dreaming_spires
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She’s still hunched over beside the dumpsters, hands on her knees, heaving up air because there’s nothing left in her stomach. She reaches out a shaky hand to give him a thumbs up. “Seriously, man, I’m fine. All good.”
Something inside him twists and squeezes brutally. Is this what this place is doing to her? “For fuck’s sake, Syd. I’m giving you a ride home.”
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Was talking always this exhausting? She honestly hasn’t been on enough dates in recent years to compare. Unbidden, her mind drifts to the little bench that forms a right angle out the back entrance of The Bear, and the not-cigarette breaks she takes there. She’s never tired after those: Carmy knows she can be grumpy and awkward and silent during a long day of work, and he likes talking to her anyway.
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Sydney's going on dates. Carmy is not jealous. They're both nailing this "being normal" thing.
Bookmarked by dreaming_spires
22 Jun 2025
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Bookmarker's Notes
“You mention Sydney quite often,” Sana says thoughtfully. “It seems like she means a lot to you.”
Carmy rubs his hand against his chin. “She is… an excellent CDC.”
“Mm,” she says in the tone of an English teacher who doesn’t want to discourage a kid by shooting down their flagrantly incorrect interpretation of the text. “But your friend, too, I would say?”
His friend. That’s a word for it. He thinks of Sydney in the quiet mornings, when they’re in the kitchen early to get ahead on prep because they’re both fucking neurotic, her hands scribbling in her notebook, the easy sleepy laughs she gives him.
“I’m in love with her,” he says.
/
“I owe you one,” Carmy says, puts his hand on her shoulder. Then he bends down and lifts the crate of cherries as if it weighs nothing, muscles in his shoulders bulging, hair tumbling over his face. Those tight white T-shirts are not good for Sydney’s blood pressure. And he wears them to work every day, like a fucking cartoon character- is his closet just filled with white tees?
Sydney very deliberately turns around so she doesn’t have to observe his walk to the kitchen, because she has self-respect. She’s a grown woman, not a lovesick little girl; she refuses to humiliate herself by pining over a man who doesn’t feel the same way.
/
The footsteps aren’t familiar to him, the stompy tread of a boot: so it’s only when she says “Hey, Carm,” that he knows it’s her, and turns.
Sydney’s here, as if his guilty thoughts have summoned her, and- Jesus fucking Christ.
She’s swapped out her usual straight-legged jeans for blue bell-bottoms, her big corduroy jacket is shrugged down around her elbows, and then there’s her shirt: it’s a sleek halter, satin, black, plunging; a strip of her midriff is bare and the slope of her hips are making him want to do terrible things. He’s always loved the way she dresses, her vintage T-shirts and offbeat coats, but this is just fucking indecent.
“Yo, Syd,” he says, nodding at her. He stubs out the cigarette on an ashtray on the table; he knows she doesn’t like it, although she never complains.
/
The moonlight has fallen across her back, and Carmy steps behind her, in order to stock the new treasures in the mental storeroom of Sydney that he meticulously tends to.
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Maybe his tolerance has gotten so low the cider is actually affecting him, because Carmy feels a bit drunk. The fingertips that grazed her skin are tingling. He wants to learn each of her tattoos with his tongue, but instead he settles for memorizing the sight of them: a car, a can of fish, spidery words he can’t make out in the dim light. A tiny wishbone, broken, tucked up against her shoulder blade, which makes him unfathomably sad for reasons he can’t even explain. And a thrice-stabbed heart.
He lifts his right hand, places it gently on the flat of her back, above the thin white band of her bra, next to the heart. Two kitchen knives, side-by-side.
/
“You’re just so lovely, Syd,” he says finally, and her stupid soft heart skips a beat despite herself.
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Before the Celexa, Carmy never used to remember his dreams, except for the nightmares. Now he remembers them in torturous detail, the colours sharp-edged like an overexposed polaroid: blue apron strings loosening, the golden arc of an earring. A bandanna red as a bruise, and the brownest eyes he’s ever seen. Planes of smooth, dark skin, bared.
In his sweetest dreams, Sydney wants it just as bad as he does. She’s pliable, spreading and melting like butter under his body, and then she’s all teeth. She’s bent over in his kitchen, fingernails scraping desperately along the countertop.
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Sydney. Sydney, in that tight fucking black halter that made him want to shove her against the door and rip it off her. He wonders if it’s currently on the floor of the fruit guy’s apartment. Wonders if he’s kissing her tattoos. What if he makes her breakfast in the morning? Oh God, what if the breakfast is good?
When he closes his eyes, he can still feel the warmth of her, the pleasant grounding weight of her body against his. Her nose pressed into his neck. “You think I’m pretty!” You have no idea, Syd. -
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Carmen gets jealous. He does not handle it well.
Bookmarked by dreaming_spires
14 Jun 2025
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"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).
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Sydney's a cook. Sydney is also in terrible, terrible trouble.
Or, Sydney finds Carmen’s sketchbook.
Bookmarked by dreaming_spires
13 Jun 2025
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Bookmarker's Notes
“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.
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(‘I could lean and he’d be like a wall, he’d hold me up’)
~
And allows her to grab him, maneuver the most precious limb like it wasn’t the heart of who he was, what he did (and she wondered, ever since, what he touched, what he felt).
Sydney holds his palm to the sky and agonizes over the barely there, the ghosts, history; the small little scars like scratched discs, like airplane contrails dragging from the north to east, going far, making her wonder where it’s heading, where it’s gone, where it’ll be.
She brushes her thumb over his pinky, along his ring finger, scopes across all of his fingers with hers — they start to curve inward, over her, holding her with sensitive strength, intrenching soft heat. It's a perfect hand, actually.
She whispers, "You heal good." and Carmy's skin thrums. She can feel it but does not say a word about it, scared he'll rip from her.
Carmy doesn’t jerk his hand away from her, anyway, pass this moment. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t tear from her, or say a thing that could cut the weighted air in half, like he's scared of a disconnect, too.
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"I need something."
Her brows bolt together. "What?"
He points down to Sydney, who tries a wry smile, and for a split second, trusts that he believes this image where she’s not deeply, stupidly, compulsively sort of in love with him.
And him, perhaps, not any bit with her.
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Carmy suddenly looks up at her, double taking her gaze and says, "You deserve my full focus." out of a dark, noiseless blue.
~
His body heat drips and simmers on this unsettling heat on her torso. It swells up in her throat, the words, until she’s blurting, “I don't enjoy feeling out of place with you."
”What?” A moment passes. Sydney doesn’t answer him. She sort of wants to cry. Like a fucking baby. “Syd, you're not out of place with me."
"And you could do this without me." She remembers, aloud.
But, Carmy shakes his head automatically, "I couldn't do it without you."
"Yeah, you could."
"I wouldn't even wanna do it without you." He means, and it's very small and very quiet but has her a vague type of crazy. Sydney doesn't say anything. She might say I like you, or I want to find out how much I probably love you, but the fire-suppression test has taken all that energy and wrung it out of her. His hand drops down, and the simmer intensifies down from her chest to her legs.
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‘I got you’
Sydney crushes the cigarette. This shit is so bad, she remembers, all that nicotine does is make her jittery, stain her skin, teeth, and her bones just rattle inside of her like vipers, wrinkle wrinkle wrinkle.
Sydney's fingers hesitate. 'I got you too.’
He doesn’t respond for a while. She's in bed — brushed teeth and water boated by listerine — by the time he sends, ‘I know, but I really got you tomorrow.’
She just like reacts that text with a flat hotness weeping down her neck, merging down the lanes of her guts and twisting them. The heat doesn’t leave. It sleeps with her, but she wakes up running with ardent chills the next morning.
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"Standards are good. You deserve them." and then, "What do you look for in a guy?" crunches up the bones in her body, because if she thought too hard about it, she’d say she looked for splinters of Carmy in everything, romantic or not. This canopy of truth would beg her, or him, to confront the second part of this, which was ‘why?’, and she didn’t really even know why. She only knew that, inside of herself, this is what it is and take it or don’t, but it would hurt her especially for him to not even look to it, or ask the ugly 'why'.
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She can tell Carmy's glad about it because there's some lilt to his mouth (where she burns burn and burns).
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(And he's in front of her, looking hopeful in a keen sort of beautiful way. She starts to think of everything at once; a kaleidoscope thing of a brain).
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He starts, sounding very low; far away, then looking back to her face, just briefly at her mouth. A part of her completely falls apart.
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(Note to self: don't look at his mouth. That makes it harder). “Splitting your world is hard.”
He says, “Good thing you’ve always had my full attention.” like an accident, and the blood knots under her skin.
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Her soul depletes. She was hoping for more, she realizes halfway into that face he gives her, like he really doesn’t give a fuck and, sadly, she really does. -
To come alive at night, to die in the morning by Cosmicserenity
Fandoms: The Bear (TV 2022)
04 May 2025
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Summary
Sydney receives a hard blow after being friends-with-benefits with Carmy for three months.
A ten-ish part, canon-divergent fic that takes place somewhere in late season 1/ early season 2.
Bookmarked by dreaming_spires
11 Jun 2025
Bookmarker's Notes
Every so often, frequently throughout the day, hazy around the edges but vivid like a television flashback, Carmy remembers the moment he told her. The sensorial things. The way her hips recoiled away from his hand when he touched her at first, because his palms were cold; but his lips were wet and warm, and he traced them all along her body just to taste the sweat on her neck and in between her thighs. How even despite the pitch-blackness of the room, he found a way to hold the right places, because fucking her was burned in the axons of his brain like muscle memory, and in the small windows of time they had together, bare and exposed, he redesigned himself into a man put upon this earth wholly to tend to her. And at the end of it all, when her body had grown relaxed in his arms and her breathing grew labored and heavy, she’d done something, she’d called his name a certain way, or shifted her body, and he told her he loved her before he could really think about it.
And she told him she loved him back. And it invoked the fear of God in him.~
Who else could love her like this? Who else could feel her like this, or touch her like this; who else would look at her as intently as he does, and who else could she open her heart to in the way she’s opened it up for him? Nobody. There is nobody, and will never be anybody, who can fuck her in the way he can– and there is nobody else who’s touch she would want after feeling his. She’d tried to avoid it. Honest to God, she did– she’d tried to bury herself in the pile of problems that needed fixing, she’d tried to deny herself the full breadth of emotions that came with wanting him and loving him; but things tend to pile up when they are left untouched, and perhaps what happened today was just the sound of the crash as it all came toppling down around her.
~
“Who knocked her up, right?” Richie grunts as he hooks another part of the light to the wall.
“I did.” Carmy replies. The last piece of the light attaches to the wall with a click. He takes a few steps backwards to look at their handiwork. “I think it’s crooked.”
“What?” Richie says, and then again: “ What ?”