milliways_bar | (no subject)

"I'd like to visit," Steph says, thoughtfully, "but not to live there. Melou was totally a jerk about how girls are treated there. I'd have to beat people up all the time."

"...I wouldn't advise it. There are better means to get your way."

"Yeah, but hitting people's just easier," she says, with a grin.

"And likely to get you beaten, in most cases."

"Nah." She grins, just a wee bit cocky. "I was Robin before I died. It'd take a fair bit to beat me."

Ulfin eyes her dubiously.

"There's hardly a man in my world who isn't trained from boyhood in the fist and the sword."

Well. In the circles he means, anyway.

"Bet they weren't trained by Batman, though," Steph says. Steph, overconfident? Never. "I'm pretty good. I mean, I beat up a whole gang once, during the war."

She did, too! She was very proud of herself. And then she died, because DC sucks like that.

"Hm. Perhaps."

It's not like he has any experience at all with women like this. Those women who did fight back in his world, chose different methods.

Steph grins at him.

"Melou didn't believe me either. He was all 'who looks after you, then?' I look after myself."

"But what do you live on?"

He's just about come to terms with the idea of a woman knight. But even Alanna lives within the kind of structure he's used to.

"The Bar, at the moment. I work for Security." She runs a hand through her hair, grinning. "When I was alive my mom worked at a hospital, and when she didn't spend the money on drugs I used that for groceries."

"Your father abandoned your mother?" he asks sympathetically. "Or died?"

It should be noted that a 'hospital' for him, would be run by monks or nuns if it existed at all.

"Abandoned us, and then died," Steph says, and shrugs. "He was a criminal. It was no great loss."

"And so then your mother went to the convent? But it didn't sound as though it suited her..."

"...convent? No..." She shakes her head. "No, we stayed at home. Well, I did run away and live on the streets for a bit, but Robin made me go back to Mom."

"But the sisterhood is the best place for widowed and abandoned women. And you said the hospital..."

He's confused.

"We can take care of ourselves," Steph repeats, looking at him curiously. "Hospitals aren't convents. Not in my time. Mom's just a shift nurse. Works at night, comes home during the day. Or - she did, anyway. Don't know what she's doing now."

"Then who pays for the hospitals?"

"The people who use them, of course. Who pays in your time?"

"Donations, partly, from the rich who feel generous. And the Church."

Steph ponders that. "I guess sometimes the rich donate. Bruce Wayne does, a lot. But mostly it's user-pays. Your system's probably better than ours."

" - of course, our health-care's probably better than yours." She grins.

"It depends where you are. Many people do survive wounds."

Steph blinks. "...what sort of wounds? I mean, are we talking slight-scratch, or leg-chopped off?"

"With swift enough care, it's possible to survive the loss of a leg. But of course, you can never work again. And if you don't seek care, even slight wounds can kill."

He's thinking of Gaheris, whose wound really hadn't been very bad.

"Mmm," Steph says. "Yeah, we're ... a little more advanced than you guys, I think."

A little.