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Annie made fun of the scarf around Hollis’s throat.

Said it made him look French. Yulia dragged her fingertips across the edge of the fabric and smirked at him.

“Clementine?” she whispered in the back of geology, and Walt shrugged for them. Let her believe that.

Hollis let Walt autopilot, and instead he ran the image of Walt arching in surrender to the violence of his hand in his mind over and over from every angle.

It reminded him of Walt standing in the snow, in Sam’s body, arched against the night. There was despair in it. He recognized the recklessness.

“ You don’t want to die ,” Yulia reminded him when he’d struggled with this, too often for Hollis to forget. “ You’re just very sad right now. ”

He thought about ninety years. How sad could one get, given that amount of time? How many flavors of fucked up could one learn about sitting in the wreckage of other people’s lives? He was still angry, by God, Hollis was still very angry , but...

At night, hours later in the blackness of the shower, water beating at the nape of their neck, Hollis asked:

Do you want to die?

Because it was cruel, and because he could.

Walt just tipped his head beneath the spray and let the soap glide down their back.