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Dear Diary...

Steph sighs and puts her diary back down on her lap. She's watching Hana and Loo play out in front of the farmhouse. They're happily occupied with seeing who can cough the biggest fireball, and Steph is, therefore, lightly scorched. Luckily, the girls are more excited by explosions these days than by burning people, and they're now contentedly playing with each other.

Steph's smiling at them, because they're adorable. But that's all she has to smile about. The journal on her lap is still blank, and she's chewing her pen thoughtfully. (She has not yet noticed that she's chewed through the end and therefore now has a blue ink-stained lip. It's the newest fashion, bb.)

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"I don't know what you want me to say."

Steph looks up at her from her spot on the ground, face tight with strain.

"I let my boyfriend kill people. I could have tried to talk them out of it, and I didn't. Do you think it hasn't been tearing me apart too?"

"It's not about me wanting you to say anything, Stephanie," Barbara continues in the same tone. "I just want to... talk. To know what you're thinking."

"We... used to be closer."

"Yeah," Steph agrees. "We used to be."

It was a while ago. And now she has friends who don't want anything of her except to be who she is, and who trust her, and haven't once told her she isn't good enough. She kind of likes that.

"The me in your world, the one who died... were you and she close?"

It wasn't a question she was expecting, not one she was prepared for. Which was why the genuine regret she felt over that, and the guilt, leaked through in her voice. "Not as close as I wish we had been."

Barbara is still convinced that that's what got Stephanie Brown killed.

"I thought it might be that," Steph says, giving her a slightly pointed look.

"Oracle ... I'm not her."

"I know." Babs almost sounds bitter. "You're still alive."

"And planning to stay that way," Steph reminds her, with a faint smile. "I've been doing all right on my own for a good two, three years now."

She doesn't need Babs and she doesn't need the Bats and she's Just. Fine. Like. This.

"Not on your own," Babs corrects. "Except, maybe, being the one who hesitates to kill."

Barbara looks at Steph and shakes her head. "It can't be easy to stick to that here."

Steph looks down for a moment, shoulders hunching slightly.

"It's hard to see why," she says quietly. "This isn't the world I know, Babs. There's no law. There's no rules. I can't just blindly obey Batman any more."

Edited 2009-05-03 01:43 (UTC)

"No," Babs agrees. "You have to make your own decisions."

Her voice grows soft. "But changing worlds doesn't mean that right and wrong change." It's not entirely clear that she's trying to convince Steph rather than herself here.

"I killed a dog," Steph says, not looking at Babs. "Almost the first thing I did when I got to this world. And the last world, we got attacked by these furry wolf creatures - wretches or something - and I killed them, too. And - I think it was right."

"The dog wasn't sentient, and I doubt the wolves were either." Barbara shakes her head. "It's different."

"They'd killed Mel's sister." She's talking about the cannibals now, of course. "They'd - Mel found her car. Remember how we were supposed to keep in touch with Erin while she was out, make sure we could protect her if she needed help?"

They're supposed to do that for everyone.

"I remember." Another one who'd fallen off the radar. Another person Babs had failed to keep alive.

"What was I supposed to tell Mel - don't go after them? Put them in prison? We don't have prisons and they'd have hurt more people if we hadn't!"

"What do you want me to say, Steph? That you did the right thing?"

Because whatever the situation, she hadn't.

Steph puts her head in her hands, face scrunched up tight.

"I don't know. I did the only thing."

"There are always options," Barbara says softly, more to herself than to Steph. "Even if we pick the wrong one. And even when we can only see the wrong one."

"I guess I had two options," Steph says, bitterly. "Let them go on eating people, or let them be killed.

"I'm having enough trouble living with myself for the one I picked - but I'd have more trouble if I picked the other one."

"There were other options." She could have called Babs, for one...

"Like what?" Steph asks quietly.

"You could have called me."

Which apparently hadn't even occurred to her.

"What would you have done?" Steph asks, meeting Barbara's eyes. "If I had?"

"We would have figured something out."

There was always Montana.

Not that Babs has mentioned that to anyone who doesn't absolutely have to know about it...

Steph takes a moment to reply.

"So ... you wanted me to make it your problem, instead of mine? Pass the responsibility on?"