Chapter Text
Alchemy
a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.
In an co-owned restaurant, a new one down the block of Chicago carved and sowed by hand, Carmy tells Sydney, "I wouldn't even wanna do it without you." underneath an uneven table, holding up the base of it. She’s supine, re-screwing with dizzy fingers, blurry brain, and something like desire masses in her chest.
The swarm starts before this.
Chicago.
2018.
Sydney's the biggest idiot on the planet, at least in CIA she was (Not the agency but that private, non-profit school known as Culinary Institute of America — the school that's been kicking and screaming at her ever since the semester started and subsequently ended. It’s there where she's been nipping the knife at her skin and making crepes out of her guts).
Months after culinary school, she’s still broke and the worst part of being broke is not knowing what to do about it, not knowing whether to use the next cord of money to live or survive that next day, which seems to be the same thing but it's not.
It isn't like she doesn't have anything to support her. Actually, contrary to it all, she's been saving some money and the resturant job she has (Or, had, formally knew, etc.) is zesty. It’s the only thing she's allowed to do — zest and nothing else.
Really. They give her a lemon and they bring dishes at her. She files a bit of the flaxen skin annnd, 'Thank you, Chef'.
She doesn't feel like a chef. That would've been fine if she wasn't broke. She might've even come to like it, having the tips of her fingers stained and tainted in succulent lemon juice, hands aching for the sheer reason of having done nothing with it but balling them up. Though the reality of her bank account comes crashing down her spine one night, laying lopsided in a 'too small' by 'for a human' squared apartment shared by a roommate, someone much more organized and resilient than her, flailing placidly around in sleep like they knew it too.
It tears her inside out. She flops back and forth in that flat cot they called a bed, reiterating this conversation she had with her dad months before, somewhere in their Chicago grown home, feeling and sounding very far away.
"I love you, Syd," He held his eyebrows up like he was trying to make peace with her, but the expression closes. He pruned his mouth. "But, remember that you don't got to be embarrassed or sad if it don't work out. I got jobs for you. The world got places for you."
She keeps thinking about this wagging, whittling hole inside of her that gapes at that world where she doesn't make food, the other places it has ringed up for her. The feeling oscillates, and she's thinking of all the shit she did wrong. If she was faster or committed or creative enough — more than enough, then her father wouldn't say those type of things, offer this tenuous embrace, this world where it has other places for her. Places she does not belong to.
She tried to imagine it. For her dad, she tried to.
In this world, she was something big and smart like an engineer ('food engineering is kind of sick, like, that's not so bad. That's isn't so far. I'll write that in my journal.') Or, maybe she'd still be artsy, a writer of some sort ('culinary critics are assholes.') She'd be a doctor in some universe, using her hands ('Butcher job? Is that crazy?').
Her chest compresses and jams up because these worlds don't exist and if she can't cook in the world she's in now, it must not exist either. She'd foreclosure herself if it had.
Sydney sleeps a sort of soundless type of sleep that night; not well, not completely.
She jerks out of her half-sleep haze, her forehead burning, limps crinkled up into this ball of nothing. Most achingly is how the quiet burns her ears. Her roommate is gone for the night, clothes disheveled and array, and there's these stacks of cook books jagging out in the shadows, lit by a slither of pointed light.
The clock beeps terribly — the same tempo as a heart beat and it swells up until Sydney wrenches herself out of bed like a mad man. She lacerates the apartment, slathering her shit together and making this fucked up sandwiched suitcase. On her phone, a one way ticket is loading payment over a crumbling bank account.
The payment goes through.
New York.
She eats it all, and her mouth doesn't know when to stop — New York Styled Pizza, Jamaican Beef Patties, Skewers cooked over charcoal, Falafels, Chorizo Tortas, Cannolis. That's only the start of her hunt.
She goes to the best restaurants. Any one she can find under the pinch of her finger, tabs on her phone cumulating and lurching at each other, swiveling into the unknown with every new tab she pulls up. She goes from Lemon Chicken Piccata to Bucatini Carbonara to Focaccia within a short, shy two day period and it's the one time she can breathe and the idea of this world with places is distended, quelled down to a quiet feat where she wins, where she's a chef.
All that food smothers her back to why she'd box her world to do this. She’s a quiet consumer and does not ask of the cook, does not look up from her food — all to the extent of one dish.
The dish is homed to a restaurant that is sterile in appearance, low noise and low-lit candles. People who look like they know people, people who had places — it’s not a place she'd dine even twice in at first glance. It’s 16 courses, excruciatingly fancy; not a regular. But then, incomes: Beef Tartare with this caviar, smoked in bone marrow. The plate pleated in colorful sauce, blacksmith-like.
The thing about food — to Sydney, at least — is that you can taste when something is loved; and so, every bite is like that love fleeing within her, nettling into her underbelly. You get addicted to that certain type of love, to the snarl of a chef, the skein they make of themselves for a plate that's done in a few minutes and, inversely, if you're unlucky, addicted to a passion to make someone else taste that love too (the ferment of a prolifically weary creator just wanting to be good at this dangerously artisan thing — the taste of sacrifice, really), and perhaps that's the downfall of a someone, of a chef; of Sydney, she sees.
In this dish, she saw something of herself. She saw home. She saw her mom, who she never met, not in reality, only withering away in her dreams or lullaby-like retellings by her father, who she imagined would've loved cooking, too.
The waiter, dressed like a fine-dine customer, comes at every increment of a few minutes and asks, "Everything's tasting well?" at that moment she chews the reason she'd massacre herself for food, in the name of the art of it; she gets throttled back to the world and its techno-color, flowery piano hymn. "Good? Can I get you anything?"
"Oh, uh," Sydney's halfway through a bite, pulling at the waxen colored napkin, thick cotton, to her mouth. "Who made this?" She points down at the plate. "The Chef, I mean."
"Carmen Berzatto." He says, sort of like this question is never asked, like everyone knows (And Sydney briefly thinks of all the chefs she doesn't know. Back at CIA, everyone knew who they were like they were the fucking federal CIA of chefs. douchebags).
Sydney gives a thumbs up. Her thinning tight smile as she goes, "Kudos." like she knew all along.
Course, she googles Carmen Berzatto seconds later and Food & Wine says 'Best upcoming chef of the New York City area'.
Pretty legit.
A scroll later —
Sydney blinks.
Three years ago: 'Congratulations to this year's James Beard Foundation Award Winners!...'
"Holy shit."
Chicago.
2022.
He retained 3 Micheline stars not long after that meal despite the 2020 shit-show while Sydney's peddling away at Smog BBQ and, soon after, Alinea when work is finally picking up.
She only sees him in pictures, in snippets of interviews that she stares at for too long before she buries her phone under her pillow, until the sight of him is burned off her retina. She wakes up at 6am every morning, prepares a daily menu at Alinea with a chef who doesn't see eye to eye with her, who calls her green and too much — sure, she is but lumber can't be saved from a fueling fire. So be it.
A long while is spent just like that: pictures, interviews and burnt retinas.
He's the first chef that she treads to twitter's search bar about every few weeks, anytime she's dwelling on inspiration. She's down on it, tipping to the undertow of leaving when a headline pops up about 'Carmen Berzatto's humble return to Chicago', something about an origin shop, newly owned by him, The Beef.
Alinea suddenly doesn't seem like a fitting place of work for her. A position auspiciously opens up, and Sydney calls in for it.
Days later, for what seems like had been bubbling up for years, Sydney first sees renowned chef, Carmen Berzatto, by family, 'Carmy', standing solemnly in the back kitchen of this worn, frayed sandwich shop she knew as a kid: The Beef. She hasn't been there in years and it actually rapt her to peer within the skeleton of the shop, at the kitchen where everything happened. It looked the way it did years back, from the outside: historic, seedy and tattered, well used but hallowed out.
He doesn't look up at first, stalling secludedly at this stain on the wall that, by any eye, does not exist. Sydney, not being seen by him at all, rouses slowly from the corner.
Sydney almost doesn't speak but, "Hi." She says with a blink of a smile. Then he does look up, so, the reality bites her. "Hello."
Carmy says, "Hi.", and that feeling inside of her starts to mirage that dish in New York, fending into that conversation with her dad, the one about the world having other places for her.
2023.
Turning The Beef into The Bear is, maybe, worse than CIA.
- Richie is on some kumbaya shit.
- They have 3 months to curate a stellar restaurant with stellar payback.
- Carmy knows Sydney's green, and she’s really trying not to be.
"Look, I'm not saying the dish is never happening," Sydney must've sighed because Carmy then ducks his head down, trying to catch her eye. "Hey, no, no, Syd, I'm just saying, it doesn't fit this menu right now. Alright? Make it a special. Seasonal or some shit, you know?"
"No, yeah, I get it. You're right. it's just," Sydney breathes out. "It's starting to dawn on me that we're sort of fucked."
Carmy turns back at the board in front of them, sidesweeping vivid and angry red slashes, sometimes black X marks over dishes that clashed the menu, or required too much preparation, too tall of orders. "Yeah. Heard."
This board is the only self expression he's got in his apartment. Sydney liked to google rooms of artists, writers, chefs, liked to looked at their roots, their bases, see if they matched hers. If his room was in these articles, she'd think he's some undercover masochist, seclusively breathing, living in his own restaurant, inside the fridge or something. Not far off, considering the placement of repetitive looking blue jeans folded neatly in the oven. The only expression of the living.
The rest of his place is bland, some organized mess that looked packaged-able, like he'd need only a car to move out at any time, a mere few hours. It's sterile in the way a doctor's surgical room is, and placid in a way that meant he did nothing but sleep here. That thought makes the back of her throat itch.
"We could do jean cutlets." He says abruptly, then looks to her, giving him a scrunched up face. "Already in the oven. We could use that, uh, smoked cherry —"
"Yeah, that's a huge fire hazard, Chef." Sydney starts to laugh, "And, sincerely, fuck you, this is serious."
All a sudden, he starts to get serious, arms unfolding while he stares off into that scrawled manifesto up on that board. He turns back to her. "The Risotto."
Sydney stares plainly at him, looking uncertain.
"I figured you hated the Risotto."
Carmy squints. "What? No." He says. Then, "Chef, I thought we were over this."
"We are," She starts, tipping her head forward. "I just thought, you know, it would be not-so-great to bring up."
"It was great.” He insists, and she sort of sours her face. “It— it was, Syd, it was just fucking bad timing and not ready for what the place was.”
”Cool. Yeah.”
He sighs.
It pulls at her momentarily that he’s looking intently at her, that the space between them was small but not small enough; that she wanted to close it.
Carmy stiffens and Sydney's breath gets caught to the back of her throat like he heard her. "Hey, hey," He pulls back from her and looks over her shoulder, putting a palm over her lower back to inch her away, "Let me show you something."
He makes a move toward that pile of cookbooks just repressing beneath the window, the only expression in his room. She watches him catalogue it until, "Okay, okay, got it." and he's walking back to her, flipping through the pages; flashes of delicate sketches that, at first, Sydney think are copy-pasted, printed into this little atlas he's made. Finally, "This." he says.
He flops the book on the counter, tilting the page to her direction. There it is: a cola-braised short rib penciled and shaded in, wielded together on paper, in some heavenly print.
At the top, a neat, cursive, 'Syd'.
"My Risotto." She realizes.
He nods. "Yeah, yeah, look, we figured it's the acid, so I got—"
"Woah, wait—" Sydney meagerly splutters a mess of sounds. "What the fuck, Carm? Are you, like...""
Carmy pauses at her, unblinkingly. "What?"
"This is, like..." Her brain doesn't render it as fast as her mouth. She starts to laugh all faintly, averting her gaze from his face to the paper in front of her. "Dude, are you Michangelo?" And then looks at him again with the short liberty she does have. "Like, Leonardo Davinci's great great great grandson?—"
"Yeah, yeah, okay," He waves it off but Sydney's genuine, pulling at his notebook for a better view. "I'm trying to show you something."
"So, you whip up the Vitruvian Man?" And then, "Were we supposed to be drawing?" She asks instead. Carmy scrubs a knuckle to his eye socket in-between her narrowing eyes, inclining closer to the page. "This shit is shaded, Chef."
Carmy exhales. "It was a hobby."
She looks back to the page in front of them, then to him. "A hobby."
"Yeah, uh," He thinks to himself, twirling his finger like he were drawing the scene right now. Sydney's eyes fidgets to this imagery. "I used to, like, draw in school. Sketch ideas for future plates, anything to, you know, relieve the stress of shit. It helped with my anxiety, if I just focused enough on something."
She muses an, 'Ahh', then, "Did you sketch denim jeans?" Sydney suggests, mostly kidding but Carmy doesn't say anything. She stalls, a lilt to her mouth. "I was just fucking with you, really."
"I knew a guy who designed pants and," He shrugs. "I don't know. I thought that shit was kind of fire."
"And this was just some hobby for you?" She asks like this was something more, like someone who wanted to know more, which might've battered him.
He hums shortly, pointing his hand back at the page. "Can we get back to this? Listen?"
"Yes, Chef." She says, spending the remaining time trying to domesticate a neurotic tick in her spleen. He's said it before, all of this, 'There's a lot of fat in a short rib so it's too unctuous. We need acid to cut it, add some balance', and she agreed but hadn't said a word because she liked the way he spoke with all bass, like the words came from a pocket beneath his esophagus; places unreachable and pretentious.
"It fits the menu." He affirms at the final round of notes. "You really fought for it, we fixed the issue, and you believed in this dish, so."
"That bothered you."
"It didn't bother me, Sydney." But he sounds bothered, so she snorts tonelessly. "This—" Sydney raises a brow; he pauses. "Okay, you challenged me. Fast kitchens like The Beef don't fit this type of dish. It's overstated and costly and rhetorical there, but at The Bear?" He leans against the counter, leaning his head to the cabinet just above it. "We could fit that. It's our restaurant, our home. We do whatever the fuck we want."
"So, definitely there's a we in this." Sydney says. "An our."
"There's always an our." And after a while, with the silence flickering between them like long and lonely candle silhouettes curving along their skulls, "I wanna do what you want to do, Sydney."
She mulls on that. When Sydney decides to finally look up from the drawing, he's already examining her, marveling in a way that has her pathetic and distressing the bones in her body that still asks to close the distance. She's reminded of the alarm in her old apartment — the blaring heartbeat settled tonelessly, building up and up the way cathartic orchestras do, but then…
His phone zaps at him; the connection between them maimed.
"Shit." He fishes in his pocket and Sydney leans off the counter like it were scalding stove burners, brimming on a bright red. A glance down later, “It’s, uh, Richie,” Carmy slides his phone back into his pocket, patting it once at the end. “Needs us at the restaurant.”
"That doesn't sound safe."
"No. Fuck no." and he starts gathering his keys, wallet, thrown over sweater, jerking back for his pack of cigarettes. He attempts to clean the remainders of powder and egg surfacing on the table to no avail, verily smearing it. "Shit. Okay." He turns to her, a soft sort of flustered. "I'm just gonna... uh,"
"Leave it, Chef."
"Right." One swallow, car keys clanking. "Right, okay. Lets go."
The Bear, formally known as The Beef, is a slaughtered constructive mess. Within the skeleton of the shop, by the kitchen, the walls are collapsed in and the floor is florid with a cool, ashy white grit piling around crevice and midsections. Richie, Fak, Marcus and Sugar are right in the middle of this catastrophe, screeching all at once by the cobalt tinted work lockers.
"Hey, hey, hey," Carmy shouts over, cutting the entire scheme. He takes a look around; Marcus is pulling at the back of Richie's shirt, Fak is standing behind Sugar who is head-to-head dueling with Richie, faces all burnt out and red; a cataclysm themselves. "What the fuck is going on?"
They all unwind their muscles, stepping back from the scene. Richie doesn't, saying, "Hey, Cousin, you wanna explain to your good, poor old sister, Sugar, that we shouldn't move the fucking lockers one inch forward—"
"Poor?" Sugar's eyes get wild. "Old, Richie, really? You're, like, fucking midlife."
He pitches his hands up. "I'm just saying, mom, respectfully, lovingly." and then strews the attention to the lockers; Sydney peeks behind Carmy's shoulder to it. "This shit goes right back where it came from anyway. We're wasting valuable, good fucking time on inching something back for, like, two fucking seconds—"
Sugar scoffs. "No, Rich, it's not a waste of two fucking seconds. There's mold."
Carmy flexes out a hand. "Hold it, holy shit," He takes a breath and totters his eyes around the small, cornered locker room. "Fuck it. Let's just vote on it."
"Vote?" Richie's face screws up. "Look, if I wanted democracy then I would've called J.B. Pritzker myself, alright?"
All tiredly, Carmy goes, "Cousin, come on." and Richie actually stands down, lolling his head back and sagging his arms.
Richie's head rolls forward. "Well, I vote no."
"Alright, fine," Carmy settles his hands to his waist, looking to the side of Richie. "Sugar?"
Sugar almost looks sorry, and maybe she was more toward Sydney, like she knew something strange was fissuring in the air in Carmy's apartment before. She says, all in favor, "We have to move it, Bear."
"Fak?"
"Well—"
"You think he's mentally capable of making decisions?" Richie inserts. "The Narc?"
"Yeah, dude." Fak says, anyway. "We have to move it."
"Marcus?" Carmy gestures a hand to his side, allowing it to fall, palm slapping his thigh. "Man, what do you think?"
Marcus sighs, hitching his shoulders up. "Yeah, Chef. We should move it."
The final votes goes to, "Syd?" asks Carmy.
"Wow," Richie taunts, snorting half-heartedly.
The whole rooms starts a different type of quiet, like a low broil. Carmy turns at him, and the whole room then singes up.
“What?”
“What What?”
“Why are you fucking with me, Richie?”
“I didn’t say a word about nothing.”
“You’re making this, like, fucking face, man, you’re fucking with me.”
“No, I just…” Richie then scoffs again. "I just thought you only took notes from Claire-bear."
"Cousin, that is not—"
"What's a Claire-bear?" Speaks Sydney, and the room turns to her.
No one says a thing but all the eyes get claustrophobic, sitting at her ribcage, jeering uncomfortably.
"Claire's, uh, a human," Carmy steps forward to her. "She's an old friend—"
"You're still calling her a 'friend'?" Marks Sugar, raising brows and crossing her arms to her chest. They exchange some type of look that Sydney can't decipher, but Carmy's lips twist and it stunts that section in her that was rewinding on the 'I wanna do what you want to do, Sydney'; so, with hell to it.
"Yeah," Sydney says abruptly, pursing her lips, as normal as possible but her mind had started to grow this reedy, stupid pitch, blinding all the other senses. "Let's move the lockers."
It's mute.
Sydney compresses her mouth, trying not to be crazy because crazy never worked, though crazy tended to seep and crazy knew how to ruin, how to tarnish. Carmy brings up a fist to his chest and circuits it, small clockwise motions, a vehement ASL, 'sorry'. She manages only to return the gesture with much less vivacity.
"Alright, so," Carmy starts over, and the words all muddled to her since she turns and takes some awkward beeline to the doors outside, blood short circuiting up her head, feeling crazy anyway once the light hits at her temple and a burn abides and dwells there.
She sits at the smoke bench and stares steadily at a burnt out bud, ashes piling over on the very corner of the seat. It gets tedious sitting there, plowing in her head and trying not to feel small and stupid and crazy.
The door opens and footsteps stop, then rise closer to her.
She knows who it is, though, and starts saying, "I'm sorry. I'm just, like, tired and trying not to be crazy about this shit." before the entity could even come near her.
The footsteps stop again, and then a sigh flutters. "We're in on this together, I should tell you everything going on. I fucked up." Carmy says, rounding his way to stand in front of her. She doesn't move, still, so, "I'm sorry."
Sydney breathes. "It's fine," and Carmy finds the time, in-between this, to sit adjacent from her, slow like she'd scuttle away. She could if she wanted to, but the willingness, the want is not present. "So, Claire's a girlfriend?"
"No," He states quickly but then his face dithers. "I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I just don't..." His hands spread helplessly; something sour, bitter erodes through her. "date much."
"Well, just so you know, that's really, really shitty." Sydney says, daring to pin her eyes to his. "To do to someone, I mean."
"Yeah, I figured that I'm being shitty."
A long time they sit there, kind of like they were smoking but instead they're just passing looks at each other, not knowing how to move.
"Chef," Sydney musters, "Our personal lives kind of get messed up with this restaurant thing. It's tied, we're tied. And, when you don't tell me things, it gets... fucked up and weird." Which is true, and sort of flight vs fight of Sydney but methodic, nonetheless, in how to say that Carmy should let her know if there is someone on his sideline (not because she feels this cinderblock of inequity or anything; because they have a partnership, an oath to one another, even, as friends, because his place in this world exists in the same timescale as her place, really, after all). "You know that, right?"
"Yeah, I know." Carmy leans his back to the gate behind them and gazes over her, and the weight of his attention brings up something foreign in her chest. Sydney doesn't know what to do with it. "I know, Syd."
"So, don't be shitty."
"Right. I'll not be shitty. That's easy." A concise, curt laugh falls from Sydney, and that seems to calm Carmy the slightest bit. A beat passes, his posture deflates. "When I'm, like, fucking up, it's good to let me know that I'm, I'm fucking up, cause I am, like, I'm, you know, trying. I'm trying, Syd."
"Obviously. You're fucking doing these beautiful drawings and," Sydney shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. "Obviously you're trying, it's..." the words fall backwards, down her windpipe.
"Right."
"Yeah."
"Okay, so we're like..." The silences stretches, then, "We're okay?"
"We're okay."
"We're back?"
"We're back." Though she knows nothing of what they're back to, what it means to be back with each other, or that they had even owned a time in their relation that they'd call a 'back' (she knows what it could mean; she knows its core-meaning, all despite).
Sydney peers at him already peering at her, and he smiles in a way that reminds her that she can smile too. This type of nirvana makes her as euphoric as it makes her unwell, which has her hoping, for some off and odd and selfish reason, that it makes him unwell too.
"Awesome. Alright." Carmy gives a short nod. "Cause we need more help with moving the lockers, so..."
Chefs are masochistic people.
“How's it going with everything? With that guy?”
Sydney’s dad sits across the dinner table, shoveling food up his mouth, munching all hard. At first, Sydney doesn’t know what to say even though there’s this silent warrant for an answer — a reaction, a face , at least — but Sydney merely feigns some irresolution, a look of callousness.
Her dad stops the chewing. “That guy,” he says, like Sydney had something hidden up inside of her. “That one you been, you know, following around, partnering up like—“
“ Following around ?” Sydney scoffs, smiling only from the corner of her mouth. “Carmy, Dad. Come on.”
“Hot shot.”
She shrugs. “Maybe a little.”
“Hot shot you ran to away to New York for, and then back to Chicago.” He points a fork at her like he knows, considering, “But not for your poor, ol' dad.”
“Okaaay,” She pushes at his fork with hers, “No, that’s not what happened.”
Beef tartare with this caviar, some smoked bone marrow happened, she’d say, but her dad starts to laugh and it’s too late because, now, she can’t help but laugh.
Laughing is cordial sometimes because someone’s already doing it and guilt’s a stupid bastard, but Sydney doesn’t have to act this way when her dad laughs. Her throat bubbles up, and the smile is something magnetic on her. It’s past them, Sydney and her father, the parts where he doesn’t know how to tell her it’s going to be hard without her tearing through her soul, trying to swallow it. Conversations are real, now, not covert in being cordial, or not knowing what to say or where to put what was said. They can laugh.
“Really, though.” He starts, and something inside of Sydney twists and shoots up to the roof of her head. Temper, her dad might’ve called it but it doesn’t broil or sting, and her chest is the same as it is any time, tight but not wreathed at least. “Tell me how he is.”
Outside, it’s night.
She likes Chicago at night because it's a warren, a catacomb of who’s awake, who isn’t. Apparently her dad’s in the in crowd of those who can’t do either, so he eats. All she wanted to do was eat some cheap food with him, enjoy being his daughter, him being her father with a plate of chicken she didn’t make, thinking about how her hands ache anyway if she doesn’t keep making food.
“Good, good. I mean, he’s…” She opens her mouth and hesitates, shrugging out, “Passionate about this. Right, yeah. He knows what he’s doing, he’s talented as shit, organized and…” hardly at all mine, and somehow splitting half my faults. “You know.”
Sydney fixates on this cake on the table that’s between them, shared on one cold white plate. Double chocolate cake, some classic of the city. The one on the table isn’t much of one. It’s spongy, a bit too too dull but somehow sugary in the wrong places; she acknowledges this but eats it anyway, enjoys it thoroughly, through every crumbly layer, tearing her teeth through the too thick, slightly sleety icing. It’s cheap. It’s not great, or even that good, but you can taste when someone loves something.
She picks at it.
“He believes in me.” Sydney supplies, more to herself, but she looks up to him anyway, her dad who still has his gaze swallowed up by his daughter trying to rebuke this welt of, want want want. “And I believe in him.”
Her dad wants to say something — ask something — but he doesn’t. His lips shrivel into a tight smile, “I’m happy for you, Syd.” He says, but that something isn’t asked and so it hangs low and humid in her brain.
Her hands start to ache, mid bite. She wheels her mind back, a memory about a shift that was a near 18 hours, a shift barely slept, months ago. She had to prep for herself and Tina, whose son decided to make another break for the principals office.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with him.” Tina said, spluttering her knife across a shallot with no chance. “I keep telling you, my love, he’s got no passion, no interest.” And then she stopped chopping, pointed the tip of the knife at Sydney. “Like you.”
Sydney’s face scrunched up. “Me?”
"You. He doesn’t have that shit you got.” Said Tina, back to massacring the shallot. “Drive, baby, drive.”
Sydney has to ask herself what she’d do if not for food, how small her world would be if she didn’t go out looking for it and a funny thing happens where Carmy speed walked by, “Behind, Behind, Behind—“, and Sydney’s chest unwittingly ached for the version of her that does not try catering and therefore never learns what it means to fail, a version that does not love food enough to still want to serve it even after its failure to provide, and a version that does not go searching out to be served in New York; a world with another place.
(Carmy didn’t say goodbye at the end shift and something within her cooked and poached about it).
Leaving The Bear didn’t feel good. Walking to the train station killed her and, halfway to her dad’s shared location, to this pedestrian diner, it dawns on her that every now and then her hands do this stupid fucking thing where they stop working on her, get all galled to the touch, tender limbs being stupid, stupid limbs she really needs to stay tender.
“And are you guys…” Sydney’s spawned back to life: her dads in front of her, the diner’s bulb lights are hot on her head, the cake is poised on her fork, her hands ache within.
“Dad,” Sydney laughs, much less bright; less intent on being believable. “He has a girlfriend, or, girl friend.”
Sydney's dad doesn't speak for a while, but a slight sway of mood accents the silence. "I was going to ask if you guys are opening up sooner than you thought." He says, a bite later, and Sydney does not speak of the sore within her solar plexus, of which lives the weird thoughts of Carmy, where they mix and coil and brim to something like verbal vomit.
Her dad took her to church on Sundays, once upon a time, ever since her mother died, which seems, now, like a very long time ago. There they'd call this verbal vomit something else: a sacrament of ill desire.
Church wasn't worth it, maybe, because the construction of The Bear is unbearable (Carmy doesn't get this joke at first. Then he does and calls it, 'fucking horrible', while an awfully good thing happens where he laughs for a while about it, muttering the sentence beneath his breath recurrently, but maybe that's the part Church made worth it).
They get to a terrible rhythm. The lockers get moved and only those walls get scrapped, so it's all over pretty quickly, except, Fak then realizes while inspecting the mold that the whole restaurant might need to be scrapped, torn part by part like some operation gameplay. It gets built back up, so, Sugar gets the permits in check, which keep on flopping and then working just as another permit flops and the whole process goes on and on, rewind, rinse and repeat. The fire-suppression test fails, and it seems the whole world has flipped the crust over them, stuffing their bodies and their restaurant under its skin, unable to breathe.
At the very least, Carmy and Sydney figure out the majority of the menu (In despite of Claire making an appearance a few times in these conversations; in spite of that rickety motion in Sydney's chest that she can't understand, can't stabilize either). He keeps showing these sketches to her, these plans. Having plans makes Sydney feel really, really fucking good, like she's a kid thinking about the future except she's in the future, an adult, and really doing something worthwhile.
Somehow that scares her half to death, too.
They're in the restaurant's kitchen when she says that, the scared half to dead part, and Carmy's penciling in a name, scrawny, fast letters to that sketchbook, shoulder grazing hers, a pinch.
"Me too." He says, finishing the touches of this idea they'd planned, of this 'back' they share.
"You think about it?"
His elbow taps her again. "About being scared?" She keeps thinking about it; skin to skin.
Sydney nods absently.
"I think I'm hardwired that way, Chef."
"Heard."
It's silent.
"My dad used to take me to church." Sydney starts, and Carmy then glances at her, nothing more than a second, cinching his brows together like he's trying to figure where this is going, it's correlation. "They used to say this thing to me, like, 'oh, you got a gift from god' and 'oh, you owe it, that gift, you owe it to us to use that shit' when, it's just this practice, you know? All because I made some cupcakes. Anybody could do what I do if they spent the time doing it, and owe it to who? It's not that serious."
"You might owe it to The Bear." He weighs in, and Sydney simply pushes at his shoulder.
"Anyway," She leans on one heel, staring off into this lone bulb blaring a white light through half the kitchen. "The thing is I actually wanted to do it, and it actually is that serious once I want it. People told me I was good and I know I'm good, and at first it was owing it to other people to use what I'm good at, but, now, it's..."
"It's owing it to you." He concludes.
"Yeah," Sydney huffs, kind of like she was holding the air in her lungs this whole time, like she was crushing herself. "And that makes it a lot more heavy."
Carmy gets quiet. Sydney, at this point, knows his quiet is his consideration, him trying to be meticulous. "The Risotto."
Sydney blinks. "The... uh, fucking Risotto?"
He hums. "It reminded me of, like... like, when I started cooking. When I started to obsess over what made something taste good, if I could make it taste that good. It reminded me of Mikey because he had niche reasons to what did it. He always had some fucking insane way of doing it, too, you know, when he did want to do all that cooking shit with me, when we were kids— or, when I was a kid." A beat passes where Carmy doesn't say anything else, only wrings his hands. "Maybe that's what pissed me off. I don't know."
"And my Risotto, other than being, like, great, pissed you off because…?"
"No, it wasn't great," Carmy says, "It was beautiful, Syd, like, infuriatingly. Beside the acid. Infuriatingly." and that's close enough to a small slither of this magnitude of admiration pooling at the extent of her existence. "It made me remember why it matters, this whole cooking thing without being all, like, arrogant about it." He gets really quiet, the type of quiet that aches. "Why you matter in this, what we're doing, and that part gets me scared, but not scared because you’re a fuck up, scared cause you’re not and I kinda am.”
A low cadence starts to whistle in her head.
“You’re not.”
“But I can be.”
“Chef,” She snorts, though more so in exasperation. “Dude, that’s, like, all of us, Carmy.”
“Yeah but I don’t want to be a fuck up to you.”
”But you’re not.”
“Then I got you, Syd. I won't let you fail.” He says while the world, the world inside her body, her stomach, does that flip and roll, plucks and hauls her down, deep under, somewhere, somehow. “If it’s heavy for you, it's heavy for me."
She didn't want to say she'd hold it for him because, truthfully, she wanted to share that weight and let it tower, let sink them to the ground until they're smashed and touching by proxy; because touching would be inevitable, and touching, suddenly, while studying him, was a thing she wanted to do terribly.
Her old apartment alarm goes cacophonous in her head, splitting her ear with a dissonant tune, a ringlet of you you you. He finally closes the sketchbook, and all those sounds get drawn under the front cover of it.
"So, yeah." He says resolutely, finally straightening up, meeting her by the eye. “Let me be scared for you.”
"If I owe it to myself, I owe it to you." She says instead of touching, "You know?" and Carmy looks at her for so long that it unnerves her.
He looks away, and Sydney suddenly wishes she hadn't thought that, hadn't jinxed it at all.
Sometimes Sydney gets so anxious that she can’t stop working and the thing about work is that it's always there. So, Sydney's always working.
She learned that through CIA, and then through her own catering business, the one that, like, totally fucking failed, and then through just about everything else in her life (Which, other than cooking, was sort of short and kind of too lonely). Work gives her distraction and distraction, if good enough, doesn’t allow her to wither in her thoughts. It’s better to be annoyed by some jackass who wants pasta made by hand than be worried about the things you aren’t capable of, or care about what it means to care about something so bad it sort it tangles all your organs and make a bruise on your vetrebrea.
Or, maybe that's just all the fucking work.
“Hey,” Marcus calls out, peeking from around the corner. “You need a ride or something?”
Sydney's halfway done with wiping up the stations, having let Tina go home early and trying to get Ebra not to leave The Bear too early, like, leave as in not coming back, not before its opening. The kitchen is still half havoc, half placid, and she knows Marcus could wait until it's all alike and parallel, clean, but she also knows Marcus has a mother, and his mother probably misses her son, so that's not something she'd ask of him.
She shakes her head. "No, I'm alright."
"You're cool?"
"Oh," Sydney exhales, suddenly tired, suddenly worn, anxious. "I'm fucking cool, dude."
Marcus laughs from the corner and, "I'll see you, Syd."
"Uh huh."
Sydney keeps on wiping until the front door creaks into a close, and waits a few seconds till it's clear. She breathes, the type of breath that comes from your gut, that otherwise worries people into, 'what's wrong?', and nothings wrong except for that she misses Carmy and that's a weird thing to do. To miss.
His notebook lays flat in the middle of the chaos.
Sydney sees from the corner of her eye, but she doesn't make the push to grab it obvious. She wipes down the counter incrementally, over every other station, lapping around the kitchen twice, never touching that one part, where he stood, where the notebook is taking his space, like it's a living standing thing, up till there's nothing left to be cleaned. That wet cloth taps at the spine of the makeshift journal (her brain gets happy by this; 'we share this' she thinks, and that mollifies that part of her that wonders if she's the only one who can't function without one), and, slowly, she snatches it mid-sweep, holding it while the washcloth mops down that same area like It'd leave some sort of proof if she didn't; proof that something of his was there, proof that she was only a thief underneath the garment of a chef, some straggler that liked to serve, liked to be told she was good at something (because she is, because she knows she is, because that's what a visionary, deep down, hopes for), or proof, really, that she was eager to hold something of his, something that he grasped, clutched and looked at.
She places the notebook back down. She picks it back up, and then puts it back down. Untouched looking. Sydney wants to keep it that way but the body betrays her and stalls in front, her wonder fletching upwards. She puts a palm at the base of the journal and scrunches it, flipping the very front open.
In slender, curling letters: The Bear.
Another breath.
Sydney thumbs the works, the shelved recipes, the shared recipes (those plans; those commitments), the forgotten food prophecies and ganders with a blink-size look, as though to keep some type of integrity of his work (because guilt's a stupid bastard); but her fingernail sticks, unintentionally, at one area, and so she chooses to open the book entirely to this one page.
The blood floods up, and the body she's incarcerated to blazes to blisters.
Brown eyes. Red bandana.
Her.