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They don’t talk about it.
This is an enormous relief to Lydia. At first.
She supposes in the back of her mind she always expected him to come back eventually; she just didn’t know when. He could be working on a different timescale than humans altogether, might take fifty years on his paternal vision quest for all she knew. He might not even understand why she was old and grey when he returned. But as it turns out, it takes hardly any time at all.
It’s barely a month after the Juice Events, as she’s come to think of them, that she climbs out onto the roof (just to do some stargazing this time, relax) and spots him sitting on the chimney. His hair is pale lavender in the dusk.
She half expects him to bolt when he notices her, like a frightened feral cat, but he doesn’t even startle. He probably sensed her coming.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey, Lyds,” he replies, like literally nothing has happened in the interval.
“Glad you’re back,” she tells him, nudging him along the chimney so she can scoot in next to him. He snorts.
“Sure ya are,” he says. He’s smirking, but she doesn’t miss the catch in his voice.
They watch the sky turn dark. It’s strangely quiet, apart from the chittering of bats fluttering over the house.
“Can you hear them?” she asks eventually, just to break the silence. She doesn’t know if she likes this new, stiller version of Beetlejuice. “The bats.”
“Uh, yeah,” he says, squinting at her. “Obviously. Why?”
“Oh, uh. Adults can’t. Stuff in their inner ears degrades and they can’t hear higher frequencies. I’m gonna stop hearing them in a couple years.”
“Wow,” Beetlejuice says. “Being human sucks.”
He looks like he might say something more. Lydia waits. He doesn’t.
It takes a few more days before Lydia persuades him to come down from the roof, and a few more after that to convince everyone else to let him stay. The adults are certainly not thrilled, but his stunt with the sandworm has earned him a bit of goodwill. Barbara threatens to break all of his arms if he tries anything even slightly demonic. They work out some ground rules which will no doubt be broken within a week. And then there’s one more entity in the house.
Lydia would be lying if she said she hadn’t missed him. The days the two of them spent alone in the house, scaring everyone who came to the door, were the most fun she’d had since her mother died. He never told her to lighten up, or that her morbid jokes weren’t funny, or that she was weird and being weird was creepy and bad. She could always just be herself around him.
Well. Until she couldn’t.
They don’t talk about it.
They snap back to their old dynamic, more or less, as Beetlejuice settles into the household and shows no signs of disappearing. They steal Delia’s cookies and turn Charles’ ties into snakes and generally fool around. It’s fun. It’s great. They’re BFFFFs forever.
Multiple times a week she wakes up in the night gasping, replaying the sickening sound of the spike going through his ribcage.
There had been a body, afterwards. She tries not to think about it. Charles and Delia had buried him — it — in the woods behind the house, probably to become a baffling cold case in about twenty years. Lydia hadn’t watched.
She’d known, intellectually, that it wasn’t him . The real Beetlejuice was off in the Netherworld somewhere, probably having a great time, and what was left on their living room floor was just a very brief vessel. But it had looked exactly like him, down to the scruff and the bitten nails. The body had been warm. There had been so much blood.
Lydia hadn’t known, before, that she had the strength to kill a person.
She believes him about the marriage having been purely a green card thing. She wouldn’t have spoken to him again if she didn’t. She might not have in the moment, might have played up the Lolita thing a little hard, but she’s pretty sure now that he was telling the truth.
It doesn’t really make things better. He could have been manipulating her into giving him the last Snickers bar. What he did to her — to Barbara — was still the same.
The other nightmares are at least straightforward. A giant laughing demon head swallowing her whole. Adam and Barbara screaming as they crumble into ash. You messed with the wrong book, now look what you’ve done...
He’s her best friend. He tried to kill her family. He’s a demon who can never be trusted. He saved her life. She murdered him in cold blood.
The two of them watch horror movies together under piles of blankets and make fun of the special effects, and don’t talk about it.
She doesn’t really let him touch her anymore. Not like that , obviously, it wasn’t ever like that. But he used to pick her up and sling her around as if she weighed nothing, would ruffle her hair like he was trying to confer some of his own chaotic magic on her. He’s a very tactile demon; it probably comes of the whole isolation thing.
She doesn’t make a thing of it, of the way the contact burns her now. She makes it a game when she ducks out of his reach, hopes he doesn’t notice the pattern. She doesn’t think it changes their dynamic much, and he doesn’t ever mention it. She’s thankful for that, at least.
He doesn’t seem too inclined to talk about his vision quest, which is a little odd considering how eager he’d been to leave. Lydia expected him to come back with some fun stories, at least, but the ones he tells her are obviously fake. He didn’t find his dad. It doesn’t sound like he tried all that hard.
“So what exactly did you do for a month?” she asks him, lying on her bed with her chin propped up in her hands. “Sit around eating bugs or whatever?”
He shrugs, a little awkwardly given he’s sitting squished into the corner between her dresser and the wall. He’s like a cat, he likes high places and small spaces. “Dunno. I did a lot of thinking.”
“Ha.” Lydia snickers. “BJ? Thinking?”
“Yes, I am actually capable of thought, Lyds, believe it or not,” he sighs, scrubbing a hand through his grimy lavender hair. “Don’t do it often, admittedly, but still capable.”
He looks tired. He looks tired most of the time lately, the bags under his eyes a darker shade of bruise than normal. Lydia doesn’t know if demons sleep — the Handbook has minimal information on day-to-day un-life for ghosts, let alone on whatever he is — but he looks like he could use a solid nap.
Then again, he might just be trying out a new eyeshadow look. You never know, with Beetlejuice.
“Sorry,” she says quietly, at which he raises his eyebrows. “What were you thinking about?”
“Oh, you know.” He waves a hand at nothing in particular. “Stuff. Life, the universe, everything. Murder. How hot the Maitlands are. Hey, speaking of, wanna go snoop through all their nerd stuff?”
Lydia, who believe it or not is also capable of thought, recognizes a deflection when she hears one. She doesn’t dig, though. That could come dangerously close to Talking About It. And they aren’t going to do that, because they’re fine.
Summer moves onward, fades into early fall. Delia takes Lydia shopping for school clothes, which is less painful than expected. She and Beetlejuice explore the town, poke around the aging covered bridge and flip through old books in the two-room library. It’s harder for him to leave the house since the Events; he’s tethered to it now, to some extent. He still has some powers that don’t apply to most newly-deads, though, and along with some tips from the Handbook they make it work.
It would be a lot easier, he keeps telling her, if she’d just summon him and unlock all the abilities that have been locked away from him again. She doesn’t respond. He doesn’t beg. Her English class is reading Faust.
She’s not sad all the time anymore, Lydia realizes around mid-October. Halloween preparations are making her miss her mom, of course they are, but she’s also excited to make costumes for the Maitlands to hand out candy for the kids. She might not have the most thriving social life but she doesn’t hate school. Her fifteenth birthday is in less than a month. She is, she realizes, glad to be alive.
Then she sneaks downstairs in the middle of the night to chug some cider from the fridge, and Beetlejuice is sprawled out on the couch with his bruise-dark eyes squeezed shut, stiller then she’s ever seen him before.
Something’s wrong, is her first thought, shooting through her brain along with a spike of adrenaline. Something is very wrong.
She tiptoes closer and he doesn’t even twitch, which would never, ever happen if he were conscious. He can sense where everyone is in the house, he’s told her, and he doesn’t have a good enough poker face for this to be a prank. He’d have given himself away by now.
He isn’t breathing, she realizes. Okay, sure, he doesn’t technically have to breathe, but he’s not breathing . She hovers over him, looking for any wound, any sign of what’s wrong, and finds nothing. Is this some new aspect of his curse? Did something go horribly wrong with the warding they’ve been setting up around the house?
“Beej,” she whispers, reaching out to shake him by the shoulder, trying to ignore the hot tears burning her eyes. “Beej, please—“
He moves so inhumanly fast that she can’t process it, or maybe it’s just hard to see what’s happening when you’ve been shoved facedown into a couch. She just knows she’s lost her footing, her arm is twisted painfully behind her back, and something hot-breathed and terrible is snarling “ Leave. Me. Alone,” into her ear.
She draws a breath in to scream, to fight, and the claws release her abruptly. “Oh, fuck,” the thing in her ear says in a much more familiar voice, “oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck, are you okay?”
Lydia gets up. Beetlejuice is hovering over her now, face pale, eyes wide. She’s relieved but she is also angry. Angry is so much easier to deal with than terrified.
“What,” she demands, jabbing a finger toward him, “was that?”
“What was what? What are you doing down here?”
“I— I was checking on you! I thought you might be dead! ”
“I AM dead, Lydia!”
They stare at each other. She’s breathing hard. So is he.
“I was asleep, okay?” he says, throwing his hands up. “I was just asleep! Don’t make a thing out of it!”
“How was I supposed to know that?” she demands. “I’ve never seen you sleep!”
“THAT’S ON PURPOSE, LYDIA!” he shouts.
And she realizes the whole time they’ve been arguing at increasing volume, he hasn’t been advancing on her the way she would expect. He’s been backing away. He’s backed himself almost into the fireplace by now, despite the embers still smoldering. His eyes are dark, pupils hugely dilated, and very, very wide.
“Are...” Her voice dries up in her throat. “Are you okay?”
That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. She’d meant to say, Are you afraid of me?
Beetlejuice’s gaze darts around the room, everywhere but meeting her gaze. He looks like a cornered animal, like the desperate opossum they’d caught in a wire trap that summer. “I’m fine,” he says, sounding a little strangled.
“Beej.”
“I’m fine, Lydia. I’m always fine. I’m great. Go back to bed. Please.”
“Why don’t you want me to know that you sleep?” she demands.
“Lydia.”
“Beetlejuice.”
He mutters something. She stares at him.
“I’m going to get some cider,” she declares, and stomps off to the kitchen.
She really, truly expects him to be gone when she returns. That’s how all of their arguments up to this point have played out— she’ll glower, he’ll retreat to the roof, and then they’ll pretend it never happened. But he’s still there, huddled on one end of the couch with his feet tucked up under him, dark eyes tracking her every move.
She hands him a second glass of cider. They drink in silence. None of the sleeping adults seem to have even woken up.
“Lyds,” he says eventually. “‘M sorry.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” she says. “But I want to know. I was worried, before.”
He sighs, rubs at his face. He somehow looks simultaneously very old and very young.
“‘S not just you,” he says. “Nobody knows. I don’t like... not knowing. What’s going on.” His shoulders slump. “I can go for a while without. I didn’t mean to, tonight. I usually go somewhere else.”
“You don’t trust us,” Lydia says slowly. “You don’t trust me.”
Beetlejuice huffs. It’s almost like a chuckle, but with no air or humor in it. “Would you?”
She looks at him. He’s so subdued. So washed out. So tired. The spike had gone right through him.
“No,” she says. “I guess not.”
“There ya go. And I know you don’t, so. Quid pro quo. Tit for tat.”
“What?”
“You don’t trust me, Lyds. Hey, I get it, obviously. I’m a demon. Might be fun at parties, but you gotta keep me on a short leash. No hard feelings.”
“Oh,” Lydia says. It hits her like a punch to the gut, and not because he’s wrong. Because he’s absolutely right.
This has gotten very big all of a sudden, and very awful, and she was not prepared. They’re going to have to talk about it and she wants literally nothing less than that. But if she walks away from this conversation now, she might be tossing out their last chance of ever really fixing this.
“Hey,” Beetlejuice says into the terrible silence, clearly uncomfortable. “Hey, it’s okay, really. I’m used to it. You’re not, like, breaking the mold here.”
“No,” Lydia says. She takes a deep breath because she is not going to cry again. “No, it’s not okay. We told you you were family and then I— I stabbed you—”
“Yeah,” he says, a little distantly, “that wasn’t super fun.”
“And now we’re like oh, hey, Beetlejuice, you can stay as long as you fall in line and never ask for any part of your freedom or your life back? How are you okay with that? You shouldn't be okay with that!”
“Kiddo,” Beetlejuice says, very matter-of-factly. “If I stopped hanging out with everyone who ever hurt me, I would literally have no one to talk to.”
“Oh,” Lydia says. She's fourteen years old. She is not equipped for this kind of conversation. “Yikes.”
“You guys are.... better, anyway,” he says quietly, picking at a loose thread on the couch. “Never been brought to life just to get killed before, sure, but there’s a lot of stuff you can do to a demon with the right tools. Back before I got cursed, there was....” He trails into silence. Lydia doesn’t want to know what he’s remembering.
“Beej,” she says, “you didn’t deserve that. You don’t deserve it. It’s not fair.”
“Yeah, well, life’s not fair. And it’s not like I’m exactly a great guy, anyway—“
He freezes, mouth and all, when Lydia throws her arms around him. The contact doesn’t burn at all. He’s a little cold, and leaf-mold-scented, and soft.
“What,” he says, as Lydia buries her face in the fabric of his shoulder, “are you doing.”
“It’s a hug,” she tells him, resolutely holding on. “I’m hugging you. Accept it.”
“Oookay,” he says, and relaxes slightly. He doesn’t seem inclined to return the gesture. He might not actually know how to. Lydia doesn’t think now is really the right time to teach him.
“‘M sorry,” she says into his jacket. “I’m really sorry, Beej.”
“Me too, kid,” he says softly, resting a hand on her back. “Me too. I had an actual friend and I fucked it all up.”
Lydia draws back. She doesn’t like the sound of that at all. “Are we not friends anymore?” she asks.
He scrunches down in his seat, seemingly frustrated— confused?— by the question. “You tell me. You’re the one keeping me around.”
“You came back on your own.”
“You know what I mean, Lyds.”
Lydia does, she thinks. The other adults, living and dead, tolerate Beetlejuice with a fair amount of wariness. The Maitlands seem... increasingly okay with him, at least, but Charles and Delia avoid interacting with him as much as possible. If one of them were to demand that he leave, she doesn’t think anyone else in the household would speak out on his behalf.
And that’s the kind of existence he’s had for millennia, she thinks. Hanging out at the fringes, barely tolerated at best. Ignored unless he was making a mess or someone wanted to use him.
“I want us to be friends,” she says. “For real. Not just because you’re a demon who can do cool tricks, but because you’re a person and I like you. And I want to trust you. Beetlejuice.”
She seems to have rendered him speechless. That’s an accomplishment she’ll cherish, she thinks.
“Beetlejuice,” she says again. He looks puzzled.
“What? I’m right h— oh, jeez, Lydia, that’s pretty low. Thought we were past fucking with me like this.”
He’s getting up to leave, expression shuttered off, when she grabs his arm. “Beetlejuice.”
There’s no crash of thunder this time. The lights don’t change, the walls don’t crawl. There’s just a slight pop in her ears as the pressure in the room changes, and a demon staring at her slack-jawed.
“Wh,” he says, and disappears in a puff of smoke.
She’s halfway through formulating the thought oh my god, I killed him again when there’s another puff of smoke and he’s back, just slightly to the left. “I can teleport,” he mumbles, staring at his hands. “Lyds. You. My powers. You. Summoned me.”
“Yep,” she says, popping the P.
He all but collapses back next to her on the couch. His expression is so very, very confused and vulnerable.
“Why,” he demands. “I didn’t even— are you— what do you need me to do?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I thought you’d probably want to be un-cursed, is all.”
“But. But I— I could hurt you. I could hurt everyone. You don’t know the stuff I could do, Lydia, you don’t even know why they did this to me to begin with—“
His hands are shaking. She grabs them, holds them still.
“Are you planning to hurt us?” she asks him. “Because I don’t think you will. I want to trust you, Beej. I can’t do that if I’m keeping you in a cage.”
“I,” he says. “I don’t. I don’t want. I’m.” He swallows hard. His head is bowed, nearly-white hair obscuring his eyes. “I’m just gonna fuck it up again, Lyds.”
“Yeah,” she says fondly. “Probably. Because you’re a person, and people do that a lot. But it’s okay unless you, like, actually murder someone. It doesn’t mean you’re banished.”
His hands have stilled, relatively, but only because his whole body is shaking now. She gives him another sideways hug.
“Sorry,” he says. His teeth are chattering a little. “I don’t know why this is happening. It’s probably ants or something.”
“‘It’s fine,” Lydia tells him. Tomorrow she’ll try looking up whether demons can have panic attacks. It isn’t terribly important right now.
It takes maybe ten minutes before he stops shaking, silent beyond an occasional bitten-off apology. She keeps her arm around him until he does. The embers in the fireplace are going out, and Lydia stifles a shiver of her own.
“I have nightmares about killing you,” she says abruptly. She wants to stop being afraid. She’s already decided. But wanting isn’t the same as being, and she is suddenly so very tired.
“Me too,” he says. He doesn’t sound surprised.
“Demons dream?”
“Not if I can help it. But. Sometimes.” He shrugs.
“About me killing you, or—“
“Both.”
“Oh. Yeah. Me too.”
“Cool,” he says, a little too light. His mask is slipping back into place, but it's not quite there yet. “Nightmare buddies.”
Lydia kicks at the carpet with a slippered foot. Beetlejuice is warmer beside her now; apparently one of his previously-absent powers is body heat. She doesn’t remember having noticed that, the first time around. She finds herself leaning into him, eyelids heavy.
“Well,” he says, and snaps his fingers. She opens her eyes and they’re in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed. “Tell ya what. You go back to bed, and I’ll sit in the corner and watch you sleep and keep all the gremlins away with my demon powers. It’ll be very creepy. All the bugaboos will, in sciencey terms, shit themselves and run.”
Lydia starts to protest, but a jaw-cracking yawn cuts her off. Besides, she realizes, she doesn’t actually hate the idea. Knowing he’s there does make her feel better.
“Thanks, Beej,” she mumbles, burrowing back under her blankets. He hoists himself onto her dresser and perches there. She can just make out his ragged silhouette in the near-dark. “Beej? I’m glad we. Y’know. Talked.”
She can’t quite hear his response, either because she’s already half-asleep or because he’s talking mostly to himself. She thinks he says “I am, too.”
Lydia wakes up late the next morning, having slept deep and dreamlessly through her mysteriously shut-off alarm. Delia shakes her awake in a whirlwind, keeping up a running monologue about the weird lightning storm last night and how she’s worried her crystals might have absorbed bad ions or— something.
Lydia isn’t really listening. She’s looking at the nearly-invisible green-haired demon curled up asleep on her ceiling.
She doesn’t mention it, though.