It was having a ghost sitting at your kitchen table. After five years of not speaking, Jesse Pinkman was sitting at across from her, looking like he'd been through hell and back. From the look of him, a stiff drink, some coffee, a shower, a shave, clean clothes, and a good night's sleep were all in order. Unable to determine which was needed most, Charlie sat Jesse in a chair while she brewed coffee and nuked some leftover pizza. She brought both to the table with a large bottle of whiskey.
"Your choice," she said, holding up the bottle. Jesse hesitated for a second, the unscrewed the cap and watched the amber liquid flow into a bright red mug with the word ARIES blazing across the side.
"I didn't have anywhere else to go," Jesse said quietly, not meeting her eye as he gripped his cup of coffee.
"I didn't ask any questions," Charlie replied, leaning the back of her chair against the wall and blowing calmly on the steaming cup of coffee clutched in her hands.
"Yeah," Jesse grunted, taking another sip of coffee. Seconds ticked by silently.
"Thanks for not hitting me with the bat," Jesse said finally breaking the awkward heaviness in the room.
Charlie smirked slightly and turned to face him, "You woulda deserved it."
Jesse closed his eyes and nodded, "Probably." He still wouldn't look at her, and on some level, Charlie couldn't blame him. The few times he did glance her way, there was a dead look in his eyes.. His hair was greasy, dirty, and scraggly, like he hadn't had a haircut or a shower in months. Charlie opened her mouth to apologize, but changed her mind and fiddled with the handle of her coffee mug.
"Hey, yo...ya know Heisenberg?" he said, staring blankly at the wall in front of him.
"Heisenberg as in the drug dealer? As in our old chem teacher?"
"Yup," he replied, taking a sip of coffee. His hand shook as he placed the cup back on the table with a loud thunk. " That one."
Charlie sat back up straight in her chair and leaned closer to Jesse, reaching for his hand as she spoke. "Jesse, I heard your name on the news-" she started, bringing up the topic she had tried to avoid.
Jesse cut her off. "You should turn on the TV," he said, staring into his cup of coffee. "He's dead."
Her hand stopped in mid-air, falling flatly to the table before reaching his. "Dead?" she asked incredulously, her eyes as wide as saucers. "Jesse, how can you possibly know that-"
He turned to her, a hard look in his eyes and repeated, "Turn. On. The. TV."
Furrowing her brow, Charlie's feet glided from the dining area to the living room, where she fumbled to find the remote in the darkness. She finally found it and clicked on the television. The blue-ish light flooded the room, giving everything an eerie glow. She switched from ESPN to one of the local news affiliates as Jesse appeared next to her in the room.
"-once again, breaking news coming out of Albuquerque, the nationwide man hunt for notorious meth manufacturer Walter White aka 'Heisenberg' comes to an end. Police closed in on a compound earlier this evening and found White on the floor with a gunshot wound to the stomach. Efforts to revive White were unsuccessful-"
Charlie turned to look at Jesse, who was now staring that the television blankly, "How the hell could you have known about this?"
"-several other men were found shot to death in the compound, at this time police do not believe there are any survivors. Again, Walter White aka 'Heisenberg' found dead on the outskirts of Albuquerque-"
"Jesse?"
He took another long sip on of coffee, his eyes not leaving the screen. "I was there."
Two years of Jesse's high school life were spent wrapped up in a girl who had gone from someone who faded into the background at the bus stop every morning to the person Jesse couldn't even contemplate living without. It all started with a joke, some stupid thing he'd said to impress his friends one morning. None of them laughed, but she snorted back a laugh and caught his eye.
It was over at the moment. He didn't realize it until much later, until she was gone for good, but Jesse Pinkman somehow managed to fall in love in that very instant, in the wake of that tiny snort.
On the bus, Jesse gave up his normal spot lurking in the back of the bus with the rest of the stoners, and slid into a seat behind her, the new headphone-clad object of his affections.
He leaned over the bus seat, "Hey, yo, you like my joke?"
She smirked and slid her headphones off her ears.. "It was more amusing then the crap you guys normally talk about."
"Yo, what's your name again? Christy?"
"We've been at the same bus stop forever and you didn't pick up my name?"she replied, rolling her eyes.
"C'mon it's Christy right? CHRIS-TYYYYY!" he yelled, his voice echoing strangely off the walls of the bus.
"Try again." She put her headphones and turned the music up, blocking him out.
Jesse slid into the seat next to her, pushing her over to the window. He picked up one of the ears of the headphones. "C'mon, yo, tell me your name," he whispered and slinked an arm around her shoulders.
She pulled her headphones off her ears and turned to face Jesse, an annoyed an exasperated look on her face. "If I tell you my name, will you go away?"
"Whatever you want."
"Charlie. My name is Charlie," she relented. "Now, can you just go away so I can enjoy my last few minutes of freedom in peace?"
"I got the first two letters," Jesse replied, standing up and walking backwards to the back of the bus. "That's gotta count for something, yo!"
Charlie rolled her eyes and placed her headphones back on her ears, making a show of raising the volume of her music as Jesse backed away.
"Hey, man, why were you buggin' Charlie?" Brandon asked as Jesse plopped into the bus seat.
Jesse shrugged and grinned. "Hey, yo, she's hot man. Think she may be next on Jesse Pinkman's list of conquests."
Brandon shook his head. "Good luck with that one, man. That girl hates everybody," he warned Jesse. But Jesse was too busy staring at the back of her head to pay any attention to what Brandon was saying.
After much cajoling, Charlie finally convinced Jesse to peel his eyes from the TV and take a shower. With reluctance, he'd stripped down and stepped under the warm water, let it melt all the filth and anger off his skin. He couldn't even remember when the last time he'd been privileged enough to enjoy a warm, unsupervised shower. Four months? Six?
He climbed out and dried off, wrapping the towel around his waist. The mirror above the sink was clouded over with steam. Jesse wiped it off, looking closely at his distorted face for the first time. His hair was long and lank, falling down past his ears. Scars covered his face, crisscrossing on his cheek, scratching across his nose.
"Jesse," Charlie said softly as she knocked on the door. "I-I've got some clothes. Might be a little big but-but they're clean."
Jesse heard her but said nothing, just stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes betrayed how he felt inside: dead, defeated.
"Should I...just leave them here or...?"
"You can come in." He growled, his voice sound harsh and foreign.
He was barely standing, holding on to the sink with both hands for support, when she nudged open the door.
"Oh, Jesse," she murmured, lightly touching a deep purple bruise on his side. He winced and recoiled, sucking in his breath. Her brow furrowed slightly and Jesse saw a brief shadow of pain and worry flash over her face before she recomposed herself.
"Hey," he said softly, as she turned her face away. When she refused to look at him, he reached out and gently turned her chin towards him. Charlie closed her eyes as he leaned down close enough so their foreheads touched. "Hey, I'm fine."
"I'm fine," he assured her. They stayed that way for a few minutes, Charlie unable to look him in the eye.
"You're a lot of things, Jesse Pinkman," she said, pulling her head away and reaching into the medicine cabinet, "but fine has never been one of them."
She removed a small tube and screwed off the cap. "It's just a scar reducer," she assured him, applying the stuff liberally to the links marking his face. It was odd to have healing hands touching his face rather than one's whose sole aim to was inflict pain and punishment.
"There," she said, placing the tube back in the cabinet. She moved towards the hall, pausing for a moment in the doorway and nodding towards the stack of clothes. " Your old electronic razor's in there. Probably not sharp...but I thought you might want it."
Chemistry made them come together, quite literally. Jesse tried for months to convince Charlie that he was worth something, that she should go out with him, but all he received were small smirks as she pushed her headphones back over her ears.
And then, in Mr. White's Chemistry class, they'd counted off to fifteen, randomly pairing up for that semester's major project. Jesse called out "eight" and so did Charlie.
"Partners, yo!" Jesse said excitedly, scurrying over to her table.
Charlie rolled her eyes and shook her head, moving a beaker out of the way of Jesse's much too baggy sweatshirt sleeve. "Let's just get this over with, ok? Your house, after school?"
And the rest was less about chemistry, and more history. She'd shown up at his house and Mrs. Pinkman sent her upstairs, where Jesse was listening to music and drawing in his sketch book. He didn't even notice she was there until she spoke.
"Is that me?" she asked, making Jesse jump.
"Hey, you shouldn't be sneakin' up on people like that!" he exclaimed, trying to close his sketchbook. Charlie pried it from his hands before he could stash it away.
"Maybe if you turned down this shitty house music you would have heard me yell your name like five times," she said, dropping her bag to the floor and sitting on his bed and flipping open the sketch book.
She was on his bed! "Yeah...well..." he had no come back for that. "...whatever."
"Uh huh...you still didn't answer my question, are these supposed to be me?"
"Um...maybe?" He offered, knowing full well the last five or six pages consisted of highly animated drawings of Charlie and Jesse. A sheepish Jesse handing a headphoned Charlie a bunch of flowers, Charlie slamming a locker door while Jesse attempted to say something funny, Charlie and Jesse wrapped around each other kissing. Mirroring real-life Charlie, the only color in the drawings was a bright red stripe of hair.
"Is this how you see me?" she asked, studying one of the drawings closely. It was the one of them at the bus stop, Charlie in the foreground drawn to look like she was shining against a background of shapeless other people.
"Um...yeah?" Jesse replied sheepishly. And before he knew exactly what was happening, Charlie's lips were on his.