A/N: This was written back in 2015. It may be AU as to canon info revealed since then.
Laurel fell into doing immigration law without really meaning to. She did not participate in fall OCI and most of the friends she made after 1L year were in PILF or externing for Public Counsel or some other public interest organization. She knew she was far better suited to this sort of work than the private firm paper chase that so many of her classmates longed for. She knew money would be tight to begin with, if not always, but chasing a large paycheck never appealed to her the way it did to others. Perhaps it was her parents who had put her off of it.
Laurel's mother, Maria, was half-Mexican, born and raised in San Diego, in a comfortable, middle-class suburb. She met Laurel's father while visiting her paternal grandparents during the summer vacation between sophomore and junior year in college. Alejandro came from a wealthy Mexican family and probably would have had a comfortable life in Mexico city had his American fiancé not bucked at the idea of living in a city where she considered it unsafe to raise a child. Maria took some of the horror stories her future sister-in-law told at face value, their truths and half-truths morphing into something almost alive. The kidnapping of a child of a wealthy family for ransom that hit the news two months before the wedding made it clear that if their relationship was to work, Alejandro would need to immigrate. Which he did, with little sentiment but some resentment at having to leave the comfortable web of connections that were waiting to provide him with success.
Not that things went badly for her parents. Laurel grew up upper-middle class. She went to a private school and flew to Mexico to visit her grandparents every summer. Her family took a Europe trip once every two years since she could remember and paying for an LSAT prep course was not even close to an issue. But Laurel always felt like her father was overcompensating for something, some sense of guilt or dissatisfaction. His political and professional successes never seemed to bring him real joy until he could convince his relatives back home of their importance. He criticized Mexico viciously, but Laurel knew her father held little love for America. They spoke Spanish at home, never celebrated the Fourth of July and Laurel always felt like the cultural expectation her father had for her were those that his family had had for his sisters. Alejandro was one of those immigrants who never quite adjusted, always felt the need to prove to himself, or perhaps to others, that leaving had not been a mistake.
The one things Laurel understood she never wanted to do was to get caught up in that loop where money and success were a proxy for doing what she truly wanted to do, for a feeling of belonging and rightness. She goaded her parents, partly because she wanted to coax them out of the bubble they lived in and partially because it was a way at getting back at them for not understanding why it was so important to her to be more than a pretty, well-off girl who married a well-to-do boy and spent her time on children and charities.
Once she knew she wanted to do public interest work, but not criminal defense – because after 1L year the sight of dead bodies sometimes sent her into quiet panic attacks – immigration was simply a logical choice. She was bilingual and Spanish-English lawyers were in demand in Southern California. So Laurel sat for the California bar and took a job at a non-profit that specialized in asylum applications and employment protections for undocumented workers. At first, her parents were baffled, then angry. Then they gave up.
Her brother came to visit once. She found him sitting in the back of the courtroom after one of her hearings. He took her for drinks and for a long time neither could find anything to say. "Mom and dad just want you to be happy," he said finally.
Laurel just shrugged. "I know, Daniel. But I am happy. I wish they would understand that."
Daniel sighed and pushing aside his half-full glass, gave her a serious look. "Does it never bother you?"
"What?"
"The people you have to deal with, the lack of respect? The lack of money, finally?"
He seemed genuine, so Laurel bit her lip and searched for an honest answer. "You know, sometimes I see these pictures of someone I knew back at school in the newspaper. Asher and Michaela both got jobs at large firms in New York. Connor is working for some big entertainment company in Century City… I know that sort of thing – working on things that get your name in the paper – would make dad proud. Or, if I had married Kahn like everyone thought I would, or… Sometimes I want those things too. But I don't want to do them just because I'm supposed to, you know? I want to do the things that feel right."
"And this feels right?"
"I'm helping people, Daniel. People who don't have anything. People who suffer just for being who they are. I think that means something. That's what all of mom's charities are about too. She and I do the same thing, really, just in different ways."
"And Kahn? I thought you liked him. Dad didn't like him, but I did."
"Dad doesn't like anyone I date." The smirked at each other. "But…I don't know. I guess it wasn't right."
Daniel drove her home and Laurel hugged him goodbye. She spent the evening thinking about things she had not thought about for a long time. Things like Sam Keating and how they had been so stupid. What they did had not been murder. It had not felony murder. It was straight up accident or self-defense. But they had been scared and Annalise had not wanted to take any chances. Covering it up had only made things worse, left them all paranoid and unable to face each other by the end of it. Laurel had no idea how Wes could work as a public defender. She could not stand even the thought of having to be reminded of 1L every day.
Maybe that was why it had not worked out with Kahn. Maybe it had not worked because Frank constantly messed with her head, until she could no longer stand either of them. Or maybe it was just that she took to drinking too many margaritas too often with Michaela. Which…
Laurel stood in the bathroom, facing her reflection in the mirror. She had promised herself to not spend her life running, to always be true to who she was and what she wanted. Yet, all these years she had spent running away from the entire host of memories and feelings that formed in 1L, burned themselves into her skin like invisible tattoos.
She paced into her bedroom and found the file from her most recent case. A sticky note on the top read: FIND A PRO BONO FIRM PARTNERSHIP FOR THIS. All scrolled in large, frantic letters. They needed someone with vastly greater resources than their little non-profit could scrape together for this case. Laurel stared at the sticky for a few minute, then reached for her IPad. If she wanted to face some of those fears, to come clean, at least with herself, this was her chance.
The homepage of Holland and Knight blinked up at her with blue-and-white lettering. Laurel typed "Michaela Pratt" into the search bar and waited for the profile to pop up. She held her breath the first few moments, realizing that Michaela had barely changed, going by the photograph. Then copied her number out onto the file's panicked sticky. She would start there.