Author's note: I do not own Beetlejuice or any of the recognizable characters. All credits and rights to original and legal owners. Please review, favorite, and follow, as it means EVERYTHING to me!

Prologue, In These Years, In This Heart

"Happy birthday, Lydia dear," Arthur smiled as he laid a gentle peck against the soft skin of her pallid cheek. She smiled meekly, fatigued by the mere idea of growing any older.

"Thank you, Arthur." She responded, her voice dry and void of any real emotions. She had just turned 26, according to the codes of the earth. The world had gone one full trip around the bright star, and she had seen another year whither away like petals on a dying rose.

It wasn't that Arthur made her unhappy on this day, no, nor that he did not bring her any form of joy. It was that there was a vastly disconsolate and morose fraction of her heart that could not be filled. It was a locked piece, and the key had long since been lost in the tangled claws of her desires and sadness.

However, there was a skeleton key. Somewhere, past the great known and unknown alike, past the doors of both life and death, and far beyond the reaches of space, was a man.

He was by no means a gorgeous being, nothing glamorous about the way he appeared, and by no ones standards was he desirable. He was crude, vicious, vile, coldhearted, impertinent, bawdy, and in all ways brash. He was caked in years of filth and dross, and he delighted in the feeling of an animated roach slithering across his anemic flesh. The black and white stripes of his threadbare and hoary trousers scarcely covered his spindly ankles and lanky calves. His shape was nothing to behold, he was rotund around the area of his waist, a pale, somewhat fuzzy stomach, and he was, as a whole, rather dumpy. His flamboyantly colored violet shirt and tastefully striped waistcoat and tie did nothing to hide the gut he himself had no shame for.

Despite that, he had led Lydia through the greatest years of her life. He had grabbed her hand and whisked her away to a place, to a time, to a life she had never before fathomed. He risked her life, and his eternal afterlife, to cavort around the Neitherworld like a king amongst men, with her at his side, and adventures to be braved laid plain before them.

His name was Betelgeuse, and Lydia had let him consume her soul, let him take over any sliver of reason that she possessed. And she loved him.