Barbara pursued Bruce as he strode out into the hallway, only a few students bothering to give glances at the pair before returning to whatever task they had been working at before.
"This is starting to get a little weird, Bruce." Barbara hissed at the new student. "I think it's about time you stopped and gave me some answers on why any of this matters to you."
By then, the pair found themselves in an abandoned corner of Gotham High; the meticulously applied wax from the first day still remained on the floors and walls, not yet scuffed by the heels of a thousand apathetic teenagers unaware of one janitor's suffering.
Bruce turned and glared at Barbara. There was a deep resentment in his eyes, almost rage. "Tell me everything you know about Garfield." he instructed her. Barbara, on instinct, took a step away from Wayne, who responded with two steps to close the gap.
"Tell me!" he growled.
"Bruce, you're scaring me." Barbara stuttered out, finding herself at the corner of the hall. The new student seemed to tower over her at the moment, but for all of his apparent fury all he managed was to lean in and sternly state "It is very important that I find out how Garfield was capable of acquiring those pictures; important enough that lives are on the line. I will ask one more time, Barbara. What do you know about him?"
"What makes you think I know anything?" she spat back at him. "Stupid," a voice in her head told her. She knew that if push came to shove she couldn't do much against someone as big as Bruce in a fight. To a point that surprised her, Bruce retained a bit of composure.
"You were speaking to him yesterday, and you both acknowledged a prior connection."
"What's with the 'good cop, bad cop' routine you're pulling all of a sudden?" Barbara asked. "It's like you switch between some idiot rich boy and a cold thug every couple of hours."
"You're avoiding the question." Bruce stated.
"So are you." Barbara replied. The air was tense with anticipation as both of the pair waited to see the other's reaction. Slowly, Barbara realized that Bruce was not going to be backing down any time soon. She sighed and began to explain.
"He's the son of Commissioner Lynns, my dad's superior at the Gotham Precinct. We've met at a couple of formal gatherings, but we never really talked. That's all I know, Bruce."
"That's all I need to know." He told her. He turned his back to her and began to walk down the hallway, to a more populated section, but a swelling of poorly thought-out courage swelled inside of Barbara. She stormed back to him, grabbing him by the shoulder and yanking him around to face her. He was glaring down at her, but the fact that she had even managed to get him to turn alerted her to just how shocked her opposition was that she had tried that.
"Two DAYS, Bruce!" she shouted, too caught in her own moment to care if any passing student caught wind of the confrontation. "I have known you for TWO. DAYS. And here you are trying to drag me along on your little crusade like I'm your lackey, your butler or something! Despite that, I don't know a damn thing about what you're trying to accomplish! Explain to me, right now¸ just why you are so interested in some grainy photo of a shadow on the school newspaper."
The bell rang. Any students that still dared to roam the halls quickly dispersed to reach their classes before their absence was noticed. But Bruce and Barbara remained where they stood, for a time that neither of them attempted to measure. Their eyes were locked in a struggle, daring each other to break before they did. The red-headed girl observed Bruce's reaction in intimate detail. His expression was an enigma to her; cold and dead on the outside, but the mildest trace of… something, a thing that she could not quite place, was writhing about underneath. And in a single action, her jaw nearly dropped in astonishment.
He broke.
"I looked at the photo and I noticed several key features. An intensely-high focus that only blurred, very slightly, at medium distance, and a thermal mode with a small blurred bar approximately three quarters of an inch from the bottom of the picture's edge. The camera that took that photo was Waynetech."
"What's so important about it being from your company?" Barbara asked, puzzled at his intense response to a seemingly mild situation.
"That camera is only available to top-level military reconnaissance units. Any places a kid like Garfield could have gotten it are criminal, at best. I have to figure out who's stealing from my company."
Barbara couldn't help but feel a bit dumbfounded by what Bruce was telling her. while her new classmate had been difficult to read, discovering something like this was, to say the least, quite shocking to her. She could not think of anyone she knew whose first solution to a problem such as this would be to seek it out and solve it yourself, instead of alerting the authorities. She wondered if she would make a discovery this shocking every day this year.
Bruce waited a moment for a response from Barbara, but received none. Taking this as a cue that the conversation had ended, he nodded to her and pointed behind him, a wordless signal that they were long overdue for their class. As he turned around to leave, a jolt brought Barbara back to her senses. "Wait, Bruce!" He turned back around to listen.
"I didn't even know you were involved with WayneTech; how would you know those little details about their cameras?"
Bruce mulled it over for a second, and turned back around to walk away. As he left, a soft-spoken response bounced off the empty hall's walls.
"My father let me help design it."