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He doesn’t know how to explain the feeling of nausea, the type that stretches for hours. Not pulsing, but delicately swirling and raising under his skin. It makes him so much more anxious, just waiting for it to happen, which makes the nausea worse and then when he might not have thrown up he's definitely going to hurl but Carmy doesn’t have time for that so the real solution is to just not fucking eat.
Easier said than done when you’re a chef.
Carmy loves food. He loves to eat, he loves to cook, hell, he even loves the science behind it. Maybe a little less than the eating and cooking parts, but it makes it on the Reasons He Likes Being A Chef list nonetheless.
A good meal is so much more than sustenance to him. It’s expression and control all at once. There’s a certain safety in it that he can’t really explain and has never tried to before. People joke about how he must not like to eat when he sits out at meal times and they laugh and laugh but they’re so, so dead wrong.
To cook is to look at ingredients and say I love you , fuck this, and to give them more. To create not out of necessity, but love. You don’t have to cook to eat. No one has to cook, really, especially not more than the bare minimum of heating something up to be edible. But to do it anyways? To Carmy, that’s love. It’s an act of creation, one that’s both completely unnecessary and screams devotion and care in the same breath.
It genuinely does hurt to not eat the food that one of them has cooked for Friends and Family. He always tries to take a couple of bites, just to try it. And when he can’t even do that, it comes home with him in restaurant takeout packaging.
He eats when he can. He beats the nausea back with a baseball bat because he hates it, hates it so much. To reject food is to not only reject the care and joy in it, but to dismiss the creator.
To Carmy, it’s always felt a bit like an argument. Not a long and drawn out one, where both people get words in and it’s fair. It’s an offered olive branch, or comments or even complaints from one side, and cold, stone dismissal from the other. It feels too much like home.
When he does take it home and he manages to stomach some of it, he always lets them know how it was the next day. Or even better, Carmy texts them right then and there when he has the energy. Real, pointed comments so they know he actually had some and isn’t just saying shit.
He smiles a bit around his bite of food. He’ll have to tell Syd that it’s fucking fantastic tomorrow.
Carmy swallows and right now, at 3:00 AM, he can convince himself that it’s not so bad. He’s being dramatic about the whole food thing. It’s not nearly as deep as he says it is when he waxes poetic about it, truly, his words just get away from him sometimes. There’s got to be irony in there somewhere, he thinks with a snort.
Besides, the nausea isn’t as bad as it comes off.
He’s eating right now, isn’t he? There. That’s proof. It’s nothing like it was in New York. And it’s only going to get better here. He just needs his feet under him a little. And maybe some extra hours of sleep here and there. And maybe another bottle of tums, just for grins.
Carmy’s also aware that more likely than not, he’ll wake up with a pit in his stomach tomorrow. Breakfast will be a couple sips of an already open protein drink and a thermos of tumeric and ginger tea goes with him to work.
It’s better now. He swore it would never be like that again. He swore it. He swore it. He’s better now. Carmy doesn’t eat regularly but he does eat goddamnit, because he doesn’t need to be a genius to understand that he fucking has to.
His hands get too shakey when he’s hungry, he thinks. Too slow.
Faster. Yes, Chef. Better. Yes, Chef. Yes, Chef.
The cigarettes help, of course. He brought his pack over with him for when he’s done eating. At this point, he’s more nicotine and tums than man. Carmy thinks he’s okay with that.
He sleeps with his windows cracked, most of the time. Not really the smartest thing to do in the middle of winter in Chicago, but he figures he’s high up enough that break-ins aren’t much of a risk. The cold air smooths something out inside of him. It calms the Bear. Signals for it to hibernate for just a little bit. It also makes it that much easier to not stink up his apartment with smoke. He still smokes on the couch all the time, of course, and he can practically fucking hear Sugar say that he’s going to burn his apartment down, but he doesn’t care.
Carmy’s fine. It’s all fucking fine.
He checks his phone for the time, and suddenly it’s 5:00 AM and it takes everything in him to bite back a groan. He still needed to shower.
It’s a slow shuffle over to his bathroom once he finishes his cigarette. He brushes his teeth now, just so he doesn’t forget, and goes through the whole brush-floss-mouthwash shebang. He really tries, now. It’s mostly because it’s more than likely that his teeth are fucked from the vomiting. The dentist is time, and money of course, and just a generally uncomfortable experience, so he does what he can to keep his teeth in decent shape.
The morning marches on.
His shower is hot. 15 minutes in. 15 minutes to get ready. 20 minutes in the kitchen after, doing everything he can to make sure he makes it through the day. The thought of tea brings revulsion bursting through him so he doesn’t bother to get out his stock of it. He’s not hungry. He grabs a handful of ginger chews for his pocket and doesn’t bother with a water bottle. He’ll drink out of whatever container he can find when he gets to the restaurant.
The morning goes quickly, and soon he’s on his way to work. The train is entirely too quiet this morning, and his thoughts buzz like wasps beneath his skin.
See, Carmy has had the same inescapable buzz under his skin for as far back as he can remember.
It waxes and wanes in severity, of course, but it has plagued him relentlessly. It’s the feeling of wasps prickling all over him, the threat of stings imminent. It’s a pack of dogs at his heels, and it’s like he can hear them but he can’t turn around no matter how badly he wants to. It’s all-consuming.
Everything in his life orbits around this fact about him. He cooks to control, and to drown out the thoughts for once in his fucking lifetime. The cigarettes he smokes give the same effect of woodsmoke on bees; it soothes the itch just a little. It helps with the nausea too, although it’s not as bad as it used to be. Still- he can’t eat a third of the time, a fact so maddening it almost kills him.
All of it is killing him, he thinks, and nothing follows it. It’s just a fact passing in and out of his brain.
There’s no desire to climb out of hell. He’s okay to spiral down into nothingness just like Mi-
Carmy cuts those thoughts off at the knees. There is no other option for him. Something will give. It has too.
Carmy just has to outlast it.
That’s what his whole life has been a game of.
His first experience in this was his stutter. He would loop his speech therapy lessons over and over again in his head, stare at himself in the mirror until he was crying, because why the hell couldn’t he just speak? He was the only one like this. His mom always told him that. He was the only one who couldn’t just talk.
Carmen Berzatto’s childhood stutter was a lesson in learning when to shut the fuck up and when to just keep going. It’s obvious which one won out.
Even when Carmy first began to worm his way into the culinary world, it was an exercise in persistence. It was 30% him annoying people into taking his calls, and 70% cooking food that blew people's minds. He never went to college. He didn’t go to culinary school until much later. But whatever cruel God existed saw fit to bless him with the knack of knowing how to make some damn good food, and being stubborn as a mule.
It’s the reason he makes it in all the hotshot restaurants he works in. It’s the reason he takes the abuse at Eleven Madison Park and emerges from it a fucking master under pressure. It might have nearly killed him, but he didn’t fucking crack. Life is now phrased into three sections: before, during, and after EMP. It helps remind him of what he’s done.
Even today, he’s the first to get to The Bear. His knives are the sharpest, he cuts the fastest, and it keeps the dogs off his heels. It smokes the wasps under his skin.
The Bear drowns it out. Because the Bear is very different from the the other manifestations of his issues that Carmy has given image to. The Bear is what kills him in his dreams but what kills the rest of it in real life. If there’s anything that can overcome the gut-wrenching, bone cracking anxiety of his, it’s the Bear: every feeling strong enough to drown it out. He can’t even lie- most of it’s anger.
He stares at the soft boil he has going for part of his prep and can’t help but think that that's him. Never as hot as it could be. Too hot to touch. Not overflowing. Too slow to cook most things.
There’s a distinct silence that isn’t really silence.
Carmy has to pause for a second. The early morning light filters into the kitchen space and he’s acutely aware how exhausted he is.
He leans on the countertop next to the stove and just loses it laughing, laughing so damn hard. He’s so happy he’s still alone yet, because his ribs ache from the heaving laughter that erupts out of him because Carmy just compared himself to a pot of water. A pot of water.
Oh God, he really has lost it.
As if on cue, Carmy hears the front door open and is quick to settle his hysterical giggles.
He glances over his shoulder just briefly enough to see thats it’s Marcus.
Marcus gives him a grin upon seeing him, and greets, “Morning, Chef!”
“Morning, Marcus.” And then, because he needs fucking something to focus on and prep isn’t enough, be asks, “How are those donuts coming?”
“Pretty good, pretty good, Chef. I’m trying to make these crème brûlée orange zest ones but can’t crack how I should fit the orange in.”
Carmy hums in thought. “Where do you want the orange? Like in the dough, the filling, the glaze, the presentation?”
And so they go back and forth, workshopping Marcus’s donuts. They drift into speaking about Copenhagen, eventually, and Carmy asks how Luca is in his fumbling, fool way.
Marcus doesn’t rush him. He waits for the words to drop from Carmy’s mouth, sickeningly patient, before he says with a smile, “He’s good, Chef. He talked about you a lot, actually- he asked if you were good too.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That you were crazy, obviously,” he responds with a laugh and it draws one out of Carmy, too.
“Fuck yeah I am.” And when he says it, it’s not so much a curse. It is a statement of honor, one that screams, so what ? He’s everything he needs to be.
Silence reigns in the kitchen, for just a few, rare moments.
It’s part of what makes Marcus’s next question take him so off guard.
“So, which of your tattoos did you get with him?”
Carmy chokes a little. Maybe a lot if the other’s reaction is anything to go by, because then Marcus is laughing his ass off at him and Carmy is choking on air.
“Shit, man, now I want to know! Luca wouldn’t tell me which one.” Marcus paused in remembrance. “Actually, he reacted a little like you did.”
And Carmy immediately knows why.
In his time spent in Copenhagen with Luca, he got two tattoos. Luca was with him for both.
The first, was his ‘live fast’ snail tattoo. A good choice, he thinks. It still makes him smile when he sees it.
He remembers when Luca came in with a fresh piece of ink. They were in their nice phase, at that point. Still egregiously competitive, but they shared cigarettes on occasion. And a bed, on more pleasant nights.
Carmy has asked Luca where he got it done, and Luca has said he’d take him, and they had gone and he had got it and they watched the shittiest cooking show they could find when they got back to his little boat. They had shared beers and spouted insults at the TV.
The second tattoo- well, that was when he got his angel and devil with the bottle one done.
They had still been together. But it had been a far shittier day. Luca had made the right call taking him to the shop again after finding Carmy spitting bile into the back alley after a phone call with his mom. It had grounded him into reality, and given him a reminder. It counterbalanced his 773, in a way. He could decide which parts of his childhood would stick with him, and he alone.
And the third time they went together, it was for Luca to get something done. That time, they had gone back to Luca’s place and Carmy gave him a blow job so damn good that Luca pulled something in his leg when he came. True story.
He has no doubts that his friend was remembering that visit to the tattoo shop.
Carmy pulls himself out of the past to answer Marcus’s question: “We went a couple of different times, but he was with me for my snail and the, uh, angel-devil-bottle thing I’ve got going on.”
“Ah, got it, Chef,” he responded, his tone sly.
Carmy raised an eyebrow. “If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it, man.”
“Were you and Luca…”
He didn’t pause his chopping. “Were we together?” Carmy finishes. He doesn’t look up at Marcus either, even though he can tell that the other paused his work from the lack of sounds alone. “No, we weren’t together together.”
“You should call him, Carm. He misses you.”
Carmy thinks of the time he spent there. It was a good experience, overall. More net positive than negative.
But something inside him prevents him from saying anything. Could he really just start talking to him? Was that how this worked? Would Luca even want to listen to him if all Carmy could talk about was normal stuff?
He didn’t know how to do that. He didn’t get how people just started conversations without a topic or a goal in mind.
He supposes he had done it once upon a time with Mikey, but. That hadn’t happened in years. At some point those skills had gotten lost in the airwaves.
Whatever. He gets out of his head as soon as more people get to The Bear. Richie comes in yelling about something, and then there’s Tina with a wave and Sydney and Ebraheim and everyone else.
Carmy leaves it all behind as the churning of his stomach replaces every thought between his ears.