Somewhere Near The Coast, Sunday

[joan_of_bark]

Poison Ivy had an army. Composed of wellness freaks and too-rich white women, but still: she was going to use it.

And so early in the morning on Sunday, instead of going to yoga class, the attendants of the annual Glop wellness retreat found themselves standing on a road. Waiting for the oil trucks to arrive. Until the brakes kicked in and the wheels screeched and Pam could push herself to the front of her blockade.

“Sorry, friends. This is the end of the line,” she said. Hands on her hips, chin held high.

“What the hell are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” the trucker snarled as she climbed out of her vehicle. She was followed by a man.

“Exactly what it looks like,” Pam said flatly. “Blocking this oil refinery.”

“You climate freaks really think that by standing here, you’re doing something,” the trucker lady spat.

Pam’s mouth quirked into a nasty smile. “We are,” she said. “We’re slowing it down.”

“What?!”

“Slowing it down,” she repeated patiently. “I used to think the solution was just to kill everyone. Now I just make it very expensive to do business the old way.” She paused. “But I might just change my mind.”

The trucker narrowed her eyes. “What if we just run you down?”

“Do it,” Pam said flatly.

The trucker got back in the car. She started the engine.

They wouldn’t. They were outnumbered. It was messy; they’d chicken out. Human nature would kick in, and they’d think, what the hell am I doing? That’s what happens.

Most of the time.

The engine roared and the wheels rolled and fear struck Pam like an electric current. Most of the time. Not this time! Headlights flared up bright and the large machine came rolling towards them–

What the hell had she done?

She grabbed Janet tight. “Don’t look,” she managed. She closed her eyes, and waited for death.

There was something she’d forgotten about life. About the poisonous little things in her system. About the poisonous little things everywhere. Trees, growing through the cracks in the sidewalk, winding vines reclaiming brick and mortar.

Life. Ferocious and eternal. It always found a way.

She couldn’t breathe. It was everywhere. Choking her. Pushing down on her. Her fingers scrambled and pulled with the desperation of the living, fighting death. It congealed under her nails, clung to her hair and her skin.

Just as suddenly, she could breathe again.

Poison Ivy and her army yanked themselves up out of the dirt, and into the open sky, shedding mushroom spores everywhere. Pam’s hand closed around an arm and pulled up, freeing some poor woman from the earth.

“I remember this,” Pam managed. “When I got to Fandom– I think we just travelled through the mycelial network.”

Behind her, Janet coughed as she pulled herself up out of the soil. Sucking heavy breaths in through her mouth, triggering more coughs. “What?”

“Since you’re all infected with the lamia,” Pam managed, reaching back to retie her ponytail. “I could take you with me. Through the network of fungal threads between mushroom colonies.”

“But that’s really cool,” Janet said, sitting back. “Isn’t that really cool? I feel like it’s really cool.”

She was still under the influence of the lamia, Pam realized. She thought all of this was fun. Yet as she pulled yet another woman up, she realized her own hands were shaking. “I almost got all of these people killed…”

And it made her feel… worried. Compassion. Strange.

Unusual, and unpleasant.

(Was this Adrian’s fault? She wanted to blame someone for it.)

“How did we get there, anyway?” Janet wondered. “I don’t remember. Anything. After you and I…”

“I took you there,” Pam said, pushing herself up to her feet. “Apparently, I can control people infected with the lamia. So I marched you all to the oil refinery, to blockade it.”

Janet stared at her. “You dragged us there against our will?!” she said.

“So it would seem,” Pam said, looking around. Her little worker bees, all strewn around. Alive.

“You put our lives in danger for your own agenda?!”

“Like I said… yes.”

Hands gripped her arm tightly, wrenching. “What is wrong with you?!” Janet thundered.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Was she having this belated realization now? Pam turned to face her. “You know what I am, Janet,” she said.

“This is not what you are,” Janet said, stabbing her in the chest with a finger. “This is what you were.”

“This is what I will always be, Janet-from-HR,” Pam snapped. “No matter how hard I try to be anything else–”

Whatever else she had in mind to say, it couldn’t leave her mouth– Janet’s lips were on hers, pressing close. (This was really going to be a problem, wasn’t it?)

“I don’t believe you,” Janet whispered into her skin. “You saved us when you could have sacrificed us.”

Pam looked away, her fingers tangling in her own ponytail. “Janet, we can’t keep doing this.” For… oh, so many reasons.

“Be a monster,” Janet said stubbornly. “Embrace the monster. But be a monster who gets between innocent people and even bigger monsters.”

Pam tugged her ponytail. She let out a frustrated noise. “Coming here was your idea,” she pointed out. “Exactly what do you want me to do?”

“What you did to me at the chemical plant in Gotham,” Janet said, crossing her arms. “You killed off the lamia inside me. You let me go.”

She wanted to grab Janet by the arms and shake her until her head fell off. “I didn’t infect these people!” she snapped. “They contracted the lamia through that weird green juice your guru was selling!”

“Can’t you still control it?” Janet argued back. “You still control the fungus, right?”

It didn’t work like that, Pam wanted to say. How it wasn’t an extension of her, like the old lamia, but a child who looked to its mother, and… she didn’t get the chance.

Because Gwendolyn Caltrope was still here. And, with the mud shaken from her hair, she was angry.

“You!” she hollered. “I heard every word! This is your fault! How was I supposed to know an agribusiness goon was going to compromise the purity of our wild, natural mushrooms?”

She stalked towards Pam, shedding lamia everywhere, her finger outstretched. “This is entrapment. Or fraud. Or something.” She jabbed the finger at Pam. “I’m going to sue you into the ground!”

Pam stared.

“You blame me for this?” she asked, incredulously.

It was too much. Too stupid. She felt the lamia come to her, crawling all over her body. Warping her skin and her voice, her hair a flame as the hallucinogens twisted the air around her. “You think everything natural is holy and pure,” she snarled. “But nature spends every moment of every day trying to kill you.”

She stalked towards Gwen, all the vengeance of nature in her body and in her mind. “Who did you send out there to go rooting through the dirt for your overpriced mushrooms? Were they trained? Were they in a rush to fill your orders? Such a rush that something poisonous slipped past them? I should make you drink every last drop of that slime you were serving!”

She towered over the woman, her eyes spitting light and fire. “A little lamia and you see colors. A little more and you will beg me for death.”

Gwen cried out, her arm coming up helplessly to shield her from the terror. It would do her no good. Ivy was cold rage and nature and…

“Wait! Stop!”

… and there was meddling Janet again. Such a little girl. So small.

“Remember the stuff you said in Seattle?” she said. “I thought you were only going to murder the real bad guys now!”

So, so small.

“That was before I knew how deep the rot went in this little summer camp,” Ivy said flatly.

Before her, Gwen sat on her knees, the white dress spread out around her. Soaked in mud and grime, torn at the edges.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she whispered. Such a tiny voice. So small.

Such a fragile little girl.

“I s-started out trying to do something good,” Gwen stammered. “Something wonderful. I thought… I thought a company that helps people take care of themselves… we spend so much time on our jobs, our families, our bodies start to break down…”

She pressed her fist to her chest, and Ivy felt some of nature’s wrath seeping out of her. The sky was blue again.

“I wanted to give people something wholesome,” Gwen whispered. “I wanted to nourish them…”

And Pam closed her arms around her, pulling her in.

“But it just got bigger and bigger,” Gwen mumbled into her shoulder. “I started cutting corners… before I knew it, I was exactly the kind of person I claimed to hate…”

She hugged Pam tight. “And now all that bad karma is coming back to get me…”

When she leaned back, she was searching Pam’s face with hopeful eyes. “It’s not too late, right? I can still make everything okay?”

Oh. Sure. Look to her for answers. “I– I don’t know,” Pam started.

It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. Because Gwen’s voice broke, not with emotion, but with a violent, racking cough that shook her entire body. Flecks of lamia fruit hurled out through her mouth with each cough, growing worse and worse with every bout.

And then a full mass pushed its way out, bursting out over her lips, tumbling down over her chin. Crawling up into her nose.

“What did you do?!” Janet exclaimed, panicked.

“Nothing,” Pam said, recoiling. “That’s not me!”

“Do something!”

But she couldn’t. Oh, she tried. She grabbed Gwen by the arms and reached out through the miasma of spores and pheromones and tried to bend them with every power she had. But she couldn’t stop it. The thing Janet couldn’t understand–

This was wild lamia.

It had a will of its own.

And what it wanted was to wrench Gwendolyn Caltrope’s body apart, to break her jaw and blind her eyes, to twist her fingers into sharp masses of pulsating mushrooms and claw at her throat until nothing remained.

Pam looked on in horror and fascination. Behind her, the women were screaming.

This was always how it went, wasn’t it? Always comes the time when your life comes full circle - when your inner demons become outer demons. When you realize you’ve screwed up not in a talk therapy kind of way, but in a spectacular, externalized, cumulative kind of way.

That’s how it always worked for Pamela Isley, anyway. A whole chaos grenade of consequences all at once.

“I don’t understand,” Janet said. “What’s happened to her? Why does she look like that?!”

“Her immune system can’t fight the lamia anymore,” Pam said blankly.

“Why can’t you fix it, then?!”

“Because this isn’t the same strain you were infected by,” Pam replied, like she should have in the first place. “This mutated in the wild.”

“But how?!”

Oh, Janet. How obvious it was sometimes, that you knew so little. Suddenly Pam did miss Adrian something fierce. He’d disapprove, yes, but at least he’d get it, and she wouldn’t feel so alone with her own demons.

Literally.

“Because all things mutate and evolve!” Pam barked, finding her voice again. “And microscopic things evolve really, really fast!”

Just in time, because the thing-that-had-been-Gwen swiped at her with its massive, grotesque claws, and she dug inside of her to find the lamia again. To find the nature demon to match this one.

“Get back. Stay behind me. Don’t try to help.”

She buried her foot in the remains of Gwendolyn’s jaw and sent the monster reeling backwards. But it came for her again almost instantly, hurling its twisted body into her. Too fast, too hard; it knocked her to the ground, and now it was on her, clawing, biting. She could distantly tell Janet was screaming–

Then Gwen buried her teeth in Pam’s throat, and she lost all focus on anything but the stupid, simple thought: ah, eat or be eaten.

Eat or be eaten.

She buried her fingers into Gwen’s skull as Gwen bit down. She pushed her own lamia tendrils deep into the brain, ignoring the fierce, deadly pain in her own skin. Her lamia ripped and ripped until it burst out the back of Gwen’s head, sending brain matter and fungus flying in all directions.

The creature slumped against her.

Central nervous system. Hadn’t replaced it yet, Pam thought distantly.

She stared up at the sky and tried to breathe. Her torn esophagus struggled, even as it tried to knit itself together.

“Pamela?!” she heard faintly, through the haze. “Say something!”

“I’m fine.” The poison was in her veins. The wild lamia. Beating. Searching.

Janet said something about how she looked like she’d been mauled. The air whistled through her throat.

“It is infected,” she croaked. “Should’ve– called Adrian…”

The skin mended itself. It felt like it was on fire.

“What do we do?!” Janet cried.

“Nothing,” Pam said. The sky distorted in front of her. She couldn’t see anything. “This is good. If I can f-fight off the wild strain, I can culture my blood. I can–”

Distantly, she could sense that she was falling. That the sky went from blue to black to pink, and the moon had never been so large in the sky. She fell and she fell until her back hit soft grass. She could feel the wind around her, billowing her white dress. Leaves, drifting up into the pinkness. The flowers in the grass.

Did she let it happen?

No. She was just powerless to stop it.

Oh well.

It wasn’t so bad, really.

The space between life and death.

Felt like… going home…

[[ okay, i lied, this is 2 out of 3. Taken from G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy #12. Tw for canon-compliant body horror under the cut. ]]