Chapter Text
Connor wasn't trying to kill himself.
He hated life, but not that much.
No matter how many times he said it, nobody believed him.
'Mom, I wasn't trying to- to-'
It hadn't passed his lips then. His mother was too distraught, too angry, too shocked to think that her little boy could've done such a thing. She didn't listen to him, just sat beside him and talked through tears. Connor tuned her out and wished it had killed him. As much as he had a broken relationship with his family, he hated hearing his mother cry.
But he hadn't been trying to kill himself.
See, he'd started doing drugs when the antidepressants had stopped working.
He'd been to a therapist at 14 after he realised that the constant state of 'I can't be happy, what's wrong with me?' wasn't just him being broken and he'd told somebody. Therapy helped, for a while. His parents were advised to put him on antidepressants, which they did, and they worked, for a while. But therapy started to hurt, so Connor stopped going to therapy. The medicine stopped working, so he stopped taking it. People just assumed he was getting over the bad times. In fact, they just got worse. He was scared that if they didn't get better he'd do something awful. So he turned to drugs.
And it helped.
Slowly, he developed an addiction. His parents made no move to stop him or seek help. They saw his dependency on drugs as just a minor inconvenience; the addiction a cry for attention instead of a cry for help. So Connor did more drugs, and his family pretended there was nothing they could do; pretended it wasn't even a problem. They sat downstairs and ate their chicken while Connor was in his room trying to silence his tears.
He only got aggressive toward them once. He was only just a week clean, an effort forced upon him by himself. Everyone saw it as an inconvenience; nobody cared if it was helping. He tried to stop, for the sake of his family, and for a short while it worked. But he snapped at everyone; he didn't get enough sleep, didn't eat enough, shook like a leaf. And Zoe was being irritating for the sake of it, and Connor got aggressive. After that, he made no attempts to stop smoking again.
The first day of senior year he shouldn't have been at school. But he was, and he was irritable. Usually a day like that wouldn't be too bad, but he'd exploded and done a stupid thing.
Evan Hansen was possibly the only person Connor could ever have hoped to become friends with. He was also the only person below Connor on the social ladder. So when he'd blown up and pushed him that day at school he'd felt awful. It was only after school he decided to try and find Evan and apologise. He was lucky to have found him, really. In an attempt to be nice, he'd retrieved the only other paper on the printer - Evan's - just to have a reason to start a conversation. It was going well; Connor had some hope inside him that he might actually make a friend, and then he'd looked down at the paper and seen Zoe's name and physically felt the walls shoot back up again.
Everyone was always comparing him to Zoe. Zoe was the effortlessly perfect daughter, Zoe was their parents' favourite; they didn't even try to hide it. Of course, when he had a chance of being friends with someone, they thought Zoe was the angel their parents made her out to be.
That night Connor had gone home and smoked until he couldn't feel his fingers. He'd folded Evan's letter as small as he could and pressed the rectangle of paper into his palm and cried silently and tried to forget.
But the day stuck in his head; no matter how hard he tried. He couldn't will the memories away. He felt horrible; he felt like a monster; he needed to forget. So he kept smoking, kept trying to forget.
Connor wasn't trying to kill himself. He just needed to feel better and the drugs weren't working again. He thought he knew his limits, and to an extent he did. He wasn't dead, at least not yet.
The risk he took was calculated, he just forgot to carry the 2.
He wasn't trying to kill himself.
"What's your name and date of birth?"
For a moment, it slipped him. After a second of awkward silence and an odd look from the nurse in front of him, he sighed and swallowed thickly.
"Connor Murphy. November 30th, 1999."
"You're in room 22C. No roomie yet, lucky thing."
Connor wasn't trying to kill himself.
Why the fuck was he here?