Pairing: Miranda/Andy

Warning: Sex, language, triggers (see below)

Disclaimer: I do not own The Devil Wears Prada nor am I making any money from this fiction.

Summary: A plane trip goes awry. Andy and Miranda can't survive on their own forever. Someone's got to rescue them eventually. Right? A story of not getting rescued.

Possible triggers: various depictions of death/dying and drowning/suffocating. Very brief mentions of taking one's own life. Nothing is gratuitous or distasteful (I think).

A/Note: This is an entry for the Devil Wears Prada July fic-a-thon arranged by the incredible xenavirgin and punky_96 on livejournal. If you haven't been, it's worth checking out. I'm still back in time in the second week of July somewhere, reading away to my heart's content. Definitely worth it if you enjoy DWP. Also... if you have been over there and you remember reading an awful lot about Miranda and Andy being hungry, well you silly human being you have already read this, so feel free to move along your day.

Part 14 is not safe for work. Cheers. ~WastedOn

Day: 1

"Don't bother me with the details, just make it happen." Miranda's muffled voice leaks through my hotel room door. "I need to leave this morning."

It is halfway between three and four a.m. when the unmistakable click of a hotel key card fully rouses me.

"And the itineraries."

Miranda's cool voice loudens as the door to my hotel room swings open. A wedge of light momentarily illuminates my bed until the door swings itself shut. "As in now, pronto, immediately. Do you need more synonyms or shall I continue?"

Cloaked in darkness, Miranda's silhouette strides to hover over my bedside, cellphone pressed to one ear, not looking at me.

I have clothes on, don't I? No, I do not. Wonderful.

"No, two tickets," she says to whomever is on the phone – probably the second assistant. "One is for Andrea."

I mentally cross my fingers that my comrade-in-arms will be up to whatever psychotic task Miranda is bequeathing her. Now that I'm first assistant, Miranda attributes any second assistant screw-ups to me.

"Tell Vera's people that Nigel can handle the rest of the shoot. But make sure to tell Nigel to put them in sandals."

Is she reaching out her arm...?

She tugs my blanket down.

Miranda's cellphone snaps shut. "Andrea, wake up."

Miranda's mouth opens to say more. She halts. Her face is hard to judge without a light source, but if I were a gambling woman, I'd guess her gaze is on the dozing redhead beside me.

"I'm up, Miranda." I sit up dutifully, pulling the sheet up around myself and grabbing my pen and pad off the nightstand.

If I have learned anything about working for Miranda Priestly, it's that if I act cool, everything is cool. This is a perfectly usual state for Miranda to discover her workers in, and no consequences can stem from it. Exactly that.

"Be downstairs in twenty minutes," she says stiffly.

"Yes, Miranda."

I sincerely hope she's not blushing; it's hard to tell in the dark.

"Get dressed, pack your luggage. I'm returning to New York early."

I don't ask how she got a key card to my room, or what the hurry was that she couldn't call me. Asking questions of Miranda Priestly is, of course, against the rules. I nod.

Miranda exits the room without a backward glance.

I stuff my head under a pillow and groan.

The Devil Wears Prada

I am ambushed as I rush to the elevator in four inch heels, still half asleep.

"Six, what's going on?" Nigel hisses. He's dressed smartly for four in the morning wearing clothes that seem like what he typically shows up to work in. He slips into the elevator with me and hits the lobby button. "Miranda just woke me up at the ass crack of dawn – same as you, no doubt – to have me come pick up the Book."

"Don't know." I yawn into my hand. "Miranda woke me up, now we're on a flight back to New York."

His eyebrows shoot up skeptically. "And you don't know any more than that?"

"If I worried about what I knew, I'd lose my marbles with this job."

"That's... probably a good strategy, actually. The only bit of information she told me is that I'm
in charge of the rest of the shoot because she's flying the coop. No good intel as to why, yet."

The elevator doors slide open. Miranda is already at the front doors. I can hear her berating the second assistant from here.

"You'll text me when you find out?" Nigel throws me a sly look. "I need to know how to handle her if she comes back breathing fire."

I nod. "Of course."

Miranda greets Nigel first when we make it to her. She doesn't spare a glance me except for a disdainful glance at my wheelie luggage. Nothing she hasn't tolerated before, though. She thrusts the Book into Nigel's waiting arms.

"I need you to keep that little blond photographer on track," she tells him. "More pictures, less flirting. The middle spread only works if the foreground is perfect, keep an eye on that."

"It'll be my baby, Miranda." Nigel gives her a reassuring smile. "Have a safe trip."

Miranda only purses her lips to that.

Nigel takes his leave after flashing me a pointed 'be careful' look, leaving Miranda and I alone to wait for the car. She taps her heel on the marble floor, then decides to thrust her handbag at me. I shoulder it without a word.

Miranda is indeed blushing. It's dusty pink and barely detectable underneath the makeup, but it's noticeable. I wonder exactly what she is picturing to cause the out-of-character uneasiness.

This is going to be a long flight.

The Devil Wears Prada

"KL2142 flying to Okinawa City is now accepting its first class passengers in zone one..."

That is me. Well, us. I shoulder my laptop bag and add the fine leather strap of a Gucci original on top of it, its monstrous weight thanks to my single traveling companion.

"Passport," she murmurs in my ear, but it is already in my hand, proffered to her. She takes it without commenting on my efficiency, and I without commenting on her lack of commenting.

Miranda Priestly is a study in silence. When she does speak it's barely detectable, but sharp and lethal all the same. Coffee, hot, now.

Those scarves on my desk in twenty minutes, or your career is over. Nineteen minutes and fifty-five seconds.

It's a strange relationship we have, her and I. I'm certain it's an unhealthy one. I perform a task well, then she says nothing, which drives me to do better, which in turn prompts her to… well, say nothing. And the cycle continues, if you could call it a cycle. Maybe you would just call it misery.

She takes the passport just in time to flash it at the boarding attendant before thrusting it into my hands again.

Miranda isn't carrying anything. Apparently even the passport is too much extra weight for her.

The boarding agent blocks my path when I try to follow hot on Miranda's heels. "I'm sorry, only one carry-on per passenger."

"I'm carrying hers, too," I explain quickly. Out of the corner of my eye I catch Miranda glancing back at us, every iota of her stature screaming her impatience.

I wonder what would happen if one day I magically have every task accomplished with a snap of my fingers, know what she is craving and have it waiting on her desk before she realizes she's hungry. Sacrifice a virgin to bring Coco Chanel back for one last design and place it in her inbox. I wonder if, just for the sake of continuity, she wouldn't say a god damn thing.

I'll find out when I'm just that good, I suppose.

Through the barricade of flight attendants and inside first class, I wrestle her hair-too-large baggage into the overhead bin before settling into my place beside her, immediately cracking open my laptop to add last minute touch ups to a memo to Irv Ravitz's office before takeoff. It's an itemized budget breakdown justifying Runway's expenses and need to fly to the Philippines to do a photo shoot. In other words, it's a load of bullshit I'm making up on the fly after Miranda waved an arm without looking up and said, 'oh make up whatever pish posh you need to,' and left me to it.

Because there is no justification for using the Philippines for a photo spread, no matter what the reader polls said. Not that the shoot hadn't been a success – it was. At least, when we left it had been.

I manage to add a few bullets about the Filipino demographic of readership before the flight attendant announces over the speaker that everything needs to be shut off. I don't mind, I'm already satisfied with my bullets. I've written many such justifications in the past, and they've all been up to snuff.

Bullshitting is easy if I remember everything my journalism degree taught me and throw it out the window.

Sometimes, in between desperately seeking her approval and grasping at the flimsy straws of her attention, I hate Miranda. I don't merely hate the woman. I despise what she stands for as a fashion icon, I loathe her disregard for the human condition, and I rip my hair out at the sound of her silky voice calling out, "Andrea."

But the moment of hostility always passes. Miranda will speak softly to me with rounded lips, like she is trying not to smile, but still including me on the joke. She will nod approvingly at an outfit, eyes slipping slowly down a model's figure like she's appreciating a fine wine that only she knows how to taste, and that action will somehow endear me to her.

Sometimes her gaze – humble and awed – lingers too long on a model, until she blinks and looks away with pursed lips. Sometimes she looks at me that way. Miranda's long looks are filled with enough guilelessness and wonder that her appreciation for the female form never felt cheap, just... enamored.

Then my anger passes, and I return to work the next day braced for more.

Miranda pulls a black sleeping mask over her eyelids, although I know for a fact she doesn't sleep on plane trips. Maybe she doesn't like spending seven hours staring at the back of the seat in front of her. Fair enough.

I think far too much about my boss. Ridiculous really, considering how little she clearly thinks about me. I don't even know why we're on this flight, for example, on the quickest connections the second assistant could find back to the States at the last minute, three days before the shoot is due to finish. Miranda hasn't deigned to tell anyone, even me – despite the fact that she alerted me to start packing my bags at three in the morning to be ready by four, and we've been on the move ever since.

Nigel cornering me in the lobby before we departed was shooting alarm bells off in my head. That had been my first clue that something big was happening, if her second-in-command had been left in the dark. I don't know why he thought she would tell me before him, but I was just as clueless.

He'd agreed with me on the point that a family member hadn't died – she wasn't nearly distraught enough – before Miranda had swept down on us and hurried me along. Albeit neither of us had ever seen an emotional state from her that qualified as 'distraught,' barring the Vera Wang faux fur expo of 2011, and we could both agree that it went without saying that she hadn't yet reached that level of emotional upset. If anything she was… eager.

Maybe Irv died.

No, because then I wouldn't be writing this ridiculous memo.

Lack of knowledge notwithstanding, I have arranged for a car to meet us at the airport 36 hours (and counting) from now and alerted Miranda's housekeeper and made sure the flight attendant brings her the hottest blazing coffee this side of the transverse mercator.

We're traveling from The Philippines to Japan, from there direct to LA, then a seven hour coast-to-coast flight to JFK International. I glance around Miranda out the window. The wings are so narrow. It's hard to believe they can carry two hundred people across an entire ocean so easily.

It might sound nuts, but I'm secretly thrilled at how much time there will be for me to lie back and sleep. In Miranda's presence it's unheard of, but there is simply nothing else productive I could be doing, and not even Miranda can deny that.

Miranda can wear her mask and sit stark awake in complete darkness all she wants if that's what suits her, but before the plane has reached cruising altitude, I am blissfully unconscious.

The Devil Wears Prada

BOOM.

I'm startled into bright, screaming, throttling consciousness by the most terrifying feeling of my life.

I'm suspended at least three inches above my seat. The seatbelt is my tenuous connection to the plane, pulling me down at breakneck speed, yet the horrifying lack of solidness beneath my legs makes my body feel like it's freefalling and there is no plane or hull or belt and I'm just in the sky, falling and falling and plummeting to my death.

There is an eardrum-splitting roaring, and choking black smoke, and cans of diet coke rolling around the ceiling like frantic cockroaches. An angry orange lick of flame is lashing out somewhere around the direction of the cockpit.

Miranda's window seat is empty; through the smoke I can make out the body of water below us that is rising up so close, so rapidly, it's like the ocean is lifting itself up in one gargantuan wave to swallow us whole.

An immensely heavy metal something directly impacts the back of my skull – my neck snaps forward and I barely have time to register the sharp starburst of pain before I've succumbed to the rush of darkness.

The Devil Wears Prada

Water.

It's around my ankles. By the time I can think life jacket, the water level surges above my head and I'm gagging. Water has never been so terrifyingly fast.

I fumble around the bottom of my seat, hoping against hope that it's there, because I can't remember where it's supposed to be.

My fingers snag something plastic. I'm grateful for one tenth of a second before glancing out the window – the water is pitch black. We're deep.

A group of unknowns brush past me, swimming hard – it's hard to tell because the water inside the cabin is nearly as dark – but something catches onto the strap of my lifejacket and before I know it, it's drifting away from my hand.

I make to snatch it, unbuckling my seatbelt – the orange vest is kicked away by someone's foot, then it's too god damn far away to see in the dark.

My lungs are already burning. My chest is about to explode and oh god, we are still sinking.

Miranda's life jacket, I think in a moment of clarity.

It's physically impossible for me to make it, I know. Everyone else had a head start while I was unconscious, and now I don't have enough air to play catch up long enough to survive.

Playing catch up. Like it's a game. Like in two minutes, I'll still be alive.

Around me, some people are still buckled to their seats, unmoving. Either unconscious or dead. Both now, actually. They won't be catching up either.

I will not give up. Not like this.

Miranda's jacket firmly in hand, I kick off to propel myself to the emergency exit, or at least in the direction I think it is. The life-jacket-kicking idiot seemed to think that it was this way.

My lungs are screaming at me, 'take a breath! BREATHE!'

I see the way out, a dim but hard outline in the bulkhead. A pair of fish dart in, then out. Even they know better than to stay inside this deathtrap, I think.

My hand catches onto the edge of the hatchway; I'm tugging myself outward when, halfway through, a current rips into me, whipping my neck to the left. My spine collides sharply with the edge of the bulkhead. The ocean itself is ripping down my throat before I choke out a horrified, "oof!"

My last breathe escapes in so many bubbles. My mother is going to be heartbroken. She watched grandpa drown in a swimming pool a few years back.

I hope they tell her I died on impact.

If they can tell either way. I don't know how they do it.

I'm gagging, doubled over, forcibly swallowing more salty, inky water, but I can't stop. I'm pinned to the top of the hatch; the hull is sinking to the ocean floor, to thousands of feet down and it has deigned to take me with it. An honor, truly.

I wonder if Miranda made it out alive.

Probably, I think. The bitch.

Then…

God, I hope she made it out okay.

I've stopped choking. I no longer feel the crushing, burning need for air. In all honesty, it's a great relief.