The Looking-Glass House

 

By Lejindarybunny

A/N: Returning to fanfiction with the fandom that I need the most. Whether or not it needs me remains to be seen I suppose, but hey. Anyway, this fic should be novel length, so lets all give a cheer in this sparsely populated area.

Okay so story. At first glance it might seem like just an angst/drama, but it’s really going to be an action/adventure too. You just have to bear with me through the set up. It’s kind of a two-faced fic, half dark, half light- hearted, but balanced. Oh and it’s BJ/Lydia romance, too. It should be quite enjoyable for everybody. Well, except maybe for Mr. Jones the web admin at my school who called me morbid to my face last time he saw me reading Beetlejuice fics. Who, me? Morbid? Never! ;D

Disclaimer: If you recognize it I don’t own it. I’m not making any money off it either.

Chapter One… Pawns

Her hair was limp across her forehead in the thick heat and drowsy boredom of her trig class. It probably didn’t help that she was draped in more clothing than many of her fellow students wore during the winter months. The long sleeved white blouse, stockings under her long navy blue skirt. Drearily Lydia scratched her wrist.

Damn, again! She thought, they’re at the itchy stage. The high school senior picked up her mechanical pencil and scratched idly at her inner arm with its point.

The teacher was saying something. Lydia looked down at her notebook, and hoped it wasn’t anything that would be on the final, as instead of notes the current page bore a scrap or two of poetry.

blood tears and broken promises

through hollow veins have spoken

though sharp and bitter their conceit

in Repose

shall we awaken

Lydia tapped her pencil on the paper and finding herself no longer inspired looked dully up at her math teacher to discover he was assigning homework. She didn’t see much point in writing it down and began to shove her things into her bag in anticipation of the final bell. But then she picked up her notebook again and opened to a fresh page.

the poison

born creeping by human flesh

and exceeding itself only in institution

leaves no room for the purity of space

By the time she had put the notebook away again the rest of the class had left as had the teacher, leaving her to assume only that class had ended.

The halls of the second floor were filled with girls stinking of expensive perfumes and exuberance, Lydia fit into the cluster of girls’ school hysteria about as well as a casket at a kid’s birthday party. But that was how it always had been, and ever would be; Lydia, he goth, the werido, the loser, outsider. Shunned, snubbed, reviled even. Who cared for the company of a lonely teenager with more on her mind than nail polish and boys? No one she’d ever met, that was certain.

With a glassy eyed, distant look in her eyes, she shuffled her way down to the senior lockers, barely registering the shoves and rude utterances. She spun in her combination, opened the blue box that was her locker pulling out her black backpack and swung it shut with a metallic clang.

The bus was of course, a solitary front seat affair, with the entirety of the other passengers at her back. She wasn’t particularly comfortable with that, but the headphones mostly blanked it out, even if thirty years later they’d exact their price in hearing loss. She probably wouldn’t be around then anyway, not the way she was going.

Lydia reached in her bag, momentarily disrupting the set of her cd player and making it skip, she shook her head and pulled out what had been her aim. A plastic bottle of Pepsi, half empty, warm and probably flat. She unscrewed the cap and took a swig. Lydia grimaced. Yes, definitely flat. But she needed the caffeine, so she downed the last of it and put the empty bottle away. Her anemic lips muttered along with a refrain she barely registered on a conscious level, she’d heard it so many times.

The bus came to a halt; she picked up her things and wandered off it. Lydia carried her things as she walked the last block to the house. Not her house, Delia and her father’s house, where she just happened to live. She’d thought many time since her seventeenth birthday about getting her own place, but without a roommate it would be too hard to pay rent, at least, if she wanted to refrain from starving. Along this train of thought, she was hit with conflicting waves of apathy. Did it really matter if she had enough to eat? At least she’d be away from there. But what was the point? She’d be just as miserable there as here, pretty much. Was getting out really worth the effort? Always it came down to that fatal indecision, and her plans were stalled and shoved aside.

Tramping up the front steps she fished her house key out of her pocket and shoved it in the door, perpetually locked for fear of art thieves and vandals. In Peaceful Pines. Lydia rolled her eyes.

She pushed the front door open and walked inside, announcing without enthusiasm, “I’m home.”

Her dad walked in from the kitchen. “Hi there pumpkin, have a good day at school?”

“Yeah dad, it was fine.” She managed a lying smile for him.

“That’s great sweetie.”

“I gotta go do homework,” she hitched her bag up on her shoulder and made her way to her room, closing the door behind her.

The raven haired girl dumped her bag unceremoniously on the floor and pulled her curtains shut. They’d been shut this morning, Delia must have been in to clean. Lovely. For a moment palpable shadows reigned in the room, before Lydia flipped on the harsh, yellow ceiling lamp, leaving it dim and grungy. She hurried;y changed out of her school uniform into black jeans and a red sweatshirt.

She turned a glare on her freshly, neatly made bed and grabbing the covers, jerked them roughly into the chaotic mess she had left them before collapsing on the surface and burying her face in the pillows for a moment. She nuzzled the sweet, cool fabric in a rare space of momentary relief. Sometimes in the solitary relief of this place, that was supposed to be hers alone, she could find a temporary reprieve from the hand that life had dealt her. But not today, today the sanctity of the room had been violated, and with it, her safety, her peace.

With this though she pushed herself roughly to her feet. She stomped over to her dresser and stared deeply into her mirror. Mirror Lydia stared back, dark glassy eyes with great rings below them, pale frame nearly gaunt, dark hair verging on unkempt. Lydia glared at the creature, who was helpless to do anything but glare back. With a sudden motion she jerked open her underwear drawer and pulled out a small box from which she took a straight pin. She closed it in the palm of her hand, and locking her door before she did so, sat down on her bed.

She stuck the pin into the fabric of her jeans, a place to hold it as she pushed up the sleeve of her left arm. Holding it up, she inspected the pale, slender limb. It was crisscrossed with red marks, some of them faded and old, others angry and new. Lydia took the pin from her jeans and placed it against her flesh as she began to scratch a new line.

 

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Lydia woke up, she lay in bed a moment, her breath catching in her throat. She reached up and wiped the cold sweat from her brow and stopped, holding her arm out and inspecting it. But she couldn’t see anything in the darkness, she could barely see her arm. As she stood up the red of her digital clock told her that it was 3:34 am. She stumbled across the room, limbs still numb with sleep and shielded her eyes as she flicked the light on. Yellow assaulted her and she squinted painfully. Every bit of sense in her told Lydia to turn it off again and go back to sleep, but she couldn’t. Not yet. So she waited until her eyes had become reasonable accustomed to the light, then removed her hand, and lowered her arm into her vision. Nothing. The skin was pale and unmarked, unbroken.

Lydia breathed a sigh of relief. Just a dream, that’s all it was. She turned off the light and the darkness slipped around her eyes like a comforting blindfold. She shuffled back and fell into her bed.

That was the third time now that she’d dreamed of hurting herself like that. And it was the most sharply detailed, the most vivid. Before it had just been snatches of the scratching and emotion, hurt, anger, pain, momentary release. Now there’d been more, she’d been in the dream, it seemed almost an entire day. But more than that, it seemed like it had been her entire life. And she felt the darkness of this dream with her still, lingering.

Lydia drifted into sleep.

 

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The alarm clock buzzed violently, a high pitched frantic whine like a swarm of killer bees strung out on helium, jarring her awake. She slapped at it impotently for a moment, before managing to shut the damned thing off. Lydia opened her eyes wearily and yawned, wondering for a moment why she was still so tired, before she remembered the nightmare. She frowned and sat up, rubbing her arm in concern.

What could be giving her dreams like that? What did it mean?

She sighed and stood, refusing to let it ruin the day for her and pulled off her red nightdress.

“Morning Lyds,” came the voice from behind her.

She wheeled around, covering with her arms her unclad chest. “Beetlejuice!” she squealed.

“Whoops,” the specter disappeared from the mirror.

Lydia rolled her eyes. He did that more times, she could almost think he was deliberately trying to catch her undressed. But no, he wouldn’t. As the human girl had grown up, so too had an elaborate but unspoken set of rules grown up within her friendship with the ghost. And they both stuck to them too! Mostly…

She pulled on her uniform as quickly as possible and stood in front of the mirror. She smirked and tapped on the glass. “Okay Beetlejuice, I’m dressed now.”

He appeared in the mirror with a sheepish grin. “Heheh, Sorry ’bout that babes.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you are,” she said sarcastically.

“Hey! I would never try to, y’know, catcha like that!”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Are you saying I’m too ugly to bother with?”

The ghost opened his mouth, but couldn’t seem to find the proper response.

Lydia giggled. “I’m teasing, BJ.”

“I knew that,” he insisted.

“Of course you did.”

The ghost pouted momentarily, then cheered up again. “So, you comin’ over after school, or do you have more important things to do than hang around with a dead guy?” he held up a noose for demonstration’s sake.

Lydia pretended to ponder the question. “Well, let’s see, I was planning on helping Claire Brewster organize Senior Prom, but I guess I could come over instead.”

Beetlejuice clapped his hands together. “Great.”

“Pumpkin!” her father called from downstairs, “You don’t want to miss the bus!”

“How’s he know that?” the ghost grumbled.

Lydia laughed. “I better go to school Beej.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll be waiting, Lyds.”

 

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Well, short chapter to begin with. The next one will be longer, I promise. What do you think so far?

Next chapter: Lydia has a bad day at school, but a better one in the Neitherworld. We hope.