Trigger Warning: PTSD, addiction.


Lumas

There are explosions everywhere. All it'll take is one lucky Capitol pilot, one accurately dropped bomb and I'll be dead.

But I don't care. I can't run to a bomb shelter. I want to do something. I want to find a way to break the spell the the last propo from Lobos cast over me.

I couldn't watch it. I saw them drag Ramona to a cell but, when they started beating her, my mind went blank. According to my squad mates, I just froze up and stared at the screen until it was all over. I told them I blacked out and they told me what happened. The peacekeepers beat Ramona until she was barely conscious.

There was no context, no explanation, only the knowledge that it was a message meant for me. I did this. It's my fault Ramona got hurt.

And I hate myself for it. I was always scared of getting her hurt because I loved her. That was why I kept it a secret for years.

When the bombing started, I had a choice. I could follow my squad mates to the bomb shelter and remain frozen and shocked or I could get out and do something.

So I'm doing something… I just don't know what.

I hear desperate screams. I follow them and find a handful of people digging in the rubble of a collapsed building. A rehab centre. It would've saved me so much trouble if they'd existed in Eight but the Capitol wouldn't let us build any, even though we had the second worst morphling problem in all the districts. I feel a stab of pain at seeing somewhere people could depend on for help destroyed. There are cries of pain and fear from the rubble. People are trapped in there.

People who were like me when I was seventeen. People trapped in one of my worst nightmares. Buried alive.

I have to save them.

I start digging. I'm like a machine. I feel so empty. Soon, my hands are bloodied but I feel nothing.

The first body I find is a child's. She's still alive, sobbing and trembling. She's skinny and her skin has a yellowish tinge beneath all the blood and soot. She must be a patient. She looks much too young to be addicted. I wonder if she chose her first dose of morphling or if she was forced to take it. I know how bad it can get.

I never chose to get addicted. The Capitol tried to get me hooked on morphling after my games, to stop me from rebelling. I tried to fight my cravings. Maybe I would've succeeded if I hadn't been so traumatised by the games.

I never would've beaten my addiction without Ramona's help. I hope this girl finds help if she ever needs it.

I can't comfort her. I have nothing comforting within me to offer her. I can't even bring myself to ask if she's okay. Wordlessly, I pick her up and hand her to someone wearing a medic's uniform. I wonder what life will be like for her in the future, if that medic takes her somewhere safe from the bombs. Will she be claustrophobic like I am? Will she spend night after night awake, staring at the ceiling like I used to, wondering when it will collapse? Will the trauma make her addiction worse like it did with me?

Then I keep digging. I need to be a robot. I'm not here to think; I'm here to dig.

The air is full of smoke. It burns my lungs and fills my eyes. I have to keep digging. Every time I stop, I think of Ramona. And it hurts.

Lobos is willing to hurt her. He's willing to torture her. He might even be willing to kill her. I might never see her again.

But I can't think about her. I have to keep digging.

I hear cries for help from across the rubble. There's a boy whose leg is crushed under a massive lump of concrete. He's still alive but coughing violently. It's clear he needs to be taken to a hospital now but there's no way any of us will ever be able to free his leg in time.

I've been here before.

I rush over.

"We need to amputate his leg," I say. "Anyone got a saw?"

The medics shake their heads. They're not very well-equipped. Most of them must be used to working with addicts rather than the injured. They're massively out of their comfort zone. I'm still impressed they stuck around this long to rescue survivors from the rubble.

I draw my knife. I always keep one on me, even though it never was my weapon of choice. Knives are useful, almost as useful as rope.

"This'll work," I say.

"Are you sure?" The medic asks, wide eyed.

"It worked when I did it to myself," I say. "I'll need something to tie a tourniquet with as soon as I'm done."

I kneel down beside the boy and start cutting. The bone is splintered, which must be really painful for him. I know that pain. I remember lying on the floor of the tunnel with the rock crushing my leg, my strength just coming back to me after being paralysed by venomous spiders and almost eaten by Titus Ford, the cannibal from District 6. The cave-in that'd trapped me had also killed him before he could eat more than my foot. I'd been in shock. Then my survival instincts had kicked in.

I could hear the trickle of water down the walls. The caves were flooding. If I didn't move, I was going to drown. I would have to cut my own leg off.

And, even though my splintered bones gave me so much pain, they were easier to cut through than a whole bone.

I hear the boy cry out in agony as I saw through his leg. My knife isn't very good to amputate someone's leg with but neither was the knife I had in my arena. I almost blacked out from the pain a few times.

But I managed. I don't really have nightmares about cutting off my own leg. My games traumatised me. I'm still scared of spiders and the dark and small spaces. I still can't eat meat because it reminds me of Titus. But cutting off my own leg was just something I did to survive.

As, I slice through the last bit of skin, the boy starts coughing harder. Blood pours from his leg. I try to tie a tourniquet with the soot-stained cloth and metal rod handed to me by one of the medics but it's no use. The boy gives a rattling rasp and falls completely still. Dead.

"No!" I cry. He's so young. He looks about seventeen, the age I was when I lost my leg and started taking morphling.

He could've been me eight years ago.

The medics carry his body away. They don't blame me for the boy's death. I don't think they could've saved him, either. Maybe my plan would've worked if he hadn't been so frail.

Ramona probably would've been able to save him. If she hadn't volunteered, she probably would've been a doctor, just like her father.

I return to my digging to distract myself from the pain but I only find bodies. I only pull corpses from the rubble. Everyone else has left because they've realised they won't find anyone else alive in there. But I have to keep digging. If I stop digging, I'll freeze up again, lose myself to dark thoughts.

It's only when I pull out the third body that I break down and cry. She's about sixteen. Her mouth is wide and gaping. She must've died of suffocation. The sight is enough to make me feel like the walls are closing in on me even when there are no walls.

She's pregnant.

Her skin is less yellow than the other patients. She must've been almost clean. There's the glint of a wedding ring on one finger. If I had to guess, she'd got pregnant and was working on getting clean so she could support her child. And she was almost there.

Before the bombing. Before the war.

Anger stirs within me. This girl shouldn't be dead. People shouldn't be dying in District 6 anymore. The fighting is over. The district is ours. This girl should still be alive. She should still have a chance at a happy future with her husband and her child.

But she fell at the final hurdle. Just like me and Ramona. Lobos took her away just minutes before Plutarch was supposed to rescue her from Snow. It was the last day of the Quell, the last day of hiding our relationship and living in separate districts.

The day after the Quell was supposed to be the start of a new life. I'd already decided I didn't want to be a soldier. I wanted to stay in District 13 with Ramona. That way, even if we lost the war, we'd be happy together. I didn't even care that it was underground like my arena. I would've felt safe because she was there.

But, instead, I'm here, buried alive by guilt, grief and anger. And Ramona's probably handcuffed and helpless on the floor of some Capitol cell, fearing for her life. The happy future I hoped for is slipping further and further away with every day she spends in captivity, with every time she's abused.

One day, it might be completely gone.

But the monsters who bombed this place, who killed so many innocent people, who beat my girlfriend half to death, they're still there. They'll always be there.

Until I destroy them.


I didn't plan to give Lumas a POV here but I realised I needed some super dark war chapters and only one of the main characters is actually fighting. District 13 may have a bunker but District 6, where Lumas currently is, doesn't. There are going to be a lot of casualties and the survivors are going to be traumatised. Speaking of trauma, watching the peacekeepers beat Ramona puts Lumas in a state of shock that he tries to fight for most of the chapter. I always knew he was going to dig some bodies out of the rubble but I only remembered he was claustrophobic when I started writing this and then I felt evil. I promise I will be less evil next chapter.