To anybody following Cold New World: I am SO sorry that it is taking me so damn long to write the next chapter. School is really hectic, and I'm barely keeping my head above water. This was just a little (sorry-about-that-hope-you-don't-mind) drabble that came to me as an Afrikaans creative writing piece. (Go figure.) Due to my limited language skills, the English version is hopefully a lot better!
Also - I dedicate this to longrandomword, for her 18th birthday! (A bit late, sorry, love.) Have a fab year!
-Sarwolf xo
Since we were children, I watched our hands. Back then, they were the same – small, pudgy and constantly dirty, as curious children's hands are wont to be. They gripped each other for strength when his mummy yelled at him, and they gripped each other for comfort when the older kids dared us to watch something scary, and they gripped each other just because, because the hands were best friends just like their owners.
As we grew into the big-puppy-feet, and handholding became borderline sexual, we worried about the future. My medium, muscular hands didn't entwine with his spindly, graceful, long fingers (as much as I wanted them to).
Not that he could ever know that. He was too brilliant – too perfect – for my silly mortal crush to sully. But even as his curls flopped with derision, and he sneered at all the boring people who weren't me, I longed to hold his chemical-stained, troubled musician-hands. Instead, I was the one healing the burns on his palms; the one dating the Marys and Jeannettes and Sarahs to keep my thoughts from those hands on me. I was the one bloodying my knuckles on the jaws of the boys who hurt him, and who tempted him into danger that I couldn't stop. I was the one wiping tears away as he hurt himself.
My hands needed to heal others, so as the teenage years waned, my hands signed me into a world of being unable to staunch the blood of the bullet wounds and the battlefield. My hands also wrote long, messy letters to the boy who would answer through twists of musician fingers on chemical, and now blood, stained hands.
Until I was the one that another pair of hands had to save – cool, well manicured hands in a foreign world.
When I didn't die, the Other hands put me on a plane to be received by the chemical-stained musician hands, which shook me for my idiocy and tried to staunch our mingled tears. The hands that finally came up to cradle my tanned, exhausted, bloodless face to bring our lips together.
The following years were finally filled with tangled fingers and happy promises and two sets of fingers (stocky and long) tracing complicated patterns on two sets of bare planes of skin. The detective and the soldier, never as close to others as we were to each other. Now, our hands are wrinkled with age – practically withered – but they still cling together, never to let go. While cooking, while sleeping, while staining or healing chemicals and skin, playing the music and tapping along to it, these hands are never far. Through blood and tears and smaller, chubbier hands, they became a legend. The short fingers with long palms and muscles of my hand, and the lone-thin-stained-delicate-beautiful hands of his are forever entwined.
Until death do them part.
