Author's Note: My betas for this chapter were the lovely guidebetelgeuse and sadertits(tumblr tag pandacookie99).

In the Neitherworld, there was a shift in the monotony.

Betelgeuse sat up in his spot in the Waiting Room, suddenly alert. Something had changed. What was it? An impatient snort flared his nostrils and he checked one of many his watches. It wasn't his wife's eighteenth birthday, so that alarm wasn't blaring yet. None of them were. That was just the one he was most eager to hear sound off. Restless, he brushed dust from the arms of his maroon tux, making an ineffective effort to distract himself from whatever disturbance had awoken him. How long had he been napping? Another watch check confirmed that nearly two years had passed in the Outerworld— the living world, where his young living wife resided; blooming and maturing and waiting, just for him.

Wife.

The word still felt strange. A soft smile gentled his grimy features and he leaned further back into the groove of the couch, fiddling with his wedding band. It was an ouroboros carved out of white gold, a rattlesnake with ruby eyes. An omen for the end of times seemed as fitting an emblem for everlasting commitment as any. Usually, the radiant band was practically glowing with warmth, but today it was room temperature— no warmer or colder than the finger it adorned.

Wait.

The ring— his wedding ring— the piece of jewelry that connected him to his living wife… was no longer warm. Panic, crisp and bleak, hit him like a bat to the back of the skull.

"JUNO!" He rasped, bursting through the door that separated ordinary stiffs from civil servants before making his way toward her office out of turn. If his wife was dead because he hadn't been there to protect her, he no longer had any reason to sit around waiting like a good boy. "JUNO!" He repeated just as obnoxiously as before as he barged into her office, interrupting her as she attempted to walk a newbie through the ins and outs of haunting.

"Learn ta live with 'em, sweetheart. You couldn't scare Bambi with a shotgun." With that bit of advice, the young ghoul was banished back to her designated haunt, leaving an irate caseworker alone with her least favorite poltergeist. "I need ya ta bump my appointment up ta now, Junebug. Time is a luxury you can no longer afford."

The decrepit spirit raised an unimpressed eyebrow his way, lighting a cigarette with one arm and gesturing for him to take a seat with the other. Betelgeuse, twitchy and anxious, did not heed the nonverbal demand. "May I ask what the rush is? You're not legally allowed out of here yet. You know that."

"AHA!" The poltergeist jeered, pointing an accusatory clawed finger in her face as though he had just caught her in a damning lie. "THAT'S only if said non-deceased marital party remains unencumbered by any force and-or forcES that seek to relieve the non-deceased party of the burden of livelihood, IN WHICH CASE the deceased party may be granted CONJUGAL VISITATION RIGHTS to help ensure that the non-deceased party remains non-deceased as per the terms of the original agreement, according to section seventy-four, subparagraph six, line—"

"Okay, okay, I get it!" Juno waved him off, rubbing her temple in an attempt to ward off the headache he was trying his absolute best to induce. "You don't have to quote it to me, I helped write the damn thing. What makes you think the girl is in trouble?"

Betelgeuse pulled back, allowing Juno space now that she was taking him seriously. "M'ring," he grumbled, hand twitching uncomfortably, unable to meet her gaze, "s'not warm anymore."

Surprisingly enough, Juno did not take advantage of this rare show of vulnerability. As easy and satisfying as it would have been to mock him for noticing something so embarrassingly small and sentimental, the caseworker was well aware of the symbolic significance of such an occurrence. Suddenly grim, she reached across the desk for her phone, held it to her ear, and started speaking without dialing any numbers.

"Carmen. Yeah, it's me. Who else would it be, ya dumb bimbo? Bring me the Deetz girl's file."

Minutes later, Miss Argentina strutted into Juno's office toting a manila folder that rivaled an encyclopedia in size and thickness.

"What do you need this for, Juno?" The beauty queen inquired, setting the file out on her boss' desk. There was an exotic lilt in her accent that added extra h's where there should not have been any. "I thought that the girl could not die, not since Betel-jerk got his hands on her."

Betelgeuse snarled, but the scathing comeback forming on his tongue was interrupted as Juno scowled and swatted at her receptionist, shooing the giggling gossiping ghoul from her office.

"You have gotten really nosey in the past few decades, ya know that? Now get outta here, scram!" When she and the poltergeist were alone again, she dared to open the file— making absolutely certain that it was out of his direct line of sight. However, something she saw brought a gloom of dismay down on her shoulders.

"Son of a bitch." A response like this did nothing to ease the poltergeist's unrest. A shadow came over her weary features, dark clouds swirling her stormy gaze. "I haven't seen anything like this in a… long time."

"What?" Betelgeuse barked, leaning almost out of his seat so that he might steal a peek at the highly confidential information. "What is it?! Lemme see!"

To have Juno perturbed, it had to be something. He knew the trouble had to be more critical than originally anticipated when without hesitation she turned the folder, letting him see the secret pages without a fight. Except for some itty bitty text at the top of the left page, the papers were blank. He had to squint to read it, but the material there was trivial. All it did was detail that after eating dinner and washing the dishes that night, his wife fell asleep at her desk while trying to finish her homework.

Cute. For brief seconds, he allowed himself to admire how fucking adorable his wife was before examining what it was that had Juno so troubled. The pages were blank. If she were dead, there would be a neat little paragraph describing her untimely demise, down to the last minute gory detail. Instead, empty white parchment stared up at him, ridiculing him with its enigmatic vacancy. He had personally never seen such a thing in any of his many years spent in civil servitude, but Juno obviously had, so he laid into her.

"Well? What's it mean?!" Rapidly, she snatched the folder back, depriving him of the opportunity to flip the pages over and divulge any further details about his wife's history that he wasn't supposed to be privy to.

"It could mean a lot of things," she began, closing the file and lighting a cigarette. The all-knowing guide into the mortal girl's life could not offer them any more insight than it already had. "It means she's not dead— yet. It definitely means that there's been some kind of supernatural interference. What kind of interference?" The caseworker shrugged, but there was nothing casual about it, and took a long, savoring drag from her smoke. "Who can say? The powers that be are no longer in control here. This is out of our jurisdiction."

Murderous intent darkened the poltergeist's jade eyes while contempt curled his upper lip. As appealing as the prospect of freedom currently was, it was dampened by the idea of somebody else fucking with his darling wife before he could have a go at her. "Sounds like a pretty fuckin' good reason t' grant me that early release, Junebug."

The disgusted curve of her wrinkled mouth as it twisted around the end of her cigarette revealed that despite the begrudging nature of her acceptance, she had come to the same conclusion as him. "Let me draw up the paperwork."

Instead of a crawl space, she found a tunnel.

It pulsated with electric blue energy, almost alive as she crawled down its thrumming, narrow path. Enthralled, she continued on with eyes and mouth agape, only to come out the other end into a perfect replica of her dark room.

"What the…?"

The floodlights were on, bathing the room in bloody light. Everything was exactly as she was used to seeing it, but different somehow. More vivid. Cleaner. All of the equipment was untouched, as though no one had ever spent long tireless nights working here. A distant lyrical hum drew Lydia's attention toward the stairs. Past the curtain that protected the darkroom from outside light, she could hear sizzling and bubbling up above, as well as that persistent beautiful crooning.

In a daze, she ascended the stairs that just minutes before she'd chased the spider down, following the horribly nostalgic chanting. What she saw once she breached the entry to the kitchen made her heart clench and stutter, all color draining from her complexion.

"Mom…?"

Her voice cracked. The woman's back was facing her as she warbled a wordless song and fussed over a pot, but Lydia didn't need to see her face to know. Far too many years had been spent staring at that photograph to not recognize the bounty of sable hair that flowed down her back, the severe shade of red that coated those lips and fingernails. This was her mother. Her mother was here. Her mother was here! A flood of heavy emotion kept her heart hammering and her feet frozen. Without warning, Lydia found she needed to grasp the edges of the doorway for stability. Was this a dream? This couldn't be real.

At the sound of her frightened, heartbroken call, the woman turned casually from her work, pausing her song. The pounding organ in the girl's chest stilled.

"Oh, sweetheart," she murmured sweetly, a gentle smile curling crimson lips. A beam of light caught the shiny, black buttons that made up her eyes and Lydia felt quite cold indeed. "I've been waiting for you."

Button-eyes or not, this was her mother and Lydia had seen enough strange and unusual things in her short life that she was beyond questioning it at the moment. With an anguished cry, she was across the room in an instant to fling her arms around her mother and bury her face in the woman's breast, hot tears dampening the black and white polka dot sweater she wore.

"Mom," she repeated, voice thick with messy tears, squeezing tight. "I missed you. I missed you so much."

Unseen by Lydia, the woman's pleasant countenance faltered in surprise at such a dramatic greeting. Then, she gentled once more and drew her arms around the girl to return the embrace. "Not as much as I missed you," she lied. "Promise."

It was unclear how long they stood within their clinging embrace, the girl sobbing incoherent nothings and the woman hushing her with soft reassurances as any good mother would. Eventually, the tears stopped coming. Lydia found the strength required to pull back from the hug to examine her mother's face, committing each minute detail to memory. She was exactly as the girl remembered her— or at least, she was identical to the scant photos that supplicated Lydia's woefully lacking recollection. Only one vital detail was amiss.

"Why…" She began, lifting a hand as though she meant to touch one of the horrific button-eyes. "What happened…?"

With rapid reflexes that made her flinch, the woman caught her searching limb by the wrist in a firm, unforgiving grip before it could make contact. Something unpleasant filtered over her beautiful face. Immediately— catching herself— Lydia's wrist was released and the offending hand came to stroke her pale cheek in a loving gesture.

"An evil spirit stole them from me, sweet girl. It's why I'm trapped here. Why I couldn't come for you sooner." Lydia'd had her fair share of experiences with malevolent spirits. Horror and sympathy for her mother's misfortune showed on her face, but before she could investigate further, the woman kept speaking and silenced any additional inquiries. "But I've been waiting for you, watching over you this whole time. I built this place just for you so that we could be together again. Do you like it?"

"I…" Confused, still reeling from the shocking turn of events that had led her here, Lydia couldn't find the right answer immediately.

"Of course!" She derailed, patting the girl's cheek in sympathy. "You're overwhelmed! How silly of me."

Just then, an eerily smiling Delia waltzed through the doorway that led to the formal dining room. She wore a comedically accurate French maid outfit that was not at all sexualized. The hems were long and tight, not an inch of skin save for her hands and face exposed. She, too, wore buttons in lieu of actual eyes. If Lydia wasn't dumbfounded by the mere sight of her she likely would have broken into gales of laughter at the absurdity of her appearance. Snapping into a straight face, her mother wasted no time in giving the maid-Delia orders; set the table, put that there, put this here, etc. Unlike the real Delia would have, this one obeyed each demand without question or complaint, ever smiling.

"That's… that's Delia… but… but she's…"

"I thought you would like her better this way," her mother clarified, the perfect line of her nose crinkling nastily. "I know I do. Now go get your other father and tell him that supper's ready. I know you're hungry." She was. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich that had proven an inadequate dinner seemed so very far away. Still, Lydia hesitated, unable to break her gaze away from the perfect stranger wearing her mother's skin.

"Well, go on," she encouraged, beaming, pulling on an oven mitt. "He's in his study."

A Charles Deetz locked away in his study was a Charles Deetz that did not want to be disturbed. But this wasn't him, was it? This was someone else. Disoriented, but still cognizant of the surreal surroundings, Lydia was able to pick up slight differences here and there as she lurked up the stairs to where she knew she would find her other-father. The shadows were darker here, the lights brighter, colors more vibrant. Delia's "art" was conveniently— desirably— absent. Where framed photos usually hung of Delia and her father gallivanting on one of their numerous vacations, they now depicted Charles and his late wife doing those very same activities; dancing, drinking, laying out on the beach, celebrating their love. In each photo, a set of shiny plastic buttons stared back at her.

Ordinarily, Lydia would knock to get her father's attention. Tonight was not an ordinary night. Gingerly, she turned the knob and pushed the door open, hesitant to stick her head past the crack and get a look inside. "… hello?"

"Hellooo, Lydia," a lively masculine voice answered, happier to see her than Lydia could ever remember her real father being. Predictably, he too wore buttons in his eye sockets. His sweater was a gaudy shade of orange and boasted cartoonish bats. Lydia adored it. The shelves that lined the walls of his study— previously filled with boring encyclopedias on law, property, and birds— were now dressed with famous horror novels and movies, some even Lydia didn't have in her extensive collection. His desk, which normally was messy with paperwork and other boring nonsense, was neat, nothing but a simple typewriter taking up its polished surface.

"Want to hear my new poem?"

Suspicious of the doppelgänger for reasons she couldn't quite define, Lydia lingered in the doorway despite his welcoming airs. "My father doesn't like poetry."

"Everyone likes poetry!" He dismissed her claim, spinning around in his desk chair animatedly as if overcome by his love of the art. Rapidly, the familiar hands of her father moved over the typewriter. Within seconds, he had a rudimentary rhyme for her.

"One little, two little,
Three little pumpkins,
Four little, five little,
Six little pumpkins,
Seven little, eight little,
Nine little pumpkins,
Ten pumpkins on the vine— and look!
This one's mine!"

Her face must have read some sort of displeasure because her other-father frowned deeply before returning to the typewriter, presumably to whip up something more agreeable to her tastes.

"I'm sorry, but," Lydia interrupted, finally stepping into the room and stopping just short of tapping his shoulder. "She— uhm… Mom said to tell you that food's ready."

"Oh, boy!" He burst out in excitement, forcing Lydia to smile in reaction to his sheer unbridled joy. It was infectious. Nevertheless, a seed of unease remained. "I could eat a horse!"

Dinner was a dazzling affair. Succulent roasted meats, steaming rolls, and crisp, fresh vegetables filled up the entire table with enough food to sustain one of Delia's fancy dinner parties, and then some. Her stepmother never would have served this much fat to that kind of hoity-toity crowd, though. Speaking of, other-Delia did not join them. Instead, she stood mute and still in the corner of the room while wearing that persistent smile and awaiting further orders. Lydia was given the seat of honor at the head of the table while her mother and other-father flanked her sides.

"How is everything, dear?" Her mother asked as Lydia gorged herself, her own plate empty.

"Delicious," Lydia answered through a full mouth, eyes drifting shut in pleasure as she took another voracious bite of savory chicken.

"Is there anything else that would make you happy? Sweet potatoes? Carrots? Corn on the cob?"

The center setting rotated with each suggestion, tempting Lydia with their vivid coloring and delicious smells, nevermind that her plate was already overflowing with the otherworldly bounty of food. It didn't look real, but it tasted real and that's all that mattered to her stomach. She was fairly certain at this point that she was dreaming, but everything felt so sincere and palpable that she had long since resigned herself to enjoying the vivid hallucination for what it was.

"I'm really thirsty."

"Of course," her mother readily agreed, eager to please, "any requests?"

Hmm. Time to get to know her mother. How traditional was this woman, really? She certainly played the part of a mother well. "Wine?"

The bloody line of her mother's mouth quirked into a mischievous smirk. "Maybe when you're older. You," she called for the other-Delia, snapping her fingers rudely, "fetch my daughter some non-alcoholic sangria."

Jumping to, other-Delia brought her a dark purplish red liquid in a fanciful wine glass, then cleared her plate away while the girl guzzled the sweet punch down. It was satisfying beyond words to see Delia so unnaturally subservient. Her mother was quick to come and replace it with an entire layered cake, decorated meticulously with rich butter creme frosting, the perimeter aglow with candles. Right before her eyes, the words Welcome home!materialized in the frosting in a pretty cursive without anyone spelling them out.

"Home?"

Other-Charles stood behind his late wife's chair, caressing her shoulders in support. Their body language was so painfully hopeful. They made a beautiful couple. Lydia wished very badly that she could remember what they looked like together when her mother was still alive. If only there was an iota of love in those cold, button eyes.

"We've been waiting for you, Lydia."

"I was waiting for you," she snapped back without missing a beat, aiming something akin to hurt at the both of them. "I saw ghosts everywhere, everywhere I went— but I never saw you. Why?"

Her mother flinched at the sharp barb, unprepared for a response like that.

"I told you," she reiterated firmly, chewing her words, "I'm trapped here. Do you think I like it? Do you think I want this?!" For a moment, her temper flared, causing everyone in the room to shrink, but she quickly took control of herself. "I only want to be with you, Lydia. We both do." Her other-father's hand squeezed her mother's shoulders in support. "So very much."

"I'm sorry," Lydia apologized quickly, rubbing her face and eyes. "I'm just… I'm tired, and this is a lot."

"Of course, of course," her mother conceded with patience and understanding, ushering her up and away from the table. "You've had such a long day. You must be exhausted, but don't worry." Her arm felt bony around Lydia's shoulders. "Your bedroom's all made up and ready for you."

"Come along, sleepyhead," her other-father cajoled gently, both he and her mother leading her up the stairs.

Just as everything else in the house, her bedroom was the same— but not. The string of paper bats she cut out of construction paper to decorate her walls came alive to fly through the air, tittering "hello, Lydia! Hello, hello, hello!" but flew too quickly for her to reach out and try to catch one. The photo of Adam and Barbara tucked into the pane of her vanity offered her friendly waves and sweet smiles, but they did not speak. "Sveet dreams, boo-tiful," a realistic miniature Drac crooned to her, before enclosing himself in his polished coffin just as her mother pulled the covers up to her chin.

The bed was her own, but deeper and softer, with jersey sheets that Delia would not have approved of. Sleep took her quickly while two pairs of identical black buttons gleamed over her prone form.

"See you soon."

"It is seven a.m. Bwahaha…"

Lydia awoke clinging to her mini-me like a child would a teddy bear, wrapped in luxurious wine-colored silk and soaked with sweat. Her flesh burned feverishly and a deep panging ache throbbed her temples. Sickness had taken hold while she slept, no doubt caused by her bike ride through the freezing rain. It took longer than usual to bring herself to slap the Count back into his coffin. Every part of her wanted to curl back beneath the covers and let go of consciousness once more— return to the beautiful dollhouse her poor, jailed mother worked so hard to build for her. Unfortunately, there was an intruder lurking in her mirror that was in… disagreement with this notion.

"Long time no see, babe," a horrifically familiar, gritty voice called from her looking glass.

She gasped, flailing clumsily in her efforts to push through the heavy blankets and sit up straight. There he was, just as filthy, fat, and crude as ever, bedecked in that dingy black-and-white striped suit that had never seen a washing. A cigarette hung from the corner of his grimy mouth, smoke seeping right past the layer of glass that appeared to keep him trapped. The eyes of a predator glared over her, electric and wild. There was nothing pleasant in his expression to give her any kind of relief. Only hunger… and suspicion.

"Naughty, naughty girl." Her fever was suddenly all the more apparent. "What kind o' trouble you been gettin' yourself into?"