Chapter Text
Charles Deetz has a demon living in his filing cabinet.
He's stopped keeping documents in there, unless he specifically wants them shredded. Anything important goes in a locked briefcase when he's not actively working on it. Anything really important goes in a separate folder lightly sprinkled with holy water and buried in another folder marked 'taxes 1978'. It's convoluted, and annoying. Most of the time, he wants his office back, craves the peace and quiet of the life he only ever really dreamed of actually having.
But every so often the demon will come and sit on his feet while he's working, and arch its back into Charles' hand when he reaches down absentmindedly to scratch its tufted fur. And that part is nice.
They let Beetlejuice back into the house two weeks ago, during a cold snap so severe that Charles found himself fretting. Fretting illogically, over a creature over a thousand years old that had cheerfully assured him more than once that it was very, very dead already, but fretting all the same.
Today, as Charles settles himself over a housing inventory list, the demon pokes its head out of the drawer it has selected as its preferred place to sleep - full of stolen blankets that are now so covered in colour-changing green-purple-red goop that they've now been relinquished entirely to the demon - fixing him with strange amber eyes in a black-masked raccoon's face. "Hey, Chuck!" Beetlejuice grates out, in a voice with all the texture of a three-pack-a-day smoker and all the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old with behavioural issues. "Wanna see a magic trick?"
Charles is well aware of the usual effects of the demon's magic. "No, I really don't."
"Aw, c'mon-"
"I do not need the walls to bleed or my fingers to turn into centipedes. I have work to do."
"But it's not-"
"No, Lawrence." He says it a bit more forcefully this time.
And is... surprised, when the look on Beetlejuice's face is, for just a moment, truly crestfallen. " 'Kay," he says, a bit sulkily, and hoists himself out of the desk drawer to lope off towards the door. "Is Lydia home yet?"
Charles checks his watch. "Should be in about twenty minutes. Delia's picking her up."
The demon will be waiting for her by the door like a dog when she does.
-
He can hear when Lydia does get home, because there's a scramble of raccoon claws on hardwood, and shrieks - of laughter, not of fear - as Beetlejuice finds some new way of startling her and Delia as they walk in the door. Then a yell of greeting from Lydia to the ghosts in the attic, and the cheery replies of the Maitlands as they phase through the floor to greet her, offer snacks, ask how her day went. After a few minutes, there's a knock on his study door, and Lydia sticks her head in. "Hi Dad."
"Lydia." Charles looks up, smiles. Beams, in fact. Because Lydia looks... happy. She's wearing a mens' wool greatcoat, an anachronistic black sweep of fabric that makes her look a bit like a bat, but there'll be no complaints from him as long as it keeps her warm. The difference between this girl and the girl she was a few months ago might be missed, to a casual observer, with all that black she still wears, but to Charles it couldn't be more clear. Charles makes a conscious choice, in that moment. He pushes the paperwork aside, shuts his laptop. "Come in. How was your day? You had art today, right? That's your favourite?"
Lydia steps inside, almost shy, for a moment. But then she hops up to sit on the edge of his desk, and starts talking about a new photography technique her art teacher has been covering. And she's alive.
Beetlejuice is standing at the study door, now in human form. Charles didn't notice him arrive, and he doesn't seem to be trying to come in. He just watches, fidgeting silently with the doorknob. Charles turns his attention back fully to Lydia. She has a lot to say today, and he wants to remember it. He only takes notice of Beetlejuice again when he sees that the demon has somehow removed the entire doorknob mechanism from the door without making a sound. He looks surprised, like it just came away in his hands.
"Lawrence-"
Beetlejuice looks up at him and winces. "Accident! I can fix it!" And before Charles can tell him no, for god's sake don't, the handsome brass doorknob bolts itself to the oak panelled door with steel bolts that would look less out of place on the neck of Frankenstein's monster. Spiderweb cracks fan through the oak of the door around the doorknob, like an impact crater. Beetlejuice grins a snaggletoothed grin. "There, good as new."
Charles run a hand through his hair, and makes the conscious decision not to yell at Beetlejuice while Lydia's in the room. "Why don't you two go -" he almost says play, like Lydia is still eight years old, but catches himself - "amuse yourselves until dinner's ready? I've just got to finish up a few things."
-
The sounds of electric guitar come loudly from Lydia's room, pulling him again out of this last bit of property inventory, and he thinks about going over to ask her to use headphones for a moment. But then he realizes it's not a CD or a Spotify or whatever - it's Lydia's guitar.
He stops, going very still in his office chair, listening. Lydia hasn't played her guitar since her mother died. Charles feels his chest tighten as a fist that he has not even realized has been clenched around his heart for the past many months suddenly, abruptly, loosens.
She's a little rusty, by the sound of it. She tries and retries a few chords, which even to Charles' ill-educated ear sound a little off. A gravelly voice offers what sounds like a suggestion, and, after a pause, the chords resolve themselves into something truer. A few more murmurs of conversation, and Lydia starts to play a tune. Surprisingly jaunty, strumming chords.
"Billy solves his problems by calling up his mom-"
Lydia's singing is clear and true. Beetlejuice takes the next line as they trade phrases - guttural and cracked, full of growl, but no less tuneful, somehow.
"Heather solves her problems with drugs and alcohol-"
"Daniel solves his problems with the doctor and the law-"
"But Malcolm's got his own way and it's better than them all-"
They come together in a neat harmony, the tune and the tone both positively gleeful. An angel and a demon, singing in harmony. And somehow it's quite perfect. Or it would be, if the lyrics weren't - that.
"Malcolm solves his problems with a CHAINSAWWWW - and he never has the same problem twice!"
By the time they get to the bridge of the song (literally just screaming and chainsaw noises, the source of which Charles doesn't dare try to guess), he feels compelled to go and rap on her door and demand they keep the volume down. But he can't quite keep the smile out of his voice. Yep. That's his kid, alright. And his... whatever Beetlejuice is.
-
He cannot get the stupid chainsaw song out of his head all the next day.
-
That evening, he asks Beetlejuice to come on a short drive with him.
"You can leave the property, is that right? Not like the Maitlands?"
The raccoon shrugs. "Sure. Hell, if you want I can just teleport you there."
Charles doesn't actually have a destination in mind, but that is... interesting information, all the same. "You can do that?" He thinks briefly of a future with no commute times, and then remembers that would necessitate taking Beetlejuice to work with him. Which sounds about as sound an idea as a marzipan lifeboat.
"'Course. I mean, I gotta drag you through hell for like half a second, but you'd be fine. Probably. I assume you'd be fine."
"...I'll pass for now," Charles decides. "Actually, I was more hoping it would be... a chance to talk."
Beetlejuice narrows his eyes at him. "This feels like a trap."
"It's not a trap," says Charles.
"Are you mad about the doorknob?"
He is, a little, but it's not an anger worth indulging. "No."
"Pinky promise?"
Charles is an adult man. He is 53 years old, a widower with a house and an established career. He pinky promises.
Beetlejuice goes human before they walk to the car, and Charles finds himself very, very glad their house is alone on the hill, far from nosy neighbours who might remember last fall. Inside the car, he perches on the seat like a seagull, clearly unfamiliar with his new settings. Remarkably, the demon keeps quiet at first, and they pass two minutes driving down calm country roads in silence before he finally speaks up.
"Okay, Chuck, level with me. Am I dying or something? Are you taking me to a big farm where I can run free forever?"
Charles snorts. Then he pulls over, and fishes a CD - over fifteen years old now, relic of a bygone age - out of a sleeve. He pops it in the player. "I heard you and Lydia singing the other day. I wanted to play you something I think you'd enjoy."
Beetlejuice narrows his eyes again. "Okay..."
Charles hits play. The recording is a little tinny, as if it was recorded a long time ago. A man with a fruity, music-hall cadence in his voice introduces the song to a snickering audience. Then he plays and sings, a whimsical piano line underneath his warm baritone. It's pure 1950s, corny and hammy and charming.
Spring is here
Ah-spring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
I s the spring
I do, don't you? 'Course you do.
"What kinda Jeeves and Wooster bullshit-" Beetlejuice begins.
Charles raises a hand. "Just listen."
Beetlejuice scowls, but he shuts up in time to catch the chorus.
All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park-
The slow smile that spreads over his face is... everything Charles hoped it would be. And Charles is struck. He often sees Emily in Lydia, the shape of her eyes in Lydia's face or the echoes of her laugh in Lydia's speech. This is the first time that he's seen those echoes of Emily in anyone else. But he sees them in Lawrence. Unmissably. Not the literal physical resemblance he sees in Lydia, but something less skin-deep, some heritable particle of off-kilter joy.
Tom Lehrer croons on the stereo about feeding pigeons cyanide-laced peanuts and Beetlejuice gets fully, completely absorbed, his hands twitching like he's playing the piano line himself, humming once he's got a sense of the tune. The grimmest lines make him cackle, especially the touch of mad scientist that enters the singer's voice at the lines We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment / Except for the few we take home to experiment, and by the end of it he's looking at Charles with his face positively shining. "Charles what is that-"
Charles hits pause. He doesn't want Beetlejuice to miss any of the next song. But yes, there's a story to be told here.
"That's Tom Lehrer," he explains. "He was a Harvard mathematics professor in the '50s and '60s who also did these music hall concerts and played - well, songs like that. Some of them would still be considered risque now. Back then, people banned him. And... Emily." Here he has to pause, swallow the lump in his throat. "She and I - we could never agree on music. She liked... punk, hard rock. All very loud and angry, and I just couldn't listen to it. There were two albums in the whole world we could agree on. One was Harry Belafonte's Calypso. You've heard that one."
"Day-O," Beetlejuice supplies. Charles nods.
"This was the other. Songs by Tom Lehrer. We'd play it anytime we were in the car together. I liked the tunes. She, of course, liked the lyrics. And I thought - you might too."
Beetlejuice is quiet, uncharacteristically quiet, for a long time. Colours flicker through his hair, blues and purples and deep greens. "Yeah," he says, after an eternity. "Yeah. I like 'em."
Charles is quiet too.
"You. Uh. You guys really miss her."
Charles can't say anything in response. There aren't words for it.
"Jeez," says Beetlejuice, staring at his hands. There's a sad hunch to his shoulders for a moment. Charles wonders what he's thinking. He doesn't exactly blame Beetlejuice for how cavalier he is about death - can understand that for a being that's been dead, been around death and dying, for over a millenium, death is and must be as ordinary as breakfast. But he gets the sense that perhaps something has finally clicked.
"My fingernails are fucked up," says Beetlejuice.
Well. It was probably about as much sobriety at a stretch as he could have expected. Charles lets it go.
"Do you want to hear a song about nuclear annihilation?"
Beetlejuice grins. "Does the pope shit in the woods?"
-
"Why do you want it?" asks Adam, frowning.
"Garrote wire," Beetlejuice answers, with a shrug. They're in the attic, the three dead members of the household, just like they were many months ago.
Barbara sets her hands on her hips. "You are not garrotting anybody, buster, especially not with my piano strings."
"Babs, you know I love it when you get assertive." He waggles his eyebrows.
Adam glares.
"I'm joking. What, can't a guy joke? Nobody's getting garrotted. Not this week anyway. I just want - and this may fucking shock you, Adam, so keep your pants on, or don't, I ain't complaining - to play it."
"The... piano?"
"Yes, Barbara, the piano. Oh my god."
"Since when do you play piano?"
"Since fucking 1788."
"You've never played it here..."
"Because I didn't have one."
"I've seen you summon a ukulele and smash it about eight times," Adam points out.
"Piano's a little bit more pocket dimension real estate. I got like twelve more ukes. I had a baby grand in there for a while but I kinda dropped it on a guy in Manhattan because he'd just said 'unless the sky falls' and I mean c'mon."
"And you want me to loan you mine?" Barbara lays a possessive hand on the little stand-up piano. It's an antique from her childhood, restored lovingly by Adam. Barbara painted little yellow daisies on its white body the year they died. She doesn't play much any more, though. One of those many hobbies they never really went anywhere with. Adam wishes she'd get back to it, but it's still hard to influence the living world. They can do things like painting and sculpting, slow deliberate things, but piano might just be a bridge too far.
Beetlejuice looks frustrated. "I'll be careful with it!"
"That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, Beetlejuice."
He runs his hands through his hair and groans, folding onto their couch in a surly pout. "Euuuugh. It's never enough with you people, is it? Don't smash the piano, BJ. Don't attack the mailman. Don't fill the kitchen with spiders. I can't do shit around here."
It's childish, but he does look... genuinely upset about it, enough that Barbara hesitates a little before sinking onto the couch next to him and patting him on the shoulder. "That's how it works, honey. We don't always get to do everything we want to right this second. Actions have consequences."
"But I was trying to- I thought this would be a good thing. Something I could do that Charles would actually like-"
He did, sincerely, just want to play the piano, Adam realizes. "We're not saying you can't play music," he offers, as gently as he can. "It's just, Barbara's very attached to this piano, and you just, sort of, you know. Destroy everything you touch."
Beetlejuice looks up at him, and then back down. "I gotta go."
And before Adam can say anything, there's a pop, and he's gone.
Adam and Barbara glance at each other, in sudden alarm, and then rush to the window.
They've seen him go back to the woodpile when he's angry, frustrated at this or that rule that stops him committing absolute havoc and is therefore stupid and boring. They usually leave him to whatever temper tantrum he's having. This time, though, they watch from the attic window - as the log Charles was halfway through splitting explodes open, sending shards of wood and moss flying as beetles and centipedes pour from its core. The insects form a writhing mass, and coalesce into a vague shape. Teeth gnash, striped snakelike appendages writhe, huge black spines embed themselves in the sawdusted ground. The writhing creature rips through a few logs, and then settles on a more human shape. Beetlejuice slumps, and sits down on the dirt with his arms hugging his knees in whole-body sad pout.
They can't go out to him, but they can stand in the open front doorway, a hundred yards away, and call to him from across the gap. It feels... ridiculous. And a lot like being parents.
"Better?" asks Adam.
"Piss off," says Beetlejuice.
"Come inside and talk about it, Beej," says Barbara.
"This sucks."
"I know, honey, I'm sorry."
"You don't get it."
Barbara looks at Adam, clearly asking for some backup.
Adam remembers that conversation in the kitchen, at Christmas. "Do you still want to stay?"
"...Yeah..."
"Come on inside."
After a minute or two he slouches back into the house, still pouting. They go back up to the attic and its slouchy, comfy sofa. They sit.
"I wanna stay," he says, after another moment, a little bit more decisively.
"Nobody wants to make you leave," Adam soothes.
And then Beetlejuice looks at him with an expression that is no longer sulky, but confused and in pain and very much human, and Adam's words die in his throat.
"I'm not stupid," says Beetlejuice. "I didn't choose to be half."
It takes them both a second to understand what he means. Half demon, half human.
"I want-" he begins. And he makes an aborted gesture, like he was about to reach out to them, before closing his hand suddenly. "But I'm. I don't."
Barbara hugs him. Beetlejuice buries his face in her shoulder.
"I broke Charles' doorknob," he says thickly, into her shoulder.
"I saw that," says Adam, who got called in for damage assessment by Charles the moment Beetlejuice was safely occupied elsewhere.
"I was just trying to stay out of the way."
And god knows they can all tell Beetlejuice is trying. Sometimes it's downright painful to watch, how carefully he treads in their presence when he remembers to. They can all see how hard he bites down on the impulses. But he's a demon, as he reminds them all so often. A being of pure chaos.
Adam thinks about what it would be like, to be the person he is - Adam Maitland, nerd, creative, crafty, lover of antiques and miniatures and sweet nurturing people whose kindness he can repay with service - and yet, without meaning to, without trying to, to destroy everything he touches.
Oh, he thinks. And leans over to wrap an arm around Barbara and Beetlejuice, squeezing against the demon's broad back.
"Gnghk," whimpers Beetlejuice. There's the sound of a few snotty sobs into Barbara's sweater. Barbara winces, but she doesn't stop holding him.
-
They move the piano down to the living room the next day. They skirt around the issue of not wanting Beetlejuice involved in the moving by surprising him with it, all ready to go in its own corner of the living room.
Beetlejuice looks too embarrassed to thank them - there's an emotion Adam's never seen on him before, and his hair goes the strangest shade of pink - but he does manage to mutter a vow of I'll be careful in Barbara's direction before excitement gets the better of him and he takes a seat at the matching painted-wood bench, cracking his knuckles and quite possibly every other joint in his hands in one horrible drawn-out series of sounds.
They both assumed there'd be some joke to it, some bit. The punchline doesn't come. He just plays a waltz. The tune is pretty, pleasing, and the way his hands move suggests real skill.
Charles walks in from his study, looking wistful and surprised in equal measure. "I know this tune," he says. "Lawrence, did you-"
Beetlejuice shrugs. "You said you liked the tunes."