Sleeping Beetle

A Beetlejuice fan fiction by Lady Norbert

A/N: I wasn't sure whether this made any sense, but a few of my beta readers loved the idea and pleaded with me to do it, so here it is. I'm rather happy about the way it turned out, really.

Chapter Fourteen: Once Upon a Dream

When Beetlejuice opened his eyes, he knew immediately that something wasn't right, although he wasn't sure exactly what it was. He grumbled to himself, sitting up, and that was all it took for him to be clued in to the nature of the trouble.

"Whoa."

Levitating a few feet into the air, he stared in some confusion at his own body, which was still snoozing away on the pallet bed. "Oh... oh, right, the so very-not-suspicious-at-all spinning wheel spindle," he recalled. "Stabbed me right in the hand, even when I didn't intentionally touch it." He paused. "Didn't something like that happen in one of those corny fairy books Donny liked when we were kids? It's awful familiar. Also just plain awful."

For a moment, he just floated there and watched himself slumbering. This became boring very quickly. "Okay, so... if I'm there... how am I also here?" he wondered, lifting a very transparent hand to try to study it. "I'm, like... a ghost of a ghost, or something. Wonder if this is what Vasile had in mind or if it's some kind of weird side effect he didn't count on." He sucked in a sharp breath, his eyes widening. "Vasile. Damn it, I've left him alone with Lydia!"

He soared down the spiral staircase, muttering, trying to focus more on being angry and less on being afraid. "If anything happens to her before I figure out how to get back into my body, I swear I will tear this castle apart piece by piece with my bare hands."

He found Lydia almost immediately, and to his deep relief, she appeared unharmed. "Babes! Babes, you gotta help me!"

She ignored him, walked right past him in fact, and hurried up a short flight of stairs. Baffled, he followed, starting back in alarm when she gave a shriek of displeasure.

"You've got to be kidding me!" she cried. As he watched, she approached the table in the hall and stared at its contents in dismay.

"And there's my shoelace. I left it downstairs. There's no question - the castle is trying to confuse me! It won't let me leave and it won't let me find Beej!"

"I'm right here, Lyds! Well, at least, some of me is - the rest of me's up in the tower." Beetlejuice tried to put a hand on her shoulder, and he supposed he shouldn't really have been surprised when it just passed right through her. She didn't even seem to notice.

"She can't see me, she can't hear me, she can't even feel me if I try to touch her..." He frowned thoughtfully, bobbing along invisibly behind her as she made her way back down the stairs and to their rooms. "Well, she's safe for the moment, at least. It's something. But I gotta figure out what's going on. Just what is Vasile up to? Nothing good, that's obvious, but I need a little more specific info than that."

His current state didn't provide him with much in the way of magic, either, which was perhaps to be expected; he could still fly, but not much else. "There's gotta be something around here that can give me a hint," he mused. "I wonder how much the castle knows... Lyds is right, the castle's definitely in on it, but if it thinks - well, if it thinks at all, it probably thinks I'm in the tower. Which I am. But this bit of me is out here, and this stupid place probably doesn't know that. So maybe I can find Vasile without anybody realizing what I'm doing."

He started drifting experimentally, moving through walls and doors to see if anything would try to stop him. Nothing did. He even passed with ease through the front door, floating out into the fresh air for the first time since they arrived, and then nipped straight back inside. "That's useful," he mused. "If all else fails, I can hightail it out of here and try to bring back some help. I don't really know whether Vince would be able to see me - but if he couldn't, I'll bet the F. G. could. Somehow." He scowled at the idea. "Last resort, though. I won't leave her here alone with him unless I've got no choice."

By the time Beetlejuice happened upon Vasile, the sun was nearly down. "You know," he muttered to himself, "I probably should have checked the other tower sooner. Makes sense that he'd hide me as far away from himself as he could. Well, no matter, now we know where to find him when we're ready to... whatever it is we're gonna do to him. Have to think of something really good."

He sat through the dinner, such as it could be called, hovering in the air just behind Lydia's chair and making all manner of expressive faces at their host. She still wasn't eating nearly enough, and it was just lucky that her usual Neitherworld appearance had such a sickly cast; it kept the hunger from being too noticeable, to others at least. But to Beetlejuice, who knew Lydia better than he knew himself, it was all too obvious. She was starving herself rather than risking poison or worse at Vasile's hands, and while he understood why, he was worried about her. But in his current condition, he was in no position to help.

It was all too clear that time was of the essence, and becoming more so with every passing day. "I need to get you out of here, Babes," he murmured, as though she could hear him in spite of his predicament. "You keep this up and you're not gonna have the strength to fight him off... and that is probably exactly what he's counting on."

Finally, after what felt like a few hours of polite small talk, Lydia excused herself from the table. Vasile bowed her out of the dining room, and she was soon shut up in their little suite with a book she'd found in the library. Hopefully it was some kind of a how-to guide for messy ways to destroy vampire ghosts, although Beetlejuice frankly doubted that Vasile would keep something like that on hand. Once she was out of sight, he followed the strigoi back up to his tower, and watched him transform into his owl shape. "Hmm, and where are you off to?" he murmured. He didn't want to watch the thing attack anybody, least of all somebody's kid; on the other hand, he wanted to keep an eye on him.

Of course, tracking an owl through the darkness wasn't as easy as he might have thought. He could see well enough, but he wasn't able to move quite that fast. "Wait a minute," he mused, watching the owl fly toward a familiar sight, "I know that place. We had to break in there to get Percy back that one Halloween! Fang-face is visiting the witches! But... why?"

By the time he reached the entrance, Vasile had regained his usual form and was in conversation with Oscar. "Oh ho, Mr. Warlock," Beetlejuice muttered to himself, "I remember you. Man, people in the Neitherworld can hold grudges like nobody's business - I thought we ended things pretty peacefully that night."

"So how did you get it into him?" Oscar was asking.

"In a manner so ridiculously stupid I feel almost ashamed for having lowered myself to it," Vasile returned. "The idiot handled a poisoned spinning wheel spindle and cut himself on the point."

"Ah, like in the fairy tale. It's hard to beat the classics. So he's asleep, then."

"And you can guarantee he will stay that way?"

"As long as she doesn't find him, you're good to go."

"Oh, no fear of that." Vasile actually rubbed his hands together like some kind of cartoon villain. Beetlejuice rolled his eyes. "She's growing weaker with every passing day - soon she's going to have no choice but to eat the food I provide if she wants to survive. Once she's eaten enough of it, she'll be under my spell, and then all I have to do is wait for her to give birth to her little abomination. She'll be mine."

"Wait, she's pregnant?" Oscar looked startled.

"Yes." Vasile made a noise of disgust. "I must allow her to carry it to term; there's too great a risk of her dying otherwise."

To his credit, Oscar seemed kind of sickened by what he'd helped the strigoi accomplish. "No offense or anything, Your Lordship, but, uh... couldn't you just as easily find some other, uh, bride? I know she has to be human, but..."

"No! I thought you understood - Lydia is perfect!" Vasile insisted. "Beautiful, intelligent, royal, and possessing power of her own, from what you told me. With her infernal husband in his perpetual sleep, only their child stands in my way." He stood up a little straighter. "And by the time her body expels the parasite, she'll be ready to embrace her destiny - as the mother of my dhampyr sons!"

"WHAAAAAAAT?!"

Beetlejuice clapped his hands to his mouth, belatedly remembering that no one could see or hear him. Lowering them once more, he strained to hear the rest of their conversation; this was difficult, since all he could really seem to hear was the boiling of his own blood.

"And then what?" asked Oscar. "What are you gonna do with all those undead kids, anyway?"

"You told me that once I've endured seven years with a mortal woman at my side, I'll be free to go beyond the villages. With my children to aid me, I shall reclaim Romania for my family once again!"

"...yeah, okay, good luck with that," the warlock muttered. "Yeesh, did I bet on the wrong pony this time..."

Under ordinary circumstances, Beetlejuice would likely have had a good laugh at how pompous, how overly dramatic, and how utterly ludicrous this guy sounded. However, these were no ordinary circumstances.

"So that's his game?" He was almost on the verge of exploding. "Half-vampire babies - with Lydia? Oh, no you don't, you bloodsucking bastard! Nobody is having any kind of hellspawn with my wife but me!"

He'd never been so angry in his entire afterlife, and really, that was saying something.

"I've gotta get to the Godfather," he muttered, taking his leave of the coven's mountain. "He's the only one who might be able to stop this mess. I'm not sure even Vince can do anything, but the F. G.'s gotta have enough power to step in here."

He paused, however, hovering in midair. "Should I go now, though? Count Jerkula's gonna be heading back to the castle before the sun rises, and she'll be alone there with him." He lifted a hand to scratch his non-corporeal head, absently wondering how that even worked. "On the other hand, I can't do anything while I'm there, and he's gonna be cooped up in his tower anyway. Maybe I can be back before the sun goes down again."

He cast an almost desperate look in the direction of Owl Castle. "Hang in there, Lyds! Your idiot's gonna get you outta this... somehow."