Work Text:
When they returned back home to New York, the first thing Fat Amy bought with her newfound fortune was a brand new luxury yacht, the Fat Dingo Bitch II .
Next, she splurged on bottle service for all of the Bellas at one of the most expensive clubs in New York City.
It’s in that club, about twelve vodka crans in, where she decides that her third purchase will be an apartment for Beca and Emily.
“Dude, what?” Beca laughs. “Why the fuck would you buy us an apartment?”
“Because I’m rich!” she says, slapping Beca so hard in the back that she crumples to the ground. “And you, giraffe legs, would’ve been my last pick to complete my crime-fighting, mob-killing, arse-kicking super duo, but you did all right. You deserve a little something for working that small brain of yours so hard.”
“Oh. Thanks, Amy. I think.”
“Anyway, I want you two…” Amy says, retrieving Beca from the floor and throwing an arm around each of their shoulders, “…to make more sweet music together, y’know? I wanna hear more jams . More tunes . And I don’t wanna hear that Flashlight shit again, it was cute the first three hundred times but we all have our limits. I want more bops —”
“Okay,” Beca cuts in. “God. Okay, we get it. Thanks. But like, stop.”
“I’m getting you two an apartment.”
“Sure, Ames.”
“And I’m getting you a better wardrobe,” she says, pointing accusingly at Emily. “God knows you could use one, now that you’re a rockstar and all. Oi! More shots!” Now addressing their service attendant and the other girls, Fat Amy melts back into the party, leaving Beca and Emily hanging with that vaguely threatening offer.
“She can’t be serious,” Beca says, gaping after her. “She wouldn’t. Would she?”
Emily shrugs, unconcerned. “It’s Amy, so who knows. But at the rate she’s going, she probably won’t remember any of this in the morning.”
In fact, Emily’s certain of it. Even if she somehow remembers this conversation, Emily doubts someone like Amy would follow through with it; it’s way more likely that she’ll play it off as a joke, questioning her intelligence for even considering it to be a legitimate offer.
But Fat Amy does remember. And she wasn’t joking.
The next morning finds all of the Bellas crammed into Beca and Chloe’s tiny shoebox apartment, their bodies strewn all over the floor and hanging off of various pieces of furniture like the aftermath of a bloody massacre.
Waking to a mind-numbing migraine and a throat so dry it hurts to breathe, Emily pulls out her phone to check the time and sees a single new text from Amy — an address. Followed by one request:
Include me in your Grammys speech, bitch.
Feeling like complete crap but also dying of curiosity, Emily rouses an extremely pissed-off Beca and the two of them extract themselves from the pile of unconscious bodies to check out the address.
“They sent the lease to us. Apparently all that’s left to do is for us to sign it,” Beca reports, frowning down at her phone as she absent-mindedly balances herself on the turbulent subway without any support. “So she didn’t actually buy the place, thank god.”
“How much is the rent?” Emily asks, almost afraid to hear the answer. With Fat Amy, especially a drunk Fat Amy, it could be either extreme: a completely run-down studio above a seedy club or a luxury multi-floor penthouse apartment.
Beca’s face is unreadable. “See for yourself.” She passes her phone to Emily.
It’s an astronomical number. Emily didn’t even know rent could go that high.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“She paid for the whole year?”
“Looks like it, yeah.”
“God. Money,” Emily says, unable to think of a better comment. Honestly, that said enough.
The address leads them to a nondescript apartment building surrounded by other nondescript apartment buildings, and Emily really doesn’t know what to expect inside. It’s like a present, a seriously unexpected and overpriced present, that she’s unwrapping for Christmas six months early.
They get the key from the doorman, take a glacial elevator up to a floor in the high 70s, walk down the spotless hallways, and come to a stop outside their supposed new apartment. Emily feels like she’s in a dream. A trippy, hangover-fueled dream.
Beca unlocks the door and shoots a look over her shoulder at Emily before opening it. “Ready?” she asks, sounding absolutely not ready at all.
“No,” Emily says, but the anticipation and giddiness forces a smile onto her face. Matching Emily’s excitement with her own smile, Beca pushes open the door.
Twenty-foot ceilings. Windows just as tall. Stairs leading up to a loft. A sparkling kitchen. Brand new appliances. Partially-furnished living room. In-unit washer and dryer. Pristine wood flooring.
At a complete loss for words, Emily lets Beca christen the apartment with the first swear word.
“Holy shit.”
Her comment echoes in the cavernous space. This is the biggest apartment Emily’s ever been in and it’s theirs for a whole year, free of charge.
They split off and explore the space in shell-shocked silence, their hesitant footsteps the only sound in the apartment for a long while. Drawn to the loft, Emily climbs up the spiral stairs and peeks around the small area, imagining a desk and some comfy chairs and maybe a soft rug. It’d make a perfect little songwriting nook.
She checks the bedrooms next, two of them complete with full bathrooms and walk-in closets. Beca pops out of the third room, baffled.
“Um, what the fuck? How many rooms does this place have?”
“There’s, uh.” Emily checks behind her to make sure. “One…two…? Three? And the loft. Oh, my god. Beca.” Emily grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. “Beca. Is this real?
Beca looks dazed. “I…fuck, I guess it is,” she says weakly. “Jesus. This is insane.”
“We get to live here?”
“As soon as we sign the lease, yeah.” A smile crosses her face, slow and wide. “Dude. We get to live here.”
“We get to live here!” Emily agrees. And because the occasion calls for it, she picks Beca up in a bear hug and spins them around in wild circles just because she can with this much space around them.
And this isn’t how Emily imagined kicking off her new life as an officially signed musician, not even close. But god does it seem like a fantastic start, their laughter echoing off the ceiling, filling up the space, painting the walls of the apartment they now call home.
To Emily, Beca has always been a bit of a mystery. With their one overlapping year at Barden being what it was, the Bellas on the verge of disbandment and Beca secretly juggling an entire internship, she hardly got to know the absolute badass of a co-captain before she was graduating and saddling Emily with the entire legacy of the Bellas.
She remembers admiring Beca a lot back then. She still does, of course, but it’s different; less blind idolization, more well-deserved reverence. In her mind, she sees her as a different Beca. A New Beca.
When it comes to the music industry, Emily is as clueless as they come. Songwriting, playing instruments, and dancing to pre-arranged choreo are all musical talents she’d grown up with, but the technicalities behind signing with a legitimate record label is a whole new animal that she definitely wouldn’t have been able to tackle without someone like Beca.
Beca, all professional and calm, standing steady by Emily’s side as they muddle through the signing process.
Beca, with her sharp tongue and blunt attitude, snapping at Theo as she rejects countless suggestions that would ultimately diminish Emily’s essence from her songs and public image.
Beca, full of sarcastic remarks and whispered jokes, assuring that she’ll fistfight the label before she lets them mess with Emily’s stuff.
It’s exactly what Emily had wanted when she’d proposed her compromise to Khaled’s offer, this partnership with Beca. But beyond the general, comforting idea of having a familiar face around, Emily hadn’t actually considered the details of what this arrangement would entail — though it makes sense now, she hadn’t even thought about rooming together.
She kind of can’t believe it, still. How perfectly everything worked out, how she gets to work with someone as cool and talented as Beca, how they get to live together in a fancy new apartment without paying a dime.
And it’s with that thought that Emily’s able to go to bed with a smile on her face every night, no matter how stressful or exhausting her day had been, heart pounding with anticipation at what new exciting adventure her next day will bring.
“What do you think,” Beca says one night, raising her voice over the rattle of the subway. “About turning the spare room into a studio?”
After being cooped up in a recording room all day, Emily can’t help but to hesitate. “Like a home studio?”
“Yeah. We’ll soundproof it, get some bass traps. Theo showed me this whole storage room of old and unused equipment at the label. Free for the taking.” She notices Emily’s less-than-excited expression and backtracks. “Or, okay. Maybe not. We can still make it a guest room.”
“No, no. It’s not that,” Emily says quickly. “And that wouldn’t be fair. I have the loft for my thing, you should have the spare room for yours.”
“Okay, first of all, you don’t have the loft, I just hate those fucking death trap stairs. Second, the studio wouldn’t be mine or anything, it’d be for the both of us. Like, I dunno about you, but I feel like we’d be able to experiment more in our own space than at the label’s recording rooms.” She grimaces. “Do our own shit without having them breathing down our necks.”
A fair point, considering the time they spend at the label always seems so by-the-book, not much room for creativity outside of what’s already been approved by the execs. Secretly, Emily had been looking forward to being in a live room with Beca at the controls again, chasing that high of producing a renegade demo with just the two of them.
But it’s different, working with a team. They’re all wonderful, talented people, but Beca’s right; their presence creates a kind of pressure that doesn’t leave too much room for spontaneous inspiration. It’d be fun to have their own setup at their own place to use on their own time.
“But, yeah. Just an idea.” Beca waves it away. “We can sleep on it.”
“No, I like it.” Emily sighs. “Sorry, I’m just…I dunno, getting studio fatigue, if that’s a thing. Whenever I see a mixing console now I get vertigo.”
Beca snorts. “Yeah, I get it. I had a nightmare last week that I was trapped in an isolation booth with no doors.”
“Oh. That’s why you keep asking me to get you things from there.”
“Ha. Guilty.”
“I like the home studio idea,” Emily insists. “We don’t need a stupid guest room. Our guests can stay in the loft.”
“What, like, they need to pass a ninja warrior challenge in order to sleep?”
“Beca, the stairs aren’t that bad.”
She rolls her eyes. “A ladder would feel safer.”
“Home studio,” Emily circles back. “Let’s do that.”
Beca gives her a small smile. “Okay. Cool.”
That's a New Beca thing for Emily, that smile.
It’s kind and gentle, reminiscent of that reassuring smile she’d given Emily across the campfire a lifetime ago, the one that had made her feel all warm and happy inside. After spending many hours together, both at home and at the label, Emily knows Beca doesn’t usually smile like that.
She likes that it seems to be reserved for her.
And in all the years she’d known Beca, first as an aloof and distracted senior and then as an aloof and distracted alumni, Emily would’ve never guessed how… soft she could be.
She’d always known Beca to be soft-hearted when it came to the Bellas, calling them family in a much more meaningful way than how her mom refers to her generation of Bellas as her “sisters.” But this Beca — this New Beca with the gentle smile and fierce protectiveness — has a different kind of softness to her. Less gooey. More radiant.
It makes Emily feel happy and special, having Beca open up to her this way. It makes her feel invincible, like she can take on anything with someone as genuine and reliable as Beca by her side.
If only she could get over her ridiculous fear of those stairs.
Their home studio becomes Emily’s second favorite room in the whole apartment.
(The loft will always hold a special place in her heart, even with its murder death trap stairs)
It’s kind of bland, if she’s being honest. Emily’s seen pictures online of home studios and they always seem so cozy, all warm lighting and comfy couches and plush carpets and an overall cabin aesthetic to offset the high-tech machinery of the actual recording equipment.
Theirs is a bit more practical, not much personalization aside from a framed photo of the Bellas, a couple of small awards Beca has collected over the years as a producer, and a comfy armchair Emily had picked out at a flea market.
“All right. Nice,” Beca says after plugging in the last monitor, leaning back to admire their handiwork. “Not the prettiest, but functional. Important thing is, we can record our own album right here, fuck the label.”
Emily rolls her eyes. “I literally just signed with them. We can’t go through a lawsuit already.”
“We’ll use fake names, duh.”
“They’re already working with us on all the completed songs we have.”
“Well then, we’ll just write more,” Beca says. “You’ve been cranking them out like crazy these days, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Breaking a contract is a problem,” Emily laughs.
Beca’s just kidding — hopefully — but Emily also feels a sense of productivity seeing this completed studio. There’re a bunch of lyric fragments scribbled in her notebook that she’s itching to develop.
And if she’s being honest, she hasn’t written a complete song in years before signing with the label and partnering with Beca. She can chalk it up to her demanding major and Tupac the hamster, but really, it wasn’t time she was lacking. It was inspiration. Motivation. Someone to bounce ideas off of.
Someone like Beca.
Writing songs with Beca is like conversing in a language no one else in her life can speak. She just gets it, gets what Emily’s trying to say and what she’s trying to do, no explanation needed. Sometimes it’s like they share a mind, the way they riff off of each other and predict what the other’s going to suggest next, riding the same wavelength to come to the exact same conclusion.
“Jesus, you’re so easy to work with,” Beca says one day, confirming Emily’s feelings. “There’ve been so many douchey clients these past few years, you’re like a breath of fresh air. The freshest fucking air in this whole goddamn music industry.”
It’s a nice sentiment laced with some colorful language, but Emily gets what Beca’s getting at. They work well together, both at the label and in their home studio, their compatibility over music translating to their work ethic; sometimes the hours they spend goofing off at the label and working seriously in their apartment blend so seamlessly together that Emily can’t really tell the two environments apart.
Everywhere feels like work. Everywhere feels like home.
And she knows it’s because of Beca and her versatile personality, shifting naturally from work mode into leisure mode at the appropriate times and always making sure Emily’s as comfortable as she can be.
Not for the first time, she wonders what it would’ve been like if Beca hadn’t come with her, if she’d taken Khaled’s offer at face value, if she’d been alone on this wild ride.
She notices it during one of their impromptu jam sessions at the home studio, the way Beca prioritizes Emily to the best of her ability when it comes to working on music together.
They’re testing out different backbeats to half-completed songs, trying to get a sense of how the overall vibe of the song will be when finished. Emily’s mid-sentence when Beca’s phone lights up, its buzzing clear and strangely HD in their ears through the high-quality mic.
Beca ignores it and keeps fiddling with the dials on the control board.
“Isn’t that Theo?” Emily points out, peeking at the caller ID.
Beca waves her concern away impatiently, eyes never leaving her laptop. “He can wait. This can’t.” She clicks around and adjusts a knob before urging Emily to finish her thought.
Emily’s still pretty clueless when it comes to the music industry, so she doesn’t really know if Beca can treat a music exec that way. But it still fills her with a certain sense of importance to be Beca’s sole focus in the moment, someone she’s willing to ignore the higher-ups for to finish talking to.
She suspects that’s the kind of focus that leads them to finish the album barely a month after signing with the label and starting to room together. Technically, it’s an EP with only five songs, but it’ll have singles and a release date and promos and photoshoots and CDs and everything, so Emily considers it an album.
It’s strange, she thinks, how life can change so quickly and so drastically. One second, she’s humiliating herself by screwing up a riff-off in some sketchy man’s basement. The next, she’s releasing a brand new single off of her brand new EP. And Emily knows in her gut that she’d be terrified to her bones if she were doing this all by herself.
But then she feels Beca by her side, arms crossed and scowling as usual, and feels invincible.
When they’re together, they’re invincible.
The day her EP finally drops, Emily sleeps in.
Well, she doesn’t actually sleep in, she wakes up at 7am from anxiety and nervousness and general panicky feelings, but the dread of stumbling across criticism on the internet keeps her away from her phone and in bed until it’s well past 11am. She lies there, drifting in and out of the shallow edges of consciousness, until the sun starts roasting her eyelids.
Grumbling to herself, Emily finally rolls out of bed and pads out into the living room.
She doesn’t expect Beca to be sitting at the dining room table; it’s a work day for normal people. She’s on her laptop, though, so maybe she’s working remotely today.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Beca greets. “I made celebratory french toast, but they might be cold by now, sorry. I didn’t think you’d sleep in this late.”
“Yeah, I didn’t either.” She peeks into the kitchen and sees a plate set out for her. Through her anxiety, Emily smiles, touched. “Thanks. You didn’t have to.”
Beca shrugs. “Got kinda antsy watching the live stream count so I thought I’d make breakfast for a change. Your mom called like, 800 times, by the way,” she says, nodding to Emily’s phone, deliberately abandoned on their coffee table the night before. “And the Bella’s groupchat is…well you probably have another 800 notifications from them too.”
Emily groans. She’d been intent on avoiding negative comments from online strangers, but she’d also been reluctant to be bombarded with biased praise from friends and family.
“I know. I’ve kinda been avoiding my phone, too,” Beca admits with a wry smile.
“You’ve released albums before, though,” Emily says, frowning. “Aren’t you used to this stuff?”
“Yeah, but.” Beca shrugs again. “I’ve never really cared about them as much as I care about this one.”
She says it absent-mindedly, eyes focused on something on her laptop screen, like it’s not one of the biggest compliments on her music that Emily’s ever gotten. She smiles into the fridge as she searches for the syrup, the anxious swirling in her gut subsiding enough to crave some whipped cream, too.
“Oh,” Beca suddenly says, looking up as Emily settles into the seat across from her with the homemade breakfast. She pulls up a paper bag from the floor and reaches into it. “I forgot I got you this.” She hands Emily two things: a wooden, hook-like contraption and a vinyl of her EP, still sealed in plastic.
She’s seen the cover art before but it’s different, holding a physical copy of it in her hands opposed to just seeing it on a computer screen. It’s real. It’s tangible. She can hold the thing she’s been working on for the past few months.
“I know you can get like, a thousand free copies, but I wanted to buy one at a record store like a normal person,” Beca explains as Emily tears at the plastic. “To like, I dunno, contribute to album sales or whatever.”
“I feel like that $20 is just gonna circle back into your paycheck somehow,” Emily points out. She looks at the wooden contraption. “Uh, what’s this for?”
“Here, give it. It opens, like this.” Beca fidgets with the thing, splitting it in half along a length-wise hinge into two hooks. She takes the vinyl from Emily and leads her over to their bookshelf, placing the contraption hook-side down and balancing the record on top of it.
“Ohh! A stand.”
“Hell yeah. Gotta showcase it,” Beca says, grinning. “Your first album.”
Happy warmth fills Emily’s chest. “No, it’s ours. And technically it’s not even an album,” she corrects. But she likes the way Beca emphasizes “first” a little, like she’s as eager as Emily is to keep making more albums. Judging by how the entire shelf is cleared off, she guesses that’s exactly what Beca has in mind.
“Eh. Semantics,” Beca says. “At the rate we’re going, we will have a full-length one soon enough. And then we’ll go platinum, maybe grab a few Grammys here and there.”
Emily can’t help but laugh. “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself there?”
“This is a forward-thinking household, Em. No room for negativity.”
“I mean.” Emily opens up her arms wide, indicating their humongous living room. “I’d say there’s plenty of room.”
“Kay, smartass.” She grunts when Emily pulls her into a hug. “Mmph. Okay.”
“Thank you,” Emily says, smiling so wide it hurts her cheeks. “I love it. I love working with you. And I love you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Beca says, but Emily knows without looking that she’s rolling her eyes and holding back a smile. “Love you too, dude.”
Emily’s eyes skitter to the vinyl on its little stand, a commemoration of the official start to their career. Happiness floods through her and she holds Beca tighter and smiles even bigger, barely able to contain the amount of love she has for her life, for Beca, and for her life with Beca.