I. Resolution
The strains of Auld Lang Syne still floated in the Gotham City air, long after the first daylight of the new year. It was dark again, the lingering Christmas lights keeping the evening cheery. It was the first of January, and high time to finish the last Christmas leftovers. Jim Gordon’s apartment was bright and full for this one evening, when he hosted colleagues, friends and family for his annual dinner. The leftovers had vanished – much thanks to Harvey Bullock – and as the hours grew later, the guests trickled away. Only those who Jim still counted family remained when the party was over.
Renee Montoya and Barbara Gordon shared a giddy, girlish grin when Jim bid a good night to Detective Sarah Essen with a peck on the cheek. The bashful smile on her father’s face sent Barbara into a fit of giggles when he came back into the room.
“What? I don’t have something in my teeth, do I?” Jim drew a finger through his moustache.
“No, Dad, you’re just really cute.” Barbara swirled her glass of champagne and took another sip with a long sigh. “She’s good for you.”
“Now don’t go getting your hopes up, little lady,” Jim chuckled, taking a seat again in his big plush armchair. “Ms. Essen and I are taking things slow.” He paused. “You do think so, then? You like her?”
Renee reached across the couch to ruffle her friend’s hair, both girls gone giggly from finishing up the holiday drinks. “Babs just needs a new mommy, that’s all.”
Barbara laughed and batted Renee’s hand away. “Dad, she’s great. Now keep being cute.”
With a long drink from his cup of coffee, Jim sighed almost in relief. “’Tis the season.” He raised the mug in a salute to the two girls. “Have to admit, it’s nice to have someone for the holidays…NOT that you girls haven’t been magnificent company to an old man over the years,” he added.
“We know what you meant, Jim,” Renee smiled drowsily, although some of her thoughts were wandering into unfamiliar territory. Jim and Sarah had been seated next to each other the entire night, sharing small jokes as Jim urged her to taste all the treats he had made available. They were a cute couple, Barbara was right.
Barbara chimed in again. “Someday my prince will come,” she chuckled. “Till then I’m good.” Her eyes glittered in Renee’s direction, but Barbara didn’t say any more.
Jim yawned widely, and stood up again. “Goodness me, I think it’s that time. You girls help yourselves to whatever you want.” He crossed toward the couch with a kiss for his daughter’s cheek, and the salute that he and Renee had made their sign of friendship. “Happy new year to all, and to all a good night.” He left for his bedroom then, leaving Renee and Barbara to each other’s company.
“Another year down,” Renee sighed. “Been a hard one, hasn’t it?”
“You think you had it hard?” Barbara raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t the one trying to train every metahuman teenager on the planet.”
“You’re not training them,” Renee shot back. “You’re financing. Big difference.”
Barbara chuckled. “Okay, so the Titans and Outsiders, no. But I’ve still got plenty to do. Even with Steph spending time at the Titans, she’s running around Gotham, and our new Robin seems like a handful. And speaking of them,” she added, with what Renee could tell was feigned spontaneity- she had been waiting to ask all night – “I’ve got a proposition for you. You’re trained up, you’ve gotten used to this. How’d you like to take over Spoiler’s training?”
Renee blinked. “What, me? Steph? I mean…wouldn’t she. rather have you and Dinah?”
“She might rather, but let’s face it, you’ve got the least on your plate,” Barbara shrugged. “And you’re ready for it. We both know you are, you’re turning into a better Batgirl than I ever was.”
“I couldn’t replace you,” Renee laughed a little, but thought a lot. “I…I don’t know. Maybe. Can I think about it? I’m just so used to only being responsible for myself.”
“Yeah, of course you can. The offer’s standing, it’s not going anywhere any time soon.” There was a very long pause before Barbara leaned nearer to inspect Renee’s face. “Well?”
“What?”
“You still haven’t told me about your mystery girl!” Barbara grinned. “The one you stayed the night with that time. What’s happening? What’s going on?”
Renee pursed her lips and looked away, sinking back farther on the couch. “Nothing.”
“Oh come on!”
“No, Babs, really. Nothing’s happening. I haven’t seen her since,” Renee said, quiet and short.
That was the truth, and Renee didn’t know how to feel about it. On the one hand, the reasonable hand, it was for the best. It had been a monumental risk, a lapse in judgment to have allowed herself the night she spent with Poison Ivy. Even if the other woman had changed, or was changing, or would eventually change, she had still been a villain for years. And more importantly than that, Renee knew now that there was a connection between the two of them that would take a long time to get rid of. Now that they had been together once, they had reason to seek each other out. Now there was no way to guarantee that Ivy wouldn’t go back into her life. No way to know that her identity wasn’t in jeopardy again.
But on the other hand, that connection ran both ways. Renee found herself thinking about that night over and over again, sometimes when she should have been focusing, sometimes when she was all alone with nothing to do. She couldn’t get it out of her head, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
The memory popped up again, the dark room and the beautiful, sultry woman, and Renee missed Barbara’s comment. “Huh?”
“I said, go after her!” Barbara set down her drink before she spilled it in excitement. “Go get her back. I don’t want to see you let a good thing go to waste, Renee, this could be great for you! You haven’t had a girlfriend as long as I’ve known you.”
Renee turned away again. “Babs, I told you, it’s not gonna work out. They never work out. It doesn’t matter.”
“This time it could,” Barbara insisted. “What’s the worst thing that happens?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I DO want to know, but you won’t tell me anything,” Barbara sighed. “You can’t be alone forever.”
That brought Renee’s head back toward her friend. “Alone? Who says I’m alone. I’ve got you, don’t I? And your dad. I’ve got my family…well, most of the time.”
“You know what I meant. Renee…” Barbara sighed deeper and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “This isn’t the first time you’ve done this. Thrown away chances. You think you don’t want them but how do you know? How do you know you haven’t found someone you could fall in love with?”
Because they aren’t you, whispered a voice deep in the back of Renee’s mind, let into the foreground by the drink. She fought back the words. It had been a long time since Renee promised herself she was over her friend. It would never happen, it simply wasn’t meant to be. And day to day, Renee was fine with it. But those late nights brought back the longings of her youth, and for years she had judged every woman she met by the standards of the one she wanted to love. This one wasn’t smart enough. That one was too uptight. The other couldn’t make her laugh. None of them were Barbara.
And with a jolt down her spine, Renee realized that those thoughts had never once surfaced when she had been with Ivy.
“Trust me,” she finally said, draining her glass. “You wouldn’t like her anyway.”
“I might surprise you,” Barbara said, a tired smile on her face.
Renee sighed and laid her head back. “It wouldn’t be the first surprise.”
The snow was falling gently over Gotham City, more of a feeble dusting, a younger sibling trying to live up to the storm that they had gotten before. But it was enough snow to be watched late into the night, and that the women did.
*****
The wilting decorations clung steadfastly to the walls and the rugs in the cottage. Even with a fake Christmas tree, there were shed pine needles stomped into the carpet, and copious amounts of tinsel and glitter from ornaments. The tree in the corner sagged with the weight of the baubles, and the wrapping paper was still spread joyously over the floor. On top of all of that, there were confetti and mostly-deflated balloons from New Year’s Eve, adding more celebratory mess to the pile of clutter. Ivy had allowed it to go on through the holidays. But she handed Harley the broom on January 1.
Harley hummed to herself as she cleaned up, keeping the last Christmas carols lingering in her head. She didn’t mind the cleaning up, when Ivy had so patiently allowed her to make the mess in the first place. Truth be told, it had been one of Harley’s best Decembers ever. She had been happy, not worried. She and Ivy had exchanged gifts, and both girls teamed up to get a good warm kennel for Bonnie and Clyde, who took it in turns to sleep on their soft dog beds and in Harley’s. There had been eggnog and gingerbread, decorations and TV specials, everything that came to mind when Harley thought “Christmas”. But something was still missing.
“You guys….” Harley started, perking the hyenas’ heads up as she took down the tangled plastic wreathes. “I dunno what’s wrong.”
Clyde barked, and both of them looked on attentively at their mistress.
“Okay, so maybe I try to figure it out…oh god, I still gotta make a resolution!” Harley realized. “So maybe that’ll help right?”
Another bark, this one Bonnie’s.
“I mean, I guess it just feels…it was just us four this year...just me and Ivy the whole year,” Harley started talking into the air, as she swept and organized and made the room livable again. “Didn’t I used to have friends? Like, lots of them? And I babysat, all these kids and they loved me. There were just all these people, all around, all the time…an’ ever since I left college…” Harley trailed off. Ever since she’d set out on her own, she had been very nearly alone. There had been the Joker, and she still bristled at the way that had turned out. She was happy living at Ivy’s, happy having a true friend again. “But it’s just not the same,” she finally sighed.
Bonnie whined, licking at a leftover candy cane before Harley snapped it away.
“No! I don’t wanna move back. Why would you even say that, Bonnie?” She chided the hyena, and then scratched behind her ears. “I just wanna, you know…just wanna get out there. Do something. See people. Maybe…” Harley’s face went as bright as the Christmas lights she was taking down. “Hey! That’s it! The kids, babysitting!” Harley squealed and jumped up and down, before composing herself again. “I can still do that, right? Well, probably not here,” she glanced around at the living room. “But I can find some place, and get some kids, an’ maybe even make some real money, some legit money.” She was off like a rocket, rattling out a list of necessary steps toward her goal. By the time the living room was spotless again, Harley had it all planned out.
She ran toward Bonnie and Clyde and threw her arms around both of them. “Thanks you two! You’re so helpful!”
Meanwhile, up in the tiny crawlspace that served as an attic, Ivy leaned against a wall with a thousand thoughts in her head. She had initially escaped here in order to get out of the way, not sure what kind of a whirlwind Harley would make. It didn’t matter how much mess she made in the process of cleaning, so long as the room was back to normal when Ivy came back downstairs.
Her long white fingers trailed down the spine of the book in her hand. This was supposed to be just a way to kill time. Not a trip down memory lane. But her senior yearbook lay open in Ivy’s lap, and there was no way to avoid it.
Pamela Isley seemed so far away. She had been a different person back then, living a different life. Pamela Isley would have grown up, finished college, become a botanist, probably married. The pictures showed a girl flocked by admirers. Here she was at the homecoming dance, lifted on the arms of several clambering boys. Her arms were thrown up in the air happily as she balanced on their shoulders. They all looked so young.
Ivy turned the pages lazily. It hardly seemed like it should matter now. But as she flipped through her old pictures, the memories came in a rushing stampede. She had spent a lot of time thinking, recently. Batgirl had left the house a long while ago now, but something about her presence lingered. It had been harder, these last weeks, to think about the theft and petty crime that had been keeping Harley and Ivy afloat for the past year. They had what they needed to eat, and anything more than that brought on the questions. Would she ever come back, if Ivy slipped back into those ways?
She flipped to another picture. Someone had made a collage of pictures of Pamela with her flings and stuck it between the pages. There were jocks, there were actors, eggheads and musicians, even a few women sprinkled in between the boys. Back then there had been waiting lists for Pam’s attention. But that was before. Before people realized that Pam was serious about being an environmentalist. Before Ivy was born. Before they all left her behind as a radical, and before Ivy had proven she deserved to be taken as a threat.
Ivy never thought she would miss that old life. Those people weren’t worth missing. But just maybe, there was something else about them that was.
For years now, Ivy had thought she was happy alone. She had her cottage, she had her plants. She didn’t have to deal with people any more. And that was the way she liked it. For years, that was the way she had made her life. Cut off from other people, fending for herself. And then Harley had come along. Then she had had someone else to be responsible for. Even when Bonnie and Clyde had made themselves at home, it had felt like having more real company around, especially with the way Harley talked to them.
It wasn’t until Batgirl shared the house that Ivy really began to feel the absence.
It wasn’t until she had that sort of closeness with someone else that she started to miss it. When she had been the beauty queen in high school, the people hadn’t been worth missing. She had fooled around and used countless people without hardly caring. Those people had never really known her. They were the ones who left her behind when her true passions had surfaced. But Batgirl knew her. Batgirl had never met Pamela Isely, never seen the woman she used to be. She only knew the activist, the woman who fought for what she wanted. And Batgirl stayed with her anyway.
Ivy put down the yearbook.
How long did you want to be alone, Ivy? she asked herself.
Too late now. You keep thinking about her. You let her change you. Stop fooling yourself.With a nod, she twirled the book in her hands and put it back away in the dark corner of the attic. There was nothing else for it, now that she knew what she wanted. Poison Ivy was a woman who went after her opportunities, not one to shrink back and wait for a prince to come. She wanted more than a fling with the woman who’d had such an effect on her. For the first time she could remember, Ivy wanted a real relationship. And she was going to get one.
By the time she came down, Harley had the living room back the way it should have been. “All done?” Ivy asked her.
“You bet!” Harley grinned wide. “And I got such a great idea, Ivy, you just wait, this is gonna be the best year ever!”
Ivy smiled back, more subdued but happy nonetheless. “Great. Can’t wait to see. I’ll be back,” she promised, and made her way outside. When she came back to the house from their post office box, Ivy blinked, seeing the living room even cleaner and more organized than it had been before the holidays. “Harl, you can stop now.”
Harley looked up from the stool she’d dragged in front of the window, to wash the highest parts of the window. “Oh, okay!”
“Here,” Ivy flicked her wrist and sent a letter flying toward Harley. “That’s for you.” She took a seat in her favorite armchair, sorting through the rest of the mail. A few minutes later, Ivy looked back over to see her friend staring at the note, her face pale. “What, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“Huh?” Harley snapped her head up. “Oh, nothing. It’s nothing. Just junk,” she said, crumpling the paper in her hands. She couldn’t tell whether Ivy believed her or not.
Hidden now, stuck in the creases and wrinkles, was the last thing that Harley had expected to read, and the last thing she wanted. “Happy New Year, punkin pie! My resolution this year? I’m going to get you back. –J.”
