Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“D’you think we’re going to get those maths test results today?”

A few steps behind Lydia, her twin brother groans loudly. “Can we at least wait until we get to school to talk about school?”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “If you do worse than me again this is why,” she informs him.

“If I do worse than you again,” he corrects, “it’s because I got the easiest question wrong.”

“You put ‘Beetlejuice’ on it again, didn’t you?”

“Might’ve.”

She turns to look back at him, hopping up to balance on the same low stone wall he does every day. There’s a grin on his face and a bright red shirt on his chest, one of the pair their mother bought them for their thirteenth birthday a few months ago. He won the game on this particular morning, getting the shirt on without her noticing and securing him the right to wear the ‘thing one’ shirt, cursing her to be ‘thing two’ for the day.

“You’re going to have to start putting in the bare minimum at some point, y’know,” Lydia tells him, refocusing on the pavement ahead of them. “It’s a shit system, but we’re stuck in it. And if you get held back and we end up in different classes I’ll go mad.”

“I got more important things to do.”

She rolls her eyes. “Ah yes, the classic I can’t do homework I have to practise! Because if you don’t play ukulele right at that moment you’ll instantly forget how to play entirely.”

“Precisely. But anyway. You don’t need to stress. You always do great.”

“Easy for you to say, you don’t have last time’s results to live up to.”

“It’ll be fine, Lyds. Trust me.”

“Sure, sure. And you’re remembering Dad said we could get pizza if we did our best, right?”

The footsteps behind her stop. She turns to look at Beetlejuice again. He looks genuinely worried.

“Shit, he did, didn’t he?”

“Oh, so now he cares.”

“...Is it too late to do my best?”

“Lawrence!”

The twins return home that afternoon in high spirits, Beetlejuice yelling for their mum to come look - at what, she has no idea - as they fumble to get their shoes off. She comes quickly, somewhat concerned by her son’s shouting, though it’s offset by the sound of Lydia laughing at him.

“MA!” he shrieks. “Mama, you’re not gonna believe this shit!”

“I’m right here, you don’t have to yell,” she tells him as she walks in from the next room.

“Okay- Okay, but- you know that maths test we did?” Beetlejuice continues, only slightly lowering his volume.

“The one you’ve been moaning to me about all week?” Emily smiles.

“Yeah, that one!”

He’s wrestling with his own foot as he talks; his laces aren’t loosened enough for him to get his shoe off, but it doesn’t appear to have occurred to him to do anything about that.

“We got our results back,” Lydia explains, pulling off her shoes rather more successfully than her brother and getting to her feet. There’s something of a disbelieving grin on her face.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah!” Beetlejuice says. “Yeah, hang on!”

The boy abandons his shoe, turning to shrugging off his backpack and shoving his hand in, extracting a sheaf of paper - crumpled slightly in his tight grip. He holds it up towards her, practically shaking with excitement. Smiling back at him, Emily takes the paper.

At the top of the front page, in her son’s messy handwriting, is written Lawrence Deetz. And beside it, in far neater red, 100%.

“You got a hundred!”

“Yeah! And I didn't even have to cheat off Lyds or nothin’!”

“Well done! But don’t cheat off your sister, Beetle.”

“That’s what I’m saying, I didn’t! I honest to god just got a hundred!”

“He tried to run home to show you but the idiot forgot he was binding,” Lydia adds in.

“I almost died!” Beetlejuice corroborates, still grinning.

Emily shakes her head, still smiling, and crouches down to give the boy a hug. “Proud of you, Squash.” As she pulls away, she hands him back his paper. “You hold onto that to show your dad when he gets home, yeah?”

He nods, looking down at his paper again, then cocks his head to the side slightly. “...Y’know,” he says, “it’s funny, I could’ve sworn I put ‘Beetlejuice’ on this.”

Lydia’s brow furrows too. “Huh, yeah. You were saying while we were walking in.”

There’s silence for a moment. A subtle sense of dread creeps along Emily’s spine, though she tries not to show it. But the spell breaks when something else occurs to her son, and he’s distracted.

“Oh, and Lydia got a hundred too, but she’s a nerd so it doesn’t count.”

“It does too count!” Emily insists, turning to hold her arms out to the other twin. Lydia accepts the hug instantly. “Proud of you too, Pumpkin.” Emily pretends not to notice her daughter leaning to the side slightly to stick her tongue out at Beetlejuice, and him responding in kind.

“Nerd,” Beetlejuice whisper-shouts as Lydia breaks away from the hug.

“Hey, you got full marks too,” Lydia reminds him. “Welcome to my level, second nerd.”

Finally managing to get his shoes off, Beetlejuice springs to his feet, one hand on his heart, the other pointing accusingly at his sister. “You take that back!”

Lydia sets her stance, putting up her fists. “Make me.”

Beetlejuice’s face scrunches up, glaring at her, then turns to Emily. “We’re gonna go fight to the death,” he informs her. Lydia nods in agreement.

“Again?” Emily asks.

“Yeah,” Lydia says. A second later Beetlejuice skirts around her and practically launches himself into her back, bear-hugging her arms to her sides. He clings on tight as she staggers into the living room and flops backwards onto the sofa, pinning her brother below her. Still, he holds tight.

“Death before dishonour!” he yells from under her.

“There can be only one!” Lydia yells back, smacking at his arms.

Emily leans in the doorway, watching the kids playfight, ready to step in if anyone’s head is getting too close to the edge of the coffee table. But though usually while watching them scrap she wouldn’t be able to keep the smile off her face, she has other things on her mind today. She glances back at the test paper on the stair, and then pulls out her phone to text her husband.

We need to talk about the kids when you get home

That evening, lying on their stomachs with a pizza box between them, the twins are engrossed in a horror film marathon while their parents eat their own dinner in the next room. They’d thought it odd, initially, that their parents would separate themselves, but according to their mother they have ‘boring adult stuff’ to talk about, so they dismissed it.

With the end of their latest film drawing close, Lydia is just about to mention how their parents have been talking for a while when said parents walk into the room. They quietly settle on the sofa to watch the end of the film, not saying much. Again, odd. But when the credits roll and the twins begin discussing what to play next, their mother gently interrupts.

“Hey, Pumpkin, Squash,” she says. “Can we talk for a minute?”

The kids exchange a look, though as always it’s brief; neither can hold eye contact for long. This seems a lot like the lead up to a Talk.

“Yeah?” Lydia agrees hesitantly. “What’s going on?”

“Maybe we should wait until the morning,” their dad says quietly.

“Too late now,” Beetlejuice tells him. “You can’t leave us hanging like that!”

“Come here then, sit down,” their mum says. Their parents shuffle apart so the twins can sit between them, Lydia beside Dad and Beetlejuice next to Mama.

“Is everything okay?” Lydia asks.

“Everything’s fine,” their dad says, putting an arm around her. “We just think it’s about time we told you something important.”

“We’re adopted?” Beetlejuice immediately guesses.

“No. Not quite.”

“Not… quite?” Lydia repeats. Their parents share a look, seemingly deciding who’s going to speak.

“You know the joke we played on the family, when you two were born?” their mother, eventually, begins.

“What, the one Uncle Terry tells us about every time we see him?” Lydia asks. “That one?”

“Yeah, no clue,” Beetlejuice shrugs.

“Right, well. Uncle Terry’s version isn’t exactly… true…”

“You didn’t actually do it?” Beetlejuice asks, sitting up straighter. “What? I respected the hell out of you for that!”

“Lame,” Lydia agrees.

“The true version is just a bit different,” Charles clarifies. “We did only announce one of you being born at first, and we did re-announce both a week later, and we told everyone it was a joke about seeing how long we could keep having twins a secret, but…”

He trails off, and Emily picks up for him.

“But when we made that first announcement, we really did only have one.”

Lydia looks from her mother to her brother sat between them. Her identical twin brother, who shares her undeniable resemblance to their parents. He looks just as confused as she feels.

“...Funny,” he says, trying to smile through his nerves. “So one of us is a clone, or what?”

Again, their parents exchange a look over the kids’ heads.

“Actually,” their dad says. “One of you is a changeling.”

There’s silence for a moment. Lydia stares up at her father, searching for his tells. He may be able to commit to a bit, but he can’t pretend as well as their mother. And yet, now, he looks deadly serious.

“We don’t know which,” their mum continues. “But I promise we’re being entirely truthful, this is not a joke. One of you is a changeling, we think a demon, and we adopted them as a baby.”

Lydia looks again at her brother. He looks uncertain, concerned. “You swear you’re not kidding?” he asks.

“We swear,” their dad nods.

Lydia looks from one parent to another, waiting for one to break, but they just… don’t. And she has a sneaking suspicion they aren’t going to; there’s commitment to the bit, and then there’s promising it’s real when she and her brother clearly aren’t laughing. Lydia takes Beetlejuice’s hand. They’ve talked, before, about the supernatural. They’re both firm believers, both being able to swear they’ve caught glimpses of ghosts before. But she doubts either of them expected it to come so close to home. If this is true - an idea which is rapidly gaining strength in her mind - then her twin brother was never even related to her. She might not even be human. Her life might’ve been a lie. Lydia feels a little ill.

“How?” she manages to ask. “How did that happen?”

“Well, there was an attempt at a classic changeling swap,” their mum explains, “by who I assume was the changeling’s biological mother. But you both started crying, and obviously that was much louder than usual, so we came to look and we interrupted.”

“She tried a wager,” their dad continues. “Asked us to choose which we kept, trying to get us to try and pick out our original child, but you were identical right down to the way you were crying.”

“It was a bit of a rash decision on my part,” Emily admits. “But I figured, even if we chose ‘right’, this woman was trying to abandon her child with strangers. I didn’t want someone willing to do that keeping either, changeling or not, so… We kept you both.”

“She didn’t argue, luckily. She left us alone after that. And for maybe a day we tried to figure it out, mostly just in the interest of knowing which one we’d already named, but it was impossible.”

“So we decided we were going to stop trying, and we’ve stuck with that since. We thought maybe it would become obvious as you got older, but, well…” She looks from one to the other of them, with the same adoring expression as always. “You’re both smart, you both have good appetites, you both have gorgeous dark eyes. And neither of you like eye contact. So, we really have no idea. We gave you both new names, got you those tiny little bracelets to tell you apart, pretended there was a paperwork mixup with registering the birth and got new certificates issued… and told the rest of the family it was a prank.”

There’s silence for a moment.

“So… where did our birth order come from?” Beetlejuice asks eventually.

“We had to make that up,” their dad says.

“It was ip-dip-do,” their mum admits.

“So I might not actually be older than Lyds?!”

“That’s what you’re thinking about?!” Lydia says.

“I get to stay oldest for consistency’s sake, right?” Beetlejuice continues, ignoring his sister.

“You’re so dumb.”

“Yes, you still get to be older,” their mum assures him, putting her arm around his shoulders and kissing the top of his head. Lydia cuddles closer to her dad.

“The reason we decided to tell you this now,” Dad says, gently rubbing her back. “Is that we think maybe one of you used whatever power you may have to… change your maths tests.”

“Not that we don’t think either of you could have got the results you did,” their mum quickly clarifies. “But when you said you thought you’d put your nickname on your paper, I wondered.”

“Little things have happened around you two your whole lives, but we don’t think you've noticed. We were always going to tell you the truth, but we didn’t want to worry you about keeping the secret when you were too little. We decided on now because those things are getting bigger, and we wanted you to know before you started questioning it yourselves.”

“You think it’s me?!” Beetlejuice blurts out. “You think it’s me, because of my grade?”

“Not at all, Squash,” their mum gently assures him. “Not at all. You both wanted your dad to get you pizza, didn’t you?”

The twins look to each other again. Lydia assumes her brother is also recalling their conversation on the way to school that morning.

“It could have been either of us,” she agrees.

“And regardless, you’re both our children,” their dad says firmly. “Whether or not we ever find out which is which, it won’t change things. We’ll always love you both the exact same.”

“And don’t feel obligated to tell us, if you ever figure it out. If you want to keep it to yourselves, that’s completely fine.”

Lydia, again, looks from parent to parent. “Promise this is real?” she asks, staring up at her mother, who nods.

“Promise.”

“Okay. Okay, I… I believe you.”

“Me too,” Beetlejuice nods. And before they know it, they’re being wrapped in a group hug, squashed between their parents. Lydia looks to Beetlejuice, and he looks back with her same dark eyes, like always.

Lydia is already in bed, under the covers, when Beetlejuice finishes getting his pyjamas on. She’s dug out the old bracelets their parents used to tell them apart as babies, one red, one purple, linked together now, and is fiddling with them absent-mindedly. He glances over her head, at his own top bunk, and then down at her.

“Hey, uh…” he says, tugging at the hem of his shirt. “D’you think I could-?”

She lifts the duvet without another word, and he clambers in beside her.

“So,” she says.

“...Yeah.”

There’s an awkward silence between them - a rarity.

“Do you think,” Beetlejuice says eventually, talking quickly, “that maybe this is why we switched to public school?”

Lydia’s brow furrows. “We switched because you’d just come out and the only private middle school close is all girls.”

“No, I’d only come out to you. They said we were gonna switch before I told Mum and Dad. I think it was actually because the only private middle close is Catholic.”

Lydia looks away from him, staring up at the bunk above. “...And one of us is a demon,” she finishes the thought. She contemplates the top bunk for a moment, before looking over at him again. 

“You can tell me, if you’re the changeling.”

“And you can tell me, if you’re the changeling.”

Again, silence.

“So, neither of us is aware of being a demon?” Lydia asks.

“No, but…” Beetlejuice turns to look up at the top bunk himself. “Maybe it’s me, and that’s why I’m trans. I was a cis guy demon but I changed to copy you. Maybe that’s why everyone always says you’re so much like mum.”

“Or maybe you’re just, y’know, a normal trans guy, and the only reason people say that is because it’s me and I’m hardwired to mimic people.”

“Do you think we’ll ever figure it out?”

“I dunno, I… I’d say innocent until proven guilty, but that just seems naive. We’d just keep wondering.”

“Yeah, I guess, but… what if we just do the opposite? Assume we’re both demons, and if we find out eventually that one of us is human then that’s that.”

Lydia thinks for a moment.

“...I can get behind that.”

He grins at her, and Lydia snickers.

“You’re always going to be my goddamn idiot of a brother, regardless,” she tells him.

“And you’ll always be my goddamn idiot of a sister.”

Chapter Text

Two years pass.

The twins get taller. Louder. They bleach their hair together, and Beetlejuice dyes his green. Their red ‘thing’ shirts get worn, and small, and eventually replaced by fresh ones. It becomes a game to point out any Among Us merch and say “oh look, it’s you.” They start playing the game for the bit, and end up quite good at it.

And things keep happening.

Small things, at first. Small enough that they’re not sure there’s anything supernatural about them at all. Could be coincidences. The school sports day they were both dreading gets rained off. The extra snacks they were pestering their parents for are conveniently on sale when they get to the supermarket. Their dad gets off work early and surprises them by picking them up from school the same days they’re wishing they got to see him more.

But the incidents get bigger. The incidents get unexplainable.

It’s Lydia who has the idea to keep a record. She’s always somehow ending up with more notebooks than she knows what to do with, and one of them finds a home on the bookshelf in their bedroom, christened ‘The Logbook’.

7th February, about 3:40, park. Logged by Lydia.

Chris from school came up to us on his bike and started riding in circles, talking like he wanted to start something, but he ended up going down the hill, couldn’t stop, and ended up coming off. Apparently the brakes he said he got replaced yesterday wore out.

16th February, heard about it at about 7 during dinner. Logged by Lawrence.

The guy Dad was going to have that dinner party with cancelled, day after Dad told us about it. Think it was us because he says it’s because the guy’s wardrobe spontaneously combusted and he’s too stuck up to do a dinner before he can get a new suit tailored.

Its entries are carefully detailed, at first. But the novelty wears off.

23 March. Lydia.

PE’s been cancelled for the last month. Probably us.

25 March. BJ.

Light blew up because Claire was being too bitchy.

29 March. Lydia.

Could not find the right lego piece. Lego storm. Ow.

They keep the log in case they ever want to look back on the incidents. They never do. And the events - at least, the ones their parents know about - manage not to prompt another talk until a few months after their fifteenth birthday.

After seeing the stress of the last work dinner’s cancellation - and their potential involvement in it - on their father, the twins resolve to think very hard about not setting fire to anything of Maxie Dean’s when they’re told about the next one. And given they end up sat in the back of Dad’s car in their dumb formal clothes on their way to a dumb formal event a week later, it works.

Their mother fails to contain a snort of laughter when she looks back at them.

“You look like you’re on your way to the gallows,” she says.

“Might as well be,” Lydia grumbles. She’s been trying to keep it in, for her dad’s sake, but it’s difficult.

“We look stupid,” Beetlejuice says, leaning forward to slump dramatically against the back of their mum’s seat. He’s wearing a neat waistcoat and a yellow bowtie that he claims is in solidarity with Lydia, since they’re both in agreement that she’s gotten the short end of the stick here. Sure, she’s fine with dresses, but this sunshine monstrosity takes the cake. The two of them had briefly campaigned for them to both go in waistcoats, until their father sheepishly admitted that the disparity was an attempt to signpost. It’s for the businessmen who would otherwise have little more than hair colour to go on, as far as identifying their coworker’s identical twins is concerned. And in the interest of not sitting through a hundred repetitions of the ‘fumble for a name/gender and then over-apologise’ routine, they relented.

“...A little bit, yes,” their mum admits. “But you’re not uncomfortable?”

They both shake their heads, but it’s clear their feeble attempts to hide their annoyance are failing.

“Look, I know these things are boring and annoying. I find them kinda boring and annoying too.”

“Emily-”

“What? I’m not going to lie to them, dear,” she tells their dad, before turning back to them. “We’re in this together, okay?”

Both kids slump just a little further. Emily purses her lips, considering her twins for a moment.

“Alright, how’s this - we’re going to let your dad focus on work stuff, but us three are going to play a little game.”

They look up, though Lydia’s looking at Mama’s hand on the back of the seat and Beetlejuice at her headrest. Eye contact has only felt more intense as they’ve gotten older, as the power around them has grown, and now they can only bear each other’s near-black eyes and only briefly.

“What kinda game?” Beetlejuice asks.

“You,” their mum grins, “are going to be my spies. And it’s your mission to infiltrate this business dinner, gather information, and get out without arousing any suspicion.”

“And what are the spymasters offering us for this job?” Lydia asks, folding her arms and raising an eyebrow. Emily gives an exaggerated sigh, but she’s still smiling.

“The spymasters are offering whatever chocolate bar the agents want from a corner shop on the way home.”

“Full-sized bar?” Beetlejuice asks.

“Yes.”

“Each?”

“Yes.”

Lydia understands the underlying contract here - don’t act out, stay polite and at least try to pay attention to what’s said to them, and be rewarded with sugar. But knowing that doesn’t spoil the game. She’s up for some spying, and she says as much to her mother. Her mum smiles in return, and looks to Beetlejuice.

“What about you, Squash?”

He seems to consider the answer for a moment, before crossing his arms and grinning. “That’s special agent Beetlejuice, to you.”

“Understood,” she grins back.

“Verdict, Agent Crypt? One for the list?”

“Undoubtedly, Agent Betelgeuse. For sure.”

Her brother watching over her shoulder, Lydia glances again at the closest little group of their dad’s colleagues before tapping away at her phone’s notes app; suspected workplace affair 8 - statement tie man getting REAL bold after his wife went home. They’re at eight affairs, four secret rivalries, five misuses of paid time off and what they’re pretty sure is a case of embezzlement.

“Y’know what,” Beetlejuice says, slouching a little lower into the ugly designer armchair they’ve commandeered as their base of operations. “This isn’t entirely awful.”

“Who’d’ve thought,” Lydia agrees. She slips her phone back into her pocket - she insisted her dress have serviceable pockets as a condition of wearing it, and her poor ignorant father agreed to those terms before he knew what a perilous search she was sending him on - and grabs her cup of pitifully weak blackcurrant squash. Someone brought that particular drink specifically for the few kids that were dragged along to the function, and nobody else has touched it.

“Think Dad’ll appreciate our findings?”

Lydia snorts. “No. But Mama will.”

Raising his own squash, Beetlejuice grins wickedly. “To getting ourselves discreetly banned from work events?”

“To our noble mission,” she agrees.

They’re still attempting to down the squash in one when their mother comes to perch herself on the arm of their chair. “Mission status?” she asks with a smile.

Beetlejuice finishes his drink, and gasps in air. “Peachy,” he reports, as Lydia retrieves her phone to hand over their notes. To Emily’s credit, she doesn’t let her eyebrows raise too high as she reads.

“...Interesting, interesting,” she mumbles. “Have you aroused any suspicion?”

“We’re very discreet,” Lydia assures her, as Beetlejuice hiccups loudly. “How’s it going on the front line?”

Emily gives a world-weary sigh. “I don’t know how your father does this. I think I may have married the world’s only tolerable real estate businessman.”

“Get that put on a mug for your next anniversary,” Lydia suggests. “World’s most tolerable businessman.”

“So how did you escape?” Beetlejuice asks.

“Luckily for me, I have an excuse.” She leans over, ruffling each of their hair in turn. “Gotta check on my little terrors.”

“Mother!” Beetlejuice gasps, quickly parroted by Lydia, hands on their hearts. “Are we mere excuses to you?!”

“Oh, I am wounded, Mother!”

“Wounded!”

Emily is unmoved. “Like I said. Terrors. Terrors who appear to be out of squash - should we go get you a refill?”

“You’re stalling,” Beetlejuice points out.

“I’m multitasking. Looking out for my kids and stalling.”

Agreeing that safety in numbers is the way to face a crowd of businessmen, the three weave their way through to the refreshments together. Lydia quickly occupies herself with passing her brother every soft drink she can find to mix into his cup, reaching five before a loud voice distracts all three of them.

“Emily! I almost didn’t believe Chuck when he said you were here! Have you been hiding?”

The owner of the voice, a man in an obnoxiously purple suit who’s popped up beside them, laughs. Emily gives him a rather forced-looking smile.

“Maxie. How lovely to see you. Thanks for the invite.”

He grins. Lydia immediately hates him. “And these are the kids? Laura, and…?”

“Lydia and Lawrence,” their mother corrects, obviously trying to hide her annoyance. Their dad’s attempts to signpost them, thus far, have been lost on people who don’t have the names to get the wrong way round in the first place. The businessman’s eyes flick over to the twins, and seemingly both having the same idea at once they step a little closer to each other. His gaze comes to rest on Lydia.

“I can see the resemblance.”

She slowly reaches for Beetlejuice’s hand. He grabs it tight.

“Well,” Maxie chuckles. “I was a little late to the game for your mother to give me a shot, but it looks like I’ve got a second chance.”

Lydia squeezes her brother’s hand like a vice.

To call what happens next a maelstrom wouldn’t be too far off.

The atmosphere in the car as Emily drives the kids home is… tense, to say the least.

Lydia, she can see in the rearview mirror, has pulled off her shoes and has her knees hugged to her chest. Lawrence is fidgeting with the bowtie he’s yanked off his neck, looking like he’s dangerously close to anxiously chewing it. Both are avoiding looking in her direction.

“Pumpkin,” Emily says gently, “Squash-”

“It wasn’t us!” Beetlejuice blurts out, at the same time Lydia says, “we didn’t mean to!”

They give each other a quick, anxious glance.

“Sweethearts, I’m not mad at you. I know- I doubt you meant for that to happen.”

“We didn’t. We were trying not to mess it up,” Lydia says, her voice small. “After the wardrobe fire thing, we were really trying not to mess anything up, for Daddy.”

“Is he gonna be mad?” Lawrence asks nervously.

“No,” Emily says firmly. “Not once he knows the context.” She won’t let him be. Not towards the children, at least. Currently Charles is back at the party, trying to smooth things over, making sure that Maxie comes to the conclusion that it was a sinkhole that ripped the floorboards apart, or an incredibly localised earthquake broke every glass item in the room, or even that a very small indoor hurricane flung all his tasteless decor off the walls. But once he’s home, she and her husband are going to have a talk about that man.

In the backseat, Lydia slides her hand closer to Beetlejuice, and he takes it. Emily takes a breath, trying to focus on driving steady.

“One of you was either defending yourself or your sibling,” she says after a few silent moments. “And either way, I’m proud.”

Neither child replies.

“Maybe we need to work a little on emotional regulation. But that’s on myself and your father to teach you, not for you to just magically know.”

She catches Beetlejuice nodding in the rearview mirror.

“Right. Now, I think your spymaster owes you two a couple full-size chocolate bars.”

Once they’ve got their shoes off back home - Beetlejuice struggling through it with one hand while he gnaws on the chocolate in the other - the twins’ mother gently suggests that her son go take off his chest binder. Her hand is resting on Lydia’s shoulder. Beetlejuice heads upstairs alone.

By the time his sister rejoins him he’s pulled off the binder, and changed into his pyjamas while he was at it, and almost finished his chocolate laid flat on his back in bed. Lydia slips silently into the room, clambers out of her dress and into her own pyjamas, and climbs up into his bunk without asking. Not that she’d ever need to.

“I’ve been pretending this chocolate is Maxie Dean’s carotid arteries,” Beetlejuice tells her. She snorts, but quickly turns pensive.

“Mama asked if he’s ever said anything like that to me before, and he hasn’t. But she’s never letting him near either of us again. And she’s gonna tell Dad to file a complaint at work.”

“I hope he gets fired.”

“He won’t.”

“I know. But a boy can dream.”

Lydia reaches across him to grab one of his plushies. Their father, baffled by but still aware of the constant Among Us jokes, bought them each ‘one of those colourful spaceman things kids are into now’ for their last birthday, in black and green. Lydia, after she finished laughing, declared that they needed to give the toys the most average, normal-people names possible. So now she hugs Barbara the green crewmate to her chest.

“Thanks, if it was you, by the way,” she says.

“Ya welcome. And good on you, if it was you.”

“He had it coming.”

A few weeks later, Lydia is making an effort to return to their more detailed style of incident logging. The lightbulbs burst in their classroom today, and it’s not difficult to figure out why.

“D’you think it was more of a provoked-harassed-angry or a persecuted -harassed angry?” she asks, peering at the laminated emotion wheel sitting on the desk beside the logbook.

“Is there an option for I’m-going-to-launch-my-classmate-into-the-sun- angry?”

Lydia re-consults the chart.

“...No.”

“Well, its range is too narrow.”

She turns to look over her shoulder at him. He’s sitting on her bed, attempting to wrestle his way out of his binder.

“You okay there?”

“It’s the newer one.” He finally manages to haul it over his head, tossing it across the bedroom before pulling his t-shirt back on. “It wants me dead.”

“Have you caved your ribcage in yet?”

“Getting there.” He flops back on the mattress. “God, I can’t wait to chop these fuckers off. And then tell everyone I meet a slightly more whacky story of how I got the scars to see where the limit is.”

“You want obvious scars, then?”

“Lyds, of course I do. I want those big stupid spiky pink ones that tumblr artists put on middle aged men.”

“You gonna put that request in with the surgeon?”

“I wanna know what they’d say.”

“Five dollars says they’ve heard it before.”

“You’re on.”

Lydia reads the new log to their parents over dinner that evening. They talk about the difference between feeling persecuted and provoked, and also the desire to launch peers into the sun. They discuss strategy for next time. They debate whether any good would come of talking to the school about all this persecution/provokation. They eat waffles and ice cream for pudding. Charles gets ice cream on his nose. His children refuse to tell him what they’re laughing at.

That night, once her brother has settled on the bunk above her, Lydia kicks his mattress in her usual way.

“Goodnight, idiot.”

“Goodnight, second idiot.”

She rolls onto her side, grabs her own plush crewmate - a black one, Adam - and gets comfortable to scroll tumblr for a while.

She’s woken the next morning via being violently shaken by the shoulders.

“Lydia,” Beetlejuice hisses. “Lydia! Lyds! Wake-”

“What?!”

She bats at his arms, eyes still half-shut as she sits up. Beetlejuice steps back as she does. Lydia rubs the sleep away, blinks, and blinks again, harder. He’s standing by the bed with wide eyes, still in his pyjama shorts but his shirt discarded somewhere. And he’s different.

“Beetlejuice.”

“Yeah.”

“Lawrence.”

“Yeah.”

“What.”

He steps back towards the bed. Grabs her shoulders again. “Lydia.”

“Yeah?”

“Lydia. Changeling magic blew my tits clean off.”

Lydia blinks hard again. It is seven AM on a Saturday morning, and her brother seems to have healed quite well from a surgery he definitely didn’t get.

“...Even gave you stupid spiky tumblr scars,” she manages to mumble.

“Yeah.”

He sits down beside her, making the mattress bounce with how hard he lands.

“I got up early to claim the thing one shirt,” he explains. “And yes, I know by the rules of the thing shirts I have thing two’d myself by admitting that. But, uh… Got a bit distracted by all this.” He gestures to his chest. “Or all this lack of this?”

She looks from his face, to his chest, back to his face. Swallows hard. “So, uh… So do you think this means it’s you?”

He fusses with the hem of his shorts, suddenly pensive and failing to hide it. “I guess it has to, doesn’t it? I changed.” His brow furrows. “I change…linged? Changedlinged? There’s a pun there somewhere, hang on.”

“So you’re still waiting for it to fully hit you, then,” Lydia says, waiting for a similar confrontation from her own confirmed humanity.

“Changeling more like… trans ling. Shit.”

“I’m getting the emotion wheel.”

Lydia stands a little too quickly, approaching the desk on shaking legs. She reaches it, and freezes. Blinks hard again. It is still far too early for this.

“Beej, you haven’t got, like… aged stationary, have you?”

“What? No. Why?”

She holds up an unmarked, yellowed envelope. “This wasn’t here last night.”

“Shit. Whose side-”

“It was in the middle. Right in the middle.”

She pads back to the bed, sitting down. Beetlejuice takes the envelope with shaking hands. They sit in silence for a moment before he finally breaks the seal, pulls out a folded note, and hurriedly hands it to Lydia. She carefully unfolds it, licking her dry lips.

“Spawn of mine,” she quietly reads. “Your power is growing. Mortal babysitters are no longer necessary. Draw a door, knock three times, and show this note to the receptionist. I expect you to return to me promptly. Your mother, Juno.”

Beetlejuice snatches the note, scanning it himself. 

“Shit.”

Lydia shakes her head. “This is an oh fuck situation. At least.”