Law of Effect

"Images of sorrow, pictures of delight

Things that go to make up a life

Endless days of summer, longer nights of gloom,

Waiting for the morning light

Scenes of unimportance, photos in a frame,

Things that go to make up a life…"

Genesis, "Home by the Sea"

Donald Margolis wakes to a feeling of warmth against his shoulder. He can't recall its source at first, but when he sits up, he sends Jesse Pinkman rolling on to his back.

The night comes flooding back to him, and he climbs off the bed and crosses, gingerly, to the bathroom, wishing he could chase off the hangover that he already knows is building. He can feel it in the pounding against his temple and the cramp that's creeping into his gut, but he's not sure what to attribute to too many shots of tequila and what to attribute to what happened last night, what he let Jesse do to him last night.

Today will be the day that he'll tell Jesse that this isn't healthy for either of them and that he really needs to go. Donald is the older one, the responsible one, the one that should have put a stop to this and just gone to therapy like his former employer has been trying to convince him to do.

But therapy won't help; not with Wayfarer 515 on his hands. Probably not even before. The only time of the day when he doesn't feel as if he's wading through broken glass is when he's with Jesse, and that's because when he's with Jesse, he's not himself.

Thinking of who he must be, other than himself, is too messed up, however, so he brushes the thought from his mind and turns on the faucet.

He splashes his face and considers taking an Advil for his headache. Maybe he'll rent a movie or call his sister in Phoenix. She's always leaving messages for him to call her, that she's concerned and worried for him, but he hasn't called her back.

Maybe today he will.

Just as soon as he tells Jesse that this all has to end, that maybe Jesse needs some help of his own.

All his intentions disappear the second he touches the silver doorknob. Because he can hear, in the ever-present thump-thump of the pipes, the ones the landlord never bothered to fix, the click of high heels, and in the sound of the door opening, a light giggle, half-sarcastic and half-self-conscious.

And he knows as he gazes at the sleeping boy on the bed that if she lives in anyone, she lives in Jesse.

A person she loved (maybe), a person who loved her (he better have).

A last vestige of a person's life. A remnant, like he's a tattoo she etched, but not on to someone's skin but into the walls of this apartment, the fabric of the bed spread.

It's all so incredibly fucked up.

The creaking of Donald's feet against the carpet seems to make Jesse stir; he sits up with a slow motion and rubs at his eyes, yawns sleepily like a cat, all teeth.

Donald can't help but want him.

He sits on the bed. It'd be predatory to make a move. So he waits to see Jesse play his hand. The younger man braces himself on an arm against the bed and smiles.

"Hey. How you doing?"

"All right," Donald replies.

They don't ever talk much.

Not about this. Not about her.

It's all left unsaid, the space between, the way she inhabits the gulf they continually cross. They'd have stayed on either side of it if she'd lived. Jesse would have been another boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks and Donald wouldn't have approved of him, but would have eventually put up with his existence because Jane liked him, and whatever Jane liked was tolerable as long as she wasn't shooting poison into her veins.

"Wanna do something?" Jesse asks. He's offering; offering again.

Donald should say no. Should tell him to leave.

But if Jesse leaves, he's alone with the realization that he'll never see her again, and that he's caused scores of deaths because he screwed up. And the guilt that the first one seems so much more important than the second.

Jesse doesn't ask again, simply waits until Donald sits and then presses his lips against the older man's again. It's like a well-rehearsed choreography.

Donald's brain is humming things at him, numbers and letters that don't make sense anymore but correspond to latitudes and longitudes and where he should be going and where he actually is. That's why he doesn't totally notice it when Jesse undoes the clasp on his pants again and says something to him that he doesn't quite catch.

"You want what?" he inquires.

"Take me. If you want." The words are said so innocently – or maybe hollowly, Donald can't really tell anymore – that he blanches, the idea's unthinkable. But the rationale behind it isn't – anything to forget.

He'll do anything to forget who he is, anything to hang on to what could be, what should have been if he'd pulled the right switch at the right time, made the right call instead of the wrong one. The whole world was on his shoulders and he hadn't held it up so it had crushed him, now he was just left twitching in the debris, waiting for someone to find him.

That someone is Jesse.

It's so screwed up, it's so screwed up, and he should say no, he doesn't want, certainly doesn't want, this should end, send him back home, this is…

Jesse's lips fly to his before he can find a perch for the foot he wants to put down.

The younger man's shirt is pulled off, somewhere in the fray, and his pants are unbuttoned and so are Donald's and – call stop now, you have to, this is out of hand, so utterly out of hand – he's fumbling for the lube in the drawer in the nightstand.

"Are you sure?" Donald asks, and he's asking himself as much as Jesse. The younger man nods and closes his eyes, lying on his stomach and burying his face against the pillow. The air traffic controller takes pains to be gentle, stroking a finger down Jesse's spine before arriving at his ass, applying lube to two fingers and slowly working one in, his mind still rapid firing numbers and letters, the wrong ones, always the wrong ones. "Relax, relax," he calms, "You still want to do this? Just say 'no' if you don't, it's okay."

Maybe he's looking for a way out.

He doesn't even know anymore.

Looking for a distraction.

You can only stay away so long, after a while it's good to get back to work.

Jesse doesn't say no, instead he relaxes and moans assent. Donald slides in a second finger and part of him wants to cry, but he can't, he's unable.

He hasn't cried about this yet. Any of this. He just shuts down.

He removes his fingers and now he's holding himself above Jesse, hands wrapped around him when he enters, as slow as he can. He doesn't want to hurt him. Never wanted to hurt anybody.

It's a daze after that and he's glad for it – he's barely conscious of rolling over on to his back and shutting his eyes, too exhausted to move but too strung out to sleep.

When he gets up to move, he'll tell Jesse that this shouldn't happen again.

He's certain that he will.