Title: Hands
Author: ianthe_waiting
Rating: T+
Disclaimer: Carnivale and its characters are the property of HBO and the show's producers; no copyright infringement is intended.
Genre: Drabble
Warnings: S.2 spoilers, insinuations
Summary: #15 – Hands. His hands knew blood.
Word Count: 851 words.
Author's Notes: Drabble: a slice of fic in less than 1500 words.






Prompt 15 – Hands








His hands were so large, obscuring hers inside his. Sofie stared at the fingers over hers, fingers so foreign and strange to her. No calluses, no dirt, no blisters, just large, warm softness holding her palms together, overlapping in prayer.

“Pray with me,” he had said, his deep voice booming through her chest, echoing in some empty place inside.

Sofie did not know how to pray, but she could not voice that thought, not when his eyes peered down at her on her knees before him. The knelt together, and Sofie could feel the heat of his body just as warmly as the heat of his hands enveloping her own.

She wondered what he did with those hands, had they ever known work?

Closing her eyes, she bowed her head and slowly her forehead came to rest against his hands. She did not pray, though she knew he did, whispering praises to a God she never cared to know. It was his voice that made her want to know then.

In her mind’s eye, she knew that the hands that held hers had felt blood, felt fire, and felt cold hard metal of evil weaponry. Those hands had held flesh, hipbones, and throats. Sofie frowned, her forehead crinkling against his fingers. She saw a tree, a mangled, terrible tree, and blood like that she had never seen before, blue, trickling down the rough grain of the grey wood.

“Amen…”

Sofie said nothing, but slowly raised her head and opened her eyes.

Brother Justin Crowe still held her hands between his. Sofie gazed into his blue eyes and tried to smile. She felt safe near him, for a reason she could not explain. She had to believe that the feeling that had led her to Brother Justin’s house had been because something, God, had willed it so.

Helping her to sit on the couch again, Brother Justin’s hands shifted over her, his thick, long fingers weaving between her own.

“Your hands should not be so rough, Sofie,” he whispered, turning her left hand over to touch the hard calluses at the base of each of her fingers.

Sofie bowed her head. Even weeks after leaving the carnival, she still bore some marks of that life.

Shivering as his forefinger moved to her right hand and the hard spots on her forefinger and thumb, he asked the question she had feared.

“You aren’t a migrant, and you were not always a maid, Sofie, how did you get such hands?”

Sofie swallowed thickly even as Brother Justin’s arm moved around the back of the couch so he could lean closer to her.

She could not tell him that she had made a living most of her life reading cards. Sofie was sure that fortune telling was something that a man like Brother Justin would frown upon. She also could not tell him that in many ways she was a ‘migrant,’ moving from town to town, living off what she could take from people who barely could rub two pennies together.

“I worked doing a lot of different things, anything I could get to get by,” she whispered, knowing that her words were not exactly a lie, but not exactly the truth either.

“I see,” he said in what Sofie would have considered a deep purr.

She could feel his breath against her cheek and smell the dinner she had made for the Crowe family upon it.

There was something almost profane in the manner he touched her hands, something that stirred her deep inside, something that reminded her of Ben Hawkins. In fact, there were many things about Justin Crowe that reminded her of that dirt farmer who had made love to her in the Chevy truck. It had been Ben Hawkins who had made sex something Sofie thought about more often than she liked. It had been Ben Hawkins who had made sex something wonderful.

That feeling was what she felt when Justin Crowe touched her hand that in some ways it felt wrong in a manner that made it all seem so right.

“You have been doing such a wonderful job with us, Sofie, with Norman too…” Justin whispered, the fringe of her dark brown hair rustling at his words.

His fingers moved to her wrists, sending obscene tingles straight down her body to her core.

“Have you cared for an invalid before?”

His voice was like an intimate caress, but the words, the question, brought Sofie back to the moment, her eyes widening from their lazed stare at the coffee table. She felt as if she were waking from a hypnotists’ sleep.

“My mother.”

Brother Justin cooed in sympathy, and spoke again as the arm that had been resting on the back of the couch wrapped about her shoulders. Sofie heard no more of his words, just felt the timbre of his voice. She answered appropriately, but she was lost in the airy caress of his large, fiery hands. He smelled clean, earthy, and Sofie let herself go again, and allowed those hands, those hands that knew blood, touch her skin.