07: Spam: Bird covet them shiny little pistols.

[omar]

[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.))

Comments

[omar]

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."

[lesliemonster]

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."

[omar]

"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."

[lesliemonster]

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."

[omar]

"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."

[lesliemonster]

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.

[omar]

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."

[lesliemonster]

"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."

[omar]

"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."

[lesliemonster]

"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."

[omar]

"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."

[lesliemonster]

"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?"

[omar]

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."