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Jimmy was genuinely trying.
He was friendly to everyone else but with a dialled down charm so it wouldn’t come off like he was flirting with anyone and ruin his tentative protection, he did what the guards told him to do and was forcing back latching on to the older and condescending ones, he baked bread, he didn’t have hope for Kim coming to see him so that he could always be so happy when they told him he had a visitor, he was a minor free lawyer and gave as much advice as he could for getting parole.
But genuinely trying also meant having to do things he would have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into in the past.
Like therapy.
It was part of the good behaviour package. And he wanted to get out. It felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket here, safe from Lalo and his men, people who liked him or who they thought he was and Kim’s smile getting easier every time she visited. But she was helping him, using the connections that she hadn’t blown up to get him a shorter sentence, and he still so badly wanted to be good for her, provide for her, give her the life she deserved. Hold up his end, as it were.
After the desert, the second time, he’d kept having this recurring thought. He’d done something bad, and he was in the position that Chuck was in, handcuffed to the hospital bed and her having the epiphany that she could get away from him, committing him without a second thought. It made his chest tight and his face sweat and he could never tell her how scared he was.
And that was part of the problem. What if the therapist told everyone what he really was? Someone who didn’t even know who he really was, would rather blow up a trait of his personality and hide in there, someone who took from everyone he’d ever loved. Walter fucking White included.
He was almost grateful when the guards guided him into the dingy little room and told him to wait for whoever was seeing him. He’d always felt better when someone made it easy for him, when Chuck had made it so clear his main want was for Jimmy to stay in his place, bottom of the food chain in the mailroom and doing everything a wife did (except the obvious) at home. Maybe he should have stayed like that, it felt like running after a meth dealer was punishment for wriggling out back then.
“Mr Goodman?”
It took him a second to realize that’s who he would ever be here. Saul was at least more solid than whoever Jimmy McGill was, a slippery, tenuous collection of personality traits from everyone else. But he was trying to not give in again. For himself. For Kim. Even Chuck and Howard, though he assumed they had a right to be disappointed that he hadn’t put a bullet through his brain.
He gave the man an anxious smile. “Hi.” He was trying. God fuck, he was trying.