Work Text:
“A hot shower, a bed and – that's a given! – separate rooms!” – Jesse declares in a tone that leaves little space for an argument.
Walt has to admit that the kid’s got a point here. After almost 48 hours of cooking non-stop, he feels exhausted, not to mention hungry, sweaty and stinking like a meth lab. Jesse turns on the ignition, and they drive through the desert, back to the main road. In approximately one hour, they see a huge pink neon sign that says “The Dreamboat”.
The sign says it all: it’s a cheap motel where lonely truck drivers usually bring the girls that they have just met on a random gasoline station on the highway, pass the night and the next day continue their journey. Some of them may even be the users of the product they cook in the desert.
The cashier, a worn-out lady of forty years or more, looks at the unlikely duo with as much interest as at any other clients: she had seen everything in this life.
“ID” – she says shortly, working on her right hand nails with a huge emery board.
Mr. White is not prepared for that question. “Er… sorry miss, but is it really necessary? Maybe we could settle it some other way?” – he asks nervously. He is already opening his wallet for a one hundred dollar bill when the woman bursts out laughing.
“I don’t need your ID, mister. I need this boy’s ID, to make sure that he’s not underage!” It seems that Mr. White’s silly comment has made her day, she even wipes a tear from her heavily painted eye.
“Here you go, Ma’am”, – Jesse shoves his driving license into her cabin. She examines it without any curiosity, and gives it back.
“Your room is number 13, on the first floor. Will you be staying the whole night? That will be 50 dollars”.
“Wait, – Walt intervenes. – We need two rooms. We are not… together”.
“Well that’s a shame, cowboy, – She says in a bored voice. – Happens so we are booked for tonight. Just have this one left. You still interested?”
After some arguing, the two agree on taking the last room, asking the woman to warn them as soon as one of the other ones will become vacant. “Really sick to see his face 24 hours a day”, – Jesse explains to the lady apologetically. She looks at him suspiciously and shakes her head in disbelief.
The kid smirks while they walk through the dim-lit corridor: “Ha-ha, she thought that you are a creepy old pervert!”
“If I am a creepy old pervert, that makes you my underage male prostitute with a fake ID, so keep going, sweetheart”.
That shuts Jesse up. They enter a small room that smells of cheap detergent. “At least they cleaned it up after the last clients”, – Walt thinks with some hope.
“So, who’s taking the shower first?” – Jesse asks.
And oh God, they need to argue about that too. Walt brings up all the arguments he can think of, that he is the mastermind of the operation, that he is older, has lung cancer, and needs to be treated with respect. He wants to use the shower so much that he is even ready to pay his partner an extra one thousand dollars out of his future share if he lets him go first.
“Switch your one thousand up your ass, – the younger man snorts. – We have no choice but do the coin flip”.
And the universe really doesn’t like Mr. White that much, because Jesse wins. “Can we do three rounds, maybe?” – Walt asks dully.
“No we cannot, yo. The coin flip is sacred”.
Jesse runs inside the bathroom and shuts the door. Looks like Walt is only left with a mini-bar and a small TV to entertain him. He takes his shoes off, climbs on the bed, opens a can of cheap beer, and starts channel-surfing.
The channels are very much alike for a good surf, though. The first 50 happen to be soft, medium, and hardcore pornography – what else would you expect from a seedy motel in the middle of nowhere? Finally, the fifty-first channel is a TV shop, and, frankly speaking, Walt fears to change the channel. It is better to watch them sell things that no one would ever need than see some unwanted intense graphic image. Not that Walt doesn’t watch porn: he just sees it as a really private business, and with other person in the same room that might be uncomfortable.
Jesse finally goes out of the shower: “Man, you are boring. How can you even watch this shit? Seriously, I only watch TV shop when I am high on drugs”.
“Pretty sure you get so high that you call them and buy the things they sell”, – Walt snaps at him.
Jesse smirks: “That actually happened once. Not with me though, with Badger”.
“Unbelievable. Means you are not the lowest link on the scale of stupidity. Thank God”.
Walt is relieved to finally enter the shower. The mirror is broken in three places: clearly someone had a very active night before they appeared here. He tries not to picture that, and just washes the smell of meth off his body. When he gets back to the bedroom, he sees that Jesse did some magic trick and already found a movie channel. They are showing “Back to the future”, and it has just started.
“You like “Back to the future”?” – Jesse asks, not turning his head from the screen.
“Never watched it. I was never into science fiction”, – Walter answers.
“Shame. One of the best movies I know, man. Watched it like 50 times!”
Mr. White has nothing to say to that, so he opens one more beer and sits on the left side of the bed, while Jesse puts his legs on the bed, right with the snickers.
“Would you mind to take these off? I plan to sleep here later”, – Walter says in an irritated voice.
“Ok man, don’t worry, I will. I just see no reason: places like these are so dirty, you don’t even want to know. Might as well look under the bed and find a used condom or something!”
The older man can’t believe what he is seeing: Jesse is actually crawling under the bed and with a victory shout gets up with something in his hands. “See? How sweet, someone left a strap-on here. And you were worried about my shoes!”
Walter takes the wretched thing from Jesse’s hands and throws it into the trash. They continue watching the movie. Jesse can’t stop commenting: “And this is the part where Marty meets his father in the café. So cool, because they are both McFly, and they both turn their heads at the same time to look at Biff”.
The kid gets all excited when the hero’s father saves his mother from rape, and even more, when Marty plays Marvin Berry’s “Earth angel” on stage, and starts to slowly disappear. Walt can see how tense Jesse is, even though the kid claimed that he had watched this movie so many times. On the screen, the younger McFly whispers: “Come on, George… come on, Dad…”
In the end of the scene, Jesse finally relaxes. “Always makes me worry for the guy, Mr. White. But then his old man does it, he saves Marty by proving he’s no douchebag. That’s what the real old folks should be like!”
“You make it sound very touching, for sure”, – Walt says sarcastically.
“You’re just a cold man with no heart, Mr. White”, – Jesse comments. They continue watching the movie until the screen goes black and the credits start to run.
“And that’s why I like the first movie of the trilogy. All ends up well. See? George is now the man in the family, Marty reconnected with his father, and Doc is not dead. The credits run at the perfect moment, when everyone is happy”.
“Pretty sure the boy would screw it all up later. Seems like a slacker to me”.
“He had to suffer a lot, yeah. But still, it’s so cool that he could use a time-machine to fix the stuff with his family. Makes you wish you had one”, – Jesse sighs sadly.
Walter pauses for a moment and then looks at the kid intently: “If you had one… what would you do?”
“Dunno man. Maybe I would try to stop myself from screwing up my life – like, get along better with my parents. Put my aunt into cancer therapy before it was too late. Pay attention on your terribly boring chemistry classes”, – he snickers.
“They wouldn’t be that boring if you actually attended them more often”, – Walt smiles, saying it with a little devotion in his voice.
“Would you make an explosion?”
“Maybe. I am a pretty versatile teacher”.
“So, what would you do if you could change your past?” – Jesse asks, curious.
“Would make you study chemistry more, so that you could cook meth better”, – Walt says with an evil grin.
Jesse laughs. “I am serious here, man!”
“To be honest, I don’t really have a clue, Jesse. Everything in my life is so intertwined... it’s like a very complex chain of events. If you take one out, then everything will be broken. For instance, if I didn’t quit "Grey Matter" 20 years ago, I would be rich and wouldn’t need money to cure my cancer. But, on the other hand, I would have never met my beautiful wife Skyler, so my son Junior would have never been born, as my future little daughter Holly. And if I never went to J.P. Wynne to teach chemistry, I would have never met you”.
Jesse looks at the older man and blushes. Walt enjoys the stunned look on the boy’s face for a moment, and stays silent.
“Man, you… you say like that would be a bad thing, – the kid mutters, smiling and confused. – Don’t you wish you’ve never met me?”
“Of course I do. – Walt says with a mischievous grin. – You are such a disaster, Jesse, I grant you that. But nevertheless, I accept you as a part of my life. You make it… exciting”.
Jesse smiles at Walt, and he feels awkward, because even that small, not even completely heartfelt praise makes the kid’s blue eyes shine. Walt doesn’t remember the time that someone looked at him with such gratitude and… admiration. The ex-teacher looks into the window: it’s a full moon today. “And congratulations, we have just created two worlds parallel to ours. You familiar with the many-universes interpretation?”
Jesse shakes his head.
“It’s pretty straightforward, you see. The quantum mechanics suggests that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an actual “world”, or “universe”. That means there is perhaps an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen in our past, but did not, has occurred in the past of some other universe. Isn’t that fascinating, Jesse?”
Walt turns his head and sees that the kid’s head fell on the pillow, and he is already drooling.
“Good night, Jesse”, – Walt says quietly as he turns off the light.
Walt’s heart skips a beat, because in his sleep Jesse mutters: “Yeah, good night, Dad”.
At that moment, the woman opens the door of their room, saying that there is finally a vacant number at the second floor, and if they’re still interested, she will clean it in 15 minutes. Walt presses his index finger to his mouth, showing her to go away and close the door, and covers the Jesse’s lean frame with a fluffy blanket.
Jesse called him “Dad”. That lifts up a thousand of different thoughts in Walt’s head, but the most insistent one, perhaps, is the urge to tell the kid that he actually lied – for no particular reason, just out of bitchiness. “Back to the future” is in fact one of his favorite movies. He doesn’t even remember how many times he’d watched it, and that scene with George McFly saving his son from disappearing always touched him a lot – how couldn’t it touch someone to finally see that cowardly father doing the right thing and being a hero? But Jesse is fast asleep, so he decides to keep this thought for tomorrow.
In the morning, however, the moment is lost. Walt wakes up grumpy and unhappy, discovering that they overslept, and they really need to go to the desert and keep working.
“Come on, it was totally worth it, man”, – Jesse says cheerfully, and, to be honest, it is hard to oppose to this charming smile of his. “It wasn’t that bad, all right”, – Walt condescends, as the RV speeds up on the highway.