@visiblurred
her pen scrawled, clearly rushed where she sat, echoing the state of her mind with all that ricocheted within its stunted walls. this city chewed up those who did not earn their way, and camille’s only means of such was to stockpile any open chances of employ. name. address. birthdate. work history...
the sound of the television scratched static into her head. it was a commonplace in public places now--not excluding her own workplaces, so it was nothing camille was not used to channeling into a subtle hum of white noise. but this was only so when others were like-minded in ignoring the provided screen (mostly in preference toward the personalized ones they carried on their person). this wasn’t the current case, to her distraction. the news was big, and had been repeated on most channels that catered to the latest happenings as their broadcasting. current events and popular culture being as dull in her knowledge as most elevated forms of media, camille gathered only what seemed to be the gist. mutant rights were foreign to her for their majority--due to her ignorance and personal stresses. she knew what others grumbled, what they began debates over, what made the apparent two sides of the issue tick, but this was the limit of her knowings.
even this much tugging at her attention wasn’t satisfactory, though. the same disembodied blight that hurled ill at her every step wasn’t taking the holiday most others were gearing up for. and it looked, now, to choose the utter infeasible as a tool.
cam was certain the first clearly formed words she’d heard from across the space was ‘that’s her, isn’t it?’
and that was, of course, followed by her entrance. she who had been the nationwide topic of discussion, and today’s centerfold from the moment cam had settled in here. so the swell of the bustling surrounding her was bound to grow; camille was expectant of this much. however, the venom and barbs then being whispered by choice patrons came as a surprise. and it was one she felt far too familiar with for comfort.
and her distraction had also worked against her now in an entirely new way. evidently she hadn’t been paying the keenest attention to the t.v.; for all the words and bulletins she’d struggled to read, she had never taken the glance upward she would’ve needed to have known the woman’s face. so it was only then, when she turned to her in the flesh, that camille’d had her first proper introduction.
her shock at this woman, her face a vague and featureless plane, made the pen she held drop to the floor. and with its landing, camille felt host to the most sickening pool of guilt. it festered, crawled in her arteries, worse. dilemma wrote itself in her face... what justification had she in glaring daggers at those verbal with their disdain, if she reacted this way at the same sight? the same person? she may as well have spilled every emotion that crossed her mind, the way she looked directly to her now.
