Chapter Text
Evan Hansen lays on the patch of forest floor where he died. He stares up, and up, and up through the path of broken branches and estimates where he had let go. He can still feel that whoosh his stomach made as it leaped for his throat when his fingers loosened and had nothing else to hold on to. Some animal instinct in him that had felt self-preservation launched at him at the very last second.
“Too late!” The words burst out of him in a chuckle he had never heard out from his own mouth before.
Evan always thought the afterlife would be just one great Nothing. He had hoped it would just cancel out his existence like pressing delete on a poor choice of words, the words being: Evan Hansen lives.
Unexpectedly, the afterlife is just hanging out in the place where one died. He assumes being surrounded by trees isn't too bad to spend eternity, especially when it feels like all the things he felt inside him have finally gentled to a numb purr.
Except he's not sure if it's apathy that's settled deep in his bones or if it's something else entirely---he doesn't think he's ever felt apathy in his life, he's always felt too much. Evan is too cautious to label it Peace, because that is definitely an alien experience. He would rather just hazily identify this quietness that has settled between each gentle rise and fall of his breaths as low-energy self-awareness.
He is dead and he thought it would just be oblivion, the kind of The End you see after a story is finished and there is nothing else to know and see of it. Instead, it's just one long meditative session.
Evan’s thoughts drift and he stares at the leaves, they rattle soothingly like waves. Or so he's heard they sound like ocean waves, he's never been to the ocean and he had wanted to visit the ocean---Florida or maybe California or maybe even Mexico---if he had ever had the chance.
He wonders who found his body. He wonders how long he's been in this Quiet Place.
He listens to the leaves and traces the branches and catches his eyes desperately upon the clouds above because sometimes his mother’s wavering grief-stricken face materializes suddenly in his thoughts.
In the Quiet Place, Evan does not think about how long it will be until slowly that veil of grief will lift from his mother's face when she realizes she does not have her broken son to keep hurting her and messing up her life.
Evan curls up into a ball upon the fallen leaves that-don't-feel-like-leaves and tries to convince himself that what he did was for the best. He won't think of his mom who will be able to just be Heidi and go and do the things she couldn't have done with him still in the picture. He won't think of Jared, his “family friend” and how he won't have to be pushed into driving Evan around and bribed into hanging out with him because his parents want him to. He won't think of his dad---he just won't. He won't think of Zoe, she won't even realize he's gone because she didn't even know he existed in the first place. When the school makes an announcement of his death to the student body she will probably know him for like a miniscule of a second before going on with her bright, brilliant life.
The peaceful neutrality he feels is a very fragile thing. He is a boy bobbing on the waves of his relentless anxiety, something nasty always manages (even in death) to wind itself around his ankle and drag him to the dark corner of his mind that led him here.
Every time he focuses on the leaves, the branches, the sky above---it is like a big heaving gulp of air away from the drowning sensation of thinking about his pre-death and post-death.
The crackle of leaves being trodden on send him shooting up into a sitting position and he hears someone say: “O shit...Evan Hansen?”
Evan whips around and nearly topples over when he spots Zoe Murphy’s brother, Connor.