Timeless *REWRITTEN* (Beetlejuice x Reader)

Chapter 1

For most of my life, I had been told that my "duty" as a woman was to be a model wife and prepare to raise a model family for the greater good of Italy. This sentiment was increased tenfold when I was 17, and word of the Fascist party taking control reached my family's spacious home on the coast in Ancona, just a little ways from Portonovo. I remember distracting my two youngest sisters with dolls and a make-believe tea party as my parents talked in hushed tones in the room next to us. I pretended to be engrossed in play, but would try my best to sneak glances and to detect bits and pieces of their worried conversation. 

My father was a politician, and once Mussolini came into power, worked directly for the dictator. I didn't know exactly what my father's duties in that capacity entailed, but the less I knew, the better; I didn't ask questions. 

I never accepted the Fascists' way of thinking. Something about it seemed wrong. It felt flawed. I never expressed any of these inner thoughts with anyone in my family, because none of them would have taken me seriously, anyway. Women's opinions only mattered in politics when they upheld the previously established beliefs of the very men forcing those opinions onto them in the first place. It drove me wild, but I did my best to hold my tongue and refrain from complaining about the system. The only place I felt comfortable and safe enough to do so was in my journal. The little leather-bound book had been my companion ever since my eighteenth birthday- a gift from my eldest brother Oreste before he went off to the military -and I carried it with me everywhere. 

It was a fairly nice day in 1927 when I decided to look back through it. Sitting down on my favorite rock overlooking the bluff, I tucked my legs up under me. The rock was smooth, worn from years of a young girl perching on top of it as she wrote about her innermost thoughts and feelings. In that same exact spot, my fingers flipped back through the tattered pages, glancing at different entries, often accompanied by a quick sketch, doodle, or sometimes even dried leaves and flowers pressed directly into the page. I smiled as I came to one entry from four years prior, shortly after I had received the journal from Oreste. I was hit with the fragrant scent from the petals of an Etruscan Saffron that I had somehow managed to stumble upon. 

"I can't believe I found one of these! Mama says they're super rare, and I managed to find one! I wish I could show Oreste, but he left yesterday to go rejoin the others at the capitol. 

"I don't understand all of these men fighting for a system that doesn't care anything about them. Oreste says that things will get better, and that one day the economy will be the best in the world; that Italy will expand its borders to the horizons and far beyond. I'm not sure that I want Italy to grow that much. What if its expanse is so vast that I won't be able to find my way back home? What if the Italy they want is not the Italy I want? 

"Oreste and Domizio got into another fight yesterday. I think Dom was drunk. I wish they could get along. I know things are hard right now, but Mama needs for us to behave. She's not getting any better, and hasn't gotten out of bed, today. I hope the fever breaks, soon. Papa says that the doctor told him she should be feeling better by tomorrow. I'm not sure if I believe him." 

I frowned a bit as I read the last bit, remembering the unease and anguish I had felt as I penned it. Sometimes my parents thought that hiding the truth from their children equated to protecting them. I didn't see it that way. I felt unnerved and frustrated by the unknown and what lies beyond it. Yet, my parents did what they could to keep my siblings and me relatively happy and carefree. That included reassuring me and the twins, Rosetta and Chiara, that Mama was sick, yes, but she was getting better! Any day, now, the fever would break and she would be back to normal! 

Little Rosetta and Chiara never once doubted the things my father told them. How could they? Their young minds couldn't begin to reconcile with the fact that our mother was dying from Scarlet Fever. So they believed every word of what Papa would tell us. And I never begrudged them that. They were only twelve, after all.