people would work on projects while they were in the lounges, and then leave the partially-completed zhadani square or scarf or whatever they were making for the next person to work on. The finished projects tended to become communal property as well -- a finished zhadani would remain in the lounge, to be used by whatever scientist or soldier wanted to wrap up in it while he or she watched the movies projected on the wall; a scarf might migrate down to the locker rooms, where anyone going to a cold planet might use it.
The interesting thing about the yarn boxes was that the level of yarn never really went down -- sometimes people would take a ball of yarn to work on a private project, but soon more yarn would show up to replace it. Now that the Daedalus was making regular supply runs, yarns from Earth began to show up in the boxes as well, along with well-thumbed catalogues of various Earth yarns and knitters' supplies.
The only person in the city who wasn't using the yarn, it seemed, was Teyla herself. It was a long time after Charin's death when she finally forced herself to open up the box in her room where she kept her partially completed zhadani. She spread it out on the bed, with all its mismatched, misshapen squares. She had remembered it being aesthetically displeasing, but now that she looked at it, she found herself remembering the story behind each square. Here was the very first square that Elizabeth had made -- Teyla reached out and touched the uneven stitches, smiling as she remembered how Elizabeth had dropped a stitch (which one? this one?) and then cursed and blushed and apologized. And here was the square that Kate had made, in a lovely red yarn that she had unraveled from an Earth sweater that had developed too many holes to be worn.
And in every stitch, Teyla saw Charin, felt Charin -- these were the stitches that Charin had taught her, that she had passed along to her friends on Atlantis. She caressed the knobbly squares, running the soft wool through her fingers, and then spread the zhadani across the bed to see how long it needed to be. It is barely half finished, she thought, and folded it very carefully back into the box. There was still a lot of work to be done. And so she took out her hooks again, and began to dive into the FREE YARN boxes herself. (There were more of them now, to accommodate a great deal more yarn from Earth.)
Square by square, the zhadani grew.
Ronon, Teyla discovered, had practiced a yarn-art on Sateda that was somewhat more like the Earthers' "knitting" than the hookcraft she'd grown up with. "Had to learn it in school," Ronon said; "never was very good at it." But with the loss of so much, it was possible that he was the only person left in all the tradeworlds who knew Satedan knitting, so Teyla was not surprised to occasionally see him in the lounges, picking through the boxes of yarn. She was even less surprised (but politely appreciative) when he showed up on the doorstep of her quarters with a large square -- really more of a rectangle -- that was entirely the wrong shape and size for the zhadani. She found a similarly colored yarn to hook more stitches around the edges and make it look sort of intentional. A good pattern must be able to change when it needs to change, Charin used to say.
She began to carry along her hookwork to the social events that John called "team movie night", which basically consisted of John watching a movie in his quarters with the door open. Teyla usually showed up; Ronon at first came seldom, and then with increasing frequency until he was the most regular attendee of them all -- Ronon would watch anything. Elizabeth and Carson also liked to drop by from time to time. Rodney did not come unless he could pick the movie (which, on his nights to choose, invariably turned out to be one of a number of serialized story-plays that Teyla found exceedingly repetitive and tiresome, and also far too similar to their everyday lives to be pleasant).
Despite the generally dull and banal nature of Earth movies, when she would look back later on this time in her life, those "team movie nights" were the parts she remembered with the greatest warmth -- sitting on a cushion with her hookwork in her lap, smiling as John and Ronon competed for the last handful of popcorn, hearing Elizabeth's rare and gentle laughter at the moving pictures on the screen of John's laptop. Surrounded by her friends. Safe. Happy. Perhaps she was even naive enough to assume that her life might always be thus.
But, as the children of Athos know well, nothing lasts forever. And when things changed, they did so very fast, in no more than a single turn of the seasons. So many people were dead: Wendy Hewston, Carson, Elizabeth, Kate; so many things changed and lost -- Kanaan, her people. It was as if the life she'd rebuilt for herself over the last three years was once again torn asunder and cast into the wind like handfuls of ashes, as if all the things she'd come to believe about herself could no longer be trusted, not even her own body that now carried a new life within it.
And she was no longer part of John's team.
She had not felt so isolated since her early days on Atlantis, when she was distrusted and ignored by the majority of the expedition.
Only, very slowly, she realized that it was different now.
It took her a while to notice that there was always someone stopping by her quarters to say hello and drink a cup of tea -- always someone coming over to sit with her in the cafeteria while John's team was out on a mission. Jennifer brought her books on pregnancy, and Earth teas that were supposed to ease the aches and illnesses of the changes happening to her body. One evening Colonel Carter came to her quarters with a large box that had been delivered through the gate bridge, and as Teyla pulled out soft baby things and bright-colored toys in wonder, the colonel explained, "We took up a collection at the SGC. Lots of people at Stargate Command have kids. This ..." she held up a stuffed furry creature of some sort, "this is a teddy bear, if you haven't seen one before; it belonged to the son of a friend of mine, many years ago." Her face was very soft as she added, "I told him you were going to have a son, and he wanted you to have it."
There were more squares for the zhadani, pressed into her hand in the cafeteria, placed gently on her lap in the rec lounge. And the biggest surprise of all was John showing up at her door one evening, fidgeting and rubbing the back of his neck. "So," he said, looking at the toes of his boots. "You said that you'd teach me that crochet thing, you know, if I ever wanted to learn. I thought, if you were bored, that we might --"
He was blushing, and sweating a bit. Teyla smiled, and rescued him from his own embarrassment, pulling him in out of the hall.
John made an extremely lopsided square in all-black yarn. Teyla was piecing together another large chunk of the zhadani, and she put it at the center, with the other, more colorful squares arrayed around it. It fits there, she thought. It feels right.
And then there was Michael. And Torren John. And she did not think of the zhadani again until some time later, when she and Kanaan were tidying her quarters, rearranging them to make room for Torren's crib and to accommodate the mingled possessions of two adults. It was a strange business; she'd dreamed of this for a long time, and yet the reality was uncomfortable and awkward. They were near-strangers to each other now, and kept getting in each other's way. They'd had a sort of almost-fight, which ended with Teyla retreating into the bathroom to move her own toiletry items so that they only took up two shelves rather than four. From the main room of her quarters (their quarters) she heard Kanaan exclaim and then say, "Do you want to keep this?"
He'd spilled out the contents of a box onto her bed -- their bed. She looked, and laughed, because there it was -- her strange-looking, mismatched zhadani, put together over five years, of many different parts. She had forgotten that it was so very close to completion. In fact, there was only one square left unfinished, a blank hole gaping at the edge of the patchwork.
"My friends and I made this," Teyla said softly, running her hand down its ragged, uneven squares. So many memories were hooked into the fabric. Here was Ronon's big, odd-shaped block, and John's black one, and the red one Kate had made; here were Elizabeth's squares, and a very neat one with small tidy stitches that Jennifer had brought her; here was the place where Carson had accidentally spilled his drink on the hookwork in her lap during one of their movie nights -- she remembered how he'd apologized so profusely, and how disappointed she'd been when the stain had failed to wash out of the expensive yarn, but now she looked at that stained square and only wanted to smile.
It was definitely not the most beautiful zhadani ever made, and Ancestors knew it wasn't the most traditional by any means, but she felt a sudden fierce pride in it.
Perhaps the missing square was appropriate, she thought. Perhaps Torren would want to make one of his own when he was old enough, to complete it. Perhaps Kanaan would like to add one of his own, to weave his life indivisibly with that of the Earthers, as she had done. Or perhaps the empty block would always remain -- a reminder of the squares that would never be completed by the hands of those friends and loved ones who had been lost over the years.
During the last four years, Teyla had wondered what she would do with the strange-looking zhadani when it was finished, but now that the time had come, it seemed that the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
"My friends made it," she repeated, and picking it up, she took it to Torren's crib, where he slept in a small soft bundle, with the stuffed animal that had once belonged to the son of Carter's friend tucked beside his tiny body. Very gently, she laid the zhadani over the side of the crib, and stroked a hand across it one more time.
Your child has a family here in case anything ever happens, John had once said to her. And, she thought, this zhadani was the tangible manifestation of that vow. Each square was a memory. Each square was a name. Charin. John. Ronon. Elizabeth. Kate. Jennifer. Carson... Those who loved her; those she was loved by; and so on, and so forth, into infinity. Even death did not have to be a barrier to love, as Carson's return had proven, as Kanaan's had.
She tucked a corner of the zhadani across Torren's small, fragile body. One of Kanaan's hands slipped into hers, and, for the first time since his return, Teyla allowed her fingers to curl back around his.
You are ours, my son, and we are yours. You have a home and a people, in this galaxy and in another.
And when you are older, I will tell you all the stories that are embedded in this fabric, all the heartbreaking stories and the ones that are full of love and laughter. And then you will know who you are and where you come from.
This is my promise to you.
Author: friendshipper
Word Count: 4900
Rating: G; gen (with a bit of Teyla/Kanaan at the end); mention of various canon deaths
Summary: Teyla makes an afghan, and Atlantis learns to crochet. Seasons one through early five.
As it happened, Teyla hooked the first square of a new zhadani the day before the Lanteans appeared -- the day before Athos was lost.
She had always enjoyed the feeling of the dyed wool and cotton running through her fingers, the pleasant repetition of the hook moving in and out. Taking advantage of a rare quiet evening, she sat on Charin's rug and sorted through her friend's many balls of beautiful yarn. Charin had obtained many of them when she was a young woman, at markets on dozens of worlds; since she no longer went on trading parties, her friends and relatives brought them back for her now, remembering the old woman's love of beautiful dyed fibers.
Charin used them to weave richly shimmering fabrics, but Teyla herself had never enjoyed spending time at the loom. Small light projects that could be carried about were more her style.
She finally selected a nice wool dyed in many shades of green. Charin had enough of it to make a decent-sized blanket. "Are you certain you do not mind?" Teyla asked her friend. "This must have been expensive."
Charin laughed and clasped her hand over Teyla's. "Look around you, dear girl. I have enough yarn to last much more than my remaining years. I would love nothing more than to see it put to good use."
So Teyla sat cross-legged on the rug and began the pleasantly familiar motions of casting a new square for a fresh project. She murmured, under her breath, the old prayer to the Ancestors for good luck that should always be said when starting a new undertaking, and then chatted with her friend and munched on nuts from a bowl on Charin's floor until it was late and time to take her leave. She left the completed square rolled up in Charin's tent; there was time enough to move the project over to her own residence, but for now, she liked having an excuse to stop into her friend's home more often.
Time enough ...
She didn't think of it again until days later, in the wake of tragedy and disaster, when they were gathered in the City of the Ancestors, taking stock of the meager possessions that they had managed to bring with them. In that last desperate flight, everyone had grabbed those things most precious to them, sometimes nothing more than their children and themselves. Charin had been unable to bring much at all; she'd been clinging to a young nephew and trying to speed along her own slow steps. But she placed into Teyla's hand a green square with a familiar pattern of stitches.
"I brought this for you," Charin said. "I am sorry that I could not save the rest of the yarn."
For some reason that was what did it -- Teyla bent her head, buried her face in the green wool, and wept quietly. She had not cried in many years, and she had been too busy, these last days, for the reality of what they'd all lost to sink in. Now it hit her with the force of a hammer blow: there was no more green yarn, no more colorful rugs and hanging tapestries -- no more village. The forests had burned. The wooden toys her mother had carved for her; the soft yellow zhadani blanket her father had hooked for her before she was born; the blue dress that a long-ago sweetheart, now married with children, had sewn for her; the big roughbark tree that she'd climbed with Kanaan and his cousins; gone, all gone.
The green woolen square smelled of herbs and incense and woodsmoke, the fragrance of her childhood -- all she had left of it now.
Charin held her until she was done weeping. "I don't know what I was thinking, really, dear. Of course you can't finish it now. I suppose I had to take something, and there was so much, and no time to decide --"
Teyla stood back, gently disentangling herself. She wiped her eyes. "I cannot see why I should not finish it," she said. The hook, her favorite small one of polished dark wood, was stuck through the hooked square, which was fortunate since the others were now all lost; she folded up the square neatly and tucked it into her coat pocket. "There is more yarn in the world."
For a long time, urgency consumed her trips offworld -- she was serving two sets of interests now, two groups of people equally desperate for food and allies and, in the Lanteans' case, the energy devices that they were so dependent upon. But all things come in time, and the day came that she quietly asked their current trading partners if she might add some rolls of gold-dyed woolen yarn to a shipment of tava beans bound for the Athosian settlement. The negotiations had gone well and, she thought, perhaps it wasn't too indulgent to throw in a little something for herself.
That evening she found a quiet balcony and began to hook for the first time in months. Her fingers still knew the patterns, though. Her father had taught her when she was very small, carefully shaping her pudgy little hands on the hook and yarn.
"Are you crocheting?"
Teyla had been aware of Dr. Weir's approach, but politely did not look up until the other woman spoke. "I am not sure. My people call it hooking."
Dr. Weir winced. "I wouldn't suggest that you call it that around the Marines. I'm not sure if it's just the translation, but on Earth, that is a slang term for ... something else." Blushing a bit, she joined Teyla on the floor, squatting down awkwardly; she did not look like a woman who frequently sat on floors. "It's not quite the same, anyway. In crochet, you hold the yarn like this -- May I?"
Teyla handed over the square, and Dr. Weir hesitated for a moment before getting the yarn arranged in her hands and demonstrating. It produced a different stitch than the usual hook stitch used on Athos, but every world had slightly different ways of drawing loops of yarn through other loops of yarn; Teyla had seen many, including some like this.
"I haven't done it in years -- my grandmother taught me when I was a kid, but I'm afraid it was never really my thing." Dr. Weir gave a small laugh. "It's hard enough to be taken seriously as a female negotiator when you aren't hauling around a shoulder bag of yarn."
Teyla tried to guess at her meaning. "Because it is a man's craft on your world, you mean?" Athos was the same -- such light portable crafts were easily suited to travel and hunting, which historically had tended to skew male. No one had thought Teyla odd for taking up a craft that was usually done by men, but then, in Teyla's experience, the Athosians were more relaxed about such things than many worlds.
"What? No, no." Dr. Weir laughed again. "Crochet is women's work. In my part of Earth, at least."
Teyla filed away another bit of information about Earth -- at least Dr. Weir's part of Earth; she reminded herself that Earth was a place of many nations. Dr. Weir obviously came from a nation with firm gender segregation. Such people, she knew, frequently had many gender-related taboos that were not always obvious to outsiders. She would have to continue observing them closely so as not to accidentally offend.
"Would you like to learn Athosian hooking?" Teyla asked, as Dr. Weir handed it back.
"I'd love to. But, really, you have to remember not to call it that where the men can hear you, at least if you don't want to deal with a lot of crude jokes."
From then on, Dr. Weir -- Elizabeth -- started joining her regularly on the balcony. Teyla taught her the Athosian hook stitches, and learned the ones that Elizabeth knew. The zhadani grew square by square.
None of the squares matched at all. Charin had taught Teyla that in order to have a proper, trade-quality zhadani, it was necessary to buy all the yarn at one time from a single merchant, since each individual spinner and dyer would produce yarn of a different thickness and color. With the original batch of yarn lost, Teyla had initially tried to find colors and thicknesses that would work well with the midweight green that she'd used to begin the project -- it was irrational, she knew, but she felt as if it was important to keep the original square as part of the design; it was a last link to the village and world they'd left behind forever. But the new squares kept coming out misshapen, reflecting Teyla's efforts at learning Earth's crochet stitches and Elizabeth's practice at Athosian hooking, and when Elizabeth wanted to come along on Teyla's next trip to obtain more yarn in the markets of Ku Daigon, she decided that trying to maintain any sort of consistency was probably a lost cause. On the other hand, Teyla thought, the zhadani would still be functional even if it wasn't beautiful. It would keep someone warm, and that was the function of such a thing, after all.
While she enjoyed the challenge of representing Atlantis and Athos in serious bargaining, it was also a tremendous pleasure to trade for fun -- to run her hands through hanks of richly dyed yarns, and choose the ones that were most pleasing to her. On Charin's behalf, Teyla began to seek out yarns and fibers to help her friend start rebuilding the collection that had been lost on Athos. It added a pleasant aspect to her trading missions.
Somewhat to her surprise, as more people saw her hooking squares in her rare moments of downtime, a growing interest was spreading throughout the city. Different people -- mostly women, but not all -- began to ask her where she was getting the yarn, and, when she explained, offered to give her various items to trade on her next trading trip if she would bring them back some yarn and hooks, too. Various yarn-hooked handicrafts began to appear around the city; most of them were misshapen and lumpy, made on unfamiliar tools by people who hadn't done anything of the sort in years, but they were popular items to trade as gifts for the various Earth holidays. A few of the born-again yarncrafters, including Kate Heightmeyer and Wendy Hewston, asked Teyla to show them how to do Athosian-style hooking. Since a zhadani square was the easiest possible project for a beginner to learn, Teyla began to accumulate weird-shaped, inexpertly hooked squares that her friends made under her tutelage. Rather than waste them or hurt the feelings of her students, she incorporated them into the zhadani; it wasn't as if it could get much stranger-looking than it already was.
She began occasionally taking a small bag of yarn and her hooks with her on missions where she anticipated having some downtime. The first time that she took out her hooking kit, to pass the time on a long jumper flight, Dr. McKay looked over at her and said loudly, "Wait, Teyla's knitting?"
"Is that a problem?" she asked, calmly hooking the rows for a new square. Dr. McKay, she knew, liked to mock what he did not understand.
"No, it's just --" He faltered, and stammered for a moment. "It's not really, um, you."
She smiled a bit, as she began to work the second row into the first. Perhaps this was the sort of thing that had led Dr. Weir to avoid bringing her own hooking to meetings, back on her world. "You know me so well, then?"
McKay's face flamed a bright, shiny pink. "No -- no, it's just that with the sticks and badassery and all, it's not something I would have -- What?" he demanded, glaring at John, who was grinning.
"Hey, I'm not getting involved here, Rodney. You're digging your hole deep enough as it is."
John and Ronon had both seen her working with yarn before, as she occasionally ate breakfast with one or the other of them, and often had her bag of yarn along with her. However, the next time that John joined her for breakfast, he kept glancing at the half-finished square in a way that was almost shy. At last he said, "So ... you mind if I ask what you're making?"
"It is a zhadani -- I think you would say an afghan." She hoped sincerely that he would not ask to see it. With contributions from nearly a dozen different people, the finished piece had grown ever more misshapen and many-colored. Teyla thought that it had a certain oddball charm, but it was definitely not how she would like her people's folk arts to be presented to the world.
"Ah," John said, and nodded.
There was a long silence, during which Teyla sipped her tea and hooked on her zhadani square, and John spread preserves on his toasted bread with a very focused intensity, as if rendering the preserves at just the right thickness had become the most important thing in his world.
As the silence passed from companionable to awkward, Teyla asked cautiously, "Would you like to learn?"
John jumped. "Um ..."
"It is all right," Teyla said quickly, because she'd learned how odd John could get when he felt as if he was being pressured. "You may let me know if you'd like to learn; otherwise, we need not speak of this again." She turned her work and began a new row. "How are your new Marines coming along with their training?"
They moved on to speak of other things, and time passed, and seasons turned. And then, Charin died, and Teyla found herself standing in the tent of her oldest and dearest friend, looking around her with numb surprise at the quantity of yarns and fabrics that Charin had managed to collect in the year and a half since they had lost everything.
"She wanted you to have her things," Marta said gently. "She said that she thought of you as her own daughter."
"I know." Teyla had cried herself dry, in the privacy of her quarters; now she was exhausted and empty, weighed down beneath a crushing burden of grief. The warm, familiar smells of incense and dyes, which had comforted her since she was a little girl, suddenly overwhelmed her -- murmuring an apology to Marta, she pushed back the door covering and stumbled out into the afternoon sunshine.
John, who had flown her to the mainland, was loitering nearby -- apparently engaged in idle chat with some of the men, but he swiveled immediately when she stepped out of the tent, and took a few steps towards her. "Hey," he said.
Teyla smiled at him, not quite trusting her voice yet, and tucked her hands in the pocket of her traveling coat -- it was really too warm for it, but she'd put it on automatically in her quarters that morning, as she usually did when she left the city on a personal trip. "John ..." she said when her voice was steady, "may I use the radio in the jumper to call back to Atlantis?"
"Of course." He didn't ask why, just shadowed her back to the clearing where he'd parked the jumper, activated it for her, and then left her alone.
Teyla perched on the edge of John's pilot chair, feeling small and very, very alone, and asked Chuck if she might speak to Elizabeth. "I can wait," she said, but Elizabeth came back immediately, as if she had nothing to do all day but answer calls from the mainland. These people, Teyla thought, did not seem to express sympathy directly, beyond a few awkward condolences; it was not their way. But their feelings were very plain from their actions -- John's anxious hovering (she could see him through the jumper's window, glancing in her direction and then looking away); Elizabeth's solicitous attentiveness.
"Elizabeth, I have been wondering if it might be nice to have some boxes of yarn in the rec lounges, so that people might choose what they need and leave what they do not want. Do you think there would be any problem with that?"
Elizabeth thought it was a marvelous idea. So Marta and some of the others helped Teyla sort through the yarns -- some would stay with the village (Teyla made sure that everyone in the village who enjoyed hooking was able to pick out a ball or two, starting with Halling) and then the rest went to Atlantis in a couple of boxes labeled in Earth script: FREE YARN - TAKE SOME!
Teyla had expected the yarn to quickly vanish from the boxes. But instead, people would work on projects while they were in the lounges, and then leave the partially-completed zhadani square or scarf or whatever they were making for the next person to work on. The finished projects tended to become communal property as well -- a finished zhadani would remain in the lounge, to be used by whatever scientist or soldier wanted to wrap up in it while he or she watched the movies projected on the wall; a scarf might migrate down to the locker rooms, where anyone going to a cold planet might use it.
The interesting thing about the yarn boxes was that the level of yarn never really went down -- sometimes people would take a ball of yarn to work on a private project, but soon more yarn would show up to replace it. Now that the Daedalus was making regular supply runs, yarns from Earth began to show up in the boxes as well, along with well-thumbed catalogues of various Earth yarns and knitters' supplies.
The only person in the city who wasn't using the yarn, it seemed, was Teyla herself. It was a long time after Charin's death when she finally forced herself to open up the box in her room where she kept her partially completed zhadani. She spread it out on the bed, with all its mismatched, misshapen squares. She had remembered it being aesthetically displeasing, but now that she looked at it, she found herself remembering the story behind each square. Here was the very first square that Elizabeth had made -- Teyla reached out and touched the uneven stitches, smiling as she remembered how Elizabeth had dropped a stitch (which one? this one?) and then cursed and blushed and apologized. And here was the square that Kate had made, in a lovely red yarn that she had unraveled from an Earth sweater that had developed too many holes to be worn.
And in every stitch, Teyla saw Charin, felt Charin -- these were the stitches that Charin had taught her, that she had passed along to her friends on Atlantis. She caressed the knobbly squares, running the soft wool through her fingers, and then spread the zhadani across the bed to see how long it needed to be. It is barely half finished, she thought, and folded it very carefully back into the box. There was still a lot of work to be done. And so she took out her hooks again, and began to dive into the FREE YARN boxes herself. (There were more of them now, to accommodate a great deal more yarn from Earth.)
Square by square, the zhadani grew.
Ronon, Teyla discovered, had practiced a yarn-art on Sateda that was somewhat more like the Earthers' "knitting" than the hookcraft she'd grown up with. "Had to learn it in school," Ronon said; "never was very good at it." But with the loss of so much, it was possible that he was the only person left in all the tradeworlds who knew Satedan knitting, so Teyla was not surprised to occasionally see him in the lounges, picking through the boxes of yarn. She was even less surprised (but politely appreciative) when he showed up on the doorstep of her quarters with a large square -- really more of a rectangle -- that was entirely the wrong shape and size for the zhadani. She found a similarly colored yarn to hook more stitches around the edges and make it look sort of intentional. A good pattern must be able to change when it needs to change, Charin used to say.
She began to carry along her hookwork to the social events that John called "team movie night", which basically consisted of John watching a movie in his quarters with the door open. Teyla usually showed up; Ronon at first came seldom, and then with increasing frequency until he was the most regular attendee of them all -- Ronon would watch anything. Elizabeth and Carson also liked to drop by from time to time. Rodney did not come unless he could pick the movie (which, on his nights to choose, invariably turned out to be one of a number of serialized story-plays that Teyla found exceedingly repetitive and tiresome, and also far too similar to their everyday lives to be pleasant).
Despite the generally dull and banal nature of Earth movies, when she would look back later on this time in her life, those "team movie nights" were the parts she remembered with the greatest warmth -- sitting on a cushion with her hookwork in her lap, smiling as John and Ronon competed for the last handful of popcorn, hearing Elizabeth's rare and gentle laughter at the moving pictures on the screen of John's laptop. Surrounded by her friends. Safe. Happy. Perhaps she was even naive enough to assume that her life might always be thus.
But, as the children of Athos know well, nothing lasts forever. And when things changed, they did so very fast, in no more than a single turn of the seasons. So many people were dead: Wendy Hewston, Carson, Elizabeth, Kate; so many things changed and lost -- Kanaan, her people. It was as if the life she'd rebuilt for herself over the last three years was once again torn asunder and cast into the wind like handfuls of ashes, as if all the things she'd come to believe about herself could no longer be trusted, not even her own body that now carried a new life within it.
And she was no longer part of John's team.
She had not felt so isolated since her early days on Atlantis, when she was distrusted and ignored by the majority of the expedition.
Only, very slowly, she realized that it was different now.
It took her a while to notice that there was always someone stopping by her quarters to say hello and drink a cup of tea -- always someone coming over to sit with her in the cafeteria while John's team was out on a mission. Jennifer brought her books on pregnancy, and Earth teas that were supposed to ease the aches and illnesses of the changes happening to her body. One evening Colonel Carter came to her quarters with a large box that had been delivered through the gate bridge, and as Teyla pulled out soft baby things and bright-colored toys in wonder, the colonel explained, "We took up a collection at the SGC. Lots of people at Stargate Command have kids. This ..." she held up a stuffed furry creature of some sort, "this is a teddy bear, if you haven't seen one before; it belonged to the son of a friend of mine, many years ago." Her face was very soft as she added, "I told him you were going to have a son, and he wanted you to have it."
There were more squares for the zhadani, pressed into her hand in the cafeteria, placed gently on her lap in the rec lounge. And the biggest surprise of all was John showing up at her door one evening, fidgeting and rubbing the back of his neck. "So," he said, looking at the toes of his boots. "You said that you'd teach me that crochet thing, you know, if I ever wanted to learn. I thought, if you were bored, that we might --"
He was blushing, and sweating a bit. Teyla smiled, and rescued him from his own embarrassment, pulling him in out of the hall.
John made an extremely lopsided square in all-black yarn. Teyla was piecing together another large chunk of the zhadani, and she put it at the center, with the other, more colorful squares arrayed around it. It fits there, she thought. It feels right.
And then there was Michael. And Torren John. And she did not think of the zhadani again until some time later, when she and Kanaan were tidying her quarters, rearranging them to make room for Torren's crib and to accommodate the mingled possessions of two adults. It was a strange business; she'd dreamed of this for a long time, and yet the reality was uncomfortable and awkward. They were near-strangers to each other now, and kept getting in each other's way. They'd had a sort of almost-fight, which ended with Teyla retreating into the bathroom to move her own toiletry items so that they only took up two shelves rather than four. From the main room of her quarters (their quarters) she heard Kanaan exclaim and then say, "Do you want to keep this?"
He'd spilled out the contents of a box onto her bed -- their bed. She looked, and laughed, because there it was -- her strange-looking, mismatched zhadani, put together over five years, of many different parts. She had forgotten that it was so very close to completion. In fact, there was only one square left unfinished, a blank hole gaping at the edge of the patchwork.
"My friends and I made this," Teyla said softly, running her hand down its ragged, uneven squares. So many memories were hooked into the fabric. Here was Ronon's big, odd-shaped block, and John's black one, and the red one Kate had made; here were Elizabeth's squares, and a very neat one with small tidy stitches that Jennifer had brought her; here was the place where Carson had accidentally spilled his drink on the hookwork in her lap during one of their movie nights -- she remembered how he'd apologized so profusely, and how disappointed she'd been when the stain had failed to wash out of the expensive yarn, but now she looked at that stained square and only wanted to smile.
It was definitely not the most beautiful zhadani ever made, and Ancestors knew it wasn't the most traditional by any means, but she felt a sudden fierce pride in it.
Perhaps the missing square was appropriate, she thought. Perhaps Torren would want to make one of his own when he was old enough, to complete it. Perhaps Kanaan would like to add one of his own, to weave his life indivisibly with that of the Earthers, as she had done. Or perhaps the empty block would always remain -- a reminder of the squares that would never be completed by the hands of those friends and loved ones who had been lost over the years.
During the last four years, Teyla had wondered what she would do with the strange-looking zhadani when it was finished, but now that the time had come, it seemed that the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
"My friends made it," she repeated, and picking it up, she took it to Torren's crib, where he slept in a small soft bundle, with the stuffed animal that had once belonged to the son of Carter's friend tucked beside his tiny body. Very gently, she laid the zhadani over the side of the crib, and stroked a hand across it one more time.
Your child has a family here in case anything ever happens, John had once said to her. And, she thought, this zhadani was the tangible manifestation of that vow. Each square was a memory. Each square was a name. Charin. John. Ronon. Elizabeth. Kate. Jennifer. Carson... Those who loved her; those she was loved by; and so on, and so forth, into infinity. Even death did not have to be a barrier to love, as Carson's return had proven, as Kanaan's had.
She tucked a corner of the zhadani across Torren's small, fragile body. One of Kanaan's hands slipped into hers, and, for the first time since his return, Teyla allowed her fingers to curl back around his.
You are ours, my son, and we are yours. You have a home and a people, in this galaxy and in another.
And when you are older, I will tell you all the stories that are embedded in this fabric, all the heartbreaking stories and the ones that are full of love and laughter. And then you will know who you are and where you come from.
This is my promise to you.