Bechloe-bible-49: No, it's not based on LOST. I've considered doing a LOST/PP crossover, but to do it right would be quadruple the amount of work that this story takes. Arr was based on Harper's Island.
SunDanceQT: When isn't she getting on Aubrey's nerves tho?
IShipChaubrey: Thank you.
96itadakimasu96: Paranoia is the worst, especially when you vaguely realize you're being paranoid.
Pixie1913: Ngl, I'm a little bit obsessed with writing her now that I've realized it and she has a face in my head.
Jadecatship: Thank you!


Dysrhythmia


Been sitting eyes wide open behind these four walls, hoping you'd call.
It's just a cruel existence, like it's no point hoping at all.
Baby, baby, I feel crazy, up all night, all night and every day.
Give me something, but you say nothing.
What is happening to me?
I don't wanna live forever, 'cause I know I'll be living in vain.
And I don't wanna fit wherever;
I just wanna keep calling your name until you come back home.
- Boyce Avenue (cover)


Aubrey has never minded flying. Honestly, she has always enjoyed the lack of distraction and having time to focus – well, the lack of distraction whenever Chloe fell asleep, that is. Now, however, she could really use Chloe talking her ear off during this flight or anything to distract her from all the thoughts and images racing through her head. Sure, she has Beca on one side of her and Julia on the other, but they both look lost somewhere in there own heads – and Conrad, her next best bet, is engaged in a one-sided conversation with Officer Clay as Brian sleeps. If Chloe were here, she would be bored, and because of that, she would be making sure Aubrey could find no peace – or what Aubrey considered to be peace at the time, at least. She has a very different sense of peace now, and not hearing Chloe's voice is excruciating.

As she listens to Conrad ramble on about his favorite Broadway shows, she regrets never introducing Chloe to her friends. They would have liked each other. She was being selfish not wanting them to meet.

Beca presses herself back against the seat and tries to stretch out her legs.

She just…wanted everyone for herself. Specifically Chloe. And now she doesn't have her at all. No one does.

"If you're really not going to sleep," Beca says, "I am."

That's fine. Aubrey gives her a nod of approval, not that she thinks that's what Beca was looking for.

"But you should still go to sleep," Beca continues, "Look, clearly she is staying awake." She looks at Julia, her words gaining her attention. "Someone is going to be up."

"Yeah," Julia agrees, "I'm not going to sleep."

"Last time you didn't sleep, you passed out," Beca reminds her.

"Beca, just stop."

Beca is quiet for a moment, staring at the back of the seat in front of her, before she not-so-boldly utters, "No."

Aubrey turns fully to look at her.

Beca refuses to meet her eyes.

Julia wraps an arm around Aubrey, her hand creating a sort of barrier between her and Beca.

"It was fucking terrifying watching you fall to the ground," Beca admits, "Chloe and I had to catch you."

"I was fine," Aubrey says.

"Do you remember even going inside?" Beca asks, "We could barely get you off the lawn chair."

Aubrey shakes her head and looks forward. "That's not true."

"Really? So you weren't crying into Chloe's sweatshirt, too tired to even move? I didn't have to practically drag your ass inside?"

Nope. Also, there had been a lot more happening in that moment than just Aubrey needing to get some rest. She sits herself up straight, subtly wrapping her arm around herself underneath the blanket. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Beca rubs her face with both hands. "No matter what I say, you're mad." She drops her hands down on her lap. "You're mad when I don't accept you're tired and you're mad when I try to point out that you're tired. What do you want?"

Chloe. Somewhere safe to sleep.

"We're in this together. Right?" Beca looks at her feet.

"Let me look out for both of you," Julia cuts in, "I actually got sleep last night. I'll keep my eye out for anything suspicious, and you two can close your eyes."

Beca doesn't budge, still waiting on an answer.

"Yes," Aubrey hisses.

"Then listen to me telling you you need to sleep."

They're probably going to die on this plane anyway, aren't they?

"You could both use some sleep," Julia says, "You know being exhausted is very similar to being drunk? You can't make good decisions when you're tired."

Beca turns to get comfortable against the window again. "Go to sleep."

xxxxx

How can anyone possibly sleep on an airplane? Aside from Beca, who passes out against the window once she gives up on telling Aubrey what she 'needs' to do. All around her people are capable of falling fast asleep though. It makes for an almost-quiet flight with Conrad's voice being the only constant source of sound. Sometimes it's comforting to hear something in the background and other moments it's absolutely grating and she just wants a moment of silence. Just five seconds of no noise whatsoever – unless it's Chloe.

"You can put your head on me, if you want," Julia suggests after she probably gets tired of Aubrey trying to settle into a comfortable positon. "Here." She adjusts her seatbelt then angles herself a little more toward Aubrey.

Aubrey stays slouched low in her seat for a few seconds longer, thinking about her options for being comfortable here. The position she's currently in seemed like one of those options when she sank down into it, but with the seatbelt digging into the upper part of her stomach, it isn't comfortable at all. The other option she has is placing the alligator on her tray table as a pillow and leaning forward. That doesn't sound very comfortable for her back. She begrudgingly sits up and leans sideways, and finds that even that isn't much better.

"I can't wait to sleep in a real bed or on a couch or somewhere more comfortable than the hospital or an airplane," Julia muses, "I think I might even take a nice carpeted floor at this point, as long as I can spread out. I love cuddling, but I also enjoy being able to move."

Aubrey also enjoys being able to move – which she can't right now, because there's no space. Maybe along with a place to hide from the reporters, someone could have considered upgrading them to first class.

xxxxx

"Chloe used to have an American Girl doll too," Julia says when Aubrey's eyes refuse to close, "Her name was Melody. She's still in the closet at home. That was the first Christmas present she ever got at our house. My mom insisted on taking her to the American Girl Doll store and Daniel to the Lego store weeks before Christmas so she could be the one to give them their first gifts. She played with it for years. I think her friends bullied her into shelving it once she got older and no one else was playing with dolls anymore. She still slept with it at night though. I don't remember when she stopped. She hung onto that playful part of herself for a very long time."

She never quite completely let that part of herself go, did she?

"I had a Lazy Dazy doll," Julia continues, "If you spanked her, she'd fall asleep. I loved her too much to do that, so she had some pretty serious insomnia. My sisters used to hide her from me all the time. They'd always say she went to find a new mom who let her sleep, and then our mom would find me tearing the house apart and get on them about it. And they always put her in places I couldn't reach her. I think all that stretching to get her down is probably what made me taller than everyone else in the end. I don't know what ever happened to her. After awhile, I just stopped looking for her when they hid her. She's probably still in that last hiding place, waiting for me to find her." She pauses. "It's kind of sad to think about her wondering why I never found her. It guess, even now, it's hard to think of her as an inanimate object with no feelings after playing with her for so many years."

"Why did you stop looking?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'm just better at sticking up for the people I care about more than I am at sticking up for myself, or maybe I just realized that continuing to subject myself to her being taken from me over and over again was causing more hurt than letting her go once and for all." Julia shrugs. "It's hard to remember what was going through my mind so long ago, especially with everything that's going through it right now, you know?"

Yeah. Aubrey knows.

xxxxx

It's four long hours between Seattle and Chicago.

Beca sleeps all four of them.

Julia alternates between talking about whatever she can think of and falling silent when it appears Aubrey might be falling asleep too.

But sleep never comes.

She's too busy thinking about Chloe, and about how if anything were to happen to her, there would be no way to contact them on the plane. It's impossible to know anything until they land – which they eventually do. The plane drops like those dreams where she feels like she's falling then collides with the ground several times before rolling to a slow stop – and Aubrey waits for a stomach to fall down out of the sky and join her as the pilot turns off the seat belts sign and people begin to move around.

"It looks like Dad called roughly 500 times," Julia thinks out loud once she turns her phone off airplane mode.

Aubrey looks at her.

"He's the only one who called."

That's a good thing, Aubrey tells herself. Unless the whole helicopter went down and lost communication with the hospitals, that means Chloe is fine. Or, it means she's not dead at least.

"Are we getting off the plane?" Beca asks, kind of groggy.

"Yes." Julia begins to gather her things. "We are."

"Did you sleep?" Beca looks down at Aubrey as she stands.

Aubrey pretends she didn't hear the question and slowly unbuckles her belt to follow Julia out into the aisle. Exiting the plane feels just as cramped as being in her seat, and she's curious to know if there is a particular reason airplanes consist of no personal space. Would it crash the plane to add a tiny bit more leg room or make the aisles wide enough to successfully walk through without accidentally almost touching someone? It doesn't matter. She still feels like shit anyway when they reach the jetwalk and can walk side by side. "How long is this layover?" she asks anyone who has an answer.

"You don't want to know." Brian fixes the jacket right as it's about to slip off her shoulders.

Great. Aubrey isn't sure if one of them initiates it or if it's an accident, but her hand brushes against Beca's as they step into the terminal and look around. It's busier than the Seattle airport, but no one seems to notice them – yet. Their fingers rub against each other again, this time in a purposely failed attempt to hold hands, then fall back to their sides. Everything is going okay so far.

"I'm going to take a walk and stretch my legs and call Dad back," Julia says as Officer Clay meets with the person in charge of telling them where they're going to wait for their next flight, "Do you girls want anything?"

Aubrey looks at her. She's going off on her own? They have to stay together. "I'll go too."

Beca audibly groans as she rubs her eyes.

"I think that you both should rest," Julia says and hands her the blanket and the alligator, "I'll be okay."

"I'll tag along with you," Brian volunteers.

"Thank you." Julia smiles at Aubrey. "We'll be back." She presses a kiss to Aubrey's cheek and ignores Beca's attempt to dodge her as she ruffles her hair.

Aubrey watches her walk away, toying with the idea of following her or refusing to budge from her spot. Instead, she sucks it up and turns to follow everyone else toward the promise of privacy with a tingling in her chest that causes her to keep glancing behind her until Julia is out of sight.

xxxxx

The Chicago airport VIP lounge isn't all that different than Seattle's – except for one thing. There are three TVs behind the bar, currently playing some sort of sports game on all of them. Aubrey drops the things she's holding on a chair and walks that way, only to be joined seconds later by Beca.

"You know, you did always strike me as one of those people who claim it's five o'clock somewhere," Beca claims.

"I strike you as a closeted alcoholic?" Aubrey sits down at the bar.

"You're not nearly that interesting. What are you doing?"

"If I told you, it might bore you." Aubrey turns to face the bar. "Excuse me?" she calls, "Could you turn on the news?" She glances back at the door to see if Julia changed her mind about taking a walk.

Beca follows her gaze then looks up at the TV as two newscasters discuss what a 'disgrace' Conrad is.

"The only bad publicity is no publicity," Conrad announces from his seat on the other side of the room.

Aubrey does have to hand it to him; he did a good job at protecting them from the cameras. But this isn't what she turned on the news to hear about. She watches as her picture appears on the screen and they talk about the possibility of her being the only survivor – one of them takes pity on her while the other seems to have a strong suspicion that she did this.

"Why are we watching this?" Beca asks, "Who cares what they think? We know what happened."

The news cuts to the weather, and Aubrey just barely manages to resist the urge to drop her head down onto the bar. Nothing. They told her nothing she wasn't already aware of. They told her nothing at all. "Can you switch to another news channel?"

"You know what you do?" Beca asks.

No, but Aubrey's sure she's about to find out.

Beca takes a step back like she's worried Aubrey is going to take a swing at her. "You become obsessed with things you can't do anything about. You can't fix this, Aubrey. You can't do anything about this, and reliving it over and over on the news isn't going to make it all make sense."

"Thank you," Aubrey says as the guy switches the channel. This channel is a little more informative. She rests her good arm on top the bar and glues her eyes to footage of police searching the island.

"Police have identified two bodies found in a river," a female voice-over claims.

Beca walks away as they say Luke's name as one of them. The other is, of course, Nikki.

"These appear to be the only two identifiable people thus far, but police are now saying the death count could be upwards of ten – possibly even closer to twenty or thirty. As of this morning almost all of the bodies found have been burned beyond recognition, and police are now relying on reports from family members and friends claiming they knew someone who had gone to attend the wedding. We did receive word last night that partial remains were found in a chapel on the island, but it's unclear as of right now who that person might be or if they're even human remains."

…in the chapel? Nobody died in the chapel. There were only how many of them left when Chloe went missing and Aubrey and Beca took off to find her? Unless, after they were gone, they went back with Benji and killed him in the church.

"What a sicko, right?" the guy working behind the bar asks, clearly unaware of who he's talking to, "How the hell does someone even do something like that? Sounds crazy, but my bet is he offered to let the last person standing live and they all killed each other Hunger Games style. That's why they're saying only one person made it out alive. That or the person who survived is the one who did it. If that's the case, they must have made up one hell of a convincing story. I bet the conspiracy theorists are going insane over this one."

"Are there computers here?" Aubrey asks, "Somewhere I can access the internet? My phone broke."

The guy shakes his head. "Nah, but there's a store that sells those tracfones around here somewhere," he says, "You know, the pay as you go?"

"Thank you." Aubrey stands up and locates Conrad. She waits until she can speak without being heard before asking, "Do you have cash on you? I'll pay you back." She tucks what he hands her into her pocket, hoping it's enough, before turning to Beca. "Conrad and I are going for a walk. You can come or you can stay." She doesn't give her a lot of time to think about it, instead grabbing Conrad by the arm and pulling him in the direction of the door - pausing outside until Beca chooses to join her.

xxxxx

"Where are we going?" Beca asks, "Julia said she'd be back in a few minutes."

"I'm not looking for her." Not completely. Aubrey would like to see her – just without being seen herself. She needs to know she's okay. But that isn't why they left the safety of their waiting room. At least Officer Clay tags along with them, not that that makes her feel much better. She spots the mobile phone store up ahead and a smoothie shop a few stores down. "I want a smoothie." No one is going to argue with her on that. "I'll meet you guys there in a second. I have to use the bathroom first."

"Do you need…help?" Beca dares to ask.

"No, Beca, I don't need help peeing." Getting her leggings up and down isn't where the struggle lies anyway; it's getting her bra on and off. She doesn't even have to pee right now. She's barely had to use the bathroom since her body decided it didn't want to hold anything down anymore.

Beca doesn't look convinced.

"You can take my leggings off later," Aubrey assures her to distract her, then walks away in the direction of the restrooms. She watches Beca process her words for a second before following Conrad and Clay toward the smoothie shop. Once they're in the process of ordering their drinks, she makes a break for the phone store, keeping an eye on them and an eye out for Julia. No one needs to know she wants better access to the news and what people are saying right now. She'll save that until she finds a piece of useful information.

"Can I help you?" a woman asks as Aubrey enters the store.

"I'd like to see your cheapest touch screen that works, and I need enough data to last me the rest of the week."

xxxxx

Aubrey wastes no time looking at phone models. She takes the first one shown to her and spends almost all of her leftover money on as much data as she can buy. It isn't much. But it should last until she can somehow get her hands on the WiFi password at Brian's apartment without flat out asking for it. If that doesn't happen, she can always use the internet at the café.

She leaves the store and glances at Beca and Conrad as they talk about something while drinking their smoothies, then steps into a corner out of sight. The one pro of this cast is that she has an excuse for taking forever. One short glance at what the other major news outlets are saying can't hurt. Her thumb hovers over the browser button, and then she hesitates. You're supposed to be checking the news, Aubrey. She clicks the tiny phone icon instead. You're supposed to be getting to the very, very bottom of this. She dials the numbers by memory, pausing a full second in between each one, then presses the phone to her ear and waits for the ringing to stop.

'You've reached Chloe,' her voicemail says.

Aubrey presses herself back into the wall, letting the shadows of the corner engulf her and hide the pained expression on her face.

'I'm busy right now, but leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I remember.'

It's not nearly as short as Aubrey's. ('You've reached Aubrey Posen; leave a message.') But it's also not long enough for Aubrey to feel satisfied. So she hangs up and she calls it again. And again. And again. And again. Just to hear her voice. Knowing full well she isn't going to be calling back.


I'm sitting eyes wide open and I got one thing stuck in my mind;
Wondering if I dodged a bullet or just lost the love of my life.