Saint Reilly (shutterbugged) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-06-15 02:14:00 |
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The camera that sat on the table in his apartment was old. The metal casing had been dinged too many times to count and the luster was worn, but it was intact. It was younger than Gatsby, it was 1928 instead of 1925 but the contact-sheet of the negatives that hung from string in the bathroom were crisp and clear. It was a pocket camera and Saint had spent an afternoon learning it in advance of giving it to Wren, careful fingers and caution. But the camera was still sat on the table, he had empty pockets and no reassuring counter-weight of a camera strap around neck or wrist. He had given Gatsby the same care, and the thin paperback sat beside the camera on the newly acquired kitchen table. The smell of developer fluid clung to his skin and to his hair but the cotton shirt buttoned over it had the sheen and weight of an older, expensive weave and it smelled of nothing at all. The tie was neatly knotted but nondescript and the three-days-worth of scruff that was inevitable when you were prone to distraction, both first thing in the morning and also (and more importantly) when you needed to buy razor blades, had been scraped neatly from the skin. He looked young and he looked clean and he looked just uninteresting enough to slide into the background of Gatsby, where collars hadn't changed significantly enough that they couldn't be imitated with an interested eye for detail. Saint waited in dust and with one impeccably clean shirt shoulder pressed against damask wallpaper, his weight rolled onto the heel of one (moderately) more shabby shoe. He had a hazy idea of the twenties, more Art Deco than the realities of Prohibition, high school history class lost in miasma of forgotten education he'd walked away from toward nomad-ing himself around the world on a camera and a smile and a shoe-string budget. The hotel yawned around him, silent and unconcerned with an anachronism who smoked quietly and without haste as he waited for the door to open. He had run, with the waiting-room lack of intent, through all possible thoughts in his own head that he could think to embarrass himself with and had stumbled over being twenty and very stupid and a self-belief he could charm his way out of being arrested in Amsterdam and sobering up somewhere with a door that locked on the outside. All these thoughts were fragile and lacked momentum. Expectation hovered, like a cloud of the heavy Russian smoke that clung to his shirt. |