Author's note:: What you have before you is my first attempt at Labyrinth fanfiction. I've always found the story enthralling, and have always wondered 'what if.' The plot calls for something akin to a novel in size, will end up as a Jareth/Sarah piece, and explores the possibility of these characters driven to work together with their flaws. Jareth will still be very much what he was in the first movie, but this isn't his game...

Summary:: Dreams are places where choices need not be made. Nightmares are places where choices are too many. Sarah secured her fate by making her choice and Jareth his by giving her one. Now they must both face the consequences in a place where the only labyrinth in sight is one they cannot see.

Disclaimer:: Own not, want lots.

Nocturne

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Chapter One

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"You are late."

It pained her. This fantasy was so unlike the well-worn edges of her last that it tore at her senses with sharp resignation. There was no taunting, no riddle to be solved and child to save. Whimsy had fled into the memory of an old challenge and the twisted tendrils of desire lay amputated at the feet of her enemy.

Here she was a pawn, little more. There she could have been so much more. Here the halls were dark in their splendor, elongated and contorted and an endless path of unease. This was no Labyrinth, tailored to her dreams. It was nothing she had ever imagined before, and to her there was nothing more frightening.

Eyes on the contorted clock, Sarah could not help but allow a desolate smile curve her lips. "If you don't mind me saying so, your Majesty, the only hour your timepiece reads is the thirteenth."

"And you were to be here at the twelfth hour, were you not?"

"I wasn't aware that I was meant to come here at all. And even when I did, it was already the thirteenth hour when I arrived."

The woman, nothing more than a dark human pillar atop a thrown, stared at her shrewdly, narrow eyes cold with her schemes, "You have no one to blame but yourself. Had you arrived here before the clocks..."

"Again, I didn't realize this was a footrace..."

"Insolence!"

Sarah bowed her head, humble in her weary fear, "Not at all, your Majesty. Confusion, maybe. You've never told me why I'm here."

I

The winter chill ached bitterly, settling in the injured joint of her left knee with very little thought afforded to her. Hours bent in the passenger seat of an acquaintance's car helped matters less, having set both her and her feet to sleep while locking her weak knee with stiffness typical of this time of year. She'd taken several lingering minutes to enjoy the whirring of the vehicle's heater before bidding farewell with a thank you to the young woman who had kindly volunteered to drive her home for the holidays, slipping a worn ten dollar bill into the unused ashtray as she slung her cloth sack over her shoulder and maneuvered her way out of the door.

Silence met her in the foyer, as did shadows, and she instantly missed the crunch of ice and snow beneath her feet.

Karen and Toby were out, clear by the way her call of hello was only met with its echo. They were last minute shopping if her intuition was still anything to go by, gathering gifts for Christmas a week before they were due. She moved on unhindered by her solitude and her house keys clambered loudly when she tossed them across the countertop, her bag thudded gently as it hit the floor. With a flip of the switch she was able to inspect the kitchen for any changes in the last sixth months (the walls were darker, the cabinets lighter), and discovered that she sincerely liked them.

There was no note taped to the refrigerator door informing her that they would be home after dinner, that leftovers from the meal the night before were there for her to heat. If Sarah were to check, there would likely be nothing for her to quickly prepare at all. She didn't blame her stepmother, who would have left a feast had she known that her daughter was coming home that night. In fact, she thought very little about food at all, choosing instead to locate the coffee grinds and filters, needing something caffeinated and warm to both sharpen her thoughts and warm her still chilled limbs.

Gurgles and small streams of steam were working their way out of the brewer when Merlin tucked his aging head around the doorway, his nose lifted in the air at the familiar smells. Sarah's face broke into a grin when she saw him, and she hurried away from her inspection of Toby's childlike artwork (the cliche-like stick figures holding hands; mother, sister, brother, and dog), appropriately pinned to every surface of the white refrigerator doors.

"Look at you!" Her fingers sank into the white and black fur at the base of the sheep dog's neck, lowering her face so that she was eye-level with her most faithful friend. She'd bored her roommates with stories of his youth since her first year in college, but fond recollections were nothing compared to the real thing.

The real thing that was licking her chin and nuzzling her cheek with his wet nose. "Missed you too, Merlin," she muttered, affectionate pressure heavy behind her eyes.

He remained close to her legs as she prepared her coffee, and sat by her chair when she took a seat at the table. As a reward for his patience, Sarah tucked her hand beneath Merlin's chin and scratched it as she stared through the French doors into the back garden. Her mind moved along a well traveled road, memories of a different kitchen in a different house. Karen had regretted selling Sarah's childhood home as much as Sarah regretted having to leave it, but payments were payments and her stepmother had been determined to use the life insurance to fund Sarah's dream of private college instead of the old mortgage (it was then, at seventeen with crutches and a broken heart that Sarah had realized that her father's widow loved her, that her life would be no Cinderella fairy tale, after all).

Merlin sighed, as if recognizing her thoughts for what they were and rested the entire weight of his head on her lap—for a single instant, with the realization that only Merlin would be there to see her cry, Sarah entertained the notion of a nostalgic sob.

She drank her coffee in calm silence instead.

II

"Have you lost more weight?" Karen asked as she released her from their hug and kissed her temple.

Her stepmother's hair was longer, bobbed around her jaw in a style that was more practical than attractive. It'd felt dry against Sarah's cheek, looked duller than its typical strawberry, as if all the strands were easing together into a faint grey instead of racing to the goal one at a time. It was a unwarranted thought to have, but mourning made the older woman a mere shadow of her old, tailored beauty.

Sarah patted her stomach as if feeling for change in its shape, "I don't think so..."

They stepped away from one another and allowed Toby his turn, the exuberant child refusing to wait for his older sister to stoop and lift him off the floor. Face buried in her thigh, he hugged her knee and started recounting the entire events of the night, divulging what they'd bought her for Christmas before his thoughts ran on a tangent and his monologue stretched into a conglomeration of everything exciting that had taken place since he'd last seen her. Sarah understood none of it, but smiled encouragingly as she pried his hands from her bad leg and wrestled him up onto the curve of her hip.

"Have you been a good goblin or a bad goblin this year?" She asked, tone serious even as a smile threatened to arrest her lips.

"Is there a difference?" Karen quipped, gathering the bags she'd set by the stairs in order to give her daughter a hug.

"Sometimes," Sarah grinned, tickling Toby's stomach before kissing his cheek and setting him on the floor.

"Does he still have the dreams?" she asked when her brother padded into the kitchen in search for Merlin.

"Infrequently, we haven't had a problem since the summer. I never thanked you for being there," Karen smiled warmly when Sarah helped her with the bags, "we would have found him, but it would have taken longer if you hadn't been here to help look."

"Don't mention it, it was like playing hide and seek..." with a sleepwalker.

Karen chuckled and led them to the sitting room. Once they'd had a relationship full of criticisms and complaints. Arguments had been their method of discussion and long days of silence their only method of getting along. At fifteen, Sarah had blamed her stepmother for the fault-lines in their communication, at seventeen she'd started to blame herself. It wasn't until she'd spent a semester away that she'd understood that blame was arbitrary and obsolete. They'd had both failed one another, love was moving beyond that and finding common ground (made easier by the void that now existed in both of their lives).

This was typical of them now, taking a seat and spending the first several hours of Sarah's visits home to catch up on what was missed. There was so much that they still didn't discuss, Sarah more than Karen, but the good intentions were still there and the pattern a comfortable one.

"I set up the guest bedroom for you. There's a new wardrobe for your clothes, and I had the latch fixed on the door so it will close. With a lock, so if ever...you know...Toby..."

"Thank you," Sarah tucked her legs under her body and leaned against the couch's armrest, watching as her stepmother took the armchair opposite her. The young boy in question ran past the doorway, sounds of a six year old's fabricated train chase streaming behind him, "Really, thank you..." she laughed.

III

There was a time when she had believed fate was a convergence of accidents, a time when free will had no place in her tales and in her dreams. At fifteen, she discovered that fate was a game, a puzzle to be won and a resolution to be celebrated then grieved. Then, at seventeen, Sarah had discovered that fate, like time, was not real. That it was a construct of the human mind and of the human desires, that it kept people imprisoned by their own wants.

A harsh lesson, one marked with scars.

She brushed her hair before laying down for the night. It was a habit she'd grown to dislike but one she couldn't bring herself to break. Shorter than she used to wear it in high school, the dark strands rested just below the nape of her neck, long enough to hide the thin scar that stretched from her clavicle to jaw...The sight of it always reminded her of how she'd received it, how'd she'd earned the deeper scars that ran along the bottom of her knee (the ones from the injury that had bitten through ligament and muscle), and she would give anything not to be reminded.

When she was younger, she used to imagine that the dreams she'd refused would haunt her until old age. That the man that had chosen to torment her would do so until she died of fright one day, and that her heart would mourn the loss of not having to choose. That's what dreams were, not needing to make choices to be happy, having everything without consequence. She had learned that by choosing she had lost...

After the Labyrinth and before her father's death, Sarah had dreamed of ordinary things when she slept. Of school and the odd looking but still attractive boy in her prose class. She dreamed of failing tests, of acceptance letters from Harvard and Dartmouth and Cornell. Dreams were of success and nightmares full of failure, ordinary failure. But after she'd become acquainted with her mortality, of her father's mortality, they began to fill with a sinister fantasy, her Goblin King nowhere in sight.

At twenty, Sarah was certain that dreams and fate were the same; she was certain that they had a pulse and that they had a rhythm.

And she was convinced that there was something about to go horribly wrong with hers.