"Stay with me. Stay with me, Benji. Do you hear me? Just don't—don't close your eyes, look at me…"

Beca can feel her hands where it is clasping Benji's, clammy from blood and sweat, tinged with the rust-red dirt of Hangar's courtyard. His head is warm on her lap as he gurgles, his lips pale, his bright blue eyes blown blank-wide open. She can hear the whirring of 200 kilometres-per-hour as Jesse and Donald drive them away from the disaster that was Hangar's mansion. Like a buzzing that seeps into her ears, the distant firefight like pinpricks against the goosebumps on her skin, the choppers' open fire unfading and insistent.

Benji gurgles blood, until it's coming out of his mouth like a stream. Beca's trained senses override with panic.

The buzzing is louder, so loud, too loud. Beca touches her ears, feels blood streaming from the side of her head.

So, so much blood, and she's suddenly taken back to a cell, in Russia, dealing with the blood that came from her own body after going through so much electric shock. The trauma comes back nearly full-force; the panic pulls her under and she can't breathe.

Jesse turns to look at her from where he is sitting shotgun.

He has a bullet wound in the middle of his forehead, his eyes looking at her with nothing but contempt.

"This is all your fault."

.:.

(Present day…)

TUESDAY, LAX (LOS ANGELES): 1536

Beca wakes with a silent gasp.

The nightmare leaves with it a mental haze, the kind of panic that clouds the first few moments of consciousness. She feels her heart pounding, her fingers gripping the arm rest. If she closed her eyes again, she could almost recreate the adrenaline and despair of three years ago; could almost smell the dust of the desert crawling up to between her eyes, where she fought and failed to hold back the tears as she saw one of her friends—Jesse's best friend—bleed out on her lap, staining their jeep's upholstered seating.

But the faint ringing in her ears mellow to become the sound of the plane's engines, as she registers the pilot informing them of landing within the next few moments in LAX. The seatbelt sign glows bright above her.

She takes a shuddering breath, pulls the earphones out of her ears, swallows the guilt whole. She presses the heels of her palms against her eyes, forcing back the memories through long, deep breaths.

Three years. She has had three years to get used to the nightmares, but it never gets old. Only dangerously hazy, the way one forgets parts of old memories as they decay with time. She's tried, again and again, to remember things accurately; she owes him — them — that much. But she doesn't remember just how much blood he had lost, how often he'd coughed out, what he'd said or murmured during his last moments on earth, if he'd been able to at all.

She doesn't remember how long they had driven through the desert, before getting to a clinic in the nearest town. She remembers Jesse carrying Benji's body inside, and she remembers herself, frozen in place, watching as someone else dies because of her.

Her and her idiotic, compromised decisions.

Everything she remembers of that day is patched up with all the versions of her nightmares, bits and pieces of corroded memory, replaced with various unreliable parts of her psyche. She would welcome the trauma as penance, but has found herself shuddering at just how much grief can change even the most trained minds.

This is why she had asked Aubrey not to send a welcome party, or anyone, really, to fetch her from the airport. She wants nothing to do with that old life.

For one thing, she had retired right out of that mission.

Right within the same week — barely gave the Bellas time to miss her as she had fled and dropped off the face of the earth within the next thirty-six hours after Aubrey's rescue exit at the Hangar property.

She had disappeared with nothing but a resignation email that deleted itself after Aubrey and Chloe had read it. She had taken the precautions that all good spies are warrant to take: deleted existing information about her, destroyed any physical evidence of her existence, from her home base at the Bellatorum HQ, and what other little evidence she might have left during her last few missions.

(No footprints, no breadcrumbs, nothing with which Jesse could trace her back to. She had left him at the hospital where Benji took his final breath, knowing that she could never look him in the eye again, after the consequences of her off-the-books play, and the terrible call she had made that night: trying to steal the information before the Triplus got the chance to buy it from Hangar.)

She's only here because she knows, they wouldn't have called her if wasn't important.

TUESDAY, THE BELLATORUM HQ (LOS ANGELES): 1920

They've restructured, Beca notices within the first three seconds of stepping foot in what was once their 300-square-meter property. They've moved their base of operations from the floors of their main building, to the basements. It's a good move. There are less security risks. She can read C-Rose's work in the re-layout of the ground floor, sees Chloe's finishing artistic touches and maybe even some of Stacie's mess where she leaves behind a lived-in quality to the otherwise antiseptically professional look of their HQ, care of Aubrey.

There is a sudden lump that lodges itself in her throat; an ache she has been trying to keep at bay.

The ground floor is busy as the law firm "front" of a company proceeds in its day-to-day. Beca heads for the elevators, her Ray-Bans planted firmly on her tanned nose, freckles jumping out from three long years under the Malta sun.

"I'm sorry, ma'am! Excuse me, ma'am…"

She wouldn't have expected to be known by the newer recruits, but she never expected to be stopped.

Beca turns around, faces the young male security guard who obviously didn't realize what he was in for when he tried to get her attention. She lowers her shades gently to fix him a glare. The glare.

"Uh, um, sorry, ma'am—"

The guard stutters, melting under the intensity of the look she's given one too many men who had no concept of self-preservation.

"I'll just head on to the head office, if you don't mind," Beca says in a tone that implies that the guard has no right to mind. No right at all.

.:.

During her whole trip heading back to the Bellatorum HQ, there had been nothing on her mind but the events of three years ago, playing on loop. The Bellas, coming in with her exit strategy, just as she had requested. All of Hangar's men, scrambling to get as far away as possible from a swarm of government-issued helicopters descending upon them all. Jesse, hunched over Benji, carrying him into one of the vehicles. The firefight, the panic. The automatic machine guns.

(The warm, wet feeling of Benji's blood, seeping into her jeans.)

They had escaped by the skin of their teeth, but Beca closes her eyes against the phantom sensations that she can recall, still: Benji's coughs vibrating on her lap, his very warm shirt, the blue of his lips, the droop of his eyelids.

She has seen death, many times over. But for some reason, she has never seen dying quite like that.

"Stay with me. Stay with me, Benji. Do you hear me? Just—don't close your eyes, look at me..."

What remains of her training — when all else fails, don't show anyone — is the only thing that keeps her hands from shaking as she exits the elevators of HQ and steps into the the B2 headquarters of the Bellatorum, three years after she had tended her resignation.

The first thing she had noticed is the fluorescents. The smooth, ceramic interiors, the white lights and polished silver finishes: metallic and cold and sharp. It was all very Aubrey that Beca smirks to herself.

And then she pushes some intense emotions down, before the ache can choke her.

The lobby is empty; there is a distinct absence of personnel flurrying around. There may not be a lot of Bellas at any given time, but there's always usually one or two taking care of paperwork in HQ, running to and from printers and taking phone calls. And there's almost always someone at the reception.

Beca's instincts flare to life.

But she instructs herself not to panic just yet, she simply follows her eye to the nearest conference room, and she turns the corner to see the frosted glass panes of one. She relaxes a bit more when she sees that they are all inside.

Must be an important team meeting, Beca thinks as she approaches the room where the Bellas seem to informally huddle over the conference table. This must be serious, maybe a huge mission or a crisis, if they called me over.

If it hadn't been for Chloe making the call herself, Beca would have never made the trip.

"Beca…"

She presses her phone closer to her ears, but doesn't reply. She hadn't heard Chloe's voice in three years, she's allowed to lose training for a minute.

"Beca? Are you there?"

"Why are you calling? Chlo, what happened?" Panic — sharp and brittle — manifests in Beca's shaky voice and the way she grips the phone with both hands. Beca knows there is no way in hell that Chloe or Aubrey would get in touch, if it wasn't serious. "Is anyone… what happened?"

There is a telling pause from the other end of the line.

"I can't tell you over the phone. You need to… it would be better if you're here."

So here Beca is: in the heart of Los Angeles, in the central nervous system of the Bellatorum building, in their HQ in the basement. She enters the conference room and a very prominent hush sweeps across everyone, as all eyes land on her.

"We're going to have to— Beca." Aubrey loses her train of thought, stopping her briefing when she sees Beca enter the room.

Stacie is by the corner, sitting on the counter speaking with C-Rose. Lilly, Jessica, and Ashley are hunched over coordinates on a screen. Chloe is speaking to Aubrey, as she briefs one of the newer Bellas; there are new recruits, fresh faces that Beca doesn't recognize. But all of them have stopped whatever they were doing, and are now looking at her.

Beca lifts her sunglasses to the top of her head as she stands by the entry, closing the door behind her, her movements slow. Already, she feels the foreboding curl in her gut. Something's not right.

Her eyes land on Chloe, whose expression turns from surprised, to stricken, to sad. Horrifyingly, devastatingly sad.

Beca absorbs this information like glue slowly globbing its way into her brain.

The panic she had been fighting against, all throughout her travel, sharpens into a ringing in her ears.

She looks at Aubrey — stone-cold, professional, highly-trained Aubrey — whose expression is at par with Chloe's: a sickly kind of sad, directed at Beca.

Beca forgets how to inhale.

She catches their eyes, one by one, very fast, glances at them all, and it becomes morbidly clear that, whatever this meeting was about, it had something to do with her.

It is Fat Amy, of all people, who makes the move to approach her first. She carries the same, sympathetic look. Beca sees the moment Amy's eyes redden, the tears pooling at the corners.

Beca feels the ground drop from beneath her feet. No.

"Beca," Amy says, almost a whisper, approaching her with a manila folder she picks up from the table. "I'm so sorry."

Time slows when Beca takes the folder from Amy, when her fingers — steady, but slowly — open the file. Time stops when she stares at the grainy, CCTV still of a man lying in a pool of his blood, clipped to the first page.

Time falls away when Beca scans the document, flipping through it, calmly but quickly, registering a few words, but not reading the whole thing, not going through the whole thing, just skipping parts and reading phrases and catching the gist of what the folder contains, without wanting to believe any of it. She flicks through the pages with increasing urgency, looking for something, her eyes flitting through clarified images and actual photos and an autopsy report, fingers now shaking, and it's only when Chloe gently places a hand on Beca's wrist and takes the folder from her that Beca realizes that she is hyperventilating.

Her vision is blurry. Everything is blurry.

"There's — there's been a mistake, there has to be."

Beca hears her own words as though from out of her body, choked and ragged.

"Beca—"

"It's a mistake."

"It's not a mistake," said Stacie quietly, moving down from the counter and going to Beca, swallowing down the excess of the tears that are tracking her cheeks. Her voice is cracked, too. "I'm sorry, Beca."

The open folder sits on the table before her. It is a record of printed documents that detail an operative's death; a standard practice in their world, where digital records are avoided at all costs, and sometimes manual collation of evidence is safer.

On the first page is a partially blacked-out document, but the header is clear: "DECEASED". The name that follows the word is redacted.

Beca doesn't need to read the name, for her to know who it's about.

She can see the photos.

The outline of his body on the dark ground.

A few details that stand out about the death.

The autopsy report.

A picture of his lifeless face.

Something wet drops on the grainy photo. Beca, out of respect, slowly closes the folder. She can feel that her cheeks are wet. But she also doesn't find it in herself to register that she is crying. There is nothing to register, nothing to panic about or over-analyse. Nothing to feel, except for the pain that overrides all her senses.

She sits down on one of the chairs, finding no energy to look anywhere beyond a distant point straight ahead.

Perhaps her fellow Bellas are speaking her name. Perhaps they are worried, or fussing over her. Someone drops a glass of water in front of her, she sees that. She can't just not notice things. It's hard to unlearn old tricks; being mindful of her surroundings is second nature.

But none of it registers.

Only the pain registers. A consuming numbness she can't be bothered to compartmentalize, as her tears come and don't stop. Like years of bottling everything in little boxes have finally caught up to her, and what she once knew how to do so well, she doesn't remember how to do now. Her mind has room for only one thought:

Jesse is dead, Beca thinks, as the pain shocks her system into complete shutdown.

Jesse is dead.

AN: A new update? Who is she?

Anyways, I rewatched PP last night. My heart hurts.

This story will have a HEA, btw. But you'll have to stick around as I stitch up the plot points in this final act. :) The second interlude, I've already addressed through these last two chapters. We're moving into dangerous territory here, so I will put in trigger warnings when necessary. We're moving to address the first interlude, and the prologue, too. So you guys will know the context that those scenes will be coming from.

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