Work Text:
Doc woke up already in pain, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that the pain had settled in a sharp pointy feeling right next to his left collarbone while it usually would be lower down his shoulder and more of a dull ache.
He fumbled to turn on the lights in his bedroom, as the blackout curtains and sealed blinds weren’t letting any morning light in and he saw what the problem was immediately.
The night before, in a caffeine induced frenzy he had made some adjustments to his prosthetic arm and evidently he had messed up somewhere along the process, because right now its edge was digging into his real skin, sending small shocks from some sort of error the wires were experiencing. His whole arm felt heavier than it should be, which made it clear that he had definitely messed it up.
Without even bothering to get out of bed Doc yanked the plate covering the controls for his arm and just unplugged the whole thing, just to get some relief. The change was immediate, the pain stopped, and so did any control he had over his limb. He unscrewed the whole prosthetic leaving just a stump covered in metal rods and screws meant to connect the arm to his nervous system so it could react to his inputs.
The whole thing was the peak of medicine, truly a marvel of science, but since Doc had been the one who had developed the technology and still upgraded it regularly if there ever was any issues he would be the first to experience them. Not this day though, he had enough on his mind as it was, he would just undo his work from the previous night and figure out how to fix it after the Games.
Getting out of bed was harder than it had any right to be, but eventually he managed to make his way to the bathroom to wash up, leaving his arm on the bed and doing the bare minimum, not shaving and putting on whatever tattered clothes he had laying around.
Doc didn’t care anymore, not about the Tributes or who won, not about the Games or the Gamemakers. They couldn’t kill him, they needed his brain, he was an outright genius and his inventions and advancements were invaluable to the Capitol and they had no one to hurt him through anymore.
Doc had won his Games incredibly young, only thirteen, but he had lost his arm in the arena. The prosthetic arm the Capitol had outfitted him with at the time had been poorly designed, so he had taken it upon himself to redesign it. Then he had developed the technology that allowed it to directly communicate with his own nervous system so that it would behave like a real arm. At twenty he had gotten married, and the Capitol citizens had lost their mind, seeing their beloved child prodigy Victor becoming an adult. At twenty-three he became a widow, the love of his life passing away from childbirth, leaving him to care for their child alone.
Today marked the 10th anniversary since his child had been Reaped.
The Capitol had taken everything from him over and over, and now he had nothing left he loved.