#violetvelafiles

New HarlIvy fic: "Would You Take Me Back, If I Was Different?"

Poison Ivy comes back from the dead in a new body and spends one day making her way to Harley. Six chapters, complete, posting every two days. Diary, voice memo, found footage, and one very rude revolver. Ch 1–2 up now. Art's mine.

🌱🔫 "WOULD YOU TAKE ME BACK, IF I WAS DIFFERENT?" is complete!

8/8 chapters, ~33k words of HarlIvy.

Pamela Isley died saving Gotham. Two and a half years later the Green spits her back out in a body that isn't the one Harley fell in love with -- taller, greener, a stranger in her own mirror. So she does the one thing that scares her worse than dying again: she goes to find Harley, and asks the question in the title.

The whole work is built out of documents — a diary, a voice memo, a text thread, a livestream, a 2016 Arkham clinical eval. Those are the ways Pam can show up in the world when she can't quite show up as herself. There's exactly one chapter where there's nothing left between her and you.

A word on why I wrote it. This came together during Pride, out of something I kept noticing: so much of queer experience gets described, by the people living it, as becoming a different person. Coming out as a kind of death and rebirth. Transition as waking up in a body that no longer matches the one everyone remembers. I wanted to carry all of that on the most gloriously comic-book device there is — she literally dies, literally comes back, literally different, and still has to ask the most ordinary human question there is. That question is the title.

So here's the one I'll leave you with: what does it mean to "come back different"? I have my answer. I'd love to hear yours — I read and reply to every comment, and the ones that wrestle with the ideas are my favorites.

🏳️‍🌈 Reunion, resurrection, slow burn, a gun that's absolutely Chekhov's, and — for once — a happy ending. Happy Pride.

📖 Read on AO3: archiveofourown.org/works/85487321

Chapter 4 of "Would You Take Me Back, If I Was Different?" is up: the one told entirely in text threads.

Poison Ivy clawed out of the ground in a new body, and Gotham's finding out one screenshot at a time. 🌱

Read on AO3 →

Ivy finally shows up at Harley's apartment.

She knows Harley's an influencer now. The makeup, the dating advice, the million-plus followers. What she doesn't know is that Harley is live. Right now. That the single most exposed moment of her whole resurrection -- walking up to the one person in Gotham who might recognize her -- is going out to fifty thousand people in real time

Ivy has no idea how Harley is going to react.

We do. The stream got deleted, but a Gotham true-crime YouTuber's bot had already grabbed it, clean, and tonight he posted the whole thing, picked apart frame by frame.

So now you get to watch the reunion Ivy walked into blind. On camera. Every second of it.

Ivy thinks she's knocking on a door. But she's walking onto a stage.

WOULD YOU TAKE ME BACK IF I WAS DIFFERENT — Ch 5, "Gotham After Action."