You can put your strength down.  / I'm sitting here with you, at the kitchen table. / You don't need to say anything.

ACT I, SCENE I                           
WINNETKA, IL                                   1999

[Lights up. The backyard of an inner-city apartment complex, mid-summer.]

A yawn pries June's airtight maw wide open, and the fervid breath of summer spills across a Chicago suburb, vast as an empty belly: remarkably expansive, stretched-thin, humid and pink and so, so hungry. At the solstice's peak, when famine persists and exhaustion ceases, July swells at the base of its throat, sticks to the gum-covered sidewalks that snake through the city like wandering tongues, and the towering, stern-browed buildings that line every downtown street like rows of bone-slick teeth. Before long, it is August. The cycle of digestion proceeds.

[Enter MAIREAD ERICKSON. She is five years old, and it shows: in her pigtails, secured with baby-pink ribbons, and in her gap-toothed smile, and in the Minnie Mouse bandages crisscrossed across her kneecaps, and in the way that her weight barely disturbs the uneven soil below her. She is five years old, and it shows: particularly, in her resolute attentiveness to the mud pie that she's spent the last hour meticulously crafting.

CARMEN BERZATTO kneels beside her, nursing a brimming curiosity; he's seven, with a nest of buttery curls, a persistent speech disorder, and a gentleness uncharacteristic of his bloodline — designed to engross, to captivate. He picks a wildflower, and places it on top of her creation, nodding proudly.]

CARMEN  A g-garnish.

MAIREAD  What's a garnish?

[Atypical of the daughter of two world-renowned chefs, she doesn't know what a garnish is, but she knows that it's pretty. He's pretty, too, but she doesn't care about that yet. In this moment, nothing else could possibly matter. She's not certain that it ever will.]

Before long, it is August. Life as the Erickson twins know it is about to change for the better.

[Enter CHARLAMAGNE ERICKSON. He's five years old, and it shows: in the scar on his forehead, fresh from learning to ride his bike without training wheels, and the dog-eared board book on classical music that's clasped in his clammy toddler hands, and the impatient puh-pat, puh-pat of his light-up sneaker-soles against the hardwood as he waits at the door, eager to greet his parents. They'll arrive, in time; his mother's face will be masked by runny mascara, and his father will lift him into his arms, and a James Beard Award nomination letter will flutter between them in the wind like a white flag, and no one will ask where his sister is.

Instead, they'll spill into the home, where NATALIE BERZATTO will set the table, and MICHEAL BERZATTO – soon-to-be fifteen, bearing a thin string of sweat across his hairline, and the festering urge to blur the lines between fed and loved somewhere much deeper – will prepare them dinner, puttering around in the kitchen for hours.

In this moment, nothing else could possibly matter. He's not certain that it ever will.

Lights down.]

ACT I, SCENE II                        
CHICAGO, IL                                       2001

[Lights up. MICHEAL BERZATTO's fifteenth birthday party. Lincoln Park, Chicago.]

September passes, and then October, and then November arrives on the breast of a cold spell, the first sign that another brutal Illinois winter is at bay. The months begin to stack atop one another like spinal vertebrae, and as the year winds down, mothers feel it in the small of their back, fathers in the palm of their hand. Calendar pages are torn out and thrown away with the garbage; children stretch and beg to be held until they grow out of their garments; amidst it all — at the epicenter of the confounding strangeness of normalcy — the Earth still tilts and spins.

The seasons change regardless. It is autumn now, and autumn is stained with Carmen Berzatto's blood.

[Enter CARMEN BERZATTO. Carmy, MAIREAD ERICKSON baptizes him, because she is seven years old, and Bobby Flay is predicted to win the latest season of Iron Chef, and Carmy sounds like Bobby, so Carmy might become a famous chef, too.

But Carmy isn't famous, just nine, and so desperate for solitude that it's suffocating him.

Carmy's nine, and in between the two boys that are tussling across the green before Mairead can stop him. Mairead's seven, and pulling Carmy out of the barbecue before she can stop herself.

This will not mean something until the moment she thinks that it won't.]

It is autumn now; Mairead is seven and Carmy is nine — with an angry burn streaking across his forearm and a gash on his head leaking fluid the same color as the leaves in Lincoln Park. She blots it with the hem of her Chicago Children's Museum t-shirt, and adrenaline — buzzing and consistent — lingers in the air, in the empty space between them.

Something else is there, too, that — to the artistic and percipient mind — is enrapturing and inceptive, avant-garde in its own unequivocal manner.

Read as: An immature ache, desire before it attains a permanent seat in the lexicon. You are here; I am, too. We have been bound to these coordinates, on this day, in the same place, and although we are too young to understand it, we must trust in the fact that there is no greater gift that we could have ever been given.

Presently, it will be filed away, categorized in the assemblage of phenomena with unnatural complexities, but someday, when she's ready, she'll call it as it has always been — the moment that every important piece of information, every memory and detail that had ever held pertinence to either party, interlocked within their crosshairs and became inexplicably melded together.

Someday, when she's ready, here is how she will remember it: the city of Chicago breathed a rib-rattling sigh of relief, and everything around them shifted.

But for now, Mairead is seven, and Carmy's nine, and she's never realized how blue his eyes are until this moment. Maybe he'll grow up, she thinks, and become a famous chef, just like Bobby Flay; maybe she'll open a bakery next door to his restaurant, where all the pastries are garnished with berry-flavored jam, as crystalline clear as the lazuli-shard gaze that tucks itself under a few stray curls, under the years-old Minnie Mouse bandage that, once they are home, she digs out of the medicine cabinet.

It is here — with her fingers in his blood-soaked hair, her hands trembling against the crest of his forehead — that revelation occurs: plates contract, dust settles, time lulls, and — at last — the girl surrenders.

MAIREAD Why'd you do that?

CARMY He's my b-brother. It's my j-job to protect him.

This will not mean something until the moment he thinks that it won't.

[Lights down.]

ACT I, SCENE III                        
WINNETKA, IL                                   2009

[Lights up. A Chicago suburb near the ERICKSON FAMILY home. Two weeks before Christmas.]

[A black cat runs out into the street, spooked by something unseen to the audience. MAIREAD ERICKSON, now sixteen, chases after it. A school bus's headlights fade into view; there is a loud crash, a cry of surprise, a squealing of tires. A flash of color, then seemingly-eternal darkness.]

[Lights down.]

A brief intermission . . . .

ACT II, SCENE I
WINNETKA, IL                                   2009

[Lights up. Northwestern Memorial Hospital. New Year's Eve.]

[MAIREAD ERICKSON lays stagnant in a hospital bed, with wires threaded through her unwashed hair and a thick, white bandage wrapped around her head, obscuring her eyes. NICOLETTE ERICKSON lingers at her daughter's bedside, gazing down at her from beneath a creased brow. Behind her, ARTHUR ERICKSON stands, a firm hand curled around his wife's shoulder. CHARLAMAGNE ERICKSON, Charlie, is noticeably absent; he has been unable to secure a flight home from New York, where he's in his freshman year at Juilliard, studying classical piano performance.

A DOCTOR enters; THE ERICKSONS turn towards the door.]

DOCTOR Mr. and Mrs. Erickson, I have received your daughter's latest scans from the neurologist. Do you mind to step outside so that we can discuss the results?

[Both nod. Exit NICOLETTE ERICKSON, ARTHUR ERICKSON, and DOCTOR.]

[The room is still for some time. Then, amid talk of an aneurysm, of cortical blindness and optic nerve compression and total field vision loss, there is a hesitant creak of the door. Enter CARMEN BERZATTO. He's nineteen now, with a plaid scarf wound around his neck, a cap tugged on over his curls, and blue-marble eyes that have never quite stopped holding sadness. This is the first time his feet have touched Chicago ground in years. MAIREAD ERICKSON stirs; she still knows him by sound alone.]

MAIREAD Carm?

CARMEN I'm here.

He realizes his hands are shaking. Habitually, he clenches and unclenches his fist, pin-pointing the moment that his blood turns uselessly to slush; his heartbeat is all but a hummingbird, wings thrumming madly against his sternum. He's nervous; he promised he'd write, but culinary school kept him so busy, and then it got cold, and a stack of unsent letters — half-transcribed into sloppy braille — grew dust-riddled in his kitchen locker, and now, everything just feels different.

Yet, Carmen Berzatto is here, against all odds; he's nineteen, stuffed to the brim with feelings that he can't quite place, and haphazardly grappling for solace — for familiarity — in the association that's been cemented into his bones since childhood — her.

And if there's any lingering evidence, anything left to solidify his claims, it's the sound of Mairead Erickson's voice. The way his name sticks like honey in the back of her throat; the realization that she's kept it safe for all of these years, stored away with her family heirlooms, cob-webbed and filmy, but never completely forgotten.

MAIREAD You left.

Read as: This is not how our tie should've severed.

CARMEN But I'm here now.

Read as: It is. I can hurt you less this way.

For a moment, he is seven, and she's five, and they're making mudpies in the backyard, and she can see him. He's nine, and she is seven, and she's patching up his wounds, and he's using every strategy that the speech therapist taught him to thank her without a stutter. He is seventeen, and she is fifteen, and there's a one-way ticket to Paris in his back pocket, and he's saying goodbye without really saying anything at all, because what is there to say, really? What is there to do, in order to avoid the inevitable, but alter the course of their lives forever? He's eighteen, and she's sixteen, his plane leaves in an hour, and she can see him, and he's taking it all for granted.

MAIREAD You left me behind.

CARMEN I'm here now, May. Nothing else matters, okay? I'm here. [Like he is trying to convince. Whether it be her, or himself.] I'm here.

[A beat. The lonely squall of the heart monitor. CARMEN BERZATTO shatters.]

[Lights down.]

ACT II, SCENE II
CHICAGO, IL                                   2022

[Lights up. Lakeview Funeral Home. Early spring.]

Micheal Berzatto is dead.

Carmen Berzatto comes home, and Charlemagne Erickson follows him, a dog's handler trailing its dragging lead. In time, his sister will make sense of all of this — Mairead Erickson will piece the narrative together; she will realize what it means that Charlie could return to Chicago for him, but never for her; she will watch both of their worlds come unraveled, and she will be waiting at the end of the fraying thread, ready to love them with needles and yarn, the only way she knows how: reparably. Regardless.

Just as the vulture garners nourishment, fulfillment, from the circumstance of demise, it will be at the funeral, when she's sitting on the edge of a church pew with her fingers braided together over the head of her cane — perpetually pruned from her job as a dishwasher at the Berzatto family restaurant — that the seat beside her will shift, and she will find it in her to forgive her brother.

Read as: To feel loved and to be fed; the lines are blurred now, Mikey. Just like you always wanted.

[CHARLIE wraps a tentative arm around MAIREAD'S shoulder. She leans into his embrace. Lights down.]

ACT II, SCENE III
CHICAGO, IL                                   2022

[Lights up. The Original Beef of Chicagoland. Late spring.]

Eventually, she will find it in her to forgive Carmy, too.

But it won't be then, when his plane touches down in Chicago, or when his cab drops him off at the Beef, or even when — several months past the service that he couldn't be bothered to attend — they're alone for the first time, together, as full-fledged adults, standing in solitude outside of the restaurant built at his dead brother's hand, and he breaks the silence by stomping out his cigarette with a heavy, non-slip work boot, a foreign sort of tenseness curdling in the air between them — the kind that could only be cut with a knife.

She isn't sure the reason — perhaps, the futile desire to please, or maybe just the injurious reopening of an eternal girlhood fissure —  but she doesn't question when his pacing ceases. She doesn't object when she hears him walking towards her, or feels him wrapping his arms around her so tightly that, for a moment, she wonders if he is afraid that she will become like him, like Charlie: talent defied by cowardice, a conglomeration of desire and passion and the ceaseless, pulsing urge to run.

She is not like Charlie, though, and she is not like Carmy either; without hesitation, Mairead goes back to her root. She embraces the boy who she has held at every age, and buried at the nape of his neck, in the crook of his elbow, beneath the vigor of that desolate, lacunar gaze — like always — she finds what she is looking for.

The truth: He needs her to forgive him, to love him not with needles and yarn, but this time, in a way he understands: with forks and spoons, with pots and pans, with the unwavering and vehement determination of a chef, the broiling urgency of the career that she, too, so desperately covets. 

[But it is never that easy, and at the end of the day, the cage of CARMEN BERZATTO'S steely-strung hands — from the leather-tough pads of his tattooed fingers, to his palms tarnished carmine, mottled with scars and callouses from a lifetime of kitchen burns — is still a cage.

And MAIREAD ERICKSON knows this now.]

END OF PLAY

INTRODUCING . . . .

The Lamb 
Cailee Spaeny ⭑ Mairead Erickson

&&& and . . . .


The Lion
Evan Peters ⭑ Charlemagne "Charlie" Erickson

&&& with . . . .
Jeremy Allen White / Carmen Berzatto
Ayo Edebiri / Sydney Adamu
Ebon Moss-Bacharach / Richie Jerimovich
Lionel Boyce / Marcus Brooks
Havana Rose Liu / Finley Lancaster
Dev Patel / Maxwell Caulderfield
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor / Memorie Thornton

Amelia Heinle, Nicolette "Lettie" Erickson; Ethan Hawke, Arthur Erickson; Abby Elliott, Natalie Berzatto; Jon Bernthal or Pedro Pescal, Mikey Berzatto †; Molly Gordon, Claire Dunlap; Oliver Platt, James "Cicero" Kalinowski; Jamie Lee Curtis or Michelle Pfeiffer, Donna Berzatto; Rachel Sennott, Francie Fak; Madeleine McGraw, Little Mairead; Walker Scobell, Little Carmy; Drew Starkey, Teenage Mikey; The Bear Cast, Their Characters; &&& As Described, Others.

This bread is the sweetest because it is earned.

Author's Note — here are some important things to consider before you read:

✧ this book will contain foul language, parental/familial trauma, characters struggling with/in bad mental health, slow burn, mentions/depictions of blood/injury, mentions/depictions of character death, so on and so forth. please proceed with caution! a read is nothing compared to your health & well-being. <3

✧ the bear & any people/places/things associated with it belong to christopher storer. i only own my ocs, as well as any extended plots/lines/etc.

✧ cover is by my love nightwvngs !!!

✧ me n yall rn 😹😹😹☝️☝️☝️

OH BROTHERRER. . . . . another new fic 😁😁😁 as usual i did not plan to post this bc it's been sitting in my drafts since like august?? but award show season got me back in my bear brainrot so its here i fear 😔 another sibling set with angst 😔 another m/f couple 😔 forgive me 😔 . . . anyways . . . this fic has a lot of layers and im not gonna sit here and yap about it all, all you need to know is:

✧ the ages in this show made my head hurt so i completely screwed the canon and made them up myself. in the present day (pilot), carmy is (newly) 30, natalie is 34, the twins are 28, sydney is 27.

✧ mairead & carmy were childhood best friends, she understood and cared for him when no one else did, ya da ya da. mairead's parents are the cdc & ec at alinea (fine dining restaurant in chicago), they met and came to know carmy's father through the restaurant business. they won the james beard when they were young and basically came into wealth overnight, but ignored that their kids were struggling (rich but sad anyone??) they also took care of the berzatto children a lot because of their home situation & vice versa, but neither was ultimately super great so the kids ended up spending a lot of time with uncle jimmy and other assorted family members 😃

✧ charlie & carmy had some romantic business going on in their late teens, they ~experimented~ and charlie followed him to new york where he went to juilliard for piano, then followed him home when mikey died. charlie still has lingering feelings for carmy, which (amongst other things) causes a rift between the siblings as a result.

✧ mairead is blinded by an aneurysm after a freak accident, she wants to go to culinary school but her parents are embarrassed of her being blind, don't want the stain on their family name & think that she won't be able to handle the kitchen's fast pace, so they get her a job as a dishwasher at the beef to let her get the feel of working in that kind of environment, which is where she ends up staying and is still there when the events in this story take place.

✧ this fic will focus just as much on character journeys & self discovery (especially for mairead and carmy) as it does the ships bc taking a character and gutting them from the inside out is my speciality!!! also found family bc this is the bear after all. it's a love story in many ways 😁

✧ now that we have covered the basics, here are a few other ~very important~ plot points:

1. i plotted this fic before finishing the bear, so i obviously didn't realize that claire/carmy had the whole childhood friends to lovers thing going on also. however, i really want this story to be a deep dive into carmy's past relationships (more than what we see on the show), so where claire represents carmy's trauma/adverse experiences in adolescence/early adulthood, mairead represents the rare comfort/friendship/a soft place to land that he had growing up because he is my pookie baby and he deserves that. she is to carmy, essentially, what pete is to natalie. with that being said, things are not going to be perfect between them and there is still a lot of ~collateral damage~ to work through!! fun!! mairead also has her own dynamic with claire from child/teenhood so i'm excited to dive into that as well, however messy it may be 🥰🥰 (molly gordon u are my princess and i am so sorry)

2. charlie is trans FTM, i couldn't find a way to work it into the summary without it seeming out of place, but it does play an important role in his character, so thought i'd mention it here! he is also ace/demisexual, his original love interest was going to be sydney but it just wasn't working out in my head. i may eventually pair him with someone but his part in this fic is going to be very much focused on self-discovery/sad lost man finding his purpose. however, i need gay syd like i need air, so charlie's jazz bandmate, finn, will be her eventual love interest <3

3. i am a sydcarmy truther before i am a human being, so i am not going to write out any of their scenes! they will still be besties! the clairecarmy storyline will also still exist (unfortunately) to provide maximum drama & angst. just bear with me, we will get through it together 💪

4. the ending paragraph in the summary w/the cage metaphor was inspired by one of my favorite poems of all time, "swallowtail" by brenna twohy. it is not my original concept/idea, so i felt like it was appropriate to give proper credit where it is due. definitely give that poem a read if you haven't, it is absolutely beautiful <3 

yall when i said i wasnt gonna yap and then i did:

Dedications — to all my fwends fxllmoons nightwvngs awfulmoons peoplehoods foxgIoves antivenoms crierayla starryeyedturtle halosnite petals4soho and anyone else in their bear brainrot rn!!! thank u to all who stop by to read & i hope that u enjoy!!! <3

The Works — Started 1/17/24 | Ended — | Published 1/17/24 | Status ongoing / slow updates

© BANANAPOPSICLES / 2024
IN THE WEEDS