WARNING: This article contains spoilers for DC Comics' Love is a Battlefield.
The romance between DC's Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy has launched one of the most iconic comic book relationships in recent memory, so much so that the pair officially tied the knot last year in Injustice: Year Zero. And while fans have been treated to the beginnings of their relationship over the course of the past few years, a new Valentine's Day special, DC: Love is a Battlefield, will show readers its end - and how the couple's love will live forever.
Love is a Battlefield is essentially a collection of vignettes centered on the various romances throughout the DC universe, and Harley and Ivy's entry, "The Beginning," from writer Tim Seeley and artist Rebekah Isaacs, is as illuminating as it is touching. Presented over a series of flashbacks, the couple are playfully bickering over the most crucial points of their relationship in a series of narration boxes. However, the twist comes in the story's final pages, which reveal an aged Harley and Ivy - the former in a hospital bed and the latter looking over her. All of these remembrances had just been the couple looking back on their decades of adventures and misadventures, throughout which they were always at the other's side.
Harley is barely able to speak through her coughing fits when Ivy unveils something she'd been working on; a modified Lazarus Seed (derived from a Lazarus Pit) that will allow anyone who eats it to be reborn as a plant after their death. "The thing is," Ivy explains, "plant cells can't hold memory the way animal cells can. All of this? Everything we shared? It'll all be gone. We'll be new life-forms... with new lives." Harley swallows the seed without hesitation, saying, "Y'know what? That's okay. I got a whole lot of things I'd like to do different this time around." Seemingly bemused, Ivy asks her lover what she's regretting. "I wanna find ya earlier, Ivy," Harley says as the ailing couple hold hands. Ivy takes her own seed and plants a kiss on Harley's forehead.
It's unclear how much time is meant to have passed between the current DC continuity and whenever this short story is set, but it is clear that the couple had (predictably) been through all sorts of hijinks and turmoil over the years. From Harley turning to Poison Ivy for comfort after her splitting with Joker, to the duo inadvertently preventing another Crisis event, to them seemingly becoming official members of the Bat Family, it's clear that Ivy and Harley have been through untold highs and lows. But no matter how low those lows got, their love never waned.
The story's title, "The Beginning," is an apt one as it can be looked at through both a literal and figurative lens. The flashbacks showed the couple's actual beginnings together, but the final pages - and the introduction of this new and improved Lazarus Seed - signal a whole new type of beginning for Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, one that will see the couple together forever, even after death. It's about as close to a "happily ever after" as anyone ever gets in Gotham.