Swamp Thing

It began with an incursion.  Not an invasion, since that suggested yet another arrival of extraterrestrial forces.  “Incursion” was a better word to describe the emergence of a horde of alternate reality versions of Batman dragging the world into darkness and chaos. The incursion threatened the Green by dousing the light, by harming plants and all living things, and despite a rather annoying incident where Batman led the rest of the Justice League across the sacred ground of the Parliament of Trees, Swamp Thing was soon offering his strength and skills to turn back the threat. In the end, he was only on the edges of the fight, but as the League called upon the totality of humanity to free Earth from the Dark Multiverse, the Green and its avatar were part of the victory.  And Alec, perhaps as a way of making it up to him and the Green for offending the Parliament, was invited to a party to celebrate the victory.

But the victory had left the Source Wall, the mysterious dividing point between the known universe and the unknown, shattered.  The rules of reality, of physics, of magic, had been upset.  And as a result, ancient forces long locked away threatened Earth. Even as the heroes of the world were still coming to grips with the knowledge that they needed to address the changes to reality. When the dust had settled, the Tree of Wonder, an artifact of the threat to Earth but not itself a threat, took root in Salem, MA.  And Wonder Woman, herself connected to the world’s magic, felt inspired to find allies to address the changes to the magic.

Among those she connected was the Swamp Thing. He had long respected Diana, admired what she stood for, even felt a bit of awe in her presence.  But her pitch to him sounded all too familiar.  It was that of a warrior trying to use a sword to beat back magic.  She might as we use a sword to drive away the air.  It was naïve, and a bit distressing that even Diana, at the end of the day, fell back on the same methods that Batman might use.  He politely, even regretfully, declined her offer to help.

But that was not the end of it. He looked around at the world.  And what did he see?  Man’s inhumanity to man, as ever.  A cadre of heroes, each more powerful than the next, unable to stop the worst in man, unable to save the Green, unable to protect the world. A cold and uncaring universe that would just keep going on if Earth blinked out. And around it all, a broken reality that he could not fix.  That he could never fix.

Even as Wonder Woman tried in vain to gather her team, Alec returned to the swamp outside Houma, Louisiana.  He sometimes found release and relief there.  But this time, he found death and distress, found violence and vileness.  A woman, long ago the victim of a grotesque experiment, had fled into the swamp from the prison on the edges of the bayou. Behind her, a squad of government-employed criminals.  Alongside her, the literal ghosts of the experiment, of the torments she lived and the torments she brought to the world. Alec offered her sanctuary.  The criminals offered her death, even as the ghosts invaded his swamp. Not for the first time, his efforts to bring a little salvation to the world failed as man hated and hunted man.  He found the cold eyed woman who commanded the criminals in her office in the prison, told her, this Amanda Waller, that he was keeping an eye on her now.  But his anger soon dimmed to disappointment and disgust.  He could kill Waller, and then what?  Wouldn’t there be another one, just like her?

 

He soon turned his attention back to the larger problems in the world, as sorcerers and mages and the great wielders of white magic and black realized that they could not ignore the changes around them.  As much as Wonder Woman sought to recruit Alec, so did the mages.  Baron Winter, the overly mysterious self-declared first among equals, sent out an invitation to a conclave.  Alec had no use for Winter, for his dull theatrics, for his ignorance of the Green masked as a holistic understanding of all. He did not bother to respond to Winter’s summons.

And yet he had to attend, if in secret.  If his faith in Wonder Woman to address matters was limited, his faith in Winter did not exist at all.  Weary as he was starting to feel, he hid his consciousness among the potted plants and spied on them.  He learned nothing.  No, not nothing.  He learned that Zatanna, occasional ally, former teammate in John Constantine’s ill-fated and ill-assembled Justice League Dark, and trusted friend, had chosen to attend, and had the same doubts he did.  (He also learned that she was more perceptive than most, and she alone noticed his presence in the room.) He regretted not attending, if only because she could have used an ally.

Only Zatanna, he knew, would find him.  She would put on a show of being upset that he was acting the spy – perhaps not entirely a show, but the stage magician she pretended to be six nights a week had a way of becoming real – and chew him out and eventually seek to work with him. And, ever more weary, he wasn’t sure he wanted even that.  So he contrived to offer her something else.  Something she could take to Wonder Woman – since he was sure she would eventually play the hero again – while he returned to the swamp to think.  He ventured to the Tree of Wonder.  And waited.

And began to realize just how tired he was. Everyone and everything was coming up short.  The world was getting further away. He was supposed to be the Avatar of the Green.  The melding of man and plant, connected to both, protecting both, even from each other.  And he could not find that connection. The Green was still there.  Mankind was not.  Alec Holland was not.

Even as he waited, even as he sensed that this alien tree, this artifact of a lost reality, was eager to speak to him, he did something that plants can’t usually do.  He sighed.  And knowing that time would not pass in his absence, he concentrated and sent a sprout of himself through the Green.  Across the realities.  To the Bar.

It began as it usually does, with a visitor in the swamp he calls home. A visitor whose idea of saying hello was to threaten the swamp. Alec did his favorite "create a giant head from the depths of the bayou" trick to scare her. And then it turned out she was a superheroine and just wanted his attention.

Her name was Stargirl, and Alec was vaguely aware that she was famous as a teen hero in LA and that she was part of some under-successful offshoot of the Justice League. Clearly, she thought highly of herself if she would risk his anger. But he was willing to let it go once she explained there was a threat to the Green in Lake Erie. A threat that he had missed, since it was crowded in with all the other seemingly small threats to the Green. But one that, once he focused, was clearly not to be lumped in with logging and lawnmowers.

So, after letting the Sureen know where he was going, he left the heat of the bayou for the cold of the shores of Lake Erie. Where he would soon meet the rest of Stargirl's team - which she said was connected to the Justice League, but she wasn't clear as to how. And where he saw the threat. A huge festering pink sore of an island that reminded him of the Rot but didn't have the same feel. It was, as the heroes insisted, of another reality. But after all he'd seen since becoming the avatar, he was sure he could handle it.

The rest of the team was a strange mix. But Alec was glad to see Buddy Baker, Animal Man, involved. He'd been hoping to talk with Buddy, to offer condolences on the death of Buddy's son and congratulations on an unlikely Best Actor award. To tell Buddy about the recent avatar war that somehow left out the Red. But Buddy was all business, rushing the players onto the stage, and turning leadership over to heroes Alec had never heard of.

Even stranger was who the heroes chose to bring in. Mera was Aquaman's wife or lover or something - it wasn't clear - but she didn't seem to share Aquaman's antipathy for him. Etrigan the demon was, as ever, arrogant, hateful and verbose, but the scope of the threat was so great that he was willing to work with others, and didn't mention his grudge against Alec from their recent battle.

And there was Poison Ivy. Her reputation was widely known. Criminal, twisted, crazy, and connected to the Green. He'd met her - a version of her, at any rate - in the future of the Rotworld, and found her to be, if not reliable, at least a friend to the plant kingdom. Meeting her in the present, she was in awe of him. He'd seen it before, from the Seeder and from Capucine, and he never could accept it. He was not a god. He was not even that unique. But she looked at him and just stammered that she was not needed if someone as powerful as the Swamp Thing was along.

And yet...

The moment they set foot on the strange island, it all went wrong. Alec could have never dreamed that the forces of the island, what Stargirl and her teammate Equinox called the Breakers, could cut him off from the Green! He could not feel it. Could not reach out and touch the trees of Siberia or Somalia or San Juan. Could not project his mind into the grass and the grains and the seeds and the sunflowers. Could not move! The island was sucking him in. His power was gone. His power was gone.

He felt lost. And then he felt the island. It was at once trying to kill him and trying to absorb him. It was alive and if not sentient, it was following a plan to remake Earth in its own darkness. There was not a thing Alec could do.

No. There was the tiniest thing. He managed to create one single flower on the surface of the island. For a second, he thought maybe he could get it to grow, to form a new body. But this was all he could manage. He would die, and take the world with him.

"Can you hear me?" It was Ivy, somehow reaching him through the Green or through her own powers or through some magic source of power he couldn't identify. He reached out to her. And the connection was complete. She would not merely repeat his warning. She would speak in his voice. For a single moment, they were one, and he told the others that the island was going to connect to the methane at the bottom of the lake and use it to move the next step, and the next. But he could not help them stop it. It was up to Ivy and Etrigan and the neophyte heroes and the woman from Atlantis.

He was done for. The link between him and Ivy severed. He was fully engulfed in the eldritch power of the Breakers. And then he saw it. The tiniest of things. The tiniest of doors. A door to another place. Not the extradimensional hell of the island. But a refuge. A refuge where the Green, or another version of the Green, was strong enough that he could take just a little power. And send a shoot through the door.

Moments later, the power of the heroes and the villains destroyed the island, and with it destroyed the body of the Swamp Thing. Poison Ivy wept for the loss of the most unique and special being in the world, and swore to restore his body and mind through her own strange alchemy. No one has any reason to know that at least a part of him had survived.