The Manly Art of Knitting PV Sasha Kane Closed

Interacting With: @Sasha Kane | Dialogue Hex: #143314

3 September, 2022

Concepts came to Leonard in much the same way that a treasonous culprit responsible for the death of the royal family sans their plucky teenage princess was to be waterboarded. Whether it was the sum or a single part of his endless equation adding up a fundamental craving for control spurred on by a familial incident, a lifelong aspiration to use logical thinking in order to help people, and a complex combination of a superiority and inferiority, well, complex, he had been rendered incapable of consuming concepts bit by bit, leaving subjects as simply something cool that happens sometimes. He could drown in knowledge hundreds of times over, and as long as he knew the science behind suffocation and the bodily processes involved in death, he would be fine with it. His dogged dedication eventually turned him into a starved hound, devouring as much information about the world around him in an effort to inform his decisions, which worked like a charm when it didn’t involve people. Moving, breathing people with thoughts of their own, tinted glasses and wonky perspectives that set his cerebral gallery askew.

The concept of masculinity, then, was an inexorably inexplicable drink of motor oil and gym club swear poured into his mouth like a tsunami of leather muscle cars playing Metallica. And all of those things had beards despite common sense being nigh requisite of eschewing needless hair that would only serve to waste nutritious juices. And all of those things just talked about girls first and dragons later despite the fact that dragons were obviously the cooler part of those two conversation topics. In short, it was complicated and involved emotions, and while Leonard stood firm in that he could wrap his sizable head around any given matter in any given time period, he could not get anything close to emotions stuck in his thick skull. For fourteen years and several months he’d allowed his research to expand via empirical evidence, and all it had done was bewilder him further about how much sentiment being human required, much less being a boy who had to juggle nursing hopeless crushes on random girls, fighting with anyone who dare encroach on thy most adored and purely artificial territory, and generally coexisting with other people and forming relationships with them. Peppered into his routine were the rounds of judgement passed about from stranger to stranger like they were playing hot potato with Leonard’s internalised emotional issues, with healthy thoughts such as enacting a dress code that forbade anything but tuxedos and dress trousers circling around his mind prompted by a passing boy in a completely normal t-shirt. Judgement and jealousy; interchangeable at best, codependent at worst. Leonard Oaksworth; insufferably phlegmatic at best, plain insufferable at worst.

All of those things within the other all-things, along with the peculiar lines of correspondence he’d clipped off from his mother’s explanation of why his colour-coded hand-me-downs included her sheer skirt and valiantly strived to piece together in any way that made any sense, had been instrumental in the orchestrated whims of the universe shoving him into his neighbour’s garage sale. He liked to think that everything that had transpired in the history of humankind as they knew it led up to him and that he was the most interesting point of importance on planet Earth. He did not like to think that he was to be reduced to a background character in a bloody boring bildungsroman who was defined by his desire to study and his confusion about not being man enough. He did not like to think that an audience of immortal, omnipotent deities had been entertained by the way he’d socially suffered for a decade over picking a pink star as a congratulatory sticker in nursery. He also once held the world record for longest time wasted not liking a particular brand of pickles because they made their dill too green, and so he renounced his pride, his prejudice, and in a very masculine manner he paid ten quid to the wrinkly old woman at the cardboard counter for his first-edition copy of The Manly Art of Knitting.

Leonard liked books. The boy would babble on about it to anyone with a quarter of a tympanic membrane to spare, and his parents were predisposed to forewarn teachers and temporary playmates alike of the fact that if he found something to read, he would read it until its text was engraved into the tombstone of the time he’d never get back. Yes, he could find adequate amusement in the observations of the sodium-to-vitamins ratio on the back of a packet of crisps, and indeed, he could. Just because he could do such things didn’t mean he wanted to, that he was willing to do so when there was a fresh Doyle paperback on the table, and so the habit continued and his eyesight gradually worsened to prove it. The Manly Art of Knitting was no fresh Doyle paperback, and nothing but his morbid curiosity had compelled him to put it on the table, but he’d coughed up some good money and so read it he would and his eyesight would gradually worsen to prove it. Leonard liked books, and there was no more homely habitat for one itching to hunker down with a lovely little yellowback about the rugged craft of putting bits of yarn into other bits of yarn than the library.

Hogwarts’ library did not belong to Leonard in any way, shape or form. He was a mere student subject to, devoid of the right to. Yet, he strutted into the place with all the confidence of a politician fresh off a circuit of press interviews, all of which he lied in, and he considered it the most familiar portion of all of Hogwarts aside from the near-death experiences he brought on himself. The entrance was made of oak, after all, and it was here that he fully felt as though he was worth something, if only as a cleaner of cobwebs as he reached for the thickest textbooks available. Look at that, his tension had ebbed from the waterboarding rag so much that it allowed him to make a surname-based pun. He surveyed his surroundings with practised ease, and found few threats to his morning of silence. It was the first weekend of the academic year, meaning most chose to mar their memories of school with such ridiculous things as socialising, but there were handfuls of pupils as a result of the drizzling outside and the odd detective who actually wanted to learn something. He admired the latter’s dedication, expected consultations from their types about covering up eyebags with enchantments, but today he would take a break from studying and. First, he had to get the perfect disguise for his latest adventure into not-so-contemporary fiction. He settled on a ginormous tome draped generously in dust about advanced alchemy. Its hardcover sleeve was thick, its title was embossed in gold, and it was his latest purchase’s size tripled. Brilliant.

At last, he approached the fireplace, looking ever so forward to settling down and learn just how manly knitting could be. An amazingly appropriate shelf must have been paid royalties for its beautiful positioning, for he needed to sidestep its wooden beams and leatherbound contents to dramatically reveal someone sitting right there in his self-proclaimed spot. All at once ambulances came to save the rapidly fainting neurons in his nervous system, citizens wailed on the streets and ran about like headless chickens, governments collapsed as the mad mobs of overly privileged pitchforks and whiny torches burned down historic landmarks of rationality. It had taken years of only the most comprehensive confidence-building exercises (read: saying) to think about the possibility of reading a book like The Manly Art of Knitting in private, and here some blonde boy clad in the shades of spring sat, thoroughly ruining his plans and perusing what Leonard assumed to be some flashy, stereotypical wizard-meets-witch romance covered with pastels that was decreed compulsory material in the freethinking flaxen curriculum. In any case, he was a fourth year. An upperclassman. An alumnus of the renowned institute they so loqauciously called Hogwarts in approximately four years, and with increasing evidence that proper graduation only came to those who decided to forego the afterlife and haunt the halls after a billionth hag attack, life was too short to not read The Manly Art of Knitting. You know, behind another giant book so he could still hide the fact that he was reading The Manly Art of Knitting. Hooray for self-esteem.

“Hope I’m not intruding on anything here,” he smiled strenuously as he spoke, a courtesy extended only to avoid any attempted hex-adjacent assaults on the basis of him being a perceived attacker, and tried to figure out which space in the sitting area would allow him to tactfully ignore the other’s presence while letting him feel the fire’s heat.

Then, he gasped. It was a small, surprised intake of air that left him feeling more breathless than he had, and still he stood upon seeing the book clutched within the other’s fair hands. His hopes, so suddenly reignited after being stamped out by the stranger’s cruel, unwitting foot, relied on the answer to one question. Eyes may have been the external window to the soul, but literature was a fine substitute in a scholastic setting, and muggle literature was like balmy broth. His two homes, Brighton and any room full of books, mixed wonderfully into a stew whose chef he most definitely needed to know.

Leonard descended, cross-legged and uncharacteristically enraptured in the characteristics of–and this did deserve a gasp the size of the Eastern European exported angst machines–someone who wasn’t himself. “Have you heard of The Manly Art of Knitting?”

OOC Disclaimer:

Reducio

The supposed first-edition copy of The Manly Art of Knitting is a completely made up thing that is separate from the somehow existent actual real life book called The Manly Art of Knitting. It may not even be called The Manly Art of Knitting in-universe. The old woman at the garage sale may be a lying criminal stamping her own titles onto stories and selling them for ten quid to insecure teenagers.