With the Joker restored to his usual sanity, such as it was, the rest of Gotham's Rogues gallery returned to their home city. Everyone was glad to be back, and while not entirely pleased by the resolution, most were just glad things were back to normal. Except Poison Ivy.

She was fuming over Joker and Harley's reunion, and even more so when Harley had called her later to tell her the whole breakup had been fake anyway.

"How could you do that to me, Harley?!" demanded Ivy. "How could you get my hopes up like that only to dash them!? Why wouldn't you tell me the truth?!"

"We couldn't tell anyone the truth, Red – we didn't know who was behind the note," said Harley.

"You don't think I'd threaten to kill your children?!" demanded Ivy.

"No, I don't mean that," said Harley. "I mean if anyone else knew it was a setup besides me and Mr. J, there's a risk it coulda got out. It's not that I don't trust you, Red, it was just too risky to trust anyone. The act had to look real, and everyone had to buy it, otherwise there woulda been talk. If there had been any other way, I never woulda kept the truth from our friends. Though I kinda think Jervis suspected…"

"Don't give that little runt credit like that – he has no idea what he's talking about!" snapped Ivy.

"Have you and Jervis been fighting?" asked Harley, surprised. "That's not like him."

"You're saying it's like me?" demanded Ivy. "Do you think I'm quarrelsome and unhappy too?"

"What? No!" said Harley. "Did Jervis say you were?"

"He implied that I wasn't happy, and said the reasons for it were my own fault," snapped Ivy. "He said I hadn't examined my own role in Jason's betrayal enough. Victim blaming nonsense, isn't it? Well, you're a shrink, so you tell me."

Harley said nothing. "Harley, I said you're a shrink, so you can tell me it's victim blaming nonsense," repeated Ivy.

"I mean, yeah, what happened to you wasn't your fault," agreed Harley. "But letting yourself get bitter and resentful about it is a choice you've made…"

"No, it's a natural reaction to being betrayed by a man I trusted!" snapped Ivy. "I'll admit I was an idiot to trust him, but I learned my lesson about trusting men…"

"Look, Red, you're not gonna wanna hear this, but we can always choose how we respond to situations," interrupted Harley. "We can't control our feelings, or God knows I can't, but we can control our actions, and our actions include how we choose to let the experiences we've had shape our lives. See, this is what you don't get about me and Mr. J. You think I'm just so blinded by love for him that I can't see who he really is. You can't accept that I see who he is very clearly, and still choose to be with him. You can't accept it because it seems crazy to you. Well, I am certifiably insane, but you still have to respect the choices I've made. And you have to respect the choices you made, no matter how bad they were in hindsight. Every day you let what happened to you control you, rather than accepting what happened and putting it behind you, you get stuck in this victim mode, and you can't progress beyond that. I could have seen myself as a victim of Mr. J's – I could have lied to myself and said Mr. J took me in against my will. I could claim I never saw the abuse and the pain coming, but that wouldn't have been true. He's the Joker, and he's never pretended to be anything else. That's the man I fell in love with, crazy, mad love with. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I've accepted that about me. I know what happened between you and Jason was different – I know he did genuinely pretend to be someone he wasn't. And it was horrible what happened to you. You have every right to feel aggrieved, because you were a victim of a horrible man. But you can choose to live like a victim forever, or you can choose to stop. But it's your choice, Red. Just like Harley Quinn was my choice, despite Mr. J's influence. Ultimately, it's always our choice. And once you accept that, once you see yourself as you truly are, no matter how painful that is…it's so freeing. And it's the only way I've found to be truly happy."

"I am happy!" snapped Ivy.

"You might be," agreed Harley. "But I know you find happiness by pursuing the things you love, not destroying the things you hate. If you're led by your hatred of men to destroy them, I don't think you'll ever be truly happy. Because you actually can't eradicate all men."

"I can try!" snapped Ivy.

"You could, I guess," said Harley. "But I wish you wouldn't, for the sake of my son. On the other hand, if you're motivated by your love for your plants, even if you do end up killing a lotta men in the bargain, that's the part that'll make you happy. I mean, I kill a lotta people, but it's because of my love for Mr. J. I could be doing anything for my love of Mr. J, and that would make me happy. You have a great goal in life – you're trying to protect the environment. That's a noble cause driven by your genuine passion for plants. So that's what you should indulge, and you should let the man-hating go. I think you've realized you've outgrown it at this point anyway, haven't you? I mean, you've met enough great guys now to realize it's not true that all men are awful. You've probably met enough to realize that not even most men are awful, except for a tiny minority of them like Jason and Lex. And it would be crazy to let a minority of people ruin your life for any reason. You can always choose to be happy, and you do that by rejecting even deeply held beliefs when you realize they're wrong. I believed I was a good, responsible doctor for a long time. I was wrong. And accepting that led me to true happiness. You can do the same. But you can't do that by lying to yourself anymore. The truth will set you free."

"I'm not going to be lectured to by a woman who pretends to be my friend, and then lies to me!" snapped Ivy. "How do I know you're not lying now? You wouldn't know anything about the truth setting you free, since you wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in the face! Which, by the way, I'm sure the Joker is likely to do before the week is out!"

She slammed the phone down, fuming. "Just unbelievable! Spouting all this nonsense about the truth after she just put on this elaborate deception! And how dare she think she knows what's best for me?! I expect it from men, but not from women! I guess it's all the internalized misogyny that she's picked up from hanging around J! He's such a typical man!"

But the more she thought about that phrase, the more she realized that the Joker was far from the typical man. And the more she thought about that, the more she realized that Jason was also far from the typical man, since she had never met another man who was as sociopathic as he had turned out to be, which was remarkable considering most of her male acquaintances were supercriminals. True, she hadn't usually given men the opportunity to betray her – often she had killed them before they could reveal their true selves, or their true selves as she believed them to be. But for the first time, a small part of her began to wonder if maybe Harley was right. Maybe she was generalizing inaccurately about a whole group of people. And maybe she was wrong to do so. Maybe the belief she had held on to for so long wasn't true.

It was a horrible thing to consider, but she couldn't get the idea out of her head, and it gnawed away at her as the time passed. At last, she picked up the phone and dialed a number. "Hi, Pam," said a familiar voice.

"Harvey, would you like to…get dinner tonight?" asked Ivy, slowly.

"Get dinner?" repeated Two-Face, surprised. "Is that a euphemism for coming over to your place and having sex that you regret the next morning?"

"No, it means just what I said," snapped Ivy. "I'd like us to…get dinner. Just go out on a date and…talk."

"About what?" asked Two-Face, confused.

"Just anything. Our ideas, our interests, our general plans for the future," said Ivy. "You don't have to say yes…"

"No, I'd…like that very much," said Two-Face, slowly. "It's just very unusual. You're not normally interested in my ideas or plans for the future, or anything except me satisfying your immediate gratifications."

"Well…maybe I've been wrong," said Ivy, with tremendous effort. "And maybe I wanna do better. There's nothing shameful in that, is there?"

"No," said Two-Face, hastily. "No, no, no, it's very good! I'll have to consult the coin, of course, about accepting your invitation, and about the location and time…"

"I'll pick you up at eight, Harvey," interrupted Ivy. "Bye."

She hung up the phone, sighing. "Talk about someone who can't let go of a wrong idea," she muttered. "But that's not me anymore. From now on, I'm going to try to give men a fair shot. I still expect them to disappoint me, but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. But it does seem crazy to judge the majority from a few bad apples. It seems crazy to condemn an entire group for the actions of a few, and to generalize that they all deserve to die because of those actions. And whatever anyone else says, I'm not crazy."

She sat down on her sofa and turned on the TV. "And now a report on the environment – the climate crisis continues to worsen as our collective carbon footprint continues to increase, with experts predicting that in ten years time, due to drought and deforestation, there will be no more trees in the Amazon rainforest, resulting in the complete destruction of that ecosystem. Meanwhile, the melting of the polar icecaps continues to raise ocean levels, and pollution levels in our oceans continue to rise, with plastics flooding in from other countries, and air travel and car ownership increasing exponentially…" the announcer read.

Ivy's hands tightened into fists. "I hate humanity," she muttered. "They all deserve to die."