multiversallogs | I know it's hard but...

Entry tags:

I know it's hard but...

Who: Steph Brown, others [closed]
What: Monster fighting, rescues, healing
Where: All around Baedal
When: Over a two week period since Hasi broke reality
Notes: Everyone has their own thread starter, which are in no particular order, if there are any problems/questions please let me know!
Warnings: NPC death, gore, violence, monsters, PTSD, my inability to be succint, if I've missed any feel free to tell me

The monsters are new for her.

It's not that she isn't used to dealing with all the assorted bullshit that Gotham can throw at a vigilante, but there's nothing quite like this. There are people like Killer Croc and Zsasz and Black Mask, who might be horrific, but they're still people. These monsters are more like animals, but they're huge and violent and they hunt people. She's not trained for this, she's not equipped for this and she sure as hell isn't prepared for it. Getting the gun and new batarangs from Rex helps, and she adds a large hunting knife to her array of weaponry, but it still doesn't feel like enough.

It's terrifying, in a way that she doesn't have time to deal with, so she pushes that down and focuses on doing what she can. There's moments, as she faces down things that eclipse her worst nightmares, when she wonders if she should be hiding instead of out here fighting. But there are other moments, times when she wins, when she gets to reunite a parent with their lost child, and it doesn't matter that Steph is bleeding, bruised and exhausted, because she did good.

At the behest of Babs, and the reminders her own body sends, she forces herself to stop and rest once in a while. Usually she goes back to wherever Babs is, or Kate, if she happens to be resting at the same time. Her sleep happens in small bursts, a few hours here or there, curled up near Babs or Kate and letting the exhaustion take over. She tries not to eat too much, because she has no idea how long these monsters will stay in the city and she's scared that food will start running out. She's already started collect supplies, bringing them to the safe places and distributing them to people.

She doesn't think about the dead bodies she sees, or the injured people. A lot of Baedalites can look after themselves, but some of them can't and it's those who end up as smears on a wall. Except for when she has to stop to throw up, after seeing half eaten corpses; then she thinks about it, and she doesn't know how long she can keep going out and coming back alive.

She hopes no one will hold it against her if she gets killed.

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To be fair, the X-Men tried. It just never really took.

Laura's adrenaline is way, way up, and as they start to run out of targets, she's still full of this wild anger that frightens her sometimes with how easy it is to coax to the surface. She knows it makes her dangerous, that she is not always capable of reining it in, and that she has hurt people in the past and will continue to do so in the future. She dispatches the last few around her with particular viciousness, going far beyond what is actually necessary.

When the last one of them is finally down, Laura just stands there, covered in gore and smelling super fantastic as a result, breathing hard not from exertion but from that thinly veiled anger. It's never enough for her, this bloodletting. Maybe she's been penting up too much in this city, trying to be a normal girl again.

After a moment, she reins it in and sheaths her claws.

As the final zombie she beheads falls to the ground, Steph turns her attention to Laura. In response to the way Laura looks, Steph goes very still. Scared isn't the right word, maybe wary fits better, but even that isn't quite right. Her own breathing is coming hard, but she carefully slows it down as she watches Laura.

When the claws go away, some of the tension in her shoulders disappears, "You okay?" There's genuine concern in her voice, which might be a little odd considering she's also covered in gore and holding a bloodied knife, but she doesn't think Laura will notice, or care.

"I'm unharmed." That's how she's going to answer that question, yes. Laura never knows how to answer questions like that under the best of circumstances.

She wipes a bit of blood off her face and her arms, knowing that, yes, they actually will need to get hosed down at some point, if only to avoid freaking out civilians. She glances at Steph, assessing her for injuries, seeing none. "You were leading survivors." They should, like, probably go find them or something.

Not that she was stalking her or anything, nope. Laura would never.

"That's not what I asking," but it's said with the wry amusement of knowing that was the best response she could hope to get from Laura.

She takes a moment to guess how much time they've been spent fighting zombies, but sometimes she loses herself in things like this and she honestly have no idea how much time has passed. "They should be at the safe house by now." Hopefully, maybe. If they haven't run into anything else.

"We should clean off before we go find them," in their state it's likely they'll do more harm than good, both because they'd scare the civilians and because they might infect them with something. She doesn't wait for a response before starting to walk to the closest residence; hopefully they have a) a hose in their backyard and b) running water.

'Hopefully maybe' isn't how Laura operates -- you never leave anything to chance -- but she has a pretty good idea of Steph's character and figures the other woman has it under control. Okay. She doesn't really want to deal with survivors anyway, dealing with hysterical people is... not her forte.

So she follows her into the building -- she couldn't give less of a fuck about the gore, but it's prudent to wash off since it came from some highly infectious monsters, and she doesn't want to get it on anything else or just leave lying around. "Not on the grass." Steph's probably on the same page there; just in case some of this is contagious, they should probably avoid letting it seep into the soil. These people have a stone porch, that'll work.

Laura? Paranoid? No, never.

She nods at that, and once she's located the hose and found out it works - quietly thanking every God she can think of - Steph stays on the porch as she washes the gore and blood off her suit. She's extra attentive to her gloves and cowl, tipping her head back to make sure no water runs into her mouth. There was gore in her hair, making her reconsider having it out of the cowl, but she washes it out as best she can and makes a note to plunge her hair into antiseptic later.

When she's as clean as she can get, she hands the hose to Laura and pulls off one of her gloves. All her pouches are air and water tight, so when she opens one to get out her CiD it's unaffected by both zombie bits and the water. A quick text gets sent to Babs, checking if the civilians arrived, and a few seconds later she receives a confirmation.

"They made it there safely."

Laura rinses herself off much less thoroughly because she doesn't care -- she gets the majority of it off her, that's good enough unless someone gets all up in her face and starts rubbing against her. Which. Would be weird. The miscellaneous gore slides right off her costume, whatever version of unstable molecules that thing's made out of apparently having been made with quick biohazard clean up in mind.

She is much less intimidating with wet hair and more like a normal teenaged girl who just stepped out of the shower or something.

"Good. I will see if there are more." More zombies, she means. She's planning on clearing out at least the area, especially since Steph mentioned a safe house nearby.

It's kind of nice to see Laura looking almost normal, although Steph is well aware it's pretty much entirely an illusion. Nothing about Laura seems normal.

"Mind if I tag along?" She prefers to ask sometimes, especially wth people who are as withdrawn as Laura, rather than just assuming a team up is going to happen.

"Okay." No reason not to -- Laura's a little unsocial but she's not one of those obnoxious people who freak out about other do-gooders on their beat, unless said other do-gooders are ruining things with their incompetence. Batgirl is not one of those people.

Her claws come back out once they've exited the house and are back on the street, just as a precaution. Not that it takes that long to pop them out, but often things will think twice about messing with her when she's the one with the bigger teeth, so to speak.

Before they get to the street, Steph pulls out a hair elastic and ties her wet hair up into a bun. She doesn't need it whipping around and flicking into her face if they get into a fight. It looks a little weird, but she's not worrying about that. Once they're there, Steph lets her hand rest on her gun in it's holster.

"How are you finding all this?" She means all the monsters and horrors; not that she expects much of an answer from Laura.

"Hearing." Laura, that's probably not what Steph meant by finding. At least she is the least likely person in the world to judge Steph for her hair choices; she really ought to be more practical with hers.

And speaking of hearing -- and smelling -- once they're out on the street and moving, it's clear that Laura's keeping her senses open. She uses her eyes much less than her nose and ears, like an animal.

"Not what I meant," she shakes her head, hiding an amused smile. One day she will learn how to communicate with Laura and it will be a miracle.

"I was asking how you feel about the whole monsters situation. It's not easy for most people," She's not really expecting much of a response, but Steph is nothing if not persistent.

It's a demonstration of how much Steph trusts Laura that she isn't giving a hundred percent attention to their surroundings. She's wary, ready to spring into action and keeping in eye out, but she trusts Laura to warn her before anything nasty gets close.

"It's what I was made for." Not... exactly -- again, her primary target has always been people -- but in a way, what they were aiming for with her was the perfect killing machine. They got it.

More or less.

Certainly, none of this seems to be bothering her. She gets a little worked up, but that could be explained as adrenaline. She's perfectly fine now, sniffing out their surroundings as calmly as if they weren't in the middle of what is pretty much a warzone.

"That doesn't mean you have to like doing this," Which isn't quite what Steph was trying to say, but she feels this is an important point to make anyway.

Steph stopped enjoying herself after the first day. It was nice to cut loose - to fight monsters instead of people - because she never felt guilty about taking down some creature from the abyss in the same way killing the militia agent had been keeping her up at night. But it lost any appeal pretty quickly; especially after seeing so many dead civilians.

"I don't." To be fair, Laura doesn't like doing most things.

Except eating. She really likes food.

Finding nothing in this part of the area they're in, she keeps moving on, her ears open for shouts of distress or the sounds of violence. It's pretty quiet, the area's been fairly cleared out, but she stops and tenses when she smells something that is neither human nor xenian. But it's not attacking anything, and she's not sure whether it's worth it to take down something that might not be aggressive.

She usually kills first and asks questions later, but that's not how X-Men operate. It's not how Avengers operate. She hates uncertainty and moral grey areas.

"There is no choice."

She doesn't say good, because it doesn't seem appropriate to, but the thought is there. Sometimes it seems like Laura enjoys the violence too much, and while Steph can't exactly judge, considering her own feelings on punching things, it does concern her a little.

When Laura stops, Steph does too, hand curling around the handle of her gun, ready to unholster it, "What is it?"

Laura's right about there being no choice, but Steph isn't sure what she can say in response. She doesn't really know what to say at all, and she hates feeling like that.

"Reptilians." They definitely smell like it, anyway. She climbs up a building onto the roof, trusting Steph will follow -- they're both kind of roofy lurky people. (That's a technical term.)

She points them out to her -- a group of about five or six of them, milling around the street, picking through food on the ground upended from what used to be a street vendor's cart before it was trashed.

Laura pauses. "They are not hurting anyone." That's where her hesitation comes from. She's spent the last three years teaching herself not to kill everything automatically, that if there's another way, she should take it. But she's unsure because just because something isn't attacking anyone right now doesn't mean it won't, and they don't know how sentient most of these creatures actually are. They're walking on two legs and communicating to each other, albeit in a primitive grunting sort of language.

For some reason, Steph's thoughts keep drifting to Killer Croc these past few days - possibly just because he's the first monster equivalent that comes to mind - but it's not pleasant. Regardless, she follows Laura up onto the roof and peers down at the reptilian creatures.

"They aren't," She's as hesitant as Laura is, "They might not be planning to, either."

Steph's thought about it too, about how sentient the things they kill are, but usually it's easier to deal with because she's coming directly under attack. Kill or be killed leaves less moral decisions to make.

"Maybe one of us should go down and try to see if they mean anyone any harm?" She's already preparing herself to go, because Laura doesn't seem like the type to try communicating. And because Steph would rather go in and have Laura as her back up, than it be the other way around.

Laura is still extremely reluctant because it goes against every instinct she has, but...

Maybe her instincts are wrong. Maybe they're bad.

"Okay," she says at last. She gives Steph a look like, yes, that's exactly what she's expecting. Laura knows her strengths. Not provoking potentially aggressive things into hostility is not one of them.

"If they try to eat me, feel free to come start stabbing them," This seems like a good compromise in Steph's opinion, and at least this way she won't get eaten. Hopefully.

A small part of her wishes she had her Robin costume -- Bat costumes are designed to be intimidating, even though Steph toned the scary down from how Cass's costume was. She also feels stupid for being scared about this, considering she just dove into a zombie horde without a second though, but somehow psyching herself up for this is difficult.

After a deep breath, she gives Laura a slightly tense smile and heads over the side of the building they're on, to climb down to the street. She approaches the reptilian creatures slowly, making a lot of noise as she does and keeping her arms held slightly out from her body, so it's clear she's not holding any weaponry. She hopes, maybe, that if she doesn't startle them, they won't attack her.

Laura follows after a beat. She's backing her up, but it's probably better she doesn't approach them head-on, considering she always sort of looks like she's about to kill someone.

She is betting that they know that she's there; they're not human, they almost certainly have better senses. The way their tongues flick out to taste the air, she's certain they can smell her. She keeps her distance, claws in, posture unthreatening.

But she'll leap in in an instant if she thinks Steph is in the slightest bit of trouble.

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I know it's hard but...

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