There Are A Few Scenes In The Next Chapter Of Time Is A Flat Circle That Are Condensed For The Sake Of

There are a few scenes in the next chapter of Time is a Flat Circle that are condensed for the sake of brevity, but if there’s interest I may expand on them and others here or in a whole fic of extras for LoopJuice!

Also, there will be a sort of “post-mortem” for Time is a Flat Circle, if you have any questions about the fic or anything send them my way! I’ll drop the playlist there too haha (and perhaps expand upon demon/witch lore that are outside of the POV characters’ knowledge…)

Part 2 of LoopJuice is here! Chapter one of Time’s Arrow is out now. Please read the warnings and tread with caution! And sorry in advance. I got a little too poetic with this one. (The Post Mortem has been pushed back until after or midway through Time’s Arrow is completed, since it’ll touch on a lot of things that haven’t yet been fully expanded upon.)

As always, here are some extras! Also a bit of outright explanation, since I know this chapter might be a bit hard.

Chapter One:

- The lyrics for this chapter’s title are from “Goodbye, My Danish Sweetheart” by Mitski! The song itself fits more with Time is a Flat Circle (andoneofthelastchaptersofthisfic), but the selected line specifically is meant to refer how to Beetlejuice is unknowingly reflecting on his deep yearning to be seen and heard and understood, and how it impacted his relationships and his self worth.

- “And Beetlejuice was in the deepest, dreamiest slumber of his unlife.” - This is referencing one of the most haunting scenes from “Asteroid City”. It’s meant to hint at the revelation Beetlejuice has in this chapter, which is similar to “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

- “Ty takoy malen’kiy! Gde tvoi roditeli?” - Suprise! The old lady was Russian. Beetlejuice’s mother dumped him somewhere in Russia. Sorry for the Google Translate use, but she says “You are so small! Where are your parents?” She was very concerned about how scrawny and cold he was. As she should’ve been.

- “A strange, scruffy little creature was clung to his back, licking the side of his face and rubbing it’s soft nose against his neck.” - Rabies is doing something called “slubbing”, which is how opossums show affection!

- “Maybe I think you’ll need to replace me. How? No one else was like her. No one else was like him. Maybe I think you’ll need to try. I’m not coming back, Beetlejuice.” - Another “Asteroid City” quote. (Sorry, I cannot stop… that scene makes me tear up everytime I watch it.) Rabies isn’t actually speaking to them, obviously, it is just their hazy, grief-stricken mind imagining it. Telling them what they thought they needed to hear.

- “She clings to their back as they ride an old sled down the house’s stairs.” - Lydia made Beetlejuice watch “Home Alone” at some point during their time stuck in the loop. It gave them the idea to ride a sled down the stairs, like Kevin did in the film. It did not go well.

- “ “It can’t rain all the time.” She is near. The scent of formaldehyde is at the edge of their senses. She’s put their favorite movie on. How thoughtful. How sweet.” - Lydia watched “The Crow” while sitting with Beetlejuice in hopes that the sounds of their favorite movie would maybe convince them to wake up. Also, because she missed them, and that movie makes her think of them.

- Annabell Lee - Of course, Lydia is reading out Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabell Lee” to Beetlejuice as they sleep. It was one of her mother’s favorites, and she holds it very near and dear to her heart. So she decided to share it with Beetlejuice, to show that she cares.

- “Sometimes, sometimes they still think they still hear her, still feel the luminance of her smile.” - SORRY ANOTHER ASTEROID CITY REFERENCE. That Wes Anderson-esque awkward dialogue has a death grip on my brain. Also, the scene it is from is thematically relevant.

- “Silly Goose.” - Deb calls Beetlejuice “Goose”, since she often mispronounced “Betelgeuse” as “Bet-El-Goose”. And she likes to call him a silly goose.

- “ “What do you want, Goose?” They suppose they want what everyone wants. Power, a partner. Kids, someday, maybe.” - The phrasing and response is a reference to “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals”. (Also perhaps children will come up again later? Who knows! ;) )

- “ “It was fun while it lasted.” She was the sun, chasing away his shadows and bathing him with her overwhelming, scorching radiance. She was fire, singeing his hair as he warmed himself with her glow. She was light. He shone only with the light she cast. She was everything.” - This part has two huge inspirations. First, “The Moon Will Sing” by The Crane Wives. Specifically, how the singer loved someone “like the sun”, and how they “Bore the shadows that you made, With no light of my own”. This song greatly embodies Deb and Beej’s relationship, and how it was very one-sided and draining for him. He basked in the limited attention and affection she showed, and allowed his own needs and wants to be pushed aside in favor of Deb’s. Secondly, that one scene from “Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake”. The exchange “You were a wonderful experience.” “You were everything.” literally brings me to my knees. I wanted to try to evoke similar emotions with Beetlejuice’s thoughts, but I know it doesn’t even come close to the original, lol.

- “He’s cold again. He feels a shiver wrack his body, a highborn wind chilling-” - A “highborn wind” is a reference to “Annabell Lee”! The poetry continues to rub off on Beej.

- “How could you?” “How couldn’t I?” - Yep, you guessed it. Another “Asteroid City” reference. Like the original scene, it’s an exchange between an abuser and the spouse he abused.

- Yes, Beetlejuice murdered his husband. Not on his own, and it wasn’t his plan, but he straight up led that fool to his death. There will be more on that later.

- “He is cruel. He is gentle. He makes him laugh.” … “(It was so easy, so salty and gross - )” - These are both references to lines from songs that I listened to when writing Beej and Cyrus’ interactions. The first is “Cop Car” by Mitski, and the second is “Gross” by Penelope Scott. The former really embodies parts of this chapter as a whole, and the latter is literally perfect for BJ and Cyrus’ relationship.

- “Like all the tales and tragedies. He is Ariadne, he is Medea, he is Loki, he is the Crescent Moon, he is Grettir, he is - ” - Beetlejuice retreated into literature, for a time. (Now he’s mostly illiterate.) He, like everyone, felt a kinship with a lot of the characters he read about. Ariadne is the woman who helped Theseus kill the Minotaur, but he abandoned her on an island. Medea was the wife of Jason, and helped him achieve all of his great accomplishments, but he betrayed their marriage. (And she killed their children in retaliation.) Loki was often the scapegoat of the Asgardians, cleaning up after their messes and sometimes taking blame he didn’t deserve. The Crescent Moon was torn in half by a witch, and kept slowly dying despite the Sun Maiden’s best efforts to keep him alive. Grettir’s tale is insane. My special interest used to be mythology, especially Norse and Greek! Go look more into these tales, they are all so intriguing. Overly Sarcastic Productions does a great job summarizing a few of them!

- “He was the sacrificial lamb raised to slaughter, the scapegoat fed milk and honey and led away into the woods.” - Now you can see why, thematically, Beetlejuice’s features are specifically from a sheep!

- “Orpheus’ voice calls to him. (Or was it Eurydice?)” - Sorry not sorry, more Greek mythology! Beetlejuice is unsure if Adam and Barbara are leading him to the light, or if he is the one dooming them to the underworld.

- “Five humans, two dead and three living, huddled together. They are happy. They are home. What need do they have for the demon exiting stage left? (Well, no, not stage left. More to the center.)” - Obviously, this is a reference to the last song of the musical, and the way Beetlejuice leaves. And just a smidgeon of 4th wall breaking from Beej!

- “… we need to talk. About.. him.” - I won’t elaborate, I just wanted to draw attention to this line! :)

- “He doesn’t fit into the couple. He doesn’t fit into the family at all, into their home. He is a mismatched piece of a puzzle that never existed, he is something wrong. Something that doesn’t fit anywhere.” - This is a phenomenon I’ve heard a lot of autistic and/or queer people talk about experiencing. The feeling that something is just wrong, that you are wrong, that you don’t fit in anywhere. You want to be seen, but you’re scared of what they’ll see.

- “He is an intruder in the Garden.” - The ‘Garden’ is meant to be a reference to the Garden of Eden. Beetlejuice feels like he doesn’t deserve what he sees as a perfect paradise.

- “Oh, wait until you see the daisies. They’re beautiful.” - Barbara is still taking great care of the garden.

- “He is a vile cloud of poisonous miasma. He is a foul, mangy hound. He is a monstrous serpent. He contaminates the air and wilts the flowers with his presence alone.” - More dog imagery, and a direct reference to him feeling like the Serpent. Y’know, THE Serpent. The one that tempted humanity and ruined Eden. THE DEVIL from THE BIBLE.

- “Soft petals and sharp thorns. Purple and yellow and green and orange and red. Love and warmth and comfort.” - Each of the colors represent one of the Deetz-Maitlands family members!

- “I will ruin you. I know that you mean so well- ” - The Crane Wives, my beloved. This is from another Beetlejuice-coded song, “Tongues & Teeth” by The Crane Wives.

- “The rot spreads. He desperately tries to stop it with bloodied claws- The blood is everywhere. It flows from his ear, his wrist, his side- The wound on the back of his head, the metal in his chest, it bubbles up in his lungs and flows from his mouth. Sulfur and iron chokes out the magnificent aroma of the Garden.” - Beetlejuice feels like his trauma has tainted him. Like it will ruin the Deetz-Maitlands if he gets too close to them, if he shows them all of him, the ‘bad’ included.

- “No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avator and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood.” Lydia is reading “The Masque of Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe at an inopportune time.

- “ “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Her voice is so faint now, yet still she reads. What is it now? Must be new. He’s never heard that one before.” - Lydia is reading “Paradise Lost”! Wow, great thematic timing, Lyds!

- “She’d never shown him warmth, or care, or love- nothing a mother ought to do. Just hatred. Just cold.” - I swear, this wasn’t meant to be a Warriors reference. It was just meant to connect to the theme of warmth, I SWEAR

- “But rain is washing the blood away. The smoke clears. The flowers are still there. They still call to him.” - Another The Crane Wives reference, this time low key. “Curses” by The Crane Wives is INSANELY Beetlejuice-coded.

- “Colors cascaded through it. Forest, violet, indigo, sanguine, ivory, slate.” - Obviously, this is visually referencing his mood-ring hair!

- “There were myths about him. Stories, cautionary tales, urban legends. He made breathers tremble in their villages and beds and skyscrapers.” - Yet another Mike Flanagan reference. “Doctor Sleep”, you will always be famous to me…

- “Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish, Now are visions ne’er to vanish; From thy spirit shall they pass, No more - like dew-drop from the grass.” - Some more great thematic timing from Lydia! She is reading “Spirits of the Dead” by Edgar Allen Poe.

- “He didn’t mind being torn apart by the hounds if it meant he got that glorious peek into joy.” - Some more Greek mythology… this time he’s referring to Actaeon, the man who was ripped apart by his own hounds after Artemis turned him into a stag. His crime? Peeping (on accident in some tellings but intentionally in others) on her while she bathed. Beetlejuice still, on some level, sees himself as a vile voyeur of the Deetz-Maitlands happy-ever-after.

- “He would take any sort of treatment if it meant they wouldn’t prematurely leave him alone again. He would trim his claws, pull his teeth, cut his horns-” - Yikes, still got that “beat me, just don’t leave me” mindset.

- “A cat is laid on his chest, it’s paws tucked under itself. It’s fur is black and long, blurring into the darkness as Beetlejuice’s eyes struggle to adjust. One golden eye glows at him, wide and curious.” - Say hello to Pluto! I have yet to see any fanfics that bring up the cat Delia talked about adopting, so I decided to do my own take on them! She is named after a cat in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe. (Gasp! Is Delia a Poe fan?) She did not lose her eye to a crazy guy like in the original story, she lost it due to an infection.

- “It steps closer, causing the demon to let out a grunt as one paw is planted firmly on his left pec. Ow.” - This is based on my own beloved black cat always somehow managing to step right on a boob. Every time.

- “With a third trill, the cat steps closer, settling down on the side of the demon’s neck. It rubs it’s cheek against the side of his head.” … “It even gripped at his face with a paw when he tried to lean away.” - this is something that my other cat loves to do. It is sweet, but ouch. My jugular.

- “Trash mammals” is, once again, a “Night in the Woods” reference!

- “But now, this lithe little scraggly black cat was licking his face with it’s coarse tongue, doing it’s damndest to groom his scruff.” - Some cats love facial hair! No idea why, but people with beards are usually a cat’s favorite in their families.

- “His mouth hurt so bad, and a brief curious search with his tongue revealed he was missing two teeth - a canine and an incisor. They would grow back, but damn.” - He bit Juno so hard that he lost two of his teeth!

- “Beetlejuice let out a ‘HWAUGH’ noise…” Please imagine it sounds like this.

Confused about the metaphors and symbolism? Worry not, I will do my best to explain!

- Warmth - warmth is a running theme throughout LoopJuice as a whole. As Beetlejuice says, his mother had “.. never shown him warmth, or care, or love- nothing a mother ought to do. Just hatred. Just cold.” Unlike other demons, Beetlejuice’s extremities are cold, and he doesn’t feel the full benefits of the hellfire within him. (Thanks a lot, dad.) He is both always physically cold and emotionally starved of care and warm gestures. He is always desperately searching for that missing warmth. He finds it in Deb, but it is not real warmth; she is a wildfire, burning him up and leaving nothing behind. Rigel was cruel to him and never cared for him. Cyrus was cold in a way that made it feel like warmth, like the last stages of hypothermia. (There will be more on him in later chapters, so I will not give too much away here.) Beetlejuice finally finds real, genuine care in Lydia and The Maitlands, and later Delia and Charles.

- Rot - Beetlejuice feels like he is tainted, ruined by the things that happened to him. By who he is. He is his mother’s child, and she’s horrible. Bad things happened to him, and he is worried that the echoing pain will reach others. Juno’s words really got to him - he believes he was born broken and wrong. But he wasn’t, of course! His trauma and pain do not define him. Who his mother is doesn’t define him either. That’s when he sees that it was never rot, it was just moss. It was just him, all of him. The good, the bad, the hurt. He decides whether it is actually going to cause harm, he has to help it flourish and be good.

- Animals - Beej does not see himself as a person. No, not a human, a person. Someone with morals and thoughts and feelings. He often compares himself to animals, because that is the closest he can currently get to describing how he feels.

- Flowers - compared to the lifespan of a demon, the lives of humans are short. To Beetlejuice, humanity is beautiful like a rose; it is pretty partially because it is fleeting, impermanent. Flowers are beautiful because they die. At first, he felt the same way about humans. But now that he has gotten so close to a few of them, he sees more than that. “Soft petals, sharp thorns.” A “magnificent aroma”.

(Here is a picture of my darling son, as a thank you for reading this far. His name is Pumpkin!)

that. last post. scares me.

who the fuck. is getting hypothermia

istg if you hurt any of them…..

(im just kidding please continue the beetlejuice angst i love hurting him)

-🪲🕸️

Hehehe, I love hurting him too unfortunately! And boy howdy, I do sure hope the residents of the Deetz-Maitland-Shoggoth household know how to treat severe hypothermia! Just in case. ;)

Oh, the wonderful things I find when rereading what I wrote in a 2am frenzy. Some worth keeping, some in desperate need of rewrites.

Also, here’s a little peek into my writing process! I plot out the chapters into the beats the story needs to hit, then I color-code it and go in to write. If I get stumped, I halt and go pick up another section so I don’t loose momentum. (I had quite a bit of steam for the pink section though, it’s one of my favorites!) I simply put the words down, as rough as they need to be, and put the parts I know need editing in double parentheses to easily find later. I don’t have to find the perfect words right away, and I can get my thoughts down quicker to give me time to marinate on the proper phrasing for the mood and such. (I suppose 2am Blue had a headache and ran out of words) I also leave comments on the doc to remind me of important little details for later chapters or to add something I think is funny, like “idiot haul”.

Listening to lots of Mitski for this chapter since one of her songs is used for its title, thank you Ms. Mitski <3 she’s stuck with me through 12k words and I’m not even done with the full rough draft

Oof, a peep into the vibe of the next chapter of Time is a Flat Circle; here is a list of the songs I’ve had on loop to get myself in the right mood for writing it! Goodbye, My Danish Sweetheart by Mitski, Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush, This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush, Coyotes (alternate vocals) by Modest Mouse, Green by Cavetown, Skeleton Song by Kate Nash, Pearl Diver by Mitski, I’m Your Man by Mitski, Never Love an Anchor by The Crane Wives, Last Words of a Shooting Star by Mitski, Shapes by Alec Holowka… hold on to your butts folks! I’ve already teared up writing this chapter for various reasons. One of them is the lyric title for this chapter, and it spiraled from there haha

OHHH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING, THANK YOU!!!! IM GOING TO CHERISH THIS FOREVER <333

fanart for @possum-quesadilla's Time is a Flat Circle on ao3