Rationally, he knew he ought to be missing the nerve endings closest to the skin, and hence completely unable to preform tasks requiring any kind of dexterity. Playing his piano, for example, but he managed that fine. Learning to crack an egg without crushing it had been tricky business, especially considering the (lack of) availability of eggs, but he'd done it. Wiring a ground line into the central cortex of a four-pound plastic explosive's charge, now... more difficult than both of this things, but it ought to have been, and he managed it splendidly, anyway.
That frightened him a bit, sometimes. In the first few months in the tunnels, he'd wondered if perhaps his escape had not been entirely of his own engineering, and that he'd been released back into the populace intentionally, with all of these strange, inexplicably accessible skills. Nothing quite like a rogue animal to make the rest of the herd appreciate their keepers. Like the virus that lived quietly enough in his veins. Alone in the dripping darkness of London's bowels, he couldn't help but agree with that sentiment. On the rare occasions he stopped considering himself an avatar of IT, the Idea, a cobbled-together automaton in pursuit of a single goal, he couldn't begrudge them the sentiment. Under previous circumstances, he would have rather watched Norsefire rave on about British supremacy than sit in the dark, occasionally confronted with a flash of hands that could wire explosives. It was like seeing himself naked.
Revolutionaries always took themselves too seriously, but he was too dangerous to try anything different. So he allowed himself one private joke. Not a joke, even, more a warning. Guy Fawkes.
He had not been a crusader against intolerance. Quite the opposite, really. He was just a fanatic from the other side, set on blasting the other blokes into oblivion, to allow room for his own oppressive regime and depressingly routine brand of despotism. That! crowed the man in the dark to himself, That is why I must die by the end of this, and why they up above must remember not to repeat their mistakes.
He met the prospect with little concern. Wonderful to be an everlasting Idea- Ideas did not die, but only occasionally became lost. That was more frightening than death. After what he'd gone through... before... many things were, now. Things he was conscious of not having known in the much earlier Before, the blank one that preceded the dark one. He'd bear torture and experimentation and screaming rooms and silent rooms and endless dark and searing light with the endless patience of a waiting thing if only to insure that the greater He, or the IT, really, would not wander lost. IT had little quarter in the world as it was: the man in the tunnel knew there must be others who held that lost and precious thing to their hearts, but he was alone in it now.
The tall man in the borrowed tyrant's face slipped like shadow through the tunnels, triggering the rudimentary detonator as it went. His ungloved fingertips went numb as IT's conviction settled to sleep in his breast, flames falling into ever-glowing coals. IT would sustain its vessel until the time came.