A/N: This is a bit all over the place, and I apologize for it. But you do know how obsessed I am with Will's eyes so I hope you'll forgive me this exercise in angst. Thanks to Ladybug-Jojo and her friend for the cover image idea!
Alicia Florrick didn't get to enjoy a leisurely ride into the First-Lady-and-head-of-a-firm-sunset. Her ride had been fast, secret, dirty, a mad rush. And in her mad rush to the emergency exit she hadn't bothered to take the time to reflect on what she would miss the most about him.
The easy way out would be to just focus on the carnal. She could truthfully say she would miss his body, his closeness, his kisses, his hands, his warmth but those features would make Will nothing more than the summer lover one remembers fondly in times of sexual draught.
She could say she would miss his guidance in court, his brilliance whenever the case became a tad too complicated but that would equate him to a boss, at most a mentor. Like Diane was for Cary.
Their friendly chats she would surely pine for. The laughs he was able to elicit from her apparently without any particular effort on his part would become a memory of the past she would replay just once or twice more than was appropriate but if that was all, then what would be the difference between him and a friend?
No, what she would miss the most were his eyes.
His eyes that had first made him stand out among the hordes of drunk students that had checked her out at the pool party.
The seriousness she had read in them when he had declared that he would execute a cannonball in his tailored suit because "a lawyer has to be ready to dive in even when not fully-geared" had gotten out of her the first smile of the evening.
The glint of challenge that had been the finishing touch to his look had intrigued her to his being a possible sparring partner.
The triumphant glimmer that had been irradiated from his orbs to all his classmates after getting out of the water, freezing and bordering on ridiculous, had cemented the idea that his ego was oversized and that he needed to be taken down a peg.
His vulturine glance had stopped on her but had been surprisingly gentle in the perusal. He had seemed to scan her without the scrutiny that de-humanized. She had felt appreciated but not objectified.
That attitude she had noticed in them when he had moved his head unnaturally to include her in his field of vision during their first in-class debate had been a sight she would never forget.
He had seemed fiercely competitive and yet he wouldn't have turned just to let her understand that. A simple listening of his words would have been enough. He had turned to let her catch that shimmer of hilarity he had somehow taught his eyes to conjure. He was having fun playing the game of back-and-forth with her and at the end of class he wouldn't hold her differing position against her.
Indeed, he had offered her a drink to drown her sorrows when the Professor had supported his theory. She had ordered Tequila, drowned the shots straight and enjoyed thoroughly the surprised look he had thrown at her when she had chewed him to bits the following day. Hangover and still the finest legal mind on the other side of the desk.
She had tried to solve the puzzle of his eyes more than once during their student years. She was certain that they hid the secret of his success with women. Granted, he had always been handsome but the law seemed to attract handsome specimen. Or at least it did at Georgetown.
Will had an extra oomph.
The killer combination of his lips, always arranged in a smirk that flirted with a smile and those hazel orbs was unique. He made people feel safe. He made her feel safe and that was no banal task.
Counter intuitively, that feeling was the most dangerous of all. It was practically a reflex to drop her guard when he was focused only on her, prejudiced in her favor, wordlessly answering her every fear with an universal glance, almost stare of approval. Those two had elicited from her confessions she had never voiced before, not even to Owen. Those two were responsible for those comfortable silences at the firm all those years later that were always threatening of morphing into something more.
Around him, she dropped so many of her carefully-applied touches, she remembered what it was like to be young and that the word fun existed. She reveled in the pure enjoyment that resides in spending time with a person so unlike the others. She delighted in the simplicity. And what was more simple that kissing the grown-up boy with the cute smile and the reassuring grin?
So simple and yet so entirely complicated.
Maybe it was the distance she had gained, maybe it was a sort of training camp to prepare herself for what was about to come but she had found her head flooded with images of him whenever she had unwillingly vexed him.
From his accidental discovery of her relationship with Peter, to his beaten-dog countenance that had completely undermined his enthusiastic "Congrats" for her self-proclaimed happiness. At the time she had been taken in her whirlwind romance with Peter but she had spent more than one moment pondering why he hadn't voiced his discontent over her choice and why she hadn't pressed him on the matter.
With the benefit of those 15+ years, in hindsight, he had been afraid of being openly rejected and she had been terrified of him being a little too good at making women swoon.
They had been both terribly wrong.
They should have trusted one another.
Regrets did not belong to her normalcy. She despised regrets. But she had found herself playing the game of "what if" as a macabre pastime to avoid thinking about the future. Was there a set of steps that would have prevented that moment of election night in which she had sealed her future away for Will? At which fork road had she taken the wrong turn?
She should have stopped the clock a thousand times during that last case together. She should have let Cary handle all the plotting and the behind-the-curtain plans. She should have used her minutes more productively, committing to memory every single detail of how he was worshipping her with his eyes. She should have paid more attention to the hope that he was harboring, to the enthusiasm he couldn't seem to hide. She should have relished her last moments as something other than a bringer of misery and pain.
She hadn't. Too busy with preparations. Discussing her new move with Peter and Eli, wasting precious minutes wondering why Peter hadn't been as thrilled as she had imagined he would be. Lying to Diane, and indirectly to him, about her knowledge of any coup that might be brewing at the firm. All those hours wasted in make-up rooms getting pampered for interviews and photo-shoots. She needed them back.
She pretended at night that if she had them back she would have been ready when the phone-call came.
She was having dinner with her family after having gotten a tour of Peter's new offices in Chicago. Without even checking the caller-id, she had answered with the mission of getting rid of the disturbance as soon as possible and getting back to them.
"Is it true?"
Will's voice carried a rage unknown to her. He couldn't have possibly found out like that? Could he?
"What is?"
She feigned ignorance as she signaled to Peter that the call would take a while and moved to the hallway of her apartment to get a sliver of privacy, closing the door behind her.
"Is it true, what that fucking reporter told me?"
The swear-word was what eliminated all doubts. Will didn't swear. Not around her at least. It was another little thing she had loved about him. She tried desperately to remember some tiny particular about the night he had told her he was a reformed-swearer just to stop the tears that seemed to be cascading without any control.
"It's true."
Cary would have wanted her to deny, deny, deny. Peter and Eli would probably have agreed. "You can't let the press dictate your life" but what did they all know? Not one of them had experimented what cruelty lied in having all the trust in someone destroyed, wiped clean by the media.
Ironic that the main chapters of 5 years before were being re-read with her assuming the role of the villain.
She searched urgently for the words to say, but none came to mind.
"I do mean that little to you."
"No, Will" were the only words she had managed to pronounce in the midst of her hyper-ventilating crisis. The tears were too many, too fast, her breaths were short and ragged. She was drowning in the dark depth her actions had caused.
"You and whoever is in your little circle of traitors can expect to have your things messengered to your houses in the morning. No need to come pick them up."
His tone curt and business-like, Will had taken back control of himself and was disposing of technicalities, lumping her with all the others in the process.
"And know this, I will win the war and I will do my very best to maximize the devastation along the way."
He was issuing threats of war but she couldn't move forward from that hurt sentence he had used before.
"I'm sorry, Will, I'm so sorry. It was never about you."
"You're damn right it wasn't. It has always been about you, about what you wanted, about what suited you the best. I have never done anything in the past to make you regret your decisions but this time is different. This time I'll make you regret making such a fool of me."
"I never meant to do that."
"You could have said a clear No and I would have let you go, as always. But I forgot you have a tendency of doing things well or not doing them at all. You had to rub in my face just how stupid I have been. Now you'll get to know that I'm not always that dull."
The tone signaled the end of that conversation and she huddled down on the floor trying to catch her breath.
She was paralyzed. She reverted to the child-like trance she used to fall in when her parents argued way too loud. Her knees nested in her arms and she protectively hugged her body and tried to keep it together. It took her a bit but she got up and she reentered her home. Her children and Peter were immediately worried.
"Mom, what happened?"
"Nothing. Just a stupid reporter spewing mud about me."
They all hugged her and she escaped Peter's look. Once in their room, she told him before he had the chance to ask.
"The press knows about my new firm. They called Will."
She was grateful for his silence and did not offer any ulterior explanation over why her eyes were so red over another man.
So that had been the story of why she had never been treated to Will's looking at her after her leaving the firm. Each day she anticipated the random meeting in court with supreme dread and each day she counted her blessings when she had avoided him once more.
Until, one day, it happened.
She was riding her wave of satisfaction over a tough win when she raised her head and met his eyes.
She had come to believe that he would treat her like a stranger, as if she had chosen Berkeley for law school or as if he had decided to stay in Baltimore and their paths had never crossed.
That had clearly been a delusion. Will looked at strangers with sympathy and warmth, he considered them possible clients, possible friends or simply people he had no reason to mistreat. Instead, in those few seconds before he turned the corner she had discovered that strangers were his eyes. They reflected a jaded man, a half-empty man, the kind of person that had substituted cynicism to hope. Those were the eyes of a merciless man that did not admit faults or justifications.
She went on with her day but she passed it in a state of mourning for those eyes that had introduced him to her, that had been her guide in their relationship and that had been sharpest than any Cupid's arrow.
She had missed, she was missing and she would miss those eyes that had made her fall in love.