Chapter Text
First came the skulls.
She was cleaning out her room when she saw it: barely tucked behind her favourite vintage lamp and treasured ink well, the macabre manifestation sat in peaceful silence while its coagulated blood made friends with her maths homework undisturbed.
That was, until she screamed.
Patchy and littered with blots of blood and thin shreds of sinewey muscle, its lifeless eyes looked through her tinted sunglasses and shadowed garments. It sneered, almost as if her attached head had offended it.
It probably did.
The head sat there for two minutes before Delia came to her rescue, screaming and covered in red paint, clay and wielding a bible; her father was close behind, a wooden cross in hand and gripping a bunch of rosaries. Lydia didn't miss the nunchucks tucked into her step mum's belt. Probably a gift from Otho.
The decapitated rabbit head was buried in the garden under Delia's new sculpture, entitled 'How long is forever?'. Lydia thought her step mother's new obsession with Alice in Wonderland was darkly fitting, and in an attempt to get out of being life coached ("step-mum-coached, Lydia," ), she let Delia use her crude adaptation of the White Rabbit act as a grave marker for its decapitated cousin under the oak tree.
Delia was more than delighted to share this somewhat morbid experience with her step daughter. "Oh, our first burial together, Lyds! Isn't this sweet? Quick, take a picture!"
Charles just shook his head and did what Delia asked, coaxing Lydia to shuffle closer so he could fit them into the frame, insisting that yes, he did know how to work the camera, despite accidentally pressing the off button. Twice.
"I've got it this time!" Charles had insisted, certain, as he zoomed in close to the White Rabbit's sharp teeth.
"You must have got your artistic talents from your mother, Lydia," Delia remarked between the fifteenth retake.
Lydia, for her part, just grinned before running towards the house to find the shovel she knew her dad hid in the cupboard. He used it to scare away the squirrels that tended to find themselves in his kitchen whenever she forgot to close the windows at night.
Watching Delia place the statue down from the kitchen window, Adam had remarked that she looked "a bit too Delia-lighted," and was met with a groan from his wife and a giggle from the goth girl covered in dirt and pointing a shovel at him.
"That was the perfect Dad Joke, Adam," she had told him, before going back out to hand the delighted Delia the shovel as they posed for another picture. This time, even Lydia was delighted for there had been an actual flash.
Later, in what she called 'The One Big Dark Room', she found that half the lens had been covered by her dad's thumb and in the background there was a non-tasteful blurry glob. How her father had managed to do that, she had no clue. It was kind of impressive, actually.
It was also unsalvigable, but at least it had their faces in it.
She'd make sure to hang it on her wall.
The sculpture lay in solemn guard over the decapitated rabbit head, until one clear night when lightning struck its twisted face and its shattered fragments blessed the ground it had religiously stood over.
Turns out, forever lasts three months.
Delia was inconsolable for four.
Had Adam been less of a man, he would have said she was Delia-stroyed or Delia-evestated, but instead he gave her hot cocoa and listened to her play what she insisted was a melancholy tune on her triangle 'to cleanse away the bad omens'. In reality, it sounded like a cheery death march, but Adam had never been one to judge the eccentricities of the living.
Barbara, bless her dead soul, had tried to coax her into finding a new hobby. Planting, perhaps?
Meanwhile, the goth just shrugged at her step mum's antics, relieved that her midnight smoke escapes now no longer included avoiding the crooked stares of Delia's first attempt at ceramics.
It did, however, include a very lengthy talk about "lung disease, skin like grilled cheese, and saggy old asses," all of which were things that would happen to her if she kept up that nasty habit. At least, that's what Charles had insisted would happen to her eventually when he caught her leaning out of the kitchen window and finishing off a packet of cigarettes one night when he came down for a midnight snack.
The lecture lasted about ten minutes before the unmistakable sound of the bins being tipped over and the newly-potted plant pots shattering alerted the duo of their newfound company and they stilled, staring at each other in moment of blind panic.
Those were Delia's plants.
"I'll scream and you get the shovel?"
"Deal."
Lydia giggled whilst she reached into the cupboard and heard her father scream into the star spotted ether, followed by the faint tapping of furry footsteps retreating. She threw the shovel into the black abyss for good measure, wheezing as it landed haphazardly onto the single survivor of Delia's potted plants. Then, silence.
"She's going to kill us."
"She might not notice."
"Nothing slips passed an unmedicated Delia, Dad."
"I'll buy replacements." Charles had never been so happy that Delia had been having an affair with Prince Valium that night.
"Sweetie, hide the shovel."
Needless to say, when they heard the knock from the front door and opened it to find red and blue lights intermittently glare at them, followed by a police officer with dark circles under his eyes and a pallid, sleep deprived expression on his face, the father and daughter duo were less than surprised.
In their haste, Lydia had forgotten to get rid of the shovel.
"Squirrels again, Mr Deetz?" Officer Nardole asked between yawns, spotting the item the goth was failing to hide behind her back.
He was met with twin sheepish grins and he sighed, heading back to his car after giving them both a warning and telling them to "Get a damn exterminator if you have to - also, it's Matthew's birthday next week and you're all invited."
"Only if you stock up on Delia's favourite wine!"
"They're in the fridge right now!" the sound of Officer Nardole's chuckle drifted out of his open window as he drove off down the hill.
The Nardoles were always sweet on them. Lydia, especially, ever since she insisted they hire her pro bono to photograph their wedding the month prior. She offered the same for Matthew's birthday, of which Jacob was more than happy to accept in his sleepy haze. Matt had so loved their wedding photos after all.
Lydia didn't think about the head until it returned.
Three months to the day, the head crawled back to its final resting place besides her vintage lamp and ink well. Without its fully rotted flesh and fur, she found its hollow sockets and chiseled cheekbones were considerably more palatable to share desk space with. Though still smelling putrid, a quick wash under the tap got rid of most of the soil and death, and a few spritz of Barbara's old perfume gave it a lavender aroma that didn't remind her of its glassy glaring eyes or its blood on her calculus term paper (that was something she could never fully explain to Miss Shannon).
She tucked the skull back where it was and worked on her psychology homework.
Between explaining the differences between asocial and antisocial people, the smell of lavender tickled her nose and she sneezed, getting up to grab a tissue only to catch a glimpse of Delia in the garden from outside her window. From what she could see, her step mum was bending down curiously to see a single wilted petunia behind her pristine pots.
"Oh god."
Lydia blew into the tissue and prayed.
"LYDIA!"
Her head dropped. Apparently, God was a sadist.