Semiconscious

No matter how you see them, or what they do or say
People are not good or bad--just a thousand shades of grey

She finds, more and more often, that she does her best photography when she is only half-awake – in that dim, semi-conscious state of near exhaustion, courting the sweet kiss of reprieve. Her photos lack focus, and blur a bit at the edges, but she thinks that it makes her unique, and she thinks it makes the photos look softer.

He comes to her at that time, for he is still far too weak to create a form for himself. But he comes to her none the less, and finds himself staring at the little girl-child.

She’s a cur, the little bitch, with pale skin that is only accentuated by the dark, heavy clothing that hangs on to her, weighing her down

(downdown)

She wears a black veil, and he muses that at their wedding, she had worn none. Maybe she would have preferred it, he thinks sardonically to himself. Maybe it would have given her a sense of familiarity.

But he knows it wouldn’t have.

Little bitch.

She snaps away fast shots of useless, trivial things, and even though he hates her, he absolutely adores this – that she can find something so trite and make it something so magically.

Or maybe that is him making her to be something more than a frail little girl-child.

This girl – this fucking girl – is the epiphany of everything that he hated. She was innocent, with rules, and a sense of justice, and a kind heart. Sometimes she whispers his name – barely – under a heavy breath, and he sees something akin to pity in her eyes.

He fucking hates her.

Which doesn’t explain at all why he loves her.

Snap click crick

The endless sound of photos as they tumble through the camera – that fucking camera – mock his very existence in a monotonous drone of film and gadgets.

Her fingers are long and smooth, and have never seen a day of hard labor in their life, tap at the shot, over and over again, because she is thorough and appreciates a job done well. Those same smooth, long fingers, trace the edges of the film as the photographs develop, delicate and soft as a whisper along the photo paper.

Betelgeuse wishes she would touch him like that. Betelgeuse reminds himself it’s never gonna happen.

Not that he couldn’t convince the stupid bitch to crawl in to his bed, and to beg for his caress, it’s just that Betelgeuse would personally rather kiss a sandworm.

Even if the dip of her neck does smell awfully tasty. . .

Lydia shivers and gives the clock at her bedside four suspicious glances to be sure that the time reads right, for her vision is blurry in this state of semi-consciousness. 3:10, the clock shines merrily in the darkness.

She glances around her room, because she knows that he’s there, watching her, and she snaps off a few photos, because she hopes that one day she can catch him on film.

If he knew that was the reason she was so adamant about taking photos every night –

(which he didn’t)

then maybe he would feel a little more guilty about planning the death of that frail, lying bitch.

(which he does)

He owns her soul.

She just doesn’t know it.

She thinks she has escaped him – that even though he hangs around her like a plague, that he has no power over her.

But she promised him a marriage; and Betelgeuse likes to think that he believes in keeping promises.

Which he doesn’t.

But that little fucker didn’t need to know that.

Betelgeuse is lingering at Lydia’s shoulder, and Betelgeuse is floating near Lydia’s side.

Barbara, ever the watchful surrogate, is the second one to notice him, and she whispers to Adam worriedly.

Betelgeuse hates them too.

Those two – the suckers that he had scouted out over a lifetime ago – were the ones who lead him to Lydia. He hates them for calling him there. Betelgeuse hates them for being so goddamned spoilt that they couldn’t deal with a single family themselves. Betelgeuse hates them for wanting that frail little bitch out of their house in the first place.

But mostly Betelgeuse hates them for being so fucking happy, when he was so fucking alone.

And if he ever gets the chance, he’s going to show them how much he hates them, by exercising them.

They deserve it, nearly as much as he does.

He isn’t looking, and she snaps a quick shot with a Polaroid. He looks over at her with a dead pan look, because it’s the middle of the day and he knows she takes her best shots at night, but she holding the snapshot to her chest and has a fucking smile, and he feels nothing but contempt for her.

Almost.

“What are you smiling at?” He wonders angrily, because she can’t hear him, and therefore, she can’t answer him, but mostly, she can’t even see him. He leans in, and traces the edges of her cheek bones with a filthy fingertip. Her eyes are sunken, and he knows that the little sleep she has been getting hasn’t been nearly enough, and that the fucking bitch is gonna to go comatose on him before he can even think out a fitting punishment for her.

Lydia looks down at the photo, and smiles. “Caught ‘cha.” She says, and holds up the picture of him, as if she proud of it.

Betelgeuse studies it, and sees that she didn’t really catch him, that all she caught was the remnants of his ectoplasm, the left over aura from when he was alive. He looks at his, and then at hers. Her aura fell off of her in waves, doing wonders to light her pale skin and cast away the dark dreary her clothes gave her. If he could surf, he could have ridden her aura clear to heaven. . .

Betelgeuse is on his feet in an instant, trying to put as much space in between him and her as he can, because (and he practically hisses as he realizes it) that maybe she’s getting to him.

Barbara and Adam fade in, and Betelgeuse wonders what she’ll do now – after all, if Juno were to find out he were haunting her, she could have him exercised.

But Lydia surprises him, and tucks the polaroid in to her pocket, and gives Barbara and Adam the sort of smile he is beginning to wish she would give him.

Betelgeuse frowns, and his golden eyes darken, and he knows that the emotion that is filling him is -

(should be)

- loathing.

Which doesn’t explain why it felt so much like . . .

The shoot tonight is quick and unimaginative, and Betelgeuse pretends not to notice that she isn't really focusing her cameras on the still, previously shot, flowers, but rather on various places of he room where he might be, and various corners where he might

be.

The Polaroid’s develop – he wishes she would at least try to catch him on something classier than a polaroid - and she vocalizes her complaints with a mewl from the back of her throat. With every click of the cameras, though, she brightens – scanning the print for any signs that he was still there. And every time she is disappointed, she raises her pitch just a little higher until her protests are screams.

“Fine!” Lydia growls out at Betelgeuse, and runs a hand through her long, dark tresses. “I’m done with you!” She says, and flops unceremoniously on to the bed with a sigh and a whimper, not bothering to turn out the lights.

Betelgeuse ignores her, and flicks off the switch, and tries to ignore the pang of sorrow when she flinches. He sighs twice before magicking himself to her side, and curls himself coldly against her back, a dead man who isn’t entirely sure of his feelings, and definitely not sure of what he’s going to do. Other than sleep.

He rather enjoys sleeping.

Betelgeuse's corpse was still warm when he learned that ghosts don’t need to sleep. Sleep is for people, because people have a body that needs rest to heal itself. But Betelgeuse, for reasons of familiarity, he supposed, could still feel the creeping warmth of sleep for years, and he allowed himself to slip in to a blissful, dreamless state of unawareness – not sleep, by any means. Because in order to sleep, you need a body.

And Betelgeuse didn’t have a body. Betelgeuse didn’t have that much at all. Because Betelgeuse isn’t mortal anymore.

But she is.

The knowledge had always stung – like a slap across the face – and he swears violently and jerks, and his shoulder (which isn’t really there) hits the edge of her bed, and he recognizes a shot of pain (which is also not really there) as his ‘funny bone’ is touched.

Betelgeuse laughs. He laughs with a horrible, screeching, angry tone that bounces hollowly off of the walls of the room, soundless to everyone but him, and even he thinks that the laugh is a bit eerily. But still he laughs, thinking up images of Lydia’s rotting carcass being buried in some hole, the same carcass being rotted away with time, because nature doesn’t treat anyone different because nature is the biggest fucker of them all. She is mortal, and one day she will die, and then he will move on, because this house is already empty, and it doesn’t need anymore of his kind of emptiness.

But he laughs, in the dark of the night, and no one notices.

And when he’s done laughing, he cries.

The man that Lydia has brought home with her is young, but still older than her, and he eyes her with a hunger that Betelgeuse knows is in his eyes (that don’t exist) as well. The man that Lydia has brought home eyes her as if she is prey.

Incidentally enough, Betelgeuse is eyeing him like he’s prey.

“C’mon baby,” his whispers in to the curve of her neck, her pale, smooth neck, and she lifts it up and presents the softest, most vulnerable part of it to his administrations. “You’re parents aren’t home, and no one will be until morning.”

Lydia nods, and he leads her backwards, and Betelgeuse can feel the sex in the room before he can even think to reach for third.

And when he tries, Betelgeuse lifts him up off of her and throws him across the room.

Lydia is oddly silent during this exchange, and she has a wicked grin playing on the treacherous snake’s pit she calls a mouth.

“Betelgeuse.” She croons, and reaches under her pillow for a hidden polaroid. “Smile.”

Betelgeuse is blinded, and he stumbles against her bed post, and forgets that it can’t hold him.

Faintly, from the corner of his eye, Betelgeuse computes that the man has fled – but mostly he is focused on the treacherous little bitch who is slinking sexily (god help him!) towards him.

“You’re there, aren’t you?” She asks, pulling her bottom lip in to her mouth and then releasing it. “You’re there, and I want you to hear me now: You will leave this place.”

Something in her manner – cocky though it is – is off, and she casts a shy look down. If Betelgeuse had been blinded an instant later, he would have missed it. Luckily (for him) it was the first thing he saw.

“I’m not afraid of you.” She whispers with a false arrogance

(except she was)

“And you are not welcome here any longer, Betelgeuse.”

(except he never cared if he was welcomed in the first place)

She sighs, and flounces out of the room, and when she’s on the other side of the door, he hears her collapse. And if he had looked, he would have seen her shaking.

But Betelgeuse already has her number, and he doesn’t need to look to know that he’s won.

She returns to the room an hour later, and her make up is cleaned off, and the persona is gone, and Betelgeuse is laying in her bed.

But she doesn’t know that.

So when she falls in to the bed, exhausted from trying to hold the façade, she doesn’t know that he is wrapping his arms almost protectively around her.

And when she begins to falls asleep, she doesn’t know that he is crooning a tune to her that his mother used to sing to him.

And when she is snoring softly, she doesn’t feel him tremble in a sad, semi-conscious state.

He tries to get her to see him.

He sets lures and traps, and touches her constantly.

But he supposes that he is something odd, if he is even too unusual for Barbara or Adam to see him. But he also supposes that it’d be better if he had a form for them to see.

But nothing can be done about that.

Just like nothing can be done when a drunk driver pulls around the corner of the small town Main Street too fast and splatters her against the cold pavement before speeding away, not even stopping to see what the bump in the road was.

Betelgeuse knows she’s dead the second she’s hit, because his body (which wasn’t there, despite all his insisting) grows colder, and he feels himself distance himself from the world, because something inside of him hurts so bad he thinks he’s dying again.

And then he is so numb that he doesn’t remember rushing to her side, only that he was there, and that the pavement was the color of dried blood, and that it was cold and wet and dark from the ground up.

Betelgeuse looks around at the carnage – she is ripped to pieces, his pretty mortal girl-child now road kill

(highway pizza)

Her arm lays somewhere off to the side, twisted and broken in too many places to count. But he tries to count, because if he doesn’t, he’ll begin to notice that the air has a sharp metallic scent to it, and that he can see her ribs peeking out of her stomach, or that her arteries bleed a darker color than her veins.

He’s so busy not noticing, that he doesn’t notice that he’s actually holding her against him, his body (which shouldn’t exist, but does) is cradling hers as her hand (which is still so soft, so unbelievably cold), is grasped firmly in his. That body was his. Betelgeuse remembers distantly. He was the one that was supposed to break it to his will. He was the one who was supposed to make it bend. Not some drunken moron who didn’t even know that he had hit her.

“S’at me?” She asks, standing near him with a dim look of utter emptiness on her pale face.

Betelgeuse nodds mutely (which, he would later note, wasn't so odd, because he hadn't spoken to anyone in such a long time), and some of his sanity began to return.

“It was an accident, right?”

Betelgeuse gives his head another quick jerk, and stared steadfastly off in to space.

Lydia reaches around him, and grasps his hand, and her own. “Then s’kay.” She says with a smile and a gleam of acceptance.

And then Betelgeuse turns his hand from her cold one to the colder one, and grasps her tightly.

She leans in, and steals a kiss from him (which was weird, because he always thought that he was the one who stole kisses).

“I own your soul.” He tells her, brandishing her with a hard kiss.

“I know.” She sobs silently against him, falling in to his embrace.

“I love you.” He admits more quietly, and drops her dead body back on the pavement, opting instead to hold on to the wisps of her soul.

Lydia smiles against him. “I know.” Just like he already knows. . .

“Take me to heaven?” She asks, and wraps both of her arms around his neck, which shouldn’t exist, but does.

And Betelgeuse doesn’t feel the need to kill her anymore. In fact, Betelgeuse can think of much better ways to bend her, to break her.

“With pleasure.”