Orion

I am His Highness's dog at Kew;

Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

- Alexander Pope

He wouldn't have gone for her if he'd had any other choice. But the Powers That Be had gone to town on his lovely little loopholes and tightened them into nooses. No, for all intents and purposes (until he could really take a couple of decades and unknot the language, anyway) appearing to freshies was out, and that was most of his business right there. Once word got around, well... It was better to catch 'em fresh off the boat. No mortals at all, either. At least ones that couldn't see him on their own, and there were about fuck-all that could these days.

But interestingly enough, there was nothing regarding the girl herself, his precious conniving fiancee Lydia Deetz.

Probably it had been deemed superfluous. He couldn't manifest a wisp of ectoplasm within Winter River without nuclear retaliation from the Maitlands. The aborted exorcism had done a number on their powers. Hell, that chick rode a goddamn sandworm outta Saturn! They hadn't been slouches before, especially for their first year over, but now they even made him a little twitchy.

But the goth gal had bigger dreams than a one-horsefly town like that. He'd been watching her from rear view mirrors and the pale reflections of train windows. Soon she'd be alone in the big old scary city and he could really roll up his sleeves and get to work.

At first, it was just a glimpse in the corner of her eye from time to time. That she could deal with. Lydia was very used to pretending she didn't notice what was lingering on the edges.

She could have gone on happily for quite a while, too, if the overhead lightbulb of her rickety dorm room hadn't fizzled out like that. Something about the strobe flicker of it messed with her already-tenuous grip on delusion and there was really no mistaking the figure in her closet mirror.

She turned on her deak lamp. "You again."

"Hey, sugar-bat. You know I missed ya too much to stay away."

That voice... Fingernails down the chalkboard of her soul. "What do you want?"

"Same thing I always wanted. Y'know, what you owe me, what you screwed me out of, what you ruined my afterlife over... Nothin' much.

"Why now? Why me?

"Why not?"

She yanked open a desk drawer and scrabbled through the contents until she found what she was looking for.

She brandished a piece of chalk at him. "I'm calling Juno!"

"Tattletale!"

"This thing is, I can't do anything. Nobody really can. All you can do is not say his name. Any ghost can show up in a mirror. It's just that you can see him." Juno shrugged.

"So... That's it? He's a TV I can't turn off?"

"More or less."

"I see. Well, then. I guess that's it." Lydia sighed. "Don't tell Barbera and Adam, though. I don't want to worry them," she added, evasively twisting a strand of hair in her spindly fingers.

Juno squinted at Lydia through a veil of smoke. "Oh?"

"I mean, it's out of all of our control, isn't it? That's kind of the point. So don't make them worry about it."

"That's brave, in a way," Juno commented, and took a long drag off her smoke. "Foolish, though. Wiser women than you have been brung low by that devil."

Lydia smiled crookedly. "I've lasted this long, haven't I?"

"Yes. That's worrying enough as it is. Once he's done with hammers, he goes to watchmaker's tools. Be careful." She grimaced to herself before speaking again. "You should know how to get in touch by now. If you need something..."

Lydia nodded.

Juno looked away, stewing. "I can't help but think I should have stopped all this from happening. Kept him away from you lot in the first place. Scared your folks out of your home myself. I would have, if I'd known. Useless now, though..."

"I'd be working for you if you had," Lydia remarked, tone airy enough coming out, but tinged with enough lead to prove its truth.

Juno considered this for a long moment. "There is that," she murmured. Maybe her tone was gruff and grateful, maybe it was merely weary. It was hard to tell with Juno. With no further ado, she faded from sight.

People in adjoining rooms took to banging on the walls at night, but eventually she just gave up on trying to please anybody and became the pariah of her floor.

"I'm failing half my classes," she told him bitterly, wrapped in an entire blanket and rubbing her dark-circled eyes.

"So? You don't need to work. Aren't you one of the landed gentry?"

"What? No! I have scholarships, you asshole, and and I'm going to lose them."

"Who cares? You do art. You don't even need school for that."

"Yes, I do!"

"Pfft... I've met artists, you know. Better ones than the hacks that you have to study in your boring ass classes. You just do art. You don't need someone telling you a bunch of shit you already know."

Either her sleep-deprived delerium was getting worse, or there was some kind of compliment in there. She glared back suspiciously. "That's not what art school is about. It's about using really expensive equipment you'll never get to use again and making friends with people who do a lot of drugs. At least as far as I can tell."

"Then you're failing at half of it."

"That's what I told you."

She started taking allergy pills to knock herself out and slept a damn sight better than the dead, no matter what her mirror said to her at night. The drugs trapped her in her dreams, but that was a small enough price to pay.

She bought a Walkman and played a cassette of "Disintegration" by The Cure constantly. She wore sunglasses all the time, even in class. She had less and less time to dump into her clothes and hair and eventually regressed to appearing to be a sort of ragged beatnik in dusty black.

She drank coffee constantly. She moved contantly. Everything she did she did all the time.

All her clothes reeked of darkroom chemicals.

In his day, she would've been called a witch. It wasn't saying much, really. In his day, a person could be called a witch for just about anything, looking at someone funny or having a little too much luck or, say... getting caught in the bed of someone who should've supposedly known better and being fingered as an incubus while the lady got off scott free... Well. Anyway.

They would have called her a witch and they would have been right because that's what she was. Not that he planned to tell her that, because she already thought she was Lord Satan's gift to the afterlife as it was. But nobody really knew about witches these days, nobody much on her side. And fucking good for them. He hadn't hung out in the future for six hundo because he was super fond of the old days.

Nowadays, if someone was strange, people just let them be strange, even if they were a woman. At least in this slice of the world. The shit they used to do... Well, he wasn't holding in what was left of his guts with a pillow for his goddamn health.

Her powers steamed off her, untapped and fizzing into the surrounding world. You could taste it, almost, like ozone in the air. She didn't really use them. She didn't know how. They just made everything moreso around her. It barely even took an effort to apperate in her mirror, and the mortals in the next room could hear him easily. No wonder the Maitlands had gotten strong right off. He should've guessed before by that alone.

It was a stroke of luck in a way, the one person he could pester being a witch. But then, he'd always had a little too much luck, hadn't he?

"Oh, you're the loud girl. You schitzo or what?" She was taller than Lydia, and peered down at her with detached interest.

"Not really." Not yet.

Faint strains of "Fascination Street" hammered out of the headphones around her neck. Lydia wondered where this was going.

"So... What's up with that?"

"Ghosts."

The other girl tucked a ratty strand of pink hair behind one ear. "Huh. Really?"

"Yeah."

"Someone die in that room?"

"I don't know."

"But there's ghosts."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Wonder how that happened?"

"They can move around. After they've been dead long enough."

"Makes sense, I guess. Be a pretty boring afterlife otherwise."

"Yeah, it would."

She really wasted too much film on pictures of her mirror. She made a collage of them, but it wasn't her best work.

"Are you ever going to stop playing that goddamn racket?"

"Are you ever going to leave me alone?"

"Nope."

"Then no."

He rolled his eyes, which was an impressive enough gesture when he did it. "That's your problem, see? You can have anything in the world and you choose some whiny, black-clad nobody."

"Huh. Then we do have something in common, after all," she drawled in monotone before returning her gaze to her sketchpad.

Silence was her victory, sweet and fleeting.

Juno was considering sending Lydia a thank-you note. Thing had been peaceful, so very, very peaceful for her in recent months. She'd even taken up crossword puzzles.

It was, in retrospect, a mistake, and Lydia would admit that freely enough. But what she wouldn't admit is that she thought she was being so clever at the time. Making a joke. Making him into something small and idle, no bigger than the videotape of Bride of Frankenstein on her shelf, something she'd dress as on a lark for Halloween.

"Oh, no, I get it," he drawled when she stepped before the mirror in a black catsuit decorated on the arms and shoulders and waist and knees with swirly, spangly, rather Vincent Van Gogh-ish stars she'd fiddled together out of tinsel. That was it. She could have at least worked with a jibe or a quip or even a flat insult. But he only looked bored of it all and, frankly, of her.

Instantly, instantly, she felt dumb and young. All she'd managed to do was show him how much power he had over her.

"Also, you've got it backwards, by the way. You fix this up in a mirror? This one should be on the other side." He poked the tinsel star on her left shoulder as he spoke.

Lydia went saucer-eyed and still. She could see that, in reality, there was nothing there. She could also see with the kind of vision that ususally only lingered in her perciphial sight and used to give her migraines when she tried to use it as a little girl that his arm was distending the surface of the mirror as easily as if it was cling-wrap and extending beyond it into her side and his finger was poking against the ornament.

She could feel him pushing the tiny hard body of the saftey pin inside against her skin.

He laughed, loud and long and madder than any particular hatter you'd care to provide.

"Gotcha!" he crowed in her face, and disappeared with the pop of a vacuum.

It was only then that she got really, properly angry.

If it was any other day but Samhain, if it was any other star but his, if it was any other girl but Lydia who bled powers so fantastically (He was disappointed in his fellow poltergeists for dropping the ball when she was thirteen and shit was really going crazy for her. Hell, for that matter, where was he? He bet they would've had fun...), nothing would have happened. His fingers would have touched glass for the millionth time. But the veil between the worlds had gotten thin enough and he'd managed it.

He was sure Juno would be all over his ass the second she found out, but it was worth it to see the look on Lydia's face, blank dumb shock and fear, and oh, yeah, more than a little fascination.

He'd gotten her. He'd gotten her so fucking bad!

Maybe one day not too far from now, and he thought this more and more as of late, she was going to let him out. When she did, it sure as hell wouldn't be on his terms. Nothing in his afterlife seemed to be on his terms anymore. He was going to end up wrapped even tighter around her little finger than he already was. Witches, man. They'll do that to ya. Get a bit too familiar and that's exactly what you end up as: a familiar.

But out was out and that was good enough for him. There were worse fingers to be around.

She got real drunk that night and tumbled into bed well after the witching hour without changing out of her costume. She'd lost half the stars, but the belt and the one on her shoulder were still there.

She dreamed of stars, she dreamed of being blinded and seeing again, she dreamed of blood and hunting and walking up the long path to the sky. She dreamed of the loyal dog at her heels.

She dreamed about Betelgeuse, too, but what else was new? She did that every night, anyway.

fin.

Author's Notes: Boo, Author's Notes! The most boring part of fanfiction! I am sneaking them in at the end. You may leave now if you wish. Scenes from this fanfic have lingered in my head for the last three years, and I've always wanted to see them written down. So I wrote them down. I'm not sure why, or why now, and I haven't watched the movie for at least a year and can only hope they all sort of sound like they should. Some of these elements are stolen from The Big Book Of The Only Plot Elements You're Allowed To Have In Beetlejuice Fanfiction, but hey, at least I steered clear of that troublesomely present tendancy to have strange men attempt to assult Lydia. Tangent. Anyway, I hope this isn't too much of a soupy mess. I tapped out chunks of it on my phone while at work, and filled in the rest over a weird hazy week of ebbing sleeplessness. That being said, I'm still really fucking proud of the whole loopy monstrosity.