AN: Wrote this story because I just have a lot of Glimmer feelings, okay? I could write an elaborate five-page essay on why she is a cinnamon bun who deserves to be protected. Consider this the slightly less painful version of that.
TW for Games-typical gore, panic attacks and mentions of Capitol prostitution
Feeling super, super (super!) suicidal
She has three sisters. Amethyst, the youngest, is five, and still waits every day with her fingers smudging the glass at the window for Glimmer to come home.
The Academy is allowed to take one if Glimmer doesn't make it out, and they'll kill another if she doesn't make it into the final eight. Sometimes it's what keeps her sane, but mostly it's what breaks her.
She leaves Amethyst sobbing in her bed and boards the train with a passing wink at the cameras. This Glimmer has no sisters. They don't fit with her angle. This Glimmer has no family, has no home, has no friends or hopes or dreams but the ones they've crafted for her, that pour off her lips now, her tongue slick with the taste of their perfect lies. They dress her in pale pink and a flouncy skirt that hangs at the tops of her thighs, a strapless top. The summer breeze runs over her shoulders like fingers, brushing her throat, sliding down the small of her back, threading through her hair. She practises smiling in the mirror and reminds herself. This Glimmer is not human. This Glimmer is not whole.
"Just come back," Amy sobs, tiny fingers digging into Glimmer's wrist. "Please, please, you have to come back. You promised."
The Capitol streams past her train window as she rides, filthy and shimmering like rainbow swirls of oil. The city throbs and hums like a single twisted organism, painted and adorned in bright, acidic colours, buildings rising up to brush the clouds, a city as mutilated as its people. Glimmer rides into the mouth of the beast until the city is an ocean all around her, with nowhere to look that isn't Capitol and twisted half-human creatures with their eyes and their smiles digging into her skin.
Her mentor tells her to get up. She rises almost on instinct as the train slows and the fat and the wealthy pore over a body she's carved out of stone. She smiles brightly at the faces, letting the leers creep over her as she dips and arches her back and brushes back her hair. The animals beneath her snarl and slaver their approval. On a screen behind them she volunteers over and over, look for all the world like she wanted this.
Her mentor digs a nail into her back and she beams again. Bile scalds the back of her throat. The men stare at her from down below with eyes that say not yet. But soon. She smiles at them until her face aches.
"But I don't want to," Glimmer whines, thirteen and petulant. A hand cracks across her face.
"This is not," the trainer hisses, "about what you want."
Tributes from the outer District might get makeup, but Glimmer is One, and that means she gets the good stuff. She comes in the night before to a team of surgeons, scalpels and razors glittering like stars, and lays down on the plastic chair. The drugs pull her under. They saw away at the creature in front of them, slit her skin and slide silicon under her breasts, peel the soft layers of fat from her stomach, pad out the curves of her hips and arch her back. They erase everything that made her human- the little scar on her shoulder where a branch nicked her tree-climbing, the slight bump in her nose, the crook of her teeth from where she used to suck her thumb. She trades the scabs and scars and memories for white, unblemished skin that covers her now. They inject her eyes with fluid to turn the hazel into a bright emerald green that sparkles like the stained walls of the Capitol. They dig her out of the girl she once was and turn her into a garnet, chipping away at her, shaping her into a precious trinket, eyes made of glass. They hollow out her stomach and underneath her ribs, clean the space so it sparkles white and ceramic like the inside of a china doll.
She finds Amy trying to push her teeth into place with a pencil, glitter smeared across her lids. "All I said was that I wished she looked more like the girls on the chariots," her mother explains. Glimmer wants to strangle her.
Then they dust her in gold and silver, sprinkle jewels across her hair and encrust her with gems. She stares in the mirror at this half-human creature blinking back at her, with lips redder than sin. With long limbs soaked in gold and soft, clear flesh at her nape, lashes long and inviting. Her body is shimmering curves of land waiting to be staked, a kingdom waiting to be claimed, where fingers will leave purple stains around her wrists and choke the life out of her.
She can hear them calling for her as she boards. The sound of screams slam against the closed door like rushing water, muffled by steel, pouring through the cracks and nudging at her. Bright light seeps through as they open and the screams redouble, high-pitched and fervent, the vivid colours stinging her eyes like acid as they hail her name like she's their idol.
The dam breaks. Glimmer rides out into the fray.
She wears gold for her interview. A golden sheath with sequins clustering at her breasts and hips that pools on the floor and clings to her waist. And heels, and nothing else.
The crowd is a seething, twisting mass of colour, pulsing and throbbing and screaming for her, baying like dogs. Not for her blood- that's for the outlier tributes, for tiny, timid Eight who's throat she'll slit, for broken Ten who'll stumble trying to run before they run him through with a sword. But for her. They want her pretty and unbroken and laid out like a feast and they'll bring her through the arena so they can have it. Have her.
"And another lovely lady from District One, put your hands together for Glimmer D'Argenta!"
She sits down in front of Caesar and crosses her legs so that the slit in her skirt shows.
"I-" Glimmer starts. "Um, I-"
She gasps as the freezing water hits her. A interview trainer stands impassively, hands on the bucket.
"Try again," he says. "Two more strikes and we turn on the shocks."
Ice drips down her back. She smiles and starts again.
She does the interview flawlessly, like she's done it a hundred times asleep. They did turn on the shocks, eventually, the the feeling of a hundred volts screaming through her veins isn't something she'll forget easily. She's learned. She pouts and giggles and smiles and smiles and smiles like a trained puppy, here girl, smile girl, pretty pretty pretty girl. She tips her head back and laughs and lets her hair fall down like a golden wash, feels the crowd surge towards it, held back by the leash of not yet. Soon. If and when she comes out of the arena they'll be no leash but the price tag branded to her skin and anyone who wants can own her.
"But a lovely girl like you must have someone back home, surely," Caesar probes. Glimmer gives him her number four laugh- soft, bubbling, painted nails held up to her painted smile.
"Well, I prefer to keep my options open," she replies. The crowd hoots and whistles as one and she laughs again, arms held wide, throat exposed, body saying yes. Yours. There is no human here.
She spends the night tangled in her covers, eyes wild, skin burning up as her stomach knots itself together, the sick twist of her guts. She washes her makeup off again and again and again until her face scalds pink and raw and bleeds from tiny nail-marks, tears her extensions out so that her scalp is patched with blood that soaks into her roots, digs her fingers into her stomach, curls and convulses on the floor, sobbing hysterically, choking back screams, her eyes rimmed red and dark shadows punched under her eyes, a vein on her forehead standing out. She slams herself against the wall and muffles her cries with her own hands, suffocates herself with a pillow, vomits until there's nothing but bile, hides underneath the covers as if the darkness there could make her tortured mind go numb. Her head spins with screams and a baying crowd and a hundred comments of beautiful lovely pretty aren't you just gorgeous she bites her own tongue and the scent of copper fills her nostrils and Amy and oh please god I don't want to do this I can't do this Amy please don't make me but Amy but she'll die but they'll kill her I can't.
"When I grow up," says Amy solemnly, eyes wide. "I want to be just like you."
She wakes Peridot up. Her mentor sighs, and calls a prep team in. They fix her hair and file her nails and rub cream on her face. Then they give her a pill to swallow. Sleep comes easy as nightmares.
It doesn't matte what happens in the arena. She's already dead.
Teen Idle- Marina and the Diamonds
AN: Reviewing is a thing that's fun to do.