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lets-talk-appella · 5 years

Text

Roman Holiday

Bechloe Week 2019 -- Soulmates

Summary: Three years after the events of Pitch Perfect 3, Beca and Chloe meet again on a long-haul flight to Rome.

Word Count: 9k

Rating: G

AO3 and FFN

For @acabellas, who read it first.

Beca shoves her bag into the overhead with a muffled curse. She’d told herself to pack light, but apparently, she hadn’t listened.

“Do you need help with that, ma’am?”

Beca glances over, making quick eye contact with the overly-perky blonde flight attendant (really, just that simple sentence had been coated with enough false sugar to rot Beca’s teeth) before returning her attention to stowing her carry-on.

“No, I’m good, thanks,” she grumbles, then puffs out a breath when her bag finally slides into place and stays.

The attendant walks away, and Beca plops down into her first-class seat, barely taking the time to appreciate the enormous, clearly-able-to-turn-into-a-somewhat-comfortable-bed window seat and the large TV screen in front of her as she reaches for her headphones. She settles back into the cushy seat, places the headphones over her ears, starts the first track, and closes her eyes with a sigh. She’s looking forward to listening to some demos and then maybe watching a movie before passing out on the overnight flight to Rome.

On second thought, Beca thinks as she starts to doze off almost as soon as her eyes are closed, maybe she’ll skip the movie and just sleep. Sleep would be good.

And, who knows, if the seat to her right remains empty, maybe she can stretch out even more on that.

With that hope in mind, Beca lets herself drift off to the sound of her music, which perfectly muffles the commotion of hordes of other people—vacationers, mostly—boarding the flight.

Unfortunately, not ten minutes later, she’s pulled back to consciousness by that same annoying, overly-sweet voice that somehow manages to pierce through her otherwise relatively sound-proof headphones. Rather than opening her eyes to acknowledge the annoyance, she keeps them closed and hopes the flight attendant will leave soon.

However, that isn’t the case.

“I’m sorry, but as the plane is at capacity, we can’t move your seat,” the attendant apologizes extremely loudly, apparently speaking to another passenger. “The best we could do is move you to business class, but as you paid for first class—”

“No, it’s—it’s fine,” comes a softer, almost contrite voice that Beca finds herself straining her ears to listen to. “Thanks for trying.”

Someone has kicked Beca in the stomach. That’s the only explanation for the horrible pang that rocks her gut at the sound of that voice.

Before she can stop herself—she realizes too late that she should feign sleep for the entire flight—her eyes open, first finding the irksome flight attendant, then sliding past her and onto the person she’d been speaking to.

And she looks directly into Chloe Beale’s face for the first time in three years.

There’s a moment, a single half-second, where Beca thinks—hopes—that this is some kind of fever dream brought on by exhaustion, years of failed repression, and expired turkey in her airport sandwich. But her hope is almost immediately crushed, demolished, absolutely obliterated by the simple fact that she can see the trace of laugh lines that had formed around Chloe’s eyes and maybe the slightest hint of lighter streaking in her hair, pulled up into a messy bun. Beca knows herself well enough to know that she isn’t dreaming; she doesn’t dream in that much detail.

She can see a similar struggle of some kind going on behind Chloe’s eyes, can tell by the way her brows furrow just slightly and lips part only a hair in surprise; to anyone else, the signs might not have been noticeable, but Beca can tell. Chloe isn’t happy to see her.

Time resumes in the next beat of Beca’s heart—though for a moment, she’d thought it might have stopped—and Chloe’s face pales. “H—” she starts, then has to pause and clear her throat. “Hi, Bec.”

It’s automatic and so, so easy for Beca to say, “Hey, Chlo,” as if it’s been mere hours since they’ve seen each other.

Then, Beca stares at Chloe and Chloe stares at Beca and no one makes the first move until the sugary flight attendant (Beca had almost forgotten she was even there) clears her throat pointedly. “Yes, well, seeing as you have elected to keep your seat, I suggest you take it,” she says, gesturing to the seat to Beca’s immediate right even as she starts walking away. “We will be taking off shortly.”

Chloe’s eyes slide closed and her lips tighten, but then she nods and lifts a large pink duffle to hoist up to the overhead. Beca’s ears ring as Chloe gets settled, and she takes off her headphones automatically even though she knows they aren’t the cause. Her mind races, full of panic and guilt and disbelief and anger—because what are the odds of this happening now, today, when she’s had no time to prepare the words she knows she needs to say but were never intended to leave her lips.

She’s startled when Chloe’s knee bumps hers as she sits. She thinks Chloe even apologizes for the minimal contact but Beca doesn’t hear her, too busy shifting away and doing her very best to make herself small while also fighting back the torrent of memories threatening to overtake her.

Chloe looks a little older, a little more strained (which is probably to be expected after three years—Beca knows she’s certainly looked better), but still so familiar, still so Chloe that being this close to her pierces Beca like a knife.

God, the last time she and Chloe touched—Christ, even the last time she saw Chloe in person…

It’s unfortunate and a shame and absolutely beyond painful that one of Beca’s freshest, most recent memories of Chloe is how gorgeous she looked while kissing Chicago Walp.

Beca puts her headphones back on.

Leaning against the wall of the plane, she pretends to be staring out the window while in fact seeing nothing and doing her best to think of nothing. A feat in which she is only semi-successful.

Their flight is going to last nearly nine hours; it seems like it takes even longer than that for the plane to finally leave the gate and begin its roll down the tarmac. Even then, it’s almost twenty minutes before the real takeoff begins and the plane, along with its 375 passengers, hurls itself forward with a roar.

The takeoff—and the ten minutes immediately following as the plane builds altitude—isn’t smooth.

It’s pretty much the exact opposite of smooth.

Beca doesn’t mind a little turbulence, but she has to admit this seems excessive for a plane of this size. She can hear her bag and Chloe’s sliding around in the overhead, and a particularly hard jump of the plane almost makes her smack her head against the window. After that, she takes her headphones off so they don’t become damaged.

At the next heavy jostle, Chloe lets out a sharp gasp and Beca reflexively glances over. Chloe’s knuckles are white from her grip on the armrests and she’s tense as a board, ramrod straight in her seat. Her jaw is clenched, chin tilted down, and her eyes are squeezed tightly closed.

Beca grimaces; she remembers holding Chloe’s hand during the rocky sections of their flights as Bellas. Or, more specifically, she remembers Chloe’s grip nearly shattering all the delicate bones in her own hand. Beca hadn’t minded, though. Not really. All that mattered was that it made Chloe feel better.

She knows it isn’t her place anymore.

She wonders if Chloe has ever flown with Chicago, and if he ever let Chloe squeeze his hand to death.

Beca clears her throat. “So. Rome, huh?”

Chloe’s eyes fly open and she glances over sharply but doesn’t reply. If anything, she seems to draw in on herself even more, looking away just as quickly.

It’s a clear signal for Beca to stop talking now, please. And maybe she really should. Maybe she should stick with her original plan of music, movies, sleep, and—most importantly—seclusion, because there’s a reason they haven’t seen each other in three years and, going into the flight, Beca had had no intention of changing that. She had no real reason to.

But she can’t just sit in silence when Chloe is right there and is obviously terrified. She just can’t. So, with a promise to herself to cease any and all conversation once the turbulence has passed, Beca leans in.

“I’m not gonna bite, you know,” she shrugs, hoping she seems more relaxed than she really is. “And it’s a long flight, so…”

Chloe glances over again, but this time, she doesn’t look away. Her posture doesn’t budge—Beca wouldn’t be surprised if there were finger indents left on Chloe’s armrest—but she does seem to at least consider the fact that Beca is talking to her.

“Yeah,” she eventually says, her voice clipped. “Rome.”

“No layover?” Beca prods, for no reason at all other than she’s worried about potential damage to Chloe’s spine from being that wound up.

“Nope, just—just Rome.”

“Oh, nice. Uh, me too. Rome.”

And then Beca’s completely out of ideas for conversation topics. She settles for bobbing her head, a move that, in accordance with a poorly-timed jostle of the plane, actually does cause her to whack her head against the window. Despite the sharp pain, she pretends not to notice in the hopes that Chloe didn’t, either. It doesn’t quite seem to work, though, because a corner of Chloe’s mouth quirks up and—thankfully—her posture seems to relax just slightly.

“You’re not too busy being a superstar?” Chloe asks, only the barest hint of teasing leaking into her tone.

Beca’s brain stalls for an instant as she processes the fact that Chloe’s actually engaging in conversation. “Superstars get vacations, too,” she shrugs once her brain defrosts.

Chloe’s hands relax on the armrests, color flooding her knuckles again. “I suppose. They don’t get private jets?”

Beca can’t stop herself from smiling just a little, thinking about how incredulous Theo had been when she’d turned down his offer for just that. “I wanted something more low profile.”

As soon as she finishes her sentence, the flight levels, reaching an altitude that doesn’t attempt to knock Beca’s teeth out. The noise level of the engine drops as Beca pops her ears, and she realizes she had basically been shouting at Chloe to be heard.

The turbulence (hopefully) finished for the moment, Beca settles back into her seat as Chloe moves her hands to her own lap, folding them with a soft sigh. If Beca kept the promise she’d made to herself, she would put on her headphones again and block out Chloe for the rest of the flight. It would maybe be for the best, thinking long-term.

But, as in the case of her overpacking, Beca doesn’t listen to herself.

“So—”

“Um—”

They start speaking in unison, and it’s so awkward and this entire situation is so uncomfortable and unexpected that it makes Beca laugh, and just like that, she can’t quite remember why it was she’d made an internal vow of silence to begin with.

After all, it is going to be a long flight.

“You go first,” Beca suggests.

“Oh, okay,” Chloe says, pushing a strand of hair that had escaped from her bun behind her ear. “H—How have you been?” she asks, her voice light and casual.

“Uh, good. Yeah. Busy.” Beca winces, slightly irritated by her own urge to stop talking. She’s given countless interviews on national television—it should be the easiest thing in the world to talk to Chloe. (She knows why it isn’t.) “The last few years were crazy, uh, tours and albums, and… well, we wrapped up this tour last week, and, you know, I’m taking some rest now before I start on the next album. Theo has been kinda… he’s fine, really, but. A vacation would be good,” she finishes with a huff.

She thinks that’s a decent amount of information, a coverage of the surface-level details Chloe should be privy to. It answers Chloe’s question, in a way, without detailing how truly exhausted she has been, how much this latest tour drained her of energy and happiness and how uncertain she is about her future with the label because she had never really wanted to sing, only produce, and her answer doesn’t even hint—doesn’t reveal so much as a single trace—of how honest-to-God lonely she is and how she puts out so much music in such a short time simply because she never wants to go home to her huge, magnificent, outstandingly empty house at the end of the day.

Chloe doesn’t need to know about any of that.

Chloe smiles. “That’s your third album?”

“Yep, third,” Beca nods. “It’s kinda crazy actually. Three albums in three years is kinda a lot.”

Oops. She wasn’t supposed to let that slip. She shifts in her seat, but if Chloe picks up on anything strange (Beca’s glaring need for rest, for instance), she doesn’t say. No; instead, she leans forward, all huge eyes and excited smile and practically oozes enthusiasm as she assures Beca, “They’re really good though! You’re doing amazing.”

Thrown by the sincerity shining from Chloe’s eyes, Beca stammers, “Th—thanks, that’s really—you listened to my albums?”

“Of course I did,” Chloe shakes her head, as though shocked that Beca would question that. “We all did.”

She’s telling the truth. Beca knows because Chloe’s tells—eyes begging Beca to believe her, lips parted and ready to fling another compliment, her upper body leaned toward Beca in earnest—are all in place. Chloe doesn’t lie about music, and certainly not about Beca’s. She never has.

Beca has to look away; her eyes drop to her hands, which fiddle with one another in her lap. “Yeah, I… thanks.”

She doesn’t need to clarify the “we all” part of Chloe’s statement. Beca has been better about keeping in contact with some of the Bellas than she was with Chloe, but still. She hasn’t seen most of them in quite some time. The most recent was Amy, and that had been before her five-month world tour.

Saving Beca from further awkwardness, the drink cart prattles up the aisle ahead of them, stopping first next to a businessman in a full suit. Unfortunately, the same sickly sweet flight attendant from before is one of the women distributing the drinks.

Beca groans softly in annoyance.

“Problem?” Chloe asks, following her line of sight.

“Just. That flight attendant is so fake-nice. You know?”

Chloe grins back at her playfully. “Maybe you’re too real-grumpy.”

“Whatever,” Beca huffs. “She’s paid to be nice to us. I want to know what she’s really thinking.”

“Well, Bec, she does have to deal with a ton of rude, smelly strangers on a flight.”

“Speak for yourself. I showered this morning.”

Looking surprised by Beca’s teasing, Chloe opens her mouth to fire right back, only for the drink cart to pull up next to her. The sugar-soaked voice asks for her drink order, and Beca’s.

They both come away from the encounter with glasses of white wine, complementary for first-class passengers. Beca sips hers, savoring the flavor as well as the feeling of it starting to roll through her limbs, calming her, and overall doing her best to avoid accidentally spilling it anywhere.

“So, how are you?” she asks after a moment, glancing over at Chloe. She isn’t sure how much she wants to hear, in all honesty, but it seems rude not to ask, and for whatever reason, she desperately wants the conversation to keep going.

“Oh, good, yeah,” Chloe replies, then stops.

It’s weird. Beca vaguely wonders if this is an episode of The Twilight Zone and they’d somehow flown into another dimension where Chloe stops speaking after only three relatively useless words.

So, Beca prods. “Vet school is still…?”

“Yeah, I graduate in December. A semester early, actually,” Chloe admits with a shrug and a pleased-looking smile.

“Dude, congrats! That’s a huge deal!”

“Thanks! It was because I did that internship, actually. I had a lot of the hours required, so. Early graduation.”

“Nice, nice, that’s… yeah. Great job.”

“Thanks,” Chloe repeats, then looks down with what might be a little shyness, or simply a desire to end the conversation.

Once again, Beca isn’t sure what to say. She knows she should ask more, like about Chloe’s classes, or maybe even use Chloe’s old internship as some kind of conversational spring-board to jump into reminiscing about the years spent living together in New York, but she doesn’t quite want to take a stroll down memory lane after all this time.

And Beca can’t ask about Chicago. She can’t.

So, she pretends to look out the window for several minutes, the silence hanging between them becoming steadily more uncomfortable as time passes. Beca has no idea if Chloe has dozed off or has started reading or what because she doesn’t want to look away from all the interesting… shapeless white mist outside, which is growing steadily darker as the plane carries them toward Europe and a different time zone.

It gets to the point where Beca is relieved to hear that increasingly-familiar-and-annoyingly sweet voice of the flight attendant, accompanied by the rattle of a rapidly approaching food cart.

“Sushi, chicken, or pasta?” the woman asks. “We also have a menu if you would prefer something else.”

“Uh, sushi’s fine,” Beca mumbles, accepting the tray of it from the attendant.

Chloe orders pasta, and takes the tray with a “Thank you.” She stares down at the plate for a moment as Beca eats, long enough that Beca starts to become concerned that there’s something wrong with it—maybe it’s grotesquely overcooked or contains an errant used Band-Aid—but then Chloe looks over at her, surprise written across her face.

“So… this is really nice, wow.”

Beca stops chewing. “Hmm?”

“The food. The wine. The… everything,” Chloe says with a grand gesture around the first-class cabin.

“Oh.” Beca swallows the bite of sushi and glances around the cabin. It is certainly nice, though nothing that she hasn’t experienced before. Her (Theo’s) private jet is really much nicer, excessively so. “Yeah, I suppose it is,” she says slowly, wondering for the first time why it’s Chloe sitting next to her rather than some snobby, stiff CEO with money to toss out the window. “Hey, why are you flying—”

“Are these mushrooms any good, you think?” Chloe muses as she peers suspiciously down at her pasta, poking her fork at the limp gray fungus mixed into the sauce.

Beca looks over her shoulder at the mushrooms. “They look okay,” she says with a shrug. “Gotta be safer than anything I’d make.”

Chloe pauses her prodding to grin at Beca. “You were a decent chef,” she says, the pitch of her voice raising rather obviously. Her eyes flick away and she takes a massive bite of her pasta. She always has been a bad liar.

Beca raises an eyebrow and tilts her head skeptically. She had tried cooking for Chloe and Amy a few times when they’d lived together in New York, yielding less than ideal results.

Chloe’s nose wrinkles guilty. “Okay, you weren’t great.”

“Chloe.” Beca stares. “I had the fire department come twice!”

“Yeah, okay, but the little sad face you made after was so cute.”

“Mmph.” Beca rolls her eyes, trying to ignore the tingling heat rising in her neck at Chloe calling her “cute.” She highly doubts that anyone at the fire department would have called her “cute” after almost burning down the apartment complex twice. “Still not as bad as the time Amy almost got arrested for assault when she punched the mailman.”

Chloe laughs, a real, full laugh that makes her eyes shine and brightens the air around her. At the sight of it—of Chloe’s sincere happiness—something trickles within Beca’s chest and clicks in her mind and it’s suddenly so wonderfully, unexpectedly, stupidly easy to sit next to Chloe again.

“God, what was it?” Chloe asks, her lips still twitching in amusement even as she continued eating her dinner. “He surprised her or something?”

Beca shakes her head with a smile she knows is bigger than the situation really warrants. “No, remember, she thought he was Bumper in disguise and she was mad at him.”

“Right, yeah. Those two were really… something.”

“May I take your trash?”

Beca looks up and directly into the eyes of her least favorite flight attendant. She’s steering a cart full of dirty dishes and trash and looking pointedly at their empty dinner plates.

“Uh…”

“Totes!” Chloe says happily, reaching for Beca’s plate to stack it on top of her own and hand them to the flight attendant. “Thanks!”

A moment later, the cart rattles away, and Beca’s eyes flick to the TV screen in front of her seat as she considers what to say now. The interruption had thrown off the progress they’d made—despite the ease with which she and Chloe seem to be able to fall into conversation again, three years is still a long time.

She glances at Chloe from the corner of her eye; she’s examining her nails, something she only does when she doesn’t know what to do or say next.

It’s probably a bad idea, but… “So, do you want to watch a movie or something?” Beca asks.

Chloe looks up, eyebrows lifted. “Beca Mitchell wants to watch a movie?”

“Shut up,” Beca groans. She thought she’d heard the last of that a long time ago, but apparently not. “You know I like movies. Just not boring ones.”

Chloe bumps her shoulder against Beca’s teasingly. “Okay, well, you pick a non-boring movie and we can watch it together.”

“Uh… right,” Beca mumbles, trying to scoot farther away from Chloe without her noticing. Yeah, the movie thing was her idea, but Chloe touching her brought back too many memories of Hood Nights and choreography and competition celebrations and—Beca swallows.

Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. She can’t forget that large, camouflage-wearing detail.

She taps the screen in front of her, waking it and wincing at its brightness. She turns it down, noticing that around them, several people have closed their window shades and have reclined, likely preparing to sleep for the majority of the rest of the flight.

Chloe, though, doesn’t look tired. And Beca is far too wound up to do anything other than search for the movie she had in mind. She makes the selection, ignoring Chloe’s look of deep skepticism, and pulls out a pair of earbuds, giving the left to Chloe and keeping the right for herself. Before Chloe has a chance to protest at her movie choice, Beca starts Booksmart, one of her favorites.

Less than two hours later, as the end credits roll, Chloe takes out her earbud with an expression that Beca can only describe as a mix of pity and regret.

“Good, huh?” she asks quietly, mindful of the few people dozing around them.

“Why is that on here?” Chloe replies after a moment.

Beca rolls her eyes. “It’s a cinematic masterpiece, Chloe.”

Chloe wrinkles her nose and lifts her shoulders. “I… it’s kinda lame.”

“What?” Beca gasps, deadly serious. “You’re kinda lame. You laughed during it!”

“Yeah, I did…” Chloe says carefully. “Some parts were good, and I liked, uh, the crazy girl.”

“Gigi.”

“Her,” Chloe nods. “But... the whole thing with the strawberries and the—the dolls? I dunno, that was kinda unnecessary.”

“Okay, yeah,” Beca admits. “But—”

“And that girl in the bathroom was so rude to Amy, like really, I didn’t like her at all.”

“I mean, fine, but the rest of it—”

“Was lame?”

“Was hilarious.”

Chloe purses her lips. “Mmm…”

Beca slaps her hand down on the wide armrest between herself and Chloe. “That’s it!” she says forcefully, and is rewarded with wide blue eyes and a slackened jaw. “Get off this plane!” She lets the corner of her mouth quirk upward just enough for Chloe’s expression to relax and a soft smile to light her face.

“What, am I supposed to just jump out?” Chloe fires back.

“Yep. See ya!” Beca gives a mock wave. “Don’t forget a parachute.”

“Shush,” Chloe says, and then time slows down. Beca can see it coming as if in slow motion, can track the exact movement of Chloe’s hand as it rises from her lap, arching through the air, then falling, falling to rest perfectly on top of her own. Chloe’s skin is soft and warm, but Beca feels as though she’s just plunged her entire arm into a bucket of ice water. It shocks her enough that she pulls away before her brain catches up, her body’s reflexive protective mechanisms taking over.

Hurt flares across Chloe’s face for an instant before her expression goes blank, but it still hits Beca like a truck when she snatches her own hand back as well. Shame rises in Beca’s neck—which is stupid because she has no reason to feel bad about this, about needing space, about protecting herself from the unexpected and… not entirely unwelcome touch. (She wants more than anything to put her hand back under Chloe’s.) But still.

At this point, she’s sitting next to a stranger, and her body knows that even if her brain refuses to believe it.

Which...

“So, you tried to change seats.” The words that leave Beca’s mouth surprise her just as much as they surprise Chloe, who pales and doesn’t quite meet Beca’s eyes.

“What?”

Beca half wants to take it back, but she knows Chloe heard her the first time. “Earlier,” she forces out. “When you got on. You... tried to change seats.” It comes out as more of a question, made worse by the way she lifts one shoulder.

Chloe’s eyebrows draw together and she looks down at her lap, twirling her thumb ring. Beca notices for the first time that there’s no wedding ring (the thought that she could have been sitting next to Chloe Walp rather than Chloe Beale turns her stomach), but before that information really sinks in, Chloe whispers, “Yeah, I… I did.”

Beca nods, lets that sit in the air before taking a breath. “I don’t blame you, you know. I probably would have done the same thing.”

“Beca…”

“I get it. Three years—”

“Three years...” Chloe cuts her off with a shaky breath. “Three years is a really long time. You just—you vanished. You know?” One of Chloe’s hands runs through her hair roughly. “After we knew you for seven years, Bec, you just—you signed with Khaled, and then you vanished.”

“Not completely,” Beca shrugs uncomfortably.

“No, not completely,” Chloe concedes with a single nod. “We got your cards, and Amy and Aubrey and Stacie always said you’d talked to them, but… you didn’t call me.”

“I did once.”

She did, about two months after she and the Bellas had their huge hug-a-thon on stage in front of hundreds of members of the U.S. Armed Forces. She’d called Chloe from her contemporary, freshly-painted, excessively huge studio office in L.A. She called because Chloe was still in New York but living alone since Amy and her newfound millions had moved out of that cramped apartment three days after Beca had, and Beca had known how lonely Chloe would be. So, shoving aside thoughts of a certain soldier with a stupid name, Beca had called. Only for Chloe to talk all about Chicago, telling her all the dates he’d taken her on when she’d stayed in Europe an extra two weeks to be with him, and how he calls as often as he can and how he writes to her and how it’s just like old time love stories and how he did this and that and on and on and on.

Beca hadn’t really felt the need to call after that.

“Yeah,” Chloe says, likely remembering that call. Her eyebrows draw together, but she doesn’t say anything else.

“I mean… you didn’t call me, either,” Beca mutters, glancing out her window at the now black sky.

“I… no. I didn’t.”

“It’s both of us, Chlo.”

“What happened?” Chloe asks, looking for all the world as if she has no possible clue as to why they’d let their friendship grow stale.

Beca almost wants to laugh at her. Or maybe scream. Instead, she says, “We got busy. Things just changed. It happens.”

“But we always said—”

“What can I get you ladies to drink?”

Beca could hug the flight attendant. Neither she nor Chloe orders anything to drink, but the interruption still ends the line of conversation that Beca had been trying so hard to avoid for the past three years.

Deciding that an uncomfortable silence is the best option at the moment, Beca uses her screen to check how much time remains in their flight: about four hours. Unease rolls through her stomach. She just isn’t sure if it’s because the number is too big or too small. She reaches to close the tab on the screen, wanting to power it off.

“I missed you, you know.”

It’s soft, barely a whisper, and clearly said so that Beca could easily ignore it if she wanted to. Beca pauses, her hand hovering in front of the screen. Slowly, her fingers curl, rolling inward to her palm, forming a tight fist that she lets fall to her lap. She really shouldn’t—but then she looks over and Chloe’s watching her, her face open and honest and so unassuming that Beca knows she could never say another word back in response and Chloe wouldn’t blame her.

“I missed you, too,” she says instead, and Chloe swallows.

“Don’t… let’s not do that again. Promise?”

“I…” Beca doesn’t want to make a promise that she’ll inevitably have to break (she can’t bear seeing Chloe with anyone that isn’t her) and she knows how selfish that makes her, but she also can’t bear finding out whether Chloe’s disappointment looks the same as it had years ago. She clears her throat. “Promise,” she says, and if Chloe knows she’s lying, it doesn’t show.

Instead, Chloe smiles and takes a breath. “So, what are these other people doing in first class? Are they all famous singers, too?”

“Oh, um,” Beca has to take a moment to catch up to the change in topic.

“That guy is a master animal trainer,” Chloe whispers with conviction, pointing subtly to the man seated in front of Beca, wearing a suit. “He’s headed to Rome to meet a caravan of lions being transported to a nearby zoo, where they’ll perform tricks for the kids.”

“Mmm.”

“And the woman in the gray sweater? You see her?”

Beca follows Chloe’s gaze diagonally across the aisle to a row ahead of them, where an older woman wearing a gray turtleneck leans heavily against her window, mouth hanging wide as she sleeps through the duration of their flight. She looks so peaceful that Beca’s actually mildly concerned until she sees the steady movement of the woman’s shoulders as she breathes.

“She’s an assassin.”

Beca snorts loudly enough to make the man in front of her jolt in his sleep.

“Quiet!” Chloe chastises, though her own twitching lips betray her. “She’s only stopping in Rome for five hours, during which she has to arrange the deaths of three high-profile members of the French government.”

Across the aisle, the woman twitches and begins to snore softly.

Beca hums and plays along. “Why are three high-profile members of the French government in Rome?”

“Because they thought they’d be safe there. Little did they know that The Black Widow—”

“Is that her?”

“Yes. Little did they know that The Black Widow has been tracking their every movement and is going to take them down.”

“Clearly they were wrong about the safety thing.”

Chloe nods seriously.

Beca makes a show of looking over at the snoring woman. “Well, someone should tell The Black Widow that the guy in front of her was once a knife-thrower in a circus.”

The beaming smile of delighted surprise that Chloe sends her more than makes up for any residual awkwardness from their earlier conversation.

It’s easy. It’s so easy for Beca to lose herself talking to Chloe like this. In fact, she’s 98.3% positive that even if it had been more than three years since they’d seen one another—if it had been five, ten, twenty, even fifty years—they’d still be able to talk like this. Because it’s Chloe. She’s always been able to be like this with Chloe. She could talk like this with Chloe all night.

But. Maybe it’s not a good idea.

Next to her, Chloe stifles a yawn into the back of her hand, but seems to shake herself out of it, trying to stay awake, presumably to continue talking. And if Chloe wants to stay up, that’s fine with Beca.

In search of their next conversation topic, Beca reaches for one of the magazines in front of her, hoping to find some article in there they can talk about or make fun of. She pulls one out of the slot and is horrified to see her own face—in a somewhat unflattering photo—gracing the cover of one of those trashy tabloids.

“Oh god,” she mutters, trying to shove away the magazine before Chloe can see it, but before she can, it’s snatched out of her hand.

“Did you plant this?” Chloe asks as she scrutinizes the cover and headline, which Beca hadn’t had a chance to read.

“I didn’t, I swear!”

Chloe only grins in that teasing way she has. Her eyes drop to the cover and she reads aloud, “‘Pop star Beca Mitchell seen leaving grocery store in a rage: Her secret war with record label over diet.’”

Beca huffs and rolls her eyes. “That’s the best they could do?”

Chloe gasps sharply and she clutches the tabloid to her chest in mock scandal. “You mean these rags don’t always report the truth? No. Way.”

With another eye roll, Beca plucks the magazine from Chloe’s hands and stuffs it back in the slot it came from. “Honestly, I’m still amazed that they can get away with this. It’s false reporting.”

“Come on, at least some have to be true,” Chloe insists, batting her eyes (rather unnecessarily, in Beca’s opinion).

“Well…”

“I mean, not all of the ones about you dating having to be true, but some, right?”

Beca shrugs, trying to look as unassuming as she can while wondering why, of all the ridiculous things the tabloids had written about her, Chloe would choose to ask about that.

“Oh come on, there’s no way you’re single,” Chloe insists with maybe too much enthusiasm, her voice a tad brighter, somehow, than it is normally. “There’s no way!”

“I—uh… first of all, I am single,” Beca says slowly, her eyes flicking to the back of the seat in front of her even as her neck warms. “But not all of the rumors were false, no.”

“Which ones?”

“Um—did you know these seats, like, recline into beds?” Beca asks quickly. “Here, let me…” she fumbles for the button on the side of her seat, pushing back with enough enthusiasm she’s surprised she doesn’t launch herself to the back of the plane. Her seat smoothly reclines into what is basically a soft, slightly-smaller-than-twin-sized bed, and she lies back, staring at the ceiling of the cabin.

Of course, she should have known better—maybe should have faked a bathroom emergency or something instead—because approximately one-sixteenth of a second later, Chloe is reclining in her own seat-bed right next to her and poking her in the shoulder.

“Which rumors are true, then?” Chloe asks persistently. “I’m not leaving until you tell me, so.”

And that doesn’t help anything at all because Beca’s traitorous mind immediately flings itself to a dorm shower, bright eyes, perfect pitch, and rising steam. She shuts that down as well as she can, turning her neck to meet those same bright eyes, sparkling with amusement and maybe something else that Beca can’t identify.

Beca sighs dramatically and flops her arm over her eyes. “Um… I’m definitely not having an affair with Liam Hemsworth,” she says, sliding her arm to her forehead to peek at Chloe.

“Oh, I knew that one was fake,” Chloe dismisses with a wave. “You wouldn’t do that to Miley.”

Beca pauses. “Right.”

“But other ones?”

Beca really doesn’t know why Chloe’s so invested in this.

“I… fine,” she mutters, flopping her hands down to her stomach and lacing her fingers together. “I did go on a date with Kristen Stewart.” She looks sideways, trying to gauge Chloe’s reaction.

Chloe’s eyebrows raise, but she doesn’t look nearly as surprised as Beca had expected. Maybe a slight downturn of the mouth, but that could mean anything; maybe she just doesn’t like supernatural romance movies or something. Before Beca has a chance to decipher the look, Chloe’s plowing on.

“How was that?” she asks, fully rolling to her side facing Beca and sliding a hand under her head to act as a cushion.

Mirroring her, Beca also rolls to her side. “It was good! She’s really great.”

“And pretty.”

“Yeah, and pretty. But I think we were better as friends, you know?”

“Yeah, I… that’s a trend.”

“Hm?”

“Any other girls?”

“Um, not really.” Beca raises a hand to her nose, rubbing it absentmindedly. “With the albums, you know, my label kinda… Well, Theo thought it might be better for my ‘image’—she uses her hands to make air quotes—“or whatever to not really date until I’m more established. And to date more guys than girls,” she adds.

Chloe frowns. “That’s not… it’s your life.”

Beca can’t stop herself from laughing. “Not really. Not when I’m signed to a label.”

Chloe’s frown deepens, but she doesn’t say anything. Beca could kick herself; she really hadn’t meant to say anything like that. Before she can make up for it, though, Chloe leans forward.

“So, do you… prefer girls?” she asks, her eyes flicking away and back. “You never really said.”

Beca swallows. “Oh, I… is it a problem?”

Chloe’s eyes fly wide and her hand flutters toward Beca as if to rest on her arm. “Bec, of course not! I mean, you know I dabble in the lady pond.” She says this at normal volume and with no trace of shyness. Beca kind of admires her for it. “Come on, it’s totally fine.”

Beca nods, smiling to herself a little. “I tried telling you guys first, you know.”

“Hm?”

Beca lets herself smile properly now as she remembers a European stage filled with all of her best friends. “Come on, Chlo,” she urges gently. “I sang ‘Freedom ‘90.’”

“Oh, right...” Chloe breathes, her eyes again flicking away as she bites her lower lip.

Beca’s stomach drops as she remembers what else happened that night. She thinks Chloe might be remembering, too, now, as her eyes take on some faraway place and time. Beca blinks and behind her eyelids she sees it all again, the way Chloe had strutted to Chicago, pulled him into a kiss that had made the earth crumble from beneath Beca’s feet.

She knows Chloe’s thinking of that, too. She can see it in the way she won’t make eye contact and her teeth toy with her lip.

Reality crashes into Beca, stealing the breath from her lungs and making her feel like the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. She knew this was a bad idea, knew she should never have talked to Chloe like this, because when they leave this plane, it’s going to hurt more than ever.

She might as well kick-start the ending now.

“So,” she starts, not recognizing the sound of her own voice. “How’s, um, Chicago? Are—-are you meeting him in Rome, or…”

A shadow crosses Chloe’s face and she shifts, rolling onto her back again to stare at the ceiling. When she still doesn’t answer, Beca begins to worry that she’d somehow put her foot in her mouth.

“Chlo, I—”

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Chloe breathes, still watching the ceiling.

Oh.

Beca rolls to her back as well, unable to look at Chloe directly. She doesn’t want to hear about how Chicago is Chloe’s “soulmate” or whatever is about to happen. She doesn’t want to hear about the white picket fence house and their eventual two-point-five kids or how they’ll renew their wedding vows every ten years or something ridiculously cheesy like that. She doesn’t want to hear how Chloe is going to dedicate her life to a man who absolutely does not deserve her—though, Beca can’t be sure because she never really even talked to him—and doesn’t want to hear how he’s her “better half” or whatever the hell goes with having a soulmate.

Beca wants to throw herself out of the plane, sans parachute, for being the one to even ask about Chicago in the first place.

“I… don’t know,” she says eventually, risking a glance over.

Chloe’s lips press together and she takes a deep breath through her nose. Beca looks back at the ceiling, unable to face Chloe’s disappointment.

“Well, I do,” Chloe says. “I think there can be different kinds of soulmates.” She pushes herself back on her side facing Beca, but Beca doesn’t move. “I think anyone you connect with—boyfriend, girlfriend, family, friends—anyone who just gets you, and you get them, I think that’s a soulmate. And I think you can have more than one soulmate.”

“You think so? More than one?” Beca asks, feeling Chloe’s eyes on the side of her face.

“I hope so. Not sure though. Maybe you only get one soulmate of each kind, you know? But you can have multiple kinds.”

Beca tries her hardest to control her expression. She clears her suddenly dry throat and asks the ceiling, “What... happens if you think someone is your soulmate, like you really, really think so, and then… they’re not?”

Chloe takes another deep breath, one that Beca can hear is jagged around the edges. “Which kind of soulmate are we talking? Because maybe they’re just—maybe they’re just not the kind you thought they were.”

Beca can’t find her voice. She must have lost it somewhere along the line, it having fallen from her throat to bounce around the inside of the plane and slip out a crack in a door seal to disperse among the clouds.

It’s so quiet in the plane, save for the humming white noise of the engine, that Beca’s sure Chloe could hear how hard her heart was beating if only she listened closely enough.

“You know?” Chloe prompts, sounding so small and needy that it snatches Beca’s voice right out of the air to shove it back into place in her throat.

“So, Chicago is your… soulmate.”

Even as Beca’s heart clenches around the word, Chloe starts to laugh, a surprised bubbling noise that makes Beca finally turn to her in shock.

Chloe shakes her head and stops laughing, though a smile still graces her face. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to… no. Chicago isn’t my soulmate. We broke up eight months ago.”

Oh.

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Chloe sighs. “To answer your question, I’m going to Rome, alone, on a first-class plane ticket because I’m treating myself, Beca. I… this was a long time coming.”

Beca’s heart is in her throat now, she’s sure. She knows she’s probably supposed to say something like, “I’m sorry,” in response to the news about Chicago, but she can’t quite manage to lie to Chloe yet again.

Chloe’s eyes drop. “I thought Chicago was my soulmate. I told myself he was. I needed him to be.”

Beca wants to ask the question that dangles there on the tip of her tongue, but she’s too afraid. Afraid of the answer, afraid she knows what Chloe is going to say, afraid that it’s too late. Afraid that she’s wrong.

She feels the moment fading, knows that with every passing second the window gets smaller and smaller, until before long, it’s going to close entirely and she’ll spend the rest of her life wishing she’d said something, wishing she’d had the courage to ask the question and hear the answer that will change everything.

She knows she’ll never forgive herself if she doesn’t say something, so she takes a breath that churns her stomach and opens her mouth.

Chloe snores softly, nothing more than a nasally inhale, but her eyes are closed and she looks more relaxed in sleep than Beca can remember her looking in a long time.

Her window of opportunity closes with a bang and Beca settles back and closes her eyes, mentally berating herself, hoping against hope that all of this had just been a horrible nightmare from which she won’t ever recover.

She is so, so stupid for doing this to herself.

*****************

The next time Beca opens her eyes, the cabin is brightly lit, a result of both the interior lights and unfiltered sunlight streaming through the one or two windows with shades lifted partway. A blueberry muffin, a slice of banana bread, and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee rest on her tray, the airplane’s offered breakfast.

Frowning at the items, she wonders if the flight attendant had just placed them there or if someone had ordered—Beca whips her face to the side so quickly it makes her neck crack. The seat next to her is upright and empty.

Beca fumbles for the lever on the side of her own seat, sitting up and pushing the recliner back to seat form. Her eyes roam the cabin, searching, both hoping and dreading that everything had actually been a result of her imagination. Then, at the front of the cabin, a light near the ceiling flickers off, and Chloe steps out of the restroom, looking exhausted.

Relief tinged with pain rolls through Beca; trying to hide her reaction, she rubs her eyes then focuses on unwrapping the muffin.

“Morning,” Chloe says lightly as she sits down. “So those restrooms are still really tiny.”

“They are,” Beca agrees around a yawn. She hates changing time zones like this. A glance at her watch tells her she got about two hours of sleep. “Did you order this stuff for me?” she asks, gesturing to her breakfast.

Chloe nods. “I hope that’s okay? The cart went by and I didn’t want you to miss the breakfast.”

“It’s good. Thanks.”

“Totes. Um, I think they said before I went to the bathroom that we would be landing in, like, twenty minutes or so, so…”

“Right.” The breakfast on her tray doesn’t seem so appealing anymore. Still, she picks at it, even if it’s just something to do with her hands. Chloe reaches for one of the magazines in front of them and starts to read. Thankfully, Beca isn’t on the cover of this one.

Beca takes a sip of her coffee. Chloe turns a page. Beca finishes off the muffin and starts on the bread. Chloe raises a hand to rub at her cheek as she reads.

Beca’s mind races, but is simultaneously quiet. It’s a weird state, and she blames it on the lack of sleep, time change, and the presence of Chloe. She knows she could—maybe should—say something about Chloe’s whole “soulmate” thing, but now in the relative daylight, it seems too far away to bring up again.

So, they sit in silence, listening to the engine noises grow louder as their altitude drops. Beca pops her ears several times, the plane rocks back and forth unsteadily (Chloe takes several deep breaths and grips the armrests), and, after only a few moments where Beca is positive the plane is going to crash, they touch down on the tarmac with a small bump and the sudden slowing brought on by strong brakes.

Next to her, Chloe relaxes with a sigh.

Beca pushes her window shade up and looks out at what she can see of the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, trying to shove down the rising unease in her stomach.

She knew this would happen. She did this to herself, which probably makes her some sort of sick masochist who gets off on things like falling in love for the second time with the same person only to have her walk away without a backward glance. Again, for the second time.

Beca’s problem isn’t that she never loved Chloe back (she likes to think Chloe was in love with her, too, once). Her problem is that she absolutely, totally, utterly sucks at the timing of these things.

The plane comes to a stop that jerks Beca to the present. The stale air fills with the metallic clink of unbuckling seat belts and melodic chimes as people check their phones and take them off airplane mode.

Beside her, Chloe unbuckles and stands with a stretch, reaching into the overhead bin.

Panic rises inside Beca’s chest, making her fumble with her own seat belt before finally undoing and standing with screaming, sore muscles, having to bend her neck awkwardly to avoid bumping her head on the overhead.

“Well, uh, have fun in Rome,” she says, rubbing at the back of her neck.

“Thanks, you too.” Chloe gets her bag down and rests it on the seat, sparing Beca a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Stay in touch?”

“For sure.” Liar.

The falsely-sugary flight attendant opens the door, and immediately passengers in first-class begin to walk out. Chloe’s eyes flick to the queue, then back to Beca.

“Bye, then,” she says, too brightly.

“Bye.”

With only a second’s hesitation—one that might even have been a figment of Beca’s hopeful imagination—Chloe picks up her duffle bag and takes her place in line. She takes a step forward, and Beca reaches out to catch her shoulder.

“Wait, Chlo—” Chloe stops instantly, her eyes wide and maybe a little hopeful. Behind her, the line stalls. “Why were you talking about soulmates?” Beca asks in a rush, desperation driving her voice to a higher pitch than normal.

Chloe’s eyes flick to the growing line behind her, many heads peering around to see what the hold-up is. Her mouth opens, then closes again.

“Please,” Beca whispers, her grip on Chloe’s arm never loosening. “Please.”

Chloe’s eyes finally meet hers. Beca’s stunned to see they’re swimming. “I was trying to tell you,” Chloe breathes. “Chicago wasn’t my soulmate because I’d already found mine wandering around an Activities Fair.”

Surely, the plane can’t have landed. It was impossible for the plane to have landed, because Beca’s still 30,000 feet in the air and falling, falling fast, the floor having dropped out from under her feet.

She recoils, reclaiming her arm, shaking her head, because she’d heard wrong, she had to have, or she’d misunderstood, because there’s no possible way Chloe had said those words.

Beca doesn’t get a chance to ask her to repeat it, though, because as soon as she takes her hand from Chloe’s arm, Chloe’s moving, walking down the aisle to exit the plane and leave Beca behind. Immediately, the passengers that had formed a line behind her press forward, filling the aisle and lengthening the distance between her and Beca by the second.

Beca doesn’t blame her one bit. If their positions were reversed and she had been the one to drop a confession like that, she’d be running away as fast as she could, too.

She has to catch up.

“Chloe, wait!” she calls, but either Chloe doesn’t hear her or purposefully ignores her, because Beca is forced to watch the back of her head as she rounds the corner of the aisle ahead to step out of the plane.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit…” Beca chants under her breath. She shoves her way into the aisle, ignoring the sounds of protest emitted by the passengers that had technically been in line—which, they’d totally butted in front of her to begin with, rude—and whirls, snatching her back from the overhead. It takes everything in her not to rush forward and send people stumbling, shoving her way out of the plane, but she knows that would more than likely just get her in trouble with customs or something.

So she’s forced to wait, to inch her way forward with the rest of them, while knowing that with every moment that passes, Chloe is only getting farther and farther away.

“Come on, come on, come on…”

With one last parting wave and a “Thank you for choosing us,” from Beca’s least-favorite flight attendant, Beca’s free, bursting forward from the plane with so much enthusiasm she almost topples over and into the tunnel connecting the plane and their gate.

“Chloe!” she calls out desperately, but there’s no sign of her.

Beca hates cardio.

She might make an exception, though, just this once. With more agility than she knew she still had in her exhausted body, Beca surges forward, her bag clutched close to her chest, and ducks and weaves around other passengers, trying desperately to get to the end of the tunnel and to Chloe. She’d chase her through the entire airport and across all of Rome if she had to.

She stalls behind a slow-moving couple, tottering along as if this connecting tunnel is their favorite place on earth. “Move!” she shouts at the back of their heads, and the man starts and flings himself to the side, creating enough space for Beca to squeeze through and then she’s running again and there’s the end of the tunnel and now she’s at the gate and—and there’s the red hair.

“CHLOE!” she nearly screams it, and by some miracle, Chloe stops and whirls, her eyes flying wide when Beca doesn’t stop, only runs to her and throws her bag to the ground and reaches forward, her hands cupping Chloe’s cheeks and pulling her into a kiss that Beca knows will change everything.

There’s a beat where Chloe doesn’t respond and fear explodes in Beca’s mind.

But then Chloe’s arms wrap around her waist and the lips under Beca’s soften until Chloe’s kissing her back, and the fear is replaced by exaltation so strong that Beca can’t be sure it doesn’t lift her off her feet.

Minutes, hours, days later, they finally separate, and Beca’s eyes flutter open to take in Chloe’s flushed cheeks, swollen lips, and gleaming eyes.

“I…” Beca has to take a deep breath. “Is that what you meant?”

Chloe’s face breaks into a huge smile and she nods frantically. “Yes, I—yes, I meant you.”

“Good,” Beca smiles. She doesn’t think she’ll ever stop smiling now. “Because I—you—the whole thing—you’re my, uh, you know—”

Chloe stops her babbling by pressing a quick kiss to her lips, one that still makes Beca’s knees weaken. “I know,” she says, then laughs. “So, you ran up that tunnel, huh?”

“Yep, and I’d do it again,” Beca says proudly, standing as tall as she can.

Chloe’s eyes sparkle. “You know you would have caught up with me at customs, right? Or baggage claim? You didn’t have to run.”

Beca blinks. “Uh.”

“It’s okay,” Chloe grins, lacing their fingers together. “I’m glad you did.”

#bechloe #bechloe fic #my writing #beca mitchell #chloe beale #bechloe week 2019 #i'd suggest reading on ao3 or ffn cuz formatting

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