Pamela is made of (hemlockandhoney) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-11-25 16:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | !dc comics, *log, holly robinson, pamela isley |
log: ivy & holly @ the gotham botanical gardens
Who: Poison Ivy & Holly Robinson
What: Holly wanders into the wrong abandoned building, gets offered a place to stay.
Where: Gotham Botanical Gardens
When: Vagueish, basically while the disappearances are happening in Gotham.
Warnings: None.
The Gotham Botanical Gardens were glad that Ivy was home. Dim buds flourished bright again, petals flayed proudly in succulent offering, like nature's burlesque offering the flash of pollinated garters beneath bluebonnet skirts. Stiletto point stamens stood erect and lewd in the golden beams of a midday sun, one displayed brightly through the massive skylight that functioned as a roof. It was warm inside the greenhouse, sticky like midnight jungles. Alive with the kind of rustling leaves and hiccuping treefrogs that one would expect in more temperate climates than Gotham. Winter would come eventually, but Ivy was no greenhorn when it came to constructing ecosystems and manipulating the kind of plant genetics that might make the more lush greenery more susceptible to collapse in the cold. This time, nobody would interrupt her, and this garden would grow year round. At one time, everything came from the Garden. This was the first glimpse of a new world order, anchored in stone and breathing with the hostile patience of an animal kept caged for far too long. Outside, the city moved, but in here, nothing moved without Ivy knowing about it. The Gotham Botanical Gardens? Had a reputation as enticing as the half-broken-down fairground on the far stretch of Gotham. Rumor and whispers ran rife about the Gardens and what lay within and she’d always been terrible about secrets. The girls on the street said it was lush, and warm and the air smelled like growing things. Some said it was beautiful, the way Gotham wasn’t and some said there was a woman in it as beautiful as the plants. And some (most importantly?) said that it was a place to crash if you were lost and alone, if you needed to spend time off the streets and licking wounds, temporarily. And if girls who stayed alive under streetlight knew anything? It was where to find the safe spots and hide out in them. The Botanical Gardens sounded like it might be a good start, and when Holly stepped over the threshold and the air turned warm and moist against her cheek, purple boots and a wrist loaded down with jelly bracelets, her eyes widened under the smudged eyeliner because no one had said it looked like this. The latest girl, the one who’d been as new as you could get and still be doing this? Was Hannah. And okay, she wasn’t an idiot, you didn’t go yelling someone’s name when people were around, but Holly began to hunt, stepping carefully around fronds that reached. For a plant, Ivy was temperamental. Too bored with society to be bothered with being shunned by it, she got her thrills at the expense of others to make fellow rogues skeptical of ever calling her friend. She'd inevitably be insulted by their mortality, by their assumptions, and see them promptly buried in the peony beds. Her henchmen, when she'd bothered to keep them, knew not to look her in the eye. Like some vengeful deity of regal flippancy, she was rarely flattered by attention or arrogance. All of those henchmen got fed to the man-eating flytrap eventually, and word got around. Applicants stopped coming, and Ivy appreciated the solitude more than she'd ever appreciated men willing to dirty their hands for her. She hadn't released a deadly plant toxin into the city in quite some time, and not just because of her more recent incarceration. She wasn't hellbent on destruction, there was reason to her rhyme, and there were even rumours that she could be kind to those in need. But, again, like any hothouse flower, Pamela was fickle, and intruders? That was always a call for interrogation. Especially now that Ivy had been out of the loop for what appeared to be ages. And so, a cranky root lifted, stretching from between the spaces of cobblestone walkway to trip the toe of a purple boot. And in the moment that followed, Ivy made her way down the stairs, metallic slats now overgrown with moss, arriving at the ground level with a, "And what do we have here?" She knew her Gotham was long-gone. That Gotham had had the same smoke-stained brickwork and the smell of the docks late at night, it had had the same squeal of traffic and the sense of being watched if you walked home alone, but that Gotham had mobsters who ran the institutions like blood through veins. There were no freak-shows, no clowns with bats instead of balloons and no plant women pulling themselves out of the fronds of green. Holly came to a scooting stop on booted feet and stared, aghast fascination as one root trickled its way across stone and over her toe, and hello, this was not normal or usual and now she wasn’t thinking of mobsters with a thing for young girls, she was wondering if her friends were cocooned in a web somewhere. “Nothing,” she said quickly, because that? Was nothing good, and she backed up one-two steps with a lush, full smile that had been borrowed when her pulse was quivering, ready to jump to ten. “Really. Total mistake, turned around, I’ll just be going.” "Don't." A syllable transcended with a voice that took measurements and then coaxed her. Little girl Gretel came to find a witch, and Ivy's voice was confection. Licorice whips, raspberry divinity whipped light and luring. Flower buds twisted, watching the girl in her hasty retreat, backpedaling in her street rat boots. The green sepals of roses arched like curiosity could be at home in them, accusing hands on rosehips and all that. It was a little Wonderland, with a much higher chance of getting eaten alive in the golden afternoon. Ivy stalked forward and the flowers shrank back, the vines that dripped from the ceiling knotted up like nooses. "You have nothing to fear here," she said after an assessment. Young street things, boys and girls, had always been a pastel palette in so much red and black. She did not begrudge them their circumstances, and there had been a time when she actually looked after many of the city's orphans in Robinson Park. Her efforts from then were not forgotten, Ivy didn't go feeding strays to her flytraps just for sneaking into the wrong building when it got bitter-cold out. Still, Ivy wasn't an inviting presence. She was a red queen swathed in battalion black. Midnight military catsuit couture. She stopped from a few feet away and listened to the rustle of the plants around them. She was intense, like hearing things that not everyone could hear. After determining that the girl had come on her own, and that there was nobody else creeping in, Ivy softened. She looked. "Tell me why you're here." She wasn’t a little girl looking for fairytales. No one had read her gingerbread houses and wicked witches and no one in Gotham was nice without a reason outside the shelters and the clinics that littered the city with hot-spots of the occasional good deed. But the plant-lady’s voice? It was like melted chocolate, and the trickle of vinery over one scuffed purple boot toe, that didn’t get noticed. Nothing to fear, okay, yeah sure, lady. In that cat-suit? Someone was kicking ass, she’d seen enough of them around town to know. But nothing was tendriling toward her like it wanted to eat her. The vines shrivelled up and out of reach, Holly stretched out a finger to touch a huge red bloom that looked like the sun setting over the water, light as a kid touching silk with sticky hands. Maybe it wasn’t smart and maybe it wasn’t clever, but the flower? Was really pretty and she’d never seen anything like this growing in Gotham. The parks? Were places to crash, or places to shove a needle in your arm if you’d scored. Dirty grass and scrappy trees and anything that wasn’t awful didn’t last long. This? This was the freaking Garden of Eden. “I’m looking for my friends.” And this? This place was sweet digs if you were looking for a place when it was cold out. The air felt damp, warm like a sticky summer day. Already the weight of her sweater, the jacket over it, felt too heavy, too trapped. This place made you think about curling up and going to sleep, heavy, sweet smells and thick air. “They disappeared and no one can figure out where they went. And this place is really cool.” "Yes, it is… cool." Ivy considered the word carefully like she was trying to decide if it fit, or maybe just trying to remember the context of cool. It was vocabulary from another life, and not something that she could remember using in a very long time. Maybe when she'd been human, when she'd been young. Ivy couldn't remember being young like the girl that stood before her now. She'd never had dirty sleeves, although she could remember empty stomachs. Her family had been present, but neglectful in the eye of their own self-importance… Ivy knew it wasn't the same for the young woman who was here now. Cool was something that she'd worried about when she'd been Pamela, something she'd wanted desperately like cool could be worth something. These days, Ivy didn't care for cool. The idea was as lacking in fascination for her as junk food. Still, she remembered the appeal of it. She looked around her home of hothouse flowers and lush greenery. Cool. "There is no one here but us. Do your friends have names?" Cool wasn’t a past consideration for Holly. More like a luxury. Cool came after ‘warm’ and after ‘safe’. It trailed ‘good enough’ for miles and it wasn’t anywhere close to mine in the list of things that were desirable as a basic consideration. But cool? It was a nice to have. An extra, a freebie. This place? Was a freebie that had free central heat. It was warmer in the greenhouse than her entire apartment with the heat cranked as high as it would go, and it was beginning to snake inside her head and making her drowsy. She blinked, heavy-lashed eyelids and her eyes were dreamy blue as she looked from one flower to the next. Cool wasn’t worth more than a buck or two, but it was nice while it lasted. No one here but them and that sucked - but if her friends had found this place? They’d have ditched anywhere else, Holly was pretty clear. “They have names.” Just probably not the kind printed on legal documents. Holly wasn’t even sure her name was stored somewhere in City Hall. “Pip and Candy are the latest. Rose went earlier. They keep disappearing,” she said, candid and young and she wasn’t trusting, not exactly, but plant lady here wasn’t acting like she wanted to feed her to the flowers. Ivy considered the given names of her intruder's friends while a low lying branch stroked her dark shoulder, affection reserved for the mother missed for too long. Elbow bent, her fingers stroked the thin spindle of branch bark, the fringe of leaves that wouldn't die despite the changing seasons. Ivy's fingertips pinched and stroked like plotting men pulled at the ends of their mustaches, but plotting wasn't what was happening here. She was reflecting, and after a moment came to the conclusion that those names were not, or were just no longer, familiar to her. Pip and Candy? Rose was forgivable, but the other sounded like characters in a game of make believe gone on for too long. Street kids and especially the ones who grew into young woman, it was almost an anomaly that they survived Gotham, although that was rare. "I haven't heard of them," she admitted. Young woman and homeless youth went missing all the time, but until now, Ivy had ever had someone investigate for their whereabouts here. "I'll keep an ear out," she said with no true commitment. Ivy's connection to the plant life of Gotham was continuous, it was a flood of things heard in passing and conversations captured by flower buds, but she always had more practical means of finding out the things that were important to her. Ivy turned then, back to the young creeper, and began to slink into the same direction from where she'd once came. "The next time you want to come looking for a lost friend or just a warm place to lay your head, try the second story windows first. Less of a chance of getting eaten alive by the snapdragons." It wasn't a threat, just a suggestion, and her parting words. |