Been awhile since I've been bitten by the fanfic bug, but I just finished watching Breaking Bad, and...well, here goes.
This takes place after the final episode.
Walter White woke with a strangled gasp and lay, dazed and shivering, on the hard floor. He blinked the sting of sweat from his eyes and found himself staring up at a blank ceiling. Slowly, he sat up.
He recognized this place. It was his house—the house where he'd once lived with his family, in what now felt like another life. The living room was just as he'd last seen it: empty and lifeless, devoid of furniture, a skeleton of itself. The word HEISENBERG, sprayed across the wall in dripping yellow, was the only splash of color.
What was he doing here?
Memories flashed through his head. Bullets. Screams. Agony. The wail of police sirens. Darkness closing in around him. His hand flew to his stomach, to the place where he'd been shot. His palm came away clean, free of blood. There was no pain now; only a distant ache, like the ghost of an old wound. When he pulled up his shirt, there was nothing, not even a scar.
He had died. He remembered it. Yet here he was.
The faint buzz of a fly reached his ears. He turned to see it sitting on the floor beside him—a huge, black housefly, washing itself with its forelegs. Its wings vibrated and twitched. Automatically, Walt smacked his hand down atop the fly. When he lifted his palm, there was nothing there. The buzz came again, from somewhere above him.
He drew in a deep breath…and doubled over in a coughing fit, muffling the sounds against one fist. The coughing lasted a long time, and it hurt, and it left him feeling drained and shaky. He flopped back down on the floor, trying to catch his breath. It was a few minutes before he gathered the strength to climb to his feet and walk over to the window.
The street outside was still and quiet, the sky a flat grayish-white. There was something very unnatural about that sky; it looked like it was made of paper, like he could punch a hole in it. The houses were all more-or-less as he remembered them, except they appeared slightly older, slightly shabbier, the lawns unkempt, the windows dark. No cars, no signs of life.
This was his house, his neighborhood, and yet it was…different. Wrong.
Steady, he thought. Breathe. Take stock. Gather information before drawing a conclusion.
Slowly, he walked through the empty rooms in his house, but saw nothing except a few stray pieces of trash crumpled in the corners. His gaze lingered on the baby's room, the spot where Holly's crib once stood.
His heart twisted in his chest, a sudden, sharp spasm. He turned away.
His pulse drummed in his throat as he looked out the window, at the backyard pool...which was, oddly enough, filled with chlorine-blue water, the only color in sight. Everything else seemed faded, bleached out. A world in grayscale.
The faucets in the bathrooms and kitchen didn't work, so he walked outside, knelt beside the pool, scooped up some water and drank from his cupped hands.
And then he noticed—he couldn't smell the chlorine at all. Unease flickered inside him. He gathered up a handful of his dirty, sweat-stained clothes, held them to his nose, and inhaled. No odor. His sense of smell was completely absent.
The sense of unease deepened and chills wormed their way under his skin. None of this made sense.
Maybe he was still dying. Maybe this was a hallucination, a few fleeting dreams before the final darkness closed in. But he didn't really believe that. This was too detailed, too fully realized to be a dream.
He walked back through the house, out through his front door, and surveyed the street. It seemed to fade into nothingness at the edges, details blurring into a white mist.
"Hello?" he called out. His voice echoed in the stillness. "Can anyone hear me?"
No answer.
He began to walk. A few times, he stopped to knock on doors, but no one answered. When he peered in through windows, the houses all appeared just as bare and deserted as his own.
He kept walking until the mist around him thickened, and he was walking through solid white. Still, he pushed forward. The mist was cold and clammy against his skin, like damp fleece. It blotted out the sky, the pavement, until there was nothing but a sea of mist. He kept one arm outstretched in front of him, waving blindly to prevent himself from running into anything.
Finally, the mist thinned. He stepped out into clear air…and found himself in front of his own house again. For a moment, he could only stand, staring, his jaw hanging slack. "This is impossible," he muttered.
He turned and walked in a different direction, and the mist swallowed him once more. Again, when the mists cleared, he emerged back into his front yard. No matter which way he walked, he found himself returning to the same spot. His mind raced wildly, trying to make sense of it. This place was an endless loop, a snake eating its own tail. It was nonsensical, a physical conundrum. Yet it existed.
He dug his thumbnail into his palm, hard enough to hurt. "Wake up," he hissed at himself. "Wake up, dammit."
The scenery remained unaltered.
Dazed, he trudged across the street and sat down on his front steps. Another deep, racking fit of coughing seized him. It lasted for almost a full minute. When it was over, he slumped, eyes closed, waiting for the dizziness to subside.
Maybe he should keep exploring. He could break into one of the other houses, see if it had a working phone, a way to contact someone outside this bubble in space-time, or whatever it was. But he was just so…tired. So damn tired. He lay down, cheek pressed to the cool concrete. Beneath the exhaustion, he felt a deep and steadily growing terror, like a void in the center of his chest. "Where am I?" he whispered.
Time passed. How long, Walt didn't know; the clocks here didn't work. The sky darkened and brightened, but there were no stars. For that matter, there didn't seem to be any sun. The light was gray and diffuse, emanating from everywhere and nowhere.
His investigations confirmed that none of the other houses contained working phones. Or working televisions or computers, for that matter. He was alone.
Strangely, he felt no hunger, which was just as well, because there was no food. He slept on the living room floor whenever exhaustion overcame him, but he never woke up feeling rested. Sleep was simply a brief gap in his consciousness, like a line of text neatly inked out. It brought no feeling of refreshment or renewal.
The fly still buzzed around his house, sometimes close and loud, sometimes so faint he could hardly hear it, but always there—it seemed to be the only other living thing in this place. Occasionally he chased it around, more for sport than because he actually expected to catch it (which he never did). It was just a game to relieve the boredom, which had quickly become the most salient fact of his existence: constant, unending, oppressive, and utterly intolerable.
It was becoming harder and harder to deny what, deep down, he had known since the moment he woke up. He was already dead.
He stood beside his pool, staring into its shimmering blue depths.
So, Walt thought wearily, this was his eternal fate. This was hell. Not a flaming pit, but a gray, empty, pointless existence in a lonely world filled with reminders of the family he had lost. He had to admit, it seemed like a fitting punishment.
He laughed, a hoarse, slightly crazed sound. The laughter broke off into another coughing fit. It went on and on until he thought he'd cough up his lungs. Finally, it tapered off, leaving him empty and sore and aching. Maybe he would have cancer for the rest of eternity too. Always dying, never dead. No Skyler to wipe his brow with a cold cloth, to lay a blanket over him when he woke up disoriented on the bathroom floor. She had always been there, long after anyone else would have deserted him. And now, even she was gone. He would never see her face, never hear her voice again.
He would never hear anyone's voice again.
More time passed, sliding by in slippery chunks, difficult to define or pin down.
He went for aimless walks. Sometimes, he thought he felt eyes watching him from the windows of the empty houses, but when he looked, there was no one there.
Occasionally he raged, pacing, shaking his fists and screaming like a madman at the sky. Sometimes he wept. Once or twice, when he was feeling particularly desperate, he even got down on his knees and prayed for forgiveness. No one answered, and afterward, he felt absurd—as if he had walked up to a telephone pole and asked it to do is income taxes.
If there was a God, even He couldn't hear Walt's voice here.
Because there was nothing else to occupy himself with, Walt spent most of his time inside his own memories, replaying the good times with Skyler and Walt Junior.
He missed their voices—Skyler's gentle, warm alto, Junior's clear tenor, broken and halting—the way he took pains to enunciate his words in a way that always made Walt feel somehow both protective and proud. And Holly. Little Holly, so tender and soft it had sometimes seemed impossible that anything so pure could exist.
He remembered his fiftieth birthday, the day he first learned his cancer diagnosis and everything changed.
Back then, he had been a small man, an unimportant man, frustrated and resentful toward a world which refused to acknowledge him. He'd kept his anger hidden, always simmering beneath the surface, because there was nothing he could do to change his reality. But he'd had his family. Their love, their trust, so real and essential, like air—something you didn't notice or appreciate until it was gone. And Walt had broken that trust with his own two hands.
He thought about Jesse Pinkman, too. Jesse had been many things to him; his protege, his partner, his friend, and then his enemy. The last time Walt had seen him, he'd been a broken man, scruffy and disheveled, blue eyes staring out through a fog of despair. After being held prisoner in that horrible compound for so long, he'd no doubt have some deep psychological scars. But Jesse was alive, at least. He was free.
Walt wondered what he was doing now. He hoped Jesse hadn't slipped back into his old habits and started using again. Maybe he'd learned from his mistakes. Maybe, finally, he would make a decent life for himself. After everything he'd been through, he's earned a bit of peace.
He walked numbly down the street, hands in his pockets. He'd lost count of how many hundreds of times he'd crossed the length of his tiny world. How many more thousands, how many more millions, billions of times would he take this same walk? How long before his sanity completely dissolved?
This was what he deserved, he reminded himself. No more, no less.
At least he had left his family some money, even if they would never know it had come from him. That was what he'd set out to do, wasn't it? That was why he started cooking meth in the first place.
Of course, he'd enjoyed it, too. Despite all the pain, the terror, and the horrors he had committed, he had tasted for a brief while what it meant to truly live. He had been a wild animal, a king on a throne of crystal blue, a god of blood and gunsmoke and chemistry.
And he'd left a trail of shattered lives and corpses behind him. Hank. Jane. Gale. Mike. All the countless others who had died because of his arrogance. And—
He stopped.
Ahead of him, a figure in a black hoodie sat motionless on the front steps of the house next to his. Walt blinked a few times. No. It couldn't be.
...could it?
The figure's head turned slowly toward him. Walt stared into blank, red-rimmed blue eyes.
"Hey, Mr. White."
-To be continued