Marry The Knight Ch. 15

Having opened the face of the grandfather clock in the study with a precise application of pressure to begin with, Bruce set the hands of the clock to the minute before his parents' death. He held the hands there against the motion of the machine, and after being locked in place a motion, the grandfather clock obligingly unclenched from its position. When he let go of the hands, they spun back to the correct time. He shut the glass protector on the clock face, and stepped through the cracked door to the staircase.

***

Paige whimpered as she shoved her hand between her legs, barely able to breathe to moan in relief as she sank two fingers into her wet cunt. Feverishly, she worked herself, humping her ass off the floor and into her thrusting fingers.

"Fuck me," she whispered shamefully. "Ivy, please, fuck me, fuck me, with that sweet tongue of yours. Fuck me, Ivy. Fuck my juicy cunt!

With a deep breath, Ivy pushed Paige away from herself. She spoke hypnotically, her pheromones working quickly on Paige's oversexed mind. "You don't want to fuck me," she mewled. "You want to fuck Harley. Go fuck Harley, Paige. She wants to soooo much."

Whimpering, Paige rushed to obey, her well-pleasured brain completely focused on Harley now. Still, Ivy felt just a little misgiven, leaving them alone. She cast a last, longing look at the two before she hurried on. Paige was letting Harley out of her cage. Ivy wondered if she'd regret that. There were times when she would've liked very much to know Harley didn't mind a kennel.

She followed after Bruce.

***

Everything felt strange to Harley—how she'd been in pain but it didn't hurt and it was warm and she felt in control but totally out of control too, not in control of herself but Bruce was in control of her so she was controlled.

Strangest of all was the sensation in her sex, where a sense of heaviness seemed to press down on everywhere she was sensitive, dammed up frustration physically touching her. It was no painful so much as numbing, but through that numbness something tingled.

"Poor girl," Paige fussed. "Let's get you bathed. You'll feel better after. Then we can have some fun."

Naked but for her collar, Harley followed after the other woman, following the sparkling engagement ring on her hand. She allowed herself to be led to the master bathroom, where Paige drew a bath for her, just hot enough to steam. It was big enough for both of them, and they slid into the water together, floating into a fit with the water and each other.

Harley felt herself reviving quickly after she'd ducked into, and surfaced from, the bath's warmth. The world stopped being so fuzzy and she noticed things with the usual clarity no one credited her for. She could see the well-polished mirrors of the bathroom, the monogrammed towels, all the luxurious appointments set out for, well, her, she guessed. She was the one who could benefit from all those expensive shampoos and conditioners. Her and Ivy and Paige and Mistah Bruce, too, in a roundabout way. If she felt good, and looked good, he would like that. He would like it a lot.

Harley liked it when Bruce liked things.

Then she winced, feeling Paige's fingers follow the livid red welts upon her pale skin. She closed her eyes and shuddered at the memory of how her splendid body had produced such splendid feelings in such an unusual way...

"Doesn't it hurt?" Paige asked, her voice muted to a near whisper.

"Yes and no," Harley answered. "It hurts, but it don't hurt. Or it hurts, but it also hurts. Like when you're doing a guy that's really big, and he stretches you out, and you don't think you can take it, but you do..."

"But Harley, those welts on your body! A collar! How can you endure it?"

"Guess it's just an acquired taste," Harley said cheerily. "Ya know, you seem awful curious about it. Wanna acquire my taste, supa-model?"

***

Ivy hissed through her teeth as she whirled around the study, feeling like a flower that'd gotten too much sun. He'd gone in here, she knew it, knew it! Where was he? She'd been just a half minute behind him, yet she couldn't scent him anywhere—none of her houseplants reported seeing him. It was like he'd vanished into thin air!

She heard a rapping on the window. Odd—the curtains were drawn. Ivy went to the thin sliver that was left open and pulled it wide. On the other side of the glass, Vicki Vale was trying to get her attention. Ivy rolled her eyes and pulled the sash up the window frame. Was the reporter trying to get a scoop with her eavesdropping or just being a voyeur? Was there a difference?

"He went in there!" Vicki said, so eager to please she was practically whimpering. She jabbed her forefinger at the grandfather clock in the corner. "In there!"

"Thank you," Ivy said politely. She felt her pheromones taking Vicki's will. "Why don't you go take a bath? I'm sure Harley's gotten the water nice and warm."

Vicki grinned at her as she climbed into the room. This was why Ivy worked alone, mostly. Operational security was so hard to maintain once you had some floozies around. Vines were much better. As a last resort, Harley. She was mouthy, but sometimes mouthiness could be useful...

Repressing a shudder, Ivy went to the grandfather clock. It didn't look like a secret passage—it wouldn't, of course. She opened up its belly, reached past the pendulum, but the wall there seemed solid. After yanking her hand back out of the way of the pendulum, she tried banging on the clock's back.

It sounded hollow, almost.

***

"Talia and Nyssa? Since when do they work the same side of the street?" Dick asked, exercising his leg with lifts, a weight strapped to the cast. He was nearly a hundred percent, possibly because he was still milking the injury to avoid the Clocktower.

Inside the costume vault, Bruce armored up, selecting his most potent arsenal. With the League of Assassins in play, this would be less crowd control and more ironclad combat, complete with broadsides. "Talia's reasons are personal. If nothing else, she'd rather kill me herself than let one of her father's assassins do it. I'm sure Ra's would prefer I die in agony."

"Ain't love grand," Dick mused. "And Nyssa?"

"Me spurring Ra's offer to be his heir, coupled with choosing lowborn marriages instead, is a graven insult to him. An insult weakens his position. Given that Nyssa intends to take his position one day, she can't let her 'inheritance' be damaged ahead of time. She'll see this as an opportunity to jockey for power."

"And I thought Komand'r was a bad in-law. Not to mention Gordon Jr., the Bertinelli crime family—all Zinda's clan is dead."

Bruce pulled on his cowl. "Between the Floronic Man and the Joker, I think I win on exes, though."

"You've got a point there. My women have a great taste in men."

"Not that it's paying off at the moment," Bruce reminded him tersely, now fully armored, as he strode to the Batmobile.

Dick stopped his exercises to sit up on the recovery cot and shout after him. "Hey, I'll go back as soon as I can figure out a romantic gesture to make up for my... staycation. And as soon as I know how to tell Barbara that I don't want to marry Starling."

"Why not?" Bruce replied.

"Because I'm not made of Viagra. Even down here, sometimes it feels like there's going to be a cave-in!"

"Just bang a broomstick on the roof if you want us to quiet down," Bruce told him, dropping into the Batmobile's cockpit.

It sealed shut after him, the closed glass giving Dick a momentary look at his reflection, and then it sped off down the long passageway leading to the waterfall that concealed the Batcave's exit.

***

Whatever Wayne was hiding, he favored security through obscurity. It made sense. A big, high-tech set-up used a lot of juice—all a burglar would have to do was look around with an electromagnetic visor and they'd be able to spot the hiding place. The grandfather clock was pretty simple in comparison to the safes and vaults that the man favored elsewhere in the mansion. Its big defense was pretending it wasn't hiding anything.

But now that Ivy knew something was wrong with it, she just had to grow some moss through the grandfather clock and then she knew it, inside and out. With that done, engaging the mechanism was as easy as picking a lock from the inside. The clock swung out of the way and Ivy saw a staircase just waiting for her, dark and dank enough for mushrooms.

The perfect place for a murder, it looked like.

***

Dick laid back in bed and resumed his leg exercises, never noticing Ivy's approach until the vines wrapped around his body, cocooning him to the bed. No sooner were they out of the way than Ivy was kissing him, infecting him with her rampant lust. His manhood sprang to life, restrained only by the bonds holding him in place. He suddenly wanted to fuck Ivy more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life, and he'd first met her when he was thirteen.

"Dick Grayson," she drawled, sauntering around the Batcave. She kept it a one-sided conversation: slipped a vine between his lips as a gag. "I was wondering when we'd meet. I've known a lot of rich daddies and a lot of cute stepsons, but Nightwing himself—yes, it has to be you, doesn't it? And that would make... Tim Drake, Red Robin, and that quiet little Asian orphan, she has to be Batgirl? One of them, anyway. There are all so many of you..."

She examined the crime lab, running a hand over the various instruments, imagining the fun she could have once she took over this place as a base. Less foliage, of course, but the roots could run deep, all the way to the surface, and in the forest aboveground, she could draw such power...

Then of course, there was Wayne. Her husband. "So, Bruce Wayne is Batman. I won't pretend that doesn't make sense. And here I thought no one could be less respected than a beautiful woman. I suppose an idiot trust-fund kid is even more invisible. I always wondered how he seemed to luck into such great business deals before he'd manage to sink his own yacht..."

Ivy looked back at Dick. She had reduced him to a mass of quivering jelly, except for the fine-looking hardness struggling to part the vines at his groin. She hopped up on the lab table to enjoy the way he was trapped there, utterly dominated by her power both sexual and physical, fidgeting around like a little boy more than trying to escape, hoping that his erection wasn't showing. Oh, he needed to fuck all right, no doubt about that.

"I suppose it stems from the death of his parents, right? And here I thought that just gave him intimacy issues. I suppose he decided to get his jollies beating up criminals? And he recruited a bunch of impressionable youths into his crusade, that is genius. All of us in the underworld think you Bats are mercenaries he hires or something. But so much more loyalty when you're—homegrown, so to speak."

She leapt down from the table and almost broke from her sultry stride, wanting to run, wanting to skip around her conquest. She'd been here before, as a prisoner, stripped of her powers, made to wear an ill-fitting nadir-of-fashion, interrogated like a common criminal or put under lockdown for her own protection like some helpless little girl, the male arrogance of it! Bruce Wayne and Batman, the same person. It all made sense. The same way he tried to control the city as Batman, he tried to control her as Bruce. He exerted his mastery over her just as much by defeating her plots as by...

Ivy quivered. No, she wouldn't think of that now. She'd stopped moving in front of a keepsake—the Ventriloquist's dummy, useless now that a much bigger dummy had become Ventriloquist. She strutted about it, observing the trophy in its spotless glass.

"So many mementos. You took Harley's favorite mallet, you know. She's been wondering where that got to. Anything of mine? For God's sake, you keep a token of your victory over the Penny Plunderer, you have to pay homage to me somehow!"

The vine released Dick's mouth. When he spoke, his breath was heaving. "Some of your flowers... in the back. Sunlamps, mechanical waterer... they're early work..."

"Yes... back when I just bred flowers, before I realized my true power—not too fair for me to talk about breeding around you, is it?" Ivy wandered closer to him. "As if you need to think of that anymore..."

Dick gritted his teeth. He was trying so hard not to beg for just a slightly better look at her, and there she was, walking about naked. And it was a dark cave, too. Ivy made a point to stay out of the light. "You think you'll get his inheritance if you kill him?"

"Oh yes!" Ivy agreed, running a hand over her breasts. She focused on the money, her excitement there, because when she thought of him never laying a hand on Harley again, there was an odd melancholy. It wasn't so bad, now that she thought about it, watching him fuck her—"I'll have to kill you too, of course. Nothing personal. I would've split the inheritance with you before, but now that I know you're Nightwing—heck, you were probably Robin too, am I right? Well, I have to do something about all the plans you foiled, all my poor babies that you destroyed..."

"How are you going to do it?" Dick asked, eyes closed, struggling to not even try to look at her. "You've tried to kill the Batman before. You think it'll be any easier now that you have to get away with making it look like it wasn't you?"

Ivy threw herself forward, catching herself with outstretched arms on two stalagmites so she hung forward, her hair brushing her shoulders before lapsing down her chest. "That's the beautiful part! Now I don't have to worry about it! I just tell a few interested parties that he's Batman and what happens? Oh, no, my poor husband, the Mad Hatter killed him! Guess I only have his vast fortune to comfort me..."

"Won't work," Dick insisted, even as his hips involuntarily worked to relieve the pressure on his groin.

"Oh, like I should let a Bat lecture me on murder. None of you are any good at it, darling." Ivy's brow furrowed and she pulled herself back up. "Wait, were you Batman for a little bit? You seem quite familiar. What, did Bruce eat some bad sushi?"

Dick struggled to focus and she felt so bad for him, writhing around under her vines, that she almost wanted to jerk him off, just so she could say she'd done it. She'd wanted Nightwing as a boy toy for a long time. Robin had been cute too, but doing that with such a young innocent had just seemed too tacky. But if she was going to kill him anyway... maybe just for one brief moment... she could send him out with a bang.

"Think what happens if Bruce dies... and it's discovered that he's Batman." The thought seemed to quell Dick's arousal. When he spoke again, his voice was more focused. "Imagine the lawsuits. Every cheap thug he ever stepped on will sue for damages. Your inheritance? It will be tied up in court for years!"

"Nonsense. If he dies as Bruce Wayne—"

"Do you know how many of us there are? Sure, some of us you know because Bruce adopted us, but do you know who Huntress is? Oracle? Red Hood? You really think any one of us will let you get away with the money? Hell, Huntress and the Hood would probably just kill you and be done with it, but I imagine Oracle will let the newspapers know who he was. He'll be a martyr. You'll get nothing."

Ivy ordered the vines to tighten. Dick groaned, feeling pleasure as he was pained. The first place the pressure touched was his bulging groin... "Then I'll do it for the sheer pleasure!" she hissed. "With the Bat out of the way, I'll be able to steal ten times as much! I won't need his fortune!"

"But you still have it," Dick panted. "Why go to the trouble of losing yourself a fortune in the hopes you can gain another one?"

Ivy realized she was reddening and turned away, flippantly dismissing him. "I'm a villain. He vexes me. If you can't kill a guy like that, what's the point?"

"I don't think he vexes you. Harley vexes you. I think you're angry that he resists you. He's maybe the only man you've ever wanted and you can't have him. You find it insulting."

Ivy whirled around. "God, you sound like Harley when she's on her meds. Alright then. I find it insulting that a man who dresses like a bat has the audacity to refuse me. To say nothing of how he's foiled my plans and touched my Harley. I'm still going to kill him."

"But he hasn't resisted you—" Dick wiggled around a moment, groaning—Ivy wondered if he was thinking of one of the many women he had to have—then forced himself still. "He married you. Not Talia, not Selina. You. And you've got to know Harley was just a package deal."

Ivy crawled atop the bed he was straitjacketed to, laughing as she pressed her weight into him with her hands and knees. "Only to neuter me."

"To sue for peace," Dick argued. "To reach détente. Out of all the criminals in Gotham, he knew you were the strongest, the most dangerous, so he bought you off with a wedding ring. Isn't what you've wanted all this time? Him? He's given himself to you."

Ivy bit her lip. Tapped her chin. "You bring up an interesting point. Not just a pretty face—or a big cock." She batted, cat-like, at the mound raising its floral covering by several inches, Dick grimacing as he felt her touch on his crotch. Even through his clothing and the restraining vines, it was shockingly delicious. "Maybe I should fuck him to death, as a thank you. Then I get it all. Dead Wayne. Batman's cock. Everything I ever wanted."

"But with Batman gone, who's going to keep the Joker away from Harley?"

Ivy squeezed her hand into a fist. It was a last-resort argument, she could tell. Dick was worried about invoking her wrath with Harley's name, as well he should be, but he had a point. The little bastard. Wayne had raised him well.

She didn't like Wayne. She hated Batman. But she loathed the Joker.

And if Bruce dominated Harley, he didn't hurt her. She couldn't control him—he was the Bat—but she could trust him with Harley. And with that sick need of Harley's satisfied, the Harley Quinn part of her satisfied, that left loving, girly Harleen Quinzel all to Ivy. No pain. No sadomasochism. Just them. All she had to do was share.

Well... plants needed water and soil and sunlight. She was Harley's sun, her rain—let Bruce be where she was planted. It would still be Ivy that truly made her grow.

Plus, there was the money. Tax-free, risk-free, Bruce letting her use it for whatever environmental causes she wanted, taking directives from her on running Wayne Enterprises, letting her do her research. She'd shared a cell with Maxie Zeus. This wasn't being conquered by Rome, this was paying tribute to Rome.

And he'd probably get himself beaten to hell and back, pretending he was in the Justice League's... league. She could enjoy that.

Suddenly, the Batcomputer started screeching. Ivy looked over at it. Even without knowing the system, it was easy to figure out the schematic on display was the Batmobile. And easy to guess why large areas of it were colored red. Still, she asked.

"What's that?"

"Damage report," Dick replied. He was staring at Ivy's ass unfettered. He just couldn't help it. "The Batmobile either hit an IED or was struck by some kind of rocket—it looks totaled."

"And Batman?"

"What do you think?"

Ivy frowned. It was no wonder Selina liked him so much; he had nine lives too. "Can we listen in to what he's saying?"

Dick's eyes glazed over Ivy's bare back. "Computer, unmute comm channels!"

Instantly, a cacophony of noise and static swirling around Bruce's gruff voice: "Oracle, it was a trap. Been hit. I'll need the Batmobile cleared up if the self-destruct doesn't work."

"What about you?" Oracle replied, in her voice-modulated patois. "The League of Assassins—"

"No. Just the Demon's daughters. Matter of honor. They're going to take me—prepare a strike team, but don't scramble unless I tell you."