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Jesse lets the gun fall from his hand. He can see the dark patch on Mr. White’s side. The man doesn’t need Jesse to shoot him. He just wants Jesse to, wants his final script to be followed down to the letter.
Fuck that. Jesse’s done with letting Mr. White pull his strings.
He can’t stop looking at him, though.
This man has been so many things to him. The old, nerdy teacher that he used to make fun of; the partner he cooked with in an RV out in the desert with nothing around them but blue sky and red rock and wind-blown dust. The man who once saved Jesse’s life, then turned around and made him into a murderer. The monster who’s destroyed everything Jesse dared to try and love, and who cast him into hell without a second thought.
Jesse hates this man. He looks at him and he hates Mr. White more than he’s hated anything in his life, and he wants to bury his head in his hands and weep because there is no point to it, anymore.
Mr. White is looking at him. He looks tired and worn out. There is nothing of Heisenberg left, just a sick man with a bullet in his side and nothing left to do but die.
Jesse should turn and go. He wants to. But he looks into Mr. White’s dull, world-weary eyes, and remembers that maybe he loved him once, too. When he got out of rehab and had been so lost and alone, Mr. White had been the one to put his hands on Jesse and tell him to close his eyes, voice saying, It’s okay, I’ve got you, Just let go, and Jesse had loved him, then, just a little.
And so Jesse steps forward. His arms go around Mr. White and the man seems to crumple, sinking down to the floor. Jesse goes with him. He’s so thin, Jesse thinks. Even if that bullet hadn’t found its way into his side, Mr. White was still on his way out. The cancer would take him, just like it had taken Aunt Jenny.
“Get out of here,” says Mr. White, and his voice trails off into that old, familiar cough. “You don’t want to be here when the police show up.”
“Think you’ll last that long?” Jesse asks.
“No,” says Mr. White. There is relief in his voice. Acceptance. It’s more than the man deserves, but in that moment Jesse is too tired to feel any resentment.
“Mr. White,” he says, then stops. Nothing he can say will ever encompass all that they’ve been and all that they’ve done to each other. So he just sits there and waits until Mr. White’s breath rattles in his throat one last time, and then he gets up and leaves the corpse behind.
He gets in one of the cars and doesn’t look back.
Jesse drives with no destination in mind. He drives until the sun starts to come up, then pulls off to the side of the road, rests his head against the steering wheel, and cries and cries and cries.