Glitz De La Cour [D13] FIN

You were born as a gift to the world.

Held high in your mother's arms as she whispered your name on her lips. Glitz De La Cour, a girl who would shine like glitter according to your mother, but you were nothing more than a fussy baby at the time. Tears, screams, and full of so much life, your father swore you were the worst baby. Your mother had told you the world would be yours, built in the palm of your little hand, but you never knew it came with much more than just the good parts. You grew up in riches, dressed in the softest of fabrics and had everything you could ever want. You were a prodigy in the eyes of others, learning how to walk and talk faster than most of the other children your age.

By the time you were six, your mother had seen Glamour Kinkade work on the sixty second. She had marble in her eyes and an aesthetic decided by the time she started working on the garments she wanted to push towards the capitol. You were only six when you thought the Hunger Games were cool, watching Peridot Myler and Aria Wolfe, pretending like their story was one of the books your mother used to read to you. You stared up at the screen to see Glamour Kinkade with the indigo lips and pretty hair, knowing that he had created the stories of the sixty second, which mother had told you was the best games by far.

You believed her.

By the age of eight, you were growing smarter, learning that the world was filled with bountiful stories meant to inspire and grow. Your mother would dress you up every year in the uniforms of the tributes, let you play pretend with your friends as she would give you plastic spears and swords and even a blowgun just like the tributes in the sixty third. You were amazed with not only the stories, but the scenery of the arenas. A pyramid of sorts built in the center of the sixty third. The river styx of the sixty second. The forests of the sixty fourth. So many different creations meant for you to discover and fall in love with. You would build block versions of them with your mind buzzing, but they were always crumbled by your mother's expectations.

Fashion was her dream, she built an empire upon styles, hair, and modifications. Trends created by her empire, but this was not what you wanted. You built your blocks, designed the framework and art in your head, letting the imagination take over. By the time you were in school, you grew attached to the subject of arenas and the functionalities of it. Glamour Kinkade had quickly become a favorite of yours, not because he was pretty, but because his creations were ingenius, aesthetically pleasing to the eyes and fluid enough to grab your attention. You watched the sixty second over and over until you knew every piece of the arena, until your mother would come in shut it off and go over sixty second inspired fashion pieces she asked you to create.

The Sixty Seventh is where your world shatters, not from a bad year, but because you lost the only person you felt close to. An argument with another girl, who like you was a Glamour Kinkade fan, but she said you'd never get the attention of someone like Glamour Kinkade, despite you knowing you're better than the other girls your age. You were more mature and had a brain behind your eyes. The most stylish of your class from the fashion business your mother owned and yet none of it was enough to get Glamour Kinkade's attention. Sure, you were eleven and way too young for someone like Glamour Kinkade, but it didn't stop you from wanting it to be real, but the sixty seventh brings back one of the worst victors in the world to you.

Leon Krigel is the death of your chance.

Your mother finds you ripping up every Glamour Kinkade poster on your wall. Indigo lips ripped into small pieces, thrown in the bins outside, showing the world that Glamour Kinkade was your first heartbreak. Just like the rest of the capitol, Leon Krigel made a wave in the capitol, echoing along the walls of the people because two of the most eligible bachelors were now off the table. You remember crying for days on end on the phone with Crystaline, telling her how you wanted to walk up to the training center and show Leon Krigel a piece of your mind, but you were eleven and like all things, the emotions fade.

The realization hits you one day, during the seventieth quell, watching Charlie Garnet's first games in action. The doppelgangers are majestic, but you realize in that moment you had never been attracted to Glamour Kinkade like the other girls and boys in your class. All of it had been peer pressure, a need to fit in, but you knew in your heart that Glamour Kinkade would have meant nothing to you, except for his mind. You wanted ask a million questions about his work, the designs of the arenas he made, and the mechanics behind how the arena worked. Your mother had other plans for your knowledge, the interest in fashion had led to her to believe you were going to take over her work once you turned old enough to run all of it.

The world would never get another De La Cour fashionista because you had other plans, going behind your mother's back with classes specific to architect and design. Psychics classes taken in secret, you wrote code in your free time, learning the art of everything involved in creating arenas and buildings and everything else in between. By the time you become fifteen, you realize the worth of your brain. You've found yourself still attached to fashion, but instead it's become more a hobby than a future. You would find your desire in the world, the place you always wanted to be.

A creator of great things, but you fell in love with the story more and more.

It's such a shame when you see Glamour Kinkade kicked out of his impenetrable tower, left behind for sabotage and bias towards district four, but you saw it coming for years since Leon Krigel won. A bet made with Crystaline on how long it'd take for Glamour's bias to be shown in a public fashion, but it finally took Capricious King stepping in to prove it. Rumors still spread that Glamour wasn't the worst gamemaker, especially after another eleven wins that year again. Katelyn, Kirito, and Harbinger force you to study harder in order to create an environment that even the elevens can't survive through. You spend your youth learning the basics and honing your own craft.

During the seventy second, your mother questions your desire to be something more than just a name in fashion. She's always disapproved of your art, but you still show her everything you create, giving them names based on the ideas you have. Every time, she looks them up and down and disapproves of them, always calling them monstrosities that are too focused on the details of things that no one else, but an architect or designer would see. You still bring it in to class to show everyone, receiving high remarks and proving to your mother that she truly knew nothing in this part of the world. You stayed on a streak, high above the rest, letting your ego grow and grow.

You were hired in the seventy fourth as an architect for the capitol, building stores and studios. They gave you access to the maps of the capitol city, showing trust in your capabilities, you worked like a dog day in and day out. Living on your own had become troublesome, but you pushed through the hardships, listening to your mother complain about this and that over lunches where she talked of tribute uniforms and the parades she had attended. You heard of Hyacinth Mortuus and grew fond of her in the games, only to see her die like the rest of your favorites, but you constructed an entire statue for one of the highest regarded politicians who worked alongside Snow. It had been a tiresome project, but you had done it.

The next few years you spent your days creating some magnificent places in the capitol, where capitolites would flock to. You were one of the upcoming creators where many of your coworkers had swore you would become an intern designer for the hunger games, but with every year that came. No one took you in. By the seventy ninth, you had almost given up everything just to be an intern designer, but no position had opened up. You were left to do civil work for the year, spent building arches and domes and creative pieces to hold up new shopping centers. You were getting pressured more and more by your family to just give up on your dream and continue your hobby in fabric, but turn it into a career, but you didn't give up like them.

You grew from the pain, lending it to your fire. You watched many people die over the years in the games and you wanted to help create the stories and the narratives of the games with your art. You knew more than many of your colleagues who had grown larger and larger. Your name started falling from grace, but you were convinced your breakthrough was coming. The eightieth is the year you dropped every project of yours and threw everything you had into it. A whole application filled with more than just your architect jobs. You had put down your fashion background with the gowns and suits you designed for famous appearances.

Glamour Kinkade had been announced as the gamemaker and part of you believed he would be your savior. Your life had once revolved around him, a hero in your eyes with an aesthetic eye for lots of things. He had to know you were worth the risk, but part of you was scared. Turning in the application had led to anxiety eating away at your heart, but after the long wait, you found a letter on your counter next to the dress made for one of the escorts. A small moment of letting yourself breath is all you take before you feverishly rip the letter open, but your heart sinks at the one word.

Denied.

You break out in a violent rage through your apartment, ripping up the gown meant for someone else. Ashamed about your failure, you throw away project after project sitting on your desk sinking into a heavy depression, watching the eightieth games happen. Angel De Costa and Parson Cham having won your heart, but watching both die like nothing made you feel emptier. Watching Bette Sublino had been a sucky moment, knowing another four was winning, proving the public right about Glamour Kinkade, even if it was the female tribute. It makes you sick to your stomach when they announce the twist, showing the living tributes in a bunker that you could have designed much better than the ones who had. A sickening fills you as you stare into the eyes of Maxwell Temple and others.

The capitol made you sick sometimes, in a way that you never knew the word for, until years later.

Breaking out of your stupor, the next year you get a break finally. It ends up being random chance of Crystaline hooking you up with a pass to prove yourself. You build a clock tower meant for an example of your work, but it ends up being soft enough that you're put on the team as a junior designer instead of an intern one for the eighty first. You enjoy your time there being nothing more than a builder than an idea creator. They send you to work harder than the rest, forcing you to hate everything you make, but you bite the bullet. It's lackluster in your position, but it's enough to impress some higher ups who were gearing up for retirement. Charlie Garnet announces her retirement and part of you feels bad for her, knowing that the seventy sixth had been such a success for her.

Your coworkers throw a party for Charlie Garnet, despite her not showing up.

Instead, you sit in a corner watching them all get drunk with a rerun of the eighty first playing. Damaris Hope's death fills your head and something deep in your gut makes you feel sick. It's something you've seen in the eyes of others before. You were just a means to creating it and every time you felt sicker and sicker this games seeing that look knowing you were apart of it. Despite staying on your own, you manage the right conversation that night, getting asked to come back as a regular designer for the next games.

You come back as a designer and throw ideas out there for others. Xenia Montague is meticulous with how the arena should function. The aesthetic reminds you of the seventieth with tech being the main idea around it. You set to work creating pieces of the arena that make you prouder than any other day. You are on the top of the world and part of you knew that one day it'd come crashing down on you. You laugh and cheer and survive your way through the Hunger Games until it gets closer and closer to the end.

Both elevens are close to the end and part of you has a bad feeling about it. The sickness comes in when one of the fan favorites in Ike and Cedar fall before the finale. The end of the eighty second comes with an explosion of news and Kassandra Nerys as the victor. Rumors spread about how the small girl from eleven had survived. Before anything concrete comes out of this, Xenia Montague is blown up. The papers call it a freak accident, but you had a feeling it was something else. You almost dare to investigate, but your heart doesn't let you. It's when you're talking to Crystaline that you find out the world is really crashing down upon you.

At the age of twenty six, you are told about the blacklist of other people like you. Creators, designers, and all sorts of people who work towards the hunger games are along the list. It spreads like wildfire as a new generation of people are hired to replace them. Work is taken away from you as your name is listed on the blacklist where professionals in both the civil and games fields will no longer hire you or give you projects.

It drives you up the wall, until you can't have it anymore. You finally learn what it's like to be Glamour Kinkade after all these years, but you were not like him. No. You were better than him, you would always be better than him. After everything you gave the capitol, you lost it all. After everything, you crawl back to your mother who still thrives with fashion, but one look at you, she declares you are nothing more than blacklisted scum. You do what any rational person would do at this point, you scare her away and rip her biggest project up with your hands, until you're satisfied. Your mother starts screaming at you, but by this point, it's too late to go back.

She calls the peacekeepers.

You run.

You run and run and run and run and run.

You run until you remember you can disappear for good outside of the capitol. The idea is batshit crazy, but you had heard the stories of Dom Copperview. You use the only knowledge you have left, memorized every page of the way in and out of the capitol, knowing of a weak spot in the whole defensive position of the capitol that you use to sneak away through. In the dark of the night, you sneak into the forest outside the capitol walls, hiding away from the public eyes, nothing more than a memory. Your mother will come up with the idea that you killed yourself when you hear about it in District Two months later. You run wherever you can go to.

For a few years, you spend your days surviving with a wanderer who you ran into. They teach you to hunt and fend for yourself outside the districts. You take up less flashy clothes over the next few months, abling yourself to sneak into the districts. You move from district to district for years, learning what you can about the people who you had once killed. You grew fonder of them, but you still had a vendetta against the capitol. The whispers of your own hatred built up from the months and months of hunting for supplies and learning of the atrocities you had committed burned away at your soul.

You remembered the years spent staring at screen after screen of nameless tributes that meant nothing more than entertainment to you. You realize now, they all had a story, a family, and a desire to be something more than what life gave them. You burned at the fire in your chest with the information you've learned. You are moving through districts to the next one and the next one, learning more and more about things you never wanted to know. Blinded by the shiniest of gems from the past, you've learned that you were blind to everything. You lost your dream and the innocence you thought you had, when really you were too privileged to see the truth.

District Three is the district you find the frequency, after two years on your own in the wild and the districts. You tune in to hear District Thirteen's frequency, despite having taken apart the entire stations time and time again, but with a clue now, you find your way across all of the districts, past the wilderness into what was District Thirteen territory, until they take you in when you offer your mind to them. Maps and devices built in your head from your days of working with the capitolites. They let you in after a long period of holding, where many officials think you're a capitolite spy.

You prove them wrong in the first year you're there.

Dressed in some of the most exquisite fabrics that you had packed from One to here, you show up looking more out of place than the rest of thirteen. No one talks to you, there's an issue of trust, but when you sign up for the soldier work, people create more of a distance between you and them. It's distasteful when one of them comments on the fact you're overstepping the boundaries, but you have always pushed the boundaries since you were younger. It's during training that you prove your worth in coming up with the smartest and most efficient of solutions.

Afterwards, you laugh in other trainee's faces knowing none of them were as grand as you. You glitter and stand out compared to the others, but that's all for show when it comes to the complexities of missions that they train for. Someone calls you the rooster after you swiftly clear a whole metaphorical hallway after being late in one of your gowns, designed by yourself. Always flaunting your expensive tastes and intelligence, but you stick it to them, flipping the trainee off, leaving everyone else to their own matters.

You were different from them.

The past was vivid in your mind still, the years spent destroying lives.

You knew the capitol had to pay for stomping your efforts in the dirt and for the countless children's graves you've seen in person.

You needed to show thirteen that it was your way or they'd crumble under it all.

None of them knew the capitol like you.

You'd do whatever it took to crumble the system you were in.

Anything you put your mind to was possible.

You were the gift that your mother said, but not all gifts are wanted.

You were the gift the capitol needed.