Chapter Text
*
“If you can find him, we’ll kill him,” Jack says.
Walt is still reeling from grief and fury and betrayal as he keeps his eyes locked on his Chrysler and what’s hiding underneath it.
The words are on the tip of his tongue—found him—but Walt hesitates, holding them in his mouth and tasting them like an unfamiliar wine, a bitter one he quickly decides he doesn’t like. Bitter like decay. His empire is crumbling into a colossal wreck in front of him and he realizes he can’t watch Jesse die too. He can’t lose anyone else right now, can’t be the cause of another death in his family—and Jesse is still family, despite everything.
Found him he thinks again, the words perching precariously behind Walt’s lips, still bitter and ready to oxidize and turn to poison if allowed to fall free. Walt swallows the words to get their taste out of his mouth, keeps the poison inside himself where it belongs.
“No. Just forget it. Cancel it,” he says instead, a cold command.
Clemency instead of wrath, like a merciful king.
*
Jack and his men leave Walt with one barrel of his money and they steal the rest. They leave Walt his Chrysler and load the barrel into it for him. Walt holds his breath until the moment their cars are all out of sight.
He glances down at the watch Jesse gifted him for his birthday and he gives it another minute in case any of Jack’s men come back. Then another minute. Another two. Another five.
Then he deems it safe enough and he kneels in the sand beside his Chrysler and peers beneath it.
Jesse is still hiding under Walt’s car, his blue eyes a storm of terror and anger and betrayal.
“Jesse, they’re gone,” Walt tells him, voice dry and heavy. “You can come out now.”
“Why? So you can kill me yourself?” Jesse sounds furious and scared and near tears.
“I don’t want you dead,” Walt says, and he means it. He’s lost nearly everything else—he’s been backed into another corner and now he has to run, to disappear for a while to regroup, and the thought that he might’ve had to disappear alone is chilling. The thought that he had almost lost Jesse too—and by his own action—is unbearable. The thought that he’d let Skyler and Saul and all of them get in his head and convince him to have Jesse killed is equally nauseating and infuriating now that he’s snapped back to his senses. He would’ve regretted it immediately. He’s relied on Jesse too long, cared about him too long—it would’ve been like cutting off one of his own hands.
“Bullshit,” Jesse says.
“I don’t want you dead,” Walt repeats, his eyes locked on Jesse as he wills him to hear the sincerity in his voice, to see the despair in his eyes at the mere thought of what he’d almost done. “Now come out from there. We need to go.”
Jesse stares at him a moment longer and Walt sees it in his eyes the moment Jesse decides to obey. He still doesn’t look like he believes him, but he obeys anyway.
Jesse crawls out from under the car.
There’s a moment when he first stands up that Walt thinks he might run for it—Jesse seems to think he might run for it too—but Walt locks eyes with him and something in his expression manages to hold Jesse there, like gravity. Like magnets. Like a chemical bond.
“Get in the car,” Walt tells him, trying to gentle his tone just a little. Just enough.
Jesse gets in the car.
*
The car makes it maybe a mile before dying on the dirt road, gas leaking out from a stray bullet hole.
“Great,” Jesse mutters as they both climb out.
Walt retrieves the barrel of money from the trunk.
“We’ll take turns rolling it.”
Jesse scoffs but doesn’t argue.
They walk.
It’s open desert for miles.
It’s hot and dry and miserable. It’s tense and quiet and fraught the same way the atmospheric pressure grows fraught before a thunderstorm.
It stays hot and dry and miserable because the thunderstorm is not a thunderstorm and it’s only in Walt’s heart, it’s not the kind of storm that can bring rain or relief.
They keep walking.
This is an image reflected, Walt thinks. Almost chiral. Another walk through the desert, the two of them trekking back to civilization after a scrape with death. The first time—after Tuco—bonded them closer. This time might’ve broken them, might’ve stripped away a crucial electron and ruined their covalence. It remains to be seen.
The tension lasts but not the quiet.
“So how long?” Jesse asks during one of his turns rolling the barrel, not looking up from his task.
“Hm?” Walt asks, because he isn’t going to waste words replying to such an unclear question.
“How long ‘til you kill me.” Jesse’s tone is dull, flat, resigned—like it’s a foregone conclusion.
“I don’t want you dead,” Walt tells him again. Maybe if he says it enough times Jesse will believe it.
“I don’t believe anything you say anymore,” Jesse says back.
Maybe that’s fair. Maybe Walt deserves it.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he tells him anyway.
“Whatever.”
Jesse hasn’t once looked up from the barrel.
*
They stumble across a secluded homestead out in the desert and Walt buys an old truck with a handful of cash from his barrel.
Walt and Jesse load the barrel into the back.
They drive in silence for a long time.
Finally Walt sighs and says, like a peace offering, an olive branch, “Jesse… what I said on the phone earlier—just think about it, okay? You know me. Probably better than anyone else ever has. My calculations were meticulous—Brock was never going to die, all right? And the risk of any kind of lasting damage was so incredibly miniscule—”
Jesse scoffs and glances over at him with a steely glint in his blue eyes, and says, “So you really think that makes it okay? Poisoning kids is fine as long as they survive?”
“What else was I supposed to do, Jesse? I needed you to help me get rid of Gus—to protect both of us—but you wouldn’t, so I had to take drastic measures.”
Jesse looks away at that as if Walt had slapped him.
They both go quiet for a moment, nothing but the road noise and heavy silence between them. Walt keeps his eyes on the road. Out of the corner of his eye he can see that Jesse still has his head turned sharply to the right, staring determinedly out the passenger window.
“Why are we even still talking about this?” Walt asks after a moment. “It’s in the past, and everyone survived—except Gus, which was the whole point.”
Jesse scoffs but doesn’t look away from the window, and he mutters back, “If you have to ask…”
Walt does have to ask. That’s exactly why he did ask, but he’s not going to make a fool of himself by asking again if Jesse’s just going to be childish about it and refuse to answer.
So Walt just shakes his head and keeps driving in silence.
*
When they arrive at the vacuum repair shop, Saul is still there in the room in the basement waiting for his own relocation. Cinnabon in Nebraska, he says, and Walt feels confident Saul is going to hate that if it’s really where he’s headed.
“So, hey, dynamic duo back together, huh?” Saul asks through a fake-looking grin, but he throws a subtle nervous look at Walt right after that seems to ask the silent second question of is he going to be a problem for me or you?
Jesse scoffs and ignores him.
Walt answers the spoken question with, “That’s right,” and the unspoken one with a glare meant to convey I’m handling it and he’s mine and if you interfere you’ll regret it.
“Well all right then,” Saul says. I hope you know what you’re doing, Saul’s eyes say.
Jesse doesn’t speak to either of them and eventually falls asleep on one of the beds, lying on his side facing the wall.
It’s getting late and Saul is sitting on his own bed across the tiny room and Walt is sitting on the edge of Jesse’s bed at his feet because there isn’t a third bed.
Saul starts talking about time travel when he really means to talk about regrets, and Walt calls him on his bullshit because he's so goddamn sick of people not just saying what they mean to say.
So they talk about regrets. Walt talks about Gray Matter but he looks at his watch and thinks about that moment in the desert when he’d almost handed Jesse over to be murdered by a gang of neo-nazis. He thinks that if he would’ve actually followed through with that, the regret would’ve crushed him. It was Jesse. No matter what he’d done, no matter how he’d screwed up, no matter how he’d betrayed Walt out of fear or guilt or some misguided moral impulse—it was Jesse. His Jesse. And Walt had almost—
Each tick of the watch sounds like an accusation. Jesse had trusted him. Jesse had been so incredibly loyal, at least until he found out about Walt poisoning Brock. Jesse had given him a six-thousand-dollar watch for his birthday. What has Walt given him lately? Lies. Manipulation. Almost a death sentence.
He can’t stand it all of a sudden.
Walt puts one hand on Jesse’s ankle to reassure himself that his partner is alive and really there next to him. It’s gentle enough not to wake Jesse but possessive enough to earn Walt a raised eyebrow from Saul.
Walt leaves his hand where it is.
He makes a silent promise that he will fix this. He’ll win Jesse’s loyalty and trust back somehow.
He’s lost everyone and everything else, he can’t lose Jesse too.
*
Five AM the next day, Ed comes down to tell Saul his new life is ready and it’s time to go.
Jesse is still sound asleep, passed out from exhaustion most likely. Walt’s shoulders and back are screaming at him—he slept sitting up on the end of Jesse’s bed with his back leaned against the wall.
His hand is still on Jesse’s ankle like it’s his tether to reality. Maybe it is.
Saul leaves.
With Saul gone, Walt could move to the other bed but he doesn’t.
Ed returns about an hour later to discuss options with Walt while Jesse still sleeps on.
Ed recommends splitting the two of them up and sending them to opposite ends of the country. From a completely objective standpoint, it's the smartest thing to do.
Walt flat-out refuses.
He tells Ed to do whatever’s necessary to keep the two of them together.
Ed has a lot of valid reasons as to why that's a bad idea. Walt ignores every single one of them.
"Yes I know it’s riskier, but it’s my money we’re paying you with and I’m asking for you to make this happen. Keep us together."
Ed makes it happen.
*
Walt halfway expects Jesse to yell and argue and refuse to go with him and maybe even throw a punch at him when Ed informs him of the plan later on that morning.
Jesse does none of that.
Jesse just looks from Ed to Walt with an almost betrayed expression, and asks in a quiet and resigned-sounding voice, "So, what, I don’t even get a say in this? What if I'd rather go by myself to, like, fucking Alaska or something?"
"Everything's already been arranged, Jesse," Walt tells him. "This is the plan. You’re coming with me and that's final."
Jesse looks down at the floor with a bitter and humorless smile, and doesn’t say another goddamned word to him.
Literally not another word—he's completely refusing to speak to Walt.
Jesse keeps up the silent treatment throughout all of their preparations to leave—he’ll speak to Ed but not to Walt, like he’s making some kind of a point. Like a rebellious teenager who thinks he's making a stand.
Even when Walt asks him a direct question or asks his opinion on something—nothing. Jesse refuses to talk to him.
It’s infuriating, but Walt tries to act unbothered. Clearly Jesse’s doing it to annoy him, so Walt tries not to let on that it’s working.
*
New Hampshire is cold and the cabin is tiny. Barely big enough to hold one person, let alone two and all of the baggage and tension between them. It’s almost nightfall by the time they arrive and start carrying in their supplies.
“There’s only one bed,” Jesse points out—to Ed of course, not to Walt—in a tone that manages to sound scandalized and resigned at the same time.
“Typically I only send one person up here but it was the best option available to get you two somewhere quickly. And as you can see there isn’t room for another bed.” Ed says, like that’s the end of it.
“Is there at least a fucking air mattress or something?”
“Indeed there is,” Ed answers.
“Thank god,” Jesse says under his breath.
Ed helps them carry in all of their supplies—food, bottled water in case the pipes freeze, clothes, some wood for the furnace—then he retrieves an ancient-looking cardboard box from the hall closet, which contains the folded up air mattress and a hand pump to inflate it.
“I’ll plan on being back up here around this time next month with more food and supplies,” Ed tells Walt on his way out the door. “Might be able to get my hands on some chemo for you by then.”
Jesse glances over at that but still doesn’t deign to speak to Walt.
“Thank you,” Walt tells Ed.
Ed nods. Leaves. Drives away.
It’s just Walt and Jesse and this tiny cabin now, and the snow. Endless snow outside. Nothing like the desert.
“I wasn’t lying about the cancer being back,” Walt tells Jesse.
He waits for Jesse to say good, to spew some kind of invective like Skyler had the night she’d told him she was waiting for the cancer to kill him.
But Jesse still stays silent.
Jesse drags the air mattress out of its box, unfolds it in a symphony of plastic creaks, then connects the manual pump and starts blowing it up without a word.
The air mattress is a smaller one, a twin size by the looks of it. The only place in the cabin with enough floor space for it—enough floor space that isn’t also right next to the drafty front door or too close to the wood-burning stove to actually be safe—is on the floor right next to the bed. So that’s where it goes.
*
The air mattress has a slow leak and deflates in the night. Walt wakes up to Jesse’s frustrated huffs of breath and the sound of him working the handheld air pump.
Walt doesn’t move to help, doesn’t offer to share the bed—he’ll hold onto that bargaining chip for now so that maybe he can use it to make Jesse speak to him again. He’ll wait for Jesse to silently hint at it, or for him to try to climb in and then Walt will tell him no, Jesse, if you want to share the bed you’ll have to say the words and ask me, something like that.
Jesse doesn’t ask, doesn’t even acknowledge him—he just tears two strips of duct tape off a roll that he must’ve found lying around, patches a big X over the leak when he finds it, and pumps the mattress back up.
It goes down again by morning—must have another leak hiding somewhere. Probably in one of the seams. Probably not fixable.
Jesse just sighs and pushes the flattened air mattress under Walt’s bed to get it out of the way. He throws his blankets on a chair.
He still doesn’t say a word to Walt.
*
The silent treatment can’t last forever, Walt tells himself the next day.
It doesn’t come naturally to Jesse, who’s normally loud and expressive and social. It has to be a constant taxing effort for Jesse to be this quiet and cold and to keep holding everything in, and he will break eventually. He’ll cave. He’ll talk to Walt, even if just to scream at him. Walt would welcome it, honestly.
Jesse doesn’t ignore him completely—that would be almost impossible in such a confined space—so Walt gets an occasional glare, and if he asks Jesse to put another log in the fire because he’s closer Jesse usually does it, but he still won’t talk to Walt.
Walt tries to trip him up and trick him into saying something, anything.
It never works.
“I meant to tell you, a car went through the carwash a couple weeks ago that looked just like that old Nova you used to have. Same shade of red and everything, just, completely identical,” Walt tries, knowing damn well that the car Jesse had before it got shot up when Tuco kidnapped them was a Monte Carlo, not a Nova. But Jesse doesn’t correct him, doesn’t say a word.
On another day he tries, “Who is that sings that one song, it’s like—lose yourself in the music, own the moment, something something—you know that song? It’s stuck in my head. Vanilla Ice or somebody, isn’t it?” He knows it’s Eminem only because Junior loves that song but Skyler hates Eminem with a passion and doesn’t like Junior listening to him. Walt knows he’s one of Jesse’s favorites too, and he’s waiting for Jesse to call him old and uncool and berate his knowledge of contemporary music. But it never happens. Jesse stays quiet, and Walt’s never been this disappointed over not being insulted before.
One day Walt gets extra pathetic and decides to fake a big sneeze every twenty minutes or so, hoping maybe Jesse will automatically say ‘bless you’ out of habit. It’s not what he really wants but it would be words, spoken by Jesse to Walt. It would be something. That doesn’t work either though, but after the seventh or eighth fake sneeze Jesse goes and digs a bottle of allergy pills out of the bathroom cabinet and pointedly sets them down next to Walt before going back to the other side of the cabin to finish watching his dvd in silence.
*
Being friendly and being pathetic to get Jesse to talk to him doesn’t work at all, and after a week of trying those tactics Walt feels like he’s losing his mind, and he’s pissed off enough to try being an asshole instead.
So he starts bitching at Jesse at every possible opportunity, but he tries not to make any of it too cruel—the end goal is still to reconcile with Jesse, after all. He just has to get him talking again first.
“We’re going to get ants if you keep letting plates sit in the sink with food on them,” Walt says upon noticing approximately ¼ of a teaspoon of instant mashed potatoes still clinging to the corner of Jesse’s empty plate one day. It’s too cold for ants here and Walt knows that—Jesse has to know that too, but he doesn’t snap back at him or call Walt on his bullshit. Walt hates it.
“Don’t drink straight out of the milk jug, Jesse, that’s unsanitary,” he says. Walt doesn’t actually care. Walt does it too sometimes, and he knows Jesse’s seen him do it. He hopes Jesse will call him out on the hypocrisy but he just ignores Walt and silently puts the milk back in the fridge when he’s done.
“Turn the volume down on that, it’s obnoxious,” Walt says while Jesse’s watching Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium for the tenth time. It isn’t loud at all, but Jesse turns the volume down anyway, without talking to or looking at Walt. Walt considers bitching about it again, but it’s down so low now that he can’t even hear it across the cabin. He sighs and gives up for the night.
“Quit leaving the caps open on the shampoo and body wash, Jesse, if something gets knocked over in the shower it’s going to spill out and go to waste.”
“Can’t you pump the mattress up quieter? Some of us are trying to sleep here.”
“You know, if you would just wash your dishes right after you use them the food wouldn’t get dried on and we wouldn’t have to waste so much water soaking everything before washing it.”
“You’re going to use up all of our milk way before Ed comes back if you keep eating cereal for dinner like a child.”
“You’ve been spending way too long in the shower, it’s going to overwork the water pump and then what are we going to do if it stops working?”
“Aren’t you going to eat some real food instead of that pre-packaged junk all the time?”
“Do you have to chew so loud?”
“Are you seriously watching that asinine movie again?”
And so on.
But three full days of the Be An Asshole routine produces no results other than leaving Walt more frustrated than ever, so he gives it up. Clearly it’s not working and if he keeps at it he’ll probably just end up making Jesse hate him even more, which is the opposite of his goal.
*
To finish off the last four days of their second week at the cabin—which is also Jesse’s second week of silence—Walt decides to try ignoring Jesse right back.
Not just by not talking though—Walt takes it a step further and pretends Jesse isn’t even there. Doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t talk to him. Stops making enough coffee and breakfast for two people so Jesse has to start making his own. Takes advantage of there being no lock on the bathroom door to casually barge in there to take a piss while Jesse’s in the shower. Walks out of his own showers completely naked and gets dressed beside the bed as if he’s the only one in the cabin. Things like that.
Walt thinks he catches a few glares from Jesse out of the corner of his eye now and then but he doesn’t look directly at him to check.
For the first two days, Walt thinks this might be what finally gets through Jesse’s stubborn streak and gets him to just talk to Walt. Maybe Walt was going about it all wrong at first, because by trying to get Jesse to talk to him by being nice or being an asshole, he was still giving Jesse plenty of attention and a one-way interaction. Cut that off, and maybe Jesse will get lonely or attention-starved enough to cut this shit out and talk to Walt.
But then Jesse starts pretending Walt isn’t there at all too.
Walt wants to scream, wants to grab him and shake him, wants to slap him in the face and force Jesse to stop ignoring him.
Walt doesn’t do any of those things. He keeps ignoring Jesse and he silently fumes, and he plots.
He starts considering doing something drastic—perhaps staging an injury, perhaps accidentally-on-purpose cutting one of his own fingers while making dinner. Something Jesse couldn’t ignore.
The only thing that stays Walt’s hand is the possibility that Jesse would ignore it anyway, the possibility that Jesse truly is so far past caring about Walt that he would ignore him as he bled and not make a single move to help him. That would hurt worse than the silence. It would hurt worse than the cut itself, he imagines.
*
There’s a routine at night, one which hasn’t varied much despite their shifting mind games with each other.
Walt always goes to bed first and takes the actual bed. Jesse’s sleep schedule is more sporadic but he’s usually at least two or three hours later than Walt—Walt knows this because the whoosh-and-clack sound of the handheld air pump inflating the mattress twice a night tends to wake him. Walt usually glances at the clock, ignores the noise, and goes back to sleep. Three to four hours later the noise of Jesse working the air pump wakes him up again, because that’s the amount of time it generally takes the air mattress to fully deflate again and for the discomfort to wake Jesse up. Another three to four hours later when it deflates a second time, Jesse just gets up for the day and shoves the air mattress under Walt’s bed.
Sometimes Walt sleeps through the middle-of-the-night re-inflation. Sometimes Jesse doesn’t wake up after the first deflation and spends the next day rubbing his back and wincing because he slept half the night essentially on the hard floor.
One night, early on in their third week at the cabin while they’re both still ignoring each other’s existence, something different wakes Walt up.
A slick repetitive sound of skin sliding on skin, hitched breath, the beginnings of a moan quickly stifled.
Walt knows exactly what he’s hearing after about five seconds of listening.
He listens for another thirty seconds or so, licks his lips, and considers touching his own cock to the sound of Jesse’s choked-back moans and whimpers. He decides against it—not because he doesn’t want to (he does), not because he isn’t attracted to Jesse (he always has been), but because this is too good of an opportunity to waste.
Clearly Jesse either thinks Walt is asleep, or he forgot Walt is there. He thinks he has privacy right now. He's horny and probably half-asleep and his guard is down and maybe Walt can at least shock him into swearing or yelling at him.
Walt licks his lips again, then says in an amused tone, “Really, Jesse?"
The sounds stop, and there’s a sharp inhale like a gasp from Jesse’s mattress on the floor. No words though.
Walt adds, "If you want to scandalize me, you’ll have to try harder than just masturbating next to me.”
Jesse still doesn’t say anything.
Walt realizes he’s broken his own no-speaking streak but that’s never really been his game anyway, it’s Jesse’s. Walt’s game is to get Jesse to speak to him by any means possible.
Jesse still doesn’t speak though. Doesn’t in any way acknowledge Walt.
A minute ticks by in silence. Walt waits patiently.
Jesse doesn’t say anything.
The slick sounds start up again.
Walt huffs out a laugh.
“Okay,” Walt says, deciding fuck it and sticking one hand down his pants to wrap around his own stirring cock. “You don’t mind if I join in, right? If you do, just say so,” Walt adds in an almost cruelly amused tone. It's a perfect opening for Jesse to hurl a homophobic slur at him, and Walt’s hoping he will.
But Jesse doesn’t say anything.
The slick sounds don’t stop. Walt adds his own slick sounds to them, pushing down his pajama pants and underwear to free his cock for better access.
He listens closely for the little half-moans and stifled whimpers Jesse can’t seem to hold in. They have Walt’s dick rock-hard in record time, and he wonders what Jesse would do if Walt joined him on the floor and got on top of him, if he pressed their lips together and pressed their cocks together, kissing him and jerking them both off at the same time. Jesse wouldn’t be able to ignore him then.
Instead of doing that, Walt strokes himself and listens to Jesse’s noises and waits until he thinks Jesse might be getting close.
Then, deliberately and with all the grace and subtlety of a bucket of ice water, Walt gives it one last try and asks breathlessly, “Who are we imagining right now—Andrea or Jane? Just want to make sure I’m on the same page with you here—”
The noises stop abruptly and then something soft and cloth-covered hits Walt in the face hard—Jesse’s pillow—and then there are angry footsteps stomping away, then the slam of the bathroom door.
Walt lets out a breathless laugh—finally, a fucking reaction. Still no words but something. It's a start.
Walt doesn’t move the pillow off of his face, doesn’t stop stroking his cock. He inhales deeply, stealing Jesse’s scent from the pillow and then biting into it as he comes.
*