CLOSED | prompt eight | RUIN

[dondarrion]

prompt eight | R U I N dressing-room style. closed to rog.

 

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D. REMIE | campaign

[impermanent]

[ D. Remie's not a terribly demonstrative person by nature. She's capable of it, sure, on the occasions when she needs to be (presenting an abstract, winning her way past a velvet rope, making a new contact that promises to be a step stone to new and different places) but it's never something that happens by default. It turns on and turns off, like a switch inside her that she's generally loathe to flip, but which exists nevertheless.

As a result, her expression gives very little up, her mouth flatting out to something almost aggressively neutral. Sometimes she thinks that's exactly what she did: burn down her life, give up every thing. All to come here, to this shit town of a city, to follow a man around with her camera. (A man who'd rather see her gone on most days, if only to stop her from staring.)

She doesn't look up from her camera as she loads another roll of black and white into the back. Her tone is noncommittal. ]

You win some, you lose some. [ The back of her camera snaps shut and then she's winding and shooting her way to the red "1" on the display dial. ] How's that for pithy.

[carcetti]

[ It's mostly Terry's initiative that sees Remie permitted to follow the Carcetti campaign. It'll look good, she says. A leg to stand on when it comes to convincing people he cares about education or the arts, or the young in general. Of course, what they get isn't quite what they were expecting. (Not that that's always a bad thing, but she's hardly the kind of person they want attached to his entourage. Photographer, fine. Punk, not quite. Baltimore's hardly the right place for that.)

Where she's on one extreme when it comes to being obvious, Tommy Carcetti, aspiring mayoral candidate, lies at least on the other side of the divide. On screen and in a chair, sure, he does fine, but the fact that he also possesses a petulant streak and enough patience just to balance on the head of a pin isn't the sort of thing that's terribly hard to divine. (That, and the fact that he tends to waver from the campaign trail if a pretty face proves too enticing, but luckily there haven't been any moments like that to put into the old scrapbook, at least just yet.)

As if to prove the point, he rolls his eyes, leaning his head back over the crest of his chair. Campaign headquarters are set up pretty nicely, all things told (the office they sit in doesn't filter in too much of the noise on the other side of the door), but it's still no suite at the Hilton. (He's not in a great mood. There's no use in being upset over having done a little double-dealing in a career like this, but that doesn't mean he won't allow himself a little time to grieve.) ]

Is that what we hired you for? [ She wasn't hired. He doesn't care. ] Wisecracking?

[impermanent]

[ She's been with the campaign for a over under a month now and already D. Remie thinks she got Tommy Carcetti's game all figured out. It's part hubris on her part and part obviousness on his, a mix of youthful bullheadedness on both their parts, working in concert to create a caricature in D. Remie's mind which she looks for and waits for and constantly photographs. (An error on her part, an unfairness; her job wasn't to validate the version of truth that she wanted, but to document every version of truth that she came across — from every possible angle, as frequently and as often as possible, both in color and black and white and a thousand shades of grey.)

He's talking and it seems like she's not paying attention, her her gaze still lowered, her hands still fiddling with the camera. Then she catches something out of the corner of her eye, a gesture he's made moving across her peripheral vision and that's when she feels the twinge and the itch, that knee-jerk compulsion that tells her: now, do it now (do it now or miss the shot and beat yourself up over for the next week and a half).

Wind wind wind and without much warning the camera's up and pointed in Carcetti's direction. There's a click, a slide of the focus ring, a whir and then another click. Wind. When D. Remie closes her lead eye she can still see the imagine fizzling against her retina — the tones inversed and oddly moonlight blues and melting yellows as it dissolves slowly back to the black of the insides of her eyelids. (The crane of his head across the back of the chair, the twist of his shoulders, his tie a little loose. Carcetti looks like he's playing at being attentive only D. Remie knows he's not — he's distracted and a little irritable and not really paying attention to her at all. It's a photographer's sleight of hand, another tool in their toolbox beyond the film and the lenses. Remove a moment from all context, from the greater continuity of movement and time, and it can mean virtually anything.)

Her eye opens again behind the camera. Her finger twitches again. Click, whirl. Wind. ]

The commentary only comes in two flavors. Wise or questionable. Take your pick.

[carcetti]

[ He sits up abruptly almost as soon as the picture's taking, nose wrinkling. When on a stage, he's a near perfect politician. Confident in speech and stride, bright, boyishly good looking — or so the media says, straight-backed, charming. Solid platforms, if not a solid voter base. A guy to vote for. But strip away the trappings of an interview or a debate, and it's a different story. ]

Questionable?

[ Thirty minutes at max, he figures, before Norman drags him back out onto the road. (Can't handle one punk followin' you around with a camera, ain't no way you gon' be able to handle Baltimore, trust me. Great fucking advice. Like having a shutterbug follow him around would really throw him off his game. I get hundreds of cameras in my face every fucking day, you think I can't handle this? You sure we couldn't have just gotten some sorority freshman?) ]

Ever think about branching out? Y' know? Maybe talk sports. Hell, even politics.

[ Thirty minutes, and what does he spend his free time doing? He ought to nap. Study up. Call Jen. Call the kids. (He'll see Jen later tonight, at least. The kids, in the morning, since they'll already be asleep when he gets home. He doesn't know how they're so fucking energetic when they get up.)

A sigh. (He isn't going to end up doing any of those things.) ]

Hit me with questionable, then. I'll pick whichever one suits me better.