Work Text:
The list so far said:
twin sheets
pillow
blanket
He had the sleeping arrangements accounted for, then.
Walt took up the pen again and added, clothes that fit him. He had no idea what size Jesse wore, and since any phone call to him lately mostly netted long, blank silences, he didn’t think Jesse himself would be much help; he would have to approximate from the clothes left in Jesse’s apartment, the ones that were all two or three sizes too big. He wanted Jesse to look like a grown-up, someone sensible. This was a new start for both of them. If he could put enough capital behind Jesse—or if Jesse, whose share of the deal with Gus was still untouched, could put enough behind himself—then Jesse actually had a chance at having a new life. It was all about money and presentation, and he planned to tell Jesse so, as soon as Jesse’s eyes started looking remotely human again.
twin sheets
pillow
blanket
clothes that fit him
He would need food, too. He had seen enough of what Jesse ate to know that no one could hope to feed Jesse Pinkman out of an ordinarily-stocked fridge. He would have to draw a line, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a few packages of powdered-sugar donuts and some Funyuns. Bologna. Those crackers that looked like goldfish. He would allow Jesse to wreck his cholesterol and potential for avoiding type two diabetes if Jesse would just—fucking—talk to him. Smile. Something.
What he had done, he had done for Jesse. He could imagine saying that, but he could not imagine the response that he would get—it was a confession that he could never make. One more confession that he could never make. Something unidentifiable burned in his stomach, in his chest: he had tried—twice! twice!—to wake Jesse, and Jesse hadn’t woken up, just flopped fish-like at the end of his hand, or, eyes slits, glassy as marbles, mumble at him, mush-mouthed. If Walt had nightmares, he had them of Jesse in the crack house, next to degenerates, completely unsafe, not about Jane Margolis. Not about Wayfarer 515. He took the responsibility that was his—that was what people did, that was when men did—they handled what was theirs. Jesse was his. His responsibility.
And he would provide for him.
twin sheets
pillow
blanket
clothes that fit him
junk food
He wondered if Jesse ate his sandwiches with the crusts off.
*
After he had taken Jesse out of the crack house, where empty vials had crunched like hard candy underneath his shoes, he had stretched Jesse out in the backseat of the car. High, heartbroken, Jesse was frighteningly malleable. He tucked his legs up onto the seat and curled in on himself, like a child. He was better off now. He was better off. Better to be red-faced with crying and sick with guilt than stretched out in his bed with poison running through his veins, not waking, or—or choking on his own vomit, the muscles in his throat standing out like cords as he struggled to breathe. Walt found a blanket for him in the trunk—bright fleece—and put it over him. Jesse’s hands scrabbled at the underside of it, puffing it out, making it billow, and Walt realized that he was trying, in some half-hearted way, to tuck it in around himself, and since that was more than Jesse had tried to do for himself since Walt had found him again, he helped him with it.
“Here,” he said, lifting Jesse’s feet and sliding a fold of blanket underneath it. “Snug as a bug in a rug. There you go.” He was talking to Jesse like Jesse was a child, Walter Jr. sick with the flu in second grade and shivering constantly, his skin like banked coals. (Walt had brought him banana popsicles from the store, and cold washcloths, and a variety of thermometers, because he didn’t trust the accuracy of the one they had always kept, since it had set in a plastic cup in the bathroom collecting dust for God knew how long.) “Go to sleep.”
Jesse closed his eyes, but his mouth was still a tight, rigid line. Not sleep, only obedience.
Walt would take it. He patted Jesse’s ankle and went back up front with Mike, who glanced at him with an unreadable, granite-like expression on his face. Walt wanted to ask him what the fuck he thought he was looking at. Instead, he clenched his hand around his knees.
“Where do you want to take him?” Mike asked softly.
He didn’t know. When his fourth and most agitated voicemail message to Jesse had gone unacknowledged, his only thought had been to find him: he’d had visions of Jesse with the back of his head blown off on some street corner. Jesse with a latex tourniquet still looped around one arm, a needle dangling from the crook of his elbow, his mouth blissed-out, his eyes empty, gone. Then, when Mike had located him, his only thought had been where Jesse wasn’t going to be. He’d had no contingency plan. Now, looking at Jesse in the backseat, curled up in that determined fake-sleep, he still didn’t know. All he could do was eliminate options.
Not back to his apartment. That would kill him.
He could check Jesse into a motel somewhere. A mini-fridge. Room service. Pay-per-view pornography.
“I would suggest,” Mike said, “a facility I’m familiar with.” He handed Walt a card.
Walt stared at it blankly until it resolved itself into information about a drug rehabilitation center somewhere outside of town. He looked back at Jesse again, at the beads of sweat that had gathered along his hairline, and he touched the front of his shirt, still a little damp from Jesse’s tears. Rehabilitation. That was something they all needed, wasn’t it? “Fine,” he said. “Jesse? Fine?”
Jesse didn’t say anything.
“Saul Goodman can arrange for funds to be transferred to cover any expenses,” Mike said. “From Pinkman’s share.”
“No,” Walt said, so harshly it felt like the words scoured his tongue on their way out of his mouth. “No, I’ll take care of it. Of him,” and he hoped that Jesse was awake enough to hear that, to know that, but there was no movement or noise from the backseat, and Mike didn’t even flinch, just looked at him with that same cool gray stare.
“It’ll cost extra,” he said, “to get him in so late. To jump the waiting list.”
“Everything costs,” Walt said, and Mike started the car, and they drove.
*
twin sheets
pillow
blanket
clothes that fit him
junk food
his money
It wasn’t, he realized, a shopping list, or a list of reminders. It was a list of things that he could give Jesse Pinkman.
twin sheets
pillow
blanket
clothes that fit him
junk food
his money
his sobriety
a place to sleep (temporary)
There was a limit to what he could provide Jesse. The list of the things he couldn’t give was longer. What he had to do, he supposed, was hope that this would be enough—that whatever happened, whatever truths came out, he could take out this list and look Jesse in the eye, and say, “I did all this for you,” and not have Jesse laugh at him. Not have him crumple up the paper and throw it back in Walt’s face, like all the provision meant nothing.
He wanted one person to be grateful to him. One person in his life to know what Walt had done, and sacrificed, and goddamn appreciate it.
Except what he had done for Jesse was, ultimately, as unmentionable as what he had done for Skyler, for his son, for his daughter, and just look at how well that had turned out, in the end, when Skyler knew. Still. Appreciated or not, understood or not, forgiven or not, he knew what he could do, and not do, for the sake of what was his. He knew what he could give.
And everything cost.
He added to the list:
silence