Grief is a shapeshifter.
It is, in one moment, the formless and dark matter residing in a small corner of the chest cavity. In another, it is the speed with which cutting words are released, and the irreparable damage in the aftermath, the kind such words are meant to bring. And in another, it's the hours spent awake, or the hours spent refusing to wake. Grief is a number of things, but it is never just itself.
More often than not, it looks like numbing. And even more commonly, it figures like hate; the kind that makes you set yourself on fire, if only to take the world down with you.
.:.
SOMEWHERE IN YUCCA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA...
She leaves no trace.
It's been eight days — almost eleven, counting from Chloe's phone call — but it could have been half a decade, for all that Beca doesn't care to note time passing. She has a mission to accomplish, and her safehouse in the desert is a good enough place to plan and execute.
She cuts all ties with the Bellas; the news is too raw with them around.
She's done nothing since; not sleep, not eat. Her body is only as a conduit for her impossibly sharp mind, made sharper still by fresh grief dampened by a self-preserving defense mechanism that keeps her focused enough to not feel anything. Only the planning. Only the mission.
So when she's disturbed by the hollow clang of knocking, in (what she assumes to be) the dead of night, her annoyance cannot be overstated.
"Leave me alone," she says with a loud but unyelling voice, making it clear to whoever is on the other side that she will not be argued with. Not that her voice would carry through the three inches of fortified steel where she's housed herself.
There is only silence, and Beca knows that patience all too well.
She closes the case files she's reviewing and heads to answer the door, already knowing who would be on the other side.
"What do you want?" she says as she unrigs the bunker door open. Chloe's expression is barely illuminated by the weak basement lights of the abandoned property, but she'd wager it's something along the lines of "worried sick".
Chloe doesn't reply, so Beca heads back to her desk, leaving the door open.
She still has three floors of blueprint to memorise before she heads out in 1400 hours.
Mildly, she senses Chloe enter the bunker, senses her take in the surroundings of the safehouse. She does not say anything, and Beca doesn't have it in her to spare attention for the redhead — who is currently a dyed blonde with an inch of red roots —who seems to wander about the small space like a ghost.
Perhaps that is what she is. Perhaps that's what they all are to her, now. The haunting of a life she'd like to cut herself out of.
"When's the last time you ate?" Chloe gently asks after a while, her voice small.
"Don't remember." There is no chance for an exit strategy on the second floor, but that doesn't matter. Beca makes a note on the blueprint.
"Have you — did you sleep at all?"
"Look," Beca says, sticking the pen back into the cap in her mouth as she turns to the current distraction she really does not fucking need right now. "I don't know why you're here, Chlo, but maybe you haven't noticed that I'm a little busy at the moment—"
"Stop it!"
The words are said with the force of two palms slamming on the edge of the table in front of her, Chloe rattling the table enough for Beca to look her in the eyes.
Her red-rimmed, dark-circled, wet eyes.
Beca doesn't hold gaze, just bites the flesh in her mouth.
"Just… stop this, Beca." Chloe runs a hand over her face, over the disheveled mess of hair that Beca has rarely ever seen on the normally bubbly, optimistic, put-together operative. "I know — Becs, I know you're grieving," Chloe's voice is soft; tattered along the edges and Beca fights the instinct to run away, "But it hasn't been easy for us either. You just… you were gone, Becs. Three years. Three…"
Chloe chokes on tears that she lets fall from a head hung low. Beca's nails dig into her palms, but she keeps still where she sits at her desk, unable to look her friend in the eye.
"We lost you for three years," Chloe says, not accusing. Just sad. "And now… now it feels like we're losing you again."
The silence that follows aches to be filled, but Beca doesn't have the words — she doesn't have the fortitude, the presence of mind, the energy. All she has is a burning, angry drive to do something about the hole that she feels in the middle of her chest.
"I read the debrief," Chloe says, and they both know what document she's referring to. "Beca, if you're going after the drive—"
Beca's blunt anger sharpens, just a touch.
"Okay, you know what?" she scoffs with a bitter smirk, "I don't need this right now. Like, at all. Okay? I don't—"
I don't know what to do. He's gone and I don't know what else to do.
And this time, it's Beca that chokes on her own flood of emotions, a dam having been broken eight days ago and she's still trying to patch it up with duct tape and paste and thirty-years worth of self-preservation that is doing jack shit at keeping things together.
She stands up and moves away, turns her back to Chloe and tilts her head up, hating the way her eyes are welling.
(Hating the way she can still remember him wiping her nose as it bled, once upon a time...)
(Hating the way she has never, not once in her three years of self-exile, considered the possibility of never seeing him again. Because he was always just… there. A truth sitting at the back of her mind, an inevitability that was always waiting to happen. A little hope she didn't realize she had carried with her. Of one day waking up to his presence in her life. Of one day being with the man she'd inadvertently fallen in love with, even when the prospect of a happy ending was so inconceivable for her, at the very least, she was hoping she'd see him again.)
(Hating the way losing him feels like losing oxygen.)
(And hating herself, most of all. For causing it.)
Beca chokes on the steady, heady rush of guilt. Her pained, wet chuckle is something Chloe doesn't miss.
"Beca. It's not your fault."
"Oh, fuck you," Beca chuckles bitterly as she swipes at the stream of tears now pouring out of her goddamned eyes. Fucking emotions.
"It isn't!"
"It isn't what?!" Beca snarls now, turning fully to Chloe who has moved closer to placate her friend, only to be met with a wrath that Beca projects outward; a fire usually reserved for burning herself. "Isn't my fault? You gonna tell me it isn't my fucking fault when the Mob got to him, because they couldn't get to me? It was that… piece of shit drive that he was looking for when they gunned him in front of their fucking…"
Beca chokes on the frayed end of that sentence.
Distantly, she is aware that she is losing the battle to keep her face neutral. While it feels like the last goddamned thing that matters, she needs to keep it together right now. She needs this right now, damnit.
It should have been me. That should have been me.
It is this single thought that is lodged between her ribs, twisting and painful and true.
"It was my fault, and we both know it."
The confession is waterlogged and soft, spoken through a humourless smile and two tear-tracked cheeks.
Chloe is shaking her head, but even she doesn't have the heart to contradict it with a lie, Beca knows this. Chloe is a good liar, except when it comes to the people she cares about.
They both stand there for a moment, basking in the truth like salting a wound. Until Beca feels lightheaded and takes a seat in the wall-attached bunk bed that is just small enough to accommodate her form. She cradles her head in both her palms as she tucks an impending sob underneath more important things.
I wish it were me.
She tries to run through her mission happening in 1330 hours: search and destroy, delay reaction, exit optional.
She feels the bed dip where Chloe sits beside her. She feels her friend's arm wrap around her shoulder. She feels herself tugged closer, and she lets herself lean. She feels like this, too, amongst the wreckage of what she has done, is another thing she does not deserve.
"I know you don't — that you're not coming back to us. I know that," Chloe whispers gently after moments have passed in the silence of missing each other, "And I know I can't convince you not to put yourself in harm's way for this, but… I actually have something for you."
Beca straightens up when Chloe reaches into her tote bag to pull out a big, ominous manila envelope.
"God, I hate these things," Beca chuckles as she accepts it, but does not open. Her fingers lingering on the brown flap.
After a moment, Beca breaks: "What is it?"
"It's everything we've got about the drive, over the last three years. Everything you weren't able to hack out of our systems," Chloe chuckles. "Names, dates, whereabouts. It's all there. We just… we wanted to make sure you got all the help you need."
Beca is silent as she considers this gesture. She is silent because she cannot trust her voice. Instead, she places a hand on Chloe, who clasps both their palms on her lap.
They stay there for a long while, Beca leaning on her friend's shoulder, staring into the space before her.
"Stay safe, Becs," Chloe whispers by her hairline, squeezing her fingers.
Beca does not reply. Not tonight. She does not have it in her to lie.
.:.
There are three facts to the matter at hand:
One, is that Jesse died trying to destroy the drive. The very one that had brought them together and torn them apart. The one that had killed his best friend, when she had risked to steal its contents before they could make a deal with Hangar. Jesse had dedicated the last three years to finishing the race that she had dropped out of. He had succeeded; he found it. But he had also tried to destroy it.
Two, is that Jesse had failed. She knew from official reports that the drive was declared as "defunct and destroyed evidence", somewhere in the debriefing report of him getting shot in Germany. The drive being destroyed is a lie. Beca knew the CIA. And she knows when they were covering their tracks.
Three, she knew the CIA had the drive. It was clear, when she reviewed all the case files, when she looked into the details the only way an ex-operative could. The way the Bellas wouldn't know what to look for.
All of this, leading to the very matter at hand.
Which is thirteen hours later.
After working tirelessly to find and identify where the drive had fallen after Jesse's attempt to destroy it, infiltrating what should have been the classified underground location of a massive bunker in an abandoned mine, in the middle of fuck-all, California.
The right side of her face is swollen.
She had taken the southern entrance, and had been faced with the physical impossibilities of a heavily-guarded facility.
He's dead. Because of me.
It's a personal record: she counts seven down and three, maybe four, more to go. She still has half a kilometer of corridor space to cover, as per the blueprints.
He's gone. He's not coming back.
The last two are a nuisance;
Physicality notwithstanding, she endures. Bloody, bruised, and fucking aching all over, she endures. Beaten up within an inch of her life, but they're not looking too good, either So she endures. She just needs to get to the lower basement. To the vaults. That's all she needs. Search and destroy. Delay reaction. Exit optional.
That is, until she feels the telltale prickle of a needle into her shoulder.
"Fuck!"
She stumbles. Struggles at the thing jotting out of her arm. Her opponents — two heavy-set, freshly-disarmed refrigerators — start to blur.
She feels it in her head when she hits the floor with a thud.
He's gone. And it's all my fault.
The last thing she thinks before she falls into the bottomless pit of unconsciousness:
How the day had been beautiful. The sun had been warming, the craggy hills had been peaceful. She imagines the long stretch of desert like she was just racing through Mexico, before everything went to shit.
Today is a good day to die.
And she's ready.
.:.
"Finally, room service. You got some wifi in here? I feel like tweeting this."
He finds her the way he had both expected, and feared: stored away in one of the holding cells, strapped to a chair, bleeding and groggy. Blood crusting her ever-black outfit in that terrible way he never wanted to see. Ever.
Beaten, bent-up, broken all over.
Brutal and yet, still beautiful.
His heart shatters and soars.
It's been far, far too long. The ache and relief and fucking unholy crest of unbearable longing threatens to choke out of him.
He steps closer, slower than he imagined himself doing, in all the times he let himself imagine seeing her again, if at all.
"I hate to break it to you, but that's not in my job description," he says, steady. But only barely.
He kneels when he is close enough to get a good look.
Her nose is broken, and her eye is swollen, almost past the point of recognition. Split skin, split lip. Bruises blooming all over what skin he could see of her face. Her hair is sticky, her eyes bloodshot and completely glazed over, barely able to stay open.
She looks like she just came from a fresh interrogation.
He cannot help but cradle the side of her face, even as his lungs seize.
"She's been here for seven hours," comes the voice from behind him, as he proceeds to untie the semi-conscious woman from where she is chained and padlocked to the small chair. "Two more, and I wouldn't have been able to help. Took you long enough."
Jesse hardly hears over the roar in his ears and the urgent need to get her as far away from this place as possible. She almost slumps down to the floor, were he not there to pick her up as soon as he uncuffed her and unlocked her chained restraints.
He grimaces; she is not her usual weight.
The lights in the outside corridor are gone. He knows the cameras are dysfunctional for only thirteen more minutes.
He can make it out in ten. He's timed it.
So he gives the man at the doorway a quick nod, gently shifting Beca's body in his hold.