Work Text:
He stands there and listens to her pack because if he doesn’t watch her leave him with his own eyes then he doubts he will ever believe it. She leaves the bedroom - their bedroom - and pauses by the door. She already has her shoes on.
“Jimmy-”
Nothing is moving in the room but he can still hear the gunshot ripping through Howard’s skull over the sound of packing tape. Once or twice he thinks he can hear Kim sniffle but she was never comfortable with crying in front of him so he pretends otherwise. To distract himself from the emotion flooding his lungs, he tries to work out if there is a magical combination of words that will make her stay but he knows better. Someone needs to save them and she is always the stronger of them.
“-I’m always going to love you-”
He just wishes he could breathe.
“-but-”
He walks out eventually. On her third, maybe fourth trip to her car. Every step carrying him further into the sea. He lies on the couch in his office until Francesca arrives. And then a new day begins.
When Chuck died he jettisoned every reminder, treated it as though it mattered as much to him as he had to his own brother. Jimmy McGill survived but as something hardened. He began playing make believe with a character of his own creation, someone who was the antithesis of everything Charles L. McGill ever stood for. The law was something to be toyed with, exploited. Played with before devouring.
He can’t do that with her as she has sunk through his skin and into his DNA. So he names a company after her dad’s favourite movie and keeps the painting she bought with her first HHM paycheck as a lawyer to try and keep her with him. Around him their entire history is erased, as though the desert is reclaiming the land that was stolen from it piece by piece. The office they met in, the office they owned… He has no idea what happened to the home they shared. Jimmy McGill was killed there, in the same spot as Howard Hamlin, but no one came to clean up the blood splatter that time. He dreads driving past and seeing the stains.
“-if I don’t - if we don’t-”
Mike’s knowing looks are too much but he thankfully never says anything. His taciturn nature for once being what he needs because there is nothing sad about the clown he becomes. He serves a purpose and, above all, serves himself. He lets the anger mould him until there’s nothing left. He’s glib, heartless and tacky and with every inappropriate joke, he hopes Chuck can hear him down there, hopes he is screaming against the injustice of it all over the hail of machine gun fire and cackling laughter.
“-If this doesn’t scare you, I just-”
No one mentions the names McGill or HHM or Wexler anymore. They only exist on paperwork and plaques in libraries, forgotten newspaper articles and empty graves. It all becomes the scorched earth of his past and, at times, it feels as though he is the only one it happened to. On the rare occasion that he’s alone, he finds himself screaming that it happened, it all happened. They existed. She had loved him and he had loved her, oh how he had loved her. They are an essential part of the city, of its history, from the towering offices to the just visible underworld. They cover it all, their initials forever interlinked and scrawled across the city.
“You made me so… You made me the happiest I have ever been, but-”
So he plasters his face over every surface he can across a town she no longer lives in. The world may have forgotten them but she won’t forget him, he won’t let her. She needs to know he is still there. He is still there and when she forgives herself - and if she ever forgives him for what he has become - then he is still there.
“-I can’t - I don’t-”
He is still there and he loves her just as much as she had loved him in a time when all they had was the other and that had been enough. When gambling on them felt like the smart thing to do. When a shared cigarette felt life changing. When love was a word too small for what they had.
“I can’t stay.”
One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other, he thinks as he grabs his keys, shedding what is left of his skin and leaves everything behind.