Author's Note: Aptly named, this is what's known as 'a prologue'. Unfortunately, this is a prologue to a story that I have not yet written, nor have any ideas for whatsoever. So I propose this, read my prologue, and help me find a story for it. And if nothing ever comes of this, it's a drabble with potential. Thanks so much for reading.
They aren't long slender hands, bone white yes, but the fingers aren't delicate and tapered, they aren't artists hands, there is nothing ethereally elegant about them. They are hands that have seen work, rough, square thumbs and long fingers with pronounced knuckles and flared fingertips, bleached and powerful, much like the rest of him. The black chipping nail polish makes the image especially profound, draws attention to the finger nails which fan towards the tip and are jagged – they aren't at all like Dracula's hands. It's amazing, almost impossible, to see calluses on a vampire's hands – and the life he'd led previously had not lent itself to calluses, but they were there, lumps of misused and hardened flesh that were testament to an afterlife of holding every sort of weapon known to man and quite a few that were never intended for violence.
He often found himself staring at the hands, nimble as they rolled cigarettes, strong as single fingers punched through steel plating and squishy demon innards, cramped as they folded around a pen and wrote dexterously despite the awkwardness. It all started with the hands really, he would catch himself watching those incredibly square, indelicate fingers with their broad pads and thick calluses and wondering what the palm readers would say, or what they felt like. The hands were dangerous, enthralling. It was really, he thought, the hands that had started the whole fiasco.