Out of Sight, Out of Mind//A Beetlejuice Fanfiction

||Chapter Seven|| Rules, Schmules!

"Why do we have to go through this again?!" complained Betelgeuse. Great, he was bored and they'd gone over the house rules with him fifteen times. He wasn't even listening, to be fair, and that was driving the rest of the family insane. Not one of them wanted to know how many times it was going to take until he actually listened and understood all the rules they had been telling him about for the past two hours and they didn't need to know.

"Because you need to follow these house rules if you're going to stay here," calmly replied Barbara? "Otherwise you're going to have to go back to the Netherworld. Understood?"

Again, Betelgeuse decided not to listen. "Rules, schmules! I'd rather do something other than listening to you guys go over these stupid things."

"Do you want to stay here or not?" deadpanned Barbara, raising an eyebrow and folding her arms. She scowled up at Betelgeuse from where she and the rest of the family were sitting on the couch and none of them looked to be too pleased.

"Yeah...." he admitted. "I have nowhere else to go. Turned out the Netherworld was thrown into chaos after I got rid of my mom and they threatened me with the same fate as her if I didn't leave that soon. I'm lucky Lydia made that wish. Otherwise I wouldn't have known it was safest to come straight back here. Of course, I knew how you all were going to react to me showing up again and I prepared myself for the worst."

"Oh, you poor thing," said Barbara as she and Adam teleported up to him and wrapped their arms around him in the first hug he'd been a part of since he bid farewell to them the week they'd all first met. "If you'd told us from the beginning, we wouldn't have attacked you. Come here."

She pulled him down to a chair opposite the couch and sat him down in it before she and Adam went and sat back down on the couch with the Deetzes. Barbara summoned a blanket and wrapped it around Betelgeuse.

He was happier. They were more caring towards him than his mother ever was and he was thankful for that. He snuggled into the blanket then levitated it above his head and letting it drop onto him. Everyone else laughed (they loved that joke. Lydia was the one who often pulled that joke and it never failed to amuse her family. It was one of their favorite games to play together).

"Hey! I know that joke! I'm gonna do it again!" announced Lydia as she stood up and walked over to where Betelgeuse was sitting. She pulled the blanket off of him. He pulled a funny face at her and she did the same before turning to her family and throwing the blanket over her head.

Almost instantaneously, her family burst into laughter and Lydia smiled from underneath the blanket before taking it off and throwing it back in Betelgeuse's direction. He pretended to grab it and it nearly landed in the fireplace and caught on fire (luckily it missed but it was still singed a little around the edges. Barbara used her powers to levitate the blanket into the air then snapped her fingers and the singed side of the blanket reverted to normal. She levitated the blanket back down onto Betelgeuse and he pretended to snuggle into it again before he rolled it into a ball and used his powers to levitate and chuck it back at Lydia.

"Lydia, that joke is never going to get old but please try to be more careful when you throw a blanket next time," said Barbara as she wiped a false tear from her eye.

Lydia, who was participating in an intense game of "throw the blanket back and forth" with Betelgeuse, turned to look at Barbara. "I'd like to see you and Adam pull the same joke on me sometime soon. Maybe even with Betelgeuse. It's gonna be even funnier if the three of you do it together."

"Well, we could but don't you think it would be even funnier if the four of us did it to your dad and Delia?" asked Barbara, bursting into laughter.

"Well.... we could do that." Lydia, Adam, Barbara, and Betelgeuse looked over towards both Charles and Delia with playful smirks on their faces and the two living adults looked at each other nervously before leaving the room.

"We'll go over the house rules with Betelgeuse some other time!" called out Delia.

That left Lydia and all three deceased people alone in the living room and they glanced at one another knowingly. They knew now was the time to pull the prank together on Charles and Delia and they were hopefully going to make the two living adults laugh as loud as they could.

Hopefully.