Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If Barbara is honest with herself, a part of her knew he’d be back. A part of her even knew he’d be back this soon. No part of her was prepared to be looking past him at the hole in her (well, the Deetz’s technically) wall, courtesy of what Barbara is pretty sure is the same sandworm responsible for chowing down on the Neitherworld’s worst mom. Lydia is, of course, happy to see him.

“Beetle-beverage,” she greets him, sardonically but warmly.

“My favorite murderer,” he calls her, ruffling her hair and causing it to poof up and out as if gravity defying hair is one of the many diseases he carries and can infect others with. Lydia removes a very small and fairly polite snake from her curls and hands it back to him.

“Good to have you back,” she tells him, as he tucks the little snake into an inside pocket of his striped and shabby jacket. “Things were starting to get kinda predictable around here.”

Beetlejuice adjusts his stained cuffs and does some lazy jazz-hands in the direction of the hole he and his preferred form of transportation have created. It repairs itself without a trace that it was ever there, save for the demon now standing in the living room (and the enormous striped snake monster coiled into a less enormous striped ball at the foot of the stairs). And just like that: he’s back in their lives (well, after-lives). The sandworm slithers into, and takes up residence in the basement. This is a fact that Adam learns the hard way.

“Now that,” Beetlejuice says, as Barbara rushes to her husband to make sure all of him is still intact, “was a primal scream.”

Adam stares at him, panting heavily despite his lack of physical lungs.

“A-dawg,” the demon addresses him cheerfully. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Put ‘er there-…”

Beetlejuice holds up an unwashed hand for a high-five.

“…or anywhere you wanna put ‘er,” he continues.

“Thereisagiantsnakeinthebasement!” Adam shrieks.

“Haaaa, yeah, same,” Beetlejuice replies, adjusting the waistband of his tattered trousers meaningfully. Barbara is moments away from rolling up her ghostly sleeves and punching the demon in his grinning, green-tinged face.

“Well does it intend to stay there?” Adam asks, incredulously.

Beetlejuice folds his arms across his chest and frowns.

“First of all, *she* is not an ‘it’, Adam,” he sniffs. “Rude.”

She, as it turns out, is named Sandy (“Big Sandy,” Beetlejuice tells them, in a tone that leaves Barbara with the distinct impression that somewhere there is an even BIGGER Sandy). And after the initial shock wears off, she and Adam end up taking to each other, like a boy to a dog (if the boy were dead and the dog was a snake). Even the adult Deetz’s take Beetlejuice’s presence well.

“Mr. Juice,” Charles says, with only the smallest of long suffering sighs.

“Chuckle-bucket,” Beetlejuice calls him in reply.

Delia’s smile is a little bit frozen around the edges, but she approaches the demon anyway.

“Oh! It’s you. Isn’t this…nice.”

She looks around at the house’s usual inhabitants as if for reassurance that this is actually nice, then runs a hand over the fabric of her skirt.

“I’ll just go change into something less flammable,” she declares. Charles follows her up the stairs.

“She’s smarter than she looks,” Beetlejuice stage whispers to…Barbara isn’t entirely sure who.

It’s not long before the house is humming with the combined energy of a teenage girl and a supernatural creature of even less emotional maturity, even when they are only doing something as mundane as painting each other’s fingernails. But Lydia does have to go to school, and do homework, and sleep, and it is at these times that Barbara finds that she is most often the focus of the demon’s attentions. She can’t call what he does stalking, exactly, because there’s nothing secretive about it. He trails after her in a way that she would call toddler or puppy-like, if she were describing anyone other than him. He’s too large, and scruffy, and foul mouthed for such associations. It's strange to have him in her space. And frustrating, because he does not seem to have any concept of how close one should stand to another person, or how much space he takes up. He isn’t a tall…man, but he is, to put it kindly, husky. Probably the only thing that keeps her from colliding into him is his inability to keep still, and his penchant for using furniture in ways it was not intended.

It is on what Barbara has (since her death, anyway) come to think of as a typical day that Beetlejuice flops onto his back at her feet, on the floor of the attic she and Adam still spend most of their time occupying, and starts unbuttoning his pants. Barbara shrieks and leaps up from the couch she has been sitting on. His actions aren't intended to be a jump scare, and scared is not what Barbara is. It's not out of the ordinary for him to be in the attic: it’s sort of become an unspoken agreement that he is more or less welcome in their space when he isn’t being Lydia’s smirking, scheming shadow. So long as he behaves himself, that is.

He has.

Well. Had. He has, up until this moment, been practically…good. Sure, he’s made snarky comments, said more curse words, and replied “that’s what she said” to more innocuous statements than Barbara would normally like, but he has kept his hands to himself and his gestures PG-13 rated at most. He is, Barbara grudgingly admits to herself: funny. And...lively is the wrong word. His company almost isn't unpleasant, although Barbara has not told him so, and does not intend to. This is disappointing of him.

It shouldn’t be, really. He remains the…man Barbara once referred to as a ‘needy pervert’. It’s her own fault for thinking he wouldn’t pull something like this if given the opportunity. The fact that Adam is downstairs with Lydia, both engrossed in her homework, certainly gives the demon opportunity. She scowls down at him, ready to throw the nearest thing she can get her hands on at any offending parts of his anatomy. To her surprise, he isn’t leering back. He raises an eyebrow at her, then shakes his head as if she’s the one who’s being unreasonable.

“Jeez, Babs,” he says, rolling his eyes and then shutting them. “Unclench your everything; I’m just giving the gut a break.”

Barbara’s eyes travel down his frame almost against her own will, as he folds his hands over his round stomach.

“I’m a big boy,” he continues, “and these pants aren’t.”

He’s not wrong. The fit of the striped trousers is more snug around his thick thighs than it should be, and without his suspenders, his paunch would definitely push them down. Instead, his stomach is propped up and oozes over his waistband in a way that, now Barbara thinks about it, probably isn’t entirely comfortable. With the button undone, his belly has forced the zipper down, and each side is far enough away from the other that she isn’t sure how he intends to ever get his pants zipped again. This is: awkward. Barbara tries to burry the feeling under meaningless conversation and morbid curiosity.

“Then why do you wear them?” she asks. She has seen him conjure a decapitated head out of thin air; surely he can magic up a properly fitted suit.

He’s still for a moment, and with his eyes closed he looks even more corpse-like than usual.

“It’s what she gave me to wear,” he finally mutters, the words coming out rushed, as if he’s embarrassed to admit it.

“You mean: your mother,” Barbara clarifies gently and unnecessarily. She realizes she is still hovering over him, and steps back so she can settle on the couch again. He cracks open an eye to watch her.

“Duh,” he grunts.

“Did she make it for you?” Barbara asks, because it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t bespoke; that it might have once hung on a rack in a department store with others like it. Beetlejuice snorts and opens his other eye.

“How should I know? I always figured she yanked it off a corpse. Out of, you know, necessity.” And then, in case she doesn’t know necessity, he helpfully adds: “Of me not being naked.”

Barbara is very careful not to react to that. It is, she thinks, what he wants.

“And you couldn’t just wear what you were wearing before because…?” She prompts. It’s probably a wholly awful story. Another nacho story. The sooner it is out and over with, the better.

“Before what?” He asks instead. She thinks he might be playing some kind of game until she looks down at him, and he looks back at her with genuine confusion on his face.

“Before,” Barbara says, gesturing to all of him, “this. Whatever you wore then.”

“There was no ‘before’,” he tells her, both physically executing and verbally pronouncing his air quotes.

“Oh, okay,” she sasses back. “Your mother dressed you like this when you were a kid? When you were a baby?”

He sucks in a long and useless breath through his nose, then hauls himself into a sitting position. He steeples his fingers.

“Barbara,” he begins. “Sweet, beautiful, surprisingly strong and occasionally violent Barbara. I. Am. A demon.”

He pauses, as if checking to make sure she is keeping up. Now it is her turn to roll her eyes.

“And?” She says, more than asks.

“And as a demon,” he continues, “I just: was.” He makes a hand motion like a birthday party magician. The implication is of something appearing from out of nowhere. Possibly with a poof.

“Wait what?” She finds herself asking. “You…” She can’t quite bring herself to finish the thought, but he does it for her.

“Just suddenly existed one day, fully formed, entirely grown, and with a knowledge of all swear words and no social skills? Yes, Babs: I was just here, and queer, and trust me: nobody was used to it.” He says it like a punchline; like he’s expecting her to laugh. All she can do is stare at him.

“That’s so-…” she murmurs.

“Freaky?” He suggests. “Gross?”

“Sad,” she says, softly. He eyes her suspiciously, then leans back against the seat of the couch, folding his arms over his chest.

“Pfft,” he snorts, “what’s so great about babies anyway? So what if they’re little and conveniently hug sized and people feel compelled to comfort and protect them no matter what they smell like, or what comes out of them, and no one expects them to know anything or gets annoyed at them for getting something wrong or acts like it’s their fault when it’s not like they’ve ever seen a clipboard before because they just started existing yesterday!”

His words increase in pace and pitch and Barbara reaches out almost desperately and places a hand flat on top of his now purple haired head, to keep him from...well, she isn't sure. Exploding, maybe. Launching into orbit. He freezes, still breathing rapidly and pointlessly through his nose. He swipes a wrist across his mouth because he has drooled, like an overexcited dog.

“That run-on sentence got unexpectedly personal,” he admits, stiffly.

“A little,” she agrees.

“Anyway, point is: I’m not a person. And if you guys keep that in mind, it’ll make all of your lives slash afterlives just a little less frustrating because you can expect me to be a monster to begin with,” he continues, brightly. He seems almost proud of himself.

“I don’t…think that was your point,” Barbara points out. He glances at her over his shoulder.

“Wasn’t it?” He asks.

She shakes her head and removes her hand from his hair. She doesn’t miss the way his shoulders sag slightly in disappointment.

“No,” she says, firmly. She hopes she isn't going to regret saying what she's about to say, but it deserves to be said. “And: I think you're wrong. You are a person. A different person, but that’s okay.”

He watches her out of the corner of his eye. He is, she suspects, waiting for the other shoe to drop; for the insult to come, or for her to declare it a joke and take it all back. When she doesn't (because she wouldn't. What kind of person would? Other than...oh.) he raises the eyebrow she can see.

“Are you sure you were afraid of being a bad mom, or did you just not want to squeeze the egg out of your ass and sit on it for however many months it-… human reproduction: unclear,” he admits, waving a hand. He has grown awkward suddenly, and not just because of the mental image of a human laying an egg. For all Barbara knows, he likes that sort of thing.

“How did you know about that?” She asks.

“Welp, look at the time!” He quips, looking at his pale, bare wrist. Despite his extra bulk, he’s surprisingly quick and graceful, and he’s almost to his feet, when she grasps his shoulders and forces him back down onto his backside. Barbara is quick herself.

“Beetlejuice,” she asks, seriously. “Were you watching us?”

He winces under her hands. “Mumble,” he mumbles.

“Beetlejuice,” she warns.

“Yes, okay?” He admits, wriggling free from her grasp and springing to his feet. He spins around to face her. “And yes: it was very creepy.” He says that last bit defiantly, as if trying to goad her into a fight. It’s so very obvious. He’s also standing in front of her with his pants undone and his pale round belly trying to escape from the confines of his shirt. It’s an image that makes him hard to take seriously. She also isn’t angry. She might have been, she thinks, before she died. Before she met him. Before this conversation.

“For a while?” She asks.

“Mumble,” he mumbles again.

“Why?” She wants to know. “Why…us?”

They are, he has long insisted, boring.

“Iunno,” he answers, sullenly. He drags the toe of one of his worn out boots across the ground and looks like nothing more than an overgrown teenager in corpse cosplay. Finally, he admits (as if it pains him to, naturally):

“You were…nice.” He shudders at the word, but continues. “You were a n-nice couple, and I figured after you bit it, you might be nice to me.” He shoves his hands in the pockets of his still undone pants and grimaces. “Wow,” he mutters to himself. “Mom seriously had my number.”

Barbara can recall the woman's words and they're no less enraging in retrospect. No mother should call their child foolish for wishing someone would love them. No mother should tell their child they wish it had never been born.

“No!” Barbara insists. And after a moment of thought. “I mean…not the right number?” She pats the space on the couch next to her. Beetlejuice slinks over, but plops himself on the floor again. Barbara finds herself wondering if furniture isn’t a somewhat foreign concept to him. She’ll have to ask later; this conversation is too important to derail.

“It was a good idea,” she tells him, “to find people like that. It was smart.”

His eyes widen comically at the compliment. This is so very definitely the first time anyone has called him ‘smart’, and it makes something in Barbara’s chest ache, because he isn’t stupid, not really. It’s a strange way to think about a millennia old creature who has probably done things in positions she doesn’t even know exist, but what he is is: naive.

“We…kinda weren’t, though, were we,” she realizes, out loud. “Nice, I mean.”

“Well I can admittedly come on a little strong,” he says, emphasizing only the word ‘little’. She remembers. The sudden realization of being…dead; of all the things she would never get to do or be. And then a hideous grinning creature appearing from behind the sofa. It had been terrifying. Anyone would have reacted the way they did. But she remembers too, the slow careful way he had tried to explain things. And he had tried to shake their hands. It had been very unnatural, but:

“You tried,” Barbara says. “I’m sorry we screamed at you.”

He waves her off. “Totally used to it,” he tells her with a grin. “Kind of a turn on re-…”

He’s cut off because she has pressed a hand over his mouth. His lips move against it for a second but he doesn’t lick her palm, which she considers progress.

“Okay,” she says. “The way your mom treated you: it wasn’t right. You know that, don’t you?” The way he refuses to meet her eyes, she knows that deep down: he doesn’t. “It wasn’t,” she repeats, firmly. “And I know it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but she was a real-…”

“Oh, she’s not dead,” Beetlejuice interrupts. “I mean: she’s always been dead, but she’s not permanently dead. She’s almost definitely re-manifested by now, although I’m not sure because we’re obviously not on speaking terms. Not that we were really on speaking terms before, after she cursed me and banished me to the wander the world of the living unseen and alone, but-… Are you gonna punch me?”

“What?” Barbara asks, through teeth she hadn’t realized she was clenching. “No!”

“Well you look like you wanna punch something,” he points out. Literally. He finger guns at both of her balled up fists. She looks down at them, and then does something she never in all of her life or afterlife thought she would do. She flings her arms around him. He flinches back, but once again she’s faster. She envelopes him in a hug: firm, but not too tight. His chin rests on one of her shoulders, and she lifts a hand to gently stroke the hair on the back of his head. It’s a stiff, tangled mess, and she regrets touching it immediately, but she doesn’t stop. Beetlejuice is rigid in her arms, his own arms limp at his sides. Gradually though, she can feel the tension start to leave his neck and shoulders. She draws back eventually, but gives his hair a few more strokes up and off of his forehead. His eyes are squeezed shut.

“That feels good,” he says softly, although his voice remains just as raspy, even in a whisper. “Not sexy,” he assures her, quickly, “just: good.”

She lets her hand fall back into her own lap.

“We were supposed to call you Lawrence, weren’t we?” She asks. It’s a hypothetical question. He opens his eyes reluctantly.

“Gee, I don't know” he mutters, bitterly. “It is my name. And it’s not like you tell somebody your name if you don’t want them to call you it, but hey: I get it. I’m not a Lawrence. It was stupid.”

She looks him over. He doesn’t really look like a Lawrence. A Lawrence is someone with brown hair (maybe a little bit floppy), and a healthy glow, and an easy smile (not a rictus grimace, which is all Beetlejuice seems to be capable of; something in his jaw seems to be off). A Lawrence wears t-shirts and jeans; maybe sweat pants. It’s what his mother had called him too, when lulling him into a false sense of security and familial bonding. Barbara gets the feeling he might have gone off being called it since then, at least for the time being.

“If you do ever want us...me to call you that, just let me know,” she still offers, even though it sounds weak to her own ears. The look he gives her in response is patronizing.

“Babbles,” he says, which is not her name, “they’d have to change the whole marquee and like half of the merch.”

She has no idea what he means by that, but she has a sneaking suspicion he’s intentionally trying to confuse her into changing the subject. She has another one in mind anyway.

“You never tried to get Adam or I to see you,” she says, because it’s not a question. Even knowing what she knows now, she still can’t say she ever once felt haunted before the floor gave way. She has felt haunted since, but mostly only by herself. He shrugs and rolls back into his back at her feet.

“You wouldn’t have,” he reminds her.

It’s true. She and Adam aren’t like Lydia. They would have gone on with their hum-drum lives, completely oblivious, and he would have gone on: alone and invisible. It isn’t her fault, but Barbara still can’t help but feel a little guilty. She sees him now; really sees him.

She’ll find a way to make sure he knows.