FIC: Outran the Avalanche (AU)
TITLE: Outran the Avalanche
AUTHOR: prufrock_26/scrambledeggsong
CHAR: Jesse & Mike
GENRE: Gen, AU
WORDS: ~4750
WARNINGS: None
A/N: Title from Timber Timbre's Beat the Drum Slowly.
SUMMARY: In a world where Mike Ehrmantraut got out and settled down in a comfortably anonymous South Dakota retirement, Jesse finds him after the events of Felina. And after a sojourn in Nebraska. With a cat.
Jesse has a car, and an address, and just at this moment, he doesn't remember where he got either one.
His chest hurts, and the road's full of lights-way, way more lights than the cars can account for, ducking and swerving and pulsing in and out, in and out, splitting fireballs bursting out in the middle of the highway and fizzling into dull electric blackness. Jesse grips the steering wheel hard to be sure he's still earthbound, changes lanes again, hopes that the lights he's plunging towards aren't real, figures maybe they are.
A green sign out of the corner of his eye; Santa Fe, 40 miles. Not where he's going, but he thinks the direction's right. North. There's a map pasted in the corner of his brain, that corner he kept as safe and quiet as he could the last few months. It's his second grade classroom, plastic chairs empty and just him left. He's probably in trouble, but for right now it's just him and this ratty old map of the States, faded candy colors and the names printed in thick black letters, and Jesse can read New Mexico next to where the teacher's written in felt tip pen My Home State! He steps up close, holding his breath, listening to the old air conditioning grumble and hiss-Mr. White wheezing somewhere close by, but not too close, not yet, not here right now and he can't see Jesse, so Jesse leans forward and looks at the map.
New Mexico, strawberry red. Two perfect squares up, one over, up one more, and Jesse puts his finger on South Dakota, bright purple. He counts: One, two, one and one, 48, 64, Redfield, South Dakota, 5, 7, 4, 6, 9.
A door bangs, and the teacher's coming, and Jesse jumps away from the map, heart pounding so hard already he bets if he looked down he could see his ribs shuddering out of his chest, but he can't look down. The night's bursting with lights; some of them are cars and some of them are angels, and his wrists are burning and he feels like singing, and he's got to keep his eyes on the road and the car pointed north.
Red, white, blue, green, purple; north.
There's a sign for Colorado, and Jesse cuts across three lanes of traffic, and, because this road is chock stinking full of angels tonight, lives.
/ / /
Seventy miles out, give or take, the gas runs out, and for a minute he thinks that's the end, good run but over now, time to walk off the overpass or wait for a speed trap to catch up with the runaway dog, but when he's sat in the gravel next to the freeway for a couple hours it occurs to him that he's freer than he's been in years and his entire body's still running on the amazing ice cold high and if somebody was coming for him surely they'd have been here hours ago, he's not trying not to get caught or anything and maybe, just maybe the thing to do is actually just to keep going until something bigger stands in his way. Two days later his hands are still shaking and he's still stuck on that thought, the long held breath before an interruption that refuses to come on cue.
He sleeps on buses and in stations and never wakes up in cuffs. He feels like a kid on vacation, all McDonalds and no bedtime.
The cash he nearly abandoned in the stolen car on the side of the 25 takes him as far as Omaha, and in Omaha, he meets Nona.
Nona is nine years old, and he loves her. She’s blind in one eye, which Jesse can sympathize with, because if he covers his left eye she’s all blurry and wiggly herself. It hurts to look at her that way, so he takes his hand away and wipes the tears off his right cheek and leans his forehead against the cool glass. Nona doesn’t mind. She’s placid, curious, too lazy to uncurl herself to respond to Jesse’s whispered hey, but she stares back at him evenly, like she’s glad to see him here.
Jesse never liked cats all that much--Aunt Ginny had one, he recalls, eighty fucking lifetimes ago, but he died before Jesse came to live with her, which Mom said was just as well because Jesse’s apparently allergic or something, not that he ever noticed anything. He told Ginny that Mom was lying, and they could get another cat if she wanted, like if she was lonely or something, but she laughed and said why’d she need a cat when she had him. He thinks that was maybe supposed to be kinda mean, not mean mean but joking mean, like he’s like a cat or something and that’s the joke, but mainly he just thought it was nice. Why’d she be lonely, with him there, why’d anyone need a cat and a nephew both. He thinks he was a good nephew. He hopes.
He can’t remember what Aunt Ginny’s cat was named, or even what he looked like, but he hopes he looked like Nona--gray and brown and kinda frumpy, but in a nice way. She looks comfy, like you could be trying to sleep or watch TV and she could jump on your lap and you wouldn’t even mind. Jesse wishes there wasn’t glass in between them, so he could at least pet her a little, but there’s no latch to open up the case and he doesn’t wanna ask anybody for help. He knows he looks like a total hobo, and since he came in here in the first place to get warm, because Nebraska’s a fucking ice tornado even though it’s only like October, he’s really fucking invested in not getting kicked out until he absolutely has to.
Especially now. He doesn’t want to leave Nona. He wants to stay right here, where it’s warm and really quiet for once and Nona’s curled up watching him, swishing her tail back and forth at him. Jesse lifts his hand and waves back at her.
God, he wants to stay.
Something in Jesse’s gut loosens alarmingly, and he takes in a gulp of air and presses his hands flat on the glass. For two weeks and change he’s been flying high, and now, with little warning and less grace, he’s crash landed in a PetSmart outside Omaha, Nebraska, and he’s met this cat who’s waving at him with her fluffy gray tail and he’s crying but he doesn’t want to take his hands off the glass. He turns his face into his sleeve and smells Todd, and for a minute, it’s easy to believe that’s the person moving around in the aisle behind him, blond and patient and waiting. Jesse wants to turn around and prove himself wrong, but he thinks that if he moves his head at all he might puke.
Behind the glass, Nona yawns enormously and finally pushes herself up on her paws to stretch. Satisfied, she steps up close to the glass and stares at him. Jesse blinks through tears as she swipes at his hand, a wobbly circular high five that says click, click, click through the glass.
“Hi,” he whispers, and Nona smacks at his hand again with her tiny paw. “Hi.” Todd’s not here. “I’m Jesse.” Todd’s dead. Everyone’s dead, I think. “Hi,” he says again, because he’s too tired to think of anything new to add to this conversation. Nona doesn’t mind. She yawns again, and bats at his runny nose.
After a minute, Jesse pulls his hands away from the glass to wipe his face a little, not that it probably helps much, and leans in to kiss the glass right over Nona’s head. It’s seven forty, almost closing time, and he’s got a plan stupid enough he’s just got to pray it’ll work.
/ / /
For a week he sleeps on the cement floor in the back storeroom. It's chilly and smells faintly of shit, which is fine, because Jesse can pretend, if he needs to, that he's back where he belongs. Every morning he wakes early, goes to the tiny gross bathroom to cough up crap from his fried lungs and splash water on his face till he knows his name again, and sneaks out before anyone can come in and find him.
He doesn't know what he's doing. Any minute somebody's gonna show up and ask him that, Mr. White again maybe, red in the face this time and yelling, what the hell are you doing, don't you think or do you just do these things, seriously, Jesse, are you high? And Jesse's not gonna have an answer. Yes? I wish? I don't know? I got hit over the head and I woke up here, honest.
Yeah. Sounds about right.
He stays away from the store during the day so nobody gets suspicious, but he says good morning to Nona every day on the way out, and wishes he could reach into the cage to scratch behind her ears or her belly or whatever cats like. He promises her somebody’s coming soon to give her breakfast and scratch her ears, and she’ll have a great day, probably, and he’ll be back tonight. Half the time she’s sleeping when he leaves, but he says hi anyway, quiet so he doesn’t wake her.
He finds a pay phone and tries all the numbers he knows--Mom and Dad first, because it’s reflex, because he learned that number before he knew what a phone number was and he can still sing it in his head the way Mom taught him, five-oh-five, three-four-four, nineteen eighty-two. He hangs up after the first ring when he realizes what he punched in and stands for a minute gripping the receiver too tight and breathing so hard his lungs hurt. He walks around the block a few times to convince himself nobody’s gonna trace that call and tries again, Mr. White this time. The only number he’s got is disconnected, which isn’t a huge surprise--and it only would’ve been his wife, anyway, and what’s Jesse got to say to her besides “sorry about, like, everything”?
None of the numbers he can think of get him anything but dead air--even Saul, which, like, ironic. He needs to talk to Saul for just one minute, but every time he tries he gets static and a voice telling him the phone’s been disconnected. He racks his brain for the number Saul gave him right around the end, the man in the red van with the vacuum cleaner card, but after about sixteen wrong numbers he gives up, smashes the receiver back into place and heads to the 7-Eleven across the street to grab supper and get warm while the sun sets.
He’s got one more number buried in his head--the other one Sault gave him right before everything went to hell--but he’s afraid to try it. First, because if it doesn’t work he’s really, truly got nothing, and the only person left in the world who might be able to save him is thin air after all. Second, because if the number does work, he’s almost as scared of what Mike might do to him.
Shoving that thought down, Jesse licks Doritos powder off his fingers, shoves his hands into the pockets of the oversized jacket he stole from that Wal-Mart in Denver, and tries to look like a guy who isn’t gonna cause any trouble. He’s gotten good at that over the last six months.
Four hours later, he whispers “goodnight” to Nona, sneaks past the creepy glow-in-the-dark fish, and curls up in the back room behind a stack of boxes. He can’t get warm all night, hugging his arms around himself and listening to Todd move around in the dark.
/ / /
On the morning of the eighth day, Jesse wakes up, coughs over the bathroom sink until it hurts to breathe but there’s no more gunky crap coming up, and sneaks into the dark store to say good morning to Nona. She’s awake today, stalking back and forth, and when he leans in she gets right up to glass. Jesse thinks maybe she’s trying to see him, like maybe her good eye’s got a better chance at close range.
He tells her to be good, and gets ready to mingle with the first customers on the way out into the chilly Omaha morning.
It’s about half an hour later, crossing through side streets on the way to the Fareway where he got breakfast yesterday, that the last three and a half weeks come crashing down on him with a speed and weight he didn’t know they had, and the world splits open.
In the yard of the first house on Grant Street is a dog, one of these high-energy mutts running back and forth from end to end of the fenced-in grass box. Jesse can’t quite see him, not when he’s standing still, but he doesn’t need to. He can hear it just fine, the shrill, metallic rasping as this gray blur yaps from one side of the yard to the other, pouncing on his own toys and barking at pigeons. It gets louder and louder, even though he’s slowing his steps, even though his heartbeat’s getting so loud it’s deafening, hard and fast in his ears and in his throat, and Todd’s standing behind him right now, it was all a trick and it’s over right this second and all he can think about is how much it’s going to hurt.
He’s distantly aware of stumbling, ripping his knee open on concrete, a car swerving to miss him, and then a hundred, horns shrieking and lights blaring, the police on their way to arrest Todd and him and Mr. White spraying everything with bullets that never find their mark. He finds a dark corner and makes himself as small as possible, and waits for everything to stop.
He doesn’t know, later on, how he found a telephone, much less dialed the number. It’s gotta be one of those survival instinct things, fright or flight or whatever, brain cells firing on autopilot. All he knows is that in the middle of everything, out of dark and noise and Todd’s breath down the back of his neck, the weird whirling, beeping static turned into the grouchiest voice in the world asking him how the hell he got this number, and that the only answer he could find was, “Help.”
/ / /
Mike, goddammit, is retired. He recognizes that that statement in itself is not particularly impressive, guys of a certain age tend to do that, but when you take into account that his retirement cost ten thousand dollars, it begins to take on an extra significance that warrants just a little respect.
Respect from other folks hasn’t presented any trouble thus far. It’s the universe that hasn’t gotten the memo.
Because Mike is hard-pressed to think of a ruder fucking joke to play on an old man than to interrupt his breakfast crossword puzzle with a phone call, quite unintelligible and very full of words that have no business in a polite Sunday morning, from Jesse goddamn Pinkman, who is supposed to be retired or dead a long fucking time ago.
Jesse, by his own estimation, is neither. Jesse is in Omaha, and this is the clearest piece of information Mike can get from the kid, who seems, by the noise, to be hyperventilating into a pay phone on a busy street and possibly dying of pneumonia. Mike’s suggestion that he slow down and take a few deep breaths meets with little success. Jesse sobs that he’s gonna die, Mike pushes the crossword a few inches along the table, and the universe lets out a belly laugh.
“Jesse,” Mike tries again, and the kid half-wails “Yeah?” on the other end. Mike holds the receiver another inch from his face, and repeats himself. “Slow down, kid, I’m not gonna turn you in, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m sorry, Mike, you gotta, I, I’m sorry I don’t know--” The kid starts babbling about how he didn’t mean to call, he thought Mike would be mad, and Mike has to give him credit for figuring that out, at least. He is, in fact, mad.
“Jesse, for God’s sake shut up a minute.” Jesse shuts up instantly, and Mike manages, in the ensuing silence, to work out a few pertinent details. Yes, Jesse is in Omaha, Nebraska. Yes, he came there by himself. No, nobody followed him--he thinks--he doesn’t know, but by this point Mike’s willing to bet whatever brought Jesse to Omaha solo scrambled his already less than stellar mental capacities enough to ramp up the junkie paranoia to about twelve hundred percent.
When Mike asks what the hell he’s doing in Omaha, Jesse flounders a little. There was, Mike gathers, a cat.
He’s not going to finish his crossword, but he can at least finish the coffee, so he does that while Jesse sobs into the phone that he thinks everyone’s dead. Mike knows. He saw the Journal headline three weeks back, the news broadcast a few days later. He figured Jesse was one of the bodies they didn’t bother to name. On a street corner somewhere in Omaha, Jesse bawls that everything exploded, that he stole a car and it had money, that he doesn’t know what happened but he thinks they found him. He apologizes to Mike about a hundred times while Mike carries the coffee cup over to the sink and rinses it out, shaking the clear drops onto the dish towel folded on the countertop.
He interrupts Jesse to ask for an address. After a few minutes of bewilderment and two trips away from the phone followed each time by a string of frantic hello’s, Jesse supplies him with the two street names he needs, and Mike writes them down on the pad by the phone. Omaha’s a good three hour drive, and he doesn’t want to have to waste time searching once he gets there.
“Listen, kid,” he tells Jesse, who gulps and goes silent as soon as Mike starts to talk. “This is what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna sit still, you’re gonna hang right where you are until I get there, okay? I’m gonna drive down, it’s gonna take a while, should be there around noon, and I want to see you right there where you said you’d be, you understand? Say it back to me so I know you understand.”
Jesse swallows audibly, and says, “I’m gonna stay right here. Till you get me.”
Mike nods.
“Hang in there, kid.”
/ / /
“Shoes,” Mike has to remind Jesse, “go on the mat. For shoes.”
The kid looks bleary and dizzy enough to walk into a wall-not his fault, Mike gave him three Dramamine at a rest stop off the 29, as much to knock him out as anything else, if he's completely honest with himself. Mike holds an arm out behind him and shepherds this sleepy barefoot kid into the house, making a mental note to come back and burn the things that Jesse deposited on the doormat, because they smell like they've been soaking in vomit for months. Mike had to crack the windows in the car, and even then it wasn't what he'd call a pleasant ride. No wonder the kid felt queasy.
It's not the moment for a tour. Mike herds Jesse straight to the bathroom and leaves him there to get cleaned up while he goes to the kitchen for a garbage bag. All of the clothes, he tells Jesse, go into the dumpster down the street. No exceptions.
He gets back to the bathroom, knocks twice on the door, and stares at the skinny arm that swings the bundle of mildewed clothes out into the hall. It's hard to say what's more alarming-the fact that the kid's all bone, or the thick, irregular patches of shiny scar tissue ringed around his wrist. Stuffing the rotting shoes into the Hefty bag and jerking the ties shut, Mike has to shake off the fleeting impression that he's cleaning up after a corpse.
When he comes back from throwing out what might be Jesse Pinkman's only worldly possessions, the shower's still going. Jesse's delayed “yeah” when Mike asks through the door if everything's all right in there doesn't exactly ring with confidence.
“You clean?” Mike sticks to the basics. Jesse grunts back. He doesn't sound sure. From the echo, he sounds like he's lying on the bottom of the tub.
Mike gives him five more minutes, collects an old pair of sweatpants and a Philly PD t-shirt from his bottom drawer, and announces that bath time's over. Fifteen minutes later, Jesse emerges from the bathroom still dripping but fully dressed and no longer sporting any egregious mud or bloodstains that Mike can see. It's an improvement. Kid looks like a drowned cat, but it's an improvement.
Twelve hours ago, he'd have told anyone curious enough to ask that Jesse Pinkman died when Walter White did-probably a few months before. Given another twelve hours, he thinks, it could have been true either way. He could examine the fact that he drove eight hours to pick this kid off a sidewalk in Nebraska for just a phone call, but the thing's done. So he's a softie. So he's felt guilty for half a year about leaving this gullible idiot in the same state as Walter. So he's an old man without a son, and he misses Kaylee. Pop psychology isn't gonna make a peanut butter sandwich for the walking corpse swaying at the breakfast bar.
Jesse's halfway through the sandwich-kid eats like a bird, apparently, now-before he picks up where he left off around the South Dakota border. Mike, taking the opportunity to enjoy a crossword after a hell of a day, hears the shuddery inhale before he looks up.
“Take it easy, kid,” he tells Jesse, who takes this as a direction to start sobbing. Mike sighs, folds up the crossword, and passes over a napkin. The kid crushes it in his hand without wiping a damn thing and sits squeezing it while his nose drips onto his plate. It sounds like just getting enough air to keep bawling hurts like hell, but he's showing no signs of stopping.
Fully aware it's a question without an answer, Mike asks what's wrong now. What's the matter, kid, what do you need, c'mon, none of that, you're okay now, you're safe. Jesse, built like a skeleton, with a scar that cuts across his eye and peanut butter in his patchy beard, okay now, safe, folds himself over and sobs till he's coughing, and Mike stands by with water and the occasional pat on the back.
“Come on,” he tells Jesse, “you're fine,” and Jesse shakes his head.
“We left her,” he blurts. It's all he'll say, rocking on the bar stool with his arms hugged around himself, still sobbing. “We left her, I, I left, I said I'd come back and I left her, I left, we left, she's all alone and I, I, I didn't, I, I left her-”
“Kid. Kid.” Mike holds Jesse at arm's length, shakes him a little, trying to establish a little sanity here. “Left who? Where?”
“Nona,” Jesse wails, which doesn't help Mike much. He buries his face in his hands, and Mike tries again.
“Nona who?”
“NONA,” Jesse insists. “The, the, at the, I told you, at the store, Nona, she can't see good and she liked me and I, I left her, Mike, I didn't meant to do that.” He grabs Mike's arm. “We gotta go back. I. We. Can we, can we go, Mike, we can't just leave her there, we gotta go back, she's not gonna know where I went, Mike, please, we gotta GO-”
Over the course of the next several minutes, Mike accomplishes a number of things. He convinces Jesse that the napkin is for his nose, ascertains that Nona is the cat Jesse babbled about over phone, and that Jesse is in fact proposing that they drive all the way back to Omaha to adopt a cat from the PetSmart the kid squatted in for a week. He also manages, in the end, to get the kid to stop crying. It takes promising that they will, in fact, drive back to Omaha-but as soon as Mike's said it, and repeated it twice for clarity, Jesse drags in a deep breath and swipes at his cheeks with his mangled wrists, and goes from begging to saying thank you thank you thank you in between coughs.
“She's great,” he explains eagerly while Mike suggests that he work on the rest of the sandwich, while he's here and it's made and his ribs are sticking the hell out. “She's, like, big and gray, kinda, and she can't see really great but she's super nice.” He takes a bite of sandwich, at Mike's prompting, and mumbles “She likes me” through Wonder bread and peanut butter, wiping his nose again with the crumpled napkin. “You're gonna like her,” he promises anxiously. Mike tells him that's good. That's great, kid. We'll get her.
“You just eat your dinner,” he tells Jesse, “then I'll show you where you're gonna sleep.” The kid looks ready to pass out in his plate.
“You're gonna like her,” he repeats, hoarse and wavering. “Honest, Mike.”
“We'll get her, kid,” Mike assures him. “Eat your dinner.”
Jesse eats his dinner. Within twenty minutes, he's sacked out on the pullout couch, curled up in the middle of the mattress swaddled awkwardly in the only spare blanket Mike owns. It's eight PM.
Mike cleans up the kitchen, takes out the trash, checks the locks-twice tonight. He finds a number online for the store closest to where he found Jesse, and talks for a few minutes to a very friendly young lady named Jennifer, who is happy to tell him that they do have a cat named Nona, that yes, she's up to date on her shots, and of course, if he and his nephew can come tomorrow they can take her home. She asks how old his nephew is, and Mike grimaces in the direction of the living room.
“He's a kid,” he tells Jennifer, and thanks her for her help.
/ / /
Jesse's nearly silent the whole way to Omaha, curled up against the window of the Chevy in a jacket of Mike's that's way too big, chewing on his nails and tugging at the seatbelt like it's choking him. He keeps twisting around to look behind them, scanning the rear window for something or someone he never seems to see. Mike is more than happy to reassure him every twenty miles or so that the cat's still there, they're going to get her, and to turn on the radio and give them both something to focus on besides the godawful silence.
On the way back, Jesse talks to Nona the cat for two hundred miles. So far, he's right: Mike likes Nona. She doesn't any noise. From what he can see, she really just wants to sleep. Mike can sympathize. He wishes Jesse would take a hint from his friend's example-lie back and close his eyes, let the cat sleep and shut up.
He lets Jesse talk, though, because it's enlightening. The majority of Jesse's conversation with this cat is spectacularly uninspiring and repetitive-Mike points out that by now, if Nona understands English at all, she's got the details of who everyone is and where they're going down pat-but it's the asides that interest Mike. Jesse tells Nona she'll be out of that cage soon, this is the last time forever. He promises, tugging the sleeves of Mike's jacket securely over his wrists, that they're not gonna chain her up or anything. Over and over, Jesse swears to this cat that nobody's ever gonna hurt her, ever again. They're going to a good place. A safe place.
“Mike says it's okay,” Jesse tells Nona earnestly. He's twisted around in his seat, one finger hooked into the wire door of the carrier, even though Nona seems to be asleep and Mike told him to just face forward an hour ago. “It's gonna be fine, for real.” Mike, signaling towards the on-ramp for the 29, hopes dearly that it is.