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Gotham wasn’t actually that bad a city. Steph had actually lived in a few different ones now, and visited lots, and for all the crap her hometown got, it stood up pretty well. The architecture was nice; good balance of eras, a unified aesthetic with a lot of variety to keep it interesting.
The street system wasn’t ideal, especially in the old parts of town, but they didn’t have any of the traffic nightmares of New York or, really, most of the rest of the metro belt. Only Metropolis did a better job at avoiding gridlock.
Public transit was robust and reached most of the city, and while the buses weren’t wonderful they weren’t bad. Sometimes they were even on time. The libraries and schools were all pretty well funded, because the Wayne Foundation made up the tax shortfall in districts with below average income. The street lights usually worked, and the cops were a lot more chill than most places unless they thought you were a supervillain, in which case they still probably wouldn’t shoot you, even if maybe they probably should.
The supervillain problem was worse than average, she could admit that, but crime as a whole actually wasn’t. Air pollution had been really bad forty years ago, and the river still wasn’t anywhere you’d like to swim, but that was true of a lot of places, and their reputations didn’t linger like this. She’d been to Paris! Gotham sanitation workers were about 400% more successful, and they kept working through frankly ludicrous conditions! Possibly they were paid really well, she didn’t know.
The weather, though. She’d give the world that one. Gotham’s weather was consistently terrible, awful, no-good, and deserved everything anyone had ever said about it.
Which made it actually really weird that their supervillain problem featured someone with a plant theme.
“Move somewhere tropical, Eisley!” she groused, as she swung to the next roof, careful of her footing. “Cultivate jungles! Save the planet! Stop making us come out in the freezing rain to deal with your unseasonable bullshit.”
She paused for a second on her last rooftop perch, both to gather herself and in case Ivy took the cue. She often did. Supervillains in general seemed to have a hard time resisting a straight line—which Steph could relate to, honestly. And she’d caught Batman holding back his entrance for the most ironic dramatic moment before, so it wasn’t just a villain thing.
No villain attack, which was good, because Steph was on her own out here. This was hopefully just a scouting mission. Probably Poison Ivy wasn’t even here.
This afternoon, just after lunch, as Steph was getting off work, every park in the city had suddenly erupted with enormous…growths. They were tree-shaped, thirty feet high with little crinkled green leaf things at the top, but from what inspection had been done so far seemed more like fungus than anything. The spreading limbs had a weird rubbery texture.
Steph was calling them Doom Broccolis.
Whatever they were, they were suspicious as heck, and in response to their appearance Batman had immediately rallied the troops. Which had quickly led to the discovery that Red Robin was missing, and had been for at least eleven hours. He’d never checked in last night.
The troops had promptly been rallied even more urgently, and dispersed across the city to its various infested green spaces.
So Steph’s mission, like everyone’s, was twofold—see if she could learn anything about Ivy’s scheme in time to foil it, and search for any sign of Tim. If they were lucky, he’d just dropped out of contact voluntarily for unrelated reasons and could be yelled at later. If not… Well. If not, he needed them.
She’d been telling herself all the way here that she appreciated that Duke and Damian were the ones who’d been sent out with each other as backup, that she was respected and trusted to operate solo and that was a good thing. The practical side of her would really prefer backup please, and the insecure one kept murmuring that maybe what it really proved was Batman cared less if she died.
Batgirl gave herself a little shake. Shut up, little voice, she told it, and mentally squashed the slug of it under her heel. She adjusted her gas mask to make sure the seal was tight. Time to get her reconnoiter on.
And hopefully not have to fight the most powerful metahuman in Gotham by herself on unfavorable terrain, in the freezing rain. That would be really great.
There was almost no sound as she crept through the nasty rubbery grove that had erupted in the long narrow triangle that was Hyde Park.
The broccolis themselves were silent, not even creaking or rustling in the occasional gusts that drove the freezing rain at an angle, and city traffic and all the sounds of people were hushed on a day like today, between the weather and the large-scale supervillain incident. Everyone who could be was either out of town or at home, stuffing newspaper into any cracks in case of spores.
After an unenlightening loop around about half the perimeter, Steph was forced to drop to ground level and forge her way into enemy territory. The doom broccolis had avoided uprooting any existing trees or large shrubs, which meant the spacing was slightly uneven and in some places there was no easy way through on foot, but for the most part they were far enough apart to leave plenty of corridors of sky for Steph to stay out under—cover from line of sight wasn’t worth putting herself directly below the things, if she could help it.
Fairly quickly, she noticed something that had not been in the photos from the main infestation in Robinson Park, forty minutes ago.
She clicked her comm on. “Hey,” she murmured just above the subvocal range, for the throat mic. She’d mostly gotten the knack of subvocalizing rather than whispering, which didn’t engage the vocal cords and which the microphone pasted to her neck therefore didn’t pick up well. “Is anybody else seeing…fruit? On the broccolis?”
There was a second of dead air, and then Red Hood said, with a grimace you could hear, “yeah. Like…huge brown cherries, on a couple of ‘em.”
“The ones here are more or less mushroom colored, like the stems,” reported Signal from Finger Park. “But kind of like cherries, yeah.”
“Don’t touch them,” warned Batman, with the condescending Dad-instinct need to tell everyone things they already knew. Steph was in the middle of rolling her eyes when she rounded another broccoli and froze dead.
“Holy crap.” The broccoli mushroom tree at the middle of Hyde Park was bearing fruit that wasn’t shaped like cherries at all. Batgirl’s first thought had been holy shit it’s people, but then she’d taken her second look, and now it was worse. “Team,” she said, trying to keep her voice professional, “I… think I found Red Robin.”
Because dangling from the central broccoli, by dark hair that turned into green stems just before joining the bough, were seven still vaguely formless figures, torsos partially sheathed in giant green leaves like Ivy wore sometimes for modesty, and with arms and legs looking just barely stuck together. Like a partly melted wax figure, or dragon fruit that wasn’t quite ripe. The fingers and toes were mostly fused, and greenish at the tips. The faces were kind of melty too, hopefully enough so that they wouldn’t be a sure match against a photo to a stranger, but not so much that Steph couldn’t instantly recognize the lines of one of the faces she knew best in the world.
There were seven under-ripe Tim Drakes growing from a broccoli tree.
A clamor of demands for clarification was starting in her comm, and she crept forward as she waited for Batman and Oracle to quiet them all down. There was a bulge halfway up the meaty-looking trunk. “I said ‘think,’” she murmured, studying the nearest Tim-fruit for signs it was actually the real one, “because this broccoli—”
Something slammed into her from the side before she could say any more, heavy and cold and leaving her head ringing and her gas mask flying away, and the combination of experience and instinct only barely let her leap and handspring with the blow, just fast enough to avoid the grasp of the thing that had struck her.
Her boots and glove almost skidded in the freezing-rain-on-grass and left her wiping out, but the jagged rubber treads she’d selected specifically for moments like this saved the day.
Steph made a three-point landing and stared up at Poison Ivy, standing looking thunderous on the top of a huge coil of some sort of vine, several more of them lashing around her like octopus arms. Steph couldn’t even tell which one had hit her.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit, Steph thought, and grinned.
“Gotta try harder than that, Pam!”
No one was talking in her ear. The ear she’d been smacked in. She reached up to check. Yeah, the comm had had it.
She couldn’t be sure about the throat mic—the stick-on patch it was under was still in place but she was pretty sure it got most if not all of its broadcast strength from the earbud unit, so it probably wasn’t transmitting to the others anymore but it might be. She’d keep that in mind to a) pass info just in case and b) try not to embarrass herself, in case there was a silent audience.
Ivy didn’t go straight for the kill, so Steph took the time to readjust her stance into a slightly more upright, flexible posture that kept both her hands free, though she didn’t bother to straighten her cape, which had gotten flipped forward over her right shoulder while she was flipping around.
“You’re planting dude-trees now, Pam?” She and Ivy absolutely weren’t on close enough terms to use first names, even if the meta lady had currently been on the upswing and working with the Birds of Prey again, instead of on a sharp down and terrorizing the city. “What, real guys not listening to you anymore?”
“Human beings are disgusting resource sinks,” Ivy said, in a tone of abstracted disgust that didn’t omen well for her losing her head and making a mistake. “Especially men. I’ve always been working on alternatives. Sadly,” she gave a shallow sigh, inspecting her nails, “the ones I’ve developed have always been…limited.”
Steph nodded sagely. “The veggieburger problem,” she agreed. “Hard to get a plant to do the job of meat.”
Ivy glared. Hah. That one got her. “My new varietal,” she snapped, “will overcome that problem. Each specimen engulfs and consumes one large mammal, and produces fruits that mimic the full intelligence and abilities of the prey sample, in a vegetable form completely loyal to me.”
Steph gaped, because one, that was the most terrifying thing Ivy had done in years, and two, consumes was a very very alarming word in this context. “The Doom Broccolis are carnivorous?” she did not actually squeak. She really hoped her throat mic was still working. Even if it wasn’t, though, backup should be incoming.
Ivy rolled her eyes. “They are not even distantly related to broccoli. And yes, although the digestion process doesn’t really set in until the fruits ripen; the early experiments failed to reproduce cognitive function accurately, due to the breakdown of key tissues.”
Whew. So Tim had…at least a little time left, probably. Steph looked uneasily around the grove of horrible flesh fungus. “I don’t see any loyal broccoli people,” she said. Maybe they were off guarding the other parks?
Ivy scowled. “Of course not. The early cultivars weren’t large enough for human trials, obviously.”
…so there were loyal vegetable guinea pigs or something. Sometimes it was easy to forget Ivy had once been an actual lab scientist.
“So wait, you haven’t actually done a person before and you start with—him?” Steph caught herself at the last second; she didn’t know which identity Tim had been caught in.
“Why not? Red Robin is an excellent specimen. Good balance of strength, strategy, and unlike Batman actually takes direction.” Ivy made a sour face, like her inability to control any version of Batman for long was a thorn in her side.
“Is that what you think,” said Steph, who had had the experience of trying to control Tim Drake. He did try to be accommodating, about most things, usually, and he did take direction better than Batman, for what that was worth, but in the end he’d always go off and do whatever he thought best, no matter what, and possibly let you yell at him about it later.
If anyone could take stock of his preconceived values and identity issues and think his way into a twisty workaround for inbuilt loyalty programming in order to fuck over his creator, she’d bet it would be a perfect copy of Tim.
“Also I caught him skulking around my newest greenhouses,” Ivy shrugged. “Waste not, want not. Recycling is good for the Earth.”
Haha, Ivy had just called Tim garbage. Harsh. But as interesting as it would be to see if the veggie-Tims actually did go rogue, them waking up would mean Tim was now actively dying if not already dead. So no. Not that funny.
Steph caught the enemy’s eyes shuttling subtly toward the central broccoli with its heavy burden of fruit. Aha. Just as she had suspected. (As of like…six seconds ago.)
Poison Ivy had been keeping Batgirl talking, buying time for her Tims to ripen.
Steph appreciated the compliment of putting off the fight rather than counting on being able to end it quickly, but she’d been buying time, too. And unlike Ivy, she was done shopping.
Her Batgirl cape wasn’t nearly as wide cut as her Spoiler cloak had been, not as good for hiding things in, but she’d contrived to use its cover to take out and arm nine individual exploding batarangs while they talked. That was more than she carried normally, or even would be allowed to carry normally, but when you were fighting evil trees more ordinance tended to be called-for, and Batman had issued a supply.
Without wasting time, she started throwing. Her aim had never been especially exact, something Damian liked to give her a hard time about, but here all she had to hit was ‘an entire tree.’ No fiddly precision targets today. She had to aim for the ones not showing fruit or trunk bulges, which she was going to have to trust didn’t have people inside, rather than having just recently acquired very tiny people—this seemed like a safe bet since Ivy tended to be soft on kids.
Not enough to stop periodically trying to destroy humanity for their sake, but enough that it was hard to imagine her hurting one face to face.
“No!” Ivy shouted. She got points for not leaping toward the blinking explosives to try to stop them, sending vines striking like snakes instead, but she was too busy doing that to get away from the bomb that had landed only about five feet away from her.
The blast blew her off her feet, and clear off her pedestal of green. She’d managed to remotely yank two of the batarangs out before they went off, saving those doom fungi, but Steph wasn’t worried about that; she’d successfully set the supervillain up for the kind of fatal misjudgment in defense of plants Batman always said was the surest way to beat her, and now she charged in to make the most of it.
She got there in plenty of time to really put her weight behind a punch hammering down into Ivy’s face, then kicked her in the chest, heel driving in just below the collarbone. Ivy gave a very human uph and pained expression, though she didn’t fall, and Steph went for another kick, this one more carefully aimed.
This was a mistake. One green-tinted hand came up and closed around her ankle like a Venus flytrap made of carbon steel, and in one sharp uncoiling move Eisley rose to her feet and with a twist of her whole torso flung Steph head over heels across the grove.
She realized somewhere between getting thrown and suppressing the urge to vomit as she gyroed upside-down that she’d been thrown straight for one of the remaining undamaged, unfruiting tree-things. Could see the surface getting sort of…gelatinous in preparation for her impact, which was so many flavors of no.
Her hands didn’t fumble at her belt, courtesy of many hours of drills and live practice, even as instinct screamed for rush and now now now.
Her grapple caught in one of the spreading ‘boughs’ at the top of another broccoli, and she tugged the line to send herself swinging out on a long arc just short of making contact with the fungus that wanted to eat her.
She peppered the air in front of her with ordinary, nonexplosive Batarangs as she came back around on the end of the wire—Ivy smacked these casually aside, but it made enough of a distraction that Pam didn’t notice in time the moment when Steph got her backup grapple into a different tree, and accelerated.
Going for a kick would have been the smart, safe option, but Steph was rarely smart and almost never safe, so instead of slamming her full body weight heel-first into the supervillain and hoping it stuck this time, she grabbed with the full strength of endless thigh workouts and dragged Ivy clear off her feet.
Ivy’s plants were protective, but they tended to rely heavily on her for targeting anything that wasn’t right in front of them, so keeping her disoriented was a good idea if you could manage it. It said so in her file. So this part, the grabbing, had been an actual plan, even if one it had taken about two seconds to make, and even if ‘hit the supervillain essentially with your crotch’ was probably a combat recommendation no one would make ever.
The next part was sheer impulse, based on how much easier Ivy was to move than expected—maybe her punch resistance wasn’t so much physical density as some sort of supernatural rootedness, and if you could get her off the ground it stopped working?
Steph released the retraction mechanism on her secondary grapple and let it start paying out again, an instant before she hit the max-strength retract button on her original grapple, the one that was still in her other hand, and gripping a bough halfway across the grove.
Her right shoulder screamed, but Ivy let out a startled choking sound as their trajectory wrenched around out of the arc Steph had been carrying her into headfirst, and shot the other way. Which meant she was still discombobulated, which meant Steph still had the upper hand, shoulder or no.
Steph picked the right moment as they went rocketing back, and let go. Momentum kept Ivy flying, and none of her plants reacted to catch her in midair before she landed. Right on target.
Ivy sank headfirst into her own carnivorous fungus tree, in the gelatinous patch where she’d tried to throw Steph. Her legs kicked once, and then fell still. “See how you like it!” Steph shouted, which was perhaps not the wittiest repartee ever, but she didn’t care.
She landed, staggering a little because her shoulder might be dislocated a little bit and was definitely killing her. And normally she wouldn’t turn her back on a villain just because she’d gotten one good hit and they hadn’t immediately gotten up again, but what she’d been fighting for this whole time was time, because the window of opportunity to stop Tim Drake-Wayne from being reduced to protein goo and the pattern for a bunch of veggie-copies was closing fast. This wasn’t a defeat-top-rank-supervillain-solo mission, this was a rescue mission.
She pelted back toward the relevant tree, holding up the elbow of her bad arm with the opposite hand against the jolt. How to get him out? With two good arms she could have climbed or grappled up to the level of the bulge that represented the broccoli’s prey and started cutting, but it would be hard to get good leverage. Was there a better option?
One of the Tim-fruits twitched on its stem. Fuck it.
Steph recalled the grapple-end of her holdout gun from where it had been since she use it to get the drop on Ivy, fired it into the gummy-looking limbs of the Tim tree, and hauled herself up. She needed to start carrying a better cutting implement than a Batarang, how did Midnight Boy Scout not mandate that already, but for now she gripped one swoopy sharp black wing awkwardly in her gauntleted left hand, braced toes and knees against the nasty cool-flesh stem, and put all the strength her bad arm had into cutting through the tough husk.
It wouldn’t cut.
More of the Tims were starting to move. Their copy nervous systems booting up or whatever.
The whole tree seemed like it was twitching, and then she realized it was, or rather just the lump under her feet was, and she pulled back her Batarang just in time for something thin and yellow to burst out through the surface of the Doom Broccoli, and disappear, leaving an almost invisibly thin slash that dribbled a transparent greenish fluid that reminded Steph of aloe vera gel but smelled more like old mango and artichoke.
The rubbery husk was being sliced up from the soft, inner side with the hawks-head emblem that belonged in the middle of Red Robin’s chest, which wouldn’t you know was a holdout throwing star thing after all, just like his R used to be. She should’ve known.
Talk about impractical shapes for a knife.
“Keep going, you’ve almost got this.”
Whether he heard her or not, he went on thrashing and slashing, and Steph with her Batarang tore as best she could with her bad arm at the shreds between cuts, trying to get them to snap and let all the thin slashes add up to one hole large enough to escape through.
The Tim-fruits were still twitching. Would they fall to the ground and then peel their limbs free like they were breaking out of husks, and get up and start walking around? Or would they need to get all the way to looking like functioning humans before detaching from the stems?
A whole arm burst out in a rush of goo. They were going to make it.
The fingers of the nearest fruit came unstuck, one by one, curling around air the way Tim curled his around a staff.
And then he was out, headfirst and gooey.
“Man, Ex-Boyfriend Wonder,” Steph sighed, as she let him grab onto her and lowered them on a slowly paying-out jumpline, helping him reach the ground with slightly more dignity than clawing his way down the slime-encrusted ruptured stem of his prison would have allowed, assuming he hadn’t just landed face-first and died. “Why’d you have to go breaking yourself loose at the last second like that? I was supposed to be the hero!”
“Believe me, you—pbbbft—were,” Tim answered, pausing partway to spit out a mouthful of sap-gel that he must somehow have been breathing in there. “I’d never have even managed to wake up if you hadn’t turned up to distract Ivy and make such a racket. I could feel her speeding it up, toughening up the…things, pushing.” The shiver was understated enough Steph might not have noticed it if he hadn’t been clinging to her waist. She eyed the Tim fruits. They’d stopped moving. Good?
Feet on the ground, Tim brushed fruitlessly at the slime all over his costume, then obviously gave it up as a bad job. “Where is she?” he asked, looking around.
“Over there.” Steph landed too, and pointed to where Ivy was still embedded head-first in a broccoli.
She’d disappeared up to the waist, and didn’t seem to be making any effort to get out. In fact, as they watched she seemed to sink in another centimeter.
“Okay, that’s a bit better than a distraction,” Tim acknowledged. “But also I don’t think we should let her finish. I don’t want to fight a dozen vegetable Poison Ivys.”
“Don’t like to eat your vegetables?” Steph teased, even as she sized up the situation—should they pull Ivy out, probably the faster option but then they’d probably have to fight her some more right away, or try cutting down the Doom Broccoli with her still in it, more thorough?
“Yeah actually I’m not going to be able to look any cabbage varietals in the face for the next six months,” said Tim, apparently agreeing they were broccoli regardless of their creator’s opinion and the mango smell, “but come on. It’s never good when villains start to spawn. Chiraxes was bad enough.”
“Blegh,” Steph admitted. The duplicate Drury Walkers had at least had a super short lifespan and been self-disposing. “Okay, I’m all out of bombs. You?” Probably a dumb question, given all his storage space had been confiscated.
“Ivy took my belt and everything in my bandoliers,” Red Robin admitted, touching the cape closure thing at the top of them, where he’d shoved his little sigil-thing back into place in spite of all the goo. His stupid little gimmicks would be easier to make fun of if they worked out less often, lucky stiff.
“But she left that.” Because Tim had all the luck when it came to details like that. “And your mask?” Not that Ivy had ever cared much about things like the Bats’ secret identities.
He shrugged. “I guess she didn’t expect it to be relevant long.” Anything she wanted to know from or about him, the copies could have told her, soon enough. And he wouldn’t have mattered, once he was dead.
This had been another close one; Steph got those feelings out with a little shiver of her own. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s do something about Ivy. Everybody else should be here soon.”
“Backup,” Tim sighed, pushing his hair back from his face and having it stick that way, messily moussed with doom fungus glop. “I love having backup.”
“Sure didn’t act like it back in the day.”
“I am an older and wiser man now. Who values being alive and made of the original meat products.”
Steph stole a glance over her shoulder at the Tim tree. “…I’m really glad those things aren’t waking up.”
“Me too. Think of the ethical implications.”
Steph side-eyed him, not sure whether that was intentional humor or not, then decided it didn’t matter and elbowed him in the ribs anyway. She immediately broke into a run to avoid any counter-attacks, bad arm carefully supported once again. “Race you to the supervillain!"