Disclaimer: As always, none of the characters belong to me.
The Night Was Weeping
Everybody wants to be us.
The words have bounced in Andy's head for several days. The haughty arrogance of the statement, the casual indifference of the tone, the easy dismissal after the fact all combined to mask a gaping emptiness inside Miranda. An emptiness of something Andy can't quite put her finger on or name; all she knows is that it's cavernous and echoing in its absence.
Andy walks the short distance from her desk to Miranda's office. It's late, sometime past midnight. She doesn't touch anything; she doesn't even pass the threshold. But her eyes trace the austere office. Because this is probably the last chance she'll have to really see the place.
She takes in the clean, sharp lines of the space. It reminds her of its owner so much. Cutting. Severe. Without warmth.
The tall glass doors close behind her silently. Andy doesn't look back at the darkness shrouding the office. It's always the transparent things that are most obscure.
She knows there is a beauty in empty things. She appreciates it more than most.
She smiles at the young intern that hands her the Book—he looks haggard—it's the least she can do. Andy walks out of Elias-Clark knowing she won't ever return to it in the capacity in which she's leaving. The letter tucked away in a forgotten corner of Miranda's desk ensures that. She hesitates and looks up at the darkened building. Her freedom is bittersweet.
Andy holds the Book tightly as the subway hurtles its straight lined shape tangentially along the curving railway. The car has a few other passengers scattered far away from one another; all sojourners together on the midnight train to widely different destinations. She blows her bangs and leans her head back.
Everybody wants to be us.
As a child, she had explored the woods behind her home. Her mother's be careful always lost among the foliage. In a clearing, further than she ought to have been, she had found an old barn. Its paint had been faded and its old wood had drooped on one side, but there had been something about its solitude that had attracted Andy's attention.
So it had been when she spent a summer hopping through Europe. The beautiful, ornate places like Versailles and the Buckingham Palace were magnificent to behold and Andy had enjoyed them. But it was the abandoned castles in France and Germany that captivated her interest. It had been the feeling of them, the danger of them, that had attracted her.
Andy stands as the squeal of metal on metal signals her stop. The night air has a bite of cold and she breathes it deeply hoping to distract the direction of her thoughts. She remembers the feeling of entering an empty place. She is addicted—as much as she had been as a child and teenager—to the rush of adrenaline tinged with fear of walking into an abandoned, forgotten place. She loves that feeling of her presence alone being able to fill up an empty place. It is a powerful sensation to bring new life to a once glorious place.
Andy slips her key into the lock and turns the heavy tumblers silently. Her steps are loud in the quietness of the house. She places the Book down softly with the key she used to enter laid atop it like a sacrifice laid over an altar.
She waits several long heartbeats.
Abandoned things are grand and imposing…and so very lonely. Their silences reverberating in the vast emptiness; their echoes of maybes and might have beens muted through the solemn passage of time.
Andy has always loved those untouched, lonely places.
But, she has learned that people are not objects; they cannot so easily be appreciated and explored.
Andy knows people are not places, and she shouldn't try to make a home out of them. Especially not Miranda. Miranda who is grand and imposing and untouched and abandoned and so very lonely. And empty.
Miranda who is all those things but also a house of flesh, blood, and bone. Miranda who houses a soul, no matter how desolate and lonely. Miranda who Andy cannot touch and fill—in any sense of the word—without explicit permission.
Andy exhales a noisy breath. It's all she can leave in the place: an echo of her passing presence.
She's halfway out the door when she hears her name waft up to her ears. It's almost lost into the night, but Andy is conditioned to hear Miranda's voice no matter how quiet it may be.
No other command is uttered, so Andy walks to where she heard the disembodied voice originate. Miranda holds out a glass of wine across the island partitioning her kitchen. Andy takes it without comment. They drink liberally, the silence around them inordinately calm and comfortable.
Andy stares at Miranda without subtlety or shame. She has looked at the editor for hundreds of hours over the course of hundreds of days. She has seen Miranda at her lowest and at her highest. But she has never seen the editor like she is seeing her now.
"Everyone wants the fame and fortune. But, nobody wants the work, the sacrifice…" Andy stops from saying the words loneliness and emptiness. "Nobody wants to be us." She takes a steadying breath. "Not even you."
Miranda quirks and eyebrow but makes no comment. She swirls her wine and stares back without subtlety or shame.
"Not even me…" Andy's breath stutters. She puts the glass down. The attraction to abandoned, empty places finally makes sense. The addictive feeling wasn't about an adrenaline rush; it was recognition.
"Indeed." Miranda doesn't move to comfort or appease but her eyes soften making her hard edges smoother and less severe. "The question, then, is: what do we want to be?"
Andy has only one answer to that question but her bravery fails her; she holds the words between the straining cage of her chest.
Miranda considers Andy for a long moment before she smiles wistfully her eyes sparkling in the overhead light. She sips her wine with relish. "Agreed."
No more is said.
And silence, like darkness, like emptiness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.