Dappled sunlight danced through the leaves up above, throwing splashes of light and shadow across the soft grass. A gentle breeze whistled through the trees, making them rustle and whisper as if they were telling each other their secrets. Right on the edge of hearing hung the low, indistinct hum of the city waking up, too far away to seem real.
It was, Eve thought as she opened her eyes, a wonderful way to wake up.
Even though the air was full of a sharp wintery chill outside, the cocoon of trees that Ivy had created protected Eve and helped the plants within to thrive. It was, in essence, a greenhouse, but Eve liked to think of it more as a temple. The roof stretched high, but not so high that it could be seen outside the copse of tall trees that shielded it from prying eyes. Vines and branches twisted and coiled overhead in a way that resembled the vaults of a cathedral ceiling, a thousand shades of green intertwined, the sunlight passing through and casting patterns like stained glass. It was almost as if Nature had decided that people needed a place to worship its magnitude and magnificence, and a suitable construction had simply sprung out of the ground, ready-made.
It was a place, Eve was beginning to discover, where she could be free to worship the goddess that walked under this canopy and called it her home. It was only her third morning waking up beneath Ivy's self-made sky, but already she could feel a shift in how she was being regarded. Now that they were staying together, and all Eve's experiments – performed using equipment that Ivy had produced when she'd moved in, and had mentioned nothing of where she'd got it from – could be conducted without risk of the results being discovered by someone else, Ivy had definitely relaxed.
"Breakfast?"
Eve pushed herself up into a sitting position and turned to see Ivy standing beneath an impossible tree. Its branches were heavy with fruit, all different kinds, none of which it should have been possible to grow on the same plant. Feeling herself staring, Eve flattened her hair and got up, brushing the grass that had been squashed by her sleeping body until it stood on end again, only slightly dishevelled.
Ivy smiled at her, a gentle, slow smile. "Good morning, Evelyn. How did you sleep?"
"Um…well, thank you." Eve swallowed. "That's amazing." She pointed at the tree. The previous two mornings, Ivy had appeared with some fruit arranged on a large leaf for breakfast, but only now was she finding out where that actually came from. Curious, she walked towards it, running her fingertips gently over the trunk, feeling the smooth bark against her skin. "You have to show me how you did this," she breathed.
Ivy smiled again. "Later. First, you need to eat." Her elegant fingers reached up into the branches of the tree, and returned with a fat red pomegranate clasped between them. With a whisper of a touch, the skin of the fruit split along some invisible seam and burst open. Inside, the flesh glittered as bright as rubies.
"Try some," Ivy said gently, and Eve didn't need telling twice. She carefully took the fruit and scooped some of the flesh into her mouth, marvelling at the tart sweetness that exploded on her tongue. She licked her lips, staining them scarlet.
"Wow!" Eve had never eaten anything like it. "That is…that's like the epitome of what fruit should taste like. Everything should taste like that."
Ivy laughed, somewhere between a purr and a chuckle. "Try something else, they're all yours if you want them. I like to experiment sometimes, too."
Hours later, Eve sat cross-legged on a patch of grass, two microscopes resting on a tree root that had burst out of the ground in front of her. Strewn across the grass were sheets of paper, notebooks, files, pens, and pencils, with several bags leaning against the tree containing anything else that she might need (Eve was not a tidy scientist).Three small vials sat in a rack beside her – one full of Ivy's blood, one full of her own for the sake of comparison, and the third full of chlorophyll. She'd managed to distil some by crushing leaves in a pestle and mortar, a blender not being available, mixing them with water and straining the liquid through a cloth. It was very much a low-tech version of what she would normally have done, but practically, it yielded the same result.
It was just then, as she was fiddling with the magnification on the microscope, that Ivy appeared beside her and picked up the two vials of blood, holding them up in the light. Eve watched as a small frown appeared between her eyebrows.
"It's funny," she said, uncrossing her legs and resting on her knees. "To the naked eye, our blood looks pretty much the same, besides the slight change in colour."
"But it's not." It was a statement, not a question.
"Far from it." Ivy crouched down and leaned in close as Eve was speaking, and it was all she could do not to stare at the woman's perfect, sculpted body. She swallowed, her mouth dry. "You…you see, your blood," she took the vial and held it up, "your blood, well, under a microscope, the red cells bear more resemblance to chlorophyll than they do haemoglobin. I'm no expert, but compared to my own, my…regular, human, blood, there's a massive difference." She turned away, trying to busy herself and distract her mind. Her hands were shaking slightly as she inserted a needle into each of the vials and let a few droplets fall onto two glass slides. She put one slide under each microscope. "Take a look," she said, gesturing towards them.
Ivy knelt down, too, her bare thigh brushing against Eve's. Even through the sturdy denim of her jeans, the brief contact caused goosebumps to erupt on her skin.
"Fascinating," Ivy breathed, studying the two samples. "I've never tried to make a comparison like this before. Side by side, they're…completely different." She looked up, glancing at Eve with an expression bordering on respect. "What's the chlorophyll for?"
There was a moment's pause – Eve's mouth had gone completely dry, and she had to struggle to work up some moisture so she could respond. "I wanted to try mixing them," she explained. "I was wondering if mixing the chlorophyll with my blood would create a substance that at all resembled the sample I got from you."
"And if it turns out that my blood is not simply a mixture of the two?" Ivy enquired, arching an eyebrow.
"Then…well, then I'd probably have to test it further. A result like that could mean that your red blood cells aren't even based on iron, but magnesium, like a plant." Eve smiled slightly, the excitement that always came when she was on the brink of some new discovery filling her with anticipation.
"Proving that I am not, in fact, human," Ivy said slowly, processing the idea. "You're a clever woman, Evelyn." She stood up, flicking her long red hair over her shoulders. "Come."
Wordlessly, Eve got up, cleared the samples away and followed Ivy into the trees. They walked in silence for a few minutes, then Ivy stepped onto a thick, low-hanging branch and held out her hand. Hesitantly, Eve took it and climbed up to stand next to her, and the next moment the branch was moving, lifting them up through the trees, past leaves and flowers and blossoming buds, into the canopy. The branch stopped and Eve followed Ivy as she stepped down and sat in the midst of a large oak tree, using her hands to coax new leaves out from their hiding places to form a sort of cushion against the hard tree bark. Another wave of her hand and the roof of the cathedral, close enough to them now that Eve could have stretched up and touched it, peeled away and revealed the dark grey sky above them, thick clouds swollen with rain.
Captivated as she was, it took Eve a moment to remember that there had been several burning questions she'd been wanting to ask. She stared out across the park as the first drops of rain started to fall, feeling that if she wasn't looking at Ivy it would be easier to say what was on her mind.
"Would it bother you, if you weren't human anymore?"
She could feel Ivy's eyes on her, but it was a little while before she replied.
"You and I live in a world with men and women who can fly, who can run the circumference of the Earth in seconds, who can hold entire continents above their heads without breaking a sweat. There are people who are the very peak of human condition; creatures and beings of magic and science; gods and monsters, most of them trying to get by without causing too many problems for everyone else. There are those wandering the surface of this planet that weren't even born here. The world has changed so much," she said at last. It was almost as she was speaking to herself, like Eve wasn't really there, but just a voice in her head asking the questions. "We've entered an age where nobody really knows what makes a human anymore. These people, most of them, started out as human, like me. They were normal, and something cataclysmic happened that forever changed who they were, and how they would be seen by everyone else.
"But that didn't stop them from being human. Underneath, down at the smallest level, they are still intrinsically human in a biological sense. Their DNA is basically the same, bar the changes that let them shoot lasers from their eyes, or change solid rock into gold, or whatever it is that makes them 'super'.
And then there's me, and others like me. No longer biologically human beings, but still able to identify ourselves as such."
"No longer human, but still capable of humanity." Eve was still staring out at the falling rain, but she stole a glance at Ivy when she spoke.
"What makes you think I'm capable of humanity? Of compassion?" Ivy asked. She sounded genuinely curious, rather than insulted.
"I'm not dead," Eve said simply. "You had the opportunity to kill me, and you didn't. You let me come and visit you instead, and learn about you, and every time I learnt something new and you let me walk away from here with that information, you could have ended my life to stop anybody else finding out what I had." Feeling emboldened, she shuffled sideways along the branch until she and Ivy were side-by-side, and looked her straight in the eye. "That compassion, that trust of another person, that willingness to let someone in…it's hard to do, it's so hard. The hardest thing most people ever do is trust another person with their secrets, because as soon as you've let them out, that person has all the ammunition they will ever need to break you down."
Here, her voice cracked, but she cleared her throat and kept going, because she felt that she needed to say it, and Ivy needed to hear it. "Look. For all I know, your skin is made of bark and your hair is actually trichomes, and your blood might say you're a plant, but your thoughts and feelings? Your compassion, your conviction? They make you human. There's still something left of the woman you were before this happened to you, and no matter what your blood or your DNA says, that's still a part of who you are."
Ivy was staring at her, and immediately Eve felt a flush of crimson sweep up her chest and face. She wasn't one for bold, impassioned speeches, but there was something about being in love with Ivy that made her want to comfort her and reassure her, to make it known to her that she was loved and admired and that she wasn't just a freak of nature. How far from a freak of nature she was.
The silence hung between them, thick with anticipation and misted rain. Ivy was thinking something over.
"No longer human, but still capable of humanity," she said slowly, and then she smiled. A proper smile, that lit up her eyes and made Eve's heart do a backflip. "You're a clever woman, Evelyn."
And then she was there – she closed the gap between them, and in the midst of wonder and amazement and surprise and the warm pull of attraction, Eve could only think of one thing.
She was kissing Poison Ivy.
Hello, lovely readers! Apologies that chapters have been a bit sporadic recently – unfortunately essays and exam prep must take precedence for now, but I will hopefully be able to post more regularly when that's all done and dusted.
I have a request for you: would anybody be interested in creating some character art for this story that I could use as the cover picture and publicise on my profile? I would be willing to give you some detailed character descriptions to help you, as well as cosmic goodwill and word-spreading about your art/stories in return for what you come up with.
Message me if you're interested, and please please keep reading and reviewing this story! Your support is what keeps me going :D
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