AN

AN: I don't know where this came from. It is a little different than what I would normally do, but I can't get it out of my head. Call it a vicious plot bunny.....Please read and review if you want me to continue this.

Disclaimer: All things Labyrinth belong to Jim Henson. He was such a cool guy. Mark (sigh) is mine. Bastard.

Chapter 1

The Darkness

I knew that it was going to be a long night when I pulled into the driveway. Mark's car was there and he wasn't in it, but all of the lights in the house were off. I knew what that meant. It meant that he would be sitting on my living room couch, listening and waiting. Waiting for me. Before I turned off the car, I had a fleeting thought of pulling out and driving away, but I knew he would still be waiting when I got back. Since he had undoubtedly heard my car, it would just make him angrier if I decided to leave again. I knew what the darkness meant, but it never stopped me from praying that this time would be different. I grabbed my things from the car and headed for the house.

Mark was a nice guy when we met. He was still a nice guy, except when he was angry. It was his anger that had separated him from his family when they told him that he needed to seek help for his problem. Mark didn't like to have problems. He thought they made people abnormal, different. I didn't know about that last part until recently. He had told me his version of the story, where his parents and siblings pushed him away and refused to have any contact with him. I, always being extremely close to my family, had immediately felt sympathy for him. Once upon a time in my life, I had felt pretty shut out from my family as well. It wasn't until the Labyrinth that I grew out of a lot of my childish fantasies. I tried telling Mark how I used to play make-believe in the park, even when I was a teenager He had laughed out loud at my story, and merely said, "It's a damn good thing that you don't do that sort of thing anymore. People would thing that you were one of those freaks that hang out at the theater downtown all the time."

That's when I knew that Mark hated anything out of the ordinary. I was a little afraid of him when we first started dating, but passed it off as the jitters. Here was this beautiful god of a man whom I was dating. Piercing green eyes that could look straight into your soul. Thick black hair that fell on his forehead just so. He was mine, and I was the envy of all the girls I knew. He would pick me up from work and take me out every night. We saw countless movies together. We did everything that normal (by Mark's definition) couples did on dates. We had been almost inseparable when he had asked me to marry him. I took no time in saying yes, throwing my arms around his neck, covering his face with kisses and mentally declaring myself the luckiest girl alive.

How quickly our lives change.

We had decided to go on a picnic that fall. It was a beautiful Saturday; the sun was shining, the golden leaves on the trees were making the landscape look as if it was on fire. Picnic lunch packed in the trunk, we headed out in search of a place I had been to in my childhood, Potter's Field. More like a meadow, it had once been on the property of old Mr. Potter, a dairy farmer who had died probably fifty years before. I knew the approximate location of the field, and spent a good hour pouring over a map to look for any familiar name that would lead us there. Mark was growing more and more agitated with all of my uncertain directions and began taking his own shortcuts. After getting us lost, he pulled over and we began arguing. True to form, I said something smart-alecky, and he slapped me. Not hard, just enough to shock me into being quiet and leave a sting on my cheek.

Since then, it has been the way we have ended most of our arguments. But, I was sure that he never meant it. He always said that he didn't and would always make it up to me in some way. He just couldn't control his anger, and he needed someone to support him emotionally. I never thought much about it until he began to leave bruises. But, he loved me and having someone was better than being alone.

Which is why, on that night that I had come home to a dark but not-so-empty house, I was willing to take anything that was coming to me.