x and y {a Dear Evan Hansen one-shot collection}

my love, my drug {Connor x Alana}

Preview: ❛Alana wonders what her fellow classmates would think of them spending most afternoons together like this. Surely they'd laugh, ask why she lets Connor fill up the empty space in her afternoons. Sometimes, like this afternoon, she questions herself for it as well. Not with regret, but rather with a self-actualising curiosity. ❜

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There are few people who can see through Alana's well-preserved pretence of overachieving cheerfulness.

Evan does, of course. He understands what it's like to live as a character and not his true self. Not as though he ever will have the nerve to tell Alana this and sympathise with her. And Evan's life is in too much turmoil to focus on someone else's or take the time to care deeply about her.

And Jared suspects. Behind his glasses, he eyes her with a critical gaze, more often than she knows. He has not the time or the patience to pry further. A true observer and third party to her life. If someone else puts a dent in her steely facade, he is more than interested to see the results but he is well aware of the fact that he is not the person to do such a thing.

There is a distinct difference between her interactions with those two versus her interactions with Connor. Connor sees through her words, reads between the lines, listens for the unspoken. He's smart; she hates him for it because she knows how he abuses his mind for reckless highs. A waste, she often thinks.

And Alana is left to wonder what he is like under his own character that he plays so well.

-

It's nothing formal. There is no spoken invitation, merely an indicative look across the cramped school hallway and she follows him outside and across the track field.

"Those things will kill you," she says when he lights a cigarette.

Connor blows smoke into the air. With his long legs, it's difficult to keep pace with him. Clutching her bag of books tightly to her chest, Alana goes with him behind the metal bleachers. It may as well be a million miles from school, with the sounds fading into the distance.

Connor drops his bag onto the ground; settling down beside it, he opens a book. Kneeling onto the ground as well, individual blades of grass dig deep into Alana's knees. Opening her own book, the seclusion envelops as them as well as silence.

It's a system, their meetings after school, one that works well for the two of them.

Silences to make up for the noise, quietness to cancel out the cacophony of the day.

Alana wonders what her fellow classmates would think of them spending most afternoons together like this. Surely they'd laugh, ask why she lets Connor fill up the empty space in her afternoons.

Sometimes, like this afternoon, she questions herself for it as well.

Not with regret, but rather with a self-actualising curiosity.

Watching him from the safety behind her book, Alana studies him attentively, more than she has before. She watches as he absently rubs his thumb and middle finger against each other as he reads. Notices how the pale autumn rays of sunshine filter through the locks of hair that frame his shadowed and angular features. How he bites on the inside of his cheek, occasionally lifting a hand to brush his rogue hair out of his eyes.

Pressing her palms into the grass to support her reading position, Alana is now curious if people around her have ever taken the time to look past her surface and notice the small things that she does that sets her apart from the façade she struggles to maintain.