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Amputation

Summary:

He never quite feels like his hands are his own, even years later.

Fill for #6 of the r/FanFiction November Sense and Sensibility Prompts: proprioception.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

The plane is here. 

Beetee sees himself from above, as usual, but not only himself— the landscape around him too. The trap has somehow fallen to the forest floor, and he thinks that the camera must be focusing on his face right now and he tries to make it look shocked and then someone is touching him, there are people coming out of the plane, and he has just won the 34th Hunger Games and yet he is watching them at the same time. 

The man, tall and broad, grabs Beetee's and he realizes he's been making almost a fist, digging his long, ragged nails. He stopped being truly aware of what his hands were doing about a week ago, when the electrical trap started to really take shape. It had scared him at first, but then he had realized they worked perfectly fine, and he didn't need to be aware of them for them to do what he needed. 

He looks at the hands ( his hands, he reminds himself, but he doesn't believe it) now and sees that they're covered in marks— calluses and dirt and scrapes, yes, but also paler half-moons and a cracked seam on his knuckle that he seems to have repeatedly, deliberately pulled apart. 

Beetee knows he should be horrified by this, but instead he is just vaguely relieved that nothing got infected. 

The man touches his hand again, and he's shocked and pliant as he lets himself be led onto the deck. He didn't run to it, he wasn't sure it was real. 

His Victory Tour poster is a photo of his hands, at work on some component or other. But they've airbrushed every speck of dirt, every self-made mark off completely. Even digitally cut his ragged nails, or (he suspects) replaced them with someone else's. 

It's months before he's fully aware of where his hands are in space again, before he feels like they belong to him, and even then only partially. 

Notes:

Not me writing drabbles when I should be working on the next chapter of the main story. (But I also couldn't give this particular prompt to any other character, come on).

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