Sleeping Beetle

A Beetlejuice fan fiction by Lady Norbert

A/N: I neglected to say it in the previous chapter, but special thanks to beta reader Theresa, who was the one to alert me to the existence of the salt mine amusement park.

The title doesn't really match the chapter but I was running out of ideas for chapter names, honestly. There's one more after this, but I've had that one picked out since the beginning.

I've never written from Donny's point of view until now; this will either be a good idea or a bad one. Let's find out.

Chapter Twenty: Before the Sun Sets

Donny was, naturally, relieved to hear from Prince Vince following the incendiary situation at Owl Castle. "They had us on the edge of our seats for a while there, I must admit."

"Well, let's be honest - Brother always has had a fondness for the dramatic. Lydia's much the same way," he noted with a chuckle. "I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that once they knew they were safe, they started enjoying the performance!"

"My dear Donny, I haven't a doubt of it." The prince smiled, shaking his head. "In any case, Lydia asked me to get in touch and set your mind at ease about everything. They'll be making their way back to you in a few days, once they finish up whatever remains to be completed in Romania proper."

"I appreciate everything you've done for them, Vince. And also how you've kept me in the loop but out of danger."

"Don't forget, they're my family too, at least in some sense of the word," Vince pointed out. "There's no need to thank me - but you're welcome all the same."

He had to wait, with an almost uncharacteristic impatience that truthfully surprised him, while Charles collected the travelers from the airport. Donny felt almost like a puppy who had been left home alone for too long, wriggling anxiously as every passing moment brought him closer to seeing them again.

Finally the door opened, and with a rush of cold air and errant snowflakes, they stumbled across the threshold and dropped their bags with a sigh of relief. "Hi, Donny," Lydia greeted him. "We're back, and in one piece even."

"Welcome home!" Knowing how much his brother disliked any sort of display of affection (unless it came from Lydia or, occasionally, their mother), Donny contented himself with merely embracing his sister-in-law. "I'm so glad to see you both! Have you had a good time?"

"It was a trip I could really sink my teeth into," Lydia replied with a laugh. BJ snorted.

There was too much which could not be said in front of Charles, and he was clearly in no particular hurry to be away. So they sat around the kitchen table with steaming mugs of coffee, and Donny and Charles took turns peering at the images on Lydia's digital camera. The wintry fauna was beautiful and ethereal, the castle ruins strangely majestic despite their dilapidated state. "The magazine will be so disappointed," she remarked. "They sent me all that way to see this building and it was nothing but stone and ashes. It has some interesting legends around it, though, I'll do what I can to make a story out of that."

"If they don't buy the truth, maybe they would buy it as a work of fiction," Donny offered. "You could try your hand at storytelling."

"It's an option, definitely."

The last several pictures on the camera featured an amusement park, and Lydia explained that it was actually located underground, inside an abandoned salt mine. Charles was especially interested in these, which surprised Donny; Lydia's father didn't really come across as the sort of man who would willingly spend a lot of time around rides that were designed to induce nausea and high-pitched screaming. But then Charles reminded him of what Lydia had mentioned before she left - that he had persuaded himself that their destination was very different from what she had actually told him it was.

"I had no idea there were salt mines in Pennsylvania, pumpkin," Charles marveled. "And I never heard of one that was so big they could fit a theme park inside! It's incredible!" He paused, looking thoughtful. "That must be a marketing puzzle. What sort of mascot would you put in a salt theme park?"

"YouTube commenters," BJ muttered. "They're the saltiest characters you'll find anywhere."

Once Charles had reluctantly gone home, BJ resumed his usual form, and they were free to tell Donny about the rest of their adventure. "Prince Vince kept me pretty well informed," he explained, "enough that I was concerned - but I was sure you'd find a way out of it. He also insisted that I remain here so I'd be safe. How did you manage to get to Beetlejuice, Lydia?"

"Once I understood what I needed to do, it really wasn't too hard," she admitted. "Vince sent me a sonnet - his poetry really has improved, I have to say - and it contained clues that let me know I had Beetlejuice's magic. From there it was easy enough to put a spell on my yang pendant so it would help me find him."

"That's something I've been meaning to ask," Donny said. "It's happened a few times now, Beetlejuice's magic latches onto you. I know you always have a little of it, but how do you end up with the rest of it?"

"I asked the Fairy Godfather about that, because I was wondering myself," Lydia replied. "According to him, it's a subconscious act on Beej's part. His magic transfers itself to me as a means of protecting me when he's not able to do it himself. Like when Hugo's ritual in New Orleans went all wrong - I should have been killed for real, in a way that couldn't be undone. But because of the juice jumping into my body, we were able to reverse the situation. It was the same sort of thing here; the juice went to me because of Beetlejuice going into the enchanted sleep." She paused, then chuckled. "Suddenly I feel like some kind of storage unit."

"I wouldn't go that far, Lyds," Beetlejuice interjected, looking amused. "But the F. G. says that the juice sort of has its own understanding about things. It's really me doing it, but I don't know I'm doing it until after it happens."

"Would the reverse ever happen?" Donny wondered. "Would Lydia's bit of your juice ever transfer itself to you?"

"I guess it could."

"Probably not," Lydia corrected him. "Unless I'm remembering the details wrong, the contract makes sure that it stays where it is. Otherwise, you might end up losing that piece of my humanity that you were given, and possibly the fabric of reality would start fraying."

"That might be fun to watch," Beetlejuice said with a grin. His wife didn't say anything, but she gave him a look that even Donny understood.

With his hosts' permission, Donny decided to stick around for a week after their return from Romania, and in that time he began to suspect something was... not quite right.

Beetlejuice, in his human form, went back to work. Lydia did too, in her own way, but she was tired. A lot, in fact. "It's just jet lag," she said, when he asked.

"Jet lag?"

"A kind of tired that results from air travel," she explained. He and Beetlejuice had both died long before airplanes were invented, so he wasn't familiar with the effects; flight in the Neitherworld didn't cause such a thing. "It happens to humans sometimes, especially when they fly far - we went through several time zones."

At first, this explanation made sense. After a few days, however, he brought it up again. "Please don't think I'm interfering, sister, but I'm worried about you. I don't think jet lag should be lasting this long, and you don't seem like you're any better."

She made a funny sort of face. "Well, to be honest, I'm not feeling too great lately. My stomach's bothering me a lot - I'm not sick, exactly, just sort of achy and tired. I wonder if maybe I picked up some kind of bug in Romania."

"And Beetlejuice didn't eat it?"

Lydia chuckled. "Not that sort of bug," she clarified. "An illness, like a stomach virus or a cold or something like that. I'm dosing myself with rest and fluids, which is the usual sort of treatment. Lots of orange juice and chicken soup."

"Ah, orange juice - liquid sunshine itself! Bound to be the best thing for you in this cold weather!"

"That's what I'm thinking." To that end, she spent a lot of time on a chair by the fire or the wood stove, with a blanket across her knees and a book in her hands, resting and reading. As February melted into a less bitter March, she began to venture outside again, tending to her bird feeders and peering through the telescope her husband had given her. But she still occasionally massaged her stomach, still napped every afternoon, and if pressed would admit to cramps and a general sort of malaise.

Despite this, she was as cheerful as ever, and maybe that was the reason Beetlejuice seemed largely oblivious to her ailments. He lived with her continuously, after all, and that probably made it easier to overlook things. To Donny, life with Lydia was far more of a novelty, and that might have made him more observant. At least, that was how he explained it to himself.

"She's ill?"

Once he could no longer justify trespassing on his brother's hospitality, Donny returned to the Neitherworld, and his first act was to report to the prince for an in-person debriefing, as it were. Vince, naturally, was less than pleased to hear that his beloved Princess of Beetles was in anything less than perfect health.

"She insists it's nothing too serious, and Beetlejuice doesn't seem concerned at all," Donny assured him. "But before I left I asked her to please consider going to the doctor, now that the snow is starting to melt and the roads are more passable. If it were really as minor as she says it is, I would have thought she'd be over it by now."

"Hmm." Vince drummed his fingers on the arm of his throne. "What are her symptoms, exactly?"

"Stomach cramp, fatigue, occasional headache. At least, those were the only ones she would admit; there might have been others. The last day or so I was there, she was starting to be a little irritable too," Donny reported. "Not too terribly much - my brother calls her 'the sunshine of his afterlife' for a reason, you know! But small things seemed to bother her more than usual."

"Well, that sounds a bit unpleasant, but not too worrisome," the prince mused. "I'll try to persuade her to see a physician the next time I speak with her, as well. She did just have a very difficult ordeal, with her hunger strike and the emotional turmoil of being held captive; it may still be having some lingering effects."

"Maybe that's all it is!" said Donny, brightly. "That makes perfect sense. After everything she went through, she needs time to get back to her old self. You know, she couldn't really afford to be scared when it was all going on - she had to be brave, and angry, so that she could get through it. Now that it's over and she's safe, maybe she's letting her feelings catch up to her."

"An excellent point," Vince agreed. "Especially since she didn't know all the details until the very end. It must have been quite shocking to learn that Vasile intended to make her the mother of his half-vampire sons. I question whether he would even have waited for her consent on the matter." He shuddered. "Not that we would have allowed it to get that far, of course, but imagine what might have happened if we hadn't been privy to the situation!"

"Horrible." Donny shook his head. "I don't really want to think about it, if you don't mind. I'm so relieved it's all over!"

"As are we all - your brother most especially, I daresay. Magically induced sleep or not, I have little doubt that he would have found some way to put a stop to it, if all else had failed." The prince gave a small chuckle. "At least Lydia was clever enough to make Vasile believe she was already expecting; even without knowing his true intentions, she bought herself some much-needed time with that fabrication."

Donny smiled and nodded, and they both lapsed into a thoughtful silence. He was turning the whole adventure over in his mind, stringing the details together in a chain of events. And suddenly everything made a lot more sense, and he and Vince - clearly reaching the same conclusion at the same moment - stared at one another with wide, startled eyes.

"Oh."