eeveee | Of Perfection (Cardcaptor Sakura: Meilin/Syaroan)

There was a ring on her finger, an admittedly silly - if not outright ridiculous - sentimental and ultimately purposeless token of the promise she had threatened him into assuring he was going to keep this time around. Her mother liked to snort at what she considered a symbol of the paranoid distrust foreigners held to a spoken vow. Meilin didn't bother with trying to explain just what it felt like to carry a solid proof of his commitment.

Her mother also didn't believe in courting, even if it might not really be considered such when the ring was well in place on Meilin's hand and Syaoran regularly complained about his sisters nagging him about setting a date already. When Meilin asked what she thought, her mother had glanced down at her daughter's hand, and asked her just what she was trying to prove.

So Meilin, who never really had had all that much belief in her mother's romantic advice anyway, had called Kinomoto-san in Japan, as she had least had some experience in the field. But nice as it had been to talk to Kinomoto-san again, the ten minutes she had spent arguing with Kerberos before Kinomoto-san's brother took the phone away from him hadn't really been worth it; and Meilin had forgotten just how innocent Kinomoto-san was. The other girl had come up with an impressive list covering most things from expensive electronics she couldn't afford to elaborate home-made projects it would be difficult to execute. It ended with a confident pep-talk assuring her that "he would love anything that you gave him, Meilin-chan", but when she hung up, Syaroan Lee's bride-to-be was as empty-handed as she had been when she dialied the number.

Meilin called Daidoudji-san.

After regretfully telling Daidoudji-san that her cooking still needed a bit of practice, the two had pondered the problem for quite a while. It couldn't be too expensive, as Meilin regrettably did not hold a steady income and might not have much of a talent for saving up money. And anyway, she was firmly convinced that the best way to prove her devotion would be to make the effort herself, and put her heart and soul into his Christmas present. Daidoudji-san agreed with that, and thus began a new thirty minutes of discussion about how Meilin could best utilize her talents to give Syaroan something nice for Christmas. After ruling out cooking, sewing, embroidery, wood carving, drawing, flower-arranging and paper-mache, Daidoudji-san had asked if Meilin knew how to knit.

Meilin's mother still kept the scarf that Meilin had knitted in third grade. She used it as a toy for the cat, but Meilin must have done a thing or two right even if it the result hadn't looked quite like the teacher's. And if she could have produced such results things ten years ago, it would be a piece of cake for somebody like her to get it even better now.

Unfortunately, somebody had cursed her knitting needles. A clever, personal curse at that, as their grandmother could only sigh every time she took the mess from Meilin's hands to show her how it was done. It was a skill her sister had mastered at five, but the moment the pins and yarn was back between the Meilin's fingers, it tangled and knotted and became unnaturally impossible to steer. When three hours had passed and her efforts had produced a small patch of fabric full of holes, the old woman had gently taken it from her, and touched her shoulder. When Meilin looked up, she smiled sadly at her.

"Is this really necessary, Meilin? Don't you think that your cousin will be happy if you buy him a nice hat somewhere?"

Meilin consoled herself with that it was quite normal for elderly people to start getting forgetful, disconcerting as it was that the matriarch of the Li clan failed to recognize such obvious magic.

"Meilin, those knitting needles aren't cursed."

"What?"

"They're not cursed. Really, what gave you that idea?"

She absently took them from his hand, staring down at them and not quite comprehending what her cousin was telling her.

"Are you absolutely sure?" she finally asked, catching his eyes defiantly, "there's no magic? They're not magical knitting needles, are they?"

Syaroan looked confused. "Is there any reason they SHOULD be? They're completely normal knitting needles. There was no reaction to any of the chants or spells, you saw it yourself."

A frustration that felt dangerously close to dismay was rising from her belly, and she threw the damned pins at the wall with a wordless cry of anger. There was disappointingly little damage done as they clattered to the floor. She strode over to pick them up, and made a futile effort to break them in her fist as she made her way to the door.

"Meilin..." Syaoran said weakly behind her, and she whirled around to find him staring wide-eyed at her.

"I can't even learn how to knit!" she howled, shaking the fist with the pins in his direction, "it's the simplest, easiest, stupidest thing in the world, and I can't do it!"

Syaroan only stared more, with a slightly intimidated and decidedly confused expression. "But why do you want to do that?" he asked, lowering his arm. When she didn't answer, he pressed on a bit, "I didn't know you were interesting in handicraft. I thought you found it boring."

The humiliation was catching up with her now, and the urge to break the pins into tiny pieces was disappearing in favour of hopelessness. She slumped down in the chair on the other side of the desk, and put the pins on the table between them.

They sat together in silence for a while, Meilin trying not to make excuses that only would make things worse and Syaoran observing her very quietly. She could hear him trying to start conversation four times before he actually did it.

“Was there any particular reasons you wanted to learn how to knit?”

She shrugged without taking her eyes of the floorboards, but the quiet sigh that reply was met with made her glance up at her cousin. He was looking at her with a sympathy she wasn’t sure she appreciated, even if time had taught her that unlike her, he didn’t think less of somebody just because they couldn’t master everything, always. And Meilin knew that, too, that not everybody can be good at everything, but what she didn’t admit as easily was that she couldn’t stop herself from thinking like that, anyway. She couldn’t stop feeling just a bit smugly sorry for those that gave up without giving something any honest effort, and it was very rare that effort and ambition failed Meilin. But the five hours of tears of frustration and muttered curses that made the old woman’s lips tighten in disapproval seemed to think otherwise. When Syaoran gave her a small smile, she took the knitting pins from the table and started turning them over in her lap rather than looking at him and that cursed understanding she thought she had glimpsed in his eyes.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” she finally ground out, tightening her left hand around the steel pins to avoid venting the rising frustration by throwing them at something again. The pins didn’t budge, and trying to express some of her contempt through staring at them did little good. They were still just pieces of disgustingly dull metal, and the joints of her hand had long since turned white. And then, of course… the reason why it WAS sort of a big deal, beyond her personal mortification.

She loosened the grip on the needles, and used her thumb to push the engagement ring a bit firmer in place. He had given it to her more or less on his own initiative, and it was worth remembering that if anybody had seen her at her worst and still put up with her, it was the young man sitting on the other side of the small desk in their great-grandfather’s cluttered study. She had no doubt that he knew just what he meant to her (and she knew that he would never have agreed to marry her, if she didn’t mean the same to him), but there was no harm in reminding him once in a while.
Doing so with a knitted hat full of holes would probably not do much good after she had made a couple of valiant attempts at maiming the equipment in front of him, no matter how much Kinomoto-san believed that it would make Syaoran happy (Kinomoto-san didn’t always understand everything too well). And calling Daidoudji-san – even if she knew that Daidoudji-san, like her cousin, did not look down on others for not being as talented as her – was not much tempting when she still felt like using the needles to tie up the newly planted climbing ivy in the garden.
Meilin looked at her lap with the knitting needles and the sore hands and the ring, and decided that she could try again tomorrow. Maybe something different – maybe she could sew something, even if her mother had strictly forbidden her to get close to the sewing machine. She put the knitting needles down on the table once again, and reached out to grab her cousin’s hand as he was lifting it to turn a page in some dusty tome. He didn’t say anything even though she felt him startle in surprise, he didn’t even say anything to the pretty stupid way she was looking at the ring she had bought him – not until she yanked at the hand, and climbed to her feet without letting it go.
When she finally looked over her should, he was leaning down across the desk with a slightly perplexed expression, supporting himself on one elbow with the other hand still hanging firmly from hers.

“Meilin!” he exclaimed, and pushed himself into a standing position – tried to pull his hand back, too, but she tightened the grip.

“You’ve been holed up in here all day,” she stated, making it clear that she would not listen to any protests, “all week, actually. Let’s go somewhere. I’ll buy you ice cream, or something.”

And even if he protested, and even if she was using money that could potentially have been used to obtain some sort of last-resort trinket to give him on Tsukishiro-san’s twenty-fifth birthday, it made her feel better about the disgraceful first attempt. Not because it was so rare of them to go out to get ice cream, but because it reminded her that even if her knitting left something to be desired, there were other things she did well - and that even if she couldn't knit, Syaroan still liked it when she held his hand.

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