When you die, they make a list

Of every love you never kissed

Of each regret, and each mistake.

Every choice you failed to make.

-Next Time, Bare Naked Ladies

Chapter One

How close we are

Betelgeuse, former bio-exorcist, ultimately the greatest prankster, and (excluding the fact that he only had a sad memory of his former power) the ghost with the most, tottled along with Lydia as she hustled and bustled her way through a less than easy life unnoticed and unhelpful.

After all, it was dificult to be of any use when you couldn't even hold a proper form.

For a while, Betelgeuse had held on to the bitter anger towards Lydia Deetz for foiling his plans to be free. He was this close to being a free man, this close to having everything he could have possibly wished for.

Well, not everything. . . but it was close enough.

So when he had nearly died – again – he tethered himself neatly to Lydia, determined to make her suffer as he had suffered. But as the days turned in to weeks, and the weeks in to months, Betelgeuse began to notice little things about her. . . the way her smile never quite reached her eyes, the way her nose wrinkled at the thought of vegetables, and the way she would chew nervously on the inside of her cheek while studying.

He had tethered himself to her in hopes of destroying her.

He came this close to admitting to himself that it wasn't the reason he stayed. . .

Juno had asked him once how he managed to pull it off – even with all his powers, it was unheard of for a ghost with no reason to keep unliving to go on. And with Betelgeuse's dreams of being free so throughly obliterated, his only anchor to the mortal world should have been severed.

He had told her that it was his hatred for Lydia that had kept him there. It wasn't the truth, but it was so close that she probably couldn't tell that his hatred wasn't hateful at all. . . in fact, if Juno had cared enough to investigate it a bit, she might have been surprised to see that Betelgeuse's 'hatred' was in reality far closer to 'obsession.'

So Betelgeuse had remained anchored – barely – and was always this close to slipping away, the tiny, shimerring threads that tied him to the mortal world, to Lydia, quivering with the weight of his lonliness. His form was barely a whisper of cold breath on the back of Lydia's neck, a formless spector who hung around her to – what? Be a little closer to the one he might have loved? See her in every waking and sleeping moment? To wait for her to show some sign, any sign, that she remembered him too?

Betelgeuse was this close to letting her go, this close in believing that she had pushed him to the back of her mind, when one day she stopped and shivered. Betelgeuse threw himself around her in that moment, enveloping her in a shifting mist of ectoplasm and loosely strung together life force. That was all he could do. . . his form wasn't tied tightly enough to her world to even give her a message. But he was this close. . .

"Betelgeuse?" She questioned, her brown eyes, thicked heavy with mascara and shadow, darted this way and that, and her hand flew to the base of her throat in one of the oldest ways a woman would protect herself from evil. "Are you there?"

Yes. . . Betelgeuse thought so loudly that for a moment, he thought that maybe she could hear him. After all, they were this close. . .

"Silly me." Whispered Lydia, shaking her head. For a moment, Betelgeuse thought that maybe her eyes had misted over, that maybe she was locked in a bitter nostalgia. But then a harsh light seeped in to them, and she looked the same as he always remembered. "He's gone."

Silly girl, indeed. Betelgeuse agreed. But with the whisper of his name – only once – the cords that tied him to her world began to thicken, binding themselves around himself and her. He was by no means even a shadow of his former self, but if he had been able to find a mirror, he would have seen glowing green eyes staring back from an otherwise empty fog. By the whisper of his name, he managed to whisper three words. . .

You aren't silly.

Lydia eeped, and jumped uneasily. Her eyes darted a little more frantically than before, before she took off at an easy pace. . . probably hoping to outrun the ghosts of her past at a slight jog.

But the threads of fate had thicked in to yards of yarn, and they pulled Betelgeuse along beside her. Betelgeuse smiled in spite of himself, feeling a bit whimsical and happier than he had been in a very long time.

In fact, if he could have, Betelgeuse was sure that he would have laughed.