AUTHOR'S NOTE: I started this fic at a different point of my life over eight years ago under a different account name that I am unable to recover (MELANCOLIAI), under the name The Darkworld.
For some reason, that damn plot bunny Bunnicula came back to me, all these years later, after watching Beetlejuice for the umpteenth billionth time.
Not many people read that story (to the five who reviewed: thank you!), but the four chapters posted will be re-posted here and updated for editing.
The story starts around two decades after the movie, Beetlejuice. (So around present time.) It will have some elements of the cartoon, but mostly Movieverse. Be forewarned, this is not a fluffy, funny story, there will be plenty of violence, blood, angst, and possibly some lemons, as well as some scenes that are not for the faint of heart. You have been warned. This is rated "M" for a reason.
Some characters are based on real world historical figures.
Prologue
Lydia Deetz had no idea why she cared what happened in the world of the humans any longer. She was as different from them as literally the night was to day. She was now darkness; the humans were light. She vaguely remembered during her earlier life saying something to the effect that her life was one, big, darkroom… Now it was a big and eternally dark world.
So why did she continue to come back here? Why did she continue to torture herself in this way? Why come back to a place that was memories, that was so far from her "life" as it was now that it might as well not exist?
She idly twisted the odd old ring around on the ring finger of her left hand. She remembered it from the memories of this place. It was the only tangible thing she had remaining to her from before. She wondered yet again why out of everything she had had, all she had managed to hold onto was this one thing... The ring from a memory that wasn't the most pleasant of the many from "before".
Lydia's head snapped up and she leaned closer into the sparse, dried foliage of the tree limb she crouched on as a light blinked on on the porch of the oddly-shaped house in front of and below her. Her eyes changed as the colors of her irises swirled from their normal deep, dark brown to an eerily red hue with a piercing shine from light refraction Her pupils reacted to the sudden light and shifted from their normal, large round shape to a slit of vertical black as she focused on the opened door which revealed an elderly-looking, frail man who came out into the light that spilled across the porch and part of the night-darkened lawn.
"Lydia? Is that you out there? Pumpkin, come inside, it's cold, and we miss you. Come back in, Lydia..."
Lydia's eyes suddenly seemed to be malfunctioning, they were becoming watery. She blinked quickly a couple of times, and a red-tinged tear traitorously slipped down her ashen white cheek as her eyes slowly went back to their normal dark hue.
"Charles? Charles, come inside. What are you doing? You have to stop this...She's gone, honey, you have to stop. Come back inside. I'll ask Barbara to make you some of her hot cocoa that you love. Come inside, dear, that's right..." Lydia watched as the woman who used to be her stepmother gently wrapped her soothing, coaxing words and arms around the man who used to be her father and brought him back inside the house which used to be her home.
The man looked out into the darkness again before his wife led him back into the light, and for one brief moment, Lydia could have sworn that their eyes met in the night.
The door slowly closed shut and Lydia's preternatural hearing heard the double snicks of the locks being thrown even over the distance and the low humming noise of the wind, which had picked up and was blowing her long, black hair around her face, creating a momentary chiaroscuro of dark and light shapes in front of her eyes.
She turned like quicksilver on the branch and leaped from the limb to the soon-to-be frozen ground and ran, too quickly for a human's eyes to see, darkness moving through darkness, into the night, and away from the memories and the pain.
She ran to outrun the knowledge of the pain she had caused. The pain that she wasn't able to protect them from. She tried to run from the pain she lived with, every night.
She never could outrun it.