AN: This story has been floating around on my hard-drive for the good part of two years, and it is finally to a point where I have to finish it or go insane. Not sure which yet. Maybe both.

Any mistakes are my own, and due to my own stubbornness. This is a fluffy story, people. Don't look for historical accuracy here.

Much thanks and love to Saxonny, my long-suffering beta. Go and read her stuff. It's amazing. And thanks, too, to those lovely people who read this at various stages of it's incarnation and told me their thoughts.

Now, everyone knows that no-one belongs to me, right? Oh, except for Joy. And Chris. But you can borrow them if you ask nicely.

Please review!! I love to know what you are thinking.

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Chapter 1

Sarah's mouth stretched in a huge yawn, and she slumped further down into her chair. The warm, stuffy air in the lecture hall was making her sleepy, and Professor McDonald's droning voice reminded her of a bee buzzing against a window. Her eyelids drooped lower and lower.

A sharp poke in her ribs made her sit up and glare at the girl next to her. Joy just grinned back at her and surreptitiously slid a note across the desk towards her. Sarah glanced at it and blushed.

You were beginning to snore. And drool is not a good look on you.

Scribbling "Thanks" underneath it, Sarah pushed the note back to Joy, and tried again to concentrate. Neuropsychology, a class she was normally so focussed and interested in, but today, her mind just wanted to wander. She began doodling mindlessly in her lecture pad. Circles, squiggles, a heart, a rose. One eye, another, a sharp aquiline nose, thin lips, the suggestion of hair....

A note being pushed under her hand interrupted her drawing. With a quick glance at the lecturer to see if she was being watched, she opened it.

Are you going to come clubbing with us tonight?

She looked up at Joy, who was looking at her with an air of expectancy, and shook her head slightly. Joy frowned.

"Why not?" she mouthed.

Sarah sighed, scribbling her answer.

Because I don't want to be a third wheel with you and Chris. And I don't want you guys trying to set me up again.

She pushed the note back over to Joy, and turned back to her drawing. No, the shading wasn't quite right over the cheekbones. She pulled out her eraser and used it to smudge away some of the darkness. Much better......

The note was pushed back under her hand.

Wow! Who is that you are drawing?

Sarah looked down at the picture in front of her, and suddenly started in disbelief. Jareth! A crude rendering, but it was him, staring out from the page as he had stared at her in the final minutes of their confrontation.

She glanced up at Joy, and realised that the people around her were gathering up their books and bags; the lecture was over. She quickly closed her lecture pad and shoved it into her own bag, then flung it over her shoulder and got up. Joy pulled on her sleeve.

"Wait for me - I'll just be a second."

Sarah watched as her friend walked to the front of the hall and talked to the professor. She smiled, and then closed her eyes. Why, after all this time, couldn't she forget her childish dreams of Jareth? They had haunted her all through her adolescence. It was only when she had come to University and begun to study Psychology that she had been able to look at them clinically. She had read any book that she could get her hands on, devouring any knowledge she could find to explain why she felt the way she did, why she had experienced what she had. Why she felt so different from the people around her.

From her studies, she realised that she had created him in her need to have control of her life at a time when she felt that she had been abandoned; by her mother leaving for her career; by her father marrying again and having another child. She had needed to feel like she had power over the path her life had taken, so she had created a fantasy world of the Labyrinth, complete with riddles and obstacles to overcome.

All alone in her life, she had needed friends, allies against the problems she had come up against, and she had created them, not realising at the time that they were parts of her. Now she understood. Hoggle was a manifestation of her sense of guilt and self-doubt, of cowardice and selfishness, of abandonment and betrayal, that in the end had changed it's nature and helped her help herself. She had obviously given him an ugly exterior, because these were things that she had not wanted to face in the beginning, but it had also taught her the lesson to look beyond the exterior and find the goodness within.

Ludo had been her inner child. He had looked frightening, but in reality, had been scared of the wilderness he had found himself in. She thought that she needed to protect him, but in the end, he could protect himself. She had found, through his appearance in the Labyrinth, that she had a strength she did not realise she had.

She had known instantly what Sir Didymus had represented. He had been the self-righteous part of her that had believed, no matter what the fight, that she was the one on the side of good. He was her instinct to rush headlong into things and not think about the consequences. She had not needed him in the end because she knew she could deal with her problems herself, and could defeat them logically without letting passion make her irrational.

And that left Jareth.

A smile flitted over Sarah's face. Ah, the joys of adolescence and hormones, she mused. It was not surprising that she needed to control the emotions that she felt inside of her, the wild and cruel side of her, her newfound sexuality, and so she had created Jareth, a symbol of all of the things that she didn't understand about herself, and then she had destroyed him.

She understood now that she had done these things in her head, that it was all a fantasy construct in which she came to grips with the reality that was her life. She had felt a fleeting disappointment that the magic she had believed in since she was a little girl was not real, but knew that as a grown up, she no longer needed to believe in magic. Magic wasn't real.

So why couldn't she exorcise the ghost that was Jareth?