It was just past four in the morning, and the first glow of dawn was spreading from the horizon. Jesse's nearly silent eight hours of driving were disturbed only by the uneven snoring of Walt rippling out of the backseat. The roads had been relentlessly dark for the past five hours; headlights rarely glared in his windshield, and his only company had been long-haul trucks loudly lumbering to pass his irredeemably slow Chrysler mini-van. As the next hour wore on, and he wound his way near, and then through, Salt Lake City, it occurred to Jesse that he couldn't remember the last time he drove. This was the first time since captivity he had control of the wheel.

In the panic following Walt's collapse, and his awkward struggle to get him into the van unnoticed, he had thrown away any thoughts of heading to the Gulf of Mexico. He conceded that they needed to find a remote location so that Walt could expire in relative peace, and Jesse nearly groaned recalling the thought. He had no intention of staying with Walt until the end. Once the man was stable and comfortable, he would make an escape into the night.

Finally past the city's limits, he saw signs for the next smaller, and less conspicuous, town: Bountiful. Exhaustion and hunger drove him to the local Motel 6, and the ball cap and sunglasses guise raised no eyebrows in reception, despite the sun's absence. He parked the van perpendicular to their new room's door, and then pressed the button on his key chain to open the passenger door. It glided backward comedically slow to reveal Walt slumped forward against his seat belt, glasses dangling from his nose.

"Jesus," Jesse muttered, as he rushed to push Walt back against the seat. He clapped against the man's cheeks a few times, trying to stir him quietly. Walt's eyes flickered, and soon he sat forward looking at Jesse.

"What happened?"

"Can you walk? The room's there."

Looking disoriented, Walt unfastened his belt and stumbled from the van. Jesse passed the key to his hand, and he stiffly walked to the room to unlock the door. Jesse entered a few minutes later to see Walt seated on the edge of the mattress, straining to catch his breath.

Pocketing the room key from the table, he looked at Walt curiously. "Are you…okay?"

"Yeah, yeah," Walt wheezed.

"You wanna sleep, you hungry?" Jesse was purposely using his loudest, warmest voice that was ever so patronising.

"What happened, Jesse? You were…leaving."

Slumping against a dresser opposite the bed, Jesse sighed. "You fell…remember?"

"No, I – I don't have any recollection."

Jesse could see the discomfort in Walt, and how he was still struggling to inhale fully. It reminded him of a hot, sandy day in the desert when Walt made him finish the cook on his own, and it had been when he realized the man was terminal. Despite his diagnosis, he rarely saw him suffering from this day. Most of the time it felt like Mr. White was invincible.

"Well, you know I bet it was from all that booze you drank, right? What was that, a forty of bourbon? Crazy." He ruffled his hair, and looked down at his shoes. He could see a recognition crossing Walt, and he hoped the man had nothing more to say to him about the events of two evenings ago. The gashes on his hand and stomach were still raw, and reminding him with every movement how stupid he had been.

Walt laid back on the bed, clutching his chest. His breaths were shallow, but quiet, and Jesse guessed he just needed some rest. He brought a plastic cup of water to the table next to Walt, and after a quiet thanks, he laid atop the covers on the opposite side of the bed. He hoped to sleep for it would be another ten hours to reach the exact place he had in mind.

The bed shook, and Jesse woke, frozen in silence against his pillow. Someone bulkier than he was laying down beside him while shifting the pillows one by one. He could feel the comforter he laid upon being yanked down the bed from beneath him, and every forceful tug had him squeezing his eyes shut harder. He stayed as still as possible so as not to betray himself as awake, and soon he could feel the comforter being laid atop him. A hand rested on his shoulder, and he jolted against its touch. He buried his head into his pillow, hoping at least he wouldn't be forced to watch what was about to happen to him. The hand had bounced away at his jolt, but he could feel weight shifting in the bed as though someone were peering over him. He hated when Kenny watched him like this. Sometimes he couldn't stand just waiting for it, and he would flop to his back and initiate it himself. He decided to do just this, and rolled over. He put a hand out to the man's chest, and dragged a finger down it lightly.

"Wake up," a voice said softly.

"I am awake," Jesse returned.

The man snatched the hand from his chest, crushing it as he pushed it to Jesse's side. The weight beside him on the bed lifted away, and he could tell he was being deserted.

"What, am I supposed to keep pretending?"

He could suddenly hear a bracing cough breaking through, and then the violent beams of midday sunlight hit his eyes. His brain was racing, knowing there were no windows where he thought he was. He sat up quickly, rubbing his eyes. "Jesus, I didn't mean to-"

"It's nothing." Walt's cough had stopped momentarily.

"I just…"

"You're getting there, I think. This is the first time you've been so lucid this quickly..."

Walt's warm tone unsettled Jesse, and he just stared at the blank television screen. He didn't think he was getting better, he just thought he was getting better at recovering from insanity. A pause passed, and Jesse stood.

"We need to eat, and then move. We've got ages to go yet."

"Ages to where exactly, Jesse?"

"Montana, near Yellowstone actually. I got a line on a cabin. Looks real remote." He stopped for a moment. "What do you think?"

A faint smile crossed Walt's face. "That's fine. Good work, son."

The word was like a hand ripping his stomach out from his asshole. He gripped the black bag, whitening his knuckles, and left the room without looking back. Teetering behind him was Walt, who settled into the back seat of the van once again. Jesse closed his passenger door remotely, and shook his head. Ten more hours, he thought, ten hours and we'll be as free as money can buy.

"We're only a couple hours from the cabin, there's no need to stop now," Walt complained.

"Listen, I'm the one driving here, so what I say goes. I'm hungry, and this place is called Butte. Butte, Montana."

"A year with neo-Nazi's, and you're still so childish. How can that be?"

"How can you still have no sense of humour after everything your ass has been dragged through, huh? You'd think a man this close to death would have a better outlook on life."

"Just, let's hurry, alright? This is a risk, and an unnecessary one."

"Alright, pipe down. Look, there's a burger shack thing. 'Bonanza Burgers' – wow, what year is it up here?"

After navigating the drive-thru, Jesse drove to park closer to the highway so the two of them could eat in peace. Despite his protests, he knew Butte was a tiny town, and so he was trying to be a bit cautious. As cars passed them hurtling toward the on-ramp, the two devoured their cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

"Take it, take another ring."

"No, no – that's – alright, fine." Walt took another onion ring from the bag.

"After we eat this, I need to use your burner phone to call the woman on this ad. Then we might need to hit a Western Union or something. I figure she shouldn't get a bunch of cash from me directly, you know?"

"Hm. That could work." Walk took another bite of his cheeseburger. "Perhaps we can hide me right in the back of the van."

"Yeah, for definite. This is so gonna work." Jesse stared ahead, finishing the last morsel of his burger. He sucked on the straw of his milkshake hard until it strained to pick anything up.

"Jesse," Walt started.

"What?"

"Where did you go the other night, you know, after we fought?"

Jesse ate the last onion ring and scrunched up the paper bag. "Nowhere, and I ain't talking about any of that shit."

"Jesse."

"What?" He was annoyed now, and trying hard not to fall into an obvious Heisenbergian flytrap.

"Don't you think it may be good for us, since we're not parting ways, to talk about what happened?"

Jesse exhaled deeply, then turned to face Walt who still sat in the backseat. "Are you done eating? 'Cause I think it's time you got in the back of the van."

Slowing in the dirt driveway, the van crunched across branches and mulch to pull up before a cabin nestled in a myriad of trees. The owner had described it as secluded, and Jesse was relieved to see it was. The Western Union trick worked, and it gave the owner the impression that his financier, located somewhere else on the continent, was taking care of his money. The story he gave her made him out to be some sort of heir trying to get away from temptation, and he requested her secrecy with the most gravity he could muster. Mrs. Busby had handed him the keys happily, and wished him a fruitful six months of privacy.

The cabin itself was two stories of wood panelling with a grand, bay window and deck overlooking Flathead River. There were three bedrooms, a couple living rooms, and even a games room. They didn't need a space this size, but Jesse was beside himself. After putting away a small haul of groceries, a task that felt incredibly novel to him at this stage, he wandered to the living room to see Walt on the deck watching the river. Lighting a cigarette as he joined him on the deck, he said, "It's nice, isn't it?"

"It is," Walt started. "Though, I can't help but notice it's not exactly near Yellowstone." The tiny smirk emerging curled in the corner of his mouth.

A subdued laugh escaped Jesse's mouth as he leaned on arms over the railing. "It's some other park I guess."

"Glacier National Park, I believe."

"Sure," Jesse said. He was watching a woodpecker crack away at a cedar tree merely ten yards away. "Woody Woodpecker, in the flesh."

"How exactly did you find this place again?"

"Oh, just an ad in the paper for rentals, like holidays and stuff." He didn't turn around, and just puffed on his smoke, enjoying the mix of crisp, northern air and tobacco in his lungs.

"An interesting choice to advertise a Montana holiday home in an Arizona paper."

"Yeah," Jesse forced a laugh. "Not everyone's into that stifling, desert heat when they want to chill, I guess." As silence lingered, Jesse knew Walt was dropping the inquisition tactically, as he was sure it would prove useful to the sadist later.

"This place is more beautiful than I deserve."

Without missing a beat, Jesse returned, "You got that right."

"Jesse," Walt started, pained.

"Nah, it's cool. This is a good place to kick it, the bucket I mean. Nature, and all that shit." There was a calmness lapping at Jesse now, and an eerie warmth.

"What I said to you the other night, about being ruined and…leaving you there, with that man. I didn't mean those words."

Jesse dragged on his cigarette, and looked back to Walt, who was sitting so plainly in his deck chair. His posture was as correct, and stiff, as it ever had been, and his arms were resting on both armrests like he was some sort of statue.

"I was with that girl again, the other night. You know, you asked me where I went, well I ended up with her. She had blue crystal, my crystal."

Walt swallowed hard, but said nothing.

"She was underage."

A sort of sickened expression rounded Walt's face. "How underage are we talking about?"

"You weren't wrong in what you said." Jesse stubbed his cigarette out against the deck. "Shit." He started to brush the bits off the deck, but there was now a tiny, black circle where he burnt the wood.

Walt motioned for a cigarette, which garnered a look of incredulity from Jesse. "I have a foot in the grave, please."

Jesse handed him a cigarette. "I nearly killed her when she told me."

A gasp of shock huffed from Walt.

"I don't know. What's wrong with me, you know?" Jesse nearly laughed as the distance now made the past year seem like an absurd nightmare to him. He wondered if maybe Randall was a figment, just a manifestation of trauma from surviving the compound. His heart jumped; maybe I never hurt her, maybe I left her untouched. He stalked away to the deck's rail again, letting his eyes bounce off the glistening blue water of the river. It was so blue it was nearly aquamarine, and he instantly was imagining diving in, and swimming to the centre just to let himself sink. There was a pristine quality to this wilderness, like something he'd seen on the Discovery Channel, and he knew that for once he was where should be. As he smirked to himself, his eyes dropped to the rugged path below the deck that snaked through trees to the river. A brown mass bumbled through bushes toward the house. He went white, and slowly turned back to face Walt.

Dragging on his cigarette, Walt began, "A lot of people feel that something is intrinsically wrong with them after suffering trauma, especially trauma as severe as you suffered. Guilt is very normal feeling, as is rage, or a sort of unquenchable longing. And your post-traumatic stress disorder is your brain trying to work through the shock of the trauma, though in a very unhelpful way."

"Bear, I can't…bear." Jesse was stammering.

"It's normal to feel like you can't bear the weight of what happened. And I'm talking about everything, not just this man's actions. We really should start using his name; that will help you in the long run."

"No, BEAR. There's a bear down there!" Jesse nearly yelled it, and there was an audible growl from their visitor.

Walt's eyes went wide, and he shot up from his chair to peer over the railing. There was a big, furry bear with that unmistakable hump between its shoulders stalking toward the house. Walt put a hand on Jesse's shoulder, and started pushing him away from the railing.

"It's time to go inside." He walked Jesse in, and quickly locked the sliding door behind them.

"Yo, is that a grizzly bear?"

"What do you think?"

For the next few days, Walt was mostly bedridden, and spent his waking moments in a violent state of hacking cough. Jesse brought him water and soup, and kept insisting that his present state was due to the cigarette he smoked, or the bourbon he drank, or exhaustion from the action they saw. Walt would nod along with his reasoning, but Jesse knew the man had written himself off a bit prematurely. Walt looked nothing like his aunt did in her final days, and he knew that unless there was a dramatic change, they had months left to manage.

It had hardly been over two weeks since they escaped the compound, and both were struggling to sleep soundly. Walt had taken the master bedroom as they agreed it would be easiest for him to manage with an en-suite, although it meant he would be on the second floor with no access to the kitchen once he was unable to traverse the stairs. Jesse told Walt he would take one of the guest bedrooms near to his, but in truth he had spent every night in a different room since they arrived in Hungry Horse. The first night he slept on the deck so that he could fall asleep looking at the stars, after having convinced himself that grizzly bears could never climb the furniture he mounted at the top of the deck's stairs. It proved a sleepless night, but he pissed off the balcony gleefully at three in the morning, and managed to see two shooting stars. The second night, he slept on the large, cushiony couch in the living room that he reckoned was the centre of the house. The moon shone through the grand window and kept him awake, but he didn't care. Any time he felt slightly uncomfortable, he changed positions on the couch, often switching top and tail just because he could. The only room in the house he avoided was the children's room on the ground floor on account of its bunk beds. Tonight, he was in a guest room next to Walt's, and he could hear the man's coughing intermittently. Walt stocked his bedside table with his pharmaceuticals, and he knew how to administer everything he needed. Jesse was instructed that only if Walt called for him in the night should he come in. He rolled to his side as another coughing fit reverberated through the drywall. It was unrelenting, and Jesse gave in to the urge to check in on him with a cold compress. He entered the room without flicking the light on, and bumped his leg against a chair. "Crap."

"Jesse?" Walt strained through a cough.

"Yeah, I'm hitting the lights." Now illuminated, he could see Walt doubled over the edge of the bed, dry heaving with his coughs. Jesse sat next to him, and gingerly pressed the cloth against the man's forehead.

"Go on, back to bed," Walt ordered as he leaned back to his pillows, his hand taking over the cloth on his forehead.

"I'm not sleeping," Jesse said, with eyes clearly drooping.

An incredible sigh escaped Walt's mouth. Jesse's eyes darted to Walt's face, who was half grinning before another cough erupted. As his lungs calmed, he spoke in a brusque voice, roughened from the constant hacking. "I keep turning it over in my mind. Hell can't possibly exist, can it? It defies all known scientific laws, but you know there is the smallest little part of my brain that keeps chirping, what if? I'll be the first of us to make an entrance."

Jesse was softly kicking a leg against the side of the mattress. "I don't think you get to make an entrance. I think you're zapped into eternal torture, like using the transporter on Star Trek."

"Those men in prison I killed, Mike's men. They were hardened criminals, the type who would be there."

"Mike will be there. He'll be turning the crank on one of those medieval boards that stretches you 'till you break into pieces." Jesse looked at Walt just so the man could see he was serious.

"It was a mistake," Walt said, coughing and throwing his eyes to the heavens.

"A mistake is forgetting to pay a bill, not murdering someone."

"Ah, so maybe you see that Gale was not a mistake after all." Walt shifted the cloth, and sat expectantly, waiting for a retort.

Jesse seethed in silence, wringing his hands against his chest. Those words, with their trace elements of flippancy, plunged into the part of him still simmering, and he now had the urge to make Walt's cough worse. He pictured the white cloth stuffed in Walt's mouth, and his hands grasping his neck so tightly that he could hear his vertebrae crunch. Jesse stood, and let his eyes linger on the cloth as he leaned over Walt. The man's eyes were slightly dulled, and drooping terribly. Jesse peeled the cloth away with one hand, and smiled faintly before his other hand ripped Walt's mouth open by the jaw, and rammed the cloth in. Immediately coughing against it, Walt tried to push against Jesse's chest, and then reciprocate his strangulation, but as the illness had slowed and weakened him, Jesse was choking him with both hands long before he could secure any grip of his own. Still, Walt's hands scraped at Jesse's, trying to wedge his fingers in at some angle to gain leverage, but Jesse just pressed harder against the man's arteries. Five minutes, he told himself, at least five minutes and he will be free. His mind tuned into the first time Kenny choked him like it were some sort of broadcast. There had been an overwhelming sense of relief at the thought it would be his end, but this gave way to the most depressing, yet all-encompassing, orgasm when he realized it was merely for sex. He had strangled Kenny in retaliation, but it only escalated their exchange. He could now see the veins in Kenny's head jutting and throbbing as he squeezed his neck, but the man's devilish smirk bore into him through gritted teeth. Jesse leaned into his grip on his neck with all his body weight, and panted, "You have to die…you have to die and stay dead."