Drabble #7: In which Takaba hits pay dirt…
IPOD Prompt: 'Creating Dreams' by Jordan Chan
In choosing his camera, a week later Takaba was rewarded with his first exposé, thereby cracking the Kouyama case, when he recovered Aoki Mayu hiding in Nikko.
None of it mentioned her working at Club Dracaena at all, not that Takaba had a choice in the matter. His boss both congratulated and threatened him with heavy emphasis on editing if he wanted to take credit for his work at the time. After countering with his threat to go viral pay or no pay, they came to a compromise in which Takaba begrudgingly agreed upon and a fat check was written.
All his hard work had paid off handsomely and he didn't even have to split the profit with Mitarai. Not that that man didn't try.
Weeks later, the price of his exposé was exposed in all irony. In having his big break embraced more by the entertainment industry rather than respectable news organization, almost all his subsequent work from that moment on seem to lead him from one celebrity to the next. He was on the celebrity beat and seeing repeated trailing zeros on his checks.
For the first time in his career, Takaba was making the kind of money he'd boasted about. Yet, he hated it with a passion.
Mitarai was right: he wasn't a photojournalist.
