Notes: A long time ago, I decided that I wanted to remix Pebblysand's "Once" (which you really should read because it's awesome) from Alicia's point of view, because, well, it's become my headcanon. I started to, once, then abandoned it and cannibalized parts of it for something else. I told her, last night, that I'd wanted to do it, and she gave me the go ahead, and, well, this happened.
Alicia has mastered the art of deflection, of answers that contain just enough truth to be believable but not so much as to be damning. She is a lawyer, a politician's wife, a daughter and a sister and a lover. It's in her DNA.
We were kids, she told Tammy. We're not kids anymore.
There's nothing between us, she told Peter.
Once, she told Laura. A long time ago.
Once, she told Laura, and it's funny, because she spent years denying that once, keeping it in a box that she sealed with just a friend three hours after it happened. The once has always been easier to justify than the again, and again, and again, so she dusted off the box and opens it up, shares its contents as if they meant nothing. (She knew better, but that's one line she refuses to cross.)
Once. Once in the spring, when it was supposed to be a time of rebirth but everything was ending, had been ending for months. The next beginning was barely visible on the horizon, but it was shrouded in so much uncertainty that it hurt to look.
"Still going out tonight?" Will asked her, once.
She wanted so badly to say no. Wanted to say not again, I can't spend another night drinking until I remember how to mean it when I smile. Instead, she deflected, latched onto the barest hint of a look in his eye, turned the question around. "You're not?"
He shrugged, said might but meant no and she was grateful, so very grateful. She set food and beer on the coffee table, put a cheesy comedy in the VCR, and settled down on the couch to watch. After ten minutes, half a beer, and a few bites of kung pao it occurred to her just how ironic it was, trying to remember how to laugh so she didn't have to remember how to smile. She studied the movie intently, tried to remember what she found so funny about it when she saw it in the theater last summer. She thought Peter liked it, then, so maybe that was it. Maybe that's why she couldn't laugh at it now, without him. Maybe it wasn't the movie, maybe it was him.
Will wasn't laughing, either, and she wanted to ask him why. "Will?" she murmured, shifting on the sofa as the credits started to roll.
"Huh?" He was bleary-eyed and distracted, and the question seemed somehow redundant, all of a sudden, as if she knew the answer.
"Nothing," she lied. "Thought you fell asleep." She punctuated it with a yawn of her own.
"Can't," he said, and, well, that was predictable.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, and she was pretty sure that she knew the answer, but he said no and she felt suddenly unsure, wondered if she was misjudging him, too. "I'm going to bed, then," she told him. "Up early tomorrow."
He smiled at her, then, and she managed to smile back before slipping into her room and closing the door. In bed, she stared at the backs of her eyelids, tried to make sense of the future, to organize the past so that she could tuck it away. Five weeks lay between the present and the end of law school, but even with a job lined up and the bar exam looming, she wasn't sure what existed beyond that. Five weeks felt too close and too far, too soon and not nearly soon enough.
She drifted into an uneasy sleep for an hour or so, not so much sleeping as dozing, and the sound of a distant car alarm was enough to pull her fully awake. Her mouth was fuzzy from too much beer and MSG and she got up for a glass of water, noticed Will. "Still here?" she asked him, and it was strange the way the question was so simple and yet so profound at the same time. For how long? she might have added.
"Yeah," he said. Soft, expressionless.
She sank down next to him on the floor, watching him, trying to parse that. Which question are you answering? Her leg was touching his, just barely, but he had never felt so far away. He asked her to hand in an assignment, and the nagging voice in the back of her head that insisted that he was lying to her finally found a voice. "What's going on, Will?" That's what the voice said.
She didn't look away, just watched him as the words didn't come, couldn't come. She had seen his look before, staring back from her own mirror for weeks after her father— "Who?"
He didn't answer; she didn't really expect him to. He was like her, really, and she liked that about him. Liked the way he didn't give voice to every silly thought to enter his mind, the way he kept his business his, could brighten anyone and everyone's day without ever breaking a single confidence, least of all his own. She set a hand on his shoulder, not too close but close enough to remind him that she was there. "I'm sorry," she said, because that's what people said, because she was, because when someone is dead the words don't matter.
He tightened his grip on his favorite ball and then that ball was shattering her water glass, forgotten on the kitchen counter. She didn't pull away, did her best not to acknowledge it, but it happened so quickly that it surprised her, made her flinch. "My sister's nineteen years old," he said, and his voice was harsh and broken, not cracking but boiling with unvoiced rage. "She's nineteen years old and she comes home from work and she finds a chair upside-down on the floor and her own father hanging from a rope in the basement."
She brought a hand to her mouth, too shocked to form words, too devastated to find the right words, and unwilling to let herself say the wrong ones until suddenly the words were burning at the back of her throat. "It's not your fault," she told him, but he couldn't hear it, not then, not in that moment. He kept talking, and she cut him off. "No," she said. "Listen to me. It. Is. Not. Your. Fault."
Years later, he looked so haunted sometimes that she wished she could pull the box off the shelf and repeat the words because she should never have let herself sleep until she knew that he believed them. He never let her cross that line, though, and in the end it's just one of the dozen reasons that she could never really say no to him, could never look at him without her insides tying themselves in knots. It's why she walked away and, maybe, why she still dreams about him, still hears his voice when the world goes quiet, and a part of her wonders— No. That's not something she wonders, not something she lets herself wonder, but he stepped in front of a gun and maybe—
Yes, she tells Finn. Will mattered to me.
There aren't many things that she believes in, but she believes that he was good, even if he refused to believe it himself.
That night, though—morning, really—that morning she failed him, fell asleep with her head in his lap after he ran out of words but before he let himself cry. He shook her awake for class and the few minutes of sleep didn't convey any wisdom. There was so much that she could have said but none of it felt as right or true as I'm sorry and It's not your fault and she knew better than most that repetition was the surest way to make truths seem suspect so she let him lie to her, let him tell her that he was fine. She let herself believe that I'm fine meant I need space and so she slipped out of the room and into the shower where she let herself cry even though she couldn't quite identify the reason for her tears.
She wasn't grieving. She'd never met Will's father, and it took her entirely too long to even remember the man's name. She wasn't crying for Will, either, not really. She hurt for him, but they had been in a weird place for a long time and his pain didn't punch her in the gut the way it did back in 1L. Nothing really hit her that way, anymore, and maybe that's what she was mourning. She used to feel more than she did, used to let herself feel more. She used to think that the future was certain and things like this undermined that belief, undermined that confidence. Will's dad was dead and she couldn't explain why and the horizon kept receding into the distance, moving further and further away from her grasp and it terrified her, the way a lifetime of planning could fall apart in a few moments.
(Now, of course, she knows that it's not plans that should be mourned, it's people, but it's too late to say it so she closes her eyes and puts the thought away.)
She washed her tears away and studied her reflection in the fog of the bathroom mirror, searching for some sign of life behind her eyes. When she found one, a tiny reflection of light, she wrapped herself in a towel and stepped into the hallway, determined to face the day. Will was there in the doorway of her room and she stopped, watching him.
There were lines that they had never crossed, had never even acknowledged, even as their toes brushed up against them. Standing there against the wall, watching him, she had the strangest sense that the line had disappeared behind them and she hadn't noticed. She didn't know if it was weeks or days or hours or minutes ago, didn't know if it mattered. She froze, unable to move forward or back, trapped in that moment of realization and helpless to do anything about it.
(There are other boxes in her life, secrets and memories tucked safely away. The one she refuses to acknowledge ownership of, even now, is the one that knows that she wasn't helpless, that she wanted to cross the line as much as he did, needed it as much as he did.)
"Will," she breathed when he moved towards her, but he didn't let her say more. His lips were against hers, insistent and demanding and she pulled him closer, determined to make it better, to make him better. She refused to admit that there was nothing altruistic about it, that it was about making herself better, then. She will never admit it. She pulled him closer, fingers balling into fists around the bits of his shirt that she could grasp and she felt more in that moment than she had felt in months and even the water dripping from her hair down her back felt like something.
His kisses moved from her mouth to her neck and it was almost too much but at the same time not enough and the voice at the back of her head was back, nagging and keenly aware that he wasn't in any state to be crossing lines that could never be uncrossed. "Will, are you—?"
He didn't let her finish, didn't let her get the words out before his mouth claimed hers again, demanding and harsh, making her dizzy. She tried to slow it down, slow him down, tried to make the world stop spinning but he pressed her hard against the wall and she realized that she didn't want to slow down, didn't want to stop feeling. She was going to tell him as much when his knee pressed against her and she was able to connect feeling to desire and arousal and she bit down on his lip to keep from moaning out loud.
His hands moved down to her hips, and suddenly the future was crystal clear to her, suddenly she could see him lifting her up just enough to gain entrance, her legs and arms wrapped around him for support as he fucked her against the wall but it was the wrong future, the wrong picture. "Okay," she breathed, and the word was ragged and strained. "Let's do this right," she added, leading him back into her room.
There was something dark and confused in his eyes but she didn't have the words to tell him that this line they were crossing mattered, but that neither of them would be able to stay there for long, that lines existed for a reason. She didn't have the words, then, so she let her towel go and settled onto his lap. She held him tight and let herself taste every inch of him that she could reach, determined to make a memory that she could carry with her going forward, sensory proof that, just once, they did more than toe at the line and instead tumbled over it, giving into whatever it was that kept pushing them together before the future could tear them apart.
She didn't mean to fall asleep, afterwards, but she did.
(That's another box, really, the way she had never felt comfortable sleeping with someone else around to watch until she met him. The way she could always– always– close her eyes and trust him to keep her safe.
She doesn't sleep much, anymore.)
He woke her with a kiss, an hour or so later, and a tiny part of her wished that she could pretend not to notice, wished that she could just sleep through the next day or week or month until things made sense again.
"I don't want to wake up," he said, and it was eerie, the way he could give voice to the contents of her head. It frightened her, made her want to step back over the line and into the safe familiarity of the world she thought she knew, only that world was gone and it had nothing and everything to do with Will.
"I'm sorry about your father," she whispered, and he squeezed her hand in acknowledgment. "You need to go home."
"I love you," he said.
(And yeah, that is one box she will never open, can never open. It's the box that pushed her back into his office that snowy night one February after he kissed her for the first time in fifteen years. It's the box that let her say "can we talk?" even though she knew they never would. When he said it again, she panicked, for a moment, then made excuses for him. Even though, now, she wants to think that he meant it, she couldn't, she couldn't let herself accept it then. She measures her life in lines and boxes and Will has always had the ability to deconstruct all of them, to walk right up to the point of no return then push past it and pull secrets from her lips and this is why it was always easier to lie two decades of history into a simple once.
But, of course, now she'll never get to tell him that maybe she loved him too. Now, when she stares at the backs of her eyelids all she can see is him and all she can feel is the lump in her throat and she's not sure that she'll ever forgive herself.)
"We've got bad timing, Will," she said. It wasn't kind or polite, but she wasn't one for niceties, then. She hadn't yet learned to play the smiling wife. Her fingers moved against his skin, tracing light patterns until the patterns became deliberate, somehow, until she shifted and felt him hard against her hip. It didn't occur to her, then, to wonder what was it about the combination of his grief and her fear that pushed them over the line. It didn't occur to her to wonder, so she shifted, just a bit, and when he slid into her and, that second time, it wasn't enough to keep the fear at bay, wasn't enough to keep the uncertainties of the future from crashing down around them.
(She wonders, now, if it would have been different, if she'd known.)
Then, she came apart with Will inside of her and Will's fingers moving against her and Wills eyes screwed tightly shut against her shoulder and it was incredible, really, the way her body responded to him even when her mind was a million miles away.
She wishes she had been more present, then, but she wasn't, and when Peter called three hours after Will boarded his plane, he said he was sorry and she whispered that she loved him, and she didn't mention the way that Will had marked her. She ran her fingers over the bruise on her neck, felt her pulse, strong and quick beneath it, and the horizon stopped receding with every word that Peter spoke.
You're a bastard, she tells Peter, now, and she means it as much as she meant I love you, then.
Will was the hero, Finn says on television, and she decides to believe it. She decides to believe Finn, decides to stop being afraid of uncertainty, of moving through life without a plan. Maybe it's too little, and certainly it's too late, but he says I love you against the backs of her eyelids. In the dark of the night, she lets herself peer into the box that she kept him in, wraps memory around her like a blanket.