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Chapter Text

Mikey cut him out. 

He had been ruminating on it for weeks. His grades in everything but art had taken a swan dive, art only surviving because apparently scribbling out a portrait of Mike with mocking eyes could count for credit. From the second the words met his ears, he couldn’t manage to keep the thought from repeatedly thudding against his head like the weird thudding of Mike’s half-dead pickup truck.

“Bear, I’m just- I’m not gonna hire you.”

“C’mon, you’re better than this place. You’re better.”

“I want to set this place on fuckin fire. It’s no fuckin good. You know that.”

“Y’know what? Just don’t fuckin come anymore. I don’t like you being- Yes, I’m being serious! I only kept letting you in because I knew if I stopped, you were going to be a fuckin pussy about it.”

So Carmy had been looking for something to get back at him with, to make him feel just as shitty. And then one day, it hit him.

Sal’s was a sandwich shop, not at all unlike The Beef, which had started up in the past five to ten years a couple buildings down. So naturally, any time Mikey and Sal ended up in the same ten square feet, they’d hurl insults at each other, trade a few punches past Richie and one of Sal’s guys, and call it a draw.

Carmy still wanted to find a job, and Sal’s was looking like an excellent option.

-

“Shit, you’re that kid that always hangs around The Beef!” Sal realized several minutes into the interview.

“Uh y-yeah, I was until Mikey kicked me out.”

His eyebrows furrowed a little at that, “Kicked you out? The hell’d you do?”

“Fucking-“ he bit down hard on the inside of his bottom lip and shook his head, “I didn’t do shit. He uh he just thinks that-that I can do better.”

Sal seemed perpetually on the edge of yelling, “Damn right. Beef is a shithole , but how do I know you’re not going to take our recipes and go report back to your brother?”

“I uh,” his knee bounced hard under the table, “You could- you could probably ask him if you think I’m lying, but he won’t even let me in. Of course he’s not gonna take my advice on anything.”

He breathed out a sigh and quirked his jaw, “I don’t think you’re lying, but the second I get any fuckin word about The Beef switching things up, you’re canned. Got it, kid?”

“Yessir,” he said, eyes widening a little, seemingly clearing that hurdle.

“If you don’t know how to do something, what are you going to do?”

“Pr- uh probably ask the person closest to me or whoever is supposed to be teaching me shit?”

“As long as the closest person isn’t me or Freeman, you’ll be golden. You good under pressure?”

“Yessir.”

“You know a lot about cooking already?”

“I know the basics, but uh I’ll-I’ll learn whatever you throw at me.”

“I like the sound of that. I’ll have to run you by Freeman, but I think we’d like having you around.”

-

During Sunday dinner, Carmy told Mike about getting a job at Sal’s. 

His eyes squinted and his brow pinched like he was going to cry, but he just growled out, “Carmy, you fucking dick . I told you to find somewhere better, not working for the scum of the fucking Earth!”

“Michael, language!” Ma said, slamming a hand down, so the cutlery jangled with fear of her. “Carmen, why in God’s name are you working at Sal’s?”

“Because Mike won’t let me work at The Beef,” he gestured wildly to him.

“Christ, they’re both shit! Just eat your braciole and do something in retail,” Ma commanded.

“Are we just not congratulating Carmy on getting hired?” Sugar burst out. “Just gonna ignore that?”

“Yeah, I want t-to cook! I-I like cooking a lot.”

“So go somewhere that’s not fucking Sal’s!”

That conversation went in circles for a while, both he and Sugar progressively shrinking into themselves.

-

The next Tuesday, he had his first shift. For several minutes, he sat in the student parking lot, thumbs tapping into the steering wheel, but he eventually bit the bullet and resolved to pull out. It would put him half an hour early, but he supposed it couldn’t hurt to get a jump on all the training shit he had ahead of him.

“Everyone, meet Carmy. He hopped over to our side from The Beef,” Sal announced with a heavy pat on his back.

There was a chorus of excitement from the other chefs, each one taking a break from their dinner prep to marvel at him. Carmy shifted from foot to foot, heart beating too fast to do much of anything else.

“Wilson, you’ll be taking our little traitor under your wing.”

“Again?” He complained, southern twang filling his voice.

“Roxie turned out just fine, didn’t she?” 

“Yeah, didn’t I, Wilson?” Roxie interjected.

“Alright,” he groaned, “let’s get you going.”

Carmy threw an apron over his head, tied it around his waist, and stood to attention. Wilson, who always stood to his full 6’2” height, laughed at how it hung well past his knees.

“Give it here.”

He swallowed down the stomach acid burning in the back of his throat and handed it over. Wilson tied a knot into the neck strap and pressed it back into his hands.

“And Shrimpy, stop shakin’ like that. You’ll chop a finger off.”

His lips pursed, but he simply nodded, not in any way stopping shaking like that.

“Alright, come here, you’re gonna chop some veg with me.”

“Yessir.”

He placed a container of bell peppers and a knife in front of Carmy.

He chuckled, “You’re one uptight kid, ain’t you?”

“My uh family says that all the time.”

“No wonder. I think you’re strangling your knife there.”

He loosened his grip just enough that his knuckles looked less white.

“Better. Poor thing still can’t breathe though.”

He took a breath and tried to replicate the way he’d seen Mike do it a thousand times.

“Good, kid.”

Wilson took one out, cored it, and had it cut into matchsticks in a matter of seconds. Carmy blinked at the display and nodded slightly. 

“I blow your mind or something?”

“I don’t think I’ve really seen someone do prep stuff up close.”

“Well, you hung around The Beef an awful lot, didn’t you?”

“I’d normally be there during the dinner service. We go straight from 11 AM to about 10.”

“When did you all eat family?”

“2, before I’d get there after school.”

He placed his perfectly cut bell pepper in the container.

“Those were awful good for a kid, but you’re gonna have to pick up your pace a little.”

He nodded, “Heard.”

-

A couple hours later, they had moved on to sautéing veg in a pan. Wilson handed it off to Carmy while he was taking his smoke break even though Carmy would have killed to have something to settle his nerves. 

Sal was an intimidating man with broad shoulders that Carmy barely came up to and a loud voice, emboldened by years of running this kitchen. Sal put a hand on Carmy’s shoulder and leaned down.

“You a perfectionist?”

His voice went barely audible, and it made Carmy’s stomach drop, “I uh I-I guess? Sometimes?”

“You uh you-you guess?”

He paused for a second while his jaw tightened, “I am.”

“Well kid, no one here gives a shit if your cuts are perfect parallel bullshit, right? Not me or Freeman, not Wilson, not the customers. Got it?”

“Uh-“

“You have a stutter?”

“Uh, n-no.”

His hand tightened on Carmy’s shoulder, and Carmy’s throat tightened further. He blinked and stirred the veg.

“We don’t have any fucking time to waste here, kid,” he said, words constricting around him like barbed wire.

He nodded.

“Are you slow then?”

“N-no, sir.”

That word among others had found its place in his head since he developed the stutter. His mom has never been a patient woman.

“What was that?”

“No, sir,” his intonation went warped.

“There’s more you two should be doing. You’re slowing Wilson down.”

“I won’t.”

“Am I making you nervous?”

“No, sir.”

“You said you were good under pressure.”

“I am.”

“You can’t be slow at this. You have to be able to handle the pace.”

“I can.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Carmy tried to focus on the clicking of the knob when he turned the heat off instead of the panic bashing around his torso. Wilson strolled casually back toward him.

“We’ll see.”

Sal clapped the hand on his shoulder and kept walking through the other stations, voice filling the kitchen again.

“Looking good, Tiny,” Wilson said, examining the veg. “You know your way around this stuff, huh?”

Carmy cleared his throat, trying and failing to loosen it up. “Uh… a b-bit.”

“Oh, Sal just gave you a little talking to, didn’t he?”

He nodded, stomach roiling dangerously even though he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“You’ll get used to it.”

-

Carmy stands at his station, heartbeat thudding in his ears but hands and gaze steady. 

He doesn’t think about how he’s going to pay rent for his one-bedroom apartment on a commis’ salary, and he doesn’t think about Mike. He doesn’t think. 

He takes a couple spears of asparagus and has it chopped within seconds. If the pieces were stacked on top of each other, you’d be able to easily pick out the variation in the length, but they’re all close enough that they’d cook evenly. He takes another couple and does it again.

“Well done, Chef.”

“Thank you, Chef,” he says easily.

It’s not particularly loud at The French Laundry. Of course, there’s the back and forth of calling orders and the natural scraping and clanging and sizzling that a kitchen can’t exist without, but he’s never been yelled at here. If he’s fucking up, he’ll get those types of talks that he used to get from Sal, but he’s become pretty desensitized to them. He picks the useful critique out of the string of insults, and he keeps going.

Carmy doesn’t always do well with change. Weirdly, moving across the country hasn’t given him too much difficulty outside of the nauseating cost of living here. Changing himself though, is a whole other world. He’s been nervous and quiet but oddly frenetic since he developed a personality, and he doesn’t think all that is changing any time soon. 

So while discipline at French Laundry has come few and far between, he can always feel the rhythm of a kitchen timer ticking away. This place has been friendly enough, and it’s taught him a fuck ton already, and he feels like the simple act of chopping veg is life or death. 

His heart is pounding. He’s chopped all the asparagus. He moves on to the onions.

While he’s never truly relaxed per se, any time he steps into a kitchen, his heart starts thudding hard in his ears because he has to be able to handle the pace.

Chapter Text

When Sugar was 17, she had a boyfriend named Randy. He’d come to dinner sometimes, and when prompted, he’d only manage to make some awkward conversation before Ma or Mikey were off on something else. Carmy, being still in elementary school and not knowing much else about him, liked that about Randy because it was something that Carmy had experienced since the time he could talk.

Sometimes when he’d sleepwalk, he’d wake up to find Sugar and Randy sitting next to each other with something playing quietly on the TV. Sugar would be leaning into the arm of the couch and Randy would be leaning into Sugar. Carmy would just apologize, feeling like he interrupted something, and wander back upstairs.

Somewhere in the middle of summer though, he remembers watching Scrubs with Richie and Mikey when Sugar quietly slipped through the front door, mascara trailing down her face.

Richie paused the show and Mikey stood up, “Sug, hey, what happened?”

“I uh,” she gave a watery laugh, “I broke up with Randy.”

Mikey pulled her into a hug, “Do I have a little prick to beat up?”

“He’s a huge prick, but you don’t have to beat him up.”

“If you say so.”

She buried her face in his shoulder, probably staining his shirt black. He didn’t seem to mind. After a couple minutes, they separated. She wandered over to the couch, and Carmy wordlessly watched her sit on one end curl her knees up to her chest.

“Why’s Randy a prick?” Richie asked softly.

Her jaw tightened and she glanced at Carmy, “Randy is a prick because when he’s drunk, he gets… touchy .”

“Christ, Sug. That’s fuckin…” Richie murmured.

Mike looked like he needed to strangle something.

“I know it’s fuckin.”

“Did he?” Richie asked.

“No, he almost tried to, and I think I broke his fucking nose.”

Mikey nodded slightly, “Sug, did he give you anything? Any fuckin- any letters? Any teddy bears?”

“He made me these stupid little paper cranes.”

“Go get ‘em. We’re having a bonfire.”

Sugar went upstairs, and Mikey and Richie started walking to the backyard. 

“Yo Cousin, get it started, would you?”

Richie did a little salute and grabbed a flashlight.

“I don’t think you want to be here for this, Bear.”

“What-what do you mean?”

“I’m about to encourage your big sister to be as violent and-and fuckin vulgar as she’s feeling right now. I don’t want her to be worried about you hearing.”

“I’ll cover-cover m-my ears.”

He sighed and considered it, “Earplugs?”

“Okay.”

“Why do you want to hang around for this?”

“I want… I w-want to-to be with you guys. I’d-I’d-I’d just be sitting awake in-in bed,” he said as he grabbed earplugs from the bathroom cabinet.

Sugar came back downstairs with a shoe box almost completely full of paper cranes. She said something to Carmy, and he squinted, trying to read her lips. Her head lifted, hearing Michael explaining something.

He ruffled a hand in Carmy’s hair before putting an arm on his shoulder and guiding him outside. Richie had the sparks of a fire starting to catch and take hold. Carmy stood, watching the fire flicker and morph. Mikey soon returned with lawn chairs and bug spray.

The three others gathered around her while Sugar crouched down and held a paper crane out to the flames. An ember reached out to it and caught on fast. She dropped it toward the fire’s edges, and it latched onto the dried twigs.

Sugar stood up and watched the fire roar to life, flickering and swirling like a writhing beast. He watched the orange-red dance across her face. 

Of course, he had seen Sugar yell and get pissed and frustrated, but she never had the bite necessary to finish a fight that Mikey or Ma did. Maybe that’s why when he was that age, he saw her as so much softer than they were, but in that moment, there was no trace of softness.

She had bite. She had finished the fight with Randy in one hit, and while she was still shaken and felt sick to her stomach, the fire breathed life into her as she had done to it.

His gaze turned to the fire. Another paper crane was dropped in. The fire promised to erase anything they wanted it to. Carmy had always been a nervous kid, but he saw his big sister drop in another awful crane, and he watched it become ash. He sat down in the lawn chair, orange and red dancing in his vision, and he felt completely calm.

-

Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2014

He’s one of ten. He’s one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs. 

He got a call about it almost an hour ago, and he’s been pacing his apartment since. The floorboards creak every couple seconds, and toward the beginning, he had hoped that the sound would bring him back to himself, but he’s lost hope since then. Now, it just repeats.

He’ll have to publicize himself. He’ll have to seem likable and healthy and not like he still paces when taking a step feels, in a distant sort of way, like walking on broken glass.

Creak

Michael would be so much better at this. He’d never admit it, but he wants to call Mike and ask how the hell he does it. How can he be a Berzatto, born and raised, and also come across as relatively well-adjusted? Carmy’s been trying to master well-adjusted for decades and always feels that he comes up horrendously short.

Creak

And then a photo of him will be plastered on Food & Wine, and he’ll look like he’s trying too hard not to feel fucking awful. He’ll read a blurb about a big brother’s restaurant and the beaming elevation of Italian home-cooked meals, and he’ll spend the rest of the night choking on bile. No one in the world should do what he does.

Creak

He paces until the sharp pains through his feet become less distant, and he only manages to break the endless back and forth by slamming a fist into the back of his couch, sending it scraping a centimeter or two. There’s still something burning and crackling from his stomach to throat, so he wets a rag and begins scrubbing the cigarette ash from his floors. Several hours later, in the early hours of the morning, he curls up on his imperceptibly misaligned couch and falls asleep.

The following morning, he wakes up drained, and even as hours slip by, the feeling never loosens its hold. He’s sure that he had to have showered, had to have walked to work, and had to have done a million things since he got here. That’s all the confirmation he has that he’s done anything at all, that he would have noticed if he didn’t.

He gets some feeling back in his fingers by the time he’s making the oyster crackers. The pâtissier would make the flower shapes, and Carmy would carefully place them in the fryer. 

Carmy drops them in, watching closely to see when they’d be perfectly crispy. The kitchen timer in his head is ticking and ticking and ticking, and the smell of the oil tends to make him a little more nauseous than normal, and the urgency of it all has his face flushed.

Then, a wave of sharp pin pricks stab through his hand, and flames erupt from the oil. He stumbles back a couple steps, heat and vibrancy arresting him completely. 

In those few moments, he sees a future laid neatly out in front of him. French Laundry burns down, and Food & Wine renounces him. He swallows his pride, and he gets on a plane to Chicago, to Mike, and his ravenous need to be better than anyone else shrivels. He rests. He watches the fire, and he’s completely calm. 

And then, the Garde Manger cuts through it with a fire extinguisher, and it claws at the fryer and the wall before being swiftly fizzled out. He looks down at the white foam and still feels Mike’s presence. 

“Chef?” The Garde Manger asks.

He breathes shakily, finding air to be much harder to grasp outside of the trance. The heat and the pain in his hand start to return to him. He blinks hard and clears his throat.

Carmy finally meets his eyes, “Yes Chef?”

“You uh… your hand okay?”

“Shit, yeah uh,” he goes toward one of the sinks, “yeah.”

He bites his tongue while freezing water runs over his tattoo of a knife through a hand. He wraps a paper towel around it and throws a rubber glove overtop. He takes a deep breath and goes back in.

That night, he leaves the glove on. The world feels as quiet as it ever seems to get, and with his head spinning a little, he goes to sleep soon after he gets home. He dreams about an animal with burning fur bringing French Laundry to the ground. It guides Carmy home, and they and Mike sit at the bottom of the front steps.

He has that dream every couple nights for a few weeks. He never reads that article by Food & Wine. Eventually, he forgets about all of it because every morning after, he always goes back in again.

Chapter Text

There’s a lot he remembers about the Christmases of his childhood. Carmy had never been capable of doing things uncomplicated, and Christmas mornings were no exception.

For some of his earliest Christmases, he’d have far too much energy to sleep, leaving him hating everyone for an hour around 3 pm and being asleep in Michael’s lap by 4. This problem was only fixed when his ma started giving him stuff to run up and down stairs every Christmas Eve.

There were a few years where the excitement of the morning was able to outweigh the chaos of the evenings. No matter his age though, one piece of awe and wonder never failed to reach him. 

“Bear, look,” Mikey leaned down and whispered to him.

A sweeping arm gestured to the table.

“Look-look at what?”

“Your ma made all that. All by herself. Make sure to tell her good job.”

He nodded.

“I w-w-will.”

-

When he was 20, Carmy came home from The French Laundry. He almost felt… good, okay. Since he was little, his ma would go on about finding something for himself to hold onto and never let go of. Sal’s had him at a bit of a rocky start, but in the couple of years after, he had roughly wrapped his hands around cooking and only tightened his grip since.

So when he was 20, he walked into the kitchen, the ground zero of every Christmas incident.

“Hey, Ma what can I help you with?”

“Oh, after all these years, you suddenly want to lend me a hand,” she said, setting a kitchen timer before slamming it back down on the counter.

“I know how to help now. Just-just give me something.”

She pointed to a pot that was centimeters from boiling over, “Stir that.”

Without another word, he took the wooden spoon from the counter beside it and started stirring. 

-

A couple hours and several glasses of wine later, the kitchen was slowly devolving into a private property.

“Hey Auntie D, how’s it going?” Richie asked, lazily opening the fridge.

“You know I love you, but if you’re just here to fucking chat, I have a rolling pin right there to beat you with.”

“Christ Ma,” Mikey laughs, “we’re just grabbing beers. We’ll be out of your hair in two seconds.”

Mikey meets Carmy’s eyes and finds them wide and frantic.

“You holding Carmy hostage in here?” Mike asked, taking the bottle opener from the top of the fridge.

“He asked to help. He’s helping.”

A kitchen timer went off, and she pulled the rolls out of the oven.

“You helping, Carm?”

“Uh…” he stopped the kitchen timer before it made him go fucking crazy, “Yes, yeah. I’m helping.”

“Oh, so now that Carmy’s the big shot chef in fuckin Cali, he gets to help?”

“He gets to help because he knows how to shut the fuck up,” she took Mikey’s face in one hand, pressing in his cheeks, before turning back around. “Carmen, the fucking gravy!”

“What? What gravy?”

“You’re supposed to be doing the fucking gravy!”

“You put me on garlic bread,” he mumbled half-heartedly before pushing it aside and pulling out one of their last remaining pots.

“Why would I have put you on garlic bread?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, it makes no fucking sense. I think I’m losing my mind here! Didn’t I tell you two to fuck off?”

“You did. Doing great, ma.”

“Have fun in here,” Richie said as he turned to follow Mike.

Another timer went off.

“What the fuck is that one for?!” She yelled.

“That’s to take the cod out over here.”

He stopped the timer and took it out.

“We need fucking gravy.”

“I’m doing it, ma.”

“This is all complete shit without gravy.”

“But I’ve got it. Don’t worry.”

“God, Carmy, this is all too much for one person. I’m losing my fucking mind.”

“I’m here, ma. It’s not just you doing this.”

“No, you’re a quiet boy, but you can never understand this, Carmen. You’ll never understand what it feels like to do all of this alone.”

“What uh what-what don’t I understand, ma?” He stirred the gravy while she crumpled into the corner of the countertop.

“Why can’t it be easier? Why can’t I do all this and feel like any of those sons of bitches are going to care?”

He blinked and chewed at his bottom lip, “We all love it, ma. It’s always amazing.”

“No,” she sobbed, “You all never love it, but I always do all of this to myself because I hope you will. It has to be perfect.”

“It is perfect. It’s always perfect, and-and gravy’s done. It’s okay.”

He moved the garlic bread back over.

“Why do I do this to myself? This is awful. It’s always awful.”

When he bit more of his lip off, he picked up a metallic taste.

“You want to make it perfect, and it’s always perfect.”

She tossed a cigarette butt into the trash and lit up another. Her lips curled around it, trying to strangle her sobs.

She whispered, “Oh, stop fucking talking, Carmen.”

-

Carmy sat next to Sugar again this year. He watched Michael bullshit with Richie from across the table. 

“Your lip is bleeding,” Sugar murmured.

“What?” He blinked, barely coming out of his stupor.

She pointed, “Your lip.”

He touched it and found little smears of orange-red on his finger, “Oh, shit yeah. It was- it was bleeding earlier.”

He rubbed it on his black pants.

“You’ve been chewing at it again,” she said defeatedly.

“Today, yeah.”

She nodded slightly, “Well… everything looks really good.”

“Yeah… always looks perfect.”

“Always tastes perfect,” she agreed. “Should I be worried about how long she’s taking?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was she at?”

“A 6 maybe. Cried.”

“So she’s probably just cleaning up her makeup?”

“Probably.”

About 10 minutes later, Mike went up to check on her. A couple minutes after that, Carmy could hear her yelling. About 5 minutes after that, Mikey came back downstairs.

“Yeah, go ahead and say grace, Unc. She said to start without her.”

“I feel like she said a hell of a lot before that.”

“She’s just- she’s fuckin resting. Go on.”

-

Carmy has been laying in bed for hours, wired and uncomfortable. Nausea has settled in the back of his throat, and despite it being early spring, the room feels warm enough on his skin that it’s almost making him claustrophobic. He gets up, roughly forces open his bedroom window, and lights a cigarette.

He looks out into the abyssal darkness of the alley and thinks how even though he’s only a couple miles from his childhood home, it feels like light years away. 

He doesn’t get homesick, at least not in the way of wanting to pay that home a visit. It’s more like missing a lot of specific moments, ones where he saw how normal he could have felt. When he was a kid, there wasn’t a time when burrowing into Mikey’s side didn’t make him feel safer.

He’s several years past feeling like that. There was a time in his life when his stomach wasn’t always roiling, when his heart wasn’t always thudding. It was early, maybe even before he started school, but no matter how many years have separated him from it, he still remembers a time when he didn’t have to make himself feel like this to survive.

A cold breeze brushes across him, and it has a calming effect on the heat that always mottles his cheeks when he gets too panicked. Eventually, he rubs the cigarette into his ashtray and collapses back into bed.

-

He doesn’t eat breakfast. While walking to his first day at Grace, he tries and fails to feel less lightheaded. He walks through the doors at 5:29 in the morning, and despite the awful malaise that has always and will always cling to him, he will be good at this. He’ll be the fucking best at this long before it ever kills him.

“I’m Chef Ram. I’m the sous, and you two are going to start by measuring out some ingredients. Any questions?” 

Something beyond just competition grips Carmy as he stands next to the other commis, not quite hatred but an insatiable urge to completely fucking smoke this guy. Carmy glances in the direction of the other commis. He finds him subtly looking back, and their gazes both switch to Chef Ram.

“Luca, Carmen. Carmen, Luca,” he introduced. “If you have other questions, say them with your mouths, not your eyes. Now, I printed out instructions for every ingredient. Do you two know what oxalis looks like?”

“No Chef,” they both said.

“It’s like a three-leaf clover. If you don’t know what anything else is, check the label. If it doesn’t have a label yet, ask me.”

“Is oxalis wood sorrel?” Carmy asked, having dealt with it at The French Laundry.

“It is, yeah.”

-

And Carmy learns. By the end of the first couple weeks, Carmy is spending almost half of the day stirring sauces, watching the plum consummée reduce, or boiling carrots for the carrot terrine. The other half is still lugging around massive bags of ingredients or cleaning stations throughout the day, but considering Luca is still more 30/70, it must mean they see something in Carmy.

He watches dishes go out that are perfectly complex, perfectly beautiful, and he knows that he’s been allowed to create some part of them. If he’s achieved that within the first month, he wonders how far he could go here, how long it would be before he can become a chef de partie at a restaurant with three Michelin stars.

His stomach is still roiling, his heart is still thudding, and he is so all-encompassingly exhausted already.

And the carrot terrine turned out perfect.

Chapter Text

Every couple Sundays, Carmy and Fak would go to the ice rink together and play hockey until Mikey came to wrangle them up and take them grocery shopping for everything needed to make braciole.

When they were a little younger, Ma and Fak’s parents would be more strict about helmets and winter coats, but since starting high school, they’d all loosened their grips a little. Carmy and Fak laced up their skates, threw on gloves, and headed out onto the ice. 

It would always be relatively empty, a couple families inching little kids across the ice, but the two would always manage to find a corner where they could bat a puck back and forth. They’d aim from further and further, trying to keep precision while their skating became faster and faster.

After Carmy tried to shoot to Fak and missed by a good couple feet, Fak yelled, “Hey Carmy, you’re really bad at this!”

And Carmy yelled back, “Hey Fak, you’re really bad at shit talking!”

“Hey Carmy, guess what?”

“What?”

“Fuck you!”

“Hey Fak, guess what?”

“Dude, I’m not gonna bite!”

“Y-you should!”

“No!”

“Fak, just fuckin trust me!”

“I’m not doing it!”

“Fak, guess what?”

“Fine! What the fuck do you want?”

Carmy began barreling toward him, causing Fak to start screaming and trying to ward him off with the hockey stick. As the gap between them started to shrink though, Carmy paid more attention to reaching Fak and less attention to his own hockey stick.

It caught on the blade of his right skate and soon enough, his left skate slid out beneath him. He landed hard on his back and slammed his head into the ice.

Immediately after, Fak was yelling something about instant karma, but when Carmy only curled into himself, he skated over and crouched down beside him.

“Carmy, dude, hey are you okay?” He said, voice shaking.

Carmy groaned and pushed himself up, head lulling between his shoulders. He saw the air around him swirl and Fak’s hand develop a hazy double. It all had him swaying back and forth with his stomach hovering in his throat. His eyes squeezed shut, and he tried to stop seeing it.

“Are you gonna throw up? Like, remember when Will Dannick hit his head during a game then completely spewed everywhere?”

“maybe?” Carmy whispered.

“Should I- like I think we need to call your mom, right?”

“no, she’s…” his words came out slow and syrupy, “she’s gonna be pissed.”

“What about Mike?”

He shook his head. 

“Let’s just get you off the ice, okay?”

“okay.”

“Promise not to spew everywhere?”

“Uh… I’ll try.”

Fak considered it a moment before deciding, “Good enough.”

He opened his eyes and winced when raising his head sent a stronger shock of pain between his shoulders. Fak wrapped an arm around his chest and stood both of them up. Carmy leaned into him, going stiff in an effort to stop the ice from spinning beneath him.

Fak slowly guided them along the ice. Carmy was almost as physical as the rest of his family, but the unflinching hug into Fak’s side had him somehow more on edge. He sat Carmy down on a bench, but he seemed wholly unwilling to take more than one hand off Fak.

“Are you- will you be okay for a second while I call someone?”

“hold on,” he murmured.

Carmy was too preoccupied with forcing the knots out of his skate’s laces. He desperately needed something else to keep him steady. His breath loosened a little when both of his feet touched the floor. 

“sorry, what were you…?” He asked, finally moving his hand from Fak’s knee to his own.

“Dude, I gotta call your mom. I’m not a fuckin brain surgeon.”

“she isn’t.”

“But she can drive you to one though,” Fak said as he stood up, “Just stay right there. I’m gonna call her, but don’t move!”

“Just-just-just get the fuck back here.”

“Sorry Carm, can’t hear you! Too far away!”

He chewed at his lip and tried to find a position that didn’t make it feel like he was being ripped down the middle. His eyes fell closed. Ma wasn’t just going to be pissed. Almost purely in anticipation, he felt a rancid guilt twist around in him.

After a couple minutes of Carmy desperately trying not to cry or vomit or pass out, Fak returned, carrying their bags from a couple benches down.

“So your mom’s gonna be here in like half an hour, and she sounded a little freaked.”

“freaked?” He asked over the sound of his jittering knee making the bench creak.

“ Loads of swearing.”

“yeah,” Carmy said, knowing that to be a given.

“But I think it was like an ‘oh fuck, my son got his shit rocked by a hockey stick’ kinda freaked.”

“oh.”

“Jeez, dude. You sound like a fuckin zombie or something.”

He breathed through a wave of nausea, “feel like one.”

“Head hurt?”

He explains tightly, “yes, fuckin head hurts.”

Fak sat down and placed an arm around him. Carmy stayed rigid but welcomed the touch.

“Do you want me to distract you, or do you just want me to shut the fuck up?”

“tell me about all the tattoos you’re gonna get.”

“Gladly.”

-

“Neil, your mom will be here in 5 minutes. Don’t get kidnapped. Carmen, we’re going to the ER,” she said, watching as Carmy ineptly forced on his too-small Adidas.

She slung his bag over her shoulder and placed a hand on his arm, long nails pressing into the fabric of his coat.

“Bye, Mrs. Berzatto.”

“Bye, Neil.”

As they walked toward the exit of the rink, his ma picked up on the swaying of his steps.

“Why are you walking like that? Manage to sprain an ankle too?”

“‘m kinda dizzy,” he admitted sheepishly.

“Just make it to the car, Angel.”

He hadn’t heard the nickname since he was little, little enough that she’d call his wide blue-eyed stare and wild blond waves cute instead of unsettling. Maybe that was what lowered his guard, maybe it was just the throbbing pain that stretched from his shoulder blades up to the back of his head.

“and nauseous.”

“If you feel like you’re gonna be sick, say something. You’re not getting that shit in my car.”

“okay,” he mumbled, leaning his head into her shoulder.

“Or on me.”

“okay.”

She huffed, voice tight and watery, “Okay.”

He managed to get into the car, and he curled and melted into his side. 

“Okay, you’re gonna go to the emergency room,” she said as she was pulling out, “and they’re going to give you expensive -ass painkillers, and you’ll stop feeling like that.”

The lines of the parking lot doubled and tilted across his vision. He tried to just close his eyes, but they seemed etched into his eyelids, endlessly spinning and contorting.

“Ma,” he mumbled tightly, one clammy hand gripping the handle of the locked car door. 

“ Shit ,” she hissed as she stopped with a jerk.

The car unlocked, and he leaned his head out and hummed each breath until he heaved roughly onto the pavement. His ma had a hand on his shoulder, thumb rubbing up and down. Eventually, after another couple heaves, he closed the door behind him and curled back up.

“Carmen, look at me.”

He slowly turned, leaning forward for fear of bumping his back and head on anything. His glazed over eyes met the tips of her dyed blonde hair. She studied his pale face.

His ma breathed out a curt sigh and cupped a hand on his cheek, “You’re going to be just fine.”

“okay,” he mumbled.

“And you’re not going to vomit in my car.”

“yeah.”

“Our Lady Victory,” she growled as she pulled out of the parking lot, “pray for us.”

His eyes fell shut, and his ma tried to just watch the road, just keep an eye on him, but she was spiraling hard and fast.

“I swear to God,” she muttered more to herself than to him, “if this shit happens again because you weren’t wearing a fucking helmet like a moron, you’re paying the medical bills. You’re lucky I am this time. It’s not hard to wear a helmet, you selfish… Scaring your mother like this.”

She glanced down at him, finding his eyes still closed. Silence filled the car for a few moments, unsteady and strained.

She breathed in and tightened her grasp around the wheel, “I don’t know how to do this. God, you just look so awful. My tiny little Angel, I just don’t know how to handle you hurting so much… You know, when you were born, you weren’t even 5 pounds. You were just so tiny and sickly too, and I could barely look at you because you were always so, so upset about something , and I couldn’t fix that. I never could, and it seems like there’s nothing in the world I can do that will make you happy.”

He listened, far too exhausted to answer or even to ignore her.

“I know you’re never supposed to be jealous of your children, but how am I supposed to just feel okay when Michael can just make you smile like it’s Christmas fucking morning? I know I’m not a perfect mother, God, do I fucking know that, but what have I done that was so awful to you? I’m sure you’re not this miserable when you’re not around me, but for 14 years, I’ve been trying to figure out what the fuck you want from me, and I haven’t come up with shit.”

Carmy let her words wash over him like waves overhead. It almost felt like the ending stretch of a dream, like he was vaguely aware that he should have been fighting for air, been struggling and gasping against it, but outwardly, it didn’t seem to do anything to him. Inwardly though, he was held underwater for half an hour straight.

-

He got diagnosed with a moderate concussion, and a couple hours later, his ma was grabbing Michael to carry Carmy inside. 

“Hey Carm, rise and shine,” Mike patted a hand on his shoulder.

“Mike,” he whispered and blearily turned around.

“C’mon, piggyback?”

“why?”

“Cause you’re concussed and high as shit?”

He blinked at him before deciding, “okay.”

His ma held the front door open while Michael lifted up his legs. Carmy nestled his head into Mikey’s shoulder.

“Hey, don’t get too comfortable up there. I’m like five seconds from dropping your ass.”

Carmy hummed and didn’t listen in the slightest. Just as promised though, Mikey dumped him onto the couch. This seemed to wake him up a little, having him crawling up to the arm of the couch and searching the room for where Mike ended up.

Mike appeared in feeling before sight. He lifted Carmy’s legs and sat beneath them before replacing them in his lap. Carmy blinked for a moment before contentedly laying his head down.

“when is it?”

“Looking like… 8 o’clock. I’m sure you guys can’t blame me and Cousin for eating without you.”

“Blame Carmy,” his ma called, cutting open their braciole, so the microwave might just get through to it.

Carmy instead focused on, “where’s Cousin?”

“Still at the restaurant. Figured he’d run the joint tonight while your busted head gives us some family bonding time.”

“yeah.”

“So how’re you feeling, kid?”

“uh… fine. sorry about all this.”

“No, no hey,” he whispered, “don’t be sorry. I don’t care what Ma put in your head, you didn’t mean to do shit. Just fuckin… rest up, and I’m sure she’ll be off your ass soon enough.”

“sure.”

“Your head still hurt?”

“um… a little.”

“You hungry?”

He scratched at the middle of his forehead with bitten-off nails, “kinda.”

Mikey called to her, “Ma, you got the braciole warmed up?”

She called back, “Be patient.”

“But seriously, you shouldn’t feel guilty for this. She’s just fussing.”

“sure.”

Mike patted Carmy’s knee. Soon, their ma came over carrying a plate of braciole. She ranted about Mikey making sure Carmy didn’t get it on the couch because “he’s basically an invalid right now” and when did Michael stop doing raisins? It wasn’t her favorite part or anything, but “it had to have been added to your great grandfather’s recipe for a reason.”

“Ma?”

“What is it, Michael?”

“Do you wanna just take a load off? You’ve been stressing like crazy since you called me about Carm. Look at him. He’s fine.”

Carmy’s eyes traced the crisp, metallic light and shadow of the fork in his hand. He’d picked over most of his plate, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to put it down.

“I know he’s fine. He’s not looking at me like a kicked puppy anymore.”

“So get over here. Armchair’s calling your name.”

“Fine, one of my sons just went out and got himself a concussion, but sure, I’ll take a load off. Absolutely nothing that I should be worried about.”

She begrudgingly sat in the armchair, ankles crossed on the ottoman and lips pursed. 

“do I get off school?” Carmy wondered.

“Christ, we carried you in here,” she remarked. “I’ll give you a couple days.”

“thanks, Mom.”

“Of course, Angel.”

“That’s a throwback,” Mikey smiled.

“Yeah, it just slipped out when he was complaining on the way to the car.”

“Oh what? How awful to complain about getting his head bashed.”

She curtly sighed, “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” Mike turned, “Kid, you done with that?”

“oh uh yeah, sorry,” he handed it to Mike.

He got up, grabbed his ma’s plate as well, and dropped them in the sink before rushing back.

“You guys wanna watch something?” 

“Something good. I don’t want to watch those stupid action movies you and Richie are always going on about.”

“Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is fuckin genius.”

“Oh sure, all those explosions were very poignant. Just find something Carmy wants to watch. Us two would be here all night.”

“Well Bear?”

Carmy took his eyes off the TV guide, “Fight Club.”

“We just watched it last week,” their Ma commented incredulously.

Mikey shrugged, “Shouldn’t have asked him if you didn’t want Fight Club.”

“Should have known. He’s been talking about it since.”

“we don’t have to.”

“Oh hush,” she sighed, “It was a fine movie. It won’t kill me to watch it again.”

He chewed at his bottom lip with a pause, “okay.”

That night, he fell asleep on the couch halfway through the movie. Mikey took Carmy’s blanket from upstairs and carefully draped it over him, wishing him goodnight even if he didn’t hear it. For hours of restless sleep, Carmy dreamed about walking into the jaws of bears.

In the following days, he bit his tongue when the room tried to spin, tried to keep his eyes focused when it felt like his head was trapped in a vice grip. Eventually, he went back to school, and he could finally breathe when his ma stopped mentioning it.

-

Each night, Carmy walks home from The Beef with the wind chilling his near-perpetual wired, feverish feeling. He gasps the cold in until gasps turn to breaths. The knots in his chest never fully untie themselves, but each night, the taut strings at least get a hold of some slack.

Tonight, he trudges up the steps to his apartment and drifts to the kitchen. With his eyes glazed over, he tosses a TV dinner in the microwave and sits on the counter, his surroundings tuning out as the seconds turn to syrup. The soft beeping breaks him from his stupor.

Over the course of his first couple years in kitchens, he lost a noticeable amount of feeling in his fingertips, and it wasn’t like after that, he 100% always remembered never to touch any pot or pan without the barrier of a towel. 

When he places the plastic tray on the coffee table, it feels a little warm and nothing more. He tears off the top, finding thick steam meeting his face.

“Shit,” he whispers to himself, brushing his florid fingertips together.

In the end, he throws them under the tap for a couple seconds before he starts picking at his uninspired Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. Guy Fieri’s voice spills out from the TV with an enthusiasm that Carmy can’t seem to follow.

About an hour later, Carmy throws out the tray, turns off the TV halfway through another 6-foot biker-looking guy showing off his smoker, and wanders listlessly off to bed. There are very few things he wouldn’t give to just be able to sleep when the exhaustion is this heavy, but he just melts against the surface of his too-firm mattress, and he waits.

He thinks about the sticky, decades-old upholstery, his favorite knife waiting on the tile to slice open someone’s foot, he thinks about the several stashes of tums and pepto bismol he had already set up out of necessity by the end of the first week. He thinks about how KBL Electric probably has something to do with selling coke out of the alley.

He wouldn’t be here if Mike was. Carmy would still be running on empty at EMP. Mike might have saved him from that horror, but he couldn’t have not caustically hated Carmy if all of this was what he thought Carmy deserves.

He pauses and traces his eyes along the corners of his room. He wouldn’t be here if Mike was.

More thoughts walk in and out of Carmy’s head until it all starts to fade to nothing. He has a dream about trying to wash the grease and grime from his hands, but it only grows across his skin until he chokes on it. 

At around 4 in the morning, Carmy has showered, dressed, and is now pacing his apartment, trying to piece together a schedule for the day. Most of it was going to be looking over the stupid fucking books, but he doesn’t think anyone would mind him helping with prep.

Somewhere around 19 or 20, he grew to love prepping. It meant he had cleared the hurdle of lugging bags and crates and measuring out ingredients. Even after clearing a lot more hurdles since then, the simplicity and reliability of chopping veg had him coming eagerly back to it.

When he’s putting on his coat, it occurs to him that maybe it would be a little worrying for him to stroll into work at half past 4 in the morning. Of course, he could lie about it, but the containers of already-chopped veg might just give him away. 

Instead, he lights up a cigarette and switches from foot to foot. He tries and fails not to think about the impromptu road trips where himself, Mikey, Richie, and Sugar would pile into Mike’s shitty pickup truck before the sun came up. It wasn’t the first brand he tried, but sometimes, Mike would treat the four of them to a fancy-ass pack of Sapphires. The strange luxury of it stuck, and since then, he’s scarcely bought any other brand for himself.

At around 4:15, he walks into an Al-Anon meeting. Considering how many times he’s strolled in between the hours of midnight and 5 AM, he’s eternally grateful that they pretty much run 24/7. There’s an older man with the start of a graying beard at the front while only three other people sit in the sea of black plastic chairs.

Carmy takes his usual seat by the back center and lets the man’s words envelop him. 

“The Imad I met when we were in high school together was easily the coolest person I’ve ever met. He was funny and kind at the same time. He could- he could multitask, and especially as a college professor now, I’ve started to see just how rare that was for a young man, but… 

Imad is a really fucking good guy, but he never- he never lets me help him out. I’m doing good for myself, been doing good for myself past 10, 20 years, and he’s been fuckin… he’s been scraping by, in and out of homeless shelters for 30, 40 years, and I know I can’t give him money, but I have a guest room. I have time and-and patience and just- I don’t know.”

-

In a smaller, more manageable way, refusing to enter the office, to sit down for even a second, reminds him of his first couple weeks back. The constant thrumming, constant clatter, and constant heat all drum up his sense of urgency. He hasn’t taken a smoke break since he got here somewhere around 5:30. 

Of course, that also means his stomach is roiling and that he can almost feel the adrenaline pumping through him, but he wouldn’t have become a chef if he couldn’t handle these. He chops bell peppers and carrots, onions and celery.

“Yo Cousin, what are you doing out here in the land of the living?”

“Helping out with prep. Need a change of pace before I go back to looking at the books. What are you doing showing up almost an hour after your shift started?”

“I was scoring us a new addition to the decor.”

At this, Carmy finally turns to look and sees him holding up 8 different Denis Savard hockey cards whose sleeves had been joined together to form a grid.

‘Denis motherfuckin Savard, Number 18!’ echoes in his head as his eyes trace it.

“You got a frame for it?”

“Sure do.”

He nods, “Put it up, then you have a fuck ton of other shit to do.”

Richie’s “Heard,” falls on deaf ears.

The first domino fell before he even realized it. Even the most beginner level chefs know that when you have a knife in your hand, you might just want to pay attention to where it is. The blur of adrenaline and the numbness of his fingers mean that he doesn’t feel a thing when he turns back around and slashes deep into his forearm.

He only knows when he sees it, red on orange, blood on chopped carrots. There’s a sort of trail from his arm to where the knife is now pressed firmly against the cutting board. 

“Ffffuck,” he whispers, taking the towel from his shoulder to catch the rest.

He turns and rushes to the restroom, forgoing the horribly public sinks. In a rush of electricity shocking through his nerves, he places the soaked towel behind the faucet. He bites into his tongue and grips the edge of the sink before turning on the cold water. It causes a flash of pain that makes his stomach jump to the back of his throat.

“Hey, you alright?” Richie asks, “Saw the fuckin crime scene back there.”

“Fine, yeah,” he croaks and taps the toe of his shoe against the floor.

Carmy turns his shoulder when Richie tries to look over it to see.

“Oh stop being a fuckin baby.”

“Go do your fucking job,” he says wiping at the blood that had fallen down the side of his arm.

“We’re not even open. Plus, since you got here, half my job has been keeping you from fuckin self-imploding. Just let me see it.”

“Fuckin fine, if it means you’ll stop hounding me.”

It’s a slash that stretches diagonally from the top of his arm to somewhere further down on the side, going as deep as the course allowed. He had just sharpened the knives yesterday, meaning that cutting through flesh felt a little more like cutting through softened butter.

“ Jesus Cousin. That’s a fuckin…” he remarked. “That’s an Ebra situation. You can’t just slap a bandaid on that.”

“No, it’s-it’s not. Just fucking listen to me,” he growls,  “I’ve cut the shit out of myself before, and I’ve never gotten stitches for them.” He lifts his arm to show off the scar through the flesh above his thumb, “I don’t need Ebra, I don’t- I don’t need stitches, Cousin. I’m fine.”

He sticks it back under the faucet and tries to keep his gaze away from its center.

“Hey hold on, now let me see that,” he leans over and examines the thick, gnarled scar, “What did you even- can’t stick a bandaid on that either. How’d you stop that from spilling everywhere?”

“Paper towels and rubber glove.”

“Christ, the more I learn about your stupid fuckin Eleven Madison Park stint, the less I like.”

“You liked it before?”

“Not one fuckin bit, but 1. All that,” he circles a hand to gesture to the wound, “Is a lot bigger than the hand one, 2. How do you plan on throwing a rubber glove on it?”

He begs, “Cousin, just fuck off. I don’t need you worrying about me.”

“Oh yeah, I’ll just let the several-inch wound walk. Nothin’ to worry about there.”

“I’ll fuckin- I’ll gauze it up myself. Will that make you happy?”

“No! That will not make me happy because you fucking clearly need stitches!”

“I-I-I don’t need stitches,” he yells back, “It’s barely bleeding anymore!”

“Alright, fuck this. I’ll be back in a second.”

“What are you doing?” He turned the faucet off and started frantically grabbing at paper towels, “Cousin, don’t you fuckin ask him! I’m fine.”

By the time Carmy successfully pressed the paper towels to his arm without vomiting or passing out and opened the door to the bathroom, Ebra was walking over to him.

“Carmen, show me your cut.”

“Ebra, it-it-it’s fine.” He says tightly, “I need you out there a fuck ton more than I need you stitching me up.”

“Richie said that you would say that. Show me it to prove you don’t need stitches,” he challenges.

A kitchen timer goes off in his head, begging him to act, to move, to get the hell out of here. He blinks hard and breathes in for a second before taking the pressure off his arm.

“Oh, this needs stitches badly. Let’s go to a table up front.”

He places a heavy hand on Carmy’s back and urges him forward. His feet stall for a second, desperately trying to dig into the tile, but Ebra wins out eventually. They go through the kitchen, and he mumbles ‘behind,’ but never makes eye contact.

He clears his throat, trying to smooth out the shaking, “I left my towel back there.”

“You can get it later.”

“It’s probably staining the faucet,” he comments more to himself.

“Can clean it later. Now, sit down while I get the first aid kit.”

He keeps the paper towel on his arm when he sits down. With his other fingertips kneading into the crinkled skin of his forehead, he prays for everyone to just stay in the kitchen and not acknowledge his quaking form hiding up front. 

“Alright,” no such luck, “Do you want to know what I’m going to do?”

“Fuck no,” he croaks.

He squeezes his eyes shut and feels his leg bounce so hard he thinks he might be shaking the table, but if he stops moving, he fears the adrenaline will kill him.

“How’s the surgery going over here?” Richie asks, wandering his way back to them.

“It hasn’t started. Carmen is moving too much.”

“Hey, Cousin,” he says and sits down opposite them, “look at me.”

He shakes his head and feels both hands shiver hard despite the heat of the place. While he doesn’t think he lost nearly enough blood to be made lightheaded by that instead of the panic, the thought circles anyway.

“Hey, just fuckin take a breath. You’re fine, right? You’ve been saying so like it’s nothing.”

He inhales sharply through his nose and clears his throat. There’s bile burning at the back, but he’s pretty sure either getting up or asking for anything right now would kill him too. 

Ebra asks, “How do you fix this feeling?”

“Uh… Cold.”

“…Cold?”

“S- uh sorry… yeah, touching something cold some-sometimes helps.”

Selfish… scaring them all like this. It makes the last of the color in his face drop, pale skin tingling with the lack of blood.

“Oh shit , I know that look.”

Richie rushes to place a garbage can by his side, and Ebra returns when Carmy hadn’t even noticed he left. The room spins, but he swallows it down and bites his tongue.

He finally opens his eyes to receive Ebra’s cup of ice. He takes one in his right, feeling the cold bite at his fingers and slowly turn more slippery. Breathing comes just a little easier, and his leg doesn’t bounce quite as hard.

“Place your hand flat,” Ebra instructs.

Carmy starts to unfurl his hand, and he tries to stop his fingers from twitching inward which goes about as well as expected.

“Good, Carmen.”

His right fingers tighten around the ice cube and his gaze lands sharply on the tile opposite his left arm. He brushes his knuckles against his jaw and feels cold water trickle in beads down his arm.

“Cousin, do you remember Mike’s 30th?”

“Uh…” he feels the first pinprick go in, and it makes him glance toward the trash can, “What uh what about Mike’s 30th?”

“First time you drank with the big boys? We had to steal Sugar’s phone, so she wouldn’t propose to Pete after a fuckin month of dating?”

“Yeah uh I-I-I think I remember some of the beginning stuff.”

He snorts, “Oh yeah, that sounds about right. When she found out, Sug was even more pissed than your Ma, but Mikey and I should have been like professional drunk people babysitters or someshit. We had you covered. But yeah, that was a good fuckin time. First year he rented the golf cart.”

Each pinprick feels like a punch to the stomach, but the nausea never quite reaches high enough for him to call it.

“No, I-I thought the golf cart was later.”

“Oh, it was not . I’m not going to tell you the story right now, but your first real drink definitely was the first year with the golf cart. You’re thinking of golf cart year 2 which was a couple years later.”

“Wait, uh,” he pauses waiting for the nausea to pass, “How did you know Sugar was trying to propose?”

“I can tell that golf cart story. So, it’s like 8 or 9, Sun’s been down, I’m supposed to be DD on the golf cart, but it’s a fucking golf cart, so I’m pretty tipsy too. It’s Mike, you, and Sug, and all 3 of you are fuckin hammered , and we’re talking about how we probably should’ve gotten our coats, and then Sugar starts fuckin sniffling about how on the first day they met, Pete gave her his coat, and she’s going ‘Guys, he’s just a fuckin sweetheart. When-when you guys meet him, you’re gonna think he’s such a fuckin sweetheart. I wanna marry him so bad.’ And then she goes ‘I should tell him that.’ and starts trying to get into her back pocket to call him.”

“Just-just don’t remember any of this.”

Carmy switches out his ice cube.

“You feel any less woozy? Still pale as shit.”

“Not really.”

“Yeah, but no wonder. Somewhere during this trip, you felt less like running around with us, and more like dogshit, but after like fuckin half a minute of Sugar trying to get her phone out and arguing with Mike about calling Pete to ask for his fuckin hand in marriage, she finally gets her phone out.”

In some ways, the lines kind of blur between Mikey and Richie, but he thinks that the difference between the way they tell stories is that Mikey was built to be a storyteller. Richie wasn’t. He’s just trying to remember what happened, trying to remember why it was funny, and when he finds it, the difference reveals itself. Richie laughs at his own jokes, and Mikey doesn’t… didn’t.

He closes his eyes and rests his forehead on his cold fist.

“You alright?”

He swallows, “Uh yeah, fine.”

He feels Ebra turn his arm over, but refuses to react. For once, his body chooses to freeze instead of fight.

“Well… she’s-she’s trying to figure it out, but Mike’s reaching in the back trying to get it. They’re like fuckin slapping at each other, I think Sugar’s trying to call Pete with just her thumb, but it’s- it was a bumpy road, she just can’t get it, and then. Then, you just fuckin snatch it from her, stick it in your pocket.”

He breathes a laugh through the nose, a slight smile finding him.

“We’ve barely seen him since, but I think drunk you might be a fuckin kleptomaniac.”

“Drunk me could be anyone for all I know.”

“Including fuckin mastermind electronics thief.”

“Including-including that, yeah.”

“At some point, you handed her phone off to me, and Mike and I played keep away with her the rest of the night.”

He hums and nods.

“Alright, Carmen. Stitches are finished.”

He chews at his lip before asking, “Is there gauze on it?”

He doesn’t feel that kind of pressure, but the pulling of the stitches makes it harder to tell.

“No, I’m just starting that.”

“Yeah Cuz, don’t look yet. Scary part’s still going.”

“Fuck off,” he says with no real bite.

“Never. So, mind doing me a favor?”

“What favor?”

“Next time you cut the shit out of yourself, would you mind finding Ebra instead of making a break for it?”

He breathes out a sigh before nodding, “Yeah, maybe.”

“And mind not getting back to work until you’re sure you’re not gonna hurl?”

“Yeah… fine, but uh you owe me one and a half favors.”

“You want to use your one right off the bat?”

“Mind not getting into a screaming match over fuckall with Sydney?”

“I won’t start one, and we count it as the half?”

“Deal.”

“Alright,” Ebra announces, “everything is covered.”

Carmy finally retracts his arm and turns it over, examining the bandages.

“Sorry, you guys are completely behind now. You can go.”

Ebra hands him the remaining gauze, “Change the gauze every other day. If it gets infected, then we will send you to a hospital doctor. I will put ‘restock first aid kit’ on the whiteboard.”

He leaves the room, and Richie follows. Carmy leans back in the chair, forcing air down his lungs. Any time something like this happens, guilt and shame latch onto him like a snake’s fangs. He would have given anything to have slapped a couple layers of paper towels and gauze onto his arm, but now, he is nauseous and lightheaded and horrible.

Richie comes back in with a deli container of water and sets it on the table beside Carmy. Carmy nods as thanks and struggles to force another gulp of air down. It becomes easier as he watches Richie put the frame of hockey cards up.

“So when did you start getting so freaked out by this shit?”

“What shit?”

“All the medical, getting sewn up type shit?”

He blinks and shifts his gaze to the booth beneath the frame, “Uh I don’t know. I just- I think I’ve always been like that.”

“You haven’t though. There was this one time when you were in elementary school I think, and you were just telling Mike how this girl broke her arm like you just thought it was fuckin crazy that that could even happen. Sure as hell didn’t seem scared of it.”

“Yeah, I uh I-I probably wasn’t as terrified when I didn’t know how much that shit cost. Paying medical bills myself almost wasn’t as bad as when my ma paid ‘em though.”

“Yeah, when something would happen to one of you guys, she’d throw a bonafide shit fit. Just being a mother bear or something I guess.”

He pursed his lips and nodded, “Sure.”

“Still haven’t told me why you all of a sudden decided to get grossed out.”

“I don’t- I don’t think it’s even that I’m grossed out. It’s- I think it’s more that I’m already so fucking pumped full of adrenaline that if I look down and see ‘oh fuck, that’s-that’s really fucking bad, like that could put me out of commission for a while and be fuckin useless for a couple weeks,’ it’s uh it’s enough that I’m- it was really good you had the trash ready.”

“Christ, you already spend enough time looking over those guys’ shoulders. What’s another couple hours gonna do?”

“Make everyone really sick of me really quick?”

“They’ll deal. You’re bound to have all kinds of idiot French Laundry wisdom to shove down their throats.”

“I don’t want them to feel like I’m sticking around for me and not them.”

“So become the world’s best one-handed chef or someshit. You didn’t do a lap around the globe because you didn’t feel like trying.”

“I mean, I’ve-I’ve been opening and closing my hand this whole time, but that’s- it’s a fucking big cut… And I’m gonna have to change the gauze, and-and Ebra’s gonna have to take the stitches out at some point, right?”

“So we’ll help you with the fucking big cut. It’s no big deal.”

“Why-why is it no big deal? You think I’ve been such a fucking pain in your ass, but suddenly, you want to do me favors?”

“You have been such a fucking pain in my ass, but family takes care of family. Ohana or someshit.”

Chapter Text

Carmy remembers the plane ride. He remembers Luca. It always confused Carmy that anyone would ever want to cling to him. Well, Fak was different because Carmy’s near-lifelong friendship with Fak wasn’t formed in a pressure cooker of competition, anxiety, and perfectionism.

But during a smoke break one day, Carmy admitted that he’d been looking to get a job at noma, and then, Luca was looking to get a job at noma. He didn’t mind it, felt the flattery of imitation more than anything, but that didn’t mean he understood it.

Either way, they managed to get on the same flight even if they were in completely different seats. Carmy spent the whole 10-hour flight too terrified he was going to sleepwalk to actually get any sleep. They had a layover in Iceland though where they found each other, Carmy with a right leg that had gotten sore from bouncing up and down and Luca with the back of his hair all mussed up from being pressed against the seat.

“You uh,” Luca yawned, “You slept?”

“Not uh… I didn’t, no.”

“Christ, it’s what 1 AM and we’re basically moving all day tomorrow?”

“ You’re moving tomorrow. I managed to get this place that’s already furnished and shit.”

“So what exactly are you staying up for?”

Carmy breathed out a sigh, “I uh… I sleepwalk. I-I just have all kinds of shit that means sleeping in public doesn’t always go great.”

“So I’m gonna go try to buy a sandwich, but after that, I can wake you up if you try to pull anything.”

“Oh no, it’s-it’s fine.”

“It’s not a problem, mate. No offense, but you look like you need it, but uh wish me luck. I don’t know a word of Icelandic.”

When Carmy sat down in a plastic chair to wait for him, he fought hard against sleep. He rubbed at his eyes, bit into the back of his bottom lip, but he was completely out within a couple minutes. 

Luca spent about 5 minutes frustratedly fiddling with a currency converter. He spent about another 5 minutes nonverbally communicating with the young woman serving cold, plastic-wrapped sandwiches and whose knowledge of English began at hello and goodbye and ended with counting to 10, but to her credit, Luca’s knowledge of the Icelandic language was that he didn’t know shit.

Soon enough, he wandered back to sit beside Carmy who was lightly snoring. He placed the sandwich he was saving for Carmy in his jacket pocket and started on his own. Everything was calm and still for a while. When Luca finished the sandwich, he plugged in his earbuds and zoned out for a while. 

Carmy dreamt that he was walking down the stairs to The Beef, but they were the way he saw them when he was a kid. Neither the light of the kitchen nor the basement could fully illuminate them, leaving a thick dim patch in the middle that threatened to house any number of nails or bugs or cracks. 

He continued walking anyway, pulled forward by pure momentum, but the dark patch stretched on and on, darker and darker as it went. The unsteady steps grew harder to see, and their creaking grew louder until each one made his stomach drop with the prospect of falling through it.

Though he never turned his back on the endless, inky depths in front of him, sounds from behind him echoed off the walls. Thousands of cacophonous screeches and taps of rat feet and skin-crawling scuttling of cockroach legs all filled his ears and played tricks on the hairs on the back of his neck.

He kept going, steps light but never feeling light enough, trying to get away from the mass of pests writhing close behind him.

And then, he took a step that was completely silent. He hesitantly stepped his other foot down, dread strangling him as he felt but did not see the cold stone beneath him.

His head lifted, staring into the blackness in front of him. When he turned to his right though, sharp teeth met his eyes.

Luca flinched as Carmy finally jolted awake, gasping for air.

“Carmen, Carmen hey,” Luca said as Carmy’s eyes squeezed shut and he dragged fingers across his uncombed hair. “You alright, mate?”

“Uh…” he breathed deeply despite his lungs trying to spasm and his heart pounding in his ears, “I’m fine. I’m fine, yeah.”

“You… you think talking about the nightmare would help?”

He cleared his throat, “You really want to hear that?”

“I mean, we have another 15 minutes before we have to get moving again, oh and uh completely unrelated, but I got you a sandwich.”

“Oh uh thanks…” he holds it in his lap, “Y’know The Beef?”

“Your… brother’s place?” 

“Yeah, well when I was a kid, I would hang out there all the time. Family never paid a cent for an actual babysitter, but I was always terrified of the stairs down to the basement.”

“You gonna eat it?”

“Figured I’d wait until we got back on.”

“Sure, what about the basement steps?”

“We’d uh we’d just have like old appliances that didn’t work, probably still have some of our old toys down there, but when I got a little older and I’d be willing to go down there at all, I’d run down ‘em because it sounded like each one of ‘em was just gonna break beneath you. Plus, it was dark enough that one time my cousin Richie stepped on a mouse.”

“And the nightmare?”

“Oh shit, yeah uh I was just walking down the steps, and the-the creaking was just getting louder and louder that I felt like I was going to fall through every step, but it was a fuckin dream, so I couldn’t just turn back, and there were like rats and cockroaches that started filling up the stairs behind me, and uh and when I got to the bottom, I turned my head, and a fuckin bear jumped me.”

“Well shit, you’ve got bears down there too?”

“Probably Mike’s childhood teddy bear or something, but uh half the dreams I have have a bear just pop in. Doesn’t even have to do with what’s going on.”

“Wonder what that says. Should steal my sister’s old dream analysis book.”

“Oh fuck no. I don’t want to know,” Carmy huffed.

-

Carmy sat between two strangers and ignored the sandwich in his pocket. He wondered why, even when he was now thousands of miles from them, his family still wormed its way into his subconscious. At least half of this was just to get the hell out of there, but no matter what, the fur and teeth and claws would always find him.

His stomach growled despite his lack of appetite. Any level of stress had that effect on him, and higher levels erased any progress he had made on eating despite it. Instead, he pulled out his sketchbook from his backpack and fumbled around the sandwich to pull a ballpoint pen out of his pocket. He scratched out dark fur and drew in the contours of massive teeth. 

Once he was halfway satisfied, he clipped the pen to the front cover and shoved it back in the backpack. His knee started bouncing again as he slipped his hands into the pockets of his coat. 

He thought about how he bought it when he was working at French Laundry a couple years back. It reminded him of when he would steal Mike’s hoodies when he was barely getting out of kid sizes, but it was the only one on the rack and he liked the look of it, so he gave it a shot. 

Grace certainly pushed him, but it felt different from anywhere he’d worked at before. They wanted him to grow but not by force, not by screaming in his ear. He felt better at Grace, ate better, slept better, and even if it was fucking noma of all places that was looking more and more like they would want him among their staff, getting through the interview wasn’t the hard part; it was saying goodbye to Chef Terry and Chef Ram and everyone but Chef Luca.

Thanks to the way Chef Terry ran Grace, he had slowly wandered back above the line of being underweight. He was still a little short for it, but the jacket fit just fine. He continued running his thumb over the plastic wrap.

Noma had started out as a dream spot. Until the past year or so, it was one of the restaurants that he thought about in a distant sort of way, like he would consider himself lucky just to eat there someday, but being best new chef and a James Beard award winner was definitely eye-catching, even or especially to big names like noma. When he found out they accepted him for a commis position, he was ecstatic for the few seconds before it sunk in.

He was going to work at one of the most high-end kitchens in the world, he was going to work at noma, and Carmy didn’t know any Danish, and moving to Denmark meant improvement and exponential growth, but it also meant ripping his life and his comfort zone to shreds, like getting prematurely thrown into the public pool to teach him how to swim. 

He’d felt at least a little nauseous ever since got the news. If he sunk, he could make the walk of shame back to Grace, but as much as he loved it there, he didn’t want that. He wanted to be better, needed to be, but there was no guarantee that he could handle this. Maybe it would be stress or starvation or lack of sleep, maybe everything would just make his knees buckle, and he couldn’t get back up.

He closed his eyes and took in a breath. He wasn’t that nauseous, and the last thing he had eaten was a pack of pretzels about five hours ago. He was fine. Noma could be the death of him, anything could, but he was fucking fine.

He choked down half the sandwich and spent the rest of the flight forcing himself to breathe steadily enough that maybe it wouldn’t come back up. 

-

Carmy rolled his suitcases onto the boat. It was small in a cozy sort of way and colored in that pleasant gold and orange and teal that seemed to paint the whole city. He rolled the suitcases into the bedroom, and as he looked around, he slowly became more aware of how he’d see this place when in a panic. The ceiling barely stood above six feet, too low not to suffocate him, and he’d never gotten seasick before, but that was going to be tested a little more strenuously now.

He wandered back out to the living room and looked down at the table.

The note on it read:

Dear Carmen,

Attached is the wifi. 

Take the trash out, sweep the 

front walkway, make sure there

is water in the bowl for Coco.

Enjoy your stay.

-Marie

Carmen placed the note back down and knocked a knuckle on the table. 

-

Noma was good for his career. He learned, and he understood, and when he’d fuck up a little, he’d then do it right a million times over. Noma felt like watching the world click into place, like he had mastered every subset of cooking known to man.

It was electric, both like an endless, ingenious flow state and like the smell of his nerves frying.

Noma made him who he is, but it also whittled him down into something strange and unrecognizable.

-

“Mate, hey, wait up,” Luca called from the locker room as Carmy wandered out.

Carmy stopped for a moment, watching Luca zip up his backpack before they both started walking out together.

“What’s up?” He asked, rubbing at his eyes.

“Just wanted to ask well- are you- are you doing okay?”

His brow furrowed slightly, “I’ve been okay, yeah just uh why do you ask?”

“I just noticed the other day that you’ve… you look like you’ve been losing a bunch of weight. Don’t think I’ve seen you this skinny since we met.”

Luca was never one to wait a couple days to say something, but he’d been trying and failing to find some way to say it that wasn’t horribly blunt. Carmy sighed and tightened his jaw, trying to come up with something to say.

“Stress does that to me,” he landed on.

“The other day, I also think I was coming back in while you were headed outside. After that, I heard someone puking out there.”

His lips twitched before he murmured, “Does that too.”

“How often?”

“Um… every couple weeks maybe.? It uh it-it just depends though.”

Luca nodded slightly and followed Carmy’s gaze to the sidewalk in front of them.

“Is there a way to fix that?”

“Popping tums means it’s not every other day.”

“Tums?”

“They’re like uh antacids.”

“Oh like Rennies, yeah.”

“Why are they called Rennies?”

“Probably a Mr. Rennie.”

“Mr. Reynold?”

“Could be for all I know, but shit, are you even capable of just chilling out, just stopping stressing for a second? We were just talking about fuckin Rennies, and you were half-shaking the whole time.”

“Cold out here.”

“Mate, it’s barely chilly.”

“Aren’t the winters pretty bad in London?”

“Aren’t the winters pretty bad in Chicago?”

“Okay, yeah uh I-I couldn’t stop stressing out if my life depended on it.”

“I’m glad that worked. I blanked on whether Chicago winters were bad.”

Carmy elbowed his arm, and they laughed lightly as they elbowed back and forth.

“Alright truce, truce,” Luca called after a few seconds.

“Fine, but uh… I’m doing pretty okay. I guess Grace didn’t freak me out as bad, but I love it a lot at noma. I wouldn’t be near as good if I didn’t come here.”

“The whole vomiting thing isn’t great though.”

Carmy mumbled half-heartedly, “Sure.”

“Do you fucking disagree with me on that?” He asked incredulously.

“No, shit that came out wrong. Just-just yeah, it-it-it really isn’t great.”

“Sure,” he mimicked.

“Don’t make me elbow you again.”

-

Ebra’s been out a couple days, the flu or something. Carmy supposes that’s all he needs nowadays to fry his nerves to bits. He’s been monitoring everyone pretty closely, utterly terrified of being down another set of hands.

It’s put everyone else on edge too. Richie and Sydney have been at each other’s throats a little more often, and Tina’s been short and dismissive to say the least. Before this, things were halfway under control, and his micromanaging was needed less and less.

Now though, sparks set off his skin as Sydney tries to interrupt Richie’s fucking story time to do checks.

“Housekeeping, Chefs!” She calls.

“Sydney, you’re literally just talking to Tina. Is it really that hard to say, ‘Yo T, check your shit!’ Anyway-“

“Not anyway , we’re almost an hour behind schedule, and we have less than two hours to open, so to do the fucking math for you-“

“Hey, there’s no need to be all condescending. I’m raising morale over here. Talking while we work, or does the stick up your ass not allow for that?”

Tina takes her roasted bell peppers out of the oven and slams them on the counter.

“Ay, both of you, quiet!”

Syd’s jaw tightens and her voice hardens, “Did you hear me call housekeeping?”

“No because you were shouting for no reason,” Tina says and takes a cutting board still covered in scraps and dumps them.

“I was shouting because Richie would not stop fucking talking.”

“Again, I was telling a funny story to help everyone destress while we’re down Ebra.”

“It won’t kill you to stop for one fucking second.”

“I was in the middle of it! It’s rude to interrupt someone, y’know.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Carmy bursts from across the kitchen like just the sound was driving him up the wall, “Cousin, when Syd does checks, stop fucking talking. Syd, if Richie doesn’t shut the fuck up, don’t throw a shit fit. Now, we’re hours behind schedule, and we need to fucking move .”

-

Family’s up, but Carmy’s heart is pounding, and his stomach is twisting, and momentum has its claws in him. A chorus of ‘behind’ moves past him, too enthralled by the prospect of a break and some good food to consider his disinterest in it.

That’s until, “Jeff, you coming?”

He breathes a sigh through his nose, “I’ll be there in a second.”

She walks over to lean into the counter beside the station he’s working at, so she can study his face instead of his back.

“You’ve skipped the past three days. Why should I believe today’s gonna be any different?”

He shakes his head and turns to her, “I’m fine, T. You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh fuck off, of course I have to do that. Somebody has to wrangle los idiotas,” she gestures to Carmy and vaguely to Richie.

“Month or two ago, Richie said looking after me was half his job.”

“And half of your job is babysitting him. Seriously Jeff, are you coming to family or not?”

“I’m not,” he turns back to his station.

“Why’s that?”

“Not hungry.”

“Very creative.”

“I’m not lying, T.”

“Then give me enough to feel like I know what’s wrong with you.”

He breathes out another sigh, “I don’t know. I’m-I’m just stressed, and that can fuck with my appetite.”

“Stressed about what?”

“About picking up the extra work, everyone fuckin being at each other’s throats.”

“Is there not always tons of work and people yelling at each other?”

“More than usual.”

“So it’s that easy to lose your appetite?”

The corner of his mouth twitches before he admits, “Yeah.”

“And after however many years of working in a kitchen, you’ve never found a way around it?”

“This is the way around it.”

“You lost me.”

“Um…Skipping family is the way around feeling like I’m about to throw up for the rest of my shift.”

Now, she breathes a sigh through her nose and breaks eye contact, “It really is like herding cats.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I don’t want you to be sorry about saying this type of shit.”

He blinks and furrows his brow, “Go eat, Tina.”

“You can’t just drop that and then tell me to fuck off. So… that’s been going on for a little while, hasn’t it?”

He nods slowly, “A little while, yeah.”

“You ever tell any doctors about that?”

“No… probably just tell me to be less stressed.”

“And all those antacids don’t fix this?”

“They do,” he says uncertainly.

“But?”

“Only so much.”

“What if you just got a couple bites in? Something’s better than nothing.”

He blinks rapidly, “No.”

“Again, can’t just stop there.”

He breathes out a sigh and taps the toe of his shoe into the floor, “I don’t know.”

“So much more descriptive. Thanks for that, Jeffrey.”

“Fuck off.”

“No,” she says with no room for argument.

A stretch of silence washes over the kitchen while conversation from family drifts softly into its edges. Through the two or three concurrent conversations, he thinks he can hear Richie telling that same story to someone new. It’s a little easier to mind it when it’s someone who isn’t a master storyteller. His thoughts find their way back to the kitchen.

“I really don’t know what to tell you, Tina. I don’t know what it is, but I really don’t feel up to family today.”

“Or yesterday? Or the day before that?”

“Yeah,” he makes eye contact and hopes that if she understands just a little more, she’ll lay the fuck off him.

“That isn’t good, Jeffrey.”

He nods down at his hands.

“Nothing I can do to change your mind?”

“Nothing.”

She crosses her arms and leans back into the counter, “I’m gonna go get some, but we’re not done with this, okay?”

“Okay.”

-

Of course, it isn’t nearly as sharp and hazy, hollow and massive as it was, but it feels something like the hunger he used to carry with him through New York. It reminds him of the walks home. He would be exhausted and lightheaded, but that barely registered as the buzz of adrenaline still lingered on his skin, still numbed his fingertips. A delirious sort of joy held onto him, and he was able to set aside the aching in his feet, in his back, and the much sharper pain of his long-empty stomach.

By the time Tina’s station is clean and she’s fucking around with Richie, Carmy starts to believe that maybe he can slip past undetected. Maybe he can walk home like he used to (as if he didn’t used to stand on the brink of total collapse.)

And then, “Yo Jeff,” snaps the fucked up nostalgia in half. 

She presses a container of Tupperware against his chest with a look that ties him firmly to the present.

He considers fighting it, but after a few seconds, he just decides, “Thanks, T,” and goes to throw it in his backpack.

-

At night, the world goes slow and syrupy as the hours tick by. There comes a certain point in exhaustion (realizing at 2 AM that he thinks he’s barely tallied 15 hours of sleep in the past week), where everything seems to mean less. He’s exhausted, and he can’t sleep, but there’s a fleeting sense that he’s okay.

His stomach is all but settled, his heart rate feels almost normal. He can convince himself that stress was the only thing steadily carving strips of his fat off, that he never wanted that, that it never felt like proof of his dedication. With little apprehension or shame, he pulls the Tupperware out of his backpack and picks at it until it’s empty an hour later.

And then, he wakes the next morning. And God, was that sense fucking fleeting.

Chapter Text

Mikey picked Carmy up and put him in the car seat he’d started keeping in his pick-up truck. Carmy did his own seatbelt and kicked his legs while Mikey made his way to the front.

“Alright, how was school, kid? Any aliens land?”

“No,” Carmy smiles.

“Pirates attack?”

“No.”

“The Joker?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

“S-Spiderman!”

“Spiderman dropped in to pay you guys a visit?”

“Yeah, I got t-t-to dress up as-as him.”

“It’s not Halloween, is it?”

“No, he’s-he’s my hero. It’s hero day.”

“Oh got it, yeah. Well, today, I went to the library to pick something up for you.”

“I don’t-don’t wanna read.”

“I’m not gonna make you read a word of it. I just want to try to teach both of us what’s in it.”

“What-what is it?”

“It’s called sign language. You move your hand a certain way and that means a word, and I was thinking that might be faster for you.”

“I d-d-don’t want you to be my teach-teacher.”

“I won’t really be your teacher. I don’t know this stuff either, so we can figure it out together. That sound okay?”

He nodded but was still wary, “Okay.”

“And don’t tell Ma about this. I don’t know if she’ll like it, even if it’s good.”

“Okay.”

“You can tell Nattie about it when we pick her up though. I think I’m gonna get her to help us.”

“Okay.”

-

Mike sits in the middle of his bed with Carmy and Nat on either side. He starts flipping through the pages, quickly finding a fingerspelling diagram.

“Aren’t you gonna read the introduction? There could be stuff we should know in there.”

“We’re just getting some basics down first. We can learn about the effin grammar and all that when we can say each others’ names.”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Carm, you know how to spell your name?”

He nods slightly, feeling the heat of shame flush the back of his neck. Mr. Badhra said he keeps putting his letters backwards, but Carmy always loses track of which ones he says. Maybe he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t want Mikey to know that.

“Alright, c’mon we’ll all do it together.”

“C’s easy enough.”

The three of them form it together. They go through each letter of each of their names several times until it feels almost natural. Carmen gets shortened to Car, Michael gets shortened to Mik, and Natalie gets shortened to Nat.

They spend hours that night going through the book and finding more and more. By the time they get ready for bed, Carmy has his name, brother, sister, home, and especially I love you internalized (it reminds him of Spiderman). By the end of the month, Carmy can tell Mike or Sugar what he needs when he’s too scared to speak. 

-

Even after third and fourth grade, when speech therapy started to make some leeway, sign never really left him. Sometimes, it would still be easier to sign than to speak. He can’t think of the last time he told his family he loves them, but he signs it all the time.

Even after moving away from the only two people he knew he could sign to, he’d find reasons to. It was the first voice he ever had that felt like his, that he never felt afraid of. 

-

During his first couple months working at French Laundry, the saucier’s name was Taylor. She was particular and a little intense, but she also had the sense of humor to take out her hearing aids when someone was getting on her nerves.

After noticing them, he was strangely emboldened. That softer piece of home called to him until he couldn’t bear to let his withdrawn nature stop him.

So at the end of the day, she said, “Good work, chef. See you tomorrow.”

He signed, “Thank you, goodbye.”

It sparked a kinship between them, each brushing up their rusty ASL. That was how he learned that his grammar was severely fucked, bordering on incomprehensible signed English, but he isn’t quite sure what he should have expected from learning select sections of one book. 

After Chef Taylor quit and moved to a place he was proud to know someone from, he decided he was going to study up a little more. For a couple weeks, he spent his mornings looking up ASL conversations on YouTube to try to decipher the grammar system. 

The interest quickly fell to the wayside, and since then, he’s barely ever found an opportunity to use it. 

-

When he got up this morning, he didn’t know it was going to be like this. He and Syd have been sorting through paint colors, lighting fixtures, etc. for the last couple days, and it makes sense to him. Plating and presentation had always been one of his favorite parts of a recipe. A delicious meal is good enough, but the ones that are both delicious and strikingly beautiful are those that stick with him.

That’s what today looks like too. He compromises some things with Syd, but while they haven’t worked at a lot of the same places, those separate points of inspiration are still barely a gap to bridge. 

At maybe 10 that morning, Carmy wonders if there’s anything they could salvage from the basement. He’s not as scared of the steps as he used to be, but he’s gotten a lot heavier since then. Thankfully, the creaking only stops when his Adidas meet the concrete floor.

It's colder than upstairs, sending goosebumps across his skin, and much dustier too. The dim yellow light sputters to life and splashes across tables and cardboard boxes and old appliances. Even though he’s been down here recently, the smell still hits him like a wall of nostalgia. Before he even knows what he’s doing, urgency fizzles out in favor of quiet.

He drifts along the wall, fingers tracing the more recent boxes. In a sudden daze, his thumb lifts the top. A framed and signed photo of Bill Murray looks back at him. It was all garish and grimy and old, but it was Mikey’s. Heat flushes the back of his neck for a reason he can’t place.

His jaw tightens a little as his fingers gather the dust of another. Opening it reveals a napkin with a drawing on it. He recognizes it to be a bear, even if the ears are too big and the snout is too short. It’s done in crayon. The napkin sits on a stack of books, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Sign Language peeking out behind it.

The heat is spreading, pulsating across his skin with every exhale which are getting shorter by the second. Dust catches sharply in his throat, and he coughs with a hand still resting on the box. His fingertips leave tan streaks in the block of gray, and it’s in lungs, Mike’s in his head, and he can’t fucking breathe.

What does Mike want? He’s been making guesses, and he’s starting to set aside the option that The Beef was what he wanted. If he had loved The Beef as is, he would have stayed there, so where the hell does that leave him?

At guessing wrong. Is it too late to start over? Is it too late to try to change the paint colors and the lighting fixtures? Fucking god, he’s wrong. It’s all fucking wrong because Carmy’s the one staying home, and Michael’s the one never coming back to it.

He swallows down acid as his muscles go too taut, and his throat is welded shut. It’s wrong. He feels sick. It’s all fucking wrong. He can’t hear the clock ticking or the thudding of demolition. It’s all white noise, only punctuated by his thudding, frenzied heartbeat. Mike must be disappointed. Carmy feels lightheaded.

“Hey Carmy, you finding anything?”

The shaking in his hands, in his shoulders becomes more noticeable to him under her scrutiny. He doesn’t dare turn around. She reaches the end of the stairs.

“Umm…” he tries to wrestle his thoughts toward the present.

“Everything okay?”

He nods and almost holds his breath. Her footsteps toward him make him want to vomit right then and there. He turns and rests his fists on top of the cardboard box, leaning his head down as he gains some stability.

“Did something…” she tries to find, “bother you?”

He hesitantly nods and clears his throat.

“Oh wait, can you sign? I feel like Richie said something about that at some point.”

He signs, “Yes. You understand?”

“Yeah, my mom is mostly deaf, but uh… would talking or uh signing help you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, do you want to like get away from that super dusty box? I-I think I wouldn’t be able to breathe either if I was in your spot.”

She pulls out a chair at the big wooden table, and he walks slowly toward it as if his balance is toying with him. He hunches out over it, hands carding through his hair for a moment before he leans his head to watch her sit down.

“Did you… find something in one of the boxes?”

He signs, “Yes, drawing.”

“What about it?”

“Old, stupid…” he remembers more than he thought he would, but there are definitely still gaps, “but there still. I don’t know.”

She nods, and he hopes it got across right. It feels like a betrayal to not remember enough of what they learned together. That tie to him is steadily falling apart.

“Are we wrong?”

“Wrong?” She confirms.

“Yes, does he like it? I don’t know.”

“I’m probably not the right person to ask, but… I mean, you literally have all kinds of notes on this stuff, right? If you’re just like at least trying to keep him in mind, he’s sure to… to feel like he’s still a part of it, right?”

“I don’t know.”

His throat is so tight, and he can’t feel his fucking fingertips.

“Hey, dude, Carmy just like- it’s okay. We’ll figure this out together. We’ll be okay.”

He doesn’t answer, just shoves the heels of his palms into his eyes and slightly shakes his head. He forces air into his lungs, but it doesn’t want in, and it doesn’t want out. His chest is aching, and he’s never forgiving himself for letting Syd see him like this.

“What’s wrong?”

“I want to ask him. I want to talk…” his hands shake hard.

“I’m sorry.”

He nods and feels a little lightheaded.

“Breathe,” she reminds him.

He nods again.

“We’re good. We can change shit if you feel like we need to. We’ll figure this out.”

“Yes.”

-

And they do. After looking through Mikey’s eyes, he just wants to make it feel warmer. There really isn’t a lot to change. They go with a slightly different color for the booths and switch up the flooring, but they were already close before now. 

Carmy has never managed to successfully act like him, but he likes how well he knows Mike’s tastes. There’s familiarity in it all, like he can feel the softer pieces of his childhood home embedded here. 

Chapter Text

Some days were worse than others. Sometimes he’d manage to stay relatively alert from start to finish, but today, it was the last period before lunch, and any attempt at listening to his haphazard, confusing Algebra teacher had his mind diving down rabbit holes within seconds. His leg bounced heavily, and he shed his jacket in a desperate attempt to cool his feverish heartbeat.

With a quiet sigh, his gaze moved down to the sheet of graph paper in front of him and let the grid guide the proportions of a pair of shorts. He drew them again and again until the only thing that was able to reach him 20 minutes later was the sound of the bell ringing. 

He shoved the paper into his backpack and zipped it up like he had done a million times.

“Carmy?”

And never once had a voice other than Fak’s followed it.

“Uh y-yeah?”

His head lifted, feverish heartbeat returning with fervor. It was Claire Siegel, pulling her hair out from under her backpack and letting it fall in waves over her shoulders. 

“Oh, didn’t mean to like freak you out or something. I was just wondering if you were gonna be at The Beef tonight? My aunt Tiff and I are going to hang out there.”

“Oh, is-is your aunt Tiff Richie’s Tiff?” he nodded a little too quickly.

“Yeah, I know she goes there a lot.”

“Oh, uh yes-yeah I’m-I’m gonna be there. I’m pretty much always there.”

“Sweet. Mind saying hi so I don’t feel like a complete loser for hanging out with my aunt on a Friday night?”

He’d at least known of Claire since maybe kindergarten. She’d known him during the worst of his stutter, but he’d also been there when Katie broke her arm. Claire just stood next to her, watching her scream and cry while everyone else was scared off. A rumor started that she broke Katie’s arm, so she was called a freak for a couple months. People had changed their thoughts on her, but he often had a feeling that people still thought of him that way.

It had been long enough since he’d really talked to her that her image was still shaped by the forced community of elementary school. He remembers that you were expected to hold hands with any kid you dared to disagree with. He brushed away the thought that he should’ve tried disagreeing with her then as he focused more on how much easier words seemed to come to her.

“Uh sure yeah, but uh I wouldn’t hold it against you. She seems pretty cool.”

“She is pretty cool, but I don’t know. It’s not that I’m embarrassed to be hanging out with her. It’s just like I’d feel less like a dork if I was also choosing to hang out with someone my age.”

“I’m-I’m okay with saying hi if you want me to, but uh why don’t you invite any of your friends?”

“Oh, they would definitely think I was a dork. I haven’t even told them I skipped a grade.”

He hummed and nodded slightly, “I didn’t know you skipped a grade.”

“Yeah, never had a third grade, meaning I now feel like really tiny compared to everyone here. I swear some of the seniors have to be lying about their age.”

“Oh yeah, I guess a lot of the people who work at The Beef are tall, so I’m used to it, but I’m also not that tall, and I don’t even have an excuse, so…”

“Yeah, c’mon dude just like get taller already.”

“Uh I would say I’m-I’m trying if there was a way I could try to do that.”

“Milk. Not even trying to drink milk.”

“Shit, yeah uh yeah, I-I better get on that, huh.”

“Yeah, if you don’t grow an inch by tonight I’m gonna be so disappointed,” she grins. “Alright, see you Berzatto.”

“See you, Siegel,” he mimicked.

He rushed back to the classroom three doors down from Algebra, barely managing to find his seat before the bell rang.

-

He could not describe how close he was to backing out. If he went through with it, that meant talking to Tiff, who was nice enough but who he didn’t really know, and Claire, whose presence made him panic in and of itself. If he didn’t go through with it, that meant he would have to go into Algebra everyday, knowing that he had made someone else feel the way he does because he was too much of a fucking coward to just talk. 

Mikey always talked a lot about doing it scared, so when he told Richie he was going to play on the BallBreaker and in the process, waltzed through her field of view, he was fucking terrified.

She called, “Carmy hey!” 

And when she said, “C’mon, sit down with us,” he didn’t keep walking.

They were out the door about half an hour later, and Carmy managed not to puke from the nerves. It was all he could have hoped for until the dreaded walk of shame to the back of house.

Richie patted him on the back, “Look at you, finally fuckin growing some. Go tell Mike about your little crush. He’ll get a kick out of it.”

Carmy shrugged his hand off his back, “Fuck off, that-that’s not-“

“Bad date?”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“Y’know, that’s the worst kind.”

“Again, fuck off.”

“Again, tell Mike.”

“Fuck no.”

“Ditto, Cuz.”

-

“So I heard something from Cousin,” Mikey beamed as they started the drive home at the end of the night.

“Yeah?”

“Claire? Tiff’s little niece? The half-pint?”

“Christ, she’s not that short.”

“Well, I mean, to you, she must look normal.”

“Fuck off,” he grinned.

“Alright alright, I’m just fucking with you. But are you two-?”

“No, no I’ve barely talked to her. It’s not-“

“But she’s calling you over and shit?”

“He saw that?”

“Hey, you’ll learn how to be discreet about that shit with practice.”

“It wasn’t ‘that shit.’ It was just like-“

“What was it, Carm? Give me the whole run down.”

“You’re not going to fuck with me?”

“No, I’m asking for real. I want to know.”

“Okay uh… I guess she said she wanted someone else there because she-she felt like a dork just hanging out with her aunt when her friends were-were like doing shit, so she um she asked me to come over and-and talk to them.”

“And you fucking did it! You, Carmy Berzatto, fuckin went over and talked to a girl! God, pigs must be fuckin flying or someshit.”

“You said you weren’t gonna fuck with me.”

“I’m just saying it’s fuckin crazy for you. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Fuck off.”

“What? Oh, so you were pulling all these chicks I didn’t know about because to my fuckin knowledge, you’re not the most outgoing kid! It’s surprising, but it’s good!”

“What? It’s-it’s-it’s fucking surprising for me to talk to someone?”

“You know what, yeah! Yeah, it’s fucking surprising because you don’t talk to anyone besides Neil. You don’t even talk back to those little shits who step on the backs of your shoes, give you fuckin flat tires when you walk out because you just keep your head down-“

“Shut the fuck up! You don’t fucking go to my school. You don’t fucking see me there!”

“Oh, so you’re talking to people? You go out of your way to talk to fucking anyone outside of Neil?”

He pauses for a second before deciding, “Yeah.”

“Sure, kid.”

“Just fuck off.”

Mike breathed out a long, quiet sigh through his nose. It drained most of what remained of the tightness in his shoulders.

“Fine.”

He couldn’t describe how badly he wanted to punch Mike in the nose. No matter how many times he managed to embarrass himself in front of Mike, say something stupid, never be as charismatic as he was, none of it would stack up to Mike embarrassing him himself.

-

Green eyes. She has green eyes and pale, lightly freckled skin that’s touching his. 

It’s warm, and he feels like he should have taken his necklace off, but it would be weird to do it now. She’s glanced a couple times from the cross up to his eyes. Now that he thinks about it, she might just be looking at his chest, but he isn’t sure.

It’s all a whirlwind of soft skin, his lips on her, her lips on him, and he feels present. He didn’t think he would be. Going in, he was sure he’d suddenly find his thoughts somewhere else, The Bear, Roosevelt High School, the shore of Lake Michigan, and of course, he’s faltered (he doesn’t remember a time when his mind wasn’t racing), but it seems like all roads lead back to her.

There are hands in his hair, on his back, and his hands are meeting skin that he can feel fat and muscle and bone underneath. She’s living and breathing, and she’s seeing him so closely, like gunk under a microscope, but it seems like she likes what she sees. There's a shiver down his back, and her grin goes wider. She probably knows all the physiological processes that caused that, and he could barely add the restaurant’s costs together. How the hell is he doing this right?

Before he can dive deeper, he lets her roll him over, her knees against his hips and her arms pulling his wrists above his head. If he wanted to, he could resist her hands, easily pushing back against any pressure she tries to place on him, but he doesn’t want to. There’s a strange flow to this, an unsaid choreography, and he wants to see where it leads him.

-

Even in his own bed, when he hasn’t just had sex with Claire fucking Siegel, he can never sleep. For about an hour, until he was completely sure she was out, he was spooned against her. It was nice for a while, more of her keeping him tied to the present, but soon enough, being unable to move for fear of waking her had him wired and feeling like his skin was too tight.

Eventually though, he slowly, carefully rolled onto his back, allowing him to bounce his far leg against the floor. That was a couple hours ago, and since then, he’s been agonizing over needing to purge this energy somehow but feeling preemptive guilt over her waking up to an empty bed.

He’s so clearly not built to handle something so gentle and languid. Every day of his life rests on loud, explosive speed. It’s silence, softness that kills him.

What the hell is he supposed to do with a hand on his cheek that doesn’t leave a mark? For how long can he keep pretending he’s someone who can handle mundanity? 

The worst part is that he loves her. It’s only for that reason that he’s followed her to parties, followed her into bed. She’s taken his hands and guided him to places he can’t find his footing in, and he thinks he’d let her do it again. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t fucking get it, but he’s mainly just worried that the moment it’s too far for him, he’ll cuss her out instead of asking to go home.

She rolls over and whispers into his jaw, “You awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you sleep okay?”

He turns his a little to look at her, “Yeah.”

“Everything okay? You sound off.”

“I’m good, yeah. Just got thinking about shit.”

“What kinda shit?” She asks, still sounding half-asleep.

“Restaurant shit,” he decides on.

“There’s always restaurant shit.”

“Always get thinking about it.”

“Sucks.”

“I guess.”

“What time is it?”

“Uh…” he flips his phone up on the nightstand, “4:17.”

“So you’re running late then.”

“Yeah, I’m like half an hour behind schedule right now.”

“So your max is like 4 hours of sleep a night?”

“Right, yeah.”

“You must terrify your doctor.”

“I would if I saw her as much as I probably should.”

“Yeah, that helps your case a lot.”

“Does my health terrify you?”

“I mean, if I were to tell my coworkers I’m dating a smoker, I’d definitely get some questions.”

“Helps with anxiety.”

“Well, there’s this little thing called anxiety meds. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them.”

“I would need fuckin halfway meds. I still need to feel the flow of the kitchen. That and a fuck ton of nicotine patches.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged.”

“Do you know how long Sugar has been trying to pull this shit?”

“As long as you’ve needed anxiety meds?”

“I have breathing techniques and shit.”

“Baby steps,” she worms her fingers to interlock with his. “So how did you really sleep?”

“Not a second, full all-nighter.”

“I had a feeling. You want to take a melatonin and be 2 hours behind schedule instead?”

“Are you allowed to prescribe me that?”

“It’s like sharing ibuprofen. I’m pretty sure it won’t kill you.”

He shakes his head, “…I don’t do melatonin.”

“Gonna say any more or was that just it?”

“Sorry, uh… I was trying to remember the dream I had because I know I at least told it to someone, but um I tried it maybe 5, 10 years ago, and I had fuckin gnarly vivid nightmares the whole night.”

“Oh yeah, it does that sometimes.”

“Do you take meds?”

“I’m pretty much just on melatonin now. Oh, and adderall, but I’m on a super low dose. I do get it about the ‘feeling the flow’ thing.”

“Sugar also thinks I have ADHD.”

“I can see it. We’d be very different ADHDers, but I think I’ve kinda started to figure out how your brain works, and it seems a little like mine.”

“How my brain works?”

“I don’t know. Just like how you operate or whatever. I really, really like mind-reading people.”

He hums. 

“Well uh… I should probably head out. I’ll see you soon though, right?”

“Uh yeah, sure. Did I say something?”

“No, no we’re good. I promise, just see you soon.”

-

The worst part about seeing someone is that they see you. It’s fucking creepy to be known like that. Again, he can’t help but clarify that she is good, they love each other, she’s so fucking good , but he’s so fucking not . Why the hell does she want to be that close to him? Why would anyone?

He knows what her sleeping breath sounds like. She has to be smart enough to know that he shouldn’t be let in like that. He’ll be weird or awkward or he’ll use it to hurt her without realizing it. It’s not a fear but an inevitability. He’s not built for this, and that’s too fundamental to be changed.

Chapter Text

Saturday nights were like this most weeks. His mom was barking orders, and Mikey, Tina, and Ebra listened but didn't seem to take her as seriously as she took herself. Richie was bullshitting with customers up front, thus creating a line almost out the door, and Carmy was sitting in the office with his feet up, exactly how Mikey always did.

By then, he hadn’t really seen all that as much as heard it. The walls were paper-thin, and the cyclical nature of the kitchen was comfortingly reliable. He really should have been working on the massive packet he got assigned for math, but Ma wouldn’t check on him until after her smoke break about half an hour from now. Instead, he drew the lamp overlooking the desk, scribbling in its deep black. It absorbed him so effectively that he didn’t even notice when it started getting louder outside the door.

“Carmen, I have to ask you to do something.” His Ma explained, a little breathless, “I know you’re not gonna like it, but we need you.”

-

And that’s how he ended up standing beside Richie, notepad in hand and throat frozen shut.

“Alright kid, you’re gonna watch me for three customers, and then, you’re gonna step right there and start taking ‘em. Okay, number one, how’s it rolling Tommy Boy?”

Carmy’s eyes glanced between Richie and Mr. Thompson. He watched them talk, narrowed in when Richie got his order and shouted it to the back. He almost considered running outside just so he could breathe a little better, but he could only imagine how his mom would scream at him later. Fear planted his feet, and he watched mutely, too overwhelmed to pick up much from Richie.

“And you’re up, kid… Alright, public service announcement:” Richie addressed the antsy crowd, “We will now have two lines. Carmy here will be our express lane, so if you don’t have time to shoot the shit with me, just stop a little early and pay this kid a visit. Just go easy on him because he had no plans of getting work experience at the ripe old age of 12. Alright, ready, break .”

Carmy, who was barely tall enough to comfortably rest his elbows on the counter, watched three people form a line in front of him.

“Hi, Carmen, was it?” The nice woman asked.

He nodded and looked up at her with wide, frantic eyes.

“Hi Carmen, can I get two mortadella, please?”

“Y-y-yeah,” he starts writing.

“And two cups of water.”

He hums.

“Alright, good luck, kid.”

“Th-th-th…” he trailed off, choosing to nod instead.

Heat prickled up the back of his neck, and he prayed that his mom wouldn’t hear him talking like that. Whenever his stutter would strike him again, a sort of dread did too. His mother always seemed to talk about it like some ugly thing that was best left in the past. God, he would fucking love for it to have always stayed in the past.

“3 prosciut, only giardiniera on 2, and 3 fries.”

Carmy nods and writes it down.

“You got all that?”

“Y-yeah.”

Richie chimed in, “Repeat it to him, let him check,” with a pat on the back.

“Uh th-th uh…” he tried to breathe and loosen the knot in his throat.

“What kinda express lane is this, Rich?”

Carmy almost flinched away from him.

“Hey, you rejected the tried and true. Just let him work through it,” Richie circled a finger, indicating for Carmy to get fucking moving.

“Pros-prosciutto,” he held up the sign for ‘3,’ then ‘2,’ “with g-giard-giard…”

“3 fries, close enough. If this is the plan, kid needs to find a plan B,” he grumbled as he slipped through Richie’s line.

Carmy stumbled his way through about 4 more orders before Richie was caught up enough to let him off the hook. With his heartbeat thudding in his ears, he slipped back into the office, finding it much more comfortable beneath the desk now.

-

“Yo, Bear,” Mikey called, “You in here?”

He knocked on the underside of the desk.

“What’s up? Something happen?”

He signed to Mikey, but he quickly noted, “Woah woah woah, get out from under there first. I can’t see shit.”

Mikey sat in the office chair while Carmy scooted to lean back against a filing cabinet.

“I’m stuttering a lot. Richie hears it,” he signed.

“Was he a dick about it?”

“No, customer.”

“No shit, I thought Ma was just saying that.”

“No.”

“I mean, you made it. Didn’t kill you.”

“I failed.”

“No, you let it rip. You did it scared, I’m proud of you, Bear.”

“I don’t want mom to hear me.”

Mikey sighed before deciding, “We gotta get home somehow, and no matter what she says about the stutter, you still did it. Got it, buddy?”

“Heard,” he whispered.

-

The second the three of them piled into Ma’s car, she asked, “How’d the taking orders go? We didn’t hear anything, so I figured it went fine.”

“Y-yeah.”

“You’re stuttering.”

He breathed out, “Sorry.”

“That was a little better, but oh, don’t tell me you were stuttering in front of the customers, would sound like an idiot.”

“N-no.”

“Alright, Ma lay off him. Seems like he’s had a fuckin night.”

“We’ve all had a fuckin night! Tonight was just a fuckin night , but Christ Carmen, didn’t they teach you anything in all that speech therapy?”

“It-it-it works mos-most of the time.”

“Most of the time,” she groaned.

“That’s good, right?” Mikey argued, “Most of the time is a hell of a lot better than none of the time, yeah?”

“I’m pretty sure we didn’t ask for most of the time.”

Carm would have injected, ‘I didn’t either,’ if he could speak comfortably. 

“That’s just how it is, Ma. He’s just like that.”

“I worry. That’s all I think. I think I’m worried.”

-

Josephine Mikayla Berzatto AKA Joey AKA JB is born on August 17, 2023, at about 7 that evening. It’s almost 9 now, and they all talk softly around her.

Sugar’s so exhausted she thinks she might be slurring her words, Pete has cried himself out, and Josie is breathing softly. Pete’s dad is holding her with a smile that never falters. He, Richie, and Pete’s aunt take up the plastic chairs while Carmy taps a foot against the linoleum, unable to sit down if he tried.

Everyone talks and jokes, and everything is fine. Naturally, that scares the shit out of him, but he’s trying to swallow that dread the best he can.

“Isn’t she the coolest?” Sugar whispers and leans her head on Carmy’s waist beside her.

“She’s the fuckin coolest,” he murmurs back.

“We’re all gonna have to learn not to say ‘fuck’ all the fuckin time.”

“Shit, yeah.”

“‘Shit’ too,” she smiles.

“I meant… shoot.”

“Bingo.”

“Yeah, that’s gonna be- that’s gonna be effin hard.”

“Wasn’t ’fuck’ mom’s first word?”

Her smile gets him too, “Yeah, yeah I feel like I remember Nonna telling us that.”

“Okay, so that’s like step 1 of breaking the cycle. Not having Josie’s first word be a swear.”

“Why does having the ‘ine’ on the end suddenly add an ‘s?’”

“What?”

“Joseph to Joey and Josephine to Josie makes no f- effing sense.”

“Josie just sounds prettier, and when she gets older, people will still call her that. A 40 year old Joey sounds like some Italian mobster.”

“You mean Jimmy?”

“In not so many words, yeah.”

“I think a 40 year old woman could still be a Joey, especially to her family. I mean, I never started going by Carmen.”

“I still think Josie’s prettier, and I’m actually her mom, instead of her weird uncle, so…”

“Christ, am I gonna be a weird uncle? I’d do effing anything to not be a weird uncle.”

“I think holding her might be a start. Build up some rapport early.”

He shakes his head and purses his lips, “You know that freaks me out.”

“With those arms, I’m pretty sure you’re not gonna drop her.”

“What if I hurt her?”

“You won’t, I promise.”

“I’ve-I’ve never… no, I-I have, but I held Bella.”

“When did you hold Bella? I never held Bella.”

“Last time we saw Viv and Sammy probably? That Christmas, so that’s-that’s 10,15 years?”

“It’s literally just left arm holding her body and her head in the crook of your elbow. It’s easy.”

“You want a turn?” Pete’s dad asks, tuning into their conversation. “I’m hearing some whispers over there.”

“I- uh I-“

“It’ll go fine, I promise,” she says and reaches up to squeeze his shoulder.

“Uh okay, okay yeah.”

“You sure about this, Cuz? You need someone ready to take her off your hands?”

“Uh not sure at all, but uh,” his throat went a little dry as Pete’s dad placed Joey in his arms. “Oh.”

And God, she’s fucking tiny, but what little weight she has is heavy and solid in his arms. That’s a person right there. She’s going to grow up and be a person. Some of the shit that plagues their family is genetic, and he’s so sorry to her for that, but he hopes as little as possible is in her nature so that she can still be nurtured away from all of it.

He hates that she’ll never know her uncle Mikey. He hopes that she’ll never know what it feels like to stand in his mother’s kitchen on Christmas Day. Instead, he hopes that she grows up and likes being a Berzatto enough to look forward to coming home. He hopes she never feels like himself or Sugar or Richie do. He hopes she never feels like Mikey did.

His eyes whip up, suddenly aware that he’d heard his name, “What?”

A chorus of quieted laughter follows. Only now does he take notice of his eyes going glassy.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt your whole spiritual experience over there,” Richie says.

“No uh sorry. She really is the coolest, Sug.”

“You sure? You want someone else to take her?” She teases.

“No…” he breathes a laugh through his nose, “No, I don’t.”

-

Sugar closes the door to their office and leans against the desk.

“I’m letting mom see her,” Sug says quietly.

Carmy crosses his arms and tries to find anything at all to say.

He looks up at her when he can manage to answer, “Why? I thought you were… not going to do that.”

“She has genuinely been doing better the past couple months, and I’m definitely not having Christmas at hers or anything, but… she just wants to meet her I think.”

“What do you mean ‘she’s been doing better?’ What’s- what does that mean?”

He has to force himself to breathe a little.

“She’s been seeing a therapist. Been steadily becoming less of an alcoholic.”

“And you’re not fucking terrified?”

The ‘because I am’ goes unsaid.

“Only a little, but uh… I just wanted to ask if you would come too… just like as backup if things go south.”

“Pete won’t work for that?”

“I just… I don’t think he’s even capable of putting Mom in her place, even if it’s for Josie.”

“You think she’d still listen to me?”

“She’s missed you like crazy.”

He breathes out a sigh. That kid is fucking phenomenal, doesn’t deserve all this shit.

“I don’t know if… if I remember how to deal with her anymore. I might end up cussing her out if things do go south.”

“I mean, if you cuss her out the right way, it might be some kind of reality check. Just keep all of this shit away from Josie.”

“Cousin busy?”

“Cousin has Eva.”

“Okay,” he breathes.

“You’ll do it?”

“Yeah.”

“God, thanks Bear. I’m sorry I’m making you do this.”

“You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t really need it.”

“Yeah, I am definitely a little bit terrified, but… I think I’d feel worse if Josie could have had a good relationship with her Nonna, but I just never let her.”

He quirks his jaw but doesn’t say anything.

She elaborates, “Some people are bound to be better grandparents than they were parents.”

He shakes his head and noncommittally offers, “Maybe.”

-

In the four days since Sugar asked him to do this, Carmy has had nightmares so fucking violent and gut-churning that he’s thrown up two days and barely slipped by on tums the other two. 

Part of his trying to be a quarterway healthy person is trying to tell someone when something is wrong. It briefly crossed his mind, but Sugar already feels guilty about the whole thing, and Donna always had a soft spot for Richie, never picking him apart like she did her own children. No one else would understand what it means for him to talk to her. 

When he thinks about the last time he saw her, the scene unfolds itself in lurid clarity. There’s shattered glass from the dining table to the massive fucking hole in the wall, fallen wine glasses intermingling with the smashed window. His ears are still ringing from the massive crash, and there’s a brief moment where the car is stopped in the entryway, and everyone gapes at it, breathing and watching.

Mike’s voice rings too, yelling and begging, and Donna is hysterical with black mascara smeared across her cheeks. His shoes crunch in the glass, and he breathes in dusty drywall. He doesn’t even mind the waste when the cannolis eventually get thrown out. Even a couple hours later, no one can stomach them. After the police take Donna to check her into a psych ward, Carmy holds Sugar’s hair back as she vomits on the front lawn.

He doesn’t think he can do this.

-

He only tries to turn around once on his way to Sugar’s house. It’s a Monday afternoon, and the roads are halfway quiet. Keeping the radio blasting is the only thing stopping him from going completely off the rails. He stands on the front step for a second and, once again, considers turning back. Even though his hand shakes a little as he knocks, he refuses to let Sugar down for the millionth time.

“Hey… I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I didn’t think I would either.”

“Sprite?” 

He can only imagine how sickly he must look.

“Please.”

He’s there before Donna, so there’s about 15 minutes of calm. While Sugar tidies up what she hasn’t had time to, Carmy curls up on Sugar’s couch and holds Joey. 

“Yo,” he murmurs to her. 

She presses her hand to her mouth, watching him with massive brown eyes.

“I hope your Nonna is good for you,” he whispers. “She wasn’t good for me or your Ma or-or your-“

“Are you talking to her?” Sugar asks from the other end of the room.

It pricks some color back into his cheeks to admit, “Yeah?”

“I’m her mom, not her ma ,” the word goes sort of nasal, bringing out that stereotypically strong Chicago accent that Mikey was always particularly adept at channeling.

“Heard,” he smiles softly.

“Keep going, it’s good for her to hear real words. Pete’s family keeps trying to baby-talk to her, and I’m really trying not to say anything, but it’s driving me up the fudging wall.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I could baby talk if I tried.”

“Yeah, don’t. You’re actually my family, so I’m allowed to kick your butt.”

“Heard.”

“And if I hear you call her Joey one more time…”

“I’ll make sure you don’t hear it.”

“Christ, give her back. You lost your baby privileges.”

“No, eff off.”

“I was literally the one to name her. You weren’t a part of that at all .”

“Should’ve given her a name with a better nickname.”

“What the eff do you think Josie is short for?”

“Jozzephine.”

“Effing Christ, can’t you just call her Jellybean? We knew she had to be JB ‘cause that’s just fudging adorable.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty effin good…” he breathes unsteadily, “she’s off to a really good start, Sug.”

She pauses for a moment before nodding, “Thanks.”

“Well,” he murmurs, “I hope you let me get to know you. I’m not the coolest uncle you um you could’ve had, but I’m trying… a lot. Right now, you’re really, really good. You’ve never done anything wrong, but later, you’re gonna mess up a lot because that just happens, and um… I hope I don’t mess up. I hope your Nonna-“

And the doorbell.

Carmy watches silently as Sugar opens the door and lets her in. Donna closes the door behind her, and Carmen’s presence seems to freeze her up. Sugar takes Josie while Donna keeps a hand on the doorframe.

“Hi Carmen,” she breathes like if she speaks too loudly, she’ll scare him off.

He gets to his feet and feels a tightness in his throat that he had almost forgotten about. Her hair is perfectly blond and perfectly swooped away from her face, and her eyes and eyebrows are pinched together.

“Uh h-hi Ma.”

She places her hands on his shoulders and rubs her thumbs across the seam of his t-shirt, “You look fuller, healthier. It looks good on you.”

She doesn’t smell like wine, not even listerine. All he gets is sickly sweet perfume and cigarette smoke. 

“Thank you,” he says, jaw tight and tongue heavy.

She turns his hands over, gliding fingers over his tattoos, “Are those new or did you have these ones before?” 

“I don’t- I don’t… uh remember which-which ones I had before,” he clears his throat and looks anywhere but her eyes.

She was never meant to see the branzino tattoo. He thinks she knows what memories it’s attached to but doesn’t comment on it.

“How have you been?” She asks despite seeing the unfamiliar scars on his hands and the deeper bags on his eyes.

“Okay. You?”

“It’s been a long couple years, but I’ve been feeling okay,” she branches off to look at Sugar and Josie behind him, “You both look worried sick, but I wouldn’t have asked for this if I thought I would be bad for her.”

Donna sits beside Sugar and looks down at Josie.

“Oh Natalie,” she breathes and places a hand on her arm. “She’s perfect.”

“I thought so too,” she smiles.

Carmy hesitantly sits on her other side and glances between Donna and Joey. 

“How much did she weigh? She seems little.”

“5 pounds 4 ounces,” Sugar responds like she’ll never forget it.

“Oh yeah, she takes after her younger uncle then. Carmen, you were just the tiniest little thing.”

When she presses her fingertips to her eyes, Carmen chokes on air. The only things missing are long red talons and a halo of Christmas decorations behind her. Maybe Joey can sense the tension in the room, her grandmother near tears and her uncle uneasy and fidgeting, because she starts to whine.

Donna asks, trying to steady her voice, “Does she need changed?”

“Uh smells fine, and I like just fed her… I don’t think she’d be cold. She gets cold easily,” Sugar goes through her mental checklist.

She stands up and holds Josie close to her body, her cries bellowing into Sugar’s neck. 

“Do you want to play her music? All three of you loved music. Would calm you right down.”

“Doesn’t seem to do anything for her, but uh… how do you guys feel about going on a drive?”

-

Carmy sits in the middle, keeping a hand on Joey’s carrier like doing so will protect her from all harm. Barely a minute into the drive, she had calmed down and has now returned to squirming carelessly.

“She really doesn’t like music?” Donna asks quietly from the passenger seat.

“Yeah, I don’t know if she just hates lullabies or what, but it makes it even worse somehow. We’ve started doing whale sounds to put her to sleep.”

“Maybe-maybe she just likes quiet,” Carmy murmurs.

Donna comments, “She’d have a rough time at our parties.”

“She never would have hung out with you guys at The Beef,” Sugar agrees.

“That’s-that’s probably good.”

“Carmen, take a breath. You sound nervous.”

She tactfully leaves out ‘You’re stuttering,’ but he feels the sentiment dig into him anyway. He hums and tightens his jaw, gaze held sharply out Joey’s window. 

She shakes her head and murmurs, “I didn’t mean that. You sound fine.”

“Getting a business, especially a restaurant off the ground can be kind of stressful,” Sugar tries to bail him out.

“You don’t need to do that, Natalie. I get it. It’s been a long, exhausting 5 years, before that too when I was a lot worse than I am right now…” She whispers like she’s scared to say it out loud, “Worse to you.”

While his jaw is still tight, old instinct bleeds into the mix. Some old structure in him begs for him to disagree with her, to say that she doesn’t hurt him, never has. He just breathes.

Sugar shakes her head, “We’re okay, mom.”

“I’ll be better.”

“You are doing better.”

“For less than a month. You know how much I don’t want to, but it’s very, very easy to find myself back there again.”

“Then please get back out. I want to be able to…”

“Able to what, Natalie?”

Her hands grip the steering wheel just a little tighter, “I don’t know.”

“Able to know that I won’t do to her what I did to you?”

“ No , no, mom…”

“Then what? Spit it out.”

“Just… able to trust you. I’m-I’m sorry I don’t have a nicer way to say that.”

Donna breathes slowly in and slowly out, “Don’t be sorry.”

“Mom, I-“

“ No , Natalie… She’s your daughter. Of course , I want to be a part of her life. I’d never leave if it were up to me, but it isn’t. She isn’t mine.”

Carmy pinches the bridge of his nose, wiping at the tears that prick at his eyes. When the hell did she start acting like an adult?

She’s decades too late. 

Donna Berzatto could have been reasonable and understanding, maybe even kind this whole fucking time, but she just wasn’t. She wasn’t to him or Sugar or Mikey for all of these years, and he hates her for it. 

The worst thing about the people who hurt him most is that sometimes, they chose not to. When he was little, he’d sleepwalk out to the living room and curl up in her lap, and he’d wake up to her hand on his hair. 

That’s not the act of someone who hates him. Was it just bullshit Berzatto genetics that doomed their household from the start? Or was he not worth trying for? 

“Carmen, what’s wrong?”

He’s not crying yet, but his throat is tight.

“S-sometimes I’d-I’d sleepwalk out to the living room…”

Chapter Text

It’s one of his first memories. Considering both that his dad had already left and that he was still refusing to speak, he was somewhere around 4.

He remembers looking out the window and seeing rain spatter sharply against it. It was never the rain itself that bothered him, more what it warned of, and he knew that not too long from now, massive, angry thunder would be booming in his ears. He ran upstairs as fast as he could, tripping on the last step, but he kept running to Mikey’s room anyway.

He covered his ears as he curled up next to the tub of disorganized trading cards beneath Mikey’s bed. Just as the rain had promised, thunder crashed through him. It was awful and cacophonous, like broken plates, and he let out a whine that was broken by sobs.

When Mikey’s feet padded through his bedroom though, Carmy felt that maybe the world wasn’t ending.

He crouched down and looked at Carmy with brows knitted up in worry, “Buddy, hey what’s wrong?”

Carmy shook his head, wholly unable to convey that.

“Are you okay?”

He shook his head again, remembering the pain in his knee. When the thunder struck again, he let out a wail he couldn’t hold back if he tried.

“Hey hey hey, you’re okay. It’s just the thunder. It can’t hurt you, Bear,” he explained to Carmy who struggled under the pain of the sound.

Mikey laid down, blinking at him for a moment, and tried to piece together a solution.

“Y’know what, I’m gonna be right back. Just give me like 15 seconds. You can time me, I swear. Start counting, okay?”

Carmy didn’t know how long a second was and couldn’t quite figure out how to count past 10, but Mikey was back by the time he had made it to 8 in his head.

“Alright, here’s Teddy, so he’s gonna protect you while I get some other stuff, alright kid?”

Carmy nodded and struggled to breathe between sobs, but at least his best friend (and favorite stuffed bear), Teddy, was there now. While Carmy waited, the rain drowned out an argument between Mikey and their Ma about babying vs. being completely apathetic toward him. It got cut short when Mikey headed back upstairs.

“Alright, here’s some earplugs. Can you come out just a little, so I can make sure you put them in right?”

Carmy hesitantly took Teddy and wormed his way out from beneath the bed. Mikey showed him how to squish them, so Carmy could fit them in his ears. When thunder hit again, his hands moved to cover them, but it didn’t seem to hurt.

“Better?”

Carmy nodded, face still blotched red with tears. 

“Can you come with me? I want to show you something.”

Carmy shook his head, blond curls that he refused to get cut waving back and forth.

“You can have another minute, Bear,” Mikey said and sat next to him.

Mikey felt massive and steady and safe. Carmy burrowed into his side with his arms wrapped tightly around Teddy. If he could count a minute, he would drag out every second.

Soon enough though, Mikey stood up and said, “Alright, c’mon. I don’t want you to miss it.”

Carmy wiped his nose on his sleeve, and Mikey leaned down to take his hand. It took some coaxing to get him out there, but Mikey helped Carmy put on his winter coat, and Carmy put on his velcro shoes. Mikey had set up one of the lawn chairs on the back porch. With the sound of the thunder dulled, Carmy watched mesmerizingly beautiful lightning cut through the deep, dark sky. 

“Woah,” Carmy whispered as the rain that snuck past the awning dotted his pants.

He never saw how deeply Mikey beamed in that moment. Carmy just felt the warmth of safety bloom in his chest.

-

His hands shake as he scrubs a rag firmly against the floor. It’s going to be ripped up soon, so there’s really no reason to, but he can still see traces of red-orange tomato sauce peeking out between the tiles. The place is closed, and when discussing renovating it, they barely even go into the kitchen, but the couple of times he has, it’s made his breath catch like the awful creak of the basement stairs.

All of him is shaking with barely-contained hysterical energy, but scrubbing the floors late into the night is better than desperately scraping his apartment for something, anything to do. For at least a couple minutes now, he’s been rubbing at this one spot because he feels like if he can just fit the rag into the crevices of the tiny crack, then maybe the room wouldn’t feel so hot and he wouldn’t be able to hear his heart pounding.

He knows his temper has been getting worse. Honestly, he’s just been trying to keep his distance from everyone, but after a couple minutes of ripping up his rag against it, he sits back on his heels and forcefully throws it into the little red bucket of soapy water, splashing some over the edge.

Carmy sits back against one of the ovens. He presses the top of his head into it, fingers tightening and unfurling and teeth ripping ruthlessly at the back of his bottom lip. He’s felt like this for a couple weeks, starting somewhere a couple days after the tomato cans. 

It feels like he swallowed a human-sized fish hook, and knowing himself, he panicked and struggled against it, making it all so much worse. He remembers the one year his ma got a whole branzino because she knew he would be there to help her with it. Mostly, he just remembers the lifelessness of the eyes. They saw once. They moved once. And then he sliced it open.

He leans forward to press his palms into his eye sockets because behind them, his mind supplies an image with that kind of violence. It makes Carmy dizzy to think of him that way, red-orange and glistening against the ceiling lights in the Coroners.

The world closes in on him as he gets up and stumbles to the bathroom. Carmy steadies himself against the sink, head spinning and knees wanting to buckle, and he lets frigid water meet his fingertips. He brings it to his eyes, pressing the chill into their red-rimmed irritation. 

It’s normally his cure-all, but it doesn’t do nearly enough, and the ticking of the clock overlooking the kitchen fills his ears. Temptation pulls at him. He’s still dizzy. He’s still nauseous. He’s still frustrated and overheated and shaking hard, and his nerves are so hopelessly fucking fried, and there’s something writhing in him, deeper than his stomach, deeper than what’s behind his eyes, and he knows it’s going to be so much fucking worse, but the inevitability has him ensnared.

Wednesday, February 22

12:02

And the bang sounds in his head. He tries to shove his phone back in his pocket, but the urgency has him dropping it in favor of whipping around and collapsing into the closest stall. It watches him from behind as his stomach lurches and the walls shake and loom over him.

As he endlessly gags and heaves and coughs, the world ends and collapses onto his shoulders because he starts to forget how he ever lived in a world that Mike no longer does. Carmy doesn’t remember how he used to breathe, used to work, used to stand against the pressure of needing him there. The feeling consumes him completely, feeling sick and wrong and lost so hard that he doesn’t know what to do with it.

-

His stomach purges itself until he’s crumpled and melted against the stall wall. The worst parts of the panic have drained out of him, leaving him lightheaded and exhausted, like one wrong move will have him passing out on the tile. 

After such exertion, his heart presses harshly on his sternum and continues to flutter against it. The ache is enough to convince him to lift his arm and knead a palm into it. 

He stays there a while, waiting for the room to stop spinning, but it never does. Eventually, he lifts himself from the tile and drifts to the locker room. With inept, trembling hands he discards his apron and puts on his sneakers.

Streetlights cut through the abyssal darkness, and he watches the slow switch from light to dark to light between them as he walks past bars and restaurants and other buildings that he’s seen a million times. He at least knows them all by name, has probably been to half of them with Mike.

The fish hook shifts, and even past the dulling effect of exhaustion, he feels it fully. He’s incapable of suffocating it anymore. In late February, early March of last year, he would feel in bursts. 

When he was alone in the long, restless hours of the night, he’d start crying without any provocation. He guesses it was sort of perpetual though, that in his subconscious, Mike was always sitting and waiting with his feet propped up on the desk in his office. By morning though, the lack of sleep would hollow him out, and he’d go to work just as he had before he knew.

He wipes the budding tears from his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and breathes through the catch in his throat. In every building, in the cracks in the road, in the flickering street lights, Mike follows him.

“Buddy, hey what’s wrong?” Slithers out from the back of his mind.

He clears his throat. He keeps trudging his way home.

-

That night is endless and cold and unforgiving. He chainsmokes, he denies three calls from Sugar, and the fish hook guts him entirely.

By the time warm light spills across the walls of his apartment, his eyes sting so hard he can barely keep them open. He rubs at them and flips through his drawings on the coffee table.

He doesn’t remember making all of them. Neither the several shaky-lined, haphazard sketches of Mike nor the tattooed hand flaying a branzino take him by surprise. The red-snouted bear lifting its head up from a human carcass does.

Its tired eyes look back at him.

He quickly gathers up the papers and reaches up to slip them into the half-full box on the top shelf of his closet. With static filtering through his hearing and vision, he picks up the colored pencils and ball-point pens and slots them back into their boxes which always sit on the other end of the coffee table.

Then, he looks down at his hands. He’s itching for something else to do and think about and also wholly unwilling to be in anyone else’s presence. 

-

The next thing to break him from his stupor is a knock on the door. It jolts him up, heart thrumming and reaggravating the ache in his chest. His eyes flick to the door as he silently begs for there not to be another. The person knocks again, harder and more frantic this time.

A muffled, “Carmy, just open the damn door!” Follows.

He lets out a sigh and scrubs his hands up and down his face. Despite how lightheaded and exhausted he is, he gets up to open it. Sugar has red-rimmed eyes and her hair drawn into a bun. He watches her study him in return.

“Sugar, please…” he pleads and shakes his head, barely managing to get the words out. “I don’t want to-“

She cuts him off by pressing open the door further and wrapping her arms tightly around him. Carmy feels her shake against him and hears her sob into the side of his neck. His arms hover anxiously at his sides for a moment before hugging her back.

She speaks frantically, “I know, I know you never answer your fucking phone, but Pete told me to at least wait until the morning to check on you because we both knew you would never do anything, but it just got to me that today, you weren’t answering me.”

Before he completely loses it, he closes the door.

He breathes in, “Sorry.”

Tears spill down his cheeks, but he tempers his breathing, strangling down sobs. 

“Are you okay?”

The muscles in his neck tense further.

He gasps, “Fine.”

“Breathe, Bear,” she reminds herself almost as much as him.

He’s shaking hard, hands turning to fists against her back, but he shakes his head and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Bear, Bear hey,” she breaks the hug but keeps her hands on his shoulders.

Sobs start to chip through while he lifts his hands and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Listen to me, you’re okay. You can cry. Nothing will happen if you cry. Like, I’m a fucking mess right now, but that’s literally fine.”

And like the flip of a switch, he’s completely lost in it. He pulls her back in to at least keep the dignity of her not watching him while he bawls his fucking eyes out. Soon enough though, his arms tighten around her until his fingers tighten onto the tops of her shoulders.

-

At some point, it drains out of him, and he’s left melting into Sugar’s arms. It gets quiet for a while as both of their breathing evens out.

“Do you want to sit down?” She murmurs.

“Sure, fuck,” he mutters and rubs roughly at his face.

They sit on Carmy’s couch, and he takes the side with his pillow on it.

“Your bed creak too much?”

“Uh… Oh no uh,” he tries to jumpstart his brain, but the words still come out awkward and disjointed, “watch TV out here sometimes uh b-before I fall asleep.”

She blinks at him for a second before taking a breath in and out.

“You used to cry over anything when you were little which, despite what mom thought, wasn’t the end of the world, but… I don’t think I’ve seen you cry since sometime before Michael. I don’t know how you just shut it up like that.”

“Um…” he shakes his head, “I don’t really know either, I think… it was just kinda I got the call, and I still didn’t know if I fuckin believed you, but that night, I got home, and it just- it completely fucking wrecked me.”

“And after that night?”

“I don’t know… I uh I-I coasted kind of, but it’s- sometimes, I’d have to step out. Like-like it would just hit me sometimes, but uh… I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Thanks for saying that. Just please like at least text me back.”

“Okay… what about you? What was your first night?”

“Well, I found out what happened at like 2 in the morning, so I was running on fumes, but I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs.

“Was last night also like that for you?”

“ Yes , yeah.”

She half-smiles, half purses her lips in pity.

“Well uh at like midnight or something, Pete drove me to that diner we used to go to on the way to Lake Michigan, and my stomach was too messed up for me to really eat anything, but I stole a couple of his fries and dipped it in my milkshake.”

“Yeah… you finally get over that?”

Her smile turns more genuine if still a little watery, “No, it was fucking disgusting. I’ll never understand why you two think it’s good, but it made me feel… connected to him. So yeah, a good bit of that night was spent crying in a stupid, kitschy 24/7 diner. But, the waitress felt bad for me, so she got me a free milkshake. I’m not really one for signs, but I don’t know. Just got to me I guess.”

He hums. He feels the urge to go back and be there. He wants to have been there long before this time last year. His throat tightens as his thoughts churn.

“What’s wrong?” 

He clears his throat before deciding on, “I wish I knew more.”

It seems like her throat tightens too.

“I should have told you more.”

“I didn’t check my texts a lot.”

“I’m so sorry I didn’t do something to make sure you knew everything that was going on. You deserved some kind of warning before…”

He stares doe-eyed at her for a moment before he turns his gaze back to her hands fidgeting in her lap. With his brows furrowed, his lips part for a second before he shakes his head and closes his mouth.

“Talk to me, Bear.”

His breath hitches for a second until he breathes out, “I uh… I didn’t know what to do with myself. Still don’t think I do.”

“Sometimes… sometimes I think it’s worse to have pretty much years of trying to check up on him and hold him together just for everything to completely blow up in my face, but… I was literally the one calling you, and I still can’t imagine what it was like for you when you found out.”

He shakes his head again and crosses his arms tightly around himself. 

“I stayed there the rest of the day.”

“God, any time you talk about working in New York, it worries me a little more.”

“It uh… it wasn’t great, but I-I stayed, but I could barely get myself to talk which was really fuckin not good. I still don’t know how I made it to the end of that shift.”

“That’s really not good, yeah. It’s crazy that they didn’t let you leave.”

“No, I-I didn’t tell them anything. Called off sick when it was really the day of the funeral.”

“I mean, I’m sure you weren’t exactly feeling great.”

“No, I uh… I spent most of the morning dry heaving, but yeah, even if it was just that that was wrong with me.”

He watches her hands tense up and her lips purse, so he has time to brace for impact before the words reach him.

“What stopped you from coming?”

It doesn’t make a difference as her question wraps around his ribs. He forces himself to breathe against the constraint.

“At the time, I really didn’t think he’d want me there. I uh… for years, I thought he hated me.”

Her breath hitches, “He loved you so much.”

“Uh… I know. I know now. Even when I was pissed as hell, I loved him a lot, and after… fucking everything , I know that he did even when he wouldn’t talk to me.”

Sugar nods, seeming satisfied with this, “Exactly.”

“You take off work?”

“Couple days, yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“Spent a lot of time at Mom’s. On the first day, Pete came with me, but after that, it was just me, her, and Richie.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, I spent most of the time just sitting alone in his room, playing with his shit.”

“You solve any of his Rubik’s cubes?”

“Yeah uh one day, I spent almost the whole day trying to do one, and I did figure it out, even if it was after like 6 hours or something.”

“Congrats,” he murmurs.

Carmy hasn’t really done anything to feel ‘connected’ to Mike and feels like maybe he should. He doesn’t think he could handle crying in the middle of a diner though.

“Thanks, I only almost gave up like 5 times, but… we barely packed any of his stuff up,” she says like an offer.

“Mom want it there?”

“I think.”

He blinks at her hands for a second, “You’re not gonna convince me to pay Ma a visit.”

“Hey, I was not -“

“Sounded like you were.”

“Maybe you’re just letting your hatred of Mom get in the way of something that would probably be really good for you.”

“No, you’re just gonna use this as another reason I should talk to Mom.”

“Oh yeah, I’m using it against you . That’s clearly what’s happening here.”

His lips part for a second before his teeth start ripping at tissue again, and he shakes his head. It’s infuriating sometimes how the people around him can so easily make him seem like the crazy one. He tries not to think too often about how he’s the common factor.

The fight drains out of them, both eager to find something to look at other than each other.

“Sal’s closed at some point, right?” He asks.

“Yeah, probably 2017, 2018 maybe. Why?”

“And he never opened anything else?”

“Right?” She explains expectantly.

“Fuckin hate Sal.”

“Is there like more to that or?”

“Well, was my first real job… Started with Mike’s fuckin enemy and somehow got even farther from him after.”

She breathes out and nods, “I stand corrected.”

“I don’t know how I ever handled being that far from him.”

“You never could be. Sending you to kindergarten without Mike was like the worst injustice Mom ever dealt you.”

“Remember it feeling pretty high up there, yeah.”

“I mean, I get it. Especially when we were all that young, he was probably the coolest big brother anyone could ask for, but… I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone love someone as hard as you loved him.”

Sometimes he’ll hear a string of words that strikes just the right meaning, takes the amorphous, spasming feeling and uncoils it into something understandable. It never ceases to knock the breath out of him.

“Um…” he nods,  “yeah. That’s- yeah. I fuckin… loved him a lot.”

“It was mutual.”

He nods again, feeling fresh tears prick at his eyes, “Christ, don’t fuckin get me going again.”

“It wouldn’t kill you.”

“Oh fuck off, Sug. That was more emotional than I’ve been in front of someone in the past fuckin’ decade or something. Was more than enough.”

“I think your emotion metric is just super fucked.”

“Probably, but uh at least some of it is by choice.”

“Then stop that,” she teases.

“Fuck no,” he shares her tone. 

They go quiet for a while as the brief levity settles. Carmy glances behind her, to the denim stacked in his oven. When Carmy moved out, he and Mike had to split the collection, and the latent hostility between them suddenly became so overwhelming that Sugar had to stand as a mediator for the entire process. The collection was reunited when Carmy came home to Chicago, but in those weeks, he had never felt so split from Mike.

“I never saw him when he was like that. I’m uh… sorry you had to,” he murmurs, daring to make eye contact.

She crosses her arms, shrugs her shoulders tensely, and whispers, “It was rough… really rough.”

He nods and watches her thumb brush up and down against her arm, seeing if she’ll manage to say more.

“We should check on Richie too.”

“Yeah?”

“I only saw Michael during Sunday dinners and whenever I could handle seeing him, but Richie did it all the time. To me, Mike would go MIA for weeks toward the end, but Richie probably stayed with him through everything.”

Carmy nods and both wants to hear it all and wants to go on with his life, never knowing.

“I think all that shit rotted his brain a little. Of course, he was always forgetful, but um…” she let tears spill down her cheeks again, “it got worse. He could barely keep stories straight sometimes, but we all listened anyway because that was when Mike felt most like Mike, even if he never really felt right.”

He feels himself go pale, bile burning in the back of his throat. For just a moment, he doesn’t regret leaving them. He wouldn’t have been able to handle it. There’s no fucking way.

“Are you okay?” She asks.

“Uh yeah, are you?”

She wipes her tears and nods, “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“You’re stronger than me,” he breathes, trying to breathe through the knots in his chest.

“You’re stronger than you think you are.”

“I don’t know.”

“You could go into The Beef every day surrounded by constant reminders of him.”

“I don’t-I don’t really remember a lot past moving away from here. So… of course, it fuckin hurts to think about him, but I want to. It’s only really bad when I get reminded that he wasn’t always like how I remember him.”

“You got most of the good parts.”

“And the telling me to man up and cussing Mom out in front of us and shit, but no one’s fuckin perfect.”

“Remember him throwing forks at Lee?”

“How could I not?”

“God, he could be such a dick.”

“Lee could too. I don’t really blame him for that one.”

“Well…” she hums, “No, I’m not gonna argue with you on that.”

“Remember when he threw his Blackhawks jersey in my laundry, and it turned all my shit pink?”

“Oh shit, I forgot about that! You were so pissed,” she remarks.

“I swear he did it on purpose.”

“Or was just really, really not thinking.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t that past him either.”

“Do you ever just want him to come back, so you can punch him in the fucking nose for how much he hurt everyone?” Sugar asks, still grinning softly but more tense and uncomfortable.

“A lot, yeah. I’ve been pissed all the time the past couple weeks, but uh…” his eyes trace the outline of his coffee table, eventually rustling up the courage to say, “I think I just want him to come back.”

-

“Cousin, uh hey, you’re on speaker with Sugar and me,” he mumbles.

“Yo, uh do you have Ebra’s number?”

“Uh… sure, why?”

“Just wanted to ask him something.”

“What’s up?”

“It’s-it’s nothing,” Richie rushes, a frantic energy starting to bleed into his voice. “But you got it?”

“Richie, what’s going on?” Sugar asks authoritatively.

“Jesus Christ, you don’t need to bust out the mom voice. Everything’s fucking fine. I’m chill.”

“Why do you need Ebra?” Carmy asks sharply.

“It’s not a fuckin-“

“Cousin, why do you need Ebra?”

“Cousin, it’s not-“

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“Woah, it’s not like that! It’s not fuckin-“

“So you’re hurt.”

“It’s fucking nothing!”

 “But you need Ebra?” His voice stays fairly flat.

“I can probably get his number from Tina, y’know.”

“And you think she won’t figure you out either?” Sugar asks.

“Just let us help,” Carmy breathes.

“You can fucking help by giving me Ebra’s number.”

“I can drive you,” Sugar offers.

There’s a short sigh where Carmy can almost feel Richie pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Cousin?” He asks when the pause goes on a little too long.

“I think I broke a finger.”

“That sounds like an urgent care problem, not an Ebra problem,” Carmy explains.

“Oh fuck off.”

“You think he has splints and shit lying around?”

“As long as you’re paying.”

“I will,” Sugar chimes in.

“Woah wait, you sure, Sug?”

“Yeah, I’m sure, Rich.”

Carmy wonders, “How’d you break a finger?” 

“Sugar, mind kicking him to the curb for me?”

“I can kick him to the backseat,” she offers.

“Deal.”

-

So Sugar has her hands tightly around the wheel, and Carmy watches Richie carefully from the backseat. He cradles his hand, keeping his blotchy red knuckles steady.

Even though none of them say a word throughout the several-minute drive, each one of them is fully aware that the others’ thoughts are racing, that they’re all thinking about Michael but can’t find the will to let him out.

It’s cloudy outside. People go to work. They talk, they laugh, they may have lived lives where they never even passed Michael in the street. They don’t know. They shouldn’t, really, there’s no reason for them to. It’s a normal day outside.

They sit down side by side in the waiting room, Sugar holding off tears again, Carmy in the middle with a vice grip around his chest, and Richie slumped into the chair, defeated and drained.

“Punched a wall,” he whispers.

“We know,” she whispers back.

“Sorry for all this, making today worse.”

“I would say nothing could if I wanted to jinx the shit out of us.”

“True that, Cousin.”

A young nurse calls, “Richard Jerimovich?” 

Sugar leans her head on Carmy’s shoulder, and he presses his cheek into the top of her hair.

“You two are kinda getting along,” he comments.

“He’s not in a fighting mood.”

“You aren’t either.”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder if he’s calling us mopey fucks wherever he is.”

“Probably…” She looks down at her shoes. “Do you think he got into heaven?”

“Maybe. He didn’t have to take care of us like he did. Spent his whole fuckin life trying to make everyone have a good time.”

“You think?”

“That might even things out. Hope it does, anyway.”

“I want to talk to him. Just say something and have him answer back.”

“Yeah, I never know what he would want. That’s part of what I’ve been pissed about. If I could just pull that fucker down here to ask him about the design shit I can’t find plans for.”

“He’d probably make fun of me for taking that long to do his Rubik’s cube.”

“I think he’d be proud that you did it.”

“And we can’t even fucking ask him about that.”

“Do you have voicemails?”

“Yeah,” she says, pulling out her phone.

“Not-not right now. I don’t want to cry in front of anyone.”

She holds her phone flat against her thigh, “Do you?”

“Yeah… that’s what I did during the funeral. Just went through everything I had on him.”

“I did that at some point,” she nods.

“Was he also yelling in most of yours?”

She breathes out a soft laugh, “Yeah, was always loud as shit.”

“Yeah, when he talked like a normal fucking person, it didn’t feel like him.”

-

They get out of Sugar’s car and walk into The Bear. No place makes more sense to spend today. Carmy goes to unlock the door, but it already is, and there are lights on inside.

He mumbles, “Shit, did they know we weren’t meeting today?”

“Yeah, you texted the group chat,” Richie explains, already fiddling with the brace for his broken pinky.

“When?”

“Like 3 in the morning last night.”

“We’re closed,” Tina says from the back.

“It’s us, T,” Richie calls back.

Within seconds, she’s looking teary-eyed out of the doorway, and within another couple, her arms are wrapped around Richie.

“Oh baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry to you too,” he whispers, leaning his chin down to rest in her curls.

Ebra and Marcus follow quickly behind.

“We were working on something back there if you want something to do,” Marcus offers.

Naturally, Carmy responds, “Please, yeah.”

-

It’s like Michael’s spaghetti. They follow the recipe down to the letter, but of course, they can’t truly replicate it. Carmy couldn’t either.

Halfway through, though, Ebra mentions, “Was that thunder?”

And suddenly Carmy’s not stirring sauce anymore. 

“Uh could you?” He asks as he sets the wooden spoon down.

Feeling like he’ll miss it if he doesn’t move quickly enough, he rushes toward the front. Rain pounds hard against the windows.

“How are you holding up, Bear?” Sugar asks.

Carmy only gets to “Um…” and a nod before turning back to snatch his coat from the locker room.

Tina, Sugar, and Richie all argue, but before they can stop him, he’s out the door.

He looks out beyond skyscrapers, finding deep, dark clouds spanning the sky and rain on his face. It feels like coming home. 

There’s a chill in his skin, and his hair is already sopping wet. It makes him cry, but he doesn’t mind that. 

Lightning illuminates the sky in a rapturous spectacle that Carmy wants to live in. The boom of thunder feels like Mikey’s voice. 

The connection is intoxicating. It loosens the vice grip on his ribs, carefully removes the fishhook, and he can breathe. Goddamnit, he can breathe.