Chapter Text
“You know what? I will take it! I need a distraction anyway! I love it! Here we go!”
Chloe furrowed her brow slightly as she watched Beca turn on the spot and scramble between the clothes hung up on their clothes rail that acted as a divider between the beds in their apartment. That was a far more enthusiastic reaction than she’d expected her best friend to have when finding out that they had that Bellas reunion tonight at the Brooklyn Aquarium. Beca wasn’t usually keen on plans suddenly being sprung upon her (even when it had been organised several weeks ago).
The redhead sat down on one of the chairs at their small kitchen table, pulling delicately at the Bellas scarf that she had tied a little too tightly around her neck earlier, and she glanced at Fat Amy who sat on the edge of the fold-out couch that acted as a double bed that Chloe and Beca shared, “What happened?” she asked the Australian.
“She got fired today” Amy replied quickly.
Chloe’s eyebrows rose in shock as she let out a gasp, “No!!”
She knew Beca better than anyone else. Beca was her very best friend, having bonded with her in college. Well..if ‘bonded’ meant barging into Beca’s shower one day (much to Beca’s horror) and dueting with her then yeah, they bonded. Follow it up with a shared conversation on the bug tattoos they both had and a much later heart-to-heart about how terrible their childhood upbringings were - by the time Beca had reached the end of her freshman year Chloe was certain she never wanted to spend another moment of her life without the petite brunette in it.
So she had stuck around Barden University for a further three years, repeating her senior year while Beca continued through college. And while she’d implicitly told everyone it was because Russian Lit was a really hard subject, in actual fact it was because she’d had the hugest crush on Beca in college, and had wanted to make the most of the opportunity to share captaincy of the Bellas with her. Those three years meant that the two women had become closer than any two friends could get, to the point when they had even begun communicating without words.
While most of the Bellas moved back home after graduation, both Beca and Chloe had agreed that there wasn’t really much of a family for either of them to ‘go home’ to. So they, along with Fat Amy (Beca’s long-time college roommate), had decided to rent an apartment in Atlanta to suit Beca’s blossoming career at Residual Heat Records. There they had been able to afford a three bed apartment between the three of them.
Within a year Beca had been head hunted to become a Music Producer for an NYC-based company called ‘BFD Records’ (‘Big Fucking Deal Records’ as Fat Amy had fondly nicknamed it) and the trio had moved to Brooklyn, with nothing really keeping them in Atlanta any more.
The living conditions weren’t nearly as ‘luxurious’, with Beca and Chloe agreeing to share the fold-out sofa bed in the small studio apartment while Fat Amy ‘shot-gunned’ the double bed beside it. But it was all that Beca could realistically afford for them. And at the end of the day, it was home.
So yeah, Chloe knew Beca very well. And as such, it surprised her that the brunette had been fired. She knew Beca had a bit of a surly attitude from time to time and that her sarcasm could often be misconstrued as aggressive or stand-off-ish behaviour to those who didn’t know her. She also knew, having had many the bedtime conversation with Beca, that her best friend had come to realise that being a music producer really hadn’t been as brilliant as she’d hoped it’d be. Chloe knew Beca had been unhappy and frustrated with her job. But she certainly couldn’t imagine the company wanting to fire her.
“I didn’t get fired!” Beca said in an exasperated tone, still rifling behind the clothes rail, presumable looking for the tub which she’d placed her old Bellas outfits in, “I quit!”
That made more sense to Chloe, having spent far too many moments over recent months with Beca getting in late from work and rambling about how shit her day had been and how tempted she was to quit. In those moments Chloe would just sit silently in their bed, having paused whatever Netflix show she’d been watching on her laptop, and allowed Beca to assume her favourite position: laid horizontally with her head on Chloe’s lap while she stared at the ceiling, babbling angrily while Chloe stroked/plaited her hair.
“You did?” Chloe said brightly, a big smile brushing over her face, thrilled that her best friend had finally made a decision that would make her far happier, “Congratulations!!”
“Thank you!” Beca said, poking her head between the hanging clothes, then pointing at Chloe while she looked at Fat Amy, “That’s the reaction I was after!”
“Do I even want to know how Amy reacted?” Chloe asked cautiously, knowing just how quickly Fat Amy could jump to conclusions. It wouldn’t be too far fetched to believe that the Australian probably bundled the petite brunette and tried to hug her too hard. Beca had confessed to Chloe once that she hated it when people enveloped her in hugs because she was so small – she felt as though she were suffocating.
Beca raised her eyebrows at the redhead and Chloe knew what that meant. It meant that every way Chloe thought Amy had reacted was exactly how the blonde had reacted, “Ah..right..” she added quietly, a sympathetic smile on her face.
And Beca disappeared behind the clothes rail again, before quickly muscling back through it carrying a large plastic tub that her old Bellas uniforms lived in, plopping it on the fold-out sofa-bed in the space beside Fat Amy.