The meaning of mirrors had changed since she had taken a trip through the Labyrinth, though the memories of it had become more muddled as time had gone on. It was almost as if someone had taken a sponge to them and little by little, attempted to clear them away. She sometimes doubted that she had been there at all, and it seemed more likely that it was merely her imagination, as fanciful as it had been. Sarah thought often of her Goblin King, and wondered at what a specter she had created - a rock star with an incredibly strange hair cut.
Sarah had been having dreams.
They weren't unusual, they came when she was stressed or tired - dreams about the Goblin King. His fae eyes and his strange manner of speaking, and those damned crystal balls. She was always a mixture of fearful and something else she couldn't quite explain, but as the dreams were not unusual, she didn't think much of them.
That morning, she stood in front of one such a mirror. She always felt as if she could see something out of the corner of her eye, especially lurking in the corner of mirrors. She feared that when she looked, someone was also looking back on the other side. She was curious about an ache she had noticed on her hip bone, which had been steadily growing over the last few days. When she reached down initially, she felt only her smooth skin - but after that night, she found there were raised bumps in the area that hurt, and when she touched them, it stung.
She looked down, having pulled her pajama bottoms down to find that there was a mark there. It was a bruised red, and it looked as if it was a burn. It was beginning to take the shape of an oval, and she wondered if it was some sort of rash, or something. Each time she touched it it stung, and she thought to herself that if it went on for more than a few days, she would go see a doctor.
She undressed, her dark hair swinging at her mid back. She turned the hot water on, but when she stepped into it, she found that it hurt like hell on the injured flesh. She let a hiss of air out from between her teeth, glancing down to see if it was bleeding, as it certainly felt like it was. The skin was still inflamed, but it didn't look much different than it had.
"Ow, fuck, ow," She whined, quickly making her way through her shower so that she could stop the madness.
She wrapped a towel around herself and used a big comb to drag the wet tangles out of her hair before looking at herself again in the mirror. She was still young, but some of the baby fat had gone from her cheeks, which only accentuated the hazel of her eyes and the rose curve of her mouth. She pushed her lips together before leaving her twin in the mirror world.
She had to go to work.
Sarah had gotten a job as an illustrator. She worked on children's books mostly, her willowy, fairy-like creations perfect for children, even in their strangeness. Once she had returned to the real world, all of the creatures she'd met stayed with her, opening her mind to a bevy of new ones that she could create. It was rare that she showed all of the drawings she still had of Jareth, his face a recurring theme in her art as well. She had noticed that each time she tried not to draw him, some element of him ended up there.
She dressed in a sundress that was tan and linen, pulling on a pair of sandals and tying her hair back into a high pony-tail. Spring had been on it's way, and it was the first day it was to be warm in quite awhile. Sarah was thankful for it - she lived in New York and she was tired of the snow. The fall was nice, but the slush and general malaise that came with a good long winter started to get tiring. She pulled on a light sweater before grabbing her things and rushing out of the door, nearly knocking her cat over in the process.
Her neighbor said 'good morning' and Sarah continued on her way, rushing down into the street where she stopped at her favorite coffee shop. The line was long and they were moving slowly, and she tapped her foot unconsciously while she waited. She ordered a black coffee and a danish, which was sticky - so when she attempted to eat it she regretted her decision to chose it immediately.
She was stopped by a coworker, who appeared to be rushing to work right alongside her. Her name was June, and she was an older woman who also illustrated, though her portfolio was more given to graphic design and PR.
"Hey Sarah," She said, falling into step beside her.
"Hey June," Sarah replied, a little breathlessly. "Oversleep again?"
"Yep," She smiled. "We're making a bad habit of it,"
Sarah smiled, and they both pushed through the doors on the tall, mostly glass building. The building was old, and the elevator was sometimes scary, so Sarah opted to run up the stairs. She was out of breath by the time she hit her floor, and found June waiting for her with her own coffee in hand. They found their desks and turned on their computers, old dinosaurs that held up for the moment, but made it difficult to do much of anything of import on them.
Sarah usually preferred to work from home, but she had meetings all week long, which meant that there was likely to be a repeat of this for the next four days. She had meetings with publishers and authors and she had come to dread these weeks, if only because it was a non-stop critique fest. Change this, change that, are we sure we have to pay you for this?
Sarah was distracted a few times throughout the day by the throbbing in her hip, and it got progressively worse as the day came closer to ending. It was so distracting at some points that she had to fight the urge to go home, just because it was hurting so much. She was glad when the meetings were over, and she dropped down in the chair in front of her desk to gather all of her things up. She started a bit when her body bent to sit, causing the marking to hurt all over again.
She looked up, finding June standing near her cubicle. They smiled at one another, though they both knew they looked tired. This was never the fun bit of the job.
"Want to go get a drink?" June asked, tilting her head curiously, watching Sarah gather up her stuff.
"I'd love to," Sarah wasn't sure she wanted to get home and find whatever it was that was growing on her hip, and alcohol would at least keep her mind off of it for awhile. "Where to?"
"Well, we could go to that ridiculously overpriced place and order one of those mixologist cocktails," June said, smirking. "They have interesting finger food, too,"
"As long as you're buying," Sarah said, lifting herself slowly from her desk, trying not to make it look like she wasn't hurting as badly as she was.
June just laughed, and Sarah followed her out of the office after slinging her bag over her shoulder.
Sarah found herself walking home alone after a couple of drinks with June. June took a cab home, and Sarah just decided to skate the short distance back to her brownstone. Sarah was unsettled by something she'd seen in the bar, a glimpse of a man who was so strikingly familiar - and yet so different, that she'd nearly spilled her drink. June had asked her what was wrong, but Sarah had been forced to play it off as if she hadn't seen anything at all.
She comforted herself on the walk home, thinking it had just been someone who looked like him - and that it couldn't have been him, as his hair was shorter and he was dressed like an actual mortal, not a Goblin King with leather and sparkle. She hated that even now, his image haunted her. She wondered if maybe she was crazy, and had been since adolescence.
She opened the door to her brownstone with a click and flung herself into it, hearing the door bell she'd hung up rattle. She saw the cat come bumbling out of wherever he'd been sleeping, meowing angrily for food and perhaps because she'd been gone for so long.
"Hello Hoggle," She said, leaning down to pet her smash faced cat - named because he reminded her exactly of Hoggle. A little bit grumpy, and certainly a little bit mistrusting.
She fed the cat and slowly made her way into the bedroom, which was decorated warmly with a few golden hues, the walls having been painted to resemble a shimmering fairy land - something she had done herself. She undid her dress and slowly removed it, careful around the painful mark. The alcohol had dulled it into a thud, but she found that it was much more swollen than it had been that morning. She wondered what it was, but it certainly felt like a burn. She stood in her spring patterned underwear in front of the mirror, trying to get a better look at it. She couldn't remember burning herself, not cooking, not from a curling iron, not from hot water - so where in the hell had it come from?
It looked like more a shape, and it reminded her of an eye - crudely drawn out by a child's hands. She thought it was a ridiculous thought, and set her mind on digging around in her bathroom cabinet for some burn cream in the hope that it would at least dull the sting enough for her to sleep. She found the burn cream, but she couldn't say for sure how old it was, and she'd knocked almost everything else over in the process.
She opened it and carefully rubbed it on the sore area, having to grit her teeth through the pain it caused - but she was glad to find that it helped, a bit. She would hopefully be able to get some sleep now.
Sarah woke up in a place that was eerily familiar, though she was sure she had never seen it before. Her feet were so cold that she could not move herself at first - snow whorls spinning around her as if they were glittering fairies dusted up by a ferocious wind. When she looked down, there were footprints, thousands of them, moving away from her in the snow. She had to force herself to follow, as the path was soon to be swallowed up by the heavily falling snow.
It became obvious she was following a caravan of some sort. All of the occupants were dressed in white, resplendent in furs, leathers and silks. They were fae, following along after a quintet of young men carrying a resting woman atop a bed made of juniper and pine. Sarah saw boughs of dried flowers sticking out from underneath her, and atop her silk clad body rested red jewels. They looked like blood in the snow. She recognized Jareth immediately. He stood at the head of it the troupe, dressed in pure white from head to toe. His hair had been cut a bit shorter, and was stylishly pushed back from his brow, a good deal smoother than it had been. It was so white it almost matched his garb. He did not see her.
She began jogging through the snow in an attempt to catch up with him, her adrenaline making her forget how cold she was. She ran to stand in front of him, waving her arms and shouting his name, but he never responded. He could not see her at all. She found she couldn't touch him, there was a force so strong that it almost threw her backwards off of her feet.
She was forced to take a passive stance, following after them in silence for what seemed like miles until they came to a clearing. It looked like a fairy ring, but Sarah was sure this was different. They had piled up gifts all in a circle, and they came to place the woman in the precise middle of the circle. Sarah realized that she was dead. She seemed to know that this woman had been important to Jareth, simply by the bereft look he had on his face. The quintet of young fae set her ablaze, and Sarah was forced to step back with the suddenness of it. The fire burned low, before it caught to the body, creating a plume of rose colored smoke. Sarah expected to smell burning flesh, but all she could smell was juniper and pine.
Sarah watched as the woman seemed to dissipate away into nothing but scented, glittering smoke - and her eyes were drawn to Jareth, who stood solid beside the pyre, his strange eyes dancing with the color of the flame. Sarah noticed another standing next to him, one who looked eerily like him - but somehow younger. Sarah stared, free of all expectation that she too might be examined. His face was less kind, more beautiful. His look was even sharper than Jareth's had been the first time she had seen him.
The younger fae turned his eyes to her, a dark smile creeping up on his features, his teeth sharpened into little needle points. She gasped, surprised. He had seen her.
And then, she woke up.
She shot straight up out of her bed, surprising the cat so much that he yowled and scrambled to safety beneath the bed. She felt bad almost immediately, groggily calling his name, though she knew the damage was done. Hoggle would punish her by hiding under the bed for at least a day. Her hair was in her face, sticking to her lips, and her feet were so cold they were almost painful. When she pulled the blankets back to look at him, she found they were soaked with chilly water. It was unbelievable. The snow?
She was forced to get out of the bed and redress it in dry sheets, but by the time she had completed it she was fully awake and the pain on her hip was blinding. She was beginning to feel uneasy, wondering if she should take herself to the emergency room. She decided she would put it off, considering that the burn cream had helped. She slathered more on and took a few painkillers, crawling back between her sheets. She fell back asleep without much resistance, but it was a strange, eerie, dreamless sleep.
Whens he woke up again the light of the sun stung her eyes, pouring in through parted yellow curtains that she had hung up over the wide window that looked out over the neighborhood. She groaned, feeling hungover, and pushed her hair out of her face before blindly reaching for a hair tie to tie it back. The cat was still nowhere to be found, the pain in her hip had subsided just a bit. She wished she could sleep the rest of the day away while she was comfortable, but when she looked at the clock she realized how late it had gotten - and then she realized she was late for her appearance at her dad's birthday.
"Shit!" She muttered, scrambling out of bed and into the bathroom.
About twenty minutes later she was scrambling out of the door in an outfit she'd thrown together, nearly tripping over the pointy toed heels she'd chosen to compliment the overall relaxed look of the high wasted a-line skirt into which she'd tucked a mint colored t-shirt. She'd thrown on a straw hat and a linen jacket and made her way out into the afternoon, catching a cab so that she wouldn't be any later than she already was.
When she was faced with the ultra hip exterior of the restaurant she knew immediately that her step mother had been responsible for choosing it. It was certainly not something her father would have chosen, her docile father who would have been happy with a paper hat and one of those awful cakes from the grocery store piled high with sugar buttercream frosting. Sarah realized when she walked in that she was under dressed, and she found herself glad that she'd at least chosen to put high heels on. She grasped her messenger bag in front of her self consciously, taking off her hat and carefully making her way over to the table that had been laid out for them.
This was the sort of restaurant people typically went to at night, but her step mother had chosen it as a place for what could be considered brunch, or maybe even lunch. It was mostly empty, excepting the people she'd invited to the party. She saw her little brother, who was growing into an unruly teen right before her eyes. He still seemed like Toby, his sandy blonde hair and blue eyes unchanging, despite his affinity for ignoring the world around him in favor of games on his phone or whatever other portable device he was carrying around. She didn't blame him, honestly. She had wanted to escape, too.
Her step mother greeted her in an exasperated fashion, giving her a cursory hug before reminding her that she was late. Sarah felt embarrassed, wishing she hadn't chosen this day to be late - further proving to her that she could never make it to a designated place on time.
"I'm sorry," She said, earnestly. "I had a rough night,"
"Well, come on over, your father will want to see you,"
She said hello to various friends and family she had spent little time with over the year. She leaned down and gave Toby a big hug, even though he protested loudly and she had messed up his hair by the time it was all over with. Grumpy, he pushed his hair back down into place and pouted, seeming to slide down into his chair as far as he could. Sarah moved over to say hello to her Father, who stood up and gave her a big hug and a warm greeting. She sat next to her brother after the greeting was done, smirking at him as he glared at her.
The lunch bled into dinner, and she watched the party get more jovial the more wine that they drank. She had barely touched hers, and her appetite was not what it was usually was - so much so that her mother had commented on it in passing. Sarah deflected, saying that she just 'wasn't hungry'. She ate a few bites of her pasta before pushing it aside, agreeing to a box to take it home with her. She participated in the conversation as much as she could, but it had been a long time since she'd lived at home. She and her stepmother had come to terms, but they'd never been very close - and she'd left to go to school as soon as she'd turned eighteen. She felt sort of outside of the family, as she always had once her father had remarried.
After awhile, the pain on Sarah's hip began to return, and she thought, perhaps it was time that she left the little soiree. Her father had opened his gifts (she had gotten him a first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass), and she felt as if she'd fulfilled her requirement of being there. When she stood, she wasn't expecting that she'd become so dizzy that she would fall backwards, right onto the floor of the restaurant.
There were general cries of concern, but Sarah was too woozy to make much sense of them. The last thing she remembered was her step mother leaning down into her face, her father looking on just as concerned, and her mother mentioning something about how she always found a way to make a nice evening about her. It was all black, after that.
She didn't know what time it was when she woke up again - and it took her a few minutes to realize where she was. She felt the tug of a cord in her arm and realized that there was an IV attached to her forearm. On her other arm rested a blood pressure panel, which tightened up uncomfortably and caused the monitor above her to beep once it had taken her blood pressure. She looked around the room, the lights in the room dimmed, a glow of florescence making itself obvious from the nurses station that was parked outside. The hallways were empty. She didn't see one nurse.
Sarah expected to find her family there, but her heart thudded into her stomach as she realized that she was alone. She frowned, feeling the abandonment of it more sharply than she might have thought, even after having been away from home for some time. She wrapped her arms around herself, finding that it was uncomfortably chilly.
"Dad?" She tried, wondering if maybe he'd just stepped out to get a drink. She was met with only silence, and the electronic buzz of the machines she was hooked up to.
Sarah began to feel a creeping along her skin, a creeping that caused the hair on her arms to stand on end. The lights in the hallway were flickering. It was too quiet, too empty. She felt, with some urgency, that it was time for her to get out of there. She ripped the IV out of her arm with a hiss of pain, pulling the rest of the wires and pads off of her body. She was wearing nothing but a hospital gown and her underwear, but she was sure that she didn't have time to try and look for her clothes. She couldn't even find her shoes.
She didn't think twice about it, she slid out into the hallway. It was completely devoid of life. There were no nurses, no doctors, no patients. There was just nothing, and the ever increasing feeling that something was watching her. She began walking in the direction of the double doors, thinking that if she could just get out of this hallway she might be okay again - there might be people beyond. Maybe her family was there, sitting in the waiting room, drinking bad vending machine coffee. The pain in her hip had grown so bad that it caused her to limp, so she moved along as quickly as she could.
The hallway started to get darker. The lights flicked off one by one, as if something was following her down the long corridor. She began to run, looking back as often as she could while she picked up her pace, realizing that the hallway had become shadowy and thoroughly opaque. She could no longer see the rooms beyond, it was so dark. She felt something closing in on her, whispering strange words at her back, tossing her hair around, telling her to look back.
Sarah was so afraid it didn't matter where she ended up, or the pain she had to bite through, she broke out into a full run, her bare feet slapping against the cold linoleum floors. It seemed to be driving her in specific directions. Each time she turned a hall and she came up against it, she had to turn again, like an animal that knew it was about to be caged. Sarah became ever more disoriented when the hospital was no longer a hospital at all - but a thick bramble of thorny branches which looked as if they had no other purpose but to poke and sting.
The branches caught her hospital gown, tearing small holes in the fabric and then her skin. The skin around the scratches became puffy and itchy, though she had to ignore the pain to make her way towards the only spot of light she had. The hole seemed to be getting smaller, and smaller, and she began to panic that she would be caught in the foliage, speared among it's branches, never to be seen again.
She made it, breaking free of the strangling branches out into the dry, burning sunlight. It was dusty, and she coughed, having sucked some of it into her lungs. It blurred her vision, but she felt free of the presence that had been chasing her just moments ago. When she finally wiped the dust from her eyes, she realized where she was.
She had stood here, years ago, Jareth telling her in his velvet tones that she had only hours to solve his Labyrinth. He wasn't there, and his lack of presence was a void. There was no Hoggle, no biting fairies. It was just her, and this empty, barren place.
Sarah felt more reticent than she had the first time around. She was not as determined or bull headed as she had been when she'd been a girl. She was hurting and wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and her memory was so clouded that she wasn't sure she remembered how to get anywhere near his palace. Would he even be there?
She had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming.
She wrapped her hospital gown around her as tightly as she could, though she now realized that she was without her bra, she was thankful to at least have her underwear and something to cover herself with. She was sure she had to be dreaming, but it seemed so real - and she felt so lucid. She began to trudge through the glittering dirt, finding the two heavy doors that had swung open for her after she'd asked the right question. She knocked, and there was no response. They stood solid, and stupidly, she thought she might call the Goblin King into existence. She shouted his name and was met with only stony silence.
She remembered, or tried to remember, that not everything was as it seemed. She did something that someone might not have thought to do in her situation and tried the door knob. It swung open heavily, and she hopped back to avoid it, peering into the darkness beyond.
She really hadn't been expecting to ever have to do this again.
(I TOLD YOU N I TOLD YOU I WAS GOING TO REWRITE THIS. I FEEL LIKE THIS IS BETTER, I DON'T KNOW, YOU TELL ME. CHAPTER TWO SHOULD BE UP IN THE NEXT COUPLE DAYS. SHARE/COMMENT IF YOU LIKE!)
