This is a cold war

[controlledvariable]

Who: Stephanie Brown and Barbara Gordon
What: Planning
Where: Steph's apartment, then Babs' place
When: Just after the transmissions
Notes: none
Warnings: Police brutality, violence, swearing, might contain mentions of PTSD

Steph only sees one transmission, and she doesn't consider that there may be more -- the first had been unaccompanied, although she does not that this isn't the same as the first. It's not anonymous, but somehow she doubts Karen Nakai is responsible for sending out the transmission.

Honestly though, she's not really thinking after she watches the scene play out on her CiD. They're just kids. After automatically pressing the record button, she has to put the CiD down to stop from breaking it, and then when her hands start hurting from being clenched in such tight fists, she forces herself to take a breath and relax. It doesn't work.

"Motherfucking piece of shit assholes." There's no one to hear it, but she swears anyway, and that actually does help a little. The next step is wiping the tears from her eyes and getting dressed. It doesn't matter that it's 5am and she'd been planning to go to sleep soon, she needs to do something.

There's no doubt about what she has to do. This isn't a line of investigation she can follow up on her own, and the first person that comes to mind is Oracle. So when Steph is dressed and composed enough to actually leave the house, that's where she heads.

She runs the whole way, partly out of a sense of urgency, but mostly because there's too much anger and energy in her system right now and running is the only option right now. She wants to go pick a fight and beat the shit out of someone to help herself calm down, but that's selfish when there are more important things to worry about, like tracking down the militia agent responsible for hurting kids and beating the shit out of him. As she runs, she mentally starts running through ideas for how to go about this; she needs to investigate the owner of the CiD, she needs to find the kids she saw, she needs to find the militia agent featured and kill him.

The thought doesn't really startle her, it's not the first time she's had a similar one, but the fact of it settles like something heavy in her chest. If she finds who did this, she'll kill him. Bruce's rules don't matter, Tim's and Babs' opinions don't matter, not even Cass's does right now. There's no Arkham Asylum to send this man to, no Blackgate Prison for him to rot in. There's no justice system that's going to stop this man from hurting kids again, so she'll have to do it. She doesn't know how it will affect her, whether she'll be able to cope with it, but her feelings aren't important. She has to stop this.

She's crying again by the time she reaches where Babs is staying; hot angry tears that don't stop until she presses her palms against her eyelids and just breathes for a minute. She forces the thoughts of violence out of her mind and just focuses on what she'll need to do. Talk to Babs. Find the kids. Stop the militia.

It never occurs to her that she should wait until a reasonable time. She doubts Babs sleeps much, and even if she's asleep right now, she'd want to see this. So the knock on the door is unhesitant.

"Babs, it's Steph. I need to come in."