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His hand alights gently on my arm, even as mine holds a lightsaber to his neck. A butterfly coming to rest upon a flower of thorns.
How can this be the same hand that struck down all those Jedi? That snatched life so easily from Yord and Jecki?
This hand should be a coarse hand, a battering hand, a hand that wraps like a chain around my wrist and wrenches me into the dark.
But this hand is only a promise of a presence, quiet and calming, a soft beckoning whisper, beseeching peace against the threat of death.
And in its solemn silence, it shatters something in my soul.
...
Later, this same hand stirs a pot. Cooks a meal where it carved through flesh. With precision, it repairs its ravaged helmet. So aware of its fragility and taking care to honor it where it once destroyed without heed.
I must be ware if it reaches for me.
And it does reach for me. Again and again.
A hand full of pain.
A hand full of want.
A hand full of possibility.
I turn it away, refuse to take it.
But I do not stray far from it.
...
One day becomes many.
His hand never touches me. Not to strike, not to tend.
It only reaches, and waits.
It allows me space. It allows me time.
It shows compassion to small creatures, scattering food, plucking them from peril.
It forages, it fishes; it scavenges, it seeks.
It shows me wonders in the nature of the rock, of the ocean, of the sky.
It gestures towards a future that can be mine, if I would only claim it. If I could only brush the cobwebs of the past away from my eyes.
And as one day falls to another, so too does the shroud.
For such a hand with all its faces has done something that none else have ever done.
Let me be the one to choose.
When it twitches at his side, prepared once more to call me in, I reach for it before it can reach for me.
...
This hand instructs me in the way of the Force. Leads me to the powers I have bidden lay dormant for so long. It guides them to the sun, raises them from their temporary grave.
It is patient, it is kind, it is adoring.
And when it accidentally touches mine, the attraction there is nothing we can deny.
...
While a storm rages through a thunderous night, this hand clings desperately to my skin, laces needily through my hair. It travels my body, stroking a desirous fire to life, one that burns without pain, that sparks a new awareness of the world, of my self.
And where this hand once stabbed and snapped my life in half, it knows only how to please me, and makes me whole.
Again and again and again.
...
In the quiet hours of breaking dawn, his hand caresses my cheek. It begs me to be his.
I take his hand. They entwine together, and impossibly, perfectly, fit.
For now, these hands thrum with love.
Who knows what they'll be capable of tomorrow.