hunger games fic: pretty young things, repeat after me
pretty young things, repeat after me. victor!glimmer. glimmer/finnick. pg13. Glimmer's a put on a show kind of girl. That helps her, as a Victor.
Glimmer’s sleeping, shirt half-zipped up and Cato’s hand resting on her stomach, and then -
And then there’s buzzing, so much buzzing and it hurts everywhere.
Marvel screams, so loud that it rings in her ears and then there’s someone else screaming, high-pitched and keening, and she realizes that it’s her.
Cato’s fingers wrap around her wrist and his face is double, triple in her vision and his mouth is so red, dripping with blood, his eyes bright, so so so blue and angry as he says, “We have to run, Glim.”
Her feet find their way in front of each other one at a time and she doesn’t remember this, she won’t know until she’s sitting across from Caesar Flickerman and he asks her about it with a fiercely white smile, but she passes out at the edge of the forest and Cato throws her over his back and carries her all the way back to the Cornucopia.
Marvel dies.
No one really cares all that much.
In the quiet of the night, Cato’s head rests on her breasts, his hand possessively slipped inside her underwear.
There are eight of them left. The pair from Eleven, the pair from Twelve, the girl from Five.
Clove left to get water with a sneer, her voice careful as she snarked, “If you get attacked, Cato, make sure Glimmer dies first.”
Cato rustles and says, half-awake and lazy with sleep, “I’m going to crush the girl on fire’s throat with my thumb.”
He shifts, half-hard against Glimmer’s thigh, his finger tracing patterns on her, and Glimmer rolls her eyes. How predictable.
She says, “When are we offing Clove? I’d love to show the little psychopath what I can do with one of her precious knives.”
Cato’s hand stops and Glimmer cants her hips up.
He is growling more than speaking when he says, “You won’t touch her.”
Glimmer remembers briefly, in the Capitol, seeing something she wasn’t supposed to.
In the training area, Cato’s hand rested for too long on the pathetic curve of Clove’s back and she smiled at him, long, wicked, her lips thin and pink. A finger ran over the curve of her blade and her eyes flitted back and forth between the knife and Cato’s blue gaze.
Glimmer shook her hair then and thought, fuck that.
Glimmer sighs tiredly and says, “Why so protective?”
Cato gets up and walks away.
In the end, it is Cato who gets to do it.
Glimmer went looking for food since supplies were running low.
She comes back, a groosling with it’s neck snapped and feathers plucked hanging from her arm.
Clove’s body is frail and her head lolls awkwardly to the side, her skin lily white. Her blood is on Cato’s hand and his fist clenches around her blade, bloodied and silver and flashing in the sun.
She says, her lips pursed into a smile, “Without me?”
Cato grimaces and his entire back ripples.
“Don’t complain,” he yells, “or you’ll be next.”
(This is how Cato kills Clove:
Clove is tied to the poles of the tent and Cato murmurs, with your knife right?
She twists her arm and grunts. Cato says, “You know I’ll only enjoy it more if you fight,” and at that her eyes narrow, her tongue licking her lips slowly as her mouth opens.
She says, be creative, sweetheart and he kisses her, long and rough and bruising, while he drags the knife along her veins until they burst.
Her last word is Cato and he doesn’t cry.)
In the end, the girls from Five and Eleven die without their interference. The huge kid from Eleven comes at them, eyes crazed, and Glimmer sends an arrow through his neck in under three seconds.
“And then there were three,” she says when she’s cleaning the shaft. He eyes her angrily from the other side of the tent.
He says, “Girl on fire first.”
“Of course,” she concedes, waving her hand in the air.
He says, “I’m going to slice you open like a fruit.”
Glimmer laughs.
Glimmer says, “Sorry about this, sweetheart,” and rips Cato open with his own sword, from the base of his throat all the way down his body. He gurgles once, then twice, his eyes bulging and open.
She smiles sweetly and then chops off his dick.
She says, “You didn’t know what you were doing with it, anyways.”
In the end, Glimmer sleeps on the surface on the Cornucopia and hears the mutts before she sees them.
Katniss crawls up surface and Glimmer says, “Bitch, please.”
She tosses the girl on fire over the edge with a toss her long, blonde, shiny hair and that is how she’s crowned Victor.
Caesar Flickerman’s hair is pink.
He smiles and says, “In honor of you, of course.”
Glimmer’s hand is resting on his knee and she breathes, deep, so her breasts strain against the champagne-colored silk of her dress. Her cheeks flush on cue.
“How sweet of you,” she lilts, her hand coming up to her chest in a sign of humility.
“Well,” he says, “we all know you’re not nearly as sweet as you look.”
The audience roars. Glimmer beams at them and bats her eyelashes one too many times.
“I’m offended, Caesar.”
Caesar rubs her shoulder and coos.
“We all saw what you did to poor Cato,” he continues.
The crowd murmurs; a few people boo loudly.
“There can only be one Victor,” Glimmer says, arching her neck back slightly so her hair cascades against her back.
He turns towards the masses and says, “Should we let her in on the secret?”
He turns back towards her and says, “Cato and Clove were having, how do I put this delicately, relations.”
Glimmer’s laugh is perfectly pitched and lasts exactly the right amount of time. A muscle in her jaw tightens. She crosses one leg over the other and wrinkles her dress.
“Like I said,” she trills, inching towards the edge of her chair, leaning in close to Caesar, “there can only be one Victor.”
The crowd goes wild again.
“You look like you know what you’re doing,” someone says.
The light in the room is blue. The theme of the party is summer or something more specific, beach blanket bingo or some other bullshit. The daughter of one of the leading families of the Capital is turning eighteen. Glimmer’s presence was requested.
Glimmer’s wearing coconuts and she’s doing the limbo.
She turns around and Finnick Odair is sipping on a daiquiri, a short neon suit hanging low on his hips. He crosses his arm and a girl walking by, slightly chubby, dull brown hair, stops in her tracks.
She shakes her coconuts and says, “Get me a pina colada and maybe you’ll find out for yourself.”
There’s sand on the floor of the bathroom so Glimmer steps out of her shoes. She’s wearing little enough that she makes quick work of her own suit, untying the knots on her bottoms easily enough. She gathers up her hair and pulls down her coconuts.
Finnick flushes the toilet and Glimmer perches herself on the edge of the sink.
He walks out, adjusting his shorts, and she says, “Just the person I was looking for.”
It stops him in his tracks, the sight of her naked, legs spread. Glimmer smiles at that.
He says, “Can’t say the same about you.”
Glimmer hops off the ledge and whispers, in his ear, one hand trailing down his abs and finding its way into his shorts.
“Oh, please,” she murmurs moving his hand to palm her breast, “you know you want to.”
Finnick stands there, unmoving, his hand on her breast, and Glimmer presses herself to him impatiently.
“Jesus Christ, Odair,” she huffs, “I thought you had more game than this.”
She kisses him first. She’ll remember that, later, and cringe.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty one,” Johanna Mason drawls over her empty glass. Her feet dig into the cushions and she arches her back like a cat.
Glimmer’s dress is skintight and nude colored. Her heels are five inches tall and when the light hits her right, she looks spectacularly naked.
Glimmer shakes her head and smiles, a finger in the corner of her mouth and a hip cocked perfectly to one side.
“Well, aren’t you a jealous one?” she teases, a hand skimming over the fabric of her dress.
Johanna barks more than laughs, the noise harsh and fast. The music seeping through the speakers is soft.
She says, “Oh, Princess, you are not my type.”
Johanna fingers clamp over the top of her glass and she moves her wrist in a circle slowly, the last drops of amber liquid swirling around the bottom of the glass.
She says, “I hear you have a thing for Finnick.”
The light in the room shifts and Johanna looks around before standing.
“Party’s over, sweetheart,” she smirks, and Glimmer is left standing alone, her mouth dropped open.
Finnick calls her.
“Glimmer,” he says, “what are you up to this evening?”
Her fingers curl around the phone and she wedges the phone in between her shoulder and ear. The apartment is empty and she pads over to the kitchen. Her sweatpants drag along the floor and she takes out last night’s leftovers.
“Why don’t you tell me,” she giggles, twirling her fork around the chicken pad thai in the plastic container.
“I’m bored and free for the night,” he talks into the phone.
She drops her fork and throws it in the trash.
“Come over then,” she says, biting at her bottom lip and she goes to change.
“I watched your games, you know,” she says.
Finnick tenses next to her and Glimmer slips her hand into his to try and relax him.
“I actually wrote a paper on your pre-Games strategy for a class at Academy,” she continues.
Finnick tears his hand out of hers and says, “Jesus, Glim.”
She shifts farther away from him and pouts, “What? We’re Careers.”
Finnick gets off the bed, his jaw tense, a muscle twitching.
He spits, “And look where that’s gotten us.”
The letter arrives at her apartment in the Capital a month after she completes her Victory Tour.
She had been bought and paid for by two very excited friends. She had fetched a record price. She had been made into a whore.
Glimmer’s hand shook when she read the letter but she set it down and poured herself a drink. She kept drinking until they steadied.
And then she lit the letter on fire, watching the embers float through the air as they burned that horribly beautiful orange color.
She reported to the room as demanded two days later anyways, because she has a mother and father and four siblings. She has neices and nephews.
There are too many people I love, she reminds herself after in the cold loneliness of her apartment. It was worth it, she reminds herself, even though she cries herself to sleep for nights and can’t sit up straight for just as long.
Finnick tells her, “You do it for the people you love.”
He wipes away her tears and says, “You do it so the people you love stay safe and whole.”
His voice trembles slightly, his eyes tear up. He brushes a thumb along her jawline softly.
She wonders if he would do it for her but knows better than to ask.
So, a Victor tells her, “Jesus, Johanna Mason’s a mess.”
Glimmer laughs.
They say, “Her and Finnick Odair could not be more obvious about the whole thing.”
And then, then she whips her head around too fast and she loses her footing. Her glass slips between her fingers and shatters on the floor.
“What the fuck?” she manages, whisper-soft and trembling.
The Victor glances at her out of the side of their eye, eyebrow raised.
“Uh, yeah,” they say, “for fucking ever. They’re balls deep in angsty sex and feeeeelings. Which is all kinds of twisted considering he’s so disgustingly in love with Annie.”
“Excuse me,” Glimmer says and runs to the bathroom.
She drops to her knees and vomits for fifteen minutes, her stomach churning until there is nothing but acid and bile, and even then, her body emptied and tired, she still feels incredibly sick.
She lets him fuck her once, after she found out, and he presses his forehead to hers and says, “God, you are beautiful.”
She says, “Who’s Annie?”
And he rolls off her, tired, and murmurs, “A lot of things.”
Finnick leans against her wall. His head thumps against it once, then twice.
She’s sitting on the bed, naked, her arms crossed in front of her breasts.
“You are so full of shit, Finnick,” she spits.
“You think that if you stop fucking me, Annie’s gonna deserve you all of a sudden? You think that you’re ever going to be able to stop fucking Johanna? Because it’s bullshit that somehow, even though you have two people that you somehow, in your fucked-up, broken mind love, that I am the bad guy.”
Finnick slides down the wall and rubs at his face.
Glimmer is still yelling and ugly red patches flush onto her skin.
“You’re not being fair,” he manages half-heartedly.
“Listen up, Golden Boy,” she spits, her face twisting, “you might not be as crazy as Annie or as up front about your issues as Johanna but you are fooling yourself if you think you are not just as fucked up as every single one of us.”
Finnick stands up and tugs his shirt over his head.
He says, an edge in his voice, something that makes her skin crawl, “I’m not the one who started this. Remember, Glimmer? And if you’re going to yell at me for all of my issues, beautiful, let’s see if you can handle your own. Why don’t you stop trying to fuck everything that moves because your daddy didn’t love you or your boyfriend cheated on you or whatever the fuck your issue is.”
(Glimmer remembers vaguely in the corner of her mind, Johanna at a party, her smile wicked, her voice thick with alcohol.
Finnick was there, flirting with some pretty young thing from the Capital, and Jo rolled her eyes.
She said, “Sometimes it’s hard to know when he’s acting, isn’t it?” the corners of her mouth clicking into a smirk, her spine poking through her back so the knobs of bone were visible.
Johanna took Glimmer’s drink and Glimmer said, “You bitch.”
Johanna laughed and said, “Just wait.”
She should’ve listened to her, then.)
Glimmer says, “Fuck you, Finnick.”
He says, “You have, remember?”
And then she slaps him across his stupid, perfect face.
Johanna pulls her aside at a party and says, “Finnick’s an asshole.”
Glimmer sounds like Johanna when she laughs.
She says, “You could’ve warned me.”
Johanna puts her feet up on the table, her arms behind her head as she cocks her head.
“But then how would you learn, gorgeous?” she asks, her smile sharp and dangerous.
Glimmer’s eyes flutter shut and she grips the arms of her chair tighter.
“You bitch,” she spits and Johanna just laughs and laughs and laughs.
Finnick goes back to Four and Johanna Mason knocks on her door.
“Fancy a drink, glamourpuss?” she asks, pushing her way in and past Glimmer.
“What do you want?” Glimmer drawls, arms on her hips, blowing her bangs out of her eyes.
Johanna is opening and closing the cabinets loudly before grabbing two glasses and biting the cork off the bottle of scotch she brought.
“You need to learn how to drink,” Johanna states, shrugging one shoulder, “I figured I could help you with that.”
Glimmer arches an eyebrow and crosses her arms. Finnick left and she wonders how much he loves Jo. She wonders how much he loves her and knows it’s not as much.
Johanna’s hands still, pressed flat to the marble countertop, and for a moment she sags, her shoulders hunched.
She says, “I’m not great with girls, or whatever.”
“Duh,” Glimmer enthuses, “Obviously.”
“You’re going to need friends,” Johanna says, lifting her glass up to drink. “I guess this is me offering.”
Finnick went back to Four but before he left he came to her door and said, “I’m going home.”
Glimmer said, her mouth in a line, “Go to hell instead,” and slammed the door in his face.
Glimmer’s sleeping, shirt half-zipped up and Cato’s hand resting on her stomach, and then -
And then there’s buzzing, so much buzzing and it hurts everywhere.
Marvel screams, so loud that it rings in her ears and then there’s someone else screaming, high-pitched and keening, and she realizes that it’s her.
Cato’s fingers wrap around her wrist and his face is double, triple in her vision and his mouth is so red, dripping with blood, his eyes bright, so so so blue and angry as he says, “We have to run, Glim.”
Her feet find their way in front of each other one at a time and she doesn’t remember this, she won’t know until she’s sitting across from Caesar Flickerman and he asks her about it with a fiercely white smile, but she passes out at the edge of the forest and Cato throws her over his back and carries her all the way back to the Cornucopia.
Marvel dies.
No one really cares all that much.
In the quiet of the night, Cato’s head rests on her breasts, his hand possessively slipped inside her underwear.
There are eight of them left. The pair from Eleven, the pair from Twelve, the girl from Five.
Clove left to get water with a sneer, her voice careful as she snarked, “If you get attacked, Cato, make sure Glimmer dies first.”
Cato rustles and says, half-awake and lazy with sleep, “I’m going to crush the girl on fire’s throat with my thumb.”
He shifts, half-hard against Glimmer’s thigh, his finger tracing patterns on her, and Glimmer rolls her eyes. How predictable.
She says, “When are we offing Clove? I’d love to show the little psychopath what I can do with one of her precious knives.”
Cato’s hand stops and Glimmer cants her hips up.
He is growling more than speaking when he says, “You won’t touch her.”
Glimmer remembers briefly, in the Capitol, seeing something she wasn’t supposed to.
In the training area, Cato’s hand rested for too long on the pathetic curve of Clove’s back and she smiled at him, long, wicked, her lips thin and pink. A finger ran over the curve of her blade and her eyes flitted back and forth between the knife and Cato’s blue gaze.
Glimmer shook her hair then and thought, fuck that.
Glimmer sighs tiredly and says, “Why so protective?”
Cato gets up and walks away.
In the end, it is Cato who gets to do it.
Glimmer went looking for food since supplies were running low.
She comes back, a groosling with it’s neck snapped and feathers plucked hanging from her arm.
Clove’s body is frail and her head lolls awkwardly to the side, her skin lily white. Her blood is on Cato’s hand and his fist clenches around her blade, bloodied and silver and flashing in the sun.
She says, her lips pursed into a smile, “Without me?”
Cato grimaces and his entire back ripples.
“Don’t complain,” he yells, “or you’ll be next.”
(This is how Cato kills Clove:
Clove is tied to the poles of the tent and Cato murmurs, with your knife right?
She twists her arm and grunts. Cato says, “You know I’ll only enjoy it more if you fight,” and at that her eyes narrow, her tongue licking her lips slowly as her mouth opens.
She says, be creative, sweetheart and he kisses her, long and rough and bruising, while he drags the knife along her veins until they burst.
Her last word is Cato and he doesn’t cry.)
In the end, the girls from Five and Eleven die without their interference. The huge kid from Eleven comes at them, eyes crazed, and Glimmer sends an arrow through his neck in under three seconds.
“And then there were three,” she says when she’s cleaning the shaft. He eyes her angrily from the other side of the tent.
He says, “Girl on fire first.”
“Of course,” she concedes, waving her hand in the air.
He says, “I’m going to slice you open like a fruit.”
Glimmer laughs.
Glimmer says, “Sorry about this, sweetheart,” and rips Cato open with his own sword, from the base of his throat all the way down his body. He gurgles once, then twice, his eyes bulging and open.
She smiles sweetly and then chops off his dick.
She says, “You didn’t know what you were doing with it, anyways.”
In the end, Glimmer sleeps on the surface on the Cornucopia and hears the mutts before she sees them.
Katniss crawls up surface and Glimmer says, “Bitch, please.”
She tosses the girl on fire over the edge with a toss her long, blonde, shiny hair and that is how she’s crowned Victor.
Caesar Flickerman’s hair is pink.
He smiles and says, “In honor of you, of course.”
Glimmer’s hand is resting on his knee and she breathes, deep, so her breasts strain against the champagne-colored silk of her dress. Her cheeks flush on cue.
“How sweet of you,” she lilts, her hand coming up to her chest in a sign of humility.
“Well,” he says, “we all know you’re not nearly as sweet as you look.”
The audience roars. Glimmer beams at them and bats her eyelashes one too many times.
“I’m offended, Caesar.”
Caesar rubs her shoulder and coos.
“We all saw what you did to poor Cato,” he continues.
The crowd murmurs; a few people boo loudly.
“There can only be one Victor,” Glimmer says, arching her neck back slightly so her hair cascades against her back.
He turns towards the masses and says, “Should we let her in on the secret?”
He turns back towards her and says, “Cato and Clove were having, how do I put this delicately, relations.”
Glimmer’s laugh is perfectly pitched and lasts exactly the right amount of time. A muscle in her jaw tightens. She crosses one leg over the other and wrinkles her dress.
“Like I said,” she trills, inching towards the edge of her chair, leaning in close to Caesar, “there can only be one Victor.”
The crowd goes wild again.
“You look like you know what you’re doing,” someone says.
The light in the room is blue. The theme of the party is summer or something more specific, beach blanket bingo or some other bullshit. The daughter of one of the leading families of the Capital is turning eighteen. Glimmer’s presence was requested.
Glimmer’s wearing coconuts and she’s doing the limbo.
She turns around and Finnick Odair is sipping on a daiquiri, a short neon suit hanging low on his hips. He crosses his arm and a girl walking by, slightly chubby, dull brown hair, stops in her tracks.
She shakes her coconuts and says, “Get me a pina colada and maybe you’ll find out for yourself.”
There’s sand on the floor of the bathroom so Glimmer steps out of her shoes. She’s wearing little enough that she makes quick work of her own suit, untying the knots on her bottoms easily enough. She gathers up her hair and pulls down her coconuts.
Finnick flushes the toilet and Glimmer perches herself on the edge of the sink.
He walks out, adjusting his shorts, and she says, “Just the person I was looking for.”
It stops him in his tracks, the sight of her naked, legs spread. Glimmer smiles at that.
He says, “Can’t say the same about you.”
Glimmer hops off the ledge and whispers, in his ear, one hand trailing down his abs and finding its way into his shorts.
“Oh, please,” she murmurs moving his hand to palm her breast, “you know you want to.”
Finnick stands there, unmoving, his hand on her breast, and Glimmer presses herself to him impatiently.
“Jesus Christ, Odair,” she huffs, “I thought you had more game than this.”
She kisses him first. She’ll remember that, later, and cringe.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty one,” Johanna Mason drawls over her empty glass. Her feet dig into the cushions and she arches her back like a cat.
Glimmer’s dress is skintight and nude colored. Her heels are five inches tall and when the light hits her right, she looks spectacularly naked.
Glimmer shakes her head and smiles, a finger in the corner of her mouth and a hip cocked perfectly to one side.
“Well, aren’t you a jealous one?” she teases, a hand skimming over the fabric of her dress.
Johanna barks more than laughs, the noise harsh and fast. The music seeping through the speakers is soft.
She says, “Oh, Princess, you are not my type.”
Johanna fingers clamp over the top of her glass and she moves her wrist in a circle slowly, the last drops of amber liquid swirling around the bottom of the glass.
She says, “I hear you have a thing for Finnick.”
The light in the room shifts and Johanna looks around before standing.
“Party’s over, sweetheart,” she smirks, and Glimmer is left standing alone, her mouth dropped open.
Finnick calls her.
“Glimmer,” he says, “what are you up to this evening?”
Her fingers curl around the phone and she wedges the phone in between her shoulder and ear. The apartment is empty and she pads over to the kitchen. Her sweatpants drag along the floor and she takes out last night’s leftovers.
“Why don’t you tell me,” she giggles, twirling her fork around the chicken pad thai in the plastic container.
“I’m bored and free for the night,” he talks into the phone.
She drops her fork and throws it in the trash.
“Come over then,” she says, biting at her bottom lip and she goes to change.
“I watched your games, you know,” she says.
Finnick tenses next to her and Glimmer slips her hand into his to try and relax him.
“I actually wrote a paper on your pre-Games strategy for a class at Academy,” she continues.
Finnick tears his hand out of hers and says, “Jesus, Glim.”
She shifts farther away from him and pouts, “What? We’re Careers.”
Finnick gets off the bed, his jaw tense, a muscle twitching.
He spits, “And look where that’s gotten us.”
The letter arrives at her apartment in the Capital a month after she completes her Victory Tour.
She had been bought and paid for by two very excited friends. She had fetched a record price. She had been made into a whore.
Glimmer’s hand shook when she read the letter but she set it down and poured herself a drink. She kept drinking until they steadied.
And then she lit the letter on fire, watching the embers float through the air as they burned that horribly beautiful orange color.
She reported to the room as demanded two days later anyways, because she has a mother and father and four siblings. She has neices and nephews.
There are too many people I love, she reminds herself after in the cold loneliness of her apartment. It was worth it, she reminds herself, even though she cries herself to sleep for nights and can’t sit up straight for just as long.
Finnick tells her, “You do it for the people you love.”
He wipes away her tears and says, “You do it so the people you love stay safe and whole.”
His voice trembles slightly, his eyes tear up. He brushes a thumb along her jawline softly.
She wonders if he would do it for her but knows better than to ask.
So, a Victor tells her, “Jesus, Johanna Mason’s a mess.”
Glimmer laughs.
They say, “Her and Finnick Odair could not be more obvious about the whole thing.”
And then, then she whips her head around too fast and she loses her footing. Her glass slips between her fingers and shatters on the floor.
“What the fuck?” she manages, whisper-soft and trembling.
The Victor glances at her out of the side of their eye, eyebrow raised.
“Uh, yeah,” they say, “for fucking ever. They’re balls deep in angsty sex and feeeeelings. Which is all kinds of twisted considering he’s so disgustingly in love with Annie.”
“Excuse me,” Glimmer says and runs to the bathroom.
She drops to her knees and vomits for fifteen minutes, her stomach churning until there is nothing but acid and bile, and even then, her body emptied and tired, she still feels incredibly sick.
She lets him fuck her once, after she found out, and he presses his forehead to hers and says, “God, you are beautiful.”
She says, “Who’s Annie?”
And he rolls off her, tired, and murmurs, “A lot of things.”
Finnick leans against her wall. His head thumps against it once, then twice.
She’s sitting on the bed, naked, her arms crossed in front of her breasts.
“You are so full of shit, Finnick,” she spits.
“You think that if you stop fucking me, Annie’s gonna deserve you all of a sudden? You think that you’re ever going to be able to stop fucking Johanna? Because it’s bullshit that somehow, even though you have two people that you somehow, in your fucked-up, broken mind love, that I am the bad guy.”
Finnick slides down the wall and rubs at his face.
Glimmer is still yelling and ugly red patches flush onto her skin.
“You’re not being fair,” he manages half-heartedly.
“Listen up, Golden Boy,” she spits, her face twisting, “you might not be as crazy as Annie or as up front about your issues as Johanna but you are fooling yourself if you think you are not just as fucked up as every single one of us.”
Finnick stands up and tugs his shirt over his head.
He says, an edge in his voice, something that makes her skin crawl, “I’m not the one who started this. Remember, Glimmer? And if you’re going to yell at me for all of my issues, beautiful, let’s see if you can handle your own. Why don’t you stop trying to fuck everything that moves because your daddy didn’t love you or your boyfriend cheated on you or whatever the fuck your issue is.”
(Glimmer remembers vaguely in the corner of her mind, Johanna at a party, her smile wicked, her voice thick with alcohol.
Finnick was there, flirting with some pretty young thing from the Capital, and Jo rolled her eyes.
She said, “Sometimes it’s hard to know when he’s acting, isn’t it?” the corners of her mouth clicking into a smirk, her spine poking through her back so the knobs of bone were visible.
Johanna took Glimmer’s drink and Glimmer said, “You bitch.”
Johanna laughed and said, “Just wait.”
She should’ve listened to her, then.)
Glimmer says, “Fuck you, Finnick.”
He says, “You have, remember?”
And then she slaps him across his stupid, perfect face.
Johanna pulls her aside at a party and says, “Finnick’s an asshole.”
Glimmer sounds like Johanna when she laughs.
She says, “You could’ve warned me.”
Johanna puts her feet up on the table, her arms behind her head as she cocks her head.
“But then how would you learn, gorgeous?” she asks, her smile sharp and dangerous.
Glimmer’s eyes flutter shut and she grips the arms of her chair tighter.
“You bitch,” she spits and Johanna just laughs and laughs and laughs.
Finnick goes back to Four and Johanna Mason knocks on her door.
“Fancy a drink, glamourpuss?” she asks, pushing her way in and past Glimmer.
“What do you want?” Glimmer drawls, arms on her hips, blowing her bangs out of her eyes.
Johanna is opening and closing the cabinets loudly before grabbing two glasses and biting the cork off the bottle of scotch she brought.
“You need to learn how to drink,” Johanna states, shrugging one shoulder, “I figured I could help you with that.”
Glimmer arches an eyebrow and crosses her arms. Finnick left and she wonders how much he loves Jo. She wonders how much he loves her and knows it’s not as much.
Johanna’s hands still, pressed flat to the marble countertop, and for a moment she sags, her shoulders hunched.
She says, “I’m not great with girls, or whatever.”
“Duh,” Glimmer enthuses, “Obviously.”
“You’re going to need friends,” Johanna says, lifting her glass up to drink. “I guess this is me offering.”
Finnick went back to Four but before he left he came to her door and said, “I’m going home.”
Glimmer said, her mouth in a line, “Go to hell instead,” and slammed the door in his face.