Who: Professor Ivy and Lady Jay What: Labroratory crimefighting invesigations, with science! and bad behavior! Where: Professor Ivy's When: Bat-Mite plot time. Warnings: Suggestive-ness.
The Gotham Garden Apartments looked different ten years ago, when the neighborhood had still been the primary killing grounds in a mob turf war. It'd been the side of town that nobody came when they had a choice in the matter, not unless they had a debt to settle or some blood to shed. Changes came over time with the help of the city's masked vigilante movement. The mob moved off the block when their men kept turning up dead and in jail, their stockpiled cash going missing and ultimately funding charities. Citizens reopened their shopfronts without immediate fear of stepping on the toes of Falcone or owing tithes to Black Mask, and the Garden Apartments, once abandoned save for the seedy dealings conducted in its basement, were now renovated with new paint on the walls and old wrought-iron for the balconies.
Perry Ives resided at the very top of of a modest seven stories, where three apartments were joined by the partial demolition of several walls, bringing to life a sprawling penthouse that doubled as his research facility. Two labs, a library, and a plexi-glass quarantine. All of which got used more than the kitchen, but perhaps not as much as the bedroom. It should have been impossible to maintain such a living space on a professor's salary. Even with the grants and funding awarded from the city for his research in biological engineering, it would have been a stretch. Fortunately for Perry, he'd been the forerunner in revamping this side of town in the first place, which came with its perks in having first dibs on building his base of operations.
The neighborhood had turned trendy in the last couple of years, in the way that bad neighborhoods turned art neighborhoods could. Bars popped up, but never stayed long. The graffiti was inspired by bright colors instead of gang signs, and there were more musicians per square foot than anywhere else in the city. The latter was responsible for the more recent construction of sound-proof walls surrounding his lab. Some of those kids had talent, but it didn't make for a good late-night soundtrack to his crime solving. Fuck. He was getting old, he realized as he sparked a joint while wandering barefoot through his living room, the long hem of his corduroys getting tangled up under his heels before he opened the balcony doors for some fresh air.
The freight elevator required a specific code after the sixth floor, which should have been familiar to her by now. His laboratory was a happening place in the evenings, especially in times like this when the city decided to fuck itself up with some new toxin or pink-themed frenzy. It was always something, wasn't it? He stood out on the living room balcony, smoking weed amongst the night-blooming jasmine that clawed like pricking fingers up the panes of open French doors. He'd left the front door unlocked for her, in case he did not hear her over the sounds of the city from where he stood, absorbing the evening and clearing his head while the sample was spinning in a centrifuge, preparing to be tested further in the lab.
He wore a gray cardigan with corduroy trousers dark like tree bark. A tarnished silver crucifix hanging long as an unraveled noose from his neck, and sentimental bracelets of black twine and time-stiffened rubber packed thick on one wrist. Across the street, past the static blur of taxicabs and young drunks, was his newest project. Something to pacify his insomnia and chaotic work-ethic when he had free time, which was almost never.. but it was coming along nicely all the same. Neo-Eden was an inner-city collaborative garden in the making, the two year renovation that rose out of the ashes of a demolished building's concrete lot. The concrete was gone, and the pipes were pulled out. Now children were setting up birdhouses built out of recycled car engine parts, and homeless women helped pave mosaic pathways with half-buried old soup cans that they colored with environmentally-friendly paints. The local organic garden effort should have made Perry smile.. considering what it used to look like. What this whole block used to look like.. but it didn't. Because meanwhile, the city's crime flourished in other neighborhoods like a cancer. Change came easily, but progress was something else. He took another drag, and exhaled toward the moon.
The front door was unlocked, and she knew it would be, but Jay didn't come through the front door. No, she'd left the house in full regalia tonight, battle armor and armed to the teeth, because she'd still have work to do later. It wouldn't much do to have the Red Hood swanning in through Perry's front door. On the rooftops, though, she was a familiar sight, and in this neighborhood nobody really cared who they saw up there. A drunk leaning halfway out his windowsill spotted the shape of her, sleek and dark, making the leap between his roof and his neighbor’s, and he called out. She didn't turn around, and he’d forget about her by morning, just a shape in the blur.
There wasn't much to worry about in this neighborhood, and she knew who the drunk musician with the bottle of sherry at the window had to thank for that. Unlike so much of this city, unlike the neighborhood she was born squalling into, this place had gentrified and moved its ass up in the world. The old tenants, so many of them, were gone, replaced by skinny hipsters with steady jobs or their parents’ money. It could have been worse, though, and she knew some of the oldsters had stayed on to see a better life here. Truthfully, this was what Gotham dreamed about, while it tossed and turned with its spined back turned toward the sky in sleep. Safety was a dream, before wealth or luxury. Of course, it dreamed of them too.
Her footsteps were light on the shingles, but he'd hear them. She wasn't bothering to be stealthy. She slid, grabbed the gutter, and landing neatly on her feet in front of him. There he was, the old bastard, mooning at the sky with a joint. She should have expected. "Getting philosophical, Perry?" she asked, her voice muffled behind the mask. She walked past him, clicking open the latch at the back of the metal hood, and pulling it off with the short tug and sweep of a motorcycle helmet.
The Red Hood was an odd one, so far as the lore of Gotham was concerned. Weren't they all, though, villains and heroes alike. Half the population of streetwise guys thought she was a man, the other half a woman. Her ‘costume’ was nothing more revealing than a motorcycle jacket and dark jeans with leather at the knees, combat boots with steel toes, and enough guns to make a card-carrying NRA member blush. She'd always been small and skinny, but the only time she'd wished for more curves had been when she was fourteen. A guy picked her up off the street, and before he raped her he had the decency to let her know why she'd been chosen - because she had such small tits that she looked like a little boy, but girls didn't fight so much. Now he drank his dinners through a straw, and without eyes, there were no tits for him to see.
Some people knew she once worked for the Bat, and some didn't. Some thought she was the Joker's daughter, or Ra’s Al Ghul's mistress. Everybody had a theory. She once ruled the underworld in this town for a little while, holding the pimps and the junkies in line in a crazed effort to keep crime measured and in control, until the Bat ripped that from her grasp too. These days, things were more mundane, at least for now. She cleaned the streets. She maintained her little warehouse down by the docks, chock full of lost little girls who needed a bed and didn't want to be wound into the various banal cruelties of the system. She patched her world up, rinsed dirt with blood, and killed less than she had once.
And there was Perry. She didn't know what Perry was in her life, and instinct told her not to think too much about where he sat in the web, what he meant, where his threads connected. She dropped her hood on his couch, looked the centrifuge over, and then walked back to him. She had kohl around her eyes to keep them nice and dark behind the glass ports of the helmet. Her irises were brown, plain brown, plain Jay, but the fire in them, their width and breadth, a little too open and unblinking, made them amber in the right light. She plucked his joint from between his lips and took a very long drag. Just the one. She had to work later. She held it, and she looked at him like a painting. Gritty, wicked old bastard with his high school goth cross and bracelets, hash and community gardens and solving crime, jasmine climbing his walls like a secret garden.
She exhaled, and handed the joint back to him. "Got answers for me yet?"
There wasn't an area code in Gotham City where it was considered good practice to leave one's door unlocked, but Perry existed in the strange echelon of vintage pseudo-celebrity that actually saw some semblance of retirement rather than a grave at the end of a bitter gunshot. Old age wasn't a known luxury for the rogue gallery or the vigilantes that patrolled their city at night. Those that managed to beat the odds and survive for a couple of decades with most of their mind intact looked at one another with a nostalgic kind of well done, whether they'd been on the side of right or wrong. At that point, it was just good form.
He still met up for some misty afternoon chess with a couple of the old capes, listening to laments on bad knees and the loss of the silver age. Trading stories and highlight footage with some of the old pros was good for morale, and vibes, and remembering just how much of themselves that they'd put into Gotham.. but it wasn't when Perry felt the most at home. Sometimes that came with the rare midnight visits to the Chinatown district, in a back room for hours of card games and hash. Those were the nights that he crossed with some very select old rogues, the ones that he enjoyed getting philosophical with. Understanding the past didn't mean condoning it, and everybody needed their own bizarre kind of closure. Sitting down with an old arch nemesis and realizing that you were both old, and that you both hadn't completely accomplished what you'd been aiming for.. it was cathartic. Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
Gotham was unending, and someone could claw their way through the dark and the fury for a hundred years, they could turn the city on its side and shake all of the bad out, but weeds always grew back faster than flowers. It had taken Perry a long time to realize that their vigilante warfare wasn't the cure they'd hoped it would be. Their hack-and-burn method of attack on the mob and the nutcases that came out at night was effective in a brutally pleasant way.. but there was always another psycho in warpaint around the corner, and the mob wasn't the only criminal organization in town anymore. It was frustrating to fight so endlessly for years and not make any headway. He'd witnessed too many of his good friends lose it in the worst way when the years dragged on and they had nothing to show for it but dead families and whole daisy-fresh list of new enemies.
After too many years of getting shot at and losing the people closest to him, he'd hung up the mask with no regrets. And retirement suited Perry. Although he was employed with tenure at Gotham University, that served best as a platform for deflating over-confident undergrads.. the fact that the salary paid for all of his little landscaping endeavors was really a bonus. He wasn't a particularly well-liked professor. His classes bordered on impossible; a joint effort accomplished by his clinically extensive curriculum and his notorious knack for lecturing while on peyote. But one had to think outside the box if they were going to get anywhere in Gotham these days.. which was why he liked Jay.
Well, maybe not liked her, but her company was considerably more endurable than any other woman he'd ever known to wear a helmet. She always took the roof, all drop-ins and quiet vanishings. It was why he traditionally lingered on this specific balcony in wait, a creature like him developed all sorts of habits. Habits with oak brown eyes and guncarved fingers. When she stole the joint, it made the bristled corner of his mouth tick with the shallowest, knife-edge of a grin. She looked and he looked back, following the smoke as it left her mouth, calligraphic swirls of vanishing ink. There was always faintly herbal notes in his apartment. Not just marijuana, but some decidedly hippie-esque sage, and the sweet-tart of verbana. There were security systems and technology for days, but the living areas still managed to retain the woodsy elements of cedar bookcases and human musk. It never seemed entirely clear if Perry smelled like his penthouse or his penthouse simply smelled like him. Whatever it was didn't seem to linger, not even on his clothes, after he was gone.
Jay's question inspired him into animation, and he stepped around her in order to stamp the joint out in a clay bowl that looked like useless adobe and was therefore probably so authentic and antique that he had no place using it as an ashtray. "You in a hurry, Jay?" Although he was already turning in direction for the lab because stoned science was always good science. "That was the most fucking festive I've ever seen the GCPD," which hinted at the fact that he didn't see why they should bother stopping it from happening again.
Jay watched Perry stub out the joint, and she dropped her jacket over the back of the couch. Underneath was cotton and kevlar, a heavy piece of body armor that went up all the weak spots - a high, skintight collar, and sleeves all the way down to the wrists. That came off too, with an appreciative groan because the thing was so tight against the skin that she did nothing but sweat under it. Underneath that was just a simple white tank top. Her bare arms had definition that would have made an olympic wrestler cry into her bowl of anabolic steroids.
Yeah she was heading back out later, but she deserved a little quiet here. She'd been going practically nonstop since the incident downtown, and Perry's mention earned him a brow raise as she followed him into the next room. "Gotham doesn't run on Perry time, brother" she advised him. She took a seat on a nearby chair, slumping down, content to watch him do his science work while a light fuzz crept up over her thoughts. "Hey," she said, crossing her legs, "You know how I feel about non-consensual orgies. I thought we talked about this." There was a murmur of humor, but only just enough to dull the steel. Kara L didn't get herself a fucking pass because she thought it was all in good fun to conscript people into large-scale sexual assault. Maybe it was just her hangup, but Jay had a bit of a hard line on things like that. Huh, wonder why.
She'd never tell the old bastard, but Jay liked this place. It wasn't home, but it was better in its own way, an oasis. Jay didn't really feel safe anywhere, but something about the smell here - she didn't know what it was, but something here felt safer than her own bed. Joint or no joint, it calmed her down when she'd been running full tilt manic along the knife's edge for too long. Perry was a legend, or an ex-legend if he liked, and people seemed to know well enough to keep their distance from this place. Maybe it helped that she'd been spotted in the area more than once. She'd like to think so.
There were a lot of aspects of Perry’s life that Jay had no perspective on. She’d never been to one of Perry's lectures, for instance. College hadn't exactly been in the cards, not for her. Sure, mommy Bats would have seen it paid for, but what was the point when she'd spent her last year of high school officially dead? It wasn't as if she'd ever been the brain of the bunch anyway. Even the rogues had always known that she wasn't the best Robin, and the sting had almost gone out of that, after all these years. She liked to think she'd made up for it, all those late nights smashing heads with the heel of her boot. Instead, those long, thick, viscous evenings just clung to her shoes and wouldn’t be scraped off. Ah, well. She'd realized a couple years ago that no amount of gore was going to make her better at hand-to-hand than this asshole or better at crime-solving than that one, but give her a knife and a neighborhood where kids were getting shot up in the crossfire every day on their way to school, and set her to work. Stick with what you know, right?
She didn't know science, and she didn't know how far this mess with Krazy Kara could be expected to go, but she did know that they'd figure out a way to take her down. 'They'. Still a word she was getting used to being lumped into again. "I'm here to watch you do some sexy science shit," she said, waving a hand and settling in. "Let the show commence, man. I want to know what brand of roofie Kara L dropped in everybody’s drink.”
The lab was static chrome once with machinery fresh off the robot farm. Well, the machinery was still daisy fresh, but the lab itself managed to look like some dilapidated coffee house out of the grunge era of Tibet. There was even some old red flannel shirt draped over the back of that creaky chair on wheels that Perry sank into with the familiarity of a throne. The roll around chalkboard that typically housed calculations and reformulations was currently rented out by the massive sketch of a lotus flower mandala. A tapestry hung on the far wall, detailing the tree of life finely embroidered in every shade of green.
Then there was Perry, as out of place as the centrifuge in this bohemian den. He picked the dark, squared frames of his reading glasses up from the table's edge, and slid them onto his nose to regard Jay where she slumped with crossed legs. He had no grasp of her, no understanding of her save for what she wanted him to know. Which said enough, really. There weren't a whole lot of reasons that people got into this line of work, and for women the list tended to be even shorter. He'd never asked her the precise reasons, just trusted her enough to know that they were the right ones for her. He'd heard enough stories to get the gist anyway, all without being prone to gossip, and that kind of tale didn't get nailed into the midnight street corner rumor mill unless it was true, or unless somebody was willing to let it pass for the truth. In either case, he never asked.
Jay would never have to tell him that she liked coming here, Perry knew that she wouldn't come around if she didn't. The moment that something started to feel like a chore, he got the feeling that it didn't make Jay's to-do list for very much longer. So as long as she wanted to drop in from his balcony on late nights, he'd leave the door unlatched. They operated best with no questions asked, he found. And why change what worked out so well for him?
"Since when do you find science sexy?" He had to ask with half-attentive interest while pumping purell into his hands. The air immediately took on that blatant alcohol smell, and it managed to even overpower the wet green scent of crawling ivy that dripped out of the open file cabinet beside where Jay was camped. Bare feet nudged his wheeled chair across the floor for a backwards slide to the centrifuge, where he mashed a button, collected the sample, and skated in nonchalance back to his desk.
"I thought you'd go more for guns and leather.." The halogen lamp clicked on, and the little bobblehead flower that was suctioned to the top bounced cheerfully. Dumping the sample into a petri dish, Perry introduced the microscope and started to adjust the settings for some analysis. "But if you want me to talk dirty about the physics of bullet trajectory, or the chemical change that is involved with tanning animal hide.." It was an open-ended offer as he got to work. The silence was suddenly there, serious and weighty between them, as he studied the microscopic breakdown of their little friend. After what seemed like forever, he straightened and reached for a long forgotten mug of tea. The liquid inside was muddy, a day old, and cold, but he drank it anyway. "We're looking at alien blood, completely not from here, but there's some kind of kryptonite as well, so that at least tells us from where."
He sat back and pushed the glasses up in order to rub at his eyes. He hated having to deal with alien shit. As if Gotham wasn't complicated enough. Why couldn't they keep that shit in Metropolis where it belonged? "Want to look?" The invitation was punctuated by a pat on his corduroy knee, with suggestive eyes bouncing over the rim of his coffee mug once more. Bitter herbal tea on the tongue to dilute anything too devious in the tone.
"You underestimate me," she said, with the hint of a smug edge to her smile. Later on, she would consider doing filthy things with his reading glasses that would make him think of her every time he put the things on, just to prove how sexy she could find science to be. But not right now. "If I wanted guns and leather, I'd have a list a mile long of other places I could be right now," she added. That much was true. They weren't really hurting for leather and guns in the vigilante business, even if they weren't always on the same vigilante. "Tanning animal hide could be fun," she said, pursing her lips. "I could see how that could go in a sexy direction, with the right kind of imagination."
When the results were in, however, Jay was all business. "Even I can put that one together," she said, watching him with sharp eyes despite the weed and level of contentment - high above her average, for the curious. "Sure," Jay said. She pushed to her feet, grabbed Perry's chair by the back, and edged it out enough that she could settle in between his legs. Screw sitting on his knee. Bad Santa. This was more comfortable, and frankly, cut a little more to the point. She scooched back, just a little, then peered through the lenses, completely ignoring anything that might or might not be going on behind her.
She barely knew what she was looking at, but one or two things had rubbed off after knocking around the batcave and all its equipment. She'd seen blood under a microscope before, but not like this. "So she dumped the stuff off a foreign planet and her own blood into a cocktail shaker and sprayed it on civilians?" She shifted in the seat in the guise of re-settling herself. "That is so not sanitary."
"I would never," he swore of underestimating her. It seemed somehow unwise to underestimate a woman that carried enough firepower to arm a small militia at any given moment. Although that promise was made with an air of exception, because Perry saw nothing wrong with underestimating people for the sake of irritation alone. He didn't have all of the enemies that he used to, so the danger of expecting less than was somewhat less grave than it had been decades earlier. It helped that most people were idiots.
Most people included his students, and most teachers, and many, many masks.. but not Jay. She at least had the ambition to cozy up and learn. That was something that Perry could work with, and he did, regularly. He swept her dark hair aside when she got close, and while she examined the sample beneath the microscope, his breath was a warm reminder against the back of her neck. Eventually, it wasn't just his breath, but the graze of his lips, unspeaking while she studied. He murmured in soft agreement when she assessed the situation, and he chuckled at her comment on sanitation. "Quite."
He didn't know how long she wanted to pretend like she was still watching the ameobal crawl of the alien blood-thing under the scope. He'd given up on finding it interesting sometime around the moment she'd sat in his lap. Besides, it was alien, they weren't going to learn how to deal with it tonight. So tonight, the world could run on Perry time. Crimefighting was all well and good, but these days, he was a man better built for experiments.. and tonight, he wanted to find out how long it took against Jay's skin until he smelled like gunmetal, and she smelled like patchouli. The sample could wait, Gotham could wait. Before she could protest, he already had that rolly-chair in motion, arms tight around her waist in a familiar trajectory leading them toward the bedroom. Mouth still against her neck, the grin was prickled like cacti and thorns and eventual broken promises. "Time for the pop quiz…"