Hello, everyone! I'm so sorry it's taken so long for me to update. Lots of things have been happening – I've been working a lot, I moved house, and then there was Christmas, and now I'm jobhunting and looking for full-time work. But my writing will continue! The end of Ivy and Eve's story is in sight. Once it's finally finished, I'll be starting something new, so head on over to my profile and see what I've got in the running. You can send me a message if there's a particular story you'd like to see! Anyway, let's continue.
Eve woke up late on Christmas Day, bleary from the fug of what might have been a nightmare, but was now too close to the edge of her mind to remember properly. The first thing she noticed was that Ivy wasn't with her; the second, that the canopy above her was open, and the grass was carpeted with thick white snow. Ivy's sanctuary was cold, quiet, and empty, as if nothing was alive there anymore.
Cautiously, she crawled to the end of the branch she was still lying on and called out into the silence. "Pamela…?"
Nothing. Not a sound, not a bird tweeting, not an answering call, not a footstep softly crunching in the snow. Tentatively she called out again, but still she got nothing in reply. A frown crinkled the centre of her forehead.
There was a rustling behind her, making her jump so she almost slipped and fell to the ground. It wasn't her lover, but one of her plants, which had stretched itself up towards her. It looked for all the world like it was waiting, as a person does when waiting for you to take their hand. Mystified, Eve reached out towards it, and it slithered up her arm like a snake, wrapping itself securely around her torso and lifting her off the branch. Hurriedly Eve pulled her cloak of leaves and moss more tightly around her shoulders, not wanting it to fall to the ground and expose her to the chilling air.
She almost squealed in shock when her bare feet landed on the snow. Hopping from foot to foot, she wished fervently for the first time that she hadn't abandoned her own clothes and shoes. It was so cold and painful that at first she didn't even notice when it wasn't cold anymore – but when she did, she looked down and stared at the trail of grass that had grown under her feet, pushing its way through the freezing blanket of snow to give her a pathway to walk on. She crept forwards, still searching for signs of Ivy, of anything. The grass, incredibly, seemed to know exactly where she would be going.
If you'd been watching Eve creep through the silent, snowy glade, this is what you would have seen; a small, slender figure, wrapped in a long cloak of dark green that meant she was the first thing you noticed against the blank background. Her gait was cautious, and her head darted from side to side frequently and without warning, like a skittish animal that knows it's being watched, but it can't see what's hunting them. Warm breath burst forth from between her pink lips in short gasps, and her body was slightly hunched as she tried to keep the heat inside her. She did, however, still manage to be beautiful; she resembled a wood nymph, caught by surprise at the changing of the seasons.
This is how Ivy saw her, though her eyes were closed as she sank deep within her meditation, at one with the Green. She was in tune with the entire park, the entire underground web of plants that filled the earth beneath Gotham and beyond, and she saw everything the plants could see. The feeling was all-encompassing, the feeling of being stretched and pulled in every direction, seeing everything, hearing everything, through a gossamer veil of green. She was caught between the worlds, right then, and the only thing stopping her from surrendering completely to the Green, the thing that tethered her to the here and now, was the thought that her Evelyn was there, and she was looking for her. She wanted her, needed her.
Ivy's eyes snapped open.
Eve gasped, having rounded a corner of the glade and seen Ivy for the first time. She saw her lover held above the grass, in a pose reminiscent of Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man, plants surrounding her from every direction. The grass had grown upwards, curling itself around her legs and feet, and the branches of trees – maple, dogwood, ash, walnut, holly, spruce, pine, oak – reached from all sides to twine themselves in her hair, around her arms, cradling her torso, crowning her brow. Her skin was shimmering with an iridescent green glow, and her eyes held otherworldliness within their emerald depths, reminding Eve that no matter what she said, no matter what she believed, her lover was not entirely human. She stayed where she was, partly from apprehension and partly from awe. She watched and waited as Ivy slowly started to return to her, blinking her eyes once, twice, while her plants brought her back down to earth. The spot where her feet touched the ground was almost immediately free of snow, and instead a circle of springy moss spread out around her.
As the plants receded, Ivy reached out a hand and beckoned Eve closer. She watched her lover creep slowly towards her over the grass, patches of moss blossoming beneath her feet until the floor of the glade was carpeted in their delicate green softness. She watched her lover, and her heart began to break.
Because she knew this could not last.
When Eve reached her, she was trembling as she reached out and cupped Ivy's face in her hands. "Where did you go, Pamela?" she whispered.
"I was meditating," Ivy said breathlessly. There was a fine sheen of perspiration on her brow, as if being so in tune with the Green for so long had put strain on her body and mind. Eve's fingers reached gently up and across her forehead, stroking Ivy's dampened skin. "I had to find someone."
"And did you find them?"
Ivy shook her head. No matter how hard and far she had searched for Harley, there had been so sign of her. She had, however, half expected this; Harley had known her for a long time, and she knew all the places in Gotham where there were no plants, not even a patch of grass or a potted ficus. All the hiding places, beyond Ivy's web of Green, where she would be safe from her. It was infuriating and terrifying in equal measure, because now Ivy had not only no way of knowing where Harley had gone, but also who she had told about Eve. Had she even told anyone? Or had she come to her senses, calmed down, and decided not to say a word? It was impossible to know.
Eve's voice brought her back to the present. "Who were you looking for?" she asked carefully, as if she didn't really want to know.
Ivy sighed, taking hold of Eve's hands and clasping them tight, lacing their fingers together. "I've known her for a very long time. I thought we were friends, but now…I'm not so sure." She swallowed hard and took a breath. "When I first met her, she was Dr Harleen Quinzel, my psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. But now she's –"
"Harley Quinn." Eve's face had gone white. "Harley Quinn. Was that her, here, last night? Was that why you knocked me out?" Her widened eyes grew reproachful.
"I didn't want her to know about you," Ivy murmured, her voice wavering only slightly as she faced up to what she was going to have to admit to the woman she loved. "I wanted to keep you a secret, Evelyn, because I know what Harley's like. I know what the people I know are like. There's usually some kind of strange, tenuous truce between us all, unless any one of us has some something another one wants, or one of us has a weakness that can be exploited in some way…"
"And I am your weakness," Eve finished for her. She bit her lip nervously, chewing on a piece of loose skin.
Watching Eve, Ivy marvelled at how her face and body could be so expressive when she wasn't doing anything other than standing still. There was a tiny bit of residual anger in her eyes, left over from once again having her lover drug her against her will, but now she knew why it was rapidly receding. Then, there was the tension and fear, visible in the wrinkle between her eyebrows and the clenching of her jaw, the stiffness of her shoulders where only moments ago she had been relaxed and happy to be in Ivy's arms again. She was clasping Ivy's hands in a grip that was perhaps a little bit too tight, as if she couldn't bear to be apart from her.
"Do you regret this, then?" she asked suddenly, desperately. "Us? Me, being here? Me…loving you?" Her voice was shaking, as if she were on the verge of tears.
Immediately Ivy pulled Eve close and held her, stroking her hair. "Of course not! Evelyn, I love you. I don't ever want you to leave, you must understand that, but you're in danger now."
"Why would I be…nobody knows I'm here, do they?" Eve asked. There was a pause, the kind of pause that only comes when there are terrible things that aren't being said. Eve's hands started to tremble. Her voice caught in her throat, but she managed to choke out her next words. "Do they?"
Ivy, her eyes filled with regret and shame, nodded her head.
The change was instantaneous. Eve seem to retract and fold into herself, removing her hands from Ivy's grasp and taking a small step away from her. Her eyes grew wide and filled with tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks. "Ivy," she said, her voice shaking. "What did you do?"
"I said your name." Ivy, too, was trying not to cry. Her words were filled with guilt and shame and heartbreak. "Just your name. And now Harley knows you exist. And she knows how I feel about you." She swallowed hard and reached out gently, then tried not to flinch when Eve subtly jerked away from her touch. "It was an accident, I swear, I'm sorry, Evelyn, I'm so sorry…"
A single tear started to make its way down Eve's face, a shining trail all the way down to her collarbone where it disappeared into the cloak of moss. The betrayal was clear in her expression. Horrible, uncomfortable silence thickened the air between the two lovers. Thoroughly ashamed, Ivy turned away from her.
She had ruined it. She'd had something wonderful, and she'd ruined it all with one careless slip of the tongue, when she'd been trying to be so careful. Idiot. She wrapped her arms around herself in an attempt to quell the roiling in her stomach. She, Poison Ivy, scourge of Gotham City (according to the various newspapers that loved to report on her antics and how her breasts managed to stay in her 'costume'), was never meant to love. That human capacity for such intense emotion had been stripped from her when that man, that Jason Woodrue, had strapped her down to a cold steel table and irrevocably changed her biology. It was why she seduced people to get what she wanted; it was why she had never let anybody get too close; it was why, when she had finally managed to find some semblance of happiness, she herself had gone and broken it down. At that moment, Poison Ivy hated herself, for the first time in her life.
"What can we do?"
Ivy jumped. She hadn't even realised that Eve was still standing behind her. Slowly, she turned around again, brushing the hair out of her eyes. Eve was looking at her with a hard expression that she'd never seen on her face before.
"Ivy?" she said. "What. Can. We. Do?"
Ivy was staring at her, not because she didn't know what to say, but because she couldn't quite work out if Eve was angry or just trying not to cry. Maybe it was equal parts. Gingerly, she reached out once more, and this time around she was able to take Eve's hand without her pulling away. Good. This was progress. Maybe they weren't ruined, maybe things could be okay between them, but there was still too much at risk if anybody tried to hurt her. There was only one way of getting out of this that she could see where she could save Eve's life, even if it meant breaking her own heart.
"You need to disappear," she said at last, and Eve's eyebrows quirked upwards. Before she could get a word in, Ivy spoke again, her words starting to run together as she rushed to get it all out in the open before the worst happened. "You need to hide away somewhere, somewhere that nobody who wanted to use you against me could ever find you. Move back to Chicago, move to the middle of nowhere, I don't know." She ran a hand through her hair in exasperation. "Just…give me up, Evelyn. Please. Just forget me, because if I ended up getting you killed, I would never be able to live with myself."