Nightwing's Daughter (Fanfic)

Aspen The Weed

Nightwing's Daughter - Chapter 5

Aspen The Weed

I held my position, not wanting to make my presence known. I looked at the scene with a pair of high power night vision goggles. My fingers frozen to them due to the bitter wind that bombarded me from all sides. If only my cape had built in heat warmers... I shook my head, not the time to lose focus. My radio earpiece beeped. "Red Robin to Starling, report your position." I open and closed my left hand repeatedly before touching my ear to reply. "Observing south entrance. High activity, permission to take a closer look?" There was a crackling noise on the other end as other intercoms joined the conversation. "Permission granted. Do not engage." Batman was as emotion filled as ever. I let him know I had received the message.

I jumped off of the evergreen tree that I was currently on, keeping to the shadows as I dropped onto another lower nearby tree. I kept the group of twenty in sight at all times. They were handling what looked like exotic plants. They had a long line, starting at the door and ending at an unmarked van on the other side of the court yard. The plants were being passed down the line. I caught a glance of one of the men. He looked stressed? Worried? No terrified. His trembling fingers went to enclose around a plant that was being passed to him. He was shaking too much though, his fingers slipped and the potted plant went crashing to the ground.

In the silence, the pot making contact with the ground sounded like a bullet being fire from the gun. It might as well have the same effect. I watched frozen in place as a giant plant emerged from the ground in front of him, cracking the asphalt and towering over the man, at least three times his height. It wrapped tendril like vines around the soon to be dead victims neck. It began to grow a scarlet bud in its upper center, it grew bigger and bigger. The bud finally burst to reveal a redheaded woman in a green leotard with matching gloves and boots. Poison Ivy.

"How dare you... how dare you hurt one of my new babies." She was breathing heavily as though by dropping the pot the man had caused her physical pain. She jumped gracefully down from the plant, cradling the young sapling, like a mother cradling her new born child. "It's ok, shhh, I'm here, mummy will take care of the nasty man." Ivy flicked her wrist. The man couldn't move before the vine lifted him from the floor. He squirmed and writhed, his screams muffled as he rose higher and higher, a sickening crunch echoed around the court yard.

There was a moment of silence before Ivy turned to the men. The vines of the giant plant encircled the corpse and started to drag it back down the hole it had created on its entry. "Don't you dare let it happen again! GET BACK TO WORK!" She stormed back into the giant green house that made up part of the botanical gardens, cradling the injured sapling. I was frozen to the tree. My voice cracked as I spoke into my intercom. "Ivy, she's collecting some sort of plant from the greenhouse, she's real protective of them, she killed one of her men because he dropped one." I jumped down to the lowliest branch that was still covered by leaves. The men continued to pass down the plants, putting them in the van.

A shadow caught my eye. I looked over from where I was in the tree just in time to spot Batman run across the glass roof of the green house. He used some sort of cutting tool on the glass panes, securing a line to a metal pole that protruded from the roof. He looked in my direction, weather he saw me or not I couldn't tell. He turned back to his work; I threw a sceptical look at his back. I heard the earpiece crackle, "Come on then." His coarse voice said somewhat grumpily. I allowed a strained light laugh to escape my lips as I jumped down from the tree, with the entire line of men with their backs to me it was easy to run across the asphalt, in fact it was even easier to use one of the side doors.

I was hit with an overbearing mugginess that hung in the air. I was just like when dad had taken Tim and me to the zoo when we were littler, there had been a section completely dedicated to dessert wildlife, the dome was hot, heavy and it made it difficult to breathe. If it came to a fight, we would have very little stamina, Robin and I may last a little longer than Batman, but not by much. We needed to think this through, we couldn't just go in guns blazing. "Robin, Batman and I are in the dome. Where are you?" There was a pause; I heard muffled conversation down the other end. He was probably talking to a policeman. "I'm outside talking with police reinforcements. There's a problem downtown, a load of Gotham's guys got taken to that, so we have backup... From Blüdhavan." There was a series of snickers down the line "I'm speaking to Detective Inspector Grayson right now." I froze. Dad had been called into work earlier that day, cutting our trip into town short. Nightwing couldn't be here tonight because my dad was...