Archive of Our Own

She’s not sure when it happens. 

It must’ve been a slow and gradual thing, so subtle that Emily can’t pinpoint the exact moment it snowballed out of control. 

It could’ve started with that spontaneous house party. Or it could’ve been way before that, when she agreed to come with Emily to Khaled’s label. Or maybe it’d been growing since the beginning, the very, very beginning, when they’d first met at the Treble’s pool party. 

Either way, it kind of feels like it was inevitable. Emily thinks about how she’s sharing her dream life with one of the coolest, kindest, most awesomest people she’s ever known; like, how could this not happen?

But no. No, she doesn’t want to think about it. Because the more she thinks about it, the more real it becomes, the more defined it gets. 

And it’s the biggest cliche ever, crushing on a roommate, a colleague, a friend — even admitting it to herself makes Emily cringe internally — and she really wants to stop thinking about it. In fact, she has to because Beca’s coming out of her room, hair all messy, clothes all rumpled, and she’s giving Emily a sleepy smile and a lazy wave as she shuffles into the kitchen to make her morning coffee.

There’s nothing there. Absolutely nothing Emily should be getting so flustered over. But she is because it’s Beca and she looks so soft and huggable and adorable and — 

— no. 

Exhaling slowly through her nose, Emily forces her eyes back down to her phone and ignores the wild beating of her heart. It’s just Beca. No biggie. Nooooo biggie. Just Beca, casually taking away her breath just by…literally just by making coffee.  

It’s like getting knocked off-balance by a powerful wave, the way Beca so naturally and carelessly sways Emily. And sure, Emily can take a hit, knows how to swim, knows how to keep her head above water, but there’s only so much she can take before these waves overwhelm her and start pulling her under. 

At this point, it doesn’t even matter how it started. Just that Emily doesn’t know how to stop it, how to stop being so obvious, how to get over it. 

She just needs time, she figures. It’ll fade over time. It has to. 

She doesn’t have time for this shit.

Beca's schedule and plate are both already so overloaded with stupid little things that should’ve been handed off to more competent people, if there even are such people that fit that description at this dumbass label. There are three idiot artists and five idiot techs and two idiot execs breathing down her neck and she doesn’t have the time or patience to deal with any of them. 

So she certainly doesn’t have time to deal with feelings. 

It’s unbelievable. Un-fucking-believeable. 

After so many years of living with the super hot, super talented, super single Bellas, Beca somehow ends up falling for Emily. Emily. The dork who assigned names and personalities to all of their kitchen appliances. The klutz who gave herself a mild concussion by tripping over her own feet at dance practice. The nerd who once woke Beca up at 2am to excitedly show her a clever rhyme scheme she pulled off in a verse. 

Well, okay, Emily’s also hot and talented and single, so maybe Beca’s being too hard on herself. 

So yeah, she’s crushing on Emily, which is fine, it’s fine, she can shove all of that into a little box in her brain and stuff it away. 

That’s what Beca tries to tell herself as she emerges from her room one morning and finds Emily at the kitchen counter. She’d stayed up late last night and even though she feels like 100 pounds of pure crap, just seeing Emily sitting there makes her feel better, which is kind of unfair. 

Obviously it’s not her fault she looks so pretty munching on toast and scrolling on her phone, so Beca swallows down her dumb feelings and offers a small smile and wave as she heads for the coffee pot. 

And she could keep convincing herself that there’s no point in pining after someone like Emily, not when they already have something so great going on between them, but then Emily goes all rigid and starts blushing and Beca doesn’t know what the hell reality is anymore.

It’s moments like these that throw her for a loop because Beca knows for a fact that someone as sane and reasonable as Emily would never feel that way towards her. Admiration, maybe. But genuine, romantic interest? Emily’s unpredictable sometimes, but that’s gotta be a reach. 

And now her face feels all warm because Emily’s blushing and it’s so stupid but it makes her so happy at the same time, emphasized by a dumb little flip of her stomach, and it’s all too much for 8 in the morning. 

So she bottles it up and tries not to think about it, just praying it doesn’t accidentally slip out when she’s least expecting it. 

It slips out one day when she’s least expecting it.

Emily’s up in the loft, pencil tapping idly against a blank page, when she hears Beca call her name from the studio. 

Beca’s in business mode when Emily shuffles in. “I need your help with these stupid-ass harmonies,” she says, and then pauses, realizing the insult, before backtracking. “Sorry, I don’t mean…the song isn’t stupid, it’s the har— never mind, just throwing the whole sentence out. I need your help with these harmonies,” Beca says, starting over. 

“I’m not too good with those,” Emily admits.

“That’s fine. I just want to test a few out. You okay with singing the main part a couple times? If you’re busy, I can just record you and I’ll work on it on my own.”

“No, not busy at all. I wanna help.”

They put on headphones and gather around the mic. Beca has a printout of the lyrics already annotated with countless notes, and she holds it out in front of them as she starts a backbeat loop. 

Emily sings through the first verse with no problem. It’s one of her newer songs, one that she’d finished only a couple weeks ago, and the lyrics are still as fresh on her mind as they were the day she wrote them down. 

She just…well, she shouldn’t think too much about who she’d written the song about.

Beca doesn’t jump in until the chorus, her voice pitched low so as to not overpower Emily’s, the crease in her brows deepening as she listens for something Emily can’t hear. They sound great, in her opinion. Better than great. They sound perfect.

“Hang on, sorry.” Beca suddenly cuts them off. “That’s not doing it for me. No, you were great,” she says quickly. “But let me try something else. Can we take it from the chorus?”

They do three more takes like that, Beca trying out different harmonies in various octaves and on different words and phrases, a minuscule twitch of her eye the only indication of whether she likes it or not. She crosses out each attempt on the printout of the lyrics, marking up the already-illegible notes with red slashes. 

And each time they start over, Emily grows increasingly aware of the fact that they’re singing one of her songs, one of her love songs, huddled close together, leaning towards the mic, closed off in this small room, and maybe Beca’s not paying close attention to the lyrics but Emily certainly is. Because it’s one of her more autobiographical songs, based on extremely real feelings towards an extremely real person standing three inches away.

Emily tries to focus on the technical aspects of the song instead. She fails, of course, but she tries.

The fifth take seems to be it for Beca. She joins at the pre-chorus instead, nodding the entire time, and harmonizes to the entirety of the chorus. She smiles a little to herself as she sings and Emily has to look away — she has to or she’ll have thoughts — and stare hard at the lyrics sheet even though she can sing this song in her sleep at this point. 

With her eyes boring into the piece of paper, she doesn’t notice Beca trying to get her attention until she bumps her shoulder against Emily’s. She points to herself, then to the lyrics, then to Emily, and then brings her finger to her lips. Emily gives her a thumbs-up.

Beca squints at the lyrics beneath her annotations and takes over the next verse on her own. 

Singing the verse, Emily’s verse, the verse that Emily wrote, the verse Emily wrote with Beca in mind…singing it to Emily. 

Her brain short-circuits. Beca’s singing is clear and beautiful as always and Emily hates that she’s so perfect, so talented, so captivating.  

And she feels it again, that overwhelming rush, the tidal wave of messy feelings and unwarranted desires, crashing over her head and threatening to drown her. It’s like being tossed around by a hurricane, the way Beca can make her feel so many different emotions all at once. Emily can barely catch her breath before the next wave is pushing her towards the bottom of the ocean. 

Beca stops the backbeat and pulls off her headphones.

“Yeah, sweet. That one sounded good,” she says, nodding as she scribbles down more illegible notes. Like her singing didn’t just shake Emily to her core. “I was also thinking — and you can definitely fight me on this — about making this into a duet. You’ve already got like, this back and forth thing going with the verses. Might be worth it to have a completely different voice thrown in there.”

“Oh,” Emily says, blinking out of her stupor. “That’s what you were doing. Yeah, I like that.”

“Cool. You got anyone in mind? I can reach out and see if there’re any guys who might want to —”

“What about you?”

Beca stares at her. “What? What about me?”

“You…uh. Um.” Emily chokes. “W-…w-well, we sounded…good. Together. Right now.” Her heart starts racing and she hopes to god Beca can’t tell. “Like n-not. Not together together, just our…voices… together,” Emily finishes lamely. “Your voice is amazing,” she adds in a whisper, like that makes it any less awkward.

The corner of Beca’s mouth twitches upwards, as does one of her eyebrows. “Uh. Thanks. But I don’t think…”

“Yeah, no,” she rushes to shoot down her own stupid suggestion. “That’s. That’s totally weird.”  

“It’s not weird, just a little…um. I think it’d be better with like, a real singer. But, okay. You…” Beca clears her throat. “You want a…girl. Singer. You want this to be a duet with two girls.”

Emily stops breathing. She’s aware of her mouth opening and closing, trying to form words, but she can’t for the life of her remember how to speak. 

“That’s…I mean, hey, that’s fine. Totally fine,” Beca says. Her voice remains calm and collected, though it’s clear by her expression that she hadn’t expected the conversation to take this turn. Despite wanting to die, Emily has to give her credit for taking this in stride.

“We can…yeah, we can find someone like that. A girl. There’re plenty of —…okay, but you should know that there’s a lot of shit that comes with this. Like, you have my support, I’m sure you’ll have Theo’s, and the label will back you because I’ll kill them if they don’t. And mostly people will be cool with it but there’ll be other people who won’t, and —”  

“Okay. Um, Beca.” Emily feels like she’s suffering from a stroke as she cuts Beca off. 

“Yeah?”

“A guy is fine.”

“Oh. Okay,” Beca says quietly. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Positive?”

“Positive.”

“Okay,” she says again.

“Yeah.”

Silence stretches between them, its weight emphasized by the soundproofing of the room. Suffocating on her own heart which is now lodged firmly in her throat, Emily can barely squeak out her question. “I-is that all?”

Beca shakes her head a little like she’s returning to reality. “Yes,” she says, voice a little too loud. She winces. “Yeah. Yes. Thanks.”

“Yup no problem bye,” Emily says in a rush. She barrels out the door and practically sprints to her room, slamming the door closed and diving under her covers to bury her burning face into her pillow. 

Well, it’s out now. She’s out now. 

And Beca probably thinks she’s gone insane. 

Beca doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. 

To be fair, she never really knows what the fuck is going on. Sometimes life is just one, big, chaotic acid trip of batshit insanity and she just has to roll with it. Living and dealing with the Bellas for four years had really honed in that skill; at this point, she’s somewhat of an expert of going with the flow.

But this version of not knowing what the fuck is going on is different. 

This version involves Emily, one of the few people in the world who makes sense, who she can lean on, rely on, and depend on in a way she can’t with anyone else. Emily, who she’s gotten to know so well over the past few months — so well that sometimes it feels like they can read each other’s minds. Emily, who she’s falling harder and harder for with each passing day because Beca’s an idiot and can’t feel emotions in moderation like a normal person.

Emily, who came out to her in the middle of a jam session. 

And it’s not the coming out part that’s baffling — everyone knows that all of the Bellas are at least a little bit gay — but how indirectly it was delivered and who that indirectness was aimed towards. 

Making the song into a duet was an offhand suggestion. So maybe Emily’s recommendation was also just as offhand, made in the heat of the moment, fresh off the high of an unplanned recording session. Maybe there was no real meaning behind it. Maybe she wasn’t even coming out at all.

No, Beca knows better; she’s not that dense. Except…except maybe she is because she doesn’t know if it really means what she thinks it means. 

And she still doesn’t have time for this, to deal with it like a grown woman, to sit down and talk to Emily about what she’d said, to sit down with herself and really think about all of these big feelings she’s been feeling. 

Because she doesn’t get a moment of goddamn peace. 

Apparently, being capable and having functional ears is a cardinal sin punishable by being overworked to death; everyone’s constantly on her ass about something or another and it’s getting old, really, being relied on so heavily by so many people because everyone else sucks at their jobs. 

So no, it looks like she won’t get to deal with whatever’s going on between her and Emily. She’ll sweep it all under the rug like the mature, responsible adult she is and carry on spewing fire onto anyone who so much as thinks about sending her a passive-aggressive email over the weekend.

Emily seems just as eager to pretend like it didn’t happen, returning from her Sunday morning run with a pep in her step like she doesn’t have 500 tons of emotions weighing on her shoulders. 

“Hi,” she greets, her smile a ray of sunshine.

Buried under a mountain of paperwork and glaring daggers at her laptop, Beca can’t even pretend to match her energy. “Hi,” she grunts. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Emily pause at her tone. “Bad day?” she calls. 

Beca sighs. “The usual amount.”

Emily hums as she kicks off her shoes. “I might be able to turn it around a bit.”

“Ugh. Doubt it,” Beca says, grumpy and pessimistic. 

What she doesn’t say is that Emily’s already done enough of that just by coming home with her usual smile and happy disposition. There’s no freaking way she would ever say that. Doesn’t stop her from thinking it but she won’t say it.

A large cup appears in front of her, placed gently on top of the horrendous pile of paperwork scattered all over the table. “Got you coffee,” Emily says brightly. “Soy latte, one sugar, extra shot.”

Beca blinks. 

Emily falters. “Is that…sorry, was that wrong?”

“No. No, that’s my exact order.” Beca blinks again as she takes a sip. “Wow, yeah. Thank you.”

“It’s not a complicated drink,” she says, laughing. “I’ve heard you order it a bajillion times.”

“Yeah, but still. Thanks.”

“Well. You’re very welcome.”

Emily’s smile really is unmatched. Everything about it is perfect, from the way it scrunches up her eyes to the way it lights up her whole face. It’s absolutely mesmerizing.

Stop staring, she tells herself firmly. Look away, Beca. Look away now. Now! 

Beca wrenches her gaze away and re-focuses on her laptop. 

Jesus.  

“I’m gonna do laundry,” Emily says, nodding towards the closet with the washer and dryer, oblivious to Beca’s internal cringing. “Do you want me to add your stuff? I don’t have much, just the outfit for tomorrow’s gig.”

“Oh, yeah, I can —” Beca moves to get up but Emily holds up a hand.

“No, I got it! You. You stay. Do your super serious adult thing.” 

“God,” Beca groans. “I’d seriously rather not.”

“Hm.” Emily pauses, contemplating something. “I’ll grab your sheets and towels, too.”

“Wh-no, you don’t have to —”

“Hey! I said stay!” Emily warns, jabbing a finger at Beca as she ducks into the hallway. “It’s a ginormous washer, it can fit both our sheets and our clothes!”

“Yeah, but —”

“Stay! I got it!”

Relenting, Beca sinks back down into her chair and grumpily resumes throwing hands with Theo over email. It’s not until she hears the rustle of sheets and the dragging of the laundry basket across the floor that Beca realizes that she’s a little hung up on the fact that Emily is doing their laundry. 

That’s not, like, normal…right? Roommates don’t just do each other’s laundry, do they?

It’s weird, the way it’s not weird. If it were anyone else, Beca would absolutely not be cool with this, wouldn’t even think to mix in her dirty laundry with another person’s. But it’s Emily and they’ve done this before and it’s never felt weird at all and Beca’s scratching her head as to why when Emily shuffles back into the living room.

“Is that everything?” she asks, the basket balanced against her hip. 

And it clicks. Looking at Emily, it clicks. 

It’s the domesticity. The intimacy. How comfortable they are around each other. How easy, how natural, how uncomplicated. There’s nothing forced about how they coexist, splitting and mixing and combining chores, almost like they’re…they’re…  

“Beca?”

…And she’s being obvious. Like, glaringly, hopelessly obvious. 

“Yeah. I mean, no. I mean, yes. That’s everything.” Her foot taps nervously on the floor. “Thanks.”

Emily starts the washing machine and Beca focuses on the white noise of the rushing water, trying to drown out the erratic beating of her heart. 

She doesn’t know what the hell her brain is doing, giving her these realizations and epiphanies when she’s so goddamn busy. Now she can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop herself from peeking over her laptop at Emily fiddling with the washer, her hair in a messy braid and her features soft in the morning sunlight. She’s not even doing anything remotely noteworthy, nothing cute, nothing sexy, nothing that warrants the heat that rushes to Beca’s face. 

Her stomach’s doing that stupid thing again, lurching and flipping around like she’s falling, physically falling, kicked out of a plane 10,000 feet in the air. She knows it’s only figurative, that it’ll all be fine as long as she gets a hold of herself and uses the dang parachute so she doesn’t, like, die. 

Emily slides the closet door closed and catches Beca watching her. She smiles, eyes questioning.

And Beca realizes she wasn’t kicked out of the plane; she’d jumped voluntarily. 

Without a parachute. 

Emily’s freaking drowning.

She’s stranded in the middle of the ocean and she’s drowning. There’s no life raft to board, there’s no straw to grasp. She’s not even wearing a life vest. It’s just her, treading water in a stormy sea, desperately searching for something to keep her afloat. 

There’s no way out, she can’t escape the brutal waves because Beca is everywhere, next to her, attached at the hip, always in the same room, always in her space. 

Always on her mind. 

Emily’s had crushes before, but they’ve always been more surface-level, based purely on what-ifs and idle daydreams and happy, tingly feelings. Crushing on Beca is a whole new experience. An all-encompassing, all-consuming, literally crushing, borderline suffocating experience. It pulls at Emily, a deep yearning that threatens to swallow her whole.

She’s pretty sure this isn’t what a crush is supposed to feel like, but then Emily has to consider the possibility that this isn’t a crush, that it’s something bigger and uncontrollable and real…and she doesn’t have the energy to unpack all of that. 

And it’s not enough that Beca’s constantly in her orbit. Lately, it’s like she wants Emily to notice her, wants her attention, wants (and this one makes the least sense) to be as physically close to her as possible. Emily’s only human; there’s only so much of Beca’s presence she can take before she’s overthinking every touch and getting flustered with every compliment like some lovesick teenager. 

Sometimes it doesn’t feel one-sided and Emily doesn’t know what to do with that information. It’s honestly too much and she can’t really think or speak or breathe when Beca gives her that soft little smile or jokingly flirts with her.

Because it is a joke, right? She’s not seriously flirting. Right? 

“Hello…? Earth to Emily.”

She snaps out of it to see Theo waving his fingers a little in front of her eyes. 

“S-sorry,” Emily says, violently shaking her head. It does nothing to clear her thoughts. “Um. Uh…yes. I like it.”

“Oh? You do?” he asks, perplexed. 

“Y-ye…s?”   

Theo leans back in his seat, smiling a little. “You have no idea what I just asked.”

He has a point. “Something about the…the, uh.”

“…The set location for the b—”

“For the beach scene. Yeah! See, I knew that,” Emily says, bullshitting. 

“Hm,” he says, still smiling. “So what do you like about it?”

She pauses for a beat. “Okay, you know I wasn’t listening.”

“Yeah, I know,” he chuckles. “Sorry, you’re easier to tease.”

They’re in one of the smaller conference rooms at the label, just the two of them for a change, discussing the logistics of filming Emily’s first ever music video. It’s arguably one of the most exciting things to happen in her life. Twelve-year-old Emily would have been on the floor with absolute glee. 

And here she is, barely able to keep track of the basics, brain filled with thoughts about Beca.

“Wow. Uncanny.” Theo taps his nose. “Both of you do that — that thing where you pinch the bridge of your nose, like this, when you’ve got a lot on your mind.” 

Emily rips her hand away from her face.

Unbothered, Theo presses on. “Is she why you’re all spaced out?”

She whirls on him. “I-is sh-who why?” Emily asks, like she doesn’t know exactly who he’s talking about.

“That tiny little producer we have running around this place? You know, your friend?” She doesn’t want him to say who, to make it real. But of course, he does. “Beca?”

It’s now a familiar sensation, the way her heart stutters a little whenever she hears that name. Like it’s not enough that she’s overloaded with these confusing emotions and feelings, like her body has to chip in its two cents with all of these physical, involuntary reactions to a simple name. 

Emily fumbles over her response, hesitating long enough to make it super awkward. She can’t quite get with Theo’s rhythm, doesn’t really know how to brush him off and banter with him as well as Beca does. Beca with her snark and her wit and lightning-fast comebacks. Beca with her easygoing attitude, her lips tilted into a sly smile.  

Emily’s chest tightens. 

“Wow. Tongue-tied.”

Her face is on fire. “Ugh. Stop.”

“Nail on the head?”

“Can we get back to the…the thing?” Emily groans, pinching the bridge of her nose before she realizes what she’s doing. 

“Yes, if you can,” Theo agrees. He’s still smirking, the little jerk. 

For the rest of the meeting, Emily tries her best to focus, keeping her mind completely blank as she listens to Theo drone on about the filming schedule and the set design and the script and the crew. All things considered, it’s not a bad effort, but now Emily can’t help but wonder just how obvious she’s being.

If Theo can see it, can everyone else? 

Can Beca?

The possibility should fill her with embarrassed horror. Having someone like Beca find out that the lame, dorky little song-writing freshman Bella has a thing for her? It should be the subject of her worst nightmares. 

But it isn’t.

Because she knows Beca isn’t like that; she might be awkward when it comes to expressing her feelings, but she’s still mature about how she handles them. Emily’s gut tells her that Beca would take this dumb crush of hers in stride, just as she had with that supremely disastrous coming-out confession in their studio.

It’s still nerve-wracking, acknowledging that this crush is real and it’s here to stay, but it’s not as daunting as Emily has been making it out to be. So maybe she is drowning in an ocean of feelings. All she has to do is keep swimming until she sees land. Simple. 

She’s not doing a good job of keeping Beca out of her thoughts as she listens to Theo, but somehow Emily feels a bit lighter, a bit more sure, a bit more resigned. 

It’s just Beca. She’ll be okay.

She is not okay. 

Good god is she not okay. Beca’s struggling. Legitimately struggling. She wasn’t made to feel this many emotions, wasn’t made to have her every waking thought devoted to a single person, wasn’t made to have romantic feelings like this.

But it’s not like she can stop herself and reign in these unfamiliar urges. More often than not it’s an unconscious thing; absently standing too close, smiling at nothing in particular, finding any excuse to be together… It’s almost impossible to keep track of the things Beca does with Emily because they’re both comfortable enough with each other and what she does because she has absolutely no impulse control. 

Is she making two mugs of hot chocolate because she boiled too much water and has the mix on hand anyway? Or is it to surprise Emily with and relish in that grateful smile? 

Is she sitting right next to Emily on the couch even though they have a humongous sectional because it’s chilly in the apartment and they usually share a blanket? Or is it just a lame and transparent justification to sit close and non-verbally invite Emily to cuddle up against her?

At least there’s like, no debating why she puts her feet up in Emily’s lap. That’s purely her lack of impulse control, no question. 

Emily doesn’t seem to mind, wordlessly readjusting the blanket over them as she smiles over her mug of hot chocolate, inhaling deeply. She goes back to reading her book, the arm she has resting on Beca’s shins a warm and comforting weight.

God, they’re basically married. All they need is a cackling fireplace to complete the picture.

Beca closes her eyes. What’s with her? And what is it about Emily that brings out her gooey sappy domestic side? Why can’t she just suck it up and come clean with her feelings on the very possible chance that Emily would return them? 

She glares at her phone and viciously scrolls through all of her apps for some kind of distraction. Somehow she stumbles across a cursed video and plays it just for the hell of it, forgetting that her volume is on high. Tinny sounds of chaos, panicked screaming, and gasps of horror blast out from her phone.  

Emily looks up and scrunches her nose at the noise. “What are you watching?” she asks, laughing.

“Old Bellas videos on YouTube. This is the one Fat Amy eats shit and flashes the President.”

“What?” Emily leans over to see. “How was that not removed?”

Beca shrugs. “This dude blurred it out. Honestly, this whole video’s kind of a masterpiece.” She holds her phone out so they can both watch. “Look, he pieced together a whole-ass montage of all the news coverage we got.”

“Ha, I remember watching this one the morning after. My mom was so conflicted,” Emily giggles. “She hated the slander you guys were getting but she was living for the attention.” 

“Yeah, god. She gave me an earful when we were talking about Worlds.”

“Oh!” Emily leans closer, arm pressing against Beca’s as she reaches over to scroll through the suggested videos. “Is there anything from that? There has to be some official channel for Worlds, right?”

Beca can’t think with Emily’s face so close. She can hardly even move, her hand frozen around her phone as Emily taps away on the screen, terrified that if she even breathes too loudly Emily will realize their proximity — or lack thereof — and pull away. 

“Oh, my god! The whole 2015 show is on here! All 2 hours and 13 minutes of it!”

“Dude, there’re like, six thousand ads,” Beca groans, but Emily’s tapping it into full screen mode and settling back in her seat, vibrating with excitement.

“There’re timestamps for each group. We’ll skip around,” Emily says. Her hand lingers on Beca’s phone, their fingers brushing. “What, is this too heavy for you to hold up?” she teases.

“For 2 hours? Yes.”

“I said we’ll skip around.”

“Ugh, fine. You’re lucky I like you.”

Beca chokes herself into silence as soon as the words are out of her mouth. It’s a harmless comeback. It doesn’t mean anything. She says stuff like that all the time. It’s normal totally normal very normal.

Emily, unperturbed, just hums happily. “Yes. Yes I am.” And taps the ‘skip ad’ button. 

This isn’t the kind of distraction Beca was looking for at all, it’s the literal opposite, but she’s never really been able to say no to Emily’s rare bouts of pushiness. Screw it, she’s had a long day. She deserves a modicum of self-indulgence.

True to her word, Emily skips around the various sets, only watching the groups that had received high scores or ones the Bellas had befriended. It doesn’t take long for Beca to become invested, her long years as captain coming back to haunt her as she examines the arrangements and choreography through a critical eye. Some deep-rooted a cappella instinct in her wants to start taking notes…as if she’d ever be in the mood to make these kinds of sets again.

Looking at the show from this angle, it’s crazy to see just how insanely talented all of these groups were; DSM aside, the Bellas faced some seriously tough competition that year. 

She’s so engrossed in the performances that she doesn’t notice Emily had fallen asleep until her head is suddenly plopping onto Beca’s shoulder. 

Of course this would happen. She’d practically invited this situation with open arms. Letting out a huff of annoyance for show in case she’s still semi-conscious, Beca shrugs her shoulder up a bit. Emily’s head lolls back a little. Her lips are slightly parted, letting out deep, even breaths.  

She’s out cold.

Beca pauses the video to cut off the lively sounds of singing and cheering. She should wake Emily and urge her to go to bed. She should, but she doesn’t. Instead, she sits there with Emily’s face inches away, stewing in her overwhelming feelings, trying not to think any thoughts.

Thoughts like how easy it would be to just turn her head a couple more inches and lean in, to close that tiny gap between them, to press her lips against Emily’s forehead. She’d never know, this deep in slumber, and Beca just wants to know, is actually dying to know, how soft and warm Emily’s skin would feel against her lips. 

Beca freezes and snaps back to reality, her mouth hovering a millimeter over Emily’s hairline. She can see her stuttering breath fluttering the baby hairs there and she knows that if Emily were to regain even the barest hint of consciousness, she’d feel how close Beca’s face is. 

Dear lord, what the hell is she doing?

She jerks her head back quickly. Emily stirs a bit at the movement, eyebrows scrunching a bit. Beca swallows down her panic and inhales slowly, trying to cool herself down and stop acting like a complete buffoon.

Sleep. Bed. She should get Emily to bed. 

“C’mon, Em,” she mumbles, lifting her shoulder up and down. “Bedtime.”

Displeased with the disruption, Emily’s face scrunches up even more as she groans, lips pulling into a pout. Beca has to close her eyes and turn away lest she do something incredibly stupid. 

Like grab her face. Pull her in. 

Kiss her. 

But it’s stupid to want that. Selfish. Inappropriate, even. What they have right now, this partnership and this friendship and the confusing blur of marriage-like domesticity they have as roommates, is perfectly fine the way it is. There’s no need to jeopardize all of that just because Beca can’t keep it in her pants.

So she banishes all thoughts of kissing Emily anywhere and shakes her awake, ignoring her complaints, and shepherds her into her room for the night. 

And if she leans back against Emily’s closed door and touches her fingers to her lips like some yearning, pining fool…well. No one can blame her. No one can blame her for falling head over heels in love with Emily Junk.