HERE'S THE DAY YOU HOPED WOULD NEVER COME;
a response to Pika-la-cynique's challenge.
Labyrinth belongs to the Jim Henson Company, not me.
She had always expected a summons, a threat, a promise—thrilling words of magic and command, such as she had been given within the endless and confusing boundaries of broken staircases and reordered time. She had expected thunderstorms and goblins, abductions, cracked mirrors and stopped clocks. In her dreams, in her fantasies, the Goblin King always returned with a bang, a thunderous crash of lightning that reflected the curling smirk on his lips and the wild depthless magic of his eyes.
But this…it seemed tame, sad, perhaps a little forlorn. A peace offering, perhaps, or a token of some grief she could not imagine. Nothing had changed, really; just time. Time, and life, and growing up. Sarah didn't call her friends very much anymore, and never asked them through the mirror, for her dorm room had no place for them, and her high school friends would never have understood. Trinkets and playthings no longer littered her bed room; instead, she had piled near every surface high with books and papers, notes and folders and the assorted and sundry things necessary for a successful university experience.
To the ordinary observer, it merely looked as though Sarah had acquired an unusual paperweight and picked up, somewhere, a snowy white feather, laid across the desk to look at later. The unnatural glow the crystal exuded could really only be seen if you turned out the lights, or if you looked at it too long in a shaft of sunlight; then the odd glittering aura around it might be discerned. The feather, too, carried a faint sheen of sparkling something quite beyond the ken of normal mundane creatures, but next to the crystal one would barely even register the extreme cleanliness of that single feather.
In fact, it was a message entirely lost on anyone but Sarah, and anyone witnessing the look of fear bordering upon horror which graced her face might have thought her quite mad, or at least upset about something entirely unrelated. After all, what was there to worry about a crystal and a feather? Alone they meant nothing, together only a little more, and it had been years since Sarah had last encountered the Goblin King. He had never confronted her again, in fact, or spoken to her, or attempted to tempt her as he had. Their encounter in that place beyond time and space had been final, it seemed, and now…
Bitterness stung her heart to tears, but Sarah refused to let them fall. Words sprang up and died upon her tongue, tasting of ash and broken dreams and betrayal. She had fully expected the Goblin King to return to her life; wasn't that was kings and princes did? Fall in love with the beautiful heroine and refuse to let her go? This crystal, this feather; they felt too much like goodbye, and she didn't even have to touch the little globe to feel that sense around them. They had a palpable brokenness and fragility she could almost see, as if one touch might cause them to dissolve like spun sugar in a spray of water, until it was as if they'd never been.
Even now the crystal glimmered oddly, casting her still reflection into a ghostly, pale light. Her cheeks and eyes looked hollow, her lips a deathly hue, her face a rictus of fear and apprehension, with falls of shadow framing the death-mask of a long-forgotten priestess to an order none remembered. Had she always looked so…ordinary? Where had the spark of magic gone, the touch of eldritch life? She had run that labyrinth, dammit, and won too; why did it have to feel as if she had somehow now lost, and for good?
Jareth had never come, not even in her dreams. Sarah had never called out for him, perhaps too terrified that he would appear, right there, to tempt her again with promises and threats and sweet, sweet songs. He had been so beautiful, so strange, so much more than she could handle at the time, a swaggering and arrogant prince of a world she could only dream of. Of all the things the Underground had to offer Jareth had been the most inspiring and the most cruel, teasing the edges of her youthful fantasies and promising something so much more…decadent, mature, adult. She had wanted to taste that, yet somehow knew that then was not the time. Such things had their place.
But now…now…she doubted she would ever have the chance.
"Jareth," she whispered, and reached to touch the mirror, but nothing happened. No flare, no glow, not even a minute shifting of the shadows behind her. The crystal didn't even have the grace to change its light, except perhaps to grow more melancholy yet. A steady hysteria began to work its way into the woman's throat, and she tried again to no effect. Her friends' names brought about even less, if that was possible, and in the end she beat her fists against the simple glass and cried for what she had lost.
Ludo, Didymus, Hoggle…they were never coming back, it seemed, and neither was Jareth. They had passed from the effervescent reality of her dreams to a memory of her youth and nothing more; the mirror held no magic, and their names could no more summon them than a breath could summon wind. The labyrinth had crumbled away in the interminable grind of the ages of her mind, all its creatures given over to childish fantasy and nothing more. She knew in her heart of hearts that they had been real, had lived and breathed and laughed within those precious hours she had raced against the clock, but to what end? They had required more than she could give in a world that no longer believed in them, and now she had seen the last.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, touching the glass again. "I couldn't save you." At last she drew the cool crystal to her palm and cradled it close, pressing her lips to its smooth surface. It felt alive, if weary, and for a few moments she could pretend that this was not the last magic in the world but merely a message, a test, a way to make her think and love what she had denied for years too long. It swirled beneath her fingers and she held it to her heart, safe and tender and soft as it fluttered like a bird. A beat, a pulse, a flash of light and it was gone, scattering incandescent dust in all directions that twisted and faded like the last sparks of a silver firework.
At that, she hit her knees and wept.
A/N: I don't…know. I've been wanting to write a response for a while, and typically speaking it would have involved romance and angst and fluff because those are my favorite things. But…but. What more could a girl who had run the labyrinth and still kept her fantastic friends fear most, but losing them forever?