(no subject)

[notbreakable]

It's not like Kimmy isn't used to being stared at.

Back in Durnsville, the first few days after her rescue had been awful. Of course, she was thrilled to be free and to find that the whole world hadn't disappeared, but the photographers and journalists that wanted to know every single detail about her life underground had been less... thrilling.

In New York, she'd mostly blended in after her first day or two having been side-eyed. She was eccentric but for the most part anonymous. And she'd loved every bit of it. No one knew she was a "Mole Woman," that she'd spent the better part of her life in a bunker.

In Darrow, sometimes she gets second glances because her attire kind of resembles that of a third grader, at least in color, or because she's holding the city's cutest baby, but that's it. And that's why it's so surprising that during what should be a pretty normal commute to work, people won't stop looking at her. Some point, even. She checks her teeth, her hair. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.

She's confused but relieved by the time she reaches Brian's place, letting herself in with a big exhale as she moves to lean against the closed door. 

[For Truth on Your Back plot, Kimmy has the message that she COULD HAVE ESCAPED on her back. Find her anywhere around Darrow the morning of the 21st or at Brian's if you, you know, live there.]

Comments

[panickedandran]

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?"

[notbreakable]

"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?"

[panickedandran]

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."

[notbreakable]

"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?

[panickedandran]

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."

[notbreakable]

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."

[panickedandran]

"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."

[notbreakable]

Kimmy just nods, following Michelle's lead. She's normally not so easily stunned into silence. In fact, it's normally hard to get her to shut up.

But the message on her back says more than enough. And even if she doesn't know the story, even if no one here knows the story, she still feels the shame of it. The heat of it. Seven years she added to their sentence. "Thank you," she tells Michelle.

[panickedandran]

"Of course," Michelle says with a slight shake of her head. Even if it doesn't mean what she instinctively has to wonder if it means, no one's secrets should be left out in the open for someone else to gawk at, and Kimmy, while maybe not someone she's known long enough to call a friend, has been nothing but kind to her, so helpful the day she got here. The least she can do is try to return the favor now, in some small way, however possible.

She waits a moment, then frowning slightly, glances over at Kimmy. "If you want to talk about it, you can," she offers. "If not, we can just... pretend this didn't happen."

Running away from uncomfortable truths is something she's always been good at.

[notbreakable]

"I do that a lot," Kimmy confesses aloud, and it feels funny to admit that to herself let alone anyone else. Titus had been pressing her about opening up and getting help for a long while before she disappeared and wound up here. "Pretend it didn't happen, I mean... I..."

She inhales sharply, glances around to make sure no one is eavesdropping. "Have you heard of the Indiana Mole Women?"

[panickedandran]

"The—" Michelle starts, then shakes her head. She doesn't need to repeat the words to know that whatever Kimmy is talking about isn't something she's heard of before, and she thinks she probably shouldn't try to guess at what it means. Better to let Kimmy explain whatever connection it has with the words on her back than to start theorizing about things she's unfamiliar with. "No, no, I haven't. Should I have?"

[notbreakable]

"No," Kimmy says, shaking her head. Then: "Well, I don't know. Maybe. We were on The Today Show?"

A lot of people here haven't seen The Today Show, though, thankfully. If she hadn't received that newspaper that one time, nobody might know what she'd been through. "We were... kidnapped, about fifteen years ago. There was this reverend, he told us the world was ending... or had ended, and it was our fault..."

Saying it aloud is a million different kinds of surreal, and Kimmy makes herself look away as she does.

[panickedandran]

For a moment, it feels like she can't breathe.

Just a minute ago, she'd been trying to convince herself that the word escape didn't have to mean anything, that it was just the shit she went through that she couldn't get out of her head. With that being the case, Michelle almost can't determine if Kimmy's answer is surprising or if it's anything but. What she does know is that she doesn't need to have any of the blanks filled in. Knowing that much, it's clear what she could have escaped from. It's just chilling, too, the story so similar to what happened to her, though the difference in time sends a shiver running through her.

"It's okay," she says quietly, though it's really anything but, at least as far as what happened to them is concerned. "I get it. I..." She take a deep breath, trying not to let her composure slip. "Something pretty similar happened to me, actually."

[notbreakable]

Kimmy barely knows Michelle so it’s hard to not immediately wonder whether she’s lying, but then Kimmy’s always been trusting and this is not the kind of thing that anyone would joke about.

Unless they were really, really awful.

And while Kimmy doesn’t know Michelle that well, she at least knows that she’s kind. Nice. Right now, though, she looks genuinely shocked. “Really?” she asks. “I mean, you don’t have to talk about it, I know what it’s like to not want to talk about it…"

[panickedandran]

"He ran me off the road," Michelle says abruptly, as if the words have been there for a long time, just under the surface, waiting to come out. She told one person the day she got here, but apart from that, she hasn't talked about it at all, just carried it around with her like she has so many other things. For all the running she's done, there's no getting away from what's left in her own head, and sometimes that's what she wishes she could outrun the most. "This guy, Howard, and he... I woke up in his bunker and he told me that there'd been some kind of attack. That the world had ended, essentially."

As it turned out, he hadn't even been entirely wrong about that. Still, she would rather have faced the monsters outside than the one she was trapped underground with, no question about it. "So, yeah."

[notbreakable]

Kimmy, now, is the one who is genuinely shocked, hands clasping over her mouth.

She wouldn't wish what she went through on anyone, and it isn't like Michelle was the one that got into a stupid van by choice (a fact Kimmy constantly has to remind herself wasn't her fault, even if a part of her will always believe it was.)

"I'm so sorry," she says, through her hands. "That's awful. Did you... you said you were driving when you got here, does that mean you escaped?"

[panickedandran]

"Yeah," Michelle says, nodding, her voice a little fainter, almost like she doesn't believe what she's saying. She knows it happened, but it feels surreal now, and less noteworthy than when it happened. She got out; she did what she had to, a matter of survival. Sometimes she isn't sure if Howard actually would have killed her or if he just would have kept her there, but either way, it wouldn't have been worth finding out. She didn't want to meet the same fate as the girl — or girls, for all she knows — that came before her. "Barely, but... yeah."

[notbreakable]

"That's amazing," Kimmy says, the message she can't see on her back feeling even more cruel, now.

But the terms of her escape meant sending Cyndee out first, and Kimmy could never live with herself she'd gotten hurt. Or worse.

If only she'd trusted her gut instead of a man. "You must be really brave."

[panickedandran]

It takes everything Michelle has in her not to laugh at that, the description about as far from how she sees herself as it's possible to get. What she went through, what she did to get out, it was only because she had to, decisions she made because there was no other choice. She fought out of necessity, not out of any sense of courage. In the end, before she wound up here, she'd turned toward Houston, and maybe that ought to count for something, but she's never been brave.

In light of what it says on Kimmy's back, though, she's not sure she should even just come right out and say that, though Michelle certainly can't fault her for the meaning behind those words. Really, she could have escaped long before she did, stood at the door of the bunker, just one turned key away from freedom, and after seeing that woman, went back inside. She's in no position to judge, and anyway, it's not some kind of abduction competition, who had it worse and who dealt with it the best. That they survived at all is the important thing. That's what says the most.

"I only did what I had to," she says with a slight shake of her head, glancing towards the floor. "It kind of came down to life or death, by the end."

[notbreakable]

"Oh," Kimmy says, then hesitates, not sure what to say to that. Really, she doesn't know what to say to any of this. She's spent all of her energy trying to not have this conversation, and yet here she is.

Not with Titus or a psychiatrist or a journalist. With another woman who went through something horrible, too. "I... don't think we ever thought we were going to die," she continues. The reverend hadn't been a particularly violent man. "But we didn't think there was anything else. He told us there wasn't anything else."

For a long time, they'd believed him. "I found a rat one day. An alive one. He... the reverend said it was sent by the devil to test us, but I could go out into the world if I wanted to. But he said... I had to send one of the others, first. I couldn't do that."

[panickedandran]

"Of course not," Michelle says softly, almost as if to herself, shaking her head. Maybe their situations weren't exactly the same, but they're close enough that it's easy to put herself in the same position, to imagine Howard telling her that she could leave, but only if she sent Emmett out first, and she never would have done it. The risk would have been too much. Hell, she'd still believed Howard up until she climbed out of that bunker and realized there were birds chirping, a surefire sign that her life might not have been in immediate danger after all. It's easy to question, to doubt, but less so to take a game, especially when it's someone else's life on the line.

What Emmett did for her, she'll never be able to repay him for.

"I... If it helps, I would have done the same thing," she offers, the circumstances of the conversation itself, the words written on Kimmy's back, making it seem like a good idea. "I mean, Howard, he never even would have let me try, but if I'd been you, I wouldn't have done it, either. You can't take that kind of chance, right?"

[notbreakable]

"Not with other people," Kimmy agrees. She would have taken that risk herself, absolutely, figured the end of the world was better than being stuck with the reverend for even longer than she had been, but she never would have forgiven herself if Cyndee had been hurt. Or Gretchen, or Donna Maria. "When she found out, she blamed me. Seven more years we spent stuck down there."

[panickedandran]

"Jesus," Michelle says softly, the amount of time alone difficult to fathom. Howard had told her one year, maybe two, and though she knows now that he never intended to let her go, that he would always have deemed it unsafe in order to keep her there with him, there's a difference between that awareness and actually living it. All things considered, she didn't lose too much of her life. With everything that happened, it's hard to consider herself lucky, but in some ways, she knows she was. "She shouldn't have blamed you for not wanting to risk her life. It's a lot, but... What else could you do?"