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At a glance, his hands appeared pristine. A scholar’s hands; the hands of a man who lived his life comfortably, in tomes and scrolls etched in ink that tethered his dreams to the world. His slender fingers, the nails spotless and neatly trimmed, described an elegance often associated with wealth, sophistication, the kind of privileged lifestyle people like her were supposed to aspire to, as much as they bitterly envied it.
But such shallow assumptions ignored the finer details.
Like the knobby knuckle of his ring finger, which retained a slight leftward curve from a bad break when he was young, scrappy, and more likely to respond to his bullies with fists rather than words, generously meeting them at their level.
Or the myriad ghostly scratches that peppered the dorsal flesh, all the way up his wrists; a lifetime of lessons Tara had attempted to teach, and that he had stubbornly refused to learn.
Or the odd patches of milky white smoothness, scars scorched deep into the skin over decades of study that he carried as a reminder of the wages of power, the importance of control, and that great ambition never came without some sacrifice.
She turned his hand over to inspect his palm, gently probing one of the yellowish knots where his staff had made blisters in the early days of their adventure. They were most of the way toward proper calluses now, but she made a mental note to make another batch of soothing ointment all the same.
Gale stirred from his slumber just enough to blindly slide his hand over her stomach, up her neck to cup her cheek and draw her into a drowsy kiss.
“Dawn already?” he mumbled against her lips.
“A ways off yet.”
He kissed her again softly and whispered, “Come here.” His fingers sunk into her hair, cradling the back of her head and guiding her to his chest as she shuffled closer. The arm beneath her curled around her back, that hand coming up to grip her ass, holding her firmly against him. Gale hummed in satisfaction, his thumb lazily stroking her neck as he drifted back to sleep.
Tav had sat in awed wonder as these hands of his composed out of nothing a sky of stars more brilliant and breathtaking than any symphony she had ever heard.
She had stood in awed silence as these hands called down the furious wrath of those same heavens, a power so great and terrible it turned his eyes to lightning, laying mortal waste to entire fields of battle.
Yet the most extraordinary, most unlikely thing his hands had ever done was this.
Hold her.
Love her.
And there was no other place, no safer, nor kinder, nor more gentle place she would ever want to be than wrapped up inside of them.