Re: O'Brien, Leah
Leah tilted her head to one side, mischief playing across her face. "My turn," she declared. It didn't take much thought to come up with a spirit animal for him. "I think you're the fish, O'Brien. Trusting. Persistent. Single-minded. That fits you perfectly."
Letting her eyes fall closed for a moment, she gave a nod of thanks when he agreed to let the subject drop. She wasn't so self-absorbed in her own pain to not realize that she wasn't the only one who had lost loved ones. In many cases, Leah considered herself lucky to even have part of her family still with her. And yet... as far as she knew, what she'd been through wasn't common. O'Brien's ability to smile in spite of what he'd been through was enviable.
Opening her eyes once more, Leah let her gaze follow O'Brien's hand to the freeze-dried ice cream. An eyebrow arched in question. "You're really going to eat that shit?" Disgust mingled with surprise in her tone. Of all the treats laid out on the table before them, that would've been the last thing she reached for.
He had every right not to answer that question. When he began to detail the story, Leah's attention stayed on the camera, the bottle of water, the people dancing around them, anything else but O'Brien himself. That wasn't to say she wasn't listening. She was. To every word. No specific mention of a wife or kids of his own, which made sense and was reassuring in a way. If he'd had a wife and children who were dead, how could he ever manage to smile, even the tiniest bit?
Feeding someone false hopes wasn't Leah's style. She wasn't very good at lying, either, or so Brandon always told her. There were more questions on the tip of her tongue; questions that would go unasked for a while. She'd never been a fan of the Twenty Questions game, especially when it was her turn to be interrogated. O'Brien was a far stronger person than she could ever dream of being. To still have hope, to be making the best of a bad situation. She envied it. So much.
"Must be why you have so much fun with those kids Kori looks after." That was better than asking more prying questions about the family he'd lost.
Leah rolled her shoulders in a shrug at his question about helping him take pictures. "Nothing better to do, I guess. Might be worth it if we can get some embarrassing shots of the hostess and her stupid friends." She smirked at him. "Unless you'd rather hang out here and pig out on the crappy imitation ice cream."