Pamela is made of (hemlockandhoney) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-23 00:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | plot: switch, poison ivy |
Who: Cerise.
What: Waking up in Gotham all Ivy-fied.
Where: The greenhouse.
When: Thursday night.
Warnings: Nah.
She was born in briars under a blue moon.Captured in a coffin of daydream rose bushes with greedy pinprick fingers. Their thorns went blunt against her skin in sacrifice to the new mother and the new age, and the green grass grew over her body like a shield while she slept. It wasn't a restful sleep, but a detoxifying one. She didn't remember coming through the hotel door for the almighty switch, although she dreamed about it in shades of rotten gray and asphyxiated blue. Not quite a memory at all really, just the unending sensation of a somersaulting stomach and weak knees. When Cerise awoke in the greenhouse, it was the first time in months that she wasn't violently ill.
There were other problems though. Digging her way out of a shallow grave wasn't any kind of way to wake up in a new world.
Cerise hadn't been this clearheaded in months, which was somehow disorienting in itself. Her body was free of withdrawal's bruise-like aches, and not a joint popped as she clawed loose from organic soil with a choking gasp. In pure wonder, like Eve's very first breath. She was tensile muscle, jaguar sleek with resurrection. Her hair was a caliginous halo, singing siren sonnets to the flowerbuds. They reached for her like static cling, tangling in the tarnished bark of her hair and prying into her freckled skin with avidity. The grave had been a glimpse of cold, bitter reality, but this was somehow more unnerving.
Scrambling on raw, dirt caked knees was futile instinct on a road to nowhere. Sensing panic, the flora rushed her. The birling convoy of reptilian plant life clawed after her with the urgency of neglected children. Vines seized her kicking ankles, and Cerise lost a boot in the fight for freedom. Thorns snagged on the thin hem of a vintage tee shirt, and she reached down to yank the tops off of a dozen fiddleheads with mindless panic.
The pain was an unseen shockwave that slapped her back against cobblestones and earth. She could feel it as clearly as if she'd just hacked off one of her own limbs. Searing and white hot, it did not abate. Not even when she screamed.
Some of the epic, flesh-eating venuses shrieked in agony. It was stridulous and inhuman, the nerve splicing cry of a hundred dying lambs. The soundtrack of weeping innocence during the mass slaughter, a sound that seared into her fucking mind. Unforgettable as cyanide in the spine. An ache so deep that it blew through the walls of emotion and splintered any memory of pain that came before it. What had she ever known of pain? Of injustice? She could feel its voice coarsing like mercury through her mind, Nature.
No, she hadn't know anything about that kind of pain. The anguished weight of the failed protector's crown. It soon reduced her to broken sobs among the cockleshells, and when the wild ivy stroked her hair with affection, Cerise could only repeat herself.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry.." Over and over.