Author's Note: My betas for this chapter were GuideBetelgeuse and Sadertits.

Betelgeuse arrived in the mirror before the sun could breach the horizon. Monumental relief coursed through him at the sight of his wife asleep in her bed, all cozy and sweetly nestled, not a care in the world. Things wouldn't remain that way for her for long, so he smoked, kept his mouth shut, and let her sleep. However, warmth refused to return to his ring. He had grown accustomed to the glowing embrace around his finger and was irate that something had happened to disturb it. How had their connection been tampered with? She was still here. She was still breathing. He could see her chest rise and fall with each one, proving her humanity. Up and down, in and out. Over and over and over again.

It was hypnotic. She was lovely, much lovelier a wife than someone like him had any right to. This was the closest he had come to her in years, the only opportunity he had ever had to simply watch her, them both unencumbered by outside distractions. It wasn't like long ago when she would sneak into the attic late at night— his lair at the time— and stick her nose in the handbook, meddling around in things little human girls ought not to be meddling in. Apparently, she still hadn't learned her lesson.

When that awful, adorable alarm started croaking, he was jarred from his revery not by the Count's obnoxious laughter, but by the hum of energy that returned to his ring. It was warm again. What in the ever-living fuck was going on here? The not knowing was driving him deeper down the rabbit hole of insanity than he was comfortable with. It was time for the little woman to explain herself.

Impatient, though it didn't show in his tone or body language, he wasted no time in alerting her to his presence. She was predictably flustered by the nasty surprise, maybe a bit pinker in the cheeks than he was expecting. Beautiful.

"You." Her eyes were wide. She was trembling, drowning in that sea of silk. If he didn't know any better, he would think she was scared. Lydia had never been scared of him before. How utterly delicious.

"Me," he confirmed and unable to help himself any longer, a foul grin cracked across his moss besotted face. "Y'gonna lay those B-words on me so I can give ya a proper hello?"It was a shot in the dark, but he wouldn't be him if he didn't ask.

"I— I— I—" A string of messy, squeaky sneezes interrupted the infinite loop she was stuck on. Betelgeuse frowned severely. Was she sick?Was that the reason for her flushed cheeks and quivering, not some misplaced fear of him? Disappointing, but apt. She was a brave little thing, his Lydia. Fussily, she scrambled for a tissue from her nightstand, wide eyes locked unflinchingly on him as she wiped her nose clean. There were deep shadows beneath them, incongruent with how deeply she seemed to be resting just seconds before. "Why are you here?"

The day Lydia Deetz dreaded for so long had finally arrived. Her husband had come to collect. What? She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

"Ain't it obvious?" He drawled, amused, tapping his gritty claws on the mirror's surface. "I'm dyin' ta go on our honeymoon! I gotta tell ya, babe, that waiting room is Hell. Complete n' utter Hell. But don't worry, I ain't mad atcha. Ain't yer fault y'got cold feet. Who could blame ya? Tall, dark, handsome beast like m'self at yer side, any broad woulda— wait— hey! The fuck you think yer doin'?!"

"I don't have time for this," Lydia muttered quickly, eyes downcast with something akin to guilt as she draped a blanket over the vanity, blocking him from view. He was trapped. If he could be outside of that mirror, he would be, but he couldn't. That much was clear to her without the need of explanation. "I have to go to school."

Her attendance record was clean enough that she could have spared a sick day, but a wild poltergeist popping up in her mirror and making talk of honeymoons had made the decision for her. Of the two evils, he was obviously the greater.

"SCHOOL-SHMOOL!" The irate spirit howled, causing wood and glass to bristle. "Lemme outta here! You n' I got shit we need t'talk about!"

"Then you'll just have to be patient and wait until I come back." Her voice sounded calmer than she felt, albeit sniffling. Confident that he couldn't see her judging by his continued furious blustering, she stripped from the nightgown to don her uniform, aiming a leery gaze at the covered vanity intermittently throughout the process. Her muscles ached and head throbbed. Today was sure to be another miserable day in the long line of miserable days that comprised her short, unhappy life.

"— and another thing! You owe me, little girl! Y'think I don't remember the way y'stood there n' didn't do nothin' while those losers crashed our party! Think again! Oooohohoho, you've got another thing comin' whenever I get th'fuck outta here! Just wait till I get my hands on—"

The blanket keeping his view obscured was yanked away, revealing a stern, exhaustedLydia. Whatever he saw in her shadowy gaze worked to silence him.

"I'm sorry, okay?"

Was he hearing things? Surely he was hallucinating. Nobody apologized to him.

"You're right. We had a deal and I fucked you over. It was wrong. I shouldn't have done that."

If Betelgeuse had any heartbeat to speak of, it would have been racing. He threatens her… and she apologizes? Any remnants of bitterness or indignation toward his wife that he'd been holding onto melted away in an instant, no matter how much he would have liked to cling to it. He was a vengeful creature by nature, but he couldn't stay mad at her. Not when she stood there so frail and breakable, bending to the whims of his rage so easily.

"That being said," she continued, some of her steely facade dissolving as she rubbed at her eyes, looking so very, very tired. "I still have to go to school, and I don't think I can trust you enough to let you out... Yet."

Oh. That was certainly encouraging. Cool as a cucumber, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and cozied up to the perimeter of the mirror, suddenly much more agreeable. "I dunno, sugar," he droned, taking a long look at her, head to hips where the edge of the vanity cut her off, "you're not lookin' too hot. I think y'oughta stay in."

Lydia visibly blanched at the suggestion. How did he manage to make everything he said sound like a sexual proposition? It was impressive. As tempting as the idea of crawling back into bed was, the prospect of facing her husband and discussing the semantics of their marriage was horrifying enough to keep her from indulging. Nevertheless, something that might have been a smirk flashed across her face at his antics. "Nice try."

"Lydia, dear?" Her eyes went large with panic, flickering back and forth between the unlocked door and her infested mirror. Please, she mouthed to him, begging. That was nice. That was even better than the apology. He could get used to this. What was a little more time spent in subjugation if it meant his little wife was going to be giving him the royal treatment when he got out? "Is that… did I hear a man's voice in there just now?"

"It was just Drac, Delia." Betelgeuse's smarmy grin deepened at the show of deception, but he remained obediently silent at his poor wife's behest. Her stepmother, appeased by the lie, spoke no more on the subject and disappeared down the hall. "I have to go," Lydia reiterated, already on her way out the door. "We'll talk later."

It was not beyond Betelgeuse's notice that in the last moments before his wife made her hasty escape, she bothered to stuff a black-haired doll into her book bag. Strange.

Lydia had made a mistake. She should have stayed home. Betelgeuse would have been easier to deal with than this.

Stubborn to a fault, she rode her bike to school instead of asking her father and Delia for a ride, at least having the good sense to grab her coat and scarf this time. After all, if they realized she was sick, they might have insisted upon her staying home. Probably not, but the possibility couldn't be chanced. Stupid.

By the time she filtered into class with the rest of the students, she was ready to collapse. Miss Shannon was, as usual, lacking sympathy.

"My essay?" She had demanded, palm outstretched expectantly.

Lydia had completely forgotten, too taken by otherworldly pursuits. Dumbly, disoriented, she stared back and forth from the wrinkled hand to her teacher's coke bottle glasses. "I don't have it."

This earned her a one-way ticket to ISS. Do not pass GO, do not collect two-hundred dollars. Insubordination, Miss Shannon called it. Betelgeuse probably would have been proud, Lydia considered defiantly as she trudged toward the ill-used classroom at the end of the hall, before blotting him from her mind. Or, at least making the effort to.

Miss Cooke, the detention curator, was much younger and prettier than Miss Shannon. This didn't make her any kinder. She had curly dishwater blonde hair, a fresh manicure, and a cellphone surgically attached to her ear. When Lydia made her entrance, Miss Cooke scarcely raised her eyes from her tablet to sneer in a way that dampened her beauty, then gesture vaguely at the chalkboard behind her before returning to her very important conversation about the cute barista who made her coffee that morning.

1. No talking.

2. Pick a seat and stay there.

3. No food or drink allowed.

4. No sleeping.

Restroom break times are at 11:30 AM and 2:30 PM. Any requests to leave will be denied.

There was a trio of blonde girls seated near the back of the room on their cellphones, giggling and chatting quietly but audibly, seemingly immune to the rules. Lydia recognized each of them with acute distinction and chose instead to sit towards the front, two seats away from a tall girl with a noticeable overbite, and her shorter friend who looked like she was related to Miss Shannon in some way with her frizzy orange hair and poor vision.

"— what a freak."

"— wonder what she did to get in here?"

"— probably tried to stick her fangs in someone's neck."

This was Hell. All Lydia wanted was to bury her face in her arms, forget about everything, and succumb to sleep. The first and only time she tried, Miss Cooke cleared her throat loudly and snapped her ruler against the board, as if the words up there mattered. Claire and her cronies giggled indulgently at this with no reprimand. The mute, mousy girls at her side might have offered sympathetic glances, but they were gone too quickly to mean anything.

In a near-delirious haze, Lydia fell into a waking coma as she stared straight ahead, unblinking, slumped half-dead in her seat. Everything else faded into a dull buzz, pushed to the backburner. Was any of it real? Did she really spend the night eating dinner with her dead mother in a twisted, more beautiful parallel reality? Did she really awaken to find Betelgeuse sleazing out in her mirror? Was she even sitting in ISS this very moment? Maybe she was still dreaming. Maybe she'd died in her sleep and was stuck in a nightmare. There was no mention of such a phenomenon in the handbook, but Lydia wasn't ready to discount anything.

Incognizant of her actions, she pressed the sharp point of her pencil into her thumb, only realizing what she had done once blood was drawn. Petty satisfaction was taken in smearing the rusty stain across the corner of her paper, the one that was supposed to contain her essay on The Importance of Punctuality. In her esteemed opinion, it made a much more fitting signature than her usual loping cursive.

"Who needs to use the ladies' room?"

Every girl's arm was in the air. Miss Cooke's eyes rolled as if she was expecting some other answer. "Go," she scoffed, put out by the very existence of her students. "If you little brats aren't back in your seats in ten minutes, you can expect to be back in here tomorrow as well."

A splash of frigid water from the sink felt good against her flushed cheeks but did nothing to clear her head. Not even half the school day was over. She'd yet to make any sort of leeway on her essay. For that matter, all the rest of her schoolwork had been ignored as well. It seemed… unimportant.

"Like… is that a doll?" Quick as a snake, Claire struck, darting a tan, manicured hand out to steal Lydia's mini-me from where she was hanging past the zipper of her backpack. Her heart sunk into her gut. "Wow. Stacy, Debbie, look at this! She made a doll of herself. Oh. Em. Gee. Have you ever in your life heard of anything so pathetic. I could die!"

That could be arranged, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Betelgeuse's whispered in the back of her skull, and Lydia glanced back and forth with irrational suspicion. The mean girls broke into cruel gales of laughter, picking and poking at the miniature Lydia while the real one watched on in abject horror.

"S-stop that, Claire," the girl she now knew to be called Prudence stuttered out with what Lydia could only assume was uncharacteristic bravery. "That's not yours."

Stacy took over against the diminutive ginger. "What're you gonna do about it, four-eyes? Snitch?" That was exactly what Prudence had in mind. Bravery exhausted, she melted into the background, once more a quiet mouse.

"What should we do with it?" Debbie produced a lighter from her Gucci handbag and held the flame inches away from little Lydia's yarn hair. "I say burn it. That freak probably put some kind of curse on it, anyway."

"Put that away, you ditz," Claire derided. "Smoke will set off the fire alarms, and like, my dad'll be pissed if I get any more ISS."

"I'm getting Miss Shannon," the one called Bertha announced quietly, but with determination, before disappearing through the bathroom door.

"I say…" Claire turned the doll this way and that, her pretty head tilted in consideration. "We stuff it down the toilet. I mean, it is a piece of shit."

Time froze to a standstill for Lydia. The blondes turned away from her toward a stall, cackling fiendishly as though they really meant to go through with their atrocious plan of action. Sudden and cold, something inside of her snapped.

With a guttural cry that she didn't know she was capable of, she surged forward and curled an angry fist into Claire's silky bleached blonde hair, yanking back hard. Before anyone knew what was happening, they were a tangle of angry female hormones on the germ infested bathroom floor. Lydia was so preoccupied trying to pry Claire's fingers apart and make her release the doll that the other girl was able to land a hard, close-handed punch right on her mouth. Lydia barely felt it, running on pure adrenaline and too caught up with her imperative task, but was vaguely aware of something warm and wet dripping down her chin. After a valiant struggle, she was successful and little Lydia was back in her possession— where she belonged.

"MISS DEETZ! MISS BREWSTER! WHAT ON EARTH DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?!"

The girls froze— the raven-haired one straddled atop the blonde— and brought dual gazes up to the open door, where a scandalized Miss Shannon stood eyeing them down as though they were a couple of filthy animals sullying the sanctity of her pristine school. They might as well have been, brawling mindlessly on the bathroom floor like that. Then, uncaring of the presence of their authoritative audience, Lydia lost her goddamn mind and drew her elbow back, slugging Claire in the face as hard as she possibly could with her ring-bearing fist.

In the end, she wound up with a week's suspension while Claire only got three days. It was worth it.

Delia was the parent responsible for retrieving her from Miss Shannon's office. Unsurprising. Her father was probably too busy. The ride home was short and tense.

"Are you going to tell me why you did that?"

"…"

"You can talk to me, Lydia. I might be on your side. You'll never know if you don't talk to me." Her stepmother's frustration was mounting.

"…"

"Fine," she gave up, focusing her icy gaze on the empty road. "Be that way."

The car door was slammed with more force than necessary upon their arrival home. Lydia bypassed her father in the living room— waiting to scold her no doubt— and went straight for her darkroom, ignoring any complaints from either irate parent. They had the right to be upset with her, she knew, but their distress was irrelevant. Unimportant. She was single-minded in her charge down the stairs, so much so that she stumbled over the last step and crashed into a bench, bruising her ribs. There was only one place she wanted to be, only one person she wanted to talk to. On the brink of tears, she yanked back the bench and stuffed the skeleton key— still hanging around her neck— into the padlock.

Behind the little trapdoor, all Lydia found was a wall of brick; cold, harsh, and unforgiving. Broken, she curled against it, sobbing harder than she had her entire life.

It was hours before she unlocked the door to her darkroom and ascended to face the music. Predictably so, she was grounded for the entirety of her suspension. As if she had any friends to see or places to be. It seemed a light punishment in Lydia's opinion, but it wasn't as though she was about to argue in favor of a heavier sentence. Maybe they were just taking pity on her. She definitely looked a miserable sight with her more pallid than usual complexion, split lip, and bloodied white blouse. The swelling around her eyes from obvious crying didn't do anything to help.

Betelgeuse was sure to think she was even more pathetic than he already did. Fearless of the possibility of taunting, she didn't hesitate in entering her bedroom and sitting right down at her vanity. Almost immediately, he materialized; slimy and smirking, just as she had left him. However, when those wild jade eyes took in her state of disarray, his near-pleasant countenance deteriorated. The air crackled with power, even through his mirror-cage. Matted white-blond hair stood on end, and grimy lips curled into a vicious sneer. Lydia cut him off before he could start, in no mood for bullshit.

"You want to talk? Let's talk."