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The Days
Summary: After the war, Andy Sachs writes her last article.
Pairing: Miranda/Andy
Rating: G, I guess, but includes very disturbing ideas.
Disclaimer: I do not own them.
A/N: I wrote this quite a while ago when I was freaking out about moving to Germany, as such, it comes from a very dark and quite morbid place and has mentions of war, death and terrorism. This is in no way a happy fic, and please do not read if you find such topics distressing.
A/N2: The title was, of course, inspired by ‘The Hours’.
It has been many years now, since the bombs stopped falling and we started to once again feel safe in our beds. The burden of persecution has now become the burden of memory and I, like many of us, feel the need to pass that torch on to those who step up to fill our shoes. I will not write of the countless civilians who died, nor of the brutal tactics employed by both sides; both accounts have become sordid and clichéd. Instead, I will speak of only one woman and what the war meant to her and, in turn, what she meant to me.
The dawn of July the third will always bring a sharp pain to my chest, as it no doubt will to all Americans. A cruel irony that, on the day before Independence Day, we should be forced to watch our future’s end and, with it, the loss of freedom for many of us. But it is for a much more personal reason that I shall always remember that date - it was the first time I ever saw Miranda Priestly truly crumble. She was watching the television in Irv’s office, completely unconcerned by the eyes fixed on her. It had been a horrendous news report, the first attack on a school we’d had to face. And, when the bomb exploded, Miranda had crumbled like any other parent with a child still inside. I went with her to the hospital, it had seemed unthinkably callous to allow her to go alone. We saw the truth in Cassidy’s eyes before we knew it as a fact - Caroline had been one of the thirteen who had perished inside the gymnasium - and for all the life present in Cassidy’s eyes, she might as well have been in there too.
I left Runway, and Miranda, one year, three weeks and two days later. I had planned on leaving before, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do so. Instead I waited until it was all too obvious that there was nothing I could do to help her. She was no longer the Miranda I knew, I no longer saw the passion in her eyes or sensed the fire in her belly, instead she was the Miranda I had met four years prior, whose coldness was unfathomable and endless. Her bitterness and cynicism knew no bounds and she didn’t care who knew it, me, Nigel, hell even Irv was all too often on the receiving end of one of her harsh comments or frosty glares.
She’d once told me that the only thing I could do to help her was my job. I was no longer her assistant but I thought the sentiment still applied, so I put my head down and was an editor by the time I was forty. I doubt she followed my career, but if she ever saw my name in print, I wanted it to be attached to something worthwhile, something I could be proud of and that she could know she had inspired. It wasn’t that I was trying to replace Caroline, god knows, I never wanted to be her daughter; I just wanted to give her a slight feeling of satisfaction and the knowledge that not everything was wrong in the world. I wanted her to be proud of me.
It was easy to keep tabs on their lives, they weren’t exactly low profile. Cassidy dropped out of university to join the army, a rebel who had finally found her cause, and was sent to war never to return. I mourned her when I learned of her passing, remembered the girl with shocking red hair who had told me to bring the book upstairs, remembered the haunted look of a sister who had lost the other half of her soul. I remembered the mother who had lost too much and the way she had fallen apart the first time she had lost a child and I knew I had to see her again. Not to apologise, she was no doubt sick of hearing them and I’d done nothing wrong. I might have regretted leaving Miranda back then, like a puppy leaving his master in a burning house, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been the right thing to do.
She was not easy to find, I doubt she wanted to be, but I eventually bumped into her at a party. She smiled at me, but it was neither her genuine smile not the one she saved for the press, it was something new, a flimsy veneer covering the cracks that had formed. It was obscene.
I saw her several times after that, each time she gave me that same smile, and each time we ended up in bed. We never talked, not with words anyway, until one day I asked what it was like to lose everything that had any meaning. She just looked at me and stroked my cheek. Apparently it’s not something that you can give words to. I’ve been asked several times whether Miranda and I were lovers and every time I have answered ‘no’. You probably think me a liar now, but my answer remains the same - Miranda and I weren’t lovers, not in any conventional sense. We never talked, or laughed or really even loved. We were just two desperate people who took what we could get and tried to be happy with it. If I’d acted on my feelings for her before, when I’d first felt them, when I’d first put her before everything and everyone else, it might have been different, but I waited too late.
This will be my final published article; I am fifty six years old and the years have not been kind, I find myself too tired to string two words together, much less give them any meaning. I can only hope you can take something from it, whether that be to face down opposition; to follow your heart, regardless of the consequences; or to live everyday like it means something, after all they’re all we’ve got in the end. As for me, perhaps I will retire to a cabin in the mountains and write of a life that knew too much loss, or perhaps I will accept my old age with grace and start baking cookies for two girls who will never come home.
Summary: After the war, Andy Sachs writes her last article.
Pairing: Miranda/Andy
Rating: G, I guess, but includes very disturbing ideas.
Disclaimer: I do not own them.
A/N: I wrote this quite a while ago when I was freaking out about moving to Germany, as such, it comes from a very dark and quite morbid place and has mentions of war, death and terrorism. This is in no way a happy fic, and please do not read if you find such topics distressing.
A/N2: The title was, of course, inspired by ‘The Hours’.
It has been many years now, since the bombs stopped falling and we started to once again feel safe in our beds. The burden of persecution has now become the burden of memory and I, like many of us, feel the need to pass that torch on to those who step up to fill our shoes. I will not write of the countless civilians who died, nor of the brutal tactics employed by both sides; both accounts have become sordid and clichéd. Instead, I will speak of only one woman and what the war meant to her and, in turn, what she meant to me.
The dawn of July the third will always bring a sharp pain to my chest, as it no doubt will to all Americans. A cruel irony that, on the day before Independence Day, we should be forced to watch our future’s end and, with it, the loss of freedom for many of us. But it is for a much more personal reason that I shall always remember that date - it was the first time I ever saw Miranda Priestly truly crumble. She was watching the television in Irv’s office, completely unconcerned by the eyes fixed on her. It had been a horrendous news report, the first attack on a school we’d had to face. And, when the bomb exploded, Miranda had crumbled like any other parent with a child still inside. I went with her to the hospital, it had seemed unthinkably callous to allow her to go alone. We saw the truth in Cassidy’s eyes before we knew it as a fact - Caroline had been one of the thirteen who had perished inside the gymnasium - and for all the life present in Cassidy’s eyes, she might as well have been in there too.
I left Runway, and Miranda, one year, three weeks and two days later. I had planned on leaving before, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do so. Instead I waited until it was all too obvious that there was nothing I could do to help her. She was no longer the Miranda I knew, I no longer saw the passion in her eyes or sensed the fire in her belly, instead she was the Miranda I had met four years prior, whose coldness was unfathomable and endless. Her bitterness and cynicism knew no bounds and she didn’t care who knew it, me, Nigel, hell even Irv was all too often on the receiving end of one of her harsh comments or frosty glares.
She’d once told me that the only thing I could do to help her was my job. I was no longer her assistant but I thought the sentiment still applied, so I put my head down and was an editor by the time I was forty. I doubt she followed my career, but if she ever saw my name in print, I wanted it to be attached to something worthwhile, something I could be proud of and that she could know she had inspired. It wasn’t that I was trying to replace Caroline, god knows, I never wanted to be her daughter; I just wanted to give her a slight feeling of satisfaction and the knowledge that not everything was wrong in the world. I wanted her to be proud of me.
It was easy to keep tabs on their lives, they weren’t exactly low profile. Cassidy dropped out of university to join the army, a rebel who had finally found her cause, and was sent to war never to return. I mourned her when I learned of her passing, remembered the girl with shocking red hair who had told me to bring the book upstairs, remembered the haunted look of a sister who had lost the other half of her soul. I remembered the mother who had lost too much and the way she had fallen apart the first time she had lost a child and I knew I had to see her again. Not to apologise, she was no doubt sick of hearing them and I’d done nothing wrong. I might have regretted leaving Miranda back then, like a puppy leaving his master in a burning house, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been the right thing to do.
She was not easy to find, I doubt she wanted to be, but I eventually bumped into her at a party. She smiled at me, but it was neither her genuine smile not the one she saved for the press, it was something new, a flimsy veneer covering the cracks that had formed. It was obscene.
I saw her several times after that, each time she gave me that same smile, and each time we ended up in bed. We never talked, not with words anyway, until one day I asked what it was like to lose everything that had any meaning. She just looked at me and stroked my cheek. Apparently it’s not something that you can give words to. I’ve been asked several times whether Miranda and I were lovers and every time I have answered ‘no’. You probably think me a liar now, but my answer remains the same - Miranda and I weren’t lovers, not in any conventional sense. We never talked, or laughed or really even loved. We were just two desperate people who took what we could get and tried to be happy with it. If I’d acted on my feelings for her before, when I’d first felt them, when I’d first put her before everything and everyone else, it might have been different, but I waited too late.
This will be my final published article; I am fifty six years old and the years have not been kind, I find myself too tired to string two words together, much less give them any meaning. I can only hope you can take something from it, whether that be to face down opposition; to follow your heart, regardless of the consequences; or to live everyday like it means something, after all they’re all we’ve got in the end. As for me, perhaps I will retire to a cabin in the mountains and write of a life that knew too much loss, or perhaps I will accept my old age with grace and start baking cookies for two girls who will never come home.
danke | bitte
