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“Babs.”
Nothing.
“Baaaaaaaabs.”
Not a thing.
“Barbara. Please.”
Finally, fucking finally, he sees her peering into the room. The door is usually shut, typical of the girl and her monster, but his powers have opened it a sliver.
“What are you doing?” she blurts out. Beetlejuice shushes her, holding a finger to his lips and then moving it across his neck in a cutting motion.
“Don’t you dare—“
“Adam!” she whisper-yells. She disappears for a minute, but he can still hear her. “Adam, oh my god, come look—“
Soon enough, Adam’s face pops up alongside Barbara’s in the doorway. A smile splits his face and he lets out an involuntary awww, when Lydia suddenly shifts in her sleep.
All three adults stop instantly in their tracks. It’s a much easier feat, now that they’re dead, and the room returns to its previous silence, punctuated only by the quiet music playing from some D-rated horror film's menu selection screen. They all watch Lydia with rapt attention, but she simply settles back into her sleeping position. Which happens to be with an arm wrapped around Beetlejuice’s middle, her legs pressed up beside his, and her face buried into his shoulder.
Adam breathes out an unnecessary sigh. He opens the door a touch more, just enough to slip inside with Barbara close behind him.
“You’re so cute,” he whispers. “Such a good uncle,” he punctuates with a kiss to Beetlejuice’s hair first, then Lydia’s.
Beetlejuice bares his teeth at Adam, but the streaks of pink in his hair betray him. “I didn’t fucking ask for this,” he spits out (albeit, as quietly as he can manage), “she did it on her own. These damn movies help me sleep, I thought it might help her, that doesn’t mean—“
Barbara stops him, placing a hand over his mouth. “Shh. She needs it. You’re her best friend, Beej, be there for her.”
That stopped Beetlejuice dead in his tracks. He wasn’t blind, he knew that Lydia had been deteriorating over the last weeks, culminating in a refusal to sleep. The second anniversary of her mother’s death was coming up, school had just started again, and, well, her best friend was still her demon-slash-uncle-slash-ex-fiancee. Lydia had taken to staying up all night and all day, refusing to sleep for days at a time and keeping herself awake by blasting angry music in her headphones and her new invention of Redbull-coffee (“Gives you wiiiings,” she had giggled as Delia stared at her creation in horror. The coffee maker had been hidden after that incident.)
Both the Maitlands and the Deetzes had done everything to get her to sleep. Charles had grounded her (she never went anywhere anyway), Delia tried to lull her into sleep with meditation and chamomile tea (Lydia just insisted on Beetlejuice joining them), and the Maitlands had summoned up every ghostly power they had to encourage her to bed. Her electronics mysteriously died, leaving her without music, and the air in her room had grown cold, forcing her into bed. Lydia’s stubbornness was no match for them though. It seemed Beetlejuice was the only one who finally got her to sleep with the promise of a horror marathon, Lydia finally drifting off during a quiet moment in the film.
“You have a point,” he groused. He drew the covers up over Lydia, choosing to remain mostly outside of them himself.
Adam and Barbara beamed, happy to see their adoptive daughter finally in a moment of peace and their boyfriend the cause of it.
“Keep her asleep as long as you can,” Adam said. “She needs it bad.” A worried look comes over his face and he brushes a strand of hair away from Lydia's face, careful not to do anything to wake her. He drops a kiss onto Beetlejuice’s lips, quick but still a clear ‘thank you.’
Barbara does the same. “Night Beej,” she whispers, ushering Adam out of the room before he can release the full mother-henning he is very much capable of.
“Night guys,” he whispers after them. He turns to Lydia again, who has begun to snore faintly as she falls deeper and deeper into sleep. Checking that his partners aren’t still around, he gives Lydia a forehead kiss of his own. “Night Lyds.”
