For as long as he can remember, Teshima has gotten hand-knit sweaters from his grandmother on his father's side for his birthdays.
They are overlarge and too warm for September, but by the time the seasons change, they are perfect. His grandmother likes to sew stars and moons and constellations and rocket ships on the sweaters, and he has always loved them. Space is cold and dark, but somewhere out there are burning balls of gas, lighting up the skies across the galaxy and keeping everyone warm.
When Teshima is eight, he wants to knit his grandmother a sweater in return. His father laughs and tells him that that was exactly what he wanted to do when he was young. So Teshima learns to knit from his father, who brings home thick, colorful spools of yarn and a pair of needles that he has a hard time not thinking of as chopsticks.
He practices making hats to start. His first creation is a green and orange and pink and red color-clashing disaster, but it fits his head sort of, mostly, and both he and his parents are very proud. He wears it to school the very next day. His classmates tease him, and when he explains that he made it himself, they laugh harder, steal the hat, and throw it into the gutter.
Teshima does not cry at school. He retrieves the hat, takes it home, and against his own careful plan not to bring it up, bursts into tears that night when his father sits him down for another knitting lesson.
"Don't worry about them," his father says. "They're just jealous they can't do what you can do."
"They'll wish they were as impressive," his mother chimes in, "when they find someone that they want to impress."
Teshima only really wants to impress his parents and his grandmother though. He knits dutifully through his lesson, despite his tears. The next hat is still overly colorful, but it fits his mother's head perfectly.
Teshima has no particular talent for knitting. His stitches are not very neat or uniform. They are often too large, even when he goes as slowly and as carefully as he can. Many things come out lopsided, and his color coordination is lacking. But he enjoys it. It's something steady and relaxing, and he can do it, sort of, while he watches TV. He likes being able to make things, even if they don't always come out the way he envisions.
The first sweater he makes his grandmother is navy blue with lime green snowmen which look like radioactive marshmallows. It's objectively awful, and when she receives it, she tells him so - with the biggest grin he's ever seen and a kind, cheerful laugh. He laughs with her and grins back. In the evening, she helps him resize one of the sleeves so she can actually put her arm through it.
"Your father's first sweater was much worse," she tells him.
When Teshima gets his first road bike, knitting falls on his list of priorities.
He still knits his grandmother sweaters (and she still knits for him in turn), but between what he already has and what he's annually given, he doesn't really need to knit things for himself. His parents, too, are not hurting for hand-knit goods. His skills do not deteriorate, but neither do they improve. The sweaters he makes through middle school are less horrible in color, but his stitches are still too big, and his snowflakes look like fireworks.
Aoyagi Hajime is quiet and shy and bad with words, but Teshima has never felt so drawn to another person before. Aoyagi is the first person Teshima wants to knit something for outside of his family.
He tries for a hat, but the first one he makes is definitely too ugly.
The second one is too big. The third is too lopsided. The fourth he must have chosen the colors for while his eyes were closed. It's the first time he doesn't know for sure that the recipient will accept his creation. They tease each other often, but Teshima has never doubted that his parents and his grandmother would appreciate his efforts and love whatever he makes for them.
He does not think that Aoyagi will approve so unconditionally. Aoyagi is an artist. Aoyagi has taste. Aoyagi probably does not like him enough to wear a very horrible hat, if what he gives him is a very horrible hat.
In the December of their first year, Teshima knits five hats and does not end up giving any of them to Aoyagi.
Aoyagi loses his only other hat halfway through January though, and every time the shorter boy rubs his cold, pink ears, Teshima wishes he were better at knitting.
On Valentine's Day, a very embarrassed Aoyagi gives Teshima a box of very misshaped, but very delicious, homemade chocolates, and an equally embarrassed Teshima gives Aoyagi a simple, black and white striped knit hat. The stitches alternate weirdly between being too big and too small, but the stripes are more or less even, and it's only a little bit too small.
By February, the snow has melted and the cold wind doesn't bite as much anymore, but Aoyagi wears the hat until it's almost May. (The chocolates, meanwhile, did not survive the week.) Teshima feels an oddly choking flutter of joy and pride every time he sees Aoyagi with the hat.
Teshima and Aoyagi train hard their first year, but they train harder their second year.
Teshima's knitting supplies collect dust in the corner of his room all summer. In the fall, moodier weather sets in as the days grow short again. They still ride through most of it. Fog, wind, and light rain don't cancel practice. But on the days it's raining too hard to ride safely, Teshima goes home to fret over his stitches while recordings of old races play in the background.
The stitches are smaller than they used to be, and he is more confident doing different kinds, but here and there, they are still uneven and obvious. More than once he's wondered whether he's destined to be ordinary at knitting too, but Teshima can accept his unremarkable skills in knitting more easily, regardless. He isn't trying to win any knitting contests. He just wants the next thing he makes to be better than the last. He just wants all his stitches to be the same size and even, eventually.
His grandmother's birthday is also in September. His eighth annual sweater for her is indigo fading into a beautiful deep blue with large, pale yellow stars hanging from little yellow stitches coming down from the collar. She squeals when she opens it and smiles and laughs with real tears in her eyes.
"It looks amazing, Jun-chan! You've gotten amazing! This is so beautiful, and I'm so proud of you!"
Teshima blushes. "The strings for the stars are a bit crooked, aren't they?"
His grandmother scoffs and laughs again. "They're perfect," she says. "This is perfect. I can't wait to see what you do next! You're making something for that boyfriend of yours, aren't you?"
On Christmas Eve, Teshima gives Aoyagi a very long, black scarf with white crescent moons on either end. It sort of matches the previous hat. Aoyagi is silent when he unwraps it, but holds it in his lap and stares at it like it's made of gold. Teshima can feel the heat rise to his cheeks just watching Aoyagi's face, where a tiny smile gradually emerges. After a full minute's admiration, Aoyagi wraps the scarf around both himself and Teshima (demonstrating the fact that it was really far too long) and kisses Teshima until neither of them can feel their lips anymore.
Teshima knows now, though, that Aoyagi does like him enough to wear around a subpar thing just because he made it. They both know that the scarf is better made than the hat, but the scarf is still not perfect, either. Just like the eighth sweater he's given his grandmother still isn't.
"Junta," Aoyagi says one morning before school. "Did you knit that muffler? It's beautiful."
"Hmm?" Teshima looks up from his notebook, then down at the green and black muffler he's wearing. "Oh, no. My grandma made this. She's way better than me, right?"
"I think you can knit something just as nice," Aoyagi says, somewhat defensively.
Teshima grins. "Maybe someday," he says. "I'll keep trying."
He doesn't have time to knit something for Valentine's Day though, and their third year is the busiest yet. He wakes early every morning to train before school, and practice ends every day when the sun sets. The hours he's at school are spent with his face deep in textbooks. He has callouses all over his palms from gripping handlebars and papercuts on all his fingers from turning pages too quickly and too roughly.
His knitting supplies are forgotten for long months, and in late August, after the Inter-High is over, he panics, thinking he doesn't have time to knit something for his grandmother.
And he doesn't.
She passes away suddenly right before his birthday. But her last sweater to him is mostly finished: it's off-white and beige, patterned subtly; a trail of stars creep up from the unfinished bottom, starting off in yellow and orange and gradually accumulating into a bright red star at the center. The stitches are careful and perfect, as they always have been. Teshima cries into the sweater at the funeral. He thinks his father is crying into one too.
"You should finish the sweater," his father tells him afterwards. "She'd want you to."
"You finish it," Teshima says. "I can't knit as well. I'll ruin it."
"I can't knit that well either. You've gotten better than I ever was, you know. You should finish it."
But Teshima doesn't. He doesn't knit other things either, but it isn't really a conscious decision. Life is still busy. There are exams to study for. There's a future to plan. It's easier to buy things than to make them. His knitting supplies remain where they have been, in the dustier corner of his room.
For Christmas, he gives Aoyagi a silver necklace and a kiss under a starry night sky. In return, Aoyagi brings out a large, floppy wrapped gift and shifts his weight nervously between his feet while Teshima carefully tears away the shimmering paper.
A poorly-knit scarf spills from the wrappings.
It's made from thick, multi-colored wool and immediately warm to the touch. The stitches are far too big and far too wide, but Teshima can see the love and effort through the little gaps in the yarn and the heaviness in his chest is unbearable. The design and colors are beautiful, and even though the execution is amateurish, Teshima genuinely feels that it's one of the most perfect things he's ever been given.
Skill doesn't matter when it came to love. His grandmother never wanted anything perfect from him, and neither did Aoyagi. And Teshima realizes very suddenly that even if his grandmother's sweaters hadn't all been crafted with intimidating perfection, he would have loved them anyway, in the end.
"Junta?"
Aoyagi has been watching for his reaction carefully and sounds worried. Teshima turns to him and is surprised to feel a cool dampness on his cheeks. He wipes his tears away roughly and laughs. "It's perfect," he says, voice breaking. "It's beautiful. You're beautiful."
He pulls Aoyagi into a tight hug. "Thank you," he mumbles. "I love you."
Aoyagi exhales slowly in quiet relief and relaxes into Teshima's arms. Teshima can feel him smiling against his shoulder.
When they meet at the shrine for New Years, Teshima is wearing Aoyagi's scarf and his grandmother's last sweater. The stitches at the bottom of the sweater are bigger than the rest, but they are even, and the pattern and colors match.
"Here," Teshima says, pulling out a knit hat and handing it to his boyfriend. "This was one of the first hats I made for you, but I didn't like it enough to give it to you at the time." His cheeks were flushed red, but it was hard to tell if it was from the cold or not. "I fixed it, sort of. You don't have to wear it if you don't want to, but I wanted you to have it."
Aoyagi laughs silently and takes the hat. It's black with little stars scattered into various, sort-of crooked constellations. A single little moon hangs on one side, near the bottom, arguably lopsided. Aoyagi takes off the hat he's wearing - the black and white striped one, the very first gift he'd gotten from Teshima - and replaces it with the new one.
"I'll wear anything you make me," Aoyagi says, kissing him on the edge of his mouth. "You're wearing my horrible scarf, after all."
"It's beautiful though," Teshima says, blushing.
"And this hat is too."