Day 2: We Have Cookies
She walked into a movie theater. Here, set on at gentle rise, were rows upon rows of seats. There at the front of the room was a large white screen dangling down proudly. At her feet was a red-carpet pathway lit by twinkling little lights on either side. Beca followed it up towards the seats still mildly dazed and unsure about what might've just happened.
The theater was mostly empty. Each seat appeared in a disarray; dusty and unused. The floors were littered with stale pieces of popcorn, plastic candy wrappers and piles of debris. Beca almost tripped over a stray box as she moved towards the only other person in the room. The other girl didn't look away room the blank screen as Beca sat down next to her.
Almost immediately, the house lights dimmed until the room was encased in black. The projector turned on in a flutter of sounds. A flicker on the screen as the machine warmed up and then, as if growing in confidence, the machine steadily projected images onto the canvas in a gaining speed. Soon enough, there weren't separate images but a movie playing smoothly across the screen before them.
The stranger's jaw clenched, and her fists twisted on the arm rests of her seat.
Sitting silently from one of the rows towards the middle back of the room beside the dark skinned woman, Beca watched a story unfold. And yet, as the movie progressed in a steady rhythm of abstract sounds and moments, the movie theater seemed to take up a life of its own. The dust and debris disappeared in a gradual transition from there one moment to gone the next. Each of the seats seemed to adjust themselves, straightening and fixing their otherwise imperfect existence. The trash that had been strewn about the theater no longer was there. Rather, taking a place in each of the seats, there came a strange puzzle of movement. Shadows existed where there should have been none, and the seats seemed to fill up with ghosts. Apparitions, maybe, but each surely there with one foot among the living and one among the dead. It startled Beca, whose own phantom pulse seemed to beat faster, and whose attention was no longer retained by the screen. The girl beside her remained unsurprised, and had no visible effect about the others attending the show but unconcern.
And then…
There was a visible change in the movie. Rather than mismatched pieces of video that didn't seem to make sense, something clicked. It started out with sunshine, and palm trees flying by in the warmth of a day. There was a silver truck on the screen. It was a beautiful day. There were no other sounds except for the sudden loud peals of laughter that conveyed pure happiness. It was then that Beca noticed that the girl beside her was the star of the movie because—there! Sitting in the driver's seat of the truck, holding the hand of a woman whose mouth was open in joy and laughter, was the woman sitting beside her now. The singular difference between the two being that in the movie the dark-skinned woman looked full, and happy, and alive with life. The woman whose hand the driver was holding was attempting to contain her joy. The driver, who was the woman beside Beca, turned to beam at her passenger. Even Beca, who knew not either of the two and had but the toughest of experiences concerning it on her own, could discern that they were in love.
"Her name was Denice," said the girl from beside Beca. Beca took her eyes away from the screen to look at her neighbor, who remained enthralled by the women on screen. "We'd been dating for three years, and gay marriage was legalized in California. I was going to propose to her later that day."
There was the sudden screeching of tires on asphalt that had Beca turning back to see the two women in the vehicle frantically trying to stop the truck. Denice turned to look at her girlfriend in the movie, but the other woman had both hands on the wheel now and was trying to break, twisting the wheel hard to the right. The truck spun sideways, squealing, the attempt to avoid a car which had careened from the oncoming lane into their own not working. There was the sound of a horn blaring as the car hit the side of the truck in a crunch of metal as the truck easily gave in to pressure of the other vehicle. The car was stopped, and yet the truck rolled over the car in its own momentum and flew up into the air. It spun once, twice, and smashed down on the side before slipping over onto the roof. It slid across the road in a scrape before it fully slowed to a stop.
Both women were dangling upside down in the truck, unconscious, suspended there by their seatbelts even as glass shattered around them. Faintly, then, other sounds began to leak into the scene. Other cars stopped, car doors slamming closed, the sounds of feet on pavement, people screaming, someone calling for help. The driver and the passenger of the other car were crushed in the wreckage of their vehicle.
The two hands of the woman rested side by side on the roof of the truck, inches apart, as if they'd been searching for the comfort the other would offer but couldn't quite reach.
The screen fluttered to black, and then the projector turned off altogether. Gradually, the phantom apparitions around the theater disappeared. The house lights flickered on, revealing that the trash and debris that was thought to have gone before had been there the whole time. Beca sat beside the stranger in a now empty, abandoned, trashed theater. Neither said a word for a few moments. Beca gathered her thoughts.
"I don't know what happened to her," said the woman. "If she died and ended up here, or if she passed on to Beyond Limbo. Maybe she's waiting here somewhere for me. Maybe she's not here at all." The woman turned to look at her now, giving Beca her undivided attention. "My name's Cynthia-Rose. You are?"
"Beca," she replied. "Beca Mitchell."
CR smirked, "Well, 'sup Beca? It's nice to meet you." She offered a fist, to which Beca pounded in return. "So, are you…?"
It took Beca a moment to catch onto her implication. "Oh, dude, no! No, I'm not dead. Not yet anyway." Beca chuckled awkwardly and rubbed the back of her neck.
Cynthia Rose laughed and leaned back in her seat, appearing relieved. "Good," she said. "Not that I have anything against ghosts or whatever, but I'm so glad I'm not the only one still alive."
"You're still alive?" Beca asked, surprised.
"Yeah," CR said carefully. "I've been in a coma, on Earth, for 'bout three months I think."
Alarmed, "You've been here for three months?"
"Dude, no! Fuck, I've been in a coma on Earth for about three months. Here in Limbo," her eyes furrowed in thought. "I've been here for about four days. Yeah, four days sounds about right." She ticked the days off on her fingers absentmindedly. "Has it only been four days?" She glanced over to see Beca appearing confused. "I'm sure you know by now that time moves differently here?"
Beca nodded.
"Well, maybe you don't know this yet, but we've only got seven days in Limbo." CR leaned back in her seat.
"Seven days?"
"Seven days," CR agreed. "I think it comes from some biblical thing," she rolled her eyes. "Not that it matters much to me anyway. In any case, yeah. Seven days. Six to figure out where you stand, and judgment on the seventh."
"Wait, Cynthia-Rose, am I going to die in seven days?"
"No," said another familiar voice. "You have six days now." Jesse slid into the seat beside Beca.
Something flashed in CR's eyes as she acknowledged the man beside Beca.
"Cynthia-Rose," Jesse nodded a hello before flashing an easy grin at Beca. "But it really isn't as bad as it sounds. And, if you don't like what fate you're given, you're always welcome to stay here with us. I'm sure we could find a job for you."
Beca made a face as she glanced around the theater, the lights were starting to dim again. "Yes, because I'd be completely at home here." She shook her head, "No, I think I'd rather die."
"Shh!" a ghost hissed, twisting around to glare at her. "The next show's about to start!"
And, indeed, more phantoms appeared in the seats as the room blackened once more. The projector flickered on and Jesse and Cynthia-Rose twisted around in the seats beside her to look back at the screen. "I rather like this one," Jesse smiled excitedly as the projector once again took its sweet old time to play. Beca ignored him even as her hands fisted on the arm rests at the sudden sickening feeling of danger that struck her. A feeling prickling at her senses, that screamed at her to turn away—but it was too late.
Because there she was, on the screen in a familiar scene, downing shot after shot as people pressed in around her and the music played, swaying atop her barstool. She hadn't known but in the background, behind her on the dance floor, there was Chloe dancing with Tom… except, as Beca took her final shot, Chloe saw her. Chloe's face twisted into a guilty, pained, longing expression; those electric blue eyes searching for Beca's own. As the Beca on screen stumbled off the barstool, the motion seemed to startle Chloe out of her thoughts and away from the male that was pressed against her. She saw Chloe walking away from Tom, following Beca from a distance as Beca walked through the bathroom door.
Beca watched herself distastefully and drunkenly puking up in the toilet, sloppily wiping the mess away before tumbling over onto the floor. What followed next made Beca grimace at herself, even as it called up the familiar feelings of betrayal and broken-heartedness. As the Beca on screen fell unconscious with blood dripping absentmindedly down her face (had she really hit her head so hard?) she heard someone calling for her that she hadn't heard before. Chloe.
"Beca—" there were feet at the stall of the door as someone entered the bathroom. They nearly tripped over her own where they were peaking beneath the stall door. With a slightly startled, alarmed tone, she called again, "Beca?" She knocked on the stall worriedly, frantically pounding on the door which easily gave way. Beca hadn't locked it in her drunk stupor after all. Chloe pushed through the door and into the stall easily, barely having glanced at the brunette laying on the floor below her before she kneeled down beside her. Terrified, Chloe ripped off part of her sleeve and wrapped it around Beca's head as her other hand fumbled to call an ambulance. Worried at the stark contrast of the red blood dripping down Beca's increasingly pale face, Chloe tried again to garner some sort of alertness from the smaller woman. "Can you hear me?"
Beca's eye lids fluttered on the screen pitifully. A garbled, inarticulate sound fell from her lips as Beca choked and fell into complete unconsciousness.
Of all the things Chloe expected to find Beca doing in the bathroom when she followed her in, it wasn't this. A whispered plea of her name; "Rebeca?"
The screen went black when Beca's memory ended.
"C'mon Chloe!" Tom exasperatedly implored as he reached for the redhead's shoulder. She angrily pulled away from him. "You can't keep waiting on a girl you broke up with! It's been nearly a month already, get over it!"
Glaring at the boy, Chloe heatedly argued, "Just because I broke up with her doesn't mean I don't care for her."
He rolled his eyes, "You broke up with her to be with me, remember? You made your choice. Fricking hell, wasn't that your plan all along anyway?" Chloe opened her mouth to snipe out some answer, but Tom continued, "You told me yourself. The only reason you were even with her in the first place was to break her. You didn't actually love her." Tom grabbed Chloe's hand and pulled her close, attempting to make the girl understand.
Except that she did love the tiny brunette currently laying on the hospital bed. She does love her. She's in love with Beca. And Chloe does understand. She's made the biggest mistake she's ever made, and now she may never get to have a second chance.
As Tom held her in a warm embrace, Chloe burst out in tears. She clutched onto his shirt, and he comforted her. "It's okay to feel guilt, maybe you didn't mean for it to go this far, but that's not your fault. Beca's a big girl. It was her own decisions that led her to this, not yours. You're not to blame." He rubbed her back, and though he was there for her Chloe knew that he didn't understand. He'd never viewed Beca as a person, especially not as someone equal to him. Beca had only ever been that freaky girl, he'd encouraged Chloe's plan at the time.
The plan being that she'd worm her way into Beca's heart just to break it in the end. To force Beca to feel something. To "take her off her pedestal" as Tom had once so eloquently described it. And it had been so easy to be with Beca, to get her to fall in love with Chloe. It had gotten to the point where if Chloe told her to jump, she would've asked how high. Told her to jump off a bridge, and Beca would've done it. Beca was like a puppy in that manner. She would've done anything Chloe told her to do. She'd go above and beyond the call of duty, do anything to make Chloe happy. It was so easy. Just, in all the mess of playing with Beca, Chloe hadn't noticed that she herself had fallen in love too.
"You can't keep waiting here for her to wake up. It's been a month already. She might not even wake up. There's no point waiting on someone worthless like her. Let's just go," Tom kissed Chloe's forehead and attempted to lead Chloe from the room. She tugged her hand out of his abruptly, causing Tom to pause. "Chloe?"
"You can go, Tom," Chloe sniffled, wiping at her eyes. She turned away from him and walked back to Beca's bedside, sitting in the uncomfortable chair that she'd been stationed at nearly every day for the past three weeks.
"What?"
"You're right. Maybe she won't wake up, but I'm going to wait. You can go." Chloe reached for Beca's cold, unmoving hand to hold in her own.
"You're choosing her over me? Seriously?"
Chloe had to think about it. Maybe with love she shouldn't have to think, but Chloe had already so easily broken one person's heart that she was reluctant to break another if she thought it would lead to this. Above that, there was a time that she loved Tom. Where she was exactly like him. With sudden clarity, however, she realized that neither had been in love with one another. She realized that maybe his pride would be wounded, but neither of them would be torn up over the loss of the other. He'd probably get over her within a week, maybe less.
"Yes," Chloe stated decisively. "We're over."
With that, Tom left the room and Chloe was left to her thoughts. She didn't notice Beca's hand minutely tighten in her own, a small flex and burst of warmth that ended in the beat of a second. Regardless of not noticing it, Chloe was suddenly filled with hope. Hope that someday soon, Beca would wake up and all of this would get sorted out.
AN:
Well, things have equally been going better and worse. Grades are picking up, Thanksgiving's coming up, my birthday's coming up, and there're lots of things to do on campus. Downside is that there's some sort of tenseness among my roommates. Arguments have been happening, and I'm absolutely useless when it comes to confrontations. I can't choose sides, and therefore am stuck in the middle of what's soon to be an all out war. Something like this was bound to happen. You can't live with people for a few months without having at least one argument. I'm keeping one step back from it all, but whatever. Girl drama. Sorry it's taken me a bit longer to upload than usual.
In any case, in regards to this story, there are going to be seven days. However, there won't be specific days assigned to each new chapter that I upload. Like, the next chapter won't be the start of a new day. It'll be a continuation of Day 2. Remember that time has no boundaries in Limbo, if that makes any sense.
With that said, shout out to everyone that's favorited or reviewed or is following the story.
To Snow White Misery: See! I knew you would understand what I was trying to say about song fics. The other cherub may or may not be Bumper ;) . You'll just have to see. And what? Gasp! The reactions between Beca and Jesse seemed kind of fake? Oh no! How terrible! It's just… no! It can't be! I can't believe it seemed fake! Fakeness? What? No! No, Jesse and Beca reacted perfectly normally in that chapter; not stale and slightly fake and like Beca didn't want to be close to Jesse who was the opposite! They were normal! Things were normal! It's fine! Yep! (Don't worry about being a downer, I get what you're saying completely and I thank you for your honesty, but I can't reveal anything incriminating.) Thanks a million for your review! Keep being observational-
To HermioneSakuraGardner07 and Rubiksmaniac: Thanks for your reviews and the continued support! You won't believe how much I live for it-
Thanks for reading everyone! I appreciate it immensely and entirely. Hope everyone has a wonderful day or night.