Currently, the last few hours have been devoted to Michelle freaking the fuck out. She paces around the small, almost claustrophobic pseudo-cell, a windowless concrete room apparently once used as some sort of storage (there are marks on the walls where what could ostensibly have been shelves might have been bolted there), her hair still damp. She did take his advice on the shower; the blood was grotesque and made her sick to her stomach to see on herself in the cracked bathroom mirror. Why they had even put a bathroom connected to what was apparently a storage room is a mystery to her, but then again, she's got more important things to think about than odd building plans. A single, aged fluorescent light burns above her in an unsettling brightness, casting sepia-toned light across the room and herself pacing within it.
There has to be a way out, somehow, A voice of reason calls out to her, and she thinks on it a moment before becoming highly dispirited at the idea of just how impossible that might be. Yeah, through God knows how many armed guards and whatever the hell possible area we're in. We could be in the goddamn outskirts of Gotham for all I know. Michelle continues to ponder her situation, though every moment she does, she becomes more and more despairing at the impossible odds stacked against her survival.
"I'm going to die here," She finally states in a tone of voice filled with an odd hysteria, and she spends a moment laughing quietly, terrified, running a hand through her damp hair over and over again until it begins to tangle and knot around her fingers. "There's no question about it, either! There's…no…oh God…" Her hand covers her face for a moment, wanting to cry, before she thinks back to the party and thinks about how she got in this situation in the first place.
"James…that bastard!" Her mood swings suddenly, and now she's more interested in a silent tirade cursing the man in every single way she knows how, before the tirade against James turns into a tirade against…well, everything. It's everybody's fault but hers for this horrible situation: it's James' fault for shoving her, it's Wayne's fault for throwing the fundraiser, it's Dent's for even having the fundraiser thrown for him, it's Nathan's fault for wanting her to come to the damn party, it's Joker's fault for deciding that he wanted to use her for a hostage, it's everybody's fault for everything.
Anger is much easier to deal with than sorrow. It's much, much easier to deal with; at least, for Michelle it is. In fact, she's in the middle of calling just about every angel and demon that she can remember about ten different bad names each when the door opens and somebody tosses something in, before slamming the door shut again. Michelle, preoccupied with blaming the universe for her problems, doesn't get a good look at who it was, but does get a good look at what they've thrown in. She halts her blaspheming (for now, anyway, because she's sure she'll start up again later) and slowly walks over towards the bundle of what appears to be cloth, before leaning down and scooping the bundle up. She unfurls a too-big whitish colored t-shirt and an off-brown jacket draped over it, along with a pair of jeans that are about a size or two too big for her. A pair of dirty white sneakers tumbles to the floor as she unrolls the clothing. The clothes look like they belonged to somebody else with a bigger frame before being tossed in, and Michelle goes a bit pale when she notices the splattering of red on the collar and in drip spots on the jeans.
"What the hell?" She asks rhetorically, before looking down at her dirty, torn black dress and then to the new clothes. She supposes that she can't run around in a little black dress all the time, but these clothes look like somebody was wearing them…recently. The reddish stains (she's hoping that they're not blood) are still wet.
"Oh god, oh god oh god oh god oh god oh gawd," The terror sets in and she's pacing in a tight circle around the center of the room, unconsciously clutching the clothing tight to her chest as some sort of reminder that there's an outside world on the other side of her door, panicking. He wants her to change into something easier to move around in, because something is going to happen soon.
It's all moving too fast! It's been, what, a couple hours? I think…there's no clock in here and the bastard nabbed my cell phone from my purse. I'm going to die in here!! The last thought arrives from literally nowhere; she randomly decides that she's going to die soon and continues to panic about it. But her feet ache from the heels; she can't continue pacing like this or she's going to slip and break her ankle and then be put down like some sort of champion racehorse past their prime, and so she sits down on the uncomfortable mattress and then stares down at somebody's clothing in her hands.
"I can either put it on…or don't."
Sometimes, people just need to hear the obvious. This is one of those times.
"If I don't…I'll be killed. If I do…I'll be killed, but later on."
It only takes her a moment or so before she hesitantly walks into the bathroom and closes the door behind her, slowly peeling off the bloodstained dress (there's more blood on her from the transfer of the dress against her skin and she spends a minute furiously washing it off until the area is pink and sore from the effort, but damn it all it's clean) before pulling on the new clothes and noticing that they really are a lot bigger than what would fit her. The jeans are baggy and look worn, like someone wore them to work at a job involving a lot of physical work and the shirt hangs down to her upper thighs. The brown jacket is slightly longer, about an inch or so below the t-shirt's bottom. The shoes are loose, but they're snug enough to walk in at moderate comfort.
"They're really baggy…" Michelle notes aloud, the sleeves of the jacket coming down to her palm, as she models for herself in the mirror. The red smear on her face is gone, scrubbed off painfully until there was no trace of it left except for pink where the skin was rubbed too hard, and without her makeup on to make her look fabulous enough to attend a fancy party, she looks rather plain. Boring. Boring is good.
"We didn't seem to have any transvestites willing to give up their wardrobe, so you'll just have to make do," Someone states nonchalantly from the doorway on Michelle's right, and she positively screams before tripping and falling backwards, smacking her head on the porcelain of the bathtub when she trips into it. She opens her eyes again and is scandalized to see that the Joker sneaked up on her when she was playing dress up. Then it hits her that he's been there for a little while, most likely.
"WH-what the hell are you doing in here?! How did you get through the front door without…without…?" She starts out indignant but falters as she goes on, eventually fading out into a muted silence.
"If you're not clumsy, then it's easy to open a door without falling into something and making a scene," He's casually teasing (or outright mocking) her as she stares blankly at him, and though he wasn't gunning to make her angry or anything, she's not doing anything at all and it's definitely not the reaction he had expected. He does trace her stare, though, and once he realizes exactly what she's staring at, his smile turns rather sardonic.
"Oh, did you notice the scars? They're disturbing you, aren't they?" He asks in a dangerously casual tone, now smiling in another way that looks slightly more…unhinged, than anything else. She doesn't really move at all or respond. "Do you want to hear how I got them?"
Michelle notices that something's changed about him as soon as that topic showed up; something's different, something's dangerous, something is wrong. The tone of his voice jumps a note or so higher as he asks her the last question, and she shakes her head, never looking away from him in the doorway.
"U…um…no, no thank you…?" She hopes that it's the right answer, and her tone betrays her nervousness. She pulls herself out of the bathtub, and spots more red drops on her sleeve and turns paler. She edges around him in the doorway and rolls up the sleeve of the jacket, to cover up the stain with her back to Joker.
"You have a problem with blood, don't you?"
He knows he's right, because the moment he suggests it, she freezes. If she has such a phobia of it, then she's not going to make a good extra hand during any of his plans for Gotham, and that would be unfortunate.
"It makes me kind of…uneasy…" She mutters, and feels the weight of an arm settling on her right shoulder.
"Can't stands me a liar, Michelle," She hears him say in her ear, and shoves his arm off her shoulder before taking a step away.
"I don't answer to you anyway," She snaps, and not a moment later is jerked by her hair back against him, her hair pulled so that her head is angled upwards and she can see his face out of the corner of her eye.
"Oh, but that's where you're wrong. You do." Joker adds extra inflection on that last word, and feels her heart speed up to a pounding in her chest pressed against him when the edge of a knife presses against her cheek, hard. "Because I own you now. Oh you can say that I'm wrong, that nobody owns you or something inspiring like that, but you know it's the truth, don't you?" She doesn't give any answer and he hooks the very tip of the knife in her mouth, as a steady warning. She sucks in a shuddering gasp when he does, her hands balled into tight fists at her side. "You see, this little…fort, it's mine. And so is everything in it. Everything. Do you understand?"
She doesn't move at all again, and he pulls her hair harder, which in turn makes the knife press harder and harder into the corner of her mouth.
"Understaaand??"
"Yes!" She yelps like a dog, and he shoves her away from himself, hard. She staggers forward and lays her palm flat against the cold concrete wall, the other hand to her mouth, and the Joker notices that there's blood on his knife. He must have nicked her. She's not just panicking though; she's physically shaking (and shaking hard), and he takes interest in this. He was expecting fear, yes, but this is full-blown horror; complete and utter terror. Her shoulders are shaking and he thinks that she's sobbing silently.
Well that's interesting. Maybe there's something that he's missing. PTSD, maybe. Anyway, it's still interesting, to some extent. Shrugging it off (something to maybe play around with later, if he remembers and has the time), he wipes the knife off on the back of her jacket and pats her on her head like a dog, his voice normal and almost soothing, in a very strange way.
"I think we're going to have fun together. I really mean that, Michelle."
Scratch soothing; he's just fucking with her again. She doesn't look back at him and he's fine with that for now; it's funny enough as is, and it gets even funnier when he actually does leave the room and hears her start wailing on the other side of the door. He claps his hands and lets out a sharp barking laugh, already heading down the hallway. Bringing her back was a good idea after all, it seems, if just to see what sort of trauma he can inflict. It'll serve as a good distraction, in any case.