Kimmy Schmidt

"Huh?" Kimmy asks, glancing over at Rapunzel and Pascal. She's pretty desperate to get indoors or at least away from the people who seem to be watching her for no good reason. They're making her stomach hurt. "Oh, just headed to work!"

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fatesdesign

"Okay," Rapunzel says, drawing out the word and frowning in confusion. She looks around and then leans in closer, tucking her hair behind her ears. "What's with the words on your back?"

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Kimmy used to be able to spin fast enough to catch a glimpse of her reflection without a mirror, but she can't contort herself well enough to see her back. To see whatever words Rapunzel is talking about. "Did someone stick something there?"

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fatesdesign

"Um, no. It's like, on you." She blinks and bites her lip before reaching out as if she was going to touch Kimmy and dropping her hand instead. "It says could have escaped."

She looks around and leans in, lowering her voice. "Does that have anything to do with what you told me?"

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"...what in the ham sandwich?" Kimmy mutters under her breath, trying even harder to see the message on her back without really responding to Rapunzel. She has no reason to believe she'd lie, though, and how else would she know the secret Kimmy's tried to keep even from herself? "Why would someone do that?"

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fatesdesign

"Because Darrow can be quite cruel sometimes, I've learned." Rapunzel frowns at Kimmy's reaction, and then her wide green eyes widen in alarm. "Oh no, do I have something too?"

She tries to crane her neck around to see, but she can't make anything out. Pascal, however, looks down at Rapunzel's back and goes red with outrage. Rapunzel blinks and turns around to show Kimmy her back. "What does mine say?"

[OOC: Hers says 'raised in captivity'.]

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Kimmy's trying to think of how to brush off what it says on her own back when she sees Rapunzel's, stomach churning instantly. Of course she knows about Rapunzel's past. That doesn't mean that everyone else in the whole goshdarn city should. "It... yours says you were raised in captivity?"

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It had been a long night.

He'd gotten off late from work, and instead of heading out to blow off some steam, he'd come home. Like he had every night for the past few weeks. And it was getting to him. The fucking domesticity of it. He felt like he'd been leashed.

And it had turned him into a real bastard. A bastard who couldn't fucking sleep.

When he stumbled down stairs, he was groggy and moody and looked like the last person you wanted to fuck with. In swept Kimmy, a little less sunny than usual, but she was still a little too much to swallow.

He needed some coffee. And a protein smoothie.

She turned around to shut the door and Brian squinted. "What the fuck is that?" He asked, with absolutely no preamble.

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Kimmy jumps like she's been struck, turning and clasping her hand over her heart. She doesn't normally scare so easily, the strangers on her way here must have her on edge.

"What the... what is what?"

She has no idea what she's done wrong. She might be couple minutes early, if anything, given how quickly she'd rushed to get here.

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"On your shirt," he said, though he'd already turned away from her to set up the blender, his teeth gritting as he tried to get the fucking pitcher onto the base. For how much he'd spent on it, he would've expected better, but it never fit on the first try.

"Not that I always understand whatever statement you're trying to make with your fashion choices, but that's a new one."

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"My shirt?" Kimmy echoes, turning around to try to catch a glimpse of the back of her shirt, which is brightly colored but definitely doesn't say anything like some of her other shirts do. One of her favorite sweaters says I LOVE CUPCAKES with a cupcake picture instead of the word, but this isn't that. "I don't... did someone put a sticker on there? I can't see it."

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"It's not a sticker. It's..." he walked toward her, holding her steady with a hand on her shoulder. The writing was odd, like it was a part of her shirt but not. He wrinkled the fabric under his thumb, but the words were still oddly readable.

"Could have escaped. Mean anything to you?"

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Kimmy can't help but pull away. Not at Brian's touch but what he's said. What he's read. What she's apparently been carrying around on her back all morning.

She feels sick, memories of the day she'd found the rat and almost ventured out but stayed. For Cyndee, who went on to kind of hate her for it. "You can't get it off?"

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"I'd suggest stripping, but I don't think we're going to get anything out of that but a harassment lawsuit."

She looked horrified, all the color draining from her cheeks, and he managed to actually feel bad for her.

"I don't think it's coming off. You should sit," he said, pointing her toward the sofa.

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"That doesn't make any sense," Kimmy says. So few things in Darrow do, but they rarely affect her in such a way that she has reason to be afraid. Not that not escaping is a crime, but it's something near and dear to her heart.

Even after all this time, she still feels so ashamed.

Sitting on the sofa, she tries to catch a glimpse of the message again. There still appears to be nothing, which is hardly fair. How many people had known about it before her? "How would they know?"

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To say that it's been a strange day would be putting it mildly.

Michelle is pretty sure that she was warned about things like this — not specifically, but in a general sense, weird, unexplainable shit, as if showing up here wasn't weird and unexplainable enough — the day she showed up here, but it's hard to be sure. That whole evening is a blur, the panicked state she'd been in when she drove into the city making it difficult to have a clear grasp on anything about it. What she does know is that she's stuck here. Maybe she's outside and there are no visible walls, maybe there's no one keeping her captive, telling her the world ended, but she's just as trapped as she was then, a difficult thing to come to terms with.

There's that, and, of course, she remembers the people who found her that day she got here, who tried to explain everything to her despite how difficult it was for her to hear any of it. Seeing Kimmy, she doesn't need to think twice before heading in her direction. If anything, the strangeness of what's going on around them makes seeing one of the few familiar faces here mean that much more.

"Hey," she says. "Kimmy, yeah?" Then she gets a look at the expression on Kimmy's face, and her brow furrows slightly. Maybe this weird shit has affected her, too; she'd try to see for herself, but it would feel too intrusive. "Are you okay?"

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"I... oh, I'm..." Kimmy doesn't want to say that she's okay, because she's really not, but she also doesn't want to alarm Michelle about the fact she's being followed given that Michelle hasn't even here that long.

She's trying to think of a proper but not dishonest response when she catches sight of the back of a man nearby that says he's cheated on his wife. She points. "Should we warn him?"

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Michelle follows Kimmy's gaze to the man's back, and frowns. As secrets to be wearing around go, it isn't as bad as it could be. He hasn't killed anyone, hasn't committed some kind of major crime. If he has kids, he probably hasn't hurt them. She's seen people walking around today with far worse offenses on display. Still, it's hardly a good thing, and there's no way for it to go unnoticed by the wife in question. For that, more than anything else, she shakes her head a moment later.

"Someone probably has already," she says. "And if they haven't... Fallout's gonna be the same either way." She barely knows what's happening, can't begin to understand it, but the more she thinks about it, the more awful it seems. Everyone's got baggage. They shouldn't have to unwillingly be sharing it with everyone around them. "It's weird, isn't it? All of this."

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"It's awful," Kimmy comments. She has her own secrets that she wouldn't want the world, this world, to know. Back home, she'd fought so hard to be more than a Mole Woman and still not won.

Another person stares at her for a moment and she turns to see why when it occurs to her what it might mean. She looks back at Michelle. "Oh. Is there... is there something on my back?" If there is, why can't she see it?

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Until Kimmy asks if there's something on her back, it hadn't occurred to Michelle to look. This whole thing is so bizarre, so intrusive, that she wouldn't have wanted to just go ahead and try to find out anyway, or to see what it said without some sort of prompting. When she can't imagine that most of the people walking around with words on their backs would want those facts about them to be known, it's not her business to pry.

At the question, though, she shifts to get a look at Kimmy's back, and something in her stomach twists at the words there. She doesn't know what it means, she's not about to assume — it could be anything, some sort of metaphor — but the words unexpectedly hit home even so, the mention of escape too much for her to ignore.

"There is," she says, head ducking in a slight nod. "It says... It says that you could have escaped."

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For a moment, Kimmy goes so still that she thinks she might not be able to move again. She's not so naive to think that Darrow is above being so awful, but this is on a whole new level.

Shaking out of her stillness, she tries to cover her back with her arms but it feels and looks unnatural, and so she stops. Gives up. Without context, at least, nobody should know what it means. "Oh."

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"Come on, let's — let's move over here," Michelle says, ushering Kimmy over towards the nearest wall, trying to ignore the way her stomach is turning. It doesn't mean anything, or, at least, she shouldn't assume that it does. It's just her own shit that she has to deal with, that, despite weeks here, she's barely talked about. Projecting, or something like that. She's never bought into most stuff like that, largely because it's been easier not to, but in this case, she kind of has to believe that's what's going on.

Regardless of what it means, Kimmy seems rattled, the way she tries to cover her back with her arms speaking volumes to that effect. She should focus on that, she thinks, and not what's in her own head. "Be easier to keep other people from seeing it."

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