They were always too big, considering his behemoth size above the rest of his peers. Long, spindly fingers that over the years in the military, became thick with callouses and scars. Yellowed with cigarette butts, a knuckle here and there slightly out of place from all of the fractures and breaks.
The palms of his hands were completely webbed with delicate lines from both age and the extensive length of times he had worn his fingers in a fist. He had tried to make them look a little better, had gotten tattoos, would lotion when he could remember. The ink ran deep, little swirls and designs eating up the thick, aged skin on the back of his hands, fingers blotched on the first knuckle with little images or letters. It had started to bleed and fade that strange sort of navy that tattoos do after a prologued time under the skin.
But no amount of ink on the planet would erase the blood that they carried each day. Breaths silenced by those jagged palms, lives ended with just one pull of an index finger. His hands were dirty. Worse than the muck constantly tucked under his trimmed nails. They were forever stained crimson with decisions he would never be able to take back.
Right now, he was fighting hard to stop his fingers from trembling. He’d never felt his heart race this way. His palms were tense, outstretched to minimise the age lines that spanned them, and waiting for when the weight settled between them.
Bundled up in blankets and a tiny pink hat, those same hands that had carried grenades and guns and knives, was now so carefully balancing a tiny baby girl. No bigger than the length of his hands held open side by side, weighing nothing more than just a small few pounds and ounces.
Just her face was visible. Still a little smushed up from birth, peach fuzz coating the softest, pinkest skin. Her eyes shut, tiny lashes splaying across little rosy cheeks. She had his nose. Well the one before it has been broken four times. A little button nose, a little long, with a tiny bump down the bridge. But she had the poutiest little lips on the planet. Glossy with salvia, undoubtedly a carbon copy of her mother’s.
Simon was breathless and speechless.
This tiny thing, no bigger than this calloused, ugly hands… it had come from him. And the fact somebody loved him so much to give him one.
He could feel the hot sting of tears in the corner of his eyes.
His daughter stirred, her little face scrunching up even more before she yawned. Simon only watched, how her tiny pink tongue flexed in her mouth, how the fat of her cheeks shifted to accommodate that teeny tiny jaw to open as wide as it could go. Then, she settled back into the blankets, clearly comfortable in Simon’s hands. She squeaked quietly before settling in completely.
The first tear streamed down Simon’s cheek. Then the next. And the next.
His hands. Those calloused, ink stained, bloodied evil-doing hands. He had hated them for as long as he could remember.
But now, holding the smallest, most delicate, precious being in the world.
He couldn’t remember why.
2087
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