Work Text:
Check out this music video, an indie artist made a parody of what the DWP movie should’ve been, and I’m using their lyrics as inspiration for my concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8633Lk5QHw&list=RDs8633Lk5QHw&start_radio=1
The Book was late.
This happened sometimes, a crisis in the printing queue, a layout that Nigel declared catastrophically wrong at the eleventh hour, Miranda herself sweeping back through the offices at 9 PM to overturn decisions that had taken twelve hours to make. Andy had learned not to take it personally. She had learned, more broadly, to turn the waiting into something productive.
Tonight she was failing at that.
The Runway offices were nearly empty. The bullpen had the particular quality of quiet that only descended after hours, the hum of the building's ventilation system, the distant sound of a cleaning cart somewhere on another floor, the blue glow of screensavers. Andy sat at her desk with a half-eaten granola bar and her laptop open to a document that was supposed to be Miranda's updated travel itinerary for the Paris follow-up but which had, in the last forty minutes, become something else entirely.
She didn't plan it. She hadn't sat down intending to do it.
But her fingers had started moving, and the words had come out, and now they were there, and she couldn't look away from them.
I want you so bad, old enough to be my mother,
You pull me in, call me your lover.
Leave, but don't go, gasping, I'll never recover
Andy stared at the screen.
She thought about the morning two weeks ago when Miranda had stood at the window of her office, backlit, holding a coffee cup in both hands, and turned to look at Andy with an expression that Andy still hadn't been able to fully decode. Not quite impatience. Not quite warmth. A look Miranda reserved for moments when she found something, or someone, unexpectedly interesting.
She wondered, with an ache that bordered on embarrassing, what Miranda’s rich plum lipstick would taste like. Whether it would smear across her own lips and tongue as Miranda kissed her, whether she’d be able to taste the waxy sweetness mixed with the heat of Miranda’s mouth.
Her fingers kept moving.
I'm yours, down on my knees, let it bleed, I'd sell my soul just to meet your need
Shadows rise, stars fade away, I'll burn with you, till there's nothing left to say
She read it back. Her face was hot.
She hit ctrl+P before she could talk herself out of it. As always, she printed anything she needed to see differently. Heart hammering, she crossed to the small printer beside Miranda’s desk, pulled the warm sheet free, and looked at it once. Just once.
Her eyes caught on the final stanza. It wasn’t quite right.
She reached for the heavy silver pen lying on Miranda’s desk, the one that always slightly slick with her lotion. With shaking fingers, she added the new line in the margin:
Lick the lipstick from your mouth greedily.
Only then did she fold the paper twice, quickly, and shove it deep into the outer pocket of her bag. Out of sight. She closed the document without saving it and forced down the rest of her granola bar, barely tasting it.
The Book arrived at 9:48 PM.
Andy assembled everything with her usual competence: dry cleaning first, then the Book in her bag, the Post-it schedule inside the front cover, her hands moving fast because the sooner she delivered it the sooner she could go home and perhaps disintegrate quietly in her apartment and never think about the poem again.
She didn't notice the paper slip from her bag pocket and catch against the leather cover of the Book, folding itself inside.
Andy knew something was wrong at 8:14 AM.
Miranda arrived twelve minutes early, which was unusual. She walked past Andy's desk without stopping, which was not but she also didn't hand (throw) Andy her coat, which was… and she didn't issue the morning's first wave of demands… and she didn't look at Andy at all.
Not away from Andy. That would have been normal. Miranda was frequently uninterested in looking directly at her assistants; they were furniture that occasionally spoke.
This was different. This was Miranda meticulously, architecturally not looking at Andy. The way you didn't look at something you were very aware of.
Andy filed it as a bad sign and went back to the travel itinerary.
By 10 AM she had catalogued the following: Miranda had asked for her coffee through Emily. Miranda had requested three things via printed note handed to Emily to pass to Andy rather than simply calling her in. Miranda had looked at Andy exactly twice, once across the bullpen from a distance of roughly thirty feet, for approximately three seconds, and once through the glass wall of her office while on the phone, a look that lasted longer and which Andy found she couldn't interpret at all and which made the back of her neck warm in a way that had nothing to do with the office temperature.
"Did you do something?" Emily asked at her own desk, not looking up from her screen.
"Not that I know of," Andy said.
"She's been—" Emily paused, seemingly unable to locate the correct descriptor. "Odd. About you specifically. Which is worse than angry, in my experience."
"Great," Andy said. "Thanks for that."
The day proceeded. Miranda's oddness, the calculated non-attention, the almost surgical avoidance did not resolve. If anything it intensified, and by 4 PM Andy had developed the specific variety of anxiety that felt like a frequency slightly too high to hear but perfectly pitched to rattle every bone she had.
She left at 7 PM with the Book.
The townhouse was lit when she arrived.
This wasn't unusual. What was unusual was Caroline opening the door before Andy had finished unlocking it, looking at her with an expression of specific teenage assessment, saying "she's asked for you in the studio," and then retreating up the stairs without further comment.
Andy stood in the foyer.
The studio.
Miranda used the studio, a converted room off the back of the first floor, better light, long worktables, when she was working on something that required space. Layouts. Proofs. Sometimes just thinking, which Miranda did physically, walking the length of the table, picking things up, setting them down.
Andy hung the dry cleaning. She carried the Book.
She told herself the strange day was nothing. She told herself the oddness was Miranda being Miranda, a thousand things happening behind those eyes that had nothing to do with Andy specifically. She told herself she was being narcissistic to imagine otherwise.
She walked to the studio door.
She knocked.
"Come in, Andrea."
She went in.
Miranda was standing at the far end of the long worktable, which was clear of everything except a single lamp and a single piece of paper. She was wearing black, a silk blouse, wide-leg trousers, the kind of simple and devastatingly put-together look that Miranda deployed when she wasn't trying to impress anyone, which paradoxically was when she looked most dangerous. Her reading glasses were on the table beside the paper. She was not wearing them. She was looking directly at Andy.
Andy looked at the paper.
She knew, before she could read it from this distance, what it was. The dimensions were right. The fold marks. The cream color of the printer paper at Runway that was subtly different from every other cream printer paper Andy had ever seen because this was Miranda's world and everything in it was specific and chosen.
The floor did something complicated under Andy's feet.
"Close the door," Miranda said.
Andy closed the door.
She stood with the Book in her hands, because holding the Book was something to do with her body, and her body was currently requiring instruction.
Miranda didn't speak immediately. That was a technique , Andy knew it was a technique, had watched Miranda deploy it in meetings, in confrontations, in the casual encompassing silences she let fall over people who had disappointed her. Knowing it was a technique did not make it less effective.
"Set the Book down," Miranda said.
Andy set it on the near end of the table.
"Come here."
Andy walked the length of the table. She stopped when there were perhaps four feet between her and Miranda, which felt both too close and not close enough, which was a thought she immediately tried to evict from her mind.
Miranda looked at her for a long moment. Then, with the fluid motion of someone doing something they have decided to do fully and without apology, she picked up the piece of paper and held it.
"I believe this is yours," she said.
Andy's mouth opened. "I — it was an accident, it must have gotten caught in the—"
"I didn't ask you to explain how it got there." Miranda's voice was even. Scalpel-even.
The lamp made everything warm and shadowed. The rest of the house was quiet around them, the girls upstairs, the night pressing against the tall windows.
"I've been thinking about it," Miranda said, "all day." She looked down at the paper. "That's inconvenient, as you can imagine. I have at least seventeen things that require my full attention and instead I spent considerable mental energy on—" she paused, with a poignancy that felt like cruelty "—you."
Andy said nothing. She had the sensation of standing at the edge of Rockefeller with no railing.
"I want to read it to you," Miranda said.
"Miranda—"
"That wasn't a request, Andrea."
The silence after that was very complete.
Miranda looked down at the paper and slid on her reading glasses. And Andy watched her read it, watched Miranda's eyes move across words that Andy had written in a moment of total private unraveling, and felt each second of it like something physical.
"I want you so bad," Miranda began, and her voice reading those words was low and unhurried, and Andy's hands curled at her sides. "Old enough to be my mother." Miranda looked up at that. A fraction of a pause, something moving behind her eyes. "You pull me in, call me your lover."
Andy's breath was doing things it wasn't supposed to do.
"Leave, but don't go, gasping," Miranda continued, still watching her. "I'll never recover." She let the line sit. Let it echo in the high-ceilinged room and took off her reading glasses.
Andy said nothing. Her face was hot. The lamp between them threw light upward along the angles of Miranda's face, the architecture of her cheekbones, the absolutely unyielding quality of her attention, and Andy thought, with the helpless clarity of someone who has stopped pretending: this is what I meant. Exactly this.
"Get on your knees," Miranda said.
The words landed without preamble. Flat and certain and immovable as foundation stone.
Andy looked at her.
"Miranda—"
"You wrote it." Miranda's voice didn't change. It didn't need to. "Down on my knees. Your words, Andrea. Not mine." The faintest pause. "Unless you didn't mean them."
The room was very still.
Andy meant them.
Andy meant every filthy syllable.
She had meant them when she wrote them in the blue glow of the Runway bullpen at 9:30 PM waiting for a book she delivered every night. She had meant them in the hidden way you mean things you will not look at directly, things that live in the peripheral vision of your own interior life. She meant them right now, in this room, with Miranda looking at her like that — like Andy was a woman Miranda had decided to want, with the same absolute finality she brought to every decision.
Andy's knees met the floor.
The parquet was cool through her thin dress trousers. Miranda looked down at her from what felt like a considerable height, which Andy's mind registered this distantly, not only physical. Miranda said nothing for a moment. She looked at Andy kneeling on her studio floor and something shifted in her expression, a tightening and a softening simultaneously, the expression of someone who has been proven right about something that mattered.
"There," Miranda said, very quietly. Almost to herself.
Then she moved.
Not toward Andy, not yet, but around her, a slow circuit that kept Andy at the center, her heels a soft percussion on the parquet, calculated and unhurried. Andy tracked her in her peripheral vision and then stopped doing that because it was making her dizzy and instead she stared at the middle distance and breathed.
Miranda came to a stop behind her.
"I'd sell my soul," Miranda said from behind her, and Andy's spine did something involuntary. The words were right at her ear, not close enough to feel breath, but close. "Just to meet your need." A pause. "What do you need, Andrea?"
Andy's hands were flat on her thighs. She kept them there.
"You," she said.
"That's not specific enough."
"You—" Andy stopped. Started over. "I need you to—"
"To what."
The question was patient. Miranda had all the time in the world and she knew it. This was the same quality she brought to the runway, not impatience, never impatience, because impatience implied you could be rattled, and Miranda Priestly could not be rattled. She brought that same vast, glacial patience here, and Andy felt the full weight of it pressing down on her like a hand between her shoulder blades.
"To touch me," Andy said. "To — I don't know, Miranda, to look at me and not—"
"Not what."
"Not pretend that it means nothing."
A silence.
Miranda came back around to her front. She stood close, closer than before, and Andy had to tip her head back to look up at her and Miranda looked down at her with an expression that Andy had never seen on her face before. It wasn't cruelty. It wasn't warmth. It was a mixture that required both components and was neither.
"I don't do anything that means nothing," Miranda said.
"I know," Andy said.
Miranda's chin tilted, a fraction. Emotion moved across her face too quickly to name.
She reached out. Two fingers under Andy's chin, the same gesture Andy had imagined approximately ten thousand times since that morning with the coffee cup and the backlight, and it was — it was worse than imagining it. The actual feeling of it. The cool pressure of Miranda's fingers and the entirely proprietary quality of the touch, the way Miranda tipped her face up like she was assessing something she already knew the value of.
"Shadows rise," Miranda said, her voice lower now, intimate in the quiet room. "Stars fade away." She looked at Andy's face — studied it, the way she studied everything, without apology, without looking away. "I'll burn with you."
"Yes," Andy said. Just that. Helplessly.
"You wrote a poem," Miranda said. "At my office. On my time." The faintest edge of humor, not amusement, but adjacent to it, sharper. "Using, presumably, my printer."
"Your paper," Andy confirmed. "And your printer. And—" she stopped. "Your pen, actually, I added one line by hand."
The corner of Miranda's mouth shifted. "You are extraordinarily problematic, do you know that."
"I've been told."
"Not sufficiently, I suspect."
Miranda’s thumb slowly traced her own lower lip, deliberately smearing the deep plum lipstick. Then she pressed that same thumb firmly against Andy’s mouth, dragging it across her bottom lip with slow, possessive intent.
Andy’s breath hitched. Without thinking, she caught Miranda’s thumb between her teeth, biting down just hard enough to leave faint indentations. A low, needy moan vibrated against Miranda’s skin as she dragged her teeth along the pad of her thumb, scraping the rich pigment onto her tongue. The waxy, faintly sweet taste of Miranda’s lipstick flooded her mouth.
Miranda’s eyes darkened instantly, a flicker of pure hunger flashing across her face.
“Lick the lipstick from your mouth greedily,” she quoted, voice husky and dangerous. “Well… we can’t allow gluttony, can we? That’s a sin.”
"Miranda, please."
"Stand up," Miranda said.
Andy stood. Her legs had lost their usual confidence but they held. Miranda didn't step back. Andy rose into the close space between them, ending up near enough to see the fine detail of Miranda's features, the silver at her temples luminous in the lamplight, the absolute quality of her attention.
"Tell me what you want."
Andy's heart was going at a rate that felt medically significant.
"I want you to keep doing that," Andy said. "The — the way you look at me. The way you say my name. I want—" she stopped and tried again, because Miranda's expression required her to be honest or say nothing at all. "I've wanted you since almost the beginning and I didn't know what to do with that so I wrote it down and now you're standing here reading it back to me and I don't know whether to be terrified or—"
"Or," Miranda said.
"—or the other thing."
"What's the other thing."
"Grateful," Andy said. "That you found it."
The word landed between them and stayed.
Miranda looked at her. The lamp threw its warm light across both of them. Outside, the city did what the city did: sirens, distance, the endless white noise of ten million lives happening simultaneously, and inside the studio it was very quiet, and Miranda's hand was still curved along Andy's jaw, and Andy had stopped pretending anything.
"I was going to give it back to you," Miranda said. "This morning. Put it on your desk and never mention it again."
"Why didn't you?”
"Because I've been doing that for six months," Miranda said. "Giving things back to you. Finding ways to—" she stopped. Miranda Priestly did not trail off mid-sentence; she cut them off surgically. This was the first time Andy had heard her leave one unfinished, and it did more damage to Andy's composure than anything that had come before. "You're very difficult to be intelligent about."
"I'm sorry," Andy said.
"No you're not."
"No," Andy agreed. "I'm not."
Miranda looked at her for a long time. The particular focused quality of it, the way Miranda looked at things she cared about, final covers, perfect photographs, the rare moments when the world arranged itself exactly as she intended was disarming. Andy had spent two years learning to interpret Miranda's expressions and this one was entirely about her and she had no defense against it.
"Till there's nothing left to say," Miranda said, quietly. The last line. Her eyes on Andy's face.
She closed the remaining distance.
The kiss was not tentative. Miranda did not do tentative. It was the kind of kiss that had decision in it, certain and deeply unhurried, and Andy's hands, which had been maintaining a careful civilian distance at her sides, found their way to Miranda's waist with a will of their own. Miranda's hand moved from her jaw into her hair, and the slight tightening of that grip made Andy's knees do something that required counteraction, and she pressed closer, and Miranda made the quietest possible sound against her mouth that traveled through Andy like a frequency she'd been calibrated to receive.
Miranda pulled back.
Not far. An inch. Her hand still in Andy's hair, still that precise proprietary grip, her eyes open and very close.
"I have conditions," she said.
Andy almost laughed. Almost. She pressed it back down. "Okay."
"This doesn't become—" Miranda paused, selected words with her usual precision "—sentimental and messy and public. You're still my assistant."
"Okay."
"When we're in that building you are professional and I am professional and it is as it has always been."
"Okay."
"And you do not—" Miranda's gaze dropped to Andy's mouth and came back up "—write any further poetry about me and print it on my equipment."
"I'll use my own printer," Andy said.
The corner of Miranda's mouth moved. The real one, the almost-smile she gave to almost nothing. "See that you do."
She kissed her again.
This time there was less condition and more consequence. Miranda's hand tightened in her hair and Andy made a sound she would have been embarrassed by in any other context and which here felt simply true, accurate, the right response to this specific situation. Her back met the edge of the worktable. Miranda had walked her into it with the slow inexorable quality she brought to everything and Miranda pulled back far enough to look at her, this time from slightly above, Andy's back against the table and Miranda's hand braced on the surface beside her hip.
"You wanted this," Miranda said, and it was almost meditative, the way she said it. Confirming.
"All this time," Andy confirmed.
"Say it properly."
Andy looked at her. "I wanted you," she said. "I've wanted you for a long time. I want you right now."
"You would have stayed," Miranda said. Not a question. An observation, in the way that Miranda observed things — comprehensively, from all angles, reaching conclusions that other people arrived at only later if at all. "If I'd asked you to. Paris. That night. You would have stayed."
"I would have stayed," Andy said.
"I know." Miranda's voice was quieter on that. Emotion moved through it that Andy couldn't quite name, something that had been a long time in the making. "I've known for some time."
"And?" Andy looked at her. "And now?"
Miranda didn't answer that directly. She looked at Andy with that new expression, the one that was both things at once, and tucked a piece of Andy's hair back with a gesture so uncharacteristically gentle that Andy's chest did something that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the specific terror of someone you didn't expect turning out to be complicated and human and worth it.
"Stay," Miranda said. And then, as though the word required context or she was unwilling to let it stand unmodified: "Tonight."
"Yes, Miranda." Andy said.
The almost-smile again. The real one. It did the same damage it always would.
"Good," Miranda said. She straightened up and looked at the Book on the near end of the table, as though only just remembering it existed. "The Valentino spread on page thirty-one is wrong. The color correction is off and Nigel approved it anyway, which we will discuss tomorrow."
"I'll note it."
"The accessories feature—" Miranda paused. "Is largely fine. Credit where it's due." She moved toward the doorway. Stopped. Looked back at Andy over her shoulder, which was a thing she did in her office sometimes when she'd had a final thought, and which had never had quite this effect before. "You should also know," she said, "that the second stanza is structurally better than the first. The rhythm is more controlled. You have some natural instinct for it, apparently."
Andy stared at her.
"High praise," Andy said.
"Don't let it ruin you," Miranda said, and turned, and walked back into the warm dark of the townhouse, her footsteps quiet on the parquet.
Andy stood in the studio with the lamp and the empty worktable and the piece of paper still on its surface. Her piece of paper, her words and the city outside the windows and the particular stillness of a moment that had changed the shape of something permanently.
She picked the paper up. Folded it. Put it in her pocket.
She turned off the lamp.
She went to find Miranda.
The Book, for once, could wait.