Work Text:
Beca wants.
For as long as she can remember, she's always been awkward. The girl with no friends, or the wrong friends, the one who was shoved into lockers and tripped in hallways and who was told, very firmly to her face, that she was not invited. Like every little girl, she'd cried and she'd wheedled and she'd walked around, so confused as to what she was doing wrong.
It was her smile. It was her clothes. It was the teachers who adored her, and the books she started reading at too-young of an age, and the big words that fell awkwardly from her mouth because she didn't really know how they were pronounced. It was her imagination, that seemed so different from everyone else's. She didn't want to play doctor, or house, or plan weddings, she wanted to slay dragons and explore fantasy worlds and fly on a spaceship. She wants to be the hero, to save the day.
Then she discovers music, really discovers it, and suddenly she no longer cares. It starts in the fourth grade, when during the second half of the year the school choir opens up to anyone ten or older. She joins because for the first half of the year she'd been showing up to school hours early, to get away from the cold silence that permeates the house nowadays, and the ladies in the office like her well enough to let her hang out there when it's cold but think she should be doing something else, instead. So she goes to choir in the morning, and learns to read music, and falls in love. With the sounds, and the harmony, and the bells they use for the Easter concert at the senior citizen's home. She starts begging her parents for CDs, and a music player, and better headphones, and she gets it because her parents feel guilty for not being able to stop the slow, agonizing dissolution of their marriage.
Music doesn't fill the hole in her, but it's the closest thing she's ever found, and she falls into it. She wants it to consume her whole.
By the time she reaches high school, everyone knows that Beca Mitchell is gay. It's not something she's ever said, and it had never crossed her mind when the rumors started flying, but eventually she just accepts that she's apparently the last to know. The rumors hurt, because they're mean, but once she embraces it with a nonchalant shrug whenever someone asks, the nasty words and nastier looks fade away. Because, as she learns, it's boring to be mean when the other person just doesn't care.
Beca wants to join choir, but her schedule doesn't work out that first year, and by the time sophomore year class selections come up she's learned what a raging bitch the choir teacher is, and she doesn't try and sign up. She takes a computer class, instead, and when one of the seniors shows her the music program he's using she's lost. This is it. This is what her entire life has been heading towards, and she starts sinking all of her allowance into music programs for their shitty home computer, and when her parents agree to get her a laptop for Christmas she's so excited she forgets that she hates her dad and actually calls him to say thanks.
She falls in love, more times than she can keep track of, but after the first confession goes badly and the girl's jock boyfriend has her tossed into the local creek, she learns to keep it to herself. After a while, it stops hurting so bad that none of the girls she loves ever loves her back. She pulls away, starts distancing herself from the few friends she has, and soon all anyone can say about her is she's obsessed with music and has a tongue that can cut through steel. No one knows her, and no one cares to, and she tells herself she that because she doesn't want to care, she doesn't.
Her boss at the music store tells her about his time in LA, and even though he obviously didn't make it she can't stop thinking about following in his footsteps. So when her mom and dad - over Skype - sit her down to scream at her about not actually mailing out any of her college applications, she just keeps her eyes down and barrels through it. Because she has her music, and she doesn't care what they say, she's going. She wants the music scene in LA to be her whole world.
It takes her mother having a nervous break down to convince Beca that this is not actually going to happen. She discovers, later, that her father had submitted a late admission packet on her behalf to his university, and she just knows the only reason she got accepted is because he works there, but her mother is so fragile and her father lays the guilt on so heavily that she agrees to go.
When she leaves home for the airport, she doesn't know what's sadder - that she doesn't have a single friend to say goodbye to, or that she doesn't really care. She's burned those bridges, and it's years too late to look back now.
A few months after she arrives at Barden, she's bemused to discover she isn't completely miserable. She has friends, if you count the girls she only sees at a capella practice and the guys she tries to avoid at the radio station as friends. She likes them well enough, none of them are actively mean, and some of them actually go out of their way to talk to her. She's bad at texting, and Chloe and Jesse especially are always disappointed that she never wants to hang out with them outside of mandatory events, but Beca likes her solitude. She likes mixing music, and the quiet of her room - sometimes she even forgets Kimmy Jin is in there, since the other girl never speaks to her - and she's never been one for parties anyway.
They never give up on her, though, and while she still spends most of her free time holed up in her room, occasionally she'll find her way to Chloe's for a music jam session, or Jesse will barge in with a movie he demands she watch but they never actually get around to seeing, or Fat Amy will drag her out for a random party that Beca would never, ever go to on her own but almost sort of has fun at because, really, Amy is too ridiculous not to have fun around. She stops getting annoyed when Lilly and Ashley interrupt her when she's at the library studying, or when she gets a phone call in the middle of the night to go pick Stacie up because her boytoy for the evening is way too drunk to drive her home, or when Cynthia Rose starts trying to drag her to the racetrack on Sundays (she never goes).
It's only after they lose semi-finals, after Chloe fails to stand up for her and Aubrey looks like Beca stole her boyfriend and Jesse reacts like Beca kicked his puppy, after Fat Amy can't stop looking at her with disbelief and Jessica looks like she's going to cry and Stacie won't look at her at all, that Beca realizes she still falls in love way too easily and the reason this sucks so bad is because she's disappointed them, and she loves them all so much it hurts. Even Aubrey, who Beca can't stand because she's a controlling, stuck up bitch. Because Aubrey is beautiful, and ambitious, and kind, and broken in a way that breaks Beca's heart.
So she runs, runs as far and as fast as she can, because Beca doesn't know how to deal with loving everyone. She doesn't know how to deal with letting anyone in past her walls, and at this rate she's let them all in. It's fucking terrifying, and she spends the next few weeks in a fugue. She finds herself coming to her senses while doing things she'd never do: watch movies, not mix music, cry. Nothing seems to make sense anymore, and the entire time her chest aches and she wants.
She doesn't know what she wants, but it fills Beca so completely she wonders how she can even function.
It takes a text message from Chloe to get her out of her funk, so to speak. Her phone hasn't gone off for days, so she doesn't even realize it's happened at first. She reaches over the DVD cases to look at it, and blinks repeatedly as she reads it over and over again.
WE'RE IN FOOTNOTES DQD PLEEEEEAAAAAASE COME SUNDAY XOXO
It's quintessentially Chloe, and she can practically hear the girl shrieking the words in her ear. Her chest tightens, and she finds herself on the verge of tears again. She doesn't know if she can take it, if she can handle going back. But she wants, so badly, and she knows if she doesn't do something the wanting will swallow her whole.
Her father doesn't tell her anything she doesn't know, but strangely he's the one who actually convinces her to go back. Because she loves them, even if she'll never find it in her to tell them that. Because, seriously, what kind of person loves everybody?
It hurts that Chloe doesn't tell Aubrey to let her back in, it hurts like a knife is being twisted in her chest, but when Aubrey calls her back she's so happy she's afraid she might burst into tears. She covers up with snark, and when she tells them they're all her friends she worries they'll see that she's lying, that they'll know that secretly, deep down, she'd marry every single one of them if she could. When Chloe meets her eye, she can't help but feel that somehow the other girl knows.
It's a week later, when she's holed up in Aubrey and Chloe's apartment putting the finishing touches on the arrangement for finals, when Aubrey has miraculously passed out on the floor with her feet just barely tangled with Beca's and drooling slightly on a couch pillow, that Chloe sits down next to her.
"Beca," the older girl says, so gently that Beca freezes and feels the want in her chest threaten to overwhelm her. "It's okay. You know we love you too."
Beca bursts into tears. For the first time in almost a decade in front of someone else: she sobs hysterically, and Chloe pulls her into a fierce hug, and when Aubrey is suddenly there too, hair mussed from sleep and concern in her eyes, Beca just cries harder. Because somehow, Chloe gets it. Chloe understands, and Aubrey understands Chloe, and Beca doesn't have to hide anymore.
Chloe and Aubrey are surprisingly understanding when Beca decides to change the entire arrangement, to center it on a song made popular through an old 80s movie. The choreography doesn't change much, and the Bellas pick it up so fast it's like suddenly they're living the music too. Beca loves them all so much it hurts, but now she smiles at them and they smile back and it's okay that she feels this way.
Chloe hugs her all the time now, and Aubrey's started awkwardly putting her hand on Beca's shoulder just when she needs it most. The look in both their eyes when she gives them each a thumbdrive of her latest mixes makes her want even more.
The music swells, the songs cycle back continuously while building on, and Beca apologizes to Jesse in the biggest way possible. She loves him, because he loves her, and how could she not? When he gives her a thumbs up, as the song ends and Chloe is kissing her and Aubrey is clinging to them both like her life depends on it, she understands that he gets her too.
The wanting will never, ever go away. But maybe, wanting isn't a bad thing. Maybe wanting gives her music, and the Bellas, and the radio station. Maybe it gives her movie nights she hates that she loves with Jesse and Benji, and movie nights with Chloe and Aubrey that she loves because they never, ever finish the movie. Maybe wanting brings her back to the beginning, while showing her just how much the future has in store.
Beca wants, and maybe, just this once, she gets.