Work Text:
Tired and worn from the patterns I've carved
I will do better in the morning
I'm afraid of who I'd be without you
I will do better in the morning
Twisting up smokes, I'm in control
Til the fire burns out my miniature vacation
But I'm always left with the taste in my mouth
I will do better in the morning
BETTER IN THE MORNING by BIRDTALKER
The problem with the voices inside Carmy’s head is that he knows all their names. He figures it’d be one thing if he was really fucking crazy, like, the kind of crazy that gets you locked up, or put on medication or something, because then they’d probably all be anonymous, they’d all be imaginary. And if they were imaginary, if he didn’t know who they were, he could probably convince himself that they weren’t telling the truth.
For a while he’d just pinned it on stress, but that’d been before Mikey died. He’d kept hearing phantom sounds of the kitchen even on the rare days he was legally required to have off—pots scraping, blenders grinding against fruit and veg, fires blaring, all that. But mostly, in front of all that noise, he heard Chef’s voice in his ear, almost soft, the way he cut it off, pressed it low so that it only reached its target audience.
During smoke breaks, sometimes, he’d watch from further out while other chefs discussed the eerie silence by which Chef ran his kitchen. I just want him to start fucking throwing shit, someone says. Like, fuck it, dude! Throw a knife or something! Spare us the fucking nosferatu routine! They’re only saying it because they think Carmy is too far away to hear it, but even if he’d wanted to join in, he couldn’t have. He doesn’t want to think about the fit Chef would throw if he found out that his sous was fostering bad attitudes or some shit, so it’s not worth it to agree with them. After awhile, it’s not worth it to talk to them. It’s not worth it to talk to anyone.
For months, the only person Carmy talks to is Chef. Admittedly, their conversations are limited on his end. He mostly says yes, chef or no, chef, and Chef mostly says things like: you’re a fucking idiot, you’re fucking slow, you’re fucking this up, you shouldn’t even fucking be here. Then Chef goes home and sleeps upside down in his coffin or whatever, not even thinking about Carmy or anyone else, while Carmy goes home and tries to brush his teeth without bashing his head into the mirror just to get the fucking asshole to shut up for five minutes.
It goes like that: squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube. It’s slightly too much. Like, a half of a half of a millimeter too much. Fucking idiot. Run it under the faucet, watch some of the toothpaste fall into the sink to join the helpless flecks of toothpastes of evenings past. This is fucking gross. Turn off the water. You are fucking gross. Feel grateful that he doesn’t go out with anyone after work or on days off because it limits the amount of people who have to witness how fucking gross he is. Think: that’s so fucking ridiculous, who the fuck would think that? Be glad that he doesn’t go out so that people don’t have to understand how fucking ridiculous he is. You’re always so sensitive about shit. That one sounds like Mom. Rinse the toothbrush. Turn off the water. Throw up the colgate and listerine the next morning. Go to work. Come home. Try not to bash his head in the mirror.
It goes like that for months in New York. After Sugar had stopped speaking to him—after Pete had gotten burnt, the last Christmas he’d come home—there’s little that interrupted the routine of it. The only thing that changes is now Sugar’s voice joins in sometimes, although thankfully reserved for the worst nights. You piece of shit, she’d said, buttoning up her coat to drive him to urgent care, screaming at Pete to stop making excuses for him while he cradled his hand like a baby bird. You piece of shit, she’d say, seven hundred and ninety miles away in Chicago, when he burnt pine nuts in the convection. The entire kitchen fucking reeked like melted crayons. Sugar’s voice sounded like she was wrinkling her nose at the smell.
It gets worse. Covid teaches him how to order groceries through an app on his phone. People kept their distance naturally, even on the subway. He starts making coffee at home instead of grabbing it on the way to work. He literally—literally speaks to no one outside of the kitchen, and he’s always dialed down his words to the barest minimum there. That didn’t even start with Chef, to be fair—he likes to pretend that he thinks it may have started in culinary school, where they were taught to keep their sentences short and clear, but he’s pretty sure it started well before that, when fewer words mostly meant fewer chances to fuck them up.
The first time someone talks to him outside of the kitchen in months is when Sugar calls on February 3rd, although it takes a few seconds after he answers the phone for her to say anything. At first he thinks maybe she’d done it accidentally, considering it was two in the morning, which wasn’t a weird time for him to be up but had been nearly six hours past Sugar’s bedtime since she was twelve years old. He clears his throat. Hello? he says, again. Silence meets him, and Carmy thinks maybe she’d just called to make him apologize, which he might normally give into except it’s two in the fucking morning, which he says: Sugar, he says, It’s two in the fucking morning.
Carmy, she says. Michael is fucking dead.
He doesn’t hear anything after that. He doesn’t hear Sugar explain what happened, or her pleading him to come home, to let her buy his flight, to come in a couple days if he really can’t get out of work tomorrow, to come when she plans the funeral, to fucking talk to her, please, to at least call her, please at least call me, Mikey didn’t.
Carmy doesn’t really hear anything for weeks.
That’s the fucked up part about it. People always say there are five stages, and whatever, and the first is denial, but he’d always doubted that. Maybe he’d always thought he was above it. When Nonna died he’d been the second to find her after Mom started yelling, and he’d understood it the second he saw the way her jaw sat, open and unnatural. Nonna wouldn’t have ever done that when she was alive, so it made sense that she was dead. He read the Gospel at her funeral and everything, buttoned up in his first communion suit, which was probably supposed to be too small for him at twelve years old but still pretty much fit.
At school he was one of the only people that didn’t cringe at slicing the head clean off ducks or boiling lobsters or whatever the fuck else, so he assumed he was good with death, in the end, that he was less emotional than Mom said he was, that he was tougher than Richie made him out to be.
When he actually fucking thought about it later, he realized that while he had been second in the room when Nonna died, Mikey had been third. And actually, the first time Carmy had watched a lobster try to claw its way out of a pot, it had been his brother who had boiled the water and told him to shut the lid.
So the fucking truth of was that he’d never been good with death, in fact, it was just Mikey who actually was. So good with it, in fact, that he’d done it to himself.
This thought is fucking hilarious, actually. He almost starts laughing in the middle of fucking service, has to stop plating and step away to cover his mouth with the back of his palm so he doesn’t get spit all over the fucking veal. In his head, Mikey is still alive. He says: c’mon, get it together. Put the lid on the pot, Bear. Soft and reassuring, like he always was, until he wasn’t. He gets back to plating the veal, and that night he dreams about body bags and morgues with cold freezers and boiling water.
Carmy’s very content to just keep living like this. It’s a half-life, a partial world where nothing really changed: Mikey doesn’t pick up his calls, but when had he? In the last few years, when had he picked up a call anyhow? It’s not any different than before. The only thing that’s really changed is that Sugar is calling every single day now, and he has to text her back once a week or so otherwise she sends him screenshots of plane tickets to New York. Usually he just texts her: It’s fine. Sometimes, if he’s feeling particularly generous, he’ll say: Thanks for worrying about me. But he doesn’t say sorry or I love you because both those things feel like declarations: that there is something to apologize for, that this is real, that Mikey is dead.
It only gets very bad when he starts sleepwalking. At first it’s just to different parts of his apartment—he wakes up in the kitchen, at the fridge, on the sofa, with a pack of cigarettes in his hand, with his coat on and keys in his pocket. And that’s all fucking fine, actually, that’s managable, because all it is is falling asleep and then waking up somewhere else, which is something any child or drunk has done a hundred times and never died from.
He stands up, puts away whatever he’d gotten out while he was sleeping, washes his face with ice cold water and gets dressed for the day. Sometimes he gets dressed for the day at three in the morning, but that’s fine. The more exhausted he is the less he thinks about Mikey. The more sleep colors everything with a hazy level of doubt: it’s a bad dream. He’ll wake up from it. Things’ll be alright in the morning. Go to sleep, Bear, Mikey says, in his head. Alive. Twenty fucking years ago, but alive. Don’t let the bedbugs getcha.
He thinks he’s starting to fuck up at work, but at this point he’s too narrowly focused to care. He knows what he has to do in his head, it’s his body that doesn’t listen to him, that switches up orders, that forgets to say hands, that stumbles over the numbers until they all come out in a jumbled haze. He knows what he’s doing in his head. Chef’s voice lives there, too, telling him what he should do: call fucking hands, plate the fucking greens, don’t fuck this up like you’re fucking your life up, kill yourself, maybe, maybe just fucking kill yourself if you can’t fucking handle this. Some of it’s not in his head, admittedly, but he can’t tell which.
Things are getting worse. He’s waking up with his cigarette still lit, with the oven still on, with his door wide-open. It’s getting harder to tell Sugar that he’s fine, because even though he thinks he is, the evidence is stacking up against him.
Someone eventually informs him that he can not legally go another day without taking some time off. Carmy just stares at them, blinking. Not working means having to face things which means having to talk to Sugar which means—but there’s no fucking argument. He gets sent home with his whites still on. He walks home instead of taking the subway and chain smokes an entire pack. He texts Sugar that he’s fine, because if he doesn’t do that every day she calls the police for a welfare check. He feels sick because he’s eaten nothing and his mouth tastes like ash, so he brushes his teeth and doesn’t look at himself in the mirror. In his head, his mother frowns, rubbing his chin with her thumb. You look so much like that man, she says.
She’s the only one who ever thought he looked anything like his father. He doesn’t take the time to check.
The toothpaste makes him gag, but he swallows the bile because if he throws up again it’ll feel like lying when he texts Sugar later that he’s fine, and that sounds like too much work. He changes into a t-shirt and sweatpants. He figures he’ll just—zone out. Watch TV. Smoke until he runs out and needs to go down to the bodega to get some more. Maybe he’ll make something to eat. The thought of eating makes him feel sick. The thought of smoking makes him feel sicker.
He lies down on the sofa to try and stave off the nausea for twenty fucking minutes of peace so that he can text Sugar. He shuts his eyes. You are such a fucking idiot, someone says, sharp and quiet and biting. It sounds like no-one and everyone all at once. He falls asleep.
He wakes up to someone calling his name. Over, and over.
Except—it’s not his name. But it’s the only thing anyone’s really called him since Sugar called in February.
“Chef,” someone says. Their voice is high-pitched and panicked. “Chef, you gotta get up, man.”
The first thing Carmy realizes when he comes too is that his feet are fucking freezing. The second is that the voice he’s hearing isn’t coming from inside his own fucking skull. It’s someone else, someone fuzzy and female-shaped, and he doesn’t know why he fucking says it, except he’s so fucking stupid and tired that even though he knows it’s not true, he asks anyway.
“Mom?”
At once, the picture of the woman in front of him slams itself into focus. It’s so sudden and sharp that it nearly gives him a headache, and when the shape turns into his fucking coworker, he suddenly feels like burying himself underneath the dirt-covered snow that he’s currently sitting against, slumped against the back entrance to his fucking job, that somehow he’d gotten to, still in his sweatpants and bare fucking feet.
“Oh, Christ,” he says, with feeling. He covers his eyes and his face and his shame with his hands and shakes his head rapidly at the woman who he fucking hired who is now staring at him with her mouth half open and her eyes wide and frightened. “Fuck me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, this is—”
“I’m going to go get—”
“No, Christ, don’t—”
But it’s too late. She runs back in before Carmy can get another word out of himself. The world tilts and his stomach flips with it, and he has to press his fingers into his eyes to stop himself from throwing up or passing out or something fucking dramatic like that. For a split second he considered running away before anyone else comes out to witness this—firing that girl in the morning, threatening the same to anyone who brings this up. But the problem is that his feet are still bare, and he’s starting to feel numb and frigid around the edges.
Someone clears his throat.
Someone. Carmy could roll his eyes, even though they were shut. He could recognize that disdainful sound if he’d died and heard it from six feet under.
“Chef, I swear—swear to God this is not—”
Christ, the stuttering. He could kill himself right now. He’d just have to ask Chef for the fucking butcher knife. He’s pretty sure he’d be happy to give it to him. He could serve him as a surprise course tonight, a chef’s tasting menu, a frozen fucking idiot, julienned.
Chef is silent. His jaw is tight and his eyes are narrowed. He looks at him, top of the head to the bottom of his feet. Carmy swallows, starts to shake his head, but Chef interrupts him.
“Drugs?” he says, plainly. The disappointment is thick in his voice. Carmy can only imagine why he’d come to that conclusion, how many people this has happened to before that this seems the immediately plausible answer. Carmy’s face burns.
“No, chef.”
Chef just looks at him. His eyebrows don’t even move, but Carmy can tell that he’s unconvinced, it paints itself across his eyes anyway. He doesn’t believe him. Why the fuck would he? He nods his head towards Carmy’s feet again.
“You were told to take the day off,” he points out, “And then you show up at the backdoor with no fucking shoes on. You’ve been fucking shit lately. Multiple people tell me that you don’t make fucking sense half the time. Why else would that be?”
Carmy swallows. He wants to explain it: that he knows. That he’s good at this. That it’s not his brain that’s falling apart, just his body, just his hands, just his family, just his life. He can’t get the words out. They sit at the back of his throat and Carmy swallows them because he already knows that they’re shattered, and he refuses to sound like a fucking second grader in front of Chef.
“Berzatto, either everyone’s hallucinating or my sous is fucking up his recreational drug usage,” he says. “The first would be a medical miracle. The second would be a Tuesday.”
Carmy swallows. Christ. Fucking Christ. He shuts his eyes. Shakes his head.
“I’m not,” he says, even though he knows it sounds petulant, improbable. “I’m—I don’t do any drugs.”
Chef inhales. Carmy cuts in before he can think about what he’s saying.
“I don’t. I—my brother did,” he says. It is the first time he’s said it. It is the first time he’s thought about it since Sugar told him, months ago now, on the phone, the day after he’d died. “Uhm. My brother did. I just recently found out, I guess. He killed himself earlier this year. Chef.”
Carmy’s not looking up at him. His cheeks are flushed so red and so mortified that he actually thinks it’s starting to make up for the chill that’s eating up the side of his body, sharp and biting. He doesn’t know what he expects Chef to do with this. Maybe figure that he was lying, maybe figure that he was insane. The latter was probably true. The silence is killing him. The cold is killing him. His own exhaustion is killing him. Everything is killing him but he’s not fucking dying.
“It’s all fucked up,” he says, after a second, shrugging. “I know that. Alright, I know that. But that’s what this is. I’m not—I don’t fucking take anything, shit, I swear.”
“Christ,” says Chef. He pauses for a second. Carmy can’t bring himself to look at anything except his chin. “That’s a lot.”
Before he can stop himself, Carmy cuts his eyes up to look at Chef’s face. He’s standing, still, on the lowest step up to the door, which makes him a few more inches taller than he normally is, despite the fact that normally he’s already too fucking tall. But when Carmy scans his face, expecting disbelief, anger, judgment—all the things he’s normally used to, he comes up empty handed.
He doesn’t look friendly. Carmy isn’t sure that he’s capable of it. But his eyes are thoughtful instead of angry, and his lips frown in a way that feels more like pity than disgust. It’s an odd look on his face.
“Go home, Carmen,” he says. Carmy’s heart plummets. It cracks the ice on the ground beneath him. But then Chef rolls his eyes, frustrated. “Come back when you’re sane. Piss in a cup. Get over it. Can you do that?”
Relief feels almost like a fucking sin. It shoots through his body with ecstasy and shame in the same breath.
“Yes, Chef,” he says, quickly, urgently. The words fall over themselves. He’s pretty sure they don’t come out like two words and instead they break over themselves in the rush that he’s feeling, the way it’s buzzing in his fingertips. “I can do that, Chef.”
“Get some fucking shoes from someone’s old locker,” he says.
“Yes, Chef,” Carmy says. This is familiar. He’s coming back into himself.
As he’s turning away, though, Chef stops, just shy of the second step. His head cranes down and he isn’t looking quite at Carmy when he clears his throat, quieter than Carmy expects the sound to be.
“And—” he says, through a breath. It clouds in the air in front of his face, a physical sign of the moment’s pause that he’s taking. It’s the first time Carmy’s ever seen him unsure of himself. It feels like seeing someone naked for the first time. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry that he fucking did that to you.”
His voice is resolute, stony, even, but the words behind it are true, and it’s soft around the edges. It is human decency from the least human person Carmy has ever met, and Carmy realizes—this is the first time that Chef’s ever seen him outside of work, outside of the tight quarters and rehearsed orders. It’s the first time he’s ever seen Chef in any other context. In the shifting afternoon light, in the moment of uncontrolled honesty, it’s the first time he thinks they’d ever seen either one as a human being, as a person capable of having siblings, of loving someone, of losing them.
Chef doesn’t wait for him to respond before he opens the door abruptly, returning at once back into the waves of pressure, the tight corners, the entitled fucking customers, and the rows and rows of blue aprons, white coats, scarecrows of culinary perfection without a human inside of them.
Carmy has no doubt that when he returns, it’ll be back to are you fucking stupid, are you trying to fuck up on purpose, can you actually fucking do this? But for the first time, he’s seen underneath past the wolf’s teeth, to the shining eyes above them. For the first time, he’s understood that Chef is a human being, and maybe, for the first time in months, he’s understood that he’s one, too.
He goes home. For the first time in months, he sleeps for more than three hours, and he wakes up in his own bed. When Sugar texts him later, it’s a picture of handwriting on a crumpled piece of 8x11 notebook paper, and Carmy immediately recognizes it to be Mikey’s.
It’s either a will or a suicide note. Carmy doesn’t zoom in to find out, doesn’t have to, because Sugar’s next text fills up the bottom of his screen. He flicks his eyes down to it.
Mikey’s will. Apparently Richie just found it.
He swallows. Sugar can see that he’s reading the messages so she keeps sending them, capitalizing on the moment that she thinks she actually has his attention.
The Beef’s yours.
Carmy blinks. For a second he thinks he’s still dreaming, but he feels the phone solid in the palm of his hand, had felt it vibrate against the fine bones just a second ago. His eyes sting, but it feels distant, an expected, natural consequence of things, like seeing blood after a papercut. Upsetting, maybe, but unsurprising.
He scrolls up. It is a will, decidedly, and not a suicide note—there is no preamble, no apologies, no reasoning. It just says: The Beef belongs to Carmen. Tina can have the truck. If I own anything else worth shit, please sell it. It’s signed. Michael Berzatto. He’s had the same shit handwriting since fifth grade. He’s had the same shitty restaurant since he’d been born. Now it’s Carmy’s.
For the first time he’s awake enough to understand the reality of the situation. Mikey is dead. The Beef is his. For an uncomfortable second, he wants to say: no. I want my fucking brother, goes so as to reach his thumb to his keyboard, before he swallows the feeling with the snot currently building up in the back of his throat. Mikey is dead. He needs to start getting used to that if he’s going to go back to work. Chef told him to.
But—
He has an option, now. One that he didn’t have when he spilt his guts, nearly fucking crying on the stoop of his Michielin Star restaurant. He doesn’t have to work there. The world seems split in two, cracked down the middle like an egg: one world, one that existed twelve hours ago, where his entire life is working at the restaurant, where Chef is an asshole devoid of any soul or goodwill, where he’s sure that he’ll never step foot into the Beef again. And a second, the world that exists now, after a decent sleep, after telling the truth, after texting his sister: one where the Beef is his, because Mikey wanted him to have it. One where Chef is a person, whether he wants to be or not.
He licks his lips, staring at his phone. Sugar’s three dots start and stop, start and stop.
The new world seems impossible. Choosing the world where Mikey’s dead feels like an impossible betrayal, but then, Mikey had betrayed him first, hadn’t he? And what would he be going back to, at Eleven Madison Park? Nothing different, probably, except that it would be fucking different, because now he’d know. He’d know that Chef was capable of empathy, of listening, of soft words on a cold afternoon.
He’d know that Chef was human and he’d know that he was, too, and he’d mostly he’d just fucking know: there’s a world where we are better people, and we are choosing not to live in it.
He could change the Beef, he realizes. He could make it somewhere better. Somewhere with better food, better customers, a better reputation. It’d never be EMP but it could be something different, and the kitchen could be different, too. He wouldn’t be Chef, he wouldn’t be any fucking tyrant he’d worked for before. He’d be something different. He’d be something better.
From the grave, from his memory, Mikey says: You know what you want to say, Bear. You can say it.
From Chicago, Sugar says:
Well. Do you want it?
Carmy blinks.
Yeah. I want it.