#30 day drabble challnge

[broadwaybaggins]

Pairing of your choice + Knitting

30 Day Drabble Challenge Day 2: OMG I Will Never Catch Up Edition

(Okay I know that literally no one on my dash watches ER or cares as much as I do but it’s my new obsession and this is what’s inspiring me right now because Abby/Luka is life. Also, contains some major spoilers for ER season 6-9 and beyond)

It was never a habit she thought she would pick up. It was so old-fashioned, something little old ladies did between bridge club and complaining about their various aches and pains. It was something her mother did, which should have been enough to disqualify it all by itself. But years ago, back when she’d first joined AA, her sponsor had suggested that Abby take up knitting. 

She’d scoffed at the idea at first, half-heartedly bought some supplied and checked out a how-to book at the library in an attempt to get her sponsor off her back, and forgot about it until long after the book was overdue. But one night in an attempt to busy herself with anything that wasn’t a bottle of tequila, she had found herself sitting cross-legged on her living room floor with a ball of yarn and the book open in her lap, squinting down and trying to make sense of the instructions. Things had snowballed from there.

She found that she picked it up rather quickly–in a weird way, it wasn’t all that different from suturing, or at least she’d thought that first night–and it was mindless and a way to keep her hands busy and her thoughts from going down into that dark spiral. Famously, on the night that her divorce from Richard was finalized, she stayed up the entire night knitting and then pulled a double shift the next day. In a weird way, it was a comfort–knit one, purl one, down the line, repeat until your eyes are bleary and your problems don’t seem so bad. Take all the darkness that’s inside and try to make something good come out of it. 

Abby’s work was never perfect–a dropped stitch in the sweater she’d made for her brother last year, the scarf that had somehow ended up twice as wide at the bottom as it was on top, the tiny mittens she’d attempted to make for Carol Hathaway’s twins before abandoning the project in a fit of pique and turning them into tiny Christmas stockings instead. She wore and gave her work proudly, but unless someone asked, she never volunteered the fact that she’d made it herself. She hid it almost like she had hidden her drinking for all those years, although in the grand scheme of things, knitting was nothing to be ashamed about.

The first person to catch her knitting on the job was Jing-Mei Chen, the night that Carter and Lucy had been stabbed. Abby was still settling into her new role in her ER rotation and finally feeling like she’d gotten the lay of the land, and all of a sudden the entire ER was crawling with cops and a bloody knife was falling down from cabinets almost on top of Abby and two of her new coworkers were fighting for their lives. Abby had left the trauma room where Carter was and felt panic bubbling up inside of her, one hand pressed to her mouth as if she were about to be sick. Maybe she was. She just knew she had to get out of there, if only for a minute.

Before she’d even known where her feet were taking her, she had thrown open the door of the lounge and was practically sprinting to her locker. Her hands shook and it took her three times to get her combination right, and when she finally picked up the hat that was her current projects she twisted up the yarn and dropped stitches left and right. It didn’t matter. it was the motion, that familiar autopilot, that she hoped was going to calm her down. It didn’t matter if it was perfect.

What did anything matter anymore, really?

“Abby?” came a voice from the doorway, and Abby looked up guiltily to see Dr. Chen looking at her. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” Abby admitted, then looked down sheepishly at her knitting. 

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know that either,” she said with what might have been a smile. “It helps calm me down, I guess.”

“Well, when you’re ready to get back in there, we could really use another set of hands.” Abby had nodded, and Jing-Mei had paused. “They’re going to be okay, Abby.”

“Yeah.”

Of course, Jing-Mei had only been half right that day. Later, when she and Luka had gone to Doc Magoo’s and met up with Jing-Mei and Malucci, none of them wanting to go home and miss any news, Abby’s purse had fallen open, revealing her knitting for all to see. She had noticed Dr. Chen look at it, but she hadn’t said anything.

She got Lucy’s mother’s address from personnel and sent her a delicate scarf, but never received any response.

A few weeks later when she’d gone to see Carter during his recovery, she had brought her next project along with her and promised to make him a scarf. He’d laughed and told her not to waste any time on him. She’d gotten the feeling that he had wanted to make fun of her, but hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings. Later on when they started dating, he did make fun of her, and she’d thrown her ball of yarn square between his eyes.

Dr. Weaver had found her knitting on a break once, after she’d been forced to abandon med school a second time and return to nursing, and asked if there wasn’t anything better she could do. Dr. Greene had proudly sported the god-awful hat she had awkwardly presented him after his first brain tumor surgery–for all of a week, before he said that Ella had gotten a hold of it and it was no longer presentable to wear in public. At his funeral, Elizabeth had tearfully told her that she still had it, and that Mark had been grateful for the gesture. Susan Lewis actually asked Abby to show her how, but that teaching session had turned into more of a gab fest than anything–not that Abby really minded. Dr. Romano had rolled his eyes and asked if the 1950s housewife act included dinner. Abby had wanted to punch him for that, one arm or not.

Whereas knitting used to be something she held almost as closely to her chest as the fact that she was a recovering alcoholic, now, it was just something people accepted about her. It was another one of her weird Abby quirks, along with the crazy mother and the inability to maintain a stable relationship. For better or worse, it was a part of who she was now.

But with Luka, things were different.

That statement, of course could have been applied to a number of things. But the first time Abby had brought out her knitting in front of him, a rare night off when they were just sitting around watching TV, he hadn’t immediately started poking fun at her or asking questions that she didn’t feel like answering. He had just smiled and accepted it, and they’d sat in comfortable silence, her feet on his lap and just the sound of the TV and the faint click-clack of her needles. She wasn’t sure if he found it charming or endearing or if it was a weird European thing, but she felt comfortable and safe for the first time in a long time.

He wore everything she made him with a quiet sort of pride, even the hat that didn’t quite fit over his ears and the sweater (boyfriend curse be damned–Abby would come to regret that one later, but they’d found their way back to each other eventually, so maybe the curse was just a myth after all) whose right sleeve was just a bit longer than the left. The only time he ever made fun of her was when she was deep into the nesting phase of her pregnancy, when he’d wake up in the middle of the night to find her pacing the kitchen and eating Pop-Tarts while surrounded by piles of unfinished projects. When she worried that this was mania, that her mother’s disorder was finally rearing its ugly head in her, he’d taken her hands gently in his own and said that it wasn’t, that this was perfectly normal in a pregnancy, that she had nothing to worry about. It hadn’t done much to calm her down, but it was a start.

And when Josip “Joe” Kovač was finally allowed to leave the NICU, it was his father who lovingly placed the tiny hand-knitted hat on his head before the new family walked out of County General together.