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Mr. White was dead.
Jesse was on the run, crashing at a campground, and he was in the laundry room when he first heard the news. Or maybe “on the run” isn’t even the right word. Back then he wasn’t sure if the cops were after him or not. The car radio on Todd’s El Camino was busted, so there was no news, no clue whether he should be laying low or just driving. (The radio’s still not working.) Later he would learn they’d slapped an arrest warrant on him too. He should have guessed. His fingerprints, his DNA—all over Jack’s compound. And with that rap sheet of his, it was only a matter of time before the cops caught on.
But at the time, Jesse’s only thought was survival. He’d barely escaped with his life, adrenaline still pounding, and he was just trying to keep breathing. Looking back, the routes he drove make no sense. He checked into a national park campsite like some regular tourist, bold as anything. Lucky for him, Todd’s car had plenty of cash stashed inside. The lady at the desk didn’t care about his greasy hair, his beard, his filthy clothes, or the cuts on his face. She was a bored middle‑aged clerk, always chewing rice crackers between words. She probably figured he was some kind of hillbilly or hippie. Not far off. Payment was upfront.
The laundry room was a log‑cabin‑style lodge, resin sticky on the walls, cobwebs in the corners. Rows of coin‑operated washers and dryers lined the space, with a bench in the middle. An old TV sat there too, for people waiting on their loads. Off‑season meant the campground was nearly empty, and the laundry room even more so.
Jesse didn’t have a quarter when he first rolled in. Sure, the chick at reception could’ve probably changed some cash for him if he’d bothered, but he wasn’t about to risk another face-to-face. He sighed, rubbed his face, sat down on the bench. After a while he got up, flicked on the TV, and sat back down.
Five minutes of local news rolled by before the broadcast cut to a breaking national report. Mr. White. Walter H. White, wanted for mass production and distribution of methamphetamine, had finally been tracked down. Dead. On the property of a white‑supremacist group in northern Albuquerque—Jack’s crew. They didn’t dish out many details, and for the time being, Jesse wasn’t even mentioned.
His pulse spiked, fast and violent, ears ringing, head swimming. When Mr. White’s face flashed on the screen—a blown‑up photo from his last year teaching, a faculty group shot—Jesse’s chest seized like claws digging in. He couldn’t breathe. Tears spilled before he could stop them. Alone in the middle of the laundry room, Jesse muffled his sobs, crying like an idiot. He’d known Mr. White was dying back then. He’d thought it was better if he did. He’d even wanted the fucker to die alone. Jesse hadn’t pulled that trigger at the end because he didn't want to give him that mercy. Because even then, Mr. White had been trying to work him, make it seem like Jesse wanted it that way. Jesse wasn’t gonna give him that. He’d thought, serves you right.
But maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe he’d just chickened out. He couldn't have killed Walter White with his own hands and face it. Maybe he was just a coward.
Either way, finding out Mr. White was dead like this felt so fucking wrong.
When the sobs finally eased, Jesse rose slowly and left the room, the TV still blaring behind him. Once the shock faded, anger bubbled up from deep inside. Anger at Mr. White, who wrecked his life and even in death keeps twisting his emotions. Or maybe anger at himself, for letting it happen. Probably more the latter.
Jesse hated Walt. He hated Mr. White. He thought back to that last moment—when their eyes had met, when they’d nodded at each other—and wondered what the hell that feeling had been. That strange, fleeting sense of freedom, like he’d forgiven him, like they’d understood each other. ‘Cause right then he sure as hell didn’t feel like he forgave him at all. He couldn’t forget Mr. White either. The man clung to him like a heavy, greasy film that wouldn’t wash off.
For a while Jesse lived at the campsite, then drifted from place to place, hiding as best he could. He barely spoke to anyone except when buying groceries. Maybe people half‑believed he’s dead, because the cops weren't chasing him hard. He pulled up his hood, tried to blend into crowds at big box stores. What drove him nuts was the crabs they’d given him when he was locked up. Itched like hell. Having to hit up a pharmacy to buy meds for them was embarrassing to say the least. Back at the motel, he shaved his own pubes raw in the bathroom and poured the treatment over. He cried, sobbing, furious.
He didn’t count his money, didn’t care when it would run out. He was hiding, sure, but he half-expected to get busted at any minute. Half of him thought it wouldn’t matter. Hell, it’s a miracle he hadn’t been cuffed already. He was just done with it all and couldn’t give a damn.
And maybe that was why Jesse started using ice. Well. He’d been shot up with it as a “reward” —in Todd’s words—during captivity, so technically he just never stopped doing it. And of course Todd’s car was loaded with their product. Free meth, basically. Enough to last forever. He could shoot up whenever he wanted. His own meth, made by his own hands. And it was top-shelf. He started using every chance he got.
When he wasn’t on a fix, reality blurred; Jesse felt like a ghost, going through the motions on auto-pilot. But when he hit that high, his senses fired up so damn sharp he finally felt alive.
He hated Mr. White. He wanted to see him again, too.
Days blurred like that until the visions started. Not that Jesse realized they’re visions at first. He shot up meth at home, sat still for a while, and then Mr. White’s ghost appeared. Clear as day. He looked exactly like he did when he was still breathing. Standing by the window, staring at Jesse with that heavy, troubled look, like he wanted to say something. Jesse yelled, bolting to his feet, shouted at him to get the fuck out, screamed all kinds of things. But the ghost didn’t answer. Just stood there. Jesse panicked, threw whatever’s at hand—bottles, ashtrays, anything—smashing them against the wall. Still Mr. White didn’t flinch, didn't leave. Terrified, Jesse curled up on the floor, burying his head in his knees, shaking as he did his best not to look his old partner’s way.
When the high faded, Mr. White was gone. Jesse stared at the shards of glass scattered across the floor. He wasn’t crazy, he knew it wasn’t actually a ghost, just a hallucination, like objectively speaking. His joints creaked as he forced himself upright, cleaning up the mess.
That trip totally creeped him out, but after a while, he wanted it again. He wanted to see Mr. White. Desperately. He didn’t know why.
That evening, like always, Jesse was smoking ice when he heard a voice behind him. Calling his name. Jesse.
He turned—and Mr. White was there. Not just standing like last time, but lounging on the couch like it was the most normal fucking thing in the world. Jesse pulled the pipe from his mouth, exhaled a slow cloud, and looked at him calmly. Mr. White was wearing that burgundy dress shirt and those chinos Jesse remembered too well.
“Yo,” Jesse said.
Mr. White gave him the faintest smile.
They didn’t say another word that day, just sat there in silence until Jesse eventually fell asleep. When he woke up, Mr. White was gone.
The next day, Jesse saw him again. This time they actually talked—or something close to it. Mr. White asked how he’d been doing lately. Jesse answered like it was all normal. It had been a long time since he’d spoken to anyone. They even chatted about the news on TV and other everyday crap. For a while, it really felt like he was talking to Mr. White again, and a weird sense of calm washed over him.
After that, every time Jesse used, Mr. White showed up. Jesse started looking forward to it, even if the thought sometimes creeped him out and he hated that about himself. The satisfaction of seeing him outweighed the anger and resentment that hadn’t gone anywhere. When they were together, Mr. White seemed alive again, and Jesse felt like he’d slipped back into some earlier version of himself. Like this was who he really was. He wanted to stay in that feeling forever.
They reminisced about the old days—carefully avoiding the ugly parts—and sometimes they even went for walks outside together. When someone passed by, Jesse kept his mouth shut so he wouldn’t look crazy, and once the person was gone, he and Mr. White would exchange a knowing smile.
When the high wore off, the emptiness hit him hard. He knew it was a hallucination. He remembered a fairy‑tale book from his childhood—The Little Match Girl—where a poor girl struck matches and saw visions of feasts and warmth. Jesse laughed to himself, thinking this was like the fucked up version of that story. And there was no happy ending waiting for him.
There was this one time—or so he thought—when he and Mr. White went to an amusement park, had fun the whole day. But when the high faded, he realized they hadn’t even left home. The whole shit was made up in his mind. He’d been home the whole time. The car didn’t even have gas. The whole show was getting freakier.
When he was sober—which wasn’t often—Jesse sometimes drove around aimlessly. Not to see anything beautiful, just to move. One day he got it in his head to drive all the way out to that stretch of desert where he and Mr. White used to cook in the RV. The desert should’ve looked the same everywhere, but nostalgia hit him hard. He drove until he was close enough, parked, stepped out, and leaned against the car to smoke a cigarette. It was late, almost morning. Half the sky was full of stars.
It was freezing—cold enough that even with all his layers, Jesse was shivering. A thin crescent moon hung low over the horizon, but it didn’t give off much light. Bored, he kept fiddling with the car key in his pocket, locking and unlocking the doors just to watch the headlights sweep across the ground. When they flashed on, a tarantula crossing the dirt was briefly illuminated.
That reminded him: back when he and Mr. White were still in the meth game, there’d been a time he was taking a smoke break behind a rock. He’d had his hand resting in the grass, heard a faint rustle, looked down—and there it was. A huge‑ass tarantula, right next to his hand. Jesse had bolted straight for the RV where Mr. White was working.
“Mr. White!”
Mr. White didn’t even look up from scraping red phosphorus off the belt paper. “What is it now?”
Still breathless, Jesse pointed toward the door. “Dude, out there—there was this massive tarantula! Like, right next to my hand. I swear!”
“So?” Mr. White shot him an irritated glance, then rolled his eyes and turned back to the workbench. “What if there was? Get back to your work.”
“No, seriously. What if it bit me, yo? I could’ve died, or something.”
“Jesse. Tarantulas don’t bite.”
“Bullshit. I mean, look at them.”
Mr. White stopped working and swiveled his chair to face him. “They do not actively bite humans. There’s no advantage to it. And even if one did, the venom is minimal—about like a bee sting. It won’t kill you.”
“For real?”
“And they’re far more delicate than they look. Their exoskeleton is soft. Handle them roughly and they’ll die. If you’re planning to catch one, be careful.”
Jesse grimaced. He would never catch one—too freaky, and honestly, kind of awful for the little guy. Mr. White, apparently satisfied with his lecture, went back to work. Jesse wandered around scratching his neck, thinking about it. Then he dragged a chair over, sat beside him, and helped with the prep.
“Hey, uh… about that whole ‘if it did bite you’ thing…”
“Jesse…” Mr. White’s voice was already exhausted.
“Okay, okay! Last question, I swear. Just… would it hurt?”
A sigh. “I don’t know. Probably somewhat.”
“Huh.” Jesse sniffed. “Do they, like… suck your blood?”
“No. They’re not mosquitoes. And now stop talking.”
“Hey, if I was high and a mosquito bit me, would the mosquito get high too?”
“Impossible. Humans and mosquitoes have different neuronal receptor profiles. And anyway—”
Then came a long lecture about dopamine and transporters and whatever else. Once Jesse understood that bugs didn’t get high, he stopped caring. He half‑listened, zoning out while he worked with his hands. Mr. White, for some reason, had gotten really fired up and talked about it for over five minutes.
Jesse stopped daydreaming. He was tired. Dawn was starting to show along the eastern horizon, the sky tinting pink and pale blue. Almost no clouds. He flicked his cigarette away, crushed it under his boot, and climbed back into the sand‑covered car.
Later that day, back home and unable to sleep, he used again. In the hallucination, Jesse was a tarantula wandering the desert. After a while he somehow turned back into being himself—only he was still tarantula‑sized. When he looked up, a giant Mr. White was there. No, not giant—Jesse was just tiny. Mr. White lifted him gently off the ground with both hands. Jesse could see every individual hair in his mustache, sharp and clear, and tiny Jesse Pinkman laughed. Then the giant Mr. White placed him carefully into a wide‑mouthed glass jar, screwed the lid on, carried him home, and began observing him closely. Muttering something under his breath, taking notes. From inside the jar, the outside world looked warped and huge. Jesse knew he was caught, knew he couldn’t escape, so he stayed still.
When the high wore off, he was curled on the bathroom floor. His head throbbed. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. But this trip had been nice. Fun, even. And Mr. White had felt like… Mr. White. Or at least it seemed that way. Jesse pressed his cheek to the cold floor and smiled to himself. Two crushed toilet‑paper tubes lay nearby.
He wished he could stay high forever. Hallucinations always ended. If he could just nail that perfect dope maybe he’d be locked in an endless, perfect trip.
The next week’s trip dropped him suddenly into his old house. Not his aunt’s place, but the apartment where Jane had lived next door. White blinds. Afternoon sunlight. Yellow sheets. Jane, with her dark hair, sleeping on them. But the strange part was this: he was standing there, looking down at Jesse lying beside her. Watching himself was bizarre enough, but the Jesse on the bed looked off somehow—unfamiliar, like a stranger. Then he realized why: the face was reversed, like a mirror image. So he was seeing himself the way someone else would. Which meant… who was he being right now?
He grabbed the shoulders of Jesse on the bed and tried to shake him awake. But the body just rocked limply. He slapped his cheek, checked his pulse in different places, and finally understood: he wasn’t sleeping. He was dead. Right. Jesse was dead. So whose hallucination was this? If it wasn’t Jesse’s… whose consciousness was he inside?
The trip ended there. Jesse was on the couch. He must have been gone a long time; his mouth was bone‑dry. He forced himself up, staggered to the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and chugged it. Set the glass down with a sharp clink. But something felt off—like his mind still felt out of focus, like a layer of the world had peeled away.
He touched the scars on his face, tracing them with his fingers, grounding himself in what was real. The marks were still there. He stood in silence for a long moment, lost in thought.
*
Jesse Pinkman was dead.
Walt was the one who found him. Not according to the official police record, of course. That night, he went back to Jesse’s apartment, hoping to talk him out of his path and into giving back the duffel bag full of cash. Jesse was on the bed, dead from an overdose. Heroin, and asphyxiation on his own vomit. Beside him lay his girlfriend—that heroin addict girl—curled on her side. A few used syringes were scattered on the nightstand. The girl was deeply asleep—dead to the world, but alive. She didn’t wake even while Walt shook Jesse desperately, tried to revive him. Jesse was gone, completely gone, the whites of his eyes showing faintly beneath half‑closed lids. Empty.
Walt stood there, helpless. Then he grabbed the duffel bag, wiped his fingerprints from everything he’d touched, and left the dead boy and the sleeping girl behind. The moonlight on the walk back to his car was cold and unforgiving.
The girl found Jesse’s body the next morning and called it in. (Yes—officially, she was the one who discovered him.) In Albuquerque, his death was treated as just another overdose, another junkie who’d gone too far. It happened all the time. Walt never learned what became of the girl afterward. She never came after him for money. She’d been deep in heroin addiction herself—maybe she ended up in a facility, maybe she died somewhere alone. But sometimes Walt imagined her sitting on the front steps, pale hands shaking as she lit a cigarette, waiting for the police to arrive. Rehearsing her line—“I woke up, I found him. That’s all I know.”—over and over in her head.
For a while after that, even with all the money he’d gained, Walt felt hollow. Jesse’s loss pressed down on him. A directionless anger burned in him, and he kept circling the question of who to blame. The girl? The drugs? Or that stubborn, foolish Jesse?
But the more he thought about it—the more he dissected the chain of events—the closer he came to the truth: the ultimate responsibility lay with him. He felt himself pulled toward that conclusion like into a black gravitational pit. Guilt consumed him. His own actions had led to the loss of Jesse—his student, his partner.
Walt returned to cooking methamphetamine. There was nothing else he could do.
Exhausted and numb, sleeping in shallow snatches at night, he sometimes dreamed. (His wife slept beside him, turning over only occasionally.) The dreams were replays of the past—at least as far as he could remember. Jesse was always there. Walt didn’t know why. Maybe it was obsession, or remorse, or the sense that things should never have turned out this way. Like dreams tend to be, they were fragmented, incomplete, sometimes skipping abruptly from one scene to another, yet strangely vivid and real. Only upon waking, or just before, did Walt finally realize he had been dreaming.
They were detailed memories. The two of them working side by side in silence, passing equipment back and forth. Jesse climbing into the car, complaining about his broken ribs. The long walk from Tuco’s uncle’s house back to the highway, their footsteps matching. Sometimes the dreams were short; sometimes they stretched on and on without breaking.
He dreamed of the time they’d cooked meth overnight out in the desert. The time the RV engine died and he and Jesse were stranded for two full days. While they took turns manually charging the battery, the unfiltered sun beat down on them mercilessly. Nothing living passed by except the occasional bee or fly brushing past their ears. Not even a tarantula—though Jesse had found one once and made a ridiculous fuss about it.
They had almost no food or water. Only two energy bars left, and the two of them fought bitterly over it. Walt berated Jesse for failing to bring proper supplies, and Jesse hurled insults right back. In the end they tore one bar in half and ate it, each taking their share. (A motel, he said. A hot shower, a bed. Idiot. Whose fault did he think this was?) Walt searched the area for any cactus species that bore edible fruit, but it was pointless. The night was cold. Maybe it was the temperature swing, maybe something else, but Walt’s lungs felt tight, clogged. He didn’t want to wake Jesse—not out of kindness, but because he didn’t want to show his vulnerable side —so he slipped outside the RV and coughed in the dark, away from him.
When he returned, he saw Jesse curled on the makeshift bed, wrapped in a blanket. As Walt passed, Jesse shifted and turned toward him. In the moonlight Walt could just make out his somber expression. The boy's skin had dried from the day’s sweat, a greasy sheen.
“You should eat the rest,” Jesse said.
Walt hesitated, stopped in his steps, and stood silent for a moment. “You were awake,” he finally said.
“Yeah.”
“As for the food, we divide it fifty-fifty. It's either we both make it or we both don't. Those are the likeliest outcomes.”
“You gotta eat, man,” Jesse said flatly, rolling over to face the other way. His ear looked small. “Just take it… I don’t need it anymore.”
Walt woke suddenly. He shot upright like a man jolted by a sprint, breath coming hard. His hand clutched at his shirt over his chest, eyes squeezed shut like someone in the middle of a heart attack. His chest felt tight—and for the first time since Jesse had died, a single bitter tear slid from the corner of his eye down the side of his nose. Just one. He kept his eyes closed, clinging to the vivid aftertaste of the dream. It was almost a kind of joy. God, I was alive, he thought. Back then, in that moment, in that place, with that boy. Walt had been alive then, and in these sharp, lucid dreams he lived again—more vividly than in waking life.
(His startled wife sat up beside him, rubbing his back and asking if he was alright. He couldn’t answer. He stayed silent.)
As the days passed, the dreams of Jesse came more frequently. Even a short nap could pull him under. But strangely, they weren’t unpleasant. At some point, Walt began to sink into them willingly. The meth he produced grew slightly purer than what he’d made with Jesse—and for reasons he couldn’t explain, he no longer cared as much. In the dreams that visited him every night, Jesse was alive. And so was he.
His memories began to fade (was Jesse’s tattoo on his right hand? Or his left?), but the dreams never lost their clarity. Every fleeting moment was replayed exactly as it had been, and always woke with a sense of deep, undeniable satisfaction.
One night, he dreamed again. It was the memory of sitting across from Jesse in that cafeteria on the edge of town, telling him his lung cancer was almost in remission. Jesse had practically shouted with joy, and Walt had looked around nervously, caught between embarrassment at the attention and a buoyant, almost triumphant joy.
Later, Walt lingered in a half-awake haze, pondering. If the cancer had come back then… would anything have been different? What if my life had ended at that moment? Did I live too long?
(He was six years old again, sitting on his mother’s lap, staring at his father’s shrunken body on a hospital bed—hearing the terrible rattling in his throat, feeling the strange detachment, the vague disgust, the overwhelming desire to flee the room.)
Drawn along by that thought—or rather, by that chain of images that barely qualified as thought —Walt slipped into another dream, another memory. The vast underground meth lab. That sealed, echoing space. Walt was there with Jesse. He was rambling about the best moment he believed his life should have ended.
And Jesse listened silently. As Walt kept talking, he grew drowsy, his words blurring.
When he woke up and reality kicked in, a faint sense of wrongness crept in. What was that? A dream? Yes, of course—nothing but a dream.
But this one was different.
That wasn’t a memory.
Impossible. He had no recollection of ever telling Jesse such a thing. And in the underground superlab, his assistant had been Gale Boetticher, not Jesse. Jesse had never set foot in that place. Was it simple confusion—a misassembled memory? Perhaps—after all, dreams were meant to be like that, inventing freely. He’d simply been strange lately, that was all. Yes. Yes…
Still unsettled, he got up and went to wash his face.
After that, he just kept having dreams of what he actually remembered. Weeks, months of them. Walt drifted through his waking life like a ghost, and spent his nights inside a vivid world of memories.
It was early April. Walt had earned all the money he needed and retired peacefully from the drug world. The cancer could return at any time, but he had more than enough to support the three family members he would leave behind. He’d left the lab to Boetticher—he hadn’t revealed the full process, but Gus Fring respected him enough not to force the issue.
But then, one dawn, another strange dream came.
In it, Walt lay spread‑eagled on the ground. The floor was cold, hard mortar. The ceiling quonset hut was high and dark, but he could tell it was a corrugated metal arch. And he knew—with perfect clarity—that he was in Jack’s meth lab. He knew that Jesse had been cooking there. He could have explained every detail if he’d tried.
And he was dying. A stray bullet had torn into his side, just below his good lung. The wound had burned at first, then gone numb; pain and heat had vanished.
But his mind was calm. He could almost call it satisfaction. He had provided for his family. He had taken revenge on those who threatened him. The lab—this place he had never actually entered —was clean. The batch was running smoothly. His method had been passed on to his student. Jesse was free. Jesse was alive.
How could he have forgotten about that?
His vision faded, but his eyes remained open—he no longer had the strength to close them. In the darkness behind them, flashbacks from his entire life began to surface in fragments. A deathbed montage of memories. It lasted only a short time, but to a man losing his life, it felt long.
Then the alarm rang. (Even in retirement, habit made him set it every night.) Walt woke in his own bed, but nothing made sense. His mind was chaos. Morning light slanted softly across the cream‑colored sheets. But he couldn’t tell whether the scene before him was real or another dream. He wiggled his toes—they moved. He blinked—his eyes moistened. The spine of the book on the nightstand was slightly blurry, but that was normal for his nearsightedness. Or was he dreaming the familiar scene? Had he just woken from a dream? Or was all of it—everything —the fading flashbacks, illusions, dreams of a dying man?
Was Walt truly alive? Jesse had died of an overdose—or had he lived, and Walt was the one who didn’t? When? How? And if that were true…
Whose consciousness was this?
Walt knew he had to shut off the alarm.
*
Under a cold, starlit New Mexico sky, a lone tarantula continued its slow, silent crawl across the barren landscape.