She starts regaining consciousness who knows how long after. Blearily, her eyes open slightly, mind too exhausted and body too sore to fully comprehend her surroundings, or what happened, or what she was doing. Everything seemed to be in a fog. Her brain slowly tries to comprehend the bizarre input coming from her surroundings, the first of which being the smell. The air seemed stale, old, laced with alcohol, tobacco, and candles? From the warm flickering glow she could just barely see, candles seemed about right, all mixed in with the smell of him. Having long since gotten accustomed to his presence whenever she slept, her slow as molasses brain chalks this up as a sign of things being all hunky dory and a great reason to go back to being passed out, especially since she felt really comfortable otherwise.

Sometime later she makes another bid for consciousness, the first thing she registers being that she felt really good right now, like she just had some really erotic dream. She shifts slightly, and can feel someone else move as well. "Hey babes, you awake yet?" Beetlejuice says softly. Well, softly for him. She moans and shifts in a bit tighter to him, barely able to comprehend the words, just wanting to get back to sleep. Must have been a good dream, whatever it was. "Yeah alright, five more minutes." He responds, shifting his arm that held her against him. It occurred to her that she wasn't lying down, but that she was sitting, except, she didn't really feel like she was. In fact she couldn't feel much of anything below the waist. Except when a pleasant buzz starts radiating from her crotch, and she's sent back to that pleasant, dreamlike fog.

Beetlejuice sits in his favorite chair, a large, dusty, overstuffed antique thing whose brownish red color seemed to blend in with the dim, candle lit surroundings of his living room perfectly. A naked, passed out Brianna rests on his lap, with one arm wrapped around her shoulders, and the other slowly fingering her. His hand coated in blood, which had also spread across his pant leg and onto the old chair. It had been awhile since he had been able to use this technique he'd perfected awhile back, which basically boiled down to stick his fingers in a girls vag in a certain spot and pump her full of magic, since for whatever reason it didn't work on the non-living. But on living girls it was pretty much guaranteed to give them a grand old time, for an awful long time.

It had been hours since they had left the church, though how long exactly even he couldn't say, partially due to how time moved differently in the neitherworld, and partially due to a ghost's natural insensitivity to the flow of time. It's how they can tolerate things like waiting in line for years, or living in the same house for centuries. After the fight she had put up he felt that some kind of a reward was in order, or maybe an apology, hell if he knew. After all it's not like he was exactly being selfless here. It's like he said, he likes to get his hands dirty.

But enough's enough he supposed, especially after the whole, "using his juice while he possessed her" thing. Him being around as long as he has, it takes a lot to freak him out, so while chances are she probably could never do anything like that again, he didn't particularly feel like pushing his luck at the moment. Maybe some other time.

He carefully lifts up Brianna and carry's her back outside his coffin/house. Once out he teleports them back to her bedroom, taking note of the orange glow of the setting sun that filtered in from her bedroom window. He gently laid Brianna on her bed, now fully clothed, and was about to take his leave when he hears voices approaching from the hallway. He sticks his head through the wall to see Brianna's mother making her way across the hall, the voice of her father echoing from downstairs saying something about a recent photo being in Brianna's room with her school memorabilia. He raises an eyebrow at this and pulls his head back into the room as Brianna's mother opens the door, followed by an earsplitting yell of "Brianna!"

She jerks awake like a cat dropped into a bucket of water, a reflex honed from her time with Beetlejuice, but even the sudden spike of adrenaline isn't enough to overcome how exhausted and groggy she felt. Her mother rushed to Brianna and pulled her into a tight hug as she shouted over her shoulder "Bruce! Come quick! It's Brianna!"

There's a thundering of feet as Brianna's father raced up the stairs and practically skidded into her room with a relieved "Oh Brianna, thank god you're ok." Deciding against leaving just yet, Beetlejuice leans against a nearby wall, looking rather amused at the events transpiring before him.

"Brianna where have you been? We were just about to file a missing's person report. We were so worried!" her mother half shouts at her as tears begin to form in her eyes and her father continues with "When did you get here? I checked your room barely an hour ago, and we've been waiting at the front door ever since."

"What?" she says dumbly as she looks at her father through squinted eyes, confusion plain to see "I don't know, I don't…" "Where have you been!" her mother butts in through her daughters mumbling "you've been gone all day!" "I don't, I don't know. Where's…" "Brianna you have to tell us what happened." Her father says sternly "I don't, I-I can't," panic starting to rise in her voice "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T!" her dad roars. Brianna's eyes dart around the room, now very much awake, and they rest on Beetlejuice, leaning on the opposite wall, obvious that she can now see spirits when others cant. Her eyes seem to plead with him to help her. So much so, that he even takes a step away from the wall towards her, before leaning back against the wall and averting his eyes, a mix of stubbornness and shame on his face.

Her panic increases as he turns away, and her eyes turn back to her father. "WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING!" "Nothing! I mean I don't know! I mean," "DON'T LIE TO ME BRIANNA!" "You haven't started taking drugs have you?" her mother adds in almost timidly at her husband's rage. "IS THAT IT? HAVE YOU STARTED TAKEING DRUGS?" "No! I would never!..." "I THOUGHT WE RAISED YOU BETTER THAN THIS!"

Beetlejuice scowls, his eyes still fixed on the wall to his right, away from Brianna. Father or not this guy was really starting to make his blood boil. Who does he think he is talking to his girl like that?

Soon it grows into a full blown tirade, with Brianna sobbing on the bed, her mother having scooted over so that she sat on the edge of the bed quietly while her father roared for Brianna to explain herself. Her face in her hands, she kept repeating (in one form or another) "I can't tell you, I can't, you don't understand what might happen if I did." When her father suddenly grabbed her by the shirt collar so that she would look him in the eye, and you could practically hear Beetlejuice's resolve snap.

Suddenly he's no longer leaning against the wall, he's standing on the ground in front of Brianna, holding her father up by the neck a few feet above the ground, with a downright murderous look in his eye. "Don't—touch—my—WIFE!"

Her mother screams and jumps up from the bed, backing into the opposite wall "Beetlejuice no!" Brianna yells in alarm as she quickly leaps across the bed, wraps her arms around his chest and pulls. "Don't! Leave my dad alone! Drop him!" but he doesn't budge, instead keeping his murderous gaze on her father, who was slowly suffocating in his grip, which was tightening. "Beetlejuice stop!" she yells again, but seeing as that wasn't working, she quickly grabbed her ceramic bedside lamp, yanked the cord out of the wall, and smashed it on his head.

Caught by surprise, he drops her father, and Brianna yells to him and her mother as she grabbed Beetlejuice and tried to hold him back "RUN! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE! GO!" "Bre-Brianna…" her mother stutters as she helps her husband to his feet. "GET OUT NOW!"

They race out the door as Beetlejuice prys Brianna off and disappears, but she can still feel his presence as the light changes and the house around her warps, showing that Beetlejuice must be possessing the house.

She sprints out the door just before it slams shut, and she hear's the scream of her mother from down the hall as the stairs she and her husband were running down suddenly flattens into a slide which causes them to trip and slide to the bottom in a heap. Brianna sprints down the hallway after them, but the long rug that ran down the hallway suddenly comes alive, rearing up like a giant charmed cobra that wove back and forth, blocking whichever side she attempted to run past it on.

Her bedroom door fly's open with a loud "bang!" and like a vacuum the air starts getting sucked into it, blowing her long hair in the direction of the open door as it tries to suck her back in. The carpet snake closes in on her, trying to herd her back in as the suction from her room increases and her doorway seems to cave in like it was being sucked into a black hole, leaving a round, dark hole in the wall.

Remembering her knife from earlier, she reaches for the holster on her leg and is surprised to see her knife still there. She whips it out and lunges at the carpet snake, quickly cutting a deep tear in the carpet and rocketing past it as fast as she could, making it to the stairs and sliding down the stair-slide as the carpet snake whips out to try and grab her, but misses by a few inches as she ducks beneath its grasp.

She sprints towards the sound of her mother's screams, and Beetlejuice yelling.

Beetlejuice stands behind what looks almost like an army of furniture that has her parents cornered in the living room by the window. Panicked, her father grabs one of the smaller pieces of furniture (an end table) and rams it against the window, which shatters, her parents ducking to avoid the shattered glass, but before the shards even meet them it spontaneously repairs itself with an evil sounding remark of " I don't think so." from Beetlejuice.

She races over to them and puts herself between Beetlejuice and her parents. She puts the knife to her throat and says "Beetlejuice, stop right now or I'll…" but the knife fly's out of her hands and embeds itself in the wall with a feral scowl from Beetlejuice. "I am so, FUCKING sick of having to put up with these two nosy god damn pain in the asses!" he yells more at her parents than her. But Brianna takes a step closer and looks at him with those pleading eyes. "Beetlejuice! Don't! I'll never forgive you if you hurt my family! No, they're not just my family, we're married, that makes them your family too!" "I DON'T WANT A FUCKING FAMILY!" "THEN WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU WANT ME!" she screams back at him, sounding hurt at his words. He snarls and starts to walk towards her parents, ghosting right through her like a chilling breeze. He reaches for her father who cringes and shuts his eyes as he backs into the wall as much as possible trying to avoid Beetlejuices hand, but Brianna slips in front of him, his outstretched arm going right through her, and meets him with a kiss.

For a moment he's stunned. The two of them in this awkward position, with him being intangible and his arm reaching through her shoulder after her father, and her standing on tiptoes (since she's shorter than him) to kiss him as best she can without being able to touch him. His eyes soften as his arms wrap around her and become solid as he returns her kiss. Her arms in turn wrapping around him, with one hand sliding her fingers into his scraggly hair and the other resting on his shoulder. He pulls her in a bit closer for a more forceful, but still very passionate kiss, while Brianna's parents watch in shock and the possessed house returns to normal. Right then, Beetlejuice was tempted to just ditch the in-laws and spend some quality time with his wife, but something wasn't right, he could feel it.

As much as it pained him to do so, he breaks away from the kiss and looks over to see an ageing, business like woman appear in a puff of smoke a few feet away. He quickly spins Brianna around to face the woman and says, "Juno! Fancy meeting you here. But then again you always did know how to kill the mood." "Can it Beetlejuice." "Yeah that's right, say my name, go on." He taunts, but she continues, annoyed, "I didn't come here so you could rub in the fact that you finally found a girl naive enough to marry you." She says as she takes a piece of chalk out of her pocket and starts to draw a door on the wall. Brianna's eyes glance over at her parents to see that they've frozen in place, not moving a muscle, not even blinking. She opens her mouth to say something but Juno, guessing her question, cuts in with "Don't worry about your parents, they're just frozen in preparation to have their recent memories erased. They're going to be perfectly fine, as if this whole fiasco had never happened." "So they won't remember anything about Beetlejuice?" Brianna asked as Juno knocked three times and opened the door to the neitherwold. "No dear. Like I said, it'll be like this never happened." "That's all well and good," Beetlejuice butts in as a variety of ghosts in uniform start coming through the door, some going over to Brianna's frozen parents and others getting to work putting the house back in order and checking the perimeter for witnesses. "But why did they send you and not some other smuck? I thought you were busy with all that paperwork?" he says mockingly.

"Because the higher ups wanted me to try and talk some sense into you! It's bad enough what you've been doing to this poor girl, but with all the trouble you've been causing lately, we've even had to amend a rule." "Wow, all because of little old me? What an honor. What does that make this, the fourth time in a century?" "It's the seventh." "Wow, really? That must be a new record." he jokes, but Juno continues sternly "Beetlejuice, this is a new era. We can't just go haunting any old place anymore." But he wasn't really listening.

"Stay away from my wife." Beetlejuice growled at one of the uniformed ghosts who came a bit too close to him and Brianna for his liking. "If you'd behave we wouldn't even have to consider it!" Juno responds carelessly. Making Beetlejuices expression become considerably more menacing. "What, so now you actually do consider trying to separate us?" "I mean no. Of course not. We would never…" she stutters, but Beetlejuice had heard all he needed to know to confirm his suspicions. He placed a clammy hand on the back of Brianna's neck, and a small voice at the back of her mind spoke "Brianna, stay close to me. You have to trust me on this; they might try to kill you to get me back under their thumb. You can probably trust Juno, but I Ain't that popular a guy anywhere, and there's no telling if these other smucks won't try something stupid. And I don't care about any suicidal tendencies I might have driven you to. I'll give you a heartfelt apology later, but right now, stay right next to me." And he says aloud to Juno "That doesn't sound too convincing to me." Her expression becomes even more serious. "Just keep your head down and make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again. You've already ruined the poor girls life, don't go and ruin her afterlife as well." She says in a tone that suggested she knew nothing she could say would have any effect on the poltergeist. "I can't promise anything." He jokes as Brianna's parents were being levitated to their bedroom by a ghost who looked like he had died from both freezing and starving to death. The rest of the ghosts start filing in through the door and back to the neitherwold as Juno gives him a hard look and responds with a hint of defeat in her voice. "Of course you can't. You're just as useless and manipulative as you've ever been. It was stupid of me to ever think you could change." She sighs and mutters to herself "Why did all that power and talent have to be wasted on a poltergeist."

As the final two ghosts pass through the door to the neitherwold, Juno turns to go as well, but Brianna takes a step forward out of Beetlejuices arms and yells. "Wait! Please, before you go, can you tell me something?" Juno turns back around and faces her "I guess we owe you at least that." Brianna scowls slightly as she points back at Beetlejuice. "How do I kill him?" Juno's expression saddens as she looks from Brianna to Beetlejuice. Secretly appalled to hear such words come from the poor girls mouth, at what living with Beetlejuice had driven her too. "You can't. The closest thing anyone could can get to killing a ghost is to perform an exorcism, but for that you need something personal of his from back when he was alive. And he made sure to burn everything he ever owned many years ago." She turns back to the doorway and continues. "And no, there isn't anything else I can do. He's out of my jurisdiction. I can't make him do anything. Technically he's your responsibility, not mine. I'm so sorry." And she walks through the door, closing it behind her.

"Well jeeze babes, I could have told you that." Beetlejuice says in a lighthearted tone, as if asking someone how to kill him really wasn't that big a deal. "You also could have lied." She says angrily. "True." he responds thoughtfully. "Aww well, come on toots, let's get something to eat. You're starving. And I guess we should probably try out talking for once." Now that he mentioned it, she was hungry as fuck. Which was weird because she almost never sweared, even in her head. Although she admits that now would be a really good time to start. "How did you know?" "Hey, I barely even possessed you earlier, and even then I could feel how your stomach thought it would be a great idea to start eating itself."

They make it to the kitchen and he starts to look in the cupboards. "im gonna warn you though. I may be over a hundred years old but that doesn't mean I can cook for shit." "Well what can you make?" he pulls a can from the shelf and examines the label. "You want any cranberry sauce?" she almost felt like laughing, in fact she probably would have if he hadn't just tried to kill her parents. "That bad huh?"

He puts the can back and grabs an apple from the fruit bowl "Hey, give me some credit babes." and places it on the table, where it falls apart into perfectly sliced pieces "I'm not completely useless." he takes a slice and bites it in half "You just have to know how to use me." He says in a ridiculous, supposedly seductive tone. She picks up an apple slice and inspects it while Beetlejuice continues, "You should see what I can do with potatoes. Or a watermelon." "So you're some kind of fruit slicing genius, but if I asked you to make macaroni and cheese you'd probably burn the house down?" "I dunno, I can make some pretty swell Italian food. Macaroni's Italian right?" and he continues in a sarcastic tone, "And im pretty sure that being over a hundred years old, I've at least figured out how to boil water for pasta." And then in a more thoughtful tone he says "But I'm sure I could find some way to burn the house down while making macaroni, it sounds like fun." "Well that's super," she says, while slightly unnerved at his eagerness to burn her house down. "But I don't think we even have any macaroni, so I'm just gonna stick with cereal." "Suit yourself."

So he sat down and worked on eating his apple while she gathered all the necessity's for a bowl of cornflakes. She sits down with her bowl, avoiding his eyes, and lets a moment of awkward silence pass between them before saying "So are we just not gonna mention how you almost killed my parents?" "Why? Did you wan'ta talk about it?" he says oddly casually considering the subject matter. She looks at him for a moment, then decides against it. "Alright, so what did you want to talk about that was so important?" "You know that I want you alive, but how much do you want it?" "You're asking if I want to die?" she responds skeptically. "More like if I have to keep you that way." She doesn't answer to that.

"Look babes, I'm not blind, and I Ain't stupid. I know I'm not the easiest guy to get along with." "Well that's a terrific understatement." She points out as he continues "But I like ya babes, Honest tuh god. And I don't say that about just anybody. I mean look at you. You think just any old dame could do what you're doing right now? And here you are making it look easy." "And what exactly am I doing?" he rolls his eyes. "You came this close to being an orphan, and here you are eating cornflakes with the guy who did it." "Wellll, I've gotten used to…" "Bullshit. I've seen hardened criminals with less backbone. And if I lost you, I don't know if I could ever find that again." She considers it for a moment. "That's probably the closest thing to a sincere 'I love you' I'm ever gonna get isn't it?" "What? Fuck no! I can do way better than that! But that's beside the point. What im trying to say is, you're not the only one who would want to see us separated. There are a lot of ghosts in the afterlife who aren't happy with me being able to do whatever the hell I want in the land of the living." "But in order to split us up, they would have to kill me right?" "Exactly. The minute you die, is the minute I lose the freedom to go where I want." "So far I don't see where this helps me at all." She says. He hunches over the table a bit, like he were about to reveal some secret or juicy piece of gossip. "Remember those ghosts from a few minutes ago? Well they're stuck workin for the man because they committed suicide. It's the punishment for ending your own life, an eternity working some tedious desk job in the neitherworld." "That still sounds better than being stuck with you" she says with a hint of anger in her voice. "Maybe for a few days, but not for an eternity. Trust me. You're better off toughing it out with me." "But if some other ghost kills me?" "Then as long as you weren't begging them to do it, you're off the hook. What I want to know is, if someone tried to kill you, and I wasn't there to protect you… would you still fight back?"

She didn't know how to answer that. she hung her head and considered it for a time, staring into her cereal as she sought the words. Finally she answered "…. I don't want to die. But you aren't leaving me with much of a reason to live either."

They finish eating in silence, and after she's tossed her bowl in the dishwasher she says to Beetlejuice "I'm going to bed." And he leaps out of his chair with a "Right behind ya babes." She scowls in annoyance and says "I'd rather be alone Beetlejuice." "Awww, why start now" he says while slinging and arm playfully over her shoulder as they walk back to her room. "Besides, I've heard I'm pretty comfy for a dead guy." "Fine, but nothing else." "Awww, not even a little bit?" "If I said yes you'd have me on the celling." "Well who said I would take no for an answer?" he says while waggling his eyebrows "Because then I'd find a way to burn your house to the ground, wherever it is. And on top of that, I still have school tomorrow." "Perfect! You can sleep then." And she responds sarcastically "Great! Then maybe I could die of embarrassment at having failed school 2 weeks before graduation. That should be enough to avoid working in a cubicle my entire afterlife. " "Well when you put it that way," he grabs her with an almost dancer like flourish as she give out an annoyed shout of "hey!" and swung her around so that she lay in his arms like when he had first carried her over the threshold after they had been married "I'm sure we can work something out." he backs through her bedroom door and lets the two of them plop onto her bed. Him quickly getting on top of her while she breathes out a sigh of frustration at having not listened to her, when he gives her a big silly kiss, smiles a cheeky grin, then rolls off her and seems to immediately fall fast asleep. She sits up, dumfounded, but then smiles, changes into her pajamas and gets back into bed beside him and gets under the covers, and see's the apparently fast asleep Beetlejuice's arm outstretched towards her. She rolls her eyes and lies down with her head on his chest and lets his arm wrap around her waist, and her eyes close.