#I can just see it. ppl like this are miserable n just dark. they aren’t fulfilled by life and most likely never will be | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

acabloe · 6 years

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Soon Goodbye, Now Love: chapter six

new ppl who r just seeing this it’s a guardian angel A/U

find all the parts here ☟

Ao3 ff.net

tw’s: swearing, mentions of depression and anxiety, loss of memory

still based on this song lol

here is the moodboard for ambience purposes if you’re that kind of kid

a/n: its been very long yada yada please just tell me if you want the next chapter because im stuck in au land, if you would prefer a Jane Austin au literally ill drop everything

once the lights go out

Higher City, Angel Habitat/Complex - 2:45 AM

Half an hour post-transportation and five hours after Chloe’s accident.

Beca stumbled on her footing as she grasped around the edge of the doorframe, looking for a switch or a pull to shed light into the pitch-black space that expanded beyond the doors of her residence for the next who-knew-how-long.

Her neck whined in an aggravating crick from sitting hunched over Chloe’s bedside for so long and her mind was mushed from the weight of stress, overtiredness, excessive adrenaline usage and above all else, of course--grief. The only thing keeping her from collapsing on the ground in the doorway of this small concrete hallway and weeping herself to sleep was the sentence she continued to recite to herself repetitively under her breath: “Chloe’s alive, everyone’s safe, you’ll be okay.”

She far from even entertained the possibility that the last part was rest assured, but the act of mouthing it repetitively had a numbing effect on her currently fragile mental stamina.

After fumbling for a few seconds, she huffed in exasperation and gave up trying to find a switch. Sleep was the only thing she had the brains to carry out. Deliberation over everything else that had transpired in the past four hours would be performed when her brain was a just little further away from falling apart.

The man at the front desk of the grey building had given her a small but heavy and lumpy grey drawstring rucksack before dropping her off alone in the dingy hall of her new quarters. She set it down by her feet now, using it to prop open the thick black door to let as much light into the room as possible.

Hands outstretched, she shuffled inside and waited until her eyes adapted to the murky black interior. It took a few seconds but eventually the slight outlines of shapes faded into view and she finally spotted what she assumed was a thin standing-lamp in the corner. She stepped blindly towards it and jumped backwards a little when it suddenly flickered on, sensing her hand in the air a few inches before it.

The space was little more than a closet. Beca had little mind to care, too exhausted to be grumpy. Besides, it was pretty comfortable considering her own size. The walls and ceiling were simply white-washed cement and there was a foot by foot square to serve as a window at the farthest wall from the door, though it had little to no effect at this time of the night. She wondered briefly about the concept of daylight here and if there even was sun or moonlight. The sparse furniture was a bed, an old wooden sea-trunk, and a tiny porcelain sink in the corner. Beca placed her rucksack in the trunk and sank onto the stiff but not wholly uncomfortable pallet, lacking any sufficient drive in her to take anything off, including her shoes, or even get under the soft linen sheets. Her eyes fell shut and the relief of deep sleep ebbed impending in her mind’s eye.

Yet her head pounded and her heart still fluttered at a sickening pace under her ribs. She found it increasingly difficult to keep her eyes closed; the image of Chloe, pale and fragile in such a battered state after the accident, had etched itself clearly behind her eyelids. Her breathing was difficult to regulate (she was unsure if this was due to her thinking so deeply on the act of regulating it, or an actual physical anxious reaction) and the room was uncomfortably cold.

She brought her knees to her chest and hugged them tightly. Everything was gone. Everything she and those she loved had worked so hard to build from so little was over and erased without trace. She had trudged heavily from wholly miserable to the happiest she had ever been without ease and certainly not in good time. All of that happiness. Up and gone like passing something eye-catching for its possible beauty in the sand on the beach, but upon running back to find it, its existence is nothing more than imagined.

A distinct memory faded into view. It was more of a moving image (a gif, so to speak) than a memory, but she could hear distant and muffled voices as if she were standing outside the door of a closed cinema to a movie she wasn’t familiar with.

The image was of her and Chloe in their late teens resting under a filter of broken apricot sunset through a canopy of birch leaves shimmering above their heads. Chloe’s head rested on Beca’s shoulder as she ripped up the grass beneath her, spreading it over Beca’s legs like dirty confetti.

She didn’t remember the scene as such. She only knew that it felt real. And that it ached her chest and throat and burned her eyes with the threat of tears.

Now she could no longer withhold the prickling tears and shuddering sobs and resolved that if tiring herself out would be the only route she would be able to take towards a somewhat restful night, she would charge down its’ course at a thousand miles per hour, foot stomped on the gas pedal.

She stretched and bided in the memory as deeply as she could.

Her sobs reverberated softly in the small stone room.

Underneath this, a soft irregular ticking noise sounded from above and outside her window. She ignored it. As it got louder she recognized it to be rain, heavy and sheeted. This prodded her curiosity just enough; still shaking, she stood from the bed and wobbled over to the hand-sized window. Sure enough, though it was dark outside, blue light from a nearby pathway lamp lit up tiny cascading waterfalls down the thick pane.

“How fucking ironic,” she whispered.

Chloe called in sick the next day to work. She wasn’t positive why, she simply knew that the exasperation of her most mundane course of existence would eventually wear whatever mere being she had left into the shell of a personality akin to that of a tired old cat.

The events of the past two days had stirred in her a sort of awakening for what it felt like to experience happenstances outside of her citadel of repetitive routine and emotional hibernation. Though it was not the most merry or enjoyable topics to mull over, she found herself wrapped in reflection often and began finding a need to force herself not to dwell on it so much as not to overthink to the point of obsession.

The urge to constantly check in on her odd rescue-project was difficult to quash but necessary. Chloe reminded herself that her relationship was barely visible with this human being--all she had done was let her stay the night and drive her into the city. They had barely even conversed. Still, the event had shaken her, and she had little else to think about. She convinced herself to only inquire into Beca’s situation in two days time when she was sure Beca had become a little more settled. She was confident that Flo was good hands and that she would care for her guest appropriately, especially since now she would be living above the cafe.

Except that Chloe found a bracelet resting on the coffee table by her couch that wasn’t hers. So she kind of had to go back to the cafe. Kind of.

It had taken the entire remainder of the day and most of the next to finally situate Beca into a somewhat habitable situation. After Chloe had left, Flo closed up early and she and her new employee spent several hours behind the counter and in the bakery as she showed her the ropes. Beca was happy to see how surprised and pleased Flo was at Beca’s natural agility and skill around the oven and the baked goods. Flo easily taught her to bake the four most popular pastries, specific to her family’s recipes, and how to make four of the simplest drinks on the menu to start out, as well as her way around the cash register. As the day came to a close, they left the cafe to rush their way through several more monotonous but still critical errands like setting up both a bank account and a small, temporary mobile phone. They stopped at Flo’s apartment a few doors down from the cafe before calling it a night and Flo piled Beca’s arms with enough food to last for a week or so. The following morning, Beca set out on her own to blunder her way through a T.J.Maxx and a shopping center to find some clothes that were--well, some clothes. Once she returned to the cafe they worked a little past 6:00 which came oddly fast (her orientation of time and its passing were still muddled and the work at Flo’s came naturally to her.)

Succeeding the whirlwind of toil they had conducted over the past two days, Flo expeditiously suggested that a trip downtown was in order and after twenty minutes of walking briskly through the chill of the celebratory evening, the pair dropped into two rotating stools in a colorfully-lit bar home to some very happy and boisterous company. It had been so long since Beca had had any alcohol, so she ordered the most obnoxious drink on the menu and four jello shots to split between them.

“So, first real day back! How are you feeling?”

Beca sipped her syrupy cocktail and grimaced at the unaccustomed flavor of alcohol.

“I don’t know. Everything’s kinda’ blurry right now, but my brain is sort of slacking off a little in the staying-awake-during-the-regular-daytime department. The time difference is so much more insane than when you swap from different time zones on earth ‘cause there are an extra four hours of daytime and an extra two of night. There aren’t sunsets either, the sky just goes black for a while which is actually really depressing.”

“Wait, so, do you have, like, powers or anything? Can you fly? You don’t have a halo, right?” Beca again decided to refrain from divulging her distressing ordeal concerning her glowing appendages. She had blissfully forgotten about that situation until Flo had mentioned powers, which threw her in a temporary whirlpool of apprehensive unease.

“Not really, and no, I can’t fly. I mean, I can kinda’ tell when something is wrong with whoever I’m guarding, and I can slow down time by a couple of seconds, but that takes so much energy and I can only use it in emergencies. And you know about bringing the memories back, but that’s only if the memories have been taken away by heaven. They mostly spent time training us how to deal with any situation; so like, CPR, difficult-situation negotiation tactics, advanced martial arts and stuff.”

“Oh. That is boring.”

“Yeah, kind of.” Beca sipped her drink again which was less foul the second round, but still jarring.

“So how does this-” She gesticulated vaguely at Beca’s body which she understood as metaphorical- “work anyways?”

“Oh, well after you die, you can request to be a guardian and they put you through this huge crash course for protecting a human. After training you’re assigned one person to guard on earth for their whole life, starting whenever heaven thinks that person needs the most guidance. Sometimes that means bumping into them and becoming best friends with them or marrying and growing old with them. Sometimes you never even meet them in person, just help them from afar. You do what heaven dictates is best for them, so no complicated attachments. When they die, your memory is replaced in the mind of everyone you’ve ever met as someone else, so no one will recognize you when you go back to earth and you get sent back to heaven and reverted to the age you died to start with another assignment. You can never, um, retire or whatever, and apparently you can only stop once you’ve worn out your brain. And then they, you, know, cease you ‘cause you’re no good to them anymore.”

“Shit.” Flo had sat through staring at the dark brick wall behind the bar with a blank expression enunciating her contemplation of what Beca had revealed.

“‘Shit’ is right. I guess it sounds kind of cool when I describe it, but when I thought I was actually going to have to do it for, like, thousands of years, I was really fuckin’ bummed, dude.”

“Understandable. But you hacked the heaven system, how does that work?”

“Yeah, hacked, or something. I don’t even know if they’ll be able to tell. They’re supposed to be able to connect with their angels but I severed that attachment when I changed my assignment. I think they-” Flo brought Beca’s expatiations to an abrupt halt, holding up her palm to signify silence and raising her phone to her ear, an apologetic glance tossed in Beca’ direction.

“Chloe! Hi! What’s up?” Speak of the devil. Beca squirmed a little on her stool at the sound of Chloe’s voice on the other end. She couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, but she didn’t sound particularly troubled. Even so...

“Oh, okay. We’re at a bar downtown right now…uh huh. Yeah, she is all settled, we finished a few hours ago.”

Flo removed her phone from her ear and hid it under her chin to bring her attention to Beca. “She says she has a bracelet of yours?”

“Oh, um. I guess? I don’t really remember having one but-”

“She says it is not hers.”

“No, Flo, I said it might be.”

“Okay...it is hers. You can drop it off at the café. Anything else?”

Beca seized Flo’s phone from her grasp. “Will you give us a sec’ Chloe?” She placed it on mute.

“Hey! What?!” Flo scrambled and stretched, trying desperately to reclaim her confused friend on the other end of the line, but Beca held it out of her reach, exasperated.

“Flo, why are you being like this?!”

Flo sighed heavily off of an exaggerated voiced inhale and rested her hands on Beca’s arm. Beca grew uncomfortable with the sudden sincerity in her voice.

“Okay, listen. Beca, I know you did not come back for the Bellas. I know you just came back for Chloe. I think you really need some time to adjust on earth before you do anything rash. I don’t think you should be getting too close to her and I think that you are idealizing your situation. Por el amor de Dios, Chloe doesn’t even know who you are! You need to slow your ass down, girl! We have the Bella reunion soon. You can wait that long at least.”

Beca chewed on her lip thoughtfully. This was the first vocal confirmation of what she had been refraining from thinking over fully past the whispered voice of reason behind a closet door barely ajar in the very recesses of her mind. For the thousandth time that day she swallowed the reflection of how careless and hasty her actions had been.

Beca had never dwelled so long and hard over someone or something as she had over Chloe whilst in heaven. Only her mother’s death came as remotely close a subject to how ruthlessly Beca obsessed (Obsess - used very much in the dictionary sense; not lightly. See also; beset, consume, haunt, etc.) over Chloe and her accident. Considering this, a complete and detailed plan would definitely make sense in this context; however, obsession to this point considers little factual influence in a non-idealized, material world. Hence, Beca’s rash behavior and her reactions to Chloe in palpable physical situations.

“Okay... maybe you’re right. I guess I was really weighing everything on Chloe liking me for me, and not all the stuff we shared in the past, you know? Sorry about not saying anything about it, and I really am so happy to see you. I love you so much. All of you. Please don’t think I didn’t come back for you guys. You mean everything to me, we’re family. I just, you know... Please schedule the reunion soon?”

“Yes. Fine, I will.” Beca slowly retracted her arm and placed the phone in Flo’s expectant (but now softened and more sympathetic) outstretched palm. She unmuted the call.

“Hi, Chloe, sorry about that, drunk asshole was bothering us. You can bring the bracelet to the reunion. By the way, do we have some dates for that yet? Aubrey should be here this month, right? Yes. No, uh-huh. Okay great, perfect, text the group-chat about it? Okay, bye!” She hung up and grinned at Beca. “Two weeks, as long as everyone is free!”

“Ugh, dude what am I gonna’ do in the meantime?”

“Well, I know that you only came back for-,” Beca threw her a glare and Flo surrendered, hands in the air. “Sorry, right, a couple reasons, and it is all you have got your heart set on, but you need to take a few steps back. I have to say Beca, you really didn’t plan this very well. You need to establish a solid base here because this is your life now. You may be an angel, but if you think about it, I am, like, definitely a saint for doing all this for you.”

Beca flipped her off and returned to wincing down the copious amounts of fluid she had spent an annoying amount of cash on.

“For real though, you’re right. And I really... appreciate everything you’re doing for me Flo, it means a lot.” Flo smiled and nodded.

Perhaps if Chloe hadn’t felt so out of place, she would have asked Flo to let her join the girls at the bar. But for some reason, something about the phone call and the whole situation whispered a sense of exclusion -- well intentioned or not, she couldn’t tell. She hadn’t felt this socially anxious in a while. Her mental health was not even anything she had thought about in depth for a few years and she had long ago passively accepted the concept that with age came dampened emotions, and that such was a perfectly natural sequence. If nothing would ever give her real pleasure again, so be it.

Another walk. Another achingly familiar song. Another foot in front of the other. Another fifteen minutes later and she stood in front of a deep, deep dark pond, rocky banks powdered with grey-blue frost. The water reflected with the perfection of a mirror the nothingness of the ashy sky.

Chloe now stared into this nothingness -- the sort of staring where everything at once is what those who are staring can see, but they aren’t looking, just seeing and thinking. She stood, leaning slightly in a gentle trance as she remembered the time she had dived into this same water. She had choked and snorted through her nose as she had come up for air and swallowed some accidentally. A friend on the bank had been slumped over in hysterics at her fruitless efforts to cease wheezing and laughing and coughing and yelling at her friend to stop. In her mind she imagined that it was Beca who sat beside the water giggling at her. Stupid and weird that you’d think of her, she thought, but she couldn’t properly remember who it had really been, and the image of Beca fit comfortably well in the situation.

She closed her eyes and settled deeper into the memory, in place but outside of time. In vein, she tried to remember who had actually been there to witness the moment. She couldn’t even remember when it had happened. This was not a memory she had thought about in...well, truthfully, she had completely forgotten about it since it had happened. The age of the memory prevented her from remembering details. Only present, was the sweet feeling of the moment, a honey-like residue, resting delicately in her conscious.

She was now fully trying to convince herself, however, that Beca had not been there. She finally shook her head as if to dislodge the memory and sharply inhaled cold air, opening her eyes to see, hunched over on the side of the banks with chin rested on knees, none other than the subject of her specious nostalgia. Chloe blinked several times and recognized the figure to be but a log, dark and rubbed to clump from weather and wear. Now freaking herself out she rose swiftly and promptly speed walked for her home, holding herself firmly from looking around for fear of misreading another inanimate object.

She wasn’t there, obviously she wasn’t there. Just someone who reminds me of her, or looks like her. Obviously.

#soon goodbye now love #bechloe #bechloe fanfic #bechloe fanfiction #beca mitchel #chloe beale #Pitch Perfect #pitch perfect au

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