Work Text:
1.
Most of the times that Carmy is forced awake, it's from Mikey being obnoxious, either flicking the lights on and off, or bodily jumping on the bed in a WWE-imitation move, or slamming the door open and clapping with those huge bear paw hands. Subtlety never seems to be an option for him. If it is, he ignores it.
But tonight, when Carmy opens his eyes with a startled inhale, he can't figure out what woke him. The room is still and quiet. He can only see the shadow gradients of furniture and the blinking red light of the cable box.
Then Mikey whispers, "Hey," from where he's apparently squatting right by the bedside table. The proximity is so close and unexpected that Carmy jerks backward and almost brains himself on the wall.
"Holy shit. Mikey, what the fuck?" Carmy whispers-yells back, but Mikey is too busy hissing laughter to respond, silhouette quivering in the dark as Carmy's vision finally adjusts somewhat.
"Don't shit yourself, dude," Mikey orders hoarsely with dregs of laughter breaking up the sentence. "C'mon, we're sneaking out."
"The fuck are you talking about?" Carmy's still pissed but now also confused. They've never snuck out anywhere in their life, but only because the definition doesn't fit. Mom never gives a shit about where they go or when; even if she did, she's always asleep by midnight with the TV blaring old reruns at ear-blasting levels anyway.
Outside, a horn blares twice in quick succession, ruining the illusion of their hushed little world. Mikey glances up, eyes glinting like marbles as twin beams bump up and across the window. "Shit."
"You guys are the loudest motherfuckers I've ever met in my life," Carmy states in his normal voice. "What are we even doing?"
"Richie got a trash bag full of these crazy fireworks from overseas somewhere," Mikey says, also at regular volume, finally turning on the side lamp before standing up. "We're heading out to that development by Mariano's to test them out. You coming or what?"
Carmy's been clutching the comforter up to his neck this whole time without even realizing. Now he tosses it down to the foot of the bed, scrambling to step into a pair of pants draped over his desk chair. There's school in the morning, but it's not like he's going to do anything except doze off in different classrooms and cut out early to avoid the assholes in sixth period.
They mimic sneaking out, with exaggerated tiptoeing as if they're burglars in some old time-y movie, until Mikey says out loud, "Ah shit, I forgot my phone," and stomps his way back into his room. Carmy hears the door handle hit the wall with a dull thump, same as always.
As they finally duck outside, there's another honking noise and the high beams flash on and off against the garage door. "Let's go let's gooooo," Richie is saying, thumping the steering wheel a few times.
"You never got any attention as a kid, huh?" Carmy says, sliding into the backseat.
Richie turns around and points. "I'm gonna throw your dwarf ass in with the fireworks and light them all up, I swear to god."
Carmy grins as Mikey gets into the car and Richie reverses down the driveway, almost knocking over both trash cans with the duct-taped bumper. During the pause of gears clunking from reverse and into drive, Carmy looks out and sees the master bedroom window glowing with the blue glare of the TV. His own window is right next to it, mostly dark except for the lamp that Mikey had left on; from the outside looking in, the space seems unfamiliar, like it belongs to someone he doesn't even know.
He scoots over a bit and rests his elbows on the two front seats. "Hurry the hell up," he tells Richie, who holds up a middle finger in response and tries to blindly shove it up Carmy's nose, but the car is moving and they're gone.
2.
"Hey, asshole."
Carmy is too busy having a heart attack to say more than a choked, "What the fuck," because he opens his eyes and Richie is -- did he fall down or pass out or some shit? -- Richie is standing over him and staring straight down like some kind of psycho killer.
"'What the fuck'?" Richie repeats. He bounces his index finger off his own chest. "No, I'm 'what the fuck'-ing you, chef. It's half nine, you useless piece of shit, and I gotta schlep all the way over here to wake your ass up in person like a goddamn baby -- "
"Wait." Carmy squints and finally processes the surroundings: he's in Chicago. More specifically, in his new apartment, on the thrifted couch. The sun is coming in through the windows at unfamiliar angles. He props himself up on one elbow and shakes his head. "Wait, what?"
"Listen," Richie leans close, "get off the couch, get decent, and get your ass to work. Everyone's having a fucking meltdown." He picks up Carmy's phone from the coffee table and theatrically demonstrates how pressing the power button over and over does nothing. "See this thing? It's called a phone," he enunciates like he's talking to a toddler. "You have to charge it for it to work so that if people call you, you can pick up and explain why you're such a negligent dickhead."
He drops it onto Carmy's chest and eyes him for a good three more seconds before moving away. Carmy finally sits up, holding the phone against his ribcage. Oversleeping has him disoriented and less angry than he thought he'd be at the idea of Richie being inside his apartment.
"How'd you get in here?" he croaks belatedly.
"I kicked your door in, how else?"
Carmy turns to stare at Richie over the back of the couch. "You kicked in the fucking door?"
"Bro, you could've been dead in here from carbon monoxide poisoning, how the hell was I supposed to know? It could easily have been a life and death situation," Richie barrels onward when Carmy tries to interrupt. "Easily. You're welcome."
There's a kernel of truth and sincerity in there, as always, barely visible from underneath multiple layers of general assholery, also as always. Then again, Carmy had just no-call no-showed with a dead phone battery two weeks after Richie'd gotten the worst news of his life. That was probably fucked up.
"Are you gonna pay to have it fixed?" Carmy yells, even though Richie has already disappeared from view.
"Are you gonna come in to work?" Richie yells back from the hallway, mimicking both the intonation and pitch except an octave higher, before the door opens and slams shut. After that punctuation, it's quiet again.
Carmy blinks exaggeratedly, still trying to sync mind and body back together. The back of his shirt feels sleep-damp, forehead slightly sticky, possibly the remnants of a nightmare that he can't remember now. He should be scrambling after Richie but there's something keeping him anchored to the couch instead. The specter of his dead fucking brother, maybe.
He presses the back of his hand to his mouth and laughs. Wonders when that concept is actually going to sink in. After the shock of the initial couple days afterward, during which he was mostly blacked out on bottom shelf whiskey, his brain had scrutinized the available information and evidently declined to accept it as truth. Mikey is dead, you fuck, he'll think over and over -- and still, deep down, there's the unshakeable belief that he's wrong, that Mikey is out there somewhere. Carmy never calls, but if he did, Mikey would pick up because how could he not?
He stares off at nothing in particular, just watching dust motes float across the giant oceans of sunlight. Beyond that, unfocused in the background, is the yellowing smear of a popcorn ceiling that's probably full of asbestos or some shit. The place really is bright as hell. Apparently every window faces east. It might've been mentioned in the ad, but all that's a blur from this side of a thousand mile move.
"Fuck," he says to himself, just to hear a concrete sound, anything other than the unending roar inside his head.
Eventually he manages to stagger into the bathroom, grabbing the phone and powerbank off the table on the way. In the mirror, a sallow reflection stares back until a strange kind of disconnect makes it stop looking like a real, human face and more like something from a beginner's drawing book. Start with an oval, make it 3D, put a triangle nose on it; the other stuff is irrelevant, unfinished.
He plugs the phone in, then brushes his teeth and washes his face with cold water. Gets toothpaste all over the sink, which he doesn't clean up. Gets water all over the counter, which he does clean up.
From his periphery, the phone finally powers on and lights up in staggered beats of notifications. The newest one, timestamped 'now', is from Richie: BRO WHERE THE FUK ARE YOU
"Okay," Carmy narrates out loud as he walks out of the bathroom, then repeats, "Okay okay okay," gathering his wallet and his keys, shoving them into various pockets. He's up, he's going, he's out the door.
3.
Every day there's bills to sort through, each one with way too many numbers than Carmy wants to deal with. He sits in the stupid office chair and puts the stupid envelopes into stupid little piles, forgetting his own organizational system as he goes along so that none of them make any sense and would have to be re-sorted later -- yet he can't bring himself to stop.
At some point he must put his head down, and at some point he must close his eyes, because when he opens them again it's because someone is knocking and opening the door. He unsticks his thumb from the pile of mail he's still clutching, stretches his hand out, then turns his head to see Syd in the doorway.
"Hey," he says, standing, as if this had been his plan all along.
"Hi. Sorry."
"No, I'm sorry. Guess I lost track of time here." He shuffles through some more crap on the desk to seem busy.
"It's totally fine, I just needed to know where to find you," she says.
Carmy finally throws her a glance, looking her in the eye for a brief second as if it'll mean more if he hits the target dead on, then drops his attention back to the mail. Usually he would say something like, Alright, I'll see you out there in a sec, or Is there anything else you need?, but this time he doesn't. Instead he continues to divvy up the remainder of the mail into random spots until his hands are empty. The whole time Syd stands there, watching, until Carmy finally turns around, half-sits on the desk, and crosses his arms. When he raises his eyebrows in question, Syd raises hers back.
"I feel like you're being weirrrrrd," she drawls out with a purposely pasted-on smile.
Instead of answering the question, Carmy juts his chin at her and asks, "Hey, why do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Exaggerate your own awkwardness to reduce the awkwardness of the question you're asking."
"I do, don't I?" Syd agrees without argument. "I don't know. I guess maybe I want to give you the choice of whether or not to answer seriously."
"Huh." Carmy considers this. "That's like, weirdly self-sacrificial."
Syd mimics falling on her own sword before saying, "Well, you're a very fragile little thing," and Carmy looks at the ground and smiles to himself as she continues: "And I know all you guys prefer the very healthy method of needling each other until there's a fucking fistfight in the middle of the dining room, but, you know. Figured I'd try something different today."
"Right, right. That makes sense." He huffs another laugh.
"Anyway," Syd says, tossing him a life-vest, a 'get out of this question free' card, but at the same time he's saying, "It's just, uh -- "
She stops talking and watches him. Picking back up again is difficult, but he forces himself to do it before he can think about it too much. "Yeah, it's just. Strangely vulnerable to have someone catch you sleeping. I've always felt that way, even in my own bed. You know?"
"Or maybe you don't know and I'm just projecting my shit onto you," he says, backpedaling a bit, trying to get away from the suffocation of admitting something about himself out loud. He unfolds his arms to flick all ten fingers, mimicking an explosion.
"No. I know."
"You do?"
Syd smiles. It's hard to tell exactly what kind of smile it is. "Do I seem like the kind of person who doesn't?"
Carmy pauses, then says, "This feels like a test."
"Might be." Syd shrugs. The solitary glow from the desk lamp makes her eyes both doubly dark and doubly bright. "Maybe you should study up for next time."
They look at each other. From around the corner behind her, he can hear pots banging around and water running on and off in spurts and Richie yelling about weighted blankets and anxiety -- they use that trick on cows at the slaughterhouse, you know, this giant fucking machine just hugs the shit out of them -- but all of that seems very far away.
Carmy crosses his arms again, rubs up and down his left tricep the same way he does when he's cold, or when he's weighing his options about something.
"Anyway," Syd says. She sounds normal, same as ever. "I'll see you out there in a sec?"
"Yeah, for sure," Carmy replies automatically.
Maybe it's his imagination, but she pauses for a tiny bit too long, one hand wrapped over the doorknob and the other spread over the wood right above it. He can't tell if she's going to push it further open or pull it closed behind her. Before she can do either, he turns around again and stares down at the piles of mail, just breathing evenly, straining for the sound of the latch clicking into place.