By the time Beca and Chloe have been together for a year—really together, officially together, when Beca's stopped traveling and Chloe's moved out from her apartment with Aubrey and they go on dates and to the grocery store like normal people—at least sixteen other people know that the first conversation they ever had started with Chloe ambushing Beca in a dormitory shower. Chloe isn't remotely shy about, well, anything, and she'll tell the story without hesitation, complete with a coquettish smirk and a wink thrown Beca's way if she's in the vicinity. If Beca happens to blush, it's just all the better, apparently.

As it stands, everyone thinks that if Beca and Chloe were to have a song—though really, the idea of them having a song is laughable, because there's never just one song, or two songs, or a hundred songs; there are albums and playlists, mixes and symphonies—it would be Titanium. That's the one that they both wind up with tattoos from, the one that everyone knows the story about, the one that's fun and flirtatious and easy to talk about.

But then there's the flip side, the part where Beca took years to sort herself out, where Chloe was slogging through medical school and the minefield of their undefined and unpredictable relationship. The part where Beca slept alone in faraway places when she could sleep and stayed awake for days at a time when she couldn't, burying her free time in building and tweaking and discarding mix after mix after mix just to occupy her mind.

The years she spends touring and playing club gigs, she garners a reputation. The girls throwing themselves are her walk away convinced she's straighter than straight; the boys walk away certain that she's unbelievably gay. She clings to the mystery like her eyeliner and wristbands and tattoos and wears it like a shield, brushing people away and letting them think what they will.

No one knows that every time she considers giving in—it would be so easy, after all; she's in her element in dark clubs and darker deejay booths, steeped in rhythm and sound and music that she's made for the world to enjoy, and it draws people to her like she's a black hole they can't escape from—there's a girl in Los Angeles who's basically a Disney princess, all clear ringing vocals and bright blue eyes, and all Beca has is rooms full of people who matter so much less.

It doesn't matter who it is. They all smile with coy eyes and questing hands, and Beca stumbles over a rhythm that should be easy and instinctive, a sporadic syncopated beat jarring against the rest of the song, because whoever it is isn't Chloe and Beca doesn't know how to be not-alone with anyone else. She may be in her element with the music spilling out of her through a laptop and expensive speakers, but she's forever out of step, ever since she tripped into falling for Chloe's stupidly blue eyes and stupidly happy demeanor and stupidly wonderful everything.

It could be so easy to stay. Life with Chloe could be good, and she's the only one Beca's ever wanted it with. But then there are the weekly phone calls she still gets—one from her mom and one from her dad— to nudge at the splinters a nasty divorce left embedded in Beca's skin, and it doesn't matter how warmly Chloe's voice resonates in Beca's chest or how clear and blue her eyes are when there's a twofold genetic disposition to ruin good things that courses through Beca just like the music does.

It could be so easy to stay, and so easy to rip them to pieces as she did, so Beca leaves instead. She can't stay away because even if the only thing she's ever known is how to be on her own, she's forgotten how to do so without doses of Chloe's warmth to recharge on. It could be so easy to stay, so she never does.

Leaving is easy the first time. Barden wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, and the Bellas were friendly and fun enough in their own right, but Chloe is the only one who sought Beca out beyond rehearsals and setlist ideas. It's Chloe and her Disney eyes catching Beca's across every room and blurring out all the other unimportant people, but Chloe is leaving and it's going to hurt even when it had no right to, so Beca packed up and left first.

Her flight to LA is a redeye with a layover in Houston. There's some kind of mechanical issue or another that grounds their flight, and the airline offers a voucher for anyone willing to wait to fly out the next day; Beca takes it without hesitation and spends all night sitting on the floor by a power outlet, laptop on her legs and headphones over her eyes. Ten hours later, she smells like Red Bull and a Texas airport, her eyes are bloodshot and circled by exhaustion instead of makeup, and she finishes burning a CD with the first instrumental mix she's ever attempted because some apologies are too complex to involve words of any kind.

The first six months she's gone, trading occasional texts and even more occasional phone calls with Chloe, every other mix she builds echoes around the Lou Reed's melancholy thought of you as everything I had but couldn't keep.

When she lands a gig in LA for six months, her first instinct is to call Chloe. Her second is to stay silent, because Chloe is in med school and Beca's mother still hates her ex-husband for leaving her and bitched about him for ten minutes during her last weekly phone call. She settles for a text, half hoping that Aubrey will talk Chloe out of responding, but winds up in a Los Angeles Starbucks with her anyways.

Chloe kisses her, when they're sitting in hers and Aubrey's apartment in the middle of a bottle of wine and an argument about whether first means better and if derivatives of the Velvet Underground will ever be as good as the original. Fairytale romance had never been in the cards for her, but Chloe kisses her, soft and unexpected and tinged with the taste of cheap pinot grigio, and Beca falls into it before she can catch herself. She doesn't know how to be anything but alone and she's never believed in fairytales, so it just figures that it would be clear blue Disney princess eyes that she falls in love with.

She leaves LA when a new job comes up following the tail end of her gig. Months pass as she flits around the country— four on a tour, a few weeks in Seattle, a jaunt up to Vancouver that involved mildly questionable border crossings, an unofficial bar crawl-esque month in New York City—and she floats back to LA for weekends, long layovers, a day to recharge.

Chloe takes her in every time, still all smiling mouth and sparkling eyes and confident fingers that know exactly how to dismantle Beca from the inside out, but she looks exhausted even in her sleep, the circles under her eyes nudging through the makeup.

Just let me be in love with you, is how Chloe puts it, and it rips into Beca, just like the way her mother sobbed hysterically for a day after finding out about her husband's affair and then emerged from her tears and wine with a smooth façade of indifference towards Beca, who had his eyes and his smile and his obstinacy.

She could stay in LA and be just as successful with her career, but staying is more terrifying than leaving because leaving hurts them both, but when she's gone, Chloe isn't tied down to someone who doesn't know how to be anything but alone.

The relief that lightens the clouds in Chloe's eyes, though, when Beca swears that she hasn't been with anyone else—which is ridiculous, because Christ shouldn't it be obvious when she keeps coming back to Chloe with pathological insecurity and unskilled fumblings that she hasn't even kissed anyone else since the first time they slept together— shatters any delusions Beca may have held, though, and suddenly, New York feels farther from Los Angeles than it ever has before.

Her time working the engagement in New York—Thanksgiving and Christmas were spent apartment-sitting and eating Chinese takeout with only the owner's twelve-year-old Jack Russell to keep her company; New Years, sober and working and alone for the enjoyment of hundreds of drunk strangers who all have someone to kiss as the clock ticks over—is filled with a growing collection of songs and remixes ringing with blue eyes, you're the secret I keep.

A day before Chloe's 28th birthday, Beca is in Chicago and her phone has a collection of tired texts from Chloe, who's halfway into an oncology rotation and struggling to keep her optimism afloat. It happens on a whim, telling the club owner she had to bail and booking a flight she couldn't really afford—well, she could, because she hasn't had to pay for a hotel room in three years, she doesn't have a car, and half of what she wears she's owned since the eleventh grade; she just isn't used to the fact that her you'll-never-support-yourself hobby somehow became a well-paying career when she wasn't looking—and landing in LAX with six hours left on Chloe's birthday, Roger Daltrey and my dreams, they aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be ricocheting on repeat around her skull.

Chloe looks terrible—worn down by long hours and fatigue and an exhaustion that will take so much more than sleep to erase—and it shoves Beca towards holding doors and insisting on driving back to Chloe's place even though driving in LA is almost as terrifying as family holidays. It's a solid 45 minutes back to Chloe's apartment, even with every shortcut Chloe knows like the back of her hand, and Beca spends the first forty of it silent, letting Chloe play with her fingers and trying to think of a way to start speaking.

Sex in Chloe's car while parked literally twenty feet from her apartment door was definitely not something Beca ever considered, but she's barely managed to finish saying now might be yet before Chloe's yanked her across the console and into her lap.