A/N: This was written as a gift for Josie's birthday (Happy birthday again!) but I couldn't post it until today because of severe lack of Internet connection. It's set not too long after 510 and it's the answer to Josie's prompt which was what would happen if Alicia finally found out about the fated voicemail in Season 5. It's obviously AU and I'd say also OOC (I'm not really able to tell what the characters would do anymore) but it's an hopeful birthday/Christmas present!
Bad timing used to be a drinking game.
Not an everlasting drinking game. Not a popular drinking game. Not even a public drinking game. A drinking game nonetheless. Born out of her noticing his penchant for using that particular combination of words. The prosaic "wrong place at the wrong time" considered too banal for Will Gardner, he had adopted, unconsciously, "bad timing", had been called on it and it had become their excuse to indulge in alcohol.
Bad timing used to be about laughter.
Aggravated laughter during a cramming session with beer bottles precariously situated on the carpet, among notes and open books; celebratory laughter with shots lined up on the bar the night of the last final, her smile-laden voice whispering in his ear, his arm softly circling her back; complicit laughter of all those bad-timings thrown in conversations in which they didn't belong just so they had an excuse to drink together.
Bad timing used to be about knowing one another.
Tentatively suggested whenever he perceived a weird mood and somehow knew words weren't going to be involved. Confidently prompted after an hard day at school, each other's company and light alcohol functioning as the best brand of comfort. Smilingly offered as a way to dissolve the tension each time they ended up on the opposite side of a class discussion, as a way to dissect, point to faults and congratulate, a mutual respect preventing any damage.
Bad timing was now about missed connections.
Eli's explanations falling deafly on her ear. A relationship she had believed of mutual respect once again based on a lie of omission. Two minds apparently on the same level reduced to the cliché of the political operative and the puppet wife used for his purposes.
Suddenly, just as she had in the cramped room for the listening of the wiretap, she needed to breathe.
She ignored Eli's calls, and ran as fast as the prohibitive heels would allow her. She stepped into the busy sidewalks of Chicago, Christmas music mingled with city noises, providing a background soundtrack that couldn't pierce her sense of dullness.
A message lost more than three years before shouldn't matter.
Logically she knew that, rationally she shouldn't care, reasonably she should have gotten to her car and gotten to her office, as if she never decided for an impromptu visit to Peter's office.
Instead she kept walking, brushing off the well-wishes of passer-bys that recognized her. The world as a whole seemed to be at a standstill compared to the immediacy of the unsettled feelings inside.
Bad timing then was two twenty-something-year-olds with a friendship that never waned, always circling something more but never quite reaching the point of no-return. Bad timing now and two forty-something-year olds engulfed in a series of professional matches in what seemed more and more a battle to the death.
He would never stop and she would never walk away. On and on it went, a twisted and decayed carousel, enjoyable at the height of speed, when the audience was blurry and it was a mock trial in his dorm room all over again and then leaving a bitter aftertaste, whenever the world slowed down because nobody would claim bad timing to drink, relax, smile and breathe again.
And he had loved her.
She imagined his voice, tender as during the Ashbaugh weekend or vulnerable as during the "I'm not interested in anyone else". She craved to hear that message, to have him speak to her again.
Suddenly, her steps were not aimless anymore. Suddenly, she had a purpose. Suddenly, she had an unwavering destination.
Her previous office was empty, as it often was by the time she reached the building after the long walk. Luckily, his light was the only one on. She entered with more swagger than what she felt and used the ice-breaking line she had been preparing for an uncounted number of blocks.
"Bad timing. Two fingers of scotch."
She directed herself immediately to his liquor cabinet and poured them both the amber liquid. He took the glass from her, a pained ghost haunting and releasing him in a few seconds. He downed the scotch and went towards his window, his hand still wrapped around the fancy glass, his look far away as possible from the room.
"I found out why I never got the second message, the one you left the night of Peter's press conference."
His only reaction was a tightening of the grasp on the glass, and a forced swallowing.
"Eli deleted it. He wanted to help Peter... Doesn't matter. He told me what you said."
This time an auditory more than visible exasperated chuckle, his eyes closing a moment, before going back to the falling snow and the semi-deserted lightened skyscrapers.
"So?"
"Our worst example of bad timing."
"It wasn't bad timing..."
His response was immediate but then he seemed to ponder his next words before vocalizing them.
"Just as it hasn't been bad timing the last 20 years."
"What?"
"Bad timing is about fate. It's about believing that there's some sort of cosmic conspiracy that prevents events from happening. It never applied to us. Bad timing was just the name I used to pet my ego anytime you rejected me. Had I picked another moment, she would have given us a chance. Had we been really dating by the time she met Peter, had she not gotten pregnant, had she divorced him right after the scandal... and so on. I must admit, I had gotten proficient at the self-delusion."
"Will..."
"It was all in my head. There's no bad timing involved here. There's you not loving me, not even caring for me enough to extend me the decency of a conversation before deciding to jump ship. And then there's me, being an utter and pathetic fool."
It wouldn't have been hard to infer his opinion from the way he had questioned her but hearing him be so direct was a much more vehement blow.
"How can you say that? How can you even think that?"
"Think what? They're all hard truths I learned in one day. Not even a full day actually."
"You really believe all of that? The deposition, is that what you think of me? That I used you for my own purposes?"
It devastated her. That he could believe that of her. Will had gotten her from the word go. How had they found themselves in such a gnarled situation?
"It's the logical conclusion."
"Well then, I'll logically conclude that you don't know me at all."
Because, really, how could he? He might as well have believed that she loved Ashbaugh more than him.
"Finally something we can agree on. I don't know you at all, Alicia. I probably never did."
His apparent calm infuriated her.
"Simple is better, is that it?"
"What?"
"You're spinning a story for the jury and I have been cast in the role of villain. You're proficiently rewriting history. Congratulations!"
"As always, I'm taking my cues from my betters. You started rewriting history. I'm just following your lead. Although I would say in my case it's more re-reading than re-writing."
"I never did."
"Of course you did. And gloriously too. "This is a business decision". One meager sentence to rewrite 4 years."
She felt the need to keep her position and re-state her abridged version of the truth.
"It was a business decision."
"Exactly. Don't worry, I'm not questioning it. I got it the first time. You treated me like your run-of-the-mill boss. I was only the name partner. Nothing more than that."
"It wasn't like that."
"Sure it was. You chose a firm with Cary instead to be managing partner here."
"I needed to build something of my own. This firm will always be yours and Diane's. I wanted more."
"It's remarkable, how natural a lawyer you are. It's almost convincing."
"Almost of course, you wouldn't want a story in which I'm not awful as you said I was."
"If that were the truth, you could have come to me instead of going behind my back. You could have started without ChumHum and the others."
"There's no firm without clients."
"Sure, but there are plenty of firms without 40-million-dollar clients."
"So what? You would have been ok, as long as I started so small you could laugh at me?"
"I'm merely pointing a fallacy. You didn't want to build something on your own. You wanted to have control over the clients you already had. Which you could have accomplished here."
"It wasn't my name of the door."
It meant something. Having her name on the wall welcome her each morning as she got to work. It meant something reading it on the desktops and hearing it said from the assistants when answering the phones.
"When Diane left, eventually, it would have been."
He had her. Therefore, she resorted to the reason that had worked on her.
"If I stayed, I would always have been under you!"
"Under me? See, you did consider me just a boss. Because otherwise you'd realize that ever since Georgetown, you have never been "under me". Just the opposite."
The emotional arguments were low blows. Yet she couldn't have expected a much different outcome, considering the reason for her visit.
"Is it true?"
"What is?"
"What the message said."
"It doesn't matter."
What? It most certainly did. She wasn't ready to answer the why part but it did.
"Of course it does."
"Really? And why would it?"
He had a talent to ask the difficult questions. One of the qualities of a great lawyer. She had been merely spared the onslaught for so long.
"It would have mattered, back then."
"No, it wouldn't have. It was another one of your lessons, Alicia. It's romantic because it didn't happen. If it had, it would have just been life, isn't that what you said?"
But those had been the words of so-long before. Before the dinner, before the exceptional moments of good timing, before the incontrollable attraction.
"You're twisting my words."
"Am I? I don't think so. You would never have chosen life with me, not for more than a stolen and regretted moment anyway. It wouldn't have mattered then and it certainly doesn't matter now. So whatever it is that you're doing here, you can go."
She focused on the word regretted. Small arguments were much more winnable than large, looming ones.
"I...I never regretted those moments between us. I cursed my weakness, but..."
"I don't want to hear it, Alicia. It doesn't matter."
Again. It had so speedily become a mantra she despised.
"Stop saying that!"
"What should my line be, instead?"
"What?"
"What did you expect me to say? You seemed to be puzzled by my reaction to it all, Alicia. You ride your high horse and pound against me as if my firing you and hampering your plans was somehow a malicious and unprompted crusade against you. You accuse me of casting you as a villain but you did exactly the same thing and for no discernible reason. What did you write for the villain? What am I supposed to say?"
"Fine. Since we're reverting to children anyway, let's play by their rules, shall we? I'll show you mine and you'll show me yours."
"I can tell you right now that I never imagined you coming into my office wanting to talk about a three-year-old voicemail."
She certainly hadn't imagined overhearing Eli talk with Natalie and discovering a three-year old secret.
"You never created a decision tree for me during the Ashbaugh case? What did you want me to say?"
Her last remark had been uncalled for, she knew that and it had to have hit an open nerve because he was suddenly furious.
"Get out! Get the hell out!"
"Or what? You're going to call the guards and have me escorted out again?"
His movements were instantaneous and fast. He reached her and she prepared for another one of their moments in which they deposed their arms and stopped fighting.
Her life felt often out of her hands. Her past was a tale for TV specials and a burden she couldn't shake. Her future always assumed the connotation of a recent past. Her days moved in such a flurry that no planning was ever truly allowed and the days ran one after the other with no space to ponder or slow down.
The moments with Will instead always felt full of present. When his presence loomed large and exciting and wrong in front of her, the flow of events stopped.
It was Will and Alicia and the intoxicating taste of their lips against one another, the raw, pure feeling of a connection that refused to die. All the past and the future mingled in what for a second or two was a perennial present.
This time he surprised her and moved away from his office and from her. And the moment that should have been wasn't and this time he got to be the one that ran away.
She should have let him.
She should have let him be furious and sad and whatever the hell he was feeling but it was the same impulse that had brought her in Will's office to make her run after him. It was a nagging sensation of having done it all wrong, of having wrecked what should have been built.
She blocked the doors of the elevator from closing and got in, pushing a button and sending the world to a much-needed halt. His breath was ragged from the exertion of controlling himself against the wrath building in his eyes.
"Get the elevator moving again!"
His seething should have provoked her normal fight response. It happened so easily, these days. It had happened in his office and it had derailed the entire conversation.
She should have spewed meticulously-chosen words, have him react the same way and luxuriate in just how far down she had fallen in his opinion. She should have reveled in the distance between the two of them, in just how exquisitely she had managed to drive him away, to transform him from the man that reached for her to the man that turned away from her. She should have focused on her priorities and on just how complicated Zach and Grace's life already was, on Peter and Marilyn getting a bit too close, on her life without Will Gardner. Hell, she should have let the attraction that she never could quite get rid of get the best of her and tried to kiss him and then ran away invoking weakness once again.
She should have been able to call the ride another instance of bad timing.
Instead she chose not to.
"It was great timing."
"Alicia..."
"Cary opening his own firm and asking me to join. I've wanted to be at the helm of one forever, do you remember?"
He shook his head.
"Of course you remember, there was that one afternoon in which we fought for hours over whose name should go first. You had that ridiculous tirade about how Gardner was a less frilly surname, a solid surname you could trust and as such it should be the first one in the letterhead, alphabet be damned. Cavanaugh was the whimsical closing that would have hinted at our creativity. And you weren't even that drunk."
"It always would have been Cavanaugh & Gardner. But I liked watching you get all worked up to defend your own surname. And to think that you gave it up so easily just a few years later."
"So you do remember."
"When it comes to Georgetown I'm cursed with memories that I would love to forget."
"Why? They were some of the best years of our life."
"They were. But I wonder now if I made it all up."
"Of course you didn't. You can't negate an entire past for one gesture."
"But it all gets informed by it. Every interaction we ever had is now marred by my knowledge of the future."
"I never expected you to react like this."
"How did you think I'd react?"
"I..."
"You never even thought about it, did you, Alicia?"
There had been too many responsibilities, too many things to worry about, too much.
"There were so many problems..."
"Yeah, that's what I had imagined. I always knew I wasn't important enough. And yet, finding out just how unimportant I really was, it was... painful."
The tears could not be reigned in anymore. The hesitant pronunciation of the word painful had shattered what semblance of mastery of herself she had regained. She had never intended to harm him like that. Never.
"You shouldn't cry, Alicia. It doesn't become the woman you are now. The conquering general of the new firm that could, annoyingly harassed by her old firm that just won't accept the circle of legal life. Isn't that right?"
The harassment by Lockhart/Gardner was the only contact she had with Will. If she lost that, what would be left?
"If you wanted that, you should have never called me that day and invoked Georgetown. You shouldn't have called me at night to joke how even our worst nightmares at school couldn't compare to the brutality of the interviews you had to endure. You shouldn't have reminded me of what used to be and then let me offer my help."
"Because that meant I owed you forever?"
"Because that meant that you shouldn't have gotten to use "it was never meant personally" when backstabbing me."
"It never was meant personally."
Hurting Will had not been her objective. Of course not.
"I know. We have already established that you didn't even spare a thought for me. 20 years of caring and I don't even deserve that. But when I had to work Diane for days and ask David Lee of all people for a favor, that was personal. I wouldn't have done that for anyone."
"So you did see it as a sort of contract. You did that for me and I should have done something for you."
She didn't truly believe that but she had been caught up in the heat of the discussion. She never could concede.
"No, no, no I don't know you but you don't know me either. At all. When have I ever asked for your gratitude in four years? When? Trust, loyalty, friendship, those you do not ask for. Even forgetting all those moments of ours, I've always considered you a friend, I trusted you more than anyone else in the entire office, especially after Diane's interview. And you threw it away. I was having a meeting with our publisher that was offering stability as the selling point of our firm. She was saying that we were a big family and Diane interrupted us to remind me that it was all a lie, that I never got to be part of your family and it turns out, not even of your circle of friends. It had been all in my head."
Tears kept streaming and breathing started to be arduous. Having to hear in detail just what treatment she had reserved to the care and affection he had sported for her for 20 years was tearing her to pieces and leaving her completely clueless as to what to do next. She only had the overwhelming urgency to fix it.
She gathered all her strength and started to talk.
"It was not all in your head. In fact that was one of the problems. The attraction between us, it had gotten out of control. I watched you with Laura and I had dreams of the two of you and the urge to call you at night, when I should have been doing a thousand other things. I watched you with Riley being the brilliant, caring lawyer you are and being with you in a room without anything happening was one of the most difficult exercises in control I ever had to perform. I watched you handle Zach on the stand, turning Patty's damaging questioning moot without even getting up on your chair and it was all too much, Will. I had to take Cary's offer. We would have ended up together otherwise."
He seemed to take in what she had said, among the remnant of tears and in an outburst of honesty she had denied herself for so long.
"What are you telling me?"
"I wanted to have a firm of my own. I didn't like some things in the management here. But the real reason I left was that it was becoming clear that I would have been able to resist something between us much longer."
His breath was becoming heavier and the rage that had simmered down during their conversation was being rekindled by the second.
"Get away from that damn elevator panel or I won't be able to answer for my actions anymore. You let me out right now."
"Will..."
"Don't call me that!"
He was keeping himself in one corner of the elevator, his hands constricted in fists and his eyes looking down.
"I won't restart the elevator until you let me explain."
"There's nothing to explain. It's all crystal clear now."
"I was wrong."
The three words were vocalized without her full permission. She could have stopped there, let him take it as a sort of apology, and free both of them.
Instead she recognized the magnitude of what she had done and she finally acknowledged that it hadn't fixed the problem. Her days were still mostly about Will, about how to circumvent his brain, about how to best face him. Her greatest pleasures came from being occasionally one-upped by him or in watching the mischievous smirk of recognition when she came up with a particularly clever maneuver.
Most of all, when she had heard from Eli the contents of that message from three years ago, it had mattered. It had mattered enough that she had abandoned all and she had come to him. It had mattered enough that she had subjected both of them to a conversation she never had the courage to have with Peter. It had mattered enough to fight the bad timing.
It had mattered enough and that was why she kept talking.
"I was so wrong to think that it would have been a solution."
He had quieted down again, probably resigned to get through her explanation as quickly as possible.
"I was looking for the solution to the wrong problem. I love my family."
"And I don't see why I should be hearing any of it. Don't you think I get it by now?"
"But I love you too."
There it was, the only possible explanation to her situation she had never examined before.
"But I'm in love with you."
There it was, the inconvenient and yet undeniable truth that twenty years of bad timing had not been able to annihilate.
He laughed at first, a tormented sound devoid of any hint of hilarity, then he looked at her, all his perfected acts dropped, oozing vulnerability.
"Why are you doing this to me?"
She approached him, abandoning the control panel while maintaining her distance and still not touching him.
"I should have done it long ago."
"Why are you lying to me again?"
"I'm not. That's why the message mattered. That's why it still matters."
They were face-to-face now, she could smell the scent of his shaving cream and the hint of scotch that lingered in his breath.
"You're lying, Alicia and I truly can't understand why. I can assure you that there is nothing more you can take."
"Why are you so adamant to believe that?"
"Because I have seen you love first-hand, Alicia. Betrayal never seemed to be on the menu."
"That was before."
"Well, isn't that convenient? There's no going back from what you did."
"Maybe that's not necessarily bad. You always put me on a pedestal, Will. Now you know what I am capable of. Can you still love me?"
"It's not the right question, Alicia. Loving you is beyond my control."
She smiled, despite hearing the but laced in the tone of his voice. It was an automatic response to his mentioning love.
"Forgiving you, believing you, trusting you, those are entirely different questions."
"Trust me, I know that."
She realized her poor choice of words a second too late. Incredibly enough, instead of calling her on it, he smirked, she smiled, they laughed and once again the present was inescapable. Their eyes closed, their fingers entwined, their lips touched.
This time, instead of letting themselves be enslaved by their passion, they let each other go, but he didn't have to look regretfully at her running away from her emotions.
It reminded her of their first kiss, 20 years before. It had been a bad timing night, ironically. After their first lost mock trial, the same one they had discussed during her first case at Lockhart/Gardner. Tacitly forgotten the day after, but never erased from her mind, despite the alcohol haze. He had said that having her as a partner made the loss sting less. The joking tone, the tender words, his lopsided smile, his caring eyes, the carelessness of it all, and she had kissed him. Rapidly, as a way to say "me too". Just a peck. And yet his cheeks had rouged and hers had felt suddenly heated. It had felt a lot like a beginning of what had been sealed during their first battle in class. Alicia Cavanaugh and Will Gardner had never been just competitors. Never just friends. Never just lovers.
Never just anything. Now simply everything.
"Will you let me try, Will? To give you reasons to forgive? To let me convince you that I love you? To win your trust back?"
"I have always let you do anything, Alicia. Ever since I gave you the closing of that mock-trial when I had the edge to nail Captain Hook in front of the Jury."
Their minds synched once again, he had been thinking about the same trial she had been.
"But I'm done being treated like a dirty secret or a factotum at your service."
"Of course."
"And I won't let up on you in court."
"Wouldn't expect it from the man I love."
She had never been one to throw the l-word easily around, not when it came to the men in her life. She tried putting it in the conversation following her spontaneity that had guided her throughout the night. She was rewarded with the hint of a smile and his eyes unable to mask the surge of affection. She smiled back, and finally pushed the button on the elevator.
"Prove to me that bad timing is nothing more than a series of unfortunate coincidences."
"I'll take that challenge and you know how I am with challenges."
She dared to wink. His smile widened and his eyes glinted wantonly.
Bad timing used to be a drinking game. It used to be about laughter, about knowing one another.
It would be again. And so much more.