A/N: Day 7 of Bechloe Week 2018: Disney
Back to where it all began. ft. excerpts from Seven Keys chapter 1 and 2.
It was almost inevitable that Beca and Chloe would end up at Disneyland for a day while they were in California over Christmas. Not anything to do with it being where they first saw each other, of course – just that it was Disneyland, and they both had reason to want to go at this point in time. For Chloe, it was a nice bookend to her time at university, given she'd last been here just before she started. For Beca… she just missed Disney, she used to have an annual pass and end up here at least monthly because she lived close by. Of course, there are no annual passes this time, and Beca grumbles a little at how expensive it is to buy a multi-park day ticket when she lines up to get them, Chloe standing across the pavement waiting for her.
Chloe looks around the wide area between the two parks, teeming with people even though it's a few days after Christmas. She hopes the lines aren't too bad inside, she didn't come to a theme park just to walk around (although she'll steer clear of the teacups, thanks. For one, it's a kids' ride, but mostly Fat Amy just totally ruined them for her last time and she doesn't want to think about that). Beca finally gets to the front of the queue and buys their tickets, soon stepping away from the counter and turning to walk back towards Chloe.
Chloe could hear Aubrey's snarky comment to Amy, but she was suddenly distracted, looking at someone across near the ticket window who looked impossibly familiar. Her concentration only snapped back to her friends when Aubrey jabbed her in the side, and she blinked a couple of times, looking back at her friends and then quickly towards the ticket window.
"Oh, sorry, I swear I saw-" Chloe stopped, shaking her head, "never mind. Where were we?"
Chloe shook her head, trying to push away the sudden flashback as Beca arrived in front of her.
"What?" she asks, looking confused, but Chloe just shakes her head again.
"Nothing."
They enter Disneyland first, leaving California Adventure for later. There's better breakfast spots in the original park, and they'd decided they may as well have breakfast there if they were making a day of it.
Most of Main Street looks fairly homogenous, and Chloe can't quite remember if this is the same café that she saw Beca at four years ago, although it does have that same gazebo table in the front corner, and she shares a look with Beca when they are led to that very table and handed menus that makes her think that maybe, if they both recognise it, it might be the same place. Neither of them mention it out loud, however, instead falling into a conversation about their dismal atempt at trying to learn at least vaguely how to play Fortnite last night so they could try and talk to Will about it on his level, because they'd had a quick chat to him and Jake after their Christmas meeting and there was definitely a pop-cultural age gap becoming obvious.
They both order a coffee while they're still looking over the menu, but Beca orders an orange juice too. She'll swear she isn't pedantic, but she has a routine around breakfast and orange juice, and she tends to stick to it no matter what the context. Her juice arrives while they're ordering their food, and Beca starts twirling her glass around (carefully – it's full, and she's an adult) with one hand and tapping her fingers against the table with the other while Chloe orders.
The girls were chatting amicably, halfway through their meals when Chloe glanced up, doing a double take – okay, triple – at a small brunette sitting by herself at the table under the gazebo at the edge of the restaurant. She swore she recognised the girl, from one of her favourite, albeit largely unknown, bands, and they were kind of in LA…
"Holy shit, is that Beca Mitchell? I thought I saw her earlier, but I wasn't sure, but that's totally Beca Mitchell" Chloe whisper-yelled, kicking Amy under the table when she went to turn around. "Don't fucking look! You're so obvious"
"I'll be subtle!" Amy promised defensively, but shook her head and stayed facing Chloe, who was glaring at her. "Okay, angry ginger, calm down"
"I can't tell if it's her or not, but I think it is?" Chloe continued, her mind running faster than she could keep up with. There was a slight chance that seeing Beca Mitchell in a music video for that one song from Seven Keys – Beca's band – that made them super famous for all of two months had been the moment Chloe realised how super gay she was, and-
Aubrey's poke in her arm was enough to snap Chloe back to her friends. "Do you really want to be staring at her, Chloe?"
"Yeah, go say hi! Ask if it is her!" Amy finished Aubrey's statement.
"No! Isn't that weird? You'll look like an idiot if you're wrong," Aubrey argued, and Chloe shrugged, glancing back up to maybe-Beca-Mitchell, who was tapping her fingernails on the table impatiently and sipping from a glass of orange juice.
"Maybe I'll work it out when she comes closer, she'd have to move closer to us to leave," Chloe points out, almost hopefully, ignoring Aubrey's raised eyebrow and going back to the food in front of her.
Chloe snaps out of her second flashback of the morning when her coffee arrives, glancing up at Beca to see she's looking at her curiously.
"What?" she asks, this time, but Beca just shakes her head.
The waitress recognised Beca (and so, she thought, did a redhead on a table slightly further into the café) and let her sit there for twenty minutes having only ordered a single orange juice before asking her if she was going to order anything.
"I'm sorry…" Beca started, trying to come up with a lie, "I was meant to meet my boyfriend here but he's got really caught up somewhere, he should be here in a minute, we'll order then."
In truth, Jesse hadn't provided an excuse, he was just late. Beca sighed quietly to herself and spun the now two-thirds-empty glass of juice around on the table, glancing at all the people around her. Lots of families, as there always were at Disney – and the redhead. She was sitting with two blondes, one of them loudly rushing through sentences that Beca half-heartedly tried not to eavesdrop on, aided by the accent of the girl that she couldn't quick pick out. She almost wished redhead had gone on the recognition that seemed to flash across her face when Beca first sat down and came over to ask for a picture or something, at least so Beca could have something to distract her from this situation.
Beca snaps back to reality to see Chloe looking at her as curiously as she was looking at Chloe earlier, and she realises that – maybe – they're probably in the same position here. When she asks Chloe confirms with a shy nod.
"I still kind of wish I'd said hi to you then," Chloe admits, "but also I don't because it'd be… very different."
"I spent most of that breakfast being all, oh they look like they're having fun I must want to be with them because Jesse is pissing me off, but that totally wasn't it and I might've freaked out if you'd said anything to me," Beca says in response.
"Yeah, that's why I'm kind of glad I didn't meet you properly until later on. I'm… very glad this happened."
"So am I. And I was questioning everything in my life around then, it's about when I decided to quit the band and break up with Jesse so maybe I would have been open to you confusing the hell out of my sexuality… but it still freaked me out a little in Toronto, and that was 18 months later."
"I think the fact that you didn't even recognise why you took notice of me means you probably weren't ready to realise anything," Chloe's words are cautious, but after a moment, Beca nods.
"We met at… almost the right time. Maybe Toronto was too much too soon, I don't know. But I guess we're here now. So it's fine," She changes tone partway through the sentence, her words sharper.
"We're here now," Chloe doesn't push her any further, knowing now isn't the time or place. It's just another thing to add to the slight worry playing at her mind about whether she's messed up after hearing that conversation between Beca and her mother the other day.
It's Disneyland, so of course, their tense moments across breakfast quickly give way as they talk over their meal and not long later they're back out in the park. They've both been here before, of course, but it's still fun. Beca rolls her eyes when Chloe squeals, seeing Minnie mouse taking position not far from the castle ("We didn't see Minnie last time, only Mickey!"), but doesn't fight Chloe's insistence at getting a photo together with Minnie.
She doesn't fight Chloe on anything for the whole day. She goes on the silly kids rides with her just because they have short lines, she lets Chloe buy them matching mouse ears that they'll never wear again, she reluctantly admits she has a huge thing for cotton candy and buys the biggest tub they have available. It's pure sugar, why wouldn't she like it? There's one place, though, that she won't buy into the 'magic of Disney'.
"Okay, I draw the line here," Beca pulls Chloe to a stop, her expression turning horrified as she looks at the sign indicating there's a thirty minute wait for It's A Small World, the creepiest and most boring attraction in the park.
"Oh, that? Same. No way I'm going on that, Aubrey dragged us to it last time," Chloe shakes her head, pulling Beca to start walking again, in another direction, Beca mildly surprised that it's not just her grouchy memories of that ride years ago that ruined it. It totally, actually, sucked. "We haven't done any proper roller coasters yet though, you up for that?"
"I, uh… may get a little scream-y on roller coasters? Like, I do them, but your ear drums might hate me," Beca admits, scowling when Chloe laughs in response.
"Badass Beca Mitchell is scared of roller coasters? That is…" Chloe trails off, eyeing Beca conspiratorially, "super predictable."
"What? Why?!"
"You get freaked out driving through the M1 tunnel in Sydney, and you freaked out on the plane over here…"
"Oh, shush," Beca grumbles, playing offended, although the light poke in the side Chloe gives her indicates her girlfriend knows she's bullshitting. She likes to have her feet on stable ground. It's totally a rational desire.
The first roller coasters Chloe drags them on in her new mission to make fun of Beca are not particularly intense – the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, the Matterhorn Bobsleds – and mostly they just grin at each other, leaning into the excitement of it all. They skip splash mountain – "I don't wanna queue for an hour just to get a bad photo and messed up hair" Chloe argues, Beca surprised at her insistence but shrugging and moving on – and in the mid-afternoon, move over to California Adventure.
"What about that one?" Chloe asks, a teasing lilt to her voice that Beca only understands when she glances in the direction she's pointing, at the biggest coaster, the star attraction of the park.
"Uh…." Beca trails off, wincing away a little.
"You would've been on it before, right? I did last time, I didn't mind it, but you've been here so many times?" Chloe pushes, Beca not making any move to respond. "Wait, you haven't?"
"I don't like being upside down," Beca's answer is shy, as she gestures at the loops in the middle of the coaster, the train running through at that moment as if scheduled to accentuate her point.
"Look, that's a valid concern," Chloe admits, indicating for Beca to follow her in an entirely different direction.
"Wait, you'll let me off that easy?" she asks, surprised.
"There's a difference between fun-scared and actually scared and I'm not going to push you into anything that'd be the latter," she explains, shrugging.
Beca doesn't feel the need to respond verbally, instead giving a thankful smile as they continue on to something a little less wild. It's Disney, after all – there's plenty of that.
And there's plenty of "Minnie & Minnie" rainbow shirts that Beca pretends she's not as excited about as Chloe when they find them in Downtown Disney after their dinner, until a stern look from her girlfriend forces her to let her guard down again and start shuffling through the rack for her size.
"I don't know why you pretend to not like Disney," Chloe states curiously as they sit at one of the Downtown Disney restaurants in the evening for dinner.
"I don't know either because I kind of love it," Beca admits, shaking her head as she goes back to flicking through a menu, feeling Chloe grinning at her.
"Now come on, work out what you're having, we don't want to miss the light parade."
