The Basketcase and The Princess

CHAPTER 1

New year, new start.

Is exactly what Chloe told Aubrey over and over on their pre-school year vacation in Ibiza. They had needed to let off steam. Their course of action was lazing on beaches by day and partying by night to forget about the world, if only for a little while. Chloe who had been the little beacon of positivity in Aubrey's life, believed it, and Aubrey had to fake it until it was true.

It had to be true, right?

Chloe and Aubrey returned to Barden, now the only two Bellas left. Everyone else either having graduated or dropped the a cappella group due to that one little incident. Ok maybe it wasn't that little of an incident. Maybe it was a big incident, and Aubrey was nowhere close to living down the extreme embarrassment of barfing during the performance at Lincoln Center. Add onto that they had both just came out of bad relationships. One of them had to be positive.

New year, new start?

Right.

Aubrey was determined to not let anyone make her feel worthless again. What had started out as drunken hook ups with Unicycle, she'd only learned his name was Michael after they'd actually started dating, had gone awry. He'd been hooking up with other women. Plenty of other women.

He was hot. And he knew it. He acted sweet. And knew how to use it to his advantage to get what he wanted and for a while Aubrey had fell for it. But that was the past.

New year, new start.

New Bellas. That was a place to start.

Someone on campus wouldn't have had access to youtube and not have seen the video. Aubrey had been instilled with an all or nothing attitude from her father. She was currently at nothing with all to gain. She was a Military Brat, never having lived in one place for very long but somehow she'd stayed friends with Chloe since her dad had been stationed in New Orleans. As her dad always said
"If all you're squadron dies, recruit replacements to die instead of you."

There had to be more Bellas.

Right?

So wrong.

Chloe needed the Bellas more than Aubrey did, which was a big part of why Aubrey was determined to make it all work. For Chloe. They had been like each others family for most of their lives, and only had each other now they were both at Barden. No, that was harsh. They were never an "only". They were like sisters and Chloe had always wanted a sister, again.

Positive thinking. Chloe would rarely let herself think back on the past, not that it upset her like it did when she was twelve. When she did let her mind think about her sister, her mother, she thought of them with fondness, not sadness. She didn't miss Maura, who had been a family friend of the Beales since before Chloe had been born, whilst she had been away at college like she thought she was meant to either. Maura, she could never bring herself to call her mom, had taken in the teenage Chloe and given her pretty much everything.

Chloe had broken up, well it had ended, with Lana, over the summer. Lana had been a Bella, and they had been on and off and off and on all year. Chloe had wanted it to be more, thought it was more. Chloe had learned to leave the subject well alone of them going public with their relationship, always having caused arguments she could never win.

Chloe had convinced herself for a while that she was happy to live in secrecy with Lana but it just wasn't as fulfilling as she needed or wanted. When she pressed and pressed one too many times for them to come out as a couple therefore she'd be effectively outing Lana, Lana just couldn't do it. Chloe never hid her sexuality but Lana lived deep in the closet, and it drove Lana away from her.