Work Text:
Someone’s hands moved around her injured one, bandages being wrapped as she watched, numb. The hands were soft, nails buffed and neat, her blood staining the delicate fingertips red. Her own hand was alive with pain, and she could feel it. The warm blood gushing down, the cold air breathing through the hole, the hot burn from the muzzle flash, she felt it all. But it was distant, pain belonging to someone else, someone more whole than her. The hole in her hand was nothing, insignificant, unnoticeable next to the one in her heart.
It moved inside her empty chest, traitorously beating louder and louder and louder, until it was the only thing she could hear. The hands treating her left, footsteps moving away and joining voices drowned under the thump, thump, thump in her ears. Davis’s hands are still, not the slightest twitch to them, the warmth already fading as she clutches one with her good hand.
His eyes were closed, as unmoving as his hands. Someone’s hands had closed his eyes. Those hands had been calloused and boney, worked thin and rough from years of use and littered with tiny scars. She hadn’t understood why those hands had closed his eyes, had never understood the point. It was just pretending, acting as though this was a sleep he could wake from. As though the blood on his head was superficial, that the bend in his neck could be undone. As though he wasn’t dead.
Her hand was still bleeding, crimson red seeping through the bandage as she stroked his hair with it. Their blood mixed together as her hand moved, blending together until she couldn’t tell where hers ended and his began. She gripped his hand tighter, desperately feeling for some warmth, for a pulse, for something to wake her from this nightmare. Why had the rough hands closed his eyes? It seemed a cruel mockery of sleep, a fool's hope to be dangled and snatched away with each passing second. Why had the delicate hands bandaged hers? It seemed pointless, damage far greater than to be fixed with simple cloth.
Eventually, another hand appeared on her shoulder. She gave it a fleeting glance, but couldn’t bear to look away from Davis for long. The hand was one she knew well, had spent many hours thinking about, working with. The fingers were short, knuckles calloused, skin thick and a deeper shade than the rest, as though discoloured by blood from countless fights. The hand’s twin found her arm, their owner murmuring with uncharacteristic softness.
Whatever the words were, they didn’t make it past the cacophonous beating of her heart, and may not have even been real. The hands on her were though, a steady pressure that guided her up and away from Davis. She wanted to protest, wanted to scream and cry and beg, to stay with him, but the hands held her and she couldn’t bring herself to fight. Her own hands fell down and hung limply, unresponsive, useless.
More hands came into view, hand attached to bodies and people she didn’t know, that Davis didn’t know and now never would. The hands moved carelessly, many pairs dancing around him, checking pointlessly for a pulse, arranging the body, readying it for whatever lay next. A new pair of hands grabbed hers, undoing the wraps done by the delicate hands and replicating them with a more practiced motion. These hands were delicate in a different way, holding hers softly as they worked, knowingly gentle despite the spindly fingers.
Once those hands let go, the ones holding her pulled her further away. They tried to turn her around, to spare her from watching the unknown, unfamiliar hands closed the bag around the body, taking him away from her forever. She tried to remember his hands, where the calluses were thickest, what colour the scars were, what length he kept his fingernails, but the details were already fading.
The hands guided her further away, led her to a medical room and set her on a bed. They stayed with her, rubbing small circles on her back. The pain in her hand was slowly catching up, getting closer and closer. She raised it up, looking at it, wondering what the scar was going to look like. It throbbed in time with her heart, the hole seeming to breathe through the gauze and the wrap and the blood, still oozing out. She watched the stain grow and thought that her hand may be gone, but she had lost so much more of herself.