TITLE: Incarceration
RATING: T (teetering on M for language, mainly)
DISCLAIMER: Geffen owns Beetlejuice. Not me. I only own Caroline.
DISTRIBUTION: Here and whoever wants it can have it. Just ask.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Movie-verse. Written after a conversation that my best friend and I had one night after watching the movie for the billionth time. I think this is the fastest I’ve ever written anything. Besides essay responses for Critical Thinking and Modern History. I started on January 29th and finished on February 10th. On another note, we should have a separate category for the movie-verse. Seriously.

Chapter One:

He’d been waiting for his number to be called for at least a year or two. The witch doctor had come and gone in that space of time—resizing Betelgeuse’s head as he left for wherever the hell he was supposed to be. The poltergeist had been sitting on that ratty sofa—staring at a blank wall for so long, in fact, that he was the only one left in the waiting room at all.

It gave him plenty of time to think.

Mainly about the slip of a girl who asked for his help and then reneged on their deal.

He knew he should have been mad—furious even. To the point of violence, perhaps. But each time he thought about Lydia Deetz, a slow grin spread across his cheeks. She’d gotten the better of the Ghost with the Most. Go her.

Across the room, Miss Argentina slammed her window open and gave him a dark look that—had she been anything other than green—would have been intimidating. “You’re up,” she snarked.

Betelgeuse stood from the tattered sofa, tugged on his hideous tuxedo jacket, and was engulfed in an enormous cloud of dust. He ignored it and walked through the doors to find Juno’s office.

It was where it had always been and she was still the same—cigarette planted between her painted lips and smoke pouring out of the slit in her throat. She rounded on Betelgeuse with a glare. “Just what the hell were you thinking?”

“When, out in the waiting room? Because that’s some pretty boring shit, Junie.”

Juno prowled around the corner of her desk and looked him up and down. “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about, B,” she then poked hard at his midsection and frowned even deeper (if that was possible). “What’s with the pillow?”

Betelgeuse let out a gusting sigh and dug under his ruffled shirt to pull said pillow out. “You got me. You know as well as I do that a disgustingly overweight poltergeist is always more intimidating than a disgustingly skinny one.”

She snatched the pillow from him and put her cigarette out on it. “I cannot believe we used to work together,” she muttered.

Betelgeuse snapped his fingers and was back in his favorite black and white striped suit. Juno’s head snapped up to return that glare on him and she snarled—a newly lit cigarette appearing in her hand out of nowhere.

“While you were waiting out there I was in here pleading your case. You should be thanking me for saving your ass from an exorcism!”

Betelgeuse frowned. “What the fuck?! I only did what the Maitlands and that Deetz girl asked me to! You know how that works!”

Juno poked him again—this time right against his breastbone with the end of her fingernail. “It doesn’t work that way, Beej! You tried to re-enter the Outerworld by marrying that girl. You just can’t do that! You’re dead. You’ve been dead for over 600 years. You would think you’d be used to it by now!”

Betelgeuse shoved her hand away and poked her just as hard in the same place. His many watches cracked together on his arm with the force of it. “But I’m not used to it! That’s the point!”

Juno backed up and leaned against her desk whilst taking a drag off her cigarette. “This doesn’t change the fact that you still have a punishment you need to fulfill,” she admitted.

Betelgeuse would have paled had he been able to. “What is it?” he asked.

“Sit,” Juno ordered.

“My ass is sore from sitting for two years in that waiting room, I’ll stand.”

Juno frowned thunderously. “Then sit your sore ass down and let me explain what’s going to happen to you!”

It was never going to be a good conversation when both participants were pissed off beyond the normal parameters of anger. The air around Betelgeuse was crackling with energy, but he sat down like he was told to.

“You were going to be exorcised. Instead, you’re going to serve time.”

Betelgeuse couldn’t resist. “How?”

Juno reached into her desk and pulled out a ring with a hinged compartment on top—a poison ring. “You’re going to be imprisoned in here for the duration of Lydia Deetz’s life on Earth.”

She opened the poison compartment and chains shot out from inside. They wrapped around Betelgeuse and started to tug. He snarled at Juno and struggled against the cords of iron. “How the fuck is this better than an exorcism?!” he yelled.

“Once Lydia Deetz finds it in her heart to forgive you for what you’ve done, she can let you out and you can return here to the Neitherworld when she wishes.”

“I saved those country bumpkins from a fate worse than death and I’m being punished like this for doing what that goddamn teenager asked me to?!”

Juno shrugged. “Sorry, Beej.”

The chains were wrapping around his throat. “No you’re not.”

His mouth was covered and he was sucked violently into the ring. Juno calmly closed it and tapped a column of ash off the end of her cigarette. Barbara and Adam Maitland stepped out from behind her desk and eyed the ring in her hand with guilt on their open faces. Juno saw this and scoffed.

“Oh, the bastard deserved it,” she grunted and tossed the ring in Barbara’s general direction. The woman caught it and stared at the design etched into the lid.

“But, Juno, he did tell you the truth. He saved us…”

“Eh,” Juno shrugged. “Whatever. Get the hell out of here and give that ring to the Deetz girl. B is her property now. Says so on the ring.”

Adam could sense his wife’s need to discuss this further and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Barb. Let’s just go.”

Barbara shuffled along beside him as they walked down the hall of doors. She never took her eyes off the ring in her hands.

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