Chapter 12: The Invitation
The phone call came at 9 AM the next morning.
"Yo, Pete. You're not gonna believe this." Jesse's voice was a mixture of excitement and confusion, the kind of tone people got when reality stopped making sense. "Mr. White wants to cook meth. With me. Actual crystal meth."
I sat up straighter on my cheap motel bed. I'd moved out of Jesse's house a week ago—too risky to have a fixed address, too many people knew that location. Now I rotated between three different motels, paying cash, using fake names, never staying more than two nights in one place.
"What do you mean, cook meth?" I kept my voice appropriately confused. "Isn't he a teacher?"
"Was a teacher. I mean, is a teacher, but—" Jesse made a frustrated sound. "Okay, let me start from the beginning. So Hank—you know, my cousin's husband, the DEA guy—he took Mr. White on a ride-along. Like, a drug bust ride-along."
"Why would he do that?"
"I don't know, man, bonding or whatever. The point is, they busted this cook house, and I was there. Like, inside the house when the cops showed up."
My stomach tightened. "You were at a bust?"
"I got out the window before they came in. But Mr. White saw me. From outside. And then—get this—he tracked me down. Found my house. Showed up on my doorstep."
The story matched what I knew from canon, but hearing it from Jesse's perspective made it more real. More immediate. This wasn't a television show anymore. This was my friend describing the moment that would define his life.
"That's... intense," I said carefully. "What did he want?"
"He said we should work together. He's got, like, actual chemistry knowledge—not the street stuff, but real science. And I've got the distribution connections. He thinks we could make product better than anything on the market."
"Because he's dying."
Jesse paused. "Yeah. The cancer. He says he needs money for his family. Wants to leave them something when he's gone."
I let the silence stretch. Every instinct screamed at me to intervene—to tell Jesse about the spiral waiting for him, about Jane and Andrea and the neo-Nazis and the cage and the endless suffering. But I couldn't. Not without revealing what I was. And revealing what I was meant losing everything I'd built.
"That's crazy," I finally said. "Like, actually insane. A high school teacher turning drug dealer."
"I know, right?" Jesse laughed nervously. "But he's not wrong about the chemistry part. I saw his stuff during the cook—the precursor work, the setup. Dude actually knows what he's doing."
"Wait, you already cooked with him?"
"Just once. In this RV in the desert. It was sketchy as hell, but the product..." Jesse's voice got almost reverent. "Pete, I've never seen meth that pure. It's like nothing I've ever made. If we scaled up—"
"Jesse." I cut him off. "This guy shows up out of nowhere, wants to cook meth, and you're already planning to scale up? That doesn't seem weird to you?"
"I mean, yeah, it's weird. But weird doesn't mean wrong."
I took a breath. Tried a different approach.
"Let me ask you something. This Mr. White—he ever done anything illegal before? Like, anything at all?"
"Not that I know of."
"So he's a straight arrow. Normal guy. Teacher for, what, twenty years? And then he gets cancer and suddenly wants to be a drug dealer?"
"People change when they're dying, man. Priorities shift."
"Maybe. Or maybe someone who flips that hard is someone you can't predict. Someone who might flip again when things get tough."
Jesse was quiet for a long moment. I could almost hear him thinking, turning the idea over in his head.
"You don't think I should do it."
"I think you should be careful. That's all." I kept my voice neutral, friend-to-friend. "I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying think about it. Really think. Because once you're in, you're in. There's no easy exit from this kind of thing."
"Yeah." Jesse sighed. "Yeah, I know."
"And if you need anything—money, help, whatever—you know where to find me. You don't have to do crazy shit with dying chemistry teachers just to get by."
The offer hung in the air. I meant it. If Jesse walked away from Walter White right now, I'd find a way to support him. Figure out something. Anything.
But I also knew he wouldn't. Not because he was stupid or greedy, but because he was Jesse. Because he saw something in Walter's offer that I couldn't see—the validation of being chosen, of being wanted, of being seen as useful by someone who should have been too good for him.
"I'll think about it," Jesse said. "For real. But I gotta go—Mr. White wants to meet up again. Talk through some logistics."
"Okay. Be careful."
"Always am, bro."
He hung up. I stared at the phone in my hand for a long time.
I went to Jesse's house anyway. Couldn't help myself.
He was sitting on the couch when I arrived, a high school yearbook open on the coffee table. My knock made him jump.
"Jesus, Pete. You scared the shit out of me."
"You said you had to meet Mr. White."
"He postponed. Family stuff." Jesse waved me in. "I was just looking at some old photos. Feeling nostalgic or whatever."
The yearbook was open to a faculty page. I sat down next to Jesse and looked at the faces arranged in neat rows. Science department. Mathematics. English.
And there—third row, second from left—Walter Hartwell White.
The man in the photo bore almost no resemblance to the Heisenberg I knew from the show. His face was fuller, his eyes less haunted. He wore a sweater vest over a collared shirt, the uniform of a thousand anonymous teachers. His smile was small but genuine, the smile of someone who still believed in the value of education.
"That's him," Jesse said. "Before the cancer. Before everything."
I studied the face. Tried to see the empire builder, the murderer, the monster. Couldn't find it. Just a man who taught chemistry to teenagers who didn't care, who probably spent his evenings grading papers and wondering where his life had gone wrong.
"He looks normal," I said.
"Yeah." Jesse traced a finger over the photo. "That's what gets me. Like, if he can flip like that... what does that say about the rest of us? Are we all one bad diagnosis away from breaking bad?"
The phrase hit me harder than it should have. Breaking bad. I'd heard it a thousand times, never thought about what it actually meant. The process of becoming something terrible. The slow corruption of principle by circumstance.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe some people were always waiting for permission."
Jesse looked at me strangely. "What does that mean?"
"Nothing. Just thinking out loud."
I changed the subject. Asked about Combo's party, about Badger's girl situation, about anything that wasn't Walter White. Jesse went along with it, but I could see the distraction in his eyes. He was already making his decision. Already leaning toward the chemistry teacher with the terminal diagnosis and the promises of empire.
I couldn't stop him. Couldn't even try, not without revealing things that would destroy everything I'd built. All I could do was watch and wait and hope that the changes I'd already made would be enough.
When I left Jesse's house, the afternoon sun was high and hot. I walked through residential streets, past chain-link fences and dead lawns, thinking about choices and consequences.
$2,900 in savings. $12,100 to go. At my current pace, I'd hit the target in five to six more weeks. But those weeks might as well be years if Walter White's partnership with Jesse accelerated the timeline I knew.
In canon, things moved fast after the first cook. Krazy-8 and Emilio were coming. The deaths that would bind Walter and Jesse together were imminent. And once that bond formed—sealed in blood and shared complicity—nothing would break it.
I needed to be ready. Needed to have an escape plan in place before everything went sideways. Needed to become someone else, someone without Pete's face or Pete's history or Pete's connections to a world that was about to burn.
I stopped at a pay phone and called the number Fisher had given me.
Three rings. Four. Then a voice, accented but clear: "Clínica Vargas."
"I need to speak with the doctor. I was referred by a dentist in Albuquerque."
A pause. Some muffled conversation in Spanish. Then: "The doctor can see you in two weeks. Consultation fee is five hundred American dollars. Cash only. Do you have transportation to Tijuana?"
"I'll find some."
"Then we will see you in two weeks, señor. Please bring documentation of your medical history if available."
I wrote down the appointment details on my palm. Two weeks. By then I'd have more money, more preparation, more clarity on what was happening with Jesse.
The walk back to my motel took twenty minutes. I spent them planning the next fourteen days—deals to close, contacts to cultivate, money to accumulate. The operation had to keep running even while I was gone. Badger and Combo were reliable, but they weren't leaders. I'd need to set up systems, redundancies, ways for the machine to function without me at the center.
At the motel, I counted my cash again. $2,900. Nowhere near enough. But it was a start.
I pulled out my phone and sent a text to Badger: meeting tomorrow morning. 9am. coffee shop on central. bring combo.
His response came fast: ok boss whats up
expansion, I typed. we're going bigger.
I set the phone aside and lay back on the thin mattress. The ceiling had water stains in patterns that almost looked deliberate. Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off and quickly silenced.
In another timeline—the original one—Skinny Pete was probably getting high right now. Wasting away in Jesse's orbit, a supporting character in someone else's tragedy.
But this wasn't that timeline. And I wasn't that Pete.
I had two weeks to prepare for Tijuana, five weeks to hit my money target, and an unknown amount of time before Walter White's meth empire started claiming casualties. The margins were tight. The risks were enormous.
But I'd survived worse odds in the last month. Survived an ambush, built a network, accumulated resources that Pete never could have imagined.
Now it was time to see how far I could push before something pushed back.
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