"Forenote: Thank you for everyone who has stuck with me and subscribed to my updates and posted reviews. I never planned to give up on this story but I found myself so busy I didn't have time to write, despite the awesome fans who apparently love the Glato/Career universe as much as I do (and he'll be more prominent in the next chapters). And then I realized I really need to MAKE time to write. So I hope it brings you guys as much joy reading it as it does me creating it! Please enjoy & review"
Beauty From The Ashes Chapter 35-Through A Glass Darkly
Cucumbers.
An ombre pink glass bowl, its shadowed sides filled with perfectly peeled little slices within.
They were the first thing Glimmer noticed when she walked in…no, rather was more or less forcibly escorted…to the Head Gamemaker's quarters. Her thoughts raced in the ninety or so seconds it took for the elevator to complete its ascent to the top of the Tribute Towers. She knew before the door ever opened this was not Seneca's doing.
First, it was too early. She hadn't even had dinner yet, having been seized by two Peacekeepers ghosting behind her on the elevator before either Cash or even Gloss had time to object.
Second, force simply wasn't Seneca Crane's style. At least not before his clothes were off. Her sudden predicament had given Glimmer's mind a head start on figuring out who really wanted to see her. Clearly it had arrived at the correct conclusion when the door slid open to the overwhelming smell of roses…and something else unfamiliar to these chambers, cloying and awful.
Death her mind added. She remembered the rumors and knew now they were true.
"Pres-i-dent Sn-ow" she said slowly, trying to override a nearly decade-old habit of stuttering when caught without something in mind to say. It had been nearly that long since such an occasion had happened to the normally cocky Career tribute. But something about staring at the leader of Panem in the flesh, one who held absolute power over everyone, even Seneca Crane, gave her pause.
"To what do I owe this sudden honor?" she managed to whisper, her tongue struggling to work in a mouth drier than the Sahara desert which bordered the southern edge of District One.
Snow smiled, an action that to the average Capitol citizen may have been mistaken as kindly, even grandfatherly in its nature.
Glimmer knew otherwise. Her emerald eyes flashed to Seneca's azure ones.
Help me she pleaded silently, locking her trembling gaze with his. It returned nothing. She could have been begging an Avox to speak for all the good it would do her. Either he was in agreement with whatever was to come, or just like an Avox; he wasn't able to say anything right now. She desperately prayed it was the latter.
Snow reached into the bowl of cucumbers, pulling out a glistening round slice, and looking at it, nodding to Glimmer. She watched confused as he popped it into his mouth, chewing for a second with satisfaction before swallowing. Licking his lips in a disturbing manner, he arched an eyebrow looking back across Seneca's desk at her. It was the way a cat toyed with a mouse, a look familiar to Glimmer.
It was the one she had given the girl from Eight the first night in the Arena.
"Miss Celestine, doubtless you know how hard the Districts of Panem work to provide us with the bounty we enjoy year round?"
"Yes sir, I do" she managed in reply.
"And whether food or goods as the works of our hands we support the Capitol with, we each have our place in things, no?"
Where is this going she wondered, her body vacantly nodding in mute agreement. What is he getting at?
"And you realize that when we tamper with the natural order of things, they tend to…go astray. People forget their place. They forget the good of the whole in favor of what they most want. They…and their children….forget in time of plenty the risks, the dangers that once faced them. Before order and prosperity was brought to the citizens of Panem."
District Twelve, where you can starve to death in safety Glimmer remembered Katniss quipping to Finch during a training session just before she'd walked up.
They're dead her mind reminded her. And to think Katniss had envied her.
What the other tributes didn't realize was that prosperity, even in District One, was a limited concept at best. At sixteen on odd weekends off from Academy, Glimmer had begun to learn the jeweler's trade. She'd not feared volunteering nor even death in the Arena, if and however that was to be.
No, what Jasper Celestine's daughter feared most was the inevitable eleven and twelve hour days making luxury goods she would never be able to afford while working in air conditioned high rises overlooking Capitol tourists enjoying the manmade lakes she would never have the freedom to visit.
Prosperity, Glimmer had realized, was not food, as it had been to Katniss. It was freedom. Her father Jasper entered the Games, seeking freedom as a Victor. Her mother had become a Capitol whore, giving her by default a similar, albeit much weaker sort of freedom.
And here I stand, both Victor and Whore, without it
Gods she wished she hadn't tried to get off the Morphling for these Games! Glimmer hated Cato right now for that, though she knew his advice was sound. She wondered how any Victor could face the rest of their life sober?
Snow's droning stopped, ostensibly for emphasis, the action snapping her attention back to the present. She heard him take a deep breath, a wheezing sound that to her sounded like the gasping of a slowly dying man. She wondered if Seneca heard it too. For a mere second, Glimmer could have sworn she saw the twitch of a smile at the corner of Seneca's mouth.
I couldn't be that lucky
Still, she knew what she saw. Pushing the thought from her mind as wishful thinking she looked back up at Snow, focusing on a point just above his right shoulder. It was a skill Cashmere had taught in Image Class at Academy. Every Career knew how to feign interest; it was a key to establishing rapport. As well as learning another tribute's weaknesses and gaining their trust.
Snow shifted his gaze almost imperceptibly; his icy blue eyes surprising Glimmers' by making sudden contact as he leaned in to speak, almost as if confiding a secret.
"And before long, we have tributes in Twelve thinking they are celebrities because of their stylists and others in One trying to raise vegetables like farmers in Eleven. Tell me child….how silly does that sound to you?"
Glimmer froze upon making the connection. Not just the slight against Cinna, but more that he knew about her little garden in the backyard. The one Dazzle and her had spent a summer constructing so they could enjoy the pleasures of fresh food from time to time without having to ask their mother for credits she didn't have. The life of relative happiness she had briefly known before the Academy provided all her cucumbers for her.
And there was the moral of the tale Glimmer realized
The "Academy"…The Capitol…was to provide. She bucked the system, even as a child, placing her own life above her apparent "duty" as nothing more than a Career tribute. She'd made the mistake not just shutting up and simply dying when it was her time. No, her tryst with Seneca had thrown a monkey wrench in the works and ruined Snow's plan to calm the outer districts down with a Victor from their ranks this last time. Cato was right after all.
The odds had never been in their favor. They were in the Capitol's.
Always bet on the house winning she'd heard Haymitch say. Now it made sense.
"You see, when something as simple as what a citizen provides by the labor of his hands as tribute to the Capitol becomes usurped by their own idea of things, what's to prevent other things from becoming cast aside? What's next? Our hard won peace? Our honored traditions? Our very way of life? "
" Traditions such as the Games, Miss Celestine. The very traditions you seemed to mock now first with Cato, now with Seneca?" Snow said standing up finally, his words growing louder, more as if a statement rather than a question.
Shit! Glimmer thought. Seneca had sold her out. He knows. About Aurora. About the rebellion brewing in the districts. About everything.
She had to be wrong. Cato, Cashmere, all of them and their families were dead otherwise. She remembered what had happened to Haymitch's family. And to Finnick's. She spoke quickly, her fear getting the better of her as she shook her head, denying what she knew Snow was saying without words.
'No…no I honor the traditions. I would never…."
Snow raised a hand to silence Glimmer just as she began.
"You come from a Victor's line. Jasper was a revered winner from your district and.."
His words were little more than a whisper at this point.
"…It would be quite tragic for his daughter to die in a training accident just as he did. No doubt the citizens of the Capitol would mourn their loss"
Snow's implications were crystal clear. Glimmer didn't know whether to beg for her life or simply hope it wouldn't take Splendor's and everyone else's along with it as already forfeit. She thought of Cato and Aurora and even the tiny soul that she knew was already with her, as sickening and horrifying as the thought was to let it exist, much less care for it. Yet even her unborn child was just as much a victim as any of them and didn't deserve to die because of her stupidity.
"What must I do?"
"Ah, you are a quick learner after all. I see Seneca was right about you."
Snow's first reference to the Head Gamemaker sitting across from them gave Glimmer a brief encouragement but for what, she wasn't sure. It left as quickly as it came however.
"You will no doubt, if your impending motherhood is discovered, claim it is Cato's child. Or hell Gloss's. I don't care whose bastard you claim it is…whatever mistake has transpired between you and Seneca needs to be kept a secret. The districts would riot to know you have managed to influence the outcome of the Games through such inappropriate alliances.'
Some influence! Glimmer thought wryly. If it was so good, why am I here again?
Yet Snow's words gave her hope. First, he didn't know everything. Sure, he had learned about their affair…or series of them now…so what? At least he didn't know ALL of what had transpired. And he hadn't killed Seneca for breaking a cardinal sin of any Head Gamemaker, giving a tribute unfair advantage, so surely there was a good reason. She would just have to trust that Seneca knew what it was and that knowledge would keep her alive, at least a little while longer. Better the devil she knew than the one she didn't.
Otherwise were she to die, Glimmer knew there was only one other female tribute who would go into the Arena from One here with her, also from the Victor's bloodline.
Cashmere, pitted against her brother Gloss, would be exactly the kind of thing Snow would love to put on television and Glimmer harbored no illusions that would be the outcome if things ended badly here. She gathered up her courage.
"I will never speak of it again. I will make everyone believe its absolutely Cato's child. I'll convince them. I'll even convince Cato"
"No." he replied icily. "Convince me"
Neither Glimmer now Snow noticed the third set of eyes in the room narrow at these words, but despite the silence of his impassive expression, Seneca Crane harbored a thought as well.
Tick Tock President Snow.
Time's up