'A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal'

After very little debate, Charlie and Jesse decided to sell his Aunt's former home. It wasn't that they didn't like the area; they felt perfectly comfortable exactly where they were. It was simply the fact that after two bodies had been disintegrated on the property, certain dark thoughts became associated with the furniture and the walls and the staircase so much so that Jesse couldn't stand to even look at the hole in his ceiling anymore. So, he made the decision to call a realtor and organize pricing, which meant that he and Charlie had to relocate to the RV every time some random newcomers with nothing better to do on a Saturday decided to check out their broken down home. This particular afternoon it was a lovely African American couple that came to see the condition of the building, clearly unimpressed and uncertain about the way Beth Bailey – the house's realtor – was trying to sell them on it. Unbeknownst to how badly their house was doing in the real estate department, Charlie and Jesse were otherwise occupied in the RV parked in the driveway.

The twenty three year old had situated herself on his face, gripping the makeshift bedding (they had been forced to drag half of their essentials into the larger vehicle) as the boy below ate her out. It was difficult to perform any sort of sexual task when his ribs were bandaged, so they had had to modify some of their positions to best fit the current situation. Not that either party was complaining at this point; even if Jesse hadn't taken a solid breath in over forty seconds, he figured that if he had to die a happy man, in between Charlie's legs was the way to go. Choruses of moans and foul language spilled from her lips as she gripped his hair, hissing when he unwrapped one of his roaming hands from her waist to slip two fingers inside of her.

"Shit," She groaned, eyes drooping shut with sickening pleasure as he kept up the pace that drove her insane. The familiar feeling – similar to one of a sneeze building up – made itself present in Charlie's abdomen. Spouting as many encouraging words as she could manage and imploring for her boyfriend to keep going, she plummeted towards the edge of the metaphorical 'cliff' faster and faster. And intense pulsing began, almost thrumming harder and harder until finally something snapped when he bit down slightly, and she released.

"JESSE!" The girl above him tensed, spine curving as she rode out the waves of bliss he had provided her with.

Just outside, Walter knocked on the RV door, pretending that he hadn't just heard what was probably a woman screaming out in orgasm and calling Jesse's name.

"Yo!" Jesse shifted a still-suffering-from-aftershock Charlie away from his mouth. "It's by appointment only!"

Walter squared himself and entered moments later, slamming the door shut behind him. When he lifted the tarp, he found his two former students scrambling to cover themselves whilst staring up at their – now bald – intruder incredulously.

"How ya feelin'?" Walter ignored their nude state and leaned over to check on Jesse.

"'Bout as good as you look." He wiped remnants of Charlie's mess off of his cheek, groaning in pain as he tried to shift his position. "Jeez, you look like Lex Luther."

"Listen," He looked away as Charlie pulled on Jesse's t-shirt. "I visited you in the hospital, but you were asleep."

"Yeah," Jesse confirmed. "Skinny Pete said you wanted Tuco's address. Acting like you were all out for blood. You are alive, so obviously you wised up."

"No," Walt objected, beginning to inspect the general cleanliness of the van. "I did go see him."

"Bullshit," A heavily biased Jesse spat.

"Are you selling your house?" Mr. White changed the subject briefly, turning back towards the two who were still strewn across the mattress.

"I got two dudes that turned into raspberry slushie and flushed down my toilet," Jesse complained, pointing towards the general direction of his home. "I can't even take a proper dump in there. The whole damn house has got to be haunted by now."

Jesse seemed to realize that Walter had changed the subject, and reverted it back to the topic at hand. "You didn't actually go see Tuco?"

"Here," Mr. White tossed the kid a rectangular yellow bag. "That is seventeen-five; your half of the thirty-five-thousand. Plus there's an extra fifteen in there. It's all yours; you've earned it."

Charlie stared at the cash in awe as Jesse looked up at Mr. White uncertainly. "You got this money from Tuco." He stated in disbelief.

"Yeah."

"So Tuco gave you this," Jesse motioned to the cash. "Is what you're saying?"

"Well," Mr. White nodded slightly. "We made a deal."

"You made a deal?!" Jesse's voice raised and he grunted in pain as he struggled to stand. Charlie's hands flew to help in, and he grasped on to her small frame for support before leaning onto the RV's counter.

"That's right," Walter confirmed, spreading his arms as if he hadn't a clue in the world why Jesse would have been upset at that fact. Although it was a simple matter of his pride being ruined, Jesse still had doubts about doing business with the older gangster.

"Why would you make a deal with that scumbag?!" Jesse was yelling now, making Charlie flinch in fear. He noticed, taking a moment to lower his tone and hand her his shirt. "You see what he did to me?!"

"Because I think that we can do business together," Walter's voice was steady as he answered Jesse's first question, a parental tone taking over. "We came to an understanding."

"No way, man!" Jesse exclaimed, furiously waving his cash around. "Okay? No understanding."

"Take a look at the money in your hand," Mr. White pointed at the stacks, growing frustrated at the kid's incompetence. "Now just imagine making that every week. That's right – two pounds a week."

"Without even talking to me, you told this insane ass-clown dead-eyed killer that we would give him two pounds a week?!"

"We'll just scale up our operation," Walter suggested, spreading his hands in a picture of innocence. "We'll add a few more hours -"

"Don't talk to me about hours!" Jesse exclaimed, pointing at Charlie furiously as if to silently remind Walter about what this was doing to her. Even though they stayed together no matter how many days they were separated, his operations were taking serious tolls on her anxiety. "What about pseudo, man? How are we gonna get that?! You think the meth fairy is just gonna bring it to us? It takes me a week to get this stuff. I'm drivin' all the way to Las Cruces. 200 miles each way to meet up with my smurfs -"

"Smurfs?" Mr. White made a face, never able to understand Jesse's slang.

"Dudes who go to the drugstores and get a couple boxes at a time and then sell them to me," Jesse clarified. "And that's maybe only good for, like, maybe a half-pound worth. See; that's the bottleneck in your brilliant business plan."

"All right," Mr. White conceded, growing tired of hearing the mistakes that he had made rubbed in his face.

"Of course you would have known that if you would have just asked me." Jesse stormed past him to grab his sweater, zipping himself into it and huffing angrily.

"Let's just cook with what we have, and we'll worry about getting more pseudo later." Mr. White suggested, ironing out the rest of the details and preparing to leave. At the last minute, he turned to Charlie. Jesse regarded him suspiciously as he questioned the girl's health.

"Feeling okay?" The bald man asked her. She nodded vigorously, wide-eyed and curled into a small ball. Convinced, he stepped out of the RV and into the October air, contemplating how the hell he was going to explain to Tuco why he didn't have the two pounds he promised.

|:|

"Wasn't bad enough," Jesse ranted the next day once he and Walter had met back at the house. A 4 pounds a week deal with Tuco sounded wonderful at first, but Walter failed to factor in how difficult it was to purchase key ingredients, one of which was pseudo. "We're talkin' 200-300 boxes of sinus pills. There ain't that many smurfs in the world."

"We're not going to need pseudo ephedrine," Mr. White explained, writing down the list of ingredients. "We're going to make phenylacetone in a tube furnace, then we're gonna use reductive amination to yield methamphetamine; 4 pounds."

"So no pseudo?" Jesse seemed relieved upon the confirmation that no pseudo would be required. "So you do have a plan! Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science! Okay."

His older counterpart sighed, ripping the yellow note off and handing it to Jesse. The long list of chemicals and various substances that would be crucial to their success in cooking seemed to go on and on, confusing Jesse just by sparing a glance at them.

"What's this?" He scrunched up his nose, quoting from the scribbles and having difficulty pronouncing the names. "One autotransformer, hy-hydrous methyl-methylamine? Two thirty-five M&M tube furnaces -"

"That's MM: millimeter," Mr. White corrected, letting his thoughts take him away. "One 70-millimeter would be fine, but they're hard to come by, so…"

"'Forty grams thorium nitrate'?!" Jesse exclaimed, unable to comprehend the task before him. "Yo, Mr. White – I can't even pronounce half this shit. You know what? Count me out – I'm leavin' town. I'm movin' to, like, Oregon or something -"

Mr. White hopped up, grabbing at the younger boy to stop him from moving out of the room. "Jesse, Jesse! Listen to me." He gripped the kid by his shoulders, leaning down to his level. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

They shared a weird moment of silence, and Jesse eyed him uncertainly. "What are you doing?"

"This is the first day of the rest of your life," Mr. White tried again to no avail. "But what kind of life will it be? Will it be a life of fear? Of: 'Oh, no, no, no, 'I can't do this'? Of never once believing in yourself?"

"I don't know..." Jesse looked up at the man, lack of understanding reflecting in his eyes.

"Listen," Mr. White sighed, pointing to the list on the table. "These things? We need them. And only you can get them for us."

Suddenly Charlie danced into the room with her headphones blasting, obviously fully prepared to begin cooking something that one of Jesse's friends would wolf down the next day. This would have been perfectly fine with the other occupants of the household standing her kitchen, if not for the fact that she was completely naked. She screeched as she caught sight of the two bewildered men, ducking behind the counter and removing her headphones, which were still blasting rap music. Jesse was more used to these sorts of antics; she had a bad habit of cooking naked sometimes – something about it being 'liberating' – but for Mr. White, this entire display of strange behavior must have been bewildering.

"I am so sorry," She began to apologize, peeking out from behind the island. "I thought I was alone – you said Tuco -"

"That's alright, Charlie." Mr. White shook his hand at her, not bothering to listen to any other excuses as he turned on his heel and left the house. He'd had enough of crazy for one day.

|:|

Charlie came home from work the next day to find Mr. White and Jesse unscrewing etch-a-sketches in her kitchen. After several hours of shopping and thousands of dollars blown on the supplies Mr. White had tasked him to find, Jesse had found everything except the one key ingredient they needed; methylamine. So the boys needed to rob from the chemical handling station just South of Albuquerque, which meant devising a plan as to how to get in and out quickly and quietly that night. Charlie had no idea what they were up to, but apparently etch-a-sketches were the key to their solution.

"Do you guys want grilled cheese?" Her tone was light and airy, and Mr. White turned to her incredulously. It amazed him to see how easily she adapted to questionable situations sometimes; it was remarkable that she hadn't left Jesse after everything that this boy put himself through.

"Sure," He nodded. "That would be lovely, thank you."

Charlie simply smiled and went to gather the ingredients, turning the stovetop on. The lined the pan with oil, then placed four slices of bread and some cheese on the countertop. Cutting the sandwiches into triangles, she hummed quietly and put away the package of bread.

"What's this stuff called again?" Jesse asked as Charlie started to grill the food.

"Thermite."

"And that'll cut through a lock?" Jesse raised a brow. "'Cause this is supposed to be one big ass lock."

"In World War II," Walter began to explain, catching the attention of Charlie while she waited for the sandwiches to toast on one side. "The Germans had an artillery piece. It was the biggest in the world; called the Gustav Gun, and it weighed a thousand tons. And the Gustav was capable of firing a 7-ton shell and hitting a target accurately 23 miles away. I mean, you could drop bombs on it every day for a month without ever disabling it. But you drop a commando - one man with just a bag of this – and he could melt right through four inches of solid steel and destroy that gun forever. So yes," Mr. White smiled. "I think it will cut through any lock we're likely to find."

Charlie flipped the two sandwiches, setting them on separate plates and grabbing three glasses of water. She said nothing, setting the plates in front of them and filling their cups. She then filled her own, laid a kiss on Jesse's forehead, and began to gather the empty etch-a-sketches. Walter watched her walk out of the kitchen with the discarded toys, hearing the clang of a recycling bin shutting closed moments later.

"Is she always like that?" He was still confused about the girl's strange behavior.

"Like what?" Jesse was chomping down on his sandwich, oblivious to the point Walter was trying to make.

Mr. White shot him a look before shaking his head, assuming that perhaps Charlie had been diagnosed with some sort of bipolar disorder or something similar. "Never mind."

|:|

Later in the evening, after they had returned from the chemical handling plant with the full barrel of methylamine, both Walter and Jesse nearly collapsed when they got inside the house. The barrel – left in the trunk of the Monte Carlo in case they needed to make a quick getaway – had taken its toll on the two, who were clearly no poster boys for physical fitness. Jesse had a good amount of stamina, but in terms of health Mr. White was in no position to go jogging or do heavy lifting any time soon. So Charlie, concerned about the toll he had placed on his body that evening, made him a cup of tea and offered to drive him home. Again, he was dumbfounded by the amount of patience she must have had for this sort of lifestyle. Living close to or being involved with a drug dealer was never going to be easy, and she had already attached herself to one.

"No," He politely declined her offer and finished his tea. "I'll get home fine, thank you Charlie. I'll see you soon, Jesse."

The pair watched him go, frowning as they heard the distinct sound of familiar coughing before his car engine started. Jesse's Aunt had the same rough cough when she was still alive, occasionally spitting up blood and vomiting due to the chemotherapy. Those had been hard times for an already disturbed Jesse, who didn't exactly know what to make of his aunt's disease until she was already gone.

"We gotta cook tomorrow," Jesse sat on the edge of their mattress and hung his head, lighting a cigarette. He watched Charlie brush her teeth and change both her naval jewelry, a process that she struggled with and required his assistance. She held out the first set of beads for him to hold and instructed for him to hold the bottom part of her upper jewelry, ignoring his original statement until both her upper and reverse naval had been changed. The bottom now held a long dangly piece, one that shifted around every time she moved.

"You guys have to make a lot, don't you?" She stopped in front of her boyfriend, who had grown distracted by the sparkling appendage and had begun to play with it.

"Yeah," He answered halfheartedly, taking a drag of his cigarette and pulling Charlie's hips towards him so that he could lay a kiss between them. "We do."

|:|

"The RV won't start, baby. We're cookin' in the basement." Jesse and Walt passed Charlie in the driveway the next morning, each carrying boxes of equipment with them.

"Just be careful." She smiled, kissing him once on the lips and climbing into their red car. Again, Walter turned to Jesse in disbelief once she had roared off down the street in the Monte Carlo.

"How does she do that?!"

"Do what?" Jesse grimaced, shoving open the door of the basement and practically tripping down the stairs.

"Her nonchalance is remarkable," Mr. White clarified, whipping some sweat off of his brow that had worked up after trying to start the RV. "I don't know how she hasn't called the police on you yet."

Jesse shrugged, a smile lighting up his face as he thought of the one person that would always stay by his side no matter what. "Charlie's cool."

"She's 'cool'?" Mr. White quoted as they traveled upstairs to get more boxes, setting up the lab downstairs in between journeys. "What if one day she snaps and decides to dial up the D.E.A? She could blow this whole operation!"

"What are you saying?" Jesse's nose scrunched up as his brain started to piece what Walter was saying together.

"All I'm saying is that she has a lot of information," The chemistry teacher struggled with a heavier box, which Jesse took off his hands and swapped with a lighter load. "There's no telling what she might do."

"Mr. White," Jesse set down the box he was carrying, turning to face the older man once they reached the basement again "I've known that girl for ten years now, 'kay? She's everything to me. She's all I have – she's what makes me happy and I can't survive without her."

There was a beat of silence.

"Now let me tell you something about Charlie; Charlie doesn't have anything or anyone else left. You know what happened to her – you remember her parents and you know what she does. She's not gonna rat us out because this is the only thing she has left; I'm the only thing she has left. She's not gonna rat us out because she's not a shitty person and she knows value when she sees it. She's not gonna rat us out because she loves me and she knows that smokin' this whole Op would make our lives total shit storms. Criminals know the difference between right and easy, Mr. White – but out of all of us, Charlie knows it best. 'Cause she's gotta make that choice every day."

Walter simply stood and stared at his former student, unsure of whether or not the feeling flooding through him was relief or the desire to strangle Pinkman in anger. It was a plus side that the kid realized what Charlie was feeling, but to put her through what Walter was so desperately trying to hide from his wife? The choice of either ruining everything that he had built or going to the police? It was despicable for him to see. Then again, Mr. White was in no position to dictate between what was 'right' and what was 'easy' – he had, after all, started a meth lab.

|:|

"Yo – you ain't seein' the basement, bitch! You got that?! Is that stickin' in? All of you! House is NOT for sale! GET THE HELL OUT!"

Charlie hurried inside her house upon hearing her boyfriend's furious words, encountering a rush of terrified potential customers on her way inside. Beth was stumbling behind them, making profuse apologies and taking all of her flyers with her. This was a career-changing incident; that was for damn sure. She would either have to start selling in another continent or change her name, because no one was going to be inclined to buy from her again. Not that Charlie was angry about it at all – Beth was a sneaky, manipulative salesman that really pressured buyers and would lie right through her pearly whites.

So when the frantic woman passed her in the hallway, she merely smiled sarcastically. "Sorry it didn't work out."

"You!" Beth was furious, hair coming out of its curls and eyes wide. "You useless junkies – the both of you! Always fornicating during my open houses a-a-and leaving cigarette butts everywhere!"

"Hey!" Jesse came up behind his girlfriend and wrapped an arm around her, glaring at the woman dressed in yellow. "What part of 'get out' don't you understand?"

With one last 'humph' and a twirl on her heel, the woman stomped out of their house and slammed the door behind her. Once she had gone, a satisfied Jesse turned to his girlfriend; gas mask perched on the top of his head.

"You're home early."

|:|

Charlie opened the front door to the house, sighing and lighting a cigarette. Her workday had been average, but she had been traumatized at lunch when a bigger looking man had begun to yell at his wife. Pollos had been forced to fill out an incident report when he had ripped his tray table in two, causing the remnants of their unfinished lunch to splatter everywhere. Charlie had spent an hour on her hands and knees mopping everything up while the other employees held the husband back and ran the restaurant on their own. Her legs had just begun to feel hints of soreness, and she was sure that by tomorrow her knees would be bruised.

Out of nowhere, just as she was setting down her coat, she was engulfed by a large familiar mass and held tight. Recognizing her boyfriend but startled by his actions, she let out a squeak and clutched the back of his beanie-covered head.

"Jesse?" Her other hand wrapped itself around his shoulders, vaguely being able to detect his trembling. "What happened?"

At first Jesse didn't respond, and Charlie didn't push it. They swayed slightly on the spot, embracing each other for all that it was worth. Charlie knew that he was in shock; she had seen him do this multiple times before when something dangerous threatened to shatter the lifestyle he had built for himself. His heavy breathing paired with whimpers was a dead giveaway that something must have happened with Tuco. She figured that after traumatic experiences, it was normal for him to clutch whatever was most important to him and acknowledge it for all that it was worth. So Charlie merely slid his hat off, running her fingers through his hair and pressing kisses to the side of his head as if to remind him that she was still there; that she would always be there. After five minutes, she had finished her cigarette and Jesse had begun to loosen his grip.

"H-he killed a guy," His blue eyes were shining with unshed tears as he pulled back and clarified. "Tuco beat a guy to death."