"Rowan... What are those?" Zee asked, trying desperately to get a glimpse of the things her new friend had hidden behind his back.
"What things? There are no things!" He replied defensively, turning again to face her while his hands clutched the glowing stones and scrolls.
"... They are glowing." She huffed.
"... What are glowing?" Rowan asked, dropping the stones and scrolls to the ground for Ichor to devour, before showing her his hands.
"That's cheating!"
"What is?!"
"You and Daddy are planning something... I know it. I just know it."
"Prove it." He grinned, finally proving himself the King of Gaslighting once and for all as he whistled and walked away, doing everything in his power to lose her, before descending the stairs again. "Hey, dude..."
His creator lifted his eyes from the carvings of words he'd made into the ground, hollowed out, yet manic eyes zooming in on his creation. "Ro-Rowaaan! Have you brought them?!!?!?! Have you brought my PreCiooousss?!"
"... Sure... Buddy. Here ya' go..." Ichor rose from the ground, vomitting out the Stones that glittered, and the Scrolls that glowed just brilliantly.
"Ha-Have you told them about our cult?!!!!!!!!!" His creator pointed a clawed finger at the empty air behind him, directly at the camera.
"C-Cult? Them? What them?!"
"It'SssSss P 4 tr3on . C0m (slash) Regularrr, ya hear?! P 4 tr3on (dot) c0m / Regularrr!!!!"
"Oh, God," Rowan sobbed, whirling around. "Who the fuck are you talking to?!!!!!"
"Them, them, themmmm! Do you not sSSeee them?"
"Who's them?!!"
"Them... Them the readerSssS! They'RRREeee... I can SSSensSSee them..."
— — — — —
The surprise on Ivy's face lingered a beat longer than she would have liked before she tucked it away behind the mask she wore for everyone who wasn't chlorophyll.
'A vigilante unbothered by a man's violent death…' She supposed the rumors about the Imp weren't exaggerated after all.
Then again, Firefly was hardly a man as much as he was the representation of humanity's destructiveness.
"Well, I appreciate the assistance," The Meta offered, if only out of courtesy, before turning to assess the damage Firefly had wrought on her garden.
Many of her plants had died from the heat.
Many more were still on fire…
Her plants couldn't speak, not in any way a normal human would recognize, but through her psychic link and the distress chemicals surging their vascular systems, their 'shrieks' of pain reached Ivy as clearly as if they'd been screaming into her ear.
She clicked her tongue, anger bleeding from her posture and causing the nearby flora to writhe restlessly. Even in death, Garfield Lynns continued to be a nuissance.
Ivy almost regretted ending him so fast.
She could have drawn it out. Flooded his bloodstream with compounds that would gnaw and nibble at his insides while keeping him conscious for every second of it. "But don't you have damsels to rescue and rooftops to brood on?"
Rowan's grin widened as she walked away, immediately hating how his Adam's apple betrayed him the moment her back was in full view. Turned out he was an ass-man… It could have been worse, he supposed. He could have been into feet. And in his defense, he was a hormonal teenager, hers looked like someone had bolted Max's breasts onto them, and the way she swayed out of sheer habit really wasn't helping his case.
"I'd say there's one right in front of me."
"You're about a decade too young, sweetheart." Ivy didn't so much as glance back. "And this damsel doesn't need saving."
"Funny. That fight a minute ago told a different story." Rowan paused, his grin widening ever so slightly. "And does that mean you'd consider it when I'm older?"
Apparently Bruce's preference for villainesses was contagious, because Rowan couldn't think of any other reason he was reacting like this.
"Boys." She snorted, brushing her hair over one shoulder with the kind of haughty indifference that came as naturally to her as breathing. A vine, one of the few Firefly hadn't torched, curled up to meet her step. Rowan hurriedly leaped after her, landing at her side uninvited. She halted in response, causing the greenery around them to stiffen. "What do you want, Imp?"
'You.' He nearly blurted as the hallucinations cackled somewhere in the back of his skull. Breasts and ass aside, he had to admit she was beautiful, with high cheekbones, full lips, and eyes so vividly green they looked like they'd been cut from real emeralds… She reminded him of a certain Sorceress he'd been crushing on before his reincarnation, albeit with sharper, more aristocratic features that made her seem far less approachable than Triss.
And she smelled really, really nice. Like a meadow in bloom with something sweet and fruity underneath. Best of all, she wasn't taken, unlike Catwoman, whom he had never so much as dared to fantasize about out of respect for Bruce and what he considered the OTP (One True Pairing).
'Somebody's in looooove!' The Joker's hallucination cooed, the sudden intrusion of bis ugly mug dousing the heat in Rowan's abdomen.
"Your garden's on fire."
"I have eyes, Imp." Ivy snapped.
"I can help, but I need something in return."
Arms crossed, she glared. "I'm not sleeping with you."
"That's not what I was going to ask." Though his pride did take a hit at how fast she'd shut that door. "I need you to create a cure for the Joker Toxin. Or something that can neutralize it."
"Can't you do it yourself?"
He blinked behind his visor, dropped to a crouch to survey the absolute chaos that had seized Gotham by the balls and let loose a chuckle that sounded more exhausted than amused. "I'm a fighter, not a scientist. Batman's always been a better detective than he is a chemist, and the one person I'd have gone to first was infected too."
"I—" Rowan looked up at her, carefully picking his word. "Gotham needs you. And in return, I will deal with anyone, villain or otherwise, who tries to touch your garden until the city's back on its feet."
"Heh." The sound that left Ivy was closer to a scoff than a laugh.
"So what do you say? You scratch my back, and I scratch yours?"
"There are fire hydrants everywhere. What do I need you for?"
Rowan grinned.
Had this been any other city, she would be right, but here, maintenance fees had a habit of disappearing into a politician's back pocket long before they reached the pipes.
Under the command of Lucius Fox, Wayne Enterprises did what it could, but the company could only solve a thousand problems at a time, and Gotham—even at her best—always had a thousand and one. "You're going to bank on Gotham's infrastructure? Seriously?"
"You're asking me to save a city that has done nothing but cage me and cut down my children." Ivy paused, fire spewing from her eyes. "What makes you think I'd want Gotham operational again? What makes you think I even care?"
Truth be told, Rowan hadn't thought this far into it, and whatever charisma his heritage was supposed to have afforded him had obviously skipped a generation. Hell, he couldn't lie his way out of a paper bag, much less convince Ivy to contribute her time and possibly life for this godforsaken city.
Sucking air through clenched teeth, Rowan contemplated his response, before choosing to scrape from the dregs of his soul for anything resembling sincerity, unaware that he might've dug too deep. "Because I know evil. I've seen it firsthand. Been on the receiving end of it too. I know indifference as well—"
Back when he was first 'welcomed' into the trafficking ring, he wasn't very popular with the adults.
He couldn't cry as convincingly as the other kids, didn't have a crippling injury and weather-worn face that was telling of a tragic past, which made him a terrible 'street prop.'
If it hadn't been for whatever Reuben saw in him, Rowan reckoned he'd have shared the same harbor as the rest of them. That was the indifference he knew, and it wasn't what he saw when he looked at her. "I don't think you're either. I think you're someone who was hurt, who latched onto her passion and eventually grew to adore her 'children' more than she ever could any human."
And for good reasons.
Dr. Pamela Isley wasn't always an eco-terrorist.
The woman predating the villain had been a genuinely brilliant researcher interning under one Jason Woodrue, who had since dropped off the face of the Earth.
The young Pamela who was, by all accounts, infatuated with the mad scientist then, had agreed to help him chase down a solution to the environmental decay that was slowly but surely eating away at modern civilization.
Their answer was plant-human hybridization, which was either visionary or certifiably insane depending on how methed-up the person you asked was.
It also meant no matter how decorated Pamela's academic record was, no ethics board would, understandably, ever greenlight human trials.
Jason Woodrue's solution to that particular roadblock was to remove the need for approval entirely, starting with drugging his scientific partner, strapping her to an operating table, filling her veins with their chemical cocktail, and then gassing the poor girl with the Serum she'd helped design.
A monumentally stupid decision given that Pamela had been the brains of the entire operation. But then again, nobody had ever accused Jason Woodrue of being smart, only mad…
When Pamela finally opened her eyes, it wasn't to Woodrue's lab but to a government black site, where she was subjected to the kind of experimentation that would have made the architects of MKUltra proud.
The ordeal only came to an end when some researcher carelessly allowed the Meta access to her comfort cactus.
And the rest, as the saying goes, was history.
Something in Ivy's expression shifted at his assessment.
Was it her eyes that had narrowed?
Her lips, fighting to hold a smile that wasn't quite one?
Or her nose, scrunched in barely contained anger? "You know what I think of you, Imp? I think you were hurt. And I think you're too damn stupid, too damn brainwashed to realize humans, Gothamites specifically, aren't worth saving. How have they been treating you, hm? After all you've done for them, what did you get in return but scorn?"
Rowan let her tirade wash over him without a word, his gaze drifting to a sky that had been choked dirt-green by smog and ash.
His heart squeezed at the flood of memories, from the recently staged mob, to the group that helped Deathstroke, and the constant barrage of his character on every online forum and news outlet.
To say he wasn't hurt or disappointed would be a big fat lie, and in fact, he'd be the first to admit this was the biggest reason he wanted to give up on vigilantism, but then more flashes came unbidden.
Flashes of the kind old woman at the orphanage, of Alfred, the dumb booger-kid, Barbara, and so many others he couldn't shut out even if he tried.
His nose stung, his eyes burned and try as he might, he just couldn't quite keep the tremors out of his voice.
"Look up. Can you see them?"
Following the pointed finger, Ivy stared unamused at the toxic clouds. "See what? What are you playing at?"
"The stars, can you see them?"
"… No."
"Do you deny that they're there?"
"…"
"See, I think sometimes we can be so preoccupied with the smog and miss out on the brilliance behind it." He glanced at her, his heated gaze making Ivy fidget uncomfortably. "I used to be the same as you; I used to see demons everywhere I look, but in the last two years, I've met people who are kind. Who are good! People who got me out of a really dark place and tolerated me even when I was being absolutely intolerable..."
His lips curved up behind the visor, yet the wetness at the corners of his eyes would not dry.
"A few of those people were still in the city when the sky fell. They're suffocating in the dark corners of their own minds, forced to watch their bodies commit atrocities they'd have never condoned. They don't deserve this."
Even behind a mask, he felt naked under her scrutiny, so instead his eyes found the plated tips of his boots. "They don't deserve to be toys to this sick joke, and I wish I could save them. I really, really do, but, like, I can't!"
Rowan laughed at the damning admission, which he would have never said out loud if there weren't so much at stake. "I have only ever been good at two things. Being a cynical asshole and fighting, and right now, neither is worth a damn. But I know how to beg. I know how to grovel…"
His knees hit the vine before the rest of him caught up, his forehead pressing flat against the bark with such abruptness that it made Ivy recoil, up until she realized what it was he was doing and scrambled to pull him upright.
"What are you--?"
"Please," Rowan cried, refusing to budge despite her efforts. "Please help them. I beg of you. Gotham failed us… It robbed what was good from us. It extinguished our lights. Don't let it take theirs too!"
Ivy lowered herself beside him, gently easing his head onto her lap, and stayed utterly still while the Green crept toward them on all sides, weaving and weaving until the burning skyline and the screaming city and everything beyond the two of them disappeared from sight.
As she watched the last gap close, Pamela sighed, fingers absently scratching the back of the boy's helmet.
She didn't have the heart to tell him it might've been too late.
It'd have been too cruel, even for her.
— — — — —
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