Second date.
With Beca’s confession, something broke. It’s not so much that they suddenly start talking about it all the time – they don’t – or that everything is ok again – it isn’t – but something has shifted, and things are maybe on the way to being fine.
It began with Chloe waking up the next morning, eyes puffy and cheeks salty and sore, and creeping into Beca’s bed, with a nuzzled kiss at the nape of her neck, with a murmured “Chloe?” and a hushed “I’m here”, and it carried on that night with Beca on the sofa (rather than the armchair she had renegaded herself to) and a shared blanket, with no space between them and hands linked in Chloe’s lap, and it finally settled into place as two warm bodies settled next to each other in Beca’s bed.
For the next two weeks, they didn’t talk about It. They talked a lot – about Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars (“Why do all the queer women die Chlo? Why can’t Emily keep a girlfriend for more than 5 minutes when everyone elses sig-Os have been around for 6 season?”), about the Bella’s setlist (“I’ve been talking to Legacy and boy can that girl write songs. Screw covers Chlo, you guys should sing an original”) and about Chloe’s degree (“Why oh why did I do organic again Beca? Why? Why didn’t I just stick to the quantum mechanics and leave all these curly arrowed mechanisms behind?”) and almost every other topic under the sun, but they did not talk about It. Occasionally, references were made to the future, to ‘next year’ and ‘after’, but they almost always came from Chloe, and they were almost always followed with a noncommittal humming noise on Beca’s part, and a swift change of the subject. Except on the one occasion it ended differently.
Beca had been quiet all day. Beca was sometimes quiet these days, and Chloe tried, she tried to respect that, but anyone who has met Chloe knows that silence is not her strong suit, and that her parents call her a random number generator for her ability to pluck new topics of conversation out of thin air if necessary. (incidentally, this comes in extremely useful whenever they go and visit Chloe’s grandma; it bothers Chloe not one bit that the elderly lady is utterly unable to contribute anything other than ‘that’s nice dear’ to a conversation, she can fill the silence like a champ). So when Beca was being quiet as they sat together on the sofa, with some mindless music video channel playing in the background, Chloe just had to speak.
“So, are you excited for FrostTown Fair?!” she burst out with – the festival that the Make a Wish foundation had got them tickets for was that weekend, only 5 days away, and the final line up of performers had been announced, including Beca’s favourite cynic and lyric genius, Tim Minchin. The other girls in the house had been talking excitedly about it for weeks, but for some reason Beca had taken to falling silent every time the topic came up.
Beca stiffened. Chloe could feel the tension in the other girl’s shoulders, and when she turned to look at the girl beside her, Beca’s eyebrows were furrowed and her lip was between her teeth.
“Umm… about that. “ Beca said, quietly, as if she wasn’t really willing to believe she was talking at all.
“What Bec? Don’t you want to go? Aren’t you excited?” Chloe began, “Because I mean, it’s going to be so fun. W’ere all going to go, and well all help you, and if you’re worried abut, well, anything, you know, we’ll all-”
“It’s not that, Chlo. It’s just that I ummm…. “
“You what Becs?” Chloe asked, almost unsure of herself (as if that was something Chloe Beale ever was).
“I gave the tickets back.”
“...”
Stunned silence
“You… gave them back? How?” Chloe asked, confused, a little hurt, but mostly just not understanding what Beca was saying.
“Iwas feeling really shitty like, super shitty. And I…. I rang the Make a Wish foundation. I asked them if, if I gave my wish back, they would still be able to use the money to help other kids get their wishes. And they said yes. And so I gave it back. I told them….”
“You told them what,Beca?” Chloe asked, although it didn’t sound like a question, more like a statement.
“I told them that I was you, and that I’d… died. I told them I’d died and that was why I couldn’t use the tickets anymore.”
Stunned silence, again.
“I’m so sorry Chloe. I was feeling so upset, and frustrated, and angry. It was the day after my doctors appointment, the day after they told me… what they told me. And I was just so angry that , just when I thought the future was a thing that I could think about again, everything was uncertain and scary and unfair again. I was supposed to have finished chemo, to be all cured, to be celebrating finally being free and able to do normal stuff by going to that festival with you guys, and suddenly everything was gone again. I wasn’t going to be healthy. I was still going to have cancer. Nothing would be normal. And then then, when they said that they would be able to use the money for another wish, that’s when I decided Because even though at he start of that conversation I felt shitty and sad and scared and angry, it made me feel a tiny bit better that something good was going to happen for someone else. And I know I wasn’t really giving anything because it wasn’t really mine in the first place but…. It still made me feel better. I’m so sorry Chloe. I know how hard you worked and I- I’m sorry.”
For a few minutes, after Beca’s unusually impassioned and length monologue, there was silence. And then Chloe wrapped her arms round the small brunette next to her.
“I’m sorry Becs,” she said softly. “I’m sorry that you felt that way, and I’m sorry that we won’t be able to go. But i’m glad that someone else can have the wish.”
“Thank you for not being mad at me,” Beca ventured.
“Oh, I’m mad,” Chloe replied, perking up slightly, “but I already know how you’re going to make it up to me.”
“Oh yeah?” Beca grinned, this sounded more like her Chloe, not that sad, soft, sombre Chloe of a second ago.
“Yep! Date night.”
“Date night?”
“Uh-huh”
“I’m making up for ruining a weekend you’d been planning for months by taking you on a date?”
“Nope! You’re making up for ruining a weekend with our housemates that I’d been planning for months by letting me take you on a date! How you make it up to the others is entirely up to you.”
And the scheming began.
First off, Beca had to tell her housemates that their long-awaited trip to London for the festival was, in fact, cancelled. And explain to them why.
The day after her conversation with Chloe, after 24 hours of frantic activity on her part, she had called a house meeting. She sat on the coffee table, facing the sofa, bottom lip trapped between her teeth and her right hand tapping an incessant rhythm on the top of a pile of CDs stacked next a place of cookies on the table next to her, the tempo of her anxiety only increasing as the Bellas filtered in one by one. When they were all there, she met Chloe’s eye, sitting opposite her in one corner of the sofa, with Amy and Stacie squished in next to her, and Emily’s lanky frame folded up, perched on the arm. Although not technically a member of the “house”, Aubrey was curled up on the floor in front of the sofa, back resting on Stacie’s legs, and the two girls’ hands entwined on the blonde’s shoulder. Not breaking eye contact with Beca, Chloe took a deep breath, looking at Beca to do the same, and then nodded. Beca tried not to look at the eyes of the other Bellas, all of whom looked confused.
“So… Guys. I… have some news. Most of which, I’m not gonna lie, is not good, so, I’m y’know, sorry in advance, and that,” she stumbled over her words awkwardly, wishing she had rehearsed this, wishing she could pull this off like a well-oiled Bella performance. But alas, that was not the case. She was shaking slightly now, her breath that much harder to catch as her lungs seem to shiver with the rest of her body. Her eyes were wide and she really wasn’t sure she was going to be able to get any of these words out. She was shaking more now and-
-again, she caught Chloe’s eye, and again the older girl kept her eye contact and took a deep breath, this time with her hand on her chest. Beca mirrored her actions, but it wasn’t until Chloe shuffled forward (not without difficulty, squashed as she was between the arm of the sofa and the arm of Fat Amy), til she could get herself off the sofa, and joined Beca perched on the edge of the coffee table.
Chloe was somehow not shaking. Since her conversation with Beca the day before, a sense of calm had seemed to descend on her. Beca was scared and angry and afraid and Beca needed her help. Therefore, she would, and could, help her.
“You all know Beca had a CT scan a couple of weeks ago,” Chloe began, her voice calm and measured, her hand clasped in Beca’s, grounding the girl next to her, saying the things she couldn’t say.
“We hoped that she was gonna get the all clear at that scan, but what it actually showed is that the tumour has got bigger. It’s spread from the bones in her leg, to the blood vessels going up to her thigh, and they want her to have her leg amputated mid-thigh. Soon, Obviously Beca is not thrilled at this idea”
Silence. Another deep breath.
“In light of that, Beca was feeling shitty and grumpy, and cancelled the tickets for next weekend’s Frost Fair. She’s-”
“-I’m really sorry, guys.” Beca finally chimed in, eyes downcast, feeling thoroughly ashamed at herself. If the situation had been literally anything other than what it was, Chloe might have rolled her eyes: as if anyone was going to remember to be cross with her after it had just been announced that she had to have her leg amputated, Beca was even more ridiculous than she had originally estimated.
There was silence. Emily look mildly horrified. Stacie and Aubrey looked unsurprised, although if Beca had looked, which she didn’t, she would have noticed that both girls’ knuckles had whitened, slightly, from the force with which they gripped each other’s hands. Amy’s head was cocked to the side, and she opened her moth without speaking for a moment before-
“Well shortstack, it’s pretty crappy that we don’t get to go to that awesome music festival and listen to the Bard of my homeland singing explicitly blasphemous but hilarious songs, but it is at least 12 times shitter that you’re joining the ranks of the peg-legged shortly. The cookies are the consolation prize, right?” she proclaimed, reaching forward from her seat on the couch for the plate of cookies next to Beca, “although, you could be a pirate, and that could be fun…”
“I’m so sorry Beca,” Emily finally stuttered, tears in her eyes, “don’t worry like, at all, about the tickets, we just umm… we just want to help you,” the younger girl trailed off, hot tears trickling down her face now as Beca reached forward and grabbed her hand sympathetically.
“Thanks Em,” Beca almost whispered, giving her friend’s hand a squeeze. True, it was Beca who was supposed to be saying that some surgeon she had yet to meet could reprieve her of one of her four crucial limbs, but she had been sitting on this information for two weeks, and was a whole 14 months older than Emily. She had this.
No one really knew what to say at this point. Every had questions, but in the past few months a general understanding had developed amongst the Bellas that they wouldn’t burden Beca with the weight of all of those questions. As a general rule, questions were directed at Stacie, as the Bella with the most medical knowledge and access to sensible sources, and were absolutely not directed at Beca, or Chloe, or google, because that way lay nightmares and misinformation. So Beca was blissfully ignorant of the frantic, panicked, and tearful discussion that took place in Stacie’s room that afternoon, while she and Chloe snuggled in bed to marathon the Gilmore Girl’s.
(In a fit of solidarity, and in keeping with their Universities bizarre emphasis on the fact that they could take a year out of their degree up to three times with barely any good reason should they so feel the need, Chloe had abandoned Chemistry for the year. Beca had, of course, postponed her third and final year again, and neither girl was in any way trying to consider the amount of money they would owe to the Student Loans Company by the time either of them actually graduated. Thank God for single parents and maintenance grants, was all Beca had to say on the subject of money. To cut a long story short, they both had time on their hands these days, and they largely spent it together, in bed, watching Gilmore Girls. Because life in Stars Hollow in the early noughties was infinitely better than Bristol 2k16.)
That Friday, the day that Chloe was taking Beca out to make up for Beca screwing up (Beca was never gonna understand that girl but she was not complaining), Chloe herself was suspiciously absent. Beca woke up, cocooned as usual in her and Chloe’s bed (because who was she kidding about it being her bed), and for a second just revelled in the feeling of warmth and softness the duvet and the arms wrapped around her brought. She sleepily opened her eyes to the dimly lit room, and then –
“Stacie?!”
“Shhhh Bec, too early,” Stacie murmured from behind her, hot breath on the back of Beca’s bare neck, her distinctly not red or curly hair rustling under Beca’s chin.
“Stacie, where the hell is my girlfriend, and, in the nicest possible way, what the hell are you doing here?!”
Stacie sighed, apparently resigned to the fact that she was expected to be awake, and shifted back from Beca slightly, allowing the smaller girl to roll over and look at her.
“Chloe had to go into uni, she had an early meeting with her educational supervisor, she’s not sure when she’s gonna be back but maybe not til this afternoon. Something about some lab work being left over.” Stacie recited. Recited, as if she’d learnt what she was supposed to say before she’d even said it.
“Right…,” Beca replied, not entirely sure what was going on, but knowing the brunette in front of her was far too stubborn to tell the truth if she wasn’t supposed to be, “and you’re here because…?”
“Because apparently your whiny ass can’t sleep without being a human teddy bear. She didn’t want you to get cold, or something? Anyway, because she asked me to be, so nuh,” Stacie replied, a little more energetic now, sounding more like herself and emphasising her point by sticking her tongue out in Beca’s face.
“Ewwww. Morning breath. You wanna brush your teeth?” Beca replied with a wrinkled nose. She didn’t buy this meeting business, but if Chloe was going for a surprise date, Beca wasn’t going to stop her. And brushing her teeth was still super boring.
And so the day wore on, with no sign from Chloe. Beca had a few texts from her (My meeting was super long and I am SO BORED / This lab is dull and slow and blah I just wanna know who Rory picks once and for all goddammit / Did someone make you lunch? Please say someone made you lunch and you didn’t try to make lunch. / Don’t worry, you’re gonna see me soon! Stace is gonna bring you and the girls to Ikea – they need furniture and we need a DATE) but nothing about Chloe’s bright and airy tone over text based communication was making Beca any less suspicious. Still, she had no idea where the girl could be, so she buckled down and let Stacie take care of her for the day. She didn’t really need taking care of, but she knew for some reason it made the girls feel better when she let them do things for her, and she wasn’t really complaining about Aubrey making her cheese on toast for lunch, or Emily running upstairs to get her laptop charger for her when the dreaded “You have 10% remaining” message popped up on screen, a mere 57 minutes into Serenity.
At 2.30pm, just after cheese on toast and serenity, when Beca was warm and sleepy, she was instructed to put on nice jeans and a nice top, and get in the car. Apparently they were going to Ikea.
“Ikea?” she asked sceptically, getting changed in her room while Stacie sat on her bed.
“Yep!” Stacie replied, mouth popping on the ‘p’ and leaning back on her hands, “Ikea. Now hurry up Becs, we’ve got things to do.
“Like buy furniture?” Beca muttered under breath, but she allowed herself to be chivied out the house, along with Amy and Emily, by a slightly flustered Stacie, to Aubrey’s waiting car. Piled in the back seat with Emily and Stacie (you don’t even need to know Amy’s argument for being in the front to guess that it was both ridiculous, and compelling), warm with a blanket snug on her lap and sleepy with her belly full of toasted cheese, it came as a surprise to exactly no one, and was in exactly noone’s plans, that Beca fell asleep.
Beca was disorientated when she woke up, brain fuzzy and unsure where exactly she was. The car. Stacie. Aubrey. Chloe. Ikea. Ikea?
It was dark outside, but there were bright lights everywhere. The car wasn’t moving anymore, and her right side was cold where Stacie and Emily weren’t anymore, and it was then that Beca realised what had woken her up: a smiling, glowing Chloe was knocking on the window she had been sleeping against. Slowly, stiff from where she had been curled up to sleep, Beca sat up and wound down the window.
“Hi!”
“Hey… Where were you Chlo? And where are you? I mean where are we?” Beca asked, still confused and sleep addled.
Chloe smiled sympathetically, “well get out the car, silly, and you’ll see!”
Limbs still protesting at their changing position, Beca unfolded herself from her ball, rolled down the window and got out of the car, Chloe quickly passing her her crutches, to see…
The Royal Albert Hall. FrostTown Fair. Tim Minchin.
“Chloe, you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did!”
“How?!”
“I got up at 4am, I snuck Stacie into bed with you-“
“-that, I noticed,”
“-and I got the 5am Megabus to London, I was in the queue by 9 and… here we are!”
At that point, Beca let her crutches fall to either side of her and threw herself at her girlfriend, hands on the other girl’s rosie cheeks, and kissed her furiously.
“You” – kiss – “are” – “the” – “best” – “girlfriend” – “EVER!” she yelled between kisses. And picking up Beca's crutches from the floor, off they went.
The night went off without a hitch. The ‘seats’ they had were in fact standing, but Chloe being Chloe had bought one of those collapsible stool situations with her, and had packed a bag full of illicit drinks and snacks to keep the six girls going all evening. Tim Minchin with full orchestra was even better than any of them had imagined, and if anyone thought it was utterly ridiculous of Amy to suggest that he was either her third cousin twice removed, or one of her many ex-boyfriends, none of them pointed it out. Amy and Emily graciously agreed to use the two train tickets back to Bristol that Chloe had already purchased, which meant Beca finished the evening lying across the back seat of Aubrey’s car, head on Chloe’s lap, with her mind racing at 100 miles an hour. It wasn’t until almost an hour into the journey, when Stacie was sound asleep in the front seat, that the adrenaline finally began to wear off and Beca began to feel sleepy. Beca’s eyes were drooping closed but she knew there were two things she had to say to Chloe before sleep really overtook her.
“That was the best night of my life, Chlo,” she murmed sleepily into Chloe’s thigh, the soothing sensation of Chloe’s hand stroking the back of her neck only adding to her sleepiness.
“Mine too Becs,” Chloe whispered back.
“I’m gonna do it Chlo. I’ve got an appointment on Monday and-“ Beca gave an enormous yawn – “I’m gonna say yes. I’m gonna sign the form. I’m gonna do it.”