Chapter Text
Even before the cancer diagnosis, Walt feels like his life is over.
Once upon a time he envisioned that he and Skyler would fix up what supposed to be their starter home in Albuquerque, before selling it for a tidy profit and moving to the Circle of Enchantment with the other nouveau rich. He would enjoy a fruitful career as an enterprising chemist at Gray Matter, and he and Skyler would have three perfect children, and he would retire comfortably in his late forties and attend silent auctions and galas with Skyler on his arm in a designer gown with her hair done up and her face soft with smile lines.
Of course, that didn’t happen.
On his fiftieth birthday, they’re already behind on bills and the dishwasher has been broken for three months and the carpet is thirty years old. Skyler looks tired more often than beautiful and Walter can’t help but feel a little sting of resentment every time Walt Jr. picks up those goddamn crutches and hobbles off to school.
The worst part, the part that makes the rest unbearable, is that he thought becoming a teacher would be an adequate consolation prize for losing out on billions of dollars. He had hoped that even if he couldn’t fulfill his secret dreams, he could light a match for the students at Wynn. But that hasn’t happened either. As far as he knows, his students’ dreams are never much more ambitious than middle management at blue collar firms, and that feels like salt in a gaping wound he keeps picking at out of boredom.
Skyler tugs pitifully at his cock that night, not even looking at him, and he almost tells her to stop.
*
Walt has always prided himself on his intuition, but perhaps the reason his life has dwindled into wet embers is because he never heeds that tug. He doesn’t notice most people, but there have been a few times, a few chance meetings, that seem to ignite a fire in his brain; that trigger a voice that screams for him to go after what he wants.
Gretchen was the first, pure and gentle. She always looked at him like he was the sun, and she was the moon, grateful just to be in his orbit.
Then there was Skyler. She was breezy, and her smile was brighter than Mercury on a cloudless night, and when she laughed he couldn’t help but do it too even if he couldn’t personally muster any humor or joy. She found his detachment and his logic endearing.
It doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
When he sees Jesse Pinkman fall out of a window, he feels that same inexplicable tug.
Like all the fates have gathered and are screaming, desperately, telling him that this is his destiny. This is how he makes it right. This is the moment he’s been waiting on for half his life. And suddenly he knows what he needs to do.
“You wanna cook crystal meth?” Jesse asks, dry and disbelieving. “With me?”
*
That first day, Jesse is both irritating and infectious, like a seasonal fever. He asks too many questions and hovers too close (don’t stand so close to me, Walt thinks, and then blinks in confusion because he doesn’t know where that came from). Jesse doesn’t understand the science or the mathematics but there’s an insatiable curiosity there, and even if Walt can’t give him true comprehension it’s gratifying to feel like he’s finally found a student who will hang onto his every word.
And more than that, Jesse watches him. Closely. As if he’s mesmerized by the magic Walt is working with a handful of common household chemicals. It almost reminds Walt of Gretchen; she would watch him in the lab with that same soft, quiet look of wonder.
When Walter is done with that first clumsy batch, Jesse looks at his meth like he’s not worthy of it.
“This is glass grade,” he says, as if in disbelief. “You got—Jesus, you got crystals in here two inches, three inches long. This is pure glass. You’re a goddamn artist. This is art, Mr. White.”
Walter feels that little tug again. He ignores it, quietly unfolds his glasses, the picture of humility. He knew his meth would be good. But for some reason it means something to hear Jesse say it out loud. “Actually, it’s just basic chemistry. But thank you, Jesse. I’m glad it’s acceptable.”
He smiles, a little. Can offer him that much. But he’s changed his mind.
Jesse is bright enough to listen. Bright enough to know beauty and brilliance and complexity when he sees it. Not bright enough that Walt feels threatened.
Jesse is not like Gretchen at all.
*
The adrenaline is still pumping through his veins when he rolls into bed that night, the scent of laundry soap and money on his hands, the scent of sweat and phosphine gas haunting him like a ghost. He’s killed two men and saved Jesse’s life and seen more cash than he ever has all in one afternoon, and he’s never felt so good. Not in years.
He reaches for Skyler, but he isn’t thinking of her. Not really. It’s a shapeless lust. A tug. He buries his face in her hair and the phantom scent of cigarette smoke fills his nostrils.
“Walt, is that you?” she asks, breathlessly, when he touches her.
There are images, senses in his head, lightning fast and kaleidoscopic. The barrel of a gun glinting in the sunlight. The heat of a bush fire and sweat running down his back. The muffled cries of dying men. Dollar bills fluttering on a spin cycle. Jesse’s eyes, watching him.
He finishes inside of her, so hard that for a moment he thinks it’s the end. Desperate, gasping, wet, choking breaths. He thinks he can feel the cancer throbbing in his lungs. He can’t look at her.
“Are you okay?” she asks. Tentative. Soft.
He can’t look at her.
He shuffles out of bed, feeling suddenly sick to his stomach.
*
Jesse Pinkman’s innocence doesn’t matter to him, but it should.
For most of Walter’s life he’s lived by that game. His instincts and his desires incompatible with what most people would consider moral righteousness. But he’s always played by the rules. He knows what he wants to do, but he shouldn’t, can’t, and inevitably won’t. He flips a coin more for his own benefit than for Jesse’s, but can’t help feeling the gut punch of disappointment when it lands.
*
“Who is Jesse Pinkman?” Skyler asks, and Walter physically feels his lungs seize.
There’s an easy explanation for it all on the tip of his tongue. Something that would excuse the second cell phone, the mysterious calls, the nights he falls into bed after she’s already half asleep, the distracted way he makes love to her. It would be so easy to say he’s sleeping with Jesse. That he’s been doing it for weeks now.
He could get away with all of it.
But for some reason—perhaps the image of his daughter on the sonogram, Skyler’s pleading eyes, or the fact that it’s far too close to the truth—his lie is much more innocuous. Much less believable.
“He sells me pot,” Walt says.
He doesn’t remember much of the conversation that follows, only that—for the moment—she seems satisfied by this answer. He’s too busy listening to the hammer of his heart against his ribs, clenching the arm of the uncomfortable hospital chair, a surge of adrenaline and something red-hot rushing through his veins like a hit of his own poison.
Jesus, he thinks. If I wanted to, I could. I shouldn’t, but I could.
*
They’re scrubbing blood out of the grooves in the floor. The air is pungent with rust and partially dissolved fecal matter and bile. Jesse has emptied his stomach twice into a plastic barrel and his eyes are red from cleaning chemicals and tears. For the most part, they’re silent, but Walter quickly grows tired of mentally listening to conversations he’s already had.
“You said this was your aunt’s house,” Walter says, voice muffled by the rubber and plastic of the hazard mask. “How long have you been alone here?”
Jesse looks at him as if he’s grown two heads, then angrily resumes mopping up tissue with a soaked rag.
“Since high school. She took me in. Needed someone looking after her.”
That’s not the whole story, and perhaps in any other situation it would be impolite to pry. But Walt feels that they’re past social impropriety by now, up to their elbows in guts.
“Took you in,” he repeats. “Trouble at home?”
He doesn’t remember Jesse having problems with his family as a student, but then again, he had never thought to ask. When Jesse was sixteen, Walter’s interest in him had begun and ended with his letter grade.
Jesse wrings the rag in a bucket. Coughs, but manages to keep from vomiting again. “Yep.”
Walt waits for more. When it doesn’t come, he gently prods, “Were you in trouble?”
“Always,” Jesse sighs. He looks like he might go quiet again, his one-word answers running dry. Then he says, “My dad fucking hates me. Always has. I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m not even his kid. That my mom, I don’t know, fucked the mailman or something. Whatever.”
Walt feels a stab of pity for him. “What was the trigger? The reason they kicked you out?”
Jesse glares up at him through the mask. “They didn’t kick me out, man. They found a roach in my jacket pocket. They would’ve let me stay if I hadn’t freaked out. He never hit me before that. And then he did. So I packed a bag and I fucking left.”
Jesse lets that sit, as if wanting to make Walter feel guilty for daring to ask the question. Then goes back to scrubbing.
*
In the end, he strangles Domingo to death with a bike lock and then carefully and meticulously tucks his body into a polyethylene bin. As he fills the bin with acid, he thinks of a cool night like this, years ago, when he tucked a six-year-old Walt Jr. into bed. Just as gently as he put Domingo into this tiny plastic box.
He flushes the liquified remains down Jesse’s toilet.
Then he makes another list. Two columns, just like before. In the first column he lists out all the reasons he shouldn’t continue his partnership with Jesse. That he should leave him alone and forget him; shouldn’t even entertain fantasies of touching him. Not even, or especially when, he’s in bed with his wife. The woman he loves.
He’s half your age. He’s your former student. He wants nothing to do with you. He would kill you for trying. It would be adultery. It would break Skyler’s heart. He deserves better than you. (Walter crosses that last one out. Then writes it again.)
In the right-hand column, he writes just five little words.
It would be so easy.
*
There’s a part of Walter that is glad for the cancer in his lungs.
Suddenly the dim view he has of his future, with its decay and its fatigue and its ugliness, is brought into sharper white-hot focus, like an atomic bomb has been set off right in front of him. Now he has a more certain expiration date. Now he knows that whatever consequences there might be for his actions, he won’t live to see them.
Sometimes he thinks he might be losing his mind.
What had he said to Jesse? “I am awake.”
It’s three AM and he’s in his living room in his favorite chair. Awake. His cock is in his hands and he’s breathing through his nose and trying very hard to keep the noise down, not wanting to disturb his family. His family. His pregnant wife and teenage son who seem to resent him almost as much as they claim to love him, to need him alive. It won’t matter to them if he’s half-delirious, chained to a hospital bed, hair abandoning his body, sickness in his blood.
“That’s good, Jesse,” he mouths, soundlessly. His fantasies are wild, disparate, intangible things, like silver strands of methamphetamine smoke. Feeling him pressed close, his lips and breath against his skin, his eyes soft. Vulnerable.
He sits in the afterglow, tipping his head back. Skin sticking to the chair with sweat like glue. Imagines Jesse’s taunting laughter, his voice murmuring at the shell of his ear, “Is that all you’ve got in you?”
Tomorrow he’ll find him. Beg to cook with him again.
Tomorrow.
*
But he doesn’t have to beg.
*
There’s a lot of waiting involved in cooking meth. A lot of time to stop, steal a glance or a touch, pretend to reach for a glass stirring rod when Walt is really only trying to brush the soft skin at the back of Jesse’s neck, or catch the scent of his hair. Cigarettes and sweat and sunlight and youth.
Sometimes he gets the urge to grab him, shove him against the lab table, tongue open his mouth, wondering if he’d be pliant or fight him or (and Walt shudders every time he thinks of it) kiss him back with just as much frantic kinetic energy as when they cook. Jesse must feel it too. The chemistry here, the spark that threatens to immolate them both.
Because sometimes, he feels Jesse’s eyes on him, too.
Walt watches him work, then risks laying a hand on his shoulder. Blissfully, Jesse doesn’t seem to notice, shows no sign of wanting to shrug him off.
“See what happens when you apply yourself?” Walt asks.
Jesse looks offended, but there’s a hint of a smile there. He likes the attention. The praise. Preens under it. “Yeah, yeah. It’s not like the money hurts my motivation, yo.”
“I’d never expect you to do this for free,” Walt says, squeezing his shoulder briefly before letting him go. He lets his words hang in the air, but if Jesse catches any sort of innuendo he doesn’t show it. Walter ghosts his hand down his back, thinking about how his hands would dwarf his slender hips, but doesn’t touch him.
“It’s too fucking hot,” Jesse says, pulling his gas mask down over his face. “Gimme some breathing room.”
*
Walt feels himself deteriorating every goddamn day. The heady feeling of power, of lust, fades quickly when he’s coughing his lungs out, or when the chemo makes him feel so sick and shaky that he thinks he’s on the verge of collapse.
But Jesse’s always gentle, in these moments. Jesse always understands.
Walt pants, the sun beating down on him, as Jesse tries to cool him off with a flimsy magazine.
“When were you gonna tell me, huh?” Jesse asks, and for a split second, Walt forgets how to breathe. Wondering if he’s been too obvious. He can’t remember if he burned that list.
“Tell you what?” he asks, playing dumb. Tell Jesse that he wants him? That he’s too scared, too mired in his morals, to go after him? That he’d gladly die today if it only meant he could touch him even once?
“Cancer,” Jesse says, like he’s an imbecile, and maybe he is. “You got it, right?”
Walt looks at Jesse, with his arms folded across his chest, face open, strangely vulnerable. When Jesse asks further about the cancer, Walter realizes he barely knows him at all—not really. There’s layers upon layers to Jesse Pinkman that have nothing to do with the ones he wears in the blistering sun of New Mexico.
Walt suddenly feels very tired. Disappointed in himself and his delusions.
“The next time, put an ice pack on your head during chemo,” Jesse says. “My aunt said it helped with the hair loss.”
He doesn’t want Jesse to look at him and remember a dead woman--his mother’s sister. He doesn’t want Jesse to look at him with pity in his eyes, doesn’t want him to coddle him and treat him like a broken dying man with one foot in the grave. His compassion, his goodness, is endearing, but Walt has enough well-intentioned sympathy to fill a bathtub.
He winces.
It’s enough to make him miserable.
*
“You the guy?” Peter asks. Walt will never call him by his nickname. He could be Jesse’s age, but he’s clearly done a lot more than a few hits of meth.
“Yeah,” Walt says. “I’m the guy.”
At the very least, Walt expected Jesse to be conscious enough to glare at him, to tell him off, to tell him he was wrong—again. He wanted Jesse to fight him and scream at him and call him every foul word he knew. But what Walt gets instead is stillness. Uncomfortable, quiet stillness, interspersed only with the pulse of a heart monitor. Looking at him now, Walt is terrified the noise will stop.
He ignores every question Peter throws at him. It all blends into a whirl of white noise. Broken ribs, he says. Tuco Salamanca wouldn’t stop hitting him. Put his hands on Jesse and might have even killed him if self-restraint and his dwindling high hadn’t wound him back down.
Walter is all too aware of how differently this could have gone, like he’s occupying two quantum universes. One in which Jesse is here, unconscious and hurt but breathing, and one in which he never gets scraped up off that floor and into his friend’s car.
The rage that follows the fear is expected, but it still jolts Walt with how hard it hits. He tries to imagine living in a world without Jesse in it. Tries to imagine crawling back to that RV in the desert alone, the ghost of Jesse’s laughter and his smile haunting him. He has never met the man named Tuco, but he imagines soaking him alive in hydrofluoric acid.
Walter breathes out through his nose.
Jesse’s parents aren’t even here.
“Tell me about this Tuco,” Walt says. He can’t look at Jesse anymore. “Tell me everything about him.”
*
They’re a mean looking bunch. They’ve got cameras, and a steel gate, and they pat him down in a way that’s meant to be intimidating instead of perfunctory. He grits his teeth and glares at the man who escorted him up here, wondering if Jesse felt the same caustic mix of dread and fear and anger walking up those steps. Wondering if these men watched Jesse get hurt and did nothing.
He knows the answer soon enough.
“I remember that little bitch,” Tuco says, and Walt bristles. “You must be daddy.”
Walt doesn’t deny it.
And if that’s what it takes to keep Jesse safe, to warn off anyone else who would try to fuck with what’s his, then Walt will gladly tell anyone that Jesse Pinkman belongs to Heisenberg. As he throws the shard of fulminated mercury at the ground, he regrets that he didn’t just toss an entire cannister of gas through a window and been done with it. Let the massacre serve as a warning.
He still walks away with his life and fifty thousand dollars and the unspoken promise—for now—that Jesse is off limits.
*
Walt tunes out his rambling and waits.
“Of course, you would’ve known that if you would have just asked me,” Jesse says, and that’s a message that Walt can agree with—even only secretly. Jesse is right. He’s out of his depth, rowing without a paddle, and his carelessness put Jesse in danger. He knows it’ll happen again. Even if he tries to stop it.
The least he can do is communicate with him. Ask him questions. Give him answers. They’re partners, right?
“I wanted to kill him for what he did to you,” Walt says, and the quiet admission makes Jesse freeze, his indignation forgotten.
Jesse’s staring at him, confused and open-mouthed. “What?”
“I wanted to kill him,” Walt repeats. “I thought about ways I could have done it. Causing a fire, poisoning him, putting a bullet in his head, somehow getting close enough to throw acid in his face. None of that would have worked, so it didn’t happen. But I would have done it for you.”
Jesse says nothing.
Walt turns, as if to leave, but stops himself. He tries to keep the vulnerable edge out of his voice. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Not really,” Jesse says, frustrated. “Is this the part where you, what? Confess your homo fucking love for me? Ask me to run away with you in our shitty RV?”
“Would you?” Walt asks, suddenly, before he can stop himself.
Jesse swallows. Walt can’t tell if the expression on his face is fear or confusion or pity or all three, twisted into one. Walt is too tired to try and puzzle out the answer, so he leaves Jesse there in the dark with his money and his sad, sweet eyes, the door banging shut behind him.
*
They finish their cook in the basement of Jesse’s house. They used less methylamine than Walt anticipated, and he’s satisfied that they should be able to keep going at this same rate for a few months at least. It’ll have to be enough.
“Shit,” Jesse says, throwing off his gas mask and laying his head on his arms, as if he could fall asleep comfortably there. At his age, he probably could. “Dude, can we like, go and get some Taco Cabeza or something? Your treat, because my ribs are still all fucked up and it’s your fault. You owe me.”
Walt sighs, putting a hand on his shoulder and making him sit back up. “My wife’s expecting me within the hour.”
“Oh,” Jesse says. Just that. Just ‘oh.’ As if Walt can read any possible meaning into that one utterance.
Before he can, Jesse is stretching, his shirt lifting up just enough that Walt can see his midriff. He yawns hard, then turns to look at Walt as if surprised to still see him standing there. Watching him. His brows furrow slightly. “Well? You’re not exactly rushing home, old man.”
“Watch it,” Walt says, but there’s no heat to it.
“Whatever,” Jesse says. He pushes his chair back with an uncomfortable grating sound on the concrete floor, and then gets to his feet.
“Jesse,” Walt says, partly to stop him and partly just so he can say his name. “Wait.”
Jesse does, and then he’s staring up at him again with those unreal blue eyes. Waiting to be told what to do. Completely unaware of the power he has over Walt—over this. Over everything. Walt thinks that if Jesse asked him to, he would burn the entire world to the ground. But Jesse would never ask that.
He takes Jesse’s face in his hands, and Jesse lets him. As if he already understands what this is.
Walt leans close. Whispers soundless words, hushed against his lips. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for.
He’s standing in the haunted basement of Jesse’s house, kissing him in the dark, and it’s chaste and warm and close-mouthed and barely a kiss at all, but the rush comes in when Walt realizes that Jesse is letting him. Standing completely motionless and quiet, hands relaxed at his sides. Knowing this, Walt gets just a little bolder, breathing him in, fingers digging hard into the side of his head.
Jesus, Walt thinks. Jesus.
He swipes his tongue, insistent, at the seam of his lips. This seems to be crossing a line. Jesse tenses, turns his head, and mumbles a very quiet, “No.” But he doesn’t pull away completely.
Walt lets him go anyway. Panting, aroused, blood rushing through his head. Just from a kiss.
“Holy shit,” Jesse says, and his voice has never been smaller. He presses his fingers to his lips, stunned. He doesn’t look terrified, exactly, but it’s enough to cool Walt’s blood. He doesn’t want to scare him off. Doesn’t want to ruin the tentative, newborn trust between them. He’s afraid it’s too late for that.
“I’m sorry,” Walt says, leaning against the lab table. “I shouldn’t have—I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Shut up,” Jesse says.
Wisely, Walt obeys.
Jesse paces back and forth for a moment or two, holding himself. It’s a self-soothing mechanism. He has a lot of those—little tics that paint a picture of a young man who craves affection more desperately than anything, but never receives it without cost. Walt would give him that. If he asked.
“This is why you’ve been so fucking weird about this from the start,” Jesse says. “Holy shit.”
Walt chooses his words carefully. “Jesse, if I’ve hurt you or frightened you, I’m sorry. Truly.”
Jesse laughs, bitterly. “No, you’re not. You’re not sorry about anything. You’ve wanted me since that first cook but you were too pussy to do anything about it. Admit it.”
He will not.
“It won’t happen again,” Walt says, fumbling for a lifeline. “I promise you, nothing has to change between us. We can carry on just as we did before. I won’t—I won’t make any more clearly unreciprocated advances. That was wrong of me.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jesse says, scrubbing his face with his hands. “Don’t get all fuckin’ dramatic on me, man. I’m not gonna go crying to the police about how your creepy ass wanted to screw me in a damn meth lab. I’m not a kid so let’s talk about this like, I don’t know, adults.”
But you are, Walt thinks, desperately. You are, and we both know that.
“Why did you let me kiss you?” he asks instead.
Jesse scoffs. “What?”
“Why didn’t you push me away?”
Jesse looks bewildered. “Um, because you’ve got cancer, I guess? Because I don’t—what do you want me to say?”
“You know what I want you to say,” Walt snaps.
Jesse swallows, and then he’s quiet again. He’s clearly more comfortable in the empty space between words than Walt is, because it’s his choice weapon against him, time and time again. Letting Walt stew in his own paranoia and guilt.
“Mr. White, I can’t,” Jesse says at last. “Don’t make this weird, man. I can’t—be what you need me to be for you. Not right now.”
Not yet, Walt hears.
*
“So how was it?” Skyler asks, later that night, with a smile. “Was it an experience?”
Walter thinks of Jesse’s lips, warm and soft against his. Not right now. Not yet. “Yeah. It was definitely an experience.”