Note - The Good Wife is not mine. This will become a series of one shots about Alicia's political and personal future.
One
When she first runs for SA, she's not sure why. Fuelled by betrayal, grief and an unrevealed need for political glory, the reasoning behind her decision becomes blurry. She forgets she has a life - forgets about her kids and protecting their privacy, her firm, remembers only Zach's lies and Peter's lies and Will, always Will, when his hand was up her thigh, when he swiped her belongings across the floor and said,
"You're awful."
And all she could see were glistening eyes and a hardened mouth. She sees blood when she sleeps, dreams about her death, wonders if Will would be like her now - forgetful of the present and living only on the adrenaline of the past.
Especially now. She wonders what she's doing, standing in her dressing room mirror, attempting to a regain a non-existent form of balance before her final interview.
Her eyes are reddened, and she can't help but notice the lines forged into her skin, battle scars, symbolic of everything she's lost, everything she's become.
Her secrets are flooding the news cycle; and she knew this would happen, that her lead would never last.
She's not Saint Alicia, and yet, nothing gave her more confidence than knowing its strength, allowing her to manoeuvre into different versions of herself, undetected.
Will's dead, and his death haunts her, beyond her emotional control, reining in the last remnants of good in her life, and destroying it, simply because of high-quality footage of the night when she stopped being 'The Good Wife' and began to find herself.
She stares herself down in the mirror, sees nothing but broken pieces, a woman who destroyed herself because she truly was awful. But she promises herself, that she can make it. That she's not willing to burn everything down, she wants to fight even though it all hurts and she can't see the point.
She remembers returning home after school, seeing her mother with a new man just weeks after her parents separated. She rushed upstairs, found Owen in tears, promising herself she would never let herself become like that.
Except life had other intentions.
She's become everything like her mother, selfish and without even meaning to be.