[yuletide] treat | Excuse Me for a While
Title | Excuse Me for a While
Fandom | Breaking Bad
Character | Skyler White
Rating | MA
Word Count | 1100
Summary | She toes the invisible line between Arizona and New Mexico. The sign above her head proclaims 162 miles to Albuquerque. But here is probably close enough...
Warning | Brief mention of self-harm (not by Skyler)
Author's Note | Written as a 2013 yuletide treat for htbthomas
On all levels that count, she knows it’s absurd, but Skyler can’t help feeling like the day should be more meaningful, more significant than this. That there should be thunderclouds gathering ominously over the roof of her car. Stammered, stuttered news alerts read by incredulous anchors that were barely out of high school when he was Heisenberg and they were front page headlines.
The thwack, thwack of helicopters hanging heavy in the sky above her head, and a finger-print smudged calendar, pages bent out of shape, declaring an anniversary of sorts.
Instead, the trees in her peripheral vision sway slowly in the almost not there breeze, and from behind her too-large sunglasses she watches a lazy sun slink in and out between cotton wool clouds. She’s wearing new sandals and there’s a pebble beneath the ball of her left foot. One hand drops from the steering wheel and her eyes follow for a blink, her thumb and forefinger fiddling at a faded-to-greenish-now stain on the hem of her shirt that she’s only just noticed.
Skyler’s no longer the novelty she once was and she should probably be pleased with her tattered cloak of obscure anonymity.
Probably…
She knows more than nine years have passed. More than nine but not yet ten. She can no longer be more specific than that.
It wasn’t winter, she remembers absently. Maybe it had been spring…
Holly’s almost finished middle school. She has blonde curls and curious eyes and likes music and books and trying to figure out what makes the sky blue. Flynn’s been gone for more days and months than she dares to count. He calls, sometimes.
Mostly he doesn’t call.
Skyler’s okay with that. She understands.
So she says.
She adds two and two and comes to the conclusion that Marie has a boyfriend. Skyler doesn’t know his name. Doesn’t know what he looks like, or what he does for a living, or whether he collects strange rocks and walks with a limp like she sometimes imagines he might.
She doesn’t know and she thinks that’s probably for the best.
There’s a plastic crate of gifts in the base of her closet. A not-so-random assortment of odds and ends that she’s selected carefully between then and now, oven mitts, cat figurines, hand bags; all purple, or near enough to count.
When the lid will no longer be forced into place Skyler drops the lot at the nearest Goodwill. Follows up by driving to the twenty four hour Walmart on West Anthem close to where she now calls home. Buys an infinity scarf or a pair of earrings, a note book or a scented candle.
Starts the whole process over…
She’s writing a book. It’s a laced together collection of short stories, just like she had always planned. Her main character is little more than a skinny kid with a big mouth and wardrobe full of clothes that never quite fit.
She calls him Caleb James and each of the chapters, there are seventeen so far, tells the very end of his story.
Sometimes he is the predator and she spends paragraphs describing his shifting, shifty eyes, curling her prose into the stuff of nightmares.
Sometimes… sometimes he is the hapless prey.
The former is infinitely easier to write.
In the sixth chapter he has a family who love him and miss him and who heap Christmas gifts labelled in his honour beneath a shedding fir. In the ninth he is all alone. Sometimes he pulls a straight razor from his wrist to the crook of his elbow and sometimes he dies in his sleep, peaceful and dignified and almost one hundred years old.
Sometimes he drags unsuspecting former science teachers into illicit drug manufacturing and sometimes it is he who is dragged.
His name is not Caleb James.
And in the absence of known truths, she conjures endless possibilities.
She spends her days veiled behind a thin net of dusty curtains. The infamy has mostly faded now. Skyler pretends she’s glad. Smokes cigarettes in her kitchen, a pack a day because she knows it won’t be lung cancer that gets her in the end. There’d be too much poetry in that.
She laughs when she remembers how.
The front wheels of her car roll across the loose gravel at the side of the road. The state line is a handful of uneven strides in front of her and as she cuts the ignition she has to close her eyes and clamp her teeth together to stop the ever-present screaming in her lungs from ripping free.
It’s been years in the making, this moment; more than nine, not quite yet ten.
Maybe she’ll find meaning in the meaningless, after all.
Sometimes, when Skyler tells herself that she hates him, that she’ll always hate him, that she always did hate him, she can believe it.
Just for a heart-beat, just for a single breath of ice-cold air.
And she feels clean then.
But it’s not surprising really; she still is the best liar she’s ever known.
She toes the invisible line between Arizona and New Mexico. The sign above her head proclaims 162 miles to Albuquerque.
But here is probably close enough.
She has a speech memorised. Has carefully constructed sentences compiled that invariably end with a vicious fuck you, too. But now that she’s here, now that she’s ready, she finds the words she’s planned just won’t come.
After all…
“I think I might have liked it, too.”
Her lips crack and strain around the syllables and her voice all but refuses to give them volume, to give them life. The strengthening breeze catches them as they fall, carries them off across the highway to disappear amongst the tumbleweeds. Both literal and figurative.
She blinks, breathes. Feels ill.
Thinks: this part is no lie.
It’s a revelation, and a weight drops because…
She didn’t like it, not really. At least, not in the way she’s come to reconcile that he did.
But she did like it, too. For a beat.
The power. The passion.
The game.
And when you spend your days folding chipped ornaments into smudged newsprint, marvelling that someone on the other side of the country placed a bid worth eight whole dollars, then it’s probably not a stretch that she’d find something exhilarating in the horror.
Even if she mostly hated it at the same time.
There’s a thin line, she thinks; wonders if maybe that’s been the point all along.
*
Fandom | Breaking Bad
Character | Skyler White
Rating | MA
Word Count | 1100
Summary | She toes the invisible line between Arizona and New Mexico. The sign above her head proclaims 162 miles to Albuquerque. But here is probably close enough...
Warning | Brief mention of self-harm (not by Skyler)
Author's Note | Written as a 2013 yuletide treat for htbthomas
On all levels that count, she knows it’s absurd, but Skyler can’t help feeling like the day should be more meaningful, more significant than this. That there should be thunderclouds gathering ominously over the roof of her car. Stammered, stuttered news alerts read by incredulous anchors that were barely out of high school when he was Heisenberg and they were front page headlines.
The thwack, thwack of helicopters hanging heavy in the sky above her head, and a finger-print smudged calendar, pages bent out of shape, declaring an anniversary of sorts.
Instead, the trees in her peripheral vision sway slowly in the almost not there breeze, and from behind her too-large sunglasses she watches a lazy sun slink in and out between cotton wool clouds. She’s wearing new sandals and there’s a pebble beneath the ball of her left foot. One hand drops from the steering wheel and her eyes follow for a blink, her thumb and forefinger fiddling at a faded-to-greenish-now stain on the hem of her shirt that she’s only just noticed.
Skyler’s no longer the novelty she once was and she should probably be pleased with her tattered cloak of obscure anonymity.
Probably…
She knows more than nine years have passed. More than nine but not yet ten. She can no longer be more specific than that.
It wasn’t winter, she remembers absently. Maybe it had been spring…
Holly’s almost finished middle school. She has blonde curls and curious eyes and likes music and books and trying to figure out what makes the sky blue. Flynn’s been gone for more days and months than she dares to count. He calls, sometimes.
Mostly he doesn’t call.
Skyler’s okay with that. She understands.
So she says.
She adds two and two and comes to the conclusion that Marie has a boyfriend. Skyler doesn’t know his name. Doesn’t know what he looks like, or what he does for a living, or whether he collects strange rocks and walks with a limp like she sometimes imagines he might.
She doesn’t know and she thinks that’s probably for the best.
There’s a plastic crate of gifts in the base of her closet. A not-so-random assortment of odds and ends that she’s selected carefully between then and now, oven mitts, cat figurines, hand bags; all purple, or near enough to count.
When the lid will no longer be forced into place Skyler drops the lot at the nearest Goodwill. Follows up by driving to the twenty four hour Walmart on West Anthem close to where she now calls home. Buys an infinity scarf or a pair of earrings, a note book or a scented candle.
Starts the whole process over…
She’s writing a book. It’s a laced together collection of short stories, just like she had always planned. Her main character is little more than a skinny kid with a big mouth and wardrobe full of clothes that never quite fit.
She calls him Caleb James and each of the chapters, there are seventeen so far, tells the very end of his story.
Sometimes he is the predator and she spends paragraphs describing his shifting, shifty eyes, curling her prose into the stuff of nightmares.
Sometimes… sometimes he is the hapless prey.
The former is infinitely easier to write.
In the sixth chapter he has a family who love him and miss him and who heap Christmas gifts labelled in his honour beneath a shedding fir. In the ninth he is all alone. Sometimes he pulls a straight razor from his wrist to the crook of his elbow and sometimes he dies in his sleep, peaceful and dignified and almost one hundred years old.
Sometimes he drags unsuspecting former science teachers into illicit drug manufacturing and sometimes it is he who is dragged.
His name is not Caleb James.
And in the absence of known truths, she conjures endless possibilities.
She spends her days veiled behind a thin net of dusty curtains. The infamy has mostly faded now. Skyler pretends she’s glad. Smokes cigarettes in her kitchen, a pack a day because she knows it won’t be lung cancer that gets her in the end. There’d be too much poetry in that.
She laughs when she remembers how.
The front wheels of her car roll across the loose gravel at the side of the road. The state line is a handful of uneven strides in front of her and as she cuts the ignition she has to close her eyes and clamp her teeth together to stop the ever-present screaming in her lungs from ripping free.
It’s been years in the making, this moment; more than nine, not quite yet ten.
Maybe she’ll find meaning in the meaningless, after all.
Sometimes, when Skyler tells herself that she hates him, that she’ll always hate him, that she always did hate him, she can believe it.
Just for a heart-beat, just for a single breath of ice-cold air.
And she feels clean then.
But it’s not surprising really; she still is the best liar she’s ever known.
She toes the invisible line between Arizona and New Mexico. The sign above her head proclaims 162 miles to Albuquerque.
But here is probably close enough.
She has a speech memorised. Has carefully constructed sentences compiled that invariably end with a vicious fuck you, too. But now that she’s here, now that she’s ready, she finds the words she’s planned just won’t come.
After all…
“I think I might have liked it, too.”
Her lips crack and strain around the syllables and her voice all but refuses to give them volume, to give them life. The strengthening breeze catches them as they fall, carries them off across the highway to disappear amongst the tumbleweeds. Both literal and figurative.
She blinks, breathes. Feels ill.
Thinks: this part is no lie.
It’s a revelation, and a weight drops because…
She didn’t like it, not really. At least, not in the way she’s come to reconcile that he did.
But she did like it, too. For a beat.
The power. The passion.
The game.
And when you spend your days folding chipped ornaments into smudged newsprint, marvelling that someone on the other side of the country placed a bid worth eight whole dollars, then it’s probably not a stretch that she’d find something exhilarating in the horror.
Even if she mostly hated it at the same time.
There’s a thin line, she thinks; wonders if maybe that’s been the point all along.
*