omar | 07: Spam: Bird covet them shiny little pistols.

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07: Spam: Bird covet them shiny little pistols.

[It seems like it's going to be a real easy port at first, despite the landing. A hotel to loot, full of all kinds of things that will enhance Omar's quality of life beyond what Leslie will provide him with -- not to mention enough odds and ends to let him finish his current toothbrush-based project. It's not as good as Risa, but it will do him fine.

That lasts until the voices start. Or one voice, particularly. One he's been badly wanting to hear since he first came on board.

Brandon won't show himself, though. And he says there are others around, ones Omar will want to see almost as badly, but he won't say where. Not until certain conditions are met. After everything Omar put him through, how can he say no to anything Brandon wants? It's not anything he wouldn't have done for him when he was alive, anyway. Not at first.

Brandon wants presents, and Omar plans to shower him with them. A knife from the kitchens will do for now, and if he can find a gun in someone's room, all the better. Then he sets to doing what a thief does best.]

((OOC: So basically Omar is wandering around and has been told to steal anything even remotely valuable. For once, his usual rules are off -- if you fall under the umbrella of "civilian," the hotel/Brandon will tell him you're a criminal, and may even say you're one of the ones he has to get revenge on -- so if you want to be robbed and/or hurt, or just encounter him being loopy as hell and chatting with his dead boyfriend, this is the place.))

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There was a neck tie around Leslie's head. She won it in a game of limbo! Which she really needed to get back to, but there was the issue of the bathroom. About half the people at the party were ghosts, and didn't understand the need of a person to use the toilet. They were really insistent on her staying in the bar, but she managed to beat box her way out.

And who was she to run into on her way out of the bathroom but Omar!

"It's Omar!" She waved and smiled. "Hi, Omar. Was I looking for you? Yes. Yes, I was. And you found me, so good job us. What's going on? How are your feelings?"

"Warden," Omar greeted her, surreptitiously adjusting the knife tucked up his sleeve so it would be better hidden from her prying social worker eyes. "I got some news y'all might wanna hear."

He paused and glanced at the nearest painting, frowning. "It don't need to be no secret, baby. Ain't no one gonna hurt you again. You got Omar's word on that."

Under normal circumstances, Leslie did not have the street smarts to recognize someone hiding a knife up their sleeve. Under these circumstances, it wasn't a guarantee that Leslie had the street smarts to recognize someone hiding a bazooka up their sleeve.

"Baby?" A few key words -- the term of endearment, being hurt. She thought that she had it, but she also thought that she could taste the color blue on her tongue right now.

"Are you talking to a ghost? I talked to one earlier, it was awesome."

"He ain't no ghost," Omar shot back, wounded. Just because Brandon was dead, talking to him through a painting, and invisible, didn't make him a ghost. "He just waiting on me, that's all. He'll come out soon enough. Just need to help that along, first..."

He glanced her over critically, thoughtfully. She wasn't exactly the jewelry-wearing type, but she must have something that would appease.

"Really," Leslie said, completely enthusiastic. Perhaps overly so.

He. There's only one person that Omar could be this attached to, she's sure of it.

"Okay." She puts a hand on his shoulder. "Omar, I talked to my dad earlier. It was really special. I want you to be able to talk to your person, too. What does he need?"

Even in his murdered-boyfriend-related distress, Leslie's hand still got a critical look. It was ameliorated, though, by the other thing he saw.

"Your watch," he said immediately -- although he shot another glance to the painting a second later, looking for confirmation. "You like it?" he asked the wall. "Bet you look all badass wearing it."

"Your pops give you that?" he asked, turning back to Leslie.

"Uh-huh. Just today. He used to wear one like it."

Didn't he? Leslie had forgotten all about it, until her Dad reminded her. She'd always thought he was a pocket watch person.

She turns her wrist around, and the watch jangles. Heh.

"It's a good watch," Omar agreed approvingly. "Real nice." And it would look real nice on Brandon's wrist, along with all the other gifts.

Well, it was Leslie. He might as well ask. She wouldn't give him cigarettes, but for something this important? How could his own personal caseworker say no? He nodded towards the wall. "He like it, too. You wanna help me out, Knope?"

Was it a nice watch? She paused, processing the compliment. Of course it was. But did she want to help Omar out? Of course she did. It was a pretty tricky situation to navigate, in her current condition.

"Support your thesis statement," she said, hiccuping in the middle of statement. "How does the watch help you guys?"

"Brandon want the watch. I want him to have it," Omar replied flatly, narrowing his eyes. It seemed pretty black and white to him, really. What more solid thesis statement could she want?

Maybe if she knew... He frowned and leaned in slightly, lowering his voice. "Boy say he gonna keep hiding out until... till I make right. For what happened. And he ain't even the only one here: he say Tosha around here somewhere, and I needs to be having a word with that Stringer Bell. But he won't help me none unless I help him. He earned it, Warden."

"Omar," Leslie said, in a way that was infused with a mix of drunken pity and actual empathy. "If that's the case, he needs more than a watch."

Moreover, nothing in Omar's files indicated that Brandon was someone who needed bribes before he'd help out his boyfriend. All the same, Leslie read how Brandon died.

Let the guy have a nice thing. She takes the watch off, and holds it out.

Omar bristled a little at the pity in her voice. "No, he don't. I'm dead and I'm fine. So's he. Boy just--"

He broke off suddenly, as if interrupted, looking back at the painting. Whatever the content of Brandon's silent rebuke was, it took a while, and it left Omar looking upset. He didn't even see her take off the watch until it was already being held out to him; he turned back to her, startled, and grabbed it reluctantly out of her hand. "Boy fine," he said again, sounding hoarse. "He just want what he earned. And I want him to have it." He smiled wanly at the painting. "He look real good in shiny things."

Leslie has been tiptoeing around the Brandon issue. Because it is, unquestionably, Omar's most painful memory. She knows that it's a sore spot, and always will be there. And there are times -- quite a lot of them, actually -- where it seems like Omar is just daring her to push it. Like he wants her to, to give a justification for pushing Leslie even further away.

Normally, it's not a game that Leslie has any interest in playing. It's not a game to her now, or ever. It's a truth. That Omar lost the person he loved most in the world directly because of the choices that he made. He has to admit that, has to stop blaming outside forces or codes, before he's able to make any real progress.

Here's nowhere near ready. And so Brandon sits between them. An unacknowledged weight, ready to tip the scale in an as yet unforeseen direction.

"Brandon didn't love you because of shiny things."

This isn't talking about how Brandon died. This is who Brandon was. Leslie's drunk enough to think there's a difference, speaking distantly while she looks at the painting.

"He loved you because you wanted to provide for him. 'S not the same thing."

"I know that," Omar snapped back immediately, angrily. "It's just the same now. If he here, then he surely going to be provided for." There was no doubt in the if. It didn't matter if he couldn't see Brandon yet: he heard the voice clear as day, and he'd know that voice anywhere. Even in the next life, which he already was in, anyway.

For all the grief he gave her, Leslie was a pretty insightful woman. Omar had been waiting for the other shoe to drop on Brandon for some time now, waiting for her to cross the invisible and silent line he'd put there for her. At any other time, her saying Brandon's name alone might be enough of a last straw for Omar.

But today, there was no game-playing. No messing around the conversation. This was too serious, and if Omar would suffer later for his current earnestness, so be it. "I'm taking care of my boy," he murmurs. "This how he want me to do it."

It's not that Leslie didn't believe that the ghosts around here were real. Her own conversation with her father has lasted hours. Longer than any real conversation that they'd ever had.

It's just that this seemed so unlike the man she'd read about. Most importantly because:

"He doesn't seem like the kind of person that would want to see you in pain. And you so clearly are. More than I've ever seen you."

"Only cause--" And there he does cut off, jaw tight, eyes burning. Even with no trap laid, he'd managed to walk right into it: there's nothing he can say next that won't be exactly what Leslie Knope wants him to say. Only cause he suffer first. Only cause he in pain, too. Only cause this whole thing been my fault.

He breathes in and out once, quickly, nostrils flaring like a bull's. It's rare for anyone to get under Omar's skin, and he surely doesn't like it now.

"Thanks for the watch," he sneers coldly instead, sliding it onto his own wrist. "Warden."

When Leslie first came to the barge, she'd tried so hard not to use the word "warden." Because she'd honestly seen this as a genuine rehabilitation project, rather than an out and out jail. She still does, really.

But Omar is the one who can't leave, freely. Leslie can. She can hardly lecture him on the terms he uses.

Warden. It's his way of ending a conversation, of shutting down whatever else they might have left to say.

Screw that. While he's standing here, she's telling the truth.

"You don't deserve all of the bad things you think you deserve," she says, locking eyes.

He never has.

Again, the only way to win is not to engage. He should just play it like he did with Bunk Moreland: say nothing, let her say her piece, and wait for it to be over.

But whatever force is egging him on right now -- the force he's calling Brandon at the moment -- it won't let him do what he'd rather do. It won't let him play it his own way, and if he were more in his right mind, that would be enough to immediately make him back away from all of this.

Instead, he hears Brandon whisper encouragingly and it is, somehow, enough. "Thought you was here to try to make me change my wicked ways," he sneers. "Thought I was supposed to be accepting just how much of this was on me."

Edited 2012-11-27 23:52 (UTC)

"I want you to be accepting of anything, Omar."

Which has really been at the root of her problem, as his warden. Omar needs to be pushed past the amused complacency that he wields as armor. He can't accept full responsibility for what happened to Brandon, he can't forgive himself for what happened to Brandon. Two contradictory notions that he has managed rend himself in place holding onto.

"Anything that would push you beyond a stasis that I think you've been existing in for a very long time. I want you to accept that your choices did put Brandon in danger. I want you to accept that that doesn't mean you deserve to be punished forever. Because instead of accepting that both of those facts can be true, complicated but true, you persist in a half life. Not looking at the past, not looking at the future. Stuck."

"You putting an awful lot on my boy that ain't deserve to be on his shoulders," Omar shoots back heatedly, riled afresh by her dragging Brandon into it. "Ain't nothing about Omar 'cause of all that. A man can't do what he enjoy? What he good at? I was ripping and running long before that young man come into the picture.

"Y'all say I ain't looking at past nor future -- so what that leave me with? Right now. You think that's different for me? I always done lived in the moment, right up until the moment I stopped living."

"And look where that got you, Omar!"

She's not angry, and now that they're finally into it, Leslie's fear of losing him as an inmate is becoming increasingly distant. It's more important for him that this gets out there.

"For you, living in the moment is the exact same thing as being stuck."

"So where you expect me to go?" he scoffs, pulling a mocking expression. "What -- you think I'm all that likely to move up in the world with some legitimacy? Don't get it twisted up, warden: I like what I do. Always have, always will."

Brandon, or whatever's controlling him, must say something at that point, because something in his face nearly falters. "May have got a little less fun after that... but the game don't change. Never has, never will. And I ain't intend to, either."

"You like what you do? You like the thing that's seen everyone in the world who cares about you put in danger or brutally murdered? Seriously? Seriously?"

...except, yeah. Seriously. He does. The rush, at least. The work itself. And that's something that Leslie is going to have to work with, if she wants Omar to truly have a chance of graduating.

It's not his job to be a different person -- it's her job to work with the person that he is, right now.

"You seriously like what you do," she echos. This time, it's a realization, not a condemnation. "Why?"

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Leslie's reaction makes him instantly defensive -- albeit perhaps not for the reasons one might think. "Eyyo, listen here, warden," he snaps, downright angry now. "If you don't get that much, after all this time and with that big file you got to peruse, then you don't know nothing to start with. And if that the case? We ain't got nothing to say to you."

He's nodding along by the end of it, as though being egged on by a silent third party; Brandon of course. "That's right -- I ain't pulled no one into nothing they ain't had the will to do on they own. Brandon, too. My boy loved his work. He want a piece of that back now, and you mean to stand in my way? You?"

His mouth twists, like he wants to spit, but all he does is shake his head and turn to walk away. "I don't think so. He ain't want me to stop on account of some social worker."

Edited 2012-12-04 05:53 (UTC)

[Ben isn't quite sure when he stopped talking to Omar; he didn't notice himself stopping, he just knows that he was at some point and now he's not. He's never quite sure what to do with Omar, but the man had been saying things that in retrospect kind of concern the transgenic, and he doesn't want to see him hurt because he doesn't understand.

So he's not exactly looking specifically for anyone - not anyone real, anyway - as he goes, but he'll hesitate and draw closer the moment he spots Omar where normally he would evade just to avoid being confused or snapped at. He has literally nothing of value unless belt buckles are of interest, but he's interested, and currently free of blood except where the previous batch soaked into the cuffs of his black field jacket.]

[The hotel has been confusing him on the point of identities lately -- people's faces swim away and resolve into focus as others, people he knows, people he's got reason to do harm to. Brandon whispers their names into his ear.

This time, though, Ben's face stays Ben's face and it's enough to bother him, with the things he remembers about the young man. His voice is cool, as usual.] Soldier boy.

[What's wrong, Omar? Brandon murmurs worriedly, and Omar's expression tightens.] You need something?

No. [Ben, caught peering curiously into the open door of a room that had been previously closed when he walked by before, with no sign of anyone passing in the interim, pauses when he sees movement. Glancing sidelong, then turning fully to face Omar, he tilts his head at the acknowledgement and watches him react much as Ben has always known him to: inexplicably.]

Do you?

Need a few thing. Not anything a boy like yourself can deliver, though. [There's something more tense than usual about him -- usually, he's just annoyed at Ben, but now he seems almost worried.

Who is he? Brandon asks.]

Nobody, baby. He ain't nothing.

[The main thing Ben is concerned about, when he notices the tension, is how much of a threat Omar is; he can always see the danger in the other man, despite not being particularly concerned about it.

He remembers how fearless and efficient he can be.

The words - "boy" "nothing" - don't exactly sting; he's been called worse. He's just confused, not the least because he seems to be missing at least part of a conversation.]

Maybe. Maybe not. I've become quite familiar with the layout of the hotel. I could help.

[Omar's about to scoff that off -- he's already seen the manifest and he knows where everyone is staying, and what else could Ben say on that front that could be useful to his cause? But then he remembers what Ben said about some kind of tribute and hesitates, eyes narrowing.]

What was that you was saying before? About delivering something. Tribute. I just so happen to be in need of some, my own self.

[At this, the confusion evaporates pretty much immediately and completely from Ben; this is a subject he's more confident in, more comforted by.]

You don't need to do anything for Her - I already did. [He smiles again, though quietly.] It's taken care of.

Ain't for her I'm worried about.

No? [Ben tilts his head slightly, almost patronizing.] Then who?

[Omar's chill demeanor drops by a few more degrees.] That ain't a thing y'all need to be reconnoitering into, soldier boy. I got a need. That's all you need to know.

[It makes Ben a little more serious, but not much; most things are rolling right off him right now in a way they normally simply don't.]

I've already given the Lady what She asked for; but there is plenty more around.

[He hesitates, remembering Aya, some of the other things being said by people on the network or that he's seen. Normally he wouldn't be so bold as to keep asking questions once he's been cut off; not aloud, anyway, but.]

Is it a memory?

You got a problem with answering a question now? More what?

Is what a memory?

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07: Spam: Bird covet them shiny little pistols.

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