One Year - Lost Souls

A/N: If you haven't figured it out yet, this is part of series, I tried to make it capable of standing alone, but you might want to read the first two parts: Intertwined and Monsters Within.

Chapter One: Me and My Big Mouth

[A Neitherworld Library?]

"Dammit," Betelgeuse threw yet another book over shoulder. "Me and my big mouth," he grumbled, "I'll get Adam and Babs out of the lost souls room. I promise; bleck." Betelgeuse stuck out his tongue at the last of it. When did he become so wishy-washy? Lydia didn't somehow use that curse to change his personality, did she? He would have heard her. Whenever she used her ownership of his soul in order to alter his curse he heard it reverberating in his head.

A couple days ago if anyone had said he'd be going to a library, he'd have laughed, and probably punched the guy. Now, here he was, scouring books, and it had been his own bloody idea too. With a groan of frustration Betelgeuse juiced up a chair and sat back from the offending shelf of books which was now essentially empty. It wasn't that the books themselves were all that annoying, even if Betelgeuse hadn't sworn off "reading" a decade ago (long story; involved a flamethrower) and was now breaking his streak, he might as well just chuck his entire reputation out the window if anyone he knew found him there.

So now Betelgeuse was doing bloody research…. and worrying about Lydia, a lot.

[Flashback to Winter River Connecticut]

314 Days. (October 31, Monday)
…or perhaps…
313 Days. (November 1, Tuesday)

Betelgeuse checked his watch for the umpteenth time. Actually he checked a long armful of watches, but since he wasn't exactly sure what time zone he was in he wasn't sure if it was past midnight or not. Time was usually a moot point to the dead, Betelgeuse used it to track bar closings, but parents sometimes imposed things like curfews and groundings. It did absolutely squat if the kid was determined to do whatever the hell they wanted, but at that moment Lydia Deetz was not one of those kinds of kids.

Lydia swayed back and forth in front of him.

It felt like he was escorting a drunk home. Escorting drunks wasn't outside of Betelgeuse's realm of experience. Over six hundred years of practicing torture methods and the fastest way to get information was still a good dose of hard liquor. More convenient too, the informant would probably forget they'd informed, wouldn't be randomly missing, and it was just much more fun. Unfortunately Lydia wasn't drunk. She would've made a fun drunk, Betelgeuse could tell. Lydia was something very not drunk.

He cast a soft net of invisibility over them both as a cop car drove by. They'd just think she was high or something and they'd probably arrest him for being a creep. He was a creep, maybe not right at that moment, but it was still a notable personality trait. At any rate he was not in the mood to deal with some dumb breather coppers.

It had taken several hours for Lydia to move from the track field outside Mr. Brandon's School for Boys where the Halloween party had gone downhill. Betelgeuse had a blast, Lydia not so much, and the end result was just some mild memory tampering. There would be echoes of course, likely emotionally driven. A couple nightmares, and an easily dismissed quirk of the subconscious. Miss Shannon would avoid making dumb Halloween plans, Bertha and Prudence might avoid gummy worms, and Clare would never again own purple drapes. All for the greater good if one really thought about it.

Lydia probably wouldn't think so. And although in any normal situation Betelgeuse wouldn't be inclined to give a damn… Her very aura had retreated.

The warm tingling sensations that danced across Betelgeuse's dead synapses were far too controlled for a little breather with no training. It was a recipe for disaster, shutting off her sixth sense like that.

Right now Lydia was pretty much dead to the world, and that was no state for any girl to be wandering home alone. The real question was how Betelgeuse had gotten saddled with the job. Normally he didn't escort a dame home unless he expected things to get frisky, and although in her current state Lydia wouldn't do anything to stop him it really wouldn't do him any good in the long run. Not that he could anyway, stupid no touching rule.

Of course, Lydia had to veer off course. "Hey babes, your house is that way," Betelgeuse said with complete boredom in his voice. Lydia didn't seem to notice. "Lydia, you're going the wrong way!" he chased after her now. Usually a person's name could attract their attention, but since that wasn't working Betelgeuse had to pull out the big guns. He raced ahead a couple paces and turned invisible.

He would've preferred to just pick her up and carry her home, but Lydia's recent additions to his curse prevented him from making any move to touch her. She had to touch him on her own. Since he was invisible she passed through him with a body wracking shiver.

"What the hell?!" Lydia whirled as Betelgeuse turned visible again.

"Your house is that way babes," he pointed, up the hill.

"Well you could've just told me."

"Nope, tried it, twice. I don't know where your head's at, but it's not under that ridiculous hat."

Lydia put her hand to the witch hat of her Halloween costume, probably forgot she was wearing it. Her eyes glazed over and she was off to her own world again. Betelgeuse groaned in frustration and juiced up yet another cigarette. He'd probably gone through two or three packs just from whatever damnable compulsion kept him from skipping out on Lydia's little trip through la-la-land. He could be anywhere in the world right now, scaring up some big shot politician with a Gila monster. Instead he was stuck in Winter River Connecticut looking after a dame who wasn't even going to put out.

[Back in the Neitherworld, Post Flashback]

What brain rotting tumour growing inside of his skull kept telling him to stick around? Some bullshit sense of guilt interfering with his work, felt like he was twelve again. Back when he was just some kid conman that couldn't swindle his way past any show of compassion. Back when he had a conscience…

Fuck!

It was that 'please' wasn't it? Lydia's stupid little 'please' woke up some bullshit inner child that went soft for a free bowl of soup. Now he had his stupid conscience jabbing at him with a white hot poker of guilt. He liked his personal demons; they had great parties and chased skirts; it was some sappy disgusting shard of goodness that tortured him, stupid irony. Betelgeuse snorted at himself in derision. He was not going to become some sentimental fool, no matter what his damnable conscience was waving in his face. He had a job to do. He'd promised Lydia that he'd get the Maitlands back, he just had to figure out how. Well, he did have a plan, but Lydia would never buy into it without proof, hence why he was in a library.

"Ivanbaker's Theories on the Living," Betelgeuse read the title aloud, before flipping through the pages. Title probably should've been Ivanbaker's pseudo-philosophical waste of taxpayers' dollars.

As far as hiding places went, a library was actually a pretty good choice. There were angry mobs looking for Betelgeuse all over the Neitherworld, but even Juno would never even think of looking for him at a library. It was the perfect hiding place. Anyone who was inclined to go there were goody-goody nerds who wouldn't even know who he was.

"Betelgeuse?" a small bewildered voice asked from the end of the book aisle.

Betelgeuse went rigid, he couldn't move, he couldn't think, at least nothing beyond a numb streak of swears and 'Not him, anyone but him, anyone but Donnie…'

313 Days. (November 1, Tuesday)

[Lydia's Bedroom]

Lydia's eyes fluttered open. It felt like the very air in the room was heavier than it should be. Basically, she felt like crap. What would make her feel more exhausted upon waking up than going to sleep? With a glance at her clock she swore under her breath realizing she'd slept through most of the school day. Lydia brought her hand to her head, checking for a temperature and trying to sort out thoughts that were lost to time. Instead she felt a stiff plastic based fabric. The witch hat was still on her head and the previous evening came rushing back to her.

Betelgeuse! She forgot to put him away. If she knew one thing it was never ever to leave him out. "Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse."

The ghost appeared in front of her. Banishing had to be done in person. Lydia was about to say his name again, but paused, he was… paler than normal, if that was possible for the dead to be. Plus he was completely still. It looked freakishly unnatural, and considering how freakish Betelgeuse was normally that was really saying something. "Betelgeuse?" He flinched at the sound of his name, before a steely breath left his corpse of a body and he seemed to register what was happening around him . It was all in his head of course, but that was true about everything for the dead.

"Are… are you okay?" asking was more instinctual than actual concern. Betelgeuse could curl up into a ball of pain and rot in hell as far as Lydia was concerned.

"It's been, what?" Betelgeuse checked his clock, thirteen hours breather-side since he'd last seen her. Lydia looked like she had barely woken up; not a sign of a healthy soul. Betelgeuse flumped into an invisible chair, leaning back to keep his face relatively unreadable, and juiced up a cigarette to try and calm his frayed nerves. "What'd you want now babes?" he supplemented rather than talk about time.

"Put that out and don't call me babes," Lydia sneered in disgust. "You expect me to just let you run rampant?" she sounded like his mother, or Juno. "You could've blown up Australia or something," blowing up Australia… that sounded like fun. Betelgeuse couldn't help but crack a smile. "Don't even think about it, you're going back to the Netherworld."

"No such thing," Betelgeuse sat up, taking one last drag of his cigarette before flicking the offending butt into nothingness, "Netherworld is just a typo from an early edition of the handbook. It's pronounced Neither-world and it's spelled like it sounds."

"Well… that's… not even remotely important, you're going back, end of discussion."

"Hey, I was already there!" Betelgeuse protested. "Getting ghosts out of the lost souls room isn't exactly a walk in the park, even for me."

"Like you would pass up an opportunity to run wild? Bullshit."

He grumbled in surrender, he wouldn't have believed himself either. "I brought proof," unceremoniously he dropped the book he'd brought over at the foot of Lydia's bed. Although the choice of book was largely incidental, it just happened to be in his hands when he'd gotten spooked by Donnie and whisked away by Lydia, bringing a book was not an accident.

"What's this?" she crossed her arms, making no move to touch whatever it was that the poltergeist had dropped on her.

"My plan for getting Adam and Babs out of the lost souls room."

"How is a book a plan?" Lydia asked incredulously, but she reached for the bound stack of pages. Technically Lydia had no evidence to suggest that Betelgeuse hadn't just juiced that book into existence to say whatever he wanted it to. That was the upside of widespread literacy; people start thinking that something is true just because it's written down.

"Okay, the book was my plan for getting you to go along with the plan," Betelgeuse admitted casually as she started skimming the pages.

Then her brown eyes locked onto him, "You make it sound like you're going to get something out of it."

Betelgeuse scoffed, which only made Lydia's glare harden. Either he was losing his touch or Lydia was getting smarter, "Alright, alright, I'm a tool! I know I'm a tool. You know I'm a tool. Doesn't mean I can't offer a deal that goes both way. I figure if I get your ghostie pals back your life goes pretty much back to normal. We call it square. I stay out of your hair for the rest of eternity."

"Which I'll bet you intend on spending outside of the Neitherworld."

"Well yeah but… not blowing up Australia." He was in too deep to go back to the Neitherworld right now. Any ghost, monster, or sick sadist could essentially do what they wanted to him without any repercussions. He had to get on Lydia's good side or his afterlife was a total wash, which for him personally was a hell of a lot worse than it sounded.

"You're an idiot," Lydia said, continuing to glance through the book, "and I don't see how some ghost pondering the meaning of life has anything to do with how you're going to get the Maitlands out of the lost souls room."

Betelgeuse snapped his fingers as he made a flip board appear in midair. With a thick black marker he drew a big circle, and then he filled it with little squiggles that looked suspiciously similar to sperm. "This is the lost souls room," based on the smirk on his face he'd noticed the similarity too. Then he drew a stick figure outside the circle. "Getting in isn't a problem," big arrow, "problem is, I can't get out," big question mark in the middle of the lost souls room. "I lose track of the door and there won't anyone coming to fish me out," then he drew a second stick figure, "I need a compass, someone to stand by the door and keep me oriented while I get them, and you've got a stake in this little operation."

"What?!" Lydia looked gobsmacked, then livid, "What?!"

"Okay… wrong way to introduce that topic…"

"I'm not that stupid! Just because the first time we met I asked you to take me there to find them doesn't mean I'd have no problem with you killing me!" Lydia roared. "I have no intention of dying, not even for Barbara and Adam," Lydia was shaking, she would die for them, but she knew it wouldn't help, and she knew that they would never forgive her for doing so. "It's the biggest betrayal of everything Adam and Barbara stood for. They stuck around because they wanted me to live! Really live; instead of wallowing in disappointment and resentment and…" Lydia's anger trailed off and Betelgeuse could understand why.

Wallowing in disappointment and resentment was exactly what she'd been doing since Clare Brewster moved to Winter River, since the Maitlands had been taken away by technological exorcism. With a terrified gasp Lydia buried her face into her hands, pulling up the blankets around her like a cocoon. The Maitlands were the only two people whose standards she wanted to fit. They were the best influence she had ever had, friendly, accepting, caring. That was the kind of person she wanted to be. And when she was given Betelgeuse's soul, a wellspring of supernatural power, she had never even tried to help them. She'd been so wrapped up in herself, in her pain, that she'd forgotten why it had hurt so badly to lose them.

"Dammit," Betelgeuse groaned watching Lydia's break down. His first instinct was to teleport away and let her deal with whatever it was on her own. Except that every sob seemed to stab him in the chest, throwing him off balance and making him forget every inclination except for fixing it. And why the hell was he so emotionally tied to her? Whatever the reason, Betelgeuse couldn't bring himself to leave her. He couldn't do anything to help of course, but he stuck around picking the farthest corner from the bed to lean against and wait for the air to clear.

It took a while for Lydia to calm down, for her brown eyes to peek out from her ball of tears to stare in confused disdain at the ghost who was surprisingly still around. Betelgeuse caught that look, "Figure if I'm here then I'm not off blowing up Australia," actually he could probably have pulled that off, leaving a duplicate was easy, but watching the complete despair lift from Lydia eyes was worth it. At any rate the door was open now, he could feel Lydia's living energy relaxing into the space around her. "You don't have to die to get to the Neitherworld, but I know you wouldn't take my word for it, which is why I brought the stupid book."

"But the Handbook said…"

"Handbook says jack-shit. The publishers don't want anyone to try it, but a trip to the Neitherworld couldn't kill a fly. Besides if I went around killing people I'd just end up in the lost souls room anyway, and I've been stuck there before, it ain't fun." Betelgeuse didn't think the weighty silence was pulling his way, "You want to just leave the Maitlands there?"

Lydia flinched at the ghost's words, if she was willing to die for them, then standing around outside of the lost souls room was nothing. She pointed a finger disparagingly at Betelgeuse before speaking, "Wait downstairs."

Betelgeuse groaned as Lydia's little alteration to his curse forcefully teleported him away.

[Chapter One: End]

A/N: Gawd, it took forever to get the dialogue for this chapter to sound natural. It still doesn't really sound natural, particularly because we've started the major exposition dump for my own theories on the Neitherworld. I hate exposition dumps.