Chapter Text
They didn’t even notice that they were dead until the cat started screaming. At first, even that wasn’t so unusual. Copernicus was always chatty, often finding himself a seat in the kitchen while Veronica cooked so that he could tell her about his day in a series of chirps and mewls that she nodded and sympathized with as though they were having a conversation.
JD only realized that something was different when Nostradamus arrived and joined in on the noise.
Veronica stared at him, putting a hand over her throat. “Is that…”
“Nosy?” JD whispered around the lump in his throat. The cat made another little yowl before approaching JD to rub against him affectionately. “I missed you, sweetheat.”
“JD…” Veronica said. “Why is… how… The crash.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking that too.”
“I’m so happy to see him,” She said, and he could see that her eyes had filled, “But that cat is dead.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I think maybe we are too.”
“Oh. Well…” She paused. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“But we’re in our house! I mean, is this what the afterlife is? The two of us, in our house, forever?”
He smiled and took her hand, spinning her under his arm to pull her close. “Maybe this is heaven.”
She laughed, shaking her head indulgently. “JD, I’m being serious--”
“I know, Ron. But, can I say that, since we’re doing this, I’m glad we’re doing it together.”
She smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder. He rubbed her back, still not sure how this, which was so similar to the way their lives had been, could be death.
“I keep thinking about all the things we didn’t do,” She whispered after a while.
He knew immediately what she meant. It was a conversation they only ever half-had, starting with vague jokes or hypotheticals that never quite went anywhere.
“We weren’t ready,” She said quickly. “It’s just… now we’ll never be, you know?”
He nodded. He had liked to believe that they could have been ready, or that no one ever was, but even he had his doubts.
After all, what the fuck did either of them know about being good parents?
“I’m sorry.” She looked away and swallowed hard.
JD shook his head and pulled her back into the hug. “Veronica--”
“You wanted to,” She whispered, her voice struggling around a lump in her throat.
“No, Ronnie.” He rested his hand on the back of her head. “I wasn’t… It was always easy to drop the conversation. I mean, we had all the time in the world, right?” He laughed bitterly.
Veronica almost never fully cried, but he could tell she was close, which meant he was close too. They held each other for a long time before he said, “I’m never going to regret the way we lived our life, Veronica. It was perfect, while it lasted.”
She smiled, clearing her throat to speak. “I don’t need one of your big romantic speeches, JD.” She rolled her eyes. “This is why we didn’t write our own wedding vows.”
He laughed with her and kissed the top of her head, letting her lead them away from the conversation and back onto comfortable footing.
After a minute of looking around and searching for something to say, he noticed an odd detail. “Did you leave a book on the table?”
She tilted her head. “We died an hour ago and you’re going to talk to me about clutter?” Her voice was finally clear, with no trace of the previously threatening tears.
He picked up the familiar banter easily. “Well, I built enough storage into this house for you to be able to put things away, but ignoring that, did you leave a book on the table?”
“I don’t think so.” Veronica crossed the room and picked up the book. “The Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Oh that’s nice, we get a book.”
“What does it say?” He waited while she skimmed through it.
“Surprisingly unhelpful for a handbook,” She said. “Stuff about the Netherworld, some information about being a ghost, how to handle the living. Pretty much what you’d expect.”
“Anything interesting?”
“JD, it’s a book for dead people about being dead. I think just about all of it is interesting in some way.”
“What’s the Netherworld?”
“The afterlife place. We can go there if we want, or we have the option of staying here as ghosts.”
“What do you want?” He asked, looking around the house.
She followed his gaze and together they studied their stuff, the walls that still needed art, the little spaces that should have had furniture, the shelves they hadn’t managed to fill.
“I’m not ready yet,” She whispered, an echo of the phrase they’d hidden behind many times.
He took her hand. “Neither am I.”
So they stayed.
At first, it didn’t feel like haunting. It felt like living in their house, aside from the fact that they couldn’t leave, didn’t need to eat, and occasionally fell through walls when they leaned without paying attention. It was, surprisingly, normal. They took care of the cats, though Nostradamus hardly needed care anymore, and waited to see what would come next.
The other shoe dropped when a car pulled into the driveway roughly two weeks after they died.
JD recognized Colin when he walked out, but not the people following him. Colin looked tired, maybe even sad, as he led the couple up the stairs into the house.
“As you can see, the outside was designed to emulate old world beach houses, while the inside was intended to be modern and bright, with comfortable spacing. It’s some of Dean’s best work.”
The man nodded absently towards the woman, who was strikingly tall and red-haired. They both had an air of wealth, but a certain stench of eccentricity hung around them and put JD off.
“Now, I think this wall would have to go,” The woman said. “It’s in the way of creating the collective environment.”
JD pinched the bridge of his nose. “You can’t remove that wall, you twit; it’s load-bearing.”
Colin flinched a little. “This house belonged to a very beloved Boston architect and his wife. It… might not go over well with some people in the city if you made too many changes.”
“If it was so important,” The man said, blustering, “They shouldn’t have left it.”
Colin flinched again, physically ducking away from the man while, next to him, Veronica leaned in, her hands curled into fists. “They didn’t leave, Mr. Deetz; they died.”
That made the man blanch, just a little, which gave JD a stab of satisfaction. “Take that, jackass!”
Veronica glanced at him. “He can’t hear you.”
“I know, I just had to get that out.”
She took his hand and they followed Colin and the Deetzes through the rest of the house, listening with alternating rage, pain, and misery while they talked about the house.
“It’s perfect,” Deetz finally said, smiling with too many teeth. “We’ll take it!”
JD’s jaw flexed. “Colin, I swear to god or satan or whoever’s in charge here, if you sell this house to these people, I’ll--”
“I have the paperwork in my car,” He said with resignation.
“How dare you!” JD snapped, “I introduced you to your boyfriend you son of a bitch! Traitor!”
“JD!” Veronica grabbed his hand, and he looked over to see that her eyes were brighter than normal. “He can’t hear you.”
“How could he do this to us? To what’s left of us?” He gestured at the house, the bedroom they were standing in. Their bedroom.
“He doesn’t know we’re still here.”
He pulled her against him, needing the comfort of having her close. He knew he shouldn’t whine about someone buying his house-- technically speaking, he didn’t live there anymore-- but it still stung. It was the home he’d fought so hard for. Against his will, his eyes filled with tears and he had to fight them back.
***
Veronica walked downstairs and watched the Deetzes sign the paperwork. They were eager, cheerful, talking rapidly about the things they wanted to move in, including sculptures the woman made and something about an office space for the man.
She felt a frustrated growl build in her throat at the idea of this man setting up shop in her office. The place she’d written hundreds of Heather letters, and three (Three!) award winning articles. It was sacred, and it was not for some fancy rich asshole to invade.
JD joined her seething in time to watch them get into a fancy car and drive away. She looked at him, her eyes blazing. “JD, we’re ghosts.”
He sighed. “Yes, that’s very evident.” Sarcasm oozed bitterly from tight lips.
“What do ghosts do , JD?”
He looked at her, realizing slowly dawning on his face.
She smiled. “Let’s haunt this bitch.”
“Moving is always chaos,” JD said, days later when they were watching two long-suffering movers haul a collection of the ugliest furniture Veronica had ever seen into their house. “We just have to make it a little worse, is all.”
His smile was one Veronica recognized as his “Let’s fuck shit up” expression, which had softened over the years, but still succeeded in reminding her of when they’d first met.
She smiled back. “Are you ready?” They had spent the intervening week studying every word the handbook had to offer on haunting. They weren’t exactly skilled yet, but they’d both learned how to do some fucked-up claymation shit with their faces.
“I was born ready. Let’s make them see us.”
That, as it turned out, was the tricky part. Try as they might, and as scary as they made themselves, no one noticed them.
“I was really expecting a lot more screaming,” JD said dejectedly, sitting next to Veronica so he could rearrange his face into its natural order.
“You looked really good though,” Veronica said, offering a small smile. She was perched on the railing of the widow’s watch on top of the house, looking out over the ocean.
“Thanks, Ron. Hey, you missed a spot,” He reached over and helpfully lifted her cheekbone back into place.
“Let me get the book, maybe we missed something about being seen.” They had not read the book the way it was probably intended, starting with the chapters on haunting and skipping the introduction and everything about the Netherworld entirely; one did not do as well as Veronica had in school without being an effective skimmer.
She went back to the beginning, glancing through the introduction. “It says here that living people ignore the strange and unusual.”
“So the reason they won’t see us is because we’re being too weird? If I just show up looking like a regular person we could have a civilized discussion about the situation?”
“No, I think ghosts are considered strange and unusual no matter what they look like.” She chewed her lip. “What if-- don’t get mad-- but what if we made ourselves visible in a different way?”
“Like what? Hey, do you think we could train Copernicus to help us?” The cat had continued to hang around them, but had avoided the home’s new owners surprisingly effectively.
“No, god knows I love that cat but he’s nowhere near smart enough to do what we need him to.”
“Nosy could have done it.” The ghost cat in question walked through the wall in time to curl around JD and lay down. He hadn’t liked when their faces were weird and had gone away to wherever he disappeared to when they couldn’t find him.
“I still think we can, if we go about it the right way.”
“How so?”
“Sheets.”
“What?”
She sighed. “I think we need to cover ourselves with sheets. Think about it; we still have mass, so they’ll hang on top of us. We’ll be visible!”
He grimaced. “But at what cost, Veronica? I mean, just because we’re dead doesn’t mean we’ve lost all dignity.”
“You never had that much dignity to begin with; it’s hardly a loss.”
He frowned to hide his smile. “You wound me, Wife.”
Resting her head on his shoulder, she looked up at him. “I think it’s the only way.”
“Fine, we’ll try it tonight.” He put his arm around her and kissed her hair. “This isn’t over yet.”
The sat together, like they had for so many mornings when they were alive, looking out over the ocean and watching the waves roll in.
“Hey, who’s that?” Veronica asked, pointing out towards the water.
She was too small to be the Mrs. Deetz. She was wearing a full black dress and large, wide hat, a costumey outfit on the best of days, which looked downright silly on the beach.
“Has to be a teenager,” JD said, standing.
“How did we not even notice her?” Veronica asked. “I had no idea the Deetzs had a kid.”
He shrugged. “Maybe she’s been hiding? Let’s go down there.”
“LYDIA!” JD recognized Deetz’s voice coming from the back porch and he stopped before jumping off the roof.
The figure turned, and JD could make out a narrow, pale face, framed dramatically with cropped white-blond hair.
Veronica sighed next to him, watching her trudge up the beach towards her father. She looked back towards the book on the table. “She seems… sad, don’t you think?”
JD nodded.
“What if… never mind.”
“What?”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Veronica, this is a bad start to our afterlife together if you’re already keeping secrets.” He bumped his shoulder against hers gently.
She finally quirked a smile at him. “Nothing, I just… feel bad kicking a family with a kid out of a house. I hear moving can be really damaging on the teenaged psyche.”
JD laughed and rolled his eyes, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Very funny. Why don’t we try your little sheet trick and then see where we stand. Based on how today went, this family isn’t getting haunted out of here anytime soon.”
“It’s a plan. Come on, I think we have some spare linens in the attic.”
“Christ, not the ugly ones from your old apartment?”
“Hey! Those--”
“Those are dead old lady sheets, Veronica, and we never should have kept them.”
“First of all, that old lady is the reason we met, and if we happen to bump into her in the afterlife we should say thank you, and second of all, I would rather cut holes in ugly sheets anyway. You may use whatever sheets you’d like.” She squared her shoulders primly to emphasize her point.
***
Veronica had donned an ugly floral sheet, feeling like a complete fool as she examined her reflection in the cracked mirror they’d stored in the attic. “What do you think?”
JD had opted instead to put on his old coat, claiming that it would have the same effect as the sheet if she was right.
“A flying coat attached to an invisible man is much more intimidating than a sheet, Veronica,” He’d insisted.
It was comforting to be the less ridiculous of the two of them.
Together, they marched down the stairs and into the bedroom hallway. “It really disgusts me that they’re taking over our bedroom,” JD said.
Veronica shuddered. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“I mean, that’s where--”
“JD.”
“Right. So… what now?”
“Now we do what ghosts do. Wail and moan and shit, make some noise.”
He nodded seriously.
A moment later they exchanged a glance. “You first,” JD said finally.
“Ugh, fine,” She muttered. “Oooooooh! Awoooo!!! We’re ghooooosts!”
Beside her, JD laughed
She elbowed him. “Shut up and help me, dick!”
“That’s no way to talk to the love of your unlife.”
“JD, I swear to god--”
“Fine, Jesus. AAAOOOOO!!! WOOOOOO! Very Scary Things Are Happening!”
“Could you two keep it down? I’m a child for christ’s sake.” The teenager from the beach opened the door that had once belonged to their shared office. “Keep your weird sex shit in your bedroom.”
She stopped when she saw them.
“Um… What the fuck.”
“Lydia!” Deetz’s voice filtered through the master bedroom door. “Watch your language!”
“But dad! There are…people in the hallway!”
“It’s late, Lydia, stop playing games and go to sleep.”
“But dad!”
“Lydia, I don’t want to ask you again!”
Lydia’s lips pressed into a thin line and she pulled out a polaroid camera, snapping several pictures of the two of them. “He’ll have to believe me when he sees these.” She picked one off the ground, shaking it vigorously for a moment before looking at it. She then looked back up at them.
She stared, stepping closer, looking between them and the photo in her hand. “No feet.”
Well, Veronica thought, we wanted to be seen.