Chapter 33: Plastic Trees
Maya didn’t sleep. She scrubbed the teacup Logan had used, wiped down the counters, and repotted a struggling fern, her hands moving on autopilot while her mind spun in tight, sickening circles. The image wouldn’t leave her: Roman Sionis, a man whose name was muttered in the clinic breakroom alongside words like ‘raids’ and ‘consolidation,’ kneeling on her thrift-store rug with the detached focus of a mechanic. He’d assessed Logan like a piece of faulty equipment, diagnosed him with three clinical words, and carried him off into the night. Effortless. As if he owned the problem, and by extension, the person.
That was the part that coiled, cold and slick, in her stomach. The sheer, terrifying ease of it. She’d hit brick walls for months. Logan had scraped and charmed for years. Roman saw an obstacle and simply… absorbed it. Made it part of his system. Her idealism, Logan’s ambition, their mutual desperation—it was all just raw material to him. Fuel.
She waited until noon the next day before calling Logan. The phone rang until it went to voicemail, his old greeting—”You know what to do, and if you don’t, figure it out.”—sounding like a relic from another life. She didn’t leave a message.
A text buzzed back a minute later. Not from Logan’s number. From the same RS contact.
> He’s fine. Regimen adjustment. Resting.
The clinical tone was a slap. She stared at the screen, her thumbs hovering. Let me talk to him. What does ‘regimen adjustment’ mean? Where is he? Every question felt naive, a child tugging on the coat of a moving train. She typed out a simple OK, then deleted it. She sent nothing.
Instead, she went to her cramped bedroom greenhouse. The Ming Thing watched her with its veined, fleshy leaves. Her night-blooming cereus had closed, a spent, wrinkled fist. She touched the soil of her original pothos, the one she’d nurtured from a clipping. “I invited it in,” she whispered to the leaves. “I opened the door and let the frost inside.”
Logan surfaced from the dark not with a jolt, but with a slow, viscous drift towards consciousness. His body felt like it had been disassembled and incorrectly put back together. The ache was deep, cellular. The sharp, familiar pain in his knee was a ghost; this was a full-body murmur of wrongness.
He was in Roman’s bed. The sheets were crisp, cold linen. The room was dim, the blackout curtains sealing them in a perpetual, expensive twilight. He tried to move, to push himself up on his elbows. A wave of dizziness washed over him, his muscles trembling with a pathetic, rubbery weakness.
“No.”
The voice came from the armchair in the corner, a shapeless shadow resolving into Roman. He was reading something on a tablet, the blue light painting his features in stark planes. He didn’t look up.
“I need to walk,” Logan said, his voice a dry crackle.
“You collapsed. You’re on an IV drip for electrolytes and a mild sedative. You are not walking.” Roman finally lowered the tablet. His eyes were calm, implacable.
The cold precision of the options left no room for argument. It wasn’t a threat; it was a flowchart. Logan’s jaw tightened. He looked to Roman’s expressionless face. The independence that had been his armor, the thing that had gotten him out of his shitty hometown and through a hundred diner shifts on a bum knee, roared inside him. It was met by a wall of utter, exhausted physical failure.
Roman stood, setting the tablet aside. He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight.
“You broke the protocol,” Roman said, his voice quiet in the dim room.
“I was doing what you needed,” Logan rasped. “The union, the Gazette, the three fucking fundraisers in one night. I was closing the deal.”
“You were running on malice and momentum until the machinery seized. That is not useful to me.” Roman reached out, his fingers brushing the inside of Logan’s wrist, tracing the line of the IV taped there. His touch was cool, proprietary. “I don’t need a martyr. I need a tool that remains sharp. You neglected hydration, nutrition, and rest. You hid the migraines. You doubled your painkiller dosage without telling Vreni.”
Logan’s breath caught. He hadn’t mentioned the headaches, the vise that had been tightening around his temples for days. He’d hoarded the extra pills, the little white ones from the earlier prescription, taking them like secret candy.
“How did you…”
“I review everything.” Roman’s thumb pressed lightly on his pulse point. “The pharmacy logs. Your heart rate from your watch. Your speech patterns on the campaign footage, which became increasingly slurred after 8 PM. You were trying to prove something. To me? To yourself?”
Logan turned his head away, staring at the seam of the blackout curtain. “I was just getting the job done.”
“You were failing.” Roman’s hand moved to Logan’s chin, turning his face back with gentle, inexorable pressure. “You are not allowed to fail. Not at this. Your value is your functionality. Your mind. Your voice. You let them degrade.” There was no anger in his words, only a chilling, analytical disappointment. “So now, I fix it. The regimen is being rewritten. You will follow it. There will be no negotiation.”
“Or what?” The old defiance flickered, weak but present.
“Or you will be removed from the field. Confined here. Fed through the IV. Monitored.” Roman’s gaze didn’t waver. “You will accomplish nothing for your gardener friend. You will watch the election results on television. You will be safe, and perfectly, utterly useless. Is that your preference?”
The cage of the offer was exquisite. Logan saw it perfectly. A gilded, sterile, absolute prison of care. He swallowed, his throat tight. “No.”
“Good.” Roman released his chin. “The new protocol starts now. Sleep is mandatory. Eight hours, monitored. Diet is controlled. You will be accompanied to all engagements. Your medication will be administered by Vreni, directly. Your autonomy, for the next seventy-two hours, is revoked.”
He said it like he was reviewing a security briefing. Logan felt a hollow open up inside his chest. This was the cost of having his pain taken away, his path cleared. He had traded the chaos of his own mismanaged life for the perfect, suffocating order of Roman’s.
“Maya,” Logan croaked. “She called.”
“I texted her. She knows you’re functional.” Roman stood. “Your connection to her is an asset. It will be managed. When you speak to her next, you will be rested, clear-headed, and you will reaffirm the timeline for her pilot program. You will not alarm her. You will not be a problem for her to solve. Do you understand?”
Functional. Asset. Managed. The words stripped everything down to its bare, ugly wiring. Logan closed his eyes. The fatigue was a weight pulling him back under. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I understand.”
He heard Roman move back to the chair. The soft tap of fingers on the tablet resumed. In the dark, with the silent drip of the IV feeding him, Logan understood the final, unspoken term of their deal. Roman hadn’t just fixed his knee. He owned the cure. And to keep it, Logan had to surrender everything else.
And to keep it, Logan had to surrender everything else.
The next seventy-two hours passed in a blur of enforced stillness. Vreni, Roman’s austere physician, appeared like a ghost to change IV bags and administer pills from a small, locked case. Logan slept, woke to broth and measured water, and slept again. The migraine that had been a constant, gnawing presence behind his eyes receded, leaving a strange, hollow quiet in his skull.
On the fourth morning, the IV was gone. A new suit, darker wool, softer leather shoes, lay across the foot of the bed. Roman watched him dress from the doorway. “The schedule is on your phone. The car is downstairs. Emil and Leo will be with you.”
“Bodyguards?” Logan buttoned his shirt, his fingers still feeling clumsy.
“Facilitators,” Roman corrected, his tone leaving no room for debate. “They ensure adherence to the timeline. And your hydration.”
The first event was a meet-and-greet at a renovated community center in the Burnside District. Emil, a broad-shouldered man with a placid face, opened the car door. Leo, younger and sharper-eyed, walked a half-step behind Logan’s left shoulder. Their presence was a wall, subtle but immutable. When Logan lingered too long talking to a former diner regular about property tax breaks, Leo’s hand settled on his upper arm, not gripping, just resting.
“Time to circulate, Mr. Walker,” Leo murmured, his voice polite and firm. He guided Logan gently towards the next cluster of voters.
Logan’s old defiance sparked, a hot flash in his chest. He almost shook the hand off. Then he saw the water bottle Leo offered, unopened, and remembered the crushing dizziness in Maya’s apartment. He took the bottle. He let himself be steered.
Maya refreshed the Gotham Gazette’s politics page for the tenth time. A new headline glowed on her screen: Sionis Gains Ground in District 11, Polls Show Surge Among Working-Class Voters. The article quoted a union rep she vaguely recognized from the clinic. He talks straight. No bullshit. He sees the rust we see.
A wild, giddy laugh caught in her throat, sharp and bright as broken glass. It was working. The whispers she’d planted in waiting rooms, the flyers slipped beside brochures for flu shots, were bearing terrible, beautiful fruit. Her hands shook. She could almost feel the weight of an official health department letterhead, the crisp approval of a pilot program. Her formulas, in real clinics, helping thousands.
The giddiness curdled instantly, soured by the memory of Roman’s silhouette in her doorway. She had traded for this with Logan’s drawn face, with his silent, sleeping form. She closed the browser tab. She couldn’t tell Ivy, not yet. Ivy’s purist fire would see only the compromise, the poisonous root of the medicine. Maya needed to see the medicine first. She needed to hold the proof in her hands, however it had been grown.
She opened her secret ledger, the one disguised as a gardening journal. Patient codes, dosage notes, results. She began drafting a formal proposal, her optimism a frantic, fragile vine twining around the solid post of Roman’s impending power.
At a high-dollar fundraiser in a restored opera house, Logan felt the familiar weakness lick at his knees. The room was a cacophony of perfumed air and clinking crystal. He was mid-sentence, charming a skeptical couple who owned half the vintage stores in the Fashion District, when the marble floor seemed to tilt.
His words didn’t falter, but his weight shifted minutely. Roman, who had been a dark, attentive presence nearby discussing acoustics with the event planner, was suddenly at his side. Roman’s hand slid around Logan’s back, his touch firm and warm through the fine wool.
“You’ll have to excuse us,” Roman said to the couple, his smile seamless. “A minor scheduling conflict. Logan, the councilman from the waterfront needs a moment before he leaves.”
He spoke as if stating a simple fact. To Logan, the arm around him was both a cage and a crutch. He hated the need for it, the public display of support. Yet as Roman guided him smoothly, steadily, towards a quieter anteroom, the relief was profound, a physical unknotting of anxiety he hadn’t fully acknowledged. He didn’t pull away. He leaned into the support, letting Roman take a fraction of his weight.
“You’re pale,” Roman said under his breath, the words for him alone. “Five minutes. Sit. Drink this.” He handed Logan a chilled glass of sparkling water from a passing tray.
“I’m fine,” Logan muttered, the old reflex kicking in. But he took the glass. He drank.
“You are performing adequately,” Roman amended, his eyes scanning the room over Logan’s head. “Because you are following the protocol. Your independence is not being erased. It is being… structured. To prevent collapse.”
Logan finished the water, the cool liquid a trail of clarity down his tight throat. The weak feeling began to recede, anchored by the steady pressure of Roman’s hand on his back. It wasn’t freedom. It was something else, a terrible, reliable symmetry. He straightened his shoulders, and Roman’s hand fell away, the support withdrawn the moment it was no longer needed.
“The councilman?” Logan asked, his voice steady now.
“Doesn’t exist,” Roman said, a faint, private edge in his tone. “But you are ready to re-engage. See the woman in the green dress? She is the deputy mayor’s disaffected niece. Your particular brand of casual disillusionment will appeal to her.”
Logan looked at the woman, calculated the angle, and pushed off from the wall. He walked into the crowd alone, but he felt the invisible architecture of Roman’s plan holding him up, guiding his path as surely as Leo’s hand on his shoulder. He missed the chaos of his old life with a sudden, aching sharpness. He also, reluctantly, appreciated the solid ground beneath his feet.
He also, reluctantly, appreciated the solid ground beneath his feet. The final event of the night was a cocktail reception at the Gotham Museum of Antiquities, a vaulted space where echoey conversations bounced off marble busts and glass display cases. Logan moved through the crowd, a glass of mineral water perspiring in his hand, performing the now-familiar calculus of eye contact and tailored small talk. He felt Roman’s gaze from across the room, a constant, low-frequency hum of awareness.
Then the screaming started.
It wasn’t a social shriek. It was raw terror, ripped from a dozen throats at once, followed by the deafening crash of a display case shattering. A figure swung down from the shadowed rafters on a thick vine, landing in a crouch amidst a spray of priceless pottery shards. He was shirtless, muscles coiled under mottled green skin, a crown of twisted foliage sitting atop his wild hair. “The rot stops here!” he bellowed, his voice like grating bark. “This city chokes on its own poison!”
Pamela Isley’s latest protégé, a biomass extremist called Briar. Logan’s mind supplied the name from a news segment Roman had made him watch. Panic turned the room to a churning animal mass. A security guard lunged; a whip-like vine snapped out from Briar’s wrist, wrapping around the man’s throat and lifting him off his feet. Another vine speared the ceiling, raining plaster dust. “No one leaves!” Briar roared. “You will hear the green truth!”
Logan’s body went cold and precise. He didn’t run. He scanned. The main doors were blocked by a tangle of thorned growth sprouting from the floor with unnatural speed. The rich and powerful huddled behind overturned tables, sobbing. He saw Emil and Leo, hands inside their jackets, their eyes locked on Roman, awaiting an order. A terrible, clear choice crystallized.
This was a moment for Black Mask. For brutal, hidden efficiency.
Logan shoved through the fray towards Roman, who stood perfectly still, a dark island in the chaos. He grabbed Roman’s arm, his fingers digging into the immaculate wool. “No,” Logan hissed, his voice low and urgent under the screams. “Not him. You. Roman Sionis.”
Roman’s head turned slowly. His eyes, flat and analytical, held Logan’s. The unspoken question hung between them: Why?
“They’re hostages, not witnesses,” Logan pressed, the words tumbling out fast. “Guide them. Save them. Negotiate. The news choppers are already outside. Be the man who solves this, not the ghost who makes it disappear.” He gestured with his chin at the weeping socialites, at the thug with the vine for an arm. “This is your stage. Take it.”
For a heartbeat, Roman’s expression remained unreadable granite. Then, something shifted. A decision, not of passion, but of supreme theatrical calculation. He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod to Emil and Leo, a stand-down order. He straightened his jacket.
Then Roman Sionis stepped forward, his hands raised, palms open. His voice, when it came, didn’t roar. It projected, calm and resonant, cutting through the panic. “Enough.”
Briar’s head swiveled, his glowing green eyes narrowing. “Another suit full of lies.”
“I am a suit,” Roman agreed, taking another deliberate step, placing himself between Briar and a cowering cluster of guests. “I am also the only person in this room who can get you what you want. A platform. An audience. You want to talk about the city’s poison? Then talk. To me. And let these people go.”
“They are the poison!” Briar spat, but the vine around the guard’s neck loosened a fraction.
“They are your microphone,” Roman countered, his tone relentlessly reasonable. A practiced, boardroom cadence. “Hurt them, and you’re a footnote on page six. Spare them, speak your piece through me, and Gotham hears you. That is the trade.”
Logan watched, breath held, from the edge of the crowd. He saw Roman become something new before his eyes: not a savior, but a brilliant negotiator, a pillar of controlled authority. He herded the hostages toward a side corridor with precise instructions, his voice never rising. He argued down Briar’s demands, offering a televised forum instead of immediate chaos. He turned a terrorist incident into a live, mediated debate.
Fifteen minutes later, the first SWAT teams breached just as Roman was promising a summit on urban forestry. Briar, confused by an enemy who didn’t fight but instead moderated, was subdued with rubber bullets and nets. The vines retracted, withering to dry husks.
Roman stood amidst the wreckage, his suit coated in fine white dust, accepting the tearful thanks of a heiress. The cameras, now inside, ate it up.
In her apartment, Maya absentmindedly clicked the TV on for background noise while trimming her Ming Thing. The local news break-in made her scissors slip, nicking her thumb.
“...ongoing situation at the Museum of Antiquities where a hostage crisis has just been defused, thanks in large part to the astonishing courage of city council candidate Roman Sionis…”
The screen showed grainy, thrilling footage: Roman guiding the elderly, speaking calmly to the monstrous figure, standing firm as the police moved in. The chyron read: SIONIS: COOL HEAD IN CRISIS.
Maya’s blood welled in a perfect red bead on her skin. She stared, not at the heroic figure of Roman, but at the blurred edge of the frame, where a familiar profile stood watchful in the dust-hazed light. Logan. His green-hazel eyes were fixed on Roman, his expression unreadable, but his posture was that of a sentinel. He wasn’t a hostage. He was part of the architecture.
She brought her bleeding thumb to her mouth, the taste of copper sharp on her tongue. The Ming Thing seemed to lean toward the flickering screen, its red veins pulsing in the television's glow. The medicine was coming. The pilot program was all but guaranteed now.
But the cost, the terrifying, brilliant cost, was playing out live on every screen in Gotham. Logan hadn't just opened a door for her. He was holding it open from deep inside a fortress she was only beginning to see. And she had no idea how, or if, he could ever walk back out.