Chapter Text
After only three days as a patient of Winter Garden Paediatric Hospital, Lydia Deetz has already gained a reputation among nursing staff as somewhat of a magician. You see, she's supposed to be a girl with impeded strength and stamina, according to her physical therapist, thrown off-balance by the trauma to her head. She's barely started managing self-propelling her wheelchair. And yet, within a few hours of getting herself rolling, she was escorted back to her ward by the nurse who spotted her heading past their station, armed with a camera and a rather casual air about what she was doing there unsupervised. This would only be mildly concerning, if it weren't for the fact that said station was halfway across the hospital.
When questioned, Lydia had simply shrugged and mumbled something about photography, before asking that the curtains be drawn around her bed again. Easier that than explain the demon she talked into pushing her once her arms got tired. The same demon who, two days and a few more vanishing acts later, is pacing back and forth behind the chair she's parked in the hospital garden.
"A coma dream?" Beetlejuice asks, spitting her words back at her like they taste bitter. Lydia doesn't look away from the viewfinder of her camera.
"Mhm," she hums.
"Seriously?!"
"Yep."
"I have never been so insulted in all my existence."
"I doubt that."
"Aren't you mad?"
She sets the camera down in her lap when she hears his pacing pause, twisting to look at her demonic companion. He's red with anger, quite literally, and staring at her with eyes far too bright to pass as human. She matches his energy with none of her own.
"I'm furious," she deadpans, releasing her brake so she can turn to comfortably face him. "Beej, what did you expect him to think? A coma dream or an imaginary friend is a pretty rational explanation."
The demon folds his arms, still hurt, but relenting. "You wish you could imagine me up," he mutters as the red fades back into green. Lydia rolls her eyes.
"I didn't plan on mentioning you at all," she says, "because I knew this would be the response. It slipped out when he asked how I came up with the name Bonebag, and now apparently you've been lumped in with the coping mechanisms."
"I resent that. I'm the opposite of a coping mechanism. I'm an anti- coping mechanism. Tell him that next time."
“Sure, yeah, I’ll tell my therapist that the demon following me around says he’s not imaginary. That’ll help.”
Turning back around, Lydia raises her camera again. Beetlejuice takes a seat on the path beside her.
“Why was he asking about Bones?” he asks.
Lydia shrugs. “Something about physio raising concerns. Apparently getting pissed off at my physical form and swearing at it with its own name wasn't very mentally stable of me."
"I thought that was pretty reasonable. Bonebag really dropped the ball with the whole atrophy thing."
Before Lydia can point out the fact that Bonebag really had no way to avoid the atrophy, the conversation is interrupted by a voice from behind them.
"Miss Deetz!"
Startled, Lydia scrambles to put down her camera and turn the chair around yet again. But she relaxes slightly when she sees who it is walking down the path towards her.
“Oh, hey Liam,” she says.
The nurse raises his eyebrows, coming to a stop a few feet from her. “Whatcha up to out here, hm?”
“Taking photos? I saw the trees out here from the window in the ward, thought I could do something cool with them.”
“And you know what else you can see from the ward? That bright yellow pompom. You ain’t slick, Lydia, and you need to stop sneaking out.”
At the mention of her hat, Lydia reaches up to somewhat defensively adjust it on her head before she grabs her pushrims again. “I wasn’t sneaking out,” she says, not looking at him as she struggles momentarily with her wheels - it’s still a little tricky to get herself started. “I just left. Not my fault nobody noticed.”
“You’re not supposed to be unsupervised,” Liam points out, turning to walk back the way he came alongside her.
Lydia doesn’t answer that, preoccupied with glancing over her shoulder to check that Beetlejuice is getting to his feet to follow them. The nurse follows her gaze - seeing nothing behind them, of course - before speaking again.
“Who were you talking to?” he asks.
“Nobody.”
“Well, nobody seemed to be quite the conversation partner.”
“I think you’re just jealous that I’m interesting enough on my own that I don’t need someone else to have a good chat.”
He doesn’t look convinced. Lydia rolls her eyes.
“I’m not going mad, if that’s what you think. It’s head trauma-” she taps her left temple, a few inches from the scar that now runs over her scalp “-not a lobotomy.”
Liam stifles a snort of laughter. “I think that’s between you and your therapist,” he says.
With an offer of help from the nurse turned down, Lydia gets back to her bed in the corner of Ward 18 near enough exhausted. She lays on top of the covers, stifling a yawn as Liam unwraps the bandage protecting the cannula in the back of her hand, nodding when he asks if she wants the curtains drawn.
Supposedly alone, Lydia glances over at her bedside cabinet, considering whether she has the energy to take a book from it and try to read. Probably not. On the other side of the bed, Beetlejuice flops down into her now-vacant wheelchair.
“So,” he says, releasing the brake so he can plant his feet on the floor and rock himself back and forth, “what we doing ‘till your dad comes in?”
Lydia shrugs. “Taking a nap, maybe,” she mumbles. “Maybe just watching my drip… drip…”
The two of them turn their eyes to the IV bag hung by the bed. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t do anything particularly interesting.
“You reckon they just hook you up to it to stop you wandering off?” Beetlejuice suggests.
“You think I’m annoying enough to commit medical malpractice over?”
“‘Course you are.” It’s said like a compliment.
Lydia rolls her eyes as she digs in the pocket of her jogging bottoms for her phone. 15:02, the screen says. Her dad will be coming over straight from work, but for now he’s still in the office and will be for a few hours. She tosses the phone onto her cabinet, letting out a heavy breath. In weeks past, when she and Beetlejuice were both invisible and two broken legs still worked well enough to hold her up, she wouldn’t have cared. They would have danced and sang to whatever shitty pop song was playing on the radio, thrown insults back and forth and laughed as loud as they pleased, and time would have passed like it was nothing. And sure, that wouldn’t stay entertaining forever, but at least it was better than this. Now it’s just large-print, painfully easy books she can barely read, phone games that lose novelty quick, and conversations she has to whisper.
“Hey, Beej?” she asks quietly.
“Yeah?”
“Do demons get stuck in places, like ghosts? Like how the Maitlands can’t leave the house?”
“When they’re invoked, yeah.”
She sighs. Just as she expected, he’d be stuck here if she said his name. “Can’t even make a demonic pact to pass the time,” she mutters, shifting to pull back the blanket.
But just as she’s attempting to settle in for a nap-
“Knock knock! I’m saying it out loud because you can’t knock on a curtain!”
-a child’s voice rings out from behind the curtain.
Lydia glances over at Beetlejuice, who looks just as confused as she is. She sits up, letting the blanket slip down into her lap.
“Uh… Come in?”
The curtain shifts away from the wall, and a young girl steps around it; Lydia recognises her as the kid who sleeps in the bed to her left. That, at least on a basic level, explains why she’s here. What it doesn’t explain, however, is why she’s in a girl scout uniform.
“The hell’s going on here?” Beetlejuice mutters.
“...Can I help you?” Lydia asks.
The girl raises onto her toes slightly, eyes wide. “Uh, hello, yes, um… I’m doing the cookie sale?”
She fiddles with her hair, looking expectantly up at Lydia. For a moment she only squints back, but then remembers - yeah, she does know what the hell this kid is going on about. First day she was here, someone mentioned some kid on the ward not being able to go out and sell girl scout cookies, and their parents asking if the other kids could be given a couple dollars so they could stage a more small-scale version at the hospital.
“Right, yeah,” Lydia nods, stifling another yawn. “Sorry, can’t help you there. Still getting back into the swing of digesting things, y’know?”
She holds up the hand hooked up to her IV. It’s no longer her sole source of nutrition, but the easy diet she’s on still needs a bit of support.
“Oh,” the younger girl says. “Sorry, I- I knew Benji couldn’t, but… I should have checked…”
“It’s fine,” Lydia shrugs. “I would if I could, trust me. I’m starting to forget what flavour is.”
The girl giggles. “Yeah, hospital food can be really nasty.”
“And boring as hell.”
The younger girl grins, rising onto her toes again. Lydia gives her a tired smile back. In all honesty, half of her wants to get this kid away before she inevitably gets annoying. But the other half is really, really bored.
“What’s your name?” she asks. She was introduced, briefly, to the rest of the ward when she arrived. But she was exhausted from the journey then and had fallen asleep straight after, and retained nothing.
“Skye. And you’re Lydia, right?”
“Right.”
Lydia catches her glance up at her head. She’s not sure whether the other kids have seen her without her hat on, since she tends to keep her curtains drawn. But she took it off when she got in, and the cropped patch of hair that lays irregularly over her scar is plain to see. Skye, apparently, is old enough to know she shouldn’t ask, but not enough to have the tact to stop looking.
Lydia raises her eyebrows, tapping the side of her head.
“I had a lobotomy.”
Skye’s face scrunches up, like she’s thinking hard. “Uh… huh…” she says slowly, clearly not having a clue what the older girl just said. “Well, congrats? Or I hope you feel better soon?”
Lydia stifles a laugh. “Yeah, you too.”
“Oh, I have arrhythmia, so it’s kinda an ongoing thing,” Skye says cheerfully, pulling aside her pinafore to show some sort of monitor clipped to her shirt. “I’m trying out some new treatment right now.”
“Oh. Right, well… I hope that goes well,” Lydia says, suddenly feeling a little bad for joking.
“Fingers crossed! But anyway, I should probably be going now.”
Lydia gives an absent-minded hum she turns away, glancing back down at her hand, and the IV line jutting out of it. Back to being bored out of her mind, she supposes. But Skye only gets as far as catching hold of the curtain again before an idea strikes the older girl, and she calls out to her.
“Hey, Skye?”
“Yeah?”
“What would you trade for a box of cookies?”
Lydia might not be able to make a demonic pact, but there’s always other ill-advised deals.
Letting go of the curtains, Skye steps back towards the bed. “Huh?”
“Look, I don’t have any money, but I am bored. What can I trade?”
“Wouldn’t that be dangerous for you?”
“You gotta take risks sometimes, right? I’ll be fine.”
Skye looks conflicted for a moment.
“Alright, if… If you’re sure. It’s meant to be to collect money for the scouts, so if you trade me something good I’ll pay for them for you.”
“Sure, deal. I haven’t got much with me right now, but I can always ask Dad to bring me something from home.”
Lydia swings her legs off the side of her bed and opens her cabinet as Skye takes the chair beside it. There’s a few things in there she’d be alright with parting with - some books that are probably targeted closer to Skye’s age anyway, some good-but-not-great polaroids - and she begins piling them on the tabletop.
“Oh, what about this?!”
Skye’s grabbed something off the shelf - a small shard of purple crystal. Lydia’s brow furrows.
“No, that’s… That’s not for trade.”
She holds out her hand and Skye hands it back, looking a little guilty. Lydia drops it onto the table.
“Is it one of those special, magic crystals?” the younger girl asks. Lydia shrugs.
“I don’t believe in that stuff. But it’s sentimental.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Lydia shrugs again, and nods to the things she’s pulled from the cabinet. “Anything else you fancy?”
Skye slowly, deliberately sifts through the pile. “I’m not… sure…”
Her gaze flicks towards where Beetlejuice is sitting on the other side of the bed, though of course she doesn’t see the demon. Lydia narrows her eyes.
“C’mon, I can tell there’s something you don’t want to ask for,” she says. “Just say it. You never know, I’m kinda desperate.”
Skye squirms in her seat, fidgeting with her hands. “I, uh…” she stalls, before grabbing the edge of the chair and asking very quickly- “Let me have a go in your wheelchair?”
Lydia just raises her eyebrows.
“Sorry, no, that was really rude, wasn't it?” Skye quickly corrects. “I’ll think of something else, forget it, I’m sorry-”
“No, wait a minute.”
Skye looks up, confused, at the older girl as she ponders the request. She has to agree that yeah, it was kinda rude; she’s not particularly attached to the hospital loaned chair - she’s hoping she’s not going to have it much longer - but for now, that’s the only way she can get out of bed. She’s not lending it to a kid. Nonetheless, there could be room for a compromise there.
“Alright, I’m not going to let you ‘have a go’ in it,” she says. “But maybe I could let you sit on my lap? And then we could, I dunno, roll around for a bit, or whatever you wanted to do with it.”
Lydia isn't quite sure how that offer is going to be taken, but Skye seems to perk up on hearing it. “Oh, yeah! That sounds really fun!”
“Alright then. I don’t have the energy right now, and my dad’s coming in later anyway, but tomorrow?”
“Yeah! Deal!” Skye sticks out her hand. “But if I give you cookies,” she quickly adds, “it’s not my fault if you die.”
Lydia snorts. “Yeah, sure. I'll put it in my will.”
They shake on it, and Skye jumps to her feet and scurries back to the edge of the curtain, calling “bye!” over her shoulder as she goes. Lydia shoves the books and polaroids back into the cabinet, before settling under the blanket again. Beetlejuice, who ceased his rocking while Skye could have seen it, resumes pushing himself back and forth.
“So,” the demon says. “You came back to life just to play donkey for a kid, to get cookies?”
“You gotta do what you gotta do.” She holds up her hand again. “This does not taste good.”