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Sunburn streaked either scruffy cheek like rouge. The sweat of a desert day soaked his sandy-brown hair, which was drying in rakish spikes and swirls on an improvised pillow of rags and curtains. A bead of saliva from his most recent convulsion clung stubbornly to the curve of his lower lip, glinting starrily in the moonlight. As he studied his partner’s visage from his crouched position on the RV floor, Walt was struck by the uncanny resemblance of Jesse’s still face with that of his son’s own.
In his younger years, Junior had struggled with excessive drooling—a byproduct of his condition. The neurologist had insisted this was normal and would likely subside with age as Junior strengthened his fine motor control through physical therapy, but Walt never took that pompous asshole’s conservative predictions lying down. After all, Junior wanted to be normal, and normality could not be quickly achieved through monthly—or, when they could afford it, weekly—therapy appointments. Walt had taken matters into his own hands by coaching Junior to keep his mouth closed whenever possible to avoid those embarrassing spills and instructing him to sleep on his back per the advice of an online cerebral palsy forum he’d browsed. The mouth-closing was easy to monitor, but keeping an eye on his sleeping position had been more challenging. He eventually resorted to peeking into Junior’s bedroom throughout the night, which had often revealed a sight similar to the one before him—rumpled hair, a saliva-stubbed lip. At the time, this observation invited frustration; now, Walt only felt a strange, disquieting pity.
He knew that Jesse was epileptic. This fact had been relayed to him by both an administrative email from the school nurse’s office listing the students with chronic illnesses or severe allergies and a crumpled-up doctor’s note from Jesse himself. The boy had shoved said note into Walt’s hand after showing up late to class—itself an unremarkable occurrence—and then gone to his desk to sulk. Shortly after this encounter, Jesse started wearing a dog tag that Walt would later identify as a medical ID after catching a glimpse of it while distributing graded midterms. These were concrete facts, empirical evidence. It was all far too elaborate to be a fabrication, and Jesse didn’t strike Walt as especially motivated to invent an entire neurological diagnosis, forged doctor’s note included, just to miss a few classes. Jesse needed no pretense to play hooky.
In spite of the neurology practice’s watermarked letterhead and the nurse’s email and the dog tag, Walt had never truly believed him. Jesse was clearly fine, if not incurably lazy and maybe saddled with some kind of attention deficit disorder judging by the many doodles he’d carved into his plasticine desktop during the semester. Junior had never used his cerebral palsy as an excuse to slack on his schoolwork or fall behind his peers: he was living proof that disability was in no way a barrier to success. The problem with Jesse was psychological, not neurological.
Reuniting with his former student and embarking on what could generously be called a business venture and realistically be called an illegal downward spiral had done nothing to disabuse Walt of this conviction. He hadn’t even remembered the purported epilepsy until noticing the same dog tag slung around Jesse’s neck, half-buried under the ridiculous amount of layers he insisted on wearing. The boy was still just as defiant and distractible as he’d been in high school—fixed personality traits. Some people simply didn’t have any urge to improve their lot in life, and Jesse Pinkman was one of them.
The epilepsy should have never been a problem. Jesse was a business partner—in name only—not his student and definitely not his son; Walt had no obligation to keep tabs on his physical wellbeing . He rarely acknowledged Jesse’s occasional breaks from cooking to wash down a few pills with a swig of beer or Mountain Dew once Walt had confirmed these weren’t recreational drugs. The last thing Walt needed was his already incompetent assistant mixing chemicals while tripping. Incorporating epilepsy into his well-established perception of Jesse was irrelevant, a fool’s errand.
That was until their marathon cook deteriorated into a living nightmare after Jesse—ever the genius of this twisted operation—drained the RV battery, stranding them in a desolate stretch of New Mexican desert. He had even wasted their reserve of drinking water in the process as the cherry on top of this display of sheer stupidity. Before Walt could snap and finally strangle Jesse for getting them into this mess, the kid had dropped like a stiff, elicited a sound eerily similar to the choked cry he’d coughed up when Tuco pressed a gun against his head back at that hell house, and began to convulse in the sun-scorched sand. It was at this point that his epilepsy became impossible to ignore.
Jesse stirred slightly from his place across the RV’s narrow cabin. Walt tensed, anticipating yet another seizure, but the boy merely relaxed with a hoarse sigh. Like he’d done with Junior years before, Walt had forced Jesse into a specific sleeping arrangement and laid him on his side. Seizures also produced an excessive amount of drool, which could easily be aspirated during the postictal period when the faculties were still scrambled. A convulsing Jesse was stressful, but a dead Jesse was more than Walt could presently handle.
Walt had been briefly certain during the first seizure that Jesse was going to die. This in itself wasn’t an unfamiliar realization—Jesse had managed to land himself in multiple near-fatal situations in their short tenure as full-time drug dealers that he escaped only by the skin of his teeth—but those experiences had been thoroughly steeped in panic and concern for the safety of his family and himself. The empty, sunbaked plains had provided no distraction from the disaster at hand, no immediate danger to rescue them from with his intellect. Jesse was being assaulted by a force neither of them could directly confront, and if the violence of his convulsions was any indication, he was fighting a losing battle. He had seemed horribly small then, zinc-brittle under all those layers. For a long, crazed moment, Walt had watched his partner seize in the sand and wondered how easy it would be to bury such a small, breakable body.
Of course, Jesse hadn’t died, which was ostensibly a good thing. However, he had been incapacitated for the remainder of the day by recurring seizures and the febrile exhaustion left in their wake. A search through the kid’s backpack had revealed none of the medication that Walt had previously ignored; the empty Ziplock bag he discovered suggested Jesse had recently run out. All Walt could do was build an impromptu mattress out of available materials, roll Jesse onto his side, and continue drip-charging the RV battery so they could get the hell out of here.
Cranking the battery hadn’t exactly yielded encouraging results. The engine was still dead, and he’d been unable to resuscitate the vehicle’s air-conditioning or heat despite hours of bicep-cramping labor. The latter was especially dire since the unforgiving sun had finally dove beneath the horizon, replaced by a cuticle of moon. Its icy glow weakly illuminated the RV’s interior and crystallized Walt’s every exhalation as he shredded his breath through chattering teeth. To borrow from his partner’s lexicon, it was cold as a fucking bitch in here.
Jesse was probably cold too now that the perspiration lathering his skin had dried. Walt had covered him with his coat and their cooking aprons, but neither were thick enough to provide sufficient warmth. In spite of the indisputable fact that Jesse was not his responsibility in any sense of the word, some paternal part of Walt curdled at the notion of his slumber being disturbed by the piercing chill. The kid had done his share of suffering today.
The whirlpool of his thoughts spit out an unwanted memory—a tributary of blood dribbling from the corner of Jesse’s mouth. He’d bitten his tongue during one of his afternoon seizures; frothy roses bloomed along his lips before the convulsions had even abated. Although the wound was entirely superficial and Jesse had been as fine as one could be under his circumstances, the mental image sank his heart like a well-bound coin. Jesse wasn’t his problem, but that didn’t mean Walt wanted to see the kid hurt.
The epilepsy should have never been a problem. Then again, the arrangement with Tuco and Walt's connection to the DEA should have never been a problem; Walt was quickly learning that the art of cooking and distributing meth was itself one massive problem. An issue with Jesse was inevitably going to become an issue with Walt—and vice versa. For all of his adolescent rebellion and churlishness, Jesse had only ever been respectful of Walt’s cancer. He never commented on the coughing fits or chemo brain fog aside from a few snarky comments at the very beginning of their collaboration. Jesse had integrated cancer into his perception of Walt with uncharacteristic grace, a kindness that Walt had never reciprocated.
Walt had lung cancer. Junior had cerebral palsy. Jesse had epilepsy, whether Walt chose to believe it or not—and Walt had no choice but to believe it.
Groaning softly, Jesse shifted on his makeshift palette and made an unconscious attempt to flip onto his back. Walt instinctively shot his hand out to grab the boy’s shoulder, preventing the transition. Should Walt doze off and sleep through another one of Jesse’s seizures, the kid could easily bite his tongue again or produce enough saliva— “remember, keep your mouth closed, son”— to drown in his own secretions.
“Nghh… G’off, man,” Jesse mumbled.
“Just relax,” Walt said, his fingertips tensed against Jesse’s prominent clavicle. The chain of his dog tag winked up at him in the moonlight before slipping back under the collar of Jesse's shirt. “Just relax, son. You’re fine.”
The boy was too enervated to mount a proper defense. Within seconds, he wilted and plummeted back down into the trench of his ocean-deep sleep, where Walt hoped he was insulated from the discomfort of their current arrangement. Jesse deserved a little rest.
Once Walt was certain that Jesse was settled, he reclined against the bank of cabinets with a weary sigh. This was not at all a sustainable situation. If a particularly vicious seizure didn’t claim Jesse, dehydration or exposure would get the job done. He couldn’t very well abandon the kid and attempt trekking across the desert himself: such a foolish undertaking would only doom them both. Foisting the onus of their survival onto someone else wasn’t an option, no more than passing the buck on Jesse’s wellbeing was possible.
Today had been an enlightening experience for Walt in many ways, most notably for alerting him to the actuality that he actively wanted Jesse to live. Whether this desire was motivated by genuine concern or purely selfish in nature was unclear, but the fact remained that he cared for Jesse’s wellbeing. He would hound him about keeping enough pills on him to prevent a disaster of this caliber and resume his campaign to get the kid off hard drugs (meth certainly wasn’t helping him manage his condition). Walt had invested in Jesse once before during his desperate efforts to get the kid to just apply himself to his schoolwork, and could certainly do it again with much more at stake than a failing grade. After all, he had played a major role in accelerating Junior’s progress and bringing him closer to normality: who was to say that Walt couldn’t replicate those results? Maybe Jesse wasn’t interested in improving his lot in life, but Walt had skin in the game now and a newfound duty to dig his partner out of the pits of his disability.
That journey would begin tomorrow. No matter what weather or woe awaited them, Walt resolved to rescue them from this catastrophe. If he could blindside a crew of Tuco’s thugs with a mere handful of mercury fulminate and escape his kidnapping attempt mostly unscathed, he could absolutely restart a mass-produced RV engine. This success would be the first of many in his plan to extricate Jesse from the saliva-soaked, smoky mess that was his life. Walt was going to fix this—all of it.
“Don’t worry, son,” Walt whispered into the promising darkness. “I’ll do this myself.”