Pamela Isley knows she is late when she enters the room, the appointment with Crane had taken more time than anticipated and an apology would now be in order, knowing them it would be an unspoken understanding that today of all days she is expected to be at least on time. It is Ms Gordon's first public exhibition of her photographic work, and therefore considered in their sense important.
Pamela hates gatherings like these; hates the meaningless small talk that these creatures hurled endlessly back and fro at each other as a form of social grooming. Monkeys did it all the time, and these creatures were just an evolutionary step below apes. Pamela sometimes found it difficult to understand how she could conceivably belong to the same species as them.
The small gallery – just 4 interconnected rooms with polished wooden floors and stark white washed walls lit up with bare bulbs - is unsurprisingly packed with well wishers. There are benefits to be had as the Commissioner's daughter, what Barbara Gordon could no longer do on her own strength due to the limitations of that pitiful body of hers she now did through sheer force of will through her extended network of carefully cultivated contacts.
Pamela picks up from the stares and whispers she attracts as she moves through the crowd that she is inappropriate dressed again. She does not remember if the invitation stated that it was to be formal, but most of the men are dressed in black tie and the women decked out in finery like flowers of cloth. Someone makes a joke and there is a general murmur of casual laughter. She looks around but does not recognize any of the faces in the milling crowd.
A man approaches her, offering to get her a drink and tries to engage her in conversation, she looks at him not understanding what he wants, he is asking her if she is alone. She turns away and makes to leave, but he follows not willing to let his beautiful prey escape. Her rejection of this unknown admirer attracts more unwanted attention and soon she is besieged at every side by men. They keep asking if she is looking for someone, if they can help her and it is all she can do to keep herself from wanting to lash out at them.
She is saved when the tall dark woman spots her and intervenes, sending the men quickly packing. Pamela notices that she is dressed in a severely tailored men's suit - pants, jacket and waistcoat - for today's occasion and the clothes fit the length and breadth of her well. The tall woman seems amused at the turn of events of having to save Poison Ivy from unwanted male attention. Grateful Pamela quietly leans over and kisses her on the cheek, and Huntress blushes at the intimate contact.
Gently ushered into a private corner of the gallery, Pamela sees the other two women - the blonde woman in the wheelchair with the blue eyes and standing behind her hovering protectively the other blonde the one who calls out to the tall one - "See you finally found her." Pamela smiles sweetly at the Black Canary in passing before apologizing to the Oracle for missing the opening of her show.
Oracle graciously tells Pamela that she is just glad that she could make opening night, her blue eyes penetrating in their intensity. They had known such other well a long time ago in another life as Poison Ivy and Batgirl, before the time and tide of events overtook them both.
Pamela would not have believed it otherwise but it was Oracle who stepped in when the Batman stood in the way of her return to Gotham, when his stubborn refusal to compromise threatened to tear apart the fragile web of alliances Oracle had so carefully stitched together. Only Oracle had the force of character to oppose the man who now wore the cowl, she had always been stronger than him even when they were children playing heroes. He relented in the end to keep the peace between them but extracted conditions which bound Oracle to Pamela Isley, and which in turn bounded Huntress and the Black Canary to her.
Pamela notes Huntress in the background telling Black Canary she had to beat the men off to get Pamela across the room and Black Canary remarks within Pamela's earshot that someone has to stop indulging the girl and get the girl to start wearing underwear. Pamela ignores the comment and wanders to a nearby exhibit; it is a black and white of children playing in Robinson Park. Pamela remembers when it was taken. I was there today she reminds herself.
A passing waiter hands her a drink, and while she sips it Pamela feels like she's a thousand miles away from everything that matters. She thinks I am dreaming this, I am Poison Ivy and I am dreaming that I am sipping champagne in an art gallery somewhere in Soho with Oracle, Huntress and the Black Canary, and when I wake I will find myself home in Robinson Park overlooking the canopy of the trees. That was after all the only logical explanation.
She has not seen Jonathan Crane in over 2 years, not since Cancun and now he comes to her with this news that one of Jason's tapes has surfaced in Gotham. She had thought that she had tracked down and destroyed all of them over the years, but it was probable that he made copies. Jason was always very proud of what he did.
She had been quiet for a long while after he had broached the subject of their proposed partnership. Crane believed that she was simply bewildered by his news, that after so many years the recording of her final hours if not days had finally surfaced and she would be able to know for certain and reconcile herself to what her lover had done to her. It did not cross his mind that Isley – so much like a woman, mused Crane - was coldly calculating her options in the matter, and that the end result was that she did not chose to do anything. She told him that she had no interest in the recording, it was all in the past, and she did not dwell there anymore.
She had not said – "Not like him." She did not directly allude to him but he had heard it gently implied in her quiet tone. There were too many lost years for her, having the recording and Woodrue come back into her life again was not an option. It would have opened up too many unanswered questions. She did not want to upset the house of cards she lived in now, caught between what she was and what she hoped to be.
She had not been surprised by his proposition to cooperate. It was not too difficult to understand what motivated Crane. Harley Quin had read Crane's personal file out to her one day in Arkham for want of anything else better to do, explaining the technical terms about his psychosis in detail. It was funny how Crane might have done the same with her. Arkham taught them that the basis of any friendship was a strong bond of trust and access to your contemporaries' secret files.
They had ruined him, made him out to be a fake – a nothing – a joke among his peers, sending him into a tailspin that ended in a stone cell in Arkham with feces smeared walls. He wants to take back piece by piece what they took from him; an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Crane in the end was nothing more than his father's son; a white trash preacher man crying out brimstone and hellfire only Crane didn't believe in the redemption of forgiveness only that blood from Christian and heathen alike sprouted red.
After all the only thing we need to fear is fear itself.
There was a police report in his file. He had been arrested once for being drunk and disorderly. He had accosted a young couple at their home and accused them of breaking in and taking over his house. He ended up in a urine stained lock-up in the Gotham PD with 3 other men, and it was there that it happened. Gotham's finest ignored his screams of course. He had become a stain, a sore on the good name of the community. One could always trust the Gotham PD to shit on a suspect's rights. They left him there with those men for 3 days, but if they thought he would die in that forsaken cell as some crack head's bitch they were wrong.
She smiles to herself at the thought and then she hears that voice she knows so well call out her name, never Ivy but Pamela. She feels those familiar arms wind themselves around her waist, turning her round and pulling her close. She looks into those smiling dark eyes so full of life and as they kiss she wonders if she is still dreaming.
***
Crane is standing at the window looking out at the sunset as he slowly sips his second cup of coffee. He's taken nothing in today but that strong black elixir, and given nothing back to the world but a stomach full of bile. The apartment that he will stay tonight belongs to an abandon residential complex overlooking the docks. The area was once slated for condominiums until the developer filed for bankruptcy leaving its stable of properties to slowly weather away. The grayness of the walls and the feeling of emptiness as the sounds of footsteps and laughter echo off from the back streets into the dark corridors appeal to him, reflecting in a very apt way how he has been feeling inside since the night Oswald called.
Mulling over the events of the afternoon, Crane admits to himself that one might say that today was really not his day at all. First the hopeful piece of news that after years of searching, hunting and looking he may have finally found them. The fabled them, the men who ruined him.
A set of his long forgotten notebooks had surfaced, detailing some of his early work for The Company – as they called themselves then. An interested seller had approached Oswald Cobblepot, and Cobblepot not being a fool had promptly contacted Crane after verifying that the consignment was indeed genuine. Cobblepot was a businessman, and his line of business relied on him being on better terms with his fellow rouges than his competitors, but still this apparent act of public service surprises Crane. He and Oswald were hardly friends.
A better piece of news was that there was an optical disk among the wares that this interested seller was pimping. A recording staring an old friend. Cobblepot had showed him the trailer, and as they watch it in silence Crane notices Cobblepot wincing slightly almost in passing. He knows, Crane thought, he knows how it feels to be beaten and raped, and this uncommon affinity with Isley disturbs him. Crane is not at all surprised if this sordid truism dredged up from the murky depths of Cobblepot's psyche is what really prompted the unexpected call. After all, like all of them something must have happened to Cobblepot once to push him off the edge where he has been every since. Oswald never made it as low as Arkham but low really is a relative term.
Take for example, what they did to him. They didn't have to do him in, he would never have told on them. Cross his heart and hope to die. But they didn't trust him, didn't trust anything and anyone who wasn't dead and buried 6 feet under. Dead men tell no tales, but that's a lie.
There was a girl, a young woman really on this teaching staff. He supposed that she had a crush on him, an older gentlemen and a young but unattractive woman flattered by his attentions to her, it happens all the time. There was some indiscretions on his part, Crane admits but they were both adults and it was consensual. He wasn't some child rapist like Tetch. It was simply a mistake on the part of a lonely man, and when he tried to explain she had been accepting at first but then they got to her. They had him arrested for first degree rape and sodomy in front of his students and hauled him like a crazed animal in handcuffs pass his peers.
The charges were later dropped but they had only started toying with him. Later came allegations of plagiarism that he had stolen his research off his PhD students. A former employee of questionable repute, testified to the ethics committee that Crane routinely and systematically falsified his test results but most damming were the hurtful personal accusations about his sexuality from long time colleagues and people he had come to view as friends that he had sexually harassed both male and female members of staff. They destroyed his academic career, no other university or collage on the planet would touch him after that, much less accept him as a member of their teaching or research staff.
He retired to private practice, sinking his limited funds into a small clinic in a chic neighborhood with an exclusive clientele but that avenue was soon cut off to him too. They had him struck off the medical rolls on a charge that he over prescribed addictive opiates to patients after 3 of them were found dead of suspected drug over doses. He remembers thinking at the inquiry that they didn't really have to do that; kill his patients to get at him. He had liked life in private practice, so unlike the stuffy passive aggressive environment of academia. He enjoyed the intense interactions with his patients, and the contrast of lazy afternoons when he had no appointments spent in the company of his staff; people who stood by him once but were now strangers that could no longer look him in the face.
After all these years, Crane slowly shakes his head he had thought Isley would have been grateful for the offer to grasp this sudden unexpected chance to get back what they had taken from the both of them.
But he had not prepared himself properly, he had been so overwhelmed by this windfall that he had misjudged Isley's interest and as a result his approach had been too crude and direct. He could understand her position, what was done was done and not one of them could go back and unmake the wrongs, but he wished that it was that easy for him as it was for her to discard the past, but they were the ones that couldn't leave well alone.
Crane was in rocky financial ground, he had invested a substantial amount of his assets into setting up his clinic only to have his name hauled through the mud yet again. Fortunately he had his own house and prudently made some investments over the years that would have been sufficient to see him through but they weren't finished with him yet.
He goes out for a walk one day, just a walk to while away the time and clear his head but he makes a mistake. He stops to tell a stranger the time. He remembers the flash of steel as the knife enters him gutting him like a fish, but not the pain.
He awakes much later stitched up in a homeless shelter with no identification and someone else's clothes. They tell him he was found dumped in front of the hospital barely alive, an intern going out for a smoke had literally stumbled over him. They ask him if he knows who he is and he tells them and they tell him he cannot be Jonathan Crane, Jonathan Crane is dead and buried; victim of a hit and run.
He's bewildered by their insistence that he cannot be who he says he is and breaks out hoping against hope to find someone who can tell him that he is who he says he is and that everything so far is a misunderstanding. He runs back home but there are strangers living in his house; a young couple with a baby and when he demands that they tell him what they are doing in his home and what they have done with his mother's furniture and his books, the man punches him in the mouth and holds him down until the police come. They locked him in a cell with 3 other men for 3 days. 3 days, 3 ways. He doesn't know if they intended it to happen or it happen because of the way he looked – lost and helpless - but the specifics don't matter to Crane because they cheapen what happened to him in the end.
He should have known, he should have factored in the change after all it was all there in the psychological profiles that he complied on her stacked neatly on the large wooden table in the center of his living room. It was the small changes that attracted his attention at first, changes that could not have come about without intense professional intervention and a strong support network. Resources which Isley previously never had or wanted.
She referring to herself in the first person as Pamela and in the second person as Ivy, as if consciously willing herself into separate and distinct identities. Then the more conspicuous changes in dress and manner as if to discard the Ivy personality and the symbolic move to a handsome turn of the century town house facing the Park. Poison Ivy was Robinson Park, but Pamela Isley was Park Avenue. Pamela Isley had either come back with a vengeance or more likely thought Crane someone had dressed Poison Ivy in a dead woman's skin.
He wondered how she could have funded her transformation going from literally sleeping in the raw to a lifestyle that even he could not hope to attain unless he focused his energies 24/7 on grand larceny. The word in the underground was that Isley had given up on her physical activities to focus on the more lucrative area of money laundering - washing funds intended for eco-terrorist organizations blacklisted by world governments and channeling such funds to individuals in enforcement agencies and lobby groups with certain vested interests - supplemented by some black market trading in rare and exotic plant toxins. Activities which her mysterious benefactor(s) appeared to have turned a blind eye.
But this sudden flush of cash did not explain the motivation for the change, the money merely facilitated it. Change fascinated Crane, what could be more miraculous than the moment when a caterpillar emerges from its tomb transformed?
What could have caused Poison Ivy to want to come down from her darling trees? A sudden awareness of herself being more human than plant? Triggered perhaps by physical intimacy with someone she had form a rare unheard of emotional bond? Did Pamela Isley really have a mysterious lover? How the plot thickens.
The question then remains, Crane remarked to no one but himself, whether it was truly love - not merely lust - and if so how the beloved might react to news that someone was hawking an intimate recording of Pamela Isley being physically and sexually assaulted to the highest bidder. And that Crane concluded with some satisfaction would be very interesting to observe if the mystery lover really was who the smart money said she would be.
*** Please leave a review. To be Continued
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* Release Notes
080210 - Corrected spelling of "Copperpot" to "Cobblepot"