Time seemed to stop after the car hit her, frozen in the one millisecond of sickening, snapping impact. Then things went black.

She blinked awake after a few seconds or a few eternities. She didn't feel anything except…warm. And strangely, increasingly wet.

It was impossible to process what she was seeing, twisted metal and shattered glass etching themselves onto her retina without penetrating the tiny core of thinking in her ravaged mind.

Out of instinct or happenstance, Lydia glanced up to the rearview mirror and saw a spiderweb pattern, each reflection in each shard showing the same grave face.

It clicked. She was dying. Or hallucinating, but probably dying. There was no time to process, to cope, or reflect, and the sheer enormity of it any other thoughts.

She closed her eyes, and they never opened again.

At least not on that plane of existence.

Lydia found herself standing on the sidewalk, feeling like her head was full of cotton. Dazed, she turned to walk home.

She had only taken a few steps before she felt a tug on the back of her shirt.

"Don't go home yet, babes. That's how they get ya."

She whirled and wrapped her arms around the figure that had stopped her. "Beetlejuice!"

Now ya say it," he grumbled softly, but he was hanging on to her like the mast of a ship in a hurricane.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" she managed numbly, her face buried in his jacket, eyes shut tight.

"As a doornail."

She braced herself for pun magic, but it didn't come. "Why aren't we in the Neitherworld?"

"…"

Slowly, she let go of him, backing up and opening her eyes. Beetlejuice stood before her, large as afterlife, but there was something off about him. The sparkle was vanished, the humor evaporated. But moreover, he looked… shoddy. An uncertain sketch of himself, at odds with the harsh angles of the dim world.

"Beetlejuice?"

He winced a little. "As much as I hate to say this, don't go for the three-peat. Neither of us will like it."

Lydia frowned. 'What's going on? Where's the Neitherworld? Where's this?

"You're not gonna like the answer."

She felt like she was in quicksand and sinking by the second. "Tell me anyway."

"You really shouldn't have trusted me, Lyds. You had no reason to."

"Stop it, Beet-Just tell me!"

He cringed. "There is no Neitherworld. Never was. I mean, it was right there in the name."

"Don't… Just tell me what this means." She crumpled to the ground and sat there, looking up at him. He knelt down, floating near eye level.

"We made it up."

"How?"

"You called me, Lyds. And you were just a little girl and full of belief. You made it possible; I just made it. Everything you wanted."

"But.. Sandworms? Jacques? Ginger? Why?"

"Okay, it wasn't all you. And it had to be convincing, or you wouldn't believe in it."

"Why do I have to believe?"

"Gives me power."

"What the hell are you?"

"I'm the ghost with the most, babes."

She could've slapped him. "The truth. Tell me the truth for once in my life."

"Too late for that. But…" He sighed, and his gaze turned to a vague spot somewhere over he left shoulder, clearly trying to gather his thoughts and distill them into something that made sense.

"Okay, think of it like this: People have power, right? More power than they'll ever know. They create things by believing that they're there. Feelings, auras, stories…" He gulped nervously. "Gods. When you believe in something, y´know, you make it real. You can't weigh it on a scale, you can't look at it on a microscope slide, but it's real here." He waved a hand around vaguely to indicate the place where they were, superficially the same as the real world but failing to hold up under scrutiny.

"So the Neitherwold was real, after all."

He seemed genuinely taken aback, and took a second to add it all up in his head. "Well… Maybe, but it's not where you go when you die."

She shook her head. "Nevermind. What were you saying?"

"Ugh…" He dragged his hands over his face in frustration. "Okay, short version: People make things. I'm one of those things. Kinda. There's tons of gunk and residue and scrapped ideas floating around in the ether. Turns out, that doesn't go away, ever. Give it a couple eons and you end up with me. Please tell me that makes any sense to you, because if I have to keep explaining, I think I'll talk myself out of existing."

Lydia nodded. "I still don't get it."

"Join the club."

"But what I don't get is… Why?"

"Why not?'

"Why me?"

"Dunno. Somehow, you got my number."

"You aren't even really a ghost, are you?"

"I might be," he countered indignantly. "Somewhere in the mix, I think I am. I'm older than I look. Hard to believe, I know."

"Not really," she said. The a very slow smile crept onto her face.

"What?"

"Boy, you really did it, BJ…"

"Well, yeah, but… What?"

"You did a good job. I still believe in you, you big liar. Even though I don't trust a single world you say." She poked him in the chest. "But you. I believe in you."

He brightened. Literally and figuratively. "Hah! The nature of belief! You know I love it!"

She stood up. "I think my world's been shattered enough. I want to go home."

"No, you don't."

"Why not?"

"Rules. This is the real afterlife, Lyds. There are rules. You go home, you're stuck there. That, or move on to one of the 'H' words."

She smirked. "And if I don't?"

"Lotsa places to go. Maybe they don't have talking skeletons and spiders, but it's better than mooning around an apartment for the next century, right?"

"There's a catch somewhere in there, isn't there?"

"Only one way to find out."

She held out her hands and he clasped them. His grip didn't feel clammy anymore, but crackling with energy that sparked and fizzed and mingled with her own frequencies.

"You're gonna be stuck with me now," he warned.

"What else is new?" she laughed. Her decisions were all made a long time ago. Another lifetime, even.

"You can go ahead and say it now."

"Beetlejuice."

And then they were gone.

A/N: Found this in a year-old notebook. I'd been watching the cartoon a lot at the time and somehow this came to me, at a time when I was not particularly writing fanfic. I honestly can't remember the state of mind or frame of reference that spawned it now, but it delighted me upon rediscovery.