Sometimes, the darkest part of the night when she couldn't sleep, Sarah remembered the nothingness. She remembered how it clogged her ears and seeped into her chest. She remembered how being in it felt like floating or not existing at all. When it got too bad, she'd turn her bedroom lights on and curl up under her blankets just to feel the heat. Sometimes, even with the lights on, she felt like she'd never left—that everything that happened after was a dream, a trick, an illusion.

In those small moments, she feared she would wake only to die with the rest of the world. That it was all a clever ploy, that she hadn't really won or saved anything. After all, how many times can a heroine simply talk her villains down? Twice seemed too lucky already. Too unlikely.

It was in these moments that she thought she could feel the thread wrapped around her wrist, burning. But no matter how hard she looked, she couldn't actually see it. She hadn't actually seen it since she used it to find her way back to Jareth—but then again, she probably hadn't needed to.

Whatever the reason, it acted like a tether, a reminder that her world was real and what she did to secure it.

When did she first notice she wasn't aging? After the first decade, certainly. Perhaps after Karen started asking her what facial cream she used. Or was it when she realized she had a collection of expired licenses in which she wore the exact same face? Or, the worst of all, when Toby finally seemed to catch up to her in age? That was probably the final nail in the coffin, she decided. Of all the things she hadn't prepared herself for, that was the one that did her in.

It was after Toby's twenty-third birthday—the birthday in which he finally surpassed her—that she ran to Jareth. Their meetings were infrequent and unplanned. Sarah felt herself slipping into a way of thought that was wholly unnatural to her—at first—that let time slip away from her. After all, she no longer felt its sting. It didn't matter if she hadn't seen somebody in years because it didn't particularly matter to her. Until it did. It never mattered with Jareth because time stilled for him, too.

But that evening of her not-so-little brother's birthday she found her way to the deepest part of the forest she'd helped to regrow and found the king within.

She begged him to teach her magics, the illusions that she knew he was familiar with. They would trick everybody's eyes—but not their minds because Sarah thought that was a cruelty—and have them see her at the age she should have been, not the age she was stuck at. She got better and deepened the illusion every few years, and when she looked at her magicked appearance in her bathroom mirror she thought this is how it should have been. This is what feels like home.

Alyssa married and had the child that she swore she'd never have, but Sarah did not attend her wedding and did not attend the baby shower. Invitations stopped coming until most of their interactions happened through cards sent out at holidays or the occasional email. They'd moved out of the apartment they shared not long after Sarah bartered away her mortality; although she didn't feel changed in that instant, she knew that things would change, eventually. Plus, she was graduating.

Sarah found herself another apartment, and it didn't matter that it was tiny because Jareth continued to bend reality. Sometimes extra rooms would crop up, and that usually meant that he was in a foul mood and some of the denizens of the forest would soon be paying her a visit. Through the intervening years, Sarah never quite managed to tame the goblins, though they didn't scrawl lewd words on her walls with lipstick anymore and left her clothes largely unmolested. She thought it was just as well because goblins wouldn't really be goblins without mischief; the two ideas were almost inseparable. And although she still lived in an apartment, she no longer had to share it with anybody; the damage that the denizens of the forest wrought was contained to one small, safe space on Sarah's side.

Which is what she found herself cleaning up now. Time didn't pass quite the same way it did in the forest as it did in Sarah's world. That had been true even when it was the labyrinth, so the idea of one year passing into another fascinated the goblins. If they expected magic or whimsy or some sort of monumental explosion, they were sorely mistaken. There were fireworks, of course, and Sarah's apartment was close enough to the park that they could almost be seen between the roofs of other buildings. The goblins had to settle for those and watching the clock tick past the last minute of the old year and into the first minute of the new one.

They pouted and moaned until Sarah relented and allowed them to throw themselves something closer to the party they had no doubt been expecting, which was why she was picking ribbons up off the floor and sweeping glitter into little piles to be disposed of later. She knew she should probably deal with the patches of forgotten fur and the stains she hoped were ale first, but couldn't quite muster the enthusiasm needed.

Sarah sighed and pulled her hair back with an elastic, cracking knuckles as soon as her hands were free.

"Okay, Sarah. We can do this."

Her apartment really was a mess. She flicked her vacuum cleaner on and sucked the first pile of glitter up. Seemingly endless quantities of the stuff ground itself into her carpet and was almost impossible to remove. There had to be a better way to utilize magic that didn't leave piles of the stuff behind, but Sarah hadn't made herself a very good student in that respect. Most of what she knew was cobbled-together castoffs she managed to pick up from watching others. Although Jareth and a few of the more lucid goblins had offered to teach her, she never took them up on it. After all, she had her family, and she had her career mostly because that was what her family expected of her. For as long as they were around—or, more precisely, as long as she could be around them—she planned on doing so.

Maybe, one day, she'd skip off and go live in the forest. Maybe. Some part of her knew that was unlikely because she couldn't stand being in it, being near him for too long.

At least then she wouldn't have to empty her vacuum with far more frequency than she thought reasonable. Sarah snorted as she dumped the canister out into her trash can, watching the glitter trickle down through the rest of her garbage. After everything was picked up, she would have to go over her carpet at least twice more to make sure all of the hair and glitter was up; it tended to grind into the floor and reappear at inopportune moments. Although she didn't like living in filth, she normally wouldn't have worried about getting it so clean so soon. After all, something was only going to come back after some lost artifact—most likely with a few friends—and the process would begin again.

But Sarah had the oddest feeling curling under her heart that she would soon have company—and not any company from the forest.

Maybe I should start playing smooth jazz again, she thought. The goblins hated it as if it caused them pain, and it kept them away even if it did make her feel a little bad. And even in just the years she'd witnessed, technology had made huge strides; instead of the rack of CDs she had when the goblins first invaded her life, she could simply summon any song she desired on her phone. It was much easier and less of a potential mess to clean up. She shot an irritated glare to the last remaining pile of glitter and threatened it with the vacuum.

"You're next," she promised. It sat innocently on her carpet and glimmered up at her.

Sarah clicked the vacuum canister back into place and plugged the machine back into her wall so that she could turn it on. As it roared to life, her left wrist twinged. Sarah ignored it and went to work removing as much of the glitter as she could in one fell swoop.

She happily ignored it for seventeen minutes and thirty-nine seconds until her wrist actually burned. Sarah yelped and dropped the vacuum so that she could massage her wrist with her other hand, wincing at the pain. The faintest of red lines slowly materialized around her left wrist, arcing around to connect in a circle, the same way the thread had once upon a time.

"Damn," Sarah said, and she was so involved with the pain in her wrist that she almost missed the knocking at her door.

Sarah could be forgiven for this; the walls were thin, so an exuberant knocker at her neighbor's door could easily be mistaken for a timid one at her own, and she so rarely got visitors that it wasn't something she was in the habit of expecting. As it was, the person on the other side of the door had to knock twice before Sarah realized it. She clicked off the vacuum and put her hand behind her back.

"Hello?" she asked as she opened the door.

But there was nothing there—no visitor waiting to be let inside or neighbor looking to borrow something or other. Sarah snorted and went to shut her door again. Perhaps she really had heard somebody else at a neighbor's door. It wouldn't be the first time, and she doubted it would be the last.

Except her door didn't close, and the lock didn't latch like it normally would have. Sarah kept it locked at all times because there was nothing worse than having some friend stumble in to see her speaking casually to a large and impossibly hairy orange beast on her living room couch, and Sarah only had to learn that lesson once.

She stooped low to pick up the little parcel and unwound the twine wrapped around it, which was knotted tight at the center. When she finally picked it apart, Sarah plucked the first page out of the folded pile. The paper was rough and yellowed with age, and the ink covering it was splotchy, clotted brown, and faded in places. It kept wanting to fold back up, and Sarah was careful as she flattened it out on her kitchen table. It was brittle, especially at the folds, and Sarah didn't want to ruin it just in case somebody came looking for it later.

All thoughts of preservation were abandoned as soon as she got halfway through the first page. It detailed her second run through the labyrinth—or what had been the labyrinth. She got to the part where she stood like a fool in the ancient throne room and threw down the page in disgust. She knew what came next; she did not need a reminder. More than that, she was tired of magical books barging into her life and telling her her past.

Sarah considered throwing it away and forgetting about it, but she decided that burning it would be best. It would have to wait a little until the weather was nice enough for her to open up her windows so she didn't set off smoke alarms, and her metal trash can was full at the moment anyway.

"Knock, knock!"

Sarah cursed inwardly, remembering that she hadn't actually shut her front door after she picked up the latest magical intrusion into her life. She turned, not so far away from the door that she couldn't physically block whoever was at the door, but she stopped short when she saw who it was.

"What's up?" Belinda asked, pushing her way past Sarah into the apartment. "Do you know how difficult you are to find?"

Sarah blinked at her guest. She remembered Belinda, of course—it would have taken some effort to forget the witch and her candy-colored hair—but she never actually expected to see her again, looked as untouched by time as Sarah herself did. She wore a satchel that looked like it could fall apart at the seams at any moment, and this time her hair was a bright orange, not purple, but otherwise…

"You haven't changed," Sarah stated, as if Belinda needed to be reminded of that small fact.

"Neither have you," Belinda pointed out, glancing nervously out Sarah's windows while she tugged the gauzy curtains shut. "Are you going to close your door?"

Sarah closed her door and apologized for the mess in her apartment, as if she really had that much control over it. Even though her strange brand of personal intuition told her somebody was coming, she didn't know the arrival was so imminent.

Belinda heaved a sigh of relief and flopped down onto Sarah's previously be-ribboned loveseat and covered her eyes with the crook of her arm.

"I need your help," she moaned. "Please, Sarah. I helped you."

Though Sarah remembered Belinda's help being dubious at best, she couldn't deny that the witch had provided some sort of aid, even the aid was burning a line on her wrist at the moment. So when Belinda rolled over and batted her big, brown eyes at her, all Sarah could say was "of course." She wasn't the type of person to say no to somebody in need.

"Oh, good," Belinda said. "I was really hoping that you would say that. You're sort of my only chance left."

"Oh," said Sarah, wondering how many people Belinda tried before she came to her and what sort of request they'd all denied. "Well, I am happy to help, of course." She wanted to ask what, exactly, Belinda had in mind, but hoped that Belinda wouldn't need prompting. Not knowing the witch that well, Sarah wasn't sure if she would need to ask or not.

Belinda nodded and then looked at Sarah's wrist, tilting her head to the side in confusion.

"Is something wrong with your hand?" Belinda reached out and grabbed Sarah's fingers, pulling her wrist close for inspection. "Is it the thread?"

Sarah was accustomed to Belinda being generally carefree and heedless of general consequences, like kicking angry Goblin Kings who were sort of gods out of her caravan so she could discuss secrets with the human representation of their downfall. Even when Belinda was serious, there was an undertone of her usual personality. But this Belinda, prodding anxiously at Sarah's wrist, was more grave than Sarah thought she could ever be.

"Actually," Sarah said, glad she didn't have to bring it up herself, "now that you ask, yes. Every now and then it hurts, like it's tightening or being yanked from the other end, but I know it isn't Jareth. And I can't… I don't…" Sarah paused and bit her lip, wondering how she should continue the conversation. Belinda saved her—or ruined her opportunity, depending on how Sarah wanted to look at it—by dropping her hand and standing.

"What," Belinda started, all attention focused on the papers Sarah had abandoned earlier, "is that, and when did you get it?"

A/N

This will be the only author's note I will place in this story. For future commentary (and there will be lots) please check out my tumblr blog glass-hibou! I'll be posting the footnotes for each chapter, as well as sneak peeks for upcoming chapters. And because I love replying to anon reviewers, those will go there as well; I'm hoping it will cut down on clutter here.

See you there!