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Jesse didn’t use to care much about cooking. When he was a kid, his mother would shoo him out of the kitchen whenever he asked to help out, carefully hiding her irritation and telling him to go play in his room, Jesse, Mommy is busy. His dad would echo her words from the dinner table without looking up from his morning paper, and so Jesse never bothered to learn, relying on his parents to have a meal on the table or leftovers in the fridge for whenever he got hungry.
Obviously, he had to learn how to cook eventually, especially after his parents kicked him out and he hung out at Aunt Ginny's place. Especially when she got cancer.
Aunt Ginny wasn’t like his parents. She was patient in her own grouchy way and never dismissive, showing Jesse tricks for chopping onions so his eyes wouldn’t melt and the way to cook rice to perfection. She told him flat out when he messed something up but never laughed at him about it or made him feel like an idiot. Cooking lessons with Aunt Ginny were kind of enjoyable and certainly came in handy later on.
When she got sick, Jesse took over the cooking entirely. He made her lunches — he boiled potatoes and roasted meat, cut up veggies for salads and then fruit for smoothies, cooked up stews and soups. He hadn't been amazing at it, but his cooking was decent, if his aunt’s compliments and his own modest tastes were anything to go by. He improved. He wanted to improve, if only to make Aunt Ginny happy.
Then she passed and Jesse lost the motivation to cook, turning to meth instead. He'd sometimes make eggs or sandwiches for breakfast, but during that time he mainly lived on crappy coffee and takeout.
Then Mr. White happened.
Now that he wants nothing more than to get as far away as possible from everything that he's endured, cooking for himself again becomes another mile in his run from ABQ and all the ghosts he left there.
Ed visits every month with provisions and stuff until Jesse is cleared to go into town for his own grocery shopping. It's nice to actually have something in his fridge again, to actually get hungry and eat actual human meals and not frozen stuff and junk food.
He finds he hasn’t lost any of his skills. With time, Jesse also finds that he loses himself in the process. The methodic chopping, and stirring, and seasoning comes naturally now. He doesn’t watch the pot like a hawk only to look away for a second and return to the water bubbling and boiling over. It’s no longer stressful. It’s pretty chill, actually.
One day, Jesse remembers a guy from his class in high school, Tony. He can't call Tony his friend because people like Jesse are never friends with nerds like Tony in high school. He would scoff at Tony when Jesse hung out with his own friends, but it was always for show, because that's what stoner dropouts do — they cackle at nerds who are actual decent people and are liked by their classmates. But the truth is, Jesse never had any beef with Tony. Tony always kind of fascinated him.
Tony was tall and well-built, and he had a ridiculously soft face and kind eyes. He'd discuss comics and video games with dudes from his own little nerd friend circle. He was good-looking enough that girls would have fawned over him if he hadn't been nerdy and had been more like the popular guys at school, rude and rich and smelling of cigarette smoke. Not like Jesse, because Jesse was a classic stoner and a loser — no one ever fawned over him.
What Jesse remembers best about Tony, though, is the way Tony used to bring tupperware containers full of food to school. Pancakes, tiny muffins, scones, slices of pie. He brought them and passed them around just because. There was rarely an occasion, but Jesse would see him crack open a plastic lid and offer baked goods to his nerd friends at least once a week.
Jesse never had beef with Tony, but he sure as hell envied his confidence, his easygoing attitude and his ability to not fuck up every single thing in existence. Like baking.
Tony offered him a muffin once, surprisingly enough, but then again, Tony never had beef with anyone, not even with little pothead Pinkman. Jesse had felt tame and sleepy after lighting up a joint behind the school during lunch break that day, and with munchies coming on, he would have been an idiot not to accept free food, so he had simply blinked up at Tony and mumbled a crooked "thanks, man".
For whatever reason, Tony had sat down in the empty seat in front of Jesse, resting his elbows on the back of the chair, as if waiting for Jesse's verdict. Feeling awkward, Jesse nodded several times and pushed out a hoarse "it's good", his mouth still full. The muffin had been good, chocolaty and rich, with a touch of something sour but not unpleasantly so.
"I'm glad," Tony had said, watching as Jesse finished the muffin. He then grinned out of nowhere and leaned forward on his elbows, as if about to share something mind-blowing, "They're kind of my signature thing. The secret's in the cranberries."
The first thing Jesse's still somewhat high brain had jumped to was the rock band, which made Jesse stare uncomprehendingly at Tony, trying to figure out if the guy was fucking with him. Then it clicked and he ran his tongue over his chocolate-covered teeth, realizing the weird sour lumps in the muffin weren’t lumps but those little red berries his mom made jam out of for Thanksgiving dinner. It was always too bitter for Jesse's taste, but that time around he found he didn't mind it much.
"Yeah. Yeah, right on," Jesse had nodded dumbly again, feeling strangely proud that he had some idea of what they were talking about. The moment vanished soon enough, though, and he averted his eyes to stare at the chocolate crumbs he'd been rubbing between his fingertips.
"I, uh, never really made anything before," Jesse had admitted, startled by his own honesty, "Baking or, well, cooking in general. Never been my thing."
The word "cooking" had nothing to do with crystal meth back then. Simpler times.
"That's alright," Tony had soothed, "Baking isn't for everybody, but hey, it's never too late to try. No, really!” he’d hurried to argue when Jesse scoffed disbelievingly. “It's not as difficult as you might think, especially if you start small."
And then Tony had lit up like people sometimes tend to do when they talk about something they're passionate about, and he bugged Jesse for a piece of paper and a pen. Jesse obliged, reluctantly curious, and Tony jotted down what Jesse had guessed was a recipe. Just then, the bell had gone off and Tony departed to his own seat with a smile and a light "let me know how it goes".
Jesse, paying no attention to their English teacher who bustled into the classroom, had squinted at the paper until it finally made sense. It was a recipe for a cake in a mug. A mug cake. It felt surreal and out of place in Jesse's hands.
Jesse remembers how he’d hidden the paper in his hoodie pocket out of Badger's sight as they met after class to get stoned and eat pizza or whatever it is they did back then. He remembers how he didn't think about the paper for at least a week, too busy living from high to high, until he had to turn the pockets out before giving the hoodie to his mom for a wash.
His nicotine-stained fingers had found the crumpled little ball of paper and the whole conversation with Tony came rushing back. Jesse realized he hadn't even seen Tony since then. Jesse stuck the paper in some drawer and formed a plan.
The next day was a normal Saturday, and his mom and dad took Jake with them to see some relatives for somebody's birthday. No one bothered to invite Jesse, obviously. Jesse didn't mind. Jesse had the house to himself.
The second his parents pulled out of the driveway, Jesse had fished the paper back out and unfurled it on his way to the kitchen. He slapped it down on the counter and stared at it, willing it to make sense as he scratched his head.
Jesse remembers feeling intimidated as Tony's handwriting stared up at him from the crumpled piece of paper. He remembers wracking his brain for what "tbsp" and "tsp" meant, eventually calling Skinny Pete for help, because Badger would surely make fun of him for not knowing. He remembers spending the next half hour raiding the cabinets for flour and cocoa powder and other ingredients. He remembers being unreasonably happy when he knew where to find the baking powder.
He remembers pulling out several tablespoons and teaspoons, intending to use a different one for every ingredient, and using just one of each anyway. He remembers putting everything away as soon as he added it in the mug so as not to leave any evidence of his presence in the kitchen. He remembers wondering how on earth people like Tony find baking anywhere near relaxing.
In the end, the mug cake had turned out pretty dry, lumpy because Jesse didn’t stir the batter well enough, and maybe just a touch too sweet. Jesse expected to feel proud or at least satisfied after baking something edible by himself for the first time, but all he felt was the dryness in his mouth and the cold disappointment in his stomach, right next to the mug cake. Figures.
That had been the first and last thing he'd made for a while. He never tried making the mug cake again, or baking anything else. He never told Tony how it went, either.
So how he finds himself shutting the front door with his foot, hands occupied with grocery bags full of flour and cocoa powder and other ingredients, Jesse has no idea. He sets the bags on the kitchen counter, shaking snow off his shoulders, and feels strangely at ease. He takes off his jacket, washes his hands, and gets to work.
Jesse doesn’t bother looking any recipe up on the Internet, boldly relying on his memory. Three tablespoons of sugar, two of vegetable oil, one egg, he recalls, and he tries to mix it well this time. He gets bored pretty quickly, but he doesn’t give up for a while until he throws the spoon in the sink and puts the mug in the microwave.
He washes the spoons and puts all the ingredients away as he waits five minutes for the cake to be ready. He’s careful and doesn’t burn his hand on the mug like last time, cradling it with a towel instead. He waits some more until it cools down.
Jesse pulls out a second mug to make some mint tea to go with the mug cake and eats it while watching the snowfall outside. It’s not any different from last time. Still dry, still lumpy, but this time around there’s tea to chase the dryness away and the sweetness is welcome. This time around, the mug cake feels like a reward.
Jesse makes the mug cake again next week, and the week after that. He keeps making it until he gets the measurements right, the batter is no longer lumpy and the cake tastes perfect. Eventually he starts adding other stuff to it, like chocolate chips or almonds. Not every experiment is successful, but that’s what’s fun about it, Jesse decides. Jesse also decides that he enjoys cooking more than baking, but the mug cake becomes a reassurance. Whenever Jesse craves something sugary, he knows he can make a quick treat in five minutes, all by himself, just for himself.
One day, shopping for bread and milk, Jesse stumbles across some paper cupcake liners on the shelves of the small store he frequents. They’re thirty percent off, butterfly-patterned and weirdly charming. So Jesse, in a moment of impulsiveness he rarely allows himself these days, adds them to his shopping basket.
Haines is a small place, so of course the nice cashier woman knows him by now, and it seems the sudden appearance of the cupcake liners doesn’t escape her. She doesn’t look at him funny, just smiles at him all endeared, like he’s a chubby five-year-old that has just offered her a flower. He doesn’t mind.
Jesse goes home and googles cupcake recipes. He thinks he’s gotten the batter part down with his mug cake practice, but realizes that a batch of cupcakes requires more ingredients than a single mug does. Luckily, he finds a mixing bowl in the back of some dusty cabinet, and gets to it. The hard part turns out to be actually getting the batter in the liners, but he manages it until he remembers he needs a tray to actually put the cupcakes in the oven.
He forgets to preheat the oven, and he looks for a tray as the oven whirs and the soggy cupcake liners sit all sad on the flour-covered counter. He cleans up the mess and does the dishes while he waits for the cupcakes to bake, feeling nostalgic for something that never was. The feeling is not unwelcome.
The cupcakes have a nice golden shade on top and most of them are just a tad too dark at the bottom, but they taste okay. Good, even. They’re just sweet enough, much like the mug cakes, even if they are boring. Maybe Jesse will invest in some frosting or sprinkles for the cupcakes next time.
Next time, he thinks, because now he has the time, the resources, the relative peace of mind to just plan to bake a second batch of cupcakes sometime in the future. It’s a nice thought, he decides, as he twirls the now empty paper liner with colorful butterflies that make him think of a little girl living far away in Albuquerque.
The relative peace of mind slips away momentarily as he remembers. He wants to grip the cupcake liner, just how sorrow grips his heart for a second, recalling a photo of a smiling blond girl from the screen of someone’s phone. Mike’s phone, he forces himself to admit, because even though it hurts, he misses the old man, just like he still misses Aunt Ginny.
He thinks of Kaylee. He thinks of how Mike, usually so stingy with details from his personal life, let the fact that he had a granddaughter slip out during one of their pickups and gave up after just six minutes of pestering, when he could usually go hours bravely ignoring Jesse until he told him to shut his mouth. Jesse asked to see her, and Mike humored him, flicking his civilian phone open with something suspiciously close to pride.
Jesse smiles, despite everything, and sets the cupcake liner down, uncrumpled. He plans.
He bakes three more batches of perfectly gold plain cupcakes. The third batch gets swirls of nice vanilla icing on top and Jesse goes out of his way to add butterfly shaped sprinkles. He’s so sure they exist that he doesn’t bother to google and just goes sprinkle hunting across several stores until he finds them.
The sprinkles crunch between his teeth and the frosting is smeared all over the kitchen and his hands, but he feels warm. If the second mug cake felt like a reward, this batch feels like a victory. He dedicates the victory to Kaylee Ehrmantraut.
As he pulls his fifth ever cupcake batch from the oven three weeks later, he pauses. He can usually eat two or three cupcakes at a time after he finishes a batch, and then he puts away the rest to munch on until the next time he feels like baking. There’s just no one around to share the cupcakes with while they’re still hot, he realizes, and a sense of utter loneliness washes over him.
The tray clatters just a bit too loudly when he sets it on the counter to cool off. He doesn’t bother with frosting.
The next morning he gets an idea and the void in his chest shrinks a little as he bags up the leftover cupcakes. Jesse visits the store to buy more eggs, grabs more liners, and sheepishly offers the cupcakes to the cashier lady at checkout. Her thrilled smile loosens his chest further. He keeps planning.
He googles more recipes, ponders, buys more cupcake liners, googles some more. He bakes coffee-flavored cupcakes in dark-brown liners. He decides against frosting this time but the cupcakes all have a nice melty piece of dark chocolate inside them that he thinks Mike would approve of. Jesse saves a cupcake for him and brings the rest of the batch to his next NA meeting.
The flavor for Mike’s batch came to him pretty easily, but Jesse feels pretty damn clever when he finally comes up with an idea for his next project. He figures that even if Gus didn’t like baked goods, he would have appreciated something zesty. Jesse doesn’t get the buttercream right the first time around, and the spice is too much for him personally, but his colleagues at the workshop seem to like the cinnamon cupcakes well enough.
The next time Jesse feels like baking he’s thinking of Badger, and he’s suddenly reminded how his friend always favored cookies over any cupcake you could offer him. Jesse feels nervous, but determined, as he stares at the recipe he found for M&M’s cookies. They’re new territory and they turn out slightly burnt, just like his first ever cupcake batch, but they’re perfect. Jesse raises a cookie in a silent salute and knows for a fact that Badger is okay, wherever he is.
Not two weeks later Jesse realizes Skinny’s birthday is coming up. He plans to make a couple of practice attempts before baking the actual cake, but he keeps putting it off until the marked date on his calendar glares at him from the wall, and so he has no choice but to wing it. The cake is surprisingly decent, the dark chocolate icing not quite black but close enough. The white chocolate eagle stands out like a sore thumb and looks overall ridiculous. Jesse grins and thinks Skinny would absolutely love it.
He doesn’t share the cake with anyone this time, and so it sits in the fridge until Jesse finishes it. Skinny Pete’s beanie, fortunately clean from any frosting, sits on the shelf, and Jesse hums “Fallacies” all week long.
Jesse doesn’t feel like repeating his previous batches, so he lets his imagination go. He continues to experiment with flavors, techniques, colors. It’s not always cupcakes, though, and the flavors are not always wild guesses, either. Jake gets Oreo pudding that Jesse could barely stomach, it was so sweet. Jesse honors his dad with his favorite good old-fashioned brownies, and he makes a mean raspberry cheesecake for Mom. After the cheesecake turns out to be a success, he makes another for Aunt Ginny, lemon this time.
He stumbles across an article as he’s surfing the Net one night and freezes, the somber faces of the White-Schrader family staring at him from across the screen. Jesse reads the article without really seeing the words, feeling hollow, adrift.
Walter is dead. Walter White died from a bullet wound back in September. The great Heisenberg bled to death on the floor of a meth lab. The man is gone, and yet he still haunts the people whose lives he ruined.
The older kid’s name is officially Flynn now, and the sisters are using their maiden name, Lambert. Good for them, Jesse thinks. Looks like they don’t want anything to do with Walt, either.
He makes a single batch that night. By the time he’s done, his eyes are heavy and the cupcakes glare at him, almost judging, glowing like fairy lights under the kitchen lamp. The ones with sky blue frosting seem distant and cold, like a pool on a winter morning. The ones with purple sprinkles don’t look purple enough, and the orange ones are too bright, too childish for the weight of the situation, and nothing is right. Nothing except the small light pink cupcakes. They don’t make Jesse feel anything.
Jesse thinks the tray of colorful cupcakes is a pointless apology. He closes his eyes and breathes deep, counting to ten. Next time he opens his eyes, the apology doesn’t seem as pointless. He thinks it could have even been accepted. The next morning he brings the cupcakes to an event at a group home where he volunteers, and if nothing else, the kids' smiles make him feel somewhat better.
The article haunts him throughout the next week as he tries to ignore the similarities between baking and cooking crystal his cruel mind points out, tries to push any and all thoughts of Mr. White away. The bastard has no right to spoil Jesse’s new hobby and he definitely doesn’t deserve a single crumb of Jesse’s baking. That’s what Jesse tells himself.
All the pushing dislodges something else in his mind, though, and Jesse goes right back to google, desperate for a distraction to quell the itch under his skin. He follows his gut and hits the stores in search of soy milk.
Chemistry seems like a fitting theme for the batch, but it rubs him the wrong way, so he opts for the next nerdy topic he can think of — space. Stars, namely. He looks up constellations, but settles on The Big Dipper in the end. The cupcakes are dark blue with light yellow frosting, and the lines connecting the stars on the different cupcakes are a bit wobbly, but it’s recognizable enough.
Jesse wonders if the dude would scoff at the lame choice of constellation or if he’d be all polite about it. All Jesse knows is this batch is another apology. He doesn’t let himself think too long about whether the apology would be accepted or not and grabs a large container to put the cupcakes in so The Big Dipper is still visible. He drops it off at his NA meeting, but doesn't stick around.
Jesse doesn’t bake for about a month. He barely has the mind to make breakfast, so when Ed shows up to check on him, Jesse doesn’t even have a cupcake to offer him. Ed doesn’t mind though, and together they make a potful of plain healthy soup. It warms Jesse from inside out and he finally breathes.
Ed’s visit gives him another idea, and so Jesse buys cookie cutters and more food coloring. After the cookies are out of the oven, he just lets himself enjoy the decorating process. He chooses yellow and light purple, and by the time he’s done there are several gingerbread lawyers in stripy suits smirking up at him. Jesse picks one up and bites the head off, crushing it with his teeth. The cookie is delicious, and it feels like flipping the bird at Saul. Maybe it also feels a bit like forgiving.
One morning he wakes up feeling bold and shaky with anxious energy and opens a tab he saved ages ago for a day just like this. Red velvet cake. When Jesse first heard of a cake that supposedly bleeds when you cut it, he thought it was sick as hell. He still thinks so, but this time the challenge of making one thrills him. It intimidates him. It makes his hands shake just a little, but Jesse convinces himself it’s the anticipation and the coffee he drank on an empty stomach.
The breakdown comes when it’s time to add the food coloring. His hand shakes as he’s about to pour it in and the red splatters across his wrist, his sleeve, the kitchen counter. It keeps dripping into the bowl, staining the batter as Jesse stares at it. He doesn’t know how much time passes, but the next time he blinks, a tear slips out and lands in the bowl.
He drops everything and runs to the bathroom, crashing to his knees and grasping at the toilet seat for dear life. The coffee burns his throat as he coughs it up, and he retches uselessly until there’s nothing left. He flushes, rinses his mouth and dumps the batter in the trash.
Jesse doesn't sleep that night and forces himself to forget the idea of a bleeding cake. As the sun rises, he bakes cupcakes with Nutella and toasted hazelnuts instead, and thinks how he’ll make an entire Nutella cake for Brock’s birthday. Andrea would scold Jesse for indulging him, but Jesse always knew the boy inherited his sweet tooth from his mother.
Jesse keeps baking, and his baking keeps improving. Eventually, he realizes he might enjoy baking a bit more after all. On the date of his new birthday, assigned to him by Ed, his colleagues surprise him with a brand new mixer and a “Kiss the Cook” apron. It’s startlingly pink, he thinks, and it must show on his face, because the guys all laugh, and he can’t help but join in.
He never imagined himself as someone owning a “Kiss the Cook” apron, much less as someone who people knew for his baking. He supposes it’s better than the reputation of a junkie drug dealer. The thought makes him grimace, so he quickly stomps it down, and blows out the candles on his store-bought birthday cake, promising his colleagues to whip something up in return for the gifts.
Winter slowly gives way to spring, the air warms just barely, and April sneaks up on Jesse all too fast. He’s been thinking about what he wants to bake for months, but hours of scrolling through websites for moms and elderly women full of outlandish recipes amounted to nothing. He even tries asking around for ideas, but no suggestion feels right, so in the end he figures he’ll know what to do the day of the occasion.
The day before, Jesse feels like the biggest fool as he walks into the farmer’s market. He spots the berries quickly enough, but asks the vendor anyway, just to make sure. He buys a small cup. He doesn’t need much.
On the fourth of April, exactly at midnight, Jesse sits in his kitchen. There is a plate with two chocolate cranberry muffins on the table in front of him, a candle stuck in each one. Jesse lights the first one, then the other. The number twenty-eight gently glows in the half-dark of Jesse’s kitchen.
He lets the candles burn for a while as he watches stars light up in the night sky, like thousands of other candles, remembering what was and mourning what would never be.
Jesse blows the candles out before wax can drip on the muffins and he takes a bite out of one. He expects it to taste dry, like Tony’s had. Instead, the dark chocolate crumbs he added in the batter melt in his mouth and the tartness nips at his tongue. All he can think about is how Jane would have loved the muffins, but would have never admitted it because muffins are corny and Jesse is a complete and utter dork for learning how to bake.
Jesse leaves the second muffin untouched, and quietly finishes his. And if the muffin starts tasting salty halfway through, no one is there to see it.