Chapter Text
“Move it!”
Andy huffed as she was shunted along the corridor, out of the courtroom. Like many a girl, she had torn through her fair share of fantasies as to what her life after moving to New York might look like. None of them had included rebuffing a mid-market journalist with a serious case of inflated ego, and somehow winding up taking the fall for his fraudulent financial enterprise that had left the US Government out of pocket to the tune of multiple millions of dollars.
Fuck Christian. He’d never be getting a second date now, would he?
Anyway. The New York Mirror - her first job - had gleefully leapt on the opportunity to get the scoop on one of their own (supposedly), and while Doug had quite literally gone to bat for her when her apartment door had been all but battered down, picking up the one that had secured her Ohio under-18 state champion title (‘for God’s sake, Doug, put it down! There’s no point in both of us getting arrested, and you’re a hundred-sixty pounds on a good day’) it had taken a mere two weeks for her to be questioned, charged, and now, found guilty.
Racketeering. Honestly. She’d be thirty-six before she got out, and even that was contingent on good behaviour. A fat lot of good ‘good behaviour’ had done her so far. She didn’t even want to think about what jail would be like.
As she was hauled inside the back out of the NYPD blacked-out truck, it occurred to her that her mind had drawn a complete blank, and the knowledge of exactly where she was going had somehow managed to escape her. Forty minutes later, the doors clanked apart, and a reminder glared down at her in the form of a sign adorning a pair of imposing, towering gates.
The Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn.
Just wonderful. Her home for the next decade (at least) was to be the Valhalla of internment infamy. Any criminal worth their salt seemed to wind up there at some point.
Andy was - despite official records now testifying to the contrary - no criminal, the extent of her illegal activity being a mere couple of tokes on a rogue joint behind the gym block at senior prom. Not that one would know that, she mused ruefully, shrugging on the regulation jumpsuit and wincing at how washed-out it made her skin look. Given that she was hardly prone to vanity, that was really saying something.
She sighed. Then jumped, as the impatient cough behind her signalled the luxury of taking her time was yet another she had lost.
“Your lucky day, Sachs.”
She kept her face obediently blank. The guard grinned, revealing not one but three gold teeth.
“Someone out there must really have it out for you. You’ve been assigned a very special cellmate.”
Just her luck. She blinked.
“In fact,” he said, idly, in the manner of one discussing the weather, “you’ll be her first. The Warden’s always thought it…too dangerous to let her out of solitary. Not that it was necessarily his decision alone, you understand? I hear the Mayor himself had words about it.”
Well, fuck. Andy had no idea about prison etiquette, and so chose to keep silent. But the guard didn’t offer any further information, and merely marched her down what seemed like an endless labyrinth of doors and floors, until they arrived at a relatively nondescript steel grey door, which - to her increasing alarm - took at least three minutes to unlock. This may have had something to do with it being reinforced with no less than twelve locks and bolts.
The door swung open, and she breathed a sigh of relief. It was pitch-black. She squinted, making out a lightswitch just inside the doorframe. That would mean her cellmate hadn’t been transferred yet, wouldn’t it? Only a psycho would voluntarily sit alone in the dark. She could have some time to think, and process, and decompress -
“ - Get in.”
Stepping gingerly over the threshold, she turned to face the closing door, and tried not to panic upon hearing the assortment of metal click and whirr into place, sealing her inside. The sound of being locked in was not what induced the panic. No, that really escalated upon it finishing.
Because it became very clear she was not, in fact, alone. The expected silence did not manifest, given the absence of the guard revealed steady, soft breaths from somewhere behind her.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’re claustrophobic.”
Whatever she had been expecting from someone the Mayor himself commanded solitary for, it was not the low, elegant voice underlined with steel. Andy drew herself up to her full height - more for her own psychological boost than anything else, given they remained cloaked in darkness. She steeled herself, resolving that she wouldn’t capitulate to the urge to cower, and instead address her fellow prisoner as an equal.
“No. I just wasn’t expecting you to already be here.”
“Your powers of observation are truly astonishing. It is customary to lock a door a dozen times over when there is no one inside, after all.”
Okay, fair enough. Maybe she deserved that.
“Before you say anything more, turn on the light.”
Who did this woman think she was? Commanding her like a subordinate. Oh, well. While the urge to refuse on principle was strong, the urge to see the face of exactly who she was dealing with was stronger.
Index finger extended, pressure applied. The room flooded with excruciatingly bright white light, clinical and sterile. It revealed four shoddily painted white walls, a disturbingly cracked sink and a metal bunk bed. A woman - older, perhaps around forty-five or fifty - sat on the lower bunk, perched in a fashion Andy could only describe as incongruously elegant. Scratch that. Her entire being was incongruous. Like all inmates, she wore the regulation jumpsuit, but the creases that were already beginning to litter Andy’s own seemed allergic to marring her cellmate’s. An astonishingly pristine-looking shock of white hair framed sharp, austere features. But what drew Andy’s gaze more than anything were her eyes. Piercing, deep blue. They reminded her of the shots in nature documentaries gliding over an ocean, invariably cutting to some terrifyingly ancient deep sea predator five seconds later. Behind her pupils lurked something she could not name, yet felt far more than a frisson of fear at. She had never seen someone sit in such an entirely motionless fashion before. The woman could have quite convincingly been a statue. The steady, rhythmic regulation of her breaths, as sure and precise as a professional ballet player, the laser-sharp focus of her gaze on Andy, the impeccable posture and those eyes…
She knew nothing about this woman. She was more scared of her than anyone she had ever met.
And yet, and yet. She could not shake the feeling that she had seen her somewhere before, that in her distant past she had laid eyes on the individual appraising her in return, that there was knowledge just slipping out of her grasp that would illuminate her as to exactly why her heart rate had doubled and blood pressure spiked.
“I would greatly appreciate it if you refrained from suffering a stroke. My sentence is quite long enough as it is.”
“I’m not having a stroke.”
“Small mercies, indeed. Your name?”
“Andy. What’s yours?”
“Andy. Surely not. Were you a - ahem, surprise- and that name was your parents’ punishment of you?”
Why, of all the -
“- No. If you must know, my government name is Andrea. I just go by Andy.”
“Andrea. That is…acceptable.”
Great. Not only did she get landed with an apparently notorious cellmate, said cellmate was also a bona fide snob. Even if the way she pronounced Andy’s name - vaguely French, unlike how anyone had ever seen fit to interpret it before - was oddly flattering.
“If you are not, in fact, suffering an imminent collapse or as yet undefined medical emergency, do feel free to enlighten me as to why you look comprehensively terrified. You asked me my name, so clearly my reputation does not precede me - a rare event.”
Even in her current state, it was obvious that enquiring after the reputation in question would be an exceptionally poor choice.
“Well, it’s my first time in a place like this, and my entire knowledge of prisons is based on late-night trash tv shows. Plus the reputation of this one specifically doesn’t help. Totally not saying you’re like them or anything, it just makes you kinda wary, you know?”
She smiled, hoping she could cultivate a general air of friendliness.
“Hmm.” The woman sniffed. “I can assure you that unlike some of the more…unsavoury types who have graced or are currently gracing these walls, I have never been mixed up in violent, sexual or geopolitical crime.”
Huh. Andy cocked her head, knowing full well how futile profiling was and yet indulging in it regardless. The woman really didn’t look like a mule - if she was involved in the drugs trade, she’d have to be a kingpin or a wife of one, but she’d just said she wasn’t involved in violence. Financial, perhaps? Perhaps they could establish a point of commonality there.
“Well.” She smiled weakly, trying to appear as uninteresting as possible. “That’s, uh, good. Neither have I. I’ve never been mixed up in any crime, really.”
The woman merely arched a delicate eyebrow (lucky thing, the genetics required to maintain salon-quality eyebrows in god-damned maximum security slammer conditions must be insane) and let her gaze lazily trail down Andy’s orange-clad form.
“I know I’m here” - she lifted her arms out to her sides in recognition of the seeming evidence to the contrary - “but it was a setup. Some guy didn’t like that I rejected him, and apparently if he couldn’t have me in bed, he’d rather me in here, taking the fall for his racketeering. So, yeah. Shit luck, I guess.”
A small flicker of something Andy couldn’t quite place in the woman’s eyes was the sole indicator that her words carried any interest at all. But as soon as it sparked, it vanished, replaced by the mask-like veneer of boredom that she was quickly recognising as her cellmate’s default expression.
“Do try to refrain from using vulgar language in front of me, if you can. This is a shared space, after all.”
Andy wondered if she had hit her head. Maybe Doug had actually swung her bat, but caught her instead, and this was all a dream. What the hell sort of a dangerous prisoner objected to cursing? Speaking of, what on earth was she in for - what made her so dangerous, apart from a mysterious ability to maintain illegally well-coiffed hair and eyebrows?
It was almost as if said prisoner could read her mind.
“Everyone has standards. What those standards are may not make sense to others.”
She decided a gentle quirk up of the right side of her lips constituted a suitably polite gesture for the woman to expand. When no such explanation proved forthcoming, she dared to venture verbally.
“What’re yours? Your standards. That don’t make sense to others, I mean.”
“I typically detest extended lines of questioning - I pled the fifth throughout the entirety of my trials, if you must know - but I suppose it would be better to indulge you now than have to deal with your no doubt pitiful attempts to drip feed them for the next few days, or weeks, or months - however long we are forced to tolerate the other’s acquaintance.”
Andy leant forward, keen to make sure she heard whatever the woman was about to say. It was already glaringly apparent that a request for repetition on account of subpar hearing would not go down well.
“My standards, hmm? Well. I always clean up after myself. I demand excellence and efficiency. And I have never eaten a child or an innocent.”
The speed at which she recoiled back rivalled that of any home run she had ever hit. Her back hit the cool surface of the door, pressing so hard she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had given way despite the ridiculous amount of locks. A subscriber to theories of reincarnation she was not, but what in the hell had she done in a past life to deserve being interned in a fifty square-foot cell with a goddamned, honest-to-God fucking cannibal?
“Um,” she squeaked. “Uh, y’know. There’s not really a lot of me, and my diet is 90% ramen and pizza, plus the whole wrongful conviction thing, so maybe, um…”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. You’re a woman. That automatically disqualifies you from my consideration. There is no need to regale me with a shopping list of artificial chemicals and health violations you voluntarily subject yourself to on the regular.”
The journalist in Andy wondered if this was a particularly macabre form of sexism. The rest of her - the part which actually would quite like to stay alive, thanks - rejoiced.
“You said you weren’t involved in violent crime!”
“I’m not. Anyone whose resources I repurposed passed away via entirely silent, non-violent means. I’m no savage, Andrea.”
Well. That made it so much better. Not. Her mind raced, trying desperately to come up with a strategy to make herself indispensable to the woman, useful, somehow - useful in a way which didn’t involve literal consumption, despite her professed strange ethical standards. Trusting a cannibal hardly seemed an ironclad strategy, in any case.
“Good to hear. If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been in here?”
“Seven years.”
Right. That would mean Andy herself had been nineteen then. Casting her mind back, she tried to remember any headlines she had seen around the time. Failure greeted her like an old friend. A long, slow inhalation of breath seemed a sure bet to buy time.
Then clarity struck her like lightning.
“What are your restrictions?”
“My restrictions?”
“I mean, I’m allowed to send letters and stuff. I don’t know if you are.”
“For a moment there I thought I glimpsed a modicum of intelligence. How disappointing. I have been convicted of five separate counts of first degree murder and cannibalism, Andrea. No, I am not permitted to send whimsical missives to whomever I choose.”
Rude. Yet, she persisted.
“I could send them on your behalf. To people you know, technically from me, functionally from you.”
“And why would you do that?”
“To be completely honest with you, I’m not too interested in pissing off a cannibal I’ll be sleeping above for the next decade.”
“That is a reasonable point, I suppose.”
“What else could I be useful with?”
Those eyes narrowed. Then relaxed, as if the lightning which had affected Andy had gravitated to her as well.
“You are allowed out of this cell for how many hours a day, exactly?”
“Um, the guard said I’d be out for lunch and dinner, plus some corrective education time and an hour of exercise outside.”
Andy could have sworn the blue flashed two shades lighter for a moment.
“Excellent.”
“Oh?”
“I receive a half-hour daily where I am escorted to an indoor exercise cage, and another half-hour for a shower. Both of which are observed by no less than three guards at any one time.”
“Christ,” she muttered.
“Indeed. It makes it terribly difficult to develop a…working knowledge, shall we say, of the building’s floor plan. Or plumbing and ventilation systems.”
To her embarrassment, she felt her jaw slightly unhinge.
“Floor plan? Systems?”
“I do not intend to remain here for the rest of my life, Andrea.”
Naive and unlucky Andy might have been, stupid and incapable of reading between the lines she was not.
“I can’t say I’m keen on the idea of being locked up until I’m closing in on forty, either.”
For the first time, she was treated to a smile. Undoubtedly reptilian in nature, yes, but also oddly comforting as the recipient. It sufficiently emboldened her as to request the piece of information that had been eating at her.
“If I’m going to be your - well, your assistant, I guess - maybe I should know your name?”
The woman moved from sitting to standing in one fluid motion, then positively glided across the short distance to halt perhaps half a metre away. She extended her hand, and when Andy took it, her skin was cool and impossibly soft to the touch. With some envy, she noted exquisitely clean, short nails. The woman’s handshake was firm and deliberate, and against all evidence to the contrary, a frisson of confidence ran through her. The handshake was that of someone who meant business.
Hang on. Business. Executives.
It hit her all at once. Headlines on newspapers at stands she passed by at Northwestern, never bought - of a fashion editor of some magazine she couldn’t for the life of her remember the name of, headlines which screamed in bold capitals of a maven’s satanic unveiling, of sobriquets she had idly dismissed in passing as surely hyperbolic and cruel at the time, but now which seemed imbued with terrible lucidity.
She pumped her hand up and down, and looked into the eyes of the woman she now knew had been coronated as the Devil herself.
“Miranda Priestly.”