A/N: I moved cross-country and started grad school. I am utterly crazy to have been working on this instead of studying for finals and writing several massive papers due shortly. So, for those of you who really wanted a new chapter, please keep that in mind and feel special instead of hating me because this chapter was not easy to write and I'm not even sure I like it.

PREVIOUSLY:

Lydia fussed with her tousled hair and dress and tried to calm her breathing before she opened the prosaic door with frosted glass window and brass name tag inscribed with 'Heidi, Counselor Senior Rank, Special Circumstances, Department of Marital Relations.' She didn't remember precisely how they had gotten here in nearly the blink of an eye, but she didn't think she wanted to, either. Beetlejuice was sulking somewhat off to her left and had his hand on her backside, but she had promised after all. She would just have to block sight of his arm with her body.

Taking one last deep breath, she knocked and swung open the door.

The lady at the desk looked up irritably and snapped, "What is it? I'm on my…Lydia? Is that you?" She stood up, and moved towards them, holding out her arms and smiling. "Lydia!"

Lydia's jaw dropped and Beej's hand on her ass actually froze in place. "G-grandma?"

AND NOW, ON WITH THE STORY!

Chapter Eight:

Bewildered, Lydia accepted a hug from her grandmother, a statuesque woman in a retro pencil skirt and sweater set with very long black hair only a little streaked with grey. Her grandmother that she would have sworn was alive this morning! Well, it wasn't like they kept in contact, really, but she'd gotten a birthday card this year like usual. It had had a white cake with black candles on the front, and a pop up skeleton inside that danced when you flapped the card, with a banner blaring 'Happy Death-Day!' with 'death' crossed out and 'birth' scribbled in above. She'd quite enjoyed it, and the twenty five dollar check folded into an accordion and taped to the skeleton's hands. Grandma's cards always were a little…strange…. Someone would have told Lydia if she'd died, certainly? Dad, after the estrangement from his first wife, had avoided his first mother-in-law rather assiduously, but he still would have attended her funeral, right? She couldn't nag him if she was dead.

Just as they gave each other a squeeze (the universal signal that the hug should end), Beetlejuice clamped them both together again, shouting, "Group hug!" Then he pried Lydia away from where she'd gotten stuck on her grandmother's dangly bat earrings, said, "Scuze us for a minute," and herded her back out into the hallway.

"You didn't tell me your granny is Cyanide Heidi!" he hissed at her.

"Well, you never asked, either. …Cyanide?"

"The most feared necromancer for the last hundred and fifty years!"

Lydia peered around him into the office. "She's knitting a fuzzy orange jack-o-lantern sweater." She sidestepped him to go back into the office. She'd always felt that her (biological) parents were hiding something about her grandmother, and she was going to find out what.

He blocked her. "She could knit you into a sweater!"

"She let me call her 'Gamma Nighty' until I was six. I think we'll be safe." Lydia ducked under his arm and inside before he could stop her.

"Argh!" Beetlejuice slapped his hand to his forehead and dragged it down his face. He debated with himself for a moment about just making tracks and ditching Lyds. It was, after all, her granny, she'd be fine, never mind that those types tended to keep their deceased loved ones trapped in urns on the mantel. Rumor had it that Cyanide Heidi had even managed to take down one of the Royal family, for a minute or two. And Lyds – soft Lydia, sweet Lydia, Lydia of the fantastic ass – seemed to have no fuckin' clue. He had plans for that ass that he wasn't gonna let no jumped up bone-conjuror interfere in! With a grunt of frustration he followed her in.

"It's so nice of you to drop by," the dangerous necromancer was saying as she and Lydia settled into the chairs sitting in front of the desk. Two were against one wall, and one sat against the other. The office was so cramped that their knees bumped together when they sat, and the desk had been crumpled a little to get it to fit in. "And with your first minion!" she exclaimed, "I'm-"

Lydia tried to interject. "He's not-"

Heidi, however, was on a roll. "-so proud of you, I was worried that you'd follow in your mother's footsteps. She always said she just wanted to be normal, the poor dear, but what is normal anyway?"

Beetlejuice sat down, bumping into everyone's knees, and immediately started tapping his fingers uneasily against his thighs. With some minor glee he took up as much space as possible, crowding Lydia into the desk.

Heidi winked at Lydia and continued, barely pausing for breath. "And what a catch! I'm sure I never had a poltergeist when I was just starting out as a young girl. I want to hear all about it!"

Lydia waited for a moment to be sure that she was finished and it was safe to talk. "Actually, he's not my minion."

Beetlejuice snorted. Like he would ever swan around catering to the whim of some slip of a girl, let a dame put a leash on him and order him to come to heel like a damn dog! There was a perfectly good explanation for any evidence to the contrary that might happen to involve his fiancée, right?

"This is Bee…B.J., my fiancé." She took his hand and gave a valiant attempt at a smile. "Right…honey?" She looked at him expectantly.

Then she jostled his arm. "Huh?" He snapped out of his increasingly dark musings.

"I said, right, honey?"

"Oh. Yeah. Right."

"How romantic!" Heidi said. "I can just see how it must have happened. Of course, you set out to Bind something small for your first try, maybe a twice-dead cat, and you summoned him by accident – don't worry, it takes practice to aim summoning portals with any accuracy, you should hear about the thing your cousin Permelia dragged out of the pits because she mumbled a bit – but by the time you realized it he'd overpowered you. Looking deep into your eyes, he realized that he could never harm such a beautiful lady! So he let you go. But he couldn't stop thinking about you once you banished him, and snuck back across to see you. That's how you met, isn't it? I just know it is!"

Lydia blinked. "Um, not…exactly, Grandma."

Heidi's eerily ageless face fell, and Lydia squirmed a bit at the loss of that dreamy expression. "But…kind of?" she finally said, and it wasn't precisely a lie.

"Tell me all about it!" Heidi said, perking up again.

"Well!" Beetlejuice said with exaggerated relish, leaning forward conspiratorially. Then he launched into a protracted rendition of his stint of bio-exorcism in Winter River, which painted the Maitlands as sneering villains who had tricked him into doing their dirty work, scaring off the living occupants of the house. In this fable Lydia wore short skirts a lot and fell madly in love with the handsome poltergeist that tried to scare her off but couldn't. She gladly agreed to marry him, leading to Barbara's treachery when she crashed their beautiful wedding. He went into loving detail about the dress he'd made for her and the tux he'd worn, and the fact that her parents were going to be their witnesses and could hardly drag themselves away.

The real Lydia wanted to groan and roll her eyes and say that's not how it happened, but how could she disappoint her grandma with the sordid truth?

He concluded the fanciful tale with, "And then I got eaten by a sandworm."

"Oh no!" exclaimed Heidi.

"Oh yes!" chortled Beetlejuice, delighting in a receptive audience.

"But how did you survive?"

"Well," he prevaricated, tugging at his open collar as if it was suddenly too tight. "The usual, y'know, didn't actually get a good grip on me, the ole one two."

"Is that so?" Heidi said lightly and smiled, leaning back in her seat. "Now, B.J., was it?"

"Yeah, sure, Grams. Can I call you Grams?"

"Of course, Betelgeuse."

Something in the way she said his name, a half-heard echo that prickled on the back of Lydia's neck, made her absolutely sure that her grandmother was not using the phonetic epithet 'beetle-juice,' although the syllables were similar. Should have been identical, but somehow they weren't.

Beetlejuice jumped to his feet, sputtering.

"Sit down," Heidi said in that same unsettling voice that resonated in ways that you didn't hear with your ears.

He sat.

"Shut up," Heidi said.

His mouth slammed shut.

"Now, Lydia," Heidi said, once again all pleasant affability. "Your father called me up four years ago in hysterics, demanding to know if I was the kind of witch who could exorcise a house, so I know all about that side of the story. B.J. has just enlightened me as to his feelings on the matter. Why don't you tell me the truth?"

"All about it?" Lydia slumped down in the chair.

Heidi nodded. "Allllllll about it."

So Lydia began her own story. She started with the Maitlands – how they had lived, and how they had died, and how they had returned to what was left of their lives afterward. Namely, their house.

Beside her Beetlejuice began to peel slivers of wood off the armrests where his arms seemed to be stuck down, the scritch-scratch adding to the harsh grinding noise that made Lydia's own teeth wince in sympathy.

Next Lydia outlined how she, Dad, and Delia had moved in, and attempted to explain Delia, or failing that, at least how she had completely remodeled the house, or failing that because sometimes words just weren't enough, simply explain how angry and upset the Maitlands had been.

On and on the details poured out from the recesses of her mind where she had crammed them down, never talked about, the whole episode deliberately ignored even after the Maitlands became an accepted part of the family. Other things, too, came out – how much she had resented Delia, how disappointed and angry she had been at her father, how desperately unhappy she had been. Things that Lydia had never planned to discuss with anyone. Heidi's silence seemed to actively draw the words out. Some kind of counseling trick?

Increasingly uneasy, Lydia forced herself to continue, realizing that this was likely the only chance she would ever have to tell Beetlejuice why she'd let him get eaten by a sandworm when he could do nothing but sit and listen to her. So now, speaking as much to him as to her grandmother, she went deeper. Into how she had felt no choice but to agree to any bargain with the Maitlands disintegrating before her eyes. How he had both frightened and exhilarated her with the carnival routine that punted Maxie Dean and his utterly obnoxious wife out of the house. The easy, careless way he saved her friends, who had become more like parents to her than her own flesh and blood.

She highlighted in intricate and graphic terms how the exhilaration had fled and left only terror in its wake as he proceeded to treat her with the same cavalier disregard he'd shown tossing people through the roof headfirst. She had thought, then, that the Deans were dead, and her family was next. She admitted to panicking, not knowing what he would do when he was truly free, how he would treat her in the face of what he had already done, if she would live out the night.

The office felt much too quiet when she was done. Beetlejuice sat corpse-still, not breathing, staring intently at her with his inhuman eyes glowing like opaque jade lamps.

"Oh, honey," Heidi broke the effect of the silence. "If you were the powerless girl they let you grow up believing you were, you weren't even close to being afraid enough of what he could do." She pulled her granddaughter into her arms for a quick hug and then held Lydia out, hands on her shoulders. "However, you've got necromancy in your blood. And I want you to understand the effect that had on the situation. Of course the Maitlands, righteously angry ghosts, would instead become what you most needed them to be – surrogate parents. Of course a powerful, malevolent spirit like B.J. would fixate on you – dark power knows itself."

"What are you saying?" Lydia asked, trying and failing to move away. The grip on her shoulders was not tight and could have been reassuring, but was completely immovable. "That it's my fault he demanded I marry him?"

"It's not something you could control without having been taught, so no, not your fault." With a slight shake, having emphasized the point she wanted to make, Heidi let go and sat back. "Look on the bright side! You've managed to completely enthrall him now."

Stunned, Lydia's eyes swiveled without any conscious thought towards the poltergeist sitting so unnaturally still beside her. His stare had not wavered one iota. She hadn't thought he was capable of being still that long.

A knock on the door presaged it creaking open. Someone was saying, "Hello? We're here for our appointment…?"

Heidi said, "Can't you see I've got company?" and went out in the corridor to deal with the newly arrived couple. From the muffled sounds that made it through the door, there was an explosive argument as she tried to shoo them away they battled desperately to avoid getting stuck in line for another century. Someone's ancestors were compared to geraniums.

Lydia could only hear Beetlejuice's rough voice growling, "So you think you've got me under thrall?"