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THEN.
When she first hears the footsteps, Pamela is… god, she’s angry. More than angry. The kind of anger beyond anger that makes her want to rip someone limb from bloody limb.
Because no one is supposed to be here. This is her territory, her garden—those are her goddamn trees. The cops and the vigilantes all agreed to her terms: that no one would come in past the gates to disturb her babies. Not civilians, not law enforcement—no one.
And yet. There is someone here. Walking, light-footed, through the knee-high grass toward the tall, tangled copse of jungle trees in the center of Robinson Park.
It’s quick work to snatch them up. Her vines are wild, thick, solid—their thorns quickly ensnare the fabric hanging from the human’s neck, knotting it up around a bough of one of the jungle trees so that the little thing’s feet dangle and kick, useless, high off the ground. Two objects fall from flailing hands—hands that shoot, futile, up to a gasping throat that she has no intention of allowing to breathe ever, ever again.
It’s here that she steps out of the shadows to face the human who dares to intrude on her sanctuary.
It’s… a boy. A boy wrapped up in a familiar costume, though with an unfamiliar face. The last time she saw this costume, the boy who wore it was nearly a man—tall, broad, and with a smile that she couldn’t help but return.
This one… well. He’s scrawny, she can see that much. She’s long since lost the knack of telling the age of things that grow without rings or cycles or seasons, but at a guess she’d say he’s of the age where children are supposed to be doing their homework at this time of night. Certainly, he’s younger than Robin should be—though his hair is the same dark, inky hue.
Pamela frowns, gliding forward through her garden to get a better look. He’s holding himself up valiantly, one arm hooked over the snare of the vines so there’s less pressure at his throat—her thorns have pricked, just barely, the delicate flesh of his arm, causing teeny beads of blood to well up around each sharp, woody fang.
“Lemme down!” he says, when he catches sight of her. The lenses of his little mask narrow, his teeth bared. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong!”
“Your very presence here is wrong,” Pamela says, softly. Her voice carries on the air, a susurration of the leaves all around them. “Did your handler forget to inform you that this place is mine?”
“Not my handler,” the boy spits, struggling harder for a moment. A single bead of blood breaks free and runs down the pale curve of his forearm, dripping down to the earth below. The plants perk, soaking up its nutrients—eager, ever eager, for more, more, more.
But the boy doesn’t give more. Instead, he stills himself, forcing his breath to calm in his chest.
“…Sorry,” he says, after a moment. He’s looking at her with a frown, his mouth twisted to the side in an expression she cannot quite analyze. “I, um… I just… shit, this is gonna sound so fucking dumb.”
Pamela blinks at the course language, spit with as much practice as some of the sailors who come into the harbor when she tends to the kelp there. It’s… strangely endearing, she can’t help but think. “What is it that you’ve come to do?” she asks, slow and careful, ready to tighten her vines at the slightest suggestion of violence toward her progeny.
The boy—Robin, though not the first Robin, she’s absolutely sure of it—lets his head fall back until it’s pressed tight against his straining yellow cape. “…I learned today,” he says, staring up at the canopy of the trees rather than at Pamela, his fingers bunched into fists, “that plants grow faster when you, um, talk to them. So I thought maybe I would read to your trees for a while. You know, because they’re still baby trees, and it’s going to take a long time before they become old growth. I figured I could maybe… help.”
It takes Pamela a moment to sort through the words, she’s so taken aback. “You… you want to help the trees grow?” she asks.
The boy puffs out his cheeks with a huff. “Well… yeah? My mo—uh, I mean. Someone I… knew… used to tell me that people are less angry when they can sit with a tree for a while. I was pissed when the city cut down all the ones in the Alley, cuz, like… what the hell did those trees ever do to get chainsawed like that? They didn’t know they were in the way, and it’s not like they coulda just moved somewhere else or nuthin’—“
The rest of the story is cut off with an ‘oomph!’ as the vines uncurl, loosing Robin back to solid ground. He stumbles, tripping over his cape—a moment later, he’s on his backside on the grass, the lenses of his mask wide as they’ll go.
“Oh,” he says. “Um. Thank you, Miss Ivy.”
Pamela hums, gesturing for him to pick up his things. He does, cradling them to his chest with the arm that isn’t streaked with blood—one is a book, well worn and dog-eared, and the other appears to be a simple black flashlight, both of which support his claim to be here to read to the trees. She still feels unsettled, having an intruder in her garden… but she’s dealt with Robins before. The first was… kind… to her. When he was little, littler even than this one, he would play among her plants, gentle and delighted in turns. Even as he grew, he never turned to destruction, as most children who turn into adults do—he simply allowed the plants to do as they were wont to do, finding ways to swing around and hang on and flip through them.
The new Robin is still staring at her, his lips pressed into a thin little line. He’s… oh. He’s trembling, the muscles of his legs shaking where he’s sat, tensed like he wants to run but isn’t sure he can manage it. Her thorns, bless them, must have introduced a teensy bit of her favored neuro-toxin to his system.
It should be fine, in such a small amount. He’ll be a bit weak and somewhat disoriented for a few hours yet, but it will metabolize fully by dawn, and once it does he’ll be none the worse for wear. If he’d gotten a full dose the story would be much different, but a poke or two never hurt anyone.
Well… not badly.
“You’ve pricked yourself on my thorns,” she says, tilting her head to the side. “I imagine that you’re not feeling up to a quick escape just yet.”
The boy clenches his jaw, refusing to speak the truth that she can so clearly see. For a moment, the two of them are at an impasse—neither willing to give an inch, but neither ready to draw any more blood, either. Then, against her… better judgment… Pamela raises her hand to guide the vines once more.
“What are you—“ Robin starts, twisting around where he sits. His suspicious demeanor falls away as he catches sight of the form she’s weaving, the vines careful to grow thorns only on the underside.
“Here,” she says, and the boy whips his head back around as she reaches out a hand to him. “You may sit in my paradise for a little while as the toxin metabolizes. Just until you can walk on your own again, small one.”
“I can walk just fine. And I’m not small,” Robin grumbles. Still, he reaches for her, hesitantly, letting his (yes, quite small) hand rest in hers. She draws him up to her chest, holding him there—it’s easy, effortless, with the woody, fibrous tissue that weaves through her flesh. He clutches his belongings to his belly, allowing her to carry him the few steps to the hammock.
He’s pliant, when she sets him inside. His head is loose on his neck, flopping back over the side as he struggles to arrange his knobby knees. His lenses never turn away from her, watching every minute movement of her body. Her hands, her face, her chest as it rises and falls, breathing in carbon dioxide to breathe out oxygen.
She means to leave him then. Allow him to rest a bit, and then take his leave. But the moment she begins to turn, to fold herself back into the cozy cocoon of her beloved garden, he starts to sit up again, calling out, “Wait!”
“What is it?” she asks, her long legs pressed to the side of the hammock.
He huffs, blowing air out through a slight gap in his front teeth. “I… it’s just… I can’t, um, see very well right now. Everything’s kind of… blurry.”
“It’ll ease by morning,” Pamela says, tilting her head.
“Well, sure, but—I can’t read like this.”
…Oh. He… still wants to help her trees grow. And he’s looking up at her, now—so sweet, so hopeful. A child who has not yet had the magic of the young beaten out of him.
He smiles, when she carefully climbs into the hammock beside him and sets it swinging slightly. A big, blinding sort of grin that reminds her of night-blooming jasmine, unfolding under the light of the moon. He’s already holding the book out to her, and the flashlight—talking about how somebody recommended this one to him and he’s not sure what it’s about, exactly, but he though it was the sort of thing her plants would like.
She raises the flashlight, allowing the warm, yellow light to illuminate the cover of the worn little book in her hand. “The Secret Garden,” she reads. And, god… she remembers this one. Not well—most of the memories she has from before the experiment are a little soft, a little hazy. But she remembers how she felt when she read it—like maybe, just maybe, she, too, could grow up and become someone happy, and loved, and beautiful.
Robin, beside her, beams. Then, with a little puff of air, he squirms around, shifting until he’s just a hair’s breadth from her side. “Okay,” he says. “Start at chapter one, okay?”
So she does. She opens the book, and turns the title page, and begins to read, her mouth forming shapes around the words, slow and steady. She reads about a child named Mary—and a terrible, terrible illness—and a dreadful journey—and a dreary manor. And as she reads, she feels the slow weight of the boy sink closer… and closer… and closer, until his warmth is pressed right up against her, his head leaning on her arm and rocking, just slightly, with the motion of the hammock.
He’s fallen asleep, she realizes, as her words fade away into the trees. Like a little child with a bedtime story, his breath even and his mouth open. She can’t see his eyes behind the mask, but she imagines they’ve drifted closed, lashes fluttering against the baby fat of his cheeks.
His handler will be here soon to fetch him, she knows. Breaking the rules to take care of his little duckling. She’ll allow it, just this once—but after tonight there will be no more. No Bats, no Robins—no one but her and her plants in this sanctuary in the center of the city.
“…Thank you,” the Bat says, when he comes. He stands carefully in the grass, his sleeping Robin tucked up under his pooling black shadow of a cape. And she’s going to tell him—warn him—threaten him to keep his dirty synthetic boots out of her territory… only what comes out instead is…
“…Children are the only ones who believe me, you know.”
The lenses of his cowl do not blink, and he does not shift. She’s not sure what to make of him—so solid, imposing, hidden in a cocoon made of unnatural things that reek of human pollution. Still, she does not stand down.
“Children know that it isn’t right, what the adults do. They listen to the truth… even when it’s hard to hear.”
“I know,” the Bat says, and she’s not sure he does. But he’s here for his child, holding the precious bundle of him safe and sound, and perhaps that’s all she can ask for. Just a truce, momentary. So soon to be lost to time.
Though… against her better judgment…
…she lets Robin come back the next night…
…and the next…
…and the next.
NOW.
Pamela is standing under an onslaught of pouring rain, halfway through pulling apart a factory—vile, spilling noxious chemicals into the river, the damn thing deserved to be dismantled years ago—when she hears a cry for help.
It’s not a human cry. She’s become all but immune to those, to the wailing and sobbing and on and on and on that spill from human throats. No… this is a cry that no one else can hear, a plea for help from a being no one else cares to understand. A plant, torn from its roots—pleading for water and nutrients, rent from the soil that nurtures its life.
It’s been months since she planted it, but she still knows exactly which of her lovely vines this cry has come from. None of her plants deserve to be treated so heinously, but this one… it is only a particularly wretched being who would disturb one in a place such as that.
It is because of this that she throws aside only half of the concrete from the front facade of the factory, her vines twisting and writhing, slicked with rain. There is still much of the building standing—too much by far—but she’ll have to come back and finish another time. She’s feeling rather… less than merciful… toward whichever idiot human just disturbed the grave of Jason Todd.
Six months. He’s been dead for six months. And though it’s been longer than that—years, she thinks, the length of two or perhaps three new rings on her jungle trees—since he last sought out her garden to read to them, the trees have not forgotten. Poison Ivy is unwilling to allow anyone to disturb his sleep.
She does not usually feel so strongly about the dead. Death is part of life—an important piece of the cycle, not an ending but a new beginning for all the little seedlings she encourages toward the light. If nothing dies, then nothing grows, nothing changes—that is the way of it.
Still… there is a sliver of her that is still human enough to feel loss, and Robin… he was a loss. She had a fondness for them both, the first and then the second, but it was the second that left the world a little emptier. He was young—vital. It was not his time. And yet…
She grits her teeth, the woody pulp in them creaking slightly at the pressure. The clown—if she could take a year to tear him apart bit by bit by bit, it would be too merciful. She’s never been fond of him and his chemical reek. The things he’s done to Harley… but there’s no point dwelling, not now. There will be time later to seek him out, to give him the final end he so deserves.
The graveyard where Jason Todd is buried isn’t so far from Robinson Park, where Pamela’s trees still grow. The heavens have opened, the rain sheeting down, but Pamela doesn’t stop, doesn’t shiver. Her vines are still crying—fearful of a moving mountain in the shape of two clawed hands, unable to understand the speed of the human animal that has torn them asunder. They are cringing in pain. Broken. Split. And her heart, oh—it bleeds for them, bleeds right there with the green that flows from the open mouths of their mangled stems.
…When she finds the human who did this, she is going to have her progeny take root in every soft, vulnerable part of their body she can wrench free. The perpetrator is going to wish they were dead.
She doesn’t bother to circle around to the gate, instead allowing her vines to lash out, folding the iron fence under a hundred, two hundred, three hundred pounds of rain-bloated cellulose. Her dress shivers in the rain as she strides right up, climbing the looping vines like steps and landing, predatory, on the grass on the other side. The high, stone angel that rises on the far hill is her mark—that’s where she’ll find the trail that will lead her exactly where she needs to go. She’s imagining it already, every detail of the body that will split open as her babies lay their roots through its bones, wrenching it apart apart apart—
—only when she gets there she does not find that someone took a hand or a boot to her vines, either in ignorance or malice. No… instead… there’s a boy that she knows well. A boy whose blood she once tasted, on the tips of pricking thorns and through the roots of the tall jungle grass. A boy who she knows not by his face but by the touch of a thousand leaves, his form remembered through Gotham’s foliage in a hundred ways, none of which she has ever quite been able to describe, not in human words.
This boy… he should be sleeping. An eternal slumber, far below the surface, sheltered away from the sunlight and the rain alike. And yet here he is—halfway out of his grave, his chest heaving as blood and rain and mud run in rivulets down his face, his hands, his torn black suit jacket, his dragging black tie. He is half dead, mostly broken… but, somehow, he’s alive. So, so alive—like a seed left adrift in drought, dry and waiting, that comes blooming to life at the very first sign of fresh water.
It was him. The human who disturbed her vines, it was him. Not in ignorance, no… not in malice… but in a desperate, dizzying bid for the surface, with the same struggle as any seedling, filled with the unerring instincts of anything that is allowed life—the urge to fight, to fight, to fight.
“Oh, my sweet little thing…” she whispers, kneeling down beside him. He’s struggling to stay conscious, his eyes rolling back and his lips mouthing things she cannot hear. She thinks, by the shape, that he might be asking for the Bat—his dad, the man who failed him, who left him in the hands of the clown.
And, just like that, Pamela finds that she’s… angry. More than angry—so much more. More than furious, or enraged, or incensed. She’s so angry that she doesn’t have a word for the kind of anger she’s feeling right now. The thought of ripping the Bat limb from bloody limb feels weak and simple, compared to the strength of the burning heat inside of her.
She can’t forgive Batman for letting this child die. For letting all the magic die with him. She can’t—she won’t. Let him barge in now and try to take his son back. Let him rain down his righteous fury, and chop down her vines, and burn up her trees. Because Poison Ivy? All she needs is one thorn. Just one… lucky… thorn, and he will be at her mercy, forever and always, all the way up until his very last breath.
It’s a war, if Batman so chooses. Because the flora of Gotham has Robin—and this time, oh, this time she isn’t giving him back.
Carrying the boy is easy. Effortless, even so many years past the last time she carried him. Even though he’s taller, and wider, and heavier. She lifts him to her chest, cradling him there, and it feels exactly the same as it once did, way back in a memory. She could close her eyes right now, she thinks, and be there—in the trees in a garden in the center of a city she can never quite uproot herself from. Only this time, instead of clutching a book and a flashlight against his belly… his hand has come to rest at her collar, his limp, broken fingers curled around the leafy strap of her dress.
…They’ll hunt the clown together, she decides, climbing once again over the remnants of the iron fence. Hunt him… kill him… take him apart. Together, they will bury his body so deep that his pale, polluted blood won’t reach even the most enterprising of roots. And then, after that… Jason Todd will grow up.
He will be happy.
He will be loved.
And he will bloom into the most beautiful flower the world has ever seen, because she will make it so.