"Remarkable... And she's caused no problems at all?"
"A perfect patient ever since the incident with the nightshade." Hazel replied to Dr. Neilson's astounded question.
The two psychiatrists stood in the Arkham gardens. Twenty yards away Pamela Isley knelt in the dirt, humming contently to herself while gently pruning an over-burdened marigold bush. Her usual guards, Holly Madison and Margaret Oak, were mere feet away armed with stun batons and at the ready, but they didn't expect to be of much use of Pamela did cause a problem; after all, she was surrounded by her most powerful weapons.
"Absolutely incredible... Here in the garden, she could do anything right now, and here she sits as content as any normal gardener." Elmer replied, looking to Dr. Birch with a smile. "You've really done something phenomenal here, Hazel. You're rehabilitating someone considered to be incurable."
"Patience and persistence, Elmer." She said with a proud smile. "If you'll excuse me, I should get back to her.. This is her first time back into the garden, I need to keep a close eye on how she's responding."
"Of course, of course." Dr. Neilson agreed, smiling encouragingly before stepping away, taking a last look at Pamela Isley with another muttered utterance of "remarkable" as he walked away.
As Hazel made her way over Holly looked warily at her. The guards had voiced concern with allowing Pamela into the Garden, but this was controlled an environment as they could ever hope to get while still exposing Isley to large numbers of plants. They had to know she would be triggered by them once she went back out into the normal world, and this was the best place to test the extent of her psychological recovery.
"Pamela?" Dr. Birch called out, coming to a stop a few feet from her patient and kneeling down to look at her closer to eye level. "How are you doing?"
The green skinned botanist looked up from her work with the marigold and sighed, dusting soil off her fingers as she sat back. "Better than these poor things... They need better care than this. They need a proper gardener who can look after them, if they grow too far too fast they're going to over whelm other species in the garden, and they're going to end up being too large for the nutrient supply in this soil. Really, they can't be expected to thrive in these conditions..."
"Well, now they have you to take care of them, Pamela." Dr. Birch replied with a smile.
"But I won't be here much longer, if everything goes well," Pamela observed shrewdly, "and then who will help the poor dears?"
"I suppose you have a point... Soon you'll have more important things to do with your abilities than taking care of Arkham's marigolds." Hazel acknowledged, taking a thoughtful tone. "Tell me, have you thought any further on what you will do once you get out?"
"Move."
"Oh? Where to?"
"I don't know yet. Somewhere where I can live in peace, without being harassed by people who refuse to accept what I am now."
"So you intend to isolate yourself?"
"Oh, not necessarily isolate myself. I'll probably bring Harley with me," she replied, sinking her spade into the earth deeply while growling angrily, "I can't live her to the clutches of that clown."
"But other than that?"
"Well I can't completely isolate myself, if I did I wouldn't be doing my duty to nature. No, I'll likely stay close at hand, continue to help the world how I can; but I certainly don't wish to spend my life listening to protesters outside my house condemning me for past sins. Yes, I think an Island, or some rural region well outside major cities would do nicely." Pamela explained, raking her fingers through the earth to turn and till the soil.
Hazel's face fell, grateful that Pamela wasn't looking at her as she made a few notes on her writing pad. She leaned against a hearty oak as she wrote, finishing her notes and closing her eyes as she tilted her head up and felt the sunshine on her face. For a few minutes there was silence, then Hazel opened her eyes and looked at her patient to find that Pamela was now sitting by the marigold plant peacefully and looking at the psychiatrist intently.
"You expected more." Pamela said, with a slim but somewhat sad smile.
Hazel returned the sad smile and nodded in admittance. "I admit, I had hoped-"
"That I would step in and save humanity from all it's grievances... There's a certain caped individual who has tried for ages to do the same thing." Pamela observed. "And if you will recall, his attempts were met mostly with animosity and hatred. Humanity is a strange beast, your kind rarely wish to accept free help, even divine intervention.. If Christ stepped down and told you all how to save your entire species, the only people who would listen would be the fundamentalists. Even the general practitioners of Christianity would be unlikely to respond to them. Now how do you think the entire world would respond if a woman who speaks directly to mother nature came forward and tried to help them? The Themysciran Princess has been trying a similar tactic for years and no one is particularly keen to what she and her gods have to say..."
"Well, you do have a point there... But that doesn't mean you couldn't help; after all, Wonder Woman has kept trying."
"Who said I won't help?" Pamela replied with a shrug. "I intend to rebuild forests, to try and heal the ozone, and fruit trees are one of the finest carbon controlling and oxygen producing plants, so there will be a certain increase in food presence on earth simply from my efforts to heal the world itself... It will depend on humanities own capability of whether or not they'll take advantage of this to fix their problems."
Hazel once more found herself jotting down notes. "So you're not still actively against human achievement."
"If I was I wouldn't be being considered for rehabilitation, now would I?" Pamela replied with a chuckle. "No, I bear no further ill will towards humanity, Dr. Birch; I'm just aware of how difficult it is to help humanity when humanity rarely wishes to accept the help of others. Your kind always wish to do it for themselves."
Hazel paused, lifting her eyebrows and looking intently at Pamela. "That's the second time you've conferred to humans as though you aren't a part of them."
"Well I'm not." Isley replied honestly, causing a surprised expression to cross her psychiatrist's face. "It's true, I'm not, we both know it. Besides, when I face that parole board I have to be honest, don't I? They need to see me for who I am, and be able to believe that I can be trusted as I am now, rather than expected to return to the beast I once was. The first step to that is acknowledging that I am not what I once was, in any way. I am no longer Poison Ivy... I am no longer Pamela Isley, either. What I am now is a new breed, I can no longer truly call myself human, and I will no longer be a villain, those two lives have been left behind."
Hazel nodded slowly, writing furiously as she listened to Isley's words. Half her writing now wasn't even for Pamela's therapy, Hazel no longer could find much to do to further improve Pamela's new outlook on life; but what she was learning more from her each day, and she knew it could be useful to other psychiatrists with other patients considered criminally insane. She suspected Pamela knew this, sometimes the pale green woman would simply sit and watch Doctor Birch write with an amused smile on her ruby lips, other times she's do something to entertain herself as she did now, returning to the plants she was tending to in the garden.
"It's what I can feel that sets me apart." the former botanist explained when she heard the scratching of Hazel's pen finally slow. "A human cannot feel the pain of these wondrous beings... I can. I know that the grass I fit on feels pressured from the weight I put upon it as I sit here. I know that the oak tree you lean against feels confined, because it's roots are held in by the thick concrete of Arkham's foundations. I know these marigolds know no common sense of what to do, because they've been left untended, and now their only knowledge is to expand, like conquering Roman's with no thought left in their mind but more, more, more."
"You feel all that?" Dr. Birch asked, with sudden curiosity, distracted away from her psychiatric study by the nature of Isley's meta-human abilities.
"And so much more." Isley acknowledged with a shake of her head. "The flowers, the trees, the shrubs, all of their intermingling roots. It is an insult to great intelligence, and the intelligence of humanity, to call myself human at this point."
Doctor Birch considered this for a moment, contemplating her words as Pamela returned to the Marigold, gently pruning the shrubbery to prevent it from overwhelming and crowing the other plants it shared a flower bed with. Once more patient and doctor lapsed into silence as Hazel quietly observed Isley's reaction to the plants around her.
It was almost like a trainer surrounded by animals. The individual plants all lifting, twisting and swaying as they battled for her attention and care. It was the first time that Hazel ever had a chance to observe Pamela in what could truly be considered her natural environment. The gardens themselves seemed to be enriched by her presence; Hazel saw vines and blossoms rising from the soil, lilies and roses that seemed to have died out mere weeks after their original planting were suddenly springing to life as if divinely resurrected.
Alongside them Pamela Isley seemed to undergo a similar transformation. The chlorokinetic woman's skin was greener, her eyes were brighter, and her limp disheveled red hair was changing before Hazel's eyes, gaining length, shine, volume and most particularly shifting in hue. The soft ginger-red color of a natural red head was becoming as rich and vibrant as a rose.
In this environment Hazel suddenly understood exactly why Isley could so easily manipulate and control others, with or without her pheromones. The woman's natural appearance became almost supernatural with her exposure to plants, a mere smile upon her lips filled Hazel with a warmth and pleasure that she could just barely recognize as not being an entirely natural feeling.
As she processed this she looked over towards the guards, feeling as if she were moving in slow motion. She saw the same rather dreamy smiles upon their faces and she could only imagine how a male doctor or guards would be reacting. All of this came merely from her presence, from what Dr. Birch could tell, Pamela wasn't even intentionally trying to entrance them, she was simply doing what she did naturally and the side-effect of it was seductive charisma so strong that it almost bordered upon genuine magical enchantment.
"Doctor...?"
"Yes, Pam?" Hazel replied, still smiling, though she was now trying to clear her head.
"Harley will be being released at the same time I will be, will she not?"
Finally Hazel's focus returned, the question caught her off guard but it instantly brought her mind back to the point. "If she continues with her current good behavior and continues to display a balanced emotional response, yes... Why do you ask?"
"Because we both know that if she's left alone she'll go back to him or she'll get herself in trouble and find herself back here." Pamela replied with a frown of disapproval. "Harleen is a very sweet woman but she doesn't tend to look before she leaps. If she doesn't have someone to hold her hand during her rehabilitation she's going to be in over her head in no time."
"Well, I must concede she has generally displayed an inability to function stably on her own." Hazel acknowledged with a faint nod. "Do you have a suggestion then?"
"I do." Pamela replied, turning away from the flowers to look at her psychiatrist. "I believe it would be beneficial to both of us to be allowed to transfer out of maximum security, we're both now more than qualified to be removed from Max. Sec. and allowed to more casually interact."
Dr. Birch made a quick note on her board, a thoughtful expression on her face. "Well, Pamela, that is a rather reasonable response. But before I can make a transfer request I do have to know why."
"Because it would benefit her to have someone to interact with, and to help her remember she won't be alone when she leaves the asylum. Harleen gets lonely easily, and that's what typically does her in and brings her back here." Isley replied, then she paused a moment, lowering her eyes reluctantly before continuing. "And... Because it would benefit me as well. It would.. Be nice to have someone I can interact with regularly before being reintroduced to society."
A bright smile blossomed on Hazel's face at that, it was a huge sign of progress, the very first time that Pamela had shown a desire to personally prepare herself for her rehabilitation. The young psychiatrist was thrilled at this, so much so that the difficulty at arranging the transfer didn't even stay her spirit, she was determined to make Isley's desire a reality.