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They were never the same, how could they? After Sam, after Rebecca, after everything they’d been through.
It changed them, broke them, and made them grow back together in the strangest ways.
*
After Rebecca, Connor disappears for a few weeks.
Comes back only to tell them that he was leaving, heading to Seattle with Oliver.
“It’ll be good,” he told them, “Safe, new, no one will know us.”
“Connor,” Laurel said, “You can’t leave, we need you. We need to stay together, after all of this, we need each other.”
We need Annalise, is what is unspoken. We need you to stay so Annalise will help us.
Wes placed a hard on Laurel’s shoulder.
“Laurel,” Wes said in that quiet way of his, “Let him go, maybe we all need to go.”
Laurel shook off Wes’s hand, “That’s bull, and you know it, Wes,” she said as she stormed from Wes’s crap ass apartment.
*
Michaela marries some rich, southern gentleman that summer. She met him at some Middleton party and latched on when she found out that he wasn’t connected with law or politics or anything. Just some rich, old money, young business man from the south.
Wes and Laurel come to the wedding, they sit in the back at the ceremony. They watch as Michaela delivers perfectly emotional vows, tearing up at the right places.
“She could do so much more,” Laurel whispered to Wes.
“She needs this, needs to feel safe from everything,” Wes whispered back.
Laurel scoffed, “You think this guy could protect her?”
Wes nodded, “From people looking to closely at her, yes, he could.”
Laurel crossed her arms over her chest and watched as Michaela leaned forward to kiss her groom.
Michaela drops out of law school by fall, she moved down south and enrolled in medical school.
*
Wes finished law school with the skin of his teeth, the nightmares have only gotten worse over the year, had it really been a year?
On the anniversary of Sam’s murder, Wes sat in his apartment, the same one from last year, and drank whiskey straight from the bottle. He ignored Laurel’s calls, and just stared at the scratches Rudy left.
Sam killed Lila, Sam killed Lila, Sam kill Lila, he thought over and over in his head,
And he killed Sam.
Wes threw the bottle against the wall.
After he graduated, Wes denied Annalise’s offer to continuing to work with her. He went to Haiti for a month, didn’t talk to Laurel or anyone for that matter.
When he came back to the States, he went to Seattle. Tracked down Connor, who was working at some organic chocolate shop.
“Hey,” Wes said when he was face to face with him.
“Hey Waitlist, how are you doing?” Connor asked him with the biggest grin Wes had ever seen on his face.
Wes felt himself smiling back, he couldn’t remember the last time he smiled.
At Connor’s break, they stepped outside and Wes asked, “How are you so happy?”
Connor shrugged, “It took time, and Oliver helped. But I realized something, a couple of months after I left, Sam’s dead, god knows where Rebecca is, but I’m here and I’m not in jail. I’m enjoying my time here.”
Wes nodded, “Have you spoken to any of them?”
Connor looked at his feet, “Michaela. Oliver and I spent last New Year with them, she’s good. She’s a doctor now, it suits her. What about you?”
Wes looked away from Connor, “I haven’t spoken to Laurel since graduation.”
Connor nodded and silence fell upon them.
*
Laurel graduated and took Annalise’s offer.
She stayed on, training the new Keating Five with Frank and Bonnie.
Laurel still slept with Frank occasionally, he loves her, well as much as a person like Frank can love, she knows. But after everything that’s happened, Laurel doesn’t know if she can love.
Sometimes, when she’s at her lowest low, she thinks about turning herself in, getting punishment for this sin she’s committed.
She talks herself out of it each time.
Laurel kept poking around Lila’s murder, she couldn’t stop herself, she needed to know the truth, not for her but for the others.
She could handle her own guilt most of the time. But she knows it still kills Wes to think about it.
Laurel found out the truth. And she isn’t even surprised.
One night, after sex, she said to Frank, “You killed Lila, didn’t you?”
Frank looked at her, trying to read her emotions but Laurel has had years of practice of being unemotional.
“Yeah, I did. Sam told me to, and I owned him,” Frank told her.
“Did you kill Rebecca?”
“No.”
Laurel sighed and rolled over, “That’s all I needed to know.”
*
Wes ended up in New York, he started writing crime novels and he no longer felt like walking into oncoming traffic.
He always looked for Rebecca in the crowded streets of New York. She hadn’t turned up, after three years, she’s still gone.
Wes kept in touch with Connor, talked to Michaela occasionally, sent Laurel texts messages letting her know that he’s not dead.
Sometimes, he misses them. Sometimes he misses the Keating house and the cases and the late nights. But then he remembers that he can’t sleep a full night without nightmares and he hates himself for missing it.
*
“Are we terrible people?” Michaela asked them on the fifth anniversary of Sam’s murder.
They all met up in Denver, a neutral ground.
Connor snorted, “Depends on who you asked.”
Wes looked down at the glass in his hand, and said slowly, “He killed Lila, he deserved it.”
Laurel looked up from her own glass, “We did what we had to do.”
“But does that make us awful people? We took a life,” Michaela pressed.
“He would have killed Rebecca, we had to,” Wes said.
“But what kind of people does that make us? That we would kill someone just to live?” Connor added.
“Who we are, and who we needed to be to survive, are two different things,” Laurel finally said, she drained her glass and walked away from the rest of them.
Wes left the bar, he walked out into the cold, snowy Denver night. He inhaled the cold air, let it burn his lungs. He looked across the parking lot and met the familiar dark eyes of girl who he’d lost long ago.
“Rebecca?” he said softly as he stepped into the street.
Fin