#ftt carmy

[deadandgonefics]

Chapter 42 of Failure to Thrive is up!!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51031033/chapters/163681975

Sydney showed up nervous, expectant, excited. Like a deer in a parking lot. Slightly out of place. 

Why are you here? She’d asked. 

So, to be back in Chicago, cradling everything that Mikey ever made — it wasn’t a pity, even if other people saw it that way. It was a privilege. Carmy was tasked with protecting this beautiful burden, but Sydney didn’t understand. And how could she? She had never known Mikey. 

[deadandgonefics]

Breaking down chapters

Currently torn between posting a single 10k+ word chapter, or two 5kish chapters. I kinda want Failure to Thrive to be a neat 50 chapters, which would mean bunching up more, but then again, that's a completely arbitrary number to aim for. This latest chapter is season-one era The Beef, and it explores the dynamics between the characters, as well as (of course) the chaos that is Carmy's deteriorating mental health. I think it works either split up or as one. So I'm honestly torn.

What do people prefer?

[deadandgonefics]

Failure to Thrive - Chapter 47

The forty-eight hours were impossible to count because there was nothing in his room that gave any indication of time. No clocks, no electronics, no fucking windows. It was more of a cell, really. They made him eat straight away: a sandwich that tasted of cardboard and two paper cups of water. When Carmy told them that he’d just puke it back up, they gave him a pill for nausea that made everything lodge in the pit of his stomach, heavy as a rock. If he wanted to use the bathroom, he had to press a call button and a male nurse escorted him. The bathroom had no door and the nurse gave him no privacy, didn’t turn around, even when he asked him to. Another humiliation. 

[deadandgonefics]

Failure to Thrive: Chapter 46

Read here!

He just couldn’t bring himself to keep going. It was a huge, delayed response, the realization that Mikey was dead, not just out of state somewhere on some great expedition, not right waiting around the corner for Carmy to catch up, but dead. Gone forever. He’d always been slow to grasp things, slow to adapt. He was the same way in grief. It had taken him over a year to move past denial. 

[deadandgonefics]

Working on the next update (which culminates in Friends & Family night at The Bear) and feeling so excited about it. I think it advances some relationships between the characters and I hope you like it!!

[deadandgonefics]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51031033/chapters/166579363

Before they went their separate ways, they faced each other. Carmy kept his hands in his pockets, tried not to think too much about how they’d both changed. They’d waged battles, dodged bullets. Life itself had been cheap, back then. 

A new chapter update!! I hope you enjoy and please please do give me your thoughts! I'm always down to yap and/or take suggestions! This chapter was very important for moving the plot along and providing some answers. Carmy runs into somebody from his past...

[deadandgonefics]

Syd

I'm thinking about Sydney and the role she's going to play in Failure to Thrive...like, I think she's very hungry for knowledge and she's a true creative, I also think she struggles with self-worth and feeling secure in close relationships. What kind of scenarios or themes involving Syd would people like to see represented in the fic? And how do we think she'll affect Carmy?

[deadandgonefics]

New Chapter Alert!!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/51031033/chapters/167355034

If he wasn’t thinking about Michael, he was thinking about other dead boys. He thought of Fetch’s body swinging, of Woodie’s left eye joining its right one and closing permanently. They’d both seemed so grown up back then, but now Carmy understood that they’d been kids. Fucking kids. One late afternoon before a staff meeting, Tina showed up with her son Louie, citing a canceled hockey practice. She was fresh from culinary school and the mood was jubilant, but Carmy had to excuse himself to the back alley and cry into his hands, because Louie was just fourteen, all awkward limbs and nervous eyes. They’d been like that too. Young. Kids. Dead. He couldn’t deny it anymore. It was really fucking him up.