InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "and I'm good at it too."

stephanie brown loves justice...and waffles (ex_iambatgir760) wrote in colligo_threads,
@ 2011-11-26 23:53:00

Entry tags:

jason todd, stephanie brown

Who: Stephanie Brown and Jason Todd (aka: The Reject Robin Club; aka: Even Numbered Robins).
What: Post-breakout milkshakes and bonding.
When: Before the Soap Plot. After Steph breaks Jay out of Library Jail.
Where: A diner.
Rating: TBD. Probably a bit high for language if nothing else, but we'll see.
Status: In progress.

Steph hadn't broke in to the library on her own before, but she remembered various things Parker had taught her and it had proved easier than she expected. Of course, she figured Asaph was probably making it easy on her because he wanted Jason off his hands. But that wasn't the point. The point was that she had broken Jason out of Library Jail by virtue of her supreme awesomeness, and now they were sitting in a diner with milkshakes and cheese fries. On the rare occasions she'd thought about Jason, such as when she had to explain the whole crazy Batfamily story to Proxy, she'd never really considered a situation like this. She'd figured, if nothing else, she'd have to punch him in the face. She had to punch a lot of people in the face.

Taking a sip of her milkshake, strawberry to the surprise of probably no one, she tilted her head slightly and gave him a considering look. She knew she was probably supposed to judge him, given his complete disregard for what the Batclan stood for, but she mostly just felt a weird sort of kinship with him. She knew what it was like to be rejected by the people who mattered, to try and try and never measure up. Heck, that was pretty much her life story. So, she wasn't going to go into this with any preconceived notions. Nope. She was just going to talk to him and make her own impressions. Even if he was possibly a little crazy.

"And this, kids," she said, "is why you should always bring your library books back on time." Her lips quirked in a small smile. "So...you really aren't what I expected." She paused a second. "No...okay, getting locked in Library Jail five minute after getting here...that, I'm not too surprised by. I guess everyone just makes you out to be a lot crazier than you seem." And there she went again, not keeping her inside thoughts on the inside.

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ex_iambatgir760
2011-12-11 07:00 am UTC (link)

"That it is," Steph said with a small smile, poking at the cheese fries as she thought back to her own "death" with a small shudder. Having Black Mask show up the month before, even if it had just been a hallucination of sorts, had really shaken her. She still felt uncomfortable with how that had gone. "Even if the 'death' is mostly fake." She sighed, glancing out the window of the diner. It was weird, talking about this with Jason, but she supposed he was the only one who could understand it.

"I wanted to kill Black Mask after what he did to me," she admitted. "I almost did. Had a gun pulled on him and everything. But I couldn't let go of Bruce's lessons even after all that went down between us. Maybe if I had, I wouldn't have ended up with a bullet in the shoulder and everyone thinking I was dead." She glanced back over at him. "How did you do it?" she asked, knowing she was crossing into inside voice territory. "How did you let go of that and actually start killing them?"

She was quiet for a moment. "I would have been just another dropout with a dad in lockup, a mom too stoned to care, and two or three minimum wage jobs just to scrape by...so I know where you're coming from." And a baby she couldn't afford to take care of. Steph knew that she would have kept her baby if she hadn't fallen into crime-fighting, too selfish to let go of the one good thing in her life. Her daughter was better off for the things Bruce taught her.

"I don't know if anyone could fix it at this point," she said, thinking of the mess Gotham was. "It would probably just screw things up more. That's how it goes." She shrugged. "We all force our way in at least a little, in our own ways. Some of us are just better at it than others."

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ihatecrowbars
2011-12-11 07:30 am UTC (link)

"The way I heard it it was pretty damn close there," Jason says, "Faked death or not. Facing your own mortality is not fun."

"I guess it has to do with the fact that I never really had much sympathy for the criminals I was beating up and even before the whole coming back thing felt Bruce didn't do enough to stop them," Jason says reflecting on all of that.

"Then after I came back I couldn't believe Bruce allowed the Joker to still get on the loose like he did much less let him still live. I know I won't have if he had kill Bruce," Jason says, "And it's not like there is anything still worth saving in the Joker any more whatever humanity he had was long gone before I even met Bruce. And it just grated at me. So I began looking over all that mortal stuff Bruce had taught me and decided he was wrong about it."

"After all you are right for all the stuff Bruce has done Gotham never has gotten better about crime it's just pretty much stayed the same. So I decided to try something different when I first started out as Red Hood and I got crime to go down significantly," Jason says with a twinge of pride. He could have been the hero Gotham needed. All well Gotham sucked any ways.

"Very true," Jason says, "Definitely easier when Bruce likes you."

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ex_iambatgir760
2011-12-11 08:05 am UTC (link)

"Very close," Steph admitted hesitantly. "Sometimes, I'm still surprised Leslie managed to fix me up. I really thought I was dying there at the end."

She was quiet for a moment after Jason spoke. This was something she didn't usually own up to, but she figured she owed it to him. "I used to argue with Bruce about it," she said softly. "About why we tried so hard to keep the bad guys breathing. Some days it felt like we tried harder for them than for their victims. I still don't entirely agree with it...that they deserve so many chances."

"I don't blame you," she told him, giving him a small, reassuring smile. "If I had come back and Black Mask was still around...I don't know what I would have done. I'd probably have snapped." She shrugged. "And the Joker...I don't think he's even a person any more. He definitely doesn't deserve to be treated like one. If he died everyone would be better off." She looked down at her hands. "But that's not true for all of them," she said. "Some of them can be better. Some of them are the same screwed up people you or I could have been. And I think...maybe you're taking the easy way. You could stop them without killing them. You could do it without breaking a sweat. I'm not talking about the ones like the Joker, but the other ones. So why don't you?" Maybe this would shatter this weird understanding they had between them, but Steph wasn't the type to back down.

"I mean, I'm not judging here," she said after a moment. "I'm really not. I just want to know why. I mean...sure, maybe Gotham's asking for it, with how bullshit everything can be...but why kill them just because you can?"

She gave a small, bitter laugh. "Bruce never liked me," she said. "I think the only reason he cared what happened to me was because he could add it to his stockpile of guilt and manpain. That's what he runs on, you know..."

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