Chapter One: Somnambulist
"Sarah…" That single, mocking word rang in her ears, spoken with a mixture of contempt and amusement, beckoned her more than any other sound could have. She knew the voice, the cold detachment and cruelty that were bound into it just as a natural slide towards seductiveness was a part of the man it belonged to.
She found that she was standing on cold, pale stone, in a hall that looked chillingly familiar. The strange, otherworldly shapes of the architecture, combined with the gilded scenery stretched above them, told her two things instantly. First, this was some strange, sanitized version of the castle beyond the Goblin City, and second, this was the ballroom of her nightmares. It looked like a place she knew all too well, but it felt like another one of his waking dreams, concocted to control her.
She turned, noting that she was dressed in a very old and dear set of clothing, the faded jeans and slightly ethereal tunic that had helped her to survive the endless deceptions of the Underground. And, as sure as she had known it would be, there behind her stood the man who was the cause of all of it. He looked effortless, damnably alluring as he'd always been, being the fantasy of an over-active young girl's mind, after all, and just as irritatingly arrogant as ever.
Sarah knew then, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this was a dream. He had left her alone years ago; she was four years older and that much wiser now, and the only way she could possibly be drawn back to her youth and vulnerability would be through a dream. Or, if he was here calling her name, then this was more likely to be a nightmare. One that she was not going to stand for.
"Hello, Jareth." She spoke as evenly as she could, meeting his emotionless and yet somehow vivid gaze without flinching. Just because he'd made her look like a child did not mean that she had to act like one. She even managed a derisive smile, and willed herself to wake up with all the strength she could muster. "You still have no power over me." She could feel the dream splintering all around her, the cold marble fading into formless mist that flowed around them.
His perfect features never wavered, as the ground went out beneath her.
Sarah woke with a start, her body jerking as though she had fallen from a great height and collided with a very stiff, painful surface.. It felt as though she had just come out of a dream in which she'd slipped from the edge of a cliff, and come to think of it, there had been stone…though how or why escaped her. Her dreams often did that, fading to fog the moment she opened her eyes, but it was disconcerting all the same.
She sat up gingerly, feeling the ache of her muscles as they pulled her upright, and winced. The back of her head throbbed with particular intensity. This felt more like she had fallen from a great height, collided with her headboard, and fallen to the floor for good measure. What on earth could that have been…about? Oh, no. She was looking up at her mattress, not down. She really had ended up on the – very lightly – carpeted floor below her bunk.
"Are you all right?" The voice of her roommate, Meghan, spoke from up above her, as the girl leaned out over the edge of the bed. "Looks like you finally managed to fall off. Must've been some nightmare." Meghan looked concerned, but only momentarily, her brown eyes bright with barely-hidden interest behind her horn-rimmed glasses. While she usually came off as a perpetual smart-aleck, she found Sarah's ability to have lucid dreams to be endlessly fascinating. "What was it this time, astronauts or cliff-diving?"
Sarah attempted to laugh, but it came out as a more nervous sound. She picked herself up carefully, leaning on the wooden frame of her bed for support. "I don't remember…but I think I knew it was a dream when it was happening." She tucked a strand of dark hair back behind her ears, dreading a glance in the mirror for fear of what static would do to her bed-head, and instead turned her attention to the clock, which read 7:04, a.m.
Meghan lunged eagerly for the notebook she kept on the desk beneath her bunk, nearly falling out of it in the process. She kept detailed notes on what Sarah dreamed and when, out of a desire to write a case study about her in the future. She was an aspiring young psychologist, and apparently, Sarah's imagination was a perfect specimen, though why was a question Sarah had learned not to ask unless she felt the need for a long and technically detailed explanation, most of which she would fail to comprehend.
"Wait a minute…what are you doing awake at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning?" Sarah nearly did a double-take. She was well aware of Meghan's tendency to sleep for most of the weekend, and to hang a very large and obnoxious 'Do Not Disturb' sign on their door featuring an image of intruders being char-grilled by an angry-looking dragon. For her to be conscious this early was nothing short of a miracle. "Who are you, and what have you done with my roommate?"
"We have taken her for observation, but do not worry, earthling. She will be returned from the Trichlon Nebula before it is time for her lunching." Meghan wrote furiously, keeping up a deliberately flat, processed tone of voice as she pronounced this, then snapped the notebook shut and grinned. "No, really, I was up all night writing my idiotically bad paper for Philosophy, so I could spend my free time sleeping." Returning the notebook to its hiding place, she flopped down and pulled the covers up over her head. "Wake me if you start to levitate."
Sarah shook her head, and stumbled sideways into a long-suffering armchair, her head swimming with static. She tried momentarily to recall the dream that had yanked her so unceremoniously from her sleep and dumped her onto the ground, but it eluded her. It had been a long time, bordering on never, that anything had actually wounded her while dreaming, but judging by the headache she felt coming on, it was definitely occurring now, reminding her of other days…other things.
For some reason, the fog-dream put her in mind of her little adventure into the Labyrinth four years earlier, which she had accepted long ago was either the product of an overactive imagination or not something she wanted to mention to anyone sane. Either way, it had been put squarely behind her, except as a reminder that she was capable of taking care of herself, and treasuring her half-brother Toby even when he did things like paint her face green while she was asleep.
"Oh, Sarah?" Meghan surfaced from her blanket-cocoon. "You should put some ice on that, or you'll end up with a misshapen head. Just saying." With that, she vanished into the otherworld of under the covers.
Without answering, Sarah rose, and climbed back up onto her mattress. She was unable to shake the sensation of falling, or the feeling that there was more to this than a simple nightmare. Misshapen head or not, she needed to get back to sleep and get to the bottom of this. All she had to do was find the same dream again, she reasoned, sliding under the coverlet, her eyes closing. How difficult could it be?
"Don't defy me, Sarah." The same soft cadence greeted her on her return, spoken again from behind her. Sarah blinked, trying to remember if the dream had been this bright, or this open the last time she had been in it, but make no mistake, this was a dream. There was no other way he could be speaking to her, in the same tones he had attempted to ensnare her with years earlier.
This time, the scene was a garden, but an eerily cold one. Despite the vast hedges, formed of climbing roses wound around intricately constructed trellises, she felt detached, torn from the portions of reality that would have made this scene a warm or even romantic one. She was surrounded by the crimson blooms, yet the air was devoid of their scent, and worse, silent. No life stirred around them, and in the center of the winding pathways was a fountain, against which the Goblin King leaned.
"So you do suck the fun out of everything," Sarah mused, her gaze taking in their surroundings. It suited him, in a way that she could barely define, outwardly beautiful and yet lacking anything that could make it real. This garden did not live, or breathe, or even feel as though it could. Just like a certain trickster's heart.
"I do?" Jareth arched one slender brow, looking amused rather than angered this time. He had done something to her, to punish her for her defiance, but she was unable to recall what exactly it had been. "How interesting." He straightened, moving towards her, oddly dark against such a starkly bright background. "I shall have to remember to provide you with more 'fun' in the future, Sarah."
Something about the way his words slunk past his lips caused her skin to crawl. Sarah took an unconscious step backwards, her eyes narrowing. "I don't know what your definition of 'fun' is, but I really don't think I want to find out." She kept her expression as defiant as she could, lifting her head high, meeting his gaze again with all the hatred she could muster. "What are you doing in my dream?"
Jareth's lips curved in a smirk. "Your dream? Really?" The laughter in his voice had intensified, as he moved ever closer, so rapidly that she could hardly blink before he was before her, cupping her chin in one gloved hand. "What makes you so certain that this is your dream and not mine, Sarah?" His grip was strong, and the force of his gaze had turned dizzying. "Not unless having you this close is your desire now…" He leaned towards her, only a breath away, still smiling crookedly.
"Not…unless…Hell…froze…over." Sarah hated herself for stuttering, but as usual, Jareth was willing to cheat and enthrall her by any means necessary, including the magically-induced-and-thus-not-real variety. The only thing having him this close induced in her was the desire to spit in his face, though given that this time he did seem to have the upper hand, she did not think it was wise to attempt. Jareth was not the type to suffer slights to his ego.
"Your wish is my command." He released her abruptly, thrusting her backwards, and she stumbled on ground that was suddenly far looser. She had one last glimpse of his icily beautiful face twisted by a wicken grin, and dropped away, feeling the dream shatter around her once again…
With a certain sense of déjà vu, Sarah woke with a start, feeling once more as though her internal organs had suffered whiplash. This time, she was mercifully still in the same place, and not recovering from injuries on the moth-eaten carpet below her. She slid down from the bunk, touching a hand to her chin, which for some reason felt bruised, and swung around to look at the clock.
"Oh, good, you're finally up." Meghan lifted two fingers in greeting, thoroughly engrossed in a storm of typing. "You've been out all day, but there's still some lo mein left if you want it." She motioned towards the take-out carton on the table between them, surrounded by the detritus of crushed containers and fortune cookies. "Good thing it's Saturday, right? Otherwise I'd fail Philosophy and you'd have missed all your classes."
Sarah blinked, her eyes shifting to the time on the clock. 9:30, p.m. She had just inadvertently slept through an entire day, without even realizing it. She frowned, and leaned against the bedframe for support as the room spun drunkenly. This might be the status quo for Meghan, who seemed to like spending her vacations comatose, but it was not like her at all. It meant she had ignored who knew how many friends, forgotten to do the majority of her homework, and worse, hadn't even started on the piece for her Fiction class that was due Monday.
Without fully understanding why, Sarah reached up and closed her hands around something smooth and cold lying across her pillow. Her eyes widening in surprise, she lifted it, lowering the mystery object so that she could look at it. Lifting it up to the light, she felt a shudder twist its way up her spine.
Clutched in her grasp was a long-stemmed rose, carved entirely of ice.
"Cool!" Meghan shot up, abandoning her laptop and struggles with 'the study of stupid questions', as she termed the subject, in favor of examining the sculpture in Sarah's hands. "Do you have a secret admirer, or is this your hidden psychic powers coming to the surface?" She snatched the stylized ice cube without waiting for Sarah to answer and smiled, face alight with the joy of discovery.
"Hmm, well, whichever it is, the person who left this is saying something about you being cold-hearted. Why else would they give you something this beautiful made of out ice?" Meghan eyed her carefully, intuition kicking in. "You look wiped, Sarah. Are you sure you've been asleep all day? Maybe these dreams of yours are active ones, you know, like those serial comics. You're living out a whole other life in your head."
Sarah could hardly speak in the face of such supremely normal oddness. Meghan simply gave off the air of a girl who could be completely ordinary while taking in things that would make most 'normal' people run screaming. Faced with an ice-rose appearing out of nowhere and Sarah's strange actions, she simply shrugged and ran with whatever theory occurred to her at the time.
"I don't know, exactly." Attempting to make sense of this was not an easy thing to do, although since Sarah had already experienced her fair share of strange growing up, it was easy for her at least to accept that magic was involved. Meghan very clearly saw the things she did, so an overactive imagination was out, meaning there was only one possible explanation. "Did I say anything while I was out?"
"Oh yeah, you did!" Meghan lunged for their refrigerator, placing the rose in the freezer compartment, probably to preserve it for future observation. "You said some guy's name, Garret, I think, or Jared. Does that mean something?"
Very slowly, Sarah nodded. "Yes. Yes it does." It meant that there was only one person who could possibly be involved in this – someone whose name sounded very much like Garrett or Jared. Someone who loved nothing more than to manipulate her for his own sick amusement because he could. Jareth. "Oh, he's going to pay for this."