Beetlejuice Oneshots

Our Daughter Needs You

This features: Charles Deetz, Lydia Deetz, (Emily Deetz is mentioned)

Warning: This is set at a funeral and mentions enbalming and grief. (I don't think that this is a necessary warning, but I'm putting it out here just to be safe.)

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Emily Deetz was a kind woman. Charles loved everything about her. She was kind, caring, humorous, understanding, and she also loved to barge into his room while he was reading, and frantically exclaim about how their house was haunted while a young Lydia, draped in sheets, prowled the halls.

That was the other thing. She would constantly prank everyone; the neighbors, Lydia, her friends, and sometimes even him.

She and Lydia would set up haunted houses in their garage in the middle of July. Neighbors found this quite annoying, as their old neighbor, David, let out a particularly feminine scream when he fled from their garage after Emily scared him. She was disguised as the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. In all honesty, Charles found this trait quite endearing since her pranks were usually pretty funny.

Charles knew that Emily was also very important to Lydia, because the two would always be seen together. In short, Emily was a brilliant mother. She would do the stupidest things in hindsight just because they made Lydia happy.

Once, according to Lydia, Emily had pretended to lose her keys as she screamed, "WE'RE BEING CHASED BY A MURDERER!" while she pretended to try to jam the door open while others looked at them strangely. Lydia didn't even mind the strange stares that they got just because she was with her mother. Emily loved anything out of the ordinary and even influenced her daughter to do the same.

She also always looked so beautiful, her light, blond hair lightly billowing in the wind as she chased their daughter around the local park with a radiant, mischievous smile on her face. He could say the same about their daughter, Lydia. Lydia inherited more from Emily than he thought was possible. They shared the same long blond hair and brown eyes which Charles didn't quite understand since it was supposedly a recessive trait, but he didn't know much about genetics anyway.

He couldn't say the same now, as he gazed into the open casket. Charles would describe Emily as lively, but her closed eyes, devoid of the warmth she usually radiated in, proved otherwise. Her skin was pale, and her normally long hair cut was short, hanging at her jawline. He could also faintly smell the embalming fluid that they used to preserve her body. He clenched his teeth, tears stinging his eyes as they threatened to fall, but no. He couldn't break. He had to stay strong, for his family, for his Lydia.
He grabbed Emily's cold, hard hand and gently caressed it with his thumb as he murmured his final words to her. He remembered what she had said to him.

'Charles. It's okay. I know you want to fix it, but you have to accept it– live through it. Together. Our daughter, she needs you.'
And that was the last thing he had ever heard from her. It was a vague message, and he didn't really understand what she meant. He knew that Emily had accepted her death, but how was he supposed to? They had a whole life ahead of them, a family to tend to. Now she was gone, merely a happy memory among all the sad ones that awaited him in the future. He didn't know if he would ever be able to look back on those memories without breaking, which instilled a bittersweet feeling into his mind, causing his chest to ache with a sense of longing. He couldn't say the same for Lydia though.

The teenager slowly approached the casket as he walked away from it. A clear solemn expression dominated her hardened features despite the veil that covered her face. In her gloved hand, she held a rose. The blood-red flower was clenched tightly against her chest as if she was internally sobbing. She used her other hand to lift the veil that was in front of her face as she gazed sorrowfully at her deceased mother. Her arm shook as she slowly reached out for her mother's hand, subtly flinching at the coldness of it. She carefully opened Emily's palm and gently slid the flower into it, closing her hand afterward. It was a single, elegant red rose among the white lilies, like a drop of blood on a sheet of clean white fabric.