My Lovely Rose: Prologue (Patreon)

One Bad Trip

When Ivy took in her best friend Harley after a particularly nasty break up with her “Puddin’~”, she expected some headaches. It was after all unavoidable considering how crazy Harley could be at times. It was actually a miracle how they got along, but the world had a funny way of bringing people together. Still, as much as she loved the adorably misguided firebrand of a psychiatrist that she called her bestie, Harley could sometimes get on her nerves; like how her morning started.

Ivy yawned as she lazed on her coach while she watched the morning news. Her hair was still a mess and she was still using her oversized shirt she called her pajamas, but it’s not like she had anything planned today. There was also the fact that they ran out of shampoo but she could always mix something up later. For now, she just wanted to relax and that was what she did.

She stared unseeingly at the screen while the droning of the tv reporter went over her head as she drank her cup of apple peel tea. The aroma of the spices, mixed in with the flavor of the fruit and the sweetness of honey helped her relax so she could start her day as fresh as a daisy.

She was in bliss, free from distraction and thought, until her peace was shattered, “Gooood morning sleepyhead! I bought groceries~!” Shouted her ever so lovable, if rather loud, temporary roommate, Harley as Ivy heard her kick the door open. Ivy cringed at how loud the door banged against the wall and she wouldn’t be surprised if it was cracked.

Ivy closed her eyes and counted down from 10 and begged that she didn’t dent the metal door before she turned around and found herself face to face with the grinning face of her best friend, smiling softly as she shook her head at the girl, “Harley, you know we have neighbors and it’s not that late,” She reminded her as she reached up to give her a pat.

“It’s 9 am already Pam!~ You know most of them have already gone to work or are just preparing to go to sleep so it’s fine!” Harley replied as she stuck out her tongue at her. Ivy flicked her on the forehead making the girl stumble back in surprise before pouting at her.  

She rolled her eyes at her as she scolded her slightly, “Bad Harley. You really want me to get in trouble with my landlord?”

“Poison Ivy? Worried about your landlord? And they say I’m the comedian here,” Harley snarked out with a grin as she walked up behind Ivy and wrapped her arms around her.

Ivy chuckled as she leaned back against the girl's hold. It was quite funny how she, Poison Ivy, villain extraordinaire was renting out an apartment. Then again, she did have a hard time getting legitimate cash flow and asking a bank you robbed a few weeks earlier to fund one of your research projects or schemes does not go too well. So here she was, in a simple, but quite spacious, apartment surrounded by her plants.

“So, want me to cook breakfast?” Harley then asked. Ivy’s empty stomach grumbling reminded her that she had yet to eat.

“You did buy from the family down the street right? I love the eggs their chickens produce and their apples are the best,” Ivy asked. While she did disapprove of some of their choices for crops, like carrots and cabbages, she reluctantly let that issue go as they were a net positive with their urban farming in Gotham. Anything that could make a dent in the smog of Gotham was a net positive really.

“Of course! You know how you had me hooked with their produce thanks to their juicy zucchinis!” Harley replied with a cheer as she pulled away and skipped to their kitchen. Just as she heard the woman turn on the kitchen hood, she heard Harley shout out. “By the way! I

bought some replacement shampoo. We’re running a little low so I dropped by the local supermarket.“

“Shampoo… wait, did Harley just say the supermarket? You know I make my own… ” but her words were drowned out by the loud fan and music that Harley was blasting in the kitchen. IIvy frowned as she got off her seat and headed for the kitchen. There, she’d find Ivy preparing a fruit salad, with the blonde carefully separating the more mature seeds so Ivy could use them later, while the pan was heating up. Sitting on the countertop was the produce she bought from the nearby organic farm along with some innocent looking paper bags.

She grimaced as she approached the groceries and started rifling through them. There was a bottle of avocado oil, some dried tropical fruits imported from… Sri Lanka if her powers were correct, as well as the bottle of shampoo that Harley mentioned. Picking up the bottle, she turned it around and inspected the ingredients. The all natural claims in the packaging did not fill her confidence one bit before she scowled at the list of ingredients.

"Palm Oil? Palm Oil!? Harley!” She growled out as she turned to the girl who flinched and almost dropped the pan just as she was cooking some eggs. ”You fucking know well they burn entire forest to make those mono culture monstrosities! How can you fucking do this!" She shouted as slammed the bottle on the counter before using a vine to close the music app Harley had on her opened in her phone. She almost chucked it at the window if it wasn’t for the fact that she’d waste all that oil harvested from those tortured plants.

Ivy blushed in shame as she shrunk away at her scorn. Good, she knew damn well what she did and she should be ashamed. "W-Well! I need to take care of my hair damn it and I picked the wrong shampoo. Give me a break here Pam, it's not like there's any easy to get alternatives that do not contain fucking palm oil here in Gotham!" The girl then fired back as shame turned to indignation.

Ivy took in a deep breath and puckered her lips at the gal. They wouldn't even be in this situation if she didn’t use up her shampoo! Like, who uses that much shampoo!? "If you didn't use up shampoo like crazy then this wouldn't be a thing! I haven’t taken a bath thanks to just how you used up in the past week!" Ivy screamed and Ivy squawked out in anger.

“I was trying to be considerate here! I didn’t know that you would overreact-” Harley tried making excuses but Ivy was not having any of it as she hushed the girl. Ivy gritted her teeth as she desperately tried not to break the bottle of shampoo clutched in her hands.

“Overreact!? I have the right to overreact with the environmental destruction caused by this product!” Ivy snapped out as she shoved the bottle on Harley’s chest. Harley stared at her with mouth agape while Ivy took deep calming breaths as she paced around.

"You are insufferable!" Harley shrieked out as he tossed the bottle on the trash can before pulling at her hair in frustration.

“And you are an immature, ungrateful brat!” Harley yelled back at her as he jabbed her finger at her chest. She took her in when she needed it and this was how she was going to repay her? She faltered a bit as Harley stepped back with eyes brimming with tears.

The ugly feeling of shame welled up Ivy’s chest but she pushed it back down as she looked away from Harley. This was Harley’s fault, not hers. She should have known better. She should have been more considerate to her.

Big fat tears fell down Harley’s cheeks as the girl wiped them off. “... Fine! Have it your way! I’m leaving!” the girl shouted as she ran off crying to her bedroom. Ivy flinched as the girl slammed the door close behind her leaving her there in the kitchen all alone.

She tried reasoning to herself that she was in the right, that she wasn’t being the asshole here but her traitorous heart did not listen to her. “Fucking damn it…” she gritted out before she noticed the smell of something burning and found the eggs burning in the pan. She cursed out as she tried salvaging the food but in the end, she ended up having to eat quartered fruits and burnt eggs for breakfast.

-x-x-x-

Harley still hasn’t come out of her room and Ivy was in no mood to go out so she ended up just holing up in her own room, the normally spacious place stuffed with boxes that she had kept inside Harley’s room before she moved in. It wasn’t much, just an assortment of stuff she had from her old university before she killed that pig.

She sighed as gazed over at the clipboard she would have used in teaching sustainability and the importance of the environment. She would have loved to have Harley as a colleague or maybe even just her psychiatrist if their lives were a bit more normal. She groaned out as the intrusive thoughts about her roommate came creeping in. She hated how Harley could just live in her mind rent free. She was already living in her apartment rent free!

Frustrated at the situation, she decided to get up and start arranging things to clear her mind. She had a lot of things she had tossed in boxes she never got around to fixing. She needed to sort them out anyways so might as well.

As she was rummaging through her old stuff and tossing out things that she wouldn’t need, she came across her old bag of goodies from her freshman days. Seeing the bag of magic mushrooms brought out memories of her when she was so young and naive. Surprisingly, the shrooms looked as good as the day she zipped them up in a plastic bag.

She hummed as she opened the bag and stared into the dried mushrooms. She probably shouldn’t, but she didn’t have any stocked up elsewhere and she desperately needed to unwind so she shrugged as she popped them in her mouth before going off to bed. She should probably have asked someone to babysit her and it’d been a while since she’d gotten high, but it was only a handful compared to the amount she used to take back then. With her choice of music on, she tossed herself on the bed.

As soon as she plopped down, things started getting weird as she started sinking into her bed. “What the fu- oh shit!” She shouted in alarm only to find herself losing purchase in the soft silk of her bed. She scrambled against her coverers as she sank in further in her bed, desperately trying to fight the sucking force from beneath her while her powers remained dormant.

Panic quickly set in as she sank down to her chest and was quickly sinking. What’s worse was that she was shrinking as the bed stretched on and on while the walls shot up high till she could no longer see the ceiling. Colors bled away from objects as if they were watering washing of objects while the sound started getting distorted and twisted. With options running out, she caved in and finally called for the one person that could help her.

“Harley! Harleeyyy!” She screamed out even as her voice stretched out to infinity with echoes resounding across the four corners of her walls. The last thing she saw as she fully sunk was the tear streaked and panicked look of Harley as she reached out for her hand. She grabbed hold but her grip quickly slipped as she tumbled down into the screaming eternity between space.

She blinked as she awoke in another life and in another world as life passed by her eyes. Memories from two lives collided as she relieved another life with loving parents and a peaceful picturesque life. It was boring yet there were no powers, no magic, just humans living their lives till it ended. In this fevered dream, she merely watched along as if watching a movie through another's eyes and felt the crushing loneliness as eternity passed by inside her head and how her body reached out for companionship only to find it in screens.

What’s weirder was that she found her life, or maybe multiple instances of her life, in the form of media being told and retold a hundred times. Her life and those she knew were nothing more than a story to be told for the entertainment of everyone. From reasonable to insane, she watched her life over and over again and even wrote new instances of them but one constant remained in those lives and that was Harley being there for her. She blinked back tears as she felt decades slip by with life passing by until it ended as soon as it began. She opened her eyes screaming as she found herself back to reality with Harley holding her down.

“Oh god! Ivy! I thought you were dying! You were shaking and your mouth was foaming and I didn’t know what to do! I didn’t even know if 911 would be able to help since you’re more plant than human!” Harley bawled out as Ivy found herself crushed by the girl’s arms. She felt her bones creak in protest but the pain reminded her that she was still alive and well, that everything was now ok as things had returned back to the way they were. She clung onto Harley as tears started streaming down her cheeks.

“Harley, oh Harley I’m so sorry! I shouldn't have said those words. I was being mean and irrational and-” Ivy babbled out before she let out an ugly cry with big fat tears of her own. She was shaking and breathless from the experience. Was her life just merely an illusion? Was it just merely a story? She didn’t know and she was afraid to answer it.

“I should be the one apologizing here! Why did you take those shrooms without me!? We could have had a journey together.” Harley whined out making Harley snort out and laugh at the absurdity of her statement. Ivy tapped on the girl's back and she was finally allowed to breathe. Laying down, Harley made her rest her head on her lap.

“Harley, you wouldn’t have liked being on that trip. It was awful. It felt like I lived another life and saw our lives as stories. You wouldn’t believe half the things I saw,” Ivy replied as she wiped away the tears while laughing shakily. She let out a sigh of comfort as she felt Harley combing her hair as she had her head rested on the pale girl's thigh.

“Oh?” Harley asked, lending her ears to her as Ivy blabbered away.

“Yeah, I saw Bruce Wayne as Batman and Superman being a random reporter from the Daily Planet. Can you believe that?” Ivy snorted out in amusement. Bruce Wayne, the biggest Playboy Philanthropist there ever was in Gotham being the hardened and scary Batman? She could hardly believe the guy had the guts to hurt a fly. He looked like a big softie much like that reporter from Daily Planet.

“Awww, I missed out then,” Harley complained with a pout making Ivy chuckle. “Say, did you see us together there?” She then asked, smiling hopefully at her. Her memories came flooding in, instances of them making out, countless stories of them being a couple, and an untold number of fanarts of the two screwing each other came flooding in. She felt her cheeks turn dark green at the thought. She knew she and Harley were hot but how much could the internet thirst for them and have them together?! As couples even! They were friends… though she wouldn’t mind having Harley as a girlfriend.

Harley screamed out inside her head yet kept her expression as calm and collected as she could even after she had just bawled her eyes out, “Y-yeah… and every single instance we were friends,” She whispered back as she tried to still her beating heart at the sight of the beautiful smile on Harley’s face. She could lose herself just staring into those big baby blue eyes of hers.

“Besties for life!” Harley cheered as she pulled her close to her rather busty chest and Ivy’s mind stuttered for a bit while she processed just what happened. Thankfully, she didn’t suffocate as Harley pulled her away just in time to allow her to breath.

Y-yeah, besties for life,” Ivy replied with a shaky smile. Her thoughts and feeling warred inside her and how she really felt about Harley but one thing was sure about what she felt and that was she didn't want to loose Harley as someone close to her and she needed get her head out of her ass and apologize

“Hey Harley, want to go out shopping?” Ivy asked before she added "I'm really sorry about earlier and I was being a shitty friend. I know it doesn't mean much but I could fork in a few hundred dollars?" She's probably going to regret it, but seeing that goofy smile on Harley was worth it. Next thing she knew, she was pushed into the bath being ordered to hurry up. Well, who was she to say no to that; especially when it felt like she was going to have a great day ahead.