Work Text:
Sometimes you meet people in odd places. It’s a funny story, a strange coincidence. Like, Oh, I didn’t expect to see you here in the security line at the airport! Or, Oh, what are you doing here at the art gallery, is it a bank holiday? You meet people you haven’t seen in days or weeks or months in the oddest of places and sometimes that’s called fate by the same people who say things like cancer and hurricanes “happen for a reason.” Lydia used to know lots of those kinds of people. How they got into middle or upper management was an eternal quandary that only their own platitudes could ever adequately explain. The world is full of coincidences, funny things, and luck. She’s spent years boiling it down to this: usually, if you work hard enough, are smart enough, you get lucky. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just get fucked.
She didn’t realize it at first. That’s how those kinds of things usually go. You get trapped in a false sense of security doing logistics for a transnational plastics corporation operating in Eastern Europe and Western Asia with a special focus on the Transcaucasian Region while focusing, on the side, on the heroin business and then suddenly things come back to haunt you. Well. This may be too specific to generalize to an unspoken “you.” It’s the situation Lydia finds herself in now.
Jesse Pinkman looks nothing like he did. And he’s not going by that name. When she meets him at a board meeting she meets him as Joseph, a partner’s assistant, and his hair is styled in the popular fashion, his face wind worn and scarred. He looks like he could be anyone’s help. She feels his eyes on her through the meeting and assumes the worst. He wouldn’t be the first terrifying younger man with an interest. She doesn’t even know it’s him until afterwards, after he approaches her in the hallway on the way to the elevator and says, “Hey, I know you.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” she says. Her feet on the floor make a familiar rhythm. Her heartbeat as fast as her steps. There is only one window in this hallway. Goddam brutalist post-soviet architecture.
“No. I do. From America.”
“I’ve never been to America.”
“Oh yeah? You speak English pretty fuckin’ well for someone who’s never been to America.”
“Remarkably, English is a global language.” She looks over her shoulder. Thank god. Alexander, the head of distribution, is fast approaching. He’s as solid as a cement highway and full of that particular breed of sexism that dresses itself up pretty and calls itself chivalry.
Joseph says, “No. I know you. You know me. Or you should.” He pushes into the elevator with her and Alexander. Seven floors to the bottom, 17.3 meters to the front door, 3.2 kilometers to her apartment, six floors to her apartment. That should take an hour at most if she walks, usually. But there’s this man, now, so it may be time to take a cab. Joseph is still speaking to her. Now, his hand on her shoulder, his mouth near her ear. She feels like she could puke so violently that the lining of her throat would fall off, pour out from her teeth. “I’m Jesse,” Joseph says, “From New Mexico. You know.”
Yes. She does. Why he’s telling her his beyond her. It certainly doesn’t look like he’s turned his life around at all, so he can’t be here to moralize to her. Her skin feels cold. Under her blazer her back has turned to a sheet of ice. He doesn’t have the upper hand. So he’s here to kill her. “I’m sure I don’t,” she says again. “Who do you work for?”
“David.”
“Ah. Yes.” The American contact. Of course. “You’re from New Mexico then? I hope you have a nice time here. Prague is a lovely city.” She pushes her elbow into his diaphragm and exits the elevator in a flurry of dark burgundy blazer.
There’s very little time to relax. There has been very little time to relax. It’s been a strange six years. Between recovering from poisoning, moving continents, learning a new language, finding the right school for Kiira, setting up a heroin distribution ring under a front company and convincing half the people she used to know that she had died, there’s been little time to think. But memory is memory. Like riding a bike or whatever that saying is.
Her most vivid memories are of times she’s almost died and it’s just Jesse’s luck that he features heavily in one of those times. Not that it makes him special. There are a few recurring characters, of course, but for the most part her memories are full of people like Jesse. Just men who happened to be there at a particular time and place, never to be seen again. The world is full of violent, transient men. But what he’s doing here, in Europe….
She wants to spend all of her energy on thinking about how not to think about it, but he’s not giving her much of a choice. Because he’s here, in her living room. When a man shows up with a gun, you don’t tell him not to have tea with you. “No milk,” he says, when she brings the tea tray out. “Please.”
Ah. So somewhere in there are some manners. How nice. What would be nicer is if he would point the gun away from her. But you can’t get everything you want, after all, or what would there be to want? “No milk,” she repeats, and pours him a cup of tea, gives him a candied lemon peel for sweetener. Takes no sugar of any kind in her own. She’s learned her lesson. Over and over. Every white paper sugar packet in every restaurant, she learns her lesson. The last time she saw a doctor, there was some discussion of “dehydration” and she did not tell the doctor that dehydration was a small price to pay for your life, because the doctor would have asked why her life was at risk. It’s impossible to explain to these people. Every time she puts a ceramic mug to her lips, she is almost dying again and again. It’s so much easier to explain a man with a gun.
“Look, I don’t want to shoot you, okay? I just want to talk.”
“Don’t shoot me, then. Don’t even let it be a potential.”
He has bright blue eyes and that in itself is a problem. She remembers watching him fight for her, how bright his eyes were, then, too. He is an inescapable beacon, a spotlight that’s finally found her on the run. “Okay,” he says, and puts the gun away in his coat pocket.
Really? He just… puts the gun away? She is so dumbfounded all she can say is, “Thank you.” There is a silence between them, large enough to fill up the intentional blank space created by her minimalist decor. “What did you want to talk about?”
“You fucked me over. Hard. You know that?”
“Sincere apologies. We were all in a bad place. You seem like you’ve manage to make something out of yourself though. Congratulations. I’m glad you didn’t die in prison. That would have been unfortunate. Feel free to show yourself out.” The words rush to be first out of her mouth as she sits perfectly still.
Jesse actually seems overwhelmed by this. He frowns and starts to try to reply when the door open. It’s 15:00 on a Saturday, which means that Kiira is back from tennis lessons. In her child’s tracksuit, Kiira looks smaller than the average 11 year old. She has small hands and wide eyes, long hair a shade lighter than her mother’s. She speaks Czech first. “Hi.”
“English, sweetheart,” Lydia says softly.
“Hi,” Jesse says, looking like he’s just witnessed something baffling and impossible.
“I’m Kirra,” the girl says, taking her shoes off. “Nice to meet you.”
“This is Joseph,” Lydia says, her voice strained. “He’s a business associate. We’re talking about business. Go to your room, dear.”
Kiira nods. Takes her tennis racket and disappears down the hall.
“I didn’t realize you had a kid,” Jesse looks at his tea.
“Yes.” Lydia folds her hands in her lap. “Why do you think Mike let me live? My daughter and his granddaughter…”
“Yeah. Well.”
“Yes.” Her own teacup is made of glass and undecorated. She takes a long sip. From the living room window, the river is visible. Not close enough to throw herself in, but close enough to remind her that it’s an option. She can always strike first if she needs to.
Jesse fidgets with his teacup before saying, “So, you know, I wanted to talk to you. Does your daughter know what you do for a living?”
“Yes, of course. Partially. What kind of person do you think I am? That I would tell my daughter the less savory details?” Her voice is very quiet. These old walls aren’t as thick as the realtor told her they were.
“Does she know you sold a guy out to Nazis? I bet that wouldn’t go over great here.”
“Please. Does the FBI know where you are? What are you doing in Europe anyway?”
“There were a lot of mitigating factors in my sentencing, okay?”
That would only make sense, Lydia reasons. After all, Jesse did rat. Do his new bosses know that? They can’t. He wouldn’t be working if they did. So maybe she sold him out to Nazis once, but he’s a rat. There’s fodder here, if she needs it. And she always anticipates needing it.
“I’m sure.”
“Look, we’re going to be working together so I just thought we should, you know, be on the same page about things and-”
“I’m sorry, what?”
Jesse snorts, “Yeah. What, you think I’m just here to visit? Come on. My CV has, like, five pages of my industry experience if you know what I mean. It’s not like I went to prison and cleaned up and converted and all that shit. Do you know anyone who has?”
“I guess not.” She doesn’t ask who wrote his letters of recommendation.
“So I want an apology.”
“That’s all?”
Jesse frowns. “It’s not a small thing. I want you to apologize to me. You know, admit you fucked up.”
Poor idiot. Doesn’t he know that’s the easiest thing in the world to do? Guilt and the admission of it are second nature. Just because she rarely publicly apologizes for anything doesn’t mean she isn’t capable. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
He meets her eyes. She never knew him when he was young, but it’s easy enough to imagine a handsome young man with too much fast-burning potential. Now, he looks weathered and brutal. She thinks of Mike, of Gus, of all the men she’s allowed to touch her and all the one’s who have touched her despite forbidding it. They have been one of two types. Polished glass or scoured rock. Jesse is certainly the latter and she doubts he was ever the former.
She continues, “You probably don’t belong in this line of work anymore. And I’m sorry for that.”
“You make that sound like a threat.”
“Not now.” Her heart pounds furiously. She can feel her pulse in her wrists, her ears, her ankles. “We’ll see how business plans out.”
“Jesus Christ. I come to ask for an apology and you threaten me? What the fuck.” It’s not a question.
“I am sorry. I’m sorry I sold you out. And I’m sorry that if I need to protect my daughter that I’ll do it again.” She pauses, sips her tea again, bites against the glass slightly. “No. I’m not sorry about the last part.”
Jesse stands. “Okay. Fine. I guess we’ll see how things go at work.” He doesn’t reach for his gun. He never took his shoes off so he doesn’t put them back on now.
“There’s no reason we can’t be friends,” Lydia says, not moving, still. If she stays motionless, nothing will harm her. “I am sorry, after all. And it looks like we’ll need each other.”
“I fucking hope not.”
When he’s gone, she can finally exhale. Finally cry. Kiira does not come out of her room. She knows better than that. Sometimes her mother cries. Sometimes there are strange men in the apartment and sometimes they have guns, even when she knows her mother doesn't think she can see them. That’s just how it goes.
Just like sometimes you have a workplace shakeup, an office re-organization, and you get new co-workers. And sometimes you have a history with them but the professional thing to do is to focus on the task at hand. Lydia has made her own luck before. It shouldn’t be impossible to do it again. No matter how deeply she feels his eyes burning into her, no matter how much she now only tastes the hot dust of New Mexico in the lukewarm liquid of her tea.