I can't come alive

I want the room to take me under

Cause I can't help but wonder

What if I had one more night for goodbye?

It reeked of corruption. Not the usual sort. Not like encountering a dirty cop or watching Mayor Hill give a speech on TV. This specific kind of corruption... it was the sort that had all signs of plant life cringing, withering away and dying. It scrambled along the walls, retreating back towards the edge of the room, desperate to get outside - to get some air.

Nova could see why.

The room was toxic, the fumes of their idiotic attempt at chemistry creating an ominous fog that very clearly could have presented a danger to the likes of herself and Ivy; had they not been the monsters that they were. She didn't know why she hadn't seen it before, looking down on them from above, but now that she was level with them... they were wearing gas masks. The morons hadn't even let open any windows or doors. But then again... maybe they had the limited enough wit to know that if the fog got out - if Batman, for example were to pass by their building and see or smell them...

Hm. There was method to this madness.

"Imbeciles." Ivy seethed, moving around the room in a slow semi circle, backing them up against the door. "Do you have any competence in you? Any... degree of mercy? Do you not know what devastation you wreak on the nature around you?" There was nothing quite so terrifying as the sight of Poison Ivy in the height of her fury. Nothing would compare to the wrath she would unleash here. "No..." she snarled, vines that had been creeping along the floor either side of her now rising up to form an arch around and above her. "Mankind never knows. Mankind has never known mercy or compassion or the insight to consider anything of the bigger picture." The vines were idle no longer, spearing forwards through the room so violently that they impacted through the heads of three of the men and straight through to the other side, the impact so fierce and the flight so fast that no blood was spilt.

Nova, a new voice in her mind spoke, and without even a second to think about it, she knew who it was, and what they wanted. It was all the signal she needed, and with that, Nova's own vines swept forth to wreak havoc and justice and claim the lives of her enemies. The floor was bubbling, now. Oozing. There was a thick sludge coating the cement, horrid and wonderful all at once. She felt it dripping from her fingertips, too, like a more aqueous version of the little pots of slime and goo she remembered from her childhood. She almost laughed, but found her face going in a different direction when she caught sight of Ivy. While Nova merely had it dripping from her fingers... Ivy was covered in the stuff. There was nothing of her skin, and even if there was some still uncovered, there would be no way for Nova to discern otherwise, as the toxic sludge was so similar to the pigment of their skin.

"Oh, shit, lady. Your skin-"

Vines shot forward, dripping with the same sludge that coated Nova and Ivy - and whacked him all the way across the room. He slid down the wall with the force of it, groaning, and with the tears and rips in his hazmat suit, he became the first to demonstrate the true terror of succumbing to the toxic slime they had produced.

Ivy was sneering, the sludge making it's way down into her mouth, running mazes through the gaps between her teeth. She didn't even blink, and that scared the goons more than the actual poisonous slime. What was this creature before them that could withstand the same substance that had just melted the skin from a man's bones and not even be bothered by it? It was unfortunate that Harvey Dent had conveniently disappeared, because Nova would have loved to see the look on his face as the rest of his skin stripped itself from his bones. Especially after this stunt. With the structure of the sheer poison they had created here - there was no way they could possibly been trying to achieve anything other than chaos against nature. An attack on Earth and all her natural beauties and bounties.

And all of Gotham knew that an offense against nature was an offence against it's guardians.

So, they died slowly. One by one, they took it in turns and they collaborated - and when they were done not a single man was left standing, and not any one of them were anything but bones.

Ivy was agitated. Clearly.

She had always been fond of pacing, when at home, and she'd told Nova that it was because she enjoyed functioning and thriving in her ideal environment - that she could savour the feeling of the soil beneath her feet and spread her love to all of the plants in the vicinity. She was a benevolent, generous mother - she'd said - and Nova had agreed with her (mainly because she had been in the process of transitioning from human to plant and had been too out of her mind to dare disagree). But this kind of pacing was furious - it was too rigid to be in keeping with Ivy's usual grace and poise. They had only just finished washing away the sludge - it had taken hours - during which Pamela had grown angrier with each passing second.

"The chemical reaction between their gas and our anatomy was interesting," Nova commented, in a misguided attempt to break the heavy, furious silence that had hung in the air since their arrival. Ivy had happened to be passing by at that moment, and with the closer proximity, Nova could see she was shaking. "The... sludge, whatever it was-"

A sharp slash of pain smacked across her face, and her head turned to the side with the abrupt power of the hit.

"Shut up, you pathetic, pointless nothing."

Silence. She was silent. She didn't see what else she could do. Nova didn't feel anything but a fuzzy numbness that she'd noticed lingering since Jared's death. Ivy's shaking form was facing her, fists clenched at her sides, eyes no doubt wide with rage. Nova didn't look up to meet her. She simply stared at her feet - at the soil that scattered over her toes and cushioned her soles. Ivy was stood close enough for their toes to be touching, and she knew that if she looked anywhere but her eyes, she would be safe enough from the storm to keep on standing through it. Eye to eye contact would shatter her, send her sprawling and screaming back to the ground in a horrifically poetic truth of Ivy's insults.

Silence reigned, and Ivy never shifted. Neither of them did. For half a day, and a whole night they didn't move, and all that changed was that Nova could feel her creator's fury ebbing gradually away, until eventually she slumped, curling up into Nova's lap. Instinct pushed her to accept her, embrace her. It was too dark for Ivy's body to rejuvenate itself - there was no natural light - nothing. So, Nova shared, as the plants had. As the sun did every single day. She was Pamela's sun, and for the short, impossibly rare instance in time, her mistress was but a planet orbiting her; seeking heat and light and stability. The encounter had seriously affected her, Nova could see that now. Ivy was not just irrationally angry, she was afraid. She hadn't had to be afraid for such a long time that she didn't know how to handle it, and as someone who had been afraid for as long as she could remember - Nova could sympathize with the feeling.

Nothing was forgiven. It never would be.

She woke to an empty house. It was inexplicably upsetting, and it took an hour or two of tending to plants and sharing sustenance before she realised it was because being left in isolation meant that Ivy wasn't worried she would try to leave again. That she was so far gone that Ivy didn't have to stick around to ensure she wouldn't escape her imprisonment. And the truth was that she had no reason to leave anymore. There was nobody to escape for, nobody to go home to. Nova had murdered her salvation. There was no reason to leave, no incentive to go - because Ivy could offer her what nobody else could - she could render her a blind, thoughtless slave without the unwanted luxury of free will or conscience. It was sad, but it was what it was.

It angered her that she was now here - to have fallen so far and to have become so reliant and so weak. Nova was a lackey, and that was all.

But looking around now, at the four walls that surrounded her, at the floor that was nothing but dirt, and up at the ceiling, which consisted of an arched roof of glass; it occurred to her that she desperately wanted to be more. She didn't want to wallow in her past, in the indiscretions and the grudges she had, ultimately, caused and delivered unto herself. She wanted to mean something. She needed a purpose. Vines and leaves and petals brushed against her skin as she thought it, and it was all she needed to find herself, and to get to her feet.

She would do what Ivy had created her to do. She would get out there and she would be meaningful and she would work away her pain.

"I killed him," she muttered, a quiet confession and an acceptance to the plant life around her. They didn't judge her. "I did it. Me." The plant answered her with supportive silence, curling around her limbs. "I had that anger there, stirring inside of me. I would have lashed out sooner or later." A silent affirmation hung heavy in the air, and the lump in her throat subsided after a few minutes. She was getting swiftly better at stomaching this. "Nobody made me kill him. I did that myself. I did. I did it." You did, the plants seemed to say. Nova nodded, determinedly.

Feel better?

Yes. Better than I have in years.

The crime scene was disturbingly easy to break into. It was cordoned off in the typical way - cones, police tape. Cars with flashing red and blue lights were parked about the place. They gave her a headache and they throbbed at her psyche, giving her unwanted flashbacks to times spent in Arkham, but at least no-one was around to preside in them. It meant she could more or less just stroll in, and when she did, breaching the entryway of the sketchy building she and Ivy had reigned hell down on a few nights before; she could see why nobody was outside. It was a horror show. Gore splattered the walls, the floor, even parts of the vast ceiling. It was a high room, too, so it spoke volumes of their fury. There was so much gore that it was no surprise when she brought her gaze back down to the floor, still covered in a thick, lightly steaming sludge. There was no meat on the corpses they had left to rot there. Only bones - just as she remembered them. But even the bones were disconnected, scattered about the room, and slowly degrading into nothing as they stewed in the poisonous goo they had partly created.

"Caldwell," a deep, unnaturally gruff voice noted her presence, and Nova brought her attention up to Gotham's knight in plated armour from the depravity of the floor.

"They were brewing something here." She answered, by way of greeting, and made her way towards him - disregarding the way people around them gasped and shrunk away from her in horror as they realised what she was, and saw that she could walk through this place barefoot and unharmed. Everyone besides herself and Batman were dressed in heavy duty hazmat suits, she only just realised. "It was toxic - the bad kind - and it was destroying the purity and the structure of the natural life around here." Nova came to a stop before him, chin raised solidly as she met his impassive stare. "Two-Face was in charge."

There was a steady silence in the room for a few moments, the only sound to be heard being the gruesome hiss that rose from the goo as it melted the bones of it's victims.

"You did this." It wasn't a question.

She nodded, head cocked to the side. "Not alone."

"Mm. I see."

Once again, a moment passed where they just stood there, staring at each other. Nova remembered a while ago, the saviour who had come to protect her from her captor. He had lifted her up by her wrist, and despite her newly green appearance, he had called her by her name and asked her if she was okay. He had delivered her to Arkham, as she had begged him, and he had kept her safe, hidden away from Poison Ivy. Now, here they stood, surrounded by the evils she had committed, a line definitively drawn between them. He was looking at her now, in the same way he did Harley. It was a muted expression, and hard to pick up without intense examination, but it was there. It was in a slight downwards turning of his lips, the tight way in which he held himself around her now - the clenched fists and the way he held his head - like he was desperate to shake it in disappointment and pity.

She didn't blame him, not really. He was Batman. Who she was now was at odds with everything he stood for and against. He had tried his best to save her, but it had still driven her off the deep end.

"It's not your fault, Bats."

He didn't say anything, he merely stared at her in dismay. Nova sighed, and glanced around, eyes passing automatically over the blood and the guts and the remnants of humanity she had decorated the place with. In the darker part of her mind, she took pleasure in it. She was pleased by it. But in the quickly withering, rapidly fading side that wanted to be good and normal and moral; she was disgusted and she was horrified. She sighed again, with more angst this time, and narrowed her eyes as she searched for some clue left behind that she could work on. Slowly, she began to pace about the room, kicking bits of bone and melted metal out of the way so she could examine the ground beneath. Nova could feel everyone watching her. She could sense Batman gradually circling, guarding the exits. He didn't intend to let her escape.

The voices were getting louder inside her head, things flashed and wobbled and presented themselves through her eyes as being slightly off and it got louder and louder until it was deafening and maddening and she had to grit her teeth against it to keep herself going. She came out here to contribute. She refused to sit at home and be useless.

Nova, in the saner part of her brain, cringed. She had thought of it as home.

The eyes on her became more oppressive, aggressive, and the voices shifted in tandem to match. Suddenly they were given faces and actual presence and Nova found she was scared of them. Still, she searched. She shook her head rapidly, clenched her jaw and trembled she did so - but she searched. There were whispers building, conflicting with the voices - which adapted to the tone, becoming indistinguishable from the actual voices of the people in that room with her. A few times, she had heard someone order them to get back to work - but she was causing too much of a distraction for anyone to do so. Nova let out a small whimper, desperate in her search now. She would not leave until she had it. That clue. She would not go home to Ivy empty handed. It was unimaginable.

And, suddenly - finally - just like that... she found it. Fascinatingly, the piece of fabric was almost the exact same colour as the sludge she and Ivy had secreted a few nights ago, and she stood there in near paralytic shock as she tried to decipher what that could mean until she realised that it was far more likely that the sludge had somehow dyed it. Running her fingers delicately over it, she could sense it in there, invading the material so thoroughly that it took over the colour and expanded the limitations of it. The little thing couldn't have been more than a pocket square, but Nova's goo had forced it to spread out into this odd, deformed semi-circle.

But before she could look into it any further, a force knocked it out of her hand so harshly that Nova wouldn't have been surprised to hear a crunch of bones.

"Leave." That dark, distorted voice commanded. "Now."

If you're not here to turn the lights off

I can't sleep

These four walls and me