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Jessie is like a daughter to him, really.
Not like his daughter; he would never treat Hollie the way he treats Jessie. He needs to protect Hollie, he doesn’t feel the same about Jessie. Jessie is a grown woman, she can make her own choices… even if those choices are to be a junkie good-for-nothing lesbo.
But Walt knows he loves her. Even if he’s spent a year denying it.
No… he spend a year slowly learning to love her, even if it was against his will.
He really had no feelings about her before this all started; she used to be a burnout dyke student that didn’t care about anything, and he did not care for her.
Or maybe he did. (Like he cared about all of his students.)
Cared.
Cared is a strong word. Maybe “envied” fits better. Envied their youth, their potential, that they had their whole lives ahead of them, had options. In his eyes it was a waste; the way they didn’t care to do anything, they didn’t apply themselves, they had no motivations, no ambitions. Walt despised this kind of students.
He knew it was wrong; he knew he was there to help them find a way; but he couldn’t help someone that didn’t want to be helped.
So instead of getting angry at his students he decided to not care. And Jessie once was someone he didn’t care about. He would have barely noticed her, she would have been forgotten -like many others-. Maybe he wouldn’t even recognize her when he saw her falling out of that window that fateful day, if not for the way she got under his skin even back then.
Even when she was merely his student, she enraged him with the way she made a complete fool out of herself -being the class clown-, the way she always slept through his lessons, the bathroom breaks she would take only to never come back to class, the way she didn’t even try to cheat on his tests just wrote anything stupid that crossed her mind.
She still enrages him -more than anyone else in his life, really- but now he does care about her. Maybe not like you care about a daughter though.
You wouldn’t exploit your influence over your daughter, you wouldn’t feel a sick, twisted satisfaction when she fell back to drugs, you wouldn’t be glad she needed you. You wouldn’t make sure… make it your lives mission she did.
Maybe Walt loves Jessie like a son. The way he disapproves of her girlfriends, the way he feels proud of her sometimes. The love he feels for her is more similar to how he feels for Junior rather than Hollie. Maybe because Jessie is so boyish, or maybe because of their similar age.
Walt is pretty sure that to Jessie he is something of a paternal figure… or at least he used to be. Before Mike came and stole his spot.
That’s not right either. What he feels for Junior, what he feels for Hollie is clear, its simple. Straightforward. Walter can’t explain what he feels for Jessie, what she is to him, what she symbolizes.
Maybe she reminds him of his younger self. Maybe he wants her to do what he couldn’t. Take life and grab it by the balls; make something out of it. Maybe he wants her to achieve the ultimate potential, become the best at something; like he once wanted for himself.
But that’s not right either. Jessie is nothing like him, they have nothing in common, he doesn’t see himself in her. He doesn’t even want what’s best for her. He just wants her.
He wishes he was just in love with Jessie. That would make things easier. That would be easier to understand. It would make it easier for him to rationalize the possessiveness he feels over her, the twinge of jealousy he gets every time Jessie has a new bimbo by her side, or the way he sometimes feels like he’s cheating on Skyler simply because Jessie’s image crosses his mind.
He sometimes thinks he is in love with Jessie. She’s so beautiful is the thing. Even with her stupid clothes, and her shaved hair, even with the way she doesn’t seem to care what she looks like most the time.
Her eyes.
He catches himself just thinking about her eyes sometimes. Not only the color, that gorgeous shade of blue, but the way they stare. That wild, feral stare. Sometimes when she looks at him like that -so openly- he swears he can see her soul. Her eyes remind him of Skyler’s; they are the same color, similar shape, size. Skyler used to look at him like Jessie does. Like she cares about him, like he is making her feel something. Nowadays Skyler’s eyes look almost dead; when she looks at him, he can’t even detect anger, just empty tiredness. When Jessie looks at him there’s always emotion, whether its admiration, anger, misery, betrayal, he doesn’t care.
He loves how emotional Jessie is. How easy it is to read her. He loves the way she shouts and swears, and he loves the way she cries. He loves the way she shakes and shudders and the way she does it openly in front of him, doesn’t even try to hide it. Not anymore.
He’s infatuated with her. Jessie would call him a megaperv if only she knew how attracted he is to her sometimes. He’s seen her body countless times, yet he still steals glances at her skin whenever they are changing into their lab clothes.
Her small frame, her narrow shoulders, the sparce blond hair on her thighs, the dark hair peaking from the sides of her underwear, the pale milky skin of her stomach.
Even things he wouldn’t have thought as “sexy” in the past. He loves the way he can faintly see the outline of her ribs. It makes him want to put his hands there, see if he can reach all the way around her. He wants to see how big his hands look on her, he wants to see the difference of his weathered, calloused hands on her perfect skin.
Jessie is twenty-five -older than Skyler when he met her- but Jessie’s figure still looks so boyish, so young.
Skyler, even then, had these beautiful curves that left him breathless, her full buttocks, her thick things, and her heavy breasts left him hot and dizzy.
Jessie doesn’t have any of this; her breasts are tiny things, the space between them pronounced even though they’re so perky, the curve of them pointing upwards. He steals glances of them anytime he can, most people don’t have that privilege, the outline of them invisible in these clothes that Jessie wears. Her thighs are lean, leaner than a boy, and the curve that her waist forms is so small, so delicate.
She really is a beautiful thing.
Sometimes he thinks she is in love with him. The way she looks at him, the way she used to squirm every time he came too close to her in the earlier days, the way she lets him take control of her life. The way she defends him to Mike -the obvious paternal figure in her life.
She had even tried to kiss him once. One of the earlier days, right after they had cooked a batch in the RV. They were sitting in their folding chairs, looking at the sunset, music playing from the portable radio she had brought. They shared a blunt, and everything was dreamy even for just for a second. They had laughed, and he scolded her for everything she had done wrong that day, and she had called him a bitch, and an asshole, and then she leaned in. He didn’t let their lips touch. He couldn’t do it, he needed to be faithful, he couldn’t deal with what letting it happen would entail.
She played it off as a joke and neither of them had brought it up again. Though he still thinks about it sometimes; late at night, or at random times, when he’s eating breakfast with his family, when Skyler avoids his touch, when he feels so alone and rejected by everyone he has sworn to protect.
Even though he holds that memory like a trophy, even though he knows that if he said the words Jesse would let him in. Even after everything they have been through together… especially after everything they had been through. It’s not what he wants.
He doesn’t want Jessie to be his mistress. He doesn’t want to actually touch her, or kiss her, or fuck her, or make love to her (even though he feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin with desire sometimes).
He doesn’t want to ruin what they have. That complicated, confusing thing that they have. In a sick way he wants her to be his American beauty, his forbidden fruit. He wants the lines to be blurred, he wants Jessie to be confused about what they are, what she means to him, what he means to her.
He wants to possess Jessie. There is no why; nothing so derivative as a label could explain the bond that they have, or why they have it.
How many people could say that they have someone like Jessie in their lives? Someone that follows every single one of your orders, someone that trusts your vision completely, someone that trusts you completely, someone that would kill for you, someone willing to die for you.
He’s had a lot of roles in Jessies life. He was her teacher, her mentor, a paternal figure, role model. He was a bitch, and a complete fucking asshole. He was Jessie’s everything.
And to him Jessie was. Jessie was just Jessie.
These are his thoughts when he gets weirdly sentimental.
The feelings are complicated… they waver from love to hate.
Because he does hate her, in a way. She makes his skin boil with anger sometimes.
He hates how she never listens to him, how she still acts like a kid throwing tantrums, how she always gets them into shit. He hates that she tries to sneak around and hide things from him, how she treats him like he’s old, like she doesn’t care that he’s dying.
He hates how stupid he gets for her; how he’ll jump right into the wolfs mouth to save her, how he’ll do any stupid thing to get them out of trouble that Jessie has created.
He loves her, sure. But logically, he hasn’t really needed her around for more than a few months now… she has become a liability.