Work Text:
Lucanis’s hands are broad and firm. Rook likes to trace the faint lines that cut across his knuckles, the ridges of the callouses at the top edge of his palm. She likes the way his hands engulf hers when they twist their fingers together, how small and protected they make her feel.
Teia’s hands are even smaller than Rook’s, as quick and sly as her humour. Rook loves them for their deftness, for the clever way they touch her. They are a contradiction, manicured and gently cared for though still calloused from sharper aspects of her work.
But it is Viago’s that she is most fascinated by. She sees them only rarely, usually hidden beneath the supple leather of his gloves. Like hers, like Lucanis’s, like Teia’s, they bear the toughness borne from knifework. His fingers are long and delicate, and she loves the precise way he moves them, like anything he might touch with his bare skin is a fragile thing.
She often finds herself entranced by the old scars that extend up his forearms – patches of glossy skin that catch the light. By his right thumb, a series of radiating cuts where a vial once broke. The inside of his left wrist, a small, perfect circle from acid measured out, as if intentionally applied. Other marks abound – burns and splashes, the result of years of work.
Mistakes and miscalculations, he might call them, but Rook sees them as the things he’s survived. Stories she will never ask to hear. It is enough, that sometimes at night when Teia and Lucanis have fallen asleep next to them, Viago will let her trace her own fingers over his marked skin, and does not pull away.