Been working hard on the next chapters of A Flawed Fragility, but this idea popped into my head & refused to leave; made all sorts of noises and squeaks and hoppy motions until I acknowledged it. I know it starts off fairly basically, but there's fuel enough here for a fairly long fic so let me know what the interest level is.
After the events that had transpired the previous evening and into that morning, it certainly wasn't admiration for the editor that made Andy stay, catching her phone at the end of her fingertips right before she was about to launch it into the nearest fountain. It wasn't even sympathy or pity after having seen the cracks in the usually flawless veneer of Miranda Priestly the night before. Even as she sat, nude probably Andy's mind had supplied less than helpfully, underneath her thin robe and stripped of all makeup looking so mortal, there was still something more – something inhuman and impossibly beautiful in the drawn lines of the older woman's face. Her sadness exquisite, even as it was so ordinary.
Miranda had asked for her help, despite the asking having lacked any semblance of a polite request coming from Miranda. The fact that Andy didn't like what it was Miranda had asked of her had no bearing on the situation other than how it had influenced her resulting puerile and immature behaviour to this moment, the young woman admitted to herself, her hand now tightly fisting the device which connected her to the editor.
From the steps of the Hotel de Crillon, Miranda watched – her heart in her throat for reasons she couldn't understand, as the young woman who had done what so many others had failed to do, lowered the arm that had been about to throw her cell phone into the fountain. Ignoring the flashes of the cameras and the frenzied shouting of the paparazzi around her, Miranda watched for another long moment as the long, slender neck bowed before straightening resolutely. She turned away, however before the younger woman completed her 180 degree return to Miranda's side so that the unexplainable relief that she knew suffused her features in that moment wasn't visible to the young woman or the clamoring press.
Slipping her phone back into the architectural Alexander Wang clutch, Andy hurried to catch up to Miranda. For a moment, she had thought she had caught Miranda's eye, but when she looked again, the editor was already up the second flight of stairs, the perfectly coiffed white hair brilliant against a sea of couture and thousand dollar highlights that now seemed so lackluster and contrived in comparison to the entity and the icon that was Miranda Priestly.
Although, Andy noticed as she tripped up the stairs through the photographers and press Miranda had left in her wake, in the moment she had thought she'd locked gazes with the older woman, there had been a flicker in the perfect façade, another crack in the veneer as Andy registered how small and storm tossed she had seemed as the world clawed and grabbed, eager to take what they could from the woman who had already, it seemed, given them everything. Certainly the dissolution of this last marriage and the fear of the effect this would have on her girls were proof of that.
In that moment, there it was again, that fragile and terrible beauty that spoke to Andrea in a way and in a language she had never heard or felt before, but that whose call compelled her to answer and draw closer to the flame, even as it threatened to destroy her and everyone else in its wake.
Andy could only hope, in the privacy of her own exhausted and bewildered mind, that she had made the right choice.