A/N: I didn't expect this fiction to be so popular. You were all quite eager for the second and last chapter of this mini-story. I hope I didn't disappoint you too much. I have written Alicia and Kalinda before but in ASIC the circumstances were much different. So I feel like I'm making another experiment. You must have imagined it but let me be redundant: this one is pure angst.

For an investigator, finding out when Alicia would be home alone had been a piece of cake. She had fluctuated between letting it go and confronting Alicia head on but Will's sense of profound hopelessness had clenched her choice.

She rang the doorbell. When Alicia opened she was mightily surprised. She didn't wait for the invitation to enter inside the house and instead moved confidently while saying:

"We need to talk."

Alicia had recovered her footing and seemed to have schooled her face into submission. Then she saw the familiar spark of the warrior going for the jugular before she spoke.

"Are you here to judge me? You?"

Alicia was at her best when she was playing the moral high-ground. The hurt wife judged by the whore who slept with her husband.

"Let's have at it, Alicia, once and for all, I slept with your husband before knowing you. I didn't care who you were or what you looked like. You meant nothing to me that night. There? Satisfied?"

"You think that yelling it out loud makes it all better?"

"It doesn't. But that's not what tonight is about."

"You started it."

"I started it because you think you can lord this mistake over my head so that I have to be respectfully silent whenever you say or decide anything. It might have worked before, when there were just you and me. This time there is Will involved."

"Please, Kalinda, spare me the lecture on how loyal you are to him, will you? Cary told me that you were playing both him and Will to get more money and that if you hadn't asked for an unreasonable sum you would have jumped ship with us and we wouldn't be having this conversation."

She wished she had her bat with her. Her rage at Alicia's fake nonchalance was getting out of control. She could have broken one of her very bourgeois vases. The wife of the Governor could afford thousands of those, couldn't she? Instead she channeled her fury in her words.

"We would still be having this conversation. I am a brilliant investigator but Will is not in love with me, he picked me out of a group but I would have found a job anyway and I came highly recommended. Not to mention everything he did for you in these 4 years! Poor Alicia has enough going on so she shouldn't deal with this or that... So you see, our situations would have still been radically different."

The more she got out, the more she felt the role of Will's champion fit her like a glove.

"What did he do to deserve the dagger in his back?"

Alicia had been ready not to hold her punches but her last comment softened her immediately. All of a sudden she was distracted, lost in the thoughts in her head.

"He robbed me of my willpower."

That was an answer she was not expecting but she had understood it all so well. Nick had had the same effect on him and she had hated him for it. Then she thought of Will, of how his love didn't manifest itself obsessively, it didn't involve stalking or terrorizing Alicia, it would never include physical harm and the wrath came back in full force.

"When we're alone together, be it in the office, in an elevator, in the car I gravitate towards him and it takes me time to remember that I have a life, obligations, a family. Will makes it so easy for me to be selfish, to forget about everything else."

"What a horrible fate!"

Alicia ignored her snarky comment and kept going.

"You want to know what triggered this decision? On the night of Peter's election, I saw a man that looked like Will from behind and for a few seconds I wanted to abandon it all and hide in his apartment. I had to do something... Cary's offer was the only way out."

If that was the truth she told herself, fine. It would never work with her.

"It wasn't the only way out and you know it."

"Why don't you enlighten me, you all-knowing Kalinda? What was I supposed to do? Spend every day at my job dreading and anticipating every moment spent with him? Smile for Peter and the press and then cheat on him behind his back? You might not care about who gets hurt but I do."

"Unless it's Will, right?"

For a second she seemed to want to throw the glass on the counter on the floor and smash it into tiny little pieces. Instead, she opened the fridge, poured herself a generous glass of red and sipped it quietly.

"Where are you from, Kalinda? Originally, I mean. Are you from Canada or is just one of your identities from there?"

"Why do you care?"

"I guess it doesn't matter. Whenever you're from you must have studied the classics. When I read Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina I was so incredibly disgusted with them. My parents were going through the divorce and these two women were practically my mother in earlier centuries, flying from one fancy to another without ever being satisfied. It seemed so obvious to me that they were never going to reach whatever they were looking for because nothing is ever built on dreams and fairies. You need hard work."

"Why are you telling me these things?"

"Because you have to understand, Kalinda. I am like them but worse because Peter isn't dull, boring or ugly and Will isn't a young man looking for a sexual education. I was trapped. I am trapped. You have to know how it feels."

She didn't like the path the conversation had taken. It could reach dangerous territories. She had come here to tell Alicia off, to threaten her, to be Will's front. How had Alicia brought her back into a friend-zone?

"How what feels?"

"Not being heard. You tried to tell me your side of the story and I ignored you. I just want someone to know how sorry I am."

"Haven't your big-house friends come out of the woodwork?"

She was ready for her K.O. punch before Alicia actually managed to make her feel bad.

"Sure, and plenty more."

"Good, they're the friends you deserve."

At times, the pain of wielding the blow was comparable to receiving it. This was one of those times. Alicia was stunned and she had perceived the violence of the collision.

Tears had made their way to her opponent's eyes. Hers were similarly wet.

"Is that what you really think?"

"I think that friendship is a much trickier endeavor than people think it is. I think Will is a master at it and look what you've done to him."

"You're right. You want to hear the funniest thing? The days after a triumph should be eons better than the day after a scandal, wouldn't you think? Instead I feel much lonelier now than I felt then. 4 years ago, I could call Will."

"That's not funny at all. It's tragic"

"It is."

Was there something to add? They both got very quiet. Then she decided to reap the chance. This one might very well be the last honest conversation she ever had with Alicia.

"I don't have female friends. I have female lovers, female acquaintances, female bosses, female helpers. I don't have female friends. But you were a friend. I'm sorry things ended like that."

"They would have ended anyway after my decision, wouldn't they?"

That was probably true. She missed Alicia and their connection but she had promised Will she had his back.

"Someone has to be on his side, now that Diane is leaving."

"I'm glad that you're staying at Lockhart/Gardner. Other than Diane, there isn't anyone I trust more to keep an eye on him."

"I'm not you, Alicia, you know that."

"I know."

"We are not going to be lenient."

"I know."

"It's going to be war."

"I know."

"Is it all worth it?"

"Probably not. Often I catch myself wishing I were braver, that I could follow the least-travelled path. Apparently I'm not."

She had felt the same sense of powerlessness at her own incapacity to fight the circumstances. She couldn't help but offer some words of poisonous solace.

"You're not at the bottom yet."

"What?"

"It's not that you're not brave enough, it's that you haven't been pushed to the extremes yet. I'm not saying you've had an easy life. I'm saying that Will has been your safety net. Whatever happened, he was there to cauterize the wound, to help you up. You don't have him anymore. Right now, it's just an hypothetical, you haven't seen him look at you without the regard he has always reserved for you. You haven't seen him not available for your every minuscule problem."

Mrs Florrick was almost scared at asking the question.

"What does that mean?"

"The way I see it, you can hope for the best. Your husband won't cheat or be blinded by the power again, being the First Lady of Illinois will be fun, your firm will boom with morally-acceptable clients. Your secretaries won't overhear labor negotiations, your investigator will stay as chipper as she is now. You and Cary will be great partners. But, more realistically, something will happen. You will be ashamed enough for what you've done that you won't call me or Will. Peter will be busy with his Governorship, your children will be at college and you won't want to burden them, Cary will be in a tough case, and it will be the last strike. You will want to run away and this time you'll actually do it."

"So you're saying that after another catastrophe in my life there'll be some light at the end of the tunnel?"

Alicia had never showed her this face before. Eager for the answer. Hopeful like a child for the happy ending as the conclusion of the story.

Some part of her would have wanted to conceal her the truth, to let her indulge a little bit more in her delusions. To leave the apartment without leaving utter desolation behind her. To not let the squalor of her future engulf the woman that used to be her friend.

Will's hollow eyes flashed into her mind. Nobody had done him any such courtesy. She took the courage and dropped the bomb.

"No, because by then, you'll have nothing to run off to."

A/N: I suspect this one might be controversial but I can assure you that I'm open also to negative comments.