Chapter 2: Dreams of Orchids
The pink gel worked. Gordon’s color returned within the hour, the labored rasp of his breathing smoothing into a steady, deep rhythm. Dick watched from the hospital corridor, his shoulder against the cool glass, the static relief of a crisis averted leaving a strange vacuum in its wake. Bruce’s voice, clipped and approving, echoed in his comm. “Good work. The greenhouse transfer is being processed.”
“Yeah,” Dick answered, his eyes on the steady blip of Gordon’s heart monitor. “Good.”
The word felt hollow. All he could smell was jasmine.
He took the long way back to his apartment in Blüdhaven, the bike cutting through the refinery district where the air was thick with chemical smog. It was a blunt, physical counterpoint to the sensory dream of Ivy’s cell, and he welcomed the burn in his lungs. He told himself it was to clear his head. But when he passed a neon-lit florist, still open at this absurd hour, he braked hard enough to skid.
The bell over the door jingled. The air inside was humid, packed with the overwhelming perfume of a hundred forced blooms. It was nothing like her cell. It was cheap and cloying.
Yet he pointed to a purple orchid, nestled among garish roses. “That one.”
The apartment was dark and quiet. He placed the orchid in a simple ceramic pot on his nightstand, the vibrant purple a shocking burst of life against the grey minimalist lines of the room. He stripped off his gear, showered until the water ran cold, scrubbing at skin that still felt touched by a phantom, tropical heat. He fell into bed, muscles aching with a fatigue that went deeper than bone.
Sleep took him quickly, a drowning pull.
The dream began not as a shift, but as a seamless continuation. He was back in the corridor outside her cell, but the guards were gone. The only sound was the drip of water and the whisper of leaves. The vines parted for him without a keycard.
She was waiting, but not on her throne. She stood in the center of the room, and the smock was gone. Her body was draped only in a lattice of fine, creeping ivy that clung to the curves of her hips, the swell of her breasts, leaving her skin, that impossible shade of muted green, bare to the low, golden light that now filtered through the canopy above. Her hair was a river of fire.
“You came back,” she said. Her voice was inside his skull.
“I didn’t,” he heard himself say, but his feet carried him forward. The air was thicker now, sweet and heavy, coating his tongue.
“You brought my sister to your bed.” She gestured toward the nightstand he knew, on some level, wasn’t there. The orchid. “You invited me in, Dick.”
The use of his name sent a shock through the dream. He should recoil, fight, wake up. His muscles wouldn’t obey. They thrummed with a warm, liquid potency. Her scent was in him, part of him.
She closed the distance. Her hand came up to his cheek. Her touch was cool, smooth as a leaf. “All that tension. All that control. It’s so… unnatural.” Her thumb brushed his lower lip. “Let the forest in.”
She leaned up and kissed him.
It was nothing like he could have imagined. Her mouth was cool and tasted of rain and something earthy, vital. A low heat, diffuse and terrifying, spread from the point of contact through his veins. It melted the rigidity in his spine, unclenched his jaw. A moan escaped him, swallowed by her kiss. His hands, traitors, came up to grip her waist. The ivy leaves were soft, but beneath them, her skin was firm, alive.
She broke the kiss, her emerald eyes holding his. There was no madness in them now, only a deep, knowing hunger. “You want to know what it’s like,” she whispered, her breath against his mouth. “To truly let go. To be consumed.”
He was hard, painfully so, the fabric of his dream-self’s pants straining. The humiliation of it—the sheer, obvious control she had—was as potent as the arousal. They twisted together, inseparable.
“Tell me,” she breathed, her hand sliding down his chest, over his abdomen, lower. “Tell me you want it.”
He shook his head, a feeble denial lost in the swirl of sensation.
Her fingers traced the length of him through the fabric, and his hips bucked involuntarily. “Your body is so much more honest than your morality.” With a deft movement, she freed him. Her cool fingers wrapped around his cock, and his head fell back with a guttural sound.
This was violation. This was surrender. And his body sang with it.
She guided him down onto the moss, which was soft and yielding beneath him, smelling of rich decay. She straddled his hips, looking down at him with a queen’s possessiveness. The ivy shifted, revealing more of her, the dark thatch of hair at the junction of her thighs. She positioned him, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance. She was wet, a shocking, slick heat.
“No more Gotham,” she murmured, sinking down onto him inch by devastating inch. “No more screaming cities. Just this. The truth of growth. Of wildness.”
She took him fully, a tight, engulfing fit that stole his breath. A deep, shuddering groan was torn from his chest. He was inside her, buried in a green nightmare that felt more real than anything.
She began to move, a slow, rolling rhythm that wasn’t human. It was the pulse of sap through a tree, inevitable and slow. He grasped her hips, his fingers digging into the soft give of her flesh, trying to find some leverage, some way to reclaim a fraction of control. But the rhythm was hers. The vines above them stirred, caressing his arms, his shoulders, holding him down not with force, but with gentle, inescapable pressure.
“You see?” she panted, her movements becoming more urgent, drawing him deeper with each rise and fall. “This is what you fight against. This… glorious… decay.” She leaned forward, her breasts brushing his chest, her lips at his ear. Her voice dropped to a filthy, breathy whisper. “You’re going to come inside me, little bird. You’re going to fill me up. And a part of you will always be mine. A seed in the dark.”
Her words broke something in him. The coiled tension in his gut snapped. With a ragged cry that was half protest, half utter capitulation, he climaxed. It was a torrent, a release that felt less like pleasure and more like a fundamental expulsion of his will. He throbbed inside her, spilling deep as she ground down onto him, milking him with slow, deliberate contractions of her muscles.
She rode out his orgasm, then continued to move, her own breath coming in short, sharp gasps. She took her pleasure from his spent body, her eyes locked on his glazed ones, until a tremor ran through her and she shuddered, a soft, sighing sound escaping her lips. She collapsed onto his chest, her weight a welcome anchor.
They lay there in the humming silence. He could feel the evidence of his submission cooling between them. Shame began its cold creep in, but it was distant, smothered under a profound, vegetative lassitude.
She lifted her head, kissed him softly, almost tenderly. “You’ll come to me,” she said, as if stating a simple fact. “Not in a dream. You’ll walk through the doors yourself.”
He woke with a violent gasp, sitting bolt upright in his own bed. The grey light of a Blüdhaven dawn filtered through the blinds. He was alone, drenched in a cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. The sheets were tangled around his legs.
And he was achingly, disgustingly hard.
He scrambled out of bed, heading for the shower, desperate to wash the dream from his skin. As he passed the nightstand, he stopped.
The orchid. Its petals, wide open last night, had closed into a tight, secretive bud. And from its stem, a single, glistening drop of nectar fell onto the wooden surface below.
A droplet that, in the dim light, looked uncannily like semen.