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Well this is crazy. Misty knows the woman thinks so, because – really, a young pretty girl in the Asylum? For what?
She’s sure, this one’s got her own story, something about her degree and ugly face and that long skirt which is a tombstone for her sexuality. But not Misty, no.
Misty is a life itself – bright pale skin with bright pink cheeks and bright glittering in the dim light of old lamps under the high ceiling eyes; something this woman is rather to see on TV or in an expensive boarding school or in underage porn – but not at all within the walls of sorrow and crumbling brick. So, she thinks, this is crazy.
But Misty just shrugs, gazing through the dusk at the row of wall-high cell windows on her left.
“Guess I’ve always had an attraction for extreme personalities.”
The woman looks concerned but says nothing. Misty muses if she has this fetish on the people in prison too, but it’s more likely that she’s just a poor eternal nerd. Couldn’t find anything better than the void inside a human skull. Maybe it distracts her from her own.
Maybe she even hopes she can fix something.
As if you can fix crazy.
Misty grins, hiding her chuckle in thick darkness between cells and arms in the pockets of her scrubs. This kind of talks is always killing the fun and leaves the bare sport, not even science. Madness isn’t a kind of thing which joyfully combines all three; the science had escaped long ago, frightened with all those theories of the unconscious; something like Frankenstein’s complex which made people play with electricity and brains had scared it as well. So now you either have fun or you are an old bitch with «Jude Martin» on your soiled badge.
“Still, Arkham is a very strange place to intern. Too high-profiled.”
“And challenging enough,” Misty smiles, politely as fuck and just as sweet. “There is undeniable glamour in being around high-profiled criminals, isn’t there?”
Bloody Face who slaughtered so many women because of his urge to kill the mummy he’d never had and his love for leather furniture; that stud with knowing smirk and eyes as black and stunning as his hunger for blood and mother's koumiss. He looks like a Hannibal with his arms thoughtfully under the chin when she passes him, not at all animal-like dangerous but with a mind so sharp and edgy and sick, that Misty feels how he’s skinning her and cutting her with nothing but a glare.
Or a lovely pyromaniac Madison Montgomery who once took a different «set» - the whole studio on fire instead of photo one. Misty loves how she spat in the camera on the court staples, saying she’s too hot for Themis. Misty can’t agree more; she even blames – or blesses – the little Hollywood Firefly for that cheesy yet brilliant catchphrase; for the burning desire which destroyed the floodgate for all the little kinks Misty had but didn’t acknowledge. She will get her personal serious thanks later – just as serious as this house and the earth it stands on.
In the next cell – this two-faced burned scum Larry Harvey who’s just an average clean shirt’s lawyer with great greed and shitty ways to cover up his tracks, but Misty is still fascinated by his undoubtedly bright mind which had helped him to design all the schemes and tricks The Gotham Times has been writing about. She also obviously has a thing for his face – well, one of them: it’s wrinkled and gore-brown and glistering so unhealthy when he looks at her through this bulletproof glass. Misty both admires and considers to be tremendously stupid his idea to fight police back with boiling oil when they came for him during his lunch in the Burger King; how he revealed his true nature in attempt to avoid it’s revealing.
They all are there – Moira O'Hara, young and old at once, with her magpie’s kleptomania and good old schizophrenia; Gotham’s very own tall slender scarecrow Dr. Arden who became a true nightmare for the City couple of years ago; Tate Langdon, old-school shooter, claiming to be killed and revived, with black skull tattooed on his face and images of crude stiches on his neck and shoulders and – as far as Misty knows – hips; and lots and lots of them, of any colour and size and kind of madness.
But most of all Misty likes the one in the cell in the middle of the block – the one with blond hair and different eyes and chemical burns around them.
The one whose cell is full of flowers; the one whose head is full of them.
The one who takes her time and doesn’t look at the sudden guest as all the others; just watering the flower and humming something in a cold damp silence. Musty wants to catch the melody, but Dr. Martin speaks again.
“These are hard-core psychotics,” she stresses, her voice is hoarse and strict, little angry and somehow lustful. “If you're planning to cash in on them anyhow, girl, I dare you to give up right now.”
Misty watches her reflection curiously, still not allowing herself a chuckle; if she wanted to write a book or something, she would write memoirs and became a so-called star very soon. She would call it something like «Between Black And Red», with modest nun on the cover – a hint of red peignoir under her frock; and she would clasp to her chest, as if they were crucifix, two cards – the red Joker and the black one; Misty has thought it over. She even knows what pen name she would take – Mary Eunice McKee, because isn’t it hilarious?
And the whole book, she thinks, watching the woman behind the glass putting her watering pot aside, would be devoted to sex, sex and sex. There would be chained girls and bloodplay and choking and rape and shit and deaths – and everybody would enjoy it as they enjoy «Shades of Grey», shamefully but proudly under their blankets; and nobody would ever guess that the modest and naïve girl next door, Misty Day, who likes animals and children, had written it. People would pay her for being fucked up weirdoes when nobody’s watching; people would pray for sister Mary Eunice in anonymous chats and Mary Eunice would give them absolution and encouragement to sin again.
But the problem is – this is not at all natural. She’s not Mary Eunice with her harlequin approach to things; just an average psychiatrist Misty Day, who’s read too many books and newspapers and sees colourful dreams. She can’t be considered to be crazy enough as she hadn’t do anything crazy yet; coming here – is her first little step to the moon; and as the woman in the cell turns around, Misty loses her last doubts that it is the right direction.
Newspapers called her Poison Ivy, trying to make this case even catchier than it was, but Misty likes her real name – Cordelia Foxx – just fine. She’s been following her trial with bated breath; Cordelia was put in huge impermeable plastic box and there were nobody around but the lawyer, the prosecutor and the judge, all with gasmasks just in case. The guard stood outside the courtroom, ready to seal it if she would do anything suspicious; they watched what happened inside through cameras – and the whole world with them; and Misty in particular.
Nobody knows what she was and why she’d become like that; there are no records of her before one day she showed up in Fiona Goode’s private broad school for girls with a bunch of flowers they’d ordered by phone half an hour ago. She left their porch immediately without even taking the money; two or three hours later all the people in the house were dead, including Fiona Goode; there is even a conspiracy theory, which says that flowers were exactly for her, but there is no evidence that miss Foxx had been anyhow connected to miss Goode. Still, Misty finds this mystery very intriguing.
D'autant plus, her next crimes were much more plain and understandable – the whole LaLaurie family is poisoned as they tried to bring to life the factory near Gotham Central Park; then she destroyed paper mill and disemboweled all of its bosses, hanging their bodies on the mill’s fence. Misty still has the whole collection of banned photos from the crime scene; she wanks on them every now and then.
She was everywhere – pollen in late-spring air, having sex with people’s noses and minds, intoxicating them with fear so they didn’t leave their houses or open the windows. When everything grey and dirty turned into all that green and fresh and balmy, Misty made a small flowerbed of her own, which she waters every morning, hoping Cordelia will anyhow notice the colours and attention.
Misty is sure that Cordelia let them catch her; maybe couldn’t abnegate for herself a show, who really knows? She came to Wane’s party in a fussy black dress, with a mask and killing kisses for Bruce and Gordon themselves, and left in a lingerie made of leaves and sprout, and handcuffs.
And now she’s looking at her through the window with her heterochromic eyes – one is dark like damp ground and decay and the other is blue, almost transparent, and little green deep inside of the well of colour; with kind and loving warm welcoming smile.
A spring itself, so unfortunately allergic to humanity.
Misty wants to check if everything about this woman is true.
She wants to lick her poisoned lips, taste her toxic saliva; wants to touch thick dark veins on the leaves of her palms and make them bleed to see what colour mother nature’s blood is.
She wants to fuck her senseless to find out what her juice tastes like and what scent lingers when you pick and molest this beautiful flower and put it in the eyelet of your jacket to never let go.
And Misty wants to know all of these things about herself, too. How does her own pain smells?
How does it feel to be pollinated?
How hard is it to shoot through the frozen crust of rationality?
How does it feel to be back finally to your roots?
The old hag can’t keep her mouth shut, trembling with impatience and not quite professional jealousy behind Misty’s back:
“These would eat a novice like you for breakfast.”
Oh, is it a promise?
Cordelia smiles as if she knows the answer. Cordelia smiles as if she’s ready to give it to Misty.
Cordelia smiles as if she has already reached her very core and sown the seed of Misty’s enlightenment, and Misty’s pretty sure she will be happy to be harvested by this smile as well.
So she just answers:
“The troubled souls should be helped. And people say I have a power of resurgence. So at least give me a try.”
And finally smiles back.