Breaking the Mold
by
Owlcroft
Whenever Lydia arrived to find no Beetlejuice waiting for her, she looked for a note explaining where he'd be. This time, she didn't have to look. Hanging in the air just inside the Roadhouse door was a neon sign in rancid yellow and putrid green, flashing the message, "Lyds! Lab! Amazing!" Subtle, it was not. But she found her way down the winding hallway to the lab and tapped on the door.
Immediately, Beetlejuice opened it and grabbed her in excitement. "Babes! At last! Guess what I've done!" He hugged her hard, kissed her, then looked at her with gleaming eyes.
Lydia squinted at him. "You've turned lead into gold?"
"Better! I've replicated beetles!" He put on a lush Southern accent to add, "I'll never be hungry again!"
"That's wonderful, Beej! I suppose." She thought about it for a moment, then added, "So you take a beetle and do something to it and it . . . what? It splits into two?"
He shook his head and led her over to his workbench with retorts simmering over Bunsen burners and test tubes filled with a rainbow of colors. "It's a liquid. I just put a tiny drop on a beetle and in less than five seconds, it duplicates itself. The duplicate just . . . appears! There's cellular fission involved and the catalyst I was using didn't trigger it the right way until today, when I used a different reagent to –"
"Hold it!" Lydia laughed. "It's all magic as far as I'm concerned. But it's extremely impressive!"
"Yeah, it is, isn't it! But there's a problem – I can't eat them or I'd replicate, too." He sighed, staring at the two frost-covered beetles on the workbench in front of him. "And I have to freeze them or they'd replicate until they took over the Roadhouse." He considered that for a moment. "Not that that would be a bad thing."
"So if you eat them, there'd be two Beetlejuices?" Lydia put a finger to her cheek. "I think I very vaguely remember something like that happening before." Then she grinned at him.
"Didn't go too well, did it?" he mumbled sheepishly. "Managed to be jealous of myself."
"It was a lot of fun for a while, though. And I know you can figure a way to do this, too. Maybe make it a formula that expires after it dries, or something?" Idly, she mopped up a drop of liquid from the workbench with her finger, then realized what she'd done. "Oh, Beej. That was really, really stupid. You've told me not to touch anything without asking first and I just . . . What is this?" and she extended her finger to him.
"Hmm?" He turned to her from the flask he'd been adjusting. "Lyds? You didn't? You didn't touch something – something wet!" His expression went from questioning to horrified.
"I said it was stupid. I do know better, but I guess . . . I was just careless, thoughtless. Beej, that wasn't the replicating formula, was it?" Lydia bit her lip in apprehension.
Beetlejuice stared at her, alarmed and distressed, then nodded slowly. "Maybe," he said tensely, "maybe it won't work on a human? Or, maybe," he clutched at his hair with one hand, "maybe such a small amount won't work? Oh, Lyds. I don't have an antidote or a reversal – oh, babes!"
"I don't feel anything yet," she smiled at him hopefully. "Maybe it'll be okay? But it might be a good idea to start work on something to cancel it out just in case. Right?"
"Yeah," he looked around the lab wide-eyed, as if he could find something helpful in a corner. Then realizing how useless that was, he turned to the bench, saying, "I've got the percentages of everything written down, but . . . I can't just step everything backward." He pulled several sheets of paper covered with his squiggly writing over. "Instead of the cells replicating . . . It would be more like fusion than fission, and that's . . ." He picked up his pencil and scribbled a note just as a small popping noise was heard.
Before he could turn around, he heard two voices say, "Um, Beej?" and there were two Lydias standing there.
ooooo
By the time Beetlejuice had calmed down enough to begin work on a formula to reverse the replications, there were four Lydias. They kept looking at one another and marvelling at the way they would mirror each other's movements and even thoughts.
"I feel the same as I always have," said Lydia Two and the other three nodded in agreement.
Beetlejuice spread his hands wide. "You are just the same. You're Lyds. All of you are. But maybe you ought to all go outside or something," he told them, looking stressed and worried. "First, though, Lyds – I mean . . . Lydia One, the original –" He gestured to the Lydia nearest to him, on whom he'd kept a careful eye, and she went to his side. "Babes," he leaned to whisper in her ear, "we need a code so I'll know which of you is which, okay?" When she nodded, he murmured, "Tiny cyclops," in her ear and she nodded again.
"We'll just wait for you, Beej," she said and waved to the others to follow her out of the lab.
Naturally enough, the neighbors noticed the plethora of Lydias and came to ask questions. By the time there were sixteen of them, though, people started to get nervous.
"You said Beetlejuice is working on this, right?" asked Flubbo anxiously. "Not that we don't like you, Lydia, or the other Lydias. In fact, which one are you?"
"I'm the first replica, Lydia Two," she replied with a small smile. "And yes, Beej is working on something to . . . to reverse the effect? Or just to stop the formula from working any more. I'm not really sure."
Flubbo reached out and took her hand. "I'm sure it'll all be just fine," he said gently.
The window just above the Roadhouse front door suddenly opened and Beetlejuice stuck his head out. "Lyds! I mean, all of you Lydias! I've figured out part of it, but it's going to be a while yet. Maybe you should move out into the street."
"You mean, where we can block traffic?" called up Lydia Two.
"If I don't get this done, you're going to block more than traffic," he yelled back, then withdrew again, muttering to himself.
Ginger came over to Lydias One and Two, who were now conferring. "Look, honey. Honeys. I'm sure Beetlejuice will find a . . . a cure for you. But I'm starting to wonder about the rest of you. Have you noticed that they don't say much and seem to be a little . . . out of it?"
Both Lydias nodded and looked at the more than two dozen others, waiting patiently behind them. Lydia Two said, "It's like most copies of a copy – none of them have the same . . . definition, the same quality as the original."
Lydia One added, "At least they are quiet. If all of me was talking at the same time, even I couldn't stand it."
ooooo
As sunset approached, there were too many Lydias to count and they stretched down the road for nearly a mile. They were eerily silent, merely standing together, the newest ones appearing at the back of the crowd.
The neighbors had all gone back into their homes, closing out the throng and hoping desperately that the Neitherworld would survive an infinite number of Lydias.
Beetlejuice, meanwhile, had feverishly worked out another chemical formula, one that he thought should work, but wasn't altogether certain about.
He opened the window again to see two Lydias patiently waiting down below, talking together quietly as the rest of the throng stood somewhat further back.
"Um, you're One and Two, right?" he called. When they nodded, he waved them inside. "This is ready to try, but I'm not making any guarantees, okay?"
Once the two Lydias were standing in front of him in the lab, Beetlejuice said, "This is for Two since she . . . sort of . . . generated the other copies, see? So, Lyds, original Lyds, come here and tell me the code."
"That isn't necessary," said one of the Lydias. "I'm Lydia Two." She hesitated for an instant, then added, "The copy."
The other Lydia nodded in agreement. "But just to make sure," she approached Beetlejuice and stretched a little to whisper, "Tiny cyclops," to him.
"Okay. Now here's how it works." He turned just momentarily to dip a lab dropper into a beaker of clear liquid and draw some of the solution up. "Lyds, I mean, Lydia Two, I put a drop of this on your hand and after about a minute you should start to absorb all the other replicates, right? Then –" Suddenly, he broke off and stared at the dropper in his hand. "Hold it. Then . . . you'll . . . disappear." He looked up at the Lydia standing directly in front of him. "You'll disappear. You'll . . . cease to exist! I can't do that! It'd be . . . killing you! Lyds!"
"Beej," said Lydia Two, "you have to. Give me that. Just let me do it."
"No! Keep back!" Beetlejuice held a hand out in front of him, warding her off. He was breathing hard now, and his eyes were wild. "There's got to be another way – something else we can try! I can't do this! I can't!"
Lydia One stepped up beside him. "We have to do this. Honest, my darling, it's for the best. We can talk about it later, but right now we need stop this. Please. Just give me . . . her . . . the dropper." She put her hand on his outstretched arm and, as he turned to her, Lydia Two lunged for the small tube and seized it from him.
"No!" he screamed and juiced the dropper out of existence just as she squeezed the bulb and a single drop fell on bare skin. "No," he whispered as she looked at him in love and pity. She held out her arms and he went into them, stunned and sorrowing.
"My darling Beej," Lydia Two told him softly. "Please don't. Don't grieve for me. I can feel the others already, coming back to me. It's working, my dear darling, and it had to be done."
"But you're . . . you. You're real, and you're Lyds, and you just –" He gulped and held her and wept and kissed her over and over again. "You're real, you are! Lyds, my dearest." He couldn't talk after that, but held her close until she put one gentle hand on his face.
"Good-bye, my darling Beej," she murmured, and disappeared without a sound.
ooooo
Almost an hour later, Lydia held her darling as close as she could. They'd finally both stopped crying, and only then could she try to explain what her replicate had told her. He made her repeat some of it, trying hard to understand and believe what she was telling him.
"She never felt real, not after the first . . . copy of her appeared. And every time another 'me' popped up, she felt less real. She said she felt 'thinner, kind of stretched' and not real but like an imitation, like she wasn't actually alive. We talked about it, a lot, while we were waiting."
"But she was you," he protested. "She was you. It was like . . . losing you, only not like losing you 'cause you were still here, but like losing you just the same. If you think about a replica," he paused to sniff and wipe his face again, "it's an exact duplicate. And what I feel for you was duplicated, replicated, over and over again for each one of you. What I feel for you can encompass thousands of you, and thousands more, and thousands more."
Lydia kissed him and then kissed him again and held her face against his. "Of course you loved all of us. And we all loved you, too." She sighed a little, then said, "But you have to know that the later ones, the ones you never saw, never met, were not exactly . . . altogether there? Beej, they were more like dolls, dolls that could move and talk, but they didn't. They just stood there, like dolls do. You can't grieve over a doll."
"But she wasn't. She . . . she –" he gave up then and rested his face on her shoulder. "It's all my fault," he mourned. "I know you're still here. I know you're still . . . here," he repeated miserably. "If you weren't, I couldn't bear it."
"And we all knew you'd try to blame yourself." She rubbed her face against his hair. "But it isn't your fault at all, it's mine. And you know that."
"Nuh-uh." He shook his head, still grieving. "I made that stuff. I'm destroying it all! If I hadn't been greedy and stupid –"
"And brilliant and creative and sensitive," Lydia finished for him. "Not one tiny bit of this was anyone's fault but mine. You've already forgiven me for it, haven't you?"
"Was an accident, babes, dearest," he mumbled against her shoulder.
"Then you weren't to blame for what happened, were you? Beej, please try not to feel so bad about this. You never meant for it to happen and I'm the one who caused it to happen. We'll be sad for a while, and we'll always remember them, especially Two, but she didn't want you to grieve like this for her. I wouldn't want you to if I'd been her." Lydia thought about that. "And since I was her, or she was me, then you have to believe me. We didn't want you to blame yourself or mourn like this."
Beetlejuice said nothing, merely moved his head slightly closer to her neck and sighed.
"My poor darling. Just remember I'm right here. I'll always be right here."
A small nod then. After another few minutes, he brought his face up to kiss the corner of her mouth. "I only need one of you. There should only ever be one of you, 'cause they broke the mold when they made you."
She held him close for a long time.
