chlorophylliac | 30 ❦ Video

30 ❦ Video

[Ivy is sitting in the lovingly upgraded greenhouse, on the edge of the fountain pool she's created at the centre, and absolutely nobody was surprised. There's a plant/animal hybrid on her lap; anatomically a small rabbit, but what it's covered with is more like moss than fur and its eyes are completely black.]

The first greenhouses used on Earth were recorded by Pliny the Elder, two thousand years before my time.

The Roman Emperor Tiberius wanted cucumbers all year round, so, his gardeners made it happen. Their specularium predated the invention of glass; they used oiled cloth or sheets of mica. They weren't used constantly, only at night, to protect the plants from the cold after they'd had the benefit of the sunlight during the day.

More sophisticated versions appeared over a thousand years later. The Vatican, in the thirteenth century, to house plants brought as trophies from tropical exploration. Korea, two centuries afterward. What my contemporaries would consider a modern greenhouse didn't appear until the eighteen-hundreds.

By my time, commercial technology allows plants to be grown out of season, thousands of miles from the environments where they evolved, untroubled by parasites or predators or the vagaries of the weather. Even the most diseased specimens can heal in a place designed for precisely that.

[She falters, briefly, gaze going out of focus. It looks like she's fighting something off, consciously or otherwise.]

Which is perfectly fine, if all you want is something that will thrive in an artificial environment. But when you return it to its home -- with all the threats and dangers that plant is subject to --

[Ivy tunes out again, gaze going flat and empty.]

The following Warden and Inmate have been paired:

A.J. Crowley //

sauntervaguelydownwards → Arthas Menethil //

darknessb4me

The warden should expect a file to be delivered to his cabin shortly. Please familiarize yourself with the information therein and introduce yourself to your new Inmate as soon as possible.

[She blinks slowly, coming back to herself.]

Sometimes the rot runs particularly deep, of course. I hope you'll be very happy together.

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[Tiffany pulls her arms tighter around herself, frowning. She hadn't realized it until now, but she'd made a little internal deal with herself. If Ivy lashed out and yelled and told her to leave, Tiffany had decided that that would mean that she'd been lying - that she really had only been saying those things to provoke a reaction, and so all of it could be thoroughly dismissed.

But Ivy isn't lashing out or yelling. Which, according to Tiffany's own theory, means...]

... You know, Ivy, I couldn't eat dinner last night? Yeah. I tried, but it all didn't want to go down right. And then I woke up in the middle of the night and puked. That's kinda your fault, 'cause you put some stuff in my head and now I can't get it out.

I'm sorry.

[Her posture is less tense and defensive than Tiffany will have ever seen it.]

...I don't think I put anything in your head. Drew attention to something that was already there, perhaps. But I'm sorry.

I like sex.

[Blunt and matter-of-fact.]

Just so you know, I like sex a lot. I have it a lot when I can. If all that stuff you was talking about had ever happened to me, I'd probably hate it, huh. And men. 'Cause that's what happens - I knew a girl in high school whose stepdaddy touched her, everybody knew it, and she tried to off herself by swallowing pills. Had to go to a special hospital.

I have never wanted to do anything like that.

Neither have I. And I like sex too.

[Ivy takes a few steps away, sitting down on a stone bench.]

And I didn't stop liking it when my boyfriend in college ignored me when I said I wasn't in the mood. Or when I was locked away for the first time, and one of the guards made my access to sunlight conditional on my willingness to go down on him.

[Tiffany stays standing, hugging herself, her grip hard enough to turn her knuckles white.]

Well, that. That ain't what people say it's like. They say it ruins you.

[Ivy bites down around the diatribe about the relationship between a woman's perceived value and her sexual 'purity' that she'd be handing out if this conversation was less personal and more theoretical. Instead, fairly mildly:]

Who do you think benefits from that being what people believe?

I don't know. Why don't you tell me, since I guess you're the big expert and all.

[There's a tinge of resentment in her voice. It's not fair to blame Ivy, and she knows that, but she can't help but feel bitter anyway.]

'Cause if it wasn't for you I wouldn't know about any of this at all.

[Ivy exhales softly, not quite a sigh. Her tone is quiet and frank.]

When I was a student, I thought the same thing. I could still function, I was still interested in sex, I still liked men - so it couldn't have been rape. Part of me must have invited what had happened to me.

So I stayed with the man who did it, for six months. And he just kept hurting me.

No one has ever hurt me. I never got smacked around or nothing by a guy I had sex with.

And all pain is physical, is it?

[She watches Tiffany for a moment.]

...the worst part was realizing that I had been victimized. I couldn't sleep for days. I stopped eating. It was easier for me to think I had engineered a situation I hated, because at least I could believe I had been in control. I didn't have to live with the fact that it had been taken from me.

[Instead of answering, Tiffany sinks down onto the ground, her back against a tree. She picks up a stick and scuffs it in the dirt, not making eye contact with Ivy.]

Edited 2015-06-17 19:15 (UTC)

[Ivy goes quiet as well, glancing away without really looking at anything.

Eventually, though, her mossy rabbit hybrid sneaks out of the undergrowth and approaches Tiffany, nudging its nose against her knee. Maybe it's doing this on its own initiative; maybe it's the offer of affection that Ivy feels wary of giving. Hard to tell.]

[She doesn't do anything at first, but after about half a minute she reaches out and scratches its ears.]

I have a rabbit. Mason gave him to me.

I miss Mason a lot. He was better than a lot of guys.

[She watches as her pet tries to climb up onto Tiffany's lap.]

We never talked. He seemed -- [male, British, vaguely irritating, not strictly human.] -- harmless.

[She pulls the rabbit closer, holding it in her arms.]

He was sweet. He said I was beautiful. He was very harmless. If I'd ever said I didn't want to do something, he would've always listened, even if I'd owed him.

Good.

[Ivy can't help but feel her thoughts snag on that sentence. A fairly gentle observation:]

...There's never a point at which you owe someone the right to have you do something you don't want to do.

[Tiffany pets the rabbit's ears, still avoiding eye contact with Ivy.]

Once, back home, there was this guy who I used to have sex with sometimes.

[Ivy makes a quiet sound of acknowledgement and doesn't push for more. Whatever Tiffany has to say, she can say at her own pace.]

Yeah. But he... he wasn’t very good at it, though. He didn’t know how to make it good for girls. I didn’t even know it could be that good for girls back then. But I did it anyway - and it was because I wanted to. I did agree. I'm not saying I didn't.

Anyway, I used to have sex with him, but I stopped when I started going out with this other guy. Then my boyfriend moved away, and the old guy started coming back around. I told him I wasn’t really interested in him anymore, but he grabbed me and put me up against the wall and we had sex anyway. And I let him. I told him no and I tried to push him off at first, but then I stopped trying.

He was an asshole, but I kinda get why he thought I’d be okay with it, ‘cause we did used to do it regularly, so... and he was trying to be nice. He came and found me. He brought me a six-pack of soda. I can't blame him too much for getting confused.

So what about times like that? 'Cause... there's been times like that.

[No point mincing words.]

You told him no and it happened anyway. That you stopped fighting him doesn't equate to consent.

[She looks across to Tiffany.]

I'm sorry that happened to you.

[She looks up, finally.]

Yeah, but I don't want you to be right, though. And I'm supposed to make my own opinions about things now, so what if I want my opinion to be that you're wrong?

[But there's a difference between having a different opinion because it's what she actually believes, and pretending to have a different opinion because it's easier that way. This is the latter.]

[Softly:]

That's your choice. But why do you want that, Tiffany?

'Cause it's better than what you're saying.

...I know it feels that way, at first. It did for me, for a very long time. But the alternative was spending the rest of my life blaming myself. 'That's just how men are, so I ought to have been more careful.' My choice was between hating what happened to me or hating myself for letting it happen.

But it is how a lot of men are. Am I supposed to fight it every time or something?

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