Looking back, Beca could say that the one thing the Bellas were really good at, like, they-should-put-it-on-the-brochure good, was teaching her new things about herself. It's not something she had thought she particularly needed help with, that day she went aimlessly wandering through the activities fair in an effort to get her father off her back. But if she's being completely honest, in hindsight, she's equal parts grateful and resentful of a lot of the things she learned.

More on that later.

The point is, she had really thought she had a firm grasp on who she was, what she wanted, and the role other people were going to play in her life.

She was Beca. She wanted to be a music producer. She didn't need other people. And ok, yeah. Maybe only one of those things drastically changed over the course of her college career, but it was a big enough change where it kind of completely altered the whole course of her life in a way she never could have possibly predicted.

Ever. In a million years.

Times infinity.

Take right after graduation, for instance. If you had asked her Freshman self as she lugged her bags out of a taxi, full of bad attitude and enough eyeliner to make an Egyptian noble proud, if she ever thought she'd sing in an international a cappella competition and win? She probably wouldn't even have laughed. She probably would have just rolled her eyes and walked away. Now if you had asked her if she thought she'd ever sing in an international a cappella competition and win, and be excited about it? That may have gotten you a laugh. If you had asked her if she thought she would ever sing in an international a cappella competition and win, and be excited about it, and be partying after with the fucking weirdest combination of girls (probably) on the planet, in Copenhagen, drinking vodka directly out of a bottle, playing games like "truth or dare" and "never have I ever"? She'd have… She's actually not sure what she would have done. That's a lot of shit you'd have to have been able to predict.

Her point is holy shit did she learn a lot about herself over her 4 years at Barden. Because she did sing in an international a cappella competition. And they did win. And she was fucking stoked about it. And the shit Fat Amy was coming up with in this stupid game of "never have I ever" would have made it difficult for anyone to really get drunk, because who the fuck had ever "boxed a wallaby while wearing a banana hammock"? (She'd call bullshit, but she learned in her sophomore year to never ever question Fat Amy's stories.) So the rules were really more like 'guidelines', and everyone was definitely drinking a lot.

"Never have I ever done the dirty in a stranger's car," Stacie sung out, before proudly taking a sip out of her own bottle of wine.

"Stacie, you're not playing it right. None of you are. You're not supposed to say stuff you've actually done!"

(Well, so… everyone was drinking a lot except Aubrey.)

Beca snorted into her solo cup as she took another sip, earning a playful elbow to the ribs from Chloe where she was cuddled up next to her. Oh, and that's another thing she never would have guessed about herself. She actually really really liked having friends. And she really really liked having a best friend. She knew the other girls would probably be super hurt if she ever said it out loud (even though she knew it was fairly obvious), but while she loved them all, Chloe was… well…

Chloe was Chloe.

She was honestly the only reason she had toughed it out in the group for the full four years. Because if she was being honest, she had thought about quitting the Bellas a couple times; when finals AND captaining the team AND making all the arrangements AND helping with all the choreography AND going to and leading all the practises AND preparing for all the competitions seemed like way too much to have on any one person's plate. You couldn't really blame her for thinking about it. Just thinking, though; she would never actually quit. Because even hedging that she was even thinking about quitting was enough to bring tears to impossibly blue eyes, and she never EVER wanted to go through that again. It wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth making Chloe look that sad and devastated.

So here she was. In Copenhagen. Feeling drunker than she had probably been all year. And she was kinda sorta loving it.

"Legacy. Your turn," Beca called out, making the poor Freshman jump.

"I don't… I don't think I'd be very good at this," Emily stuttered out, shifting on her feet.

"It should be easy for you, Legacy. It's obvious you haven't done anything remotely exciting," Fat Amy said, her words slurring and her cup sloshing over as she gestured towards the younger girl.

Cynthia Rose whooped loudly. "Yeah, step up, buttercup," she laughed.

"Um… OK." Emily gulped, her eyes darting between the collection of drunken Bellas nervously. "Uh… Never have I ever... kissed another girl?"

The room erupted in a combination of cheers and boos ("She really is the most boring human alive"). Poor Emily turned a startling shade of magenta, and Beca spared a moment to shoot her a comforting look before turning to Chloe with raised brows. Chloe saw the loaded look in Beca's eye and blushed prettily before smacking her shoulder with the back of her hand.

Taking stock of the room, CR, Stacie, Jessica, Ashley and Fat Amy all drank. The only big surprise there, at least as far as Beca was concerned, was Fat Amy. (And by 'surprise,' she meant 'pretty nauseating image,' but whatever. She beat the image down with another gulp from her red solo cup, grimacing a little at Fat Amy's truly deadly ratio of alcohol to mixer.)

Emily (duh), Beca, Chloe, Aubrey (double duh) and Flo did not drink.

("In my county, they have a special prison for girls who kiss other girls," Flo said, with a startling lack of recognition that that was kind of supremely fucked up.)

(Seriously. Where was she even from? North Korea?)

Lily, who either didn't understand the game or, more likely, didn't care about the rules (as much as any of them were actually following them), had been drinking pretty much the whole time, so no one really knew what it meant when she took a pull straight out of the bottle of Limoncello cradled in her arm.

(No one really knew what she said either, the Bellas all long-used to seeing the strange girl's lips twist and twitch, adding another — probably terrifying — statement into the ether.)

(It was probably for the best.)

"Seriously, Red?" Stacie said with raised brows, her head tilted in Chloe's direction. "I'm surprised."

"I think Short Stack is the shocker here. We all saw the tongue-tied mess she turned into around her dear Kommissar."

Beca sputtered indignantly. "Hey!"

But Chloe just blushed and shrugged her shoulders. "I dunno," she mumbled, more to herself than to Stacie. "Just never happened"

"Not by choice though", Beca murmured with a sly grin.

Now it was Chloe's turn to be indignant. "Beca!" She hissed, smacking her shoulder again (a lot harder than before).

"What was that?" Cynthia Rose asked, leaning forward with a sort of enthusiastic glee, like she knew she was about to be gifted some kind of juicy gossip.

"Beca…" Chloe warned quietly, but Beca, of course, ignored her.

"Oh nothing," she said, smirk ever-present on her lips. "Just a little conversation we had."

Chloe hissed in a low voice, her expression murderous, "Beca, I swear to god—"

"Something about wishing she had done a little more 'experimenting' in college. Wasn't that it Chlo?"

The room roared to life, too many voices speaking and laughing at once for Beca to understand any single person. Chloe was flushed from her hairline all the way down to her chest by now, and she buried her face in her hands, reaching over and punching Beca's shoulder when Beca chimed in on the laughter. Ok. But for real. She was going to bruise.

"When did this even happen?" Aubrey (by far the most serious person Beca had probably ever met) asked.

Beca shrugged. "At the retreat."

"Beca," Chloe groaned, face still buried in her hands. "Please shut up."

Aubrey frowned, the lines in her forehead deepening with her disapproving expression. "Let me get this straight," she said in a huff, arms crossed over her chest. "You were all supposed to be engaged in strict team bonding activities, but instead you two decided to sneak off and talk about how you guys wanted to fool around?"

"Woah now," Beca said, hands up defensively. "No one said anything about wanting to fool around."

"You know girl," Cynthia Rose drawled with a suggestive wiggle of her brows, "all you had to do was ask."

Chloe looked truly mortified by now, and Beca actually was starting to feel kinda bad, so she took pity on her and chucked the nearest pillow in Cynthia Rose's direction. "Down girl!" The pillow smacked her directly in the face and she toppled over backwards in a fit of giddy laughter.

"Honestly, Red. You ever decide you wanna go through with it, you just let me know," Stacie purred with a suggestive wink.

The girls continued with their teasing, almost unusually relentless, and Chloe shrunk in on herself more and more with every tease and barb.

Beca began to realize that she may have made a slight miscalculation in terms of this whole situation. Teasing Chloe was one thing — usually she was a great sport about it, and she could give as good as she got — but teasing Chloe about this particular thing… well. It didn't really seem like a bunch of innocent fun anymore. Not with the way Chloe's shoulders seemed to collapse downward with every misplaced come-on by either Stacie or Cynthia Rose. Not with the way Aubrey was looking down her nose at Beca, clearly unhappy with this turn of events.

"Hey, come on, guys," Beca said with a half-hearted laugh, trying to cut through the cacophony of laughter. But no one seemed to be paying attention to her. She tried one more time: "Guys, come on, why don't we just chill…" But she was just as unsuccessful the second time as the first. It seemed the revelation of Chloe's desire for same-sex experimentation was too jucy a story not to milk for all it was worth.

But it was the look on Chloe's face that made the tendrils of unease creep into her stomach. Chloe was upset. Or rather, she was fighting pretty hard to not be upset, and losing the battle rather spectacularly. (And Beca would do anything to stop Chloe from being upset.)

An idea struck her, sort of all at once, sort of without prompting. She wasn't really sure where it came from, but she was pretty sure it probably had something to do with the 6 shots of vodka she'd consumed over the past hour and a half (Thanks, Amy), but still.

It was an idea that probably didn't make a lot of sense, not if she really sat down and thought about it. But Beca wasn't thinking. She only knew exactly two things in that moment:

She hated the look on Chloe's face (and knowing it was mostly her fault Chloe was getting all this shit in the first place definitely didn't help), and

There was one way to get the Bellas off anyone's back that worked EVERY time, and that was to give them a better target.

So Beca set her cup down, sat up, reached over and cupped Chloe's cheek, and pulled her down until their lips met.

(It wasn't the best idea she'd ever had. All in all, she'd have to admit that it was pretty much not-thought-out in the slightest. But whatever. 6 shots of vodka were telling her that it was a really great plan and would definitely, totally work out the way she wanted it to.)

The kiss surprised Chloe. That much was obvious. She was stiff, her eyes frozen wide open, and she didn't really do anything other than just sit there, even when Beca pulled first on her upper lip then the bottom, biting down and tugging as she slowly backed away, tentatively brushing it with her tongue. She tasted — no shit — like cherry chapstick and vodka. As soon as that thought registered in her brain, she snorted a laugh into Chloe's mouth.

The girls had gone silent for maybe a microsecond before erupting in a deafening roar of jeers and catcalls.

"Pay up, pitches!" Cynthia Rose called out gleefully.

"Damn, Beca. You gots moves!"

"You can't just go around kissing people, Beca!"

"In my country-"

"Shut up, Flo"

Chloe, however, was silent. Beca tried to catch her eye, tried to communicate that she was kinda sorry for how this whole thing played out, tried to ask her without words whether or not she was okay, whether or not that kiss had been entirely out of line, whether Chloe's heart was racing as fast as her own…

But Chloe kept her eyes downcast, a blush still marring her cheeks. Beca studied her face for a few seconds, trying to gauge if she should be worried. She placed a tentative hand discreetly on Chloe's elbow, but Chloe jumped at the contact, lifting her gaze with a shaky smile, immediately raising her cup to her lips and downing the remainder of its contents.

For whatever it was worth, the kiss worked as a distraction. The teasing jeers the other Bellas had been tossing Chloe's way dipped to almost nothing, leaving Beca in the spotlight. And with so few eyes upon her, Chloe's demeanor slowly but steadily improved. She straightened her spine, squared her shoulders; her chin tilted up; giddy laughs once again spilled from her lips.

Beca didn't really care about anything else. She took the teasing, took the taunts, rolled her eyes and let the other girls jostle her around and make fun of her. She didn't care. Chloe was smiling and laughing again, and that's all that really mattered.

By the time everyone was staggering their way back to their own rooms, Beca was well and truly smashed. And judging by the way Chloe was leaning heavily on her shoulder, she wasn't faring much better. Chloe stumbled her way through four weak attempts at trying and failing to get her key card in the lock before Beca rolled her eyes and took over. (It took her six, but whatever. She got it to work eventually.)

When she finally managed to wrench the door open, Beca tripped unceremoniously into the room, kicking her shoes off and unbuttoning her jeans as she went. She shrugged her vest off and was trying to pull her white tee over her head when her knees hit the edge of the bed and she went tumbling down.

It took her a couple of seconds of fighting with her elbows twisted and trapped in stretchy fabric before her shoulders started to ache. She paused and laughed at herself, at the ridiculous situation she found herself in — stuck insider her own t-shirt, too drunk and careless and uncoordinated to get herself out. Just as she was starting to think that this was her life now, and she might actually be stuck in a twisted knot of cotton and limbs for at least the rest of the night, she felt the bed dip and heard a gentle chuckle at her side. Soft hands gently pulled and tugged at the offending garment until it finally cleared her head.

The sight that met her almost took her breath away. Chloe's hair was mussed, eyes bright and open, lips curved in a soft smile, her cheeks flushed red with the effects of a night of heavy drinking. She was kind of half bending over Beca, smiling with a look in her eyes that was so soft it made Beca's chest ache. They stayed like that, frozen in this one moment for what felt like an eternity. Chloe with her arms bracketing Beca's torso, her legs warm against the bare skin of Beca's thigh, and Beca with her t-shirt dangling around her wrists, her heart in her throat.

The tension was nearing unbearable levels when a sudden wave of vertigo hit, and she had to close her against against the lurch.

"Thanks." Beca croaked.

It seemed to break whatever spell they had fallen under. Chloe scrunched her nose up with a smile before turning and flopping onto her back. "Don't mention it," she said quietly, shoulder-to-shoulder with Beca on the bed.

For a moment they just lay there. But then the room started to spin, just a bit, and Beca had to slide her leg off the bed to place her foot flat on the floor. It helped a little, thankfully, and she didn't feel quite so much like the bed was trying to heave her off, but it didn't do much. She was truly and completely drunk and was already starting to feel the alluring pull of sleep that was pushing at the recesses of her mind.

"Why did you laugh?" Chloe asked suddenly, her voice breaking through the quiet of the room. Beca started at the unexpected noise, pulling herself out of the half-asleep daze into which she was swiftly slipping.

"Hmmm?" She asked, her voice sounding as fuzzy as her vision appeared.

"When you kissed me," Chloe clarified softly, seemingly finding courage in the darkness. "Why did you laugh?"

"Oh. Um…" Beca shook her head, her earlier laughter feeling like a stark overreaction to an otherwise fairly normal occasion (as much as kissing your best friend in front of a large group of your other best friends can be considered normal). Beca shrugged. "You wear cherry chapstick, dude."

It took Chloe a second before the light bulb went off and she started laughing. "So…" She said with a chuckle, "Does that mean you kissed a girl and you liked it?"

Beca snorted. "Maybe just the taste of your cherry chapstick."

Chloe laughed again before rolling onto her side, pressing herself flush against Beca's mostly bare body and looked up with a gleam in her eyes Beca had never seen before.

"Did you kiss a girl just to try it?" Chloe said, much softer, her voice a little rough around the edges in a way that was every bit as new as the way her eyes seemed focused intently on Beca's mouth.

Beca felt her mouth go dry, her already fuzzy mind clouding over even further, a slight pressure tingling its way to life in her lower abdomen.

They had been talking, right? The lyrics. That stupid song. But the meaning of the words suddenly took on a connotation she had never really considered before. Chloe's eyes flicked up and met Beca's, a question on her face Beca had no idea how to interpret, much less answer.

"Chlo?"

Beca watched, almost in an out of body trance as Chloe slowly eased her hand onto Beca's bare ribcage and carefully rolled her body over until she was draped across Beca's form, her elbow supporting her weight by her head, fingers brushing her crown. Beca's whole body immediately erupted in goosebumps, and a shiver raced down her spine.

Well, that was certainly interesting.

Beca's heart stuttered in her chest, and her stomach clenched in a way that wasn't quite painful but wasn't necessarily comfortable either and her hands flew up, not entirely sure what she was supposed to do with them. Chloe froze, her gaze flicking up to meet Beca's eyes before slowly drifting them down to Beca's lips as though they were a magnet and she was helpless against the pull. Beca felt her heart rate spike, the tingling in her abdomen intensifying until it was almost painful, the tension of the moment stretching and warping and tearing her apart from the inside until Beca felt something snap. She did the only thing she could think of that would make this delicious torture end; the only thing that seemed to make sense, the only thing she could do. She lunged up, capturing Chloe's lips in a searing kiss.

This time, Chloe wasn't surprised.

Chloe groaned before she kind of just sank down, settling her body until it was resting on Beca's from chest to hip, a knee pressing against her own as her thigh lowered, pushing down in a way that caused the tingling in her abdomend to explode. Beca gasped, finally regaining control of her hands enough to twist one in Chloe's hair, sliding the other along her side until it was gripping at a slender waist. Chloe slid her hand down to Beca's hip and leveraged herself up, and then there were fingers at her sides and there were palms brushing against her ribcage, and a weight pressing against her breasts and her heart was thundering. Pouding; louder than she'd ever heard it. Without warning, there was tongue flicking against her own, the barest brush of initial contact. Beca's toes curled and her back arched off the bed and she was pretty sure that the groan that echoed throughout the room was hers, but she couldn't really tell because she was having a lot of trouble breathing.

Something happened. She couldn't say exactly what, but it was almost like something woke up inside her. Something that had been dormant up to this point in her life that she never even knew existed. It felt like the first time. Like the first time she had ever done anything like this, because it had NEVER felt like this.

Beca's mind swam and tilted and twisted on its axis. So she gripped harder. Kissed harder. Arched her back and pulled Chloe down and pressed their bodies as close as she could. Did everything she could to ground herself in the sensations flooding her body. Time warped, and Beca wasn't exactly sure what happened, but she must have blacked out at some point, because the next thing she knew, she was waking up with a warm body completely twisted with her own.

The Bellas were really good at teaching her new things about herself. This, however, was something she wasn't even remotely ready for.