Archive of Our Own

“Don't be mad!” Harley yells from the front door, baseball bat clattering to the floor and keys clinking into the bowl on top of her mail. There used to be three bowls, for sorting mail and keys and change. One went to Bud when he dropped his bowl off the fire escape, and Harley threw the other out the window on hour three of a nearby car alarm.

So one bowl, filled with mail and keys and change and hyena poop bags and a salt shaker filled with native seeds. When they walk the hyenas together, Harley drops the seeds as Ivy encourages them up out of the ground. Wildflowers radiate out for miles from their apartment.

Ivy’s brow furrows on instinct, folding a coffee punch card into her book and sliding it onto the table. She'd gotten home from her lab when Harley was out and dropped onto the couch to skim one of Harley’s psychology books from the coffee table. The sun must have finished setting and she hadn't noticed she was reading from the dim glow of the solar-powered fairy lights strung up on the wall.

“Why am I mad?”

It better not be another stray cat. There are only so many times she can be “in the area” of Selina’s place emptying out a mewling duffel bag. Her catnip is getting sick of her, she muses, standing and pulling the top of her coverall up over her tank top.

“I said don't be mad! You have to promise,” Harley pokes her head around the corner. She’s holding one arm behind her and pointing emphatically with the other.

Her hair is wet from the intermittent rain outside, bangs stuck down to her forehead. There are scrapes on her face and her forearm, and a blooming bruise on her collarbone under her jacket. Ivy feels her stomach lurch, anger or fear or a blur of both, and takes a breath through her nose.

She wakes one of the climbing ivy vines that crawl along the hooks on the ceiling to get the first aid kit out of the bathroom. Feels it return a flicker of acknowledgement, sleepy from the dark, then grow down towards the door handle.

“I'm not mad that you're hurt, Harl,” she says in one long exhale, walking over to where Harley is humming and hopping from foot to foot in the hall. Well, she's not mad at Harley. She might tear apart whatever idiot laid his hands on her.

Then she gets around the corner, and realises why Harley had opened with “don’t be mad”. Harley’s face drops into an exaggerated grimace. Ivy stops dead.

Batman is bleeding in their hallway.

The front door isn't even closed, which is a silly thing to get stuck on. But Ivy’s trying not to jump at him teeth first like a chimpanzee. So she looks for any emotion that isn't incredulous rage, and feels minutely embarrassed that someone might see her standing above Batman as he leans heavy on the doorframe, see her not trying to kill him, and… sell a photo to a gossip mag?

“I know you hate the guy, but we're technically co-workers now so you guys called a truce, I think, or maybe that just happened in my head but I was gonna ask you to call a truce,” Harley trips over her own words, eyes bouncing between them, “Cause you've been less maim and kill lately, sort of - like the last couple months, at least - and I'm a good guy now, so I was working with him and-”

“Harley. Why the fuck. Is Batman. In our apartment?”

The ivy surrounding them rustles to life, feeling the heat of her anger, pulsing back fear and comfort and question. It wraps around her hand balled in a fist, touches lightly at the wounds on Harley’s face and arms, and twists around Batman's neck as tight as it can without the stems snapping. She doesn't look at Harley, standing just to the right between the two of them.

He lets out a gurgling cough. Harley turns to put a hand on his arm, and her shoulders drop. Ivy’s stomach twists shamefully and she ignores it, continues to stare daggers at the stupid ears on his stupid mask. She doesn't look at Harley.

“Pam, please don't kill him. I carried him up three flights of stairs and if you just kill him in the hallway then I did all that for nothin’.”

The first aid kit drops onto the ground between the three of them, and Ivy jolts back. All the vines in the hallway jump with her. 

Batman grunts and falls forward onto one knee, his hand slipping from the doorframe to brace against the floor. He tries to hook a thumb under the cords around his neck. She finally gets a look at him, in the moonlight shining through the windows and the glow of the fairy lights. The bottom half of his face is a splotchy grey red from the vines and probably a lot of blood loss, given the splatter she can see behind him on the welcome mat.

She sees Harley put one hand out towards her in her periphery, as if she's a spooked horse. She mumbles a few swear words under her breath that Ivy can't make out over her own thrumming heartbeat in her ears.

A thin vine resting on Harley’s shoulder stretches and twists down her arm, leaves unfurling a bright baby green, like a cat twisting and purring around your legs when you get home. The traitor.

The vine on his neck twists tighter, the outer fibres tearing with the pressure. Ivy knows she could kill him right now. Hold tight until his vision blacks out. Snap his neck. Send one of the stems down into his throat and make leaves burst out in his lungs.

The arrogant son of a bitch who's thrown her in Arkham, who's burned her greenhouses, her babies, who wouldn't even kill that bastard when she-

“Pam. Please.”

She finally looks away from Batman. Looks at Harley. Her eyes are wide and sweet and pleading and Ivy feels the anger twist into a sickly sadness in her chest. Waits one more second, until the vines feel his pulse slow down.

She relaxes her tense fist, feeling the flash of pain where her fingernails were digging into her palm, and the vines on Batman's neck ease. They drop to twist around his shoulders and hold him still.

He takes a deep shuddering inhale. Harley drops the puppy dog eyes and blows out a sharp breath, then splits her face into a grin.

Before Ivy can say anything, Harley drops her whole body weight into her, her arms draped over Ivy’s shoulders. Ivy grabs her at the waist and stumbles back a step while Harley mumbles “thank you” and “love you” over and over, in between kissing her cheek and nose and forehead, stepping up on her tiptoes to reach.

The vine wrapped around Harley loosened as she fell towards Ivy, dropping down to twirl around their ankles cheerfully.

“Okay, okay, truce” she sighs, feeling the twisted ball in her chest diffuse out to a buzzing irritation, “But I'm not helping him.”

“I don't need either of your help,” Batman grumbles from the floor, voice hoarse. Harley spins in her arms so Ivy’s still holding her waist, glaring at him.

“You don't gotta be rude! I'm tryin’ to save your stupid life, ya big lout,” she barks, reaching over his shoulder to close the door behind him, hooking a foot around Ivy’s shin for balance. Ivy breathes a small sigh of relief that most of their neighbours are too scared to look them in the eye, nevermind sell their secrets.

She keeps her face set into a scowl, its effect weakened slightly as she doesn't want to let go of Harley yet. She wishes she could put her boots back on, but she doesn't want to step behind him to get them off the shoe rack.

Batman glares at her. She glares back.

“What happened? Mistake a boomerang for a smoke grenade and nick an artery on the backswing?”

She is not going to say the word batarang.

“Armour-piercing bullet.”

Ivy feels her fingers grip tight on Harley’s waist. Where the hell was he bringing her that she could get shot with an armour-piercing bullet? She was wearing a crop top. And shorts.

“I'm fine, Red. Too fast for ‘em to hit me! This guy, wearing sixty pounds of bat costume, was not,” Harley says, stepping forward to hook his arm onto her shoulder and get him standing.

Ivy lets go of Harley and separates the vines from the wall, keeping some wrapped around him in case he does something stupid. Well. Something else stupid, aside from getting shot and showing up at her home.

“I told you to leave me in the car. It can drive me back to base and I'll get medical attention there,” Batman says bluntly, undercut by the shallowness of his breathing, the weight he lets Harley take.

“Well you won't tell me how far away your little bat bunker is, and I brought you here so your gaggle of kids don't have to pull your corpse out of your car,” she replies, with much more energy.

She kicks the first aid kit along the floor as she carries Batman to the living room. Individually wrapped sterile gauze spills out as it spins across the floor. The box is overfilled from the three for one deals at the twenty-four hour drug store she drops by to tend her wounds on her commute home. She kicks it upside down to get over the rug and a bottle of eye wash rolls under the coffee table.

Batman keeps his head turned enough to keep one eye on Ivy.

Ivy sends the thin vines wrapped around her hands down to pick up after Harley, rubbing one thumb over the stem that's twirled around her index finger. She crosses her arms and hangs back, leaning a shoulder on the wall, then stands back up straight as the tension in her back starts getting painful. The house plants littered across the room chatter amongst themselves, relaying back to her in staggered time as the man's shadow crosses over their leaves.

Harley heaves him onto the couch and flicks a lamp on. He sits right at the edge of the seat, hunched forward slightly and holding a hand to his right side.

“Alright Batsy, how do we get you out of this thing? No funny business! I'll even keep my eyes closed if you have to take the mask off,” she starts, emptying the first aid kit onto the couch beside him then standing back with her arms on her hips, dropping the green plastic box to the floor. “Actually I need to empty out your bullet hole so maybe I shouldn't do that. I can get you a blindfold though! Would that help?”

Batman stares at her for a long ten seconds, and Ivy can feel him eyeing her in his periphery.

“Did you know Ivy was going to be here?”

“...No?”

Ivy hums from the doorway. She'd sent Harley a text when she arrived. Had gotten back six thumbs up and a photo of her on a rooftop with the message “stuck at work! please wait up ;)”. She figures Harley has her reasons to lie as poorly as she’s lying right now, so she won't interrupt.

“Alright! Maybe. Thought you looked shitty enough that she’d take it easy on you. Which was sorta right.”

Batman does not blink. The fact he hasn't crashed through the window yet means he trusts that Ivy won't kill him. Purely because Harley asked. Which is…

She feels her eye twitch.

“You should have put me in the car.”

“You coulda got yourself in the car if you could walk that far,” Harley points out, wagging a finger in his face. “But you got hit, bad, and didn't hang back and let me clear up like I said you should. So I had to peel you off the floor and bring you back here to clean you up. Seriously, your flock a’ birds would never let me hear the end of it if I sent you back there with a bullet in you.”

“I'm fine.”

“You were passed out. I've seen you shake off a whole periodic table a’ chemical weapons, but even you only got so much blood.”

He doesn't reply.

“Ah for fuck’s-” she cuts herself off to squeeze the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “Stick around for ten minutes to stop bleedin’ and I won't tell anyone about the amateur that got the lucky shot off on you. You can even stitch yourself up.”

She turns halfway around to look at Ivy. Her bangs are plastered messily across her forehead like she's just gotten out of a shower. She gives her a playful glare, but her jaw is set a little tight.

“And Ivy promises not to kill you. Unless you provoke her, probably, so don't start a fight. Promise, Red?”

Ivy shrugs. Then sees Harley’s eyes soften as her face turns away from Batman, giving her the same pleading look as earlier. It's less exaggerated. She's not sure yet why Harley needs this from her. But she's had plenty chances to kill Batman, and she can make plenty more if Harley ever gets sick of his stoicism. She can play nice for an evening.

“Sure. Promise. Hate to kick a bat when it's down.”

Batman looks between them as Harley turns back to him with a bright smile. Stares at her for another long ten seconds. Harley crosses her arms and starts tapping her foot like a cartoon character.

He finally relents, slipping a matte black multitool out of his belt and moving just slow enough to not flinch as he stretches behind him to cut out the right side of his suit. He drops the tool back into his belt and sets the panel on his lap politely. Ivy rolls her eyes.

The right side of his torso under the suit is slick and bright red. Blood gushes out of a penny sized wound at the bottom of his ribcage every second or so. He's keeping his breathing slow and shallow, trying not to expand his ribs.

“The bullet went through and through. I just need to slow the bleeding,” he explains, speaking overly slow, as if he's reconsidering every word he says. He turns then pauses at the pile of bandages and room temperature ice packs to his left. “Do you have a towel?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Harley hops up onto her toes and salutes. She spins around the side table into the kitchen, grabbing a leaf-patterned tea towel off a drawer handle.

Holding it up in the light, there's a yellowish stain from her morning green tea. She tilts her head thoughtfully, then throws it behind her onto the back of the couch. 

“Sit your keister on that one before you bleed on my nice new couch. Well, like new. I found it on the street and cleared out the rats nest in the arm, but I put that side against the wall so you can't even tell,” she chatters conversationally from the kitchen, grabbing an armful of towels and a roll of duct tape from under the sink. Ivy wishes she'd known about the rats before this moment.

Harley empties her arms out on top of the bandages, knocking a few off the couch onto the floor, then turns back around to open the fridge. There are a handful of loose alphabet magnets on the door and a photo of the two of them leaping away from the cops across a rooftop, cut out from a newspaper. It's been unfolded and flattened out, the paper yellowed from age.

Batman tucks the stained towel under his leg, then folds a clean towel into a perfect square and anchors it onto his side with duct tape. Ivy can't see most of his face under the mask, but his jaw is tense as he reaches behind him to attach another to his back. The vines are still wrapped around his arms at the shoulders, and he makes no move to pull them off. He's a surprisingly courteous guest.

She turns her head to watch Harley, letting him drop out of focus in her field of vision as he presses down on the makeshift bandage on his front.

“When I gave blood in college, they gave me a juice box and a cookie. And I got to skip Statistics cause I told the prof I felt dizzy,” Harley half-yells from behind the fridge door, even though she's four feet away and perfectly audible. “I don't think he believed me actually, but the TA looked like she was gonna cry when I started describin’ the needle so he didn't even mark me absent, just kicked me out. Dunno if you'll get out of work. Your boss is a hardass. But you should have a snack.”

She pops out from behind the door with a half-empty cup of iced coffee, a can of Dr Pepper, and a box of leftover noodles Ivy knows has been in there for a few days too long. She doesn't mention to her that Batman won't have the same iron stomach she does.

She'd given Harley as much poison immunity as she could over the years, returning to makeshift labs to rework the formula whenever she woke up in a cold sweat. Her nightmares had shifted out of the lab she was made in, and became flitting visions of waking up next to Harley, seizing, her eyes bloodshot and pale skin turned a putrid green. Harley would complain about waking up alone, whine about the needles. But the more time they spent together, the more scared Ivy was of hurting her.

The first time they'd slept side by side in a creaky motel bed on the run, Ivy slept flat on the mattress so she could put a pillow in between them. Harley had teased her sleepily until she passed out, but never moved it. Now, Harley sleeps with her whole body draped across Ivy’s skin, and she's barely gotten sick in years. And she uses Ivy's most precious work to eat food that the hyenas turn their noses at.

Harley scrunches her nose as she sips the old coffee through the melting paper straw, handing Batman the can and takeout box. He places the box gingerly on the coffee table, still pressing down on his wound. He holds the can up close to his face to examine it, pointedly glancing over at Ivy.

Ivy rolls her eyes again.

“You think this is my master plan, you paranoid rodent? You get shot by an idiot that can't aim for centre mass, Harley drags you back to her home, where she lives, she convinces me not to snap your neck and then… hands you a poisoned drink? In a sealed can? You think I broke into the factory and dosed the batch?”

“You've broken into plenty of factories before, Ivy,” he sneers, seeming less convicted and more catty. Ivy bites back the urge to stick her tongue out at him.

“Okay! Okay! No fighting. Here, show a’ good faith!” Harley interjects, plucking the drink out of his hand. She cracks it open with one hand and takes a sip. “Do you want me to wait fifteen minutes like they do when they check if you're allergic to hair dye?”

Batman blinks. He's still looking at Ivy. Harley also turns to look at Ivy helplessly, like she wants her to convince Batman he can make himself at home. Maybe she hopes the blood loss causes memory loss too.

“You're both immune to poison.”

Ivy narrows her eyes incredulously and thinks about punching him in the bullet wound. Harley also seems to think about punching him in the bullet wound, perhaps with a little less force.

He has the sense to look a touch chagrined, blinking a couple times before glancing at the fern on the side table. Ivy does rough calculations in her head on how long it would take to decompose him, rolling a stem on her hand in between her fingertips. Harley sighs, placing the can on the kitchen counter behind her and popping the lid off her coffee to pour the last of it into her mouth.

“Well you've got too much pride to back down on this now, but you should have something,” says Harley, turning back around to look through the kitchen. She slides her jacket off and drops it with her empty coffee on the counter. “That was my last Dr Pepper. I was supposed to get groceries today but you made me go case out a bunch of gun runners at the asscrack of dawn. I went to the same bagel shop four times today. Bagels weren't even that good.”

Ivy raises an eyebrow in her direction, but Harley avoids her gaze as she hops and leans a knee on the counter to reach the cups on the top shelves.

“Okay, that stuff’s for dogs… Ooh, I got a lemon - actually that looks mummified, not that,” she murmurs to herself.

She hooks a hand under the cupboard, leaning her whole body off the counter backwards to cheat out to the back of Batman's head. Her other arm waves out in a ceremonious arc.

“Can I interest you in a glass of world's finest Gotham tapwater, now with extra lead?”

“...Sure.”

Harley shoves off her knee up onto her foot, picks a glass out of the cupboard, and flips backwards elegantly onto the floor. Ivy bites down on the inside of her lip.

Harley’s showboating.

They haven't run a job together for a long time. Harley’s been trying to stay out of jail, since her last jailor put a bomb in her head then cleared her record. She had to get the bomb out herself. Fucking cops. Fucking jails. Fucking Waller.

Before they were everything they are to each other, when they were doing smash and grabs or heists or elaborate schemes, they clashed. Harley would improvise where Ivy was trying to mastermind. She'd take big risks for little reward, set herself up to fall to see where she could jump. Ivy knew when to cut her losses and run.

When it worked, when they both made it back home, Ivy was the one waiting for her to show up bloody and victorious. When it didn't, Ivy was just the one waiting.

Always the outdoor cat, Harley would turn up days late, hungry and affectionate. A bird in her teeth to drop in Ivy’s lap.

She did a tumbling routine on the concrete floor of the warehouse Ivy was holed up in, stuck the landing with her arms stretched up above her, knees shaking. Asked for a score when she dropped a bag of cash on the table. She set up an aerial silk on the roof of a greenhouse, spun all the way down, and had to pop her shoulder back in the socket before she went in for a hug. The last time they got separated on a job, Ivy spent the next two days in the basement of a dilapidated church she was living in, casing it like she was expecting a toddler with a thirty inch vertical leap. Then she found out Harley was back in Arkham.

When she'd pulled Harley out of the hole in the crumbling stone, sirens blaring, she didn't trust herself to say anything without getting angry. She carried her out to the woods in silence. Let Harley run out of chatter about Batman and his flashy new sidekick, let her rattle off directions to where she'd stashed the gems she got taken down for.

When they got to the car, Harley did a one-handed handstand on the hood to show she'd been keeping up with her practice in Arkham. Ivy waited until she got in, turned the key forward, then turned it back again.

She doesn't remember the words, but she remembers the way Harley shrunk into herself in the passenger seat as she told her to stop showing off. She remembers biting her gums hard enough to bleed, the bitter chemical taste of her own poison blood. 

Remembers clawing through all the dense rotting emotion in her chest. Reaching out a hand as slow as she could to brush her hair out of the tears on her face, and telling her the truth.

She didn't need the showgirl.

She just wanted Harley to come home.

Ivy rewrote all her plans. Made sure they never went down alone, again.

Harley will forever be a showgirl. When she treks out to Ivy’s sinking shack in the swamp, she does cartwheels in the leaf litter and asks Ivy to rate them out of ten, and laughs when she never goes below a nine. But she doesn't need to put on the show when she turns up hungry. She knows Ivy. Trusts she would love her with none of the stage lights.

Now Harley’s doing pirouettes around her own kitchen. Looking through the cupboards trying to find a way to make Gotham tapwater fancy. For Batman.

Who treats Harley like a bite risk, and throws her scraps of respect when she follows his orders.

Who Harley got out of bed before dawn for. Who she brought back to her home. Who she wants to get along with her girlfriend.

Because she wants to impress him. Because she cares what he thinks about her. Because she wants him to know how different her life is now.

Ivy lets out a very loud, very deep sigh, uncrosses her arms, and walks slowly over the drop into the chair across from the couch.

“So you don't get a crick in your neck keeping your eyes on me. Seeing as you're already injured,” she says, as sarcastically sweet as she can. He played along when it got her talking, but he really hated the flirting. She would almost respect that about him, if she ever respected him.

Batman lets out a short huff. She can see behind his eyes that he’s running through any recent crimes she might have gotten away with. He’s waiting for her to break the fragile truce Harley had set, and it must be all the more unsettling for him that she isn’t. He never fully lets her out of his sight, but he's trying to take everything in. Casing the exits. Counting the houseplants.

She did try to kill him in the last twenty minutes. She almost succeeded. But she's almost succeeded before, and he never looked this… off kilter. His hand that's not pressing down on his bandage is sitting limply on his lap. At some point he'd relaxed enough to almost sit back onto the couch, but he was still sitting with perfect posture, his back half a foot away from the cushions.

She's spent enough years with Harley to understand what's going on in her head, however nonlinear it is. Most of it, anyway. And Harley will just tell her the rest of the time.

Batman's not stupid enough to underestimate Harley’s intelligence, or how dangerous Ivy can be. But he seems very slightly out of his depth sitting on their couch, looking at the books on their coffee table. Bleeding through their teatowels.

The fact that Ivy’s finally relaxed won’t be helping at all, so she tries to get as comfortable as possible. She pulls a foot up so her knee is bent in front of her, leaning back into the chair. Her back hurts from spending all day hunched over a lab bench, and sitting in this half-hearted standoff with Batman isn't helping her untense.

Harley steps out of the kitchen and folds her stomach over the back of the couch with the water, one leg stretched out behind her.

“Here you go, extra lead as promised! Landlord was supposed to get us those filters for the taps with the grant from the Wayne foundation, but he used the cash to renovate his building uptown. I know it's not exactly your thing, but if you're up to smackin’ him around while you're here I'd owe you one.”

There's a cocktail umbrella sticking out of the glass, and two lonely ice cubes. Batman takes the water out of her hand slower than Ivy's ever seen him move.

Harley hops over the couch and perches onto the arm next to the pile of medical supplies. Crosses her legs and watches him expectantly with her chin in her hand as he stares at the glass.

“Not much use poisoning the water supply in a building with lead pipes,” Ivy quips. She's starting to enjoy herself a little.

He takes a sip, holding the umbrella to the side with one finger like a seasoned professional. He does not wince, so he's either a Gotham native or whatever training he'd gotten to withstand torture was worth the effort. The water here tastes like chewing on a battery.

“We used to have one of those filters in the fridge but Ivy got dirt in it and it was a bitch to clean. Plus, immune to poisons!”

Harley points two thumbs at herself and turns to flash a smile at Ivy. 

“You didn't have to throw out the whole thing. I got you a new filter. Also, hon, you're not immune to heavy metal poisoning.”

Harley’s smile drops to a pout.

“I'm not? Man, I gotta move.”

Batman is staring into his glass like it might grant him three wishes to stop bleeding, get into his car, and go home.

“How's the chest wound?” Harley pries, leaning down into his personal space to get a look. “Stopped bleedin’ yet? Want me to put pressure on the back?”

“It’s… fine. And no.”

He lifts his hand to check. Blood has soaked through the bottom of the towel, but it's stopped pouring down his stomach with each breath. He still looks a little grey in the face, with speckled burst blood vessels from Ivy’s vines.

He drinks as much of the water as he can without tilting his head back, then places the glass onto a coaster next to the abandoned takeout box. Ivy figures he either had the same apprehension about eating it as he had drinking a soda from the home of an infamous poisoner, or he got a whiff and realised how old it was.

“I'm going,” he says, moving to stand up.

Harley jumps up before he moves, waving her hands in front of him.

“Wait, wait, wait! I wanted to get Bud and Lou to meet you again. They still remember you from the old days and get mad when they can smell you off me,” she rushes. She takes off before he can reply, continuing to yell down the hall as she goes to the bedroom. “I think they'll be nicer if you're injured!”

She spins around and walks backwards once she’s out of Batman’s vision, giving Ivy a thumbs up. Batman narrows his eyes after Harley, but doesn't move to leave again. He probably should.

The hyenas are not gentle with anyone that's hurt Harley. Ivy would never yell at her - well, not since before they became actual friends, when her recklessness stopped being just a liability and became a concern, an insight she couldn't shake off. But they still argue. About the effectiveness of recycling; or Ivy’s crumbling swamp home and Harley’s lead-lined apartment; or the excesses and necessities of their own brands of violence.

Ivy always keeps her tone gentle and direct, backs off if Harley starts folding in on herself, tells her often and always that she loves her. That she only wants her to have everything good she deserves. Harley takes deep breaths and uses “I” statements and tells her she wants to be buried with her when they die so they can grow into a colossal mutant tree and photosynthesise together until the sun goes out. Tells her she loves her. Often and always.

Still, at the sound of any tense conversations in the house, the hyenas swarm around Harley’s feet. They lay on top of one another in between them on the couch. Keep an eye on Ivy for a few hours until they settle down and let her scratch under their chins. And Ivy’s never thrown Harley through a pile of crates to incapacitate her while they barked from their cages.

She might get to see Batman die tonight without lifting a finger. She hears Harley cooing at Bud and Lou to wake up from their nap. From the sounds of it, they're unconvinced.

Though, from the sounds of it, she's not trying that hard.

Oh god.

She's trying to get her to make small talk with Batman.

Ivy might strangle herself and put them both out of their misery.

Batman's staring at her again. Or still. She wants to fire out another vaguely threatening quip, but more than that she wants him to get out of her house so she can watch a bad horror movie with her girlfriend on the couch he's bleeding on. Actually, he's probably being very careful not to leave behind any of his blood. She could absolutely use that.

“You're… good. Together,” he says after a few minutes, breaking the silence. He knows exactly what Harley’s doing and he's going along with it. Probably because he wants Ivy to suffer.

She closes her eyes and tilts her head up at the ceiling, noting a spindly crack across the paint that wasn’t there a few days ago. She doesn't want to engage but he really does piss her off.

“Fuck off,” she says curtly, dropping her head down to stare back at him. “We're not bonding. I hate you. And you make my girlfriend run around after you like a dog.”

He raises an eyebrow. He really makes that mask with just enough expression that you can tell when he's being condescending.

“I'm not calling her a dog. I'm saying you treat her like a dog, you sanctimonious twit.”

“Harley is… enthusiastic. But… competent,” he responds, laboured, like it takes him a tremendous effort to be barely nice. “She doesn't need…”

He cuts himself off, frowning. Looks at the books on the coffee table for another long few seconds. Then, he actually turns away from Ivy for the first time all evening.

He looks at the fairy lights strung above the window. Out to the fire escape and the bright yellow pot of the lavender plant that's spreading out through the railings. His breathing is as perfectly even as it's ever been, one hand still on his bleeding ribs and the other sitting in his lap.

He gazes out the window for a moment. It must be close to two in the morning by now. The rain had died out just before they arrived, and in its absence she can hear people yelling from the street, no longer huddling under cover. Just as she’s pondering waking up the vines on Batman’s shoulders to poke him in the eye, he turns back around.

“She's not like the rest of my team.”

“Your gaggle of children? I should hope not.”

“I can't trust her,” he emphasises.

“But she's still reliable enough to bring to a shootout? Or did you just need someone there to carry you back to your car when you fucked up?”

He blows a breath out through his nose, frowning. Ivy looks out to the fire escape while he thinks. Water is dripping from the grated floor above them. There's an ashtray next to the lavender filled with rainwater, for when Harley smokes half a cigarette every eight months or so, then complains about the taste and swears off of them forever. Again. It’s been a year now.

Ivy rests her chin on the elbow draped over her knee. A small delicate leaf on her arm taps her jaw gently. Harley might have fallen asleep. Batman finally figures out what he was trying to say.

“She wants me to believe that she's… changed.”

It's her turn to raise an eyebrow at him. She already knows that.

“It’s… important to her,” he says, looking down at the bloody scrap of his suit on his knees, still frowning. He doesn't understand why.

Ivy knows most of the reasons. The things Harley's scared might be true, the competitive and vindictive reasons, having something with the bat that he never could. The actual honest ones.

Back in the day, before Gotham was a war zone or a siege city, Harley and Ivy would get out of Arkham the right way and play pretend at good citizens for months at a time. Ivy would get angry, quickly, and Harley would get restless, eventually. And they would get caught.

Ivy would stay angry the whole time Batman tried to knock her out, bare her just too sharp to be human teeth at every one of the cops and guards on the way back to her cell. If they didn't have the hazmats ready when she arrived, Batman would drag her back himself. He was the only one stupid enough to touch her. She'd curse him out or threaten him or flirt out of habit. Occasionally discuss the importance of her work, the agony she could feel screeching out from the Green. He would listen quietly, tell her that she wasn't lying but she was dangerous, and drop her in that dark room.

Harley would fight and scream and cry and joke, always taking a chance to really ham it up. But if she was alone and double cuffed in the batmobile, not in the back of a cop car or an ambulance, eventually she'd get quiet. And in the quiet, he'd tell her to leave. When she did, he'd say he was glad. Batman would tell her he really thought she had a chance to be the person she was before.

People tend to open up to Harley. She says she has one of those faces.

Ivy hates Batman and will always hate Batman. He's a cynical, arrogant, self-righteous, one-man crusade that thinks he's God's gift to Gotham and does whatever he wants with no consequence. She said that to Harley once and she said that's what Batman would probably say about Ivy. She'd stalked off to the park until the sun set and passive aggressively thumbs down replied to all of Harley’s apology texts.

Harley thinks he's a good guy, who's trying his best to help people in his weird way. She likes the ears on his costume. She thinks he must have experienced something traumatic at a formative age, that it shaped how he looked at the world. That his obsession with striking fear into the overcrowded criminal underbelly of Gotham might come from a fear itself, projected. She says he is Gotham, sort of, even though he's only one guy. She grew up here before he was ever part of it, but she says he has the same attitude as everyone that ever helped her out in the city. Smacking you on the head while they pick you out of the gutter. Kind but not nice.

He had believed in her. All those years ago.

Ivy clears her throat, letting him look back up at her before she talks again.

“You don't think she's changed?” she asks tersely. She knows Harley has.

“People don't change.”

She needs to stop rolling her eyes before she strains something.

“No, people don't want to change. So they don't. Harley does.”

“On a good day, I can believe that,” he says carefully.

“Good for you. Glad you only bring Harley around to get shot at with you on good days,” she replies sarcastically. She's running out of patience for the tragic hero act. “What the hell do you do on bad days?”

He presses into the towel taped to his side. Picks up the water again, tilting his head back to swallow the last few drops. Keeps the glass in his hand as he lets the cocktail umbrella fall down into the melting ice.

“I wait for the good days.”

Ivy blinks at the floor in horror as she feels a burn of angry tears behind her eyes. It passes as quickly as it starts. Whatever fight response she'd had when she saw Batman in her hallway has burned out, leaving her heady and tired. He’s never going to stop believing Harley is a woman just too far gone, that he missed out on saving. She could tear him in half.

She shouldn't have spoken to him about her. The second they were anything to each other, Harley was her heart on her sleeve. She'd spent years abandoning all tethers to her humanity, trying to save the world. Trying to destroy it. Since she met Harley, she's thought about her every single day.

She knows about every damned act Harley can remember committing and say out loud. She's watched her talk about it, joke about it, cry about it. She'd met her beside the shallow grave Harley dug herself out of, over and over. She's watched Harley be a doctor, a sidekick, a weapon. A bloody, victorious hero. Harley has been in evolution every second of her life.

If Batman thinks he has any authority on who Harley is, he's as much of an idiot as Ivy always thought he was.

She stands up out of the chair, relishing as he snaps his head back up to assess her. She should put one of those vines into his ear and tear out a chunk of his brain.

“You're an arrogant son of a bitch, you know that?”

He hums briefly. She strides off down the hallway to get to Harley, not caring if he's there when she gets back. The ivy along the ceiling in the hall curls closer to her as she passes.

When she arrives at the bedroom, the door is cracked open. Harley is kneeling on the floor, arm stretched across the bed and neck bent uncomfortably where she's asleep on the edge. Bud and Lou are resting their heads on her arm, sleeping peacefully. She definitely fed them too much earlier - they never nap like this after Harley feeds them. They each open one eye to look at her as she walks in.

Ivy feels her body unwind as soon as she sees her. She steps into the room softly, crouching down next to Harley and tapping a light finger on the hand resting on the floor. Feels her jerk back at the touch, then relax.

Harley picks her head up and opens one eye, groaning.

“You left me with our house guest,” Ivy teases flatly. She curls her arms around her crouched knees to watch Harley wake up.

“Shit. I knew I shouldn't a’ had that coffee.”

“Usually keeps people up, love.”

“It’s hit or miss for me. Batman run off?” she yawns, slipping her arm out from under the hyenas and stretching them above her. “Wait, you didn't kill him, did you?”

“I did not. I just thought about it often. And he probably jumped out the window the second I left the room.”

“Yeah, he loves doin’ that. Did he at least finish the water?”

“Yes, actually.”

Harley whoops. She pulls both hair ties off of her pigtails and pings them into a corner of the bedroom, on top of a pile of laundry.

“He likes me, he really really likes me,” she quotes in an exaggerated mid-atlantic accent, shaking out her hair. “You know Sally Field never actually said that? One of those mandala effects.”

“Yes. You made me watch the acceptance speech.”

Harley stands up fluidly, offering both hands out to help Ivy up off the floor. Keeps one of Ivy’s hands in hers once she's standing. She reaches out to ruffle Lou’s ears with her other hand to wake him up properly. He grumbles, rolling over onto his side and stretching his legs straight, toes fanning out.

“Come on you lazy mutts. I took you out at 5am. Don't you need to pee?”

“I took them to the park before I fed them,” Ivy offers, leaning over to scratch the top of Bud’s head. “He almost took the head off a cocker spaniel.”

Harley awws, turning to hold onto her shoulder and kiss her on the cheek. Ivy leans back to look at her face up close, holding her chin between her finger and her thumb. Harley smiles at her sweetly. Her hair has dried out from the rain, curling over her shoulders. There's a scrape above her eyebrow, the ends of her bangs stained with dried blood. A cut at the bottom of her jaw, in the middle of a dark reddish bruise.

“Somethin’ on my face?”

“Nothing bad. Let's get you cleaned up.”

They walk back out to the living room. Ivy holds her breath before they turn the corner, squeezes Harley’s hand, but Batman has, predictably, already left.

The latch is on the front door. He'd put the leftover noodles away and the cup by the sink. Left a pile of cleanly cut vines on the coffee table. Took a few of the towels. He must have gone out the fire escape and closed the window behind him. The whole wall rattles whenever Ivy opens that window, so she has no idea how he did that without making any sound.

She sets Harley down carefully on the couch and kisses the back of her hand before she lets it go, opening an alcohol pad from the pile of them falling into the couch cushions. Apologises softly when Harley hisses at the sting, hands her strips of medical tape to attach squares of gauze over her forehead and jaw. Upon request, she presses a kiss onto each of the dressings.

Harley recounts her day from the couch as Ivy searches through her cupboards to make her something to eat. Drops the noodles into the trash when Harley isn’t looking, rinses out her coffee cup to drop it on top of the overflowing recycling. There’s a tin of chilli in the back of a cupboard, so she heats it up in a stained pot. Harley hands her the vines and she returns them to resettle in their pot, coaxing the ends to connect with the root system.

Harley describes lining up six guys in front of the crates of guns and dominoing them into one another while Batman was dripping blood over the floor taking down the driver. She slips her shoes off and slides over to lay on the couch, resting her feet on top of the towels and bandages. Asks about Ivy’s lab work as Ivy hands her a truly miserable looking bowl of watery chilli, and the flattening Dr Pepper from the counter. Harley thanks her lovingly, as if Ivy had grown the beans from the ground herself.

Ivy picks her legs up to drop them on her lap, tracing patterns over her knees. She’d found an old hard drive with methods for introducing genes to increase hardiness into more fragile plants, so she’d spent the day working backwards from it to figure out where she’d found the original gene on the donor plant’s DNA. Checked on the progress on a few of her patents she was trying to make publicly available. She might need to get a lawyer. She only knows criminal defense attorneys. And Two Face.

The rain has picked back up when Harley finishes. It patters on the windows, and she can feel the lavender outside grumble from the excess water. The yelling has disappeared again. Everyone must have scattered when Batman dropped off the fire escape. They sit peacefully for a moment after Harley slides the bowl onto the coffee table.

“Did you speak to him? Before he left?” Harley asks hopefully.

“Yes,” Ivy sighs. Feels a twisting derisive irritation crawl up her throat that he still has any place in her evening. “It was awful.”

“Was he mean? I’ll key his car.”

“Not exact- his bulletproof car?”

“I'll find a way.”

Harley picks up one of Ivy’s hands to tap on her fingers like she's playing piano. Ivy drops her head onto the back of the couch.

“He wasn't mean. Just irritating, as always.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. He thinks you’re competent. And enthusiastic,” Ivy relays. She doesn't want to tell Harley he didn't trust her. Harley already knows that, but hearing it from Ivy might be salt in the wound.

“Huh. Competent seems good. Dunno about enthusiastic. I feel like that’s an insult coming from him.”

Harley’s staring down at Ivy’s hand, tapping two fingers slowly. When she'd stepped out of her grave for the last time, the real last time, that rotting corpse of a clown had spread rumors and slander to everyone who cared to listen to him speak. Harley knew he would. She'd rolled her eyes at the first guy who showed up to get his proxy revenge on the clown by knocking down his ex-sidekick. Then she made sure he would never walk again. 

She'd sat in Ivy’s apartment after, when they were still just shy of together, but already sharing half a heart. Told her she was going to be something else one day. She was going to be undeniable.

Ivy hopes she can remember that. She believed her then, like she believed the sun was in the sky. She can feel it every morning.

“You're…” she stops. She wants to be able to say it right. Harley would know what to say, even if she didn’t believe it. “Harley, you don't need anything from him. You know that, right?”

“I know,” she replies quietly. Her fingers stop still, and she threads them through Ivy’s to hold her hand in her lap.

Ivy sits up to turn towards her, dipping to try and catch her eyes as she squeezes her hand. The vines resting on her arm twirl around Harley’s wrist.

“I mean it. You're good, you're so good. You're the most incredible person I know.”

“Most of the people you know are career criminals,” she jokes weakly, avoiding Ivy’s eyes to look down to her shoes on the floor.

“I know Batman. And he pales in comparison.”

Harley looks back up at her, chewing her lip. She’s starting to smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“You hate Batman.”

“He has, as much as it pains me to admit it, helped a lot of people,” Ivy relents, trying to wade through Harley’s late-night onset tide of self-deprecation. If Harley honestly asked, Ivy would drop the feud and volunteer to be the next Robin. “You can do the same. You are doing the same. With him and without him.”

Harley cracks a half smile. Nudges her knee into Ivy’s stomach.

“And you're not just saying that because you love me?”

“I'm saying that because I love you, and because I know you.”

Harley reaches out and pulls Ivy to lay half on top of her, huffing out a laugh. Ivy wraps an arm around her shoulders and curls her knees up so her feet are pressing against a box of painkillers, their legs tangled together.

Ivy’s body heat is considerably colder than most humans, resting somewhere on the high end of room temperature when she’s out of the sun. Even through her clothes, she can feel the warmth radiating off Harley, feels her pulse pick up in her temple where it burns against Harley’s chest. They always even out, after a while.

“Love you too Pammy. And I know, Batman's just… some guy. Even though tonight did feel a little bit like introducing you to my dad. More violent, maybe.”

“Ew. Didn't you kiss him once?”

“Years ago! You've kissed him way more than I have.”

“To poison him. It's not my fault it's the most efficient way to knock him out. He wouldn't exactly let me pour my blood in his mouth.”

She can feel Harley shake as she laughs. Ivy smiles into Harley’s shoulder. They rest for a moment as she runs her hands through Ivy’s hair.

Ivy can feel her laugh again when she starts to speak.

“D’ya think he liked my place?”

“Oh god. Do you even like your place? I keep finding chunks of the bathroom wall in the trash.”

“I like it when you’re in it. And the wall only falls off ‘cause Bud and Lou scratch at it when I’m in the shower.”

“Why are they in the bathroom while you shower?”

“Keepin’ me company.”

Ivy laughs, lifting her head off Harley’s shoulder to look up at her. Her eyes are fluttering closed. The solar battery for the fairy lights is dying out, so it must be close to sunrise. They’re never out for more than a few hours. Harley never shuts them off, just lets them recharge in the morning.

“I like it when you’re in it too.”

“Really?”

She does not like this apartment. She’s lived in storm drains nicer than this place. Even Arkham had the decency not to charge rent.

“Well. I like you.”

“Whoa. Do you like-like me?” Harley teases.

She’s melting into the couch. Ivy’s going to have to carry her to bed, if she can get up herself. She lays her head back down on Harley’s shoulder, still admiring her face, and pretends she’s only going to stay here for another ten minutes.

“Harley, I am incredibly in love with you. Even though you left me to make small talk with Batman.”

“Aww, I love you too Pammy,” Harley coos, eyes closed as she starts dozing off. “Sorry I didn’t get to see it.”

“Not an apology.”

They fall asleep on the couch. When the sunrise wakes them up a few hours later, Ivy’s back is killing her and she’s sweating through her shirt. Harley ends up carrying her to bed, scooping her up in two arms and skipping down the hall like she weighs nothing.

When Harley opens the front door early in the afternoon, hyena leashes tangled around her arms, they have a new welcome mat. It's Halloween themed, with cartoon ghosts and pumpkins. The blood is gone.

Harley laughs loud enough to wake up Ivy from down the hall.