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Soulmates are stupid.
That’s what ten-year-old Beca thinks as she watches her dad pack their van and drive off with his new girlfriend in the passenger seat. Her mother is sitting on the living room couch, staring blankly at the wall and listening to the record player blare out a Rolling Stones song Beca doesn’t know the title of. It was her parents’ Reveal song, the one that first brought them together, the one that had been playing in both of their heads when they met. It’s supposed to be special. An anthem that defines their relationship. Now it sounds like a funeral dirge and fills the living room with an air of loss and emptiness.
And somewhere out there in the world, her soulmate has an inexplicably upbeat song stuck in their head, a wordless melody that throws off Beca’s somber mood and unintentionally pisses her off.
Soulmates are overrated.
Thirteen-year-old Beca thinks, listening to yet another one of her friends as she gushes about what song her soulmate has stuck in their head today. All of her classmates are obsessed with their soulmates and what their Reveal song will be, asking each other what songs they have stuck in their heads on a daily basis as if they have to find their One True Loves immediately and within the limitations of their school. They act like these people are the only ones they’ll ever interact with for the rest of their lives.
A soft melody starts playing in her head, sounding suspiciously like “Colors of the Wind,” and Beca wonders what the hell kind of fairytale her soulmate is living in.
She sits there for a moment, half-listening to her friends gush about True Loves and half-listening to what is basically the entire soundtrack of Pocahontas, and suddenly gets an idea.
Digging into her backpack for her scratched-up and overused mp3 player, she scrolls through her playlist and picks out a Paramore song to put on blast. When the song is over, she rewinds and plays it again. The song is stuck in her head by the end of lunch, and Beca smiles at the lack of Pocahontas. If this soulmate thing is real, then Beca would rather die than have her Reveal song be something as cliche as a Disney soundtrack.
The next morning, Beca wakes up to a different Paramore song stuck in her head, and she finds herself smiling despite the disgustingly early hour.
Her soulmate’s been doing some research.
Beca scrolls through her mp3 again and picks out a song by Taking Back Sunday next, repeating the process and ingraining it in her head. For the next few weeks, she follows the same routine, introducing different artists and genres to whoever the hell this Disney-loving soulmate is. Not even a month later, she wakes up to a completely unfamiliar song in her head.
She quickly googles the lyrics and it pulls up a band called Hey Monday. Beca listens to their album and loves them.
And she thinks maybe, just maybe, the idea of a soulmate isn’t so bad. At the very least, they have agreeable tastes in music, and Beca feels a little giddy at the thought of them sharing and connecting through music like this; none of her friends talk about exchanging songs so actively. Maybe she can make the best of this connection.
Soulmates are just wishful thinking.
Is what sixteen-year-old Beca thinks as she reluctantly rubs comforting circles on her best friend’s back as she cries over yet another boy who had lied about their Reveal song, who she had thought was The One. Vowing to never rely on her soulmate for love and affection, Beca actively starts ignoring the very idea of a predetermined relationship.
Predetermined lover interest? Pass. A long distance connection to some random guy she’s never met before? Pass. Random songs floating in her head? Whatever, it keeps her mind occupied, even if Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” is plays on loop at the most inappropriate times.
But it’s not something she can really ignore. They continue sharing songs and bands with each other, and one day when Beca googles the lyrics she has stuck floating around in her head, they turn up zero results. And she acknowledges with quite a bit of pride that her soulmate, if she still wants to believe in that nonsense, is probably a songwriter creating original content. The words are a little naive and the melodies are pretty basic, but something about them tugs at Beca’s mind. Ironically, she gets them stuck in her head.
She bitterly (but actually not-so-bitterly) hopes this songwriter is happy that their songs are infecting Beca’s mind.
These songs in her head start to grow louder, gaining some confidence, as Beca enters her senior year of high school. And from them, she decides that she wants to move to LA and become a music producer.
It has nothing to do with the beautiful lyrics and melodies that constantly swim through her head. No, absolutely not. But she can admit to herself that whoever she’s unwillingly connected to is somewhat of a muse. It sounds infinitely more cheesy and romantic, but Beca tries to see everything in a practically beneficial way.
She immerses herself in the world of music, borrowing CD after CD from her local library and bookmarking YouTube videos of covers that throw unique twists in popular songs.
She takes every music theory class her school has to offer, signing up for even more advanced classes online during the summer.
She spends hours on her piano, playing with different chords and harmonies and rhythms and eventually adding vocals to round it all out.
She begs her mom for an expensive mixing console for Christmas, for her birthday, for Easter, for anything until she finally caves and gifts it to Beca to commemorate her high school graduation.
She pulls countless all-nighters over the summer and well into the first semester of her college, experimenting with the console and remixing and mashing up pop hits.
But for some reason, she has difficulty working on the songs from her soulmate. They’re beautiful, original, raw, and full of potential, and Beca knows a studio won’t hire her unless she has some original content in her portfolio. And while she’d scribbled down the lyrics and recorded the basic melodies of these unnamed, uncredited songs, it doesn’t feel right to work on them.
Strictly speaking, she knows that they’re not her songs to produce. Whenever someone asks her what she’s working on, Beca shows them all of her mashups and remixes. Those are usually enough to impress anyone asking, and a ton of her Barden floormates starts referring to her as DJ Becs, blasting her songs at dorm parties.
When Beca first meets Chloe Beale at the activities fair, she immediately thinks this happy-go-lucky girl is her soulmate.
And she’s fucking pissed about it.
One, because Chloe is perfect for her in every way. Despite having polar opposite personalities, they vibe surprisingly well and seem to understand each other in ways no one, not even Aubrey, does. Yes, she infiltrates Beca’s shower (what the hell was she doing in the freshmen dorms anyway?) and yes, she encourages them to sing her friggen lady jam together, but Beca can feel the connection between them even before she heard their perfect harmony.
Two, because Chloe had already found her soulmate. Tom pops his head in almost immediately after they’re finished singing naked in the shower, and while Beca hopes to every deity she can think of that he’s just a fling — a creepy, perverted fling — they’re the real deal.
After years of convincing herself that soulmates are dumb and nonexistent, getting rejected by someone she saw as a miraculous cure to her vehement disbelief hurt Beca more than expected. She knows that her repulsion of the notion of a soulmate doesn’t actually mean she doesn’t have one. The songs dancing around in her head are more than enough proof. But she had grown so used to those songs that she had forgotten they were tied to a soulmate, not just a musical partner.
Fortunately, there’s an upside. Chloe opens her eyes in a way she never expected: her soulmate could be a girl. She can’t put a finger on why the thought hadn’t occurred to her before, but the revelation explains all of the Taylor Swift and Disney songs that frequently played from the other end.
So, now that she’s in college, now that she has a solid friend group with the Bellas (sans Aubrey, who probably hates her guts in every imaginable way), now that she knows she can feel love and devotion to someone who isn’t her soulmate, and now that she’s basically free to do whatever the fuck she wants, Beca dives even further into the world of music.
She starts to make demos out of the originals playing in her head, not daring to actually send them to a record company but further developing the sound of each track. It’s much more refreshing and rewarding than just mixing up existing songs, and she breezes through college creating demo after demo. The Bellas rise in status after their revolutionary ICCA championship victory, and Beca feels invincible.
That is, until the Bellas have their title stripped away. And her internship at Residual Heat starts wearing down her ego. And their new and inexperienced Bella legacy joining them at the lowest point of their reputation. And her increasing conflict with Chloe’s hysteria with Bellas and Worlds.
Senior year hits Beca like a truck, and suddenly she’s reeling from the astounding lack of real accomplishments she’s made. She wants to be a music producer, and yet she’s produced absolutely nothing of her own; her dependency on her muse starts to look worse and worse the more experienced she gets with producing tracks. Beca realizes that if she ever wants these demos to go live, she’ll actually have to meet this soulmate and actively collaborate with them.
And she’s spending less and less time with the girls, a fact Beca prayed that no one else realized yet. She knows Chloe is obsessively focused on Worlds and probably won’t notice her co-captain’s absence if Beca just delivers on her part of the set, but even that part is proving to be a chore while juggling everything else in her life.
And Emily.
Poor Emily Junk, joining the Bellas almost immediately after they had made a spectacular fool of themselves on national television. Beca had to commend this girl’s perseverance to audition for them after such a disgraceful performance, but she also had to question Emily’s sanity. The girl is tall, beautiful, friendly, and incredibly kind, constantly surrounded with an air of innocence that clashes wildly with the destructive and volatile air that surrounds the other Bellas.
Beca listens to the argument going on downstairs from her room in the attic, shaking her head slowly as Fat Amy belittles poor Emily yet again. Though she can’t pick up their exact words through the headphones, she thinks she hears Stacie and Cynthia Rose come to her rescue.
They’ve literally been trying to decide on pizza toppings for the past half hour. This is what Emily had chosen to get herself into. Beca rolls her eyes to herself as the commotion downstairs dies down. The girls are insane, but they’re family. She just hopes that Emily can eventually feel the same.
After a few frustrating minutes of absolutely no progress, Beca leans back and rips off her headphones just in time to hear footsteps coming up the attic stairs. She’s really not in the mood to talk to anyone at the moment, so she puts her head in her hands and pulls on her annoyed expression. But that facade drops when she sees Emily out of the corner of her eye. Without a door to knock on, the Emily settles for rapping her knuckles against the banister to get Beca’s attention.
“Hey, Chloe told me to tell you that pizza’s here.”
“Message received,” Beca confirms absently, eyes fixed on her laptop screen. Emily catches a glimpse of the screen and the confusing but colorful gadgets that Beca is playing around with.
“Whoa! Are you mixing?” she asks, voice rising with excitement.
“Sort of,” Beca responds somewhat evasively.
“That’s so cool! For Worlds?” Emily presses, and Beca’s filled with the familiar sense of guilt that usually accompanies Chloe’s same question.
“Uh, not exactly. It’s more of a…side project, I guess,” she settles, not wanting to elaborate on either the soulmate thing or the internship thing. Emily’s smile drops a little as if sensing Beca’s reluctance to share details, and she instantly regrets treating her so coldly. She’s been more absent than not at Bellas rehearsals because of the internship, and she’d heard from Stacie that Emily is probably intimidated by Beca. Well, the Bellas in general, but especially Beca.
The last thing she wants is to be feared by a gigantic puppy of a freshman.
“You uh, wanna hear?” She doesn’t know what makes her say it, but there’s something about Emily that makes her feel like she wants to share everything.
“Hell yeah, I wanna hear!”
Beca smiles at the enthusiasm and hands her the headphones. She hits the rewind button and starts the song from the beginning, and Emily shoots her a thumbs up and a smile to let her know that it’s playing. It’s barely twenty seconds into the song when her eyes go wide as dinner plates.
“Is it too loud?” Beca asks, lowering the volume a little.
Emily shakes her head, looking appalled. “No, it’s just… this… this is my song.”
Beca stares at her blankly, her mouth suddenly going dry. “Wh… what?”
“You’re singing my song. This is definitely ‘Flashlight.’ Oh, my stars. You’re working on my song. That’s amazing,” she says breathlessly. “I wrote this. I sang it for my audition for the Bellas, but I had no idea they recorded it for you,” she says, looking embarrassed. “But I didn’t… sing them…that part. It’s actually pretty new.”
Emily’s confusion grows, but Beca is already ten steps ahead. “The Bellas didn’t record your audition,” she says quietly. “That’s not where I heard it.”
“Then where did you — oh. Oh.” Understanding suddenly washes over Emily’s expression. So does a faint blush. “So like. So you’re saying that…you…heard it…so you’re…we’re…”
“Soulmates.”
Holy crap. Beca had been so quick to misidentify Chloe back in her freshmen year, and yet she’d been completely blind to this newcomer. Now that she thinks back on it, she distinctly remembers Chloe telling her that Emily auditioned with an original song, Fat Amy complaining that Emily’s movie night pick was always a Disney princess movie, and Stacie teasing Emily about how her music taste closely aligned with Beca’s.
She feels like a complete and utter idiot.
“Right,” Emily says. “Soulmates.”
The loaded word hangs between them like a pendulum. They’re silent for a moment, letting it all sink in, but it’s Emily who speaks first. “You know, I started writing songs because of you,” she says in a small voice. “I was, like, ten and Disney songs were my life but they you started listening to these really cool songs and I looked up the bands and loved them so much. It made me want to try writing my own songs.”
“And I…got into mixing music because of you,” Beca admits. She’d never told anyone that, but it feels so relieving and right to tell Emily. “Your songs made me want to become a music producer.”
The smile that splits across Emily’s face is pure sunshine. “This is… oh, my god. My heart’s beating so fast.” She puts a hand over her chest and lets out a giddy breath. “Is this real? Is this really happening? Are you really my…” Beca watches with a growing smile as Emily gestures towards her with both hands. “You? Like, the Beca Mitchell? And me?”
“The Emily Junk,” Beca finishes. “Like, shit, dude. I feel like I’ve been looking for you my whole life. Jesus, please forget I just said something that cheesy. I mean, like. You know. I felt like I… needed you. In person. Not just in my head.”
“So you can produce my songs without copyright infringement?” Emily teases.
“You read my mind, Legacy.”
“Look at that, we’ve already moved on to telepathy.”
Beca practically feels drunk off of Emily’s glowing happiness. She would never in a million years have guessed that someone as pure and loveable as Emily would be the soulmate to her dark and bitter ass. Despite the significant height difference, Beca feels like she needs to protect this innocent soul, to hold her and make sure no harm comes her way.
God, she’s turning into such a sap.
“So… what do we do now?” Emily asks tentatively.
Beca shrugs, suddenly feeling awkward. “Uh, I dunno. Never thought I’d get to this point, to be quite honest with you.” She glances at the nervous expression on Emily’s face and figures she should be the one to take the first leap. “How about we start simple? Like a date?”
Emily looks at her hands as she fidgets with the hem of her jeans. “Can we… um. Start a little more simple?” Her voice is small and uncertain. “Can I…stay here? A bit? And just, I dunno.” She takes a deep breath and meets Beca’s eyes. “Talk?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” She braves a smile. “You’re okay with missing pizza?”
“How about we make that our first date, then?” Emily suggests shyly, and Beca almost has a heart attack.
Fuck. She can’t be real, she thinks to herself, praying that they haven’t actually evolved to telepathy. How can she be real and m… mine?
“O-okay,” Beca stutters, feeling herself flush. “You… uh. Wanna show me some more songs? And I can show you what I have with yours so far. Maybe we can get the other Bellas to join in and pitch in an extra voice or something.”
Emily practically explodes from happiness. As if unable to restrain herself, she dives at Beca and throws her into a powerful hug, lifting her out of her chair. And even though she hates hugs and is caught completely off-guard, Beca can’t stop smiling.
Maybe soulmates really aren’t that bad after all.
She thinks, holding Emily tight.