Chapter 6: The Corruption of Miss Brown
The sterile air of the Wayne Enterprises IT sub-level tasted of recycled oxygen and static. Dick’s own skin felt like a contaminant in the pristine, fluorescent-lit hallway. He could still smell her on him. A shower had done nothing; the scent of damp earth and night-blooming jasmine seemed baked into his pores, a perfume of shame.
He paused outside the reinforced glass door marked ‘IT Security – Authorized Personnel Only.’ His reflection looked back: Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne’s bright protégé, charming, reliable. The bruise on his jaw from last week’s patrol was fading. Nothing in his eyes betrayed the hollow, screaming thing trapped inside his ribcage.
He palmed the security lock. The access code he’d “borrowed” from the system’s admin, a man with a gambling debt and loose lips, worked. The door hissed open.
The room was a cathedral of data. Server towers hummed like sleeping giants. On the central dais, bathed in the cool glow of a dozen monitors, sat Tabitha Brown. Mid-twenties, sharp, usually sharper. She glanced up, irritation smoothing into surprise, then a flicker of something warmer.
“Dick? This is a secure floor. You’re not cleared.”
He let the door sigh shut behind him. The smile he practiced was a familiar mask. “I know. My bad. Bruce wanted me to run a diagnostic on the external feeds from the Foundry District. Said you’re the only one who wouldn’t make me feel like a caveman near a motherboard.”
A lie. Easy. Fluid.
She rolled her eyes, but a corner of her mouth lifted. “Flattery. The oldest tool in the user manual.” She turned back to her screens, a wall of scrolling code. “I’m swamped. The Hydra junction is glitching again.”
Hydra. The word was a cold spike in his gut. His hand drifted to his pocket, where the organic seed-pod felt like a live coal.
“Five minutes?” he asked, moving closer. He didn’t walk like Nightwing now. He moved like Dick, all loose-limbed grace, leaning against the edge of her brushed steel desk, within her personal space. The air between them seemed to thicken. Was it his imagination, or was the hum of the servers deepening?
“I really can’t,” she said, but her typing had slowed.
“Tabitha.” He said her name softly. He leaned in, as if to see her screen. His forearm brushed hers. A jolt, static or something else, passed between them. He saw her nostrils flare. Could she smell it? The jungle on his skin, the pheromonal residue Ivy had left like a brand?
Her resolve was a thin sheet of ice. He felt it crack.
“What do you really need, Dick?” she asked, her voice lower.
“The Kentville biocore,” he said, the lie mingling with a shocking thread of truth. “The selenite unit. Bruce thinks it’s been logging anomalous data. He wants it for a physical inspection. Tonight.”
“That’s in a high-clearance vault. Biometric lock. Wayne retina-scan only.”
“I know.” His hand, seemingly of its own volition, came to rest on her shoulder. Her muscle was taut under her blouse. “But you can bypass it. A temporary admin override. A sixty-second window.”
She shook her head, but she didn’t shrug off his touch. “That would flag the system. It would get back to Mister Wayne. It would get me fired.”
His fingers trailed down her arm, leaving a path of goosebumps. He crouched beside her chair, putting his eyes level with hers. The green in her hazel irises seemed to swim. “It won’t. Because you’re brilliant. You’d make it look like a routine calibration glitch. A blip. No one would ever know.”
He was close enough to kiss her. He could see the pulse hammering in her throat. The air in the room was no longer sterile. It was heavy, sweet. Ozone and honey. It’s not you, he thought with a surge of self-loathing. It’s her poison in you, working through you. But the thought was distant, smothered by the driving need to complete the task, to earn his way back into that verdant darkness.
“Why?” she breathed. “Why are you doing this?”
His other hand found her knee. She jumped, but didn’t pull away. “Because I need you to.” His hand slid up her thigh, under the hem of her sensible skirt. The skin of her inner thigh was fever-hot. “And I think you want to help me.”
A soft, shaky sound escaped her lips. Her eyes were glazing, her pupils swallowing the color whole. He saw the exact moment her professional caution shattered. It wasn’t a collapse; it was a melting. Her head lolled back against the chair, a gesture of surrender.
“The terminal,” she whispered, voice slurred. “Use my login. Protocol Theta-Seven. It’ll give you a ninety-second ghost window.”
He stood up, pulling her with him. Her body was pliant, leaning into him. He walked her back until the edge of the desk pressed against her. The monitors cast a blue pallor over her skin.
“Show me,” he murmured against her mouth, and then he was kissing her. It was nothing like kissing Ivy. There was no cosmic hunger, no sense of falling into an abyss. This was terrestrial, urgent. Her mouth was eager, yielding. She tasted of coffee and mint gum.
His hands were everywhere, pulling her blouse free from her skirt, yanking it open. Buttons pinged against the server towers. He shoved her skirt up around her waist. Her plain, practical underwear was a barrier he tore aside with a rough jerk. The sound of the fabric ripping was obscenely loud in the humming room.
“Dick, wait, the cameras—”
“Glitching,” he grunted, repeating her own word back to her. He fumbled with his own belt, his pants. He was already painfully hard, a fact that sickened him even as he freed himself. This wasn’t desire. This was a transaction. A delivery system for Ivy’s will.
He didn’t wait. He didn’t prepare her. He hooked his hands under her thighs, lifting her onto the cold steel desk, scattering keyboards and styluses. He positioned himself at her entrance and pushed inside in one brutal, unforgiving thrust.
She cried out—a sharp, startled sound that was swallowed by the room’s hum. She was tight, almost painfully so, and dry. He didn’t stop. He drove into her, setting a relentless, punishing rhythm. The desk shuddered with each impact. Her heels scrambled against the smooth metal, finding no purchase.
“Fuck,” he hissed, the curse meant for himself, for Ivy, for the whole rotten chain of command. He pistoned into her, the act devoid of anything but mechanical function and buried rage. Her nails dug into his forearms, her face a mask of confused pleasure and pain. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps that synced with his thrusts.
He looked down at where they were joined, watching himself vanish into her, slick now with her body’s forced acquiescence. The visual was clinical, vulgar. He felt nothing but a grim, driving pressure in his balls and a cavern of disgust in his chest.
“Tell me you’ll do it,” he growled, his hips slamming into her. “Tell me you’ll make the window.”
“Yes,” she choked out, her head thrashing side to side. “God, yes, I’ll do it, I’ll do it!”
Her body convulsed then, a harsh, shuddering climax that seemed ripped from her by the sheer violence of the act. It was enough to tip him over the edge. With a final, deep plunge, he came inside her, his release a hot, shameful flood. He held himself there, pulsing, spent, staring at the exposed conduit work in the ceiling.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the eternal hum of the machines.
He pulled out. The sound was wet, final. He turned away, fastening his pants, unable to look at her sprawled across the desk, skirt rucked, blouse gaping, the evidence of their coupling glistening on her inner thighs.
When he finally glanced back, she was sitting up slowly, movements drugged and languid. She was smiling, a vacant, blissful smile. But her eyes… her hazel eyes were wrong. The green he’d glimpsed earlier had intensified, a virulent, emerald venom swirling in the iris, eclipsing the brown. It was a faint, but unmistakable echo. A signature. Ivy’s pawn.
“The vault is on sub-level three,” Tabitha said, her voice a dreamy sing-song. “The ghost window initiates in ten minutes. You should go.”
He nodded, a stone in his throat. He retrieved the selenite core five minutes later, the biometric lock blinking green for its authorized ninety seconds. The crystalline object was cool and heavy in his hand. It felt like a piece of a tomb.
Back in the sterile stairwell, leaning against cold concrete, he stared at the core. Then he touched his pocket. The seed was there, warm, waiting for the dark of the Foundry tunnels.
He had the first component. The taste of Tabitha Brown was ash in his mouth. But beneath the ash, coiling and insistent, was the phantom sensation of damp moss, and the feverish promise of a reward that waited in a greenhouse, where the real venom lived.