Drabble 1. Glimmer. Ambitious to a fault.

Glimmer is not as beautiful as she is a Career Tribute.

She hadn't been raised so – her family had enough wealth to get by, and preferred instead to doll her up in gold silk dresses, and let her be served, and pretend that her vivid beauty would provide her for life - she had been born so. A child who was besotted with ambition, a girl who would always follow the call of the sun no matter whichever harsh land it would lead – a trait, perhaps a curse, that compounded the fate of being born in the Districts.

She sees the world like the eyes of an old man, sees herself like that millisecond sparkle - gleam, not sparkle - within them: beautiful and unrivalled in her prime, but transient, forgettable, and then she will be a girl pregnant at nineteen, some rich man's wife, an envied lady the rest of her life, a ridiculous name on paper after that. The prospect fills her with a helpless, white-knuckled, teeth-gnashing sort of rage and it is what harpoons her to the Hunger Games, with its promise of legend, dazzling showers of gold stars and blaze and savage glory.

She remembers how she worked harder than anyone else - following Cashmere like a dog, a mutt - furious energy shaping her taut like a strung bow, and she remembers how she volunteered even if it meant an almost certain death. The sunlight seemed to rain down that reaping day, her hand shimmered as she raised it: crystalline conviction in her voice, terrifying resolve in her heart, the weight of twenty-three other tributes on her mind.

Later, as she waits in her circle in the arena of the Games, the battlefield few have chosen, it occurs to Glimmer that, of their twenty-four, she has the most to lose. She thinks of the goal – to be remembered as someone more than a district girl, someone who took fate with her own hands –, thinks of the maddening abyss of anonymity, and throws everything to the wind.

Written after reading the first book. Modified a little.