Hands
Summary: When they hold me, I feel safer than I ever could. They hold me sparingly. And so I memorize their every detail so that one day maybe I won't even need them to hold me.
Disclaimer: I do not own SG1 nor any of its characters. I am just borrowing them
for Mara, whose love for Jack's hands may rival even Sam's.
He has soft hands
Not on the outside. On the outside they are hard and calloused. Brown and rough, with dirt under his fingernails more often than not. His hands are careworn. They have seen more than most hands, I'd bet. Done more harm than most hands.
He has a callous on the side of his trigger finger. It's strange to think of the number of bodies that accumulated to make that callous. I've got one myself, though not quite as rough. Somehow I don't think Jack O'Neill uses the same hand cream as his 2IC.
His fingers are speckled with scars, some from gun-injuries, some from shrapnel, and apparently one from his primary school days when an exchange student closed the classroom door on his finger.
I think I know his hands like the back of my own, cliché unintended. I know what they smell like, what the feel like. They smell like machinery sometimes, like gunpowder others and in the mornings they smell like no-brand soap. Who'd have thought I would grow to love the smell of no-brand soap?
His hands are a contradiction in the way they feel. They are hard and rough, from their scars and callouses, but they are soft and warm and dark at the same time. When they hold me, I feel safer than I ever could. They hold me sparingly. And so I memorize their every detail so that one day maybe I won't even need them to hold me. For as close as they hold me, Jack O'Neill's hands are just as skilled in pushing me away, whether they mean to or not.
But they are soft hands. Vulnerable hands sometimes, but usually strong and loving. Many people have died by those hands. I have been ensnared by them. May I never be set free.