Jealousy - A Kinda Short Beetlebabes Drabble
Okay, Iām in a serious funk and have been for awhile.Ā Writing has been, and still is, incredibly difficult for me (Inability to focus, headaches, difficulty reading, words are jumbled, all that fun stuff that makes me think I should see a doctor).Ā So Iām trying to push through.Ā In short, Iām sorry that the stuff Iāll be putting out in the near future is all word vomit.Ā I may go back and salvage this.Ā Thank you and enjoy, loves.
āIām starting to hate that girl.āĀ Itās the truth, and Barbara doesnāt care how blunt and callous it sounds, though it makes Adam nearly drop his glasses.Ā Ā āWhat?Ā Itās true.ā
If the conversation hadnāt dissolved into a tense, awkward silence, Barbara wouldāve clarified.Ā The problem isnāt entirely Lydia herself, though there are complaints there.Ā No, most of her grievance is with him.
The name curse has been off the table for three years now (unfortunately), but Barbara refuses to overthink his name for her own mental health.
She hates him.Ā More than she ever hated Delia.Ā More than the cabin fever.Ā More than Jane ButterfieldāsĀ āaccidentalā comments that cut Barbara to her core.
So Barbara doesnāt hate Lydia.Ā She hates what she drags in with her when she decides to grace Winter River with her presence.Ā Like the long lost fifth horse of the apocalypse, she brings her own form of destruction in the form of a loud, crass, moldy trash opossum.Ā A trash opossum that stole away the closest thing sheāll ever have to a child.Ā Projection?Ā Perhaps.Ā But that doesnāt stop it from hurting.
Thatās not to say that Lydia is without her own flaws.Ā She never calls and visits even less.Ā Over time, Barbara accepted this as a good thing.Ā For starters, he always tags along, carrying her suitcase and making the foyer smell like a mausoleum.Ā When they sit down for a conversation, itās a laundry list of all the wild adventures theyāve been on.Ā The now famous Beej and Lyds, seeing the world and running around the Neitherworld.Ā Lydia doesnāt intend to come across as braggy, but how she doesnāt realize how it feels for someone trapped in a house for 125 years to hear about their trip to Japan and look at photographs of places sheāll never get to see, Barbara will never know.
That doesnāt fill her with hate, though.Ā Instead, as she and Adam listen to Lydia excitedly talk about her time in Ireland, Barbara feels something she canāt place.Ā She feels it when she looks at them.Ā While part of her will forever try and deny it, Lydia is crazy about him, and Betelgeuse in return.Ā Itās in the slight smiles and extended eye contact, their constantly entwined hands, the quiet conversations, the constant name dropping when you somehow manage to catch one of them alone.Ā It hit her hard when they came in from the snow last night, Lydia under his arm and wrapped in his coat.
āGot a room? Or are ya gonna make us sleep in the tool shed?āĀ Ā
