023.
there's things I've done I can't erase
every night we fall from grace
Keep The Faith - Bon Jovi
Sarah Williams stood by the window, a cup of tea in her hands. Though the liquid within had been steaming when her vigil began, she had yet to notice that it had gone completely cold in the time she'd stood gazing at the stars, lost in memory.
It had been twenty years since her adventures in the labyrinth, fifteen since she'd realized exactly what the Goblin King had been offering her, what she'd turned aside in her quest to save her baby brother. Fifteen long and lonely years, filled with pain and longing that even visits from her friends couldn't abate.
"All yeh have to do is call him," Hoggle had summoned up his courage to say once, both gruff and grudging at the same. He'd watched her looking out that window for years already, and no matter how he felt about that rat Jareth, his heart ached for his friend Sarah.
"I can't, Hoggle," was Sarah's well-rehearsed and oft-voiced reply. "Don't you understand that I can't?"
He hadn't recognized the defeat and self-recrimination that laced those words, and he'd stopped coming as often as the others after that. For a coward like Hoggle to take up for the man he feared most in the world took more out of him than he'd ever expected.
So Sarah stood at a window in her cliff top home, and as happened every night, the same scene played over and over again inside her head. The long leap from the ledge in the Escher room, their final confrontation, her cruel words, the despair on his face when he realized what she'd said.
It was hard to say how long she'd been standing there--hours, perhaps--before she rested her head on the window, the image of his face as she'd last seen it lingering before her eyes. The sigh that escaped her lips almost carried his name, but it was merely a long breath of air, as if those syllables were forbidden to her.
Her free hand reached out, and when it touched nothing but the cold glass, she whispered a familiar refrain: "I'd go back and change it all, if only I could."