A/N: Many thanks to Josie for finding the exact moment that I'm discussing in this chapter so that I could put it in the icon for this story. The quote that was actually the reason for the existence of this chapter comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar again. Brutus is talking at Caesar's funeral. Happy premiere on Sunday/Monday according to your timezone! Hiatus is finally over :)
"... If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more."
She couldn't stand people being nice to her.
In the elevator, all coddling and saying "sorry", "that was grossly inappropriate", "he was out of his mind". She ran away from all of them, passersby in her and Will's lives that butted in and passed harsh judgments when none were required.
All the way to her car in the garage, she kept focusing on the click of her heels on the pavement, walking faster, almost running so that her body, focused on her heavy breathing, would have no energy left to even formulate a thought. She wasn't ready. Not yet.
While driving away, she had called Grace to check on that Math test she had been so worried about and then Eli asking if she really had to be at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new wing of the hospital.
"Of course you have to go. The children are waiting for you, Alicia, and you don't want to disappoint the children, do you?"
"I'll go."
She had cut off the phone call before she could synesthetically hear Eli's triumphal grin on the other side of the line.
Any other day but not that particular day.
She had felt so empowered, all functional in her routine and switching seamlessly between her roles that once at her destination, she was turning back. Maybe there was no need for her to be alone in the empty terrace overlooking Chicago. Her training as a politician's wife had finally prevailed. She was unbreakable.
Then, suddenly, all her vim deserted her.
She could not find the strength to start her car again. A simple movement of the key rotating seemed impossible.
In that moment of stillness, it all came back.
The conversation, the harsh words, his look. She tried to conjure the anger that had surged though her when he had accused her of being nothing more of a masochistic, pathetic excuse of a woman.
In vain.
The image stuck in her head was that glassy speck in his eyes.
For a fleeting second, during that "I pushed for you", his eyes had betrayed him and among the bursting rage she had seen the pain. He had hidden it fast, naturally, under cruel words that would have earned him and anybody else a slap under any other circumstance.
But in her car, away from the world that expected her to behave in a certain way, nothing else mattered but his suffering.
"I hired you."
"I pushed for you."
Silence. So much left unsaid. She had expected him to say just one more thing.
"I was your friend."
And more, always more than a friend.
The tears had started to cascade irregularly on her cheeks, leaving her vision blurred and dull to everything around her. To say she was crying would be accurate but such an understatement.
Because this was Will.
The one that had dared to offer her a drink after their very first verbal battle to the death.
The one that had shown up at her dorm room with tequila and stolen the additional books from Claire to help her cope with her Criminal-Law-induced bouts of paranoia.
The one that had sent her a message a few days after the scandal without condolences or sorrys. "As Professor Sanders said on that last day: "Sometimes a fuck them all is the best motivation there is." Will". And she had laughed while she had believed herself doomed to tears.
He had welcomed her back into the fold after 13 years, showered her with subtle compliments, reminded her of just how at ease she felt around the law, made her lighten up with his presence and gave her a chance to lose herself again without fear getting in the way.
But she had lost herself too much.
He was too brilliant, too attractive, too complicit, too charming, too funny. And she had been reduced to the laughable cliché of being the one that shivered for his touch. The clear-headed Alicia gone whenever he was near.
Too tempting.
She had risked her reputation, the well-being of her family, for her own impulses. It had to stop.
There. Rational reasoning would get her back on track.
She took a tissue from her bag and tried to recover her forgotten adulthood. Everyone had priorities. Everyone had to look out for their family. If she had to power through pain, she would.
"Are you a masochist? Is that it, Alicia?"
Of course she wasn't. She had responsibilities, she wouldn't apologize for that. He had lived life without knowing what it meant to say vows, to see her husband fall in love with her again years after that first "I do" or to hold her children crying over their parents' separation. None of that was in his baggage of bachelor experiences. He couldn't know. He shouldn't judge.
"Will, this is not you."
As soon as she had felt herself regain control, she was undone again.
Kalinda had spoken the words she herself had wanted to. That raging, poison-spewing man was not her Will.
And it was because of her.
No matter how much she tried to stack the cards in her favor, no matter how much she repeated the litany of why logically it had all made sense, she couldn't escape that truth.
She had transformed the smirking, joke-cracking man she had met in the elevator in the early morning, in a bitter, spiteful shell that made a spectacle out of himself for the whole firm to prey on.
There was no way around that.
It hadn't been all her. She knew that. There had been Cary and the others, the discussions with Diane, her path to the judgeship but she had been the one to push him stumbling over the edge. Every jury in Chicago would convict her of at least that.
Not that she hadn't known.
There just had been so much to do. The interviews, the "classy but necessary", Eli-mandated photo shoots, Zach graduating, the excessive blondeness and general Amber-Madison-ess of Peter's new ethics consultant, the plotting to keep her coup a secret from all the equity partners. Her mom taking Grace lingerie shopping. Peter and their marriage. All the lies.
Her crime had merely been to put it off, to not dwell on how it would look to him, everything that she had done. It had been a defense mechanism. There had been a point in which she had taken his feelings in consideration but the depth and the intensity of her reaction had scared her into retreat. No, she most certainly was not ready to open that door. Every day was one day more. Just one more day for the plan to come to fruition, for the decisions to be irrevocable, for her to be sure.
There would be no more days now. And she still was not sure.
There was a part of her that craved to get back and tell him that none of that day had ever happened, that she was still the Alicia he had smirked at, all wet and freezing out of the pool. He could still smile and narcissistically believe that the huge win of the day before was all due to him and not his slam-dunk case. He could still count her in that web of camaraderie, fun and friendship he had built over the years. He could still trust her. He could still like her a lot more than what was appropriate. He could exist without hating her.
She wished she could. But the clock of her dream world had already struck midnight. The delusions revealed themselves for nothing more than smoke figurines her brain had molded to let her move forward. The have-it-all life was just waiting for her at home. A family that loved her more than she deserved. A new firm with competent and eager partners, with the chance of handling the law as she had always wished, a crowd of strangers that admired her from afar for all the values she represented, for the life she had lived. She was loved, adored, respected. Wasn't it the goal of anyone's life?
What she had sacrificed to get there was nothing compared to what she had gained and kept safe. That was supposed to be her line of thoughts. Chicago was a city made of politicians. To get anywhere one could not be spotless. There had to be a freckle of red, the blood of someone that had been succumbed to a greater cause. She knew that. That was what anybody would tell her in luxurious hotel halls among flowing overpriced wines and tailored clothes.
Yet none of them knew what Will had truly meant to her.
They hadn't been in that Presidential Suite being looked at as the only person that was vital for his existence, they hadn't watched the coyness playing on his face while he admitted he "wasn't interested in anybody else". Nor had they heard the 16th most-eligible bachelor offer to meet their kids, as naturally as he offered advice on a legal conundrum.
Nobody except her could grasp just how much Will had been paramount to her healing. How important his opinion had been. How she had cherished his utter confidence in her capabilities. How she wouldn't forget the laughs, the shared eye-rollings, and that air of tantalizingly reliable freedom that always seemed to surround him.
In her success, she was alone. There wasn't one person in the world she could talk to, that would just let her explain why she had made a choice that would leave her mourning a man and an unrealized potential for love. Not without judgments, or advice. Owen would listen but she was afraid of what he could say, Peter was certainly not a candidate, Kalinda, that loved Will in her own way, would not understand. She was on her own.
She had annihilated the only constant friendship in her life for her own benefit. No greater purpose than the well-being of her immediate family. She had never had the courage to ask Peter if he had forgiven himself for just how carelessly he had treated the bond of trust between the two of them. She had always been afraid of his answer irking her one way or the other. And now that things were going well... No reason to rock the boat. Regardless, she desperately wanted to today. All the questions that had swarmed in her head but that she had never voiced, trapped in the weight of consequences.
She needed those answers. She had to know, to copy, to learn.
"Have you forgiven yourself, Peter?"
"How could you look at me after what you had done?"
"How could you stand tall and survive day after day knowing that somewhere, someone you cared about, someone you loved, was hurting because of you?"
Yet she couldn't even employ her humiliation in her benefit. She couldn't ask without Peter gauging why she was asking, without him pushing on her feelings for Will. Vulnerable how she was, she probably would go on and say those three words that would make everything she had done moot, an exercise in futile devastation.
She wouldn't risk that.
It surprised her how easily she had conjured those three words in a hypothetical fight with Peter. She had never allowed herself to think of Will that way. Love came with too many strings, with obligations. She wouldn't have been able to explain it away, so she had refused to label whatever she felt for Will love. Simple. But denial could not work in front of facts. The impulse she had experienced of getting round the desk and kiss the pain away from him wasn't merely lust for the angry version of Will. It was a need she recognized very well as the primal necessity to protect and shield people you loved.
And, truly, who had she been kidding?
She had used all the other possible combination of words in the vocabulary but none fit because none were the truth. She was in love with him.
She could visualize, with astonishing clarity, the scene of how the what-if would have played. She would have waited for the office to be deserted. He would have been stressed over the full extent of the coup and the number of clients that had been stolen. She would have appeared in his office.
"Will, can I talk to you for a second?"
He would have abandoned everything else and given her his full attention. His brow would have turned worried in asking his usual follow-up question.
"Is something wrong?"
She wouldn't have wasted any time.
"I love you, Will"
He would have looked surprised, positively shocked at the unexpected declaration. She would have smiled then and nodded.
"And I'm tired of hiding it."
His eyes would have turned tender and caring, his smile suddenly conveying more happiness that he had ever shown.
"I love you."
He would have said, before kissing her passionately.
A thought emerged to intrude in the fantasy.
He would never know now. He would never know how she felt about him. If, during one of the many future yelling matches, she happened to use those words, he wouldn't believe her. What she had done had deprived the words of any meaning. They were merely hollow series of letters without significance. She had robbed herself of the possibility of saying "I love you" and him of the chance to hear it from her. He would go on thinking that he had been nothing more than a pawn in her game, that she had used him to get even with Peter, that he had been a convenient stopgap.
How hadn't she taken it all into account? How had she lost sight of all the different ways she was hurting Will and, in turn, herself?
The phone begged for her attention but her voice was still too teary to talk to Peter. She waited for the ringing to stop and focused on the photo on the background.
The answer to everything was in those three faces that smiled at her. Her family was everything. They would unknowingly help her through this difficult time.
Will wouldn't forgive her but he would recover. She would hate herself less and less the more he got back on his feet, the more he hated her. It had to be. Time would pass and she would learn to bear the burden without crumbling under the weight.
Life would go on for the victim and the perpetrator.
If, at times, the regret, the guilt and the love threatened to suffocate her, she would look at the photo and breathe.
Breathe and remember priority number 1.