Chapter Text
Cassandra found a park with a goddess in it.
The goddess had green skin and red hair with leaves in it. She wore a dress of more leaves and vines and moss. When she lifted a hand, plants grew towards it, massively larger than they had any right to be, more mobile than any plant should be.
She was a woman who controlled plants.
Cass was a plant.
She was intrigued.
She followed the goddess out of her own personal park-turned-jungle and into the city. She slipped on her human glamor as she slipped into sight of the crowds. She hated using her glamor. Gave her a headache. She could only maintain it for a few hours at a time, and that was a stretch.
But people paid no attention to the homeless kid with ratty black hair and dirt-smudged skin, looking as human as anyone else. Aside from the occasional glare or suspicious look, no one paid Cass any mind.
Just the way she liked it.
She strolled down the street, casual as anything. Just another human person. Light as petals on the breeze.
People gave the goddess a wide berth. Averted their eyes, crossed the street. Ducked into buildings or alleyways.
Perhaps she was a darker sort of goddess.
That’s okay. Cass was a poisonous sort of plant.
Cain had made sure of that.
The goddess slipped into a highrise at the other end of the street. By the time Cass caught up, she was nowhere to be seen. Security muttered into radios and glanced, but paid no mind to the homeless child in a place she shouldn’t be. People were scattering, eyes down, whispering and hurrying.
Definitely Cass’s type of goddess, then.
She followed a security guard into a hallway. A swift uppercut had them down on the ground and their key card in Cass’s hand. From there, it was easy. The monitoring room was always, without fail, in the center of the building on the ground floor. Two guards and one manager were in there. Two guards and one manager quickly fell asleep.
The goddess was working her way upwards. She was in the elevator, button pressed for the C-suite level.
She was going to get there before Cass would. Disappointing.
Now: to run up and catch the tail end of her work in person, or to sit back and watch from the screens?
Screens were boring. Cass was fast. She slipped into a stairwell and launched herself up at the railings of the next platform, leaping and flying from flight to flight. Much faster than walking.
She walked into the C-level. Place was deserted. Papers floated down. A sink in the break lounge was running. A potted plant had been knocked over. Coffee was spilled on a desk.
She went room by room, finding the same emptiness in every one.
The goddess walked out into the hall.
“I’m done,” she said. “Don’t go in there.”
She sauntered away.
Cass frowned. Goddess or not, she did run away just to have someone else tell her what to do. She pushed into the room the woman had left. The CFO’s office.
A man was dead on the floor.
Cass glanced around quickly to make sure no one was watching. She closed her eyes and breathed. Where she stood was now a hyacinth— soft purple starburst flowers in a huge, rounded plume, big leaves shooting up from the ground, almost the height of her stem.
Cass rested. She had no eyes to see, no ears to hear. No voice to speak. There was only cursory perception of her surroundings, but perception all the same. She could sense the light—or the lack of it, right now. Her sense of smell was dialed up to a thousand.
There was activity and inactivity, for a plant. There was stasis and there was growth. Right now was a time for stasis. A time for rest.
The sun rose. Runners entered the park, pounded down the sidewalk. Then came the parents and nannies with young children. The dog walkers. Cyclists. Finally, older kids fresh off from school. Teenagers with their skateboards. The walking clubs. The drug dealers.
A girl with blonde hair in loose curls came up to her, and Cass tensed in a way that wasn’t visible to the human eye. She didn’t want to be picked. It wouldn’t kill her, but being ripped apart was never fun.
The girl reached forward, and Cass panicked, and suddenly she was kneeling on the ground with her hand outstretched, halting her.
The girl’s eyes blew wide. She fell down and scrambled backwards. “I’m sorry! Don’t hurt me, I wasn’t goin—I mean, I was, but I didn’t know—Oh my god! Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”
Cass stared at her.
She couldn’t believe she had just done that. Over a little pain? This was…
Oh no.
The girl’s horror was slowly turning to awe. “My name’s Stephanie. But you can call me Steph! Um. What’s your name?”
Cass held very, very still.
She was in full form. No glamor. Lavendar skin and ropes of hyacinths for hair. No possible mistaking her for human. Far too late to change now and pretend she hadn’t been seen.
“Do you… Do you not speak English?” Steph asked. “Oh. Uhhh… Hables Español?”
Cass stared some more.
“That’s all I got, sorry,” Steph said.
Cass settled down. Steph was all open awe and baby’s breath innocence. Untrained stance. Eagerness. Only the tension of excitement, not aggression or fear.
“Oh my god,” Steph said. “Oh my god! This is Robinson Park. Poison Ivy was fighting Batman last night. You’re…” Her face went stony. Emotions cycled through her too fast to comprehend. She looked around the park with fresh eyes. At the plants. “Batman can never find out about you. He’d… Batman hates metas. There are no metas in Gotham.”
Cass transformed from her baseline hyacinths to aspen, gold blooming across her skin.
Fear. Lamentation.
“Ohh!” Steph gasped. “You can change. Does it—Does that mean something? Are you trying to tell me something?” Her gaze flicked across Cass’s face. “You are, aren’t you? What does—what do those flowers mean? Hold on a sec.”
She dug a smartphone out of her backpack and snapped a picture of Cass’s not-hair. Cass scooched over so she could see her phone. It was open to a plant identification app.
Aspen tree, it read. Populus tremuloides.
“Hmm,” Steph said. She pulled up the internet and typed in aspen flower +meaning.
Fear. Excessive sensibility. I tremble. Lamentation. Groan, it read.
“Oh!” Steph said. “Oh, so when—Oh. I’m sorry. But it’s true. Everyone knows it. There are no metas in Gotham.”
She shifted on her legs. “That’s what you are. A metahuman. It means someone who is—I’m sorry. Obviously you know this.” She gestured at all of Cass. “So. Flowers?”
Cass changed into white carnations. Her skin transformed from purple to an unnatural paper-pale. The frilled golden leaves of her hair switched into big white blooms. Steph snapped another photo. She stared down at her phone for a few moments.
“Yes. That’s what you just said, right?”
Cass nodded.
Steph grinned. “I think this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship, then, uh—What’s your name? Wait, hold on a sec.” She rummaged through her bag again and pulled out a binder, pushing the rings open and yanking out a sheet of paper. She also grabbed out a pencil from a small pouch, and thrust both items towards Cass.
“This’ll go so much faster,” she said. “Plus, you can say more.”
Cass shook her head and handed the items back. She closed her eyes and became horseshoe geranium. Fuschia blooms and wide, striped leaves covered her head. Her skin flushed pink from head to toe.
Stupidity.
It took Steph a minute to translate her flowers. Then her eyes went sad. “Oh,” she said. “You can’t read?”
Cass shook her head.
Steph’s eyes went hard. “I’ll teach you,” she said. “I’ll be back and I’ll teach you, okay? I’ll teach you.”
Cass believed her. Well, she believed that Steph wanted to teach her. But Cass was unteachable. She had tried parsing out words on signs before. She could never understand them. She just wasn’t…
She wasn’t smart.
She transformed back into her hyacinth form, and Steph left.
Steph came back the next afternoon.
And the next. And the next. And the next after that.
She brought children’s picture books with her every day.
“Told the librarian I got a babysitting job,” she said. Her hair was in pigtails today, Cass noticed. Her braces had green and pink bands on them. “I’m gonna teach you how to read, just you watch. And then you’ll write your name and I’ll know it.”
A lost cause if there ever was one.
But Cass looked at the little cardboard flipbook and learned her letters. She learned that A was for Ant and B was for Bat.
“Bats, like Batman,” Steph said. “He’s a furry. That means he dresses up like an animal. In this case, a bat. And then he fights crime. Like my dad!”
Cass raised an eyebrow.
“Oh! No, my dad doesn’t fight crime. He does crime. But Batman doesn’t fight him because he’s a small fry loser.”
Cass nodded. She didn’t understand the exact meaning of those words, but she understood the tone.
She was very familiar with that tone.
Idiot.
She knew.
“So you live in the park, right?” Steph asked. Cass bloomed solid white carnations.
Yes.
Solid carnations of any color meant yes, and striped carnations meant no. There were further meanings to each possible color.
White was innocence, sweet, a woman’s gift of good luck.
“Do you want to?”
Cass furrowed her brow.
“I mean,” Steph said. “You could come live with me?”
Cass paused. A blush stole across Steph’s cheeks. “It’s just! I bought this pot. And I have a little trowel. You could turn back into a hyacinth and I could sneak you in and no one would even know. And then you wouldn’t be living outside getting rained on and stuff.”
Cass nodded.
“Really?!” Steph squeaked. “Awesome! Here.” She ripped open her backpack and pulled out the promised clay pot and trowel. It was just the right size for a single hyacinth.
Steph dug up some dirt from near the tree that Cass lived under. There were no other plants in it. Good. This was Cass’s home dirt. She poured it into the pot delicately and patted it down. Cass pressed her hand onto the soil and shifted into her plant form. She wriggled her roots down deep. Stretched her leaf upwards. Unfurled her blooms.
She could feel Steph nearby, sense her general location. Feel the movement as her pot was gently lifted. The wisps of air between her flowers.
The increased sunlight as she was taken out from under the tree. The warmth of it and the light.
Hot air moved around her. Steph talking. The sunlight was even warmer now. Cass took a chance, and transformed back.
She was sitting cross-legged on a desk, right in a sunbeam coming through the window. She was in a bedroom. The door was closed. Steph was sitting in a spinny chair at the desk.
Cass became wisteria. Barely a change at all from her usual hyacinths.
Welcome.
Steph smiled. “Hi!” she said. “See? I remembered that one. Didn’t even have to look it up. Just like how you’re gonna learn to read.”
Cass rolled her eyes, smiling. Steph was so hopeful. An ever-determined optimist.
But it couldn’t hurt to indulge her. Especially if Steph wanted her to live here, in a house with no animals, no children who might come and pick her.
Steph was… nice.
Last time someone was nice to her, Cass had sat on his lap and turned into belladonna.
She would have to be careful to keep her distance from Steph. She didn’t seem to know that Cass was poisonous. That she could kill with a single touch.
That she had been grown for that very purpose.
Steph smiled, and chattered on about the newest picture book she had gotten. Cass stayed planted where she was on the desk.