Alternate title: self-indulgent writing exercise. Bear with me.
Allura’s hands are beautiful, with her soft skin and long fingers, clean nails that almost seem to glint in the light like clear chips of glass. At a glance her hands could be described as delicate, but it would be a mistake to do so. Allura is stronger than she looks, and has a difficult time letting go of things once she’s gotten a solid grip. Her movements are quick and fluid, fingers gliding across datapads and control screens, cradling galaxies like water before flinging the simulations out to hang in the open air. She molds her palms to the arch to the control podiums like they were meant to fit there and feels the ship hum to life around her. It was her mother who taught her to do this, brushing Allura’s hair back from her face, pinching at her cheeks to chase away her nervous pout. It’s more like a suggestion than an order, mother said, and Allura did not see the wisdom in that for many years, not until the blue lion’s cockpit lit up around her, a voiceless song echoing inside her head as Allura’s fingers tightened around the controls.
Lance talks with his hands almost as much as he does with his mouth. He makes slicing motions and zipping-up gestures, air-quotes and explosions with the flick of his fingers –boom! He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket when he’s upset, and his fingers tingle with a pins and needle sensation when he’s excited (though no one really seems to believe that when he tells them). Lance takes care of his skin, rubbing lotion between his palms every night, working it into his knuckles and the backs of his hands and up his wrists. His older sister turned him on to painting his nails when he was nine, making a gimmie motion for Lance’s hand and setting to work as she waited for her toes to dry. She was six years older than him and they didn’t always get along, so Lance sat still and held his breath as she worked, afraid she would change her mind and stop if he said anything. The polish was simple but pretty, a metallic blue that almost matched his eyes and seemed to sparkle beneath the surface of the water when Lance swam.
Pidge’s left index finger is a little crooked, tilting off just slightly towards her thumb. She broke it when she was seven, and remembers the aftermath of crying into her father’s shoulder as he carried her to the car, but not the incident itself. Her palms sweat when she’s nervous, when she’s angry and when she’s glad. She used to sneak up on Matt and swipe her clammy hands over his cheek or the back of his neck, laughing as he shrieked with disgust. Pidge’s hands aren’t always quick enough to keep up with her mind, and sometimes she can’t type what she wants or tinker how she’d like. Her brain is ten steps ahead of her body and it frustrates her, having to slow down to give her fingers the chance to catch up. There are freckles on the backs of her hands, faint until she steps outside and sun encourages them to bloom in full. Once, Pidge used a marker to connect each point, hoping to discover a pattern like the fibonacci spirals that can be found in plants, and felt almost betrayed when there was none.
There are scars on Keith’s knuckles, little white flecks where his skin has split open and bled. He’s broken a finger, too, fractured something at his first group home when another boy snuck into his room and tried to steal his bag. Keith was still half asleep when he punched him in the face, knuckles cracking against the sharp cut of his cheekbone. He gasped at the pain that burst across his hand and up his wrist, shocked to discover he was so fragile. His hands are cold, always, and his mother knitted him a pair of wool mittens the winter before she left, bright yellow and attached by a string. Keith doesn’t have them anymore. He threw them away in a fit of anger and has never stopped regretting it. He studies his hands sometimes, squinting down at his dull nails, turning over his palms to examine the pigment of his skin. There’s no family waiting for him back on Earth, but maybe there’s still something for him to find out among the stars. He worries he’ll be too unfamiliar, that they won’t recognize him.
Hunk’s hands are large and dry and warm. They shake when he’s afraid but hold steady when he sets them to work, confident with a chef’s knife, precise with the nitty-gritty of mechanics. The tips of his fingers are squared-shaped and the skin there is thick from been shocked and sliced and burned. Hunk was always taught to accept these small pains as lessons, though he still grumbles and hisses when they happen. He trusts his hands, likes to take his time with unfamiliar things and turn them over between his fingers, examining the give and flexibility of the item, its weight and texture. Hunk learned almost everything he knows about engines from his grandfather, but doesn’t want his hands to look like his did –permanently marked by dirt and oil, worked so deep into the skin that no amount of washing could take it out. He combats this with harsh soaps and scrub brushes, and it dries out his knuckles and makes them rough to the touch. Even so, his hands aren’t unpleasant, and are good at holding things like screwdrivers and whisks, baby birds that have fallen from the nest and cold, shaking fingers.
Shiro tries not to focus on his hands. It unsettles him, that he can’t remember everything they’ve done. He knows his hands have helped people and he knows his hands have hurt them, but he can’t decide how to weigh those actions against each other. His metal hand is cold and heavy. It clicks when he curls his fingers and rotates his wrist, a reminder that the entirety of his body is not his own, that a piece of himself is foreign and inorganic and given to him without his say. He keeps his hands clean, almost obsessively, dragging the corner of thin cloth along every seam of his prosthetic, scrubbing at his skin until it’s flushed pink and raw. There’s a filth there he can’t see and can’t find a way to get rid of. When he was younger he liked to trace out copies of star-maps with his fingers gripped tight around a chewed pencil, each stroke meticulous and reverent. Shiro thinks of this when his missing hand begins to ache, when his prosthetic hums and activates with a dark flash of light. He’s unsure if the memory makes him feel happy or sad.
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
snowghoul
blakekathryn
titsay
annaxmalina
