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cheriekos · 3 months ago

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Hiiiii, this is a snippet of a SuperBat Hanahaki AU I wrote up - it’s a bit weird and I don’t really know if I’ll go forward with this. It’s in Poison Ivy’s POV (lmao don’t ask me how I got here) and I LOVE this but I think I would have to go with a different version of the story I want to write if I keep this. So I’m posting this here for posterity and whatnot and I’ll probably re-write aspects of this into an existing project later. This has been lightly edited and is not beta’d. Enjoy!

Ivy doesn't get a lot of visitors. She gets plenty of wayward children and adrenaline-seeking teenagers that really liked to push the limits on her patience and graciousness. However, that plea deal she made with the city kept her a short, short fucking leash. And despite how easy it is to flick her wrist, send thorns and vines and venom towards intruders and disrespectful punks - she likes having the greenhouse. She likes keeping Robinson Park evergreen and yes, her sordid, traitorous heart was kept alight when she saw the young kids of Gotham gently step over tree roots and gaze in awe at her azaleas. That all being said - she's not quite a people person. And most people aren't approaching her unless they have a masochistic streak running through them.

"Ivy," grunts out the too familiar voice.

Ivy has a running theory that the Batman was, indeed, one of those people with said masochistic streak.

"Whatever mystery you're solving, I have no part in it," Ivy drawls, gently misting a particularly sad looking plant. She frowns. "You can check with your little Oracle - I'm sure she can scrounge up the camera footage somewhere. I've only been in my greenhouse."

"I'm here on business."

"And I just told you - I had no part of that business," Ivy says, sharper. The plant - the Passions Vine, maypop, Passiflora incarnata - begins to bloom anew beneath her fingertips. "You can't implicate me in anything."

"I wasn't planning on it," He says, with a strange lilt to his voice. Her ears twitch.

She turns, only slightly, in order to look at him. He's as imposing as ever, more of a shroud of inky darkness than a man. The white of his lenses and the faint curve of his pale jaw the only real visible parts of him in the dim greenhouse, especially in the shadows where he liked to linger. It's a familiar sight, which gives her a faint burst of nostalgia. How disgusting.

"Here on business, but not here to drag me off to Arkham?" She hums. "Color me intrigued. Do make it quick, though, you're interrupting my bedtime routine."

He only grunts. Ivy rolls her eyes, wondering how earth she found herself at the beck and call of this wretched creature. He finally steps under the blinking overhead light, awash in an orange glow. Without a word, he raises an upturned fist. When she arches a brow, he slowly unfurls his palm.

Three petals. Yellow, slim, long - flecked with blood. Helianthus annuus.

"Sunflower petals," Ivy remarks. Her eyes dart up to him. "But you already knew that."

"Yes," He says simply.

"Well, what do you need me for then?" Ivy asks, disdain coloring her tone.

"These were collected from an individual who appeared to have an upper respiratory infection," He says. "All the symptoms of a standard viral infection were present - sneezing, coughing, congestion. After five days of a normal course of cold medicine, symptoms began to evolve that indicated a lower respiratory infection. After three days of worsening symptoms -"

"Get to the point."

"The individual eventually coughed up these petals."

"...Excuse me?"

"The individual coughed up -"

"I heard you right the first time," Ivy puts her hand up. "But what in the world could cause that to happen?"

He curls his palm again, arm disappearing underneath his cape once more. "That is why I'm here."

Ivy blinks. "You thought I would know something about lower respiratory infections?"

"I assumed that, perhaps, in your tenure as an ecological terrorist, that this is a phenomenon you may have come across." He says, dryly.

"I can't tell if you're trying to be funny or not."

He just hums. "Can you tell me anything about this?"

Ivy stares, one part dumbfounded, and another part itching with the familiar sensation that comes with a near encyclopedic knowledge of plants and the urge to know and be right. How dreadful that the remnants of a competitive, perfectionist PhD student still lived within her bones somewhere.

"One moment," She says, and turns on her heel.

He waits, patient, like one of the city's many faithful gargoyles. She sits on a sturdy leaf with a little thank you and calls other vines to bring her old books out to her workshop table. She flips through a folder with old articles on diseases and infections, but that path is not fruitful. She skims a textbook, a section on herbal medicine and quickly shoves it away with a dissatisfied as another set of vines brings out her laptop and lab instruments.

Her eyes shoot to him. "Come here."

He moves, like shadow, like a piece of the night come alive. He hovers by the edge of the table, a curious tilt to his head. If she had any little bit of affection left, she would consider it adorable - he seemed like one of the many fruit bats that tried to nibble at her gardens.

"The petals." She holds out a glass microscope dish.

He shifts, then stops abruptly; there's an odd strain to his already grim face. If she hadn't known any better, she would've guessed he was hesitating. But the moment passes; he gently places the petals in her dish.

She adjusts the microscope, taking note of the regular aspects of the petals - protrusions she notes that are pollen tubes, the very odd cell structures - and briefly examines the blood specks. When she lingers too long on that aspect, her impromptu lab partner grunts disapprovingly.

"Do you have a problem?" Ivy asks, not taking her eyes off the microscope.

"Are they any irregularities with these petals?"

Ivy taps a green finger against the table. "Well, since you mentioned it - yes."

With a great of amount of self-convincing, she vacates her spot and gestures to the microscope. She can't tell what his eyes are doing under the mask but the air around him seems to fill with a general distrust. He looks into the microscope anyways; while he does, she motions for a come to pluck a petal off her own sunflower.

"Thank you for your service," She says to the little petal, and puts it into another dish. "The sunflower is a dicot, which means there are a number of expected cells within its makeup."

She switches the bloody petals for the standard one.

"Parenchyma cells, epidermal cells, xylem and phloem," Ivy waves her hand. "Things you would've learned in your elementary science class."

"However?" He prompts.

"However," She slides the bloody petals back in. "There is a mutation within these cell structures."

"Elaborate."

"Don't make a fuss, I'm getting there," Ivy says, as if speaking to an impatient toddler. "Patience is a virtue, you know."

Once more, he grunts.

"Do you see the spiraling vessel next to the xylem? They look almost identical. The difference, however -"

"This one is filled with blood."

"Not quite like a photosynthetic plant to absorb blood."

"What does this indicate?"

"Right now? Nothing," Ivy turns to her laptops and begins a new file dedicated to this particular sunflower petal. "I don't have a definite answer for you on what this is or what it means - or why your little friend is coughing up petals."

He grunts - one of the ones that clearly signals his dissatisfaction. "How soon can we know what exactly this is?"

"You'll know when I know - which is whenever I feel like it."

"This could be life threatening, Ivy," He says, urgency in his tone. She could scoff; everything was so urgent with him. Now or never. Save the city, save the world and all that bullshit. "I'd advise you to not waste time."

"Yeah?" Ivy puts her chin in the palm of her hand. "I'd advise you to take that stick out your ass."

"Ivy -" He stops abruptly. He takes in a deep breath and lets it out in a world-weary kind of way that makes him seem less like a statuesque figure of nightmares - and something more like an old man. She blinks.

"What would it take for you to...prioritize this?"

Let me out and let me raze the world in order to stare anew - and then that stupid, awful little voice that sounds suspiciously like Dr. Leland's comes in to grab her gently and say 'what can you change in front of you, right now?'

"Harley is out, but she's not allowed within Robinson Park," Ivy says. "Change the details of her pardon."

"You know I can't do that -"

"Bullshit," Ivy hisses, hands slamming against the table - and she feels it. The edges of her vision going green, how the smell of the poison in the very stems of the plants around her are present, how she could send the thorns of rose flying at his throat. How hungry her fly-eaters were for blood. It would be so easy. So easy.

"Aw, sugarplum, just think of all the good things when the green gets too big! The smell of roses, lavender, or um...um - I dunno much about flowers. Or maybe me! I'm as comfortin' as a daisy, aren't I?"

She breathes out. Slowly.

It would be easy. Getting freedom was not.

"That's all I ask," Ivy says, voice strained. "Just - let me see her. Somehow."

He stands so still. It's irritating. She despises this - how desperate she feels, all the power he has, and the embarrassment of it all. There was a time when she would send him flying to the rafters, wrapped in her vines. The poisons, the toxins, the pollens - all of her knowledge and power dedicated to trying to knock down the immovable force that was the Batman. And now here she was. Bargaining with him in order to see the woman she loved. Pitiful.

He shifts. His hand hovers in the air between them and she feels an edge of paranoia curl at the back of her mind. But then his hand settles, lightly, with his fingertips gently brushing her hand. It's...surprisingly gentle.

"I will see what I can do," He says. "

For a moment, Ivy thinks she can see his eyes. Behind the glare of those lenses, she thinks there's a human somewhere, underneath all of this. It makes something curl uncomfortably in her gut. But as soon as the moment has come, it is gone - and his hand is back beneath his cape. He's just a figure, a piece of the night, and the blight upon her existence. Familiar.

She doesn't say thank you. She already doesn't like how much of her current existence is in due part to his relentless crusade against violence - and the repeating, endless cycle of it. She doesn't want to admit that within the many hands trying to pull her away from her endless spiral downwards, his was amongst them.

She just juts her chin out, vines curling around her shoulders. "Scram, Bats. I've got work to do."

For once, he decides to take the normal way out. She watches, intently, as he makes his way to the greenhouse door, and without so much as a look back her way, disappears into the night. When she finally turns away, back to her work bench, the blood specked petals are gone.

#superbat #superbat fanfiction #superbat fic #poison ivy #fic writing #writing progress #like hanakai AU without my passive aggressive plant genius????#I think it’s a missed opportunity #But this makes me want to do something more Ivy focused…..eyes emoji #Once again…acting very active for a person who said they were gonna be inactive lmaooooo #Tag edit: atrocious that all I’ve done is post SuperBat wips in the tag and say I’m not coming back to them…silly behavior

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