Losing Miranda (7/20), Miranda/Andy, PG13
Title: Losing Miranda
Chapter: 7 of 20
Fandom: Devil Wears Prada (movie)
Pairing: Miranda/Andy
Rating: PG13
Beta:ladyvivien (thank you, lover)
Spoilers: AU, but borrowing heavily from the movie!verse. Plot owes a lot to the Helen Mirren movie 'Losing Chase'.
Disclaimer: Not mine! These characters belong to their respective owners and no profit is being made. Miranda's holiday home is based, predictably, on Anna Wintour's.
Summary: Miranda has retreated to her home in the Hamptons following a serious accident. The young and idealistic Andrea Sachs accepts a position as a nanny/assistant combo. Since Miranda is resistant to outside help and new faces, this doesn't go over well.
A/N: This fic belongs, truly, to the wonderful abina2810 . Although this is late, the fic is a reward for her generous charitable donations. Comments and feedback are gratefully received.
Miranda checks her phone with half-closed eyes, the glare of the morning sun unforgiving to the headache that’s plaguing her. There’s a new text message from Cassidy, a simple good morning with one of those smiley faces on the end that would be a hanging offense from anyone but her daughters.
Her stomach rumbles in an insolent way, reminding her of the treachery of not going down to dinner last night. Miranda was distracted at the sight of the girls so happy to see Rod, so keen to dash off with him into the evening. She’d seen the new girl coming back with the bag of food and felt her appetite evaporate. Staying in her bedroom with her laptop meant avoiding another potential argument, not to mention the awkwardness radiating from Andrea whenever Miranda walked into the room. By the time Stephen had thought to come knocking on the bedroom door, Miranda was already half-asleep, and ignored him very easily.
Morning is relentless though, and Miranda chides herself for not closing the curtains before drifting off. With the girls gone, she has the unenviable task of breaking in a new assistant. Although the workload is much reduced, Miranda is painfully aware of her own limitations as she prepares for a return to Runway. The slower pace of her holiday home is supposed to be calming, but Miranda finds herself missing the screech of traffic and bustle of bodies on every sidewalk. For too many years she’s been at the heart of it all, and it’s making this enforced sabbatical all the harder to bear.
She feels queasy at the thought of Jacqueline, with her fake smile and penchant for back-stabbing, sitting behind Miranda’s desk each day. The thought of what redecoration might already have been done is too horrifying to contemplate, and Emily’s guarded silences on the topic only serve to confirm Miranda’s worst fears. Despite the glass doors and open arrangement, that room has been Miranda’s sanctuary. An interloper defiling it, at Irv’s grinning insistence, is maddening.
So she takes an extra painkiller with her morning dose, pleased to feel the extra freedom in her leg by the time the shower is running. No sound of movement elsewhere in the house yet, although Millie’s tired little car is parked out back, Miranda notes. She wonders, as she lathers her hair with some organic miracle shampoo, whether the girl is smart enough to be punctual, whether she has it in her to anticipate Miranda’s needs. The signs are promising, a spark of intelligence evident in those big, brown eyes, and the girls were raving on the phone last night about how ‘Andy’ had gone to plead their case against some unfair coaching decision during their soccer match.
As she readies herself for the day, Miranda replies to emails already flooded in from European contacts, alternating her phone with the makeup brushes until it almost feels like her old routine. Perhaps Jacqueline won’t have much longer to revel in Miranda’s misery after all.
Millie, almost as old as the house itself and with cracked and reddened hands that make Miranda want to ply the woman with moisturizers, has breakfast whisked from the pan to the table in the time it takes Miranda to seat herself. Flicking through the Times, Miranda tries to hold back her appreciation for the perfectly prepared eggs. It won’t do to go soft and let the staff get complacent.
With a nod to signify ‘adequate’, Miranda skims the business section while Millie unobtrusively clears away. Not that the television won’t snap into life the moment Miranda clears out of the kitchen, but a little indulgence won’t hurt.
There’s no note from Stephen, though the open garage door suggests he’s long since gone. The idea of him rising before her would once have been ludicrous, but Miranda finds herself out cold until eight or nine most mornings and this has been no exception. No sign of the girl, and if she’s lounging around in bed on a work day, well, Miranda thinks she might just have it in her to provide one of her more memorable tongue-lashings.
It’s with some reluctance that she leaves the charm of the kitchen, but Miranda makes her way across to the office, gripping her phone far more tightly than she does the slender black cane that she barely feels as though she needs today. She’s stunned to open the French windows and discover Andrea already seated behind the antique desk that Emily has been occupying of late.
Seeing Miranda, the girl discreetly ends the call she’s on. Beaming one of those megawatt smiles at Miranda is obviously intended to be charming, and although it’s genuine enough to reach Andrea’s eyes, Miranda finds herself unmoved by the gesture. Honestly, do they really think that a bit of peppiness is enough to ingratiate themselves?
Miranda is painfully aware that her work plate is not so full these days, but she still conjures up a list of tasks that wipe the smile from the girl’s face and send her scrabbling for some paper to write it all down. Miranda expects her to fail, of course, because they all do.
Of course, it takes far too long to get Patrick on the phone, and the coffee isn’t warm enough, and the girl clearly doesn’t know her Vera Wang from her elbow. Each little sigh that Miranda allows to escape costs her very little, but sends the girl into a panicked sort of tailspin. It’s almost satisfying when she overhears the hushed, tearful call to Emily at eleven, and again at twelve when Miranda makes a reference to ‘the skirts’ that is painfully vague even by her own cruel standards.
Still, this girl doesn’t hum under her breath, or ask twenty inane questions an hour, and that’s an improvement in Miranda’s book. God knows she’s seen her share of morons in the guise of assistants. Millie breezes in with lunch, and although Miranda complains that food is eaten in the kitchen or dining room in the civilized world, she’s quietly grateful at not having to limp across the gravel of the driveway, since her leg is acting up from a morning of stiff inactivity at her desk.
The club sandwich is decent, though it isn’t a patch on the restaurants Miranda prefers to have at her disposal. As she composes yet another placating email to Donnatella, she thinks of her girls and wonders what adventurous, sugar-fuelled spending spree Rod will take them on this time. Calming them on their return will make her the villain of the piece again, not that it takes much with Caroline lately.
There’s a suspicious silence from the assistant’s desk that Miranda picks up on after a while, and when she moves cautiously out into the space, the girl is too absorbed in some notebook to notice Miranda’s approach.
“Working hard, I see?” Miranda asks, careful to lace her words with a quiet threat.
The girl jumps about a foot in the air and actually squeaks in her shock at being caught.
“Sorry! I didn’t see you…I was done with all my work and uh, was there something you needed?”
It would be easy to come up with some impossible task as punishment, but Miranda is already tired from a day of wrangling secret control over her magazine. She gives her curiosity free rein instead.
“What are you writing?”
“N-nothing,” the girl stammers, which is obviously an unacceptable response. Miranda toys with the idea of simply taking the notebook from her, but it might be some tedious, angsty diary and who wants to be exposed to that?
“You can tell me the truth, or you can be on the next train back to Manhattan.”
There’s a defiant set to the girl’s shoulders (Andrea, why is so hard to remember names lately? Andrea.) and for a moment, Miranda thinks she is about to be denied an answer.
“It’s a short story.”
“You’re a writer?”
“Trying to be. But not if there’s something I should be doing for you right now.”
At a temporary loss, Miranda blurts out the first task she can think of.
“The girls’ rooms need to be in a fit state for when they return.”
There’s something like disappointment on Andrea’s face, and Miranda supposes that she isn’t expecting domestic tasks, not when there’s a housekeeper attending to most of those duties with Millie’s help. But Miranda wants to be alone, wants a moment to think without the intrusion of a stranger breathing nearby, and most importantly she’s been waiting long enough for her first drink of the day.
With one last questioning look, Andrea gathers her few items and heads out to the main house. The silly girl hasn’t asked about diverting the phone, but with a heavy sigh Miranda concedes that her only calls will be from Emily anyway. As the footsteps on the gravel grow quieter, Miranda crosses the room to the half-empty crystal decanter and pours herself more than the standard two fingers of Scotch.
And yes, Miranda knows very well about the do-not-mix-with-alcohol warnings printed on every label, but at worst it leaves her feeling a little dizzy. As she flips through yesterday’s messengered proofs of the Stella McCartney shoot, it’s just reflex to pour herself a generous refill.
By the time her post-its have peppered the pages, she’s feeling unsteady, but she manages to drop the contact sheets unceremoniously on the assistant’s desk before starting her halting walk back to the main house.
Stephen’s penile over-compensation is abandoned in front of the porch, clearly actually parking it in the garage is an effort too far. It raises a flicker of hope in Miranda’s chest that he might intend to go back out for the evening, though God knows he shouldn’t be driving if another boozy night at the country club is in his plans. He’s a provincial man at heart, content with those stiff leather chairs and fat cigars on a patio, bragging about some work deal or other. It’s hard to remember a time when she found that confidence intriguing, rather than just exhausting.
Entering through the front door, Miranda is struck by the absence of noise without the girls. Usually her homes hum with their presence, as though she can hear their breathing from rooms or even floors away. It brings her comfort, and she’s sad to confess that she misses it even more keenly now as other obligations take them from her.
In search of dinner, she makes her way through the sitting room, leaning heavily on the damn cane that she can’t do without as the afternoon has worn on. It’s a short-cut, of sorts, as opposed to the long hallway with its polished floor and treacherous rugs. It also allows her a vantage point into the kitchen without being seen herself, and depending on what mood she encounters, she may just have dinner sent upstairs.
Andrea is putting things in the dishwasher, with Millie nowhere in sight. Checking the Cartier watch that hangs from her left wrist, Miranda notes that Millie’s hours of work are over for the day. With her foot actually halfway to making the next step forward, Miranda is frozen in place at the sound of Stephen’s voice. What the hell is he doing chattering with the help in the kitchen, anyway?
And there’s a sudden sick realization in the pit of Miranda’s stomach, that by sulking and hiding last night she left these two alone. Sure, Andrea isn’t naturally stylish, and needs a thorough tutorial in the correct application of eye makeup, but 25 is 25 and that trumps a whole hell of a lot. Particularly with a husband that Miranda already knows to have strayed, and when she is the alternative in her broken, frosty imperfection. The images come to her unbidden, of Stephen’s sloppy kisses being foisted on Andrea’s always-smiling mouth, of his hairy hands creeping up those firm, young thighs: the dining room table the venue Miranda’s mind chooses to torture her with.
It’s her own thoughts that cause her to remain in de facto hiding, rather than the conversation she can’t bring herself to listen to. Things sound friendly between the two, and that’s a bad sign. Eventually, Stephen slides into Miranda’s line of vision, his back turned to her so that she can see the needless crinkles of the workday in the designer shirts she picked out for him.
Part of her is yearning to flee as she sees him take up position behind the bending Andrea, who is chattering away as she loads glasses and mugs into the wire racks, seemingly oblivious to Stephen’s intentions for the moment. As his hand reaches out to caress Andrea’s ass, Miranda knows she should interrupt or flee.
The problem is, in some masochistic way, she just needs to see what happens next.
Chapter 8 -->
Chapter: 7 of 20
Fandom: Devil Wears Prada (movie)
Pairing: Miranda/Andy
Rating: PG13
Beta:ladyvivien (thank you, lover)
Spoilers: AU, but borrowing heavily from the movie!verse. Plot owes a lot to the Helen Mirren movie 'Losing Chase'.
Disclaimer: Not mine! These characters belong to their respective owners and no profit is being made. Miranda's holiday home is based, predictably, on Anna Wintour's.
Summary: Miranda has retreated to her home in the Hamptons following a serious accident. The young and idealistic Andrea Sachs accepts a position as a nanny/assistant combo. Since Miranda is resistant to outside help and new faces, this doesn't go over well.
A/N: This fic belongs, truly, to the wonderful abina2810 . Although this is late, the fic is a reward for her generous charitable donations. Comments and feedback are gratefully received.
Miranda checks her phone with half-closed eyes, the glare of the morning sun unforgiving to the headache that’s plaguing her. There’s a new text message from Cassidy, a simple good morning with one of those smiley faces on the end that would be a hanging offense from anyone but her daughters.
Her stomach rumbles in an insolent way, reminding her of the treachery of not going down to dinner last night. Miranda was distracted at the sight of the girls so happy to see Rod, so keen to dash off with him into the evening. She’d seen the new girl coming back with the bag of food and felt her appetite evaporate. Staying in her bedroom with her laptop meant avoiding another potential argument, not to mention the awkwardness radiating from Andrea whenever Miranda walked into the room. By the time Stephen had thought to come knocking on the bedroom door, Miranda was already half-asleep, and ignored him very easily.
Morning is relentless though, and Miranda chides herself for not closing the curtains before drifting off. With the girls gone, she has the unenviable task of breaking in a new assistant. Although the workload is much reduced, Miranda is painfully aware of her own limitations as she prepares for a return to Runway. The slower pace of her holiday home is supposed to be calming, but Miranda finds herself missing the screech of traffic and bustle of bodies on every sidewalk. For too many years she’s been at the heart of it all, and it’s making this enforced sabbatical all the harder to bear.
She feels queasy at the thought of Jacqueline, with her fake smile and penchant for back-stabbing, sitting behind Miranda’s desk each day. The thought of what redecoration might already have been done is too horrifying to contemplate, and Emily’s guarded silences on the topic only serve to confirm Miranda’s worst fears. Despite the glass doors and open arrangement, that room has been Miranda’s sanctuary. An interloper defiling it, at Irv’s grinning insistence, is maddening.
So she takes an extra painkiller with her morning dose, pleased to feel the extra freedom in her leg by the time the shower is running. No sound of movement elsewhere in the house yet, although Millie’s tired little car is parked out back, Miranda notes. She wonders, as she lathers her hair with some organic miracle shampoo, whether the girl is smart enough to be punctual, whether she has it in her to anticipate Miranda’s needs. The signs are promising, a spark of intelligence evident in those big, brown eyes, and the girls were raving on the phone last night about how ‘Andy’ had gone to plead their case against some unfair coaching decision during their soccer match.
As she readies herself for the day, Miranda replies to emails already flooded in from European contacts, alternating her phone with the makeup brushes until it almost feels like her old routine. Perhaps Jacqueline won’t have much longer to revel in Miranda’s misery after all.
Millie, almost as old as the house itself and with cracked and reddened hands that make Miranda want to ply the woman with moisturizers, has breakfast whisked from the pan to the table in the time it takes Miranda to seat herself. Flicking through the Times, Miranda tries to hold back her appreciation for the perfectly prepared eggs. It won’t do to go soft and let the staff get complacent.
With a nod to signify ‘adequate’, Miranda skims the business section while Millie unobtrusively clears away. Not that the television won’t snap into life the moment Miranda clears out of the kitchen, but a little indulgence won’t hurt.
There’s no note from Stephen, though the open garage door suggests he’s long since gone. The idea of him rising before her would once have been ludicrous, but Miranda finds herself out cold until eight or nine most mornings and this has been no exception. No sign of the girl, and if she’s lounging around in bed on a work day, well, Miranda thinks she might just have it in her to provide one of her more memorable tongue-lashings.
It’s with some reluctance that she leaves the charm of the kitchen, but Miranda makes her way across to the office, gripping her phone far more tightly than she does the slender black cane that she barely feels as though she needs today. She’s stunned to open the French windows and discover Andrea already seated behind the antique desk that Emily has been occupying of late.
Seeing Miranda, the girl discreetly ends the call she’s on. Beaming one of those megawatt smiles at Miranda is obviously intended to be charming, and although it’s genuine enough to reach Andrea’s eyes, Miranda finds herself unmoved by the gesture. Honestly, do they really think that a bit of peppiness is enough to ingratiate themselves?
Miranda is painfully aware that her work plate is not so full these days, but she still conjures up a list of tasks that wipe the smile from the girl’s face and send her scrabbling for some paper to write it all down. Miranda expects her to fail, of course, because they all do.
Of course, it takes far too long to get Patrick on the phone, and the coffee isn’t warm enough, and the girl clearly doesn’t know her Vera Wang from her elbow. Each little sigh that Miranda allows to escape costs her very little, but sends the girl into a panicked sort of tailspin. It’s almost satisfying when she overhears the hushed, tearful call to Emily at eleven, and again at twelve when Miranda makes a reference to ‘the skirts’ that is painfully vague even by her own cruel standards.
Still, this girl doesn’t hum under her breath, or ask twenty inane questions an hour, and that’s an improvement in Miranda’s book. God knows she’s seen her share of morons in the guise of assistants. Millie breezes in with lunch, and although Miranda complains that food is eaten in the kitchen or dining room in the civilized world, she’s quietly grateful at not having to limp across the gravel of the driveway, since her leg is acting up from a morning of stiff inactivity at her desk.
The club sandwich is decent, though it isn’t a patch on the restaurants Miranda prefers to have at her disposal. As she composes yet another placating email to Donnatella, she thinks of her girls and wonders what adventurous, sugar-fuelled spending spree Rod will take them on this time. Calming them on their return will make her the villain of the piece again, not that it takes much with Caroline lately.
There’s a suspicious silence from the assistant’s desk that Miranda picks up on after a while, and when she moves cautiously out into the space, the girl is too absorbed in some notebook to notice Miranda’s approach.
“Working hard, I see?” Miranda asks, careful to lace her words with a quiet threat.
The girl jumps about a foot in the air and actually squeaks in her shock at being caught.
“Sorry! I didn’t see you…I was done with all my work and uh, was there something you needed?”
It would be easy to come up with some impossible task as punishment, but Miranda is already tired from a day of wrangling secret control over her magazine. She gives her curiosity free rein instead.
“What are you writing?”
“N-nothing,” the girl stammers, which is obviously an unacceptable response. Miranda toys with the idea of simply taking the notebook from her, but it might be some tedious, angsty diary and who wants to be exposed to that?
“You can tell me the truth, or you can be on the next train back to Manhattan.”
There’s a defiant set to the girl’s shoulders (Andrea, why is so hard to remember names lately? Andrea.) and for a moment, Miranda thinks she is about to be denied an answer.
“It’s a short story.”
“You’re a writer?”
“Trying to be. But not if there’s something I should be doing for you right now.”
At a temporary loss, Miranda blurts out the first task she can think of.
“The girls’ rooms need to be in a fit state for when they return.”
There’s something like disappointment on Andrea’s face, and Miranda supposes that she isn’t expecting domestic tasks, not when there’s a housekeeper attending to most of those duties with Millie’s help. But Miranda wants to be alone, wants a moment to think without the intrusion of a stranger breathing nearby, and most importantly she’s been waiting long enough for her first drink of the day.
With one last questioning look, Andrea gathers her few items and heads out to the main house. The silly girl hasn’t asked about diverting the phone, but with a heavy sigh Miranda concedes that her only calls will be from Emily anyway. As the footsteps on the gravel grow quieter, Miranda crosses the room to the half-empty crystal decanter and pours herself more than the standard two fingers of Scotch.
And yes, Miranda knows very well about the do-not-mix-with-alcohol warnings printed on every label, but at worst it leaves her feeling a little dizzy. As she flips through yesterday’s messengered proofs of the Stella McCartney shoot, it’s just reflex to pour herself a generous refill.
By the time her post-its have peppered the pages, she’s feeling unsteady, but she manages to drop the contact sheets unceremoniously on the assistant’s desk before starting her halting walk back to the main house.
Stephen’s penile over-compensation is abandoned in front of the porch, clearly actually parking it in the garage is an effort too far. It raises a flicker of hope in Miranda’s chest that he might intend to go back out for the evening, though God knows he shouldn’t be driving if another boozy night at the country club is in his plans. He’s a provincial man at heart, content with those stiff leather chairs and fat cigars on a patio, bragging about some work deal or other. It’s hard to remember a time when she found that confidence intriguing, rather than just exhausting.
Entering through the front door, Miranda is struck by the absence of noise without the girls. Usually her homes hum with their presence, as though she can hear their breathing from rooms or even floors away. It brings her comfort, and she’s sad to confess that she misses it even more keenly now as other obligations take them from her.
In search of dinner, she makes her way through the sitting room, leaning heavily on the damn cane that she can’t do without as the afternoon has worn on. It’s a short-cut, of sorts, as opposed to the long hallway with its polished floor and treacherous rugs. It also allows her a vantage point into the kitchen without being seen herself, and depending on what mood she encounters, she may just have dinner sent upstairs.
Andrea is putting things in the dishwasher, with Millie nowhere in sight. Checking the Cartier watch that hangs from her left wrist, Miranda notes that Millie’s hours of work are over for the day. With her foot actually halfway to making the next step forward, Miranda is frozen in place at the sound of Stephen’s voice. What the hell is he doing chattering with the help in the kitchen, anyway?
And there’s a sudden sick realization in the pit of Miranda’s stomach, that by sulking and hiding last night she left these two alone. Sure, Andrea isn’t naturally stylish, and needs a thorough tutorial in the correct application of eye makeup, but 25 is 25 and that trumps a whole hell of a lot. Particularly with a husband that Miranda already knows to have strayed, and when she is the alternative in her broken, frosty imperfection. The images come to her unbidden, of Stephen’s sloppy kisses being foisted on Andrea’s always-smiling mouth, of his hairy hands creeping up those firm, young thighs: the dining room table the venue Miranda’s mind chooses to torture her with.
It’s her own thoughts that cause her to remain in de facto hiding, rather than the conversation she can’t bring herself to listen to. Things sound friendly between the two, and that’s a bad sign. Eventually, Stephen slides into Miranda’s line of vision, his back turned to her so that she can see the needless crinkles of the workday in the designer shirts she picked out for him.
Part of her is yearning to flee as she sees him take up position behind the bending Andrea, who is chattering away as she loads glasses and mugs into the wire racks, seemingly oblivious to Stephen’s intentions for the moment. As his hand reaches out to caress Andrea’s ass, Miranda knows she should interrupt or flee.
The problem is, in some masochistic way, she just needs to see what happens next.
Chapter 8 -->