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It’s a relief to finally say it. To voice the tiny, gnawing thought that’s been bouncing around his head for the last year, even before Wes, even before everything got even more twisted and fucked-up than it already had been. Slumped in that chair in Annalise’s hotel room, he finally owns up.
“You know, I’m actually jealous of him, because at least he doesn’t have to live with any of this anymore.”
There. It’s out in the open now, and in a way Connor feels relieved. He wants to die and Annalise Keating knows it. Now he’s partially her responsibility, and that’s freeing in a way, like knowing that your mother will clean up your messes for you. But Annalise has enough blood on her conscience that another body won’t matter much, and Connor knows this all too well. He thinks he hopes she’ll tell Oliver so he doesn’t have to do it himself. He thinks he hopes she’ll do nothing and let him go out in a blaze of alcohol poisoning or a long fall or something whenever the next bad night is. He thinks that he thinks too much. He thinks he thinks he thinks.
Annalise once told him that he was a worrier, just like her. Well, at least that’s been disproved. Because here Annalise is, standing like she’s still the unstoppable force she was when they first met back in freshman year, like she’s still nothing but quick thinking and expensive dresses and the sharpest mind in the room. She can live, Connor thinks, wake up in the morning and deal with the thoughts of Sam and Rebecca and Sinclair and Wes without letting them spiral around her until she can’t breathe and she can’t think and she just needs to make it all stop. In other words, she’s not doing exactly what he’s been doing for months.
He slumps into the recliner, hands deep in his coat pockets. “You’re a lot stronger than you think, Connor,” Annalise says.
Bullshit. He almost stepped in front of a bus, he almost cheated on his boyfriend just to feel something, all he can think about is how nice it would be to just stop breathing for a while. How nice it would be just to get some peace and quiet.
He’s not strong. He’s a coward, or a whore, or a child. He’s a law-school dropout. He’s a murderer, or at least close enough to one. He’s so many things that he’d rather not be. But strong? He’s never been that.
“I just told you I wanted to die,” says Connor, and he reaches up to twist his fingers into his hair before he realizes that it’s not there anymore. “How is that strong?”
He needs her to tell him. He needs this, he’s positive of it, because he can’t convince himself that he’s worth anything anymore. He needs Annalise to show him how to live like this, because he doesn’t know if he can.
He was walking, earlier, to whatever shady apartment complex his Humpr match lives in, when he saw a bus pass him and all of a sudden it was last spring again and he was perched on the edge of a curb. Toes curling over the edge, eyes squeezed shut, and he kept waiting to feel something fear or excitement or some goddamned relief at least, but there was nothing. Bland numbness coating his emotions with a rubber barrier until everything felt very far away.
“Because you came here instead,” Annalise says, and that’s not the answer he was looking for. He needs a step-by-step manual, a “How to Stop Thinking for Dummies.” This needs to stop.
Paxton’s skull hitting the pavement, playing Humpty Dumpty as his brain coated the sidewalk. The look in his eyes before he leaned backwards. Resolute. Committed.
Sam toppling over the banister, head bashed in by the same trophy Connor had had on his bookshelf in his apartment. A body in his car, fingers anxiously tapping the steering wheel as he waited for Wes outside of a gas station. Trying not to breathe as he dug his hatchet into Sam’s thigh, his waist, his shoulder, trying to forget that this had been a living, breathing person. Oliver’s hallway, not being able to catch his breath. “I fucked up, I fucked up, I fucked up” he’d said, gasping. “It’s not going to be okay, it’s not.” In retrospect, he’d been right. So fucking right.
Annalise shoving the gun in his hand, telling him to shoot her. Him considering it for a moment, just a split second imagining aiming and firing and being done with it. Dropping it, watching Wes shoot to kill.
Wes’ body on a cold cement floor and the smell of gas, the rage in Laurel’s eyes when he finally spilled his guts all over Bonnie’s living room. How firm she sounded when told him to go kill himself. “It’s the one good thing you’ll do in your life,” she’d said, grief rolling off her in tidal waves, drowning him in her condemnation, and he’d believed her. Part of him still does.
It happens again and again and again every time he closes his eyes. Every time he forgets to think about something else, in those awkward transition moments of day-to-day life. When he’s stopped at a red light, when he’s in the shower, anytime Netflix buffers and the apartment goes quiet for a second. It never stops.
Connor thinks there’s probably only one surefire way to force it to.
He can’t think of a way to tell Annalise this though, about the constant loop of nightmares, so he just shrugs and sits up a little in the chair. “Okay,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else there is. “Sure.”
Annalise looks at him and sighs. “You’re going to be okay, Connor.”
Something bubbles up in the back of his throat. It could be a scream or laughter, he’s not really sure. He swallows it back and doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
Annalise stares at him for a bit, head cocked to the side like a curious bird. There’s no pity in her gaze, just calculation. He’s another enigma for her to work out. Connor shuffles uncomfortably under her gaze.
“I’m going to go,” he eventually says, standing up. His vision goes blurry for a second when he gets on his feet, and he has to reach for the back of the chair to avoid wobbling. He hasn’t been eating much, recently.
Annalise nods and leads him to the door. Before he can reach for the door knob, though, she blocks his path, forcing him to look her in the eyes.
“Promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid,” she says, matter-of-factly. It’s not a question. Annalise doesn’t do questions unless she’s in a courtroom, and rarely then.
Connor hadn’t actually thought about where’d he go next. He lets himself imagine it for a moment: taking the elevator to the roof of the hotel instead and walking off, or actually stepping off the curb this time. An ending.
He looks at Annalise, arm still braced across the door. She stares back at him brutally, unflinchingly. “You’re not walking out that door until you swear.” she says. “I don’t need you on my conscience.”
The “too” is left unsaid, hovering in the air like when you can sense a storm’s coming. Annalise’s conscience is even more saturated with blood than Connor’s. He doesn’t know how she deals with it.
“I promise,” he says, and fights the childish urge to cross his fingers as some kind of insurance. It doesn’t matter, really, what he promises Annalise. She’s lied enough to him that he shouldn’t feel guilty about this.
Annalise nods and moves from the door, letting him out. He can feel her eyes on his back all the way down the hallway, and she doesn’t close the door until she can see that he pushes the ‘down’ button on the elevator.
She’s always been able to see right the fuck through him.
Connor goes home and passes three buses and doesn’t walk in front of any of them. He doesn’t tell Oliver.
When he’s in bed later, he listens to Oliver snore next to him and watches Wes smash in Sam Keating’s head over and over again.